Witness to the German Revolution (40 page)

Advocates of military revenge against the victorious powers of World War I.

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.

Striking evidence of the ultra-leftism that was widespread in the KPD.

A small, clandestine committee. The term goes back to Babeuf's conspiracy of 1796.

A major thoroughfare in central Berlin.

The former Royal Pleasure Grounds.

Jungdeutscher Orden.

Established November 10, 1918.

1715.

Borkum is one of the East Friesian Islands off the north coast of Germany near the mouth of the Ems.

Five marks to a French franc. Serge is here writing specifically for a French readership.

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.
]

Untergang des Abendlandes.
The literal translation of this title is even more significant:
The Decline of the Land of Evening.
[
Serge's note.
]

The peasants of the Vendée in Western France launched a counter-revolutionary rising in 1793.

Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916), Belgian poet.

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.

Serge was using the term “decadent” before it was corrupted by misuse in the period of Stalinism and fascism.

George Gross (1893-1959) joined the KPD in 1922, but resigned the same year after a visit to Russia.

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.

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.

Mach, Freud, G. Mahler are Austrians, which makes no difference.
[Serge's note.]

Johannes Gutenberg (1400-68), regarded as inventor of printing from movable type, produced a 42-line Bible (c. 1455).

Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), theater director famous for spectacular productions; left Germany in 1933 and went to Hollywood.

Raffke:
a current slang term for profiteer.

He was beaten to death in prison by reactionary soldiers.

Élisée Reclus (1830-1905), geographer and communard and Prince Peter Kroptkin (1842-1921) were leading anarchist theorists who had greatly influenced the young Serge.

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.

Miklós Horthy established an authoritarian conservative regime in Hungary in 1920, after the overthrow of the Hungarian Revolution.

In the debate on the German failure, Radek, Zetkin and others argued the real revolutionary opportunity had come earlier than October.

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.)

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.

i.e., Ludendorff.

“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.

The KPD was made illegal on November 23, 1923; the ban was lifted on March 1, 1924.

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.

A pseudonym of the Hungarian economist Eugene Varga.

Serge, who knew and despised Zinoviev, the dominant figure in the Comintern now Lenin was dying, may well be using gentle irony here.

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.