by Geert Mak
On the day of capitulation, half blinded by mustard gas in a ward at the military hospital in Pasewalk, Corporal Adolf Hitler buried his burning face in the pillows and sobbed. ‘So everything had been in vain. All the sacrifices and hardships had been in vain … Had all this taken place only so that a gang of miserable criminals could now have their way with our fatherland? Was it for this that the German soldier had borne the burning sun and snowstorms? … Was it for this that he had lain amid the thundering volleys and exploding shells of gas? … During those nights my hatred grew against those who had perpetrated this deed. In the days that followed I came to realise my own destiny … I decided to become a politician.’
The effect which winter 1918–19 had on the history of Germany and that of the whole of Europe is still underestimated. During those months the foundation was laid in Berlin, just as it had been earlier in Petrograd, for a political movement that was to have a formative effect on the continent for the rest of the century. What's more, this German civil strife would create so much bad blood between the moderate and the radical left that all further cooperation, even that needed to keep Hitler from power, was ruled out. It was a drama, and as in most dramas, the action can be divided into a number of acts.
To start with, the people of Berlin had viewed the entire war through rose-tinted spectacles. Sebastian Haffner remembers how, as a ten-year-old boy, he had stood on tiptoe each day in his attempts to decipher the army bulletins posted on walls. That lent excitement to life, and spice to the day. ‘When there was a major offensive underway, with the number of prisoners taken listed in five digits and fortresses taken and an “enormous quantity of military material”, then life was a party, your imagination could run on endlessly and you walked with a spring in your step, just as you did later when you fell in love.’
That mood had everything to do with the peculiar situation in which Germany found itself. Although, strategically speaking, the country had long been fighting a defensive war, it appeared the army was still on the offensive. The front lines, after all, remained fixed and far from German territory. As late as 27 September, 1918 the army bulletins were still saying that the war was all but won. Three days later, however, it had all become clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Today we know what was going on behind the scenes, but the Berliners of that day were dumb-founded. The strict imperial order, the world of the ‘Hauptmann of Köpenick’, all came tumbling down. In the months that followed some 1.8 million rifles, 8,452 machine guns and 4,000 mortars went ‘missing’ from the country's arsenals.
The new social-democrat government was still busy negotiating a truce when the first rebellion broke out on 30 October, 1918 aboard the Schillingrede, off Wilhelmshaven. It was a sailors’ mutiny, in response to another mutiny by the country's naval leaders. Despite orders from Berlin to cease all fighting at sea immediately, the naval command had decided of its own accord to stage a major battle. The entire German fleet was ordered to set sail for a battle that could in no way tip the balance of the war. The only issue at hand was the honour of the Kaiserliche Marine: the admiralty simply had no intention of surrendering without a fight. That their action would foil the ceasefire negotiations and needlessly prolong the war for months was no concern of theirs. Approximately 1,000 sailors from the battleships Thüringen and Helgoland had the courage to stand up to this plan. They brought all activity aboard their ships to a complete halt. This, in other words, was a pro-government mutiny.
The mutineers elected councils of their peers, disarmed their officers, ran up the red flags, marched into the military brigs to free their comrades and occupied public buildings. The mutiny became a revolution, and within a few days the movement was rolling through the major cities in western Germany. The same thing happened everywhere: soldiers and workers joined forces, elected their own councils, officers were forced to capitulate or flee, and civilian authorities knuckled under. On 8 November the pacifist Kurt Eisner and the poet-revolutionary Ernst Toller proclaimed in Munich the ‘Free Popular Republic of Bavaria’. That republic of soviets would last precisely one hundred days.
The army's top command quickly dispatched the 4th Rifle Regiment – one of its most reliable units – to Berlin, in case they were needed to crush a revolution. By the very next day, even these soldiers had experienced a change of heart. They took up defensive positions around the offices of the Social Democratic Party paper Vorwärts. On Saturday, 9 November, hundreds of thousands of badly nourished men and women marched on the centre of town. They were solemn in their conviction and prepared for the worst: a bloody Saturday. Those marching up in front carried signs with texts like ‘BROTHERS! DON'T SHOOT!’ But the barrack gates opened for them. In the home of Sebastian Haffner's parents, the newspaper was suddenly no longer called the Tägliche Rundschau, but the Rote Fahne.
The new, uncertain government, deathly afraid of chaos and a loss of face, was quite unhappy with this huge and spontaneous popular movement. They feared a repetition of what had happened in Russia, where the Mensheviks and others had been devoured by their own revolution. At the same time they were eager to remain on good terms with their ‘own’ people on the popular councils. Hence their decision to ‘suffocate’ the revolution, a term Chancellor Ebert actually used when discussing it with the German military commanders. The social-democratic foremen co-opted leadership of ‘their’ revolution, appeased the humiliated authorities, restored their power and then allowed the whole movement to fizzle out. Gustav Noske, Ebert's right-hand man, was enthusiastically welcomed by the sailors of Kiel when he arrived as the city's ‘governor’, and was able within a few days to call off the whole revolution, in the name of the Revolution. The councils remained, but stripped of all power. The Rote Fahne became the Tägliche Rundschau once more. Thus ended Act One.
That winter the city filled with embittered veterans. Most of them had no job, and often no roof above their head. The Allies were still blockading the German ports. Never had Berlin suffered hunger the way it did during those winter months. By the end of 1918, the city was at least as ripe for a Bolshevik revolution as Petrograd had been in 1917. Still, those events did not repeat themselves. Why?
The first reason was that the revolution's opponents had not come even close to being eliminated, as they had been in Russia. Everywhere on the outskirts of Berlin new troops were being trained, the so-called ‘Volunteer Corps’, composed of the most loyal and disciplined veterans. These corps, originally set up in order to have a few mobile and efficient army units available at a moment's notice, soon developed into autonomous, hardened combat groups who bowed to no one, except their own commander. Here the foundation was laid for the Waffen-SS.
Gustav Noske – who would later become minister of civil defence – did all he could to maintain order, and was willing to cooperate with anyone to that end, including the leaders of these volunteer corps. What those Freikorps leaders actually thought about the social-democrat government, however, is clear from their diaries. ‘The day will come when I will settle accounts with this government,’ wrote the commander of the Eiserne Schar, for example, ‘and rip the masks off all this pitiful, whining riff-raff.’ Or the commander of the Werwolf: ‘We declare war on Weimar and Versailles! War – every day and by every means!’ The ‘Brigade’, Hermann Ehrhardt's elite corps, was the first to wear the swastika on their helmets.
Meanwhile a wild bunch had gathered around the person of Karl Liebknecht. They were angry leftist veterans who roamed the city looting wealthy homes and occupying strategic buildings. Along with Karl Radek, Liebknecht hoped to disrupt the coming elections with a coup. The Russian model was to be followed, the soviets of workers and soldiers were to take power at any cost. Liebknecht remained impervious to the fact that most of the German soviets were not themselves at all interested in his plan.
The atmosphere in Berlin grew grimmer by the day, shootings became more frequent, it seemed as though everyone was carrying a pistol or a machine gun. On 28 Decemb
er, 1918 the omnipresent Count Harry Kessler walked past a number of corpses lying in state. ‘No one would be able to tell you what these young lives have been sacrificed for, or for what they have sacrificed themselves.’ That same week was the first time Käthe Kollwitz saw young, blinded soldiers out begging in the cold with their barrel organs. ‘I was reminded of a cartoon in Simplicissimus that appeared years ago, showing an invalid from the war of 1870 playing his barrel organ and singing: “What I am, and what I own, is thanks to you, my fatherland!”’
Around Christmas and New Year, Berlin was a ghost town. ‘The stench of civil war was in the air,’ George Grosz wrote. ‘The plaster had fallen from the houses, windows were broken, many shops had lowered their iron shutters … People no longer able to bear their frightened, confined existences had climbed onto the roofs and were shooting at everything that moved, be it birds or people.’
During that same period, Karel Radek succeeded in bringing the Spartacus Movement (named after the gladiator and revolutionary leader) and a couple of other radical left-wing groups under the auspices of a new party: the Kommunistische Partei Deutschland, the KPD.
On Sunday 5 January, 1919 the second revolution broke out at last. The reason was insignificant enough: Ebert had dismissed the self-appointed chief commissioner of Berlin, a radical socialist, and the Spartacists had called for a demonstration. Radical workers took to the streets by the thousand. Then Liebknecht turned up. Harry Kessler heard him from a distance, speaking ‘like an evangelist, singing the words with a soothing pathos, lento and with great feeling’. Later he ran into him amid an angry throng on Potsdamer Platz, orating again to an almost unanimously adoring audience. ‘I entered into discussion with him, and within a few minutes the majority of the crowd was on my side, particularly the soldiers, because they noticed that he himself had never been in the army.’
Accounts like this would seem clearly to show that most people in the streets of Berlin did not long for a replica of the Bolshevik Revolution. The minutes of the workers’ meetings held that week indicate that people were in favour rather of a replica of the German November Revolution, but that this time it should be done right. The ‘traitorous’ Ebert government was to be ousted. Armed groups were formed, railway stations and newspaper offices occupied. Meanwhile, Karl Liebknecht's followers drove him around the city, his convoy surrounded by trucks bearing red flags and machine guns like a Berlin variation of the triumphal progress of the great Lenin. Yet Liebknecht, as we have seen, was no Lenin. From the very start his career had been that of an activist, a militant, but not that of a political leader.
At this point the situation became very murky indeed. A general strike in which 200,000 workers took part was held on Monday, 6 January. That morning Kessler saw two processions marching through central Berlin: one of social democrats, the other of Spartacists. ‘Both were made up of drab, identically dressed shopkeepers and factory maids, both waved red flags and marched in the same bourgeois cadence. The only difference was the text on their banners. They mocked each other in passing and may, perhaps, start shooting at each other before the day is done.’ Suddenly he heard yelling. ‘The Liebknecht boy! Liebknecht's son!’ Karl Liebknecht Jr, ‘a slender blond boy’, was almost lynched by the social democrats, until a group of Spartacists succeeded in carrying him off to safety.
That afternoon a crowd gathered again on Alexanderplatz, ready to storm the surrounding government buildings. All was in readiness for the start of the Berlin Revolution. And nothing happened.
There was no leadership, there were no decisions made. Radek, newly arrived in Berlin, had not had enough time to impose discipline on the gung-ho Spartacists. He was utterly opposed to the idea of bringing down the government, and behind closed doors demanded that the new KPD immediately withdraw from this ‘dead end’ struggle.
Liebknecht was a brave, hot-headed lawyer, but no political genius. He had something quixotic about him, Kessler recorded in his diary, and simply lacked Lenin's strategic gifts. Rosa Luxemburg was an exceptional woman, brilliant and poetic, but during those weeks she devoted herself only to her newspaper and her writing. She was quite furious with Liebknecht when she heard that he had started a revolution with no preparations whatsoever: ‘How could you? What about our party programme?’ The soldiers’ council remained neutral: they were in favour of the revolution, but also in favour of public order. By the end of the day most of the demonstrators had simply gone home. Their revolution was over.
After that, Berlin's mood took a drastic swing: the Ebert government received the support of a number of conservative army units. By dint of furious door-to-door fighting they resumed control of one occupied building after another. The building housing the offices of Vorwärts was taken, and when the commanding officer asked the chancellor's office what to do with the 300 people who had been occupying it, the answer was: ‘Shoot them all.’ Being an officer of the old school, he refused. In the end, seven of the occupiers were executed, the others severely beaten. That afternoon the first Freikorps marched into the city, led by the proud Gustav Noske. He was aware of the historic role he was playing: ‘What do I care? Someone must play the bloodhound; I will not shirk my duty.’
This turn of events marked the start of a wild round-up of radicals and communists. Of the Spartacists who resisted, 1,200 were shot down in Berlin alone. Radek got off easily. He was sent to the Moabit, the huge Prussian prison in the centre of town, and there he remained for a year. As special representative of the new Russia, he was soon granted privileged status. His cell became a well organised distribution point for agit-prop, and he was allowed to receive whomever he chose, ranging from radical activists to prominent figures such as Walter Rathenau. Everyone in Berlin spoke of ‘Radek's salon in the Moabit’. Here new ties were forged between a Germany and a Russia in transition.
Luxemburg and Liebknecht, however, did not enjoy the protective support of a major power. They were arrested on 15 January, 1919, close to the Eden Hotel, beaten almost unconscious with rifle butts and then shot through the head. Liebknecht's body was taken to the morgue. Luxemburg, still alive, was thrown into the Landwehrkanal. Their deaths united them at last in the history books, although in real life they had little to do with each other, save for their frequent differences of opinion. Käthe Kollwitz was given permission to draw a final portrait of Liebknecht: ‘A garland of red flowers had been laid across the shattered forehead, his face was proud, his mouth open slightly and twisted in pain. His face bore a rather astonished expression.’ Runge, the soldier who had beaten Liebknecht's brains in, was the only man in his unit to receive a (brief) jail sentence. Lieutenant Vogel, who had shot Luxemburg, was convicted only of illegally disposing of a corpse; he fled to the Netherlands and was granted amnesty there. Their commanding officer, Captain Waldemar Pabst, remained unpunished and died in his bed of natural causes in 1970.
That was the end of Act Two.
Act Three of the drama comprised the civil war which spread across Germany that winter and on into the summer, flaring up here and there like a peatland fire: in Bremen, in Munich, in the Ruhr, and then again in Berlin. It was a civil war that has been largely erased from European memory, but one fought with great cruelty and violence.
‘Strangers were spat upon. Faithful dogs slaughtered. Coach horses eaten,’ Joseph Roth wrote of that period. ‘Teachers beat their pupils from hunger and rage. Newspapers invented atrocities by the opposition. Officers sharpened their sabres. College students fired shots. Secondary-school students fired shots. Policemen fired shots. Little boys fired shots. It was a nation of gunmen.’
The struggle was an uneven one: unorganised resistance groups from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils against highly trained and well-armed volunteer corps. At times it was even unclear who was fighting whom. In late January, Harry Kessler noted that the socialist movement had obviously split into two camps,‘because even the troops guarding the [administrative] centre [of Berlin] are socialists, and would
probably not support any civil government whatsoever.’
In the capital the war became a normal part of daily life. One eyewitness recounted how schoolchildren excused themselves when they came home late from school by saying that they had been forced to wait in a doorway at Hallesches Tor until the shooting stopped. A westbound S-Bahn train pulling into a station might seem empty, until it stopped. But that was an illusion: the passengers had simply sought shelter under the seats to avoid stray bullets.
Despite all this, general elections were held on 19 January, 1919 and Ebert's centre-left coalition won three quarters of the votes. The independent parties were buried beneath the landslide. In the People's Republic of Bavaria, Kurt Eisner and his people received only three per cent of the vote. Eisner was no Lenin either, and he resigned graciously. He never got the chance to hold a farewell speech, however: just as he was about to enter the Bavarian house of parliament, he was assassinated by a radical right-wing officer.
After these elections, and despite the violence in the streets, Ebert was able to rely on solid political backing: from parliament, the trade unions, the employers and the generals. And still the fighting went on. The conflict now had to do with better terms of employment, more money and greater autonomy for the councils. The Freikorps ran amok through the country in their own special fashion. One of their leaders, quite correctly, compared them to fifteenth-century mercenaries: ‘The landsknechts, too, cared little what they were fighting about, or for whom. The most important thing was that they were fighting. War had become their calling.’ In the end there were about seventy such corps, totalling 400,000 soldiers. Many Germans cities were the scene of widespread torture and random executions, atrocities that have survived only occasionally in individual family histories.