The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (13 page)

Places where the management refused to capitulate had been attacked and wrecked. Nor was the taste for disorder confined to pseudo-Bolsheviks. ‘This afternoon,’ Kessler added, ‘a party of Roman Catholics together with some Protestants stormed the Religious Affairs Ministry in order to haul out the Minister. We are returning to the days of strong-arm law. The Executive is wholly powerless.’
4

The latter case of religiously inspired violence had to do with the fact that Adolph Hoffman, the left-wing Independent Socialist and militant free-thinker appointed joint Religious Affairs and Education Minister at the time of the revolution, was threatening to abolish the role of the Church in Prussian schools. Hoffman was forced to resign almost immediately after this incident. But the real danger in Berlin at this point came, not from outraged Christians, who in any case organised themselves in short order into a respectable political movement and got the proposed law blocked, but from the Spartacist League – or, as it became on 1 January 1919, absorbing some other small far-left groups, the German Communist Party.

The Spartacist League had been founded by a breakaway faction from the Social Democratic Party in protest at its support for the war. The most prominent Spartacist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, had both been jailed during the war for their anti-militarist agitation. Liebknecht was freed in October during the liberal interlude of the Prince Max government, Luxemburg on 9 November. They immediately set about reviving the organisation, which had begun to decline during the last months of the war.

Rosa Luxemburg, born to Jewish parents in Russian Poland in 1871, had gained German nationality through a marriage of convenience to a political sympathiser in 1897. A brilliant and fearless writer, political thinker and early feminist, Luxemburg became a controversial but influential figure on the left of the Social Democratic Party after moving to Berlin. Karl Liebknecht, born in the same year as Luxemburg, was a son of the pioneer Social Democrat and friend of Marx and Engels, Wilhelm Liebknecht – therefore a born-and-bred member of the ‘socialist aristocracy’ – and a fluent writer and propagandist. His attempt to establish a ‘socialist republic’ on Bolshevik lines on 9 November had been forestalled by Scheidemann’s astute declaration of a moderate one from the balcony of the Reichstag that same day. Moreover, even in the elections to the ‘Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils’ in December, the Spartacists had barely managed double figures in their number of delegates. Nonetheless, they were a powerful force on the Berlin streets.

A lawyer in a suit, physically unprepossessing, Liebknecht suffered from a weak voice that, like the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, he had to train for years before it became a serviceable, even powerful political tool. Nevertheless, he commanded fanatical loyalty from his followers.
Die Weltbühne
captured a snapshot of Liebknecht in mid-December 1918:

Did you see him speak from the back of a heavy delivery truck to a packed crowd? Did you see machine guns being set up near to him, for his protection? Did you see, amidst the swarthy faces of the audience, the ominous figures keeping watch, their index fingers curled around the triggers of the revolvers they keep in their pockets, ready at any moment to sacrifice their own or another’s life for their hero, up there on that makeshift tribune? Did you feel the uncanny suggestiveness radiating out from Liebknecht to that crowd . . . when he spoke? His eyes roll wildly in his head, then protrude, as if endeavouring to bore with the full force of his fanaticism into everyone’s brains. He gesticulates constantly. Soon he rips open his jacket, strikes himself on the chest with a passionate gesture, and says – no, cries, shouts, screams, shrieks: ‘Here, brothers, comrades, shoot me down on the spot if what I tell you is not true!’ Then, the next moment, he runs his hand through his hair, snaps his head forward and tosses out the words: ‘To the lamp post’
*
with the bloodhounds Ebert and Scheidemann!
5

As for the ‘bloodhounds’, on the morning of 4 January, realising that the time had come to secure some measure of state force in the face of the likes of Liebknecht and his armed supporters, Ebert travelled to the army base at Zossen, a little less than fifty kilometres’ southward drive from the centre of Berlin. Accompanying Ebert was the newly appointed ‘People’s Commissioner for Defence’, Gustav Noske. Noske, originally a basket weaver by trade, who like so many Social Democratic leaders had risen from humble origins through the trade union apparatus and the party press, had been sent to keep control of the revolutionary situation in Kiel at the beginning of November. His success with the revolutionary sailors on the Baltic put him at Ebert’s right hand in the struggle against the far left that followed.

The purpose of Ebert and Noske’s trip to Zossen was to meet a certain Major General Maercker. Maercker, a veteran of Germany’s pre-war colonial conflicts and a divisional commander during the latter part of the European war, had started organising and training a Freikorps on the lines of the units already operating on the eastern frontiers. In his case, however, it was with the object of taking on the domestic subversives rather than the Poles and the Baltic Bolsheviks. The two Social Democrats from Berlin were by all accounts astonished, both at being accorded a full guard of honour – unheard of for civilian politicians before the revolution – and at the rigorous traditional discipline shown by these hand-picked loyal troops. The regular soldiers sent against the People’s Marine Division on Christmas Eve had been ineffectual. These ones were much more impressive. Noske was said to have clapped the much shorter Ebert on the shoulder and said, ‘Take it easy, everything’s going to be all right.’ He then addressed the assembled soldiers and told them: ‘The orders of your commanders are to be obeyed, even when they order the use of weapons and hand grenades.’
6

Meanwhile, armed rebellion had broken out in Berlin itself. The left-socialist President of Police in the capital, Emil Eichorn, had been dismissed but refused to leave office. Thousands came out on to the streets to support him. Fiery speeches from leading radicals, including Eichorn and Liebknecht, worked the crowd on the Alexanderplatz into a climax of revolutionary fervour. Within hours, armed far-left groups had occupied the city’s media district (
Zeitungsvierte
l
), on either side of the Friedrichstrasse, which for more than half a century had been home to dozens of publications, printers and press agencies. They seized the printing works that produced the pro-government Social Democrat newspaper
Vorwärts
and the liberal
Berliner Tageblatt
, the offices of several publishers, as well as the Wolff Telegraph Bureau. The next morning, they also took over the Reich Printing Works, where official documents – and the capital’s supply of paper marks – were produced.
7

Despite Ebert and Noske’s meetings with the warlords of the Freikorps, the government seemed to have no physical answer to the violence. After all, little had been done to create a force loyal to the Republic. The next day, 5 January, when thousands of Spartacists
*
and their supporters began moving north into the government district, the pro-government forces had summoned the only weapon they had: their thousands of mainstream working-class supporters, many of whom made their way into the heart of Berlin to confront the rebels. In perhaps the last example of ingrained political solidarity among the capital’s working class, when the armed Spartacists came up against the cordon of unarmed government supporters, the rebels did not shoot their way through. They were not prepared to harm their fellow workers. The Reichstag and the Chancellery did not fall.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary soldiers and sailors had declared themselves neutral, and most of the Independent leaders who had left the executive the previous week, alarmed at the situation, agreed that they should try to mediate between Ebert and his government and the rebels. Since the government demanded that the rebels evacuate the media district, and the rebels refused, this proved impossible.

It was at this crucial moment that the Council of People’s Commissioners made the decision to put Noske in charge of bringing order to Berlin. He accepted, with the notorious words, echoing those of Liebknecht on the other side of the political divide, ‘Somebody’s got to play the bloodhound! I shall not shirk the responsibility!’ In short order, Noske decided to bring in the Freikorps to do the job. He managed to make his way out through the Spartacist lines and then established himself in a villa in Dahlem, a leafy suburb in the south-west of Berlin, where he began work organising his Freikorps allies and planning the retaking of the city.

The serious fighting went on for a little over a week. In fact, the actual battle would not be decided by the Freikorps. A combination of pro-Republic loyalists who had managed to organise themselves into a reasonably effective fighting force, supported by loyal regular army units, reconquered the streets and buildings seized by the Spartacists and their allies. Again, the fighting was bizarrely localised, and the life of the city went on around it in an eerily normal fashion. Harry Kessler, who lived not far from the epicentre of the uprising, made it his business throughout these days to get out and about, making notes for his diary. Sometimes his accounts read like war reports, sometimes like travel journalism. He wrote on 8 January:

At four o’clock I was in the Friedrichstrasse. There was a good deal of traffic and a lot of people stood discussing matters in small groups when suddenly there was a sound of shooting from the Unter den Linden end. Yet the Leipziger Strasse, except for its closed shops, looked perfectly normal and the big cafés on Potsdamer Platz were open, brightly lit and doing business as usual.

. . . At half past seven I had a meal in the Fürstenhof. The iron gates were just being shut because a Spartacus attack was expected on the Potsdamer Railway Station opposite. Single shots were dropping all the time. As I left, about nine, street vendors with cigarettes, malt goodies, and soap were still crying their wares. I looked for a moment into the boldly lit Café Vaterland. Despite the fact that any moment bullets might whistle through the windows, the band was playing, the tables were full, and the lady in the cigarette-booth smiled as winsomely at her customers as in the sunniest days of peace.
8

Four days later, the last of the rebel fighters had been cleared from the area or taken into captivity, and the far-left bid to control Berlin had been defeated. The so-called ‘Spartacist Uprising’ seems, in fact, to have been a strange and rather disorganised combination of Bolshevik-style
coup d’état
on the part of a militant minority and an extended protest – arguably justified – on the part of many Berliners, especially in the working-class areas, against the way that the timidity and conservatism of Ebert and his fellow moderate socialist leaders was already allowing the old system to make a comeback.
9

The Freikorps did eventually enter the city but not until the fighting had all but died down, making its actions all but superfluous. On 11 January, Noske marched at the head of Maercker’s troops as they advanced through the suburbs into the heart of Berlin. Over the next days, further units, many newly formed, made their way into Berlin. The southern suburbs and the centre were occupied. The working-class districts, where resistance might have been expected, were left alone for now.

One large Freikorps unit, which called itself ‘The Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division’, took up quarters at the splendid Eden Hotel, on the Tiergarten opposite the Berlin Zoo, and put signs up outside the building that declared: ‘The Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division has marched into Berlin. Berliners! The Division promises you that it will not leave the capital until order has been completely restored.’
10

On 15 January, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were arrested at the flat of a sympathiser and taken to the Eden Hotel. Luxemburg, who had warned against a premature ‘adventure’ such as the Spartacist uprising became, was questioned and brutally beaten, as was Liebknecht. Then, on the orders of a certain Captain Waldemar Pabst, they were hurried out of the hotel by a side entrance, where waiting soldiers struck theirs skulls violently with rifle butts. The dazed, even half-unconscious revolutionaries were then bundled into separate cars and driven away into the Tiergarten.

The car bearing Rosa Luxemburg had travelled only a few metres when she was shot in the head. The car stopped on a bridge, from which she was thrown into the Landwehr Canal. Her body would not be found until the end of May. In Liebknecht’s case, he was ordered out of the car and immediately shot in the back of the head. His body was then returned to the vehicle and driven to a mortuary, where it was labelled ‘corpse of an unknown man’. Eventually the body was retrieved, and Liebknecht was buried along with thirty or so other Spartacist dead in a mass ceremony on 25 January 1919.

The statement that went out to the press was that Liebknecht had been ‘shot while trying to escape’, while Luxemburg was said to have been abducted from the vehicle by a mob and spirited away to some place unknown. Both stories were lies. They had been murdered by anti-revolutionary Freikorps officers, probably with the connivance of Noske. Neither, it seems, had been directly involved in the violence – certainly not Rosa Luxemburg – but their symbolic importance was such that their liquidation became a priority.
11

The crushing of the uprising was an important event in itself, but the fact and manner of the Spartacist leaders’ deaths was more ominously significant still. With the summary murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, a line had been crossed. When arrested, Rosa Luxemburg had packed a small suitcase with her belongings, believing herself to be facing yet another spell of imprisonment, something to which she, like Liebknecht, had become hardened. The fate to which she and her co-conspirator were so brutally consigned by Pabst’s killers showed what the new, angry post-war right wing was capable of and presaged a quarter of a century of savagery to come. Their deaths also created two martyrs for the German far left, the potency of whose legends remains extraordinarily strong well into our own century.