THE NEW GERMANY
BY
GEORGE YOUNG
Author of "Portugal Old and Young"; "Nationalism and War in
the Balkans"; "Le Corps de Droit Ottoman," etc.
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE
1920
Printed in Great Britain
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
The following account of events in Germany during the period from the Armistice to the Treaty of Versailles was written mostly in the summer of 1919. But the events of the succeeding period from the signature of the Treaty to its ratification during the autumn and winter call for no alteration and but little addition to the text. The six months hereinafter described from February to August were a—perhaps the—critical period for Germany and for Europe. It was the formative and creative stage for New Germany and for New Europe. If the whole phase through which Central Europe passed after the collapse of the Central Powers is considered as the genesis of a new age, then the week of actual revolution was a phase of intense heat and fierce energy, in which the old political organisms were boiled down to their most simple and essential types and in which the germs of new political institutions appeared in primitive forms such as the Councils. Thereafter came the period under review, in which the old and new types fought for a survival of the fittest; and the old—aided by the general cooling off of the revolution—to some extent reasserted their supremacy. Indeed during this last winter I have even occasionally thought that the types of old Germany might succeed in suppressing the new, thereby making it necessary to change the title and tone of this book. But I know this impression is largely due to the pessimistic and perverted point of view towards all events in Central Europe affected by the British Press with few exceptions. For our "Dailies" Germany is only a subject for "scare heads" and "stories," in which adventurous special correspondents see the Kaiser emerging from the Netherlands to re-ravage Europe like the Brontosaurus out of the Nyassa swamp. Whereas the reality seems to be that reaction has moderated as the revolution became more amenable, and that a "modus vivendi" between the two is now more of a possibility than it was.
It now seems less probable than it did last summer that the solution in Germany will be a "second revolution" as in Russia. Weak as it is politically, the present German governmental system seems too strong police-ically to be overthrown by force. The situation to-day in Germany rather suggests that in Great Britain two years hence than that in Russia two years ago.
The new Germany of this winter of 1919-20 is essentially, then, the same as that of last summer. It is not the old Germany of the autumn of 1914, nor the young Germany of the autumn of 1917. But it has developed rapidly in some respects in the course of this winter. Thus the rough and ready rule by Frei-Corps expeditions and garrisons has been supplemented by a gendarmerie (Sicherheitswehr); and the middle-class militia (Bürgerwehr) has been replaced by an organisation of armed special constables (Einwohnerwehr).
The effect and perhaps the object of this change is to obscure the class character of the conflict between reaction and revolution—between property and the proletariat. The police is no longer a weapon for use by a possible militarist reaction or monarchist restoration, and in return it will be supported by the moderate revolutionaries.
Reaction and revolution are reuniting as reconstruction; and this tendency appears in all regions of political activity. Thus the revolutionary Council system now seems established as a secondary representative institution supplementary to Parliament.
This development is, however, not due to maturity of political experience—as it would be in similar conditions in an Anglo-Saxon community—but merely to mortal weakness. German political vitality, owing to mediæval calamities, has always been low in modern times. Now, as a result of a four years' frenzy of war and a fifth year in a fever of revolution, German political vitality is a very flickering flame. So long as France and Great Britain continue to enforce the principles and procedures of the Treaty of Versailles and of the Paris Council, Germany will remain a danger to Europe—a danger, not because of its recent relapse into a Conservative reaction, nor even because of the decreasing risk of a Communist "second" revolution, but because Germany is an essential and vital member of our European body politic that is being kept in a morbid, even moribund, condition by the provisions of the peace. The Paris diplomatists have not yet learnt the lesson taught by a great French diplomatist two hundred years ago at the time of the last great European settlement but one. M. de Callières then wrote in his treatise on diplomacy—"We must think of the States of which Europe is composed as being joined ... in such a way that they may be regarded as members of one Republic, and that no considerable change can take place in any one of them without affecting the condition or disturbing the peace of all the others."
A majority of the rank and file of Greater Britain does so think of Germany to-day, but unless and until it can compel its rulers to act accordingly it will not get peace. Peace is only for men of good will.
Christmas, 1919.
65, Strand on the Green,
Chiswick.
CONTENTS
THE NEW GERMANY
THE NEW GERMANY
CHAPTER I
THE REVOLUTION
When, in January, 1919, I resigned my commission and made my way out to Berlin as correspondent for the Daily News, I had two purposes in view. One was to find out to what extent we had really won the war—in the only way it could be won—by forcing the German people into revolution; and incidentally to take any opportunity that might offer of furthering that revolution. My second purpose was to find out what prospects there were of making a more or less permanent peace—in the only way it could be made—by establishing the forces of reform in Germany; and incidentally to point out any openings favourable to the furthering of such a peace. The following book brings together and sums up conclusions communicated to the Daily News from time to time and is put forward as an answer to the double question: Have we won the war against Prussianism and have we made a permanent peace?
The answer to this question was only to be got in Berlin. The first mistake made by the soldiers and workers who had won the war was in not insisting on their representatives making peace with the German people and at Berlin. An experience of twenty years in diplomacy, beginning with the arbitration treaties of Lord Pauncefote and ending with those of Lord Bryce, followed by two years of war experience, beginning with political secret service and ending in the ranks, had convinced me from the first that true peace could only be got by developing the forces of democracy of the defeated peoples centering in Berlin, and not by any bickerings between diplomatic formulæ of the victorious Governments collected in Paris. That is why I preferred going as a journalist to Berlin rather than in any other capacity to Paris. And that is why the following papers are published. They show that anyone who spent the first six months of 1919 in Berlin and the big German towns would have seen easily enough how it was that, in spite of military occupations and religious thanksgivings and bonfires and bonuses all round, we were not winning the war but losing it: and how, in spite of territorial partitions and financial reparations, and signatures with gold pens and the setting-up of a League of Nations, we were not making peace but manufacturing wars. We have not yet won the war because we have not as yet supported in Germany the progressive—that is, the revolutionary—elements and suppressed the Prussian—that is, the reactionary—spirit: while we have, of late, been really losing the war by actually assisting German reaction against German revolution. And we are doing this just from the ignorance of our democracy and the insouciance of our diplomacy.
Our democracy has been prevented from ascertaining, and our diplomacy has been precluded from understanding what the German revolution really means, both to Germany and to Great Britain. Although we are slow to understand foreign movements, yet ignorance of such a movement as this would have been impossible but for the conditions under which the war closed. The German revolution, banned, boycotted, and blockaded, became to us a stone of offence, an odious ruin of the war, and so we failed to recognise it as the only possible foundation stone for peace.
The six months I spent in Germany were none too much to realise the radical and rapid changes going on; and I can see how difficult it has been for English readers to get an idea of what is really happening there from the little that has been written about it. They cannot do so at all unless they clear their minds of the cartoons and caricatures and clichés forced on them during the last five years by the propaganda and the Press. It is no use drawing Germany from the life for people who still have before their eyes the "Boches" and "Bolsheviks" of Punch and John Bull. One has, indeed, to clear away two strata of misrepresentation, that of our Government and Press and that of the German Government and Press; for the latter is as much opposed to the German revolution as the former.
It would have been better for Germany had it shown more courage and collapsed less completely last autumn. A few weeks' patient endurance under punishment in a losing fight would have gone far towards restoring it some measure of the sympathies of the civilised world. While the consequent occupation of the whole country would have brought us into direct contact with the German revolution, and would have prevented the fatal split between reformers and revolutionaries, between Majority and Independent Socialists. As it was, we English were left to draw such conclusions as we could from the reports of the few correspondents who penetrated to Berlin. But, with two exceptions, the English Press could at this time publish nothing about Germany that was not merely malevolent. And of the few Englishmen in Berlin as correspondents in January, almost all were replaced before the Treaty of Peace by foreign Jews who would supply the sort of propaganda poppycock with which public opinion is still being poisoned.
What people in England wanted to know was whether the German revolution was a real riddance of the evil we had been fighting and a real renascence of good that we could favour; whether it had gone far enough and deep enough to be a sincere repentance and a sufficient remediation. For, unless Germany was born again, it could not enter the community of nations, and until it did so, there could be no true peace.
They could guess that Kaiserism was dead and gone and Junkerism down and out. But even so picturesque and positive an event as the fall of Kaiserism had been only baldly mentioned in a bare telegram of a line or two. How could the British public realise that the Black Eagle of Prussia was no Phœnix and that the blaze of November 9 had left nothing of it but a bad odour and a white feather.
But in Berlin there could be no doubt. Kaiserism was dead—deader even than Tsarism—because the Kaiser was still alive. His shot-shattered and mob-swept palace was the only reminder of him. And every Berliner had more or less vivid recollections of his fall, recollections too lamentable, too ludicrous, to allow of any restoration of the Kaiser legend even now.
After reading your morning paper about revolution in Dublin and revolt in Glasgow and reconstruction in London, as you walk down to your office past
Well, this is what happened to the Kaiserschloss in Berlin on November 8.
The curious crowd that always collects outside the house of anyone mentioned in the papers, whether it's an absconded postmaster or an abdicated potentate, found that the sentries no longer challenged them, and first filtered, then flooded into the inner courts. Thereupon the police and guards left, and the palace remained in charge only of the Kastellan and a few servants and soldiers. All doors were kept locked, and beyond some shouting everything was orderly, for the prestige of the Imperial precincts still prevailed.
Then one Schwieringer, not otherwise distinguished, made his way to the Kastellan and got leave to address the crowd from a window. Having draped the balcony with a red cloth borrowed for the purpose, he declared the palace national property. This broke the spell somewhat. The rest of the soldiers left, and the crowd became noisy.
Late in the afternoon came Liebknecht, who engaged another balcony, borrowed more red curtains, made another speech, and after holding a sort of levée in the Throne Room left again. Later came soldiers and hoisted a red flag. So far the Kastellan had remained master of the situation, conducting his unwelcome visitors through the rooms, unlocking and locking behind him as on ordinary occasions with any ordinary tourists.
Then on November 10 came one Bujakowski, with a Slavonic eye for the possibilities of the situation. Having collected such soldiers and civilians as were hanging about, he made them a speech, and called on them to elect a council, and himself Commandant of the Castle, which they did. He then said he must have a suitable uniform. The council agreed, and appointed a delegation to make selections from the Imperial wardrobe.
Happy delegates—happy, happy Bujakowski! Five hundred uniforms and, say, five pieces to each. How many combinations does that give in which to find the perfect expression of a Spartacist commandant of a Hohenzollern castle. He did his best in the time no doubt. Delegate Schwartz, try a combination of those English and Hungarian uniforms! Delegate Schmidt, see if that hunting costume goes with a Turkish fez! History does not record the result, beyond a cavilling incrimination about a diamond-headed cane. But it must have been effective, for the Commandant returned from the Reichstag with his commission confirmed. The rest of the company played up to his spirited lead, and the next morning his "adjutant" attempted a coup d'état. Bujakowski suppressed it with a revolver, but was, however, deposed a day or two later by an ex-convict, who generously appointed him his secretary.
These three men then formed a triumvirate, which spent most of its time making excursions in fancy dress with the imperial cars, and, oddly enough, kept the castle in fairly good condition. It was not until the sailors' revolutionary corps turned them out that all order disappeared. Some ten commandants then succeeded each other rapidly. The seventh shot the sixth, and was knocked on the head by the eighth. The palace became a resort of bad characters, and was stripped bare. Eventually, it was retaken by force, and the sailors were ejected.
Berliners shake their heads over the loss, estimated in millions (of war marks). But I don't know that there is much to lament. Personally, I am grateful to Bujakowski. His burlesque buffoonery has exorcised the Imperial incubus that still brooded over the deserted shrine of departed littleness, and I forgive him for his share in destroying or dispersing some of the ugliest objets d'art in Europe.
Kaiserism died when William the Second fled to Amerongen and Bujakowski broke into his wardrobe. Nor has it been revived by the revulsion in favour of William of Hohenzollern that we have evoked by our proposal to put him on his trial in England. We have thereby rallied in his support many adherents of the monarchical principle who had previously abandoned him, and by persisting in making a martyr of him, by taking him out of this German pillory and by putting him on an international pedestal, we have already opened the door to a restoration of the Hohenzollern dynasty as a constitutional monarchy. This would mean a restoration of Junkerism and Prussianism, but not of Kaiserism. That peculiar blend of divine right and demagogy is gone for ever.
And what about Junkerism? That cannot be so shortly answered. Junkerism expresses itself in both regions of the ruling class to which Germany has been hitherto subjected—the civil and the military. It is the evil genius of both those great services; and seldom has the world produced public services with so much power for good in them and so much evil as in the German army and bureaucracy. And it is indisputable that the fate of Germany and the future of Europe now depend on whether the revolutionary spirit is strong enough to exorcise the evil genius of Prussianism and of Junkerism from the army and civil service. But the question as to how far, so far, Germany's good angel has fired its bad one out can only be answered as yet by a careful and impartial observation of events in Germany since the revolution. And if these events seem to suggest that the revolution has lost its impetus and that reaction has dominated it, let us remember that the results of a renascence of public conscience, such as occurred in the November revolutions, should be estimated by comparing the concrete conditions of to-day, not with the abstract principles then for a time extant, but with the concrete conditions existing before the upheaval.
As most have already got or can easily get a general knowledge of what general conditions in Germany were before the revolution of November and of what were the general principles promulgated by the revolution, much of what follows will consist of evidence as to how far the revolution has so far failed in realising those principles. For revolution has now resulted in a reaction in which every vantage point gained by the first revolutionary rush is counter-attacked and every early victory is contested again. As every consequent loss cannot be referred back to the deadlock before the offensive the general impression is that of failure. But the Prussianism that now fills German prisons with political suspects is rather a reflection of reaction abroad than a revival of the ancient régime.
By the first rush of revolution in November 1918, the military power of the officer caste was broken and the political power of land and money was reduced to insignificance. But there was no strong obstacle to their recovery, and the power of the bureaucracy was unimpaired. Though the instigators of the crimes of the old régime had been removed, the instruments remained; while the 'Independent' intellectuals, the public prosecutors of those crimes, were before long voted down. And yet before we refuse absolution to the new German democracy we must be quite sure that these relapses are real unregeneracy and not reactions caused by fear of Russian revolution on the one side or Allied retribution on the other. We can only judge of this by reviewing the revolution.
The history of the German revolution can be shortly described and sharply defined. After the first explosion on November 9 came a month of equilibrium between revolution and reaction. Then a month of which the first fortnight was a swing slowly to the right until the breach with the Independents on December 24, and a swing
The German revolution is peculiar in having reached its highest point at once and in having then relapsed to where it started from without any positive reaction. This in itself suggests that it was due in its origin to external forces—propaganda from Russia on the one side and pressure from us on the other. Our military and naval pressure broke first the prestige then the power of Kaiserism and Militarism, while the Russian precedent gave the forces of rebellion and revolution a practical example how to express themselves in co-ordinated councils of workmen and soldiers—the Soviet system. We knocked German Kaiserism out of the saddle, and Russia gave German Socialism a leg up. And that's why it went so far so fast.
That's also why it never got anywhere. For it came to power before it developed its own personalities and policies, and it had, therefore, to put its trust in pre-revolutionary politicians. The Council system had no time to produce leaders—men with enough confidence in their own position and enough character to impose themselves on the permanent officials. The Central Council—the true revolutionary Executive—and the Congress of Councils—the true revolutionary Legislature—never got any power. It was all monopolised by the People's Commissioners, who were not really a revolutionary institution at all, but an ordinary Provisional Government of parliamentarians. And though they nominally held their mandate from the Congress of Councils a majority of them considered themselves as trustees for a Constituent Assembly. Such parliamentarians could work well enough with the permanent officials, and, indeed, welcomed their assistance. Whereas the councils, of course, came into violent collision with them.
Where the council system prevailed, as in the army, it made a real revolution, and broke the officer caste until the Frei-Corps replaced the conscript army. But the workmen were not so drastic in the civil service as were the soldiers in the cadres, and they allowed the parliamentarians to spare the Amalekite. Only the political heads of departments were replaced by Social Democrats; and, in one case I know, a revolutionary Minister allowed his predecessor, out of courtesy, to keep his official residence. This was, of course, all very nice, but it meant that the old machine was not broken up, nor even brought under control. The result was that a coalition between the mere reformers among the commissioners and the civil servants was enough to counter-balance the more revolutionary commissioners and the councils; until finally external circumstances determined the deadlock in favour of the former.
The German revolution never took its Bastille in the Wilhelmstrasse. The sentries set by the Soldiers' Councils at the doors of the Government offices, who loudly demanded your pass and only looked foolish if you ignored them, were symbolic of the failure of the German revolution. So insignificant were these sentinels of revolution that no one saw the significance when they were finally replaced by steel-helmeted Frei-Corps mercenaries last April. By the first week of December it had become evident that the course of events was leading away from the Congress of Councils to the Constituent Assembly, and away from social revolution to political reconstruction. The Central Council that should have been the driving-wheel of the Socialist engine was becoming no more than a drag shoe on the old State coach.
Before the German revolution was a month old—that is, by the end of the first week of December—it was entering its second phase, in which the Parliamentary Commissioners having ousted the proletarian councils from control, then divided among themselves into reformers and revolutionaries. And at the end of the second phase, early in January, we find that the reformers have ousted the revolutionaries.
This came about thus. The German Social Democratic Party was professedly revolutionary. Its political attitude had been traditionally one of refusal of all co-operation or even compromise with the imperial political system. On this negative basis it had been possible to combine in a common front comrades of very different points of view and of political thought. But this superficial solidarity could not stand the strain of the war. A sense of patriotism carried one section—the Majority Socialists—first into countenancing and then into supporting the Government; while pacifist sentiment against war in general, and this war in particular, carried the minority into more obstinate opposition. This finally split the party much as it split our Labour Party. The Majority Social-Democrats moved towards the Government, while the Government towards the end of the war came to meet them. Until finally the Ministry of Prince Max of Baden, that ended the war, not only represented the Reichstag majority, but also the Majority Social-Democrats.
When Prince Max went down in the revolution, he remitted the reins of government to Ebert and Scheidemann. They, knowing that alone they could not rule the whirlwind, called in the Minority Social-Democrats—the Independents, offering them equal representation in the Cabinet, then called the People's Commissaries, and in the Central Council. This arrangement was ratified by the Congress of Councils, though very perfunctorily, as it was considered only a provisional makeshift.
Now, while the Social-Democrats of the Majority were just parliamentary reformers, the Independents of the Minority, Haase and Kautsky, were revolutionaries. Liebknecht was a radical revolutionary who would not come into the Coalition. Consequently, whereas Ebert and Scheidemann considered themselves as merely Commissioners to prepare a Constituent Assembly, the Independents considered themselves Commissaries for the Congress of Councils. The former considered the revolution was probably unnecessary, and in any case had done its work in preparing the way for universal suffrage and a united Germany. The latter considered that the revolution had only begun, and could only do its work through the Soviet system and a general socialisation.
The first serious difference came over the Poles, with whom the Independents had practically concluded an arrangement which was, however, upset by Landsberg, a Jew from Posen, one of the People's Commissaries. Then came serious differences over German policy towards the Entente. The Independents were in favour of admitting culpability in the war crisis, Belgium, submarine warfare, etc., and of accepting such liability as might be shown to be equitable, while frankly discussing such assets as could be realised in payment. This the Majority rejected, preferring a negative policy of passive inaction. But the final breach came over internal policy and the use of force against the revolutionaries, the Communists, who were trying to force the revolution out of the rut of parliamentary reform into which it was slipping.
This Communist Left, commanded but not controlled by Liebknecht, was working for a second revolution in alliance with Russian agents. Its fighting faction, that called itself "Spartacus"—with the accent on the second syllable—was strong in the industrial districts of the centre and west, among the sailors in the coast towns, and in
Police precautions against the Russian agents, combined with a Press propaganda against the Spartacists, provoked the latter to action. They seized the offices of the Vorwärts and other papers most offensive to them, and used them for publishing their own pamphlets. They had not apparently planned anything more than a demonstration, and did not anyhow exploit the success they had seized by surprise. The Government, however, after some difficulty in concentrating and supplying sufficient troops, converted the "putsch" into a pitched battle. Noske regulars with all the machinery of modern war, made short work of the half-hearted half-armed irregulars of Eichhorn, the Spartacist Police Commissioner. The revolution was crushed in Berlin and driven back to the coast ports, whence it came and whither it could later be pursued. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, its Berlin leaders, were arrested and at once brutally murdered by their escort with the approval and assistance of the officers in charge. This murder, perfectly well known in Berlin at the time, was only proved by court-martial four months later, after which the culprits were allowed to escape abroad.
So the Independents having committed hari-kari and the Spartacists being hoist with their own petard, middle-class and moderate Germany heaved a sigh of relief, and hoped that the bogey of Bolshevism was buried. The elections to the National Assembly were held a few days later without disturbance, and the German revolution entered its third and last phase.
The German revolution which began in November—in old German the "Month of Fogs"—and ended in February—the "Month of Fools"—was fogged from the beginning and fooled to the end. Its third and last phase began about the middle of January with the establishing of provisional government by the moderate Majority Socialists, the crushing of Spartacus, and the elections. The radical opposition had tried to delay the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, partly because it was for the moment discredited by its secession from the Coalition and its connection with the Communists, and partly because it recognised that a reaction towards nationalism and conservatism had already been set up by the attitude of the Allies and would be given exaggerated expression at the polls. The drift of a weakened and wearied mass can raise a dictator to "save society"; only the driving power of a devoted and determined minority can realise a social revolution. But the Independents had missed their opportunity of seizing power and securing such foreign support for the revolution as they had earned by their attitude on the war. Their subsequent policy of obstruction had as little success as it deserved.
By the middle of February, when the new Government was proclaimed at Weimar, a communist revolution had been converted into a constitutionalist reconstruction; and that this corresponded with the desire of the majority of the people was shown by the election result. Every man and woman over twenty was entitled to vote, and a high percentage did so; while the system of proportional representation employed, whatever its defects, at least gave a fair numerical representation of the party presentments of public opinion. As in the English election, nationalism decided the issue in favour of the party in power. The Independent opposition was discredited by Bolshevism, the Conservative opposition by Kaiserism. Apart from the women the Social-Democrats would probably have had an independent majority; but, as was shown by the Pfalz results in which the women's voices were kept separate, they were more conservative and clerical than the men. As it was, the Majority Socialists with 163 out of 423 members were forced into alliance, not with the Independent Socialists who had only 22 votes, but with the Democratic Liberals who had 75. And as this relieved them of all responsibility to the revolution there was no reason why they should not further strengthen their parliamentary position by taking in the Clerical Centre with its 55 votes as well. And thus Germany got from losing the war a coalition as strong parliamentarily and as weak politically as that which winning the war gave to us.
While the revolution was being side-tracked in Parliament, it was being sandbagged in the Proletariat. A division of Frei-Corps with all the machinery of modern war, tanks, aeroplanes, etc., was sent against the north-western coast ports where the revolution had originated and where Spartacus was pursuing its policy of aggravating the food difficulty by preventing the sailing of food ships as arranged under the armistice. Bremen was entered by force, after fighting; and the other towns opened negotiations. On the eastern frontier a front was formed against the Poles, who had occupied nearly all Posen province, and fighting continued until the Allies stopped it. Great efforts were made to get together some sort of effective force as a basis for government; and the resultant Frei-Corps, though at this early date still few and inferior, were already enough to give check to the "Bolshevist" menace within and without the frontier. Meantime the whole "soviet" system of councils was practically 'frozen out' and politically 'snowed under.' The Central Council was got to abdicate in favour of the Constituent Assembly: the Socialisation Commission to which execution of the economic revolution had been referred, resigned re infecta: while the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils were quietly ignored. A Provisional Constitution was published in which all ideas of a centralised Socialist republic were abandoned, and the federal Reich was restored with the substitution of presidents for princes. Finally the seat of the Assembly was transferred to Weimar, professedly to steep it in the sedative atmosphere of the old pre-Prussian "Kultur" of the philosophers and poets, and practically to withdraw it from the too stimulating atmosphere of Berlin, which was still an Independent stronghold. Even so might a demoralised and democratised England placate a victorious and Victorian America by transferring parliament to the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon.
All these strong measures were really signs of weakness. Spartacus had to be put down to please the Allies, the Poles pushed back to please the nationalists, the Clericals bribed with Government posts to counteract French bids for their support in separatist intrigues. The constitution had to conciliate particularist sentiment in Prussia and the southern principalities because this sentiment prevailed in the general exhaustion of national and revolutionary forces. The old driving power of national sentiment, so much abused during the war and that might still have been called on for a desperate national defence, was worn out. The new energy
Morally, however, it was not the old Germany that had bowed before the "forty-seven Princes hats." It had brought back with it from the perilous peaks and bottomless abysses of revolution a wider outlook and a deeper insight. And if it returned from its adventure only more weary and wasted it had at least learned to lift up its eyes to the hills.
CHAPTER IIToC
THE REACTION
Just a quarter of a century ago I arrived in Weimar fresh from Eton, and as a budding diplomatist was invited to dinner by the Grand Duke. The ceremony was a credit to the Court of Pumpernickel. Exactly a week before there came caracoling to the door what might have been one of Napoleon's marshals, and was one of the Weimar army. For Weimar had then an army whose business it was to deliver invitations about a foot square.
Then on the evening itself and just half an hour before dinner, appeared a Court carriage and pair, in which you drove through the ancient Barbican of the Castle to a flourish of trumpets. Next came presentation to Serenissimus, a very big, very grand old gentleman, who was always urbanely inane except when he was inanely urbane. After that came presentation to the Grand Duchess, a very little, very grand old lady, who sat in a glass case. This was said to be on account of draughts, but she looked so fragile and precious that no maid could ever have been trusted with dusting her. The only time I ever saw her taken out of it was for a presentation of Orders of Merit to deserving domestics—an institution of her own which Royalty might adopt with advantage in these days when K.C.M.G.'s are commoner than kitchen maids.
And now arriving in Germany fresh from the Army, I was again invited to an evening party at the Schloss. But times have changed and the Schloss has been promoted from the seat of a Grand Duke of a mediatised and mediæval principality to the seat of government of a modern and middle-class German Republic.
The guard in the old Barbican no longer proclaimed my arrival on a trumpet, but presented a very business-like looking bayonet. Inside the Castle the State apartments were severely bare, as befits democratic simplicity. And instead of bland and blethering Serenissimus I was received by Scheidemann blandly, blandishingly serene. Instead of gold-laced grandees dining off gold plates I find a job lot of journalists bolting "belegte Brödchen"; and if there were fewer good things to be eaten there were many more to be heard. Everything struck me first as completely different and then as curiously the same as ever. Only the Dresden china Grand Duchess had no republican reincarnation.
And perhaps some day I shall find a still newer Weimar, the centre of a twentieth century Germany that will rise from the ashes of the nineteenth century and the dust of the eighteenth. Not the picturesque, poetic Weimar of the past, nor the practical, prosaic Weimar of the present, but a Weimar of wide vistas and broad views, in which Young Germany will learn to plan the future.
And as I dreamed of this new Weimar, walking back through the moonlit streets of the picturesque old town I was roused by the rumbling of field-guns on the march against the revolution. The drivers and gunners, hidden under their helmets and heavy cloaks, hunched on their saddles or huddled on the guns, were borne by slowly, silently, shapeless shifting shadows, passing out from the town where a few lights still shone, into the dark. The New Germany is not yet.
In the old days, when Weimar was only the German Stratford-on-Avon, the theatre was the centre of local society. The first thing you did on arrival was to present yourself and a box of cigars to the old gentleman in the box-office and get a seat for the season from which you could survey from a respectful distance the social lights on the stage and the serene luminaries in the Grand Ducal box.
But nowadays, when the stage of the Weimar Theatre has become the seat of Government, it is as hard to get a ticket for a session of the Assembly as it used to be for the Selamlik of Abdul Hamid. Incidentally, Germany is to-day much more like Turkey than its old, well-fed-up, well-fitted-out self. Dingy soldiers everywhere, dirt, decay and deprivation everywhere, listlessness and laissez-faire on the surface, with unrest and upheaval below.
But once inside the theatre things are not so different from the old days. The young ladies from the pensions can still "schwärmen" for the debonnaire premier Scheidemann or the distingué Brockdorff-Rantzau, or "schauern" at handsome Koenen, the saturnine Tribune of Halle, or at Merges, the hunchback tailor of Brunswick. But personally I find a Weimar "Full Session" about as entertaining and enlightening as was Weimar Grand Opera. A stout elderly gentleman advances to the centre of the stage and reads steadily and stolidly through a pile of typewritten recitative. The Independents, who go in for bravura and even gag a little, are now nearly always away on tour in the provinces. So the Assembly can continue daily from three to six digesting a pleasantly conservative Constitution and a pleasingly liberal lunch. For Weimar is an oasis of peace and plenty in a land swept by famine and fighting. Yet even the sleepy backwater of Thuringia has become a whirlpool of revolution, and Weimar was then ringed in by a region of revolutionary strikes that threatened it from three sides. One day a scouting party of Spartacists would be arrested at the station, on another the line to Berlin would be cut by a strike in some northern town.
The first week of the National Assembly was nominally occupied with such formal matters as appointing a President, voting the provisional constitution, pronouncements on foreign policy, and programmes of legislation. But naturally what most concerned everyone was the novel and fascinating business of Cabinet-making. The game was played with great spirit up to the finish, and the night before the final announcement had to be made the Cabinet was once more reconstructed.
It was hard on Germany that its first-born Cabinet should have been triplets, a trinity of the three co-eternal and co-equal parties—radical, neutral, and reactionary. But if the present political system was to be maintained and given a majority its Social-Democratic supporters had to be reinforced from the two parties next to the right, the Democrats and the Centre. For the Independent Socialists to the left were intransigent and in voting power insignificant.
So, after a long haggle between the party leaders as to the number and nature of the posts each party was to have, there followed another hard fight as to the persons each party should nominate for their posts.
It would have required a strong Government to reconstitute the German polity, reconstruct society, restore solvency, and revive economic vitality, especially after so much of the momentum of the revolution had been
The Premier, Scheidemann, on the other hand, showed himself to be an able and active politician who could speak well on any subject and sing many songs without book. A clever man, but not the compelling personality to control the dynamic forces of Socialism or to coerce the static forces of Separatism.
His second in command in the difficult task of making a working Constitution was Preuss, the Minister of the Interior, a Jew, a jurist, and an adjuster. A man with great finesse, but little force. The questions of the constitutional future of Prussia, of the South German States, of the North-Western Republics, of the Rhine province, and of German-Austria, treated by adjustment along a line of least resistance, seemed likely to be interminable in their intricacies. Dr. Preuss, clever as he was, soon got into a terrible tangle trying to untie knots that would have been cut by the revolution.
The post third in importance, Foreign Affairs, a non-party appointment, was retained by Count Brockdorff-Rantzau—no longer "Dr. Rantzau"—since Counts, as he told the Assembly, can be democratic. He had both character and capacity, and if he achieved no success either at Weimar or Versailles he behaved with dignity under most distressing conditions.
Of the remaining Ministers Landsberg at Justice, a red Jew from the province of Posen, who was one of the Provisional Government and previously a People's Commissary, had a singular and somewhat sinister reputation. He was held responsible by those who knew for the policy of breaking with the Poles and with Spartacus.
Bauer at Labour was a trade union politician, a bourgeois turned bureaucrat. He is now Premier in the Government that signed the peace.
Noske at Home Defence (not "War," mark you, Germany has had enough of war), is the well-known Prussian Minister, the "Saviour of Society," the Bolsheviktonos.
Wissel at National Economy had a post with possibilities, but nothing so much became him in it as the leaving of it—when he found nothing could be done.
These were all Social-Democrats and constituted such driving force as that Government had. The inner Cabinet consisted of Landsberg, Noske, and Scheidemann—brain, backbone, and jaw. Heart it had none.
The new Government was, then, a Coalition between pre-revolution politicians, and its programme had to be a compromise between pre-revolution policies. It was only a Government to tide over a crisis and give the country time to recover itself. But it was at least composed of experienced parliamentarians who kept up appearances and did their best to reconstruct with pen and ink the State that Bismarck had wrought with blood and iron.
The debate that followed the announcement of the new Government showed clearly enough that the three parties of which the Government was composed, though they parliamentarily formed a bloc and socially represented the Burgerstand, yet politically had a different basis and a divergent bias. Red, white, and black make a very effective national colour, but whether red Socialism, a colourless Liberalism, and black Clericalism can make up an effective Cabinet seemed more than dubious.
Scheidemann, as Premier, opened the debate with a fighting speech for Social-Democracy. He threw the responsibility for the misfortunes abroad on the Right, the responsibility for misunderstandings at home on the Left, and proclaimed that the Government would work methodically at realising the results of the revolution.
He was followed for the Centrum by the venerable Gröber, who preached a sermon to the effect that all Power was from on High, that the revolution came very much from below, and consequently the only things left of any importance were State rights, rights of property, and the Church of Rome.
Thereafter came Dr. Naumann, for the Democrats, with an eloquent funeral oration, in which he buried the monarchy, wept over the lost colonies and provinces, and prayed that all of Germany that was left might live in unity.
Here we have the three points of view—the Radical reconstructionist, the Clerical reactionary, and the Liberal rhetorical—red, black, and white.
And the Government's programme presented the same parti-coloured patchwork. In foreign policy: an early peace on Wilsonian principles, restoration of the colonies and prisoners, equal participation in a League of Nations with mutual disarmament, compulsory arbitration and no secret diplomacy. In internal policy: democratic administration, ditto education and army, economic reconstruction, rationing, public control of monopolies, especially mines and power, right of association and wage boards, public health, rights for civil servants, agricultural development and settlement preferably on reclaimed land, taxation of war profits, income-tax, death duties graduated but not confiscatory, freedom of conscience, freedom of the Press, freedom of meeting—all sorts of freedom.
Obviously, there was nothing very red or revolutionary there, or rather the red was so cautiously peppered into the black and white that the net result was a colourless Liberalism. It was perhaps no less symbolic that the Assembly substituted the black, red and yellow of the Frankfort Liberalism of '48 as the new national colours. German Liberalism has always had a yellow streak in it.
The failure of Weimar is the failure of German Liberalism. German Liberalism always has failed Germany, and to this may be attributed the periodic catastrophes of Germany and the calamities they have brought upon Europe. German Liberalism fell an easy prey to French Imperialism in the Napoleonic epoch and to Prussian Imperialism in the Bismarckian epoch; and the one result of German Liberal movements has hitherto been to drive abroad the flower of the German "intelligentsia." The descendants of the "forty-niners" in England and America have been as valuable an element as were the Huguenots of France or the Flemings from the Netherlands, and they have joined heartily with us in overthrowing the despotism that exiled them. But if they had been a bit tougher and had fought their own fight out a half century ago they would have saved Europe and Germany the last five years. And the process is repeating itself. Weimar has failed, so far, more miserably than did Frankfort a half century ago. The failure of Frankfort was the failure of political inexperience—that of Weimar has been the failure of political impotence. Frankfort was over-confident in this power of popular idealism. It thought a revolution for right and reason could be made by righteousness and reasoning. Weimar was too cynical to think that the ideals of the November revolution could ever be a power at all in the Europe of the Paris Conference and of the Russian campaigns. Frankfort failed because its Liberalism was too young. Weimar is failing because its Liberalism is too old.
German Liberalism and its institution parliamentary party government failed in the first place because they could not come to power before their day was already past. In the second place they failed because when their ideals did get realised they did so without opposition and consequently on too theoretic lines. The German system of proportional representation for example is the most accurately and equitably representative of all electoral systems. But it did not provide the one thing Germany wanted, a powerful and
And yet Weimar and German Liberalism had everything in its favour in the autumn of 1918. The reactionary factors that had so little difficulty in stultifying the Liberalism of Bethmann-Hollweg, von Kühlmann, and their predecessors were cancelled for the time being. Parliamentary government on the party system, the form of government developed by Liberalism on the English model, never having had a trial in Germany was accepted by nearly all political minds as the panacea. The minority of extremists who already advocated Council Government on the Russian model as the only political system that could realise the revolution had not as yet converted any large body of workmen. The Trades Unions held the workmen to the parliamentary system, and only some of the soldiers and most of the sailors were really revolutionary. The idea that the Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils could be anything more than a mere improvisation for destruction and could have any constructive, still more constitutional, function never entered the heads of any political thinker. Even Liebknecht joined the Coalition Provisional Government and only withdrew on second thoughts that were probably those of the much more far-sighted Rosa Luxemburg. The surrender of their authority by the Peoples' Commissaries to the Constituent Assembly in December was received without criticism, and the subsequent similar surrender by the Central Council passed almost without comment. Germany was to have the most liberal of constitutions and that was to be enough for the realisation of the German revolution and for the reconciliation of the enemies of Germany. It was only as the weeks and months passed and it became evident that German Liberalism, whether expressed in the diplomatic ideals or the democratic institutions of Weimar, was doing nothing either for the revolution or the reconciliation, that the German workmen began to pass over to the revolutionaries. Then, before very long, this political process expressed itself in local strikes and street fighting. The centre of political disturbance and development moved away from the theatre at Weimar to the streets of Berlin and of the industrial towns.
No doubt it was good policy in one way to transfer the Constituent Assembly to Weimar. An Assembly whose vitality is that of an elderly politician after a contested election and whose voice is that of a tired lawyer talking in his sleep, could not make itself heard, still less felt, against the violence, and volleyings of modern Berlin. Whether its work will be worth much must depend on how slow things move. They could easily move too fast for the pace of the Assembly. But at least as Dr. Preuss said to me of his Constitution—"it will not get in the way of anything better." One thing was certain, that the Assembly rested for its sanction, even for its survival, on the Government, not the Government on the Assembly.
And listening to a deputy in the Tribune reading a treatise on Constitutional niceties as to federation and free-state-rights, I think of the previous afternoon, when I was listening to a street orator in Halle shouting very nasty and unconstitutional tirades about food and freedom to an armed party of soldiers and workmen about to attack the Government troops. And then, again, I think of an afternoon in the Weimar Theatre a quarter of a century ago. A prominent member of the stock company of these days was an old horse blind of one eye—who was always led on with his blind side to the footlights. On this occasion he got turned round, and realised for the first time what a fool they'd made of him for years—and the rest was chaos and the curtain.
The Constituent Assembly has determined the Constitutional future of Germany, but the fate of Germany has not been decided there. The struggle between revolution and repression has not been fought out between the stalls and the stage of the Weimar Theatre, but in Berlin and the other big towns where the Government speaks with minenwerfer and machine-guns, and the Opposition obstruct with barricades. While the pressure of general strikes and local street fighting has won a constitutional recognition for socialising property and for sanctioning the council system never contemplated by the most revolutionary Parliamentarians, on the other hand class war has given reaction the support of the whole country against the working class.
The stagnant stodgy atmosphere of Weimar was very different from the starved and struggling air of Berlin. Though at first sight Berlin did not seem any more alive than Weimar. For Berlin to-day is a town of deserted temples and of dethroned gods. All along Unter den Linden—from the Temples of Mammon—the great hotels, to the Temple of Moloch—the imperial palace—everywhere is decay and dilapidation, an abomination of desolation in every façade and on every face. Mammon has indeed come off better than Moloch; for the palace and public buildings are shattered with shell and starred with shots and the balcony where the War-Lord appeared to his worshippers has a hole in the middle. Whereas the shrines of Mammon are full of worshippers from all quarters of the world. The hotel lobbies are crowded with vulture-like profiles brooding over the carcase of German economic enterprise.
Yet Berlin, though dirty and dilapidated, is by no means dead but the centre of the conflict between two faiths—two religions. For the revolution has ended the foreign war only to begin a civil war between nationalists and internationalists. On the one side, the Old Believers in the Orthodox Faith of nationalism, founded on wars of liberation, fomented by generations of political propaganda and excited to fanaticism by a war against the world. On the other side the new Dissenters of the revolution preaching internationalism and a Commune of Heaven in which only the poor shall have a place. In December internationalism was dominant in Berlin; nationalism was developing under pressures from Paris; while imperialism was dormant. For at this time in Paris the internationalism of Wilsonian principles was still counterbalancing imperialist and nationalist policies of the Allies. It was curious to note as the issues at Paris were decided one by one against internationalism how nationalism ousted internationalism from control of policy in Germany. By the time the Treaty of Versailles was published the old orthodox factor was again firmly established and the dissenters—the revolutionary internationalists—had been driven into the wilderness.
Any Sunday morning in Berlin during the sessions of the Paris Conference would probably have given more than one opportunity of observing the revival of the only real religion existing in modern capital cities—nationalism. On one Sunday I have in mind there were several protest meetings against the proposals reported from Paris for partitioning off German populations in the Saar district, West Prussia, Danzig, German Bohemia, and the Tyrol, and for preventing
Come with me then along Unter den Linden past the gilt crosses and cupolas of the Evangelical Dom and the shell-shattered sham classic façade of the Imperial Palace—deserted shrines of the faith—to a very dilapidated and dingy circus. There was a time when the Protestants of Germany were driven into the depths of the woods and the dens of wild beasts to hold their services. And to-day we find the pastors of protestant nationalism symbolically perched on pasteboard rocks amid woodland scenery, with a very realistic atmosphere of menagerie. The congregation is characteristically middle-class and by no means so formidable in appearance as the hungry, haggard workmen and their women that we should have found in a meeting of the dissenting internationalists.
As we come in Freiherr von Richthofen is perorating a sort of commination service, each verse of which is received with a loud response. The Paris Conference is worse than the Congress of Vienna (ah). France is outraging and robbing Germany when wounded and a prisoner (aah). But not a yard of German soil shall be surrendered without consent of its population (aaah). Germany can be dissected alive, but England will be disgraced and America dishonoured (aaah), and a time will come when such outrages will find their retribution (AAAH). A roar of applause which rouses the wild beasts in their dens, so that they roar in unison. The Paris diplomats have at last succeeded in stirring up again the weary wolves of war where they were lying licking their wounds.
But then, like a thin trickle of cold water into a boiling pot, comes the aged, anxious voice of the patriarchal Bernstein. He begins by reading the resolution of the Berne Conference; but we are here to attack the Paris Conference, and get restless, shouting "Zur Sache" (come to the point). He speaks of the fair-mindedness of the British delegates there, trade unionists as well as independents, and concludes that England as a people wishes to be fair to Germany; this can even be seen in developments at Paris. But we don't share this optimism—Blödsinn (bosh), is about the mildest of our interjections. Still Bernstein, nothing daunted, maintains that if Germans bring facts before the English the English will be fair. "Quite true," shouts an elderly man near by. "What do you know about it?" cries a youth some rows away. "I have been longer in England than you have in the world, Lausbub," retorts the man.
Bernstein again becomes audible, talking about Alsace-Lorraine. Once we might have appealed to foreign fairness there, too, he says, but now it is too late. Alsace-Lorraine is lost, and we lost it. This is too much for us, and we shout: "But you're speaking for partition. Quatsch! (bosh). Parteibulle! (party claptrap), etc." Bernstein dominates the storm enough to shout: "You have been so long fed on lies you can't swallow the truth." But we are not here to have truth shoved down our throats.
Eduard Bernstein withdraws—a prophet without honour, he has this week both left the opposition party and lost his Government post. He is followed by the representative of German-Austria, the new type of professor-politician, with a Victorian appearance and a Wilsonian address—very earnest and emphatic. The union of Germany and German-Austria is, he maintains, an internal affair and quite inevitable. We give Professor Hartmann a rousing reception, and file out into the cold, clear winter weather of Berlin.
Outside is a large black, red, and gold Republican flag, and a number of enthusiasts carrying placards, "No partitioning of Germany," "No peace of violence," and so forth. A long procession forms and moves off. Look at that group, mostly elderly men and women of the middle class, thin and threadbare with the look given by hardship and hunger that once in Germany one saw only in paintings of the Middle Ages—dull faces, but not without devotional fervour. So they shuffle along round a placard inscribed "Wilson's Fourteen Points," as their ancestors once shuffled in procession for Luther's theses. Unhappily Wilson did not succeed in nailing his theses to the portals of the Quai d'Orsay.
We reach the Wilhelmstrasse, where we join the processions from the other meetings. All learn with gratification that the Sport-Palast has hooted Erzberger because he won't declare for a restoration of Posen to Germany, and that the officers' meeting passed a resolution calling for the exclusion from the peace delegation of the internationalist Professor Schücking. The procession from the officers' meeting is headed by a band playing "Deutschland über alles," and by the old black, white, and red national flag, which is fast becoming the standard of reaction. After the Finance Minister, Schiffer, has welcomed our quite unobjectionable resolution from a balcony of the Reichskanzlei, a young officer suddenly appears in another balcony waving a black, white, and red flag, and adjuring us to swear loyalty to it. We are prepared to swear anything by now without much bothering what it is, and find ourselves being moved along towards the Tiergarten.
As we pass the British Embassy suddenly the officers' procession begins to shout and wave to a flabby-faced portly person bowing and smiling on the kerb. Ludendorff! By the undying jingo! Well! what next? Then to Bismarck's statue, where officers offer tributes of rhetoric and wreaths, and finally a schoolboy, climbing the pedestal, calls for cheers for the Kaiser, while a claque below start up "Heil Dir im Siegerkranz." But this is a bit too much for the bystanders. "Where's your Kaiser? Where's your Victory?" shouts one. "You give us the Kaiser," growls a soldier behind me, "and we'll give him a wreath all right—round his neck, and pulled tight."
The German dynasties exploited Luther and his Protestant movement. I doubt they will succeed in exploiting the national protestants of Germany, who are revolting against the infallible imbecilities of diplomacy. But undoubtedly our demagogues and diplomatists have succeeded in setting up again the idols our soldiers and sailors had overthrown.
The scene described above took place in March and then it was already becoming difficult to see the other side of Berlin political life—the internationalist and revolutionary. Reaction had begun to drive revolution underground and revolution was resisting spasmodically in eruptions and explosions. Let us take another day in March, one during the street fighting, to see what this other side of life in Berlin was like.
Before the war the life that filled the public places of Berlin was as vivid and vivacious as it was vulgar and vicious. Unter den Linden was like a scene in a second-rate revue; the company in one of the rococo restaurants was like the food, exuberant and cheap, but neither interesting nor choice. Nowhere were nouveaux riches so obviously new and so obtrusively rich. Everything was bright and loud, everyone looked overfed and over-dressed. Materially there was a sort of red-faced, raucous-voiced rotundity about Berlin. Morally it was in a decadence like that of the Second Empire at Paris when a charlatan despot and a cheap-jack Government were trying to dazzle the eyes and distract the ears of a half-deluded public.