The Communists demand that the strikes first launched in resistance to the putsch are now used to launch Germany leftward towards Bolshevism. They are sickened at the idea of negotiations between the putschists and the Social Democratic government. ‘The strike must continue until the clique of officers have been totally defeated, and until the workers and employees have been armed against any possible further aggression’, reads a Communist Party statement.
In western Germany, the industrial Ruhr region is convulsed with political and social unrest. In the city of Duisburg, where the Rhine and the Ruhr rivers meet, a workers’ council proclaims the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The mines are closed. A volunteer Red army is formed. Fighting breaks out. The region is spinning out of control again. After attempts to break the deadlock through political negotiation fail, Freikorps units join the regular army to restore order.
In the south, the conservative right in Bavaria present their region as a bulwark against revolution. While Kapp flees to Sweden, Ludendorff moves to Munich. The city that once seemed the capital of Marxist radical chic now becomes a magnet for Europe’s counter-revolutionaries: militarist Prussians and Baltic Germans who feel that Berlin has betrayed them, and White Russians who dream of a return to power in Petrograd.
The left bank of the Rhine remains under Allied occupation.
PARIS: Breton’s mother turns up unannounced in Paris at the end of March, brandishing a newspaper account of the various Dadaist japes her son has been getting up to. She issues an ultimatum: either he will give up Dada or his financial support will be stopped. André very nearly buckles. His allowance is cut off the following day.
MUNICH: Around the same time, Adolf finally leaves the army. A party supporter finds him a small, cheaply furnished room to rent. He sleeps late and reads a lot.
One day he talks himself into the home of the former director of the Bavarian Royal Opera House, a Baron. Hitler turns up wearing gaiters, a large hat, and carrying a riding crop in one hand, dressed as his idea of a Bavarian country gentleman. He sits awkwardly in his chair, not quite able to relax. He stays for more than an hour–well beyond the time he is welcome. He tries to make conversation but ends up making a speech. The noise brings the servants rushing in, thinking their master is being attacked.
SEBASTOPOL, CRIMEA: Following all the other commanders who have come and gone in Russia’s kaleidoscopic civil war, General Denikin decides to leave the scene. The Western powers have abandoned him. His forces have been pushed back to the shores of the Black Sea. An evacuation to Crimea is a disaster. There is much intriguing amongst the generals. There have been a number of suicides among the rank and file. ‘God has not given my troops victory’, Denikin writes.
After being blessed with an icon of the Virgin Mary, a new and much younger soldier, the forty-two-year-old General Wrangel, takes over as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Southern Russia. The position is quite hopeless. There is hardly any coal or oil for the ships, no horses for the cavalry, no petrol for the aeroplanes and no proper equipment for the troops. ‘I have shared the honour of its victories with the Army’, Wrangel writes, ‘and cannot refuse to drink from the cup of humiliation with it now.’
The general–tall, aristocratic, the very model of the dashing White officer, a man most often seen in a Circassian tunic and fur hat, with a string of bullets around his neck–sets about trying to reform those areas still under White Russian control in order to turn them into a solid base from which to continue the war against the Bolsheviks. At the same time, he sets out to win over the French and the British, to persuade them that he is not as hopeless as his predecessor (nor as anti-Semitic). ‘I’m struggling’, Wrangel writes to his wife Olga, already in exile in Istanbul. He thanks her for the icon she has sent him. He is so busy, so tired. ‘I go to bed at two or two thirty in the morning and wake up at 7’, he writes. ‘I only have a rest at lunch time and dinner time, but even then, I’m distracted incessantly.’ He travels up to the front: ‘If only God helped me and gave me the time to finish the job’.
COLÓN, REPUBLIC OF PANAMA–BOSTON–PHILADELPHIA: The Black Star Line’s Yarmouth is renamed the Frederick Douglass, in honour of the great American abolitionist and former slave. It sails, quite slowly, through the Caribbean, meeting with local adulation (and British colonial suspicion) wherever it weighs anchor.
There is little business value to the voyage. There are few cargoes to pick up or drop off. Passenger numbers vary hugely. Though there are hints that Cuban sugar exporters would be prepared to switch to the Black Star Line if enough good ships were available, the current voyage has more the character of a royal progress than a serious commercial venture.
In Cuba, the President throws a party for the crew at the presidential palace. In Colón, Panama, thousands greet the Frederick Douglass, carrying baskets of fruit and vegetables as gifts to the heroic (and somewhat dazed) arrivals, while five hundred black workers cram aboard to escape the appalling conditions of servitude under which they suffer in the country. In Kingston, Jamaica, the captain decides to take seven hundred tons of ripe coconuts on board in the hope that their prompt arrival in America might allow the Black Star Line to turn at least some minor profit from the ship’s Caribbean peregrination.
But Garvey abrogates the commercial imperative to get the cargo home as fast as possible and orders the Frederick Douglass to make a courtesy call in Costa Rica instead. The ship is then sent to call at Boston and Philadelphia–where UNIA meetings are being planned–rather than head straight for New York. By the time the vessel arrives at its final destination, the coconuts are spoiled.
Back in the United States, Garvey works up his audiences with fresh vistas of black empowerment, with the Black Star Line as a symbol and advert of that process. The impression of successful enterprise trumps the reality. His self-confident self-help message is being heard. In Boston, Garvey talks of how it is the human will which is the deciding factor in the history of the world these days. Power is a psychological question, he says. Whites are born with the consciousness of what they can achieve; blacks have been told that they can do nothing. And therein lies the perniciousness of those who talk down the Black Star Line, he says. Naysayers, black or white, are as bad as each other. (A cartoon in the Negro World suggests that ‘white interests’ are the puppet-masters behind some so-called black community leaders.) It is self-belief that matters most. That is what Garvey is there to provide.
His own self-belief is not in doubt. His oratory is grandiose. His vision scopes the widest horizons of the future. His speeches are immoderate, intemperate affairs. In the last war, Garvey tells his supporters, the Kaiser wanted a place in the sun. ‘Now we also want a place in the sun’, he proclaims, noting that if sixty million Germans could last five years of war, ‘four hundred million ought to be able to do it a little longer’. Africa must be reclaimed. A race war must be fought and won.
The British were Roman slaves once, Garvey notes, and now they rule the world. He imagines a new black aristocracy arising from the present struggle, a Duke of the Nigerias and an Earl of Lagos ennobled by the fight ahead just as Arthur Wellesley became the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo. Garvey lacerates the lies of whites who have led blacks to believe they must serve and never rule. In front of a crowd of six thousand in Philadelphia, he promises that ‘no power on earth can stop the great onward rush of the UNIA’. ‘The black men of the world have fought the last war for others’, he says. The next war will be one for freedom.
He promises a convention will be held in New York in August to elect a leader for the black race. Garvey may be bombastic and he may be vain, but to many blacks he tells it like it is. He makes them proud. He does not pull his punches. He stands up for what he believes in. He is willing to shake things up–and maybe that is just what is needed.
WASHINGTON DC: In the spring of 1920, the League fight over, Woodrow Wilson meets his cabinet for the first time since the summer of 1919.
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p; The President looks tired. He seems distracted. His voice is scratchy. As the meeting drags on, Woodrow’s doctor looks meaningfully at the door to indicate things should be drawn to a close. It is Edith who finally breaks things up, bustling into the room and suggesting it is time to go. ‘This is an experiment, you know’, she tells the cabinet as she ushers the men out.
Woodrow hears about Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s raids for the first time. It is unclear how much he understands of them. He pronounces himself neither in favour, nor against. He asks only that Palmer not let the country ‘see red’.
MOSCOW: Vladimir protests at the fuss everyone is making over his birthday. Still, he does not stop them, all the same.
The newspapers are full of stories of peasants going to visit the Kremlin, and Vladimir greeting them like a father. Trotsky, travelling across Russia trying to sort out the railway network, writes an article declaring his old rival the unquestioned leader of the proletariat, comparing him favourably to Marx. The poet Mayakovsky composes a poem honouring the great leader: ‘like a bomb the name explodes: Lenin! Lenin! Lenin!’ (Vladimir hates Mayakovsky.) Not just one but two celebratory biographies are published. Two hundred thousand copies are printed.
Celebrations are organised by the party leadership. The Georgian bank-robber makes a speech praising Vladimir for his modesty, his willingness to correct his mistakes. The birthday boy arrives after all the speeches are over and then scolds the party, warning it against getting a big head. That only contributes further to the growing cult around Lenin, a man who virtually no one had heard of three years ago: Lenin the simple toiler in the Kremlin, Lenin the people’s servant (no grand titles, please!), even Lenin the worker (despite his minor aristocratic heritage).
There are other matters he has to think about: such as the imminent arrival of an eclectic delegation of British leftists–a Labour parliamentarian, a trades unionist, a famous suffragette, a philosopher, a Quaker–sent to investigate true conditions in Soviet Russia. The purpose of their trip is to help the British left take a view on the issue which has split Europe’s socialist movement in two: whether or not to join the Comintern. Anticipating difficulties with some of these mushy-minded middle-of-the-road types, Vladimir instructs their interpreters to stick to them like glue. He secretly proposes a newspaper campaign to discredit the least pro-Soviet and a variety of old tricks–the usual planted questions–so the whole event can be stage-managed for propaganda. He has not forgotten the lessons of Potemkin.
There is bad news at the end of April. Marshal Piłsudski’s Poles cut a deal with nationalist Ukrainians and invade Red Ukraine, beating Lenin to the punch he had intended to land on them. A city for a city: Polish troops will recapture Kiev on their behalf and, in return, the Ukrainians will renounce their claim to the mixed city of Lviv and the surrounding province of eastern Galicia. The Red Army is in retreat again. Trotsky calls for ‘drastic measures’. The Poles advance with barely a shot fired. The birthday celebrations sour.
DOORN, THE NETHERLANDS: Count Bentinck sighs deeply. The wonderful day has at last arrived: Wilhelm and his entourage move out of Amerongen and into their new house down the road.
Wilhelm’s personal taste is in ample evidence at Huis Doorn. He surrounds himself with family treasures. ‘Busts, paintings and etchings of Fredrick the Great, Grosspapa and Papa’ line the walls, he writes enthusiastically, ‘and pictures of the Prussian army in the moments of its greatest triumphs’. He even gets his old writing chair back, in the form of a saddle. It is almost as if he were still really Kaiser.
He has already got to work on the estate’s forest over the last few months while overseeing the renovations. Some four hundred and seventy imperially felled logs lie in a pile before the Kaiser and Kaiserin even move in.
WASHINGTON: Mitchell Palmer is an angry man. Most of the alleged dangerous radicals picked up in January have now been released for lack of evidence. The raids are beginning to look like a fiasco. He blames a liberal magazine editor named Louis Post, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, whose department is responsible for enforcing immigration law. He will only issue deportation orders with proof of intent to harm America. Palmer tries to get him impeached.
In April, Palmer publicly warns that he has knowledge of a wave of assassinations to occur on 1 May. Leave is cancelled for the nation’s police forces. Public buildings are put under heavy guard. In Chicago, a further three hundred and sixty suspected radicals are locked up for twenty-four hours as a security measure. Then–nothing happens.
Palmer is made to look foolish. ‘Everybody is laughing at A. Mitchell Palmer’s May Day “revolution”, says the Boston American. During the first step in his impeachment hearings, Post points out that despite the arrest of several thousand supposed radicals in January, only three handguns have been found.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: While nothing much is happening in America, on May Day in the birthplace of the revolution a stupendous agitprop performance takes place on the steps of the former stock exchange in Petrograd.
The world is shown in the state it was before the war, with Kings and Queens feasting up above, and the enslaved masses toiling below, staggering under the weight of huge boulders. A red flag appears and disappears, waved by a solitary agitator. Then August 1914 arrives, to the strains of ‘God Save the King’ and the abandonment of the working classes by its socialist representatives. Now comes 1917, red flags everywhere, the storming of the Winter Palace, peals of joy as a new world is created.
Across Russia, brightly painted agitprop trains spread the gospel of Bolshevism, armed with pamphlets, film projectors and posters. In Moscow, Lenin speaks to Red Army soldiers about to be sent off to Ukraine to fight Piłsudski’s Poles. He calls the rumour that the enemy is on the outskirts of Kiev the ‘sheerest fabrication’, remarking that he was on the telephone to the local Red commander only hours ago.
Kiev falls to the Poles the following day.
VIENNA: Anna Freud and her cousin Mausi are in torment. Summer is fast approaching, the time of year when two twenty-something young girls should be enjoying themselves. But in Vienna there is nothing to do. The shops are empty of goods. The theatres may close at any minute. In January a fuel shortage and a ban on lighting after three in the afternoon prevents any evening entertainment at all for a week.
Then Anna and Mausi hit on an idea. It is healthy, cheap and fun. It is an activity for two, or more, depending on how it is played. It requires only sunlight, something which even the government of Austria cannot ration. They are going to play tennis. But there is one problem. There are no tennis balls in Vienna, or none which Anna and Mausi can afford. Anna composes a letter to Sam in Manchester. ‘I know that it must sound rather bad of us’, she writes, in the perfect script of a schoolteacher, ‘our wanting superfluous things like tennis balls when things are as bad and as serious as they are now.’ But then, ‘there is so very little pleasure to be had for young people in Vienna now.’ She asks Sam to send a dozen balls. But only if they are not more than one pound. Six would do.
Two weeks later Anna countermands her order. It is too frivolous. ‘Mausi and I decided to give up tennis’, she explains.
MUNICH: Adolf hones his speaking technique. He tries out different lines on the disillusioned who gather at party meetings, turning from anti-British remarks to anti-capitalist ones before testing out anti-Bolshevism on his audiences, talking gravely about Russia’s economic collapse and the mass murder of the intelligentsia. Invited to give a talk in Stuttgart, he savages the Versailles Treaty. In Munich, he talks about interest slavery and launches a bitter attack on the British Empire and its subjugation of India.
When he senses the audience drifting away, Adolf shifts gears from a simulacrum of analysis to an accusatory and finally a messianic tone. ‘The day will come’, he exclaims, ‘when the sun will shine through once more.’ He calls for a new kind of leader. ‘We need a dictator’, he says bluntly, ‘who is at the same time a genius’. There are echoes o
f Mussolini here. Adolf increasingly singles out one root cause for Germany’s ills, something for his audiences to focus on: the Jews. This always seems to get a warm reaction.
Even in Munich’s crowded political market, where politics has become a blood sport, civility is long gone, wild conspiracies find willing believers and the so-called ‘Jewish question’ is widely discussed, the vociferousness of Hitler’s anti-Semitic rants marks him out. Adolf decides not just to ride Munich’s wave of anti-Semitism, but to make himself its most ardent exponent. His fanaticism becomes part of his brand.
A Hitler speech without reference to the Jews is simply not a Hitler speech. Building on a public perception during the war, but without any basis in fact, Adolf denounces German-Jewish soldiers for having shirked their patriotic duty at the front and then conspired to bring about revolution behind it. He accuses Jews of using finance and the media to control society. Some of this is familiar. The Thule Society newspaper, now renamed to take account of its role in the ethno-nationalist völkisch movement as the Völkischer Beobachter, runs excerpts of the Protocols this spring, suggesting it should be published in the millions and made essential reading for patriotic Germans.
When it comes to dealing with this imagined, conspiratorial, ever-present influence Hitler urges followers of the German Workers’ Party–now renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Na-zis–to think strategically about the future. ‘We do not want to be the kind of sentimental anti-Semites who create a pogrom atmosphere’, he tells his followers: ‘we want to grasp at the very root of this malignancy and eradicate it, stump and stalk.’ These slogans become the defining feature of the party, the tools with which to activate the crowds. ‘All means are justified in reaching this goal,’ the mangy field-runner says, ‘even if it means making a pact with the devil himself.’
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