Speakers address the crowd and denounce the fascists. The left is anxious: the Communists and Social Democrats are still strong, but in the last Landtag elections they have lost a considerable number of seats to the National Socialists, whose rise seems to be overwhelming. On this May Day, the Social Democratic party, the Communist party, the trade unions, and other workers’ organizations have summoned all their members and sympathizers to demonstrate against the government. Chancellor Brüning, heading a government composed of the Catholic party of the center and of parties on the right, could govern only by emergency measures. Parapolitical squads of the Communist party and of the National Socialist party met face to face during bloody battles on the streets of large cities. Political behaviour accordingly became radicalized. Banks collapsed, thousands of businesses were ruined, and the climate became one of catastrophe. Considerable American capital was invested in Germany. The crisis had begun with the crash of the New York stock exchange in 1929. It is the greatest economic and social disaster ever experienced by the Weimar Republic, which had been established only thirteen years before. In 1932 Germany had more than six million unemployed, and this, when one includes their families, represents a total of twenty million people living in poverty. At least a third of those assembled on this day are unemployed. May Day is the holiday celebrating labour, but most of the faces are grim and anxious. Soon the square is filled by a veritable human sea and the arriving columns must station themselves in the adjoining streets (Frankfurter Zeitung, May 2, 1932). The streets swarm with a crowd that moves toward the Roemerplatz, the large medieval square in the old city, alongside the cathedral.
All of the passengers get off as soon as they arrive and line up in columns, led by people carrying placards covered with political slogans. In the dawn, lines of trucks transporting men and women approach the city.
The weather is splendid, not a cloud in the transparent sky, and the spring air is surprisingly mild. I was impressed by the ease with which this little camera could be handled and the possibility of taking almost forty pictures without changing the reel (film in those days was not yet numbered). My father, in 1928, had given me a Leica camera, a make that had been on the market for only six years. In 1932 I was a sociology student, but my hobby was photography.
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