Der Kapp-Putsch Kaputt Ist

I'm trying to catch up on this Spaceback Saturday stuff, and finding that staying safe at home somehow isn't producing the spare time that I thought it would. So anyway, this week's installment shares cartoons about the Kapp Putsch that attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic on March 13, 1920.

"Trying to Get Rid of the Cat?" by Dennis McCarthy in New Orleans Times-Picayune, March, 1920

Not surprisingly, the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles were not popular in Germany. The country lost territory, was required to pay reparations to the victor nations, and was forced to admit culpability for World War I. Military and pro-royalist circles grumbled against the messy process of democratic government, moreover; and on March 13, paramilitary Freikorps units under General Walther von Lüttwitz led a coup to establish an autocracy with Prussian nationalist Wolfgang Kapp as its Reichskanzler.

"Am 13 März" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, March 28, 1920

The surname Kapp provided a convenient pun for German and English-speaking cartoonists.

"The Hornet's Nest" by Bob Satterfield, for Newspaper Enterprise Assn. before March 26, 1920

Kapp, a functionary in the Prussian agriculture ministry and co-founder of  the reactionary Deutsche Vaterlandspartei, was a proponent of the theory that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by its Jews and socialists. He nevertheless proclaimed that "We will not govern according to any theory."

"The New Rockers" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, March, 1920

The government of President Friedrich Ebert fled to Stuttgart and called for a general strike. Government bureaucrats refused to accept the putschists' legitimacy. Socialist and communist labor unions walked off their jobs; and without gas, electricity and train service, Berlin ground to a halt. Germany's military elite failed to come to the aid of Kapp and von Lüttwitz, and the putsch collapsed by March 18.

"Die Starken Männer vom 13 März" by Karl Arnold in Simplicissimus, Munich, April 7, 1920

That's Wolfgang Kapp on the right. The fellow on the left might perhaps be Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern (although his father, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was still a pretender to the German throne, and the royal family played no role in the putsch); the banner bearer doesn't resemble any of the putschists whose photographs I have seen.

"Putschvorstellung für die Entente-Kommission" by Eduard Thöny in Simplicissimus, Munich, April 7, 1920

The government returned to Berlin, and the putschists scattered: Kapp to Sweden, Lüttwitz to Hungary. As far as the cartoonists at the leftist satirical weekly Simplicissimus were concerned, the whole episode was just one more humiliation of their country among many.

"Konjunktur" by Erich Shilling in Simplicissimus, Munich, April 14, 1920