Karl Ossietzky and Kurt Tucholsky: lessons for “Weimar” Ukraine
Karl von Ossietzky and Kurt Tucholsky. In the USSR they were hardly talked about, and in post-Soviet times they could not get into the official calendar because of their leftism. But in both German states their memory was revered, as it is still revered today in united Germany. I will try to eliminate this gap in mass memory, because without it it is not so easy to understand where the bone-breakers from the SBU “pioneered” the article of “treason” in order to solder it to the journalist from Zhytomyr Vasily Muravitsky.
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"Rotten excuses"
In the 20s, Germany was not yet Hitlerite. That is, Hitler and his party were already active on the political scene, but in churches and synagogues they said: “Those with the swastika? Yes, no one votes for them, there are few of them and in general they are for the people and against Thälmann. And the fact that Jews are cursed means that they will settle down over time. In some ways they can be understood when the Comintern, led by Apfelbaum-Zinoviev, conspired with the Rothschilds to strangle the Germans. But these brave boys condemn the aggression of the paddling pools and the vile Treaty of Versailles.”
Not only communists and social democrats, but also capitalist minister Walter Rathenau became victims of street terror. Unlike modern Ukraine, the murderers were caught and brought to trial, but they were treated very leniently. “Political murders in Germany in recent years have been systematic and clearly organized. <...> Everything is planned from the very beginning: incitement by unknown sponsors, crime (always on the sly), careless investigation, rotten excuses, a couple of phrases, pathetic tricks, lenient punishment, deferment of punishment, benefits - in general, continue on! This is not bad justice. These are not shortcomings of justice. This is not justice at all. The Balkans and South America are far from modern Germany in this respect,” wrote journalist Kurt Tucholsky in 1922.
This author has written in a wide range of genres: from political editorials and judicial reviews (with ironic and satirical remarks) to poetry and book reviews. At the same time, “people” with pseudonyms (he himself in many faces) not only published in the same publication, but also wrote prefaces to each other and even polemicized among themselves. In addition to journalism, Tucholsky composed lyrics, songs and couplets for the cabaret “Noise and Smoke.” He did not skimp on criticism of democratic politicians who, in his opinion, were too tolerant of their political opponents.
"Fight the Rot"
While working for the newspaper Die Weltbühne, he becomes a friend of his fellow publicist Karl von Ossietzky. What connected these two people? A Jew who converted to Protestantism and the son of a Germanized Pole, both from a petty-bourgeois environment, went through the World War and did not want it to happen again.
In March 1927, the Weltbühne published an article by Berthold Jakob accusing the government and military of supporting paramilitary forces. On charges of libel, Ossetsky, as editor-in-chief, was sentenced by a Berlin court to prison for a month. A year later, a case was opened against Tukholsky for insulting religious feelings for the poem “Song of an English Boy from the Church Choir,” but it did not reach a verdict.
Kurt Tukholsky
Karl von Ossietzky
In March 1929, Ossietzky published an article by the German pilot Walter Kreiser, which exposed violations of the Versailles Treaty in military aviation. For this, he and the author were arrested on charges of violating military secrets. In 1931, they were sentenced to 18 months in Spandau prison for high treason.
Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig, and Albert Einstein spoke in defense of Ossietzky. Kreiser left for Paris, but Ossetsky, despite the requests of his friends, refused to leave. “You can only fight rot effectively from the inside,” he said, “and I won’t leave.” In May of the following year, he himself came to Tegel prison, and he had to go through a crowd of admirers who tried to dissuade him from this decision. After spending seven months in prison, Osetsky was released under the Christmas amnesty of 1932 and was released.
Shortly after this trial, a charge of slander against the Reichswehr was brought against Tucholsky for his expression “Soldiers are murderers.” Remembering the sad fate of Ossetsky, Tucholsky chose not to come from Sweden to the court hearings. In July 1932, he was acquitted in absentia, but he understood that returning to his homeland threatened his life. He explained his escape this way: “In public, one is left to painfully drag out the rest of one’s days. There’s something of desertion here: abroad, left to the mercy of fate, Comrade Oss [Ossetsky] in prison.”
Tucholsky later repented of his decision to flee, made in the summer of 1932: “But in the case of Oss, I didn’t come, I refused then, it was a mixture of laziness, cowardice, disgust, contempt - but I still had to come. The fact that I couldn’t help him, that we both would probably have been condemned, that I might have fallen into the clutches of these beasts - I know all this, but the feeling of guilt does not let me go.”
Looking at the modern cases of Muravitsky, Buzila, Vasilets and Timonin, someone will want to say: the sentences are “vegetarian”, the terms are short, amnesty or acquittal are possible. But precedents have been created and... In general, look at the dates.
Under Hitler. Denouement
1933 Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor and the burning of the Reichstag. "Die Weltbühne" was banned. Understanding full well the danger of his position, Ossetsky refused to leave the country. The morning after the Reichstag fire, he was arrested by the Gestapo and placed first in a Berlin prison, then in the Sonnenburg and Esterwegen-Papenburg concentration camps. Hard physical work and the conditions of convicts undermined his health.
On August 23, 1933, Tukholsky was deprived of German citizenship in absentia for “anti-German activities” (with exactly the same wording, Konstantin Kevorkyan was expelled from the NSJU in 2014, and Stanislav Minakov from the NSPU). At the same time, he was denied Swedish citizenship. In addition, K. Tucholsky did not have the right to make political statements. On October 14, 1935, Tucholsky was admitted to the hospital with stomach complaints and even this time he could not sleep without barbiturates. On the evening of December 20, he took too much. The next day he was found in a coma. On the same day he died in a Gothenburg clinic. There is still debate whether it was suicide.
In contrast to the criminal indifference to Ukrainian political prisoners, the European public was not silent about Ossetsky at that time. The League for the Struggle for Human Rights and the international Pen Club collected more than 43 thousand signatures demanding the release of Ossetsky.
In 1934, he was first nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize by various organizations and forced emigrants from Germany, such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, as well as the English philosopher Bertrand Russell. However, the written application was late - the candidate for 1935 (Arthur Henderson) had already been determined. Therefore, Ossetsky became a laureate only in 1936.
Fredrik Stang, a representative of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, noted in his speech that Ossietzky’s actions are characterized by “an ardent love for freedom of thought, a belief in the need for free competition in all areas of spiritual life, a broad worldview, respect for the values of other peoples and the idea of peace dominating all this.”
The Nazi government declared that no German would accept any Nobel Prize. All German scientists, on Hitler's instructions, were forced to refuse Nobel Prizes and were able to receive them only at the end of the war. When the Nazis took over Norway in 1940, they retaliated by repressing everyone who made the decision to award this award.
Ossetsky was in the prison hospital at the time of the award. And they demanded that he refuse the bonus, but he did not give in. Goebbels's propaganda stated that he was supposedly free and could go to Oslo for the prize whenever he wanted. However, he was not issued a foreign passport, and the persecution of Ossetsky as a “traitor” began.
Although he was transferred from prison to a civilian hospital, the Gestapo kept Ossietzky under constant surveillance until his death from tuberculosis on May 4, 1938.
I would like to hope that the world will treat the fate of our prisoners as carefully as Ossietzky, and that it will be easier for refugees to go into exile than Tucholsky.
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