103632 | GERMANY & FRANCE. "The Enemy is on the Right" cast bronze Medal.

103632  |  GERMANY & FRANCE. "The Enemy is on the Right" cast bronze Medal. Dated 1922. On the statements made by the Chancellor, Dr. Wirth (60mm, 12h). By Karl Goetz in München.

 

ALSO SPRACH BISMARCKS NACHFOLGER (thus spoke Bismarck's successor...), half-length bust right of Chancellor Dr. Joseph Wirth, holding nightcap of the German Michel and pointing behind him, speaking "DER FEIND / STEHT RECHTS" (the enemy is on the right)  // NICHT RECHTS NICHT LINKS, AM / RHEIN / HERR KANZLER! (not on the right, nor the left, but on the Rhine, Mr. Chancellor!), caricature of French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré as a helmeted crawling monster left.

 

Kienast 293. NGC AU-55. Pleasing brown surfaces, with some darker hues around the devices.

 

A successor to the Chancellor's role once occupied by Otto von Bismarck, Dr. Joseph Wirth served as the German Chancellor for a year-and-a-half during the Weimar period, making a fairly famous speech in front of the Reichstag in which he indicated that "...there stands the enemy, who drips his poison into the wounds of a people. There stands the enemy, and about it there is no doubt: the enemy is on the Right!" Here, indicating that the far right elements in Germany posed the greatest threat to her. Goetz, however, attempts to show the error in Wirth's thinking, stating that the enemy of Germany was neither on the right or the left, but on the Rhine in the form of the occupying French forces. Little over a decade later, however, Wirth's concerns about the right wing in Germany would prove correct, given the rise of national socialism, or Nazism, and the beginning of the Third Reich.

 

Upload: 20 May 2026.