00:00:24.260If you are only tuning in now, please listen to the first and second episode.
00:00:28.480Because, like, this is not one of those series where, like, you don't have to have read the prequels before you can understand what's going on in the new release.
00:00:37.800We're looking at each month of 1933, more or less contemporaneously with that month in 2025.
00:00:45.600It is like a really continuous story where things change very quickly.
00:00:50.320And I think to get the best version of it, you'll want to listen to the whole thing through.
00:00:54.160Yeah. And we apologize for releasing the May episode, like at the last possible moment. In our defense, these things do take a ton of time to research. And on this one in particular, I think we wanted to make sure to incorporate the truly incredible scholarship on gender and sexuality at this point in history. And it does take us a while to edit these things because they tend to be super long.
00:01:18.440Like, if you think these episodes come out long, you should see us in our little, like, Zoom chat just going on and on for hours.
00:01:34.880We have three tiers of support, the pervert, the preacher, and the creep, so you can decide which one best suits your spirit and come join us over there.
00:01:43.960we put out two Patreon episodes every month, and our paid subscribers get access to things
00:01:49.880like a Discord. They get early access to our merch. It's a fun little community,
00:01:54.600and it's a great way to support the podcast and allow us to keep doing this.
00:01:58.060Yeah. Part of why we're recording so late is that you were in the UK, right?
00:02:02.260Yeah. I went to London. I have a, I don't know if I should call this my day job or my
00:02:08.600moonlighting job. The truth is that I do both of these jobs, like largely like in my
00:02:13.780pajamas in bed at like the crack of 10 a.m. But I went to London for my job as a columnist at
00:02:22.720Guardian US as part of a retreat they were doing there. And I got to spend some time with some
00:02:27.760really wonderful colleagues over at the UK newsroom and explore London a little bit.
00:02:33.700But now I'm back in the US. We are here. We're doing it. We're going to take you through
00:08:35.660But in the end, of course, actually meant a multiplication of bureaucracies because you
00:08:40.920now had a party bureaucracy and you had the state bureaucracy and they were often insufficient
00:08:45.380merged. They were often in competition with one another, which we'll see at some point today when
00:08:50.800it comes to the book burnings. And there were different kind of understandings, like who they
00:08:54.960felt fealty to. So in some ways, actually, the Nazis did speak the language of efficiency. But0.70
00:09:00.300the first thing we see in 1933 is actually massive inefficiency. They're building a system that is
00:09:05.440labyrinthine. Declaring efficiency and then creating conditions of great inefficiency.
00:09:09.840Like, I don't know, I'm not sure that's a greater distinction. I will like grant your point that
00:09:14.940the Nazis are expanding institutional capacities and creating redundancies of institutional0.82
00:09:20.260capacities because they have their eye towards this like authoritarian control of social life.0.60
00:09:24.740Whereas like the Trump project is trying to do two things at once, partly because they've got
00:09:29.440this divided constituency within the MAGA right. So they're trying to expand control over individual
00:09:35.580social life and over institutional life and intellectual life. But they're also trying
00:09:39.220to cut back on state capacity very dramatically. And those two projects are a bit at odds.
00:09:44.540I will note, though, that there does seem to be in our own era, like, some evidence that employment purges and grant withdrawals and things like that are happening more often to women and people of color than they are to white men.
00:09:59.600So there is at least some correlation between the Trump administration's, like, disfavored groups and those who are being purged from this, like, kind of federal funding and employment structures.
00:10:12.320So that's the first thing to note there.
00:10:13.820The second thing is Kalimpo himself still has a job, but it's very clear, and this is where the sort of grand cancellations you just alluded to become a point of comparison, it's clear he can't rely on his old professional networks anymore.
00:10:27.340This isn't just about removing people from places of power, it's also, it's destroying structures within the institutions that could push back.0.99
00:10:35.020Well, no, this guy is good, we need him, fuck off, right?0.98
00:10:38.640for which there still was some legal cover, if you recall.0.99
00:10:41.600The law for the purification of the German civil service
00:10:44.960was supposed to exclude anyone who had served in World War I,
00:11:25.820We've talked about this before, right?
00:11:27.600But it's like people's actual political opinions
00:11:30.900and loyalties are very nuanced and sometimes divided.
00:11:35.000Yeah. But then it also does seem that one of the common denominators that basically everybody is exhibiting in their responses to the Nazis' rise to power is, like, cowardice and, like, indecision, terror.
00:11:47.780Yeah. And this kind of inward turn, right? He's inwardly embittered. He says, Beste, now Dean. So I don't know anything about this guy, but he just got this job.
00:11:56.300Presumably replacing someone. And he's like, I feel real bad about this. So who knows? He appears to have protected Klemperer at this point. So that's nice.
00:12:04.220But people are also not exactly winning Profiles and Courage Awards.
00:12:16.080These people are still functioning in institutions that are supposed to serve a purpose.
00:12:20.020And like, as people who work in a large institution that is supposed to serve a purpose, like, it's easy to say, well, in the end, it's more important that the kids get educated than for me to make my own kind of valiant stand here.0.98
00:12:31.220So, fuck it, I'll just go to class until they don't let me.
00:12:34.940I can also see the effect of the Great Depression and previous Weimar economic deprivation.1.00
00:12:40.300These are people of a generation who had really had their dreams destroyed by circumstances outside their control.
00:12:48.060The collapse of the Weimar economy followed very quickly thereafter by the global Great Depression.
00:12:53.440Like you just said, there are people who are unemployed en masse, right?
00:12:57.040And so they're probably thinking, you know, the cost of principle is high and the temptations to take advantage of these professional opportunities that might be ill-gotten but are also sort of greater than anything you had been led to believe was possible just a couple months ago.
00:13:17.040It's important to note that life does go on.
00:13:20.120Klemperer is also building a house at the same time.
00:13:22.420He and his wife bought a nice plot of land, and the construction there kind of turned into a nightmare, the way these things tend to, right?
00:13:29.540For that simple reason, he's like, I'm not leaving until we're out of escrow or whatever, right?
00:13:34.380People have very real everyday concerns that to them, you know, in hindsight, you're like, my God, how could you fixate on that in such a time?
00:13:41.660And it's like, well, they didn't know there was such a time necessarily.
00:13:44.900No, people are buying groceries and like fighting with their parents and trying to get laid.
00:13:50.600There's the weird contrast between the ongoingness of the demands of the daily, just social and narcissistic impulses, and then this collapse, this catastrophe of history that's unfolding around them.
00:14:02.840The simultaneity of those could be like kind of uncanny, I think.
00:14:05.960The third point I want to point to is that there are terror stories everywhere. Terror is everywhere now. But at the same time, you're not supposed to share terror stories.
00:14:13.720So what do you mean by terror stories?
00:17:05.360Yeah, this is something we see a lot with Trumpism, but I think it's a recurring sort of internal contradiction of the logics of the far right, which is that the enemy both has to be like contemptibly and preordained by nature to be like weak and simultaneously very strong and capable of anything.
00:17:23.660And by the same token, the in-group, the sort of national group, be it white Americans or non-Jewish Germans, has to be both noble and strong and preordained by nature towards domination and at the same time, like, continuously victimized and attacked.
00:17:41.180And needing to protect itself maximally.
00:17:43.440Just to give you an idea of how pervasive the sense of terror was, there's an incident that Thomas Mann records in his diary the week before Klemperer writes his diary entry.
00:17:52.880The journalist Felix Manuel Mendelssohn had fled to Switzerland earlier that spring
00:17:57.240and tried to visit Erich Maria Remarque, right?
00:18:00.380The author of All Quiet on the Western Front,
00:18:03.060who you may recall had fled Germany the day before Hitler came to power.0.73
00:19:52.420Of the National Socialists' criminal and insane acts,
00:19:54.940I only make a note of what somehow touches me personally.
00:19:58.240Everything else can be looked up in the newspapers.
00:20:00.440The mood of the present time, the waiting, the visiting one another,
00:20:03.260the counting of days, the inhibited telephone conversations and correspondence,
00:20:07.240all that could be recorded in memoirs one day.
00:20:10.020But my life is coming to an end, and these memoirs will never be written.
00:20:13.240Whoa, that is really dark. So he's like grappling with this other violence that the rise of the Nazis is inflicting on him, which is like the narrowing of his own moral universe.
00:20:25.700Which he finds being like narrowed by circumstances.
00:20:28.440It feels so tried to say this, but which is the prerogative of a citizen in a democratic society.
00:20:32.680I have no investment in this other group, but I think the way they're being treated is shameful and I want to stand up for them.
00:20:38.420That's the basic experience of democratic citizenship. And he's feeling that slipping away.
00:20:43.240I have to look up for myself right now. I understand that as a moral failing. I understand that as a frustration. But what else am I going to do? Look it up in a fucking book, right?
00:20:51.760I would argue that there is, you know, you can understand this, I think, accurately as he does as a moral failing on his part. But I can also understand it as a moral injury that is being done to him and to other journalism, right?0.99
00:21:04.480He is being deprived of the opportunity to be as righteous and good a person as he would in other circumstances have the capacity to be, right?
00:23:58.380But Sex and the Weimar Republic is really all about the question like, well, can we understand the rise of Nazism as a backlash politics?0.80
00:24:06.240Right. And Laurie's answer, I think, is sort of like, no.
00:24:10.200The backlash sort of is in there, but it's not as straightforward as that.
00:24:15.480I hope I'm not mischaracterizing his overall argument there, but it's a very, very cool book.
00:24:20.800And then I'm going to mention two German sources.
00:24:23.320I know some of our listeners read German.
00:24:25.480It says, Barbar Greven Aschhoff's Die Bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland.
00:24:29.660So that's about the, how to translate that, the bourgeois, basically the middle class women's movement in Germany.
00:24:36.000We'll talk about why that distinction matters.
00:24:38.180It's a large and powerful constituency.
00:25:13.580So that's it's a question of sort of priorities. But this is something that I think after the Palmer raids, after the first Red Scare and all the excesses in the wake of World War One, you didn't really, I think, get in the United States quite as much anymore. There had been that. But in Germany, that was still very much thriving. So you do have feminists who are very different from the people we're going to meet today, except they were getting repressed for being communist, not for being feminists.
00:25:39.400Yeah, like feminism, you always have to sort of add this asterisk that they like they disagree with each other. We're talking about a lot of different people who fit under one umbrella. Yeah. And we just can't talk about all of them because there's too many contradictions.0.87
00:25:52.660Exactly. And for our purposes, the question of how did they get synchronized, right, is only interesting for the bourgeois women's orgs because like the communist women's orgs was like.
00:26:06.020And the imposition of the Nazi version of leadership on the women's movement is very fascinating for those institutions that they don't dismantle.
00:26:16.660We're talking about the difference between dismantling an institution versus trying to warp it into something very different for your own ends.0.65
00:26:24.120That is something that the Nazis only attempt to do with the bourgeois women's movement.0.53
00:26:27.060The other two German language books is Jens Dobler's Polizei und Homosexuelle in der Weimarer Republik.0.69
00:26:32.900That's Police and the Homosexual in the Weimar Republic.
00:26:36.400That's got some really interesting stuff towards the end of the book about what is the transition really like in terms of policing.0.55
00:26:43.980And Rainer Herrn's very recent book, Der Liebe und dem Leid, which is the first history of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin.
00:26:54.160It's fascinating that it's the first one. And I think the reason it's the first one is because of where we're going to end up with today's episode. So much of their records were burned. Kahn is like, I think is the head of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society. So I think he just kind of kept collecting things that by accident had survived.
00:27:11.140Like, the stories we're telling here are, some of them are very severely impacted by the story that we're telling, right?
00:27:18.220Like, it's very hard to document some of this stuff because the Nazis were so thorough in destroying.
00:27:24.500They were destroying the means for recording what they were destroying.0.60
00:27:30.620They were, like, not just erasing these people's capacity to continue their work into the future, but erasing the historical document of what they've done in the past.
00:27:38.120As you know, I've been trying to extract sort of certain themes for each of these months.
00:27:44.620And that's admittedly always partial, but I think it does reveal just the mutability and the flux that you see in 1933.
00:27:52.560And I think in the case of May, the overall theme is not so much about rapid change.
00:27:58.400I think that we had a couple of months of really rapid change.
00:28:01.160But I think the secret theme today is the way the spring of 1933 really revealed the corrosion of norms and sort of civil society actors that had taken place really in the years before, starting with the Great Depression in 1929, but intensifying after the right wing takeover of the Prussian government by something akin to a coup from above in 1932.
00:28:24.940too. Because in a bunch of these cases, we're going to find that the break of 1933 is actually
00:28:29.700not that pronounced. The real erosion started before January 30th, and the real escalation
00:28:36.060then happens later in 1933 or even beyond. That makes sense. Yeah. So maybe let's first look at
00:28:41.640the labor movement, because we start on May 1st, International Labor Day, big day, and the Nazis
00:28:47.540celebrate it. They have a National Labor Day. Oh, interesting. But just in case people got0.64
00:28:52.460wrong ideas on may 2nd they then start a massive assault on the buildings of the independent trade
00:28:59.920unions like they're bringing out the brown shirts and surrounding these buildings okay
00:29:03.440it's uh rolling commandos of the sa and ss the order had been given in april already they just
00:29:09.480were like we'll wait until after may 1st after mayday yeah and 10 a.m sharp they all show up
00:29:15.060and start ransacking everything and arresting a ton of people it's unclear to me like what even
00:29:21.840the legal basis for this was, like they hadn't even created a legal pretext the way they had
00:29:25.960for the civil service. They just threw people in jail. And by May 10th, they banned all trade
00:29:33.120unions, confiscated all assets, and gave them to the so-called German labor front, which was like
00:29:39.120their Nazified union-ish thing. So they're getting rid of these trade unions and saying the only0.63
00:29:46.800organization that's going to be in this position is going to be the Nazi organization that are
00:29:51.820exists. Yeah. So how did we get to that point? Evans points out that the industrial working class
00:29:56.980was heavily underrepresented among the voters and supporters of Nazism. Interesting. Yeah. That's0.99
00:30:04.060not to say that there weren't people in the broader working class who were strong Nazi
00:30:09.060constituents. Mostly non-unionized rural laborers saw substantial defections to the Nazis between
00:30:15.1601930 and 33. And then the urban proletariat had probably been more captured by the socialists
00:30:49.560Many such cases. Yeah. Right, because you have to build a big tent.
00:30:54.120Workers who are profoundly committedly anti-Semitic and maybe will like sort of mistake a like anti-capitalist grievance for an anti-Semitic one.
00:31:02.500Yeah. I can imagine you could make that pitch to a sizable number of maybe particularly like the undereducated rural workers in Weimar, Germany.
00:31:11.020But it's not enough people is what you're saying for them to become as powerful as they did by 1932.
00:31:15.660Yeah, I guess the question of working class and union membership is a really interesting one. But it's also important to note that these two things are not constants. Union membership in the German working class was a lot higher at the beginning of the Weimar Republic than at the end.
00:31:31.800And Evans, in fact, says, which I think is probably right, quote, what destroyed the German labor movement was not Nazi propaganda, but unemployment. Right. It's really hard to maintain your collective bargaining position in the face of absolutely absurd levels of mass unemployment. Right. Oh, you're on strike. Cool. I'll go to the local soup kitchen and get hundreds to take your place.
00:31:55.000Right. It's really, really easy to get people to scab in conditions of that kind of deprivation.
00:32:12.360And well before 1933, the unions had to accept these increasingly humiliating restrictions on their rights and a rollback of hard won victories.0.99
00:32:22.380Some of them from just five years before were like, okay, fine, fuck it.0.99
00:32:26.680So like the labor was already severely weakened.
00:32:30.180But at its heyday, German labor organizations had been instrumental in defending the Weimar
00:32:36.840Republic against basically the earliest stirrings of a Nazi-like threat.
00:32:42.060I don't know if you know much about the Kaputsch.
00:32:44.020I've heard about this, but I don't actually know the story.
00:32:46.080So in 1923, there was an attempt by right-wing elements of the government to basically make a play for power using just a couple of army battalions.
00:32:56.400But, you know, you don't always need very much.
00:34:34.840But that is where it turned out that the unions were too weak.
00:34:37.340And there was another factor, which was you had the rise of the Nazis.
00:34:42.800There was a chance, there's a historian named Hans Momsen who's argued this, that probably why the SPD did not go for a general strike in 1932 in Prussia was that it might lead the moderates to ally with the Nazis.
00:34:57.080Like if we do this, we will push the center party, which was not super friendly with unions, into the arms of these fascists, right?
00:35:04.980So the unions and the SPD did make the strategic decision to push back against von Papen and that takeover at the ballot box.
00:35:14.080So that's a really important prehistory here.
00:35:17.440And I think it gives you a sense of that.
00:35:19.4601933 becomes possible because of the erosions of 32, 31 and 30, right?
00:35:24.240Yeah, conditions were very ripe, right?
00:35:26.260The opposition had already been weakened.
00:35:28.260There was a kind of what you might call a birth defect at the heart of the Weimar Republic,
00:35:32.640especially when it came to labor and leftist politics.
00:35:35.520In the wake of the revolution in 1918,
00:35:38.740the SPD and other moderate parts of the labor movement
00:35:42.120had established themselves as part of the two main political centers
00:35:45.920of this young republic by repressing another part of the labor movement, right?
00:35:49.580The communists, the Soviet republics that sprang up in Bavaria, for instance,
00:35:54.300the radical labor movement, et cetera, et cetera, right?
00:36:01.380So the left was always going to be split. There was the ADGB, which is the Federation of Labor that was SPD controlled, and then there were communist unions. So the problem with the general strike was always going to be that these were people who had some pretty genuine grievances, right?
00:36:18.720Yeah. So it's hard to get those people to ally in your general strike if they've been killing each other just a couple months or years before.
00:36:25.340Exactly. And where one group allying with the others will always seem like, oh, now we're inviting communism in. And what will that do to our allies in the center? This is their quandary at that moment. On May 2nd, all that comes to a head and basically all unions are dissolved.
00:36:46.420Tim Mason in his book on the working class in Germany points out that the question of the fate of labor really is central to the question of whether Nazism is best understood as a modernization or an archaic backslide.0.95
00:36:59.580Because you might ask, well, what the fuck do you replace a union with, right?0.82
00:37:05.720They did not want people to just individually bargain.
00:37:09.020It's not like what you get with the Lochner era court in the United States, where it's just like you have a private right to contract and unions would only muck that up.
00:37:18.360Your ability to sell your labor for way less than it's worth is being unfairly taken away.
00:37:23.320Yeah, your American freedom to work for slave wages is under attack by the threat of unionization.
00:37:29.660That's actually not what the Nazis are going for here.
00:37:31.460No, they have communal solutions for this.
00:37:33.340They thought the big corporations in Germany were communities.
00:37:37.700And as per a law that would be passed in 1934, the party would arbitrate via trustees of labor any disputes.
00:37:46.920In practice, this obviously ended up mostly weakening labor and strengthening bosses, which is why they liked it.
00:37:55.380At least nominally, it was a process in which a system of checks and balances, of openly lived antagonism, of negotiation, was replaced by this kind of organicist model.
00:38:11.320Like, we all get together, but in the end, aren't we all the same?
00:38:14.460There's very much a kind of communitarian element to it.
00:38:17.720What you didn't want is the union rep and the boss shouting at each other.
00:38:22.080Like, no, no, no, we're all in this together, right?
00:38:24.940So artificial papering over of legitimate class and material grievances under an ideological purview.
00:38:32.000Exactly. So that can sound a little bit like a kind of social romanticism in something like Austrofascism, so the Austrian version of this, which was a statist.
00:38:40.920This is made explicit, but Mason points out that this isn't really true, that this is also a form of modernization.
00:38:45.720This is essentially a neoliberalization.
00:38:48.220And that, sure, as you say, the papering over was full of social romanticism.
00:38:53.020But in practice, it removed leverage from the workers and made their labor more fungible and therefore devalued it.
00:38:59.360We should say that Mason wrote this during Thatcherism.
00:39:01.960Yeah, he may have had some things on his mind.
00:39:03.680Yeah, he was thinking of Maggie, definitely.
00:39:06.660When I was in the UK, every time I talked to an English person, they would tell me the story of the neighborhood or the building we were in.
00:39:12.560And then there was always some moment in the story where their voice drops and the shadow
00:39:17.200crosses their face and they go, and then came Thatcher.
00:39:37.140Arbitration, almost, like men's free arbitration clauses.
00:39:40.080Yeah, the forced arbitration clause, exactly.
00:39:41.840meaning the unions are removed as public actors and you know unions had big newspapers and all
00:39:48.700that stuff that's all gone right it also makes solidarity impossible right it fractures everything
00:39:53.340into these very specific things like is this machine dangerous should we do something like
00:39:57.940the nazis did have that but it's just it's deprived of the idea that the public has any
00:40:03.720say in this be like this is not right these people are right to strike we are supportive right like
00:40:08.760That is something, again, like with Klemperer, people are sensing that their ability to live in solidarity with others whose concerns they share, even if they don't share their lives, that's being severely curtailed here.
00:40:22.740So now we get to the women's movement, because on May 15th, the Federation of German Women's Organizations votes to dissolve itself.
00:40:29.600Oh, lovely. I knew these ladies were going to embarrass me.1.00
00:40:32.380It's just like, what were the feminists doing in the early part of the 20th century?1.00
00:40:38.760I mean, there are some heroes here and we're going to check in with them periodically, but we haven't spent much time with the organized women's movement because, again, the story we're going to find.
00:40:48.700I'm guessing the story is that over the course of the 1920s and 30s, what had been a much more robust and radical women's movement gets weakened and co-opted as political possibilities erode.
00:41:00.940Like something sort of similar to what happens with the labor movement happens again with the women's movement, in which a lot of opportunities for like forward thinking or maximalist demands slip away under eroding political and economic conditions.
00:41:15.440And suddenly you have a smaller and smaller bit of territory that you're defending as a feminist and like a more and more conciliatory position.
00:41:24.760Yeah, essentially. I mean, the movement was huge. And there is some, I guess you could frame it in some ways as like it became a victim of its own success.
00:41:34.260Yeah, that's a story of a lot of feminism.0.88
00:41:38.060But you're right. As with the labor movement, there is a real backslide. And the movement, because of its size, it really wasn't equipped to deal with it.1.00
00:41:47.640Tell me about this like gigantic women's movement. What was the status quo in like 1932?1.00
00:41:53.220So women had attained the right to vote in the Weimar Constitution.0.98
00:41:57.080So like at the end of World War I, that's just written in?
00:42:10.500Because the equal rights clause in the Constitution, as we know from the American context, does not always in practice guarantee equal protection of the law, equal access to like legal resources or to like full participation in civic and academics.
00:42:22.820So, very good question. You should have been there and been like, hey, ladies, just a quick point of word.0.53
00:42:31.580Make them write down exactly what they mean by all this. Yeah.
00:42:35.500Yeah. There were people pointing this out at the time, too, I should say. Like, they didn't need you to tell them.
00:42:39.880But, like, what you're saying is that they're formally equal in the Weimar Constitution in terms of the actual application of the law and the realities on the ground. Inequality is persisting, right?
00:42:50.520Yeah, it's worse than that, actually. So women had attained the right to vote and gotten formal equality.0.99
00:42:55.260And some of them were in the Reichstag, right?
00:42:58.460They had the right to vote, but in the Weimar era, which is something that the Nazis do take away,
00:43:02.660they had the right to run for office and some of them, in fact, won office.
00:43:05.820Yeah, the first Reichstag ever elected had something like 9-10%, I think we said.
00:43:11.740So, like, on the one hand, the movement, which in its first wave, exactly like in the U.S.,
00:43:16.820had all been about the right to vote, had attained its right.
00:43:44.420Yeah. So, I mean, that's really impressive.
00:43:46.240But the problem was the Weimar Republic, and this is something we'll see again when we talk about gay people, took over what's called the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, the civil law of the old German empire.
00:43:57.660A lot of this was just like, yes, we're a democracy, but shoplifting is still against the law.0.94
00:44:02.640But it did create this kind of need to piecemeal adjust these paragraphs.
00:44:08.660Meaning, it's not what you're saying that, oh, there are these big principles and then they fail to act on them.
00:44:14.880is that there's actually laws contradicting these things, right?
00:44:18.040So, like, you have a paragraph in the Constitution that says men and women are equal in marriage,
00:44:21.900and then you have divorce law premised on something that is allegedly no longer in the Constitution, right?
00:44:27.600So what they have is a massive litigation project wherein they have to challenge all of these old civil laws,
00:44:33.620probably different state-level laws at different parts of the former German Empire,
00:44:37.300to actually get the Constitution to be placed in force.
00:44:40.100Exactly. And it gives conservatives an endless number of grievances and an endless number of rearguard actions. So like, you know, could women be in the police? Could women be judges? Could women blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So every time you have to refight this battle and every time conservatives go, oh my God, what's happening to society?
00:45:00.660There's a lady judge now, and that can become a source to rally a lot of gendered grievance.1.00
00:45:07.700And to make that one woman judge or the five women judges into, like, hot rods of controversy and resentment.1.00
00:45:26.520All of them were used to, I'm guessing, like fairly constant attacks on their qualifications and dignity.
00:45:33.720Yeah. And then you had the fact that the women's movement was so large and really was a big umbrella, especially this non-socialist, non-communist one.
00:45:42.680And their economic pressures really started mucking with the overall project.
00:45:49.260How are those mucking with the overall project?
00:45:50.780Well, think about it. Same as in the United States, in 1919, a bunch of demobilized men show up into an economy that had expanded for women because, you know, the home front was largely female dominated. And so the question is, how do we deal with this as feminists? Do we say, well, tough shit?0.51
00:46:09.420we're in the workforce, we're going to stay in these1.00
00:47:30.700So the BDF is sort of the main representative of this bourgeois women's movement,
00:47:34.120And which then also in the Weimar Republic under the direction of Gertrude Boehmer, who's a politician for a liberal party, takes a kind of folkish turn.
00:47:42.700Can we talk about Gertrude for a minute?
00:47:44.060Because she's a really interesting figure.
00:47:45.440How did she become the leader of the BDF?
00:48:30.460But was from the beginning what we would today call a reactionary centrist.0.98
00:48:36.780She understood Nazism as a splitting of the body politic and thought the only way to combat that was to prevent further fracture, which often enough just took the shape of kicking left.
00:48:49.660We have to be unified, which means we have to move to the right.
00:48:54.160Yes, I've encountered this impulse.0.88
00:48:56.140Boima sort of isn't as important for the BDF by the time the Nazis come to power.
00:49:02.440She's sort of more like the elder stateswoman.
00:49:04.240But like there had been this kind of nationalist churn.1.00
00:49:07.160You know, there's a lot of forms of feminism kicking around in this era that are less about changing and more about like glorifying and instilling value in women's traditional roles.
00:49:20.120It's less like women should not be confined to being wives and mothers and more like we need to further value and celebrate.
00:49:25.880or wives and mothers, which is a very different project politically
00:49:29.160and one that can be, like, more amenable to conservative projects.1.00
00:49:33.280And I think it's the kind of feminist posture0.99
00:49:35.600that women often retreat to in times of, like, rising conservatism.
00:49:39.620The BDF was enormous, almost one million members in 1928,
00:49:45.200which does come with its own problem.0.97
00:49:47.300The majority of women, and we'll talk about that in a bit,1.00
00:50:24.520Like my employment opportunities are limited to those provided to me by my husband, actually.1.00
00:50:29.760The sort of economic conditions that enable feminism to be a more robust, like maybe more radical proposition were not in place for big sectors of German society.0.99
00:52:31.920But it's a different branding opportunity, I guess.
00:52:34.360Yeah. So the BDF's 1919 program placed a lot more emphasis on the family and on women as mothers and wives.
00:52:42.060It says it's anti-socialist. It retreats from sort of equal rights and employment law and focuses America alert on public decency campaigns, et cetera, et cetera.
00:52:55.240Right. So this is how we get some prohibition in the United States.
00:52:57.740So they find these kind of big tent issues that sort of allow them to represent this broader coalition. But as Evans is saying, like you can hear sort of in the background is like, well, women can only speak as mothers. Women can only speak legitimately as guardians of the hearth, as guardians of national virtue, et cetera, et cetera. Right.
00:53:18.160Right. It takes a traditional role, not as an oppressive one, but as a source of moral authority. You know, one thing you see in these like conservative turns of these early feminist movements is I think just like a lowering of standards.
00:53:30.040Right. It's a calculation that I don't want to like undermine the sincerity or the betrayal of this rightward turn, but it's also something that is responding to the horizon of political possibility being constrained.
00:53:43.380Right. Yeah. Like if you are not in a position to make women actually free from the economic and physical domination of their husbands, then you start looking at ways to make that domination more survivable.
00:53:57.800Like, okay, well, we can't make women able to leave their husbands, but maybe we could make the husbands a little less drunk and by extension a little less physically and sexually violent, which is how you get to things like, you know, prohibition campaign in the U.S. and a lot of, you know, the public decency campaigns around the world.
00:54:14.020Yeah. When Gleichschaltung comes for the women's orgs, it does not take particularly long in May 1933. Evans has a very nice, given that he's basically condensing two chapters of his book into one page, has a very nice, concise account of that in his other book, The Coming of the Third Reich.
00:54:31.180And he gives it as an example there of how, quote, organizations that have been living a relatively secure and undisturbed existence for decades were confused, divided and overtaken by events, which I think is a pretty good description.
00:54:44.020Basically, the BDF was dominated by women of the bourgeoisie.0.54
00:55:09.380Although there was a lot of Catholicism in there too, I think.
00:55:12.100If you're taking out all these people who would have voted SPD or KPD, that means that their constituency had swung seriously towards the Nazis by 1933.
00:55:23.480Once you divide out the people who were like, well, fuck no, I'm voting SPD, you really are dealing with like a lot of these.
00:55:30.600The liberal party that Gertrude Boimler represented was a shadow of its former self, right?0.92
00:57:01.720And here's a form that you can sign.0.80
00:57:03.380That form included, as you say, a pledge to expel all Jewish members, accept direct supervision from noted feminist Adolf Hitler, give the top jobs within its ranks to Nazi women, and to join the Nazi Women's Front by mid-May.0.78
00:57:19.260Okay. So you are no longer an independent organization now. You're an extension of the Nazi party.
00:57:23.860Everybody who's going to have any leadership position in what you were doing is going to be a Nazi.
00:57:28.420But you're making it sound so harsh and dictatorial. There was a signature.0.54
00:57:32.280They were allowed to sign for it, I mean.
00:57:35.540It's almost in itself a gesture of domination, like Victor Klemper recording the beating death of that communist that then gets officially logged as a dysentery death, even though nobody's supposed to believe that, right?
00:57:47.940It's just a grip over the narrative control, epistemic domination in addition.
00:57:52.940Like you're not even actually going to get to tell the truth about what's happening here.
00:57:55.980It's the way that our university leaders keep coming back to the Trump administration.
00:58:00.080They get these demands that are basically, they're invitations to self-destruction.
00:58:03.700And they come back with like, well, we agree that some mistakes were made and maybe we could like look to those and then you could see it in your hearts too.
01:01:02.140So what were abortion rights like in the Weimar era?
01:01:05.580What you see and which we'll see about a bunch of issues, abortion, homosexuality along the paragraph 175, which we'll talk about, and prostitution.
01:01:14.640Weimar was pretty good on a bunch of this stuff, but liberalization only went so far.
01:01:20.960Generally, there was energy towards liberalization, but actually in the end, not that much happened.
01:01:25.600On July 2nd, 1920, so one year into the republic, 81 members of the Social Democrats submit a motion to the Reichstag to repeal sections 218, 219, and 220 of the criminal code.
01:01:39.400Paragraph 218 is the main one that outlaws abortion.
01:01:43.820And is this a criminalization for providers, patients?
01:01:46.320Mostly providers, I believe, and a prohibition against advertising abortion services.
01:02:19.940That having been said, I think the definition of—and here, if German listeners know more about this debate, I've been away from the country for too long.
01:02:27.660My impression is that the definition of advertising has become narrower.
01:02:31.940Like, you are absolutely allowed to mention abortion services to people.
01:02:35.160What you're not supposed to do is, like, have a highway billboard, basically.
01:03:10.340This is like de facto how a lot of abortion law functioned in the U.S. prior to World War II, right?
01:03:15.820Like, it was illegal on the books, but there were all these clinics operating semi-openly.
01:03:22.020Oh, no, no. I mean, like, the law is still on the books, but the law also includes these additional provisions that say it cannot be prosecuted if it's done before the first 12 weeks after fertilization.
01:03:37.860It cannot be prosecuted if it's medically indicated, if it is rape or incest, et cetera, et cetera.
01:03:43.180That stuff is all in there. But technically, I think the main paragraph still says this is illegal.
01:03:49.340So this comes to naught. Basically, it's an SPD-KPD joint to try and overturn this thing and to say, like, let's get rid of this.
01:03:59.400In May 1926, there is a law that reduces abortion from a crime to a misdemeanor, but kept provisions against offering the service commercially.
01:04:09.300And the Supreme Court in Leipzig upholds that law in 1927.
01:04:14.640And then in the late 20s, there's this big push by doctors and writers, really just like an all-out attack on this paragraph 218, plays, articles.
01:04:24.760There's basically a deliberate defiance of the law.
01:04:27.280In the Weltbühne, Karl von Osietzky, who we met in our first episode, who's in fact, I believe already dead now that we're talking, he encouraged women to share their stories about abortion.
01:04:36.760This was mostly a KPD effort, but among the people who supported it publicly were Albert Einstein, the screenwriter Tia von Habuh, and the novelist Leon Feuchwanger, who we're going to be hearing about in future episodes.
01:04:49.140This is all like very typical of like abortion legalization efforts. You get like a combination or an alliance of like medical professionals and feminists and intellectuals. And then you get a lot of like first person testimony about the conditions of like illegal abortion meant to like de-stigmatize and educate.
01:05:06.940Yeah. And the right and social conservatives and so on basically pushed back hard against this. So the law in Weimar, if anything, kind of got nuanced and shaded a little bit, but it didn't get repealed. But when the Nazis came to power, they basically reversed all that. Paragraph 219 and 220 are restored. Advertising and performing abortions started carrying high prison sentences. And in fact, this was one of the Nazis' very first legal projects.
01:05:32.680They have a bunch of extra legal stuff that they're doing, but in terms of actually rewriting0.92
01:05:36.820laws, they're like, we like this. Let's put the dial exactly where it was, if not more.
01:05:41.940So they're really focusing on repression of women's reproductive freedom. Is this a selective
01:05:46.100project? Is it the kind of thing where they're thinking about how legal abortions might be
01:05:51.820useful for their own eugenics and racial engineering exercises, or are they just hard,
01:05:57.120no abortion? It's a good question. I think there's a bit of that. There's a eugenic argument that0.99
01:06:01.420like the women who avail themselves of abortion
01:06:03.360are the women that should be having babies.0.60
01:06:05.340But then there's also the fact that, yeah,
01:06:06.740it just accords very well with a hierarchized picture
01:06:09.820of the genders, which is what they very much
01:06:48.320Yeah, exactly. And there is a kind of an odd thing, right? Like the abortion thing,
01:06:52.620the pushback on that assault on 218 in the late 20s, early 30s.
01:06:59.980The people who were objecting to attempts to liberalize abortion law.
01:07:04.120Exactly. That was not carried by the Nazi party at all. There was barely a Nazi party to speak of, and it wasn't their bailiwick. It was a bunch of other parties doing that. So in some way, yes, gender conservatism clearly played a role, and it may have played a role in establishing broader coalitions, but this was not an issue that Nazis kind of owned, right?
01:07:22.800And the other thing is that, as with abortion in a bunch of cases, the last few years of the Weimar Republic saw a backlash against liberalization on questions of gender and sexuality.
01:07:34.160So you might think, oh, wow, that's basically people moving to the right on these issues in order to blunt the rise of the Nazi party.0.84
01:08:48.180I have read the Christopher Isherwood, and therefore, yeah, I was like, I know that there were glamorous girls with haircuts in Berlin doing drugs, but that's just not the whole political picture.
01:08:58.840Exactly. And that was mostly about the fact that the laws were more humanely enforced, that basically police departments said, look, this is pointless to just constantly bust down these gay establishments. Let's just let them be, you know.0.95
01:09:12.300Right. Like we will come after them when we want to get a gay person for something else or we will come after them when it is convenient to a bigger law and order project. Right. Like if there's gambling there that we want to shut down, if there's often like in the American context, this is how you see like sodomy laws being enforced is really it's like kind of as a tool to get you for something else that might not be strictly illegal that they're mad at.1.00
01:09:35.820It reminds me a little bit of the progressive prosecutor panic of our day, except that, as Mason points out, it's not a case where people sort of go outside of their house and they're like, gadzooks, there's gayness afoot or abortion afoot.
01:09:49.780Like, I must get rid of my progressive prosecutor or something like that.
01:09:53.300It really doesn't touch people's lives at all.
01:09:55.660These liberalizations happen in very specific places where everyone's pretty cool about these things.
01:10:00.560And, like, it's mostly these very big cities that didn't have people who had been born and raised there mostly.
01:10:05.420The Guardian just did a big retrospective on their foreign correspondent in Germany during the rise of the Nazis.
01:10:12.140And one of the things they pointed out was that he seems to have actually lived directly above one of Weimar Berlin's most famous gay bars.
01:10:18.420And he like never mentions it in his journals.
01:10:30.720And that seems to be like, I don't know, a factor of urban life.0.95
01:10:35.840If you're not interested in going to have sex with men, you're probably not going to be that interested in what's going on at the gay bar.0.98
01:10:42.020Yeah. And I mean, there were so many kind of outside groups that we even don't think about as outside groups that much anymore.0.88
01:10:47.580Berlin was a city with tons of single women.
01:10:49.760That was pretty new and people remarked on that and artists got fascinated with it and men were not altogether chill about it.
01:10:56.060But it really was a kind of almost majority minority city.
01:10:59.600But in the end, you're right, like people just kind of live their lives. But the interesting thing is there is this fixation on single women, for instance. Mason points out that about 5 million women worked in small businesses, in family businesses or care work in 1933. 5 million.
01:11:14.320That means that the average voter had no occasion to interact with single urban women working in offices.
01:11:22.960And he points out that, as in sort of racism or anti-Semitism, quote,
01:11:26.840emancipatory changes in the roles and position of women can excite an opposition among men whose own dominance is not immediately challenged.
01:11:34.740The woman question becomes a man question and a political question insofar as it arouses general passion and is felt to raise general questions about the quote-unquote moral, natural, and biological order of society.
01:11:49.460If they are being told to panic about this social phenomenon as a marker of their own status, that can be a concern that is incited in them out of proportion to its role in their own experience.
01:12:33.080The Nazis' position on gender sexuality at this point was not substantially different from the other right-wing parties.
01:12:39.200Hugenberg's DNVP, for instance, and even the Center Party, as you pointed out, as Catholics, is probably more associated with public morals issues than the Nazis.
01:12:49.840There is this kind of backlash mentality, but it's unclear why the Nazis should benefit from it.
01:12:56.120And at least initially, and with some exceptions, the Nazis cracked down on gays, on porn, on prostitution, and so on, really continued trends in the late Weimar Republic, especially after the Prussian coup of 1932.0.50
01:13:12.360This is where I'm relying on Jens Dobler's really cool work on the police and homosexuality, right?
01:13:18.040The Nazis very quickly went after prostitutes and smut and stores, but so had von Papen, so had Schleicher, right?0.97
01:13:24.840Gay clubs, by contrast, continued to operate, by and large, throughout 1933.0.67
01:13:29.480They would eventually obviously be closed down.
01:13:31.560But if you just wanted to go party, you could.0.76
01:13:34.300At least initially then, an individual LGBT person might not have experienced the Nazi seizure of power as a totally radical break, but rather probably as part of an overall sort of darkening trend.0.89
01:13:46.080This makes sense to me. They're coming to power partly because they've tapped into some media and sentimental trends against perceived excesses of social permissiveness, right?0.78
01:14:01.300Like a lot of people are living urban cosmopolitan lives and are not really bothered by this.
01:14:08.420But then you also have big constituencies of people who are maybe not exposed to the banality of like gay and female life in Berlin who actually imagine it as very frightening.0.52
01:14:19.340And the Nazis are able to ride the wave of social discontent around sex and gender that they did not originate.
01:14:27.300So one other place where people have made this argument about the fact that the rise of the Nazis really is a backlash phenomenon on sex and gender is people have adduced that as a solution to one of the mysteries we tackled in the last episode, which is why on earth would these other right wing parties and above all the center party vote for the enabling laws?0.53
01:14:48.680Why would they essentially put themselves out of business?
01:14:50.700Yeah, it's fascinating. They seem to have like no sense of self-preservation for their own power when they vote to give Hitler, who is a member of a different party, basically total control. But you've discovered this like other explanation by these backlash theorists.0.79
01:15:07.620Well, they suggest simply that could it be that they agreed with the Nazis on a bunch of these cultural war issues?
01:15:15.540We hold our nose, we'll vote for this because we need to clean up the mess.0.69
01:15:19.540And this is something that always seemed quite persuasive to me.
01:15:22.540But Laurie Marhofer's book does suggest not so much.
01:15:26.140The parties did say why they supported this law, and none of them gave public morals reasons.
01:15:30.800The center party did have socially conservative positions, increasingly so, but they could have gotten those realized by a von Papen government easily, which was a bog standard right wing authoritarian government, which is probably what they were angling for in the first place.
01:15:46.080The reasons they gave were about something else. They were a worry about communism, its threat to the Catholic Church specifically. And their main worry about the Nazis was that the Nazis were anti-Catholic, irreligious, and neo-pagan, which they very much were, right, which made them kind of weird carriers for like public morals.
01:16:03.780But how prominent was like the neo-pagan strain within the Nazis? Because that's always struck me as like, OK, a couple of the real nerds are into this like Nordic mythology stuff and they're getting into like runes. And then everybody else is, you know, the mainstream of the Nazi party is foregrounding that less.
01:16:23.580It's hard to say, right? I mean, like, it's also a time when public and private are more distinct. The overall vibe of the Nazi leadership was a lot more libertine.
01:16:33.200They were all drugged out of their mind, right? They were all on stimulants a lot.0.56
01:16:36.660Well, that might have been part of it. But in this way, Nazism was fairly, quote unquote, modern. They were not about a return to Christian doctrine. And they had opportunities to claim that they were the way that in Austria would happen or that with the Falange in Spain would happen. They declined that, right?0.84
01:16:52.020They allowed the Catholic Church a certain measure of autonomy, and we'll get to that in our July episode.
01:16:57.640But the idea of churches as co-equal places where people gather, organize, and form opinions was not really high on their list.
01:17:06.720And there was a lot of stuff about Germanic mythology that was, frankly, neo-pagan, right?
01:17:11.560Think of the Georges Circle episode we did for our Patreon.
01:17:19.520Well, this strikes me as, you know, one area where a comparison to the MAGA, right, might be illustrative, right? Because the leadership of the MAGA party is not particularly sexually conservative, right? They are in favor of a libertine sexuality that is defined by eroticized domination of women, which is one way that you get the integration of some gay men into like visible places in the MAGA movement.
01:17:45.020This is why they have great use for somebody like Milo Iannopoulos.0.53
01:17:50.740And then they are also granting a kind of permissiveness that is seen as being in opposition to the scolding or moralistic or characterized as almost maternal elements of like feminist and anti-racist social justice movements, right?
01:18:08.940Like, there's a way in which libertinism is coded conservative in the MAGA world.
01:18:15.780And I can imagine something like that or somewhat comparable might be at play with the Nazi leadership.
01:18:22.300They seem in part new and exciting because they're not just regurgitating what the center party has been saying.
01:18:28.460They have this new set of priorities, which can channel a lot of like social grievances without necessarily being seen as like limiting the impulses or freedoms of the in-group.
01:18:42.420Like there's something untrammeled, unfettered about the kind of politics that the Nazis offer.0.75
01:18:47.420Whereas I think the Christianity of the center party was still understood as a kind of restrictive feature, right?0.79
01:18:53.640There were things you wanted to do that you didn't get to do, which I feel like is probably one of the basic experiences of Catholicism.0.80
01:19:01.860I think you're articulating something that a bunch of historians have also pointed out.
01:19:05.600Tim Mason, who does seem to think that anti-feminism had a real role to play in the rise of the Nazis, tells the story a little bit differently.
01:19:13.160And I think he might be a good person to reply to Laurie Marhofer here.
01:19:18.100Like, I don't have an opinion on this, but just to point out what the other side of this would look like, right?
01:19:22.680He points out that, quote, the political implications of such common positions, of which this is an interesting example, did not always become clear until after the seizure of power in 1933.
01:19:32.760If I'm understanding correctly, his reply to Marhofer would be, well, it depends on what you mean by the rise of the Nazi party.
01:19:41.520Did anti-feminism uniquely buoy the electoral fortunes of the Nazi party between 1931 and 1933?
01:19:48.620But did it help the Nazis attain dominance after 1933 in the sense that it maybe made a bunch of conservative elites, as you were saying, more ready to sign on to the project and come into the fold?0.88
01:22:08.500But this Institute was not only doing things0.67
01:22:10.700that the modern LGBT movement would approve of.0.95
01:22:13.420There's also some sense of, like, trying to, like, cure homosexuals or, like, transsexuals and make them both, like, affirm their gender and also try and discipline them out of it, right?0.98
01:22:25.540Yeah. So it's not all great, especially the public health stuff, which sort of starts with sexual education, very good, but also, like, sexual hygiene can, like, go from, like, here's how you put on a condom to, like, much more questionable shit, you know?0.99
01:22:43.620So, you know, like the feminists, these people very much of their time and reflecting some of the broader trends in the German electorate.
01:22:52.100Exactly. And Hirschfeld, of course, one of the first campaigners for gay liberation.
01:22:58.160And his motto is through science to justice.
01:23:00.780By knowing more about LGBT people is how we get equality.
01:23:05.360Like, once you understand that this is not a disease or a sin or whatever, you will be able to treat us as human beings and as fellow citizens, right?
01:23:13.940And am I correct that he's already left Germany by our period for this episode, May 1933?
01:23:39.160So in terms of the position of gay people in the Weimar Republic, it's the same thing we've been finding in regards to labor and the women's movement.0.77
01:23:49.0001933 has really exposed the rot of 1931 and 32.
01:23:53.860The position of the Institute for Sexual Science had eroded quite substantially in the final years of the Republic.
01:24:00.700As you say, Hirschfeld had decided not to return to Germany after a lecture tour in 32.
01:24:05.720Laws around lewdness, public indecency and so on were being tightened by various right-wing governments that were coming to power.
01:24:12.620LGBT people at the time noted that those are the early rumblings, in case you're later wondering.
01:24:19.180And what we see in 33 really in the beginning is a kind of further darkening of that overall picture.
01:24:26.200One way in which this apparently showed up in the Institute is that in the early Weimar Republic,
01:24:31.020it had been sort of cool for politicians to show up and do events there and to meet with people there and get a tour, et cetera, et cetera.
01:24:51.420Yeah. In the beginning of 1933, it's noticeable that the Nazis did not go after LGBT community spaces initially. Clubs and bars remained relatively unscathed in the first onslaught of terror. They went after two things. They went after queer activities in already marginalized populations. That's above all male prostitution. The second thing they did was they went after the study of queer people. And this is where the Institute comes into focus for the Nazi repressive apparatus.
01:25:20.320So on May 6th, members of the Nazi Student Union roll up to the institute, which is in Tiergarten in Berlin, and ransack the place.0.86
01:25:28.820They're followed in short order by the SA, which is actually pretty important, I think.0.92
01:25:33.560In a lot of universities, the book burnings were organized entirely by student groups, albeit, of course, at the behest of the National Party.
01:25:40.780It was supposed to look spontaneous, even though it obviously wasn't.
01:25:43.860cri de coeur of these students who are expressing the true spirit of the german people that's right
01:25:50.500it's actually a directive coming down from the top yeah and again the stuff they're not really
01:25:55.060trying to fool anyone like there are people reciting a script at each of these book burnings
01:25:59.620you're like oh they just they're cri de coeur conspicuously the same yeah as like using the
01:26:04.700exact same words as happened at the other university earlier this week i think it's like
01:26:08.260ninthly and tenthly and you're like okay i feel like that's a lot of memorization my friend
01:26:12.920As somebody who has tried to get the students to write anything, let me tell you, it's never a 10-point list.
01:26:41.220I want Cersei to know it was me. Tell Cersei here they want people to know it was them.
01:26:45.260This is not spontaneous. This is state apparatus coming down on them.
01:26:49.960And because the Institute is so famous, because it was the center of this early Weimar social moment, I'm guessing partly it's a symbolic gesture as well.
01:27:59.500Imagine if like somebody was getting rid of a gay rights library.0.97
01:28:03.420I mean, this literally happened at New College of Florida.
01:28:05.320They dismantled the gender studies department and they put all those books in dumpsters outside and kids were, you know, taking those books and taking them home.
01:28:14.540So they leave with almost 10,000 volumes of the Institute's library.
01:28:19.360And then they're burned on what was then the Opera Square in Berlin, today's Bibelplatz.
01:28:24.860There's a memorial to this book burning.
01:28:26.260And they just throw it in there with a bunch of Marx, a bunch of Heine, a bunch of, I think Thomas Mann's already in there.
01:28:34.000Like everyone who's left Germany basically is on the stack.
01:28:37.400And we should say that the student union had begun making lists of, quote unquote, seditious literature in, I think, late March, early April.
01:28:45.160And then by April 12th, you get the theses against the un-German spirit, which is basically like, here's the type of things.
01:28:51.480And then I think the first exhortation really was to get rid of books in your own library, right? So university students, if you have a book of heinous poetry, get rid of it, please, right? And then they sort of started scouring the university libraries. Then you get stuff like the Institute. And at the same time, of course, like a lot of this is centrally coordinated, right? Like, I'm not even sure how they would know who to target exactly, but these lists sort of go out.
01:29:17.100And I'll spare people the exact details of these book burnings there. This was pretty well documented. But I think a bunch of themes that we've been tracking throughout these episodes resurfaced in this book burning, right? They had been organized in advance, but as you say, they were meant to look like a spontaneous outpouring of the people's anger, right? Of the youth cleansing, finally, the altar of German culture, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:29:40.860At the same time, these were ways of suffusing agencies, right?0.76
01:29:43.980Like, these weren't done by the SA mostly.
01:29:46.520They were at the Institute, but not elsewhere.
01:30:09.020Yeah. And, you know, we've talked a lot about outside pressures. And I think at this point, we do have to make clear that Gleichschaltung was also a process that was embraced by lots and lots of Germans, right? It provided opportunities for advancement. It could be a welcome opportunity to strike back at people you hated.
01:30:26.760Well, I shout in being this to remind our listeners that this is a synchronization process, right? Whereas in all of these civil society, organizations are being subsumed by the Nazi organizational apparatus or disbanded if they can't be.0.69
01:30:40.160Yeah, exactly. And it was heavily ritualized, right? This was not a kind of disorganized mob doing something. This was a very organized mob. This was a heavily ritualized mob. The Nazis, as I said, provided a pretty exhaustive script to this whole thing.0.73
01:30:55.880It really was about sort of settling on a version of history.0.80
01:30:59.860This is what Gertrude Boimler, I think, is alluding to in that letter that we cited earlier.0.50
01:31:04.100People have to learn how to speak Nazi, right?
01:31:06.380And this is like, well, here's how you do it, by the way, right?
01:31:08.560These are the things you can't use or can't say.
01:31:10.440It strikes me that this is the product necessarily of a very comprehensive and forward-looking strategy, right?
01:31:16.240Like, who is writing this script that's going out to all the Nazi student groups to be read out at their book burnings?0.67
01:31:23.740Like, who is deciding that this is going to be the next thing the Nazis are doing?
01:32:31.960But I think as Tim Mason and I think Laurie Marhofer would agree with this too, you know, it's not all opportunism.
01:32:38.360It's also that a lot of this was widely shared.
01:32:41.540A lot of this distaste was widely shared among more right-wing Germans.1.00
01:32:45.620And so now was their chance to take something that they kind of felt uneasy about, right, all these queers running around making a mess all over the city and turning it into something very, very useful to their own career and life trajectory, or so they thought.1.00
01:33:00.680Right. There are people who are experiencing this as sort of permission to do something that they kind of wanted to do already.1.00
01:33:05.900Exactly. And so we'll talk about some of that in our June episode, I believe. We're going to be talking about the SA and about the actual paramilitary apparatus of the Nazi party. We're also going to be talking about what collaboration is going to look like in 1933, because that really emerges very, very clearly by May and June. But we didn't have time for it this week. And I say this because I know that I am keeping you from going to the opera. Do you want to tell folks what you're seeing?