Learning About Blutmai

So far I've learned from Babylon Berlin that my American education did not teach me nearly enough about Weimar Germany, and I'd be willing to bet that I already knew more about that period than 99.x% of Americans.

I had never heard of Blutmai (Bloody May Day), when Berlin police killed more than 30 people who weren't even involved in the 1929 May Day protests. The write-up on Wikipedia seems pretty good. This article on Jacobin also seems fair.

The thing I wasn't understanding while watching the show, since I didn't have enough knowledge of Weimar-era politics, is that the German government in 1929 was controlled by socialists (social democrats, the SPD), but who saw themselves opposed to the farther left party, the KPD (the Communists, essentially). The SPD was working with more center-right parties, and the KPD thought they were sellouts. And the Berlin police — big shock — had elements of the ex-military within their ranks.

Meanwhile, all of us with hindsight know what was coming up behind those social democrats who thought they could work with reasonable people on the right. This is from the Jacobin article:

Unable to recognize the mortal threat posed by Hitler’s men, both workers’ parties seemed more preoccupied with stopping one another from potentially sabotaging the working class’s ascent to socialism, which each identified with its own leadership. The internal logics ... ultraleftism on the one hand and the SPD’s hyper-accommodating incrementalism on the other made any other outcome virtually impossible....

The Social Democrats could not imagine a socialist order beyond their gradual modifications to the existing state, and the Communists could not entertain the notion that socialism would come from anything but their own revolutionary conquest. Blutmai reinforced those convictions.

In all this, I see actions that are all too familiar: the upfront repression of banning public protest, the police's lack of deescalation on May 1 — even shooting at people on the street, and the government's overall inability to see the real threat from the right.