by Susan Ronald
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Thirteen days later, on a hill south of Wervick in western Flanders, the English tried to burst through the German line with cannonades of shell fire and mustard gas. One of the wounded was Adolf Hitler. He was blinded by the gas attack, and no one was sure if he would ever regain his sight. His voice was also affected. He could only speak in a whisper.
While in the hospital, he’d heard of the German sailors’ mutiny* but felt that this was the “product of the imagination of individual scoundrels.” By November, even Hitler admitted the navy was in disarray. “And then one day, suddenly and unexpectedly, the calamity descended. Sailors arrived in trucks and proclaimed the revolution; a few Jewish youths were the ‘leaders’ in this struggle for the ‘freedom, beauty, and dignity’ of our national existence. None of them had been at the front.”6
When the sailors at the main Kiel naval base mutinied on October 28, 1918, a revolution seemed inevitable. The cost of the war—the wasted matériel, talents, lives—had maimed the survivors’ minds. The despair was incalculable. Yet Germany rightly feared that worse might come. Its calls for a “peace of understanding” met with President Wilson’s response for the abolition of the Hohenzollern militarist empire and indeed the abolition of all royal dynasties in Germany.7
A week later, the popular, diminutive Jewish writer Kurt Eisner—a familiar fatherly figure in Munich who sported a pince-nez and long gray beard—tramped through the streets to the parliament building at the head of a few hundred men and proclaimed a socialist republic. Eisner entreated other German Länder to follow his lead.
Seeing Germany threatening to break down into its old principalities and fiefdoms once again, Chancellor Max von Baden called for Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication on November 8. Berlin’s workers had taken to the streets, Field Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorff had resigned for their failure to win the war, and were replaced by General Wilhelm Groener, who supported Baden. An armistice was in the offing, so long as the kaiser agreed to go. That night the emperor fled to Holland.* At midnight, the Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert was appointed chancellor and declared the birth of the Weimar Republic.
“I must confess that I myself feel shocked and surprised at the universal rejoicing manifested at the abdication of the kaiser,” the English-born Evelyn, Princess Blücher wrote in Berlin. “They could not be more jubilant if they had won the war.… He may deserve his fate, but it seems very hard and cruel to throw stones at him at such a moment, when he must be enduring untold anguish and sorrow.” It was the aristocracy who felt Germany’s loss most severely: “The grief at the breakdown of their country, more than at the personal fall of the kaiser, is quite heartrending to see.… I have seen some of our friends, strong men, sit down and sob at the news, while others seem to shrink to half their size and were struck dumb with pain.”8
That same day, General Erich Ludendorff skulked across the Baltic Sea to Sweden disguised in a false beard and blue-tinted spectacles. From the safety of his hideaway, he wrote to his wife, “If ever I come to power again there will be no pardon. Then with an easy conscience I would have Ebert, Scheidemann and Co. hanged, and watch them dangle.”9 It was an easy threat from the same cowardly military leader who had suckered Germany into a disgraceful peace.
On November 10, a pastor visited the hospital where Hitler was recovering. When the pastor urged the wounded men to accept “the magnanimity of our previous enemies,” Hitler felt compelled to leave the room. Groping his way back to the dormitory, Hitler wrote: “[I] threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.… The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow.”10
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Though Hildebrand Gurlitt, Adolf Hitler, and Hjalmar Schacht were still unknown to one another then, the investment banker Schacht would play a particularly significant role in the transition of the newborn Weimar Republic of November 1918 to the Third Reich of 1933. At the time of the kaiser’s abdication, this former executive at Dresdner Bank had already become politically active through the Klub von 1914, whose members were young businessmen, all democratically minded and increasingly concerned about the power vacuum created by the kaiser’s abdication.11
They were right to worry. That November, a large group of Socialist and Communist soldiers had risen up as the Spartacus League,* named after the Greek slave who rebelled against the Romans. This prompted Schacht and other members of the Klub von 1914 to form the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP), or German Democratic Party. It was intended to provide a centrist political movement in response to the excesses of both Left and Right, which the DDP believed the Zentrum Party did not fill.† Their aim was to give Germany conservative, yet enlightened, solutions to the troubled times ahead. Essentially a monarchist, Schacht also insisted that their platform should read “We rely on a republican structure” rather than beginning with the simple statement “We are republicans.”12
Schacht and the DDP sensed the need to present an alternative to the poisonous rhetoric of both Left and Right. The armistice was signed at 5:10 a.m. on November 11 by French general Foch, supreme commander of the Allied Forces, and the German High Command, led by Matthias Erzberger. Like some legendary thieves in the night, huddled in Foch’s private dining car on a railway siding in the forest at Compiègne in France, they had—with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight—made a declaration of war to come in twenty years’ time. The perceived stabilizing influences of the royal houses of Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman—incongruous to most Americans—were no more.
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Life was moving at a breakneck pace. “I think there is not much point in writing as the time passes too quickly and the letters are going too slowly,” Hildebrand wrote to Wilibald at the end of November. “What is right today is already wrong tomorrow.”13 He was expressing the fears of all Germans, and their exasperation with the pandemonium that reigned. November was so anarchic that everyone feared what the next day might bring. Bands of paramilitary groups, known as Freikorps, ranged everywhere. Hostilities erupted with the suddenness of an earthquake, only to subside and flare up again hundreds of miles away in seemingly unrelated incidents.
From the moment the armistice came into effect, and throughout the brutality of the months to come, President Wilson led the way in setting down the nonnegotiable points for any treaty. His Fourteen Points, first mooted in the summer of 1917, were at the heart of the mass European abdications. In his January 8, 1918, address to the assembled houses of Congress, Wilson laid them out precisely.14 As long as Friedrich Ebert remained the provisional head of the Weimar government, the Allies would not agree to sign anything. Elections were demanded, but the timing was wrong from Weimar’s viewpoint. The Allies, led by Wilson, chose to ignore any impact such elections might have on Germany. Consequently, the upheaval and uncertainty lasted.
January 1919 brought no relief from the “terror”—as it was called at the time.* One of the key players actively working toward making Germany a socialist republic was the left-wing philosopher Rosa Luxemburg, nicknamed “Red Rosa,” who had been freed from prison in Breslau on the same November evening that the kaiser fled to Holland. Together, she and her Spartacus League cofounder, Karl Liebknecht, began the Red Flag newspaper, which demanded amnesty for all political prisoners and the abolition of capital punishment.
Hildebrand Gurlitt not only feared a “long-lasting war” but also a coup by the Left. “I think that now the two most important things are unity and the national assembly and above all a government that has courage, i.e. to have Liebknecht and Rosa hanged.” He asked his brother, “Who will you vote for in the national assembly?… The party we belong to doesn’t yet exist, because we cannot see ourselves as part of the nobility, the big landowners or the big capitalists.”15 Schacht’s DDP was so new and so far away from Vilna that Hildebrand had most likely not heard of it.
While contemp
lating this political and social noxious cauldron, albeit from the relative security of his barracks in Vilna, Hildebrand announced that he consulted with their father, and thought it was perhaps best for him to abandon his studies in art to concentrate instead on politics and economics in the hope of discovering if these disciplines have an influence on the spiritual development of nations. “It seems especially important to me to determine how indifferent the individual can be toward political matters while our state as a whole … [is] breaking up.”16
Again, Hildebrand possessed an uncommon farsightedness at a time when most Germans were still smarting from defeat and the cacophony of political voices crying out to join their causes. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht attached themselves to the ill-fated German Revolution in January 1919—also called the Spartacist Uprising—with the more militant Liebknecht persuading Luxemburg to help him occupy the editorial offices of the liberal press in Berlin. The result was catastrophic for both. The fledgling Weimar leader, Friedrich Ebert, felt compelled to restore order quickly, and called upon the paramilitary right-wing Freikorps to use whatever methods it must.17
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On January 15, the first of the Freikorps political murders were committed. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured by the Volunteer Division of Horse Guards and brought to divisional headquarters at the Eden Hotel. There they were separately interrogated by Captain Waldemar Pabst. That evening, Liebknecht was the first to be led out from the back of the hotel, and was clubbed with the butt of a rifle by one of the guards, who had “strict orders from the officers” to do so, before he was bundled into the back of a car.18 At a desolate spot along the Charlottenburg Highway, the car carrying Liebknecht stopped to let him out. He staggered forward a few steps and was shot in the back while “trying to escape.”
While Liebknecht was taken to his place of execution, Luxemburg appeared at the rear of the hotel, guarded by officers. Again the same guard swung his rifle, this time knocking out Luxemburg. She was dragged into the second awaiting automobile. One of her guards, Lieutenant Vogel, emptied his revolver into her bleeding head at point-blank range. Her body was then hurled into the Landwehr Canal. She was found some four months later, bloated and barely recognizable. The mother of German communism—who had worked with Vladimir Lenin in 1907 at the Russian Social Democrats’ Fifth Party Day in London—had been unable to conquer militarism with her words. Her followers believed that her death and that of Liebknecht were declarations of all-out war.
Armed outrages in reaction to their murders multiplied; wildcat strikes and atrocities became a common feature of life throughout Germany in the following months. Kurt Eisner, that well-beloved local hero of Munich, was murdered on February 21—shot in the back by the monarchist-federalist Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. Freikorps units of right-wing paramilitary groups were called upon by Ebert to invade other “council republics” like Bremen, Hamburg, and Thuringia. Atrocities against the Left continued until May 2, 1919, when the last vestige of the left-wing resistance, the Munich Soviet Republic, which had replaced Eisner’s free state of Bavaria, fell.
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On January 19, the first Weimar election took place in this toxic atmosphere, only four days after the Luxemburg and Liebknecht assassinations. The duly-elected National Assembly met in Weimar on February 6. Controlled by the Socialists, the Zentrum, and the Democrat parties, the independently minded Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann became the assembly’s first chancellor. Friedrich Ebert was selected as Weimar’s first president.19
Naturally, life went on. Toward the end of January 1919, Hildebrand paid a brief visit home to his parents in Dresden. He was disturbed by what he saw. “The terrible burden that has fallen on Germany is doubly strong at home,” he wrote, “because it has hit Father so completely unexpectedly.”20 At sixty-nine, the Pan-Germanist Cornelius was disillusioned and broken by Germany’s defeat. A miasma of bewildered mourning hung over the Kaitzer Strasse home. Unlike many Germans, Cornelius refused to accept “that it was hopeless … that the whole world did not want our victory.” Hildebrand wrote to Wilibald, “that they had already been lied to for years, been given false hope and been made drunk [by the idea of victory].”21
Hildebrand also stressed that Germany must drive any thoughts of revenge from its heart and throw its total intellectual weight into the problems that lay ahead. He seemed revitalized at the prospect of having his personal freedom once again, yet still found the need to apologize to Wilibald for his “lingering” in Vilna. Essentially, Hildebrand claimed, there were three reasons for his delay in coming home. He found that he could be more useful in the East than he’d been anywhere for a good long while. Secondly, it wasn’t as bad as the press made out; and thirdly, he didn’t want to be caught up in the “big rush” home. After all, he might be mistaken for a revolutionary and summarily hanged.22 Unsaid are other possibilities. Perhaps there was also a woman of whom he was especially fond? Perhaps he also didn’t feel quite strong enough mentally to make the journey and see a devastated Germany? Maybe he even feared what he’d find back home, or any aspersions of “laziness” that might be cast at him. Any or all of these are perfectly good reasons for him to have stayed behind in Vilna.
That Hildebrand, a young man of twenty-three who had just been through unimaginable horrors, should feel any need to excuse himself to Wilibald—especially as his thinking seems to be unclouded once more—is again a clear demonstration of his unrelenting need for what can be only seen as his critical older brother’s tightfisted approval. The constant allusions to Hildebrand’s “laziness” and Wilibald’s superiority of conscience and spirit helped to make the younger brother lack an inner confidence, all while projecting an air of bravura to the outside world.
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Elsewhere, the world watched in dismay as Germany tore itself apart. The unrest and cruel political violence hardened the Allied positions. Scheidemann’s cabinet resigned on June 20, calling the proposed Versailles Treaty a disgrace and refusing to sign. Ebert quickly formed a new cabinet with Gustav Bauer as chancellor; Bauer pragmatically agreed that Germany had no other viable choice, calling it the Diktat of Versailles. No negotiation was allowed. In fact, Germany had no voice whatsoever in the outcome. The Allies used the civil unrest since the armistice as proof that the country was barely able to govern itself and that Germans still possessed an unquenchable bloodlust.
When Germany reluctantly signed the treaty, on June 28, 1919, in Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, Wilson’s Fourteen Points had crystallized into 440 clauses punishing Germany. For Germans, the most difficult of these clauses was an acknowledgment of Germany’s sole war guilt, or Alleinschulde, for having begun the war and causing all the loss and damage to its enemies. While the treaty was masterminded in many respects by France, the United States and Britain were willing participants in the dismantling not only of the German empire but also of German self-respect and pride. The United States might be accused of a lack of international foresight, if not greed. However, this was its first “allied” entry as a belligerent on the world stage. Britain and France could be accused of greed and revenge respectively. Still, despite his personal reservations, it was John Foster Dulles, as a member of Bernard Baruch’s Reparations Committee and Economic Council, who drafted the infamous clauses containing offending economic sanctions that eventually would bankrupt Germany.23
Some of the main points of the treaty included forbidding the unification of the new Austrian republic with Germany; the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France; the fifteen years’ grant of Germany’s Saar-region coalfields to France; the demilitarization of the Rhineland by Germany and the occupation by the Allied forces—which were primarily French—to ensure compliance; the restructuring of all of Germany’s colonies as either French or British mandates; the forming of the Covenant of the League of Nations, specifically excluding Germany; the making of the port of Danzig a Free City under League of Nations control; the restriction of the German army to 100
,000 men, six battleships, and no submarines; the interdiction of any German air force; the creation of the “Polish Corridor” from rich farmland in the former West Prussia and Posen, separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany; and, of course, the crippling war reparations of 132 billion gold marks.24
New countries were formed: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up into Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Austria. Italian-speaking Tyrol was given to Italy. Over the next year, more treaties would continue to dismantle the European empires, until national boundaries were barely recognizable. The Treaty of Versailles would strangle the very breath from the Weimar Republic, even before it was born. It would resuscitate the Right, and give strength to the Freikorps, who were naturally exempt from the treaty’s restrictions and who were constant reminders of the myth of the “stab in the back.” The Freikorps would become a blunt instrument also begetting the Third Reich. Yet first, Weimar would be born—after a tumultuous gestation—and give the world its cultural legend.
In the dark recesses of Adolf Hitler’s mind, the date of the founding of the Weimar Republic—the ninth of November—would live on in a humiliating cloak of dishonor. The date would be seared into his memory as a day of national calamity. It would become a day he would transform into his day and his victory.
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AFTERMATH
Don’t you feel that the time will come again when people will yearn for intellectual and spiritual values…?