by Philipp Blom
The German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe sought to give Berlin a modern, even futuristic, image.
It is difficult to imagine today how torn both Berlin and Germany as a whole were after the catastrophe of the war and the collapse of Wilhelm II’s empire. More than in any other city (with the possible exception of Vienna), the atmosphere was marked by poverty, bitterness, social hatred, and murderous political violence. “There were speakers on every street corner and songs of hatred everywhere,” the painter George Grosz would remember. “Everybody was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the gentry, the communists, the military, the landlords, the workers, the unemployed, the Black Reichswehr, the control commissions, the politicians, the department stores, and again the Jews. It was a real orgy of incitement, and the Republic was so weak that you hardly noticed it. All this must end in an awful crash.”17
Reeling from a defeat it was totally unprepared for, Germany was a nation split down the middle and engaged in a murderous internal battle. “On the street one group of white-shirted men was marching to the slogan of ‘Deutschland, erwache! Juda, verrecke!’ (Wake up, Germany! Jew, drop dead!), while another in equally military formation hailed Moscow. That left smashed heads, broken shins, and some nasty gunshot wounds,” commented Grosz.18 “The whole city was dark, cold, and full of rumors. The streets became ravines of manslaughter and cocaine traffic, marked by steel rods and bloody, broken chair legs.”
Since its inception in 1919, the Weimar Republic had been in the middle of a revolution that might have taken Germany in an entirely different direction had it been successful. This socialist revolution was led by social democrats but opposed by the party executive. The open street fighting between militias on the right and the left forced the fledgling government out of the capital and to the quiet provincial town of Weimar, where the first assembly was held in the local theater, built more than a century before by the local duke as a performance space for the plays of his minister and sometime theater director Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his friend Friedrich Schiller, whose statues in front of the building fruitlessly invoked a spirit of classical humanism.
In early 1920, the young Weimar Republic experienced one of its most severe crises as a group of disgruntled officers staged a violent coup against the government and occupied government buildings including the chancellery, forcing the cabinet to abandon Berlin once more. This time, however, a general strike was called and the coup leaders eventually had to abandon their plan of setting up an authoritarian government in the spirit of Prussian militarism. While the republic was saved for the moment, the situation remained at the edge of civil war.
The government’s fragile hold on power was secured only by a destabilizing alliance with and toleration of paramilitary forces of questionable loyalty. The problem the country’s leaders faced was overwhelming: a huge accumulation of debts stemming not only from reparations under the Versailles Treaty but also from the costs of the war itself, which had been financed by the emperor almost exclusively through obligations that he had been certain would be paid back out of the reparations imposed on his crushed enemies. Now, with its economy in ruins, its politics perilous, and its population brutalized by the conflict, Germany faced a war debt of 153 billion marks (by comparison, its debt had been a total of 5 billion in 1913). Its strategy was, or was supposed to be, a managed inflation: while before the war there had been 2 billion marks in circulation, there were 45 billion in 1919. Even at this early stage, money was rapidly losing its value, and the savings and security of the middle class began to evaporate, further destabilizing an already volatile situation.
Consensus was the first casualty in the battle of extremes, and while many conservatives thought that salvation lay in a return to national greatness and to “German virtues,” a large, predominantly urban left-leaning and internationalist faction opposed these dreams as a form of national suicide. The German left abhorred the legacy of the empire, the world of the Prussian Junkers or landed nobility, and the generals and their militarist worldview.
Perfect posture: A German war veteran decorated with the Iron Cross is begging in the streets of Berlin.
“The city looked like a grey corpse,” the painter George Grosz wrote about postwar Berlin.
There were cracks in all the walls. . . . The dead, dirty, hollow windows seemed still to be mourning those many for whom they had looked in vain. Those were wild years. I threw myself madly into life and teamed up with people who were searching for a way out from this absolute nothingness. We wanted more. Just what this “more” was to be, we could not tell. But my friends and I saw no solution in negativism nor in the fury of having been cheated, nor in the negation of all previous values. We thus, of course, drifted further and further to the left.19
An unwilling soldier, Grosz was part of a new, ideologically committed generation. His name already signified his strong feelings about the ideals and politics of his country. Born Georg Ehrenfried Groß, he had invented a new, cosmopolitan-sounding identity for himself because he no longer wanted to carry a German name. A talented draftsman, he put his skills into the service of his utopian hopes: “I considered all art senseless unless it served as a weapon in the political arena. My art was to be gun and sword.”20
Grosz used his artistic weapons in the fight against what he and his comrades in the battle for a brave new world saw as the reactionary enemies of peace and progress. In his lost painting Germany, a Winter’s Tale, for which a recently found preparatory study survived, he laid down his vision of old Germany. In the center of the canvas, a frightened, chubby bourgeois sits at his table clutching knife and fork, the plate in front of him empty but for a bone, a glass of beer next to him, a newspaper to one side. Around him is a world exploding: houses in ruins, a clock with hours missing, a prostitute, a revolutionary, a pallbearer—all in riotous disorder. At the bottom of the composition, a reptilian priest, a grimly brainless general, and a blind schoolteacher carrying a long cane and clutching a tome labeled “Göthe” complete the apocalyptic scenario.
His brush dedicated to class warfare, Grosz specialized in brutal officers, flabby whores, pinched bourgeois, and mutilated veterans, the last of whom could be seen begging in every Berlin street. He reflected what he saw around him: “All moral codes were abandoned. A wave of vice, pornography and prostitution enveloped the whole country. Je m’en fous [I don’t give a damn] was the motto, at last I am going to have a good time. A few young Americans who a few days before had been playing in an army band came to Berlin, and the orchestras playing Vienna waltzes changed overnight into jazz bands. Instead of first and second violinist, you saw grinning banjo and saxophone players.”21
Jazz became an emblem of new living and of a new generation seeking to escape the confines of the prewar world, a world whose values they no longer respected. They were the lost generation, the flappers, the new bohemians hanging around the watering holes of Paris, Chicago, London, and Berlin, of Vienna and Brussels and Atlantic City. Their days and nights seemed like a hedonistic romp, but they felt acutely that there was a terrible emptiness at the heart of their whirlwind lives; as Scott Fitzgerald described, they danced, drank, and slept around to dull their awareness of the unanswered and very possibly unanswerable questions lurking there.
But the flapper life was not for everyone. While the sense of betrayal and emptiness led some straight to the speakeasy, it motivated others to change things, to create a new Jerusalem. Despising their hedonistic counterparts, they discovered causes, ideologies, and salvation. Their enthusiasm was often real and honorable, but, as George Grosz observed in the case of Germany, their mutually contradictory hopes created a sense of menace underneath the hectic enjoyments of a time liberated from years of war:
It was a completely negative world, with gaily colored froth on top that many people mistook for the true, the happy Germany before the eruption of the new barbarism. Foreigners who visited us at that time were easily fooled by the apparent light-hearted,
whirring fun on the surface, by the nightlife and the so-called freedom and flowering of the arts. But that was really nothing more than froth. Right under that short-lived, lively surface of the shimmering swamp was fratricide and general discord, and regiments were formed for the final reckoning. . . . And we knew all that; or at least we had forebodings.22
·1921·
The End of Hope
In the fearful years of the Yezov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody identified me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes, I can.” And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.
—Anna Akhmatova, Requiem
ON MARCH 7, 1921, THE SEVENTH RUSSIAN ARMY WAS COMMANDED to assault the fortress of Kronstadt, a strategically important island in the bay of St. Petersburg, or Petrograd, as it was known then. Behind the thick walls of the fortress commanding the icy expanse of the bay were thirteen thousand armed Russian soldiers and sailors. Lenin’s government had declared them to be traitors and issued the command to eliminate them.
To attack the fortress over the ice was an almost suicidal undertaking, as the fortress and the battleships had numerous batteries manned by highly motivated and trained personnel, and the ice offered no shelter. In addition, many of the soldiers of the Seventh Army, most of whom were from peasant stock, were ambivalent about the attack. They would have to be encouraged, a task that was accomplished by placing a machine gun detachment behind the advancing troops, with orders to kill all deserters. A brief artillery engagement was broken off because a blizzard reduced visibility to just a few yards. The infantry was ordered to take the fortress by storm. As soon as the first soldiers, dressed in white overalls for camouflage, emerged from the driving snow they were inundated with a barrage of artillery and machine gun fire; the shells from the rebels’ large guns ripped holes in the ice, drowning scores of attackers in the freezing sea.
By the next day the snowstorm had subsided. The ice around the fortress was littered with corpses. The artillery bombardment recommenced and was answered in kind. Buildings on the mainland were burning. Another assault was begun, and Lenin announced another glorious Soviet victory, the liquidation of the Kronstadt rebels. His optimism turned out to be premature. Twenty thousand advancing soldiers had refused orders, knowing that they would be trapped on the open ice, and unwilling to shoot at their comrades. The attack was a fiasco. The Kronstadt sailors in their fortress directed an appeal to workers of all countries: “Let the toilers of the whole world know that we, the defenders of soviet power, are guarding the conquests of the Social Revolution. We shall win or perish beneath the ruins of Kronstadt, fighting for the just cause of the laboring masses. The toilers of the world will be our judges. The blood of the innocent will fall upon the heads of the Communist fanatics, drunk with power. Long live the power of the soviets!”1
Nobody could reproach the rebels on the island for a lack of courage or loyalty to the communist ideal. Throughout the terrible years of the civil war they had fought for the rights of workers and farmers, their own people, and no deprivation, no danger had been too great for them. The navy had always been at the very heart of the revolution. In 1905 the sailors’ revolt on the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea had been one of the first major revolutionary incidents showing the men’s determination to fight the tsar, and in 1917 the battleship Aurora had fired (in revolutionary mythology at least) the first shots signaling the beginning of a new, revolutionary age, sparking the glorious October Revolution.
Three gutting years of civil war had followed, three years of terror on both sides, meted out by the Red Army and the White tsarist forces, both equal terrors to the inhabitants of the countless villages in which four-fifths of Russians were still living. Areas had been conquered in punitive campaigns of plundering, burning, killing, and rape and then abandoned, a terrible cycle that was by no means new in Russia. Before 1917 the tsar’s armies had engaged in the same periodic campaigns of terror in an attempt to control a population still living largely beyond the law: in a country of 160 million souls, the official police force numbered only about one hundred thousand, with everyday order maintained by the often brutal rule of village elders.
This time, however, there had been no end to the violence. Worse, the new communist masters were even less adept at ruling than the aging aristocrats and corrupt officials had been before them. Without experience in governing or even administration—historian Richard Pipes calls them a government of professional revolutionaries—they fell back on theory and extreme experiments, even to the extent of abolishing money altogether in 1920 to destroy capitalism at its root.
On the eve of 1914, Russia had been an empire of vast social, economic, ethnic, and ideological contrasts; it was as though the cities were existing in a different century than the countryside. After the disastrous First World War, which had killed some 3.5 million Russians, the destructive energies generated by these contrasts plowed into the heart of society, and Russians endured the revolution, the murderous arbitrariness of their Bolshevik masters, and then the civil war. Three hundred thousand fighting men were killed in the civil war and another 450,000 died of disease, but those numbers were only a part of the human devastation.
In a contest of cruelty, Lenin’s feared secret police, the Cheka, had executed a quarter of a million people without trial, and monarchist Cossack troops shot some twenty-five thousand civilians in one province alone. Revenge was swift and terrible, as after their defeat at the hands of the Red Army some five hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand Cossacks were either shot or deported. Meanwhile, the notoriously anti-Semitic White Army murdered a hundred thousand Jews in the Ukraine; another unknown number were slaughtered during pogroms in the south of the country.
Embittered by what he believed to be resistance to his liberating policy by peasant forces loyal to the old order, Lenin had ordered grain to be impounded in villages throughout the Urals, causing the first of several artificial famines Russia was to experience within a decade. An unknown number of people starved to death—estimates range from one million to two million. A wave of typhoid followed and found easy prey among the weakened population, killing at least three million.
The navy units, the most loyal troops the communists possessed, had been isolated from this terrible epidemic of murder and death by a thick wall of propaganda. During the war they had hardly ever been able to leave their ships and visit the city, let alone their families in far-flung villages. In late 1920, however, the situation was changing. The White Army had been pushed back and the majority of Russia was now under communist rule.
The men had borne naval discipline, meager rations, danger, and boredom for months. Now, they thought, it was time for a little repayment of their loyal services. The crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol, frozen into the ice off Kronstadt next to each other, grew restive. They wanted leave to see their families, a loosening of military discipline, and a reestablishment of their famously democratic structures of decision making by ships’ committees (instead of the reinstatement of the former tsarist officers, the only ones with enough technical knowledge to run a battleship). But matters only seemed to get worse as supplies deteriorated and the already bad naval rations became so meager that there was an outbreak of scurvy among the men.
Fearing a rebellion, the navy commanders allowed greater numbers of men to go on leave and visit their families. Expecting to be treated like heroes and patriots, the sailors traveled home only to be confronted with the misery of life in the countryside and the hostility of their families. “For years,” recounted one sailor, “the happenings at home while we were at the front or at sea were concealed by the Bolshevik censorship. When we returned home our parents asked us why we fough
t for the oppressors. That set us thinking.”2
Returning to their ships, the sailors exchanged stories and experiences: the hunger in the cities and the terrible losses in their villages, the bands of street children begging and stealing what they could, the workers laboring under armed guards of Red Army soldiers like prisoners, the Cheka units moving about menacingly. This, they concluded, was not the revolution they had fought for. Many sailors became disillusioned with the cause they had served. Thousands of them resigned their Communist Party memberships, five thousand in January 1921 alone. The Baltic fleet was turning into a liability for the Party leadership, and officials indifferent to the reasons for the sailors’ disaffection blamed all problems on the actions of tsarist and imperialist agitators.
The situation on the dreadnoughts deteriorated further in February 1921, when news and rumors about unrest and strike actions in Petrograd reached the sailors. Cut off from all reliable information and fed on hearsay and propaganda, they heard stories of the army firing into crowds of demonstrators, as the tsar’s troops had done in the same city (then St. Petersburg) at the start of the 1905 revolution. Strikes had broken out, and Cheka units were arresting strike leaders and summarily shooting them in secret cellars. Agitated but uncertain what to believe, the seamen decided to send a commission into the city to investigate. What they found reinforced their impression that the state of workers and peasants was turning into a remote and harsh dictatorship: striking workers were forced to work under military guard, there were army units everywhere, and roadblocks with armed detachments had been set up.
In reaction to the suppression of the strike, the Kronstadt sailors drafted a resolution demanding free speech and a free press, immediate and secret elections, the freedom to form new trade unions, the liberation of all political prisoners, and the democratic control of all parts of government, among other things. It was a list of impossible demands, as the sailors were well aware, but it was the clearest articulation yet of growing disaffection with the central government and with the revolution itself, and it came from men who had shown their loyalty and sacrificed for the cause. They were not calling for the end of the Soviet government or of revolutionary politics, but perhaps what they wanted was even more dangerous: they were attempting to take the revolution back from the Party and anchor it in a popular democracy.