The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (14 page)

The January uprising was not the last radical leftist rebellion in Germany. There would be more. In fact, throughout most of the late winter and spring of 1919, Germany underwent a sporadic but bloody civil war that would leave a terrible legacy of bitterness and ensure that what had previously been a united socialist movement could never be put back together again. But what the cruel ends suffered by Liebknecht and Luxemburg showed was that, two months after the November revolution, the reactionary militaristic powers in the land were on their way back, albeit in alliance, for the moment, with Germany’s new ostensibly socialist masters.

Like the respectable townsfolk in a western film who hire a gunslinger to protect them, only to find that he turns against them once the job is done, the rulers of the new Republic had created a monster that they would soon find they could not control.

Footnotes

*
i.e. to the gallows.

*
Although the Spartacus League had formally merged into the German Communist Party a few days earlier, the uprising was known at the time and to posterity as the ‘Spartacist’ uprising, and so the description is used throughout.

8
Diktat

Between the suppression of the Spartacist uprising in mid-January 1919 and the signing of the armistice in July, the German revolution was stopped in its tracks. Morgan Philips Price of the
Manchester Guardian
, who had been won over to a pro-Bolshevik position while reporting from Russia in 1917-18, wrote gloomily on 17 January 1919:

A deathly quiet prevails in the city. The quiet of the grave. Military patrols on streets, artillery posted everywhere. Armed White Guards being organised by a certain Reinhardt go about arresting and terrorising at pleasure. Several of my friends disappeared. A fine condition for eve of election for the National Assembly.
1

Nonetheless, on 19 January, the nation voted freely for the first time since 1912. Eighty-three per cent of a much-enlarged electorate of 36,700,000 took part in elections for the Constituent National Assembly that would frame and pass a constitution for the new Republic.

The reason why the electorate now comprised more than half the population was that women had been enfranchised in November 1918 by decree of the Council of People’s Commissioners. Not that this was necessarily a total victory for feminism. One young woman made an early discovery, knocking on doors for one of the non-socialist parties in one of the less prosperous parts of the city, that men often still ruled the family when it came to politics, a fact that would remain true well into the twentieth century all over the democratic world. In a block of modest flats, one housewife opened the door to her and, when asked how she planned to vote, called out over her shoulder, ‘What are we voting?’ A male voice answered, ‘Scheidemann’ (Social Democrat). The middle-class young woman pressed a leaflet for her party into the woman’s hands, assuring her: ‘Read this. Even if the gentleman votes for Scheidemann, you can choose another party.’
2

Male or female, to the republican government’s satisfaction, Germans voted overwhelmingly against further radical change. Ebert and Scheidemann’s Majority Social Democrats were favoured by 37.9 per cent of the electorate. The Independent Socialists, tainted in the eyes of some voters by the association of their more radical elements with continued street violence, got only 7.6 per cent. The rest of the vote was divided between the Catholic Centre Party and its Bavarian ally (19.7 per cent), the left liberal German Democratic Party (18.5 per cent), the conservative-nationalist German National People’s Party (10.3 per cent) and the right liberal German People’s Party (only 4.4 per cent). The Communist Party had decided at its founding congress three weeks earlier to boycott the Assembly elections. Ironically, the delegates had gone against the recommendation of both Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who paid with their lives for the party’s decision to take the revolutionary road to the exclusion of all others.

The elections to the Constituent Assembly, scheduled to come together in Weimar at the beginning of February, were an impressive early expression of support for democracy. Only around a fifth of the vote went to expressly anti-republican or monarchist parties. But it was not a vote for socialism. Between them, the Majority and the Independent Social Democrats had received just over 45 per cent of the total vote. Even had they been able to go into coalition together (unlikely after their recent bitter differences), there would still have been no majority to push socialist measures through parliament.

The National Assembly met in early February at the old Court Theatre (later National Theatre) in Weimar. Ebert was elected President of the Reich, and Scheidemann its first Chancellor (though, since the country still had no formal constitution, actually he was originally given the title of
Reichsministerpräsident
, or Reich Prime Minister, and only his successor took the title of Chancellor).
3
The ministers were drawn from the Social Democratic Party, the German Democratic Party and the Catholic Centre Party.

For now, apart from Scheidemann, the most important members of the cabinet so far as the outside world was concerned were Matthias Erzberger (Centre), Minister Without Portfolio (but responsible for overseeing treaty negotiations with the Allies), and as Foreign Minister Ulrich Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, an aristocratic career diplomat reckoned close to, though not a member of, the Democratic Party. Otherwise, Social Democrats, mainly former trade unionists, dominated the ministries involved in the economy, industry and food supply. The ever more controversial Gustav Noske’s position was formalised. He was appointed Minister for the Armed Forces, soon to be known as the Reichswehr.

As winter turned to spring, the inter-Allied discussions in Paris about the terms to be presented to Germany seemed to go on for ever. Meanwhile, the German economy groaned under the weight of attempting to reintegrate millions of men into an economy still excluded by the Allied blockade from post-war international markets. Men were returning after years of suffering and danger, and they were demanding their old jobs back, at new and better wages and under improved conditions.

At the same time, there were further far-left uprisings all over the Reich – another, even bloodier revolt in Berlin in March, this time including the People’s Marine Division and blamed on the resurgent Spartacists, which cost the lives of 500 government soldiers and more than 1,000 civilians; further uprisings in the Ruhr industrial area, where militants had formed a ‘Red Army’; in the ancient port of Bremen (where an attempt to set up a ‘Soviet Republic’ was suppressed with particular brutality by Freikorps units); in the industrial conurbations of Saxony and Thuringia. The chaos was most extreme in Munich, where the Social Democrat Prime Minister was assassinated by a monarchist fanatic and the far left and the anarchists took charge for a heady few weeks of Bolshevik-style ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

The so-called ‘Munich Soviet’ led in short order to a savage counter-terror of the far right, during which the left and its supporters, perceived or real, were massacred wholesale. Six hundred and six alleged ‘revolutionaries’ were executed within a matter of days – including twenty-one young men who lived in a Catholic Apprentices’ Hostel, who, because they were young workers, were presumed to be ‘Spartacists’.
4
Many of the executions were officially classified as ‘fatal accidents’.
5
If captured, members of the far-left ‘Soviet’ government were brutally treated. The Bavarian writer and teacher Josef Hofmiller described the fate of the deposed Defence Minister, Wilhelm Reichart:

Reichart . . . was recognised . . . by a soldier whose sweetheart had lost her life during one of the uprisings. This government soldier immediately gave him a terrible blow to the face. To which the man replied: ‘I am Reichart, Minister of War of the Soviet Republic.’ Another blow to the face. The soldiers made a sport of forcing him again and again to cry out: ‘I am Reichart, Minister of War of the Soviet Republic’, after which they repeatedly hit him in the face, so that by the end he had a terribly swollen head. Then they put him on a train, and at each station he was made to shout out of the window: ‘I am Reichart, Minister of War of the Soviet Republic’, upon which he was again repeatedly beaten about the head.
6

Whether the far left could ever have taken control of the entire Reich is doubtful. Even in Berlin, in March 1919 – a much better planned and executed attempt at a coup than the poorly organised affair that cost Liebknecht and Luxemburg their lives two months earlier – the revolutionaries never seriously threatened the centre of power. Their main achievement was to divide the German capital into two bitterly hostile camps – the middle and upper class ‘West’ of Berlin and the proletarian ‘East’, where the Spartacists had their strongholds – and to push the new government into a ruthless frame of mind.

Noske, the socialist who had accepted the role of ‘bloodhound’ and now seemed to be playing it with a little too much relish, issued an order during the second Berlin uprising that any civilians found ‘in the act of armed conflict against the Government forces’ should be shot on the spot. Once passed through the chain of command of the Freikorps, this order turned out to be open to, shall we say, free interpretation. Like their comrades in Munich, reactionary Freikorps commanders such as Captain Pabst of the Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division clearly saw this as carte blanche to rid the country of dangerous subversives and Communist riff-raff, and the instruction was conveyed to the ordinary Freikorps members in that spirit.

Harry Kessler, appalled at the violence of the government’s response, wrote that Noske was ‘ensconced in the Ministry of War behind barbed wire. With seven officers, twelve non-commissioned officers, and fifty rankers as his personal guard, just like Nicholas II
*
or the tyrant Dionysus.’
7

For the next four or more years, all the same, the danger of armed rebellion from the left or right persisted in Germany. One problem was the ready availability of arms and ammunition, a consequence in part of widespread desertion from the army in November 1918, followed, under circumstances of less than perfect discipline, by mass demobilisation and the disbandment of most regular units. The radical artist George Grosz, at that time a strong Spartacist sympathiser, recalled the near-anarchic situation in 1919:

Guns and ammunition were freely on sale. My cousin, who was released from the army a short time after me, brought me a complete machine-gun one day. I could pay for it in easy instalments, he said. And did I perhaps know anyone who might be interested in buying two more machine-guns and a small field-piece? (He was, of course, thinking of my links with certain political organisations, which had started to arm themselves against their rivals.)
8

Certainly, while lacking true mass support, the Spartacists and their Communist successors could never complain about being short of weaponry.

Meanwhile, the world looked on. Most Germans were not involved in the fighting. Most wanted peace, employment and the rule of law, and supported measures necessary to achieve those things. This was even true of many who joined the Freikorps, often remaining with the colours for quite short periods of time. In some cases, these relatively brief spells in uniform resemble those experienced by armed volunteer police units at many historical junctures and in many places, from the early nineteenth-century English Yeomanry and Special Constables, to the
Garde nationale
in France, or the National Guard in America.

Hermann Zander, for instance, still in his early twenties, joined a Freikorps unit, ‘Bahrenfeld’, in the Hamburg suburb of Altona in June 1919, along with several of his colleagues from the bank where he worked as a clerk. Hamburg had recently been subjected to fierce rioting, during which Communist-led groups had seized a number of the city’s public buildings, including the prison and the city hall. The Freikorps unit, composed of four companies, totalled around 120 men. Zander’s company was assigned to guard the docks, while the other three companies took part in an attempt to drive the ‘Reds’ out of the city hall. ‘The other companies stormed the city hall, but then lost it again to the Reds. We couldn’t make headway against the Reds.’ The Mayor of Hamburg, a Majority Social Democrat, then called in the Reichswehr. Regular troops under General von Lettow-Vorbeck, a war hero who had waged a successful guerrilla campaign against the British in the former German East Africa, finally cleared the city hall. There were mass arrests and some deaths. ‘This military episode ended for me with a parade on the Spielbudenplatz on Saint Pauli,’ Zander concluded breezily and with a minimum of fanaticism.
9

Many, perhaps the majority, including those who, like Zander, took to arms on a purely temporary basis, hoped that beyond the chaos and the violence lay not just an orderly, prosperous Germany but a fair and reasonable new world organised along the lines proposed under President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. ‘Germans,’ as one distinguished historian of the Versailles Treaty wrote, ‘clutched at the Fourteen Points like a life-raft.’
10
An American diplomat in Paris, Ellis Dresel, wrote:

The people had been led to believe that Germany had been unluckily beaten after a fine and clean fight, owing to the ruinous effect of the blockade on the home morale, and perhaps some too far-reaching plans of her leaders, but that happily President Wilson could be appealed to, and would arrange a compromise peace satisfactory to Germany.