“Wandering”

In the late nineteenth century, the village of Samotschin, then in Prussia (present-day Szamocin, Poland), lay flat on the vast East German plain and rested in a lazy sleep of a sparsely populated backwater which had a total of only about 2,000 residents. The landscape itself would have been unspectacular, ordinary, possessing the lonely beauty of fields, pine woods, and streams, corresponding to the meandering pace of an era now long past. Then still a part of Germany, it was one of the less notable acquisitions of the second Polish partition of 1793. Samotschin, sluggish and sleepy, lay in the brown-needled carpet of pine-wooded fields, broken during the winter by the white fog of smoke unwinding from plastered chimneys. The village today remains little noticed, in the late nineteenth century even less so. Nothing exceptional ever happened in this haphazard little hamlet until December 1893. On the first day of that winter month, Ernst Hugo Toller was born, third child of Mendel Toller, age thirty-seven (1856–1911) and his wife, Charlotte Chaia Toller-Cohn, born in the same year as her husband.

Toller’s great grandfather apparently had accumulated a respectable amount of wealth—enough, at least, to manage sometime during the reign of Frederick the Great to leave the certainly less attractive ghetto and purchase the honor of being Samotschin’s sole Jew. His paternal great-grandfather, of Spanish descent, had a West Prussian estate, and family rumor had it that his wealth was so great he could afford to eat from gold dishes. As a boy, Toller used to dream of such legendary riches; however, the alleged family fortune had declined somewhat through the years, and Toller’s parents were merely well-off members of Germany’s middle class. Of his father, Max, who eventually became one of Samotschin’s town councilors, we are told that, after a brilliant career at an unnamed university, he became a pharmacist. It is left to the imagination why he gave up a career in pharmacy and followed the trade of his father, that of a shopkeeper. His father apparently encouraged his son’s literary ambitions and sent Toller’s first youthful poems to the father of the future literary critic Kurt Pinthus.^[1]

The Samotschin of Toller’s childhood was an intensely German town. Its proximity to Poland heightened German national feeling even among the town’s Jewish inhabitants. Although the surrounding region had become Prussian only in the last century, the Germans had little difficulty in viewing themselves as hereditary rulers. The conflict between Poles and Germans was occasionally hostile, with each group fighting over every piece of land. For the children of Samotschin, the Polish minority were derisively called “Polacks,” descendants of Cain and, therefore, cursed by God, who singularly blessed only Germans. For their parents, biblical mythology was perhaps not quite as strong; they were content to surround anti-Polish sentiment with nationalism, labeling any German who dared sell land to a Pole as little better than a traitor. To such sentiments even the young Toller was not immune. When one of his neighbors had the temerity to sell a small plot of land to a non-German, Toller waxed “highly indignant,” holding forth about such an unpatriotic act, and even demanding intervention by the Prussian authorities. “What times we live in,” he lamented, “when morals and common decency are daily flouted and Germans are no longer on the alert. What will become of the Fatherland?”^[2]

While the position of the Jew in German society was little better than that of the Polish minority, Samotschin’s Jews had little sympathy with fellow sufferers. Indeed, both Jew and German managed to unite in common opposition against the Pole. Looking upon themselves as pioneers of German culture, Jewish homes became cultural centers where German literature, philosophy, and art were cultivated with what Toller noted to be “a pride and assiduousness which bordered on the ridiculous.”^[3] In opposition to the Polaken, it was possible for the Jew to find an otherwise elusive community of interest with the German. Traditionally rejected by society as an outsider, a group essentially “un-German,” Samotschin’s Jews could, in their opposition to alleged Polish encroachment, almost feel themselves assimilated into German society. The Jew could declare the Pole to be “unpatriotic” and, at the same time, could celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday at the same table with the reserve officers, the War League, and the Home Defense Corps, drink beer and schnapps and proudly raise his glass to the Kaiser’s health. Samotschin was, of course, no more immune to anti-Semitism than to anti-Polish feeling, yet the first could always be ignored if a family was jovial enough to overcome veiled insults, politically shrewd enough (like Toller’s father) to hold a municipal position of some importance, and self-effacing enough not to emphasize the peculiarity of being Jewish. Indeed, among the Jew’s circle of Christian friends, Jewishness could almost be forgiven—but even here it was seldom forgotten. Anti-Semitism could take a variety of forms from public Jew baiting on the streets, to which the young Toller was subjected,^[4] to the more subtle but no less painful nuances of polite conversation. It was the latter that the Berlin drama critic Alfred Kerr had in mind when he noted:

“A sneering appellation on the street, a venomous glance, a scornful appraising look, certain contempt” ^[6] —all could perhaps be overlooked by the Jew who wished to succeed in German society. Yet for one with as perceptive and as sensitive a nature as the young Toller, the fact of being “different,” of not being like “the others,” was painful.^[7] Despite Samotschin’s more liberal attitude toward its Jewish minority (one is tempted here to make a connection with its intolerance toward Poles), Toller’s earliest memories were of a vaguely perceived sense of isolation, an uncomfortable impression of being an outsider, an ill-defined feeling of belonging to a group which for all its attachment to German civilization, somehow did not quite fit into German life. Toller’s first childhood recollection, one that remained with him almost four decades after it occurred, was of being unable to play with a neighborhood child, a Christian, when it was discovered Toller was Jewish.^[8] The strains of anti-Semitism were felt so profoundly that as a child Toller would have preferred not to be a Jew at all. As he explained, “I don’t want the other children to run after me shouting ‘Dirty Jew.’”^[9] As an outsider wishing to become an insider, Toller was uncomfortable at a separate Jewish school and was proud to be admitted to a Latin school taught by a Christian minister.^[10]

Toller never forgot he was a Jew, although it may have been only his early contacts with anti-Semitism that made him aware of being a Jew rather than a German, and the effects of being a Jew in German society stamped much of Toller’s work. Unlike his fellow intellectual Gustav Landauer, who would also be one of the leaders of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet of 1919, Toller seldom alluded to his Jewish heritage. He did not, like Kurt Tucholsky or the novelist Alfred Döblin, give up his religion in favor of Christianity; nor did he, like the brilliant and idiosyncratic Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, engage in a self-hatred about his Jewish origins.^[11] He neither made it a point to advertise his religion, nor did he ever renounce it. It was merely not emphasized, except by others.

It is perhaps not surprising, in view of his later humanism, that Toller expressed a preference for the more humanistic New Testament over the legal formalism of the Old Testament, the one emphasizing love and brotherhood, the other law and ritual. Toller’s later expressionist embrace of an ideology of spiritual love and brotherhood, almost as a religious experience, can be traced back to Plato. It is Plato who first sees love as the desire to possess absolute goodness and beauty, taking us from an imperfect and transient space to one of perfection and eternity, a picture of love’s ascent from the physical to the divine. It is a quality adopted by Christianity, where it became a world-conquering power of divine grace, a great redeeming force that exists in a higher realm than ordinary life. It is seen in the messianic plays of Toller, Die Wandlung the most prominent among them, which trace its roots to the Middle Ages and German Romanticism. This idea of love as religion was particularly developed in Germany. Writes one observer of this: “no people have been remotely as concerned to rediscover the sacred in the ordinary. No people have had such a will (and ability) to foster earthly spirituality with eyes to see and ears to hear and a mind to formulate the presence of the absolute in everyday things and events.” Love as religion, seen in the works of both Schlegel and Novalis, reaches back to a tradition of German mysticism first formulated by Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme.^[12] This may perhaps explain why Toller, while admiring the “power and beauty” of the Hebrew Bible, found its ethos “alien.”^[13]

Yet despite his alienation from the Old Testament ethos, the fact of being a Jew was a formative influence on his thought. A quasi-religious tone remains in much of his work even after the religious faith and ritual were disregarded. Toller himself even equated religion with both poetry and politics, two fields in which he was to be much concerned.^[14] In addition, although repudiating traditional Jewish theology, it was impossible for him to repudiate the tradition of persecution and separation, nor the tradition of hostility of Christian society in Germany toward Jews. Even if some Jews attempted to ignore the stigma of their religion and were willing to give up overt Jewish customs, even if many were willing to make the attempt to become more German than Jewish,^[15] many undoubtedly felt their Jewishness a problem at least upon occasion. At some time during their lives, many Jews like Toller became aware that all was not well, that Jewishness was a problem that had to be faced.

Many German intellectuals of Jewish origin recognized the problematic nature of their existence and were, consequently, forced into taking a position toward it. From the poet Heinrich Heine, to the satirist Karl Kraus, to the uncomfortable industrialist Walter Rathenau, to the writer Ernst Toller, there existed the same complex of questions: What does it mean to be a Jew? How should he react to his environment? Should he emphasize his religion, renounce it, hate it, conceal it, or just ignore it and hope others would do likewise? For many, the answers to such questions became sources of inner conflict that gave to their lives a certain inner restlessness. Such a restlessness was reflected in Toller’s first drama, Die Wandlung. Its hero, Friedrich, himself not a member of the Christian community, stands at an open window watching the burning of Christmas candles, feeling an acute sense of loneliness and isolation. The image of Ahasuerus, the Jew, doomed to wander throughout eternity for his insensitivity to the sufferings of Christ, haunts his mind. In the end, he bewails a religion that marks him as “an outcast, struggling between one shore and the next, far from the old and farther from the new, a nasty hybrid.”^[16] Friedrich stands between two cultures; although he may reject his religion, he is still rejected by a society to which he wishes to belong.

Many Jews, wishing to become members of the German community and aware of the prejudices against them, attempted to submerge their religion under devotion to German Kultur. Tucholsky’s quip, “If the German Nationalists were not so stupid as to be anti-Semitic, the greater part of conservative Jewry would flock to them,”^[17] was perhaps an exaggeration born of disappointment but one which, nevertheless, had some validity. In an effort to gain acceptance, many Jews felt a need to prove their patriotism. In 1914, Toller was to enlist enthusiastically to defend the fatherland and wrote home from the front to say that now, at last, his name could be erased from the list of the Jewish community.^[18] Similarly, Arnold Zweig’s Jewish hero, Bertin, willingly fights for his country. The Jewish intellectual in the trench, however, was soon disillusioned. Toller’s war experience turned him into a pacifist, while Zweig’s Bertin was quick to realize he had more to fear from the anti-Semitic Junker than the French poilu. Many Jews could try to be German—indeed, could totally accept German culture. Yet this did not imply its opposite. German culture did not totally accept the Jew.

The Jew was, in addition, in a position of increased sensitivity. Jewish emancipation owed much to liberal ideas, and it is, therefore, not surprising that many educated Jews were liberals. Commercially inclined, they naturally tended to congregate in the cities and were associated in the popular mind with the growth of capitalism. Rejection of both liberalism and the city were powerful currents in German intellectual history.^[19] The absence of a powerful liberal bourgeoisie able to extract political concessions from a reluctant monarch has long been an accepted fact of German historiography. Its all too unsuccessful career and all too accommodating character made liberalism an easy target for those who had only contempt for its principles.^[20] Yet there existed also a profound undercurrent of antiurban bias in German culture. Numerous critics of Germany’s increasing industrialization during the nineteenth century sprang up in defense of the preindustrial rural community, indulging themselves in nostalgic yearnings for the lost Volk ethos that had degenerated under the pernicious development of capitalism. Revolted by the spiritual void urban life had allegedly created, they blamed the embourgeoisement of German life on the liberal ideas that had provided the ideological justification for modern industrial society. It was easy to point the accusing finger at the ubiquitous Jew. Jewish participation in city life was greater than their numbers warranted; because they were associated with business, it became fairly easy to assign to them the blame for capitalism, to accuse them of reducing the harmony of man to self-interest, and of destroying the patriarchal rural community: in short, of being the agent of modernity that had selfishly destroyed the old Germanic values. Paul de Lagarde, a leading writer and conservative revolutionary of the late nineteenth century in Germany, succinctly phrased what was all too often a common view of the Jew: “the carriers of decay who pollute every national culture, exploit the human resources of their hosts, destroy all faith, and spread materialism and liberalism.”^[21]

Although himself an anti-Semite, Lagarde was correct when he noted the attractiveness of liberalism for Jews; many Jews were, indeed, associated with left-wing political ideas. Anti-Semitism produced outsiders “and the status of the outsider, no matter how it is attained, makes for radicalism.”^[22] This, of course, is not to say that all Jews were wide-eyed radicals; most were moderate liberals, and some, such as Friedrich Julius Stahl, were even conservative. However, a disproportionate number of Jews were involved in radical political ideologies, and it can hardly be accidental that many who were involved with Toller in the Bavarian revolution were of Jewish origin. In addition, the feelings of isolation, being a minority in a country in which emancipation remained at best partial, directed the thought of many Jewish intellectuals away from the increasingly narrow nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries toward a cosmopolitan ideal of universal fellowship and concern with all humanity. Reinforcing this was the ethical humanism of the Aufklärung with its “religion of humanity.”^[23] Socialism, with its idea of world harmony, fused with the humanitarian ethos of the Enlightenment and attracted many Jews to its ranks.^[24] For many Germans, however, the cosmopolitan socialism of Jewish intellectuals only turned them into the “classic party of national decomposition.” One unsympathetic critic observed: “From Moses Hess to Landauer, Toller and Eisner, it has been the Jewish fashion to acquire influence by indulging and arousing the instinct of the proletariat and to make unpatriotic politics with this influence.”^[25] Cosmopolitanism was mistaken for rootlessness, socialism for treason—both a confirmation that the Jew could never be a true member of the German community.

In addition to helping explain why Toller was a left-wing intellectual, his Jewish heritage also allows the historian to account for two traits noticeable in his character: the desire, so frequently expressed in his work, for integration and acceptance into a community, and the messianic nature of his manner as well as the chiliastic quality of much of his thought. As outsiders, many Jewish intellectuals were attracted to the expressionist yearning for a true community in which all religious and political differences were to be submerged into a harmonious totality.^[26] The aggravating factor of being an outcast, stemming from his neighbor’s anti-Semitism during his youth, heightened Toller’s desire for full acceptance and helps account for the attractions he found in the social program of German expressionism. Moreover, is it an accident that many who knew Toller described his mentality as more that of an Old Testament prophet rather than that of a politician?^[27]

It was in the loneliness of exile during the 1930s, brooding over past illusions, that Toller gave an evaluation of his position both as German and Jew, and in the process gave an introspective analysis of his German-Jewish dilemma:

This eloquent exposition of his religion, to be expected from so skilled and so sensitive a writer, may also explain why Toller eventually turned toward a literary career. Jews had traditionally been active in literature. The high percentage of Jews in journalism and writing suggests the extent of the participation, although not the assimilation, of Jews in German intellectual life. Yet though a part of the German intellectual scene, Jewish intellectuals were not totally accepted. As outsiders, they were underrepresented in official intellectual institutions; few Jews, for example, became university professors or made their way into the highest grades of the bureaucracy. Excluded from establishment society, Jews gravitated to unestablished areas, where their contribution was greatest. Forming a minority of only one percent of the total German population, Jews were heavily overrepresented in what Karl Mannheim called “free lance intellectuals” (freischwebende Intelligenz).^[29] Freelance intellectual is often a euphemism for the independent writer or scholar, and many Jews made significant contributions in these areas. As Paul Meyer explained in an essay on the German-Jewish publicist Maximilian Harden:

Whatever the reasons for his subsequent career as a writer, Toller had begun as early as 1904, at the age of ten, to write poetry and dream of being a playwright.^[31] Particularly after he left Samotschin to attend high school in Bromberg, literature became a large part of his life. It was here that he continued with his poetry, wrote his first play and supplemented his allowance by writing local stories for the Samotschiner Zeitung and the Ostdeutsche Rundschau. It was also as a student that Toller wrote his first work of social criticism, a letter to Samotschin’s local paper protesting the callousness of some of the town’s citizens for refusing to help a half-mad orphan of his village who had died in an epileptic fit. “I cannot understand the ways of humanity,” he confessed, echoing the lament of the hero of his later play Hinkemann: “men could be good with so little trouble, yet they delight in evil.”^[32] An instrument of self-expression, Toller’s first social protest was also an instrument of discovery; when he was a child, the brutal reality of society forcibly clashed with his sensitive nature, and Toller’s vocation as a rebel received perhaps its first expression.^[33]

If it was the writing of outrageous letters that was the cause of Toller’s troubles at home, it was the reading of outrageous authors that was a cause of trouble at school. It is evidence for the conservative nature of the German high school that Toller’s favorite authors—he mentions Gerhart Hauptmann, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Frank Wedekind—were banned. Reprimanded for reading such an “ultra-modern revolutionary” as Hauptmann, Toller was cautioned by school officials to learn mathematics and concern himself with more practical things.^[34] Toller, however, had other plans and became so deeply involved in literary matters that they soon became more important than school work. He was president of the school’s literary club, Clio, and one of his fellow students, Rudolf Jonas, observed that the young author was “very interested in literature and drama.”^[35]

While Toller may have been interested in literature, there is little evidence for any direct interest in politics. His earliest political memory was the news of Germany’s gunboat Panther appearing in Agadir. It was a measure of the young Toller’s acceptance of German nationalism^. that he had no objection to the nationalist clichés of his teachers that were called forth by the possibility of a German-French war in 1911.^[36] Such Francophobia and national enthusiasm were only further reinforced when Toller attended the University of Grenoble after his graduation from Bromberg in January 1914. While at Grenoble, he rarely attended lectures; these he dismissed as “French propaganda.”^[37] He preferred the German students’ union, where he could meet other Germans, drink beer, and sing the German national anthem. “We deprecated the loose morals of a degenerate people [The French] and admonished ourselves to always think that we had a loftier culture.”^[38]

Despite such cultural parochialism, Toller intended to attend the Sorbonne at the end of his first term and improve his unpracticed French. The outbreak of war in August prevented him from fulfilling this desire. Nevertheless, frustration of such plans was not an occasion for disappointment, and the young Toller participated fully in what was erroneously remembered as the intoxication that prevailed during the August days following the start of World War I. This memory has been discovered to be a myth. Most of the parades that greeted the declaration of war were in cities, but Germany was overwhelmingly an agricultural land, and such retrospective enthusiasm for the war has been greatly exaggerated.^[39] For Toller, however, it was a time of “emotional delirium”—the opportunity for him to end the alienation his religion had imposed. “All factions were to be united, everyone spoke one language, everyone defended one mother: Germany.”^[40] The emotionalism of Toller’s reaction was echoed by the enthusiasm of other German intellectuals who also found emotional catharsis in their praise of conflict.^[41] The intensity of their response came from something more than just patriotism. In part, the war was to be a relief from the boredom of the pre-1914 years, the collapse, in Thomas Mann’s words, of a “peace-time world of which we had enough, quite a bit more than enough.”^[42] In part, the response reflected a misconceived romanticism on what was to be the nature of warfare in the twentieth century. Twenty years later, Toller noted that for many, himself included, the war was to be “a heroic game, accompanied by the splendid thunder of guns, a knightly combat of man against man, a modern crusade in which human courage and audacity could be nobly proved and developed . . . We longed for war. And when war came we greeted it with a roar of jubilation.”^[43]

The war of 1914 (and the revolution of 1918 that was its result) was to be the decisive event in the generation of which Toller was a part. War service created a caesura between the new generation of Toller from those who had reached intellectual maturity in the 1890s. In 1905, for example, intellectuals such as Freud and Weber, Durkheim and Bergson, Mosca and Croce were too old for frontline duty. August 1914, the date of the start of World War I, was not their war: it was the war of their sons. To them, the decisive life experience had been the intellectual renewal of the 1890s—the defense of Captain Dreyfus perhaps for French intellectuals. The great event for those younger was the war itself.^[44]

From the crucible of the war, those who survived would emerge, some as pacifists, some as nihilists, but all quite different from what they had been before 1914. To Toller, it signified a radical turning of thought. It was only during military service that he began to contemplate the ending of the war. For what followed was not a short, happy war promised by King, Kaiser, and Tsar, ossified war optimists, and congenital euphemizers who glorified heroism and whose martial qualities so attracted Toller. What emerged instead was a long and grim struggle. At Langemarck in November 1914, thousands of young German soldiers sang the German national anthem as they attacked enemy lines and were killed. Different moods were then expressed that contrasted with the initial enthusiasm of the August days. “The war is not beautiful,” wrote one disillusioned soldier, “I would thank God if it was over today and I could return home unscathed.”^[45]

Many intellectuals experienced much the same transformation. Particularly valuable as an index of the intellectual’s response to the war was the journal Zeit-Echo, founded in 1914 as an “artist’s war diary.”^[46] Its first issues contained articles by Georg Simmel and Martin Buber praising the war spirit; by 1916, however, Zeit-Echo had become a radical journal opposed to the war.

For Toller, too, uncritical patriotism could not survive the experience of frontline duty where he saw war as “it really is, not as it is so often represented”:^[47] “We lost our enthusiasm, our courage, the very sense of our identity. There was no rhyme or reason in all this slaughter and devastation. . . . In that time of horror, of night and desperation, I understood that death was not the meaning of life—that man in his fugitive span of earthly existence has other work to do.”^[48]

Europe was full of the dead, disabled, and barely ambulatory walking on crutches because legs had been blown off. Many came back with unwelcome companions that stayed with them throughout life, little pieces of what they had caught in war, shards of steel that could not be removed from bodies or inexpressible sadness that could not be removed from troubled minds. Toller had seen the dying, had looked into the faces of the dead close up. The official cultural values he had once accepted as a child were to appear unromanticized when confronted with the hard reality of trench warfare. He had seen the dead bodies on the ground, stepped over the near dead bodies in battle, and saw dead faces of bodies filled with flies. Toller too died in the war, or at least a big piece of him did; a part of his soul left his body like a magician waving a silk handkerchief as it slipped from sight. Toller’s experience of war was to be imprinted into his life with archival finality.

Yet in August, 1914, Toller was convinced that Germany had been attacked by France, and he was anxious to defend the honor of his country. After rejection by both infantry and cavalry, Toller was accepted into the 1st Bavarian artillery regiment, and by August 6 he was in military training near Munich. A fellow soldier described Toller as “pale, almost boyish . . . modest, rather shy.”^[49] It is indicative of the effect the war would have on Toller that, in its aftermath, he would be neither modest nor, as a noted public speaker, shy. Toller was an enthusiastically eager recruit. The words Germany and fatherland, he later remembered, had an almost mystical power, and even the necessary but disagreeable job of cleaning latrines made him feel “positively distinguished.”^[50] In those first months of war, Toller had found the acceptance he had craved so much as a child. It is significant that he later remembered that “as a soldier, no one had to ask me if I were a Jew.”^[51] Before leaving for frontline duty, for which he had volunteered, Toller wrote in his diary of his newfound happiness, how glad he was to go to the trenches: “At last to be allowed to take one’s part! To prove one’s thoughts, one’s feelings with one’s life.”^[52]

Although soon promoted to corporal, frontline service not only took Toller’s enthusiasm for war away but also radically changed his ideas. It transformed the aggressive nationalist into what he was to remain for the rest of his life—pacifist and a socialist. War and death, paradoxically, became catalysts for his later ideas of peace and brotherhood. The harrowing experience of trench warfare undermined his naïve patriotic faith; the sight of death convinced him of the oneness of mankind.^[53] Digging in a trench one day, he pulled out a slimy, shapeless bundle. Toller was about to have a hideous awakening of insight, a tragic epiphany that stayed with him forever and changed the course of his life:

Where before Toller had eagerly volunteered for infantry combat, he now desperately sought escape and applied for transfer to the air force where he could be above the fighting, remote from the digging of filthy trenches filled with the entrails of the dead. Thirteen months of fighting, however, had left him emotionally exhausted and physically weak. He was sent to a Strasbourg hospital and discharged a few weeks later in January 1917, for psychological reasons, unfit for further duty.^[55]

Discharge for psychological reasons only baldly states a fact. The war was the single defining experience of Toller’s life, and what he saw and felt, and what war is really like, merits attention. What exactly did Toller mean when he later wrote about seeing war as “it really is, not as it is so often represented”? Combat is like drunk driving—intoxicating but filled with unpleasant consequences. Toller was in a particularly gruesome area of the army, in artillery, the most frightening place to be. War and its psychological effects are sanitized in cheerful news coverage and euphemism and in tricks of publicity and advertising. Attempts to glorify battle are daydreams straining to romanticize a ghastly experience. In photos of war, bodies of the dead lay on the ground, almost as if asleep. But anyone who has been in battle knows this is seldom true. Soldiers do not die with soft sighs or fall to the ground in slow grace. But if one waits long enough, the blood evaporates, bodies become memories, and “battle takes on a pleasing shape, in the way a jagged rock is worn smooth by insistent surf.”^[56]

Victims under artillery fire could become physically bizarre, entering a place where violence became perversely aestheticized, even transforming itself into a gentle arabesque. Henri Barbusse, in his 1916 book Le Feu, witnessed a shell burst two men “into the air vertically fifteen feet perhaps, amid a spout of soil . . . They rose and fell with the easy careful poise of acrobats, a rifle, revolving slowly, rose high above them, still revolving it fell.” Later Barbusse saw a body rising upright with his two arms fully extended outright and where a head had been was now a flame.^[57] Bodies are dismembered, becoming severed heads, strewed limbs, and hanging intestines and excrement. Violent dismemberment of human beings is traumatic, repulsive, frightening. It can even be smelled. Burning bodies release every putrid gas known to chemists. Rhinal cavities are on overdrive. The stench is all pervasive. For the survivor who beholds such horror, it can cause insanity, even in the strongest of men. Eventually, all will break down, given enough time; it is not just the weak, the gentle, and the sensitive, like Toller, who will inevitably be reduced to quivering wrecks and “walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh,” as one soldier who had seen many battles writes.^[58] It was not only the outside bodies and body parts soldiers saw, but the hidden parts as well. There are scenes in battle that should only be observed by crazed gastroenterologists. In World War II, General Sir John Hackett saw “an inert mass . . . swinging down a parachute harness beside me, a man from whose body the entrails hung, swaying in reciprocal rhythm. As the body moved one way, the entrails swung the other.”^[59] Toller had experienced artillery and mortar fire. These were, for ground troops, more terrifying than bullets, accompanied as they were by round after round of cacophonous terror that could burst eardrums, cause vomiting, and cause loss of control of bowels and sphincter muscles. Shelling both tore and ripped the body (or atomized it into tiny red bits that landed on the as yet living) and worked on the mind to the brink, and beyond, of sanity.^[60] The maximum time of endurance for such wild destruction of other humans is 240 days, according to medical authorities. Toller, like most survivors of World War I, was there considerably longer.

“Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare,” notes one observer.^[61] In World War I, the poet Wilfred Owen was driven near to madness by lying next to the dispersed body parts of the former living. World War II was a repeat of the Great War: “Marine officers climbing above body parts going insane, pilots of landing craft going insane steering through severed heads and limbs, downed fliers adrift at sea on rafts, driven insane in addition to drinking their urine [as] they tried to relieve their thirst by biting their comrades’ jugular veins and sucking the blood.”^[62] This was all more than merely most unpleasant. It was little wonder Toller was psychologically affected by his war experience. The diagnosis and treatment of shell shock mirrored the industrial experience of Germany. Physicians who were suddenly confronted with this new medical challenge adapted an industrial model concentrating on efficiency and assembly line models for treatment. Standardization and speed became prime procedures that mirrored the centralized and rationalized administration of the whole war.^[63]

What Toller would have experienced in treatment would not have been pleasant. Every attempt would have been made to brand him as a “malingerer” or coward or to question his virility.^[64] As a decorated soldier who had proven himself in battle, this would have been difficult, and it may be a sign of how badly Toller was affected that he was discharged so soon.

The Toller that emerged in 1917 was, as a result of combat, far different from the Toller of 1914. At first a narrow nationalist, he had now begun to concern himself with more exclusive ideas that stressed the brotherhood of man. The former warrior had become a pacifist, and as a pacifist he rejected not only war but also a government that to him had made that war possible. It was while in Munich after his discharge that Toller came to the conclusion that “the German government was guilty of the outbreak and continuation of the war and that the German people were being deceived.”^[65] He emerged from war hostile to Germany’s leaders and bitter about a system that had allowed such leaders to attain positions of power. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, soldier Williams echoes across the centuries Toller’s own feeling:

But the war may have also left with Toller something positive. While the war did not create expressionism, surrealism, and the avant-garde that became Weimar, a majority of Weimar’s avant-garde artists were part of Toller’s war generation. War was a catalyst for the avant-garde movement.^[66] The expressionist and Dadaist surreal visions of insanity, severed limbs and lost souls separated from disfigured bodies, reflect the intimate familiarity with the reality of vast European slaughterhouses thrown up by four years of trench warfare. Radical times required radical art. “We were looking for an elementary art,” wrote the avant-garde artist Jean Arp, “which would be capable of saving humanity from the furious insanity of the times. We aspired to a new order which could restore the equilibrium between heaven and hell.”^[67]

Yet, although radicalized, Toller, in his search for Arp’s new order, was not yet a radical. He recognized the need for political change but had not yet begun actively to involve himself with politics. When Toller arrived in Munich, the war began to show what was to become an all too common scene on the avenues of the Weimar Republic after demobilization: war cripples on sidewalks, wounded soldiers, the embittered and the cynical mixed uncomfortably with those who were not away at the front. Toller tried to forget the war. He returned to the University of Munich, where he had been registered intermittently since the winter of 1914,^[68] and threw himself into his studies with a fervor that was in sharp contrast to his lackadaisical work at Grenoble. We know what seminars and classes he took in law, economics, philology, and economics. Of particular importance for his later development as a writer was a seminar on literary criticism and writing held by Artur Kutscher, who later described Toller as his “dearest and most talented student.” Kutscher’s class introduced Toller to avant-garde techniques he would later use in his expressionist plays, including the “station technique” developed by Strindberg. In addition, he began to make contacts in Munich’s literary and political circles, met Rainer Maria Rilke, had Thomas Mann criticize some of his writings and met writers Frank Wedekind, Hanns Johst, and Erich Mühsam. Mühsam would later join Toller in Bavaria’s Soviet revolution.^[69]

Increasingly, Toller became involved in German intellectual life, so much so that he attracted the attention of Eugen Diederichs, publisher of the neoconservative journal Die Tat. Toller, who was involved in the German Youth movement, was attracted to the older man, among other things, because of his support of the movement. Diederichs had collected a small coterie of intellectuals, among them Max Weber, Richard Dehmel, Friedrich Meinecke, Werner Sombart, and Ferdinand Tönnies, who, along with promising young intellectuals such as Toller, he invited to his Thuringian castle, Burg Lauenstein, “to discuss together the problems and tendencies of the times.”^[70] A cultural pessimist, disciple of Nietzsche and Lagarde, Diederichs was a part of the cultural opposition of the Bismarckian Empire against whose alleged philistine qualities he railed in the pages of Die Tat. A self-proclaimed leader of the youth movement, he was an active proselytizer for a new German Kulturpolitik that he hoped would renew the nation.^[71]

The war had affected all who came to Diederichs’ discussion circle. Both members of the older generation of intellectuals who had matured under Bismarck and those of Toller’s generation were questioning old values and attempting, although at times only gropingly and vaguely, for a reformulation of ideas that they hoped would take into account the social changes Germany had experienced through war. It was an indication of the effect of that war on the two generations that Toller was repelled by the intellectual remoteness of the elders from the hard reality of the trench life he had experienced. Even those for whom Toller had respect, such as Max Weber, remained separated from him; although paying tribute to some of their ideas, the gap between Weber’s generation of elders and Toller’s generation of war was great. While the elders were concerned only with reform, the war generation had much greater ambitions. Wrote Toller:

As befitted Diederichs’ taste for the eccentric—he frequently expressed a fascination with the “mystical essence of life” and presided over his meetings wearing zebra-skin pants and a turban^[73] —many members of his circle were more eccentric than the staid Max Weber. Toller was alternately amused and repelled by much of the nebulous thought at Lauenstein that expressed itself in a conglomeration of Utopian völkisch romanticism. Some of the ideas called for the establishment of a Germanic religion or world salvation through the German spirit. Toller noted that:

Bitterly disappointed by his stay at Diederichs’, Toller found that “the faintly sighing pines of Thuringia” only reminded him “more powerfully by contrast of the grim battle whose prelude of four years warfare was just being played.”^[75] Toller left Lauenstein and went to Heidelberg to study economics during the winter term 1917–1918. Less concerned now with scholarship than in protesting the war, Toller began his expressionist antiwar play, Die Wandlung. He joined a group of pacifist students and quickly assumed a leading position. Although not “one of the clearest,” Toller was “one of the most enthused,”^[76] and it was under his direction that the group officially formed itself into the Kulturpolitischer Bund der Jugend in Deutschland.

The Bund manifesto, which Toller wrote,^[77] with its stress on culture and politics, was reminiscent of the discussions at Lauenstein, where talk had frequently centered on “culture’s involvement with political questions.”^[78] As befitted such ambiguous phraseology, the Bund had as its purpose “to awaken responsibility in young people and lead them to political activity.” It wished to create a true community of friends (Gemeinschaft), infuse German society with “the Spirit of Brotherhood” (Geist), and end the separation between the intellectual and the nation, “for we are convinced that it is necessary for the intellectual to root himself in the people.”^[79] More specifically, the Bund put forth a nine-point program. Points one and two demanded the “peaceful solution of the contradictions of national life” and the “abolition of poverty.” Other than going on record, however, for an economic system that would guarantee a “just division of material goods,” the Bund remained silent on exactly how such a society would be organized. Other parts demanded separation of church and state “to free true religiosity from traditional restraints,” the establishment of free universities (freie Universitätsgemeinden), and the distribution of cheap popular editions of expressionist and antiwar literature, including Carl Hauptmann’s Krieg, Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, Walter Hasenclever’s Antigone, and Leonhard Frank’s Der Vater and Die Kriegswitwe. In spite of the proposals of the Bund, Toller made it clear that the organization was not limited only to pragmatic goals or just concerned with reform; he demanded nothing less than a “total revolution of intellectual attitudes.”

The Bund’s program was imbued with an idealism that did little to compensate for its vagueness. While its goals may have been admirable, its high-minded idealism found little support.^[80] Older, more conservative and traditional individuals, such as Weber, predictably more concerned with reform than revolution, were hostile to the supposed extremism of the manifesto’s language and to the refusal of the Bund’s members to accept compromise.^[81] Even among Toller’s fellow students, the organization found little echo. One official estimated Toller’s following to be between ten and twelve students.^[82] After the publication of Toller’s manifesto, the Student Council at Heidelberg made it clear that it rejected not only Toller’s program but also “all attempts of certain groups which seek in this critical time to disturb the tried and true views of the present student body when the greater part of our fellow students are helping to defend our beloved fatherland.”^[83] Toller, quick to reply, rejected the implication that the Bund was unpatriotic (nicht vaterländisch):

Although Toller affirmed his patriotism, the outspoken pacifism of the Bund was enough to bring upon it the wrath of the German High Command as well as that of the newly-founded Fatherland Party, a right-wing mélange of annexationist groups toward which the Bund, not surprisingly, had expressed much hostility. Toller’s organization was dissolved, its Austrian adherents deported, and its German members ordered to report for induction into the Army. Warned of the army’s intentions, Toller quickly left Heidelberg for Berlin.

If Toller had become an active opponent of the war during his university study at Munich and Heidelberg, it was during his stay in Berlin that he became further convinced that “the war had been thrust upon us by egomaniacs thirsty for power and glory.”^[85] It was while in Berlin that he first met Kurt Eisner, later to be the leader of the Bavarian revolution, became attracted to socialism, and began to question not only the war but also “the guilt of capitalism”^[86] for making such a conflict possible. It was an indication, however, of Toller’s naïveté that, when he first heard of Germany’s responsibility for starting the war and the grandiose war aims of the government, he refused to believe it. Incredulity soon turned to bitterness, and Toller came to the conclusion that the German people had been betrayed:

It was this motif, that Germany had failed to live up to the ideals of all right-thinking men to make the nation conform to its true image, that again and again was to occur in Toller’s thought. During the Nazi years, he was to accuse Germany of betraying the spirit of classic German humanism; during the period of the Weimar Republic, he was to indict the nation for betraying the revolutionary ideals of the Left; now in 1917, he accused Germany of betraying the idealistic justifications that it put forth in 1914. Yet there was something more abstract, less easily definable in Toller’s critique of German society. In a revealing letter to Gustav Landauer, whose book, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, so impressed him, Toller wrote of the ideas that motivated him. In view of the great importance Toller attached to the letter—he had it published six times between 1920 and 1933—it is worth quoting in full:

All Toller’s later ideas were expressed here. The hostility toward a corrupt and corrupting system, an unbending humanitarian ethos, a desire for change, and a vague longing for an ill-defined (or perhaps indefinable) community—all would be the main themes of his plays and many of his essays, the subject of his letters and conversations. As yet inexperienced in political reality and still imbued with a youthful idealism, Toller had yet to suffer from the very real wounds a society unready for such lofty ideals could inflict. During the Bavarian revolution, when his ideals came into what was to be painful conflict with reality, he experienced anguish and despair, and his subsequent life would lack that inner peace of which, as a youth, he had so confidently spoken.

Through three-and-a-half years of war, Toller’s thought had radically altered. The uncritical and eager warrior of 1914 had become the unflinching pacifist of 1918. The bellicose nationalist who had once depreciated the French for their decadence and affirmed the superiority of German culture had now become the cosmopolitan convinced of the essential oneness of mankind and passionately dedicated to “man in all his needs.” The theorizing of the Diederichs circle convinced Toller that the important thing was not contemplation of the world or even its reform, but its radical change. The apolitical adolescent emerged an indignant socialist.

War, then, had both positive and negative consequences for Toller. Negatively, it alienated him from the government. Yet war had not only destroyed Toller’s old values, as can be seen in his letter to Landauer; it also stimulated his imagination by making him aware of an incipient new society that he hoped would emerge from the ruins of the old. It was also important that Toller’s early poems and his first major play were expressionist in style. The attractions of expressionism were strong and served to reinforce many of the feelings Toller had acquired since the outbreak of war. Of particular importance was Toller’s view that young intellectuals, such as he himself, were destined to play a major role in the transformation of Germany. Politicized by his participation in the war, Toller sought to combine desire for social change with literary inclination. Expressionism not only aids in explaining what Toller expected from revolution; it also forms the foundation for his later critique of German society. The mixing of these two ingredients, the political and the literary, was to provider an explosive, and ultimately disastrous, compound particularly well-tailored for someone of Toller’s sensitive temperament.

Notes

Richard Dove, He Was a German (London: Libris, 1984), 10. To1ler’s early life is found in his autobiography. Ernst Toller, Eine Jugend in Deutschland, in Prosa, Briefe, Dramen, Gedichte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961), 30–49. Hereafter referred to as PBDG. See also Thorsten Unger and Maria Wojtczak, Ernst Tollers Geburtsort Samotschin (Würzberg: Ernst Toller Society, 2001). The best work is Fredrick Schouton, “Ernst Toller: A Youth Biography” (PhD dissertation, European University Institute, 2007).

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 43.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 31.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 36.

Cited in István Deák, A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 25.

Jakob Wassermann, My Life as German and Jew (New York: Coward-McCann, 1933), 11. See also Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1980).

W. A. Willibrand, Ernst Toller and His Ideology (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1945), 7.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 31–32.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 37.

10.

See Ernst Toller, “Toller schreibt über sich,” in Ernst Toller und seine Bühnenwerke, edited by Fritz Droop (Berlin: F. Schneider, 1922), 4.

11.

See Hans Kohn, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Otto Weininger: Aus dem jüdischen Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962).

12.

See Simon May, Love: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), chapter 7 and 166.

13.

Ernst Toller, Letter to “Mrs. T.” Niederschönenfeld, 1920, in Look Through the Bars: Letters from Prison, Poems, and a New Version of “The Swallow Book” (New York: Haskill House 1937), 64.

14.

Ernst Toller, “Bemerkungen zu meinen Drama Die Wandlung,” Tribune der Kunst and Zeit, 13 (1919): 46–48.

15.

Wrote Theodor Lessing in a revealing passage that expressed the frustration of many Germans of Jewish descent: “We felt passionately German and we could not understand how anyone could doubt our Germanity.” Theodor Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthass (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), 169. For an interesting analysis of how German authors have reacted to their Jewishness, see Lothar Kahn, Mirrors of the Jewish Mind (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1968).

16.

Ernst Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 245.

17.

Mary Gerold-Tucholsky and Fritz J. Raddatz, eds., Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1960–1961), 1:790.

18.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 178.

19.

See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (New York, Vintage Books, 1960).

20.

Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 9.

21.

Paul de Lagarde, “Űber die gegenwärtigen Aufgaben der deutschen Politik,” in Deutsche Schriften (Munich: Lehmann, 1937), 41.

22.

Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 228.

23.

George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1970), 205.

24.

The point is further developed in chapter 4.

25.

The source of the quotation, from Georg von Below, a Freiburg professor, is indicative of

the respectability of anti-Semitism in Germany. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 224.

26.

See chapter 4.

27.

See, for example, Otto Zarek, German Odyssey (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941), 99–102.

28.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 178–79. Carel ter Haar, possibly incorrectly, considers Toller’s Judaism a dominant theme of his work. See Ernst Toller: Appell oder Resignation (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1977).

29.

Erich Rosenthal, “Trends of the Jewish Population in Germany, 1910–39,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 3 (1944), 255–56.

30.

Quoted by Harry Young, Maximilian Harden: Censor Germaniae: The Critic in Opposition from Bismarck to the Rise of Nazism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959), 11.

31.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 40.

32.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 44.

33.

The letter, published anonymously, accused the whole town of brutality and created an uproar. Samotschin’s mayor sued the newspaper’s editor for refusing to name the author of the work. The whole affair, however, was quietly dropped when Toller’s father, a town councilor, used his influence and intervened.

34.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 46. Later, while in military prison during World War I, Toller was caught reading Werfel. “Whoever reads such nonsense,” announced an Army doctor, “should not be surprised if he ends up in prison,” in Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 91.

35.

Letter from Rudolf Jonas to John Spalek, Collection of Professor John Spalek, State University of New York at Albany. Hereafter referred to as SC. See also Jacqueline Rogers, “Ernst Toller’s Prose Writings” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1972), 37–38.

36.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 47–48.

37.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 51.

38.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 50.

39.

See Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

40.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 58, 60.

41.

See Leon Fuller, “The War of 1914 as Interpreted by German Intellectuals,” Journal of Modern History 14, no. 2 (1942): 145–60.

42.

Thomas Mann, “Gedanken im Krieg,” Die neue Rundschau 25 (1916): 1475, cited by Klaus Schroter, “Chauvinism and Its Tradition: German Writers and the Outbreak of the First World War,” Germanic Review 43, no. 2 (1968): 134.

43.

Ernst Toller, “The Twentieth Anniversary of the War,” Special Manuscript Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, 3.

44.

H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 338.

45.

Cited in Walter Laqueur, Young Germany. A History of the German Youth Movement (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 89.

46.

John Willett, Expressionism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 105.

47.

“Ernst Toller über Ernst Toller,” Die Literatur 31 (April 1929): 403. For an excellent series of essays on intellectuals and the war, see Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Wolfgang Mommsen (Munich: Oldenburg, 1996).

48.

Toller, Look Through the Bars, x; Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 73.

49.

Dove, He Was a German, 21. For a description of Army life in Bavaria during the war, see Benjamin Zieman, Front und Heimat: Ländliche Kreigserfahrungen im südlichen Bayern, 1914–1923 (Essen: Klartext, 1997).

50.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 60.

51.

Dove, Revolutionary Socialism in the Work of Ernst Toller (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 25.

52.

Toller, Look Through the Bars, ix. By all accounts, Toller was a surprisingly good soldier. At his trial in 1919, his commanding officer testified to Toller’s courage, remembering him as an “unafraid and self-sacrificing comrade.” Stefan Grossmann, “Die Geschichte eines Prozesses,” in PBDG, 474. Walter von Molo even noted that Toller had won the Iron Cross. See So wunderbar ist das Leben (Stuttgart: Deutsche Volksbücher, 1957), 217. Since Toller never mentioned this in his writings, I am inclined to discount it. An internet search for World War I Iron Cross awards does not mention Toller.

53.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 71.

54.

Stefan Grossmann implies that Toller exaggerated his illness to avoid compromising his conscience. Stefan Grossmann and Hugo Haase, Der Hochverräter Ernst Toller: Die Geschichte eines Prozesses (Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1919), 13.

55.

Toller, “Toller schreibt über sich,” in Ernst Toller und seine Bühnenwerke, edited by Droop, 10.

56.

Michael Stevenson, The Last Full Measure: How Soldiers Die in Battle (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), xii. See also Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like To Go To War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011).

57.

Cited in Stevenson, The Last Full Measure, 206, from Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (London: Penguin, 2003), 154, 196.

58.

Dwight David Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 279.

59.

Quoted by Paul Fussell, Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 271, 278.

60.

John Ellis, The Sharp Ends of War: The Fighting Men in World War II (North Pomfert, Vermont: Aurum Publishers, 1980), 300. See also Paul Lerner, “Psychiatry and Casualties of War in Germany, 1914–18,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 13–28, and Doris Kaufmann, “Science as Cultural Practice: Psychiatry in the First World War and Weimar Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 1 (1999): 125–44.

61.

Fussell, Wartime, 281.

62.

Fussell, Wartime, 273.

63.

Lerner, “Psychiatry and Casualties of War in Germany, 18.

64.

See Joanna Bourke, “Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of Shell-shocked Men in Great Britain and Ireland,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000), and George Mosse, “Shell-shock as a Social Disease,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000).

65.

Toller, “Toller schreibt über sich,” in Ernst Toller und seine Bühnenwerke, edited by Droop, 10. See the outstanding article by Bernd Ulrich “Die Desillusionerung der Kriegsfreiwilligen von 1914,” in Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes: Eine Militärgeschichte von Unten, edited by Wolfram Wette (Munich: Piper, 1992).

66.

See Annette Becker, “The Avant-garde, Madness, and the Great War,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 71–84.

67.

“Rektorat an der K. Staatsministerium des Inneren für Kirchen- und Schulangelegenheiten. Munich, 7 February 1918. Betreff. Die Allgemeine Studentenversammlung vom 25. January 1918,” in Staatsarchiv für Oberbayern, St. Anw. München I, Nr. 2242/II, 3. Hereafter referred to as SAO.

68.

See Christa Hempel-Küter and Hans-Harold Müller, “Ernst Toller: Auf der Suche nach dem Geistigen Führer,” in Literatur, Politik und soziael Prozesse, edited by Georg Jäger, et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 78–106.

69.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 73–74. See also Gangold Hübinger, “Ernst Toller und eine neue Geisteskultur,” in Kultur und Krieg, edited by Mommsen.

70.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 75.

71.

Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 9.

72.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 75–76. Marianne Weber noted that the younger generation at Diederichs’ felt the old world doomed and awaited the birth of “a new nation in which international cooperation, peace, brotherhood, solidarity and socialism would reign.” Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1926), 609.

73.

George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: The Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich

(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 53.

74.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 76.

75.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 76.

76.

Käthe Lichter, “Max Weber als Lehrer und Politiker,” Der Kampf 19 (September 1926): 383–84. Lichter was a member of Toller’s Heidelberg group.

77.

Ernst Toller, “Leitsätze für einen Kulturpolitischen Bund der Jugend in Deutschland,” Menschen Montagsblatt-Dresden, no. 26 (June 16, 1918).

78.

Weber, Max Weber, 608.

79.

Toller’s relation to the ideas of Gemeinschaft, Geist, and his attitude on the role of the intellectual is treated further in chapter 4.

80.

Toller mentions receiving support from Albert Einstein; however, he quickly added that such letters of support “were a thousand times outnumbered by the abusive and threatening letters which came each day.” Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 79.

81.

Weber, Max Weber, 613.

82.

“Prorektor Endemann an das Stellvertreter. Generalkommando I b. A.K. Munich, February 5, 1918,” SAO, 4.

83.

“Erklärung der Heidelberger Studentenschaft,” Heidelberqer Tageblatt, no. 296 (December 18, 1917).

84.

Ernst Toller, “Erwiderung,” Heidelberger Zeitungen, no. 298 (December 20, 1917); see also Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 80.

85.

Toller, quoted by Howard de Forest, “Pacifist in Exile,” The Living Age 351 (February 1937): 507.

86.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 82.

87.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 82.

88.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 81. See also republications in Der Freihafen 3 (1920): 5–7; Der Kampf 13 (30 May 1920); Toller, “Toller schreibt über sich,” in Ernst Toller und seine Bühnenwerke, by Droop, 16–17; Vorwärts no. 16 (January 8, 1926), 2; Ernst Toller, Quer Durch: Reisebilder and Reden (Berlin: Verlag Das Wunderhorn, 1930), 189–91. The earliest version, unpublished, is “Brief an einen Menschen,” in Collection of Dr. Harold Hurwitz, Free University of Berlin.