Table of Contents
Preface to the English-Language Edition xi
1 A Change of Perspective 1
"The Whole Thing, an Unspeakable Jewish Tragedy" 1
Jewish Revolutionaries Do Not a Jewish Revolution Make 11
The Good Old Days? 15
The "Jewish Question" Moves to Center Stage 21
2 Jewish Revolutionaries in a Catholic Land 25
Hanukkah 5679 (November 1918) 25
"It Has to Be My Jewish Blood That Is Incensed"-Kurt Eisner 27
"My Judaism … Lives in Everything That I Start and That I Am"-Gustav Landauer 57
"I Will Demonstrate Once More That I Am Someone from the Old Testament!"-Erich Mühsam 67
"But Am I Not … a Member of That People That for Millennia Has Been Persecuted, Harried, Martyrized and Slain?"-Ernst Toller 77
"Jewish Is How My Head Thinks, Russian How My Heart Feels"-Eugen Leviné 86
"Foreign Bolshevik Agents"-Jews in the Fight against the Council Republic 92
3 A Pogrom Atmosphere in Munich 98
Passover 5769 (April 1919) 98
"We Don't Want Any Bavarian Trotsky"-The Mood Shifts 103
"A Government of Jehovah's Wrath"-The Attitude of the Catholic Church 119
"To the Gallows"-Radicalization in Word and Deed 128
"The Trotskys Make the Revolution, and the Bronsteins Pay the Price"-Jewish Reactions 137
4 The Hotbed of Reaction 157
Rosh Hashanah 5681 (September 1920) 157
"The Movement … Needed a Site That Would Become an Example"-Hitler's Laboratory 160
"The Ostjuden Danger"-The First Expulsions of Jews 173
"Travelers, Avoid Bavaria!"-Manifestations of Violence 184
"Now Germany Has Its Dreyfus Trial"-A Legal Scandal and a Scandalous Legal System 200
5 The City of Hitler 229
Sukkoth 5684 (September 1923) 229
"All the Lazy and the Vicious … Rushed, as if Magically Drawn, to Munich"-The Capital of Antisemitism 230
"Tomorrow You'll All Be Hanging"-The Hot Autumn of 1923 238
"A Mockery of the German People"-Reverberations of 1923 261
6 A Variety of Perspectives 268
Gravestones 268
Life Journeys 274
Interpretations 280
Purim 5693 (March 1933) 289
Timeline 293
Acknowledgments 297
Abbreviations 301
Notes 303
Bibliography 341
Index 363