The Downfall of Money: Germanys Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class
Page 7
Then, at around midday, Friedrich Ebert appeared in the Reich Chancellery with a delegation of Social Democrats. Prince Max admitted that without any loyal troops at his disposal he could no longer control the masses. The government should be in the hands of a man of the people. Would the Social Democratic leader take on the job of Chancellor? But first, could they settle the question of who was to be regent, acting on behalf of the putative child-emperor who would succeed if the Kaiser and Crown Prince gave up their rights?
That same morning, Vorwärts had published, apparently approvingly, a declaration announcing the formation of a regency. Now, however, Ebert told Prince Max that the survival of the monarchy could no longer be guaranteed. After some show of reluctance, he agreed to take on the chancellorship.
Ebert remained prepared to keep the monarchy, subject to a parliamentary decision on the form the post-war state should take. For now, though, the priority was to keep control of events, which meant going with the flow of the popular demonstrations. As Philipp Scheidemann, chair of the Social Democratic parliamentary party and, since October, an appointed State Secretary, effectively a minister in Prince Max’s government, had said some days earlier: ‘Now it’s a matter of putting ourselves at the head of the movement, or there’ll be anarchy in the Reich.’8
Ebert, and other of the moderate Social Democratic leaders, were not – or were no longer – radical firebrands. Even before the war, the march of the moderates had been a feature of the party’s progression, to a point where in the last elections before the war it had been supported by more than a third of the population, far beyond the loyal ranks of the industrial proletariat.
Tellingly, when on 7 November Ebert had pressed Prince Max for the Kaiser’s abdication and his replacement by a regency, his reasons had been far from revolutionary. According to Prince Max’s later account, as the two men walked around the autumnal setting of the Reich Chancellery’s garden, he told Ebert of a plan to travel, if necessary, to the Imperial Headquarters at Spa and persuade the Kaiser to abdicate in favour of regency by the Kaiser’s second son, Prince Eitel Friedrich. ‘If I succeed in persuading the Kaiser, then do I have you on my side in the fight against social revolution?’ the Prince asked Ebert. The Social Democrat leader did not hesitate in his answer: ‘If the Kaiser does not abdicate, then the social revolution is unavoidable. But I don’t want it, I hate it like sin.’9
In the end, Prince Max did not go to Spa. The wildfire of revolution was sweeping the country and threatening Berlin. The Chancellor could not leave the capital. Instead, the not strictly accurate announcement of the Kaiser’s abdication two days later followed an untidy sequence of long-distance phone calls.
So, at around noon on 9 November, Germany had no Kaiser, but technically remained a monarchy. For about an hour and a half, that is. For, while on 7 November it had been possible to discuss questions of monarchy or no monarchy as if these were debatable alternatives, events outside the Chancellery were well on their way to changing the country for ever.
While these conversations were going on in Prince Max’s office, vast crowds, numbering hundreds of thousands, had assembled in the heart of the city. Demonstrators surrounded the Reichstag and the parkland adjacent to it, pouring over into Unter den Linden and from there to the nearby Berlin Stadtschloss (City Castle), the Kaiser’s official residence when he was in the capital. The masses as represented at that moment in the streets were calling with one voice for the end of the monarchy. By the time Friedrich Ebert accepted Prince Max’s offer of the chancellorship (with no monarch, no regent and no other kind of head of state to formally appoint Ebert, they had to simply ignore the rules and just do it), rumours were spreading throughout the government quarter that the crowds were to be addressed by various far-left figures. The speakers would include Karl Liebknecht, anti-war firebrand, veteran leftist leader and co-founder of the ultra-radical ‘Spartacist’ group (named after the slave rebellion in ancient Rome), who was well known for his support of the Bolshevik regime in Russia.
It was not Ebert who personally took control of the crucial moment, however. He had returned from his meeting with Prince Max and was having a meagre wartime lunch of potato soup in the restaurant of the Reichstag. Meanwhile, the crowds took the famous phrase carved two years earlier beneath the main pediment of the building, Dem Deutschen Volke (To the German People), seriously, and it was into the building that they swarmed to make their feelings clear.
It was now shortly before 2 p.m. A group of demonstrators entered the deputies’ restaurant. Ebert was urged by the intruders, who were Social Democrat party loyalists, to address the crowd. Liebknecht was planning to declare a socialist republic on Bolshevik lines, they said. The moderate left had to assert control of the situation. The newly minted Chancellor, not a natural orator, declined. However, also among the deputies having lunch was Philipp Scheidemann. At fifty-three, the former printer from Kassel was one of the main leaders of the party, chair of the parliamentary faction and vice-president of the Reichstag. An easily recognisable figure with his bald dome and goatee beard (strangely similar to that affected by the departing Kaiser), Scheidemann, unlike Ebert, was known as a rousing orator.
According to his memoirs, Scheidemann learned enough in the minutes that followed to convince him that the talk of a regency was no longer realistic. Clearly, if Scheidemann did not take immediate action, then someone else – someone with much more radical plans – would do so.
Leaving Ebert at the table, Scheidemann and some companions navigated their way through the Reichstag’s labyrinthine corridors until they reached a big window overlooking the front of the Reichstag, where many thousands of noisy demonstrators were gathered. Perched on the narrow balcony in front of the open window, Scheidemann addressed the crowd in an improvised oration that ended with the words:
The Kaiser has abdicated. He and his friends have disappeared, and the people have proved victorious on all fronts. Prince Max of Baden has transferred the office of Reich Chancellor to Deputy Ebert. Our friend will form a workers’ government to which all socialist parties will belong. The new government must not be impeded in its work for peace and its concern for work and bread. Workers and soldiers, be aware of the historic importance of this day: unheard-of things have occurred. Great work lies ahead of us, a task that cannot be shirked. Everything for the people! Everything through the people! Nothing can be permitted to happen that brings the workers’ movement into disrepute. Be united, loyal and aware of your duty. That which is old and rotten, the monarchy, has collapsed. Long live the new! Long live the German republic!10
The speech might have sounded radical in tone. Except for Scheidemann’s historic, off-the-cuff proclamation of the Republic, however, it was nothing of the kind. Essentially, the routine socialist rhetorical devices aside, Scheidemann was telling the war-weary masses to knuckle down, stop revolting and get on with the disciplined work of saving Germany under the new, democratic regime.
When Scheidemann got back to the restaurant, a furious Ebert - ‘livid with fury’ by Scheidemann’s description11 - banged the table in outrage at his colleague’s presumption. The future form of the German state was something for a Constituent Assembly to decide! But it was, of course, too late for such niceties. There is little question that Scheidemann’s prompt action was, under the circumstances, correct.
It was not, in fact, until around four in the afternoon that the firebrand Karl Liebknecht addressed another crowd from another balcony – this time, in a piece of deliberate stage-setting, on an upper floor of the royal Stadtschloss – and made his call for a far more profoundly revolutionary change.
Liebknecht declared a ‘free socialist republic’, based on the soldiers’ and workers’ councils that had been established in the past few days. The new Soviet-style state would reach out to ‘our brothers throughout the world . . . and call on them to complete the task of world revolution’.12 After his speech, according to the American journalist Ben Hecht, the
Spartacist leader went and lay down, in his underwear, on the bed in the Kaiser’s private chamber, where he caused the bedside table to collapse under the weight of his briefcase full of files.13
For all Liebknecht’s passion, and for all the enthusiasm of his supporters, his proclamation turned out be something of a damp squib. The overwhelming majority of the crowds that day in Berlin did not want a repeat of the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. There were big crowds around the so-called ‘government district’, but no truly transformational uprising occurred that day. Scheidemann’s unauthorised proclamation, and the news that Ebert, a Social Democrat, had assumed the chancellorship, were sufficient for most of the people thronging the streets, eager for change. Many Berliners recalled only too well that Lenin and his comrades’ seizure of power had been followed, in January 1918, by their violent dismissal of the freely elected parliament – the first in Russia’s history – and the rapid establishment of a one-party dictatorship. Certainly the likes of Scheidemann and Ebert were acutely aware of the danger of the quasi-tyranny of the old monarchy being replaced, as in Russia, by an absolute tyranny of the far left.
While all the speech-making was going on, one eyewitness – a businessman just trying to get to a meeting with his lawyer at his office on the Wilhelmsplatz – noticed this strange passivity and contrasted it with the potentially world-changing events taking place.
Young boys of sixteen and eighteen had opened fire at the war ministry with shotguns because no one would open the doors. There was said to have been answering fire from the windows. Pointless, infantile behaviour. Serious men are calling for calm, and commanding the shooting to stop. It is a real revolution, but strange – the great, world-changing thoughts and events, and these boys, children with red, hot faces contorted into unpleasant expressions, who look more like they are players in a game of cops and robbers than bearers of a revolutionary power that will move the world.
There is a complete lack of enthusiasm among the masses on the street. The public is standing curiously to one side, and being entertained by the commotion as if it were at the theatre. Motor vehicles roar past, and the well-dressed middle class people in the Leipziger Strasse humbly edge away to the side of the street.14
The day of the German revolution revealed a people tired of war and the old ways, eager for peace, and eager for the most part, at this point, to give a new, democratic and, it was hoped, fairer political system a chance. On 9 November 1918, the men of the imperial establishment appeared to retreat, as if they, too, understood that their system had failed. What was the point of an elite of warlords and monarchs if in the end they led their country to defeat? In a way, it was surprising that the German people let them off so easily.
However, if they had come to despise the ancien régime for its failures, most Germans, especially of the better-off classes, feared the anarchy that might follow the end of the monarchy. And, in some cases, they feared unemployment as a result.
Curt Riess, sixteen years old at the end of the war, was the son of a Berlin tradesman who had prospered more than most under the old monarchical regime. This was so because Riess’s father made and sold ceremonial uniforms and liveries for the various German royal courts, from Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and the like, up to and including that of the Kaiser himself. His son remembers that in the shop there was a closet neatly filled with hundreds and hundreds of different uniform buttons. And the sign in front of the shop sported the warrants of the various German dynasties to which he was a supplier of court dress ‘by royal appointment’.
On the day the revolution broke out in Berlin, fearing that the masses would attack all symbols of the old regime, Riess’s father and his staff rushed to the shop, which was situated in the heart of the government district, and prepared to defend the place from the mob. The streets, it transpired, were certainly full of republican demonstrators, but no one paid the slightest heed to Riess’s father’s establishment, then or later, despite its blatantly monarchical character. Riess recalls, in fact, that, although his father switched into conventional made-to-measure tailoring to suit the republican times, the ‘by royal appointment warrants stayed where they had always been, to the end of the first German Republic and beyond’.15
So the Republic established itself, and not necessarily as something to fear. There was continuity. Unfortunately, that continuity included a continuity of responsibility for the war that the Kaiser, his ministers and generals had foisted on their nation - and then demanded that it pay for.
The left-liberal and cultural Berlin magazine Die Weltbühne (‘The World Stage’) put it concisely: ‘when they were victorious, Ludendorff and his men were on top of the world, stamping on mighty seven-league boots through the land, and heaping up debts – debts that not they, but we others will have to pay’.16
5
Salaries Are Still Being Paid
The crowned heads and the generals who had dominated the old Germany were a busted flush. Or so it seemed, at least to the outside world.
In fact, the first action Chancellor Ebert had undertaken, within hours of becoming head of the new government, was to issue an appeal to all officials of the old regime to remain at their posts. ‘A failure of organisation at this difficult hour would expose Germany to anarchy and to the most terrible hardship,’ he declared.
At the same time, Ebert was also aware that his own party alone could not control events sufficiently reliably to ensure the maintenance of basic order. He therefore decided that he would have to make peace with the radicals as well. That same afternoon, he put out feelers to the leadership of the group of mostly left-wing Social Democrats who had broken away during the course of the war to form the more radical, pacifist ‘Independent Social Democratic Party’. The ‘Independents’, as they were known, had grown strongly in the last year or two of the war, especially in the factories and among serving soldiers. Their influence could reach to places where Ebert’s could not. But on that first afternoon, the party’s demands were too rigid for Ebert to accept. He was forced, for the moment, to wait and let events on the streets take what course they might.
During the night of 9/10 November, no one was sure who ruled Berlin. Count Harry Kessler, the wealthy aristocratic connoisseur, writer and diplomat, had just returned from an official mission to Warsaw when, at around 10 p.m. on 9 November, he and a colleague gained entrance to the Reichstag building. They pleaded urgent business with Hugo Haase, leader of the Independents, who had himself just returned from a visit to revolutionary Kiel.
In front of the main entrance, and in an arc of illumination provided by the headlights of several army vehicles, stood a crowd waiting for news. People pushed up the steps and through doors. Soldiers with slung rifles and red badges checked everyone’s business. The scene inside was animated, with a continual movement up and down the stairs of sailors, armed civilians, women and soldiers. The sailors looked healthy, fresh, neat and, most noticeable of all, very young; the soldiers old and war-worn, in faded uniforms and down-at-heel footwear, unshaven and unkempt, remnants of an army, a tragic picture of defeat.1
In fact it would be Haase who played a key role in ensuring that the renewed negotiations with Ebert, which followed on 10 November 1918, met with success. At first, in the absence of their veteran leader, representatives of the Independents had stubbornly refused to allow any non-socialists to join the new government, even as non-executive experts. They had ignored Ebert’s protests that such experts were desperately needed to prevent the Reich’s food supply systems from breaking down. This stand-off lasted until Haase got back from Kiel and knocked his colleagues’ heads together. Unlike his often inexperienced radical comrades, the fifty-six-year-old lawyer was a seasoned politician, having served with Ebert for five years as co-chair of the main Social Democratic Party until decamping to the Independents out of disillusion with the war. Despite the continuing sharp differences with Ebert and co., Haase had a grasp of Realpolitik that his more hot-headed fellow Independ
ents found hard to countenance.
By early in the afternoon of 10 November, the negotiators had nevertheless hammered out an agreement of sorts. Some non-socialists would be allowed into the government, though with socialist state secretaries as ‘minders’. And ultimate power in the state would lie with a national assembly of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which was to be summoned to Berlin at the earliest possible date. A six-member governing council, chosen half from the main Social Democratic Party, half from the Independents, would run the new democratic Republic of Germany until further notice. This council would supersede the office of Chancellor, which Ebert thus held for a mere twenty-four hours. To avoid any whiff of outmoded ministerial privilege, the official title of this inner cabinet would be ‘Council of the People’s Commissioners’ (Rat der Volksbeauftragten).
On the surface, over the next days, the revolution rolled on. No Bolshevik-style dictatorship of the proletariat, but lots of revolutionary rhetoric and, for the moment, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils given their heads. All of this fitted in with the majority socialist leadership’s strategy of placing itself at the head of the revolution so as to keep it within bounds.
So the majority socialist leadership decided that it would ride the revolutionary tiger, so to speak. Leaving power with the revolutionary councils might have seemed like a big risk, but the mainstream Social Democratic Party was able to do so with some confidence for two reasons. One, which seemed quite transparent even at the time, was that the majority socialists still held the allegiance of most workers and soldiers (the majority of whom were wartime conscripts, little more than workers in uniform). Ebert and his colleagues could be pretty certain that even when the Bolshevik-sounding directly elected councils met, most delegates would follow the majority socialist line, not that of the Independents, let alone of Liebknecht’s proto-Communist Spartacist organisation. And there was a second reason, though it remained secret for years after. Late on 10 November, Friedrich Ebert had spoken on a secure phone line with Ludendorff’s successor as Quartermaster-General and thereby de facto head of the army, Generalleutnant Wilhelm Groener, and done a deal.