Ernst Toller and German Society: Intellectuals as Leaders and Critics, 1914–1939 by Robert Ellis (review)

A widely known dramatist, orator, and writer during his life, Ernst Toller was largely forgotten in post-war Germany but has experienced a small renaissance of scholarly interest since the 1980s. While earlier accounts of Toller’s work emphasize his blending of literature and politics (Neuhaus et al., Ernst Toller und die Weimarer Republik, Würzburg 1999) or provide literary analysis of his dramas (Reimers, Das Bewältigen des Wirklichen, Würzburg 2000), Robert Ellis treats Toller as a social critic and intellectual. Conceived as a contribution to the history of ideas, his book attends to Toller’s understudied post-1924 belletristic prose, in addition to his dramatic work, in order to present Toller as a left-wing German-Jewish intellectual. Like much Toller scholarship, the book has a strong biographical tendency and is structured according to the major phases of Toller’s life. It provides a sympathetic character portrait in which Toller is stylized as a tragic hero unable to rectify the injustices he passionately criticized. Treating Toller as a representative figure and “symbol of his generation” (7–8), the author fits his hero into the well-established narratives of German history from the First World War to the rise of National Socialism. The story told is informed and compelling and will appeal to a general audience, but scholars of interwar Germany may find its periodization and pathos somewhat conventional.

The clearest indication that the book is indeed intended for a popular (and specifically American) audience is its thesis that Toller is distinguished from other left-wing Weimar intellectuals because he was a leader. That the concept of leadership plays such a prominent role in the book should come as little surprise given the author’s position as “executive director at the Institute for Leadership Studies and History, a consulting firm that uses history as a tool for executive and management development” (239). While it is undoubtedly the case that Toller’s political activism was exemplary among Weimar intellectuals—he was a gifted public speaker, played an active role in the Bavarian Revolution of 1918–19, and was a persistent critic of National Socialism—the author regrettably provides little theoretical justification of his use of the term “leader,” which is burdened in the German context by the historical baggage that attends to the German notion of “Führer.” If it were simply a matter of demonstrating that Toller avoided the common pitfalls of the detached intellectual unable to reach a larger audience, reference to his activism and pragmatism would suffice; the stylization of Toller as a political leader, military leader, and even an exiled poet-leader (189), however, betrays the author’s desire to place Toller not only in the context of interwar Germany but moreover in the boardrooms of aspiring executives.

Following an introductory chapter, Chapter Two clarifies the status of the “Intellectual as Critic.” Invoking Alfred Weber’s concept of freischwebende Intelligenz, the author undertakes to salvage a positive sense of the term against the common charges of elitism and entrapment in ideology. Here Toller joins the company of Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Kästner, and Kurt Tucholsky, who were all strong critics of post-1918 German society. While solidly grounded in the scholarship, the chapter occasionally resorts to truisms about the proper attitude of an intellectual: “Allowing free rein to their thoughts, they must always be prepared to question assumptions—even their own” (16). The chapter concludes on a note of lament for leftwing intellectuals in Germany, whose cause in a radically conservative society was doomed yet whose commitment to republican and humanistic ideals was nonetheless heroic.

The subsequent chapters chart the major way stations of Toller’s biography. Chapter Three begins with Toller’s youth and focuses on his conflicted relationship to his Jewish heritage and his struggle with anti-Semitism. The author contextualizes Toller’s experience in relation to the desire for assimilation...