HISTORY MATTERS
In mid-July, a journalist from a right-wing newspaper claimed that the local holiday resort was in ‘a state of war’ because two flags had gone missing.[1]
This event does not relate to English communities in the summer of 2025, despite similar language, but to the German seaside 100 years ago. ‘Flag wars’, as they were dubbed even then, are serious business. They show individual agency, political mobilisation and national identity by visibly demonstrating the significance of political symbols. Flag conflicts touch the emotional core of politics, and this is why they matter. This was as true in 1920s-Germany as it is in England today.
Displaying—or removing—flags is a conscious act carried out for an audience. There is nothing private about flags, they fly in public or semi-public spaces including city halls, village squares, and gardens.
Politicians occasionally dismiss flag conflicts as superficial matters that divert attention from serious political issues. Writing in the immediate post-war period, the Social Democratic politician Otto Braun recalled how, during the 1920s and 1930s, ‘flag issues continued to have far greater significance in the political life of the republic and outweighed many topics that were materially more important.’[2]
What Braun missed is that ‘flag wars’ were, and are, at the heart of citizens’ engagement with politics. Contemporaries in Weimar Germany understood this and so too, closer to home, do the people of Northern Ireland. History does not repeat itself, but the processes of public debate, political communication and emotional mobilisation around flags do.
1. Flags come with historical & political connotations: re-claiming is difficult
Flags are not made for nuance. They manifest the symbolic power of a political regime and can serve to communicate inclusion and exclusion.
Regime changes often mean new flags. The winter of 1918/19 saw a brief period of openness in Germany when, after the revolution and collapse of the monarchy, the country’s political symbols had to be re-thought. Left-wing artist Käthe Kollwitz placed the curious combination of an Imperial black-white-red flag together with red bunting and a green wreath in the window of her Berlin flat to greet returning soldiers. Politically, Kollwitz’s combination of symbols made no sense but it expressed her emotional state of mind. In the aftermath of the armistice Imperial flags quickly turned into the symbol of those fighting against democracy, while red flags returned to being the partisan symbol of the political left.
Half a year later, in July 1919, the new National Assembly agreed on black-red-gold as national colours. This decision was a compromise among Weimar’s republican parties. Black-red-gold represented a clear break with the monarchy, did not stand for a single party, and linked the young republic to 1848. However, black-white-red was kept in several specific flags, for instance for the merchant navy and the Reichswehr.
2. Raising flags is never neutral: the political context always matters
The early years of the Weimar Republic demonstrated that some supporters of black-white-red had more in mind than the glories of the past. That the assassinations of the democratic politicians Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau—along with other acts of political violence—were carried out under the black-white-red banner showed the intent of those on the nationalist right.
These attacks triggered a reaction on the republican side too. By the mid-1920s, the black-red-gold colours stood for the defence of the Weimar Republic.
Election campaigns were fought in these two camps, mobilising for or against the republic, behind these respective colour combinations. The republican flag was now loaded with meaning: it linked 1848 to Weimar democracy, centred on defending the present republic and remembrance of republican sacrifices. In 1926 attempts were made to introduce a new, more unifying, design for the national flag, with examples including a combination of the republican colours with the Iron Cross.
It was, however, too late. Both the flags had become symbols that stood for the existential division of the Weimar Republic: for or against democracy.
3. Flag conflicts are about emotions, agency and identity
By the mid-1920s, flag conflicts had moved from debates in parliament to village greens, market squares and balconies.
Republican parties and organisations mobilised around the black-red-gold colours and called upon the local population to display them on important occasions. Supporters of black-white-red did the same and questioned the legitimacy of republican flags on city halls, school buildings or at war memorials.
Each side counted flags, as proof of local commitment, and claimed that their opponents were exaggerating their own numbers. For the republicans the black-red-gold flag, even when it was only in someone’s garden, was the key symbol to rally around for defending democracy. This explains the intensity of flag conflicts at local level. Anti-republicans engaged equally actively by stealing or destroying republican flags.
The court files on these conflicts provide insight into local circumstances. One ‘Josef S.’ claimed that he had nothing against the republican flag of his neighbour but took it down because it disturbed his pigeons. Another person was accused of cutting up a black-red-gold flag and sewing it together as a swastika. Pupils attended school celebrations of the republic’s democratic constitution dressed in black-white-red to show their, and their parents, disapproval.
The German People’s party flying the Reichsflagge, campaigning for the Reichstag election of December 1924. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00886 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Public domain.
4. ‘Flag wars’ need a spark: newspaper coverage, citizens’ actions and politics
The summers of 1927 and 1928 witnessed a ‘flag war on the beaches’ during which republicans escalated small-scale incidents to the highest political level.
Holiday makers decorated their sandcastles, wicker chairs or beach huts with flags—a then common practice at German seaside resorts. However, republicans informed the press and police that their black-red-gold flags were frequently stolen or vandalised.
Postcard image of flags on the beach at Rügen, 1930, detail.
A visitor on the island of Sylt asked the local mayor for help as his flags had gone missing, including ‘the big black-red-gold flag and the 10 small ones dotted around the sandcastle as well as the two republican flags fixed to the wicker chair.’
Accounts of the latest flag incidents became a regular feature in the press. In response, the republican minister Albert Grzesinski deployed more police to show that the republic protected its colours everywhere, even on beaches. Not everyone was impressed by this reaction. The national conservative paper Deutsche Tages Zeitung claimed that Germany’s criminals would celebrate as the police focused on arresting anyone who stumbled over a republican heap of sand.[3]
5. ‘Flag wars’ are not inherent to one specific political conviction
The ‘flag wars’ of the 1920s engaged supporters of the Weimar Republic and their enemies to an equal degree.
Towards the republic’s end, conflicts between the political extremes, the Communists and the National Socialists, heightened the existing battles over flags, public space and political power. When the Nazis took office in 1933, they quickly banned the republican colours and phased out Imperial flags.
A combination of swastika and Imperial flags was initially tolerated to keep the national conservatives on side and to stress the Nazis’ connections to Germany’s Imperial past. As in the 1920s, the display of flags was seen as an expression of popular support. In the city of Stuttgart, in June 1933, a local Nazi leader complained that Imperial flags greatly outnumbered Nazi flags in the streets. He suggested denouncing businesses and house owners who refused to show the swastika.[4]
To display the Imperial colours was clearly no longer a sufficient demonstration of loyalty. In 1937 all remaining flags except Nazi ones were forbidden. However, true supporters of the Third Reich knew well before this which banner they should raise.
[1] See Nadine Rossol, ‘Flaggenkrieg am Badestrand. Lokale Möglichkeiten repräsentativer Mitgestaltung in der Weimarer Republik’, in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 7/8, 2008, pp. 619-625.
[2] Berliner Tageblatt, 351, 29/07/1933: Die Hakenkreuzflagge in Stuttgart.
[3] Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 32 (17 July 1929): Auf Befehl des Landrates: Mobilmachung des Reichsbanners.
[4] Otto Braun, Von Weimar zu Hitler (Hamburg, 1949) p. 97.
About the author
Nadine Rossol
is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Essex. She works on 20th-century Germany with a focus on Weimar and Nazi Germany.
Nadine’s research explores political culture, symbols, state celebrations and identity formation. Most recently, she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic.
HEADER IMAGE: Postcard image of flags on the beach at Rügen, 1930
