Kurt Eisner Memorial: The Shot of 1919
Why is it significant?
Look down at the pavement here on Kardinal-Faulhaber-Straße: set into the stones is the bronze outline of a man lying where he fell. Most people step right over it without noticing. That is almost the point.
Key Facts
| Place | Kurt Eisner Memorial: The Shot of 1919 |
|---|---|
| Address | Kardinal-Faulhaber-Straße, 80333 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14030, 11.57400 |
| Part of Walk | Munich 1918-1945: The Nazi Era, Its Victims and the White Rose |
| Generated | Generated |
Look down at the pavement here on Kardinal-Faulhaber-Straße: set into the stones is the bronze outline of a man lying where he fell. Most people step right over it without noticing. That is almost the point.
The man was Kurt Eisner, a journalist and theatre critic from Berlin, a socialist, a pacifist, and a Jew. On the night of the 7th to the 8th of November 1918, as the First World War collapsed, he proclaimed Bavaria a republic. The Wittelsbach family had ruled Bavaria for seven hundred and thirty-eight years, and their rule ended in a single night, almost without a shot. Eisner became the first prime minister of the new Free State of Bavaria.
His party was crushed in the elections of January 1919. On the morning of the 21st of February he walked along this street towards the parliament, his resignation speech in his pocket. A young aristocratic officer, Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, stepped up behind him and shot him in the head and back. Eisner died on the spot.
The story goes that Arco wanted to prove himself to the Thule Society, a secretive far-right circle in Munich, which had rejected him because his mother was Jewish. His death sentence was commuted, and he served his time in Landsberg prison... where, it is said, he had to give up his cell to a new prisoner named Adolf Hitler.
The murder threw Bavaria into chaos: a short-lived Soviet Republic in the spring, then its bloody suppression by government troops and Freikorps volunteers in May 1919, with hundreds dead. Out of that fear and violence, Munich turned sharply to the right, and it became a refuge for nationalist and antisemitic groups from across Germany. One of them was a tiny new party where a former corporal had just started to speak. The memorial in the pavement dates from 1989. Now walk west towards Lenbachplatz and turn into Herzog-Max-Straße, where Munich's main synagogue once stood.