The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (21 page)

A senior Social Democrat, Otto Braun, described a visit to the Reich Chancellery, where Ebert, Noske and the rest of the cabinet held an emergency meeting in the small hours of 12/13 March:

As I hurried through the grand library, there was a group of officers standing there, including Seeckt and others. I can still see the self-satisfied smile on their faces. It was as if to say: Go back, you can’t save your friends now. In the ante-room I encountered the Prussian Minister of War, General Reinhardt, who gave me a brief account of what had happened. The mutinous troops were marching from Döberitz to Berlin under the command of Erhardt and Lüttwitz. He had declared himself ready to take up arms against them, but the commanders of the troops stationed in Berlin had told him: Reichswehr does not fight against Reichswehr.
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Braun asked Reinhardt whether their attitude would be different if the troops they were being asked to fire upon were marching in support of communism. Reinhardt merely smiled wryly in reply. It was shortly after this that the majority of the Reich cabinet made the decision to leave Berlin. Decamping in the middle of the night to Dresden, they suffered a further humiliation when the commander there, the same General Maercker who had declined to protect them during the National Assembly’s deliberations at Weimar, also indicated that he was not willing to take up arms on the legitimate government’s behalf. Finally, the cabinet’s caravan headed south-westward, to Stuttgart, where the ministers managed to establish a temporary seat of government.

One of the things that the Social Democratic members of the cabinet found time to do on their unexpectedly lengthy tour of central and then south-western Germany was to contact the leaders of the trade unions in Berlin. They might not have the active support of the Reichswehr, but they had the support of organised labour’s big battalions, and they decided to use it. Carl Legien and the other leaders, including those considerably to the left of him, agreed to a general strike in the capital.

Even before the general strike was declared, it had become clear that the coup’s chances of success were modest, and they became yet more modest as the hours and then days went on. Politically astute Reichswehr officers, including Seeckt, were unwilling to use violence to suppress the uprising. They nonetheless realised that if, as seemed probable, it failed, then the chief beneficiaries would be the far left – the very ‘Bolsheviks’ from whom they were supposed to be protecting the German people – whose leaders would now argue, more convincingly than before, that the only alternative to a military dictatorship was a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Nor did most civil servants carry out the new regime’s orders. In the Berlin ministries now supposedly under the control of the Kapp supporters, the great majority of officials obeyed their departmental heads, who, although not necessarily sympathetic to the Republic, stuck almost to a man with the legitimate government. Only in the ultra-conservative, monarchist backwoods of eastern Prussia was there widespread support among senior officials and military men for Kapp - who was, after all, one of their own.

The strike started on Saturday, 13 March, and though it took until Monday, 15 March, the first proper working day of the week, to reach its fullest extent, the paralysis of the transport, power and communications systems and the shutdown of the shops and factories, allied to the refusal of civil servants to carry out the would-be government’s instructions, caused, as one historian has described it, ‘the appeals of the “Reich Chancellor” Kapp to fizzle out into thin air, and nullified the attempts of the rebels to undertake any real governmental activity’.
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Sebastian Haffner, the civil servant’s son, was at that time, aged thirteen, still, like his school fellows, nationalistically inclined. He had heard awestruck comments that ‘the Kaiser was coming back’ when the rebels first marched into Berlin on the Saturday morning. More news trickled in as they completed their morning lessons, for a half-day’s school at the beginning of the weekend was still the rule then. But soon the strike began to take effect:

We had no more news, because even by that first evening there were no more newspapers, and in any case, as it turned out, no electric light to read anything by. The next morning there was no water either. No mail. There was no public transport running. And the shops were shut. In short, there was nothing.
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The locals in Haffner’s respectable area of Berlin were forced, since mains power and water had been shut down, to fill buckets from ancient municipal springs that still existed on a few street corners and to haul them gingerly home, careful not to spill the precious liquid. Otherwise there were no demonstrations, he recalled, no real discussions, unlike during the revolution eighteen months earlier. And those few supporters of the putsch in the neighbourhood rather made fools of themselves:

It’s true that our PE teacher, who was very ‘national’ (all the teachers were ‘national’, but no one more so than the PE teacher) explained many times with great conviction that ‘You can feel immediately that there’s a quite different hand on the tiller’. But to tell the truth, we noticed nothing at all, and even he was probably only saying that to console himself for the fact that he noticed nothing at all either.

From school we made our way to Unter den Linden, roused by a deep sense that this was where you had to be when ‘patriotic events’ were afoot, and also in the hope of seeing or experiencing something there. But there was nothing to see and nothing to experience. A few soldiers were standing in a bored fashion around pointlessly high-mounted machine guns. No one came to attack them. In fact everything had a kind of Sunday feeling, contemplative and peaceful. That was down to the general strike . . .

On 18 March, Morgan Philips Price of the
Manchester Guardian
wrote succinctly: ‘We are living now in Berlin without light, gas or water. The new Government is caught like a rat in a trap.’
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It was not an entirely peaceful struggle. There were some armed clashes between supporters of the Republic and the Kapp rebels. Walter Koch, the Saxon state government’s representative in Berlin, reported frequent flare-ups in the government quarter, where he had his offices and his home.

There was shooting pretty much day and night around our building, so that we quickly moved our furniture out of the line of fire. It was a frequent occurrence during the day that the call sounded from the Potsdamer Platz: ‘Clear the street!’ It was amusing to see how the numerous passers-by would crowd into the building entrances like mice. Wicked automatic fire raked the Budapester Strasse. Once the rattle of the machine guns ceased, the people would gradually risk emerging from the buildings, and ten minutes later the traffic would be flowing as if nothing had happened.
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All the same, by 15 March the rebels had already begun covert talks with the handful of cabinet members who had stayed behind after the rest of the government left town. There was already talk of ‘compromise’. The ministers in Berlin, worried that the general strike, peaceful or not, might get out of hand, and eager to restore peace and normality to the capital, understandably gave more ground than the ministers observing from the safety of the provinces were, equally understandably, prepared to countenance. It was obvious that the putsch had failed in its main object. Moreover, with the unions and the (in many cases armed) supporters of the far left now mobilised in defence of the Republic, any concessions to the anti-democratic right - which had, after all, committed an indisputable act of high treason - could only count as the crassest provocation.

On 17 March, Kapp fled Berlin and, using a false passport, found his way to Sweden. Lüttwitz took refuge in Hungary, where a right-wing monarchist government had replaced the Soviet-style regime of the immediate post-war period. Other leaders of the putsch also made themselves scarce, like Kapp, often using false passports.

As for the Erhardt Brigade, its men may have seemed peaceful to Sebastian Haffner that afternoon on Unter den Linden at the height of the general strike, but when they left Berlin once more, on 18 March, there was nothing mild about them. As they passed in full order back through the Brandenburg Gate, the brigade band playing ‘Deutschland über Alles’, insulting comments were shouted from among the onlookers thronging the adjacent Pariser Platz. The Freikorps promptly opened fire directly into the crowd, killing twelve civilians and wounding thirty more. The fatal division within German society – expressed in the tendency of many Germans to treat as less than human fellow countrymen of whose politics they disapproved – was widening alarmingly.
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Even worse were the events that followed. This time it was not the right but the left that rose up. The call to a general strike in Berlin had been raised elsewhere in Germany, including in the industrial areas of Saxony and the Ruhr. But when the putsch was over, the strikers – and in some areas the armed worker militias that had been formed to support them – refused to return to what passed for normality. The far left, criticising the weakness of the Social Democratic–Liberal–Centre Party coalition government in allowing the Freikorps and the military to get so far out of control, and using the crisis as an opportunity to put forward revolutionary demands, escalated the situation into one of near-insurrection. Especially in the Saxon city of Leipzig, and in the Ruhr industrial area, the clashes between Reichswehr and Freikorps forces supporting the government, were willingly – some would say eagerly – turned into full-scale battles that would last days and in some cases weeks.

The fighting between the leftist militants of the so-called ‘Red Army of the Ruhr’ and the Freikorps/Reichswehr forces in the first half of April 1920 was ferocious. It cost the lives of more than 1,000 workers (mostly, it is thought, shot after being taken prisoner) and of 208 members of the Reichswehr, with another 123 posted missing. Major military operations continued through April and into the month of May and resulted in the complete defeat of the workers’ insurrection.
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The problem was that, technically speaking, the area in which the fighting was taking place was supposed to be a ‘demilitarised zone’, where the Reichswehr was not supposed to operate. In response to the Berlin government’s use of Reichswehr troops against the Ruhr uprising, the French ordered their army to occupy the city of Frankfurt on Main and several other important neighbouring towns, including Offenbach and Darmstadt. The force included French colonial troops, which caused special outrage. On the first day of the occupation in Frankfurt there was an incident where Moroccan troops, surrounded by a crowd of protesters, lost sight of their officer and fired into the crowd, killing and injuring several civilians.
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The acting Chancellor, Hermann Müller, told an outraged National Assembly: ‘In Frankfurt on Main, French militarism has advanced as if into an enemy country. There are Senegalese at Frankfurt University and at the house where Goethe was born . . .’
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If the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch, though a failure, had achieved one thing, it had been to reveal the extremes which German nationalists were capable of less than a year and a half after the revolution. It was also, as the subsequent fighting in the Ruhr showed, the spark that fired a civil war within the union and working-class movement, sealing the divisions that would make a government by a unified left in Germany impossible and thereby condemn the country to weak, divided governments for the rest of the Weimar era.

Strangest of all, it was as if these multiple terrible things were happening in compartments, separated from each other. The Reich was big, and traditionally localised in its interests and loyalties. Even while epoch-making, often bloody events were occurring in the country’s cities and industrial centres, provincial Germany on the whole went its near-oblivious way. A chronicler of the ‘German Civil War’ wrote :

. . . it was precisely this diversity that stood in the way of any conscious unified effort on the part of either revolution or counter-revolutionary groups. A revolution in Berlin did not necessarily give rise to similarly directed consequences all over Germany, and a success for the counter-revolution in another part of Germany did not inevitably mean that it would find similar success elsewhere. This diversity in the cultural and social structure of the German state goes some of the way to explaining why the most explosive consequence of the Kapp putsch, the workers’ uprising on the Ruhr in March and April 1920, not only ended in failure, but also why it impinged on the consciousness of most Germans outside the area immediately affected little more than a host of other everyday events.
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All this was true, but there were some things in Germany that still held together, no matter which part of the country one was in, or which political tendency held sway there. The most important of these was, despite everything, the German military, rapidly developing, in these hazardous post-war conditions, into a self-reliant state within a state. In early 1920, no two cities could have been further apart politically than socialist-liberal-ruled Berlin and reactionary Munich, where, since the violent suppression of the Soviet Bavarian Republic in the late spring of 1919, the nationalist right dominated. But Reichswehr in Berlin spoke to Reichswehr in Munich, and vice versa.