Witness to the German Revolution
Page 29
183 Advocates of military revenge against the victorious powers of World War I.
184 Mission Interalliée de Contrôle des Usines et des Mines: Interallied Mission to Control Factories and Mines. An agreement of November 23, 1923, made a temporary, five month settlement of the reparations question.
185 Striking evidence of the ultra-leftism that was widespread in the KPD.
186 A small, clandestine committee. The term goes back to Babeuf’s conspiracy of 1796.
187 A major thoroughfare in central Berlin.
188 The former Royal Pleasure Grounds.
189 Jungdeutscher Orden.
190 Established November 10, 1918.
191 1715.
192 Borkum is one of the East Friesian Islands off the north coast of Germany near the mouth of the Ems.
193 Five marks to a French franc. Serge is here writing specifically for a French readership.
194 Theodor Daebler, Iwan Goll, Walter Hasenclever, E. Lesker-Schuller, L. Rubiner, René Schickelé, etc. The same writers had previously published—in 1919—a fine volume filled with revolutionary hopes—the title of which was just as expressive: Comrades of Humanity. [Serge’s note.]
195 Untergang des Abendlandes. The literal translation of this title is even more significant: The Decline of the Land of Evening. [Serge’s note.]
196 The peasants of the Vendée in Western France launched a counter-revolutionary rising in 1793.
197 Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916), Belgian poet.
198 Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), painter and sculptor, first woman elected to Prussian Academy of Arts; remained in Germany till her death, ignored but not persecuted by Nazis.
199 Serge was using the term “decadent” before it was corrupted by misuse in the period of Stalinism and fascism.
200 George Gross (1893-1959) joined the KPD in 1922, but resigned the same year after a visit to Russia.
201 The philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) and the physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916) were two of Lenin’s main targets in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909). That Serge lists them among the great names of German thought shows how far he was from the dogmatism of the Stalinist era.
202 Eduard Fuchs (1870-1947), subject of the essay “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” in Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street, was also an activist of the KPD; in Memoirs of a Revolutionary Serge describes contacts with Fuchs.
203 Mach, Freud, G. Mahler are Austrians, which makes no difference. [Serge’s note.]
204 Johannes Gutenberg (1400-68), regarded as inventor of printing from movable type, produced a 42-line Bible (c. 1455).
205 Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), theater director famous for spectacular productions; left Germany in 1933 and went to Hollywood.
206 Raffke: a current slang term for profiteer.
207 He was beaten to death in prison by reactionary soldiers.
208 Élisée Reclus (1830-1905), geographer and communard and Prince Peter Kroptkin (1842-1921) were leading anarchist theorists who had greatly influenced the young Serge.
209 Kurt Eisner (1887-1919), USPD prime minister of the Bavarian Republic from November 1918 until February 1919, when he was murdered by a reactionary aristocrat.
210 Miklós Horthy established an authoritarian conservative regime in Hungary in 1920, after the overthrow of the Hungarian Revolution.
211 In the debate on the German failure, Radek, Zetkin and others argued the real revolutionary opportunity had come earlier than October.
212 The claim that Ford was financing Hitler first appeared in the New York Times (December 20, 1922), which contained an account of a visit to Hitler’s headquarters : “The wall beside his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford. In the antechamber there is a large table covered with books… published by Henry Ford. If you ask one of Hitler’s underlings for the reason of Ford’s popularity in these circles he will smile knowingly and say nothing.” At Hitler’s trial in 1924 evidence was given that “the Hitler movement was partly financed by an American anti-Semitic chief, who is Henry Ford.” In August 1938 Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a Nazi decoration. (See A.C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of the Nazis (Sudbury, 1976), pp91-93.)
213 The fact that Serge can refer in a non-party publication to the different currents within the KPD shows how far the Comintern still was from the monolithism of the Stalinist epoch.
214 i.e., Ludendorff.
215 “Advice of an Onlooker,” in Collected Works XXVI (Moscow, 1964). Lenin was referring to Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, originally published under Marx’s signature, but in fact written by Engels.
216 The KPD was made illegal on November 23, 1923; the ban was lifted on March 1, 1924.
217 An example of Serge’s overoptimism; the KPD improved its position in the May 1924 election, getting 9.6 percent of eligible voters, as against 1.6 percent in 1920 (with 14 percent for the USPD), and 62 deputies; but the SPD got 15.7 percent (nearly two million more votes than the KPD) and 100 deputies. The SPD had the largest percentage of the vote for any single party at every election from 1919 to 1930.
218 A pseudonym of the Hungarian economist Eugene Varga.
219 Serge, who knew and despised Zinoviev, the dominant figure in the Comintern now Lenin was dying, may well be using gentle irony here.
220 Ruth Fischer (Elfriede Eisler) (1895-1961), became KPD leader with Zinoviev’s support in 1924, but was replaced by Thaelmann and then expelled in 1926.
Printed with permission from the Victor Serge Foundation.
Translation © 1997 Ian Birchall
This translation first published in 1997 in London by Redwords.
This edition published in 2011 in Chicago by Haymarket Books.
Haymarket Books
PO Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
info@haymarketbooks.org
www.haymarketbooks.org
eISBN : 978-1-608-46172-1
Distributed to the trade:
In the US Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In Canada Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
In Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgravemacmillan.com.au
All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data is available.
Union Bug Recycle Logo