page_title: Carl von Ossietzky
section_title: "Homeless left"
hierarchical_section_title: Carl von Ossietzky / "Homeless left"
caption_attribution_description: Cover of "Die Weltbühne", german journal
context_page_description: Carl von Ossietzky was a German journalist and pacifist. He was the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in exposing the clandestine German re-armament.
  As editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky published a series of exposés in the late 1920s, detailing Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force and training pilots in the Soviet Union. He was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, but was granted amnesty in December 1932.
  Ossietzky continued to be a vocal critic against German militarism after the Nazis' rise to power. Following the 1933 Reichstag fire, Ossietzky was again arrested and sent to the Esterwegen concentration camp near Oldenburg. In 1936, he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize, but was forbidden from travelling to Norway and accepting the prize. After enduring years of mistreatment and torture in various camps, Ossietzky died of tuberculosis in 1938 in a Berlin hospital.
context_section_description: In the 1920s, Ossietzky became one of the leaders of the "homeless left", centered on the newspaper Die Weltbühne which rejected Communism, but found the Social Democrats too inclined to compromise with the old order.
  Ossietzky often complained that the men who staffed the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the military under the Kaiser (German Emperor Wilhelm II) were the same men serving the Weimar Republic, something that was a major concern for him as he frequently warned that these men had no commitment to democracy, and would turn on the republic at the first chance.
  In this regard, Ossietzky at Die Weltbühne helped to publish a statistical study in 1923, showing that German judges were inclined to impose extremely harsh sentences on those who broke laws in the name of the left while imposing very lenient sentences on those who committed much violence in the name of the right. He often drew a contrast between the fate of Social Democrat Felix Fechenbach who was imprisoned after a questionable trial for publishing secret documents showing that the German Empire was responsible for World War I and that of the Navy Captain Hermann Ehrhardt of the Freikorps whose men occupied Berlin during the Kapp Putsch, killed several hundred civilians and was never tried for his actions. At the same time, Ossietzky was often critical of those republicans who claimed to believe in democracy without actually knowing what democracy meant.
  
  Ossietzky was especially critical of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold), the paramilitary group set up by the Social Democrats to defend democracy. Ossietzky wrote in 1924: 
  Whoever has learned from the events of the past five years knows that it is not the nationalists, the monarchists who represent the real danger, but the absence of substantive content and ideas in the concept of the German republic and that no-one will succeed in vitalizing that concept. Defense of the republic is good. It is better to go beyond that to an understanding of what in the republic is worth defending and what should not be retained. This question escapes the Reichsbanner; more precisely, it has probably not yet recognized that such a question even exists.
  Our republic is not yet an object of mass consciousness but a constitutional document and a governmental administration. When people want to see the republic, they are shown the Wilhelmstrasse. And then one wonders why they return home somewhat shamed. Nothing is there to make the heart beat faster. Around this state, lacking any ideas and with an eternally guilty conscience, there are grouped a couple of so-called constitutional parties, likewise lacking an idea and with no better conscience, which are not led, but administered. Administered by a bureaucratic caste that is responsible for the misery of recent years in domestic and foreign affairs and that smothers all signs of fresh life with a cold hand. If the Reichsbanner does not find within itself the idea, the inspiring idea, and the youth does not finally storm the gates, then it will not become the avant-garde of the republic, but the cudgel-guard of the partycrats, and their interests will be defended foremost, not the republic...
  And the effect? The Reichsbanner honors the constitution with festivals; the Reichsbanner goose-steps; the Reichsbanner drapes Potsdam in black-red-gold; the Reichsbanner scrapes with the Communists and Fechenbach sits in the penitentiary. That is the joke of it. But if the Reichsbanner had as many determined fellows among its members as Captain Erhardt, then Fechenbach would no longer be sitting in the penitentiary today. French democrats rescued their Spanish brothers in the cause, whom they did not even know by sight, from the claws of a dictator. The thought of an injustice committed somewhere in the world kept them from sleeping. The German democrats and socialists are more solidly organized. It is not at all true that they are as weak-kneed as is always believed; it is just that they have terribly thick skin. Besides, they are faithful to the law an
caption: Weltbühne cover, 12 March 1929
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