A Sense of the Enemy

by Shore, Zachary

  2

  _______

  Arming Your Enemy

  Stresemann’s Maneuver, Act I

  FROM FLAPPERS AND THE Charleston, to speakeasies and the Wall Street boom, America’s roaring twenties are remembered as a time of exuberance and hope. Having emerged from World War I as the world’s largest creditor nation, the United States enjoyed a decade of economic growth. But Europe’s 1920s stood in shocking contrast. Devastated by the Great War, Britain and France had lost a generation of young men. The Russian Revolution had unleashed fears of contagious unrest. And nowhere on the continent was the situation more unstable than in Germany. The decade’s early years brought invasion, hyperinflation, political assassinations, and revolts across the nation. Throughout the tumult, one of the few steady hands was Dr. Gustav Stresemann.

  Squat and stocky, a lover of good food and wine, Stresemann never saw fit to exercise. He consumed his work like his meals, spending long hours and late nights at his desk. There was an intensity to his manner, whether opining on high literature or dissecting political alignments. So much of his passion shone through in his face. His personal secretary once described his boss’s “watery and bloated skin” as merely the frame around his piercing eyes.1 Born in 1878 to a lower-middle-class beer distributor in Berlin, Stresemann developed into something of a Wunderkind. By the age of twenty-one, he had already earned a doctorate in economics, writing his dissertation on the bottled beer industry. He landed his first job in Dresden, representing the organization of chocolate manufacturers for the state of Saxony. As a lobbyist for industry, he became closely tied to politics. In 1906, he won a seat on the town council, and the following year he stood for and won a seat in the German Parliament as a member of the National Liberal Party. When World War I came, a weak heart left him unable to serve. Later he would suffer from kidney disease. His overall ill health condemned him to die in office, much too young and far too soon to check the spread of extremism.

  After the war, Stresemann emerged as a leader in the right-of-center German People’s Party, serving a mere 100 days as Chancellor, then assuming the role of foreign minister, a post he would retain until his death in 1929. Within a few years of taking office, Stresemann came to be seen by Western publics as a sensible statesman intent on establishing his country as a cornerstone of European stability. Coming to terms with Britain and France at a meeting in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925, Stresemann pledged Germany to join the League of Nations, settle its disputes with eastern neighbors, and preserve the current arrangements in the West. In recognition of Locarno, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.2 Albert Einstein later praised Stresemann as a great leader, asserting that his finest achievement was “to induce a number of large political groups, against their own political instincts, to give their support to a comprehensive campaign of European reconciliation.” Einstein concluded that Stresemann was a “man of mind and bearer of an idea. . . . as different from politicians of the usual stamp as a genius differs from an expert.”3

  The Locarno Agreement has been called the hinge on which the interwar era turned. It marked the true end of the First World War, and its collapse eased the way for the Second to occur. Despite its ultimate failure, the “spirit of Locarno” stabilized Germany’s international relations and reestablished Germany as an equal among the European powers.4 Given the series of crises that the Weimar government confronted following the war, maneuvering Germany back to strength was a remarkable feat, one that only a masterful strategic empath could pull off.

  How did Stresemann do it? How did he succeed in sensing his rivals’ drivers and thereby help reclaim his country’s greatness? One way to answer that question is by focusing on Stresemann’s reading of the Russians: the pattern of Soviet behavior and their behavior at pattern breaks.

  In order to restore his nation’s position among the great powers, Stresemann needed to balance dangerously delicate relations with Britain and France on the one hand and with Soviet Russia on the other. He had to manage this while simultaneously safeguarding his own position atop the Foreign Ministry. The keystones of his Western strategy were twofold: fulfill the terms of the Versailles Treaty (a policy dubbed “fulfillment”) and normalize relations with Britain and France. To bolster his bargaining position with the Western powers, he needed to foster ties to the Soviet Union through overt accords and covert deals. It was a daring strategy. Any moves too far into one camp or the other risked upending the entire endeavor. To advance along such a tenuous tightrope, Stresemann had to assess the drivers and constraints of his adversaries both East and West. While the drivers of Western statesmen were not always completely transparent, they were far simpler to assess than those of the Soviets. Gauging whether the Soviets wanted to ally with the German government or to overthrow it formed a crucial test of Stresemann’s strategic empathy. Fortunately, he possessed a true knack for learning how the other side thought and felt.

  One of Stresemann’s contemporaries, Antonina Vallentin, tried to encapsulate the great statesman’s diplomatic aplomb:

  The moment he sat down opposite a man, he was no longer confined within his own personality, he felt himself into the other man’s mind and feelings with such amazing accuracy that he could follow the most unusual trains of thought as quickly as if he had been familiar with them for years. He could thus forestall objections, and so startle his interlocutor by his intuition, that the latter found himself strangely disposed to reach agreement. . . . His sudden flashes of capacity for self-transference into another’s mind gave him moments of uncanny clarity of vision such as scarcely any statesman has possessed before him.5

  Stresemann’s empathic gifts undeniably aided his sense of what drove others around him. Yet the traits that Vallentin described were not the only factors fueling Stresemann’s success. The Foreign Minister also possessed an acute capacity for recognizing the constraints upon his rivals. From the moment he assumed the Chancellorship through his long tenure as Foreign Minister, he would need every drop of strategic empathy he could muster when dealing with the Soviets. The Russians played diplomatic hardball, and Lenin had skillfully selected the man to represent the Bolshevik regime.

  Georgi Chicherin stood in striking contrast to his German counterpart. Unlike Stresemann, whose father was a lower-middle-class beer distributor, Chicherin was heir to the refined traditions of Russia’s landed aristocracy. Tall and heavy-set, with a moustache and thin beard, Chicherin walked hunched over, as if weighted down by the knowledge contained in his capacious mind. Conversant in English, French, German, Italian, Serbian, and Polish, he could dictate cables in multiple languages simultaneously. He played piano expertly and studied the works of the composers he adored: Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. Like Stresemann, Chicherin never exercised, typically working at his desk until early morning, and his health suffered as a result. Intensely introverted, his preference for books over people left him with long hours to absorb seemingly endless facts and figures.6 Riveted by history, he consumed volumes about the wider world. In 1904, he adopted Marxism, and with it came the zeal of the converted. His commitment to the movement had a passion that rivaled even Lenin’s. He gave all that he possessed—wealth, time, energy, and talent—to furthering the cause. Intent on renouncing the outward ostentation of his class, he lived in spartan accommodations and wore only a single yellow-brown tweed suit, never varying his attire. Chicherin’s convictions, coupled with his extraordinary breadth of knowledge and his aristocratic erudition, made him a brilliant choice by Lenin to lead the Soviet Foreign Ministry. The statesmen of Europe could not begrudge him their respect. He was, in short, a daunting opponent in diplomatic affairs.

  One of Chicherin’s earliest impressions on the world stage came at the economic conference in Genoa, Italy, in 1922, when he stunned his Western interlocutors. The Bolsheviks had not only frightened Western states by threatening to spread revolution throughout the world; they had also earned Western ire by repudiating the Tsarist debts. Britain and France
in particular had invested enormous sums into prewar Russia, and they fully intended to recoup those funds. The Bolsheviks maintained that the corrupt Romanov dynasty did not represent the Russian people’s will, and therefore the new communist regime was not bound to honor Tsarist commitments. At Genoa, Britain and France pressed their case with the Soviet delegation. Chicherin responded by presenting the Allies with the Soviet Union’s counter-claims—to the staggering tune of 35 billion gold marks, a figure even greater than what the Allies claimed was owed to them.

  To justify these counter-claims, Chicherin, along with his deputy Maxim Litvinov, conjured up an obscure precedent of international law. Chicherin drew British attention to the Alabama Claims Case, which followed the American Civil War. During that conflict in the 1860s, Britain had supported the South, even funding the building of southern warships, one of which was called the Alabama. After the U.S. Civil War concluded and the North prevailed, the American federal government sued Great Britain for damages inflicted on the North by those British-built ships. The United States won the case, and Britain paid. Chicherin then drew the obvious analogy. During the Bolshevik struggle for power against the conservative White Russian armies, Britain and her allies had supported the Whites, thereby prolonging the conflict. Chicherin asserted that Britain and her allies therefore owed the Bolshevik regime for damages inflicted during the Russian Civil War. The Soviets, rather conveniently, estimated those damages at an amount even greater than what the Tsarist government owed the West.

  Britain’s Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was, in a word, flabbergasted. He retorted that Britain had never billed France for its support of the British monarchy during the English Civil War, and France had not billed Britain for its support of the Bourbons in the French Revolution.7 Lloyd George’s protestations notwithstanding, the fact remained that the Allies had actively intervened against the Bolshevik government, backing anti-Bolshevik Russian armies, and even deploying forces of their own. The analogy remained, and negotiations stood at an impasse.

  Although Chicherin had the capacity to rival Stresemann in diplomatic skill, Chicherin was hamstrung by the Politburo, the key decision-making body of which he was not even a member. Unlike Stresemann, who had tremendous latitude over German foreign policy, the Soviet Foreign Minister was forced to execute the wishes of his superiors. In fact, if Chicherin had had his way, the Soviet Union would have honored the Tsarist debts. He urged Lenin to do so, but Lenin was adamant. On May 2, 1922, Lenin sent a telegram to the Soviet delegation essentially ordering his foreign minister not to grant any concessions to the West. The Soviet government would not even return any private property it had seized since the revolution. If Chicherin vacillated, Lenin threatened, he would be publicly disavowed. Before the message was sent, the Politburo removed the language about discrediting its foreign minister, but it retained the stern warnings not to compromise.8 There was nothing Chicherin could do.

  Using his formidable knowledge of history and world affairs, Chicherin fell into line, toughened the Soviet position, and dispatched an armada of arguments like the Alabama Claims case. As with so many legal wranglings, the move was extremely clever and thoroughly unwise. The talks eventually disbanded without agreement. Constructive diplomatic relations between Russia and Britain would not resume for years. Later in the conference, the Soviet delegation met secretly with German representatives at the nearby town of Rapallo. There, the then German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau signed the treaty renouncing all debts between the Russian government and his own, and the two countries embarked on a troubled alliance that would shape the decade to come.

  Struggling for Stability

  We cannot comprehend the full challenge Stresemann confronted in reading the Russians without first recognizing the dangerous environment in which he had to function. Stresemann had to develop his strategic empathy in the crucible of nationwide upheaval. He and most of Germany’s prominent politicians in the immediate postwar years risked much more than merely their careers. In a very real sense, they had reason to fear for their lives. With the stakes this high, knowing one’s enemy could literally be vital.

  In January 1919, both of the German Communist Party’s (KPD) most prominent spokesmen, the fiery Jewish intellectual Rosa Luxemburg and the rash Karl Liebknecht, were murdered by right-wing Free Corps units, paramilitary bands that had sprung up across the nation. Another left-wing leader, Bavaria’s Jewish Minister-President Kurt Eisener, was shot and killed in Munich. Immediately thereafter, Bavaria declared itself a Soviet Republic. Within one month, that government was overthrown by Reichswehr (the German military) and Free Corps forces who killed more than 1,000 government supporters during the struggle. The following year, Free Corps units under the leadership of Wolfgang Kapp marched on Berlin, forcing officials of the federal government to flee to Stuttgart. Though militarily proficient, Kapp and his men failed to forge the political alliances needed to govern. A general strike quickly brought them down, and the Social Democratic government returned to power.

  The year 1921 saw workers’ strikes and revolts flare up across the country. In the wake of Rosa Luxemburg’s assassination, Ruth Fischer, a fervent Marxist who had helped found the Austrian Communist Party before moving to Berlin, assumed an increasing leadership role within the KPD. Yet neither she nor her comrades were able to inspire enough of the German working class, the majority of whom still supported the more moderate Social Democratic Party. The KPD attempted to spark a revolution, but the unrest was met with force and quelled.

  Political violence touched even some of the government’s highest officials. In 1922, Weimar’s first Chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann, who had resigned in protest over the Versailles Treaty, went strolling in the woods. His daughter, along with her eight-year-old niece, walked at his side. From behind a large tree, an assailant rushed toward the ex-Chancellor and sprayed acid at his face. The chemicals missed his head, burning instead his arms and legs. Prudently, given the climate of political violence at the time, Scheidemann was armed. Pulling a revolver from his pocket, he managed to fire two shots before he collapsed. The perpetrator and his accomplice escaped.9 Years later, Scheidemann’s assailants were captured and tried. In their defense they claimed that their actions had been inspired by the right-wing media.

  One of the first to contact Scheidemann to congratulate him on his escape was the German Jewish Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau. A few weeks later, when Rathenau was driving to work at the Foreign Ministry, armed gunmen drove up beside him, fired machine guns, and lobbed a hand grenade into his car. It was Rathenau who had signed the Rapallo Treaty with Russia, normalizing relations with the communist regime, an extraordinary diplomatic move but one that the far right-wing could not abide.

  As turbulent as the political scene had become, it was about to grow worse. In January of 1923, French and Belgian armies invaded. Frustrated over Germany’s refusal to pay the exceedingly high reparations imposed at Versailles, France and Belgium seized the coal-producing Ruhr region of western Germany. The plan was ill-conceived from the start. Militarily, Germany had no means of response. Unwilling to accept a violation of its sovereignty, the German government organized a general strike in the region. Without German workers to mine and extract the coal, France had no ability to remove what it had seized. A popular cartoon of the day depicted a French general telegraphing to Paris that the military operations had gone exactly to plan, but the soldiers were freezing, so please send some coal.

  Just as Kapp’s plans had succeeded militarily but foundered politically, defeated by a general strike, the French and Belgian efforts met a similar result. Force could not accomplish what only a political solution could achieve. Yet the strike took a painful toll on the German populace. In order to maintain their defiant action, the federal government continued to pay workers in the Ruhr not to work. This decision, combined with the printing of money in order to purposely inflate the Reichsmark and thereby render reparation payments worthless, led
to hyperinflation. The political costs of extreme economic dysfunction left the country primed for revolution.

  It was in this troubled context that Gustav Stresemann assumed the Chancellorship in August of 1923. Although he served as Chancellor for a scant three months, it proved a breathtakingly tense period. Facing the fallout from domestic hyperinflation and foreign invasion would have challenged any new regime. On the economic front, Stresemann’s introduction of the Rentenmark dramatically reduced inflation.10 On the political front, however, instability was still deadly. On September 26, Stresemann called off resistance to the Ruhr occupation, realizing that it only inflamed the situation and hindered Germany’s hopes of normalizing relations with the West. Continued truculence could not raise the nation up from its supine posture. He believed that a certain degree of compliance with the West was the only feasible method of getting Germany back on its feet and restoring its strength. The danger in his fulfillment policy was that the far right viewed it as unforgivable: nothing less than subservience to the victors. Unbeknownst to Stresemann, scarcely more than one month into his Chancellorship, Hugo Stinnes, an extremely wealthy Ruhr industrialist, was plotting a coup. Stinnes approached American Ambassador Alinson B. Houghton to feel out whether he could obtain American support. In place of Stresemann, Stinnes himself, along with the head of the Reichswehr, Hans von Seeckt, and the former chief of the Krupp corporation would rule Germany, presumably ensuring order and economic growth. This in turn would enhance Germany’s ability to repay its reparations to the United States and others. American Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes was not impressed, and the plot never materialized.11