Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (107 page)

During the winter of 1918, the revolutionary movement remained unstable and internally divided. There were essentially three main political camps on the left: the largest was the Majority SPD, comprising the bulk of the wartime Social Democratic Party and its mass membership. To their immediate left was the Independent SPD (USPD), the radical leftist wing of the old SPD that had split with the mother party in 1917 in protest over the moderate reformism of its leadership. On the extreme left were the Spartakists who founded the Communist Party in December 1918. Their objective was all-out class war and the creation of a German Soviet system on the Bolshevik model. In the early weeks of the revolution, the SPD and USPD worked closely together to stabilize the new order. Both the national and the Prussian governments were run by SPD/USPD coalitions. But cooperation proved difficult in practice, partly because the USPD was a highly unstable formation whose political identity was still in flux. Within weeks of the revolution, the SPD/USPD partnership was tested to breaking point by disputes over the future status of the Prussian-German army.

The terms of the relationship between the provisional socialist leadership and the military command had been set on the very first day of the new republic. On the evening of 9 November, Friedrich Ebert, chairman of the Council of People’s Representatives made a telephone call to First Quartermaster-General Wilhelm Groener (Ludendorff had been sacked
by the Kaiser on 26 October), in which the two men agreed to cooperate in restoring order in Germany. Groener undertook to effect a smooth and swift demobilization. In return, he demanded Ebert’s assurance that the government would secure supply sources, assist the army in maintaining discipline, prevent disruption of the railway network, and generally respect the autonomy of the military command. Groener also made it clear that the army’s chief objective was to prevent a Bolshevik revolution in Germany and that he expected Ebert to support him in this.

The Ebert–Groener pact was an ambivalent achievement. It secured for the socialist republican authority the means to enforce order and protect itself against further upheavals. This was a major step forward for an executive structure that had no meaningful armed force of its own and no constitutional foundation for its authority, save the right of usurpation bestowed by the revolution itself. Seen in this light, the Ebert–Groener pact was shrewd, pragmatic and in any case necessary, since there was no plausible alternative. Yet there was also something ominous in the army’s setting of political conditions even for the fulfilment of urgent tasks within its own remit, such as demobilization. What mattered here was not the substance of Groener’s demands, which were reasonable enough, but the army’s formal arrogation of the right to treat with the civilian authority on an equal footing.
¹⁴

There was deep distrust between the army and the leftist elements in the revolutionary movement, despite Ebert’s well-intentioned efforts to build bridges between the military command and the revolutionary soldiers’ councils. On 8 December, when General Lequis arrived at the outskirts of Berlin with ten divisions of troops, the executive committee (the national executive of the soldiers’ and sailors’ councils) and the Independent Socialist ministers within the provisional government refused to allow the general to enter the capital. Ebert managed with some difficulty to persuade them to open the city to Lequis, the majority of whose men were Berliners desperate to return to their homes.
¹⁵
There was further tension on 16 December, when the first national congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils passed a resolution demanding the revolutionization of the military: Hindenburg was to be dismissed as chief of staff, the old Prussian cadet school system closed down and all marks of rank abolished. Officers were henceforth to be elected by their troops and a people’s militia (
Volkswehr
) established alongside the
regular army. Hindenburg rejected these proposals outright and ordered Groener to inform Ebert that the agreement between them would be null and void if there were any attempt to translate them into practice. When Ebert told a joint meeting of the cabinet and the Executive Council
¹⁶
that the proposals of 16 December would not be implemented, there was consternation among the Independents, who at once began to mobilize their radical following across Berlin.

The political climate was now exceptionally volatile. Relations between the SPD and the Independents were very tense. Berlin was thronging with armed workers and units of radicalized soldiers – the most boisterous of these was the People’s Naval Division, whose headquarters were the Royal Stables, an imposing neo-baroque building on the eastern side of Palace Square. There was talk on the extreme left of an armed uprising. At a general meeting of the Independent Social Democrats of Greater Berlin, the Spartakist leader and ideologue Rosa Luxemburg attacked the compromise policy of the Independents and demanded that they withdraw their allegiance from the Ebert government. There was no point, she declared, in debating with ‘Junkers and bourgeois’ over whether one should introduce socialism:

Socialism does not mean getting together in a parliament and passing laws, socialism means for us overthrowing the ruling classes with all the brutality [loud laughter] that the proletariat is capable of deploying in its struggle.
¹⁷

The flashpoint for an open conflict came on 23 December. On this day, after reports of looting and vandalism by ‘red sailors’, the provisional government ordered the People’s Naval Division to leave the Royal Stables and quit the capital. Instead of complying, the sailors seized and mistreated the Berlin city commandant Otto Wels, surrounded the chancellery building (seat of the SPD/USPD government), occupied the central telephone exchange, and cut off the lines connecting the chancellery with the outside world. Using a secret chancellery hotline to the Military Supreme Command in Kassel, Ebert requested military assistance. General Lequis was called in from Potsdam to restore order. His performance was not confidence-inspiring: on the morning of Christmas Day 1918, his troops drove the ‘red sailors’ away from the chancellery and bombarded the Royal Stables for two hours. It was enough to secure a surrender by the rebellious sailors, but word had got around and an angry (and partly armed) crowd of Spartakists, Independents and
leftist fellow travellers soon gathered around the troops, who promptly withdrew from the scene.

The débâcle of Christmas Day 1918 had a polarizing effect on the political climate. It encouraged the extreme left to believe that a more resolute strike would suffice to break the authority of the Ebert – Scheidemann regime. It also ruined the prospects for further collaboration between the SPD and the Independents, who left the provisional national government on 29 December. Their Prussian colleagues withdrew from the Prussian coalition cabinet on 3 January. The majority SPD now ruled alone in the state.
¹⁸
Groener responded to the growing tension by calling for the formation of volunteer units, or
Freikorps
, a term that recalled the stirring myths of 1813. One of these had already formed in Westphalia under General Ludwig Maercker, and others soon followed: the Freikorps Reinhard, under the former Guards officer Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard, was created on Boxing Day; another Freikorps assembled at Potsdam under Major Stephani, composed of demobilized officers and men from the I Regiment of Foot Guards and the Imperial Potsdam Regiment. Freikorps recruits were driven by an unsteady mix of ultra-nationalism, a desire to make good the humiliation at the German defeat, hatred of the left and visceral fear of a Bolshevik uprising. All these units were placed under the general command of the Silesian career officer General Walther Freiherr von Lüttwitz.

To ensure harmonious relations between the military and the civilian authority, Ebert appointed the SPD man Gustav Noske to head the ministry of military affairs. Noske, the son of a weaver and an industrial worker from the city of Brandenburg, had worked as an apprentice basket weaver before joining the SPD and achieving distinction within the party for his services to socialist journalism. In 1906, he had joined the SPD parliamentary fraction in the Reichstag, where he was associated with the right-wing SPD leadership group around Ebert. Noske had long been known for his friendly attitude to the military; he joined the provisional government on 29 December, after the departure of the USPD coalition partners. When asked to oversee the provisional government’s campaign against the leftist revolutionaries in Berlin, Noske is said to have replied: ‘Fine. Someone has to be the bloodhound, and I am not afraid of taking the responsibility.’
¹⁹

The next uprising was not long in coming. On 4 January, the Berlin provisional government ordered the dismissal of Emil Eichhorn, the
commissary police chief of Berlin, a left-wing Independent who had refused to support the government during the ‘Christmas Battles’. Eichhorn refused to resign, choosing instead to distribute arms from the police arsenal to left-radical troops and to barricade himself in the police presidency. Without authorization from the USPD leadership, the police chief ordered a general insurrection, a call that was answered with gusto by the extreme left. On 5 and 6 January, the Communists mounted their first concerted attempt to seize power in Berlin, pillaging arsenals, arming bands of radical workers and occupying key buildings and positions in the city. Once again, the SPD provisional government called in troops to bring an end to the unrest.

For some days the city was transformed into a lurid and dangerous jungle, a dadaist nightmare. There was shooting at every corner and it was seldom clear who was shooting at whom. Neighbouring streets were occupied by opposing forces, there were desperate struggles on roofs and in cellars, machine-guns positioned anywhere suddenly struck up fire and then fell silent, squares and streets that had just now been quiet were suddenly filled with running, fleeing pedestrians, groaning wounded and the bodies of the dead.
²⁰

On 7 January, Harry Kessel witnessed a battle scene on the Hafenplatz in Berlin: government troops were trying to take control of the railway administration headquarters, which had been occupied by leftists. The rattling of small arms and machine-gun fire was deafening. In the heat of the battle an elevated train filled with urban commuters trundled across the viaduct that spanned the square, seemingly oblivious to the firefight raging below. ‘The screaming is continuous,’ Kessel noted. ‘The whole of Berlin is a bubbling witches’ cauldron where forces and ideas are stirred up together.’
²¹
On 15 January, after an extensive manhunt, the Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were found, arrested and subsequently beaten to death by members of a cavalry guards division stationed at the Hotel Eden in central Berlin.

The Communists now seethed with an implacable hatred of the Social Democrats. In March 1919, they called a general strike and fighting once again broke out in Berlin. Some 15,000 armed Communists and fellow travellers seized control of police stations and rail terminals. Determined to break the power of the extreme left at all costs, Gustav Noske brought in 40,000 government and Freikorps troops, who used machine guns, field artillery, mortars, flame-throwers and even aerial
strafing and bombardment to put down the rebellion. When the fighting in Berlin came to an end on 16 March, 1,200 people were dead. The violent suppression of the January and March uprisings and the murder of its intellectual leaders dealt the extreme left a blow that it was never prepared to forgive. In their eyes, the Social Democrats had betrayed the German worker to sign a ‘devil’s pact’ with Prussian militarism.
²²

No one gave clearer visual expression to this view of events than the Berlin artist George Grosz. Grosz, an early participant in the Berlin Dadaist movement, had been exempted from military service on psychological grounds and had spent the later years of the war in Berlin. In December 1918 he was one of the first wave of Communist Party members, receiving his card personally from the hands of Rosa Luxemburg. He spent the days of the March uprising hiding in the Berlin apartment of his future mother-in-law. In a remarkable polemical drawing published at the beginning of April 1919, Grosz depicted a street littered with blood-stained bodies, one disembowelled. Protruding diagonally into the lower right-hand of the picture frame is a swollen corpse, its trousers pulled down to reveal mutilated genitalia. Standing in the centre foreground, with the heel of his boot pressing on the belly of one of the dead, is the travesty of a Prussian officer, his monocle screwed tightly into his face, his teeth bared in a cramped grimace, his posture ramrod-straight. In his right hand he carries a blood-smeared sword, in his left a raised champagne flute. The caption reads: ‘Cheers Noske! The proletariat is disarmed!’
²³

Even for those who did not share Grosz’s Spartakist commitment,
Prost Noske!
captured something disturbing about the events of early 1919. The extreme violence of the repressions was in itself disquieting. The Freikorps units brought a new brand of politically motivated terrorist ultra-violence to their counter-insurgency operations in the city, hunting out hidden and fleeing leftists and subjecting them to brutal mistreatment and summary executions. The Berlin press reported executions of thirty prisoners at a time by makeshift Freikorps tribunals, and Harry Kessler observed ruefully that a hitherto unknown spirit of ‘blood vengeance’ had entered the city of Berlin. Here – though not only here
²⁴
– could be seen the brutalizing effects of the war and the ensuing defeat, the anti-civilian ethos of the military, and the profoundly unsettling ideological impact of Russia’s October Revolution of 1917.