by Victor Serge
In some ways the world of the Weimar Republic may seem very remote to modern readers. Yet there are many features of Serge’s account that remind us we are still confronting the same bankrupt social system. The starvation that haunts large parts of the Third World, the disintegration of 1990s Russia, the economic sabotage that preceded Pinochet’s coup in Chile, the sheer lunacy of the international money markets—all these have their counterparts in Serge’s account.
History does not repeat itself, but a knowledge of the past arms us for the future. Serge himself summed it up beautifully in his novel Birth of Our Power, when he reflected that defeated revolutionaries could look forward to the success in the future of others, “infinitely different from us, infinitely like us.”10
Ian Birchall
January 1999
Note on Translation
A collection of Serge’s writings on Germany—Notes d’Allemagne—was published in French by Serge’s nephew, Bernard Némoz, and Pierre Broué. I am deeply indebted to their work, but I have arranged the material in a different way (see appendix). I have also added eight further pieces not included in the Broué edition. Serge wrote copiously at this time under his own name and under pseudonyms. Even for 1923 I have translated only a selection of his work. There is still plenty more material for others to discover and translate. Correspon-dance internationale, for which Serge wrote, was a press service designed to provide material for the Communist press around the world. Hence it is possible some of Serge’s articles appeared in English at the time. However, apart from some short extracts in Revolutionary History 5/2 (1994), none of it has appeared in English in recent years.
Serge was working in a difficult and hectic situation. He, and his printers, obviously made mistakes, and on occasions he may have received faulty information. I have corrected obvious misprints but have not otherwise changed any details, preferring to leave the reader with Serge’s view at the time he wrote. Thus his reference to “Colonel Hitler” gives an interesting insight into how little was known of Hitler in 1923. I have used the most recognizable forms of place and personal names—thus “Gdansk” and “Aachen” rather than “Danzig” and “Aix-la-Chapelle.” I have not attempted to check or correct Serge’s arithmetic, which occasionally seems shaky. All notes have been added by the translator except where specifically indicated as “Serge’s note.”
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Richard Greeman for encouragement and advice on this project, to Sharon O’Nions for critical comments on the translation and notes, and to the late Peter Sedgwick, who first made me aware of Serge over 30 years ago.
I thank staff at the British Library and the LSE library for their assistance. I was working at the British Library during the period of the campaign against the proposed introduction of charges for use of that library. Fortunately the campaign succeeded, otherwise independent socialist historians like myself would be unable to gain access to our socialist heritage.
I was unable to consult material at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris because of the collapse of the computerised system at the aptly named François Mitterrand site. But I salute the staff there who took strike action against unacceptable working conditions.
Chronology
1914
August 4 War begins. SPD deputies vote for war credits.
1917
April 5 Spartacist conference, founding of organization that was to become KPD.
1918
November 9 Proclamation of republic.
1919
January 15 Murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.
April 13__May 1 Soviet Republic in Bavaria.
1920
March 13__22 Kapp putsch blocked by general strike.
October 12__17 Halle conference of USPD. Majority votes to join KPD.
1921
March 18__30 March Action.
1923
January 11 French and Belgian troops occupy Ruhr.
July 29 Anti-Fascist Day called by KPD.
August 9__11 General strike brings down Cuno government.
August 13 Stresemann Great Coalition formed, including SPD.
October 10 Workers’ government formed in Saxony.
October 13 Workers’ government in Thuringia.
October 21 Chemnitz conference fails to back general strike.
October 23__24 Hamburg insurrection.
October 29 Reichswehr removes Saxon government.
November 2 SPD ministers leave Stresemann government.
November 8 Hitler’s beer hall putsch.
November 6__12 Fall of Thuringian workers’ government.
November 23 KPD made illegal.
November 30 Wilhelm Marx government formed.
Abbreviations and German Terms Used in Text
ADGB: Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund—main (SPD-linked) trade union federation.
AfA: Allgemeiner freier Angestelltenbund—main white collar union federation.
DDP: Deutsche Demokratische Partei—German Democratic Party (liberal).
DNVP: Deutschnationale Volkspartei—German National People’s Party (right wing conservative).
DVP: Deutsche Volkspartei—German People’s Party (liberal/ nationalist).
KPD: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands—German Communist Party.
SPD (or VSPD): (Vereinigte) Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands—German Social Democratic Party after reunification with USPD.
USPD: Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands—Independent Social Democratic Party (only a small group in 1923 after bulk of party fused with SPD).
Landtag: Parliament of one of the constituent states (Länder) of the Reich.
Reich: From 1918 to 1933 the republic. Refers to the federal government as opposed to the constituent states (Länder) which had their own governments and considerable autonomy.
Reichsrat: The upper house of the federal parliament, with representatives from the various constituent states.
Reichstag: The federal parliament.
Reichswehr: Armed forces of the republic.
Reichsbank: National Bank.
Rentenbank: National Mortgage Bank, established October 1923, basing German assets on industrial and agricultural land rather than on gold (of which Germany had little).
Rentenmark: Temporary currency (November 1923 to August 1924) replacing marks made worthless by inflation.
Stahlhelm: Steel Helmet. An ex-servicemen’s association which became a far right organization.
This article has been selected out of sequence as a suitable introduction setting the tone for the whole collection. Serge, who had been politically active in France before 1914, and had many contacts there, was addressing an appeal for international solidarity to French workers. The Versailles Treaty (June 28, 1919) had imposed a heavy burden of reparations on Germany, which had to pay the victorious Allies twenty billion gold marks. French troops were already occupying the Rhineland, and as the economic crisis made Germany unable to pay the reparations, the threat of an occupation of the Ruhr became more real.
Letter from Germany to a French Comrade
Correspondance internationale, September 23, 1922
Thirty five million workers, on the right bank of the Rhine, are anxiously awaiting the “winter that kills poor people.” In less than two months the average cost of living in Germany has more than tripled, the prices of essential goods (shoes and clothes) have gone up five times. As from October 1 rents go up five times, the cost of postal communications three or four times (a letter abroad which today needs a six mark stamp will cost 20 marks), and the price of telephone calls, railway and tram tickets are going up at a preposterous rate. It has been announced that the price of bread will be quadrupled!
These are the facts. As for wages, the increases are always slow and inadequate, lagging far behind the rise of prices. The most fortunate wage earners have seen their wages doubled since the calamity of the mark. That means that in relation to food
prices they have lost a good third, and in relation to the price of clothing more than two thirds…
And this is continuing, it comes on top of years of undernourishment, constant hardship, deep poverty for many. Our comrades Ludwig and A. Friedrich from Die Rote Fahne11 have calculated that out of a total annual wage bill for working Germany12 of between 100 and 120 billion13 paper marks,14 taxes of at least 40 billion are deducted, that is more than 40 percent. Our comrade Varga15 has published figures based on scientific statistics drawn up by bourgeois experts showing that German workers are eating half as much bread and meat as they ate before the war. Hence the productivity of their labor is falling. And hence in the streets of Neukölln and Moabit16 you see so many ashen young faces, bearing the marks of tuberculosis and hunger.
People have noted in Germany “the man with no shirt,” the worker who conceals the absence of garments behind a miserable shirt front. They have noticed the children with no shoes: in the working-class districts the great majority of children, even in wind and rain, go to school with bare feet and bare heads. This winter they won’t go to school. A certain percentage will die of bronchitis… You’ve heard about those suffering from shell shock, the pathetic disabled ex-servicemen wearing the macabre ribbon of the Iron Cross,17 who sell matches in the wealthy thoroughfares of Berlin and are insulted by the police. And the beggars who swarm round the approaches to cafés, shabby, humiliated, jeered at in this country of order where all the doors to respectable homes have an enamel plate reading, “No beggars, hawkers or musicians.” These are the shocking but superficial aspects of an immense, incurable poverty.
There are others, more tragic, which you only see if you live in Germany. The countless prostitutes, at the doors to every café, in all the dark streets at night, in all the apartment buildings; and they’re hunted down, cooped up, put on a register, and persecuted with methodical ferocity… The corruption of hungry minor civil servants who are willing to sell any imaginable export license to a cosmopolitan speculator for a piece of bread… The proletarianization of a whole working class made up of former petty bourgeois whose prosperity was once the pride and the strength of the nation… Speculation drives out trade, business becomes stock exchange gambling, credit is impossible, since the slightest article no longer has a fixed exchange value but is the object of frenetic outbidding. And the big stores get visibly more and more impoverished, week by week.—And the feasting, the feasting of the rich amid this social decay, every night lighting up the windows of the restaurants where you can dine modestly for 2,000 marks (more than a week’s wages for a working woman in Berlin), while the American bars and the cafés with musicians are filled with revellers and expensive whores in fur coats, a rich harvest of assignations. Just as on decaying corpses you see flourishing hosts of enormous black and green flies, so on the corpse of German society you see swarming and also flourishing, a whole rabble of those fishing in troubled waters, of crooked capitalists, of organizers of trusts, of thieves, of international spies, from the Marquis de Lubersac18 to Stinnes and from Stinnes to the grocer from round the corner.
Such is Germany, comrade.
II
Of course all the misfortunes of capitalist Germany in decay fall only on the working classes. The others live ruthlessly—and consume greedily. There is plenty to be found in a shipwreck—so long as you are a good predator.
Now the German working class, whose growing poverty is exhausting its strength and killing its children, is—second only to the Russian working class—the one which in the last few years has done the most for the liberation of humanity. If it had not risen up in 1919, generously spilling its blood on all the public squares of its great cities, what foul reaction would now be ruling over capitalist Europe? What rival “national blocs” would be carving up the world in fraternal hatred?
On November 9, 1918, the German working class overthrew the rule of the Kaiser. In January the following year it courageously tried to make its social democratic government take the major industries into public ownership—in other words to commit central Europe to embarking on the socialist road. Workers’ blood flowed in torrents. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg fell on the threshold of the future which had been postponed. In March 1919, a second rising, put down by the Socialist Noske, in the style of a Galliffet.19 Jogisches was murdered. So much blood, so much blood! But in March 1920 the German working class broke the back of reaction, during the coup by von Kapp and his ruffians. 20 Immediately afterwards SPD ministers had them shot at.21 In March 1921, a third insurrection, deliberately provoked so it could be drowned in blood.22
Do we have to recall here some of the other great men and women who died in the German revolution—Leviné, Gustav Landauer, Sylt, Dorrenbach—or give numbers, which run into tens of thousands? Must we remember that hundreds of brave revolutionaries are every day walking in circles in the courtyards of German prisons, under the eyes of a warder from the old regime, who takes pleasure in bullying these defeated men? Must we remember the thinker Erich Mühsam,23 in prison—the poet Ernst Toller24—in prison—the intractable Max Hoelz,25 imprisoned for life? We must certainly do so, although it is unjust to pick out a few individuals from so many brave men.
The living and the dead, fighters from three revolutionary years, prove what great potential for violence and sacrifice the German working class has. And they remind us of our duty towards it—that is, towards the revolution that is ripening within it.
Now here is the vital question:
Will this German working class, energetic and combative, with great revolutionary experience, whose wounds from the civil war have not yet healed, will it allow itself to be debased, weakened and exploited in times of famine and social disintegration, without reacting with all its strength?
III
What is certain is that the status quo in Germany—and in Austria, where the problem is exactly the same—cannot last. No conservative power has the ability to prevent the unfolding of events. There are three possible outcomes:
On the one hand, the German proletariat, contrary to everything that its past leads us to foresee, contrary to its vital interests, will, betrayed by the social democracy, remain generally passive, will work itself to death, undernourished, in order to produce badly. All we can glimpse at the end of this road is irreparable degeneration, the end of a race.—But isn’t it absurd to admit that the most powerful proletariat in continental Europe could end up like this?
Or else reaction will break all resistance, will behead the revolutionary party, will tame—with a whip—the accommodating social democracy, and establish a dictatorship of hunters protected by a firing squad. And that would mean for some years the triumph of white terror in central Europe, with the consequence of perpetuating the victory of fascism in Italy, and in France the omnipotence of a military caste in the service of a handful of financiers.
Or else revolution.
Since German reaction could triumph only by beheading the revolution, in the two most likely hypotheses we are facing the German revolution.
And that, comrades, is what we must turn our minds to. Tomorrow, perhaps, red flags will be flying over Cologne; the orgesch26 of Germany, in cooperation with the black troops of the army occupying the Rhineland,27 will try to put down the fourth rising of German socialist workers. What will you do, comrade, when that day comes?
Do you know that last February, during the magnificent general strike by German railway workers, the command of the occupying forces on the left bank of the Rhine intervened to stop the strike in the occupied regions?
Do you know that in April 1918 French troops “restored order” in Luxemborg?
Do you know that the reformists in Germany have no better counter-revolutionary argument than the threat of foreign intervention, French invasion and repression?
Do you know that as of now the occupied territory is treated as conquered territory; that newspapers considered to be subversive are suppressed (among other things, for publish
ing birth control information); that “suspect” inhabitants are driven out; that our publications are banned; that postal censorship is in operation; that a reactionary separatist movement is being deliberately encouraged by the occupiers so that when the time comes red Germany will be the victim of the same blow as was struck against Soviet Russia from white Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Georgia?
Do you know, comrade, and do the people you are in contact with know it?
When the barricades go up in Berlin, what will you do, knowing that the defeat of your German brothers will confirm, perhaps for another generation, your enslavement? When you are called up either to co-operate with their capitalist masters in making an exhausted people “pay,” or to put down their revolt, what will you do?
You must prepare yourself for these possibilities. One who knows what Germany is like at present has the duty to tell you. The fate of the whole European working class will depend on the struggles developing there.
Are you a Communist, a syndicalist or a libertarian? I haven’t enquired, for in the face of the practical conclusions—or better to call them obligations—imposed by this situation, I don’t think that your personal opinions are of any great importance.
On the day when the action starts, whatever your political alignment, you must support with all your strength the German Communists: because they will be, as they always were, the first to face the danger. To act yourself, you will need an organization that is strong, large, flexible, disciplined, and clearly aware of its aims and its methods. It’s obvious that this is the condition necessary for victory. For you cannot hide from yourself the real strength of your enemies: the bourgeois state, the bourgeois army, bourgeois justice, the bourgeois press—all formidably organized for repression, and disciplined by centuries of religious and secular education backed up by frequent applications of the military law.