In Europe (32 page)

Around Christmas and New Year, Berlin was a ghost town. ‘The stench of civil war was in the air,’ George Grosz wrote. ‘The plaster had fallen from the houses, windows were broken, many shops had lowered their iron shutters … People no longer able to bear their frightened, confined existences had climbed onto the roofs and were shooting at everything that moved, be it birds or people.’

During that same period, Karel Radek succeeded in bringing the Spartacus Movement (named after the gladiator and revolutionary leader) and a couple of other radical left-wing groups under the auspices of a new party: the Kommunistische Partei Deutschland, the KPD.

On Sunday 5 January, 1919 the second revolution broke out at last. The reason was insignificant enough: Ebert had dismissed the self-appointed chief commissioner of Berlin, a radical socialist, and the Spartacists had called for a demonstration. Radical workers took to the streets by the thousand. Then Liebknecht turned up. Harry Kessler heard him from a distance, speaking ‘like an evangelist, singing the words with a soothing pathos, lento and with great feeling’. Later he ran into him amid an angry throng on Potsdamer Platz, orating again to an almost unanimously adoring audience. ‘I entered into discussion with him, and within a few
minutes the majority of the crowd was on my side, particularly the soldiers, because they noticed that he himself had never been in the army.’

Accounts like this would seem clearly to show that most people in the streets of Berlin did not long for a replica of the Bolshevik Revolution. The minutes of the workers’ meetings held that week indicate that people were in favour rather of a replica of the German November Revolution, but that this time it should be done right. The ‘traitorous’ Ebert government was to be ousted. Armed groups were formed, railway stations and newspaper offices occupied. Meanwhile, Karl Liebknecht's followers drove him around the city, his convoy surrounded by trucks bearing red flags and machine guns like a Berlin variation of the triumphal progress of the great Lenin. Yet Liebknecht, as we have seen, was no Lenin. From the very start his career had been that of an activist, a militant, but not that of a political leader.

At this point the situation became very murky indeed. A general strike in which 200,000 workers took part was held on Monday, 6 January. That morning Kessler saw two processions marching through central Berlin: one of social democrats, the other of Spartacists. ‘Both were made up of drab, identically dressed shopkeepers and factory maids, both waved red flags and marched in the same bourgeois cadence. The only difference was the text on their banners. They mocked each other in passing and may, perhaps, start shooting at each other before the day is done.’ Suddenly he heard yelling. ‘The Liebknecht boy! Liebknecht's son!’ Karl Liebknecht Jr, ‘a slender blond boy’, was almost lynched by the social democrats, until a group of Spartacists succeeded in carrying him off to safety.

That afternoon a crowd gathered again on Alexanderplatz, ready to storm the surrounding government buildings. All was in readiness for the start of the Berlin Revolution. And nothing happened.

There was no leadership, there were no decisions made. Radek, newly arrived in Berlin, had not had enough time to impose discipline on the gung-ho Spartacists. He was utterly opposed to the idea of bringing down the government, and behind closed doors demanded that the new KPD immediately withdraw from this ‘dead end’ struggle.

Liebknecht was a brave, hot-headed lawyer, but no political genius. He had something quixotic about him, Kessler recorded in his diary, and
simply lacked Lenin's strategic gifts. Rosa Luxemburg was an exceptional woman, brilliant and poetic, but during those weeks she devoted herself only to her newspaper and her writing. She was quite furious with Liebknecht when she heard that he had started a revolution with no preparations whatsoever: ‘How could you? What about our party programme?’ The soldiers’ council remained neutral: they were in favour of the revolution, but also in favour of public order. By the end of the day most of the demonstrators had simply gone home. Their revolution was over.

After that, Berlin's mood took a drastic swing: the Ebert government received the support of a number of conservative army units. By dint of furious door-to-door fighting they resumed control of one occupied building after another. The building housing the offices of
Vorwärts
was taken, and when the commanding officer asked the chancellor's office what to do with the 300 people who had been occupying it, the answer was: ‘Shoot them all.’ Being an officer of the old school, he refused. In the end, seven of the occupiers were executed, the others severely beaten. That afternoon the first
Freikorps
marched into the city, led by the proud Gustav Noske. He was aware of the historic role he was playing: ‘What do I care? Someone must play the bloodhound; I will not shirk my duty.’

This turn of events marked the start of a wild round-up of radicals and communists. Of the Spartacists who resisted, 1,200 were shot down in Berlin alone. Radek got off easily. He was sent to the Moabit, the huge Prussian prison in the centre of town, and there he remained for a year. As special representative of the new Russia, he was soon granted privileged status. His cell became a well organised distribution point for agit-prop, and he was allowed to receive whomever he chose, ranging from radical activists to prominent figures such as Walter Rathenau. Everyone in Berlin spoke of ‘Radek's salon in the Moabit’. Here new ties were forged between a Germany and a Russia in transition.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht, however, did not enjoy the protective support of a major power. They were arrested on 15 January, 1919, close to the Eden Hotel, beaten almost unconscious with rifle butts and then shot through the head. Liebknecht's body was taken to the morgue. Luxemburg, still alive, was thrown into the Landwehrkanal. Their deaths united them at last in the history books, although in real life they had
little to do with each other, save for their frequent differences of opinion. Käthe Kollwitz was given permission to draw a final portrait of Liebknecht: ‘A garland of red flowers had been laid across the shattered forehead, his face was proud, his mouth open slightly and twisted in pain. His face bore a rather astonished expression.’ Runge, the soldier who had beaten Liebknecht's brains in, was the only man in his unit to receive a (brief) jail sentence. Lieutenant Vogel, who had shot Luxemburg, was convicted only of illegally disposing of a corpse; he fled to the Netherlands and was granted amnesty there. Their commanding officer, Captain Waldemar Pabst, remained unpunished and died in his bed of natural causes in 1970.

That was the end of Act Two.

Act Three of the drama comprised the civil war which spread across Germany that winter and on into the summer, flaring up here and there like a peatland fire: in Bremen, in Munich, in the Ruhr, and then again in Berlin. It was a civil war that has been largely erased from European memory, but one fought with great cruelty and violence.

‘Strangers were spat upon. Faithful dogs slaughtered. Coach horses eaten,’ Joseph Roth wrote of that period. ‘Teachers beat their pupils from hunger and rage. Newspapers invented atrocities by the opposition. Officers sharpened their sabres. College students fired shots. Secondary-school students fired shots. Policemen fired shots. Little boys fired shots. It was a nation of gunmen.’

The struggle was an uneven one: unorganised resistance groups from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils against highly trained and well-armed volunteer corps. At times it was even unclear who was fighting whom. In late January, Harry Kessler noted that the socialist movement had obviously split into two camps,‘because even the troops guarding the [administrative] centre [of Berlin] are socialists, and would probably not support any civil government whatsoever.’

In the capital the war became a normal part of daily life. One eyewitness recounted how schoolchildren excused themselves when they came home late from school by saying that they had been forced to wait in a doorway at Hallesches Tor until the shooting stopped. A westbound S-Bahn train pulling into a station might seem empty, until it stopped.
But that was an illusion: the passengers had simply sought shelter under the seats to avoid stray bullets.

Despite all this, general elections were held on 19 January, 1919 and Ebert's centre-left coalition won three quarters of the votes. The independent parties were buried beneath the landslide. In the People's Republic of Bavaria, Kurt Eisner and his people received only three per cent of the vote. Eisner was no Lenin either, and he resigned graciously. He never got the chance to hold a farewell speech, however: just as he was about to enter the Bavarian house of parliament, he was assassinated by a radical right-wing officer.

After these elections, and despite the violence in the streets, Ebert was able to rely on solid political backing: from parliament, the trade unions, the employers and the generals. And still the fighting went on. The conflict now had to do with better terms of employment, more money and greater autonomy for the councils. The
Freikorps
ran amok through the country in their own special fashion. One of their leaders, quite correctly, compared them to fifteenth-century mercenaries: ‘The landsknechts, too, cared little what they were fighting about, or for whom. The most important thing was that they were fighting. War had become their calling.’ In the end there were about seventy such corps, totalling 400,000 soldiers. Many Germans cities were the scene of widespread torture and random executions, atrocities that have survived only occasionally in individual family histories.

From May, the work of the
Freikorps
was more or less taken over by civil and military courts. Hundreds of death sentences were carried out. This was the Third Act.

The Fourth Act was actually an intermezzo. On 18 August, 1919 President Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution. To a certain extent, the document met the wishes of all concerned: advocates of direct conciliar democracy were given the referendum, liberal parliamentarians received the national parliament, the old-school monarchists were given a president. The new parliament met at Weimar, a city intended to become the symbol of the new German unity, the city of such great minds as Herder, Goethe and Schiller, and also of the pleasant, unsullied German countryside. Weimar
was also a city that could be easily defended, if necessary, by a handful of loyal troops, but no one mentioned that in public.

Six months later, on 10 January, 1920, the Treaty of Versailles came into force. The German Army had to be reduced to a quarter of the size of the former
Kaiserliche Armee
. This meant the end of the
Freikorps
. The wild and rowdy mercenaries, however, had no intention of letting that happen; their generals, including Ludendorff, tried to seize power. The Ehrhardt Brigade mentioned earlier refused to be disbanded. On the night of Friday, 12 March, 1920, acting on orders from Wolfgang Kapp and General Walther von Lüttwitz, the
Freikorps
’ 5,000 members marched in formation into the heart of Berlin to occupy the government ministries and ‘crush without mercy every sliver of resistance’. The hours that followed were chaotic, the army refused to take sides, and finally – at their wit's end – the government called in the help of the former revolutionary forces. ‘Fight with every means to preserve the republic! Lay aside all internal differences. There is only one effective remedy for the dictatorship of Wilhelm II: a total shutdown of all economic activity!'Then the government ministers made good their escape.

Nevertheless, the ‘Kapp Putsch’ was a miserable failure, the general strike called for in such desperation by the former government a resounding success. Never had Germany experienced a paralysis as complete as the one that followed. No trains or trams ran. No letters were delivered. No factory opened its gates. In Berlin there was no water, gas or electricity. Almost all government offices were closed. No newspapers appeared. The leaders behind the putsch had absolutely no grip on society. No decree made it past the minister's offices. Within a week, it was all over. It was the final, unified manifestation of a socialist Germany.

Act Five, the drama's grand finale. The violent revolution went underground. After 1920, a variety of covert groups sprang up amid the ranks of the army and the
Freikorps
. They saw Versailles as an attempt to undermine the old German values, and anyone wishing to consolidate that peace was a traitor, particularly if he happened to be Jewish and an intellectual.

‘Everywhere, hatred was in the air,’ George Grosz wrote, ‘everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the nobles, the communists, the soldiers,
the homeowners, the workers, the unemployed, the
Reichswehr
… the control boards, the politicians, the department stores and the Jews again … It was as though Germany had been split in two, and both halves hated each other like in the
Nibelungensage
. And we knew it, or at least we began to realise it.’

The climate was described perfectly by Joseph Roth in his novel
The Spider's Web
, a story of intrigue. The narrative thread followed two protagonists: Theodor Lohse, a frustrated young middle-class man who gradually becomes a political criminal, and Benjamin Lenz, who ‘plays the pipes of the carousel’ undisturbed, forges reports for foreign missions, steals documents and stamps from government offices and has himself locked up with people in custody, pumps them for information, and waits for ‘his’ day to arrive. At the centre of the web is Munich. Important secondary characters are Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler.

Roth spun his spider's web with such great care that something miraculous happened: his fantasy was outstripped by historical reality. Starting on 7 October, 1923, his book was published in serial form in Vienna's
Arbeiterzeitung
. The last instalment appeared on 6 November, 1923, and it was on 8–9 November that Ludendorff and Hitler attempted – unsuccessfully – to seize power. In Munich, of all places. But by then the most important switch had already been thrown.