The free word
The Free Word was a large protest rally on February 19, 1933 against the National Socialists who had come to power three weeks earlier . The so-called ordinance of the Reich President for the Protection of the German People had restricted the basic rights of the Weimar Constitution , in particular the freedom of assembly and the press , two weeks beforehand . Around 900 participants took part in the public event organized jointly by liberal , social democratic and communist politicians at the Kroll Opera in Berlin .
In the run-up to the congress, the KPD member Alfred Kantorowicz wrote in Die Welt am Abend , "There are times when the free speech no longer has to be defended with words, but through action." The Nazis responded immediately to the newspaper prohibited and arrest warrant issued against the author.
Albert Einstein and many others had written an unsuccessful urgent appeal in June 1932 for the SPD and KPD to merge in the upcoming Reichstag election campaign . In preparation for the congress, the initiative committee republished it and numerous personalities joined it.
A manifesto, The Free Word , was created under the editorship of Willi Munzenberg , which even strict anti-communists supported in the escalating situation of the republic. The signatories included Georg Bernhard , Max Brauer , Albert Einstein , Käthe Kollwitz , Kurt Grossmann and Heinrich and Thomas Mann . The congress was held on February 19 in the large ballroom of the Kroll Opera.
According to the local press, between 1,000 and 2,000 rational-democratic or anti-Nazi intellectuals took part in the rally, at which “the call for freedom of thought sounded for the last time”. The criminal defense attorney for Carl von Ossietzky and later secretary of the German PEN Club in exile, Rudolf Olden , took part, as did the Kiel sociology professor Ferdinand Tönnies , the former Prussian Justice Minister Wolfgang Heine and the pacifist and writer Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt . Other factors include Harry Kessler , Theodor Lessing , Alfred Doblin and Mayor Reuter .
The publicist Erich Everth made an ardent plea for maintaining freedom of the press . The congress ended with a speech by Wolfgang Heine, his topic was “The freedom of art”. Before the rally was over, police officers intervened, had the hall cleared and declared the congress over.
A few days later the German Reichstag burned down on the opposite side of the square (see Reichstag fire ); The Reichstag Fire Ordinance issued on February 28th by the Reich President practically suspended the basic rights of the Weimar Constitution and was the starting point for the transformation of the German state into a fascist dictatorship .
literature
- Uwe Carstens , The Congress "The Free Word" of February 19, 1933 in the Spiegel der Presse, in: Tönnies-Forum , 1 (2013), pp. 55–79.
- Richard Albrecht , Ferdinand Tönnies and the ´Das Free Word´ congress in 1933 ; in: Sociologia Internationalis , 28 (1990) 1, pp. 87-90.
- Klaus Briegleb , Walter Uka, on the congress "The Free Word", in: Exile research. An international year book, 1 (1983), pp. 203-243.
Individual evidence
- ^ Siegfried Grundmann: Einstein's file. Science and politics - Einstein's time in Berlin , Springer-Verlag, 2nd edition, Berlin et al. 2004, p. 424 f.
- ↑ German Press Museum. In: pressechronik1933.dpmu.de. February 20, 2013, accessed December 31, 2017 .