Berlin полностью

The focus of the action was Berlin’s Scheunenviertel—or “barn district”—a poor quarter north of Alexanderplatz that had become a haven for Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution in their homelands. The immediate postwar era had brought a new wave of refugees from Poland and Russia. The majority of Berliners, including assimilated Jews living in the wealthier western and southern districts, tended to shun the Scheunenviertel as alien and possibly dangerous. Venturing into the district in 1920, Joseph Roth found a “strange sad ghetto world” devoid of the racing autos and bright lights of western Berlin. The streets were filled with “grotesque eastern figures” holding “a thousand years of pain in their eyes.” While the men shuffled along in black caftans, the women carried their children on their backs “like sacks of dirty laundry.” Altogether, the Scheunenviertel Jews seemed like “an avalanche of disaster and dirt, growing in volume and rolling irresistibly from the East over Germany.”

Right-wing papers in Berlin had been claiming for some time that the Ostjuden in the Scheunenviertel were feeding off the misery of “decent Germans,” and the charges were finding a receptive audience among the unemployed. On November 5 a rumor circulated among the jobless that they would get no payments that day because Jews from the Scheunenviertel had bought up all the funds to lend at usurious interest rates. Indignant, a mob descended on the Scheunenviertel and began to loot shops. Proprietors who tried to defend their property were pulled into the street and beaten. The owner of a kosher butcher shop was pummeled so badly that he died from his injuries. Jews caught in the streets were often stripped of their clothes, which were thought to contain precious foreign currency sewed inside.

Jews in Berlins Scheunenviertel, 1929

The police did not arrive on the scene until much of the damage had already been done. They closed off parts of the quarter but did not immediately expel the rioters. In fact, the first to be arrested were Jews, who were taken to the police barracks in the Alexanderplatz and made to stand for hours with their hands over their heads. By midnight the district was calm, though full of signs that it had just been a war zone: discarded booty littered the streets, shards of glass from shop windows covered the sidewalks, bonfires smoldered here and there, and some stores sported signs saying “Christian-owned.”

Contemporary accounts of the Scheunenviertel rioting interpreted this episode in very different ways. Vorwärts argued that it was “a pogrom” orchestrated by the right and the far-left to destabilize the Weimar Republic. The liberal Vossische Zeitung charged that Berlin’s business barons had fomented the rioting to distract people from the fact that heavy industry was profiting immensely from the collapse of the mark. The rightist Deutsche Zeitung insisted that the riots were the spontaneous outgrowth of popular rage over the “unscrupulous profiteering of the Jews in a time of widespread misery.” The Jewish community itself was split between those who saw the upheaval as “a fateful signal to German Jewry” and those who believed it was a momentary outpouring of economic frustration, focused solely on eastern Jews. Finally, the Nazi paper, the Vdlkischer Beobachter, claimed on November 8 that the riot proved that the Berliners were coming to their senses regarding the evils of the Jews. “The tumult in Berlin,” said the paper, “shows clearly that all the signs today point to a coming storm.”

On that very night and the following day Hitler staged his “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich, which was designed to pave the way for a march on Berlin and the overthrow of the government. As is well known, the putsch failed, and Hitler was forced to put off his seizure of power for almost a decade. The Munich putsch and the Scheunenviertel riot were not directly connected, but both pointed up the widespread malaise and extreme instability of the early Weimar Republic. And in retrospect, of course, we can see that the Völkischer Beobachter was correct, if a little premature, about the “coming storm.”

In the Jungle of Cities