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 mediaeval 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 Broedchen"; 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 "schwaermen" for the
debonnaire premier Scheidemann or the distingue 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 lost. And the men who had come to the top in the old
Reichstag days were not such as to compensate for want of power in the
machine. The new President, Ebert, the saddler of Heidelberg, had
effaced himself during the storm of the revolution and has apparently
been eliminated altogether by his new responsibility.
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 Groeber, 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 popular Government, and it
did a fatal injury to Germany by helping to split the Socialist party.
Thirdly German Liberals failed because their leaders were men grown
middle-aged and muddle-headed in hopeless opposition. They had
consequently neither the energy nor the experience for popular
leadership. And fourthly they failed because the peculiar combination
of nationalism and internationalism that constitutes Liberalism was
deprived of all prestige with the German people by the policy followed
at Paris. This policy made it almost impossible for a German to hold
any middle position between extreme nationalism and extreme
internationalism. Weimar lost its best chance of acceptance when the
German parliamentary State was excluded from the League of Nations.
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
Kuehlmann, 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 facade 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 the
union of German-Austria. For instance, you might have gone to the
Sport-Palast with Erzberger in the pulpit. I myself did not. The
rotund, rubicund, ebullient, emollient Erzberger, ex-Minister of
Propaganda and delegate to Spa, who looks like Winston Churchill
turned Papal Legate, was too ritualistic for me. I went to a "service"
at the Circus Busch, where the sermon was broader.
Come with me then along Unter den Linden past the gilt crosses and
cupolas of the Evangelical Dom and the shell-shattered sham classic
facade 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--_Bloedsinn_ (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 Schuecking. The procession from the officers' meeting is
headed by a band playing "Deutschland ueber 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.
But now, after four years' war, Berlin is like an Empire Exhibition
that has been deserted and decaying through the storms of four
winters. The stucco ornaments have fallen, the gilding is long gone,
and the whole structure is rotting away.
Indeed, the first impression you get is that both city and people are
dying of a decline. The people, like their houses, are dirty and
dingy; everywhere crippled beggars and ruined or unroofed buildings
show the direct effects of war. Clothes are threadbare, faces thin.
Stalwart, straight-backed Americans, warmly clothed and well fed,
stand out like solid shapes among shadows. As they stride through the
streets you expect to see them pass through these grey, drifting
figures as through ghosts.
Yet there is life still in Berlin, for men must be alive who can face
death for a cause, whether it be for law or for liberty. But you must
go further afield to find it than Unter den Linden where are haunting
only ghosts of the past. We are hunting the genius of the future.
We shall be out all day on this hunt, and had better breakfast on
bully beef and biscuit--a present from American friends--for black
bread and substitutes are no foundation for a long walk; and of the
vast transportation system of underground and overhead trains,
electric trams, motor-buses, and taxis that used to carry over three
million passengers daily, little indeed is now left. Moreover the
wretched remains are to-day tied up by the general strike and street
fighting. And so, avoiding the streets where sniping is in progress or
barb-wire barricades threaten a search for arms and inspection for
passes, we come to the General Assembly of Berlin Councils--that for
the moment alone retains political control of the situation, since the
Government took military command of it by the severest form of martial
law and the general use of machine-guns.
Here we find a large music hall which before the war was a typical
scene of flamboyant Berlin night-life. On this grey winter's morning
it is crammed full of grimly earnest men--the delegates. On the stage
is the Executive Council. The chairman the Independent, Richard
Mueller, is of the pastor or professor type--his colleague Daeumig a
heavily built, grey-haired man, might be an English engineer or
merchant captain. On the left of the hall are the Communists, in the
middle the Independents, and on the right the Social-Democrats, with a
little knot of Democrats--the two latter parties supporters of the
Government and opposers of the strike--but in a minority here. The
business before the Assembly is the filling of the vacancies on the
Executive Council left by the Communists who seceded from it when it
declared the strike off, and the appointing of delegates to the
National Congress of Councils which is to meet next month. But the
Communists intend to force a discussion of the Government's policy as
to the street fighting which is still going on at Lichtenberg, and the
chairman has to concede this.
First come forward representatives of the Councils' Commissions
delegated to investigate the stories of cruelties by the insurgents
and to negotiate a cessation of hostilities between them and the
government commanders. They give their reports in impartial and
unimpassioned language, but indicate their impression that the
military authorities they had to deal with were less concerned to
restore order with as little loss of life and of time as possible,
than to create the impression that the disorder was worse than it
really was. They were exploiting a local "putsch" so as to carry out a
general "pogrom."
The first speaker, Richard Mueller, for the Independents, deplores the
disorder, but denounces the Government for instructing its troops to
shoot everyone found with arms, in reprisal for atrocities invented by
its own secret service. The defence of the Government is undertaken
by a Social-Democrat, who declares the Independents responsible for
the disorders, amid stormy interruptions from the Communists. The
chairman can hardly get him a hearing, and he leaves the stage,
indignantly threatening that his party will secede unless it is better
treated.
Next dashes on to the stage the Communist leader, who delivers an
effective indictment of the Government's proceedings--at first
interrupted by angry interjections from the Right. But as he develops
the tragedy of what is going on outside, gives one name after another
of comrades shot on no more than suspicion and describes the ring of
howitzers firing into the crowded tenements of Lichtenberg, a silence
falls over the meeting, and at last expressions of disapproval and
dissociation come from supporters of the Government. For here is an
Assembly that is alive enough, and though organised in parties, yet
still open to the appeal of facts and to the force of arguments.
But suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, the speaker stops, leaps
from the desk, and dashes off the stage at the back--while a confused
uproar breaks out at the back of the hall, dominated by sharp military
orders. The whole Assembly comes to its feet and faces about. The Left
shout and shake fists at a row of steel-helmeted soldiers, with
loaded rifles at the ready and a minatory machine-gun. The Right wave
hands and shrug shoulders to assure the Left they are not accomplices.
The platform proclaims that the proceedings will continue. A Democrat
is put up to speak, but even his mind, conscious of right, and his
courageous determination to express equal disapproval with the Left as
to the entry of the troops are not enough to overcome the mesmerism of
that machine-gun. The Assembly for the moment is reunited, but its
vitality is gone.
We have been present at the first scene of the forcible suppression of
the Councils movement in its constitutional centre--a suppression that
has since become continuous.
The next covert we have to draw in our hunt is a club of intellectuals,
mostly Independents, meeting weekly at a private house. Berlin never had
a club life, and this is only an embryo of a political club before it
emerges from a social gathering. The members sit round in a great ring,
sometimes all joining in a general debate, sometimes breaking up into
small discussions. They are of all types and tendencies. The well-bred,
well-dressed man with a Balliol manner is a Rhodes Scholar and a
successful diplomatist of ultra-radical views--for such an anomaly is
possible under Count Brockdorff-Rantzau. The soldier in faded field grey
describing a scheme for educating workman members of Councils in their
duties, is a Communist. The diplomat is maintaining that Germany should
join the League of Nations, even if it and the peace conditions are
unsatisfactory. The worse the material position of Germany the better
its moral position for taking the lead in a revision of the peace and of
the League. The Communist brushes this aside as sophistry. How can you
found internationalism on national Governments or even on national
Parliaments? Wilsonism and Weimarism are both out of date and off the
mark. An international Soviet of washerwomen would be of more real value
and vitality. He is interrupted by cheers greeting the arrival of a
famous fighting flying man, who was believed to have been one of the
twelve hundred arrests of opposition leaders. An early Victorian
middle-aged man in side whiskers and a frock coat, an ex-Minister in
touch with the Government, begins to explain the necessity of
reconstructing the Cabinet by eliminating the men most compromised by
the loss of life, and including new men from the Left. He considers that
while opinion is moving to the Left the Government is moving to the
Right, and that as the breach widens the outbreaks will get worse. He
fears, however, that men who have grown old in opposition and have only
just tasted power will not be torn away from it and will find it simple
to govern by machine-guns. But the young men are not interested in the
Cabinet--they drift off into discussing their schemes for the Councils.
Here, too, is life--the life radiated by young men who feel that power
is coming to them before youth has gone, the life reflected from
middle-aged men who have broken the dull crust in which circumstance
was encasing them.
When this club was suppressed shortly after, Berlin could ill afford
the loss of vitality. For the absence of all healthy, happy and
youthful faces made it like a world of gnomes and goblins. In the case
of the men this was mainly owing to the war, and in the case of the
women and children to the blockade. Over a million of the fittest men
had been killed, and the result was a survival of all the unfit; while
the food and fuel hardships had fallen heaviest on the women and
children of the towns.
But there was another reason for the disappearance of all young men
that had youth and manliness. Their warfare was not yet accomplished,
and they had only come back from fighting the whole world on three
fronts for four years to fight against each other in the streets of
their capital cities. They went to war against the world for two
ideals--patriotism and progress; and now these two ideals had
themselves collided in civil war.
Of the two German ideals, that of patriotism is the one we know best.
That dull devotion and forced fervour that fights in massed formations
to sentimental songs. It is a form of patriotism that does not appeal
to us. To Athens Sparta is anti-pathetic. But there were fine fellows
among the Spartans as well as tyrants and helots, and now that the
tyrants are gone such as are left of the fine fellows have a chance of
realising their Spartan ideals. Now that those trumpery tinsel
tyrants, the Kaiser and his courtier generals, have retired to
scribble and squabble and scuffle over dirty linen--a Valhalla of
washerwomen--the men of the real Spartan breed, who carried the German
arms from conquest to conquest until the catastrophe was complete, are
working hard to restore ideals shattered by rout and revolution.
Of the real fine fellows that I've met in Germany half were officers
and men who had responded to the various appeals for home defence and
who were working to revive the old Spartan tradition in the
war-wearied youth.
Here are two notices from the advertisement columns of the _Lokal
Anzeiger_, which seem to me to contrast the real Spartan and the
Junker:
"To all old soldiers of the Prince Moritz of Anhalt-Dessau Fifth
Pomeranian Infantry Regt., No. 42. Regimental Comrades! From day to
day the impudence of the Poles increases. From day to day they seize
more German land and more German food. From day to day they come
nearer to--they claim more of--our Old Pomerania. All you brave old
42nd who ever undefeated have defended German soil against more
formidable foes, rejoin your beloved regiment to defend your homes
against the ungrateful Poles to liberate whom so many of your comrades
died. Report to Headquarters, Stralsund. Conditions of service are
pay, allowances, etc., as on active service with 5 mks. extra daily,
and a fortnight's notice. Obedience required to military regulations
and to those in authority, with whom are associated councils of
delegates. Signed F----, member of Soldiers' Council, First Lieut.
K----Regimental Commandant."
Note the signature of the representative of the Soldaten-Rat preceding
that of the Commandant.
In those days even Frei-Corps recruited in this manner had their
Soldiers' Councils. And it was the remains of this Council
organisation that prevented these Corps from being used to overthrow
the Republic in the _coup-d'etat_ planned when the treaty was signed.
Compare now the appeal of the Junker--a _Vortanzer_ no doubt at many a
Court Ball and a flunkey still.
"Officer of elegant appearance and engaging manners with experience of
polite society, seeks employment. Would undertake to supervise
restaurant."
Moreover, as a result of class war, the students, hitherto always the
Young Guard of revolution in Germany, have this time taken sides with
what may well be called reaction. In the various volunteer corps--the
"Noske Guards"--that are used for fighting the revolutionary troops
and the workmen, the largest and best elements are young ex-officers
or N.C.O.'s and students.
I remember when a workmen's meeting was broken up by a picket of the
Reinhard Corps noting that the privates almost all wore pince-nez. The
workmen called them mercenaries and murderers, but it was absurd to
accuse fine young men who looked like Balliol, with a leaven of Blues
and Bloods, of selling themselves for eight shillings a day and extra
rations. These Spartans and their ideals will be heard of again
unless Germany is given a square deal and a fair field.
And the other half of the fine fellows I've met in Germany were
Spartacists--fighters for the ideal of progress. For this ideal has
had in Germany as many devotees as the other. No country had so large
a radical and revolutionary political element as Germany before the
war. In no country did the economics and politics of Socialism occupy
so many minds. Sovietism is only a rough Russian realisation of German
ideals. The rebellion under Spartacus of revolted gladiators and
escaped slaves, which challenged for years the imperialism and
militarism of Rome, does give some idea of what these men are and what
their cause is.
The handsomest and most intelligent man I've met in Germany was a
Spartacist, a film actor by profession. The last time I saw him--with
a rifle slung over his shoulder and stick bombs in his belt--he
explained what he was fighting for. German militarism, he said, had
revived, encouraged by the Entente attitude; the present Government
was as much in the hands of reactionary officers as any during the
war. The war had crippled militarism, but only real revolution, the
council system, could kill it. He was glad he had escaped the war, so
as to have a life to offer to the right side. The next day he was
taken and shot.
Now, I do not intend to convey that the Germany of to-day is a
fighting country. It is quite the reverse. But a section of idealists
at each extreme has decided that they are bound to die for their
ideals as Spartans or Spartacists. That they will die in vain is
inevitable. If only because there is no Sparta and no Spartacus. There
is no German land where such an ideal as that of the reactionary
"Spartans" can now be realised, not even in rural Prussia; and there
is no Spartacus to command and control the "Spartakists" of Germany.
But there is another reason also--that there are too few young Germans
left.
On a Sunday morning I went to the Academy of Singing to hear old
German music. One number on the programme, "A Scottish Ballad of a
Lost Battle," proved to be a translation of Lady Lindsay's "Lament
After Flodden." Sung to a plaintive eighteenth century air, with the
thin far-away accompaniment of lute and spinet, it was like an echo
from the lost battles and lost beauty of all time. With bowed heads
and tear-filled eyes, men and women sat silent long after the last
heartrending refrain had died away.
In the afternoon I went out to the "Greenwood" of Berlin, a district
of pine woods, hills, and lakes, where the young people of Berlin used
to flock for picnics and water-parties. The Berliners are noisy in
their enjoyments, and on Sunday afternoons before the war the woods of
the Havelland would ring with shouting and singing and laughter, with
feasting and flirting, as though Pan himself held festival.
To-day a few girls were there wandering sadly through the silent
woods, pale ghosts of dead delights, and there was no sound but the
sighing of the pines--
"Sair moaning in ilka green loaning,
The flowers o' the forest are a' wede awa'."