As a Professor in Marburg and Kiel (1919–1929)

My first visit to my parents’ home as a civilian took place under exciting external circumstances in the spring of 1919, after I had finished teaching my first semester in Marburg. After Kurt Eisner, Minister President of the Free State of Bavaria, was murdered on February 21, 1919, the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) and the communists, who were active under a number of different names and who included some Jews, seized power in Munich and especially in southern Bavaria. On the night of April 6, 1919, the Revolutionary Central Council of Bavaria declared the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Political murders were the order of the day in Bavaria’s opposing political camps. When I arrived at Munich central station that March, the train could not enter the station and the passengers had to take cover from the machine guns in the streets. The Passover festival took place under increasing terror and worries about my father, who, as a religious Jew and representative of the mercantile community, was being attacked from both the left and the right. The climax came in April: The dictatorship of the Bavarian Soviet government, made up exclusively of communists as of April 14, led to the murder of ten hostages on April 30 by the so-called Red Army in the Luitpold Gymnasium, my former secondary school. On May 1 government troops from northern Germany marched into Munich. I was an eyewitness to the ensuing street fighting with cannons. On May 2 Gustav Landauer was stoned to death by soldiers. A short time later, militant anti-Semitism became visible in Bavaria. By early May, however, trains started running again and I was able to return to Marburg.