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Jews in the Weimar Republic
Contributed by PresentMemory

Under the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933, German Jews played a major role in politics and diplomacy for the first time in their history, and they strengthened their position in financial, economic, and cultural affairs.[54][55] Hugo Preuß was Interior Minister under the first post-imperial regime and wrote the first draft of the liberal Weimar Constitution.[56] Walther Rathenau, the chairman of General Electric (AEG) and head of the German Democratic Party (DDP), served as foreign minister in 1922, when he negotiated the important Treaty of Rapallo. He was assassinated two months later.[57]

Already by 1914, the Jews were well represented among the wealthy, including 24 percent of the richest men in Prussia, and eight percent of the university students.[58]

Antisemitism[edit]

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Austrian postcard published in 1919, depicting the legend of Jewish betrayal during WWI

There was sporadic antisemitism based on the false allegation that wartime Germany had been betrayed by an enemy within. There was some violence against German Jews in the early years of the Weimar Republic, and it was led by the paramilitary Freikorps. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1920), a forgery which claimed that Jews were taking over the world, was widely circulated. The second half of the 1920s were prosperous, and antisemitism was much less noticeable. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, it surged again as Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party promoted a virulent strain.

Author Jay Howard Geller says that four possible responses were available to the German Jewish community. The majority of German Jews were only nominally religious and they saw their Jewish identity as only one of several identities; they opted for bourgeois liberalism and assimilation into all phases of German culture. A second group (especially recent migrants from eastern Europe) embraced Judaism and Zionism. A third group of left-wing elements endorsed the universalism of Marxism, which downplayed ethnicity and antisemitism. A fourth group contained some who embraced hardcore German nationalism and minimized or hid their Jewish heritage. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, a fifth option was seized upon by hundreds of thousands: escape into exile, typically at the cost of leaving all wealth behind.[59]

The German legal system generally treated Jews fairly throughout the period.[60] The Centralverein, the major organization of German Jewry, used the court system to vigorously defend Jewry against antisemitic attacks across Germany; it proved generally successful.[61]

Intellectuals[edit]

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Heidelberg University was considered to be one of the most eminent institutions of Jewish-German learning.

Jewish intellectuals and creative professionals were among the leading figures in many areas of Weimar culture. German university faculties became universally open to Jewish scholars in 1918. Leading Jewish intellectuals on university faculties included physicist Albert Einstein; sociologists Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse; philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl; communist political theorist Arthur Rosenberg; sexologist and pioneering LGBT advocate Magnus Hirschfeld, and many others. Seventeen German citizens were awarded Nobel prizes during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), five of whom were Jewish scientists. The German-Jewish literary magazine, Der Morgen, was established in 1925. It published essays and stories by prominent Jewish writers such as Franz Kafka and Leo Hirsch until its liquidation by the Nazi government in 1938.[62][63]
presentation Section: Life Before The War

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