Weimar’s Republicans: German Jews in Democratic and Pacifist Organizations of the Interwar Period (1918 -1933)

Researcher: Lutz Fiedler

“The hall is well filled, but only one percent of the German people is represented - the Jewish people,” noted the journalist Ernst Feder on the occasion of an event of the German League for Human Rights in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Even if the association, founded in 1914 as the “Bund Neues Vaterland,” was not a Jewish organization, the German League for Human Rights was nevertheless an association that, with its pacifist, democratic and universalist self-image, became a focal point for a large number of German Jews: Albert Einstein, Stefan Zweig, Kurt Tucholsky, and Berthold Jacob, as well as Ernst Julius Gumbel and Ernst Feder. Together with the history of the Republican Association of Judges, which was active in parallel and with which there was some personal union, the reconstruction of the activities of the German League for Human Rights is intended as a new approach to the history of the Weimar Republic and the joint commitment of German Jews and non-Jews to its democratic character.

Three thematic complexes take center stage: first, the emergence of a German pacifist movement that was internationally networked in the interwar period and within the framework of the League for Human Rights and sought to promote a system of collective security and juridification on the level of civil society; second, in conjunction with the work of the Republican League of Judges founded in 1922, the public stand against political violence and radical right-wing femicides in the Weimar Republic and against forms of anti-democratic “political justice” (Otto Kirchheimer) in its institutions. In view of the political persecution suffered by the members of both organizations in the course of the transfer of power to the National Socialists, thirdly, their activities in the fight against National Socialism as well as its political, legal and social analysis (Ernst Fraenkel, Otto Kirchheimer, Kurt R. Grossmann, Robert W. Kempner) will be reconstructed using the example of selected biographies.