Very few dates bring up as many mixed emotions as November 9th. A day that, depending on which year you talk about, can represent either pain or joy, fear or hope. It's very rare that multiple important, history-defining moments of a single country take place on the same day, all within the same century, how sometimes one lead to the other and how they are all responsible for turning Germany into the country it is today. In this article, I want to go down each of these events, all taking place on November 9th, explain what they were, why they happened and what lessons we learned from them.
1918 - The Republic is proclaimed: Following the German Empire's defeat in WWI (which oficially ended two days after these events), a series of constitutional changes that weakened the monarchy and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German Empire was dissolved, and the country was transformed from a monarchy into a parliamentary federal republic with a liberal constitution. It was also the very first attempt at a democratic republic to include the entire German nation-state. This period in German history is known informally as the Weimar Republic, since the constituent assembly that established the new government took place in the city of Weimar. On November 9th, Philipp Scheidemann of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD), precursor to today's SPD, proclaimed the republic from the Reichstag building in Berlin, while Karl Liebknecht of the now-defunct Marxist Spartacus League proclaimed it a second time in the Lustgarten next to the Berlin Cathedral later in the day. This new republic lasted until Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933.
1923 - Beer Hall Putsch: By then, the Weimar Republic had been ravaged by the catastrophic effects of the Treaty of Versailles, which had been imposed five years earlier at the end of WWI. People were struggling with constant political unrest, food shortages, inflation and deep economic instability amid growing mistrust in the new republic. Even the center of industrial occupation was under French occupation. The justified feelings of anger and humiliation that this brought on the German people were a perfect breeding ground for various extremist political movements, including National Socialism, that promised to "make Germany great again", so to speak. Inspired by Mussolini's march on Rome a year earlier, a young Adolf Hitler and his fellow militants decided it was the right time to create an insurrection. To do that, they planned to coerce Bavaria's leading politicians to join their crusade and march to Berlin with them. Their targets were General Commissar Gustav Ritter von Kahr, state commissioner; General Otto von Lossow, commander of the Reichswehr; and Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser, head of the Bavarian state police. These three men were known as the Bavarian triumvirate, as they were the most powerful people in the state at the time. All three already had nationalist tendencies. When Hitler heard that von Kahr would be giving a speech at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall on November 8th, and both von Lossow and von Seisser would be in attendance, he decided it was the right time to make his move. That evening, he and his accomplices burst into the beer hall mid-speech, firing shots into the air and saying that a revolution had begun, claiming that the building was surrounded, that they had machine guns and that the national government had already fallen, all of which were lies. The three men were then led into another room at gunpoint, while Hitler took to the podium and, with just a few short sentences, turned the previous hostility of the crowd into a standing ovation. Once the triumvirate members reluctantly joined him, Hitler made the mistake of going away for a few hours, leaving General Erich Ludendorf, a former WWI military leader turned ultra-nationalist, in charge. Once he was back, he learned that all three men had changed their minds and left, ruining his plan. Nevertheless, Hitler and Ludendorf designed a new plan: to march into the center of Munich and take over the city the next day, followed by around 2,000 people. However, at around noon on the 9th, they were met by police gunfire, which left 15 Nazis, 4 officers and an innocent bystander dead. Ludendorf was taken into custody without incident, while an injured Hitler hid at a nearby friend's house, but was arrested two days later. He and his co-defendants were tried for treason, but they were met by a sympathetic judge who was impressed by Hitler's eloquence, turning him into a celebrity. In the end, he only served nine months of his 5-year sentence, writing Mein Kampf while in prison, while the Nazi party continued to grow in popularity over the next several years.
1938 - Kristallnacht: Also known as the "Night of Broken Glass" or the "November Pogrom", it refers to a series of antisemitic attacks that took place across Germany on the night of November 9th. Two days earlier, diplomat Ernst vom Rath had been murdered by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew in retaliation for the increasing hostility against Jews brought on by the Nazi regime and the Nüremberg laws. In October of 1938, the Nazis expelled about 17,000 Polish Jews from Germany, while the Polish government, attempting to prevent their mass return, passed a law that validated all passports of Polish citizens living abroad. This left everyone who had been expelled, including Grynszpan's family, stranded in no-man's land at the border between the two countries, without any food or shelter. Angry at this, he went to the German embassy in Paris, asked to speak to the person in charge and shot Vom Rath, who died two days later. This gave Nazi leaders, who happened to be assembled to commemorate the putsch of 1923, a perfect excuse to launch a state-sanctioned wave of violence against the Jewish community, in cities all over Germany and annexed Austria. Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and Vienna were among the most affected. Thousands of Jewish-owned buildings, businesses and synagogues had their windows smashed (which is why the incident is named after the noise of broken glass), were vandalized and set ablaze by Nazi sympathizers. At least 91 people were killed and another 30,000 were sent to concentration camps in the weeks that followed. This cold November night marked a turning point towards the horrors that would become the Holocaust.
1989 - Fall of the Berlin Wall: Probably the most well-known of these events, the images of people climbing over the wall and breaking it up into pieces are forever etched into the memory of arguably everyone who watched it unfold on live TV, and are easily recognizable even to those who were born later. Following a miscommunication in which East German official Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced the opening of the inner German border during a televised press conference, meant only to announce a change in travel policy for East German citizens, the news began to spread quickly, and within hours thousands of East Germans had gathered on different checkpoints along the Wall, demanding that the confused and non the wiser border guards immediately let them through. Eventually, rather than using force to try and stop them, at 10:30 PM the guards relented and opened the checkpoints. As East German Ossis fled in masses, West German Wessies, who had also assembled upon hearing the news, welcomed them on the other side with bottles of champagne, music and flowers, starting a massive celebration that went on for days. People started climbing to the top of the wall and using all sorts of tools to take it down. Many chipped off small pieces and took them home as souvenirs, such as the bookmark with a piece of wall in an acrylic frame I bought for myself at Checkpoint Charlie. Though I hadn't yet been born, it's one of the moments that always brings tears to my eyes whenever I think about what it must have felt like. Freedom, at last.
Having people in my family who experienced both the horrors of 1938 and the overwhelming joy of 1989, this day is bittersweet. It's amazing how much can happen in less than a century, and how the same date can have different meanings to different people. From my own perspective, the uplifting note of the last event serves as a way to reclaim what was once a painful day, and turn that pain into healing for us as a nation. And with this introspective reflection, I conclude my impromptu history lesson. I will now go listen to Scorpions' "Wind of Change" and dream about that better world the song describes.
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