Courtroom to Revolutionary Stage: Performance and Ideology in Weimar Political Trials

Abstract

Discussions of the role of the judicial process in the crisis of the Weimar Republic have typically focused on the ideological dispositions of judges. Judges in the Weimar Republic, according to the conventional account originally put forward by contemporary critics of the Weimar judiciary such as Emil Julius Gumbel, tended to be men of the nationalist Right, who were lukewarm or even openly hostile towards the democratic system. While judges were willing to use the legal means at their disposal to engage in harsh suppression of the Communist Party, they showed undue sympathy for right-wing terrorists and usually treated them with excessive leniency. As a result, judges are taken to have failed to defend the Weimar Republic against its enemies and, by lending implicit support to anti-democrats on the Right, to have participated in its downfall. Henning Grunwald’s study aims to establish that the conventional perspective on Weimar political trials neglects an important aspect of the role of the judicial process in the crisis of the Weimar Republic: the use, or rather abuse, of political trials on the part of the accused—Communists and National Socialists alike—to advertise their respective ideologies and to stage dramatic symbolic challenges to the legitimacy of the democratic system. In Grunwald’s view, this instrumentalization of the judicial process contributed to undermining the legitimacy of the constitutional order of the Weimar Republic, by creating the perception that no court of the hated system could ever be counted on to act as a neutral arbiter of social dispute. The political movements to which the accused in Weimar political trials belonged, Grunwald concludes, were as responsible as the conservative judiciary for undermining the stability of the Republic.