Guilt by Association. Julius Barmat and German Democracy

Abstract

Although largely forgotten today, the so-called “Barmat Affair” resulted in the longest trial in the Weimar Republic’s short history and one of its most heated scandals. The antidemocratic right seized upon the ties that Julius Barmat, a Jewish businessman of Ukrainian provenance, maintained to prominent socialists to discredit Weimar by equating democracy with corruption, corruption with Jews, and Jews with socialists. The left responded to the right’s antidemocratic campaign with reasoned refutations of the idea that democracy inevitably involved graft. Few socialist or liberal politicians, however, responded to the right’s portrayal of Weimar as “Jewish.” The failure of the left to identify antisemitism as a threat to democracy undermined attempts to democratize the German judiciary and ultimately German society itself.