The Germans had no weapons to fight the tanks that were suddenly making their appearance and breaking through lines thought to be impregnable. By 1918 the Allies had 800 of them—the Germans, twenty. The Americans appeared in large numbers and made their weapons felt. By the end of September, most German divisions, though still deep in enemy territory, were in a poor state. Bad news from the Austrian fronts added to the doom and gloom. It was time to begin the endgame while there was still a chance of a negotiated peace instead of one dictated by the victors to the vanquished. The long-term chances of equilibrium and stability throughout Europe hinged more on the ability of the German armies to hold the front line than on the enlightened statecraft of the Entente powers.
A government composed of the center-left in the Reichstag was formed, but even now it was under a Chancellor from a princely house, Max von Baden, who had no parliamentary experience and was in bad health. On paper, within weeks, Germany was transformed into a parliamentary monarchy on the Westminster model, with a strong dose of traditional federalism also incorporated. But all of this was too little, too late. The western allies simply failed to recognize that the German political scenery had changed decisively. Precious days and weeks were lost in October before the government in Berlin followed the orders of the High Command situated in Spa on the Belgian border, to sue for an armistice in order to save a negotiating position instead of facing wholesale breakdown.
8
A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE
The armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. But even before, mutiny had broken out in the German battle fleet, preventing it from sailing for the last bloody engagement that the Admiralty had planned, in order to go down with colors flying and guns blazing. The magic of military discipline was broken as armed sailors set up workers’ and soldiers’ councils, tore the insignia from their officers’ uniforms and set out, mostly by train, to spread the word that the war was over and that revolution was the answer to all the suffering of the past. Within days there were the red flags of communism all over German cities, revolutionary councils formed and radical slogans displayed, all inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
Was this a revolution? Yes and no: it was, as it turned out, above all the outcry of a nation that had suffered too much, that had lost its confidence in its leaders, that was physically exhausted and sunk in despair. It was not an attempt, carefully prepared, to create a new Germany, a new society or a new millennium. It was not even an attempt to take bloody revenge for all the futile suffering of the last four years, but rather the breakdown of a worn-out nation, its gods fallen, its ideals shattered, its self-respect broken. The war had destroyed not only the future, but also the past. The chiefs of the General Staff had told the Kaiser that only a hero’s death in battle would offer a chance to save the Hohenzollern dynasty. True or not, William II preferred a comfortable train ride to neutral Holland where the government had offered him exile. Arriving at the Dutch border, his first request was for a good cup of English tea. The disaster that he had helped to bring about he left behind without wasting a second glance. The memoirs he set out to write were of utter banality. The German drama had long bypassed him.
The General Staff tried to organize the orderly retreat of millions of German soldiers from Russia, Ukraine, northern Italy, France and Belgium. The government in Berlin had all but lost control. Reich-Chancellor Prince Max von Baden was happy to formally transfer power—or what was left of it—into the hands of Friedrich Ebert, leader of the social democrats in the Reichstag, a trade unionist and a man of order. When the Prince told him that the fate of the Reich now rested in his hands, Ebert replied that he had lost two sons for Germany. But it was by no means clear who would emerge in control, out of the chaos arising from the absence of duly constituted authority. A race ensued between communists and social democrats to proclaim the German Republic: Karl Liebknecht inaugurated the socialist republic from the balcony of the Hohenzollerns’ town palace, while social democrat Philipp Scheidemann replied in the Reichstag by stating that parliamentary democracy was dawning. Liebknecht was a communist firebrand, Scheidemann a middle-of-the-road working class leader. These symbolic acts merely outlined the ideological rifts that were now to embroil the entire country in civil war, except in the west where Allied troops made their appearance, welcomed by the middle classes, who tended to prefer enemy order to German disorder.
Ebert immediately established the Council of People’s Deputies. While its name sounded revolutionary enough, the six members were moderate socialists and social democrats. The country thus had a transitional source of authority until elections were held and the resulting national assembly could create a new constitutional order. The General Staff in Kassel, now led by Hindenburg’s new quartermaster-general Wilhelm Groener, needed democratic authority; the Berlin-based Council of People’s Deputies needed effective military power for the civil war that was about to be initiated by the Spartakus group. The latter soon transformed itself into Germany’s Communist Party, and relied for its successes on revolutionary soldiers and their weapons, on the radical opposition to the trade union establishment, support from Soviet Russia and the general state of exhaustion throughout the country.
Four factors helped the transition from empire to republic and the avoidance of communism. First of all, the trade union leaders were united with Ebert and his military allies in rejecting all attempts at Bolshevik revolution. Second, the employers and the trade unions, building on their wartime alliance, established the Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft—Central Working Committee—and together they did all in their power to transform the revolutionary upheaval into a movement for higher wages and better working conditions. The eight-hour working day was established, workers’ councils were confirmed and a minimum wage was introduced, although it was soon made meaningless by the eroding effects of inflation. Third, the generals forged a quid pro quo with Ebert and the People’s Deputies in Berlin, securing their own authority while offering, in turn, security to the politicians. All this meant that no expropriations of big companies or landed estates would take place, while the immediate demands of blue-collar workers would be met. Finally, it helped that the western allies refused to negotiate with any authority other than the Ebert–Groener axis between Berlin and Kassel: the victors needed an authority in Germany to sign the peace terms to be decided by the Paris peace conference.
The triangle of authority laid out between the Berlin authorities, the Supreme Command in Kassel and the holders of industrial power wanted to bring home the soldiers, turn industry back to peacetime production, negotiate a peace and create a parliamentary republic. While street fighting was going on in Berlin the elections of January 19, 1919 gave a three-quarters majority to the parties of the center-left: the Social Democrats, the leftwing liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei and the old Catholic Center Party. The old National Liberal Party reemerged under Gustav Stresemann, adopting the name of Deutsche Volkspartei, and so did the Deutschkonservative Partei, now under the name of Deutschnationale Volkspartei. The Communists had rejected the elections as just another bourgeois plot, while the radical Volkische fringe on the right was conspicuous by its absence.
As fighting continued in Berlin, a safe venue had to be found for the German National Assembly. Weimar was chosen not because of its associations with Goethe and Schiller, but because the little town in Thuringia offered relative calm, a suitable building in its National Theater, enough to eat and, above all, security against a Leninist coup. In fact, for the duration of the constitutional deliberations, Weimar was guarded by the Freikorps Maercker, one of the many freelance military units in search of employment.
Germans looked to Weimar to open a new chapter of national history. Nine out of ten had no stomach for Leninist revolution, but eight out of ten were ready to give democracy a try, to attempt to learn from the victors. Constitution making in Weimar was, of course, coupled to peace making in Paris. While the Germans tried to take their fate into the
ir own hands, it was all too evident that it was to be decided, first and foremost, at the Paris conference tables.
In the next few months, the communist uprisings were suppressed in Berlin and elsewhere. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were shot in the course of a mopping-up operation by Freikorps troops in the service of the government, giving rise to a martyrs’ myth. The Munich Räterepublik ended with its leader, Kurt Eisner’s assassination, then the killing of hostages, mostly elderly professors from the Art Academy, by the revolutionaries. This was followed by bloody revenge on the part of the Freikorps and volunteers moving in from the mountains of Upper Bavaria, some of them under the swastika. The rest was left to the courts, which meted out draconian punishment, death sentences included.
The men and women assembled in the celebrated National Theater in the heart of the city of Weimar were aware of what was at stake. They wanted a perfect constitution, taking the best from the German tradition and adding what they found convenient from the west. The German past offered a strong bureaucracy and administrative courts, one man, one vote elections and a legislative role for parliament. Federalism too had survived war and revolution, and while it proved impossible to reduce the old imbalance inherent in the overwhelming size and weight of the state of Prussia, for the first time now the Reich had power over direct taxation, which was soon to give rise to sweeping legislation. The trade unions saw to it that the elements of state socialism and the achievements of recent months were preserved in constitutional form. The middle classes secured guarantees of individual property. The social democrats tried to keep the door open for more socialism, once they achieved an overall majority— something they regarded as merely a matter of time thanks to the internal contradictions of capitalism.
Restoration of the monarchy was not seriously debated because even the conservatives-turned-nationalists would have been hard pressed to name a likely candidate. Instead, the left-wing liberals inspired by Max Weber, the famous sociologist, and Friedrich Naumann, the Nationalsozial leader, created an Ersatzkaiser and guardian of the constitution in the shape of the new office of Reich President. This was done not out of theoretical considerations, but primarily to create a rock on which all anti-republican movements of the future should founder. But there was also a belief in the benefits of personal authority and the hope that a popularly elected chief executive would forever block socialist experiments. Ebert, however, had forebodings of crises to come and, although a dyed-in-the-wool social democrat and now himself Reich President, he regretted the bonds of tradition and legitimacy that had been broken with the fall of the monarchy. His fellow social democrats, for their part, insisted on installing a system for referendums, assuming that this would provide a means to overrule middle-class majorities in parliament.
So, while parliament passed legislation and voted governments into or out of power, both the President and the popular referendum curtailed parliamentary primacy. The eagle remained Germany’s state symbol, but one could say that now it had three heads ready to fight each other. On the face of it, the constitution looked like a piece of perfect locksmithing. In reality, it would open the gates to the barbarians once the democratic honeymoon was over.
Meanwhile in Paris, twenty-seven states were invited to attend the conference to make peace, many of them still in the process of defining themselves, forming a government and fighting their neighbors, many of their leaders at best inexperienced, at worst bent on expansion. The vanquished states were not invited: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria. The Russia of the Tsars had been sent a formal invitation, but there was no one to accept. Thus, Germany and Russia, the two most powerful nations on the European continent, were conspicuous by their absence. The conference was conceived as an open forum, and since the Supreme Council, composed of the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan, never managed to agree upon an overall organizing principle, it got lost in detail, wishful thinking and huge contradictions. Prominent among them was the incompatibility of Wilson’s high-flying idealism with French paranoia.
Wilson wanted to call a new world into being based on national self-determination, democracy and free trade, the absence of secret diplomacy and a League of Nations to ensure peace. He understood neither the role of the old empires nor the conglomerate nature of most of the new nation-states, in particular Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. Nor did he realize that, for the post-war order to work, it needed an open-ended American commitment to put right every wrong and be the world’s policeman.
French leaders, by contrast, were obsessed with carving up Germany, extracting vast reparations and building a petite entente of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania around Germany in the east that would also serve to contain the Bolshevik revolution. They were painfully aware that without les Anglosaxons the balance of Europe, sooner or later, would be in the hands of Germany. Clemenceau, “le tigre,” put up a desperate fight to achieve the permanent suppression of German power while knowing that, without British and American support, this was nothing but a dangerous delusion. Given the popular passions created by the war as well as the huge debt incurred by all the belligerent nations, there was no way to transcend the bitterness and co-opt the new German republic as a partner into the post-war system. By treating Germany as the arch-enemy and even propounding, in article 231 of the Versailles treaty, the sole responsibility of Germany for the outbreak of the war—a question that has since claimed vast stretches of library shelving—a self-fulfilling prophecy was created. This war-guilt clause was a newcomer in the diplomatic toolbox, used to extract huge reparations irrespective of the fact that, with Europe’s biggest economy in permanent financial ruin, the world economy could not recover. Hence John Maynard Keynes, economic adviser to the British delegation, saying that this peace contained the seeds of the next war.
The other provisions of the treaty left Germany largely intact, but humiliated the country and created an all-encompassing resentment against the “dismal diktat” of Versailles. One-seventh of Germany’s territory was cut off, Alsace and Lorraine in the west, and the western part of Poland in the east, giving the Polish republic access to the Baltic. In Upper Silesia and in Schleswig-Holstein, large chunks of territory were given to Poland and Denmark, respectively. The army had to be cut down to 100,000 regulars, while the battle fleet had to be handed over to the British, together with large parts of the merchant marine. Reparations in kind were to go to the areas of France and Belgium devastated by the war. The Kaiser, now safe in Holland, was to be tried as a war criminal.
Paris in 1919 was not Vienna in 1815. The European system now created rested on the permanent exclusion of the two dominant powers on the Continent, Germany and Russia, and it even put a premium on their making common cause to unhinge the system. The Russians’ fear of the capitalist world ganging up would give them a strong incentive to find a partner, and Poland, re-created from the lost lands of the Tsar and Kaiser, would serve as a catalyst for their union. The peacemakers in Paris did not realize that, in geostrategic terms, Germany was stronger after the war than before, since for the first time in thirty years France had no substantial ally in the east to contain German energy. Britain would concentrate on its empire, by now larger, but also more brittle than ever.
This peace was “a fragile compromise between American utopianism and European paranoia,” said Henry Kissinger, with Germany in the center, dismembered but not destroyed. By the summer of 1919 it appeared that Germany had been defined, from inside and from outside, for a long time to come. On closer inspection it was evident, however, that only the first act in the great European drama had ended and that the curtain would soon rise again. What the script would be for the next act was as yet unknown. But the fringe groups and desperados of the radical left and right, traumatized by the birth pangs of the Weimar Republic, were certainly ready to strike as soon as there was the chance to overthrow it.
EPILOGUE
Four months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
Margaret Thatcher convoked a colloquium of learned historians from Great Britain and the United States and put to them the question: “Have the Germans changed?” In the defining moment after the end of the Cold War Mrs. Thatcher wanted to know where Germany was going and, by implication, how Europe would be affected. The questions revealed deep-seated anxieties about Germany’s past as much as about her present and future.
After the reunification of East and West, the German parliament decided in 1991 to honor old pledges and move the seat of government back to Berlin, the capital of Germany from 1871 to 1945. No one could be sure what effect this move would have on the style and substance of German politics. It was a shift from the provincial city of Bonn in the west, to Berlin in the east: Bonn is close to Benelux and the French border and Berlin is a only one hour by train from Poland. History was on the move again and Germany was possibly, Britain suspected, planning some kind of repeat performance: there seemed to be contemporary echoes in these concerns of Benjamin Disraeli’s forebodings in 1871 about the “German revolution” and its effects on British interests. The same fears of a “German revolution” came quickly flooding back, in Germany as well as in Great Britain and the rest of Europe.
The German Empire Page 11