by Merilyn Moos
Siegi’s analysis is detailed, revealing the process whereby the revolution was lost. Only three weeks after they had been established, many Councils had been attacked and dissolved, including by the army. There was then a crucial showdown. The Chairman of Congress put forward the following demands: ‘immediate arrest of the generals, disarming of the officers, formation of a Red Guard…to disarm the counter-revolution’. Congress accepted the ‘seven Hamburg points’, including that the Councils of Soldiers Deputies were to be responsible for maintaining disciple and electing their own officers.
However, Ebert, who professed himself to be a socialist200, argued that these positions were only advisory - final orders should be determined by the Cabinet of 6 (point 8). Although initially this position was defeated, Ebert, after talks with General Groaner, who promised him the loyalty of the Reichswehr if he stopped this nonsense, informed Congress that it was army control that had to be maintained. Two of the USP deputies only strongly objected: Congress would become a mere talking shop. Ebert argued successfully that’ the decisions of Congress were not to be carried out until the administrative orders for transacting them had been issued.’ The Councils were thus deprived of power. ‘The revolution…had been broken.’
‘The moderate left, [particularity as represented by Ebert], felt justified in their pseudo-democratic actions by what they interpreted as the needs of the hour-to protect the new order, to save the economic life of the country, to prevent anarchy and the new [Weimar] Government being overthrown by right-wing forces’ and to stop civil war. Ebert was moreover committed to stopping the ‘militant left…which wanted a ‘genuine grass-root-democratic society’ (my italics).
The catastrophic consequences of the defeat were soon seen, for not just the ‘extreme left’ but the moderate left as well. The German army, the Reichwehr, was formally established, some of whose units supported and fought for the ultra-right Kapp Putsch in 1921, only two years later, wearing the swastika on their helmets (at that time the symbol of the new Kapp government). Siegi understood the centrality of class action. He wrote: ‘Workers resistance led to the collapse of the putsch’, but, he reminds us, only one of its leaders was ever punished.
But the Social Democratic’ fudge with the military did not keep them in power. By mid-1920, the moderate socialists themselves had lost the key positions in Government. In addition, ‘between January 1919 and June 1922, the right committed 354 political murders.’201 The Reichwehr were to become Hitler’s willing executioners, marching through and subjugating Europe and murdering or forcing into exile all opponents, including many of Ebert’s own supporters. All over Europe, the strong democracy that Ebert had promised proved strong against the radical left and weak against the radical right. This carnage [following Hitler’s take over] was nothing less than the direct outcome of events in the early years of the Weimar Republic. They were victorious then, the ‘moderate’ left. They had routed their ‘extremists’.
The article reveals how deeply Siegi’s had held onto his convictions. There is no doubting from this analysis that the Social Democrats are seen (correctly) as responsible for the crushing of the revolution and that they thereby lay the foundations for Hitler. Siegi’s politics from the early 1930s shine through in this article, almost as if nothing had happened inbetween. Yet there is fudge - when he writes of ‘democratic rank and file’ action, one can hear his attempts to distance himself from the autocratic pattern of the KPD, but what this phrase actually meant is obscure. Siegi was also, I suggest, positioning his own - and so many others’ - exile as a long-term consequence of the betrayal by the moderate left in 1919.
The last years
One of my most touching memories of my father was when he turned out to support a demonstration in favour of the Kilburn 4 in 1983. I and three others were being threatened with expulsion from our union, NATFHE, for supporting a black colleague, John Fernandes, who had gone to the media with accusations about the racism of the police cadets he was teaching. The management of the College of N.W. London initially supported the police and were going to sack John, but after a vigorous campaign, kept him on. The union leadership and some of the CP however took a dim view of our campaign. The hearing to consider whether to expel us (which we won) was in the Imperial Hotel (given the nature of this dispute, this name seemed remarkably appropriate!). Unannounced, my father arrived and stood with the small crowd of people shouting slogans in our support. I was hardly on speaking terms with him at this point and I still do not know how he knew about the demonstration. I will always remember him for supporting me that day. Indeed, carefully filed away amongst his papers, is a letter to the New Statesmen written by another member of NATFHE (T. Butler) supporting us.
Although my father’s appearance at the Kilburn 4 case encouraged me to see him and Lotte, I still had little to do with them till I became pregnant in 1986, only two years before his death. But, from his letters, I gather that he had kept involved in the local political scene: he wrote letters and went to meetings to defend the wonderful Victoria Park, which lay a stones throw from their front door, and was also active in the local Pensioners Campaign, penning letters to MPs and councillors demanding more money for pensioners. He told me that he sometimes used to go the local magistrates and Crown Court and even on occasions to the Old Bailey and, dressed in his smartest clothes, would sit bang opposite the magistrate or judge, who, not knowing whom this well dressed gentleman could be, would feel more cautious about handing out unnecessarily punitive sentences to the local working class miscreants. I am sure Siegi saw this as a form of political activity which he could keep doing sitting down!
After retirement, Siegi also started to go to painting and framing classes and an amazing stream of expressionist pictures, undoubtedly influenced by the expressionist styles prevalent in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, started to appear all over the house; stacks of his work made his office almost impassable. He won second prize one year in the Hackney local artists’ competition. Here were miners crouching in the Durham earth deep underground, ‘No ballgames’ notices fixed on the sides of council estates, a women lying in her blood, called ‘To the Unknown Soldier’. But there were also pictures of my mother, hat on head, looking out to some past future and a picture I have on my bedroom wall to this day of the Paratroopers in the 1974 Portuguese revolution who had gone over to the side of the left standing guard on a roof top. Look, his picture says, there is always ground for hope.
He and Lotte became active members of a local community cultural centre in Hackney, and, later, in other local writing groups, in particular the Approach Tavern group, and my father happily returned to writing poetry, much polemical, railing against injustice, a collection of which were published posthumously, called ‘Mind the Gap’. He had already started to select poems for a volume, I think to be published by Centreprise, while still alive, but Lotte, with the help of Ken Worpole and others, completed the task.
Ken Worpole ran the Hackney Writers’ Workshop which met at Centreprise in Dalston from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s, and became Siegi and Lotte’s friend. He kindly gave me his impressions of them. He first was introduced to them via Celia Stubbs sometime in the mid-1970s. Celia Stubbs, who was then a local Hackney community worker, had met Siegi and Lotte and, discovering their literary interests, introduced them to Ken. From then till his death, Siegi had eagerly attended the fortnightly evening meetings with Lotte, and, even in his eighties, come rain or shine, had caught a bus from Mare Street to Dalston and back again, a journey which required a change of buses and a solid walk to the bus-stop. It was a very mixed group; the average age was in the high 20s - Siegi and Lotte were far older than anybody else. But the others appreciated and warmed to Siegi and Lotte, as Siegi and Lotte appreciated them. Lotte was the more dominant in the relationship, Ken told me, something which impressed the group, unaccustomed to such feisty older women (and this was after all ‘only’ the mid/late 1970s). They were constructive about others work - Lo
tte was the more discerning and astute, Siegi more benign. ‘They enjoyed the Writers’ Group, as we enjoyed them.’
Siegi and Lotte were both more prolific than anybody else. Their poetry was well received. But there was a difference in their styles. Siegi’s poetry used rhyme and was often written in ballad form, of a Brechtian type, which could have been declaimed in a theatrical setting. Lotte on occasions brought wonderful short stories, inspired in part by Greek mythology which she introduced some of the group to. Siegi and Lotte’s writing carried a strong political commitment; they eschewed writing which focused more on the confessional or the more personal, though most of the group were in fact political. They started to attend public events and read their work. Some of these took place with Hackney and Islington Music workshop, a fruitful mix. Lotte became relatively well known and started to be invited to a variety of gatherings in her own right, including by feminist circles.
But Ken Worpole said that nevertheless, although they were both very sociable and very charming, they remained something of a closed book. ‘Together, they were an impregnable force.’ Neither ever came without the other and they were ‘loyal and defensive’ of each other. Ken knew they came from Durham and almost nothing else. He had been invited to their home for tea two or three times, and they to his, a few times for supper. They kept themselves to themselves, Ken stated. They came across as a couple who had known difficult times. People guessed that they had had a troubled earlier life and kept a respectful distance. Yet, for all this relative absence of intimacy, it was Ken whom Lotte turned to on the death of Siegi – suggestive of the absence of really close friends.
I’ve chosen three short poems from the posthumously published collection ‘Mind the Gap’ and selected from a fourth; the first I presume essentially autobiographical, the second polemical, the third four-liner, a bitter sweet comment on how Nazism and repression had not bowed Siegi and the fourth, written I suspect in his very last years, reveals how far Siegi may have been beaten but had never been defeated.
HOW
How to sow
When no longer
The seed harbours life
How to harvest
When the fruit
Has not ripened
How to work
When the hours drag
Drained of joy
How to rest
When so much
Needs doing
How to celebrate
When the soul
Feels numb
BACKLASH
The Tolpuddle martyrs
Entered the fray
There happened a ‘backlash’
They were sent away
Now children learn the lesson
Avoid all strife
And live forever
A Good Dog’s life
TO HELL
I know the type of face
I know the type of phrase
And I say ‘No’
For socialism’s sake.
RESURRECTION
Where can I find you
Dreams of my youth?…
I dreamt
That all did share
Their labour’s fruit
Their joy and pain
That all did care
For all…
I went and searched…
[And] found a tombstone
Weathered
With the inscription
‘Born in innocence
Murdered
By enemies of hope…’
Dream
Dream…
Under tomorrow’s sun
All equal
None outcast.
Siegi’s return to writing and reading his poems to a radical audience of semi-working class and professional people for the first time since 1933 must have helped him feel that it was good to be alive. Many of the people he and Lotte rubbed shoulders with were to become famous for their radical and working class orientated writing - Ken Worpole, Roger Mills and others, and I can imagine my father enjoying their - then - youthful - comradeship and interest in what he represented and had experienced.
But friendship was another matter. There is a fascinating letter from Ron Barnes, dated 9.11.1979, a London artist well known at the time for his ‘naif’ portrayal of working class life, lamenting the loss of the friendship of Lotte and Siegi. Although the exact cause is not clear (and maybe never was), it appears that what Lotte and Siegi held against him was his lack of punctuality. Ron laments in the letter that he has to work and therefore laboured under that tyranny. No wonder my parents had so few friends given this level of exactitude. (I do remember when my mother was asked by a psychiatrist during a case conference one time she was in hospital to tell me one good thing about me. ’she is punctual,’ is all she said.)
Lotte and Siegi were getting on well; indeed, I suspect that it was in these twilight years, that their relationship blossomed. But activity was getting more strenuous for Siegi. He was still going out and doing the shopping for my mother and him, carrying back two heavy shopping bags, his lips turning slightly blue.
The birth of his grandson, Josh, was a source of unbelievable delight to him. He, and not my mother, visited me in hospital almost every day (I’d ended up with a caesarean and was in for almost two weeks.) His pleasure was palpable. I did not appreciate at the time quite how significant the birth of a grandchild was to him. Indeed, it was many years till I worked out that Josh was almost certainly the only direct descendant of any of his family going back to his eight great-grandparents. Although I’d given Josh the surname of ‘Moos’ because of an embedded feminism and in no way to please him, I think that knowing his family name lived on, and just maybe even more so because it was the surname of a boy, must have made him very happy.
My pregnancy also had the profoundly important effect of bringing him and me back to speaking again. He was so uncensorious when I explained my situation to him, that I realised, after avoiding him for the previous twenty odd years that I wanted to see him again. It was in the nick of time. He had just over a year to live. I and Josh saw him and Lotte as often as possible, though he found the demands of an energetic baby (who walked at eight months) increasingly difficult to cope with.
After a fall in the house, he was taken to Homerton Hospital. They showed little interest in this old man and after a few terrible days he died. But as he lay there, tubes coming out of everywhere, an oxygen mask essential for him to breathe, he pointed to the wall at the non-existent television screen. ‘Rubbish,’ he announced. ‘Football. Another opium of the masses.’ As he lay dying, unable any more to speak or make a sound, he wiggled his toes to the beat as I sang him the Internationale.
Epilogue
My father, despite the terrible losses which would have felled a lesser man, kept an insistence on hope. When I was a teenager, he banned me from reading 1984 and Brave New World, a prohibition which only encouraged me to read them. The realisation came far later that, despite the defeat of the Communist principles he had fought for, despite the evident horrors of the USSR, despite the bloody defeat of the left in Germany and the destruction of his - and Lotte’s - families, he did not want me to suck in the message of despair that these two books impart.
I remember him soon after Gorbachev came to power, about a year before he died, astonishing me when he said ‘Marx never said the revolution could not come from above.’ (Both my parents excelled at logical niceties in argument.) I argued but, looking back, my father wanted to grasp at any straw of hope. Not for him the slide into hopelessness, not for him a belief in the inevitability of oligarchy and the impotence of the left, not even for him the Parliamentary road.
Yet as we watch this revolutionary from the early 1930s, we cannot but observe a slide towards left Keynesianism, a commitment to reforming the role of the State, maybe because this was the only way he could earn a living, maybe because in the absence of any real revolutionary movement in the UK, left Keynesian was as radical as it got.
At Siegi’s funeral, my mother read, so appropriately, from William Morris: ‘A dream of John Ball’202 : ‘I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes, turns out not be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.’
End-notes
197. The softness of at least some of Labour towards the USSR in the late 1930s will also have kept Siegi distant. He would not have missed the implications of the disappearing ‘?’ after the - Fabian - Webb’s tome: ‘soviet Communism: A new Civilisation?’, published in 1935, lost its ‘?’ in the second edition of 1944.