28. Troupe31’s Audience: German Youth

Lessons of the 'Troupe 1931' Theater Ensemble

The original author of these essays was Ingeborg Franke von Wangenheim.

After eleven years, our bourgeois Weimar democracy seemed incapable of improving anyone’s circumstances, either as citizens or as workers, and this created almost universal German contempt for it. Day by day, government decisions were handed down to us, each one further limiting the People’s chances for healthy survival. Each decision also subsequently damaged the democratic government’s own chances for survival!

This was the ongoing crisis that had begun in 1919, when the new post-revolutionary Weimar government showed itself to be too weak to bring substantial change, and too subservient to the same group of brutal militarists and ideological nationalists who had kept Kaiser Wilhelm II in power. The so-called “democracy” had unaccountably held disgraced generals like Hindenburg and Ludendorff in office, even after they’d conducted and prolonged the most catastrophic war in European history!

In office, these officers only prolonged their scandalous corruption. This, after seducing an entire generation of German men — our brothers, uncles, fathers — into charging across the slaughter-field, in the name of the mediocre, idiotic Kaiser! After the organized rebellion of our own rank-and-file soldiers finally sent Wilhelm II into flight, opening the door for a genuinely progressive German revolution, the conservative Social Democrats (SPD) quickly panicked — and caved to the right.

Desperate to control the anti-war Pacifists and still any left-wing socialist or Marxist voices, the SPD turned to the kaiser’s still-loyal military officers. Today, in 1934, even the least “liberal” of Social Democrats are being hounded by their well-decorated friends. Who is pursuing them? Those “loyal” friends who’ve “cleansed” the streets of Berlin for them in the old regime, heartlessly mowing down our friends, comrades, and political leaders since 1919. How hard it is for us to mourn the passing of the most “liberal” of the Social Democrats, so surprised to see how their trust in the German military has been betrayed….