by Susan Ronald
—MARIE GURLITT, April 3, 1920
The Freikorps decided unilaterally to recapture the Eastern territories—which Germany believed it had defeated—before the Versailles Diktat was signed. “This is perhaps what had given the Teutonic Knights,” the Freikorps chronicler Ernst von Salomon speculated, “that restless seeking which ever drove them, again and again, from their solid castles to new and dangerous adventures.”1
The Freikorps’s very success in retaking Riga in May 1919 at the head of a makeshift and mostly German volunteer Latvian army simultaneously tolled the death knell of its ultimate defeat.2 Abandoned by Germany, and forced to return home by British artillery and Latvian patriots, the Freikorps men turned freebooter. Finding their powerlessness unbearable, they cut a swath like barbaric hordes of legend through everything in their path, reducing entire peaceful villages to ash. They returned to the Fatherland having burned their hopes and dreams as well as the “laws and values of the civilized world … swaggering, drunken, laden with plunder.”3
What the Weimar government hadn’t fully appreciated was that the Freikorps commanders would seek to keep their men together to mount a coup. By the time they were ordered back into Germany, more than one government overthrow had been simmering. In seemingly unrelated circumstances, “labor associations” suddenly sprouted like field mushrooms throughout Germany, spreading west and south through Brandenburg, Saxony, Bavaria, Franconia, and Württemberg toward the French and Swiss borders. In East Prussia and the former Pomerania—just across the border from the territory they had been forced to leave—the former Freikorps members stood in readiness. As men dedicated to fighting, they remained above all else committed to battle, and would join in any effort to overthrow the republic.
* * *
Hildebrand’s letters remained so self-absorbed that he made no mention of the rocky political and military state of Germany. While in Berlin in February 1920, a mere month after returning to his studies, he became ill. His landlady wrote to his parents that someone must come at once to help nurse him, since he was too weak to take care of himself. Marie spent the better part of that month sitting by her son’s bedside, worrying, until finally she could breathe a sigh as he slowly returned to health.4 The nature of Hildebrand’s illness was not disclosed. Still, given that the illness came a mere month after he returned to his art-history studies, it was possible that he had been haunted once again by his demons—particularly as Cornelius asked Wilibald to have a talk with his younger brother, since “he needs it badly!”5
Unknown to the Gurlitts and much of the German population, a putsch was scheduled for that March in Berlin. It was true that Germany had no real history of democracy and there was a great deal of antipathy for its unstable Weimar liberal governments.* However, it was the very existence of the Reichswehr (National Defense Force)—a veritable “state within a state”—and a criminal justice system that thrived as a corrupt extension of the Reichswehr that were at the heart of its problems.6 Weimar had been unable to wrest control of civil order without its army.
* * *
Economically, Germany teetered on the verge of ruin. At the beginning of the war, the German mark was valued at 4.19 to the dollar. By March of 1920, it was 83.89 to the dollar. With the key steel and coal industries working to only a quarter of their prewar capacity, the government hadn’t faced up to the causes of its economic problems. Inflation, which dogged all postwar countries, was rampant in Germany. Though it was not yet at the level of hyperinflation, the German people were suffering privation nonetheless.
Yet the finance minister, Matthias Erzberger, continued to order the printing of increasingly valueless money, ignoring the gap between domestic and international pricing. Returning to the gold standard was unthinkable. Like Germany’s military commanders in the final days of the war, Erzberger had run out of ideas.
It came as no surprise to some that on January 26, 1920, Erzberger was shot by a young ex-Freikorps volunteer who had been one of the demobilized freebooters. His assailant’s sentence was a mere eighteen months in prison. He served only four.7 Clearly, the courts approved such acts of violence.
While inflation gripped the country, support for Ebert’s already shaky government lessened. Support from the barons, Germany’s large landowners, and industry was rapidly cooling. Communist and Socialist enclaves in local government ranged from Saxony to Westphalia. The Gurlitt family’s letters show that there were two Germanys living inharmoniously side by side.
Hildebrand’s religious philosophy professor, Ernst Troeltsch, had written in the Spektator only nine months earlier that Germany was a nation in mourning. “Among the people, the effect was of a visible unity in pain, fury and offended honor,” the article began. “One heard once again accusations against a government that had allowed itself to be fooled by [President] Wilson’s phrases about peace.… The whole legend was once more spreading abroad that only the defeatists at home, the Jews and the Social Democrats had broken the backbone of our proud army.… If we had not been so sentimental the most glorious victory could have been ours.”8
Many people forget that revolutions and insurrections take money. Those who had money, and had previously backed the Weimar Republic, needed to make the strength of their displeasure felt. General Hans von Seeckt—the genius commander of the Reichswehr nicknamed “the Sphinx with the Monocle”—would become their uncompromising mouthpiece. When asked by President Ebert if the Reichswehr would back his government, Seeckt replied enigmatically, “The army, Mr. President, stands behind me.”9 So did the money.
* * *
The men of the Ehrhardt Brigade, thought to have disbanded as an outlawed Freikorps unit, began to march from their camp to Berlin before dawn on the morning of March 12, 1920. The large right-facing swastikas painted on their helmets were said to shine in the moonlight. Their boredom of a month in barracks was forgotten, their banners fluttered in the breeze of an early spring, and they sang their “Ehrhardt Lied” as they walked in step to battle. Their route to Berlin was well trodden, and they knew that their leisurely march would end just in time for the ultimatum to the government to expire. Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, a former submarine commander, had promised the government that he would refrain from seizing power until then. He prided himself on being a man of his word.10
The men waited in Berlin’s Tiergarten, where they sat, smoked, drank from steaming mugs of coffee while Berliners cheerfully greeted them. The Reichswehr night shift called out “good morning and good luck” as they wended their way home. Shortly after, two civilians in mufti approached: Wolfgang Kapp—known to the men as the Generallandschaftsdirektor (of a governmental region administrative director)—and the ubiquitous General Erich Ludendorff. They claimed to have just “happened by.” Ludendorff saluted the brigade of illegal freebooters, complimenting them on their military bearing, and wished them “Godspeed.”11
At 7:00 a.m. sharp, the freebooters marched through the Brandenburg Gate and down the Wilhelmstrasse. By noon, all the empty government buildings were occupied and the putsch’s administrative leader, Wolfgang Kapp, was working at his desk. The safety catches on their Mausers had never been touched. Shockingly, however, there was an “absolute vacuum of moral support … within the first few hours of their capture of the city.”12
* * *
One of the putsch’s key men was Captain Pabst, last seen masterminding the brutal murders of the Communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It was Pabst’s reactionary political club Nationale Vereinigung to which, among others, the Prussian functionary Wolfgang Kapp, Generals Ludendorff and Lüttwitz, Colonel Bauer (the former section chief of the German Supreme Command), and the wealthy industrialist Hugo Stinnes all belonged. As spiritual guide to the putsch, Pabst was unsuited for the role he was assigned as coordinator of other Freikorps units on a national level. He had forgotten the maxim “Whatever happens in Berlin is not representative for the rest of Germany.”
As if to drive that point home
, on the evening of March 16, only three days into the putsch, a military aircraft landed at Tempelhof airstrip in Berlin. Two men disembarked. They were met by their contact, whose duty was to take them to meet the new “Chancellor” Kapp. Discovering that the Kapp putsch was already reeling, they decided to return at once to Munich. The elder man was Dietrich Eckart of the German Peoples Workers’ Party—the younger one, Adolf Hitler. Their purpose was to discuss events in Bavaria, and see if there was some way they might work together.
Two days later, it was all over. While armed skirmishes took place in the streets of Berlin, Kapp, Lüttwitz, Pabst, and the other rebels fled. Potsdamer Platz and Budapester Strasse were reportedly raked by automatic gunfire. On March 18, the Manchester Guardian remarked, “We are living now in Berlin without light, gas or water. The new Government is caught like a rat in a trap.”13 Actually, the big rats of the new government had all fled to safety and exile, leaving history to condemn the conspirators as men who “knew damned little about complicated [political] matters.”14
The judiciary, that “blackest page in the life of the German Republic,” allowed 704 people charged with high treason to walk away from their trials without a sentence. Only Berlin’s police commissioner received a sentence, of five years’ “honorary confinement” at home.15
* * *
On April 1, the German Workers’ Party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP. Soon, it would be known internationally as “Nazi.” Adolf Hitler became its leader, resigning from the army to devote himself full-time to the party. Despite a libelous pamphlet claiming otherwise, Hitler never drew a salary from the party as such, but did accept a “speaker’s fee” when asked to talk to other like-minded organizations. After all, Hitler’s fledgling party of some 3,600 members did not have the wherewithal to support its chief. Nevertheless, its wealthy cohorts, like Dietrich Eckart, Hermann Göring, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, nicknamed “Putzi” by friends like Hitler, undoubtedly did.16
Writing from Dresden a few days after Hitler’s success, Cornelius told Wilibald that he was worried by Communist riots that swept Frankfurt in the aftermath of the failed putsch. The unrest and rising costs were most unsettling, and he doubted his ability to visit Wilibald in Freiburg anytime soon. After all, the cost of second-class rail travel between Berlin and Dresden stood at sixty-two marks. With “the ticket to Freiburg at 207 marks, the journey for mother and me alone to you would cost 824 marks; and what with bells and whistles perhaps as much as 1,200 marks.… In any case, we need to see how the situation turns out, and think of our financial reserves.”17
Cornelius also remarked that Hildebrand was still in Berlin. “He’s now working for the Curator of Brandenburg, Dr. Georg Voss. Adolphe Goldschmidt, the Berlin art historian, proposed Putz for the job—which makes me very happy. Putz is full of good hope.”18 Understandably, Cornelius feared for his son’s well-being—both mental and physical—in difficult circumstances.
“I am starting over and looking around for a friend who has a solid footing and doesn’t suffer as I do, with so much doubt and discord in his heart,” Hildebrand wrote his parents in July. Desiring to reassure his family, he continued, “I have come through a serpentine of all sorts of anxieties and all sorts of possible destinies, and when I look around, I see around me wild, hateful fanatics (both left and right).” He repeats this thought several times before continuing, “I feel so rich.… I realize that when I was in the field [of battle] I saw everything as beautiful.… I want to keep trying, despite everything, to live and not just so half-heartedly with my head hung low, but rather now, if quieter and less adventurous although steady, yet without resignation.”19
Had he truly scaled down his ambitions? As Hildebrand changed mood rapidly, it is difficult to properly evaluate the steadfastness of his resolve to lead a quiet life—particularly from the hubbub of Berlin. As if to prove the point, only three days after reassuring his parents, he berated his father for a letter Cornelius wrote to Georg Voss, Hildebrand’s Berlin mentor, who was responsible for his university work experience. Hildebrand was outraged that he was expected to thank Voss—the curator of all Brandenburg—for his unpaid work placement.
“I am somewhat shocked by this letter because I do not understand … that he is doing so much good for me. I work a lot for him,” Hildebrand argued with barely disguised rage, “and he only pays me in kind.… I do not think my work in any way inferior.… After all, not everyone lives as sparingly as I did on our field trip.… I’d be very glad to earn something … without wanting to complain, I live worse than the other workers.… But I do not feel miserable or depressed by it.”
Hildebrand can’t seem to stop himself. His tirade branches out to his father’s parsimoniousness. “I knew nothing of what was ahead of me.… A wise man would have taken flight, but I was blind, understood everything wrong and have done yet again, a little too late, and I thank you again for your most intense distrust.… I wanted to live cheap and not to live for my pleasure [hence my move to Tegel], my preference is to live in Wilmersdorf or Nollendorfplatz or near the Arts and Crafts library.”20
It is a letter worthy of an eighteen-year-old, not a supposedly mature twenty-four-year-old who had fought in the war. Hildebrand had no inclination to understand the difficulties and the financial burden that putting him through university had become for his parents, much less the need for him to find part-time work to help out. His defensiveness is myopic, arrogant, and graceless.
* * *
Cornelius, however, was right to worry. In the year that followed, creeping inflation had gone from a gentle trot to a gallop, then a run before finally stampeding into the stratosphere. By year end 1921, the exchange rate had doubled again, to over 160 marks to the dollar. Nazi Party membership stood at over six thousand people.
Only the most inventive in their financial dealings could survive as inflation became a constant companion. That summer, Cornelius wrote to Wilibald, “An American literary company, The American [Encyclopedia] of the Arts, has asked me to work for them at the rate of 1,000 words for twenty dollars. The dollar is currently at seventy-two marks to one dollar, so he offers 1,440 marks for 1,000 words. That translates in the 320 words approximately it had taken me to write this letter at 460 [sic] marks. If the whole thing is not a farce, I’ll ask for early payment of the entire bill!”21
By Easter 1922, matters reached crisis proportions. At a conference in Genoa, the Western Allies presented their bill for reparations—$32 billion—which mounted daily owing to inflation when converted from marks. Something needed to be done, quickly.
While still reeling from the dire news, a German delegation traveled a few dozen miles away to the Italian resort of Rapallo, where a secret treaty with the USSR was hastily signed. The treaty canceled all reparations between the signatories and instituted a favored-nation trade status that would help to stabilize both economies well into the 1930s. The irascible French prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, the former wartime general, fulminated when the treaty’s terms were revealed. The Germans were cozying up to the “Red Peril”—ergo, the Communists would win out over the Right and seize Germany. Poincaré declared the treaty an open act of renewed hostilities. Paris began to seriously discuss invading the Ruhr.22 The result was that the mark now stood at 284.19 to the dollar.
* * *
The left-wing backlash hit at the heart of industry. Right-wing financier Hugo Stinnes was busy handling the Ruhr Red Army, or Rote Soldatenbund, occupation of his factories and mines in the Ruhr, as were the steel and ammunitions kings Gustav Krupp and August Thyssen. The cigarette-manufacturing giant Philipp Reemtsma and his Hamburg-based factory fared better than Krupp or Thyssen. Others, like Kurt Kirchbach, grew phenomenally wealthy by manufacturing original equipment and brake systems for tanks, jeeps, and automobiles when world markets were closed to Germany in 1914. Each businessman was perpetually concerned about the state of near civ
il meltdown and the inexorable devaluation of the mark.
That July, the mark hit 670 marks to the dollar. Inflation firmly gripped the minds of all Germans. That’s when the “carpetbaggers” arrived. The ability to change foreign currency into marks, put it to work in acquiring assets or goods or even services in Germany at bargain-basement prices, meant that foreigners tended to get rich quick at the expense of Germans.
Those who took advantage of the crumbling mark were called Raffkes (profiteers) in Berlin. Reminiscent of the Northern carpetbaggers infesting the South after the American Civil War, they descended on Germany in greedy hordes, buying factories, businesses, houses, and land with inflated foreign exchange. German industrialists with easy access to foreign funds frequently joined in, making a killing.23 Rumors of tourists swindled by the Germans were rife, thanks in part to the virulent anti-German views of Lord Northcliffe, then proprietor of the Times in London.
Still the rocky Weimar government did not dare to stop printing money. The uncertainty of tomorrow soon grew into fear of the value of the mark later today. Cornelius was forced to sell the gold watch given to him by his father. Commodities became more valuable than paper money: a pound of sugar or few pounds of fruit or vegetables were a more certain form of exchange. Bartering became rife among those who earned a salary. Though wages attempted to keep pace with inflation, often employees or their union leaders were at a loss to calculate just how much they would need to ask for as a pay raise.
By the end of July, the German government demanded a moratorium on cash payments of their reparations until they could stabilize the mark. Poincaré warned that if any moratorium was granted, it would need to be against “productive guarantees,” which would include the surrender of majority shares in Germany’s chemical and mining companies as well as its vast state-owned forests.