In Europe (31 page)

Despite this chaos, the Soviet embassy was one of the most important diplomatic posts for a defeated Germany. Berlin viewed with extreme interest everything that happened in and around the new revolutionary state. Here, perhaps, lay the future for German trade and industry as well. At the same time – and this double role was one the Soviet mission always retained – the embassy was a permanent jamming station for the German powers-that-be, producing a constant flow of agitprop both open and covert. In this, one man played a vitally important role: Lenin's former travelling companion, Karl Radek. He had come into the city in December 1918, disguised as a wounded German soldier, along with a group of returning prisoners of war. By then he had become a key figure in the Socialist International, and could ‘stammer away’ – as he himself put it – in ten languages. Yet at the same time he remained a caricature of himself, full of jokes and silly
ideas, always bearded and bespectacled,‘his pockets bulging with newspapers and magazines’.

Radek immediately established contact with the radical wing of the German revolutionaries, the group around Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. He held court almost every day in the Ukrainian restaurant Allaverdi, where the Soviets had their own table and where Radek bantered with the former country gentlemen and landowners who waited on tables. All paths crossed in that restaurant, those of the old regime, the nobility, the middle class, the monarchist officers, the local revolutionaries and the new Soviet leaders. Radek adhered to the pure Bolshevik line, including the use of terror against ‘classes condemned to death by history’. Rosa Luxemburg was having none of that. Others joined in the debate. All the schisms that had arisen among the revolutionaries of Petrograd were reiterated in Berlin. In this way there arose German Trotskyites, Bucharinists and Zinovyevites, and more than that. The stylistic motifs of the Soviet Union were imitated as well: the constructivist fonts on the posters, the
russe-bolchevique
fashion, everything that happened in Russia was repeated on a smaller scale in Berlin. Except for the revolution itself. That went on in its own, German way.

Every country and every political movement prefers to write a history that makes it feel comfortable, a portrait in soft pastels, a story that does no violence to the self-image. The losers are usually unable to paint any portrait whatsoever. They simply fade away, and their story is eradicated along with them.

Only a hair's breadth separated Germany from becoming a kind of Soviet republic. In November of 1918, mutinies began among the sailors in the ports of northern Germany and the revolt quickly spread to other parts of the country. From that moment, a wave of uprisings, demonstrations and riots swept the country from north to south, from east to west and back again. In Berlin, a full-scale war in the streets was carried on in spring 1919. For three months, Munich was governed by a Soviet-style republic. It was only in 1920 that relative calm returned to the country.

The German legend concerning those painful years remained in place until 1945. After then, no one felt like thinking about that popular rebellion. It was the story with which Hindenburg and Ludendorff poisoned
public opinion after 1918. Both men, as mentioned earlier, announced that it was this social-democratic revolution that had brought defeat to Germany and twisted the knife in the back of the victorious front. That was the charge levelled against Chancellor Friedrich Ebert and his SPD party.

Thanks to letters, affidavits and sections of diaries discovered since, we now know what really happened. On that crucial day of 29 September, 1918, the day on which both army and kaiser suddenly accepted defeat, it was not the ‘whining’ social democrat Ebert who organised the capitulation, but courageous General Ludendorff himself.

When Ludendorff realised that defeat was inevitable, he manipulated matters in a way that would protect the army and the imperial elite. He advised Kaiser Wilhelm to ‘give the government a broader foundation’ by granting the social democrats ministerial responsibility. A government with such a broad popular base would then have to establish a truce, and responsibility for the capitulation could be foisted off on others. In this way the army's ‘honour’ could be preserved, a matter of utmost importance to its Prussian officers. ‘They [the social democrats] will have to bring about the peace that must now absolutely be established,’ Ludendorff told his staff. ‘Those who have mixed this concoction will now have to drink it themselves.’ It was a barefaced lie – he himself, the highest army commander, was the one who bore primary responsibility for ‘this concoction’ – but for the disgraced officers and humiliated nationalists the legend was too attractive not to believe.

On the day of capitulation, half blinded by mustard gas in a ward at the military hospital in Pasewalk, Corporal Adolf Hitler buried his burning face in the pillows and sobbed. ‘So everything had been in vain. All the sacrifices and hardships had been in vain … Had all this taken place only so that a gang of miserable criminals could now have their way with our fatherland? Was it for this that the German soldier had borne the burning sun and snowstorms? … Was it for this that he had lain amid the thundering volleys and exploding shells of gas? … During those nights my hatred grew against those who had perpetrated this deed. In the days that followed I came to realise my own destiny … I decided to become a politician.’

The effect which winter 1918–19 had on the history of Germany and that of the whole of Europe is still underestimated. During those months the foundation was laid in Berlin, just as it had been earlier in Petrograd, for a political movement that was to have a formative effect on the continent for the rest of the century. What's more, this German civil strife would create so much bad blood between the moderate and the radical left that all further cooperation, even that needed to keep Hitler from power, was ruled out. It was a drama, and as in most dramas, the action can be divided into a number of acts.

To start with, the people of Berlin had viewed the entire war through rose-tinted spectacles. Sebastian Haffner remembers how, as a ten-year-old boy, he had stood on tiptoe each day in his attempts to decipher the army bulletins posted on walls. That lent excitement to life, and spice to the day. ‘When there was a major offensive underway, with the number of prisoners taken listed in five digits and fortresses taken and an “enormous quantity of military material”, then life was a party, your imagination could run on endlessly and you walked with a spring in your step, just as you did later when you fell in love.’

That mood had everything to do with the peculiar situation in which Germany found itself. Although, strategically speaking, the country had long been fighting a defensive war, it appeared the army was still on the offensive. The front lines, after all, remained fixed and far from German territory. As late as 27 September, 1918 the army bulletins were still saying that the war was all but won. Three days later, however, it had all become clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Today we know what was going on behind the scenes, but the Berliners of that day were dumb-founded. The strict imperial order, the world of the ‘Hauptmann of Köpenick’, all came tumbling down. In the months that followed some 1.8 million rifles, 8,452 machine guns and 4,000 mortars went ‘missing’ from the country's arsenals.

The new social-democrat government was still busy negotiating a truce when the first rebellion broke out on 30 October, 1918 aboard the
Schillingrede
, off Wilhelmshaven. It was a sailors’ mutiny, in response to another mutiny by the country's naval leaders. Despite orders from Berlin to cease all fighting at sea immediately, the naval command had decided of its own accord to stage a major battle. The entire German fleet was
ordered to set sail for a battle that could in no way tip the balance of the war. The only issue at hand was the honour of the
Kaiserliche Marine
: the admiralty simply had no intention of surrendering without a fight. That their action would foil the ceasefire negotiations and needlessly prolong the war for months was no concern of theirs. Approximately 1,000 sailors from the battleships
Thüringen
and
Helgoland
had the courage to stand up to this plan. They brought all activity aboard their ships to a complete halt. This, in other words, was a
pro
-government mutiny.

The mutineers elected councils of their peers, disarmed their officers, ran up the red flags, marched into the military brigs to free their comrades and occupied public buildings. The mutiny became a revolution, and within a few days the movement was rolling through the major cities in western Germany. The same thing happened everywhere: soldiers and workers joined forces, elected their own councils, officers were forced to capitulate or flee, and civilian authorities knuckled under. On 8 November the pacifist Kurt Eisner and the poet-revolutionary Ernst Toller proclaimed in Munich the ‘Free Popular Republic of Bavaria’. That republic of soviets would last precisely one hundred days.

The army's top command quickly dispatched the 4th Rifle Regiment – one of its most reliable units – to Berlin, in case they were needed to crush a revolution. By the very next day, even these soldiers had experienced a change of heart. They took up defensive positions around the offices of the Social Democratic Party paper
Vorwärts
. On Saturday, 9 November, hundreds of thousands of badly nourished men and women marched on the centre of town. They were solemn in their conviction and prepared for the worst: a bloody Saturday. Those marching up in front carried signs with texts like ‘BROTHERS! DON'T SHOOT!’ But the barrack gates opened for them. In the home of Sebastian Haffner's parents, the newspaper was suddenly no longer called the
Tägliche Rundschau
, but the
Rote Fahne
.

The new, uncertain government, deathly afraid of chaos and a loss of face, was quite unhappy with this huge and spontaneous popular movement. They feared a repetition of what had happened in Russia, where the Mensheviks and others had been devoured by their own revolution. At the same time they were eager to remain on good terms with their ‘own’ people on the popular councils. Hence their decision to ‘suffocate’
the revolution, a term Chancellor Ebert actually used when discussing it with the German military commanders. The social-democratic foremen co-opted leadership of ‘their’ revolution, appeased the humiliated authorities, restored their power and then allowed the whole movement to fizzle out. Gustav Noske, Ebert's right-hand man, was enthusiastically welcomed by the sailors of Kiel when he arrived as the city's ‘governor’, and was able within a few days to call off the whole revolution, in the name of the Revolution. The councils remained, but stripped of all power. The
Rote Fahne
became the
Tägliche Rundschau
once more. Thus ended Act One.

That winter the city filled with embittered veterans. Most of them had no job, and often no roof above their head. The Allies were still blockading the German ports. Never had Berlin suffered hunger the way it did during those winter months. By the end of 1918, the city was at least as ripe for a Bolshevik revolution as Petrograd had been in 1917. Still, those events did not repeat themselves. Why?

The first reason was that the revolution's opponents had not come even close to being eliminated, as they had been in Russia. Everywhere on the outskirts of Berlin new troops were being trained, the so-called ‘Volunteer Corps’, composed of the most loyal and disciplined veterans. These corps, originally set up in order to have a few mobile and efficient army units available at a moment's notice, soon developed into autonomous, hardened combat groups who bowed to no one, except their own commander. Here the foundation was laid for the Waffen-SS.

Gustav Noske – who would later become minister of civil defence – did all he could to maintain order, and was willing to cooperate with anyone to that end, including the leaders of these volunteer corps. What those
Freikorps
leaders actually thought about the social-democrat government, however, is clear from their diaries. ‘The day will come when I will settle accounts with this government,’ wrote the commander of the
Eiserne Schar
, for example, ‘and rip the masks off all this pitiful, whining riff-raff.’ Or the commander of the
Werwolf
: ‘We declare war on Weimar and Versailles! War – every day and by every means!’ The ‘Brigade’, Hermann Ehrhardt's elite corps, was the first to wear the swastika on their helmets.

Meanwhile a wild bunch had gathered around the person of Karl Liebknecht. They were angry leftist veterans who roamed the city looting
wealthy homes and occupying strategic buildings. Along with Karl Radek, Liebknecht hoped to disrupt the coming elections with a coup. The Russian model was to be followed, the soviets of workers and soldiers were to take power at any cost. Liebknecht remained impervious to the fact that most of the German soviets were not themselves at all interested in his plan.

The atmosphere in Berlin grew grimmer by the day, shootings became more frequent, it seemed as though everyone was carrying a pistol or a machine gun. On 28 December, 1918 the omnipresent Count Harry Kessler walked past a number of corpses lying in state. ‘No one would be able to tell you what these young lives have been sacrificed for, or for what they have sacrificed themselves.’ That same week was the first time Käthe Kollwitz saw young, blinded soldiers out begging in the cold with their barrel organs. ‘I was reminded of a cartoon in
Simplicissimus
that appeared years ago, showing an invalid from the war of 1870 playing his barrel organ and singing: “What I am, and what I own, is thanks to you, my fatherland!”’