On the past and the future – Anson Rabinbach in TLS:

‘On November 8, 1923, Adolf Hitler and his most fervent supporters launched the infamous “Beer Hall Putsch”, a coup to destroy German democracy. Though Hitler was well known locally as a talented antisemitic rabble-rouser, his more famous co-conspirator was Erich Ludendorff, the revered leader of German military forces in the last phase of the Great War. Hitler hoped to win over the Bavarian “triumvirate”: State Commissar General (Generalstaatskommissar) Gustav Ritter von Kahr, Otto von Lossow, commander of the regional armed forces, and the Bavarian police chief, Hans Ritter von Seisser. Days earlier, Kahr, backed by the ultranationalist Combat League (Kampfbund), had promised there would be no putsch before he installed himself as head of a Bavarian state dictatorship.’

(…)

‘Nonetheless, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, the putschist option continued to coexist with the “legal path”. More importantly, Hitler metamorphosed from a rhetorically gifted local Bavarian hothead to the shrewd leader of a disciplined political movement with a fanatical anti-Jewish and anti-Marxist ideological repertoire. Historians all agree that the putsch attempt was at best “amateurish” (Detlev K. J. Peukert), “half-baked” (Richard Evans), and a “premature and ill-conceived enterprise” (Hans Mommsen).
The Munich fiasco provides a backdrop for Volker Ullrich’s Germany 1923 and Mark Jones’s 1923: The crisis of German democracy in the year of Hitler’s coup. Ullrich is best known for his impressive three-volume biography of Hitler, which established his reputation as an evocative writer with sound political judgement. Relying on the observations of journalists, novelists and memoirists, his account of the events of 1923 is compelling and concise.’

(…)

‘Using previously neglected sources, Jones effectively portrays lesser-known protagonists. One is the populist firebrand Andrea Ellendt, who attracted Bavarian crowds to her passionate diatribes against “racketeers”, “usurers”, “profiteers” and Jews. Another is Artur Schweriner, a Jewish journalist sent by the Central Association of German Jews to witness Hitler’s birthday celebration in 1923. He reported that Nazi rhetoric calling for violence against Jews far exceeded even the direst expectations and that Hitler explicitly spoke of the “will to annihilate”. Jews, Schweriner warned, should be prepared to protect themselves. Jones pays close attention to the November 1923 anti-Jewish violence in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel district that was ignited by rumours that eastern European migrants were profiting from inflation. He calls the Berlin riots “the most significant moment of antisemitic violence in twentieth-century Germany before the establishment of the Third Reich”.’

(…)

‘Ostwald is best known for his extraordinary ethnographic project, Die Grosstadt-Dokumente (Big City Documentation), published between 1904 and. 1908. As Peter Fritzsche, who first drew attention to the Grosstadt-Dokumente, notes, Ostwald “was one of the few German authors to portray the underclass with full and sympathetic strokes”. The Dokumente consists of fifty-one low-cost pamphlets, essays or guidebooks of c.100 pages written for a general audience by authors chosen by Ostwald to show Berlin and Vienna from diverse social and cultural perspectives. Among the more than thirty authors he commissioned were Ella Mensch, the pioneering feminist activist and writer, and Magnus Hirschfeld, whose classic Berlin’s Third Sex vividly depicted Berlin’s gay subculture.
A mosaic of “various kinds of texts – diaries, letters, interviews, case studies, conversations, dictionaries”, Fritzsche observed, characterized Ostwald’s unique approach to the “fluctuating and kaleidoscopic experience of the industrial city. In style and substance, the approach to the city can be considered distinctively modernist”. Yet there is a marked change in tone from the capacious iconoclasm of the Dokumente to the petulant conservatism of A Moral History. Ostwald concedes that his Dokumente had yielded “new knowledge and insights into eroticism”. Yet once the inflation era ended, “the German nation put itself right again”. Adopting the language of right-wing nationalism, he bemoans “the plague that had infected the economy as well as the minds and souls of the German people”. A lifelong Social Democrat, he joined the Reich Chamber for Literature in 1935. But his efforts to curry favour with the Nazis ultimately failed. For this reason, the historian Ralf Thies, author of the first book-length study of the Dokumente, demonstrates that his reputation suffered as he tried to cleanse the volumes of the notorious figures he had once promoted.’

Read the article here.

Bother his Hitler-biography and his book on 1923 are excellent, so by all means read Volker Ullrich.

Antisemitism in France before and after the First Wold War was more severe (although how do we compare it exactly) and more widespread in France as it was in Germany.
But I would say that antisemitism in France was more a sign of sophistication than of willingness to actively kill Jeews, one hated Jews in the same way one loved Bordeaux.

Weimar was flattened between the remnants of the past and disgust of modernity, the same disgust that is still alive. The war against modernity is still raging, it won’t stop modernity, but it will kill and it has killed many innocent bystanders in between.