The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (10 page)

The day of the German revolution revealed a people tired of war and the old ways, eager for peace, and eager for the most part, at this point, to give a new, democratic and, it was hoped, fairer political system a chance. On 9 November 1918, the men of the imperial establishment appeared to retreat, as if they, too, understood that their system had failed. What was the point of an elite of warlords and monarchs if in the end they led their country to defeat? In a way, it was surprising that the German people let them off so easily.

However, if they had come to despise the
ancien régime
for its failures, most Germans, especially of the better-off classes, feared the anarchy that might follow the end of the monarchy. And, in some cases, they feared unemployment as a result.

Curt Riess, sixteen years old at the end of the war, was the son of a Berlin tradesman who had prospered more than most under the old monarchical regime. This was so because Riess’s father made and sold ceremonial uniforms and liveries for the various German royal courts, from Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and the like, up to and including that of the Kaiser himself. His son remembers that in the shop there was a closet neatly filled with hundreds and hundreds of different uniform buttons. And the sign in front of the shop sported the warrants of the various German dynasties to which he was a supplier of court dress ‘by royal appointment’.

On the day the revolution broke out in Berlin, fearing that the masses would attack all symbols of the old regime, Riess’s father and his staff rushed to the shop, which was situated in the heart of the government district, and prepared to defend the place from the mob. The streets, it transpired, were certainly full of republican demonstrators, but no one paid the slightest heed to Riess’s father’s establishment, then or later, despite its blatantly monarchical character. Riess recalls, in fact, that, although his father switched into conventional made-to-measure tailoring to suit the republican times, the ‘by royal appointment warrants stayed where they had always been, to the end of the first German Republic and beyond’.
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So the Republic established itself, and not necessarily as something to fear. There was continuity. Unfortunately, that continuity included a continuity of responsibility for the war that the Kaiser, his ministers and generals had foisted on their nation - and then demanded that it pay for.

The left-liberal and cultural Berlin magazine
Die Weltbühne
(‘The World Stage’) put it concisely: ‘when they were victorious, Ludendorff and his men were on top of the world, stamping on mighty seven-league boots through the land, and heaping up debts – debts that not they, but we others will have to pay’.
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5
Salaries Are Still Being Paid

The crowned heads and the generals who had dominated the old Germany were a busted flush. Or so it seemed, at least to the outside world.

In fact, the first action Chancellor Ebert had undertaken, within hours of becoming head of the new government, was to issue an appeal to all officials of the old regime to remain at their posts. ‘A failure of organisation at this difficult hour would expose Germany to anarchy and to the most terrible hardship,’ he declared.

At the same time, Ebert was also aware that his own party alone could not control events sufficiently reliably to ensure the maintenance of basic order. He therefore decided that he would have to make peace with the radicals as well. That same afternoon, he put out feelers to the leadership of the group of mostly left-wing Social Democrats who had broken away during the course of the war to form the more radical, pacifist ‘Independent Social Democratic Party’. The ‘Independents’, as they were known, had grown strongly in the last year or two of the war, especially in the factories and among serving soldiers. Their influence could reach to places where Ebert’s could not. But on that first afternoon, the party’s demands were too rigid for Ebert to accept. He was forced, for the moment, to wait and let events on the streets take what course they might.

During the night of 9/10 November, no one was sure who ruled Berlin. Count Harry Kessler, the wealthy aristocratic connoisseur, writer and diplomat, had just returned from an official mission to Warsaw when, at around 10 p.m. on 9 November, he and a colleague gained entrance to the Reichstag building. They pleaded urgent business with Hugo Haase, leader of the Independents, who had himself just returned from a visit to revolutionary Kiel.

In front of the main entrance, and in an arc of illumination provided by the headlights of several army vehicles, stood a crowd waiting for news. People pushed up the steps and through doors. Soldiers with slung rifles and red badges checked everyone’s business. The scene inside was animated, with a continual movement up and down the stairs of sailors, armed civilians, women and soldiers. The sailors looked healthy, fresh, neat and, most noticeable of all, very young; the soldiers old and war-worn, in faded uniforms and down-at-heel footwear, unshaven and unkempt, remnants of an army, a tragic picture of defeat.
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In fact it would be Haase who played a key role in ensuring that the renewed negotiations with Ebert, which followed on 10 November 1918, met with success. At first, in the absence of their veteran leader, representatives of the Independents had stubbornly refused to allow any non-socialists to join the new government, even as non-executive experts. They had ignored Ebert’s protests that such experts were desperately needed to prevent the Reich’s food supply systems from breaking down. This stand-off lasted until Haase got back from Kiel and knocked his colleagues’ heads together. Unlike his often inexperienced radical comrades, the fifty-six-year-old lawyer was a seasoned politician, having served with Ebert for five years as co-chair of the main Social Democratic Party until decamping to the Independents out of disillusion with the war. Despite the continuing sharp differences with Ebert and co., Haase had a grasp of
Realpolitik
that his more hot-headed fellow Independents found hard to countenance.

By early in the afternoon of 10 November, the negotiators had nevertheless hammered out an agreement of sorts. Some non-socialists would be allowed into the government, though with socialist state secretaries as ‘minders’. And ultimate power in the state would lie with a national assembly of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which was to be summoned to Berlin at the earliest possible date. A six-member governing council, chosen half from the main Social Democratic Party, half from the Independents, would run the new democratic Republic of Germany until further notice. This council would supersede the office of Chancellor, which Ebert thus held for a mere twenty-four hours. To avoid any whiff of outmoded ministerial privilege, the official title of this inner cabinet would be ‘Council of the People’s Commissioners’ (
Rat der Volksbeauftragten
).

On the surface, over the next days, the revolution rolled on. No Bolshevik-style dictatorship of the proletariat, but lots of revolutionary rhetoric and, for the moment, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils given their heads. All of this fitted in with the majority socialist leadership’s strategy of placing itself at the head of the revolution so as to keep it within bounds.

So the majority socialist leadership decided that it would ride the revolutionary tiger, so to speak. Leaving power with the revolutionary councils might have seemed like a big risk, but the mainstream Social Democratic Party was able to do so with some confidence for two reasons. One, which seemed quite transparent even at the time, was that the majority socialists still held the allegiance of most workers and soldiers (the majority of whom were wartime conscripts, little more than workers in uniform). Ebert and his colleagues could be pretty certain that even when the Bolshevik-sounding directly elected councils met, most delegates would follow the majority socialist line, not that of the Independents, let alone of Liebknecht’s proto-Communist Spartacist organisation. And there was a second reason, though it remained secret for years after. Late on 10 November, Friedrich Ebert had spoken on a secure phone line with Ludendorff’s successor as Quartermaster-General and thereby
de facto
head of the army, Generalleutnant Wilhelm Groener, and done a deal.

The General and the Party Secretary knew each other quite well. Groener had been a key military functionary on the home front during 1916-17, the High Command’s man at the Reich Food Office, then from November 1916 to August 1917 Deputy Prussian War Minister and war production supremo. In these capacities, he had worked together with Ebert and other leading Social Democrats on the crucial tasks of keeping the industrial workforce fed and manageable.

There is a simple way of viewing the conversation between these two men. This says that Ebert, unsure of his longer-term position in the face of the revolutionary process, asked his old acquaintance Groener for the army’s support against the far left, in return guaranteeing the position of the army’s leadership and the disciplinary powers of its officers in the face of the recent wave of democratisation.

There is, however, another view. The fact was that at that point Groener had virtually no army to lend Ebert. As Prince Max’s attempts to use the 4th Rifles against the crowds early on 9 November had shown, there were almost no troops who could be trusted to act as instruments of ‘order’. There was plenty of discontent and defeatism at the front, but this was particularly true in the cities of Germany proper, where radical ideas had spread like wildfire among civilians and soldiers alike. Arguably, judging from the evidence of the past few days’ events, Ebert had more power over the average soldier than did their nominal commander, Groener. But both men had an interest in an orderly retreat to the armistice lines that had already been agreed with the Entente, and also in an efficient carrying out of the demobilisation process of (more than 8 million) German citizens in uniform that would undoubtedly also be taking place over the following weeks and months. This meant that the Social Democrat was prepared to give the High Command assurances that the essential integrity of the old army and its officer corps would be respected.
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As for Groener, he would do anything to save what could be saved of the old army, and to buy time for that army to be rebuilt as a post-war factor in the country.

Groener remained a monarchist, of course. However, it is difficult to know what else he could have done other than swear his and the army’s fealty to the new regime in Berlin. It had been Groener himself, born in the Grand Duchy of Württemberg in southern Germany, originally commissioned into the Grand Duke’s rather than the Prussian army, who had finally, it could be said, driven the Kaiser into exile on the morning of 9 November. At a headquarters meeting that morning, the Supreme Warlord had conveyed his intention, once the armistice came into force, of marching ‘his’ army back into the homeland, with his royal self at its head, and suppressing the revolution by force. Few officers were prepared to support his scheme. It would cause civil war and most probably a resumption of hostilities with the victorious Entente as well. The emperor found himself deserted by his paladins. And it was Groener who told Wilhelm II so to his face: ‘The army will return to the homeland under its leaders and commanding generals in a quiet and orderly fashion, but not under the orders of Your Majesty; for it no longer stands behind Your Majesty!’
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What Groener said was true. There were soldiers’ councils springing up everywhere. However, most of the troops – certainly those that, as the end of the war neared, had not informally ‘demobilised’ themselves - wanted the withdrawal to Germany’s borders, as stipulated in the armistice agreement, to occur in an orderly fashion. And almost none of them, except some diehard officers, were prepared to fight for the restoration of Prussian royal power.

It was a strange revolution that overtook Germany in 1918. The parliamentary regime instituted in October had been a creature of Ludendorff and the High Command rather than the result of pressure by parliamentary politicians or, perish the thought, of a popular uprising. The Republic that had been created, in a way by chance and certainly not by Ebert’s design, on 9 November, was the most radical transformation of the state in German history. However, it had already been made clear that the old imperial officials would keep their jobs. How else were ordinary Germans to be fed and the order of their day-to-day lives to be assured? Now, it became clear, the old imperial officers would also remain in place, if Ebert and Groener had their way. How else was the army to hold together and its soldiers be got home safely and in good order?

One thing was certain. In the brief vacuum that had followed the announcement of the Kaiser’s abdication, the far left had failed to take control. Liebknecht’s call for a socialist republic of Germany and for a world revolution had fallen mostly on deaf ears. The masses had stuck overwhelmingly with their familiar democratic socialist leaders, including the relatively moderate leaders of the Independents, with Ebert at the apex of that new power structure.

By the day after the great transformation, Sunday, 10 November, Berlin was surprisingly calm. The theologian and philosopher Professor Ernst Troeltsch described the scene in the leafy Berlin suburb of Grunewald, where he noticed the solid middle-class burghers taking their usual Sunday strolls in the woods, though with one or two concessions to the new era:

No elegant grooming, a conspicuous ‘citizen’ look. With many, probably deliberately, simply dressed. Everyone somewhat subdued, as you might expect from people whose fate was being decided somewhere far away, but all the same reassured and comfortable that things had gone so well. The trams and the underground railways were running as usual, a sort of pledge that, so far as the immediate necessities of life were concerned, all was in order. On every face was written: Salaries are still being paid.
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