MAURICE HANKEY, secretary of the War Council in London, advised Prime Minister Asquith in June 1915 that Britain's blockade of Germany would work in time “when the psychological moment arrives and the cumulative effects reach their maximum.” Anticipating problems in supply and distribution of foodstuffs, the German government had implemented controls in the first months of the war and sought alternatives to customary staples. In January 1915 potatoes replaced grain as the source of flour in Kriegsbrot (war bread), an Ersatz, or substitute, for the genuine article. Dearth and greed combined to drive speculation. The cost of a liter of milk in the capital went up by 175 percent in 1915, from 12 to 33 pfennige. During the Berlin “butter riots” in mid-October angry crowds smashed shop windows and fought with police over shortages and exorbitant prices. Vorwärts reported unrest in Münster and Aachen as well. With the failed potato crop of 1916 conditions worsened. Germany's increasing reliance on imports of foods such as herring, pork, and cheese prompted the British and French to buy up critical stores from neutral Sweden and Holland. Although the troops and munitions workers were adequately fed, the civilian populace was in dire need. The press was rife with accounts of food-profiteering, which the Far Right in particular attributed to parasitic Jewish middlemen. In an attempt to silence criticism from the Left, the military governors tightened state-of-siege restrictions, banning Social Democratic meetings and harassing members of the opposition with searches of domiciles and seizure of papers.

In April 1916 Kurt Eisner witnessed proof of Hankey's prophesied psychological moment when an emaciated cart-horse collapsed on a Munich street. Despite the best efforts of the driver, a policeman, and well-meaning bystanders, the beast could not be coaxed back up. “It lay there as though dead, only the labored, anxious breathing and sad black eyes betrayed that it still clung to life.” A crew of six fireman arrived, assembled a steel tripod, and by means of block and tackle succeeded in lifting the limp horse and lowering it onto a truck. A wag in the crowd shouted that fresh horsemeat would be on sale the next day.

EARLY IN 1905 THE SOCIALIST PARTIES of Europe fixated on events in Russia. The strike in St. Petersburg in mid-January, led by the prison priest Georgi Gapon, unexpectedly unified forces for reform from the salon to the stable. As Vorwärts reported on the fateful Sunday of 22 January, 96,000 workers at 174 concerns in and around the capital had struck in support of the workers’ rights movement that had its impetus in the dismissal of 4 workers from the Putilov Iron Works for belonging to a workers’ association founded by Gapon the previous year. On the fifteenth the dismissed workers’ comrades unsuccessfully demanded their reinstatement. The next day Gapon led a delegation of 84 workers presenting much broader demands, including an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, double pay for overtime, improved sanitation, and election of a workers’ council to help set wages and determine grounds for dismissal. On 17 and 18 January workers struck to impress the urgency of their grievances.

What had begun as an economic issue, Eisner noted with evident satisfaction, had escalated to a political action. Vorwärts reported that workers planned a demonstration march to the Winter Palace, where they would present their grievances in the form of a petition to the tsar. Bourgeois intellectuals had met Saturday evening to urge Nicholas to accept the document. Ominously, he called for three regiments of cavalry and a division of infantry to reinforce the garrison of 50,000 troops and four regiments of artillery. Ignorant yet of what was already unfolding on Bloody Sunday, the Vorwärts public read the correspondent's speculation that bloodshed seemed inevitable.

The next issue appeared on Tuesday, 24 January, with horrifying details of the massacre in St. Petersburg. History records that the peaceful demonstration “was dispersed by troops with a cynical brutality unusual even for Russia.” Commanded by Prince Boris Vasilchikov, the military formed a cordon on the square before the Winter Palace. The correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt wired that shortly before noon a procession of at least 15,000 workers crossed the square, singing a hymn and bearing crosses and portraits of the tsar. At their head was Gapon, who advanced to hand the petition to an officer. Rebuffed, Gapon returned to the ranks of the workers, who moved forward toward the cordon. They were met with a withering fusillade that felled 600 in an instant.

IN 1894 LUDWIG QUIDDE, editor of the Imperial Reichstagsakten (Reichstag Record) in Munich and former head of the Royal Prussian Historical Institute in Rome, published in Die Gesellschaft an article titled “Caligula: A Study of Roman Dictatorial Megalomania.” It was reprinted the same year by Wilhelm Friedrich of Leipzig, Eisner's publisher, as a twenty-page pamphlet. Although the article purported to portray the notorious Roman despot in his madness, the reader readily recognized it as a deftly veiled tract against the “personal regime” of Wilhelm II. Convicted of Majestätsbeleidigung, or lèse majesté, Quidde lost his position as editor and was jailed for three months in 1896. Typically, however, the law was brought to bear on less prominent critics of princes. In the 1 February 1896 issue of Die Kritik, a review of news items of the past week compiled by Mephisto deplored that a twenty-year-old worker had been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for shouting “Hurrah for anarchy!” while Wilhelm made an inspection tour of a warship under construction at the Hamburg shipyard of Blohm and Voß.

The attorney Max Falkenfeld of Fürstenwalde wrote in the 13 September issue that the concept of lèse majesté was a product of the late Roman Empire, which had also endowed the word “Byzantine” with its modern, negative connotation. He looked back to when the great Friedrich II ordered that handbills against him posted at riders’ eye level be lowered that the populace might better read them. Friedrich's Berlin was a capital of the Enlightenment; in the present, Falkenfeld lamented, a “mystical twilight rules the minds.” Every German citizen except the sovereign, he observed, could choose whether or not to seek legal redress for defamation. The sovereign alone had no say in the matter; the law and the state prosecutor relieved him of that right. Even more ironically, in cases of lèse majesté the accused was forbidden from arguing the merit his assertion before a judge, on the premise that ‘every deprecating assault on the inviolability of the sovereign is necessarily illegal.’ Since the well-educated critic—by far the most dangerous—usually masked his criticism well enough to avoid prosecution, whereas the poor fool venting his spleen went to jail, Falkenfeld concluded that justice would be best served by striking lèse majesté from the code.

THE LEFT LIBERAL JOURNALIST Hellmut von Gerlach remarked that Eisner, in his four-year tenure as political editor of the General- Anzeiger, won for the publication “a significance extending far beyond the range of a provincial paper.” Hesse had been annexed by Prussia after siding with Austria in Bismarck's war for Schleswig-Holstein; in its intellectual capital Eisner gloried in deprecating the Prussian arrogance and ambition personified by the German emperor. In lead articles for the paper, Berlin weeklies, and the liberal daily Vossische Zeitung ([Christian Friedrich] Voß Newspaper) he achieved his earmark style “somewhere between Heinrich Heine and Kurt Tucholsky.” In light of Eisner's coruscating wit and irony historian Allan Mitchell surmised: “Had he not been the editor of a provinical newspaper, he might well have earned his living by writing for one of Berlin's political cabarets.” Eisner's years in Marburg were in many respects the happiest of his life, a period of both respite and preparation, alive with the promise of family, friendship, intellectual growth, and meaningful work. A regular income freed him from the anxiety of the past, Lisbeth gave birth to three of their children there, and Eisner was drawn into the circle of intellectuals around philosophy professor Hermann Cohen, master of the neo-Kantian Marburg School whose thinking shaped a generation of “reform” socialists. The association with Cohen, his colleagues, and students channeled Eisner's already strong philosophical and political inclinations; “he began to define his socialism as a Kantian ethical socialism.” And through his political involvement with Bader he learned the practical application of his ideas.

Hermann Cohen had succeeded his patron Friedrich Albert Lange, enunciator of ethical socialism, as philosophy chair at Marburg in 1876. Once Eisner was settled, he determined to take advantage of his proximity to the great Jewish scholar who, continuing Lange's work, was in the process of explicating systematically that socialism has both its moral justification and philosophical fundament in Kantian ethics rather than in Hegel's ideal metaphysics or Marx's historical materialism. Cohen believed that philosophy, not science, is the vehicle for studying ethics, and that man—specifically, the individual and his associations—is the focus of the discipline. The principles that govern the conduct of individuals in their dealings with others are ethics, and moral values determine politics and economics rather than vice versa.

BACK IN NUREMBERG after his brief holiday respite in Dachau, Eisner ran the usual year-end retrospectives in the Tagespost. Pride of place was accorded Georges Weill's two-part article on Germany's woeful foreign policy in 1908, citing in particular the kaiser's Daily Telegraph interview and the “one defeat after another” that national prestige suffered from Bülow's inept meddling in Morocco. Tuesday, 5 January, Eisner drafted a proposal to Vorwärts Press in Berlin. His resolve “to withdraw from all editorial endeavors” and to devote himself to literary pursuits was impracticable at present, but he would devote “every spare moment” to the multivolume overview of world literature he had been invited to provide. He ventured that the undertaking would attract considerable interest, as no “cultural-social history of literature” existed. In addition, he was working on a history of the nobility and planned a continuation of Das Ende des Reichs, a project he had discussed with Comrade Bernhard Bruns. The latter he could deliver by 1 July 1912. Moreover, he had made considerable progress on a study of Fichte, a project that had occupied him for some years already, and he would gladly forward copy of the lecture series on Marx he was to present in the spring.

That night Eisner wrote to Belli from his room at the Schneider Hotel that he intended to meet with his wife the next afternoon to finalize some arrangement. Lisbeth wanted to leave Nuremberg, and he thought that she would do well to relocate to a small town such as Jena. “I will renounce everything, even the children. I know now that they love me but will go with their mother.” Once his family vacated the field, he saw no reason that Belli should not be with him in Nuremberg. “Then in a few months I shall present the people with the choice of losing me or having me and you.” He announced that he would arrive in Munich late Friday afternoon and asked her to take the train from Dachau to meet him at the main station. They could then ride back to Dachau together, “where we might hope to find a nest for us two.” On the twenty-sixth he would begin a tour of the electoral district in Dessau, but would visit her the weekend prior to departure.

IN NOVEMBER 1918 in the Catholic stronghold of Munich a transplanted Jewish Berliner, just released from prison, led a nonviolent revolution that deposed the ancient Wittelsbach dynasty and established the Bavarian Republic, effectively ending both the Second German Empire and the First World War. The local head of the breakaway Independent Socialists, Kurt Eisner, had been jailed for treason in February after organizing a munitions workers’ strike to force an armistice. Before his incarceration he served as arts critic for the Münchener Post, organ of the Social Democratic Party, having been demoted from political editor for opposing the war. For a hundred days as Germany spiraled down into civil war and the victorious Entente powers deliberated their vengeance, Eisner fought as head of state to preserve calm in the South while implementing a peaceful transition to democracy and reforging international relations. On 21 February 1919, on the way to submit his government's resignation to the newly elected constitutional assembly, he was shot by a protofascist aristocrat. The senseless murder shattered a tenuous equilibrium, plunging Bavaria into the political chaos from which Adolf Hitler would emerge to herald a new epoch—one that culminated in 1945 with the citizenry of Dachau, their faces clouded by complicit ignorance and worse, burying the concentration camp dead on orders from its American liberators.

For many mired in the tradition of Catholic, monarchist Bavarian politics, including the resident Majority Social Democratic leadership, it was unthinkable that a diminutive Prussian intellectual of mosaisch heritage could mount an uprising that toppled one of Europe's most fixed ruling houses literally in an afternoon. But during the war an influx of North German labor had been channeled to Munich to drive the armaments industry, significantly radicalizing the urban proletariat. At the height of the British blockade the Wittelsbachs stood accused of war-profiteering by selling goods from the royal Leutstetten dairy at inflated prices. The western front was breached, the German Army in retreat, and still the very parties that championed the kaiser's preserve called for a levée en masse for national defense. People were war-weary, hungry, disillusioned, malcontent.

DURING THE NIGHT OF 7/8 November 1918 the Bavarian ancien régime desperately sought to perpetuate itself. Interior Minister Brettreich summoned Erhard Auer for consultation as to how the revolutionary uprising might be quelled. Meeting with Brettreich past midnight, Auer and the trade-union secretary Gustav Schiefer assured him that the workers of Munich would establish order. Although Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council forces had seized the telephone exchange, General von Hellingrath was able to reach the garrison commander at Landsberg and request reinforcements. Bavarian infantry and Prussian reserve units were dispatched by train to Pasing on Munich's outskirts. At dawn Lieutenant Königsberger, whom Herzog dubbed “the savior from Schleißheim,” had his men take up positions in defense of the Landtag, now Eisner's command center. Accompanied by three of his staff officers, Hellingrath personally met his presumed loyalist reinforcements at Pasing, but the reserves were soon persuaded to join the Revolution by a carload of men dispatched by Eisner once he learned of Hellingrath's plan.

After a night of celebration with his friend Anthony van Hoboken, Oskar Maria Graf tottered through Schwabing's empty streets, bawling his approval of the sea change. By midmorning a notice, printed black on a red background, was placarded on walls and advertisement columns across Bavaria: “In order to rebuild after years of destruction, the people have seized the power of the civil and military authorities and taken control of the government. The Bavarian Republic is hereby proclaimed. The supreme authority is the popularly elected Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Council (Arbeiter-, Soldaten- und Bauernrat, or ASB), provisionally empowered until a definitive representative body is constituted. It has legislative power. The entire garrison has placed itself at the Republican Government's disposal. Military and police headquarters are under our command. The Wittelsbach dynasty is deposed. Long live the Republic!”

The morning edition of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten led with the revolutionary proclamation addressed to the citizenry by Kurt Eisner as Council chair. “The terrible fate visited upon the German people has led to an elemental movement of Munich's workers and soldiers. A provisional Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Council was formed in the Landtag the night of 8 November.

THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER 1900 saw Eisner transported from the sleepy seaside village back to Berlin and then on to Mainz for the annual party congress and the renewal of debate, as Liebknecht had brokered a year earlier, on participation in Landtag elections. The second pressing topic was Germany's colonial policy. “After the nerve-racking discussions in Hanover,” Eisner readied readers of Vorwärts on 16 September, “the congress in Mainz will be of no less significance.” By its end the reformists would hold sway on one debate and suffer short-term defeat on the other, and the cracks in Social Democracy's ideological pedestal would widen. Providing a brief history and overview of the coming electoral debate, Eisner recounted that the party's traditional tactic against Prussian three-class suffrage had been the boycott. As party ranks swelled, though, some members determined that the Conservatives could be trumped in the House of Deputies despite the stacked deck if Social Democracy backed Left Liberal candidates or even put forward candidates of its own.

Bebel supported the boycott, as had Liebknecht. The party radicals generally had no use for either the Reichstag or the Landtag, both of which they regarded as trappings of the ruling-class state and as such fundamentally incompatible with the interests of the worker: collaboration and eventually power sharing would inevitably vitiate the party's raison d’être. The radicals’ weapon of choice for advancing the revolutionary cause was the general, or political, strike. Historian Peter Gay writes: “To them proletarian mass-action was an end in itself and was to serve as a substitute for parliamentarism.” The general strike to achieve political concessions rather than economic benefits or improved working conditions was opposed particularly by the trade unionists as counterproductive, playing havoc with the lives of the rank and file. The theorists who advocated the strike as a political tool were too removed, they charged, from the workers’ real needs. The trade unionists were skilled labor, and it was they who drove reformism. Their representatives considered participation in Landtag elections an effective means of expanding the party's influence and broadening its base of support. Once again Eisner took it upon himself to plaster the cracks: “Today many of our best fighters still consider this beginning extremely questionable…. If, though, the congress decides for general electoral participation, the minority is prepared to enter the fray as well….

WEDNESDAY MORNING, 18 April 1917, Friedrich Ebert opened a meeting of the Majority expanded advisory council with the announcement that the first item of business would be the split formalized at Gotha, superseding consideration of food shortages, electoral reform, and peace initiatives. In the ensuing discussion Paul Reißhaus of Erfurt reported that most of his Thuringian comrades feared that their organization was rapidly evolving into a national-social party. Other speakers downplayed the threat posed by the Independents. Hermann Beims ventured that in Magdeburg the opposition's numbers were insignificant, perhaps 150 adherents. Erhard Auer too believed the Independents’ strength overrated. “Munich was represented at Gotha as well, by Eisner. He was not elected but rather appointed a delegate at a meeting of 22 people—11 masters and 11 misses, almost all of them Jewish elements.” The insult induced ripples of laughter. In 1982 historian Freya Eisner remarked that many Munich Jews blamed her grandfather's revolution for a surge of anti-Semitism unknown in Bavaria to his contemporaries. Auer's demeaning characterization of Kurt Eisner's cadre suggests, however, that Jew-baiting was already manifest among his professed comrades in the South.

Upon his return from the founding congress of the USPD Eisner felt reinvigorated, refocused as he resumed his critiques for the Münchener Post. In a review of Rudolf Franz's book on contemporary drama he reaffirmed the necessity of social and political engagement of both artist and critic, applauding Franz's attempt to apply Marxist historical materialism to interpretation of theater. Reprising the premise of his 1896 essay “Party Art,” Eisner stated: “In the age of the proletarian class struggle the great artist must himself be a socialist. The more profoundly and ardently his entire personality is shaped by this worldview, the clearer and bolder he examines men and matters from this perspective, the greater his artistic stature will become through socialist virtue and insight.” The next week a dance performance by Lisa Kresse, Primavera and Beatrice Mariagraete, and Lala Herdmenger evoked the observation that “even today there is still something that one may call feeling for life.” And on Monday, 30 April, Eisner hailed as a revelation the Chamber Players’ premiere of Georg Kaiser's 1912 expressionist masterpiece on the spiritual poverty of material greed, Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight).

IN THE FINAL WEEKS OF HER PREGNANCY Else Belli moved into a neat, two-storey house acquired by her father in a quiet southwestern suburb of Munich. The residence at Lindenallee 8 was situated at the edge of the vast Forest Cemetery in Großhadern, twenty minutes by tram from the city's hub. As much as Eisner would have liked to be with her, he was beset by press deadlines, speaking engagements, professional affronts, political squabbles, and personal anxieties in the North. On 1 October 1909 he wrote from Nuremberg, concerned for his estranged wife's state of mind. “If I had the money, I would send Lisbeth to Pastor Blumhardt in Bad Boll for a few months. In such surroundings her devastated soul could recover perhaps, and she might finally come to grips with the inevitable.” He worried too that the strike at the Ferdinand Wolff confections factory, for which the local party was responsible, might turn ugly. His level of involvement was such that he could “think of little else,” but other woes soon arose. In midmonth the Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer, founder of the secular, egalitarian Escuela Moderna, was executed by firing squad at Barcelona's Montjuich Fortress in the aftermath of the “Tragic Week” riots. Protests erupted across Europe. The Fränkische Tagespost announced on Saturday, the sixteenth, three days after Ferrer's martyrdom, that Eisner and Georges Weill would address the German Center Party's shameful endorsement of “this eruption of medieval benightedness and barbarism” at separate demonstrations the following day.

Sunday morning Eisner spoke to a packed house of solemn mourners at the Saxon Manor Inn on Neutorstraße. Afterward he had walked out to the Forest Café and emptied his purse for a cup of tea. He planned to spend the evening “utterly alone and destitute” at his office poring over Ibsen's just-published literary remains. Worse than poverty and solitude was the current rumor that his personal circumstances were causing him to neglect his work. “When Haller insinuated the like yesterday,” he wrote to Belli, “I declared that for one year I have enjoyed the happiest and most productive period of my life. When I was completely shattered two years ago and on the brink of suicide, my editorship was extolled….

MARTHA EISNER's LONG SUFFERING came to end the morning of Friday, 22 March 1907. Her body was interred three days later at Weißensee's Jewish cemetery. The same week Eisner wrote to Toni Hendrich's young son, Gerhard, of insomnia, enervation, and “dreams like rusty sawing.” Apprised of the family's loss, Joseph Bloch apologized on 8 April for having dunned Eisner all the while for the article on Napoleon when he scarcely had time to write the leads for the Fränkische Tagespost. Readers had been informed in late February of the change of editors and were introduced to Eisner's range of capability by a detailed review of Das Ende des Reichs that appeared on the front page of 9 March. Its author judged the book one of those watershed reappraisals that “bluntly and courageously counter the mindless or unconscionable fairy tales of official historical dogmatism.”

Eisner's lead of 28 March, “The Danger of the Press,” was a manifesto in the same vein, proclaiming the crystalline purpose and financial independence of the party press in contrast to the often veiled agenda and venality of its bourgeois rivals. Even the official organs of the most reactionary parties and interests, he wrote, were innocuous compared with papers that feigned impartiality while taking the line of sponsors whose fortunes depended on the maintenance of status quo. Because these papers relied on revenue from subscriptions and advertisements, their reportage invariably conformed to the opinions of a vested clientele, the beneficiaries of the ruling state. “The frightful political immaturity and woeful political incompetence that still prevail in Germany are in no small part the effect of the bourgeois-capitalist semiofficial press.” The Social Democratic press, on the other hand, was solely the enterprise of the party, and its profits were channeled back into the workers’ movement that begot it. “Free and independent, it serves only the socialist worldview, the liberation of the oppressed, truth, and education.” Thus through his choice of newspaper the citizen determined not only his own future, but that of all mankind. With this appeal to Nuremberg's populace Eisner launched his campaign to make North Bavaria the heartland of democratic socialism.

ERNST TOLLER ELUDED ARREST until Monday, 4 February 1918, when the strike ended after repeated appeals from the Majority Socialist leadership. At noon he was taken from his room at gunpoint and held until trial at a military prison on Leonrodstraße. Upon reporting back to his garrison, Felix Fechenbach was interrogated at length by officers who had been apprised of his involvement with the strike. He was transferred to Passau on the Austrian border, where he was kept under close surveillance. Eisner was already resigned to a lengthy stay behind bars. On Tuesday he wrote to Else from Neudeck with detailed directives. His daughter Ilse was to bring him an array of a dozen prominent German, French, and Swiss newspapers every other day, taking care that no issue was skipped. In addition he asked for a number of books from his desk, including Marx and Engels's political works and correspondence, English and French dictionaries, and the manuscript of the play he had begun while incarcerated at Plötzensee in Berlin. Stationery, pens and ink, marking pencils, a soft shirt, vest, slippers, and teaspoon rounded out the list. He urged that she procure a ticket to the Court Theater's upcoming production of Beethoven's Fidelio, “the work for our days now.” The last directive signaled undiminished optimism. It must have been of no small consolation that Wilhelm Herzog had authorized payment of 250 marks a few days earlier for Eisner's work on Weltweg des Geistes, income that continued for the duration of his incarceration.

In response to Eisner's urgent request Hugo Haase sent word on Wednesday from Berlin that he would join Dr. Bernheim as counsel. Representation was being arranged for Eisner's codefendants as well. A week later the court rejected motions for release on bail. In his cell Eisner immersed himself in writing. Else's appeal to send him the requested items was granted on the twelfth. The next day she wrote that she would bring additional archival materials on her next visit and confessed that she was concerned about his wretched appearance. For solace she intended to read in the New Testament of “the struggle for truth by one who refuses to keep it to himself but rather speaks out against the world's lies….

EISNER STARTED WORK AT THE HEROLD in January 1890. His duties were to gather news, file reports for dissemination to newspapers throughout Europe, and write lead stories. He covered sessions of the Reichstag, the powerless popular national assembly commonly characterized as a debating club, and the equally farcical Prussian Landtag. The issue of the day was Kaiser Wilhelm's new course, the defining component of which was Weltpolitik, described by Walther Rathenau as a “dilettante foreign policy.” Bismarck had never seen the need for Germany to look overseas for colonies when Poland lay so near, but Wilhelm, obsessed with national prestige and supported by wealthy interest groups such as the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), the Navy League (Flottenverein), and the Colonial League (Kolonialverein), was determined to secure Germany's place in the sun. Years earlier in 1881 Bismarck had unwittingly drafted his own pink slip when he remarked that he had no interest in colonial expansion. Although he softened his stance in the mid-1880s to accommodate public opinion, his commitment was never more than halfhearted. Consequently, Wilhelm dismissed the septuagenarian icon, demanding, receiving, and accepting Bismarck's resignation between 17 and 20 March 1890.

Eisner was assigned to cover the chancellor's departure from the capital on the twenty-ninth, one of a select group of journalists to ride with the old man as far as the Spandau station on his return to Friedrichsruh. The Herold's new retainer recalled the crowd that serenaded Bismarck at Berlin's main station, his banter with reporters who stood on the desolate platform at Spandau, the stern face of “the great misanthrope,” and the indifference of workers boarding the train to Berlin. Eisner was surprised to see two days later how his account had been sentimentalized in a major foreign paper: “Gone was the rigidity of injured pride, and the melancholy exile's two great tears streamed like silvery pearls.”

Eisner and Lisbeth Hendrich became engaged in mid-autumn 1890. Much of his leisure time was spent in Berlin's libraries researching his articles and reading the yet obscure Friedrich Nietzsche. Struggling against the allure of Nietzsche's “anarchy of the elect,” Eisner began to cast a critique.

ASSAILED BY LEFT AND RIGHT, Eisner struggled to maintain equilibrium. The Swiss press in particular regarded developments in Bavaria as ominous. “One watches with dismay,” the progressive National-Zeitung of Basel wrote, “as the hate campaign in the disheveled, so politically imprudent German nation turns on precisely the one man who thus far has demonstrated understanding of reality.” In Bern the democratic Freie Zeitung warned “if Eisner falls, the immensely polymorphous counterrevolution is victorious.” Amid the miasma of division and intrigue the Provisional National Council convened for its second session on Friday, 13 December 1918. Since 8 November the affairs of state had been conducted by Eisner and his cabinet ministers. Now that elections for the Bavarian National Assembly, the new Landtag, were set for 12 January 1919, the Provisional National Council—expanded to include 67 representatives from various professional organizations, 50 delegates from each branch of the Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Council, 29 members of the Social Democratic deputation from the old Landtag, 4 of their Liberal Union colleagues, and 6 from the Bavarian Peasants’ League—met four times over the course of six days.

Faced with imminent dissolution once the new Landtag was seated, the caretaker lawmakers pursued cross purposes, some pressing for immediate reform while others exhorted conscientious deference to their successors. Wednesday, 18 December, Minister of Education Johannes Hoffmann began the fifth session with the announcement of one of the most significant reforms undertaken by the Eisner government. Two days earlier the cabinet had approved the secularization of public-school administration, curriculum, and instruction by proscribing dominant clerical oversight of local and regional school boards and church funding for school inspectors. The costs previously borne by the parishes would be assumed by the state. “The seventh of November and the sixteenth of December,” Hoffmann declared, “mark the end of the Church and Center State of Bavaria. It would be a shame for Bavarian Social Democracy, a shame for the liberal Bavarian middle class, and a shame for Bavarian schoolteachers if it were ever to return.” The hall resounded with acclaim. In absence of industry to socialize, society itself might be reshaped.

IN THE WAKE OF THE SAVERNE episode Eisner clarified the historical basis for the Prussian soldateska's absolute impunity. The secret cabinet order of 1820, issued by Friedrich Wilhelm III to enforce Metternich's Carlsbad Decrees against liberal student nationalism, authorized military commanders to declare a state of siege, impose martial law, and act on their own initiative to reestablish order if, in their judgment, civil authorities were slow to quell unrest. Wilhelm II reiterated the directive to his general staff in March 1899. This single dictate then was the covert constitution of Prussian Germany, preempting the “utter shambles of inchoate statutes” that ostensibly defined the rights of the citizenry. Thus it was that on German soil a “boy in a lieutenant's tunic” could terrorize a town's populace and prompt his colonel, a “fanatic born of military inbreeding,” to follow suit. The conflicted bourgeoisie was ill disposed toward lasting protest, “for in the end the liberal citizen is himself a reserve lieutenant, and his son perhaps even a cadet officer too!” It all boded ill for Europe's peace.

On through the winter of 1914 Eisner's theater reviews for the Münchener Post were a mainstay of the paper's cultural offering. Constantly astute and incisive, the pieces stand out from those of his colleagues and roundly justify Hausenstein's judgment that “they were splendid.” Both the famous and the forgotten have here their monument. Karl Rößler's popular comedy Rösselsprung (Knight's Move), which the Munich Playhouse premiered on 17 January, Eisner panned as predictably formulaic, the vacuous fluff of “beautifully dressed ladies and elegant gentlemen in a loquacious state and decorative frame,” report of which struck him as more suited to the business page than the arts section. By contrast he commended the Royal Residence Theater's resurrection of Das vierte Gebot (The Fourth Commandment) by Ludwig Anzengruber, a profound work neglected in favor of box office successes that betrayed “the total wretchedness of the German theater, its direction, and its audience.” High praise was accorded the Chamber Players’ first German presentation of The Wolves by Romain Rolland, in Wilhelm Herzog's translation, on 4 March. Moved by public debate of the Dreyfus affair, Rolland had written the play in 1898 but set it in 1793 against the backdrop of the emergent Terror.