No Lost Cause: Pacifist Activism in Munich, 1915-1933

Traditional accounts of the German Peace Movement before and during the Weimar Republic have generally focused on national-level organizations and high-profile figures and activists. This thesis makes use of ego-documents written in fall 1939 and winter of 1940 to place two lower-level peace activists from Munich at the center of the study. These manuscripts make it possible to study how city-level peace activists organized within and without the confines of an organizational apparatus and gauge their perceptions of the fruits of their labors on the precipice of World War Two. One of the activists, Constanze Hallgarten, was a leading feminist peace activist and worked toward a world without war through a number of different organizations. She travelled around Europe to build connections with her colleagues in other countries and she used the connections to organize for peace in Munich through the entirety of the Weimar Republic. Max Hirschberg worked as a civil defense attorney in the same city and defended a number of targets of far-right attacks in court. While he never joined an organization as Hallgarten did, he was motivated by an inner drive for peace and rejection of violence of all kinds. While their tactics differed, both of these activists worked fervently to prevent another World War