Vossische Zeitung
- Schulz Feme Trial Adjourned
- Storm in the Poets' Academy
- White and Black
This Vossische Zeitung page of 27 October 1926 carried three very different pieces. Its court report said the second Landsberg Feme trial, in the Gaedicke case, had been adjourned indefinitely on its first day after the defendant, retired First Lieutenant Schulz, declared that nothing had been secret and that everything had happened lawfully and with the government's knowledge; the court cited a missing prosecution witness. A column signed 'Ma.' described a stormy first meeting of the Prussian Academy of Arts' new Section for Poetry, where the currents Arno Holz had voiced in a recent article resurfaced. Colin Ross opened an essay on the preconceptions newly arrived whites bring to Africa, contrasting the missionary view of the African as an equal 'brother in Christ' with the view that Black people are an inferior race destined to serve, a view that treats the existing division of labour as natural.
Translation
Schulz Feme Trial Adjourned
The second Landsberg Feme trial (the Gaedicke case) has taken a surprising turn: on the very first day of hearings in these proceedings, the court already saw fit to adjourn indefinitely. The defendant, First Lieutenant (ret.) Schulz, had “spilled everything,” professing that there was nothing to keep secret and nothing to reveal, that everything had taken place lawfully, with the knowledge of the government. The court took the absence of a witness summoned by the prosecution as the occasion to adjourn the proceedings altogether.
Storm in the Poets' Academy
One had good reason to wonder whether the first session of the new Section for Poetry in the Prussian Academy of Arts would pass off without incident. Good psychologists were of the opinion that the aspirations whose mouthpiece Arno Holz had made himself two weeks ago in a much-noted article would surface again at the constituent assembly. The good psychologists have been proved right: at this meeting, men of fantasy carried on in fantastic fashion.
White and Black
Almost all whites who come fresh to Africa already bring with them a definite, preconceived opinion about the Black man and his relationship to the white man. If they come as missionaries or in the “spirit of the mission,” they see in the native the “brother in Christ,” in any case a fellow human being who is fundamentally of the same kind and of equal worth, who merely needs to be educated and civilized in order to make of him a person who differs from the European only in the colour of his skin. The others, however, see in the Negro the member of an absolutely inferior race, destined by God and nature for all eternity to serve the white man, if not as a slave, then at least as a servant. And they accept the present order of things in Africa, which shifts all heavy and all unpleasant and dirty work onto the Blacks and reserves all pleasant and well-paid work for the white man, as the natural order of the world, without giving any thought to the possibility that a change could ever come about.
Context
The Black Reichswehr and Schulz's place in it
The Vossische Zeitung reports only Schulz's line in court: nothing had been secret, and everything had been lawful and known to the government. The documented background shows why that claim mattered. General Hans von Seeckt created the Black Reichswehr as nominally civilian 'labour battalions' (Arbeitskommandos) attached to regular Reichswehr units, as a way around the manpower ceiling of the Versailles Treaty. The Reichswehr Ministry took Paul Schulz back on a private contract as part of this force and commissioned him to set up a work detachment at Küstrin. Schulz also oversaw the organisation's internal 'Feme' justice, which generally meant quick, secret killings of suspected traitors. If the labour detachments were an arm of the army in all but name, then Schulz's defence pushed responsibility for what happened inside them back toward the ministry and the army command.
Gessler's denials, Seeckt's admission and the fall of the Marx cabinet
Schulz's assertion ran directly against the official position. The Reichswehr and Defence Minister Otto Gessler publicly denied that the Black Reichswehr existed, whereas Seeckt wrote a letter to the court admitting that such a group existed and defending the need for it. The Feme trials therefore set the minister's denials and the general's admission side by side, and Schulz's claim of government knowledge in October 1926 pressed on exactly that gap. The revelations about the Black Reichswehr went on to bring down Wilhelm Marx's government at the end of 1926, only weeks after this adjournment was reported.
What became of 'Feme-Schulz'
The adjournment did not end Schulz's legal troubles. He was sentenced to death on 26 March 1927 for inciting the murder of Black Reichswehr Sergeant Walter Wilms, a different case from the Gaedicke case named in this report. President Paul von Hindenburg commuted all three death sentences in the Wilms case, including Schulz's, to life imprisonment in February 1928, and a political amnesty in October 1930 set Schulz free. Large parts of the German right regarded him as a martyr.
Who Arno Holz was
The column names Arno Holz as the mouthpiece of the currents that disturbed the new poetry section's first session. Holz, born in 1863, was a German naturalist poet and dramatist who died in October 1929, three years after this meeting. He was best known for the poetry collection Phantasus (1898) and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. Holz argued that poems should be governed by an 'inner rhythm' and freed from regular rhyme and metre, a combative stance toward literary convention. The columnist's closing line about 'men of fantasy' carrying on 'fantastically' may well be a play on the title of Holz's best-known work.
Colin Ross, a widely read travel writer
The author of 'Weiß und Schwarz' was a household name in the interwar years. Colin Ross was an Austrian travel writer and film-maker who published 35 books, six films and around 1,200 articles between 1910 and 1945. One of his best-known films, Around the World With a Movie Camera, dates from 1926, the year of this essay. He was also an opponent of democracy, setting out his ideas in his 1931 book The Will of the World; he gave talks at Nazi events and joined the Nazi Party in 1941. In this excerpt Ross lays out two attitudes found among white newcomers to Africa, the missionary and the racial-hierarchical, without yet stating his own view.
The colour bar in South African labour law
The order Ross describes, in which heavy and dirty work falls to Black workers and pleasant, well-paid work is reserved for whites, had a legal form in South Africa. The Mines and Works Act was first passed in 1911 and amended in 1912 and again in 1926, and it legally established South Africa's employment 'colour bar'. The term colour bar usually covers a set of labour practices, union practices, regulations and laws developed over time to prevent Black workers from competing for certain jobs monopolised by whites. The Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926 placed Coloured workers alongside whites in a privileged position and required the minister to consult the mine owners and the white unions on certificate regulations. Ross's excerpt speaks of Africa in general and does not mention this legislation, but it appeared in the same year as that amendment.
Original
Femeprozeß Schulz vertagt
Der zweite Landsberger Feme-Prozeß (Fall Gaedicke) hat eine überraschende Wendung genommen: Am ersten Verhandlungstage dieses Verfahrens bereits hielt das Gericht es für zweckmäßig, auf unbestimmte Zeit zu vertagen. Der Angeklagte, Oberleutnant a. D. Schulz, hatte " ausgepackt ", unter dem Vorgeben, es sei nichts geheimzuhalten und nichts zu enthüllen, alles sei gesetzlich verlaufen, mit Wissen der Regierung. Das Gericht nahm die Abwesenheit eines von der Staatsanwaltschaft geladenen Zeugen zum Anlaß, überhaupt zu vertagen.
Sturm in der Dichterafademie
Man durfte gespannt darauf sein, ob die erste Sitzung der neuen Sektion für Dichtung in der Preußischen Akademie der Künste ohne Zwischenfall verlaufen würde. Gute Psychologen waren der Meinung, daß jene Bestrebungen, zu deren Sprachrohr sich Arno Holz vor zwei Wochen in einem vielbeachteten Artikel gemacht hatte, erneut bei der konstituierenden Versammlung in die Erscheinung treten würden. Die guten Psychologen haben recht behalten: es ist auf dieser Tagung von Phantasiemenschen phantastisch hergegangen.
Weiß und Schwarz
Fast alle Weißen, die frisch nach Afrika kommen, bringen bereits eine bestimmte, vorgefaßte Meinung über den Schwarzen und sein Verhältnis zum Weißen mit. Kommen sie als Missionare oder im " Geiste der Mission ", so sehen sie im Eingeborenen den " Bruder in Christo ", jedenfalls einen im Grunde gleichartigen und gleichwertigen Mitmenschen, den es lediglich zu erziehen und zu zivilisieren gilt, um aus ihm einen Menschen zu machen, der sich vom Europäer lediglich durch seine Hautfarbe unterscheidet. Die anderen aber sehen im Neger den Angehörigen einer unbedingt inferioren Rasse, die von Gott und der Natur in alle Ewigkeit dazu bestimmt ist, dem weißen Manne wenn nicht als Sklave, so doch als Knecht zu dienen, Und sie nehmen die gegenwärtige Ordnung der Dinge in Afrika, welche alle schwere und alle unangenehme und schmutzige Arbeit auf die Schwarzen abwälzt und alle angenehme und gut bezahlte dem Weißen vorbehält, als die natürliche Weltordnung, ohne sich Gedanken darüber zu machen, daß je eine Aenderung eintreten könnte.