Freedom or Slavery? by Adolf Hitler

Bürgerbräukeller, Munich, July 28th, 1922.

The following speech was delivered at one of the many high points of political unrest in Weimar Germany. The whole Weimar period was marked by political polarization and extremely high political engagement. Difficult and serious questions of territorial sovereignty, regionalism, class relations, religion, labor disputes, the waning role of the traditional aristocracy, and coming to terms with the new parliamentary democracy, most of which had already been boiling up before and during the war, now began to boil over. Liberal historian Richard J. Evans points to the heated political atmosphere as a bad omen for the fledgling democracy, with "every spare inch of outside walls and advertising columns. covered with posters, every window hung with banners, every building festooned with the colors of one political party or another. " [30] He even goes so far as to suggest that during the Weimar period "people arguably suffered from an excess of political engagement. Elections met with none of the indifference that is allegedly the sign of a mature democracy. " [31] Liberal democracy had not been around long enough for people to be checked out and depoliticized, hardships were keenly felt, the aftermath of defeat in the First World War effected everyone, and as a result, tensions were high.