Witness to the German Revolution (30 page)

On the very day when the KPD was dissolved by order of General Seeckt, a party member said to me with a smile: “This changes nothing. We were already illegal; our press had already been suppressed ; our central committee was already in hiding… This situation has now had a legal ratification. We used to be in a way
illegally illegal
—now we're
legally illegal…”

He added: “For my part I can see only advantages.
¹⁸⁵
The situation is clear now. All comrades will have to exercise prudence and revolutionary guile, whereas previously their old habits of social democratic legality still often had a pernicious influence. Our education as conspirators will be speeded up and made more systematic on a large scale. Our slightest moves which, when legal, might have gone unnoticed amid the minor events of political life, will at last
take on a revolutionary significance and will be noticed by the bourgeois press. And finally, it will no longer be possible to exercise any supervision over our party's activity…”

The fact is that the harsh measures taken by General von Seeckt, wittily nicknamed the last mainstay of the Republic and the last hope of the monarchy—scandalous in a democratic republic, absolutely without precedent (we should recall that the decree of dissolution also lays down the confiscation of all the property of the KPD and the Third International in Germany), seem totally pointless and totally unworkable. The illegal publications of the KPD, even in Berlin, are plainly continuing to appear; the Communist organizations have not been impaired in any way. The central committee has been dissolved; it has been replaced by a directory
¹⁸⁶
which “is based abroad.” In formal terms, the members of the CC, who no longer hold office, should not need to be in hiding, so paradoxically the dissolution of the party could be an advantage for them. To top it all, on Wednesday, November 28, it was necessary to mobilize all the police and army in Berlin to prevent a big Communist demonstration…which they failed to prevent.

At noon on that day, an alarming statement from police headquarters informed the population of Berlin that the police had been instructed to show the utmost ruthlessness against any attempt at a Communist demonstration. At 4:00pm the Reichstag was surrounded by a heavy police cordon. An impressive array of police were gathered in the Wilhelmstrasse area, around the residence of President Ebert. Armored cars crossed Unter den Linden.
¹⁸⁷
Despite the efforts of the police of the social democrats
Weiss, Richter and Severing, at 5:30pm, in the Lustgarten,
¹⁸⁸
there were more than 30,000 Communist workers singing the
Internationale
. This crowd which, in various places, had to fight the police to get to the assembly point fixed by the party, stood up to several charges by mounted police. In a neighboring street, they erected an improvised barricade. They took away their wounded, who numbered about a hundred; then they finally dispersed through the prosperous districts, despite the police brutality. This deserves to be reported. On the evening of the demonstration it was sufficient to appear on the thoroughfares of central Berlin badly dressed—that is, dressed as a worker or an unemployed person—to be pursued by the municipal police with truncheons. In the Lustgarten, the mounted police charged, armed with a new weapon, a whip with a short handle and a long lash. Its proper name is Russian—
nagaika.

Ebert and von Seeckt are installing the rule of the
nagaika.

They are still playing their role. Nonetheless, according to
Die Tribune,
the banned KPD was able to bring onto the streets of Berlin, on this bleak, cold winter evening, some sixty thousand organized, combative demonstrators.

The social democratic prime ministers of Saxony and Thuringia, Frölich and Fellisch, together with the left social democratic deputy Kurt Rosenfeld, brought before the Reichstag on November 23 some damning reports of the outrages committed by the soldiery of von Seeckt in the two workers' states of central Germany. Harmless people, suspect not of communism but of democratic sympathies,
mayors, municipal councillors, students, arrested without rhyme or reason, imprisoned in barracks, insulted, thrashed with rifle butts, stripped naked to be beaten up, thrashed, etc. A large number of such facts were cited. We know of others. Despite the denials of the Reichswehr minister, Herr Gessler (DDP), who has been exposed as a blatant liar by the deputies from Saxony and Thuringia, the solemn admission of these acts of white terror has just been formulated by General Müller, dictator at Dresden. In an order to his troops, General Müller has reminded them that “it is dishonorable for soldiers to harass unarmed populations.” And he has recognized that “regrettable excesses” have taken place. We learn that a number of Reichswehr officers and NCOs have been pensioned off as a disciplinary measure.

This is a formal confession. Despite the silence which followed the revelations made on the floor of the Reichstag, the scandal is obvious. And we don't think the confessions of General Müller will diminish their impact.

We must note the attitude of
Vorwärts
in this context, for it is worse than odious.
Vorwärts
said virtually nothing about the indignant protest of the social democrats Frölich, Fellisch and Rosenfeld in the Reichstag. It published none of their evidence; but it devoted fifty lines to the embarrassed response of minister Gessler. So that must be their political line. Was not
Vorwärts
indignant, a few days ago, at the fact that the nationalist press had accused Ebert of still being subject to Marxist influences? Imagine the anger of the editorial staff of
Vorwärts
at the idea that anyone could still take Ebert for a socialist! Finally, did not
Vorwärts
publish a statement from the central office of the SPD in which this party solemnly dissociated itself from the “anti-constitutional” actions of the Communists? They have picked their time. German social democracy remains true to itself, that is, to its cowardice, its treachery, its endless servility to bourgeois dictatorship…

Herr Severing's opinion on the current political situation in Germany, and in particular in Prussia, is interesting to discover. Citizen Severing, social democratic minister of the interior in the Great Coalition government in Prussia, has done remarkable service for the bourgeoisie. He played a notable role in the provocation which led to the Communist rising in March 1921. He then and subsequently allowed a certain number of workers to be murdered. In Prussia he dissolved the workers' hundreds and the central organizations of the factory committees. His contribution is therefore considerable in the eyes of the reactionaries. The DNVP nonetheless demanded his removal from the Prussian cabinet in recent days, as well as that of the other SPD ministers. For they don't think this Socialist minister is reactionary enough yet. They think that from now on they can do without the Socialist lackeys of bourgeois power.

Two days ago Herr Severing granted a long interview to a journalist from
Der Abend
(The Evening), of which we shall give a summary of the main passages:

“A right wing government would at the very least tolerate the armed organizations of the extreme right, which would enable them to import Bavarian methods into North Germany.”

Citizen Severing thinks that for the SPD to leave the Prussian government would be a disaster, for the consequence would be an acute intensification of the class struggle in Prussia. So the socialism of the Second International has nothing to do with class struggle, does it?

Citizen Severing does not think that the German Republic needs to be defended by private organizations such as exist, for example, in Austria. Here are his reasons: “Everything depends on the attitude of the Reichswehr. If the Reichswehr defends the constitution and the republic, then all the attacks on them will easily be repulsed. If the Reichswehr turns against the Republic, then the republican population, which is more or less disarmed, cannot win. Thus if the Reichswehr is for the Republic, then the Republic has no need of other defenders; if the Reichswehr is against it, then nobody can now save the Republic.”

I've translated this word for word. So the Prussian social democratic minister, in his horror at class struggle and revolutionary action, thinks that the German bourgeoisie needs no more than a hundred thousand reactionary soldiers to impose on eighteen million people in humble circumstances, who now face ruin, any ostensibly republican regime in which the monarchists are pulling the strings, or even an undisguised dictatorship or restored monarchy.

Citizen Severing puts all his hopes—as does president Ebert; that is no secret—in the inscrutable General von Seeckt. And he says so quite clearly to the
Abend
journalist, Herr H. Frei:

“General von Seeckt's attitude will have a very considerable importance. Von Seeckt is an extremely intelligent man, politically realistic and clear-headed. It may be said that for as long as
Germany's internal regime has to reckon with external difficulties, then General von Seeckt will see no possibility of modifying the established order…”

Shall I take the liberty of interpreting this sentence which is scarcely ambiguous? As long as the governments in Paris and London, or at least one of them, have not indicated their acquiescence in a restoration of the monarchy in Germany, then the cautious General von Seeckt will not throw into the scales his sword which is heavier than the will of a whole proletariat, of the best organized proletariat in Europe.

In these statements by minister Severing, social democrat Severing, there is nothing but double dealing, admission of impotence, admission of betrayal, awareness of the weakness of social democracy. Few contemporary documents seem to us to be more revealing of the state of mind of a great workers' party in degeneration.

Today a Marx government is being formed, headed by one of the leaders of the Catholic Center Party. The new chancellor expects to govern with the support of the center parties and the benevolent neutrality of the DNVP. Herr Stresemann and Dr. Jarres remain in his cabinet, as do Gessler of the DDP and the former member of the German National Party, Baron Kanitz. Herr Marx offered the ministry of economics to the general manager of the Stinnes companies, Minoux, who refused it.

The new cabinet, not much different from the old one, whose policies it will continue in every respect, is a cabinet in which bourgeois interests are concentrated. It intends to hold elections, but in a few months—a few long months, during which an effort will be made to disarm the proletariat and to eliminate from the administration
of the nation the social democratic element, which despite its servility is unreliable in the eyes of the leaders of heavy industry and agriculture.

The latter are setting out their plans so clearly that Herr Hergt has just written to president Ebert to ask him to form a right wing government in which the DNVP would have the place it deserves!

And the SPD?

Vorwärts
this morning (November 30) makes flattering advances to Herr Marx, praising his “reasonable character,” his positive spirit, and his honesty, and promising him the benevolent neutrality of the VSPD, doubtless on condition that his way of serving reaction is not too shocking to the democratic circles who are determined to make any capitulations that are in the slightest degree respectable.

In the same issue of
Vorwärts,
citizen Dittmann, who now signs himself “former member of the council of people's commissars”
¹⁹⁰
of the German Republic—who would have guessed it?—has discovered a completely forgotten law, promulgated on November 12, 1918, by the people's commissars, which legally established the eight-hour day. The official point of view of the German government is different. And the “former people's commissar” must be very naïve to imagine that digging up a scrap of paper, signed by himself and other colleagues of the same quality, will impose on Stinnes, Krupp, Wolff, von Seeckt, Marx and their associates any respect for the eight-hour day which they claim is legally canceled!

Correspondance internationale
, December 19, 1923

Is there still a parliament in Germany? Under chancellor Marx the fiction of a democratic regime is based only on wearisome combinations of parliamentary arithmetic, which, moreover, are so unreliable that they give the present government no stability and no strength and do not even succeed in concealing some brutal realities…