The Dream of a Carnival Night I deny the reality of the significant event which marked Germany so solemnly this week: I deny the reality of Hitler’s trial. Such events should be restored to the domain of metaphysics, something quite at home in Munich. The point in the year when this purportedly genuine trial unfolds is most fitting from my point of view. In the midst of the carnival a court assembles, it bows respectfully to the accused, to those who are blowing kisses to women in the courtroom; here justice has migrated into the barracks, here it’s the accused who are doing the accusing, barbed hedgehog barriers mount a menacing guard before the entrance of the garrison court, sixty well-sharpened pencils on a mission to inform the public are poised and it is forbidden for the poor hawkers to sell braces anywhere near the public gallery. It is necessary to be blind or, what amounts to the same, to be a member of the guileless German public, in order not to notice the coexisting phenomena on show here, to not notice that this is no ‘political trial’ taking place here in Munich, but the dream of a carnival night. Consequently, I remove any traces of dignity from the event this week and cast it from the elevated regions of the lofty editorial, into the nether world at ‘street level’. It is not political life on show here, but spiritual decadence. This is no audience, but a spirit seance. It has taken a wrong turn and descended from the faculty of the professor of the Occult, Schrenck-Notzing,2 into the ministry of Emminger.3 I don’t allow myself to be misled. I don’t allow myself to be misled – concerning the equally solemn, impartial and affecting tone with which the newspapers report this trial. For, can you not hear, my brothers, that it is the dead who are speaking? Do you not see that the court reporters are scribbling down the speeches of ghosts? Have you not noticed in the sketches of those ‘sketch makers delegated to attend the court proceedings’, that they are drawing the deceased? The tombs of world history are yawning open in Munich and all the corpses one thought interred are stepping out. A grotesque dream is forming – and all Germany accepts this miracle with indifference, as if it was self-evident. An upholsterer appeared and presented himself as a ‘writer’, and everyone believes it. A cobbler whose gaze is now lifted above a shoe recounts his trifling biography and waxes lyrical on how this ‘citizen of the world’, which he still was in Braunau,4 only became an ‘anti-Semite’ in Vienna. And the German newspapers print that with relish. Then, in his special car, a general by the name of Lindström5 arrives, a man whose name is already engraved in the mortuary register of history, and proceeds to deliver a speech against the Pope. It had to be that particular general who in the course of his life has read nothing save a manual of military science – and even then, without benefitting from it. From the afterlife of the true banished books suddenly looms one lieutenant Röhm,6 and he says, ‘I beg you to consider that I am an officer and can think only in those terms. At the front I was an officer of the general staff and I belong to that handful of those who “firmly believed that we were still going to be victorious”.’ A record of imbecility, even at the heart of the general staff! Think on, brothers, how long it has been since anyone has even given the merest thought to victory, should we not have reasoned that such men were a long time dead and buried? No, you see, they still live! They prophesy. They want to start a revolution! Oh, what a dance of death! It seems to me that German history of the present and recent past, excretes some preservative substance with which it embalms its dead so efficiently that they can be brought back to life at carnival time and are thus able to exhibit in Munich their conception of the world. Such ceremonies should remain the private business of a closed circle devoted to the conjuring of spirits and not be mixed up with politics and the public at large. But things being what they are and because sixty court reporters take down the words of the dead, I must presume that I dreamt the article that I am writing here and its justification; that I dreamt Germany altogether; her illiterate upholsterer, my colleague who, barely has he learned to read and write in a racist alphabet book, immediately becomes a writer and political personality; her general who, instead of enrolling in the Vatican’s Swiss guard, which would have sufficed, fields a cam paign against the Pope; this rattling of rusty sabres, this ghoulish phosphorescence of the living dead; these journalists who morph into comedic gossip-sheet writers when they get to report the Munich trial. That’s right: I dream, and this dream of a carnival night is called Germany. – Vorwärts, 2nd March 1924