The Flâneur's Turtle

By Michael Stelzer Jocks, History Faculty.

Every national community has its dates of remembrance.  In the secular religion that is nationalism, these are the high-holy days of each year.  They may be days of celebration, or they may be days of mourning. They are always to be days of reflection. The American calendar is marked with a number of such dates. July 4th is a date of great joy, whereas December 7th is a date that has, most assuredly, lived in infamy.  The only thing that can overshadow a day of tragedy is a more recent example of national pain.  Thus, for most Americans today, December 7th has slowly given up its power to September 11th.

Do notice that these dates need no year to jog our collective national memory.  July 4th goes hand in hand with 1776.  That infamous December 7th took place in 1941.  September 11th will always, in some way, be a Tuesday morning in 2001.

Of course, I write this on a day that is an American holiday. November 11th is Veteran’s Day, but, I think it is safe to assume that the particular date rings few, if any, national memory bells.  Though few Americans realize it, however, November 11th was not chosen at random to recognize our veterans.  As many Europeans will relate, the 11th day of November should always be equated with one particular year; 1918.  On that day, the armistice ending the “Great War” came into effect.

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But, here is a question to ponder.  What if one day marked numerous events in one people’s history, both positive and negative, that were markers of national significance?  Which year would a nation equate with the particular date? You may need to ask a German to discover an answer.  You see, November 9th is a recurring date of significance for the German nation. This date marked turning points in German, and, quite honestly, world history, in the years 1918, 1923, 1938, and 1989.

On November 9th, 1918, after four years of war, Kaiser Wilhelm, the emperor of Germany, abdicated his throne.  For many Germans, this political transformation was a surprising revelation that the war was all but lost.  For the Social Democrats, the abdication was an opportunity to create radical liberal reforms, in the hopes of making a new Germany.  For those on the left, November 9th was the symbolic first day of the Weimar Republic. To those on the radical right, this date would also mark the first instance of leftist (read oftentimes Jewish) betrayal against the nation’s war effort.

On November 9th, 1923, a racist, militaristic political party known as the NSDAP, or Nazis, attempted to forcefully overthrow the Weimar government.  The so-called ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ was largely conceived and directed by Adolf Hitler, the young leader of the Nazis. Of course, the putsch was not successful. Hitler was sentenced to jail for a couple years. But, while in prison, the ex-corporal would restructure the Nazi party, hoping for another national crisis that would lead to electoral victories for his organization.

On November 9th, 1938, the now ‘Fuhrer’ Adolf Hitler, with his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, orchestrated a massive state sanctioned pogrom against the German Jewish community.  During the evening of November 9th, and into November 10th, hundreds of synagogues were burned to the ground, roughly 100 German Jews were murdered or committed suicide, thousands of Jewish businesses and homes were ransacked and destroyed, and about 6000 German Jews were sent to concentration camps.  In the weeks afterwards, the German Jewish community was ordered to pay a 1 billion dollar fine to repair the damages.  Kristallnacht was a symbol of the ever increasing radicalism of Nazi anti-Jewish measures that would eventually culminate in the Holocaust.

On November 9th, 1989, it seemed that the German people had enough of the tragedies associated with this day.  24 years ago, thousands of West and East Berliners took to the streets, meeting at the Berlin Wall and started to dismantle the concrete symbol of Communist repression.  The world was amazed as young and old alike took sledge hammers to the physical border between east and west. If you so chose, November 9th could now be a date that would represent friendship and freedom.

German historian Michael Sturmer has labeled the 20th century, ‘the German century’.  If this is the case,  no date on the calender formed and transformed our previous century of tragedy and triumph like November 9th.