Finding Muck

Friedrich Muck-Lamberty - ‘Führer’ to his followers - was briefly famous in 1920s Germany, but never made his way into the history books. He vanished as quickly as he arrived. Until now, he has been absent from English language historical writing, not because he is considered unimportant but because very few historians know anything about him.

I came across him three years ago entirely by chance. While researching new material to update my long-running play, 'Hitler on Trial', I came across a book published in 1939, The Dear Monster, by a German artist named G.R.Halkett. I had inherited it from my father when he died, along with hundreds of other books, and it had sat unread on a shelf ever since. 

Flicking through the dusty pages that still smelled of my father’s cigarette smoke, I was quickly enthralled by this memoir of a young man’s life in early twentieth century Germany. My favourite historical period is the Weimar Republic, and the book threw new light on events that I thought I knew well.

Among the book’s many unusual insights, the name of Muck-Lamberty kept cropping up. His story was so unusual that I found myself drawn into a rabbit hole of research, digging through mostly German sources of information. I discovered much that was new, such as the strange dance craze that gripped Germans immediately after the First World War.

Although he is only a minor character in the history of the Weimar Republic, I saw in Muck’s adventures a new perspective on the familiar story of Adolf Hitler’s early career, and his claim to be Germany’s ‘Führer.’

And I wanted to share it. In schools and universities, Weimar and Nazi Germany is a thriving area of history teaching and research. I thought that teachers and academics would appreciate this unusual story for the fresh insights that it provides into a familiar period.

Not to mention general readers who, I hope, will be intrigued by this unusual character.