The Journalist Who the Nazis Could not Silence
December 05, 2024 at 02:30PM
Kate McQueen | The Atavist Magazine | November 2024 | 1,602 words (6 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 156, “The Good Traitor.”
ONE
The first time Carl von Ossietzky disappeared inside a prison, a crowd of supporters cheered him on. It was a sunny Tuesday in May 1932. Several friends had escorted the journalist across Berlin. They fastened black, red, and gold streamers to their cars and departed from the west-side offices of Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), the left-leaning magazine Ossietzky edited. As they paraded slowly toward Tegel Prison, in the north of the city, the colors of the German Republic fluttered around them in traffic.
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In a wooded area outside the prison’s main gates, about 100 intellectual celebrities, sympathetic journalists, and general well-wishers had gathered in solidarity. The crowd violated Berlin’s ban on large group gatherings, enacted to quell violence between extremists on Germany’s left and right, but writer Kurt Grossman, the secretary of the German League of Human Rights, a pacifist organization of which Ossietzky was a member, persuaded the police to keep patrols away from the area for 90 minutes. Ossietzky could take his time bidding his audience farewell. “I’m not surrendering,” he said. In prison, he insisted, he would “remain a living demonstration against a judgment from the highest court.”
Fourteen months earlier, the 42-year-old editor had been charged with treason for publishing an article about the German Air Force’s rearmament efforts, which were in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty forbade Germany from accumulating war matériel or maintaining more than a small defense-oriented military. The facts of the rearmament were not widely known until Die Weltbühne’s story ran. In turn, the military accused both Ossietzky and the author of the article, Walter Kreiser, of betraying their country.
Die Weltbühne’s circulation was small but its readership influential; this included thought leaders in politics and culture both in Germany and beyond its borders. Anticipating international outcry, the German Foreign Office expressed doubts about prosecuting the two men, but the state attorney proceeded with a closed-door trial anyway. For two days, Ossietzky and Kreiser sat side by side in a vast empty gallery, listening to the echoes of lawyers’ competing voices. “Uncanny, such a theater without an audience,” Ossietzky later wrote. The men were ultimately convicted of a lesser charge—publishing military secrets—and sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment. They were given until early May 1932 to hand themselves over to the authorities. Kreiser fled Germany to avoid doing time. Ossietzky made a point of staying.
Ossi, as his friends called him, was a small, quiet man with a high forehead, a long narrow nose, and knife-thin lips. His striking face made him easy to caricature, and newspapers often did just that. He tended to cast his eyes down at the floor during casual conversation, holding a lit cigarette between gently shaking fingers. His reserve, coupled with the “von” in his last name, which was traditionally a marker of noble lineage, caused strangers to mistake him for an aristocrat. But Ossietzky came from a working-class neighborhood in Hamburg. He barely finished secondary school, and then worked listlessly as a clerk in Hamburg’s judicial administration until 1914. His experience serving in the Great War cemented his commitment to peace and galvanized his interest in writing. He relocated to Berlin in 1919, where he became secretary for the German Peace Society and gained acclaim as a political commentator who argued against militarism and for democracy.
Journalists, he believed, ought “to hold a mirror up to the times” and be “the conscience of the day.” Week after week, Ossietzky turned out articles that vibrated with energy. His colleague Rudolf Arnheim once said that Ossietzky could interest even the most unpolitical readers in the country’s fate because his “thoughts [were] not brought forward with jargon but rather in a language in which one can describe flowers, music, and women.” Ossietzky’s articles were those of an advocate for a fledgling democracy stretched to the breaking point by increasingly radical political factions. He didn’t want the young republic to die on his watch.
After Ossietzky took over Die Weltbühne in 1927, he spent long hours working in shirtsleeves amid messy piles of papers at the magazine’s office. He was the kind of editor who preferred pencil stubs to red pens, who remembered to buy the printing crew beer and sausages. Under his leadership, Die Weltbühne published pieces from across the political left, a fact that exasperated contributors who wished he’d hew to a more radical line. The magazine became a necessary if solitary stage for those not strictly aligned with Germany’s leading workers’ parties.
One frequent topic of discussion in its pages was Germany’s militarism, an original sin that had led the country into the Great War and paved the way for incipient fascism. This got the publication in trouble more than once with state authorities. Prior to Ossietzky’s 1931 trial, Die Weltbühne had already faced a lawsuit over its coverage of the Schwarze Reichswehr, a right-wing paramilitary group that carried out numerous vigilante killings in the early 1920s. The magazine’s articles pressured Germany’s Department of Justice to prosecute the murderers and embarrassed the military, which had denied the existence of underground armed groups even as it sanctioned their activities. Later, the military insisted that another charge be brought against Die Weltbühne, this time for publishing a commentary declaring that “soldiers are murderers.”
The terms of Ossietzky’s punishment for publishing military secrets jarred his friends and admirers. People convicted of high-profile political crimes in Germany were often given festungshaft (fortress confinement), a more comfortable form of imprisonment. Such was the case for Adolf Hitler following the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch; while incarcerated, he had permission to receive visitors, and it was during that period that he wrote Mein Kampf. Yet the court ordered Ossietzky to serve his time in a common prison alongside thieves and murderers. Justice, many on Germany’s left grumbled, was only blind in the right eye.
Ossietzky insisted that his sentence was in keeping with the principles of his profession. “They may condemn us, today, tomorrow, the day after, [and] we will accept it,” he once wrote. “But our pride will be in … becoming more energetic, sharper, denser and tougher. That’s why we are journalists.” His stance inspired fellow members of the press.
Though it had not been his goal, by overseeing coverage of Germany’s militarism and facing judgment for it, Ossietzky also became a symbol for the German peace movement—and for those opposed to fascism. “If you want to fight effectively against the corrupt spirit of a nation,” he told a Die Weltbühne contributor, “you must share its fate.”
The day Ossietzky reported for his sentence, he made a final promise: When his friends saw him again, he would be “released but not reformed.” Hat in hand, he waved to the crowd and allowed himself to be swallowed by the prison’s redbrick walls.
“If you want to fight effectively against the corrupt spirit of a nation,” Ossietzky told a Die Weltbühne contributor, “you must share its fate.”
His freshly painted cell with its stone floor reminded Ossietzky of a bathroom. The food the prison gave him was meager. He needed a doctor’s permission to smoke, and was limited to ten cigarettes per day. But the situation wasn’t too terrible, he told his wife, Maud. He could read and write, at least. Ossietzky penned countless letters to supporters and to Die Weltbühne’s contributors. He drafted articles, smuggled out of Tegel by one of his lawyers, that were published under the pseudonym Thomas Murner. And he wrote to Maud with dozens of small requests: books, soap, lanolin for shaving, shoelaces, handkerchiefs, underwear. Sometimes he asked for paper, other times for envelopes.
Maud, a tiny Anglo-Indian woman with enormous brown eyes, did not have a battle-axe sensibility. She passed on many of Ossietzky’s requests to the magazine’s gruff but efficient operations manager, Hedwig Hünicke, whom one staff member referred to, with equal parts love and fear, as the “corset rods” of the publication.
Die Weltbühne forged ahead thanks to Hünicke and Hellmut von Gerlach, Ossietzky’s close friend and a longtime colleague in the peace movement. Gerlach was in his sixties, with a graying goatee and a boyish sense of humor. His weekly editorials drew on his wealth of experience as a journalist, a former politician, and the current chair of the German League of Human Rights. Gerlach supervised the production of 42 issues of the magazine in Ossietzky’s absence, publishing work by a dozen well-known male contributors and a few women, who wrote under male pseudonyms.
Gerlach’s decades-younger companion, Milly Zirker, was one of those women. The fashionable Zirker worked as an editor for the daily 8 Uhr Abendblatt and wrote political commentary for Die Weltbühne under the name Johannes Bückler. According to Gerlach, Zirker was as tough in person as she was with words; she is said to have saved his life once during an antiwar protest that turned violent. Hilde Walter was another no-nonsense Die Weltbühne contributor, who wrote articles on unions and women’s issues. Friends described Walter as assertive and opinionated, but not ambitious or vain; sometimes rude but always honest.
In addition to keeping its own doors open, Die Weltbühne assisted the German League of Human Rights and the German branch of the PEN Club with collecting 42,036 signatures in support of a reduction in Ossietzky’s sentence. The petition failed, but Ossietzky was released early anyway as part of a mass amnesty pushed through parliament by an unusual alliance of representatives from the Nazi, Communist, and Social Democratic Parties. Ossietzky walked out of Tegel on December 22, after seven months and 12 days behind bars. He would not be free for long.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/05/carl-von-ossietzky-journalism-nazi-germany/
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