As for the ‘bloodhounds’, on the morning of 4 January, realising that the time had come to secure some measure of state force in the face of the likes of Liebknecht and his armed supporters, Ebert travelled to the army base at Zossen, a little less than fifty kilometres’ southward drive from the centre of Berlin. Accompanying Ebert was the newly appointed ‘People’s Commissioner for Defence’, Gustav Noske. Noske, originally a basket weaver by trade, who like so many Social Democratic leaders had risen from humble origins through the trade union apparatus and the party press, had been sent to keep control of the revolutionary situation in Kiel at the beginning of November. His success with the revolutionary sailors on the Baltic put him at Ebert’s right hand in the struggle against the far left that followed.
The purpose of Ebert and Noske’s trip to Zossen was to meet a certain Major General Maercker. Maercker, a veteran of Germany’s pre-war colonial conflicts and a divisional commander during the latter part of the European war, had started organising and training a Freikorps on the lines of the units already operating on the eastern frontiers. In his case, however, it was with the object of taking on the domestic subversives rather than the Poles and the Baltic Bolsheviks. The two Social Democrats from Berlin were by all accounts astonished, both at being accorded a full guard of honour – unheard of for civilian politicians before the revolution – and at the rigorous traditional discipline shown by these hand-picked loyal troops. The regular soldiers sent against the People’s Marine Division on Christmas Eve had been ineffectual. These ones were much more impressive. Noske was said to have clapped the much shorter Ebert on the shoulder and said, ‘Take it easy, everything’s going to be all right.’ He then addressed the assembled soldiers and told them: ‘The orders of your commanders are to be obeyed, even when they order the use of weapons and hand grenades.’6
Meanwhile, armed rebellion had broken out in Berlin itself. The left-socialist President of Police in the capital, Emil Eichorn, had been dismissed but refused to leave office. Thousands came out on to the streets to support him. Fiery speeches from leading radicals, including Eichorn and Liebknecht, worked the crowd on the Alexanderplatz into a climax of revolutionary fervour. Within hours, armed far-left groups had occupied the city’s media district (Zeitungsviertel), on either side of the Friedrichstrasse, which for more than half a century had been home to dozens of publications, printers and press agencies. They seized the printing works that produced the pro-government Social Democrat newspaper Vorwärts and the liberal Berliner Tageblatt, the offices of several publishers, as well as the Wolff Telegraph Bureau. The next morning, they also took over the Reich Printing Works, where official documents – and the capital’s supply of paper marks – were produced.7
Despite Ebert and Noske’s meetings with the warlords of the Freikorps, the government seemed to have no physical answer to the violence. After all, little had been done to create a force loyal to the Republic. The next day, 5 January, when thousands of Spartacists* and their supporters began moving north into the government district, the pro-government forces had summoned the only weapon they had: their thousands of mainstream working-class supporters, many of whom made their way into the heart of Berlin to confront the rebels. In perhaps the last example of ingrained political solidarity among the capital’s working class, when the armed Spartacists came up against the cordon of unarmed government supporters, the rebels did not shoot their way through. They were not prepared to harm their fellow workers. The Reichstag and the Chancellery did not fall.
Meanwhile, the revolutionary soldiers and sailors had declared themselves neutral, and most of the Independent leaders who had left the executive the previous week, alarmed at the situation, agreed that they should try to mediate between Ebert and his government and the rebels. Since the government demanded that the rebels evacuate the media district, and the rebels refused, this proved impossible.
It was at this crucial moment that the Council of People’s Commissioners made the decision to put Noske in charge of bringing order to Berlin. He accepted, with the notorious words, echoing those of Liebknecht on the other side of the political divide, ‘Somebody’s got to play the bloodhound! I shall not shirk the responsibility!’ In short order, Noske decided to bring in the Freikorps to do the job. He managed to make his way out through the Spartacist lines and then established himself in a villa in Dahlem, a leafy suburb in the south-west of Berlin, where he began work organising his Freikorps allies and planning the retaking of the city.
The serious fighting went on for a little over a week. In fact, the actual battle would not be decided by the Freikorps. A combination of pro-Republic loyalists who had managed to organise themselves into a reasonably effective fighting force, supported by loyal regular army units, reconquered the streets and buildings seized by the Spartacists and their allies. Again, the fighting was bizarrely localised, and the life of the city went on around it in an eerily normal fashion. Harry Kessler, who lived not far from the epicentre of the uprising, made it his business throughout these days to get out and about, making notes for his diary. Sometimes his accounts read like war reports, sometimes like travel journalism. He wrote on 8 January:
At four o’clock I was in the Friedrichstrasse. There was a good deal of traffic and a lot of people stood discussing matters in small groups when suddenly there was a sound of shooting from the Unter den Linden end. Yet the Leipziger Strasse, except for its closed shops, looked perfectly normal and the big cafés on Potsdamer Platz were open, brightly lit and doing business as usual.
. . . At half past seven I had a meal in the Fürstenhof. The iron gates were just being shut because a Spartacus attack was expected on the Potsdamer Railway Station opposite. Single shots were dropping all the time. As I left, about nine, street vendors with cigarettes, malt goodies, and soap were still crying their wares. I looked for a moment into the boldly lit Café Vaterland. Despite the fact that any moment bullets might whistle through the windows, the band was playing, the tables were full, and the lady in the cigarette-booth smiled as winsomely at her customers as in the sunniest days of peace.8
Four days later, the last of the rebel fighters had been cleared from the area or taken into captivity, and the far-left bid to control Berlin had been defeated. The so-called ‘Spartacist Uprising’ seems, in fact, to have been a strange and rather disorganised combination of Bolshevik-style coup d’état on the part of a militant minority and an extended protest – arguably justified – on the part of many Berliners, especially in the working-class areas, against the way that the timidity and conservatism of Ebert and his fellow moderate socialist leaders was already allowing the old system to make a comeback.9
The Freikorps did eventually enter the city but not until the fighting had all but died down, making its actions all but superfluous. On 11 January, Noske marched at the head of Maercker’s troops as they advanced through the suburbs into the heart of Berlin. Over the next days, further units, many newly formed, made their way into Berlin. The southern suburbs and the centre were occupied. The working-class districts, where resistance might have been expected, were left alone for now.
One large Freikorps unit, which called itself ‘The Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division’, took up quarters at the splendid Eden Hotel, on the Tiergarten opposite the Berlin Zoo, and put signs up outside the building that declared: ‘The Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division has marched into Berlin. Berliners! The Division promises you that it will not leave the capital until order has been completely restored.’10
On 15 January, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were arrested at the flat of a sympathiser and taken to the Eden Hotel. Luxemburg, who had warned against a premature ‘adventure’ such as the Spartacist uprising became, was questioned and brutally beaten, as was Liebknecht. Then, on the orders of a certain Captain Waldemar Pabst, they were hurried out of the hotel by a side entrance, where waiting soldiers struck theirs skulls violently with rifle butts. The dazed, even half-unconscious revolutionaries were then bundled into s
eparate cars and driven away into the Tiergarten.
The car bearing Rosa Luxemburg had travelled only a few metres when she was shot in the head. The car stopped on a bridge, from which she was thrown into the Landwehr Canal. Her body would not be found until the end of May. In Liebknecht’s case, he was ordered out of the car and immediately shot in the back of the head. His body was then returned to the vehicle and driven to a mortuary, where it was labelled ‘corpse of an unknown man’. Eventually the body was retrieved, and Liebknecht was buried along with thirty or so other Spartacist dead in a mass ceremony on 25 January 1919.
The statement that went out to the press was that Liebknecht had been ‘shot while trying to escape’, while Luxemburg was said to have been abducted from the vehicle by a mob and spirited away to some place unknown. Both stories were lies. They had been murdered by anti-revolutionary Freikorps officers, probably with the connivance of Noske. Neither, it seems, had been directly involved in the violence – certainly not Rosa Luxemburg – but their symbolic importance was such that their liquidation became a priority.11
The crushing of the uprising was an important event in itself, but the fact and manner of the Spartacist leaders’ deaths was more ominously significant still. With the summary murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, a line had been crossed. When arrested, Rosa Luxemburg had packed a small suitcase with her belongings, believing herself to be facing yet another spell of imprisonment, something to which she, like Liebknecht, had become hardened. The fate to which she and her co-conspirator were so brutally consigned by Pabst’s killers showed what the new, angry post-war right wing was capable of and presaged a quarter of a century of savagery to come. Their deaths also created two martyrs for the German far left, the potency of whose legends remains extraordinarily strong well into our own century.
The January uprising was not the last radical leftist rebellion in Germany. There would be more. In fact, throughout most of the late winter and spring of 1919, Germany underwent a sporadic but bloody civil war that would leave a terrible legacy of bitterness and ensure that what had previously been a united socialist movement could never be put back together again. But what the cruel ends suffered by Liebknecht and Luxemburg showed was that, two months after the November revolution, the reactionary militaristic powers in the land were on their way back, albeit in alliance, for the moment, with Germany’s new ostensibly socialist masters.
Like the respectable townsfolk in a western film who hire a gunslinger to protect them, only to find that he turns against them once the job is done, the rulers of the new Republic had created a monster that they would soon find they could not control.
Footnotes
* i.e. to the gallows.
* Although the Spartacus League had formally merged into the German Communist Party a few days earlier, the uprising was known at the time and to posterity as the ‘Spartacist’ uprising, and so the description is used throughout.
8
Diktat
Between the suppression of the Spartacist uprising in mid-January 1919 and the signing of the armistice in July, the German revolution was stopped in its tracks. Morgan Philips Price of the Manchester Guardian, who had been won over to a pro-Bolshevik position while reporting from Russia in 1917-18, wrote gloomily on 17 January 1919:
A deathly quiet prevails in the city. The quiet of the grave. Military patrols on streets, artillery posted everywhere. Armed White Guards being organised by a certain Reinhardt go about arresting and terrorising at pleasure. Several of my friends disappeared. A fine condition for eve of election for the National Assembly.1
Nonetheless, on 19 January, the nation voted freely for the first time since 1912. Eighty-three per cent of a much-enlarged electorate of 36,700,000 took part in elections for the Constituent National Assembly that would frame and pass a constitution for the new Republic.
The reason why the electorate now comprised more than half the population was that women had been enfranchised in November 1918 by decree of the Council of People’s Commissioners. Not that this was necessarily a total victory for feminism. One young woman made an early discovery, knocking on doors for one of the non-socialist parties in one of the less prosperous parts of the city, that men often still ruled the family when it came to politics, a fact that would remain true well into the twentieth century all over the democratic world. In a block of modest flats, one housewife opened the door to her and, when asked how she planned to vote, called out over her shoulder, ‘What are we voting?’ A male voice answered, ‘Scheidemann’ (Social Democrat). The middle-class young woman pressed a leaflet for her party into the woman’s hands, assuring her: ‘Read this. Even if the gentleman votes for Scheidemann, you can choose another party.’2
Male or female, to the republican government’s satisfaction, Germans voted overwhelmingly against further radical change. Ebert and Scheidemann’s Majority Social Democrats were favoured by 37.9 per cent of the electorate. The Independent Socialists, tainted in the eyes of some voters by the association of their more radical elements with continued street violence, got only 7.6 per cent. The rest of the vote was divided between the Catholic Centre Party and its Bavarian ally (19.7 per cent), the left liberal German Democratic Party (18.5 per cent), the conservative-nationalist German National People’s Party (10.3 per cent) and the right liberal German People’s Party (only 4.4 per cent). The Communist Party had decided at its founding congress three weeks earlier to boycott the Assembly elections. Ironically, the delegates had gone against the recommendation of both Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who paid with their lives for the party’s decision to take the revolutionary road to the exclusion of all others.
The elections to the Constituent Assembly, scheduled to come together in Weimar at the beginning of February, were an impressive early expression of support for democracy. Only around a fifth of the vote went to expressly anti-republican or monarchist parties. But it was not a vote for socialism. Between them, the Majority and the Independent Social Democrats had received just over 45 per cent of the total vote. Even had they been able to go into coalition together (unlikely after their recent bitter differences), there would still have been no majority to push socialist measures through parliament.
The National Assembly met in early February at the old Court Theatre (later National Theatre) in Weimar. Ebert was elected President of the Reich, and Scheidemann its first Chancellor (though, since the country still had no formal constitution, actually he was originally given the title of Reichsministerpräsident, or Reich Prime Minister, and only his successor took the title of Chancellor).3 The ministers were drawn from the Social Democratic Party, the German Democratic Party and the Catholic Centre Party.
For now, apart from Scheidemann, the most important members of the cabinet so far as the outside world was concerned were Matthias Erzberger (Centre), Minister Without Portfolio (but responsible for overseeing treaty negotiations with the Allies), and as Foreign Minister Ulrich Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, an aristocratic career diplomat reckoned close to, though not a member of, the Democratic Party. Otherwise, Social Democrats, mainly former trade unionists, dominated the ministries involved in the economy, industry and food supply. The ever more controversial Gustav Noske’s position was formalised. He was appointed Minister for the Armed Forces, soon to be known as the Reichswehr.
As winter turned to spring, the inter-Allied discussions in Paris about the terms to be presented to Germany seemed to go on for ever. Meanwhile, the German economy groaned under the weight of attempting to reintegrate millions of men into an economy still excluded by the Allied blockade from post-war international markets. Men were returning after years of suffering and danger, and they were demanding their old jobs back, at new and better wages and under improved conditions.
At the same time, there were further far-left uprisings all over the Reich – another, even bloodier revolt in Berlin in March, this time including the People’s Marine Division and blamed on the resurgent Spartacists, which cost t
he lives of 500 government soldiers and more than 1,000 civilians; further uprisings in the Ruhr industrial area, where militants had formed a ‘Red Army’; in the ancient port of Bremen (where an attempt to set up a ‘Soviet Republic’ was suppressed with particular brutality by Freikorps units); in the industrial conurbations of Saxony and Thuringia. The chaos was most extreme in Munich, where the Social Democrat Prime Minister was assassinated by a monarchist fanatic and the far left and the anarchists took charge for a heady few weeks of Bolshevik-style ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
The so-called ‘Munich Soviet’ led in short order to a savage counter-terror of the far right, during which the left and its supporters, perceived or real, were massacred wholesale. Six hundred and six alleged ‘revolutionaries’ were executed within a matter of days – including twenty-one young men who lived in a Catholic Apprentices’ Hostel, who, because they were young workers, were presumed to be ‘Spartacists’.4 Many of the executions were officially classified as ‘fatal accidents’.5 If captured, members of the far-left ‘Soviet’ government were brutally treated. The Bavarian writer and teacher Josef Hofmiller described the fate of the deposed Defence Minister, Wilhelm Reichart:
Reichart . . . was recognised . . . by a soldier whose sweetheart had lost her life during one of the uprisings. This government soldier immediately gave him a terrible blow to the face. To which the man replied: ‘I am Reichart, Minister of War of the Soviet Republic.’ Another blow to the face. The soldiers made a sport of forcing him again and again to cry out: ‘I am Reichart, Minister of War of the Soviet Republic’, after which they repeatedly hit him in the face, so that by the end he had a terribly swollen head. Then they put him on a train, and at each station he was made to shout out of the window: ‘I am Reichart, Minister of War of the Soviet Republic’, upon which he was again repeatedly beaten about the head.6
The Downfall of Money: Germanys Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class Page 10