Witness to the German Revolution (24 page)

Was this the great class battle we have all been waiting for for months? October 30…

The next day, Germany learned that a right wing socialist government (Fellisch) had been formed at Dresden. Social democrats had accepted, from the hands of Herr Heinze, the ministerial portfolios which had been brutally snatched from their party comrades. Bowing and scraping to the Man of Order, they entered the ministries, which were still occupied by troops. Smirking officers saluted them. The general strike no longer had any meaning. A strike for what? For whom? Socialists had regained power. Virtually nothing had happened, after all!
Vorwärts
explained that you really couldn't leave the Communists in power in Saxony… Herr Stresemann was right. All the blame lay with the Communists.

The right wing press exclaimed along with the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung:
“At last!” The whole democratic press condemned the chancellor's coup against red Saxony. For having criticized “Herr Stresemann's putsch” too severely, the
Berliner Volkszeitung
(DDP) has been suspended.

Only
Vorwärts
considered that there was no doubt as to the legality of the decisions of citizen Ebert and Herr Stresemann.

Not that it approved them completely; on the contrary, it was very grieved. The SPD ministers explained that it was only under protest that they endorsed the measures against Saxony; moreover, if they didn't walk out, they didn't actually vote for them either… There is nothing so ambiguous, so disloyal, so pathetic, so confused as the explanations of the central leadership of the United Social Democratic Party.
¹⁶⁵
“Do not be so quick to judge us… We
are going to consider… We shall explain to you… We shall act…” These men feel that reaction is playing with them, is dishonoring them. They have just stuck a dagger in the back of the German revolution, but the deed was done very clumsily: their whole party saw the criminal act and can see the depth of the wound…

The bourgeoisie has just given this debased and apathetic social democracy the humiliation it deserves. The Berlin
Deutsche Zeitung
of October 30 declares: “Social democracy has been overpowered. It has bowed down right to the ground in the hope of avoiding the blow. According to all the rules of tactics, this is the moment for its enemies to strike. Now or never!” The more it degrades itself, the more its masters despise it. The more it retreats, the more it is in danger. It's an object lesson.

There is a precise, material danger, unfortunately worse than that which is facing the SPD, confronting the betrayed proletariat. Red Saxony is a demolished citadel. There remains Thuringia, on the road to Berlin, between Bavaria and the red capital of Germany. The
Sozialistische Parlementarische Korrespondenz
(Socialist Parliamentary Correspondence) has revealed what sort of a plot is being hatched against Thuringia, where there is still a workers' government.

The fascist organization Bavaria and Reich
¹⁶⁶
is watching the Thuringian frontier. At Coburg, Kronach and Bamberg illegal detachments were already gathering their forces on October 22. Hitler and Ehrhardt had their headquarters at Coburg. The fol-lowing
illegal units were there: nine companies of Ehrhardt's naval brigade, three companies of shock troops from the National Socialist party, three from the Oberland, a battery of four cannon, a train equipped with two radio transmitters and various groups from the Young German Order.

The infantrymen wore helmets. The former Duke of Coburg-Gotha was present at the maneuvers. Cannon were seen at Fechheim (three), at Weissenturm (two) and at Burg (also two). A division similar to that occupying Coburg was concentrated at Kronach. At Bamberg, the Reichsflagge organization was deploying its forces; an area was reserved for artillery and machine guns. Aeroplanes could be seen bearing the fascist swastika. “These troops are paid in Austrian crowns and French francs.” (
Vorwärts
).

They are threatening the industrial regions of central Germany. When General Müller and the SPD ministers in the Fellisch government have sufficiently demoralized and disarmed red Saxony, when Herr Stresemann has extracted from citizens Robert Schmidt, Sollmann and Radbruch all the possible low tricks that will benefit the bourgeoisie, then the gangs of Hitler and Ehrhardt, duly backed up by the Reichswehr, will take their turn on the stage.

The Socialist President Ebert has had the workers' government of Dresden dissolved. The Socialist leaders Wels and Dittmann have formed the Fellisch government at Dresden. The masses of the party, represented by their officials—who represent them badly!—are disgusted.

In this respect the meeting of SPD office-holders in Berlin of October 31 was significant. A woman militant, Wurm, declared to
applause from the entire hall that “if the Communists are wrong, they still want to serve the proletariat,” while others pretend to be mistaken in order to serve reaction. A delegate from Freiberg (Saxony) described the appalling massacre of October 27. The Reichswehr attacked unarmed crowds. It sent artillery into action against the unemployed. Armoured cars, patrolling through quiet streets, responded to the throwing of a stone by machine-gun fire that left sixteen people dead. Fire was opened on workers' stretcher-bearers who were picking up the dead and wounded; their Red Cross flag was riddled with bullet holes. In total, twenty-seven dead, twenty-two seriously wounded and fifty others injured. For the first time voices were heard calling so clearly and strongly for civil war. By an overwhelming majority the meeting associated itself with the decision by the SPD office-holders in Leipzig to demand the expulsion of citizen Ebert from the party… The brief resolution ended with the words: “This meeting finds it unnecessary to give reasons for this demand.”

The SPD leadership and its parliamentary fraction have nonetheless attempted (today, November 1) a final effort to remain in power after long discussions in the course of which it was observed that “the SPD is far from exercising within the government the influence which it has a right to”(!)… The social democratic ministers of the German bourgeoisie will only keep their portfolios:

A hundred SPD deputies out of 130 have voted for this moderate and belated “ultimatum” to Herr Stresemann.

While these sad comedies are being enacted on the political stages of Munich, Berlin and Dresden, the revolution is advancing like a slow but sure and powerful avalanche. The extent of the financial bankruptcy—and the indescribable suffering it involves—is sufficient proof.

From October 11 to 20, Reich expenses rose to 324,117,027,000,000,000 marks: 324 quadrillion. Income, on the other hand, reached the total of 2.5 quadrillion (to be precise, 2,456,918,405 million), that is less than one percent of expenditure. On October 20, the floating debt of the Reich reached 407 quadrillion… But then the dollar was worth only about twenty billion; today it is worth 200—and I am a trillionaire just like everyone else, which I assure you isn't much fun… Banknotes for a trillion marks have appeared. It seems that every day paper money worth over 500 trillion marks is being issued. It is regretted that it is not yet possible to issue a quadrillion per day, for want of paper. They are also printing, night and day, the new “real value” paper, the gold loan: 3,000,000 in paper gold dollars have already been put into circulation! and have already lost between 30 percent and 50 percent on the black market…

According to the official cost of living index, the general increase in prices between October 22 and 29, has reached a peak of 349 percent. In the last few days, with an official exchange rate of about 65 million marks to the dollar, the prices of foodstuffs and other essential articles correspond to a rate for the dollar of between 200 and 300 billion. And this difference was mainly paid by poor people who have no dollars…

Correspondance internationale
, November 10, 1923

This year, the proximity of these two revolutionary anniversaries will force itself on all minds in Germany with pitiless rigor.

November 7, 1917 (October 25 in the Julian calendar): led by the Bolsheviks the proletarians of Petrograd seized the Winter Palace; the proletarians of Moscow entered the Kremlin… An era of unspeakable suffering opened for the Russian people: but it was also an era of heroism, of victory, of resurrection. Russia, reduced during some dark days to a territory no bigger than the Grand Duchy of Muscovy in 1500, went on to extend once more from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean, from the Arctic to the Black Sea. In four years of bitter warfare, the great capitalist powers would not succeed in defeating it. It finally imposed on them respect, peace and trade. It was to remain an invincible revolutionary stronghold, the place of asylum and refuge for all defeated revolutionaries: it would give itself new laws, boldly reform its ways of life and persevere—by the harshest paths, doubtless, but freely—on the road to socialism.

November 9, 1918: the efforts of the sailors at Kiel and Cuxhafen brought down the façade of the German Empire. For a year, until the tragic days of January 1919, when Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg died, the German social democracy, allied to the volunteer corps of the bourgeoisie, Noske allied to Ehrhardt, was to build on the corpses of proletarians the edifice of a democratic republic. It constantly threatened the crowds inspired by the Russian example with famine, with foreign intervention, with an outburst of reaction…
At the end of five years of social democratic democracy, Germany, powerless, is observing French intervention in the Rhineland and the Ruhr; its twenty million proletarians and its ten million people in humble circumstances are hungry; armed reaction is striding towards power… Because it postponed the final struggle for five years, the German proletariat merely has greater difficulties to overcome. Today, as in 1919, when the Spartacists showed it to them, there is only one road to salvation: the one where the revolutionaries have gone before them

Two anniversaries; one great confrontation in the eyes of history between reformist and revolutionary methods.

“They are complementary,” I wrote recently about Stresemann and von Kahr. Just take a look. Remember that about a week before the social democrats left the Great Coalition (November 2) Herr von Kahr had made known his intention to have no further dealings with a Reich government “under Marxist influence,” that is, containing social democrats. On this point too Herr Stresemann satisfied the Bavarian reactionaries—enough to encourage them, not enough to disarm them: that is his role.