Witness to the German Revolution

by Victor Serge

  And what revolutionaries! Their very names speak volumes. Brandler is the most respected leader of the KPD. This former stonemason, stocky and broad-shouldered, about 40 years old, considered as one of the organizers of the March Action in 1921,145 escaped the following year from a fortress and took refuge in Russia until an amnesty allowed him to return. Fritz Heckert, a mason too, five years younger, has also spent time in the prisons of the republic; indeed it was a Saxon minister who once had him locked up. Heckert has been politically active since he was 15, has always been a resolute opponent of social-patriotism, took part in the foundation of the KPD and is a member of its central committee. Böttcher is a printer. He was a member of the USPD and joined the KPD after the Halle Congress.146 In 1920, general Maercker, one of Kapp’s accomplices, had him imprisoned in the Königstadt fortress. The workers released him. A friend of General Maercker is exercising dictatorial power in Dresden, and Böttcher is finance minister!

  General Müller quite clearly understands how outrageous the situation is. He has just responded to the formation of the workers’ government by a very clear declaration of war. His decrees of October 13 dissolve the workers’ hundreds—formed legally with the support of the Zeigner cabinet—require the handing over within three days of all the weapons in the possession of individuals, forbid the formation of action committees, and lay down penalties of imprisonment and fines for any infringements.

  These two ukases,147 which both begin with the words “I forbid…” are preceded by an explanatory commentary. The employers, according to this, are complaining of being molested, in various places in Saxony, by a “violent minority of workers.” Older workers are complaining about the youth… Even Vorwärts is indignant. Take a quotation: “The proletarian hundreds have been dissolved in Saxony. In Bavaria, the reactionaries are still armed. In such conditions martial law is unacceptable.” (Emphasis in the original.) Do you understand, citizen?

  Comrades belonging to the cadres of the proletarian hundreds have already been arrested.

  The congress of the factory committees in Saxony and Thuringia, which was due to meet on October 18, has been banned.

  Other measures of extreme gravity, which Vorwärts has no desire to tell its readers about, supplement these.

  General Müller, who is thus attempting to disarm the proletariat, is arming reaction. In Dresden, Leipzig and elsewhere, the numbers of the Reichswehr have been swollen by the enrollment of volunteers who wish to contribute to the restoration of order. Joint companies have been formed for which the Reichswehr has contributed officers, arms, equipment and even uniforms. The Com-munist deputy Siewert has made it known that 2,500 fascists from the Stahlhelm have been armed in Dresden and the Erzgebirge. General Müller has agreed to it. His troops need reinforcements! By courtesy of martial law, a counterrevolutionary army is being formed in red Germany.

  Even before the formation of the workers’ government, the (left) social democratic cabinet in Saxony had announced measures against the industrialists who are sabotaging production. For the latter have stopped production in a number of firms in order to increase unemployment and worsen the situation of the workers. They will be forced—with the assistance of Heckert, Brandler and Böttcher—to reopen their workshops; they will be forbidden to close them. They are greatly “harassed” by this. This dormant war cannot last very long. Either the Reich government will back up General Müller and remove the workers’ ministers in Dresden from office, whereupon the working class will have no alternative but a general strike, which would necessarily be insurrectional, or else the general strike will oblige General Müller to respect proletarian organization. Decisive actions, from which the signal for the German revolution may very well spring, seem imminent in red Saxony.

  Why Social Democracy is changing

  To grasp the effect of General Müller’s decrees, one must try to imagine the feelings of an old social democratic worker whose newspaper brings him the following batch of news items:

  In Baden, the general commanding the region has dissolved the workers’ hundreds. The Arbeiterzeitung has been seized (October 11).

  General Lossberg has banned the Niedersächsische Arbeiterzeitung (Workers’ Newspaper of Lower Saxony) (October 11).

  The Dresdner Volkszeitung (People’s Newspaper of Dresden), which had reappeared after being suspended for a week, has been suspended for another 14 days.

  The social democratic Volksblatt (People’s Paper) of Göttingen has been suspended.

  In Berlin, General von Horn has banned the formation of workers’ committees to check prices and all comparable organizations. Foreseeing attacks on the property of farmers, he has declared that they will be punished severely. The troops are authorized to fire on anyone who ignores a challenge.

  At Szczecin148 General von Tschichwitz, military governor of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, has gone one better. Considering agricultural production to be of eminent public utility, he has banned strikes there on pain of imprisonment. But even better! Any healthy day-laborer is forbidden to be absent from work. In case of illness, a medical certificate must be produced within two hours.

  The Berlin edition of Die Rote Fahne has been suspended. The authorities are looking for the publishers of the KPD illegal daily which is appearing regularly.

  On the other hand:

  The Berlin edition of Die Deutsche Zeitung (nationalist), suspended on the same day as Die Rote Fahne, has just been authorized to reappear; in the busiest thoroughfares of the capital Hitler’s Die Weisse Fahne (The White Flag), published in Nuremberg, is on sale. Everywhere you can buy the fascist agitational paper Fridericus which has never been interfered with…

  Herr von Kahr has just declared Commander Ehrhardt—the man who escaped from Leipzig, who has been charged by the high court—immune from all prosecution on Bavarian territory. The high court didn’t turn a hair. General von Lossow, whose job is to ensure that the laws of the Reich are respected in Munich, is reported to be about to resign.

  Is it to ratify the decision of the Bavarian dictator? Is it because the reactionaries clearly need to have all their experienced murderers returned to them? The high court in Leipzig has just ordered the release of oberleutnant Rossbach, the organizer of the fascist cells in the Reichswehr, who was imprisoned some months ago charged with plotting against the republic.

  On Friday and Saturday, there were food riots in Hamburg, Leipzig, Essen, Düsseldorf, Hanover, Frankfurt-am-Main, Gelsenkirchen and Wiesbaden. Some shops were looted. The blood of the poor was shed on the doorsteps of grocers’ shops… The dollar is at five billion.

  What the social democratic worker thinks, when he is informed of these things, has just been realized at Dresden, where innumerable workers’ delegations, among whom social democrats were numerous, came from all points of the country to greet the first workers’ government and to demand support and advice for organizing resistance.

  Finally, Vorwärts has emerged from its lethargy. This evening it bears, this time as a headline, the little phrase that we read here for the first time yesterday: “Martial law is unacceptable.” And it reveals to its readers that in Berlin General Horn has banned a manifesto by a social democratic temperance society which ended with these words: “Teetotallers, get organized!” Yes, it is unacceptable. But tell us, citizens, who wanted it, who established it?

  Provoke in order to repress

  It is an old tactic of all tottering reactionaries. Provoke a premature revolutionary action. Stifle the revolution before it has ripened. All the efforts of bourgeois Germany are tending in this direction with remarkable unanimity.

  In Bavaria, the royalist dictator von Kahr has outlawed the Communists and the working-class movement, repealed the republican constitution and obliged the Reich government to accept the accomplished fact.

  In the Ruhr and the Rhineland, the big industrialists—the very ones who, after getting rich out of the passive resistance, are still demanding that the Reich compensate them for the
losses they claim to have suffered—have now declared that they are unable to pay their workers’ wages. As they are negotiating and coming to an agreement with the French government, it is not a disguised continuation of the passive resistance, it’s a lockout. The lockout of at least a million hungry, exhausted, desperate workers, who, like their French precursors of the last century, are willing to “die fighting” because they can no longer “live by working.”

  In Berlin, the Stresemann government is putting the finishing touches to its draft law on the working day: eight hours in the mines, ten hours everywhere else! And it proclaims itself, in an official statement of October 17, to be determined to have the constitution and the regulations of martial law respected…in red Saxony, not in Bavaria!

  At any moment, in red Saxony, it may be the turn of grenades and machine guns to speak. Conflict is desired, sought and deliberately engineered by General Müller with the support of Berlin.

  The press campaign by the papers of the extreme right against Stresemann has been toned down, as has that of the semi-official press against Stinnes. The patriotic alliance of the big industrialists, the fascists and the last democratic government has been sealed to save bourgeois order by shedding the blood of the workers of Dresden and the Ruhr.

  Towards a German Commune

  If this set of facts leaves no place for doubt, the events in Saxony have an even clearer meaning. The dissolution of the workers’ hundreds (formed, let us remember, with the support of the Zeigner government) was decreed in conditions which were absolutely scandalous. General Müller had no right to take this decision without the consent of the state commissioner of the Saxon government, the Socialist deputy Meyer (from Zwickau), who came to present his objections to him. General Müller nonetheless issued his decree, arguing that he “had not yet been officially informed of Herr Meyer’s appointment.” This bureaucratic trick risks marking the beginning of civil war…

  The workers’ hundreds have announced that they will not be dissolved. Yesterday, October 17, General Müller’s next move was a coup; he withdrew from the Saxon government command over all the local police force and put it under his own authority. The same morning he announced that the workers’ hundreds would be dissolved, if necessary by force, with the assistance of the troops, that is, of that selfsame pro-fascist Reichswehr that he has just had reinforced by thousands of men from the Stahlhelm. The conflict is developing rapidly. The same evening, we learned two grave items of news. First of all, General Müller’s ultimatum to the Socialist prime minister of Saxony, Zeigner. In an insolent letter, read out to the Landtag, the general asked him to formally disown, before 11am on October 18, the Communist finance minister, Böttcher, who has advocated the arming of the workers and a red dictatorship. To the applause of the workers’ majority in the Saxon parliament, Zeigner replied that his government considered itself solely responsible to the Landtag, and he refused to be accountable to the military authority. What remains for the latter to do, except arrest the ministers and dissolve parliament? The second news item, quite unofficial, is a striking comment on the first: it is said the upper command of the Reichswehr has just sent large quantities of artillery to Saxony…

  Throughout the whole affair, it is confirmed that General Müller has not acted without the agreement of the Reichswehr minister, Herr Gessler, and hence of the whole cabinet…

  Von Kahr, for his part, is demanding from Herr Stresemann sanctions against red Saxony where, on October 14, the congress of the Bavarian factory committees was held at Plauen, attended by 500 delegates… Banned in Saxony itself by General Müller, the first congress of the Saxon workers’ hundreds was nonetheless held on October 13, attended by 155 delegates. A workers’ bloc has been established in Thuringia, where on October 13 was formed, under the aegis of the workers’ government, an action committee of 20 members including representatives of the KPD, the SPD, the USPD, the ADGB, etc., and of joint organizations of proletarian defense.

  On October 17, the central committee of the SPD adopted a resolution demanding—at last!—the immediate ending of martial law, and it sent Hermann Müller to negotiate with Ebert and Stresemann. There are many reasons to doubt whether this final effort to avoid a bloody battle in Saxony will succeed. However it may be, the workers’ struggle in Dresden and the proletariat which supports it will not retreat. They will meet force with force, and the insurrection may take place tomorrow. For the whole German proletariat this categorical imperative is proclaimed to the rattle of machine-gun fire: revolution or death.

  These things should be quite clear and deeply moving for all French workers, and above all for Parisians! For it is virtually a line by line reenactment of the Paris Commune. In 1871 imperialist Prussia had to be paid for the war that had been lost. Thiers149 was determined to make the French proletariat pay just as Stinnes and Stresemann want to make the German proletariat pay French imperialism for their defeats in 1914-18 and in the Ruhr. On March 17, 1871, M. Thiers announced to the good citizens of Paris the “disarmament” of the working people who were in possession of a few cannon. This was while martial law was in force. The unfortunate attempt by the forces of order in Montmartre to seize the artillery belonging to the National Guard gave the signal for the proclamation of the Commune the following day. History repeats itself. Except that the German Commune will have no less than fifteen million fighters…

  Social Democracy in a dead end

  Nothing is more false, nothing more tragically lamentable at this turning point in history than the situation of the leaders of the SPD. It was they who, with Stresemann, established martial law in Germany—that is, gave the dictatorship to seven generals under the orders of von Seeckt—in order, they said, to make Bavarian reaction respect the republic. Yes, indeed!

  Their aim was to avoid civil war at all costs. They still have three ministers, including the deputy chancellor, in the Great Coalition cabinet. And martial law is “Bavarianising” the whole of Germany, is directed exclusively against the working class, against a republican government headed by the social democrat Zeigner, and is leading the country directly, full speed ahead, towards civil war. And after some weeks the central committee of the SPD has gone so far as to request—without being able to enforce it—the ending of martial law. And Vorwärts is full of impotent and insipid protests…

  If they had the slightest bit of political courage, the SPD ministers should give Stresemann a clear ultimatum and then go away. “They won’t do it!” a social democrat assured me this morning. They know only too well that they would be told: “Fine: clear off!”

  Almost all their party is abandoning them. Half the parliamentary group, which after all is not very revolutionary, wants a clean break with the bourgeois parties. A final chance to save whatever honor may remain to this wretched party. Whole regions are facing the facts, agreeing that the Communists are right, and forming a united front. After Saxony and Thuringia, it is being formed at Hamburg, Solingen and Frankfurt, and is the object of negotiations in Berlin. Trade union officials in Bonn are becoming the promoters of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Twenty two associations of cooperatives—not normally a particularly unruly grouping!—are asking for a workers’ food congress to be called, and posing the question of feeding the masses in revolutionary terms. The Berlin regional SPD congress is due to meet almost immediately; it is no secret that it will give the opposition a solid majority.

  At this same time, the old theoretical review of German socialist thought, Die Neue Zeit, founded in 1885 and edited for 32 years, until 1917, by Kautsky, has closed down, for lack of resources, lack of readers, but also for lack of thinkers. The most authoritative voice of reformist socialism has gone silent… Could one imagine a more total bankruptcy?

  Hunger riots

  Hunger riots are becoming daily events. In the last few days, from October 12 to 18, there have been serious disturbances at Höchst-am-Main where French troops intervened, at Frankfurt, at Leipzig, at
Bibrich—where the crowd disarmed the police before the French could restore order—at Gelsenkirchen, at Düsseldorf, at Cologne, at Mannheim, at Halberstadt, at Ortelsburg, and in Berlin. In Berlin, bakeries and grocers’ shops have been looted. It is noticeable that the green municipal police behaved much less brutally in these disturbances than previously. In many cases, they had a clearly sympathetic attitude to the starving crowd. On the other hand, at Meningen, in a clash of which we do not as yet have details, the Reichswehr opened fire and killed two civilians (October 14).

  The people are hungry. Hunger is driving them onto the streets. Crowds of starving people, ready to become the terrible armies of revolution, are filling the cities of Germany. On July 1, there were 68,000 unemployed in Berlin. At the beginning of September, there were 110,000, on October 6, 160,000. Today there are over 200,000. It is estimated that in Germany as a whole (including the occupied regions) the number of unemployed is at least two million. And what poverty they are living in! The disguised lockout of industry in the Rhineland and the Ruhr must increase it considerably. Five to six million workers are working shortened days or shortened weeks. Our comrades from Volkswacht, at Lübeck, calculate that wages at present are not more than 15-20 percent of what they were before the war. But let’s be more precise. From October 8 to 14, a metalworker earned for a week 6,500,000,000 (13 gold pfennigs per hour), that is two to three dollars at the very most. From October 11 to 18, a painter and decorator earned a little over six billion, and this was the week when the dollar reached seven billion. From October 8 to 15, a miner in Central Germany earned 4,075,000,000, or 12 centimes an hour at pre-war values, and two to three dollars… But on January 16 an egg cost 110 million; about one hour’s work in the mine. Workboots cost between six and ten dollars. And these are only wages for workers doing full weeks.