Theodor Fritsch to Wilhelm Marr on New Tactics for the Struggle against the Jews (1884-85)

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III.

Leipzig, July 1, 1885

In its outward appearance, antisemitism (or at least the antisemites) has become more or less bankrupt. Stoecker has been throttled, the Volkszeitung is defunct and with it Liebermann* has disappeared from the picture for the time being; he wants to emigrate; Otto Hentze** offers me his anti-Semitic publishing house; Schmeitzner busies himself with the lighting business after failing to enlighten his century spiritually; Pinkert too looks like falling apart; he is going to print the ‘Reform’ of 1st July with Luckhardt, Berlin; Glagau’s*** ‘Culturkämpfer’ appears only sporadically – Henrici is silent; Förster+ plays only a guest role here; old Marr speaks about dying – one of these days I am going to find myself the sole antisemite – and the last is always the one who gets caught.

[ . . . ]


* Max Leibermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911), co-founder in 1881 of the Deutscher Volksverein, a conservative antisemite who was one of the main leaders of German antisemitism during its first period, editor of Die Wahrheit, author of Beiträge zur Geschichte der antisemitischen Bewegung vom Jahre 1880-1885, Berlin 1885. Later a member of the Reichstag (1890) as a representative of the Deutschland Partei and Deutschsoziale Reformpartei.
** O. Hentze, publisher of the Deutsche Wacht from 1879, and other anti-Semitic publications.
*** Otto Glagau (1838-1892), like Marr and Wagner an anti-Semite who used to be earlier a left radical. For eight years, from 1880, he was the publisher of the anti-Semitic Culturkämpfer; he reacted in several articles and books to the “Börsenschwindel” immediately after the crisis of 1873, for which he blamed the Jews.
+ Ernst Henrici, editor of the Deutsche Volkszeitung, 1881; organised as early as 1880 the Soziale Reichspartei, one of the most extreme antisemites in the “Berlin Movement” in the early eighties. Bernhard Förster (1843-1889), co-founder of the Deutscher Volksverein, 1881, Nietzche’s brother-in-law, one of the main organisers of the “antisemitic Petition” of 1880; wrote Richard Wagner in seiner nationalen Bedeutung, 1882, Das Verhältniss des modernen Judenthums zur deutschen Kunst, 1889.