24 - Now Dead, as It Stands: Outcomes and Legacy (1919–2017)

Summary

RECOVERING FROM INFLUENZA, art historian Julie Vogelstein departed Berlin by rail Friday morning, 21 February, for Munich, where she planned to visit a friend. The only other occupant of her compartment was a Prussian aristocrat, one Von der Schulenburg. They were conversing about forestry when he glanced down at his watch and casually remarked: “Eisner now has twenty minutes to live.” He handed her his calling card and suggested that she might show it to the director of the Fürstenhof Hotel in Nuremberg to obtain a room for the night. “The train will run only as far as Nuremberg,” he said. When they arrived there the platform was swarming with military guards; newspaper extras reported Eisner's assassination by Graf Arco. The track to the Bavarian capital was indeed closed.

Moments after the gunfire on Promenadestraße ended, three soldiers with rifles and hand grenades rushed to Merkle and shouted: “Now to the Landtag where we'll clean house!” Pulling them over to Eisner's corpse, he pleaded with the infuriated trio to desist. “Could he but speak a few more words, he would tell you: Do not avenge me!” Merkle and Fechenbach had soldiers from the Foreign Ministry guard carry the two limp bodies to the Palais Montgelas. Eisner was laid out on a couch in the porter's room, his assailant dropped at the building's entrance. When Arco showed signs of life, enraged sailors had to be prevented from killing him on the spot. An angry crowd gathered. Merkle insisted that Arco be brought inside. Dr. Steudemann, police physician, officially pronounced Eisner dead.

At the Landtag, where the deputies awaited the prime minister's entrance, word of the shootings arrived within minutes. Fechenbach strode into the hall, approached the ministers’ table, and spoke briefly with Auer and Roßhaupter. The two ministers turned deathly pale. A few moments later Sergeant Huber entered the journalists’ gallery, tearfully showed Eisner's bloodstained pince-nez, and brandishing his service revolver menacingly, declared that he had dispatched the assassin. At 10:10 Dr. Eugen Jäger of the Bavarian People's Party, president by seniority at age seventy-seven, opened the proceedings with a frightful statement: “Ladies and gentlemen, before we commence I must report rumor has it that Prime Minister Eisner was shot to death today.