Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  In the drawing room at Amerongen Wilhelm’s alternatives are weighed up. Of course, one option is simply to ignore the government’s request, stay in Holland and see what happens. Another is to find a way of Wilhelm giving himself up to the Americans, thereby avoiding the wrath of the British and the French. Conversation soon turns to a more dramatic possibility: escaping to some more friendly country–or even returning to Germany.

  This will not be easy. For a start, Count Bentinck’s house is surrounded by two moats. These can only be crossed either by using the castle rowing boat, or else by waiting for a cold snap to freeze the ice thick enough to cross on foot. (Wise to this possibility, the Dutch police regularly break up any ice formations.) Beyond the moats lie the grounds of Count Bentinck’s estate, which are patrolled. And even if an escape party were to succeed and get onto a public road, that’s when the real problems start. As Charles de Gaulle knows to his cost, travelling incognito in a foreign country is no easy matter. Wilhelm’s advisers suggest the Kaiser shave off his moustache, dye his hair and acquire a pince-nez. ‘What about my damn arm?’ he asks. A suitable disguise is devised.

  Taking a train after his escape could become very undignified if Wilhelm were recognised by other passengers. Perhaps he could hide out on a pleasure-steamer on the Rhine, one adviser suggests, and then make a dash for Scandinavia, like Ludendorff. Someone else proposes that a small aeroplane fly the Kaiser to a farm in East Prussia or a chalet in the Black Forest. (The problem of how to actually get hold of a plane proves insuperable.) A final, and more realistic, suggestion involves Wilhelm feigning illness. Such an option has three substantial merits. First, the Kaiser’s nervous state is already very poor, so additional illness will be easily believed. Second, illness will likely increase Dutch popular sympathy for the poor man (and thus make it less likely that the government will turn its request that he leave into a deportation order). Third, a sick Kaiser could be sent to a sanatorium on medical grounds, from which it might then be easier to escape than from Amerongen.

  To play his part, the Kaiser takes to bed. His head is bandaged, and word spread about an ear infection. For six weeks, he takes meals only in his room rather than at the family dining table. A friendly German-Swiss doctor with a background in psychiatry is called in from Antwerp to both treat the Kaiser’s nerves, and stand witness to the reality of his illness.

  So in the final weeks of 1918, Wilhelm stews in his room, with a view out over the moat and to a world which suddenly seems very far away. He considers the enormity of the betrayal he has suffered. He starts to write his memoirs.

  BERLIN: German soldiers return home to find cold hearths and hungry mouths. The discharge suits never fit. Some are just given the cloth and told to make the suits themselves. Ebert worries about their morale, concerned they will fall in with the Spartacists.

  In Berlin, he greets them in person in a speech. ‘Comrades,’ he begins, ‘welcome back to your homeland which has so longed for your return and for which you have experienced such anguish.’ He lavishes praise on the ‘superhuman deeds’ of the rank and file. ‘You have kept the murder and fire of war away from your wives, your children, your parents’, Ebert says. In some parts, it sounds almost like a victory speech–‘no enemy has overcome you’, the German leader declares–in others, it sounds like a plea for help. The task now is to hold the country together: ‘Germany’s unity lies in your hands’.

  The country has never been more divided. The German Reich, less than fifty years old, could easily break up. A current of separatism runs through the politics of Germany from Bavaria to Silesia and the Rhineland. In the German-occupied east, schemes are hatched for a Baltic imperium run by the region’s German minority. Revolutionaries in Munich are unwilling to take orders from Berlin. Conservative Bavarians wonder if it might be possible to create a new southern German state incorporating Catholic German-speakers from the Rhine to the Danube, as a counterweight to Prussian domination.

  ‘We have one enemy above all we must fight’, the Social Democratic leader tells one journalist, ‘the attempts of individuals to overthrow the new order through armed putsches’. The country is awash with enough weaponry to start a civil war. The Spartacists are accused of agitating for a coup in Berlin. They, in turn, declare Ebert’s regime a counter-revolutionary front and demand that the workers be armed against it. Enterprising right-wing officers form volunteer militias, the Freikorps, to intervene as required.

  MOSCOW: As usual, the impatient revolutionary’s mind darts between the big picture and the mundane, between theory and practice, between the grand course of world revolution and petty administrative matters which seem to be holding everything up at home.

  It is all so frustrating. Orders are issued, and people do not follow them. Decrees are published, then nothing happens. Lenin gives instructions but has to repeat them two or three times and then check to see if they have been understood. Why is it all not working better? ‘Any worker will master any ministry within a few days’, he said in 1917, just before the coup. It does not seem to be panning out that way.

  In food matters, Vladimir can blame the kulaks for hoarding grain–how else to explain the poor results of his requisitions policy? In more general matters of daily administration, he blames ‘bureaucracy’, a legacy of the old world, for holding things up. But how is one supposed to run the country without bureaucracy? There is so much to do. The nationalisation of all big companies has swollen the state’s responsibilities. Accurate information has to be collected so they can be properly managed (Vladimir has a mania for accounting, imagining an economic system where information will take the place of human choice). The chaos on the railways must be sorted out.

  True socialism–an economy run by the people for the people–cannot be built in a day. In the interim, the state will rule on the proletariat’s behalf. Someone needs to decide how many galoshes have to be produced, whether to feed horses oats or wheat. Under war conditions, centralisation is essential. A Council of People’s Commissars is set up for the job.

  Councils and committees grow like weeds in the brave new Soviet Republic. The number of state officials keeps creeping up. More and more people join the Communist Party simply as a means to advance their careers in the various branches of administration established since the revolution. A new bureaucratic class is being created, a class of managers, like in the big capitalist enterprises that Lenin so admires for their feats of production and efficiency. But whereas capitalist managers seem able to make things work in the West, in revolutionary Russia, the lifts in the Kremlin still break down on a daily basis. Moscow is perpetually on the brink of starvation.

  Lenin himself works from dawn till dusk with the blinds drawn up. His office is deliberately maintained at a Siberian temperature. He keeps his feet warm with a sheepskin mat under his desk, and protests at the luxury when somebody replaces it with polar bear. He always turns off the light when he leaves, normally late at night. Reports from subordinates pile up on his desk; his secretaries learn what they are allowed to touch (a pair of scissors on a pile of papers means: do not dare). He always reads the ends of the reports first, leaving out what he calls the ‘literature’. A register is kept of those who are late for meetings. And yet despite all these attempts to promote efficient working practices Lenin feels himself in constant struggle against the most insidious, evil, invisible enemy–red tape.

  And then there is the big job of educating the masses. Nadya, staying for a while to recuperate from illness in a children’s school on the outskirts of Moscow, where the crisp air smells of pine, shows Vladimir the letters she receives from peasants in the provinces. No one out in the sticks has a clue what is going on in the Bolshevik capital. The peasants ask stupid questions about the meaning of government decrees. One could try sending newspapers to make them better informed–but then again, Nadya points out, there is not enough paper and the peasants cannot read. Vladimir suggests setting up enquiry offices in every village in the land.
He drafts rules about how such desks should be managed: a book must be kept in which every enquiry, and the person responsible for dealing with it, is jotted down. Personal responsibility is key.

  War commissar Trotsky sends more immediate complaints back to the Red capital. There is no grease for the guns, and no hay for the horses. Factories have stopped producing shells and guns. How is he supposed to win a war under such circumstances? In December, dreadful news arrives in Moscow that the Ural city of Perm, the gateway between Siberia and central Russia, has fallen to Kolchak’s army. Comrade Stalin is sent to investigate.

  The vice is tightening again. In 1919, it will either snap shut or break.

  TRAUNSTEIN-IM-CHIEMGAU, BAVARIA: Adolf settles into a new job working at a prisoner-of-war camp by the Austrian border. The camp is being wound down. The French POWs are nearly all gone. The Russians remain. Adolf works in the clothing distribution section, keen to demonstrate his reliability and usefulness. To most he is virtually invisible: he has just one friend in the camp. Local newspapers report Woodrow Wilson’s arrival in Paris. There is still hope for a final peace on honourable, American terms. The white tops of the Alps shimmer in the distance.

  ZURICH: In Switzerland, that wartime haven for Europe’s oddballs, draft-dodgers, revolutionaries and spies, Tristan Tzara and his friends greet the war’s end with the publication, in Dada magazine, of a manifesto for their movement.

  What is this strange, chaotic, rambling document? Is it a call to arms? A mirror to a world gone mad? A provocation? A joke? ‘Dada means nothing’, the manifesto tells its readers halfway through. But no one is fooled by that. In the hands of a showman such as Tzara, self-contradiction is a technique as much as a position. Even an anti-manifesto is a manifesto. And all manifestos, whether written by an American President, a Russian revolutionary or a Romanian poet, demand the same thing from the world: attention. If only Tzara had an aeroplane to distribute the tract from the skies, like that showman D’Annunzio over Vienna.

  For Dada, at this minute, nothing could be more urgent than publicity. Zurich has had its day. As the city’s temporary cosmopolitans pack up their bags to return home and the city fades back into its normal peacetime obscurity, Tzara knows that his Dada, the Dada of Zurich, must reach out to the world–or else become as charming and irrelevant as a cuckoo clock. In the scramble for peacetime attention, Zurich Dada cannot be left behind. After four years of war there are plenty of others–radical nationalists, Futurists, Communists–who are rivals in the race for relevance. The manifesto is a shout, a cry, a demand to be heard. Look at me!

  Incendiary phrases swarm across the page, each line a tightly bound packet of dark Dadaist energy, a heavy mass of contradictions and conundrums, like a universe collapsed in on itself, incapable of resolution. ‘Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation = negation’, the manifesto claims. ‘Each man must shout: there is work to do–destructive and negative. To sweep, to clean.’ Sentimentality is bourgeois. Logic is bunk. Art must be free to be what it wants to be–or not be art at all. The individual is all. Spontaneity is life. ‘We are a furious wind’, the manifesto declares, ‘tearing up the fabric of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.’ This is the news from Zurich’s Dadaland: angry, exhilarating, funny, determined. (In Berlin, where Dada has now gained a second foothold, they are more political, but no less self-contradictory: ‘To be against this manifesto is to be a Dadaist!’ the Berlin lot wrote in their own manifesto earlier in the year.)

  As Tzara proclaims it, after four years of bloody and purposeless carnage, the only adequate response to the sanctimony and hypocrisy of bourgeois society is energy, activity, spectacle, provocation. ‘How can one contemplate ordering the chaos of humankind’s infinite, formless variation?’ the manifesto asks. How indeed? And so Dada proposes not a practical programme for how to remake the world, so much as an impulse to shake it from its torpor. Tzara is no dialectical materialist. Disaster, and chance, are to be embraced for their own sake. ‘Freedom: DADA DADA DADA’, the manifesto cries, ‘howl of taut colour, interweaving of opposites and contradictions, grotesques and in-consequences: LIFE.’ To those who have been so close to death these past few years, this fulsome appeal to life–violent and unruly–has an unmistakeable appeal.

  A copy of the magazine makes its way to Paris a few weeks later and into the hands of a young man searching for a cause: André Breton.

  BERLIN: On Christmas Eve, Berliners are woken by the boom of artillery. Troops loyal to Friedrich Ebert’s regime launch an assault to dislodge radical sailors from the royal palace in Berlin.

  Incredibly, they fail. The palace stables are used to stack the dead. Ebert fears for his life. Several members of his government of People’s Commissars resign in disgust at his decision to launch the attack. On the day of the sailors’ funerals demonstrations are held on both sides. There are daily rumours of a Spartacist coup. ‘We are on the edge of the abyss’, report the newspapers.

  During these weeks of unrest and uncertainty, Rosa Luxemburg works long hours on the Spartacist newspaper, the Rote Fahne. She discusses, watches, debates. ‘Can you tell me why I constantly live like this?’ she asks her friend Mathilde one evening, walking to the Berlin metro just before midnight. ‘I would like to paint and live on a little plot of land where I can feed and love the animals’, she says: ‘but above all to live peacefully and on my own, not in this eternal whirlwind.’ Mathilde worries for her friend. Is she exhausting herself? Is she living too intensely? Is she perhaps too revolutionary? One of Rosa’s former lovers tells Mathilde not to worry: ‘If Rosa lived differently she would be even less satisfied’, he says. ‘She cannot live differently.’

  VIENNA: Sigmund Freud finally gets word that his son Martin is alive. He has washed up in an Italian military hospital. Information is scant, but his injuries do not appear to be serious.

  Just before the end of the year more definite news arrives: Martin is now in a convalescent hospital in Teramo, a town in the Apennine mountains not far from Italy’s Adriatic shore. Freud, looking out of his frosty window at Berggasse 19, imagines the view his son Martin must have from his hospital bed. A few weeks later and Martin has moved again, this time to a barracks in Genoa, in the north of Italy, with a view of a lighthouse and the Mediterranean.

  DOUAI, FRANCE: From the soil of a French artist’s garden, a resurrection. French soldiers are commandeered to do the job. She was buried in the garden five years ago, when German soldiers came storming through, looking for loot. Now she is free again. Rodin’s Eve. In bronze.

  MOSCOW: Vladimir receives a message from an old friend, alongside a very special Christmas gift: the latest publication of the German Spartacist League. ‘God grant that the coming year will bring us great fulfilments’, the letter reads. It is signed: Roza.

  1919

  Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.

  Mohandas Gandhi

  Proletarians, to horse!

  Leon Trotsky

  WINTER

  A ROAD OUTSIDE MOSCOW: The former territory of the Russian Empire is a dangerous place to be this winter. All is upheaval. In the capital of the Soviet Republic, ice bursts open all the water pipes. No one repairs them. In five years, someone says, all the buildings will have fallen down. In ten, we will be running around on all fours like animals, another jokes.

  War stalks the land. Bandit units prowl the borderlands of Russia and Mongolia, led by a man who claims to be either a new Genghis Khan or a new Napoleon. The Muslim population of Central Asia is in a state of insurrection. Lawless Ukraine is torn in every direction as the Germans pull out. A wave of pogrom violence intensifies. In Siberia the new darling of the Whites, Kolchak, tries to persuade the world they should lend him their support so he can restore law and order. (Meanwhile, he crushes moderate Socialist Revolutionaries who cannot decide who they dislike more: Kolchak or Lenin.) The conquest of Perm in the Urals gives him
a new base from which to attack Bolshevism’s citadel in central Russia.

  Who wouldn’t want to escape this maelstrom if they could? With the war over in Europe and their country’s independence won, most Czech troops in Russia can now think only of how to get home. The Russian conundrum is a mess that they cannot solve; there is no love lost between them and Kolchak. They are told to wait a little longer, and assigned guard duties along the trans-Siberian railway. The first boatload of Czech troops–sick with tuberculosis–is finally allowed to leave Russia via the Japanese-occupied port of Vladivostok. A long journey around Asia and Africa awaits them. But what is two months at sea compared to three years in the Russian soup?

  Is nowhere safe? Vladimir Ilyich and his sister Maria are on their way to visit Nadya at the forest school she is staying at on the outskirts of Moscow. A traditional Russian Christmas party is in store. A fir tree has been specially decorated by the children with whom Nadya has made friends. The impatient revolutionary’s motor car bumps over the wintry road out of town. And then, unexpectedly, it skids to a halt. A hold-up. The outlaws take everyone’s papers and money, and make off with the car. A member of the Cheka travelling with the boss is left standing in the middle of the road holding a giant pail of milk which was to have been delivered to Nadya as a special gift. The car is recovered later that night, with a policeman and a soldier shot dead next to it.

  A thousand miles to the south of Moscow, the ragged, typhus-riddled Red Army of the North Caucasus launches a New Year’s attack on the White army led by General Denikin. Their advance is quickly stopped. A sweeping White counter-offensive begins soon after, led by a dashing cavalry officer named Wrangel. Town after town falls as the Whites clear the more numerous Reds out of the area. Though still miles away from Moscow and separated from each other by huge swathes of territory under Bolshevik control, the White forces of Kolchak and Denikin are on the move again.