Witness to the German Revolution (2 page)

Much that has been written on Germany in 1923 has focused on the relations between the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Russian leadership of the Comintern. Serge tells us nothing new on this—even if he had been aware of such discussions, they would not have been suitable matter for publication. What he does give is a vivid account of events in Germany during 1923, and in particular a picture of the consciousness and mood of the working class, the crucial factor in evaluating any revolutionary situation. Serge is describing the German events for an audience abroad—and especially for the French left—his former comrades and the people whose solidarity would be crucial if German workers made a bid for power.

Working in a press agency, Serge read the entire range of the German press from far left to far right. He also had access to the KPD's internal channels of communication. But on top of that he found time to walk the streets and observe daily life. He documented the inflation of 1923 with lists of figures that sometimes become wearisome. But he always quickly returned to the concrete—what did it mean for a worker with two children who wanted to buy some bread and an egg? The major events of the year—the French occupation of the Ruhr, the rise of Hitler, the creation of “workers' governments”—were followed through week by week.

But, despite their fragmentary appearance, Serge's reports were not just random impressions. Serge's account was in fact structured by a rigorously Marxist, materialist method. At the very core was the theme to which he returned again and again—the need for German capitalism to restore its profits. There was only one way it could achieve this—by increasing the level of exploitation. Hence the key aims of cutting real wages and extending the working day from eight to ten hours (reversing the one real gain of the 1918 revolution). It is this that makes sense of the otherwise confusing political fluctuations of the period. Would the bourgeoisie opt for parliamentary democracy (with or without the social democrats), for military dictatorship, or for the Nazis? The answer: whichever would best enable it to increase exploitation and raise profits.

Around this central core Serge accumulated a mass of detail which illuminated the crisis. A trial verdict made clear the balance of class forces. An art exhibition revealed the way in which capitalist decline dehumanized. (It is hard to know which is more surprising: that art exhibitions still took place in 1923, or that Serge found time to attend them.) When he observed a policeman watching a bread queue and looking miserable, he speculated that the cause of the misery was the fact that his wife was in the queue. In one sentence
Serge said more about the contradictory nature of the bourgeois state than many learned tomes.

For many years Serge's reputation has rested on his novels and his
Memoirs
. But his earlier writings from his period as a Bolshevik activist show that before being a remarkable novelist he was a remarkable journalist.
⁸
At a time when we have seen so many journalists, during the recent Balkan War, acting as mere transmitters of the government line, it is important to remember that revolutionary journalism has a quite different history—that it can combine passionate commitment with honest observation. Serge wrote with wit, humor and irony, but above all it was anger that motivated his writing—anger at a system in which the rich got richer while, over ten years, working people faced first slaughter in the trenches, then armed repression, and finally starvation. It is Serge's anger, controlled but never suppressed, which makes this book such a striking testimony to the experience of a revolutionary year.

Serge could not tell all he knew in these articles. He was writing under the gaze of the enemy, and the KPD's secret activity (especially its plans for insurrection in October 1923) was not a matter for the public press. Nobody could blame Serge for being deliberately misleading. But, as he made clear in the later articles, a major defeat had taken place. It was the responsibility of a revolutionary party to exercise the most rigorous self criticism. Lenin was on his deathbed, and the Comintern was now in the hands of Zinoviev, a man Serge aptly described as “Lenin's biggest mistake.”
⁹
But the tradition of honest accounting had not yet been destroyed, and Serge's attempts at evaluating the causes of failure were in marked contrast to the blustering, triumphalist style that characterized the Comintern in the Stalinist epoch.

Serge wrote as an activist working with the KPD, and as such he brought out the party's heroism, its resolute opposition to the
corruption and injustice of crisis-ridden capitalism, the dedication of its rank and file. But, reading between the lines, it is also possible to see the fundamental weakness of the KPD. The year 1923 was a frantic one. From demonstration to strike, and from crisis to arrest, militants scarcely had time to sleep. The preceding years since 1918 had been equally hectic. Amid such frenetic activity it was not possible to build a stable and consistent leadership, and to establish the necessary relations of intelligent trust between leadership and rank and file activists. The KPD had come into existence only in 1917; no organization had been built in advance of the crisis. Hence the rapid changes of leadership, the hesitations and tactical zigzags that marked the years of upheaval.

In retrospect it is easy to point to things that Serge missed. He was far too pessimistic about the cultural decay of postwar Germany. While he was very much aware of the rise of anti-Semitism, he tended to see it as a throwback to a more backward society like tsarist Russia rather than as a grim portent of much worse to come.

It is also possible to detect a certain ultra-leftism in Serge's account, perhaps deriving from his anarchist past, but also reflecting a continuing weakness of the German revolutionary tradition. He was quite right to denounce the cowardice and betrayals of the SPD—the party of Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske had since 1918 pursued a policy that was not only treacherous but murderous. But denunciation was not enough. No revolution could be made in Germany without winning over the mass of workers still under the influence of social democracy, and although Serge described the various attempts to implement a united front policy he sometimes underestimated the need to win over social democratic workers.

Like so many Marxists before and since, Serge compressed the timescale. Often he wrote as though German capitalism had no way out in 1923. In fact, the Wilhelm Marx government did
achieve temporary stabilization—there was even a brief period of prosperity in the mid-1920s. But on the essential point Serge was all too right—the choice was socialism or fascism, and the failure of socialism, in 1923 and later, as the KPD lurched into Stalinism, left no alternative to the triumph of Hitler. An understanding of the failure of 1923 is essential to seeing why and how Hitler came to power, and Serge was a lucid witness of that failure.

In some ways the world of the Weimar Republic may seem very remote to modern readers. Yet there are many features of Serge's account that remind us we are still confronting the same bankrupt social system. The starvation that haunts large parts of the Third World, the disintegration of 1990s Russia, the economic sabotage that preceded Pinochet's coup in Chile, the sheer lunacy of the international money markets—all these have their counterparts in Serge's account.

History does not repeat itself, but a knowledge of the past arms us for the future. Serge himself summed it up beautifully in his novel
Birth of Our Power
, when he reflected that defeated revolutionaries could look forward to the success in the future of others, “infinitely different from us, infinitely like us.”
¹⁰

Ian Birchall
January 1999

Note on Translation

A collection of Serge's writings on Germany—
Notes d'Allemagne
—was published in French by Serge's nephew, Bernard Némoz, and Pierre Broué. I am deeply indebted to their work, but I have arranged the material in a different way (see appendix). I have also added eight further pieces not included in the Broué edition. Serge wrote copiously at this time under his own name and under pseudonyms. Even for 1923 I have translated only a selection of his work. There is still plenty more material for others to discover and translate. Correspon-dance internationale, for which Serge wrote, was a press service designed to provide material for the Communist press around the world. Hence it is possible some of Serge's articles appeared in English at the time. However, apart from some short extracts in
Revolutionary History 5/2
(1994), none of it has appeared in English in recent years.

Serge was working in a difficult and hectic situation. He, and his printers, obviously made mistakes, and on occasions he may
have received faulty information. I have corrected obvious misprints but have not otherwise changed any details, preferring to leave the reader with Serge's view at the time he wrote. Thus his reference to “Colonel Hitler” gives an interesting insight into how little was known of Hitler in 1923. I have used the most recognizable forms of place and personal names—thus “Gdansk” and “Aachen” rather than “Danzig” and “Aix-la-Chapelle.” I have not attempted to check or correct Serge's arithmetic, which occasionally seems shaky. All notes have been added by the translator except where specifically indicated as “Serge's note.”

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Richard Greeman for encouragement and advice on this project, to Sharon O'Nions for critical comments on the translation and notes, and to the late Peter Sedgwick, who first made me aware of Serge over 30 years ago.

I thank staff at the British Library and the LSE library for their assistance. I was working at the British Library during the period of the campaign against the proposed introduction of charges for use of that library. Fortunately the campaign succeeded, otherwise independent socialist historians like myself would be unable to gain access to our socialist heritage.

I was unable to consult material at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris because of the collapse of the computerised system at the aptly named François Mitterrand site. But I salute the staff there who took strike action against unacceptable working conditions.

Chronology

Abbreviations and German Terms Used in Text

ADGB:
Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund—main (SPD-linked) trade union federation.

AfA:
Allgemeiner freier Angestelltenbund—main white collar union federation.

DDP:
Deutsche Demokratische Partei—German Democratic Party (liberal).

DNVP:
Deutschnationale Volkspartei—German National People's Party (right wing conservative).

DVP:
Deutsche Volkspartei—German People's Party (liberal/ nationalist).

KPD:
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands—German Communist Party.

SPD
(or
VSPD
): (Vereinigte) Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands—German Social Democratic Party after reunification with USPD.

USPD:
Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands—Independent Social Democratic Party (only a small group in 1923 after bulk of party fused with SPD).

Landtag:
Parliament of one of the constituent states (Länder) of the Reich.

Reich:
From 1918 to 1933 the republic. Refers to the federal government as opposed to the constituent states (Länder) which had their own governments and considerable autonomy.

Reichsrat:
The upper house of the federal parliament, with representatives from the various constituent states.

Reichstag:
The federal parliament.

Reichswehr:
Armed forces of the republic.