For those who missed the screening,
the film is available for rental/purchase from various online distributors like Fandango, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube, GooglePlay, iTunes, Orange, CanalVOD…
#RememberElserForever “Iwantedtopreventevengreaterbloodshedthroughmydeed.” Georg Elser
FROM THE PROGRAM NOTES
February 23 13 Minutes (other titles: Elser, Er hätte die Welt verändert – Elser, He Would Have Changed the World – Elser, un Héros Ordinaire/An Ordinary Hero.)
Germany, 2015, 114 minutes
German with English subtitles
This award-winning film, by Oscar-winning director Oliver Hirschbiegel, traces the true story of Georg Elser, a carpenter from Konigsbrönn who, after becoming politically radicalized, unsuccessfully attempts to assassinate Hitler in 1939. Until today, Elser remains a largely unrecognized hero of German resistance to Hitler.
Introductory remarks and post-screening discussion facilitated by Pier Marton, presently the “Unlearning Specialist” at the School of No Media. Besides Yad Vashem, he has lectured on his artwork at the Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum, and the Walker Art Center. He has taught at several major U.S. universities. Marton’s father, photographer Ervin Marton, was in the French Résistance.
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The mission of the St. Louis HMLC (Holocaust Museum and Learning Center) – one of only 22 Holocaust museums across the U.S. To ensure that the horror and lessons of the Holocaust are not forgotten and how what happened in the past relates to current events.
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All screenings are free of charge and begin at 1 pm, unless otherwise noted.
Films from January through May will screen at 1 pm at:
Holocaust Museum & Learning Center Theater
12 Millstone Campus Drive, St. Louis, 63146
“The verb ‘to resist’ must always be conjugated in the present tense. “ – Lucie Aubrac (Why? Because blindness and injustice are ever present. )
“By the clever and continuous use of propaganda, a people can even be made to mistake heaven for hell, and vice-versa. “ – Adolf Hitler
13 MINUTES is your first German film in almost ten years. What about it excited you so that it made you return to your home country?
I found the script and the title character fascinating. I have always said: If a German topic comes along that captures me, I’m in immediately. That was the case here. At first, I read the script mainly out of curiosity, because I knew Georg Elser’s story, and couldn’t really imagine how it could be told in a thrilling way. But reading it, I found myself immediately pulled into the events. I couldn’t put it down, wanting to know how it would play out, was surprised again and again – and towards the end came another two twists, astounding me extremely. At that point the latest, I knew that I simply had to do this film. You were already familiar with Elser’s story?
Yes, from earliest youth. I have been occupying myself with the Third Reich since I could think straight. All the questions to which I never found an answer as a youth have not left me in peace?till today: How was that possible? Why had no one done anything against it? Why was there never any serious resistance movement? In the attempt to find out as much as possible about the Nazi times, I encountered Georg Elser already during my school days. I thought him to be extremely interesting, although only a fraction of what we know about him today was known then. In those days, he was still stamped as this weird character who was obsessed with the idea of killing Hitler. Decades later, during the preparation for The Downfall I stumbled across Elser again – and even then I thought by myself: what a captivating story! What about him has fascinated you most? His clear-sightedness. Elser is not a politically organized man after all, but simply a free spirit, who believes in individuality and self-determination. Someone who is curious about the world and who wants to escape the constrictions of rural life. Today, we might even call him a hippie. He feels an energy that he regards as destructive – a system controlling everything, believing in violence and suppression of any individuality or creativity. This goes totally against his grain. And he senses a strong inner urge, to stand up against this system. Amazing, for a simple joiner from the countryside.
Well, an open heart and the ability of prescience are not limited to certain education levels or the?urban environment. Elser simply feels that he needs to do something. He knows that this will only work if he manages to take out this Hitler guy. And as an inventive tinkerer he then considers how he could achieve this. That a man like this can muster the energy to realize a deed like that all on his own, is really phenomenal. Elser is anything but a terrorist, after all. I think, not a day goes by where he isn’t moved in his heart by the thought of people going to die if his plan works out. That is really hard on him. Why was Georg Elser, other than Stauffenberg or the fighters of the White Rose, pointedly ignored for decades?
On the one hand, there were several conspiracy theories: They claimed that Elser was a) a henchman of enemy intelligence services and thus a traitor of his own people, or b) hired by the Nazis to execute the assault, so that Hitler could be celebrated as immortal. These theories have persisted in diverse variations, and have only been unequivocally disproved in recent times. On top of that: The thought, that such a small craftsman from the Swabia countryside is the only one?to realize what is happening in Germany, and acting against it – that is shameful. Of course, that arouses the reflex to sweep this story under the carpet. So, high time to bring this to the big screen! Did you not have any misgivings, as there already were two films about Georg Elser? No. Rainer Erler’s TV-movie “Der Attentäter” is from the 1960s – where Elser is still depicted as naïve misfit. And Brandauer’s film is following a classic ticking clock arc of suspense à la Hollywood. Exactly that is avoided by the Breinersdorfers’ script, and this is what I liked especially well: that here suspense is created via psychology, via the situation that a whole people is caught in. In a manner of speaking, 13 MINUTES for me is something like the backstory of Downfall: Whilst there I was concentrating on the final weeks of the Third Reich, here I’m talking about the 1930s, where the National Socialist movement is slowly spreading. How did your vision for the realization look in concrete terms?
I wanted to create a feeling of being permanently ill at ease. This is the feeling I encountered again and again, when occupying myself with the Nazi regime. Jean Genet, too, did describe it thus, when he was hiking through Germany as a deserter, beggar and thief in 1937: To him, it appeared as if the whole country was caught underneath a huge bell jar. This is what I was trying to show, without denouncing the people. My intention was to depict the authentic life in the countryside in Germany in those days: A traditional village community, which is progressively infiltrated by the Nazis. That can be seen in the film at the harvest festival, for instance.
Exactly. You watch this, and at first you think: This is cozy, this looks like fun, I’d like to join in that. But at a certain point you start noticing the swastikas, and you realize that there are already a few of these SA types hanging about – and suddenly this pleasant feeling is sticking in your gullet. Concerning another key scene:How did you realize the sequence with Hitler’s speech in the Bürgerbräukeller? We had the interior of the Bürgerbräukeller reconstructed inside a fruit warehouse in South Tyrol – although, only approximately one third of the room, so that I had to mirror the back wall, to get the corresponding counter shots. And we also had only about 100 extras, who were eventually turned into some thousand, with the help of computer animation. The CGI-crew had to do pick-up shots of the room’s other sections, so to speak. In addition, I used a few simple tricks which?have proven themselves since the 1930s: Because there was only half a corridor on the gallery that you could shoot from, I eventually had Christian Friedel’s hairdo inverted, put the chain of his pocket watch on the other side – and then mirrored him. And how did you approach the interrogation scenes?
To create an atmosphere of hopelessness, I never moved the camera during the interrogations: there are no panning or tracking shots, the takes are static, the images seem like walled in. I copied this from masters like Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, but naturally this could only work, because I had such tremendous actors at my disposal. If the camera never moves, the directing must be strong. There is no cheating. How did you work with Burghart Klaussner and Johann von Bülow in that respect?
I wanted to depict Johann’s character Müller as a totally stringent, pragmatic soldier, who pursues his goal to unmask Elser as a collaborator without any flourishes. Naturally, that means an amazing restriction for an actor, but Johann solved his task brilliantly. With Burghart, the exact opposite was important to me: He was supposed to bring out as many facets in his interpretation of police chief Arthur Nebe as earthly possible. For Nebe was an opportunist – a pragmatist, too, but much more flexible and complex. Eventually he was even involved in Stauffenberg’s attempted coup from July 1944. The interrogation records also show that Nebe was fascinated by Elser, in a way. So I pressed Burghart to have his character scintillate in any possible shade – which of course he did gratefully. And how would you describe your work with Katharina Schüttler [the cinematographer]?
I might formulate it thus: We lovingly rode the same wave. The great thing about Katharina is, that you can never be sure what will be next. After all, she doesn’t know either. She always stays in character, but always adds something new, so that each take with her is slightly different. Also, she doesn’t shy from anything: No matter, what you ask of her – she throws herself into it courageously and with gay abandon, like a wild racehorse. Fascinating! And naturally: how did it work with Christian Friedel [the main actor]?
Well, you could already tell in The White Ribbon what a fantastic actor he is. And I have to say: no one could have played Georg Elser even remotely like he does. Our first day of shooting already went so smoothly that we knew: We are like two brothers, steering a boat together. You just need to throw a look or a cue into the room, and at once everything moves in the right direction. It was the perfect symbiosis. In the run-up I had only given a few keynotes to Christian concerning Elser, which he immediately understood and implemented. What were those notes?
For instance “Stenz”, a Bavarian term for an insouciant ladies’ man. Elser is a guy who knows?that the chicks like him. They are wild about him, the sensitive musician who is so different from?the other chaps. Women often find the men most exciting who are hard to get. But Elser really? loved women; he enjoyed life with them, and I’m convinced that he was a great lover, too. A ?further keynote for Christian: “Pop star”. As a musician, Elser was always in the public eye, and I? wanted him in the film to lean against his bicycle as if he had jumped off the cover of a Beck CD. Or: “Capricorn”. A special type, who is not only noted for painstaking work, but also a certain form of asceticism. To lock oneself into the Bürgerbräukeller for 30 nights and scraping one’s knees in the process would probably not occur to a Sagittarius or a Libra – that is more of a Capricorn-thing. What can we learn from Georg Elser today?
Moral courage. When do you reach the point where you say: “I’m not going along with this anymore, I can’t reconcile this with my conscience?” That reminds me immediately of Edward Snowden. He, too, had observed over the years what was happening in an allegedly democratic system; this kept bothering him, until he got out and passed his information on to the public – even in the knowledge that this would put an end to his life as he knew it. He accepted having to be permanently on the run, being ostracized all over the world and living in fear of his life. Still he stood up and said: “This cannot be!” Concerning this inner urge, Snowden, this highly intelligent and sophisticated man, is not so unlike Elser. What was your best experience during the shoot?
Our two days of shooting on Lake Constance were especially beautiful. In this sequence we tell?about the spirit of a new start in the early 1930s, when an amazing number of new stuff comes up, which later is suppressed again in Germany: Jazz, the concept of free love, the “Wandervogel”-movement, the naturists… Basically, we had bad weather during almost the? whole shoot, always looming clouds, rain, thunderstorms – but on precisely these two days there? was sunshine on Lake Constance, and the fitting summer’s light. For us, this was like a big hippie celebration: It felt as if we had received help from above. But it’s really wrong, to point out those two days. Why?
Because every single day on this film was such a beautiful experience. I went to work each morning with curiosity, an open heart and a feeling of great joy. That was quite exceptional. And it wasn’t over with the end of the shoot: I also edited the film in record time. That wasn’t just due to the fact that the material was so good, but also that in Alexander Dittner I had an extremely fast and skillful editor by my side. If people buy a movie ticket and watch the finished film – what do they get for their money?
You experience a fascinating personality, who surpasses himself. At the same time, you see a system that ruins the centuries-old traditions of a cultured people. And I believe, all this is told in such a way, that the viewer is not just staring unmoved at a museum piece, but gets swept into the story.
Related information (2)
Ece Temelkuran’s quick summary on “Seven Steps To Lose a Country.”
Ece Temelkuran speaks of her book “How to Lose a Country” (“Essential reading” — Margaret Atwood), about “Right-wing Populism” at the Washington, D.C. Politics and Prose bookstore
Timothy Snyder, author of the very popular “On Tyranny,” about his latest book”The Road to Unfreedom” at the John Adams Institute in the Netherlands.
HA’ARETZ – German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier speaks in Jerusalem on January 23, 2020: I Wish I Could Say Germans Learned From History, but I Can’t….
In the U.S. political assassinations have been typically committed on progressive figures, am I right?
22 June 1963, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Photo by Abbie Rowe, National Park Service/John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston.
Some partial text- and tidbits – some used, some not.
LOTS OF INFO – CHOOSE WHAT YOU NEED
From the presentation.
How many of you were there at the previous presentation, the outstanding Who Will Write Our History by Roberta Grossman?
I would like to dedicate this presentation to my dear friend Natalie Kauffman, a tireless fighter who, had she not passed away on Thursday September 19, 2019, would have been here today too.
We are here in a museum dedicated to what could be called “A Life or Death Urgency,” a museum that deals with such an Emergency situation at one time, could become the site to discuss a present urgency.
We are here, in a museum, one of 22 Holocaust museums in this country, whose particular mission is stated to be:
To ensure that the horror and lessons of the Holocaust are not forgotten and how what happened in the past relates to current events.
I will extend these words with those of the noted Holocaust historian, Timothy Snyder, who in the introduction to Black Earth, writes:
“A history of the Holocaust must be contemporary, permitting us to experience what remains from the epoch of Hitler in our minds and in our lives. Hitler’s worldview did not bring about the Holocaust by itself, but its hidden coherence generated new sorts of destructive politics, and new knowledge of the human capacity for mass murder. The precise combination of ideology and circumstance of the year 1941 will not appear again, but something like it might. Part of the effort to understand the past is thus the effort needed to understand ourselves. The Holocaust is not only history, but warning.”
We are here, like the tip of an iceberg, one that has us floating on the surface, but composed of a great deal of survivors, those that allowed us to see the light of day… and be here today.
We are here unaware for the most part of what they, mostly ordinary people, had to do.
Yes, the title in France for the film we are about to see is “Elser, An Ordinary Hero.”
We are speaking of ordinary people, ordinary resistance. It was also an emphasis I made when in 2010 I spoke at Yom HaShoah (The Day of Holocaust/Shoah Remembrance), heroes are everywhere, mostly invisible. Just like my parents…
I am here today because, not my grandparents, but my parents survived being chased after, “wanted more dead than alive,” had managed through luck and politicization to remain alive and gave birth to me.
I will tell you after the film what my mother thought of the idea of “so many Germans in the Resistance”…
But here, to introduce the film… a few words:
1. from an interview of its director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, the director of a very different film, the Oscar winner Downfall:
Question: If people buy a movie ticket and watch the finished film – what do they get for their money?
Answer” You experience a fascinating personality, who surpasses himself. At the same time, you see a system that ruins the centuries-old traditions of a cultured people. And I believe, all this is told in such a way, that the viewer is not just staring unmoved at a museum piece, but gets swept into the story.
2. After a year’s work of accumulating explosives and honing his skills…
“By modifying a clock, he created a timer that would run for up to 144 hours before activating a lever; that would trigger a system of springs and weights that would launch a steel shuttle into a live rifle round embedded in explosive. Next, Elser added a second timer to act as a fail-safe, then enclosed the whole bomb in a beautifully built box designed to fit precisely into the cavity he had excavated. He minimized the risk of discovery by lining the cavity with cork, which muffled the noise from the bomb’s clock, and then placing a sheet of tinplate inside the wood panel to prevent any bierkeller worker putting up decorations from unknowingly driving a nail into his delicate mechanism. When he was finished, he returned to the bierkeller with the box he’d made and discovered that it was fractionally too big. He took it home, planed it down and went back again to make sure it fit.“
And as the Museum of German Resistance in Berlin states:
3. First in German:
Ihr trugt die Schande nicht.
Ihr wehrtet euch.
Ihr gabt das große ewig wache Zeichen der Umkehr,
opfernd Euer heißes Leben für Freiheit, Recht und Ehre.
With a translation:
You did not bear the shame.
You resisted.
You bestowed the eternally vigilant signal to turn back
by sacrificing your impassioned lives for freedom, justice and honor.
I invite you to watch the changes to what was considered “normal” in Elser’s small town…
—– the film screens —-
To continue…
About my mother’s reaction to my having told her that I had met a woman in Chicago was in the German Resistance…
Besides the now well-known figures like the White Rose members and the Stauffenberg plot (Valkyrie), here are a few lists of German Resistance groups and individuals like Fritz Kolbe, Carl von Ossietzky, Elise Hampel with husband Otto, the Ehrenfeld Group – from the German Resistance Wikipedia entry. And this other Wikipedia entry: List of Germans who resisted Nazism.
In doing research on Elser, I came across this book
Killing Hitler: The Plots, the Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death by Roger Moorhouse
In it I read about Dr. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister:
“Goebbels’s methods were deceptively simple. Backed by the ever-present threat of violence, he used every means at his disposal to browbeat, taunt, and humiliate his opponents. He never allowed the truth to cloud his judgment. The essential aspect of propaganda, he asserted, was that it “achieved its purpose”; whether it was true or not was immaterial. Defamation, therefore, was a specialty, and at one point Goebbels was defending five separate libel actions. He would ridicule his enemies as simpletons, nincompoops, or philanderers, start scurrilous rumors, and make outrageous accusations. His words, honed with consummate skill, would almost drip with malice and cynicism.”
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“In 1933, he was awarded the top prize—leadership of the newly created Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, with the entire German media under his control. At his first press conference, he was remarkably candid about the new ministry’s purpose. It was, he said, to make people “think uniformly, react uniformly, and place themselves at the disposal of the government, body and soul.””
Die grosse Lüge/The big lie.
Two reports done by the US during the war about Hitler’s method to ward off the truth and push his propaganda:
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
& Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.
You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we will fill you with ourselves. 1984, George Orwell (in 1949)
«But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, … truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.” -Feuerbach, Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity 1841
1. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
2. The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.
3. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is ostensibly the focal point of all vision and all consciousness: But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.
4. The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
5. The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.
6. Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality.
AND Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Johann Georg Elser and the Attempt on Hitler’s Life
by Univ.-Prof. em. Dr. Peter Steinbach Scientific Director of the Memorial for German Resistance, Berlin
(who acted as a consultant on 13 Minutes)
On November 8, 1939 the course of world history, spellbound by the assault on Poland, which the German Wehrmacht had started a few weeks previously, could have taken a turn which might have spared humanity at the time much grief as a result of the destruction of war, German occupation, extermination camps, genocide, war captivity, bombarding of cities, expulsion and the division of Europe.
The fight of the National Socialists against the opponent in war was not just meant to be conducted against foreign enemies, but also at home, at the “home front”. There it could and would turn against all who had been denoted as opponents by the powers-that-be in the struggle for the claim on philosophical leadership. In Germany, people who had been philosophically and racially defined as “enemies” had been styled proponents of the alleged “absolute evil”. Neighbors often turned into murderers, sanctioned by the state, constantly mobilized, finally driven into the war more than led into it, from which they could only have freed themselves if Germans had turned their weapons on their own government.
But on November 8, 1939, forgotten and displaced far too readily after 1945, one single man had tried to give the already started war a different, a decisive turn. Meanwhile, his deed has been painstakingly reconstructed by historical science, and is, compared to the 1950s, very well known.
Origin and Character
Born 1903 in Hermaringen in Württemberg, Georg Elser grew up in Königsbronn, in a difficult and constricted family situation. The father indulged in alcohol and was considered irascible; the family was reduced to poverty. Very early on, Elser was considered exceptionally talented in crafts and art. After seven years in school and an apprenticeship in the smelting works Königsbronn, which he had to give up due to health issues, he started his apprenticeship as a carpenter. He was thought to be an excellent worker and was proud of his profession, but also demanded appreciation and adequate remuneration. What is striking was his pronounced sense of justice. In his working life as well as in his private life, he put great importance on his internal and social independence. This led to choices concerning how he lived his life, which were not always accepted by his surroundings and confirmed the impression that Elser was a misfit. Several times he had to change his workplace in the economic troubles of the late 1920s, which subsequently led to a bad economic crisis. Although this was later interpreted as his restlessness, the lack of orders for companies was the reason for his change of positions, for each of his employers highly esteemed his professional accomplishments.
Georg Elser was thought of as an introvert and taciturn person, although he was quite sociable. Since his schooldays in Königsbronn he had made music, in Constance he joined a folk dress club, in Königsbronn the zither club. He played the double bass for the choral society of his home village, and frequently incited enthusiasm at dances which he accompanied musically. He also liked to go on hiking tours with friends. Women felt attracted to him, for they liked him because of his reliable and genial ways. In 1930, his girlfriend Mathilde Niedermann gave birth to Manfred, one of Elser’s sons.
Elser does not seem to have received political impulses and stimulation until his apprenticeship. He became a member of the woodworkers’ union and in 1928/29 joined the communist “Roter Frontkämpferbund”, but without strongly committing to either organization. Until 1933 he voted for the KPD, by his own admission, because he took this party to be the best representation of workers’ interests. Elser rejected the rising National Socialism decidedly from the very beginning. He avoided demonstrations of the SA, the NSDAP and the Hitler youth and consistently refused the “Hitlergruß”. Participation in the common reception of Hitler’s speeches, broadcast over radio and transmitted to public places via loudspeakers, was anathema to him. This shows him to be unimpressed by National Socialist propaganda.
In an exemplary way, he demonstrated with his plot, prepared long-term, that a single man, not at the center of power, was able to avoid the presumptions of the Nazi rule, even in the controllable village milieu, to recognize the injustice, to be outraged and to act decisively. Elser’s understanding of politics was marked by his own endeavor to achieve freedom and independence, and by a mixture of experiences and quite different traditions. Pietist, unionist and political notions were overlapping in his philosophy, which also was no stranger to anarchy. For anarchy did not mean chaos, but reflected the longing for a rulerless society. Added to this was an acute eye for reality. The deterioration of life conditions in the years following 1933 became a deciding motif for his opposition against National Socialism.
In 1937/38 another political motif moved into the foreground: Elser was troubled by the all-encompassing military and propagandist preparations for war. When he realized that the western powers were giving in to Germany’s demands in September 1938 at the Munich Conference, he felt a call to his own undertaking. He was internally alarmed when German troops marched into the Sudentenland and a few months later also occupied Czech territory and turned it into a protectorate.
The Event
In order to find a fitting location for his attempt, Elser went to Munich on November 8, 1938, which after Hitler’s accession to power had remained a center of the national socialist memory cult. On November 8, 1938, the evening of the 15th anniversary of Hitler’s putsch of 1923, he inspected the Bürgerbräukeller, the following day watched the memorial march of the NS- leadership through Munich, the consecration of new flags by touching the “blood flag” and the honoring of the dead of November 9, 1923, who had been pseudo-religiously sublimated as “blood witnesses”. His decision was made, to earmark the Bürgerbräukeller as a location for an assassination with explosives of the NS-leadership and to commit the attempt he considered unavoidable.
Elser prepared his deed with determination. At his workplace, the Heidenheim Armature Works, he managed to organize at least 250 tablets of pressed gunpowder and several fuses. He hid the explosives in his wardrobe, later in a wooden suitcase with a false bottom. At the same time, he was drawing plans for an explosive device which Gestapo and the press would later call an “infernal machine”, and developed a complicated detonating mechanism with two detonators, in case that one of the mechanisms would fail. In April 1939 he went again to Munich, to check the room’s security and its accesses. He also took measurements of the column behind the lectern, where he wanted to hide the device. He even tried to get himself employed by the Bürgerbräukeller, but without success.
Since April 1939, Elser had been working in a quarry at Königsbronn and could appropriate 100 blasting cartridges and more than 125 blasting caps. After a work accident in 1939, which he had probably induced on purpose, he concentrated himself completely on the preparations for his assault. In July 1939, he tested blasts in his parents’ orchard, and one month later, he moved to Munich, determined to pull off his attempt as planned. Since September he had been living in the Türkenstraße as a lodger, hiring himself out to Munich craft workshops as occasional worker, not least to fabricate parts he needed for the construction of the explosive device. Night after night, Elser was hiding on the gallery of the ballroom of the Bürgerbräukeller, to have himself locked in unnoticed after hours. With primitive tools he managed, between August and November 1939, to prepare the column behind Hitler’s lectern in such a way that explosives and detonators could be hidden.
The work was tiresome. Elser had to hide and was come upon several times. He caught the debris in a home-made bag and carried it out during the day, under the eyes of the waitresses of the Bürgerbräukeller. The work turned into a race against time, by the rally in November 1939 all labors had to be performed. While he could not prevent the war, which Germany had started by invading Poland on September 1, 1939, it confirmed Elser’s decision to prevent “even greater bloodshed”.
During the night of November 2, Elser finally hid his device in the column and filled the rest of the hollowed-out space with additional explosives and gunpowder. His complicated detonating mechanism, which could be set six days in advance, was installed in the night of November 5, 1939. In the morning of November 6, he set both clockworks for the evening of November 8.With that he let, as he later confessed, „“the thing run its own course”. After a final check of the time fuses in the night before November 8, Georg Elser left Munich in the direction of Lake Constance, in order to flee to Switzerland.
A coincidence saved Hitler, who had decided because of the war and the planned attack of German troops in the West, for once to not speak personally at the anniversary celebration of his putsch. Instead of him, his lieutenant Rudolf Heß was supposed to speak. At short notice though, Hitler then decided on a brief fundamental speech, in which he attacked the British government. But he spoke a significantly shorter time than at previous events, and ended sooner than Elser had expected. Hitler planned to return to Berlin immediately. Because of weather conditions, he could not take the plane, but had to make do with a special train of the Reichsbahn. Around 9.07 p.m. Hitler, together with high-ranking NS-officials, left the room, where the device exploded around 9.20 p.m. eight persons lost their lives, among them a waitress – the death of this innocent woman weighed hard on Elser.
Where Hitler’s lectern used to be there was a several-foot high rubble heap. The explosion had burst the manipulated column and caused the ceiling to collapse.
Elser had already been arrested an hour earlier in Constance, a short distance from the Swiss border, and handed over to the police because of the suspicious contents of his bags. After long interrogations and torture he confessed the deed a few days later, and his intention to pave the way to a European peace with it. He was kept prisoner for four years in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, later in Dachau, in complete isolation, and on April 9, 1945 was shot insidiously by orders of the Gestapo command. These are the facts in a nutshell.
Elser – Terrorist or Resistance Fighter?
Elser turned himself on the totalitarian dictatorship and became its victim. Whoever opposes tyrants, deserves the attempt of posterity to consider the morally and ethically motivated reasons for his decisions, but not the defaming statement that he had acted as an irresponsible terrorist. Elser’s deed is appreciated in the meantime, schools, squares and streets bear his name. He is exceptional, because he overcame his own limits, and with his deeds surpassed all his contemporaries.
It cannot be stressed clearly enough: The carpenter Johann Georg Elser was no terrorist, who wanted to shake up a society by mass murder. For his deed was directed against Hitler and his leadership clique, as one of the biggest terrorists to ever come to power. It is unquestionable that Elser wanted to end terrorism in Germany at one stroke. Therefore, he used for him ultimate imaginable means of violence. Elser knew that he would have to bear the guilt for this. He did not do this out of ideological delusion or a fantasy of power, or even from the presumptuous desire to enter the history books. But he owned up to his wholly individual responsibility for the “wrong ways” of German politics, which finally spiraled into the “German disaster”. He gave a signal against criminal politics. Thus, he took the blame on himself, because he had to accept responsibility, no matter whether that burdened or endangered him. When he tried, after preparing the assault, to flee to Switzerland, he did not do so because he was a coward, but because only escape offered the chance to save innocents from blind persecution by the national socialist rulers.
Elser owned up to his responsibility and to his deed. In this he differed from many partisans of the national socialist „“governmental terrorism” in power, who again and again claimed to only have followed orders, and obeyed an oath without questioning themselves whether a „“betrayed people” would not been additionally betrayed into an unconditional obedience to orders, which was frequently fed by fear and career ambition. The real traitor to Germany and the civilization that had been observed up to 1933, was Hitler. This was made unequivocally clear by Fritz Bauer, the Hessian Chief State Prosecutor and initiator of the Auschwitz trials as soon as the early 1950s.
Elser was not a terrorist, but a resistance fighter. The National Socialists knew that. They made a connection, which the post-war society in Germany did not want to acknowledge. They murdered Elser on April 9, 1945, only a few weeks before the end of the NS-state, on the same day as Bonhoeffer, Canaris, Sack and Dohnanyi. Elser is not a challenge, for his deed is understandable, if you accept the Third Reich as an unlawful state. What remains a challenge for the contemplative posterity is the German society that supported Hitler’s rule, the military that defended it to the bitter end, and with the defamation of the resistance even after 1945, kept to a morally reprehensible oath to their “Führer” and to a flag bearing the swastika.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Elser in Dachau (upon incarceration)
From his “Read-Books!” chapter, a bibliography from Timothy Snyder‘s On Tyranny.
NOVELS:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
HISTORY AND POLITICS:
Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments of ON TYRANNY are:
“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell
The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
The Rebelby Albert Camus
The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz
“The Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel
“How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kolakowski
The Uses of Adversityby Timothy Garton Ash
The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt
Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning
Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev
Mentioned in the text of On Tyranny:
1984, a novel by George Orwell
Hamlet, a play by William Shakespeare
Rhinoceros. a play by Eugène Ionesco
Fahrenheit451, a novel by Ray Bradbury
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To ride the unbalance* between:
1. excellence and a kind, singular and porous identity that contains some of the scruples, humor, humility, musicality & the beauty of a harsh and confusing, yet benign and rich reality – away from distractions.
2. the stupidity and blindness of complacency, violence, injustice, pretense, egos, short-term… wishful… and group “thinking,” and empty talk – in all of their surprising embodiments. And the false sense of fullness all of this provides.
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An appeal for a world NOT so caught up in anthropo/ego/euro/ethno/oculo/esthetico -CENTRISM.
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1. Beware of those who claim to be strong – they are often dangerous.
2. Unmask the hoax of “centrality” – ask an “EX-centric” for assistance?
3. Perceive the arrogance of normalcy: everybody, in one way or another, is handicapped… which brings us back to 1.
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*Not unrelated to “There is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first.” — Albert Camus
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