Witness to the German Revolution

by Victor Serge

  Nearly ninety different sorts of paper money with “real value” are in circulation, issued by states, cities, chambers of commerce, public bodies and large industrial companies. But wages are still paid in paper marks. The ultimatum of the ADGB to Herr Stresemann—an ultimatum which led to the launching of the small denomination notes of the gold loan, which you can’t find anywhere—was stillborn. But it seems that nothing can now disturb the unimaginable passivity, the vast cowardice of the great social democratic organizations.

  Though the tide had turned, Germany remained profoundly unstable. The KPD was ousted from the Thuringian government. On November 8, Hitler attempted a putsch in Bavaria, but he was abandoned by his allies and ended up in jail.

  Hitler: A fascist ideology

  Correspondance internationale, November 17, 1923

  Even in the opinion of some of his political admirers, Adolf Hitler has just come to a miserable end. A few months ago, at Nuremberg, the leader of the National Socialist Party reviewed nearly a hundred thousand well-armed troops. He had just assembled nearly thirty thousand men on the frontier with Thuringia. He thought the time had come to move from threats to actions, and intoxicated with the popularity he had achieved with a glib talent as an orator, the support of the authorities, the persistent advertising of the bourgeois press and the secret funds of Herr Hugenberg, he thought he could become, by firing a few revolver shots into the ceiling of a public meeting hall in Munich, something like a new Emperor of Germany. “I am assuming the leadership of the affairs of the Reich,” he calmly announced on the evening of the putsch. Where does this failed Mussolini come from? He is about thirty-five. Before the war he was a sign-painter and not German! He is Austrian or rather Czech German.172 He only recently became a citizen of the Reich. During the war, as an NCO then, it is said, as an officer, he didn’t distinguish himself in any way. There has been some difficulty in creating retrospectively a certain reputation for brave deeds.

  His successes as an organizer are indisputable but are not particularly surprising. A political adventurer, given suitable support by the reactionary forces in power and financed by big capitalists, can always, in periods of poverty and upheaval, recruit gangs who are ready for anything. This is the only way to explain the spread of what has oddly been called the “national socialist movement.” Curious to understand its ideology, I sometimes read the Völkischer Beobachter (The Popular Observer), its major daily paper based in Munich, made famous by the incident it provoked between the Reich and Bavaria. I also have before me the report given by this paper of a meeting held on the parade ground at Munich, on October 30 this year, with the leaders of the party and attended by several thousand. The honorary president of the National Socialist Party, Anton Drexler, is just as unknown to the general public in Germany as the other main speakers, Max Weber,173 Hermann Esser and Dietrich Eckart. The great man, the party tribune, is “our Adolf Hitler,” and constantly every effort is made to stress his mission of saving Germany and his inestimable personal merits. The very mention of his name unleashes “enthusiastic applause.” His speech takes up three columns and is a curious document as to the demoralization, intelligence and ideological poverty of the crowd he is addressing…

  Hitler’s main argument is that parliamentarism has ruined Germany. All ills spring from the parliamentary regime. “The very day the Reichstag was created, the German people were condemned to death… A people required to submit to the majority is a doomed people.” The remedy lies in the end of parliamentarism, the end of the rule of parties, the uprooting of Marxism. “Marxism is the great undertaking of the Jews for the conquest of the world.” The Jews are said to be starving the poor, undermining national unity and supporting parliamentarism. The German people must be pulled out of the abyss by the affirmation of a new purely national ideal and by dictatorship. “German people, the hour of deliverance has struck… To Berlin!”

  I am not distorting or overstating, even if I have abbreviated. Between these ideas, these summary, vulgar and sometimes outrageous affirmations there is no logical connection. A lot of exclamations, a familiar tone, a constant appeal to primitive feelings through terms like “my children” and “our people,” and then a frenzied conclusion, that’s all. At bottom it is a naïve demagogy exploiting national feeling, the discredit of reformist socialism and parliamentarism, poverty and the old hatred for the usurer and the financier who too often happen to be Jewish. This is the whole ideology of national socialism. That of Italian fascism, if it is not much more logical or better constructed, nonetheless has more cohesion and is also more high-flown. This German movement is indeed fascist, but already it is a degenerated, vulgarized, stupefied fascism. Terrible symptoms of the decadence of a capitalist regime which can no longer even provide the masses with an ideology worthy of the name!

  The Munich tragicomedy

  Must we come back to the Munich tragicomedy? Some details of it are scarcely known as yet. The coup was announced for November 7, the anniversary of the Bavarian revolution. It began with an anti-Marxist diatribe, in the Hitler style, by the dictator von Kahr. Hitler and his men broke into the hall. A rifle was fired into the ceiling, there was panic followed by the first splendid words of Hitler, perched on a table, to the hall which was to applaud him: “If calm is not restored instantly, for God’s sake, I shall install machine guns in the gallery.” Calm was restored and von Kahr was led away politely, “white as a sheet,” together with General von Lossow and several others. An hour later von Kahr returned, “just as pale,” and announced that he was taking on “in my capacity as representative of the monarchy,” the functions of chancellor. Hitler took the dictatorship, Ludendorff the army which was to march on Berlin. The next day, a dramatic twist. Von Kahr and von Lossow dropped their accomplice Hitler and got an excellent bargain, although a rather risky one. They got rid of a burdensome rival, imposed themselves on the bourgeoisie as saviours of social peace, the unity of the Reich and order, and acquired the right to recognition from Stresemann and Ebert. What Hitler had clumsily tried to impose by force at the risk of provoking some vigorous responses from the proletariat, von Kahr, being cleverer, obtained legally without effort: the first after-effect of the putsch in Munich was the dictatorship of General von Seeckt in Berlin… But here are some further details. “King” Rupprecht who counts a great deal on the benevolence of the French general staff, with whom it is claimed that his supporters have frequently held talks, would be alarmed to see old Ludendorff, dear to the Hohenzollern and not well thought of in Paris, leading a restoration of the monarchy.

  During the few hours that the putsch lasted, the gangs of Ludendorff and Hitler went to the editorial offices of the Münchener Post, the SPD’s Munich paper, which they ransacked from top to bottom; they likewise ransacked the home of the SPD leader, Auer, arrested Socialist and Communist municipal councillors during a committee meeting and had them taken to a wood to be shot. Vorwärts claims that only the sudden change in the situation in Munich prevented them from being executed. Posters displayed in Munich ordered all German citizens to lay hands on socialist and republican figures, Ebert, Scheidemann, Oscar Cohn, Theodor-Paul Lévy, Theodor Wolff, and Georg Bernhardt and to hand them over to the authorities “dead or alive.”

  Why did the attempt fail? Why did Herr von Kahr at the last moment drop his “loyal opponents” with whom he was so often in agreement? The answer seems simple to me. Heavy industry, high finance and the military caste were afraid of civil war and they considered that after the events of the last few days, the disarming of red Saxony and the complete collapse of social democracy, they no longer needed a coup to establish a dictatorship. The demagogues and impatient elements like Hitler have now become rather an embarrassment to them.

  Hitler has fled, like Rossbach, who was active alongside him, the Rossbach who was just recently released by the special court established at Leipzig under the law for the protection of the Republic. Contrary to what is being said, I don’t think their
political role is over. One day we shall see them again amid civil war, at the head of gangs of murderers. Ludendorff has been arrested and set free again after giving his word of honor to abandon political activity. A day or two before the putsch he had already given his word of honor to von Kahr not to act without first canceling the agreement between them. But all that is make-believe.

  The SPD senators of Hamburg for their part are showing much less indulgence for the Communist prisoners taken after the recent uprising. They have no intention of releasing their imprisoned Communist colleagues, without a shadow of proof of their guilt.

  The first week of the new inflation

  The first week of the new inflation has gone by. And we can draw up a balance sheet. I mean the inflation “in gold,” that is, of paper said to be of “real value.” These pieces of paper, monopolized by the arbitrage174 which sells and resells them at four or five times their value, remain unseen and impossible to find. But their appearance and the fixing of an official rate for the dollar and the gold mark (respectively 630 and 150 billion) has within six days, from November 3 to 9, had the result of a very steep increase in all prices calculated in gold. In paper marks, the increase for this week has reached the record figure of 502 percent. In gold, the index for the average standard of living has suddenly gone to 76.2 percent (the figure 100 corresponds to the average standard of living in 1913). The prices of foodstuffs, also calculated in gold, have increased more, going from 93.5 percent to 152.6 percent. We can deduce that even before being known to the mass of the population, paper money with “real value” has lost a third of its purchasing power. Inflation, a monstrous attempt to swindle the masses of workers and consumers, is beginning again on new base…

  The Berlin printers’ strike

  No newspapers today, Monday, November 12, and a crisis of paper money. The presses which print the paper money have ceased to work. Defying all the bans on strikes decreed by the military authorities, the printers of newspapers and of the Reichsbank have been on strike for three days. This movement, in response to the indefinite suspension of Die Rote Fahne, has been on the point of breaking out for several weeks, and has been persistently sabotaged by the union leaders; it could not be delayed any longer, but it has taken on a primarily economic character. For the week November 3 to 9 the printers earned three and a half trillion paper marks (a little more than a dollar at black market rates) or at face value 22.5 gold marks. Before the war they earned 35 gold marks a week, and since the war prices have more than doubled. Negotiations with the minister of labor have informed them of the good will of the government and of the employers.

  This is an important strike. We must stress that it is taking place despite the severe measures of martial law and reformist sabotage. It bears witness to a will to resist on behalf of a section of the working class which is far from being revolutionary. The government may well not be in a hurry to put an end to it. It is an excellent opportunity to blame the workers for the serious consequences of the shortage of paper money. For their part the printers are taking advantage of the situation; they have cut off Herr Stresemann’s subsistence and have suppressed the whole bourgeois press at a time when public opinion was following events anxiously. Only two papers are appearing: Vorwärts, where the type was set with permission of the unions, and the nationalist Deutsche Zeitung, (German News), typeset by scabs.

  The disarming of red Thuringia

  The disarming of red Thuringia is being carried out—or rather has been completed—thanks to the disinterested support given to the military dictatorship by the social democrats. The workers’ government of Thuringia no longer exists since November 10__12. Presided over by the social democrat Frölich—who is far from being of the same caliber as a Zeigner, whatever reservations we may have about the latter, it included three Communists, Tenner, Korsch175 and Neubauer. It is now clear that the experience of our comrades in Thuringia was a difficult one. At no time did they succeed in drawing the social democratic majority out of its passivity. The workers’ government was formed in order to achieve, together with red Saxony, a workers’ bloc in central Germany. For their part, the social democrats very much hoped not to have to do anything about it. When Herr Stresemann undertook his offensive against the workers’ government in Dresden, they refused, despite the efforts of the Communists, to show solidarity with red Saxony. Even better, prime minister Frölich promised Herr Stresemann to liquidate the workers’ coalition without any intervention by the Reichswehr. Nonetheless the Reichswehr entered Thuringia without encountering the slightest resistance. Social democratic police chiefs were seen complying with the disarmament of the workers’ hundreds. Comrades who know the state well say that the masses’ will for action was great, unanimous and enthusi-astic… The dishonest sabotage by the SPD ministers broke the workers’ resistance, at least for a time. Our comrades left this false workers’ government, slamming the door behind them. For their part, the Thuringian social democrats published on November 12 a long anti-communist manifesto accusing our comrades of shirking their responsibilities and “pretending to form a united front in order to foment riots” (sic). The Thuringian social democrats published this sad document while, throughout central Germany, Communist workers were being arrested, while they were often persecuted in prison, while all their press was being suppressed, while in Bavaria von Kahr was dissolving the KPD and confiscating its property!

  The abandonment of the Rhine and the Ruhr

  We have often written before: the German nation, considered as a unit of labor and culture, has no more dangerous enemy than its own “national” big bourgeoisie. Now the coming end of the drama of the Ruhr is giving us a truly tragic confirmation of this fact. For long months, suffering the rule of the German occupation made worse by continual military sanctions, dying of hunger, the Ruhr proletariat has resisted French imperialism; meanwhile the funds intended by the Reich to support passive resistance were swallowed up by arms for the black Reichswehr and by the strongboxes of the big industrialists of the occupied region. Those who profited from the passive resistance are now negotiating with the French victors. In the debate going on at present between French and German capitalists, the labor, hunger, revolt and blood of the miners and iron and steel workers of the Ruhr are the object of the most Machiavellian schemes. The Ruhr industrialists have already stated that they cannot guarantee, under the conditions imposed on them by their powerful rivals, the payment of wages: they are shutting the factories and the mines. As of December 1, if not earlier, there will be a complete lock-out throughout the Ruhr.

  The new minister of the interior in Stresemann’s government, Dr. Jarres, former lord mayor of Duisburg, a man of the right and a known supporter of Rhineland separatism, has begun his ministerial activity by cutting off food supplies to millions of unemployed, locked out by their employers, in the Rhineland and the Ruhr. Two million workers, who have borne the full burden of the passive resistance, now have no other means of subsistence.

  No means of subsistence!

  What do the tycoons of mines and ironworks, of whom Stresemann and Jarres are only the agents, want to achieve? The crime they are committing against all “their people” by condemning the workers of the Ruhr to hunger and unsuccessful food riots could have only the following aims:to create an untenable situation in the Ruhr that would make the French capitalists more accommodating;

  to oblige the French capitalists to provide for the needs of the Ruhr in one way or another, which would have the double advantage of costing them a lot of money and confirming the political separation of the occupied region of the Reich (German heavy industry seems to have decided in favor of such a separation);

  to provoke a workers’ uprising which could easily be repressed with the support of French troops, an uprising from which the proletariat would emerge demoralized and beaten, to resume work on the conditions that Degoutte, Stinnes, Krupp, Vögler and the experts of the Comité des Forges would like to impose on them: ten-hour day, s
uppression of the factory councils, repeal of the Reich’s social legislation…

  To break the Berlin printers’ strike

  General von Seeckt, “in possession of full military powers through the territory of the Reich” is issuing Tsarist-style edicts everywhere… On November 12, he had posters put up formally forbidding all the printers in the Reichsbank to stop work. The decree instructed strikers to return to work without delay, threatening that if they did not they would suffer all the rigors of martial law. The edict didn’t impress anyone. A few weeks ago General von Horn banned strikes in Berlin. Nonetheless, not a single bourgeois daily appeared, apart from one miserable nationalist rag set by nonunion labor. Having observed that his threats were useless, dictator von Seeckt has just decided to break the strike by repressive measures. On November 15 there were numerous arrests of trade union officials, mainly social democrats, from the striking organizations. Let us mention those of the president of the union of Berlin printing workers, Robert Brauns, of the president of the printers’ assistants, Gloth, and of the delegate from the bookbinders, Gäbel. Six other well-known trade union officials are victims of the military authority’s lettres de cachet.176 Various members of factory committees and less well-known militant strikers have just been imprisoned. Since all these arrests were carried out by virtue of the military dictatorship, they had no need of any legal justification; the victims have no right to any legal defense…

  We think that these means, imitated from Tsarist Russia, will not succeed in breaking a strike originally caused by hunger. Admittedly they are planning to use other measures against it which are outrageous even in the Germany of the generals. Unemployed printers from the Brandenburg province and from Berlin—there are several thousand of them—will be required to replace the strikers on pain of having their unemployment pay withdrawn. Required to become scabs or to lose their last piece of bread! The Oberpräsident of Brandenburg has signed this decree. The leaders of disintegrating bourgeois Germany think they can do anything they like. Which should cause us greater surprise: their lack of psychology or their class cynicism?