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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Democracies are fragile. Freedoms that seem secure can be lost. Few historical events illustrate this as vividly as the failure of the Weimar Republic. Fateful Hours tells one of the greatest dramas in world history: the failure of Germany's first democracy, culminating in the horrific rise of the Third Reich. But this tragedy was not inevitable. In this gripping new book, celebrated historian Volker Ullrich charts the many failed alternatives and missed opportunities that contributed to German democracy's collapse. In an immersive style that takes us to the heart of political power, Ullrich argues that, right up until January 1933, history was open - just as in the present, it is up to us whether democracy lives or dies.
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Contents
Preface
Democracies are fragile. They can flip into dictatorships. Liberties that seemed won for all time can be squandered.
With the end of the Cold War, our awareness of the threats to democracy diminished. Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” held that the future would no longer see any serious challenges to liberal democracy. In his view, there was simply no longer any alternative. Although few observers may have advanced this view as radically as he did, Fukuyama’s faith in the triumph of democracy became the hallmark of an entire epoch. The only remaining question seemed to be how long it would take for the ideology to spread to the entire world and how stubbornly those dictatorships opposed to progress would resist.
Little remains of this certainty. Democracy is under internal and external pressure across the globe. Authoritarian states like China and Russia vie for power with the Western democracies on the world stage and attack them from within. In the United States, Donald Trump’s first presidency provided a preview of what his second term in office might bring. This time, he is better prepared, less constrained by advisers, and more determined to push his agenda through. The future of American democracy has never been so uncertain since the declaration of independence almost 250 years ago. But also in almost all European countries, right-wing populism is on the rise. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, an at least partially far-right extremist party, has xattracted considerable support—and not just in the country’s formerly Communist east but also among West German bourgeois circles. It is telling that Elon Musk has advocated for voting AfD in the latest German election campaign. Right-wing populism is a global movement with worrying transnational ties. In short: Concern for democracy has become a defining feature of a new historical epoch.
The failure of the Weimar Republic led to the Third Reich. Germany’s first democracy ended in the transfer of power to Adolf Hitler. There is no overlooking Weimar when we ponder the question of how and why democracies die. The fate of the first German republic is both a warning and an object lesson not only in Germany but also globally. Prophecies that Germany or other Western democracies could return to the “conditions like Weimar” aren’t new.1 What is new is the actual global fragility of democracy, which recalls the period between the two world wars. That alone is reason enough to remind ourselves of what really happened in and to the Weimar Republic.
Weimar’s democracy is still fascinating, not least because of the astonishing contradictions this merely fourteen-year period encompassed. It was a time of new beginnings, experimentation, and a willingness to innovate. A laboratory of modernism full of vibrant culture, particularly—though not exclusively—in the metropolis of Berlin. A period when traditional gender roles loosened, and people were more sexually free. But it was also a time of seemingly endless crises and upheavals, including the hyperinflation of 1923 and the Great Depression starting in 1929. A time of political instability, of rapidly changing governments, violence, and militancy, which led to civil-war-like fighting in the system’s dying days.
It has rightly been demanded that Weimar history not be treated solely ex post facto as a prelude to the National Socialist dictatorship but as an epoch of its own, full of ambivalence and contradiction.2 Of course, given the catastrophe of Hitler’s ascent to power, there is no avoiding the question of why German democracy ultimately failed. “No one can think of the Weimar Republic without thinking about its demise,” wrote historian Hagen Schulze.3 Moreover, the current global crisis of democracy has given renewed urgency to the question of what caused the German disaster in 1933. But that’s precisely why it’s important to emphasize the open-endedness of the situation at the time. Otherwise, we ignore alternatives xiand spaces to maneuver—and risk overlooking something that is essential to answering the question of the demise of Weimar democracy.
Historians have advanced various explanations. Some point out the difficult legacy of Wilhelmine German authoritarianism: the continuing influence of pre-democratic elites in heavy industry, the large agricultural estates east of the Elbe River, the military, the government administration, and the justice system. Others emphasize the burden placed on the young democracy from the start by Germany’s military defeat in the First World War and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Still others stress the structural shortcomings of the Weimar Constitution, which granted sweeping powers to the Reich president as a kind of ersatz kaiser—the constitution’s Article 48 gave him an instrument of rule by emergency decree that practically invited misuse in times of crisis. Another school of thought points the finger at Germany’s political parties’ confinement within ideological front lines and their refusal to compromise for chronically weakening the parliamentary democracy. But as heavy as the initial burdens and failings, resulting mainly from the foundation of the republic, may have been, Germany’s first democratic experiment was not destined to fail. There were alternatives—and reasons why they were disregarded or insufficiently pursued. The end of the story was far more open than those fixated on the Weimar Republic’s ultimate demise would have us believe.
There was no shortage of opportunities to change course and go in different directions. For instance, during the revolution of 1918–19, the governing Social Democrats could have pushed through greater societal change and retained less of the past. Or the suppression of the Kapp Putsch in March 1920 and the great wave of pro-democratic solidarity following the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922 could have been the occasion for those in power to take the offensive against the anti-democratic camp. That opportunity remained unused.
During the hyperinflation of 1923, when the republic was teetering on the abyss, the forces of democratic self-preservation proved stronger than many people expected. But the election of the dyed-in-the-wool monarchist Paul von Hindenburg as Reich president in April 1925 represented a caesura. His rise could have been prevented, had the Communists been willing to go against their usual grain. Likewise, the collapse xiiof the grand coalition in March 1930, which marked a de facto end to parliamentary democracy, could have been avoided had the political parties involved been more willing to compromise. No one forced the mainstream parties in the state of Thuringia to include the Nazis in the regional government in 1930. They did that of their own free will, granting the fascists the opportunity to rehearse their rise to power on the national level. There was no reason for Hindenburg to yield to his advisers and dismiss Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in late May 1932, thereby terminating the moderate phase of presidentially appointed government. With Brüning in office, his successor Franz von Papen would not have been able to stage his coup d’état in Prussia in July 1932, removing one of the final bulwarks of the Weimar Republic.
Even Hitler’s triumph in January 1933 wasn’t unavoidable. There were still ways to keep him from power. One of the bitterest ironies of German history is that the leader, or Führer, of the Nazi Party assumed the office of chancellor thanks to a sinister game of intrigue—at a juncture when Hitler’s movement was in decline and many keen contemporary observers had already, and prematurely, written him off.
History is always open. The only thing a historian can say for certain about the future is that it will turn out differently than people at any given time imagine. The decisive factor is how individual people behave in concrete situations. That was true during the Weimar Republic, and it still is today. It’s in our hands to decide whether democracy fails or survives. The true goal of this book is to illustrate that point.
We should constantly recall that the Weimar Republic didn’t go out with a bang. It was gradually undermined by the erosion of the constitution and democratic practices. This “quiet death” should serve as a negative example of how Western democracies like the United States, whose stability has long seemed unshakable, could fail despite their long and storied tradition.4 The failure of the Weimar Republic remains a lesson of how fragile democracy is and how quickly freedom can be squandered, if democratic institutions cease to function and civil society is too weak to keep the anti-democratic wolves from the door.
Notes
1. See Sebastian Ullrich, “Stabilitätsanker oder Hysterisierungsagentur: Der Weimar-Komplex in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik,” in WeimarsWirkung: DasNachlebendererstendeutschenRepublik, ed. Hanno Hochmuth et al. (Göttingen, 2020), 182–96 (here 192–93). For more detail, see Sebastian Ullrich, DerWeimar-Komplex:DasScheiterndererstendeutschenDemokratieunddiepolitischeKulturder Bundesrepublik(Göttingen, 2009).
2. See Nadine Rossol and Benjamin Ziemann, eds., AufbruchundAbgründe:DasHandbuchderWeimarerRepublik(Darmstadt, 2021); Sabine Becker, ExperimentWeimar:EineKulturgeschichteDeutschlands1918–1933(Darmstadt, 2018); Anthony McElligott, RethinkingtheWeimarRepublic:AuthorityandAuthoritarianism1916–1936 (London, 2014).
3. Hagen Schulze, “Vom Scheitern einer Republik,” in Karl Dietrich Bracher et al., eds., DieWeimarerRepublik1918–1933:Politik,Wirtschaft,Gesellschaft(Düsseldorf, 1987), 617–25 (here 617).
4. Cf. Frank Werner, “Wir müssen über Weimar reden,” Die Zeit 45 (November 3, 2022).
xiv
1
A Magical Beginning
THE 1918 – 19 REVOLUTION
November9,1918,inBerlin:SoldierssidewithstrikingworkersinfrontoftheGarde-Ulanenbarracks.(Thesignreads“Brothers!Don’tshoot!”)
It’s November 9, 1918. Berlin is gripped with a feverish tension. Rumors of a German navy officers’ uprising in Kiel and the rapid spread of revolution has been keeping the imperial capital on tenterhooks for days. “All circles of society are nervous with anticipation that something extraordinary is about to happen,” writes one of the era’s keenest observers, the art patron and diplomat Count Harry Kessler.1 The commander in chief of the Germany March, General Alexander von Linsingen, orders the suspension of rail travel and demands additional troops to protect Berlin. But all measures of this sort soon prove useless.
On the morning of November 9, workers in Berlin’s major factories declare a general strike. The Naumburg Riflemen, a German military unit considered particularly reliable, sides with the protesters. Massive demonstrations, led by armed workers and soldiers, move from the city’s outer districts to the government quarter, marching up and down before the state buildings on Wilhelmstrasse. Theodor Wolff, the editor in chief of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt newspaper, writes in his diary: “From the window of the editorial office I can see huge masses of people with red flags pressing forward down Leipziger Strasse. Colleagues arrive with news that people on the street are ripping the cockades from officers’ uniforms, that nothing is being guarded anymore, that the city has been completely transformed in one fell swoop, that the streetcars are no longer running, that revolutionaries have occupied the telegraph office, and that the red flag is flying over the Brandenburg Gate.”2
Working the telephone ceaselessly, Reich Chancellor Prince Max von Baden tries in vain to convince Kaiser Wilhelm II, who is still at his headquarters in the Belgian town of Spa, to abdicate. In the end, around noon, Prince Max decides to take matters into his own hands and orders the telegraph office to spread the news that Wilhelm has in fact vacated the throne. A short time later, he transfers the chancellorship to the chairman of the majority wing of the Social Democratic Party, 3Friedrich Ebert. When asked whether he is prepared to exercise that office “even under the monarchist constitution,” Ebert equivocates, “Yesterday I would have definitely answered this question in the affirmative, but today I must first consult with my allies.” When Prince Max broaches the option of a royal regency, Ebert retorts, “It’s too late for that.” Behind him, his party comrades chant, “Too late, too late!”3
At two in the afternoon, the deputy chairman of the Majority Social Democrats, Philipp Scheidemann, proclaims a “German republic” from a balcony at the Reichstag. “The German people have emerged victorious across the board,” he tells the crowd. “The old and decayed has collapsed. Militarism is over! The Hohenzollerns have stepped down!”4 The leader of the radical leftist Spartacus Group, Karl Liebknecht, only recently released from Luckau Prison on October 23, leaves no doubt in his speech that the real work of revolutionary upheaval still lies ahead. “We must gather all forces to construct a government of workers and soldiers and create a new state system of the proletariat, a system of peace, happiness, and freedom for our German brothers and our brothers throughout the world.”5
That afternoon, historian Gustav Mayer goes to downtown Berlin. “What a different sight jumps out at me!” he notes. “Everywhere soldiers without cockades. People standing, strolling around and talking (but not singing) in Potsdamer Platz. Trucks and gray military vehicles come and go constantly, packed (even on top of the roofs) with soldiers, their jackets unbuttoned, between them large numbers of workers and youths with rifles slung over their shoulders. Every car has someone waving a red flag.”6 The red flag becomes the symbol of the revolution. “Red cloth seems to have been handed out from some distribution points to the movement’s followers—everyone is carrying this symbol of revolution, which until only recently was considered an outrage,” writes a bewildered reporter from the DeutscheZeitungnewspaper, a mouthpiece for the radical nationalist Pan-Germanic League.7
That evening, Theodor Wolff composes an editorial for the morning edition. “The greatest of all revolutions has brought down the imperial regime and all parts of it, high and low, like a suddenly brewing storm. You can call it the greatest of all revolutions because never before 4has a surge like this overwhelmed such a mightily constructed bastille festooned by solid walls.”8 Reviewing events the following day, Kessler arrives at a similar conclusion: “The revolution began less than 24 hours ago in Berlin, and already nothing is left of the old order and army. Never has the entire inner framework of a major power been so completely pulverized in such a short time.”9
The revolution, however, did not erupt nearly as suddenly as many people believed. In fact, it had taken more than one attempt to bring down the Hohenzollern monarchy’s seemingly secure order. The upheaval of November 1918 was not only a result of Germany’s military defeat and the shock suffered by the German populace. For some time, dissatisfaction had been brewing at the core of Wilhelmine society. The truce declared in 1914 between rival forces in Germany in the interest of winning the Great War may have papered over social tensions, but four years of conflict had exacerbated them extraordinarily. The material welfare of not only blue-collar workers but also white-collar employees had deteriorated dramatically, while industrialists and arms manufacturers had made gigantic profits.
Dramatic food shortages particularly fueled discontent. “Everything is held back for the wealthy and the property owners,” complained one working-class woman from Hamburg during the “winter of turnips” in 1916–17. “As soon as sacrifice is called for, the lords of society no longer want to be the brothers and sisters of the working class. The magnificent speeches about the need to ‘hold out’ only apply to the working class. The ruling class with its sacks of money has already provided for itself.”10
The unjust allocation of food, more than shortages per se, raised ire and left people embittered, and as of 1916 they began venting their pent-up frustration in strikes and protests. The longer the war persisted, the more Germans’ outrage at their economic misery drove them to demand peace. The 1917 Russian Revolution served as an example. Spies from the German political police constantly reported desperate women standing in line to buy groceries saying things like, “We only have to do what they did in Russia, then everything will change immediately.”115The Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD)—which was formed as an opposition force in April 1917 as the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD) continued to support imperial Germany’s war aims—became a rallying point for anti-war protest.
In late January 1918, hundreds of thousands of armaments workers in Berlin and other cities went on strike, demanding “Peace, Freedom, and Bread.” Civilian and military authorities once again succeeded in suppressing the movement, but it was clear how decrepit the foundations of Hohenzollern rule had become. “These were the first tongues of flame from the smoldering fire,” concluded one Hamburg Social Democrat.12
The situation was becoming incendiary on the battlefront as well. “I’m not putting my neck on the line anymore for the Prussians and the capitalist fat cats,” wrote one soldier home to Munich in August 1917.13 His was not the only voice of the kind. “Equal pay and equal food / Would make the war be gone for good” was a popular saying in the trenches.14 When the final major German offensive in the west came to naught in the spring of 1918, accounts of soldiers breeching discipline and refusing orders multiplied. More and more men reported sick, tried to lie low in back lines, or surrendered. “Three-quarters of the units here want it all to end,” one soldier wrote home in August 1918. “They don’t care how.”15
By the end of September 1918, the German Army Supreme Command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff had no choice but to admit the war was lost and press for an immediate ceasefire and “parliamentization” of the Reich Constitution. In other words, facing defeat, the most influential leaders of the Wilhelmine Empire were prepared to accept what they had always vehemently rejected: the formation of a German government based not on the will of a monarch but on a majority, even including the Social Democrats, who had been the largest party in the Reichstag since 1912. On October 26, the German parliament passed laws mandating a transition to a parliamentary monarchy. The Reich Constitution was amended to read: “The Reich chancellor needs the consent of the Reichstag to exercise his office.” Moreover, in his role as commander in chief, the kaiser would be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny. The special status of the military, a central element 6of the Reich Constitution engineered by Otto von Bismarck, was thus eliminated.16 Reform from above was intended to head off revolution from below. That was the basic idea behind the government reforms introduced in October 1918.
But this tactical maneuver came too late. The powers that be lost their authority with breathtaking speed. The desire to end a senseless war under any circumstances and as quickly as possible spread beyond the working classes to broad segments of the populace. US President Woodrow Wilson’s responses to the ceasefire offers made by the new, parliament-elected government of Prince Max von Baden swiftly made it clear that there would be no peace without the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. But the kaiser would hear nothing of voluntarily renouncing the throne. “A successor to Friedrich the Great does not abdicate,” he pompously declared—only to leave the increasingly uncertain situation of the Reich capital, Berlin, for the more comfortable surroundings of Spa on October 29.17 As a result, the mass rebellion also turned against the monarch. “Here in Berlin, the mood is exceedingly bad,” wrote historian Friedrich Thimme. “The masses have completely abandoned themselves to the psychosis of peace and talk about almost nothing but the kaiser and the crown prince stepping down.”18
It was no accident that the revolution was sparked on large warships of the Imperial Navy, where crewmen and officers lived together in cramped quarters and where social inequality and the whims of commanders took on outrageous dimensions. When the naval command ordered the high-seas fleet to set sail for a final battle against Britain, ordinary seamen refused to obey.19 At the beginning of November, the mutiny in Kiel spread to land, and from there it stretched out to all of Germany. Emulating the Kiel model, workers and soldiers everywhere formed revolutionary councils. “The physiognomy of revolution is beginning to take shape,” Kessler noted on November 7. “Gradual seepage, an oil slick, caused by mutinying sailors off the coast. They’re isolating Berlin. Soon it will be nothing more than an island. In the opposite way as in France, the provinces are revolutionizing the capital, and the sea, the land. Viking strategy.”20
The leaders of the MSPD still believed they could save the monarchy 7if the kaiser stepped down immediately. If he refused, Ebert was said to have told Max von Baden, the “social revolution” would be “unavoidable.” Ebert added that he didn’t want any such revolution; indeed, he abhorred it “like sin itself.”21 It is uncertain whether the Social Democrat expressed himself this directly, as the Reich chancellor related in his memoirs, but there’s no doubt that Ebert thought he had achieved his goals with Germany’s transition to a parliamentary monarchy and that he considered revolution superfluous. In any case, the constitutional reforms undertaken in late October were transparently more of a promise than a political reality. The military’s power remained omnipresent. It would take joint action by revolutionary navy men, workers, and soldiers to ensure that systemic change was irreversible.
On November 8, too, all attempts by Prince Max to persuade the kaiser to give up the throne proved futile. Wilhelm II even threatened to deploy the military to the Reich capital: “If you in Berlin don’t change your minds, I will come with my troops to Berlin after the ceasefire and blast the city to bits, if I have to.”22 This was the prelude to the events of November 9.
The leaders of the MSPD found themselves in a difficult situation. They hadn’t wanted revolution. Indeed, they had tried their best to prevent one. But there was no way they could stand on the sidelines after the upheaval and retain any influence whatsoever on the course of events. Thus, on the afternoon of November 9, Ebert did an abrupt about-face and proposed to the USPD that they form a joint revolutionary government consisting in equal measure of both parties. He didn’t make any personnel demands. When asked by USPD parliamentary deputy Oskar Cohn, he even declared his willingness to work with his bitterest rival, Karl Liebknecht, if the Independent Social Democrats put him forward for office.23 The USPD did make some demands in return for joining the proposed government. For starters, Germany was to become a “social republic,” to which the MSPD agreed under the condition that the “people be allowed to decide in a constitutional conference.” The USPD also insisted that executive, legislative, and judicial power rest exclusively “in the hands of elected representatives of the entire working populace and soldiers.” This went too far for the MSPD, which responded: “If 8this demand entails a dictatorship of a part of the social class not supported by the majority of the people, we must reject it as violating our democratic principles.”24
By noon the next day, the coalition agreement had been finalized, and a Council of Popular Representatives, as the cabinet was now known, convened for its constituent meeting. The council was made up of three members of the MSPD and the USPD: Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, and the lawyer and parliamentary deputy Otto Landsberg for the former; for the latter, party and parliamentary faction chairman Hugo Haase, party secretary Wilhelm Dittmann, who had been sentenced to five years in prison for leading the January 1918 general strike, and Emil Barth, a representative of the Revolutionary Stewards, nonunion representatives elected by workers who possessed great influence in Berlin’s larger factories. Liebknecht refused to join the government because he was unwilling to work with the leaders of the MSPD, whose support for the war had, in his eyes, forever compromised them. Nominally, Ebert and Haase shared the chairmanship. But practically, Ebert—who had inherited the Reich chancellor’s desk on November 9—claimed the role of leading the new government.25
There was no guarantee that the MSPD and USPD would agree on a coalition. The rupture of the Social Democratic movement in the spring of 1917 had not only uncovered differences of opinion but exacerbated personal animosities. It was primarily due to pressure from below that squabbling Social Democrats came together. After the collapse of Hohenzollern rule, desires for an end to the “war between working-class brothers” erupted with almost elemental fury. That anger was on ample display at a meeting of some three thousand delegates of the Berlin workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Zirkus Busch on the afternoon of November 10. When Liebknecht—the great symbol of opposition to war—took the podium and warned, gesturing toward the MSPD delegates, against “those who today walk with the revolution but were its enemies the day before yesterday,” he was drowned out by cries of “Unity! Unity!”26 That was a major personal defeat for Liebknecht, who had obviously overestimated his influence on the masses.
The conference elected an “Executive Council of the Workers’ and 9Soldiers’ Councils in Greater Berlin,” which convened the next day, with Richard Müller, the speaker of the Revolutionary Stewards, as its chairman. That body consisted of fourteen soldiers’ and fourteen workers’ representatives along with seven representatives each from the MSPD and USPD. The executive council was supposed to supervise the work of the Council of Popular Representatives. But its powers were so vaguely defined that in case of conflict the government had reason to hope it would prevail.27 MSPD leaders could be satisfied with the first two days of the revolution. They had been able to attach themselves to the revolutionary movement and were now preparing to expand their power step-by-step. Their hand was strengthened by the fact that the majority of the soldiers’ councils supported their positions and moderate views also predominated among the workers’ councils.
The Council of Popular Representatives. Left, from top to bottom: Hugo Haase, Otto Landsberg, Wilhelm Dittmann. Right, from top to bottom: Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, Emil Barth. Center: Scheidemann proclaims the republic on November 9. (The banner reads “The Founding of the German Republic”)
On November 12, the Council of Popular Representatives issued a public proclamation that has rightly been described as the Magna Carta 10of the revolution.28 It began with the words: “The government that has emerged from the revolution, whose political leadership is purely socialist, has tasked itself with achieving the socialist platform.” With the stroke of a pen, all the wartime decrees of the old authoritarian state were abolished: the state of emergency, the restrictions on the right to assemble, and government censorship. Freedom of expression and religion were once more guaranteed, political prisoners were granted amnesty, and the 1916 Auxiliary Services Act, which mobilized German men between the ages of seventeen and sixty for the war effort, was revoked. In addition, the new government promised to introduce the eight-hour working day as of January 1, 1919, and guarantee equal, secret, direct, general voting in future parliamentary elections for all Germans, including women, over the age of twenty. Those promises fulfilled two standing central demands of the Social Democratic movement. The constitutional National Assembly, which would convene in the near future, would be elected according to the new rules. The proclamation did not envision state confiscation of means of production. On the contrary, the new government pledged to “maintain orderly production” and “protect property against attack.”29 The MSPD newspaper Vorwärts(Forward) expressed its satisfaction with the document: “The platform is excellent. It will show the world that the new powers in Germany desire an order based on liberty and not coercion, anarchy, or chaos.”30 The Majority Social Democrats remained constantly and painfully aware of the negative example of how the Russian Revolution had ended.
After the formation of the Council of Popular Representatives and the election of the Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils in Greater Berlin, a modicum of calm returned. The revolution had proceeded relatively peacefully, with only a handful of deaths. The leader of Germany’s Center Party, Matthias Erzberger, signed the ceasefire agreement on November 11 in the forest near Compiègne. The new German government seemed determined to ensure order and protect private property. Nothing commonly associated with revolution had come to 11pass, the BerlinerVolks-Zeitungnewspaper declared. On November 10, it wrote: “Anyone who wasn’t put off by difficulties of walking through the streets in the driving snow would have taken home the impression that there was no need for the green security police to intervene to prevent any confrontations or riots. There was no sign that the participants of the various rallies, armed with umbrellas and wrapped in thick woolen scarves and freshly washed winter Sunday clothing, had any particular affinity for hand grenades or infantry rifles.”31 During one such Sunday walk through Grunewald forest on November 10, theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch noted that the mood was rather “subdued,” but also “calm and comfortable” with everything having “gone so well.” He added, “You could see on everyone’s faces that their wages were still being paid.”32 Novelist Thomas Mann made a similar observation in Munich, where the revolution had triumphed on November 7 under the leadership of the talismanic USPD politician Kurt Eisner. Mann wrote: “I’m relieved at the relative calm and orderliness with which everything has proceeded, at least thus far. The German revolution is a German revolution, not an intoxicated Russian-Communist bender.”33
Life in Berlin returned to normal with surprising speed. Before long, the trams were running, telephones worked, and people had natural gas, water, and electricity. Shops were open, and theaters kept staging performances. Everyday life seemed minimally affected by the revolutionary upheaval. “The revolution was never more than a small whirlpool in the normal life of the city, which continued to flow in its accustomed channels,” wrote Kessler on November 12. “The massive, earth-shattering upheaval has flashed through everyday Berlin life creating hardly any more of a stir than a detective film.”34 The same was even truer of rural Germany. “Life here is following its usual course despite the mighty volcanic eruption that occurred,” wrote Dorothy von Moltke, the matron of a provincial eastern estate in Kreisau, Silesia, to her parents in South Africa on November 19.35
Once they had overcome their initial shock, the bourgeoisie proved astonishingly adaptable. In no time, bourgeois groups organized themselves in councils similar to those of their proletarian compatriots. “A competition is underway to form all manner of councils: farmers’ 12councils, citizens’ councils, intellectuals’ councils, artists’ councils, theater councils,” scoffed the medieval historian Karl Hampe in mid-November. “The German mania for clubs has fled into the arms of the revolution.” For Hampe, as well as for more than a few members of the conservative bourgeoisie who had been loyal to the kaiser, November 9, 1918, had been the “most miserable day” of his life.36
How would things continue after the promising start of the first days? The MSPD pursued a clear agenda whose immediate priority was to address the pressing everyday problems of securing the food supply, transitioning from a wartime to a peacetime economy, demobilizing the troops, implementing the ceasefire, and preparing for peace negotiations. “Our next tasks must be to swiftly bring about peace and secure our economic existence,” Ebert declared at a national conference of the Council of Popular Representatives with Germany’s regional states on November 25.37 Ebert saw the workers’ and soldiers’ councils as nuisances suitable at most for providing emergency assistance for a transitional period. After that, they would have to make way for a democratically legitimated national assembly. All fundamental decisions about Germany’s social and political future were to be reserved for that freely elected parliament.
The USPD was unsure about what national political system it wanted. The party’s right wing had no objection to the convening of a national assembly, although it wanted to postpone the election as long as possible to enact social-structural reforms that would create a solid foundation for parliamentary democracy. “Democracy has to be so firmly anchored that a conservative counterrevolution will be impossible,” demanded the party’s intellectual leader, Rudolf Hilferding, in mid-November.38
But the USPD’s left wing rejected the national assembly and called for the introduction of a council system. At a general meeting of the Greater Berlin workers’ councils in Zirkus Busch on November 19, Richard Müller cautioned: “The national assembly is the path to establishing the dominance of the bourgeoisie…. The path of the national assembly is over my dead body.”39 This statement earned him the nickname “Dead Body Müller.” Their uncompromising rejection of a 13national assembly put the left wing of the USPD on ideological common ground with the Spartacus League, as the Spartacus Group had renamed itself on November 11. It was formally part of the party but pursued a de facto agenda of its own. Adopting the slogan “All power to the councils,” the league was busy agitating for a continuation of the revolution. “Scheidemann–Ebert are the appointed government of the German revolution in its current state,” Spartacus leader Rosa Luxemburg wrote in mid-November in the newspaper DieRoteFahne, which she had edited since being released from prison in Breslau (today Wrocław) and returning to Berlin on November 10. “But revolutions don’t stand still. Their natural law is to stride rapidly forward and outgrow themselves.” Supporters of a national assembly, she added, were, “consciously or not, dialing back the [socialist] revolution to the historical stage of bourgeois revolutions.” The urgent historical question posed by the upheaval in Germany, however, was “bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy.”40
But the Spartacus League had no great influence. The group was in its infancy, and membership was still limited. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were “well aware that a truly socialist republic could not be established with the means at their disposal,” author and Spartacus member Eduard Fuchs wrote to historian Gustav Mayer in mid-November.41 The radical Left didn’t possess any decisive sway in the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, where MSPD members and moderate representatives of the USPD had the upper hand. Germany was thus very far removed from a Bolshevik-style dictatorship of councils in the late fall of 1918. Nonetheless, bourgeois circles deliberately exaggerated the danger of such. “Spartacus” became a dog whistle for Bolshevism, encouraging popular fears of chaos, terror, and civil war.42
The effectiveness of this bête noire was such that even a keen observer like Theodor Wolff fretted about “Spartacus folks and lots of rabble waiting, armed, for an opportunity to launch a putsch, and there’s no sufficient organized force that can offer protection.”43 The fear and hatred were focused on Liebknecht. On November 11, Mayer surmised that, in his “monomaniacal ambition,” the Spartacus leader was out to become “the Lenin of the German revolution.” Eleven days later, Mayer added in his diary: “You hear only voices of pessimism that say that the 14triumph of Bolshevism in Berlin can no longer be prevented and that Liebknecht is paying the soldiers who follow him ten marks a day.”44 By early December, posters were appearing on Berlin advertising pillars calling for Liebknecht’s murder: “Strike down their leader! Kill Liebknecht! Then you’ll have peace, work, and bread.”45
The MSPD leadership also fell for the stereotype of the Bolshevik enemy and had no qualms about instrumentalizing popular fears in domestic political conflicts. The articles in DieRoteFahneplayed into their hands by using aggressive language that suggested Liebknecht and Luxemburg were scheming to take power by force. Both Ebert and Scheidemann maintained an overblown fear of “a Russia-like situation,” combined with an aversion to all forms of disorder and anarchy. Broad segments of the bourgeoisie and the military leadership in particular shared this “antichaos reflex.” As Colonel Ernst van den Bergh, an officer in the Prussian Ministry of War, remarked, the two MSPD leaders embodied “the direction all rational people must support with full conviction.”46
In a phone call with Ebert on November 10, Ludendorff’s successor at German Army High Command, Wilhelm Groener, already offered his cooperation. “The officer corps demanded that the government fight Bolshevism and is ready to be deployed,” Groener recalled saying in his memoirs. “Ebert accepted my suggestion of an alliance. From then on, we talked every evening via a secure connection between the Reich Chancellery and army command about the necessary measures. The alliance proved its worth.”47 There was no formal agreement between the two centers of power. But they did work together, which would have great effect on how the revolution proceeded.
On November 11, the Council of Popular Representatives acted on a request by Hindenburg and sent a telegram to army command, beseeching the generals “to order the entire field army to maintain military discipline, calm, and strict order under all circumstances.” Until they were decommissioned, soldiers were to “follow orders unconditionally,” while 15retaining their weapons and preserving their ranks. The soldiers’ councils were tasked with assisting the officers in the “preservation of discipline and order.”48 The officer corps’s authority was thus essentially restored, and the soldiers’ councils suddenly found themselves reduced to a subordinate role.
A main reason the MSPD extended a hand to the army command was the realization that the orderly demobilization of eight million soldiers was hardly possible without the military leadership cooperating. The political leadership counted on the generals accepting the reality on the ground and behaving loyally to the revolutionary government. In a November 20 cabinet meeting, after Emil Barth demanded that Hindenburg be dismissed to defuse Entente worries about “the persistence of German militarism,” Ebert refused, saying that the former commander had “given his word of honor that he would stand behind the government” so there was no need to “dislodge him from his position.”49
This trust allowed the military leadership to reestablish itself as a force in domestic policy, and before long, officers were confident about going out in public again. By mid-December, when returning guard troops were ceremoniously welcomed back to Berlin, Kessler observed: “The red flags are conspicuous in their absence. Everything is black-white-and-red, black-and-white, and occasionally black-red-and-gold. Common soldiers and officers once again commonly walk around displaying their cockades and epaulettes. It’s a big difference from November.”50 Writer Gerhart Hauptmann was excited by the military’s return: “Battle helmets, machine guns, field kitchens, and banners. Everything in its right place militarily. The army’s deeply rooted popularity has become evident again. Splendid troops. No red symbols … I called out ‘Bravo.’”51
The people’s representatives also shied back from rigorous actions concerning the civil administration because they feared they couldn’t run the country without the expertise of the old state apparatus. Some of their earliest statements were appeals to civil servants to do their duty. On November 11, Gustav Mayer called it a “reassuring sign” that “a large part of the civil service doesn’t want to retreat and pout and that the new men are prepared and eager to collaborate with experienced 16‘technical’ experts.”52 The state secretaries in the Reich government retained their posts, and although they were flanked by two “supervisors” from the MSPD and USPD, the latter had no chance to do any genuine monitoring since they depended on information supplied by the ministerial bureaucracy.53 Other high-ranking officials such as Prussian district administrators also kept their jobs even though they made no secret of their preference for the toppled authoritarian German Reich and their antipathy to the new order. Not a single high-ranking functionary from the old system was dismissed. At a conference of Germany’s regional states on November 25, Ebert justified the decision not to push for a wholesale replacement of administrative personnel: “Having seized political power, we needed to make sure that the machinery of the Reich didn’t break down…. The six of us couldn’t do that alone. We needed the cooperation of experienced specialists.”54
Festivereception:FriedrichEbertwelcomesreturningtroopsattheBrandenburgGateonDecember10,1918.
The MSPD popular representatives also took a soft approach on issues 17of ownership of the means of production. There was no comprehensive agricultural reform, not least because of worries about Germany’s already strained food supplies. On November 11, the Council of Popular Representatives assured the agricultural lobby that “the Reich government will vigorously protect [you] against all attacks on property and production.”55 Such assurances were primarily directed at the aristocratic owners of large agricultural estates east of the Elbe River, who were already up in arms at the abolition of Prussia’s three-tiered electoral system and the resulting loss of their political domination in Germany’s largest regional state. Big agricultural interests held sway in most of the farmers’ councils, whose formation the Council of Popular Representatives had approved on November 21, and they stabilized rather than democratized or revolutionized the status quo in the German countryside. One bit of progress was the “Preliminary Ordinance on Rural Labor” of January 24, 1919, which revoked discriminatory Wilhelmine legislation concerning farmhands and allowed them to unionize. Nonetheless, the economic power of the Junker, as large-scale estate owners were called, remained untouched—and with it a fundamental pillar of the agrarian-conservative dominance of Prussia.56
Along with the estate owners east of the Elbe, the elites who had most vocally called for a war of territorial conquest prior to 1918 and resisted any democratic reforms afterward were the industrial barons of the Rhineland and Westphalia in western Germany. They, too, feared for their privileged position of power after the November Revolution, especially as the call to nationalize key industries represented a core element of the Social Democratic political platform. Members of the USPD pressed the Council of Popular Representatives to act on this demand. Their MSPD colleagues, however, favored deferring the issue so as not to imperil Germany’s postwar reconstruction with any hasty experiments. The decision reached by the governing cabinet on November 18 was a compromise, declaring that “those branches of industry that are sufficiently developed for socialization should be socialized” while making clear that the government was in no hurry to see this carried out. It was decided to form “a commission of renowned national economists,” to include “people with practical experience from the ranks of labor and 18entrepreneurs.”57 The commission met for the first time on December 5 under chairman Karl Kautsky, a leading Social Democratic Party (SPD) intellectual before 1914 who had gone over to the USPD during the war. That body met for weeks without achieving any results.
Prior to that, a groundbreaking decision had been reached. On November 15, business owners and unions had signed a formal accord, the Stinnes–Legien Agreement, named after the two chief negotiators, industrialist Hugo Stinnes and the chairman of the General Commission of Unions, Carl Legien. It recognized trade unions as “appointed representatives of the working class” and voided all restrictions on freedom of association. Employers recognized the rights of workers returning from the war to their old jobs and agreed to an eight-hour workday without wage cuts. Moreover, working conditions were to be set by labor contracts, works councils were made the rule in all businesses with more than fifty employees, and mediators with equal numbers of representatives from both sides were to be employed to resolve labor disputes. Responsibility for seeing that the reforms were enacted was given to the Central Working Community of Industrial and Commercial Employers and Employees Associations in Germany—or ZAG, for short.
Germany’s trade unions celebrated the agreement as a great triumph, and it did indeed represent significant sociopolitical progress over the Wilhelmine Empire. But the captains of industry were the bigger winners insofar as labor leaders’ pledge to preserve the existing economic order, including private ownership of the means of production, basically prevented the nationalization of key industries. In a letter to members on November 18, the Federation of German Employers’ Associations (VDA) justified its concessions to unions by arguing that there was still “the greatest reason to fear” that the government could decide to socialize production. Because of that, it had been imperative to “shore up the position of unions, which at present represent the moderate wing of the government, with all the means at our disposal.”58
From December 16 to 21, the First General Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, which came from throughout Germany, convened in 19Berlin, following a call to do so by the executive council on November 17. The congress was intended, on the one hand, to decide whether Germany should have a national assembly or adopt a system of councils and, on the other, to elect a central council as a new superior executive organ of state.59 MSPD representatives were rightly satisfied with the results of the delegate elections. Of the 514 deputies who assembled on December 16 in the Prussian House of Representatives, some 300 were affiliated with the MSPD and only 100 with the USPD. Others were party unaffiliated or members of the leftist bourgeoisie, while the Spartacus League was barely represented at all. One of the congress’s first acts was to deny Liebknecht and Luxemburg, “who had been of such service to the revolution,” the status of “guests with consulting voices.”60 Given the makeup of the congress, there was no doubt how the most important question would be resolved. A large majority rejected a motion to stick with “the council system as the basis of the socialist republic” and to grant the workers’ and soldiers’ councils the highest legislative and executive authority. In the end, the congress decided to call an election for a national assembly on January 19, 1919.61 That was almost a month earlier than February 16, the date the Council of Popular Representatives had previously agreed upon.
For the spokesman of the left wing of the USPD, Ernst Däumig, the “celebratory endorsement of a national assembly” was equivalent to a “death sentence” for the council system, and he accused the delegates of having mutated into a “political suicide club.”62 But from the beginning, the introduction of an “unadulterated” council system, as propagated by USPD left-wingers and followers of the Spartacus League, was a pipe dream. Most local workers’ and soldiers’ councils saw themselves not as alternatives to a freely elected parliament but as temporary, provisional organs that wanted to help ensure order in the transitional phase until the convention of a national assembly.
USPD delegates refused to follow their party leadership during the election of the Central Council. On December 19, they petitioned that the Central Council should have “the full right to approve or reject laws before they are proclaimed.” That went well beyond Haase’s proposal that there should be joint consultations on major draft laws. After Ebert 20vigorously opposed the motion, saying that it would largely impair the government’s ability to act, the USPD petition was rejected, whereupon USPD delegates refused to participate in the Central Council election. In essence, the USPD voluntarily renounced a significant part of the power it had achieved in early November.63
Ebert and his supporters’ satisfaction at the congress was hardly complete, however, as delegates passed two resolutions that didn’t suit their plans at all. For starters, the congress called upon the government “to begin immediately with the socialization of all industry ready for it, in particular mining.”64 Moreover, delegates demanded a comprehensive reform of the military along the lines of the “seven points” proclaimed by the Hamburg Soldiers’ Council in early December. Those points included the order to transfer supreme command over the armed forces to a people’s commissioner under supervision of the executive council, getting rid of all the trappings of rank “as a symbol of the destruction of militarism and the eradication of the idea of obedience to the death,” and having soldiers elect officers in the future.65
Both resolutions showed that the MSPD delegates remained interested in major social reforms. The demands were unmistakably directed at the Council of Popular Representatives, which had thus far taken no steps worthy of the name in that direction. The formation of a commission had postponed the issue of nationalization indefinitely. And from the beginning, Ebert had pursued a policy of cooperation with the armed forces’ high command on military policy.
The military leadership immediately protested the congress’s resolutions. At a joint meeting of the cabinet and the newly elected Central Council on December 20, Groener warned about “grave dangers” resulting from them. The connection between troops and the officer corps would be ripped apart, he claimed. The officers would “no longer be willing to cooperate,” and the result would be a “complete dissolution of the army.” Groener added, ominously, “I predict the most difficult times for our people.” Ebert shared those reservations, proclaiming that “action had been somewhat hasty and premature” on the whole issue. He proposed that the congress’s resolution be deemed to apply only to military on the home front, not in the field, and that nebulous 21“conditions of realization” had to be declared before it could be executed.66 This was another instance of the MSPD leadership deferring a decision to avoid a contest of strength with the officer corps. The questions of ultimate authority over the military and the election of officers would no longer be part of the “conditions of realization” of the “Hamburg points” issued by the Prussian Ministry of War on January 19, 1919.
The situation in Berlin came to a head around Christmas. Conflict had been simmering for some time between the city commandant, MSPD politician Otto Wels, and the People’s Navy Division, a radical leftist group of some 1,800 seamen who had quartered themselves in the Berlin City Palace and Royal Stables and were alleged to have engaged in plunder. Wels demanded that their leader, Heinrich Dorrenbach, vacate the palace and reduce the size of his force by two-thirds. To exert pressure, Wels withheld their pay, even though it had already been approved by the Council of Popular Deputies, which angered the navy men, so on December 23, an armed unit temporarily occupied the Reich Chancellery, cutting its telephone lines. Another group of navy men under Dorrenbach’s command marched on the palace and took Wels into custody.
Late that night, MSPD popular representatives were alarmed to learn that Wels was being abused and his life threatened, prompting Ebert to ask the Prussian Ministry of War for military assistance. Before sunrise the Lequis Commando was ordered to storm the palace and the stables. The situation was “ripe for a major decision,” wrote Kessler. “If the government has sufficient energy, it will use it to remove the entire radicalized navy division from Berlin.”67 But the operation failed. The navy men received support from the security force of Berlin Police President Emil Eichhorn as well as from armed workers. The Lequis Commando was forced to back down, leaving the government with no choice but to resolve the conflict by negotiating with the People’s Navy Division. All told, eleven navy men and fifty-six members of the commando died in the fighting at the palace. Radical working-class spokespeople in Berlin blamed the bloodbath on the MSPD popular representatives. At the funeral for the fallen navy men, protesters carried placards reading, “We 22accuse Ebert, Landsberg, and Scheidemann of the sailors’ murder.”68 The funeral was a “far bigger affair than expected,” wrote Kessler. “A huge crowd stretching as far as the eye could see … At the head of the procession, seven identical silver-black coffins, all of them with wreaths of red and white flowers, conveyed on seven royal coaches from the stables … Behind that, wreaths and flowers, all either red or a mix of red and white, carried by deputations bigger than I had ever seen before.”69
The Christmas fighting in Berlin ruptured the government coalition. The USPD popular representatives were particularly angry that their coalition partner hadn’t even informed them about the decision to send in troops. In their eyes, this proved that the MSPD leadership had made itself, once and for all, dependent on the military command. Events had shown, Wilhelm Dittmann criticized at a meeting of the cabinet and the Central Council on December 28, “how dangerous it is to try to work together with military power that is based on the old generals and the old army.” Emil Barth asked: “Can any socialist government be based on the power of bayonets? Must it not be based on the trust of the people?”70 On December 29, following Central Council confirmation to the USPD that it had approved the three MSPD representatives’ orders to the Prussian war minister, Haase, Dittmann, and Barth resigned from the government.
The MSPD leadership now had a free hand, proclaiming that very day, “The paralyzing divisiveness has been overcome.”71 The three USPD popular representatives who resigned were replaced by two members of the MSPD: union secretary Rudolf Wissell, who was given responsibility for social and economic policy, and military expert Gustav Noske, who took over the department “military and navy.” Noske had been sent to Kiel in early November and had made sure to steer the revolution into calmer waters. The new man would “have to have rhinoceros-thick skin,” Scheidemann declared at the midnight meeting of the cabinet and Central Council on December 28–29.72 Noske obviously fulfilled that requirement in the eyes of his MSPD colleagues.
“It’s as though the air is electrically charged with an incomparable political tension,” wrote a Berliner Tageblatt journalist about the mood in the 23German capital on New Year’s Eve. “The old year comes to an end in feverish excitement.” At the same time, however, he noted the outbreaks of unbridled hedonism with consternation. “The confetti of carefree revelers is falling in spirals, and men and girls, hungry for life, are dancing their way into the new year. Music is playing in hundreds of establishments. There is dancing and more dancing: waltzes, foxtrots, one-steps and two-steps. People’s legs flit over floors as though they were under a witch’s spell. Skirts fly, people gasp for breath, and champagne corks pop…. Never has there been so much or such frenetic dancing in Berlin.”73
The dance mania extended to provincial Germany. “The broad masses have a horrifying lack of sensitivity for what we’re going through—people are dancing the nights away, as if nothing has happened,” complained historian Karl Hampe in his New Year’s Eve diary entry. “Never has the transition from one year to another been celebrated in such a dismal mood.”74 Kessler agreed. “Final day of this terrible year,” he noted. “1918 is likely to forever remain the most terrible year in German history.”75 Many educated German bourgeoisie shared these sentiments. They couldn’t comprehend how swiftly and weakly the old monarchist authoritarian state had collapsed, and they regarded the new democratic order with skepticism. “My attitude toward this massive upheaval is half numb, half disgusted, and not in the slightest democratic,” wrote Romance language expert and diarist Victor Klemperer, summing up the year.76 Historian Gustav Mayer, who sympathized with the MSPD politically, drew a similar conclusion: “The collapse is not just of the ruling class and a political system. It’s simultaneously the moral collapse of an entire people, a destabilization of all its standards, a seismic disturbance of all its values, a questioning of all moral relations and all duties. We’re living on the day after an unprecedented earthquake, uncertain whether the last blow was indeed the hardest and whether it makes any sense to start rebuilding the rubble.”77 Hedwig Pringsheim, Thomas Mann’s mother-in-law, concluded her New Year’s Eve diary entry with the words: “We enter a new year, shaken in all the convictions of our existence, uncertain and helpless. Chaos after the lost war.”78 By that point, little remained of the magic of the early days of the revolution. 24
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht dared to stage a rival new beginning. On December 30, they helped found the German Communist Party, the KPD, at a convention in the Prussian House of Representatives. One hundred twenty-seven delegates from fifty-six locations in Germany came together for the event. More than a third were Spartacus League members, and nearly a third were part of the International Communists of Germany, a group that had been formed by leftist radicals in Hamburg and Bremen during the First World War.79 The delegates were a heterogeneous group. Older functionaries from the prewar Social Democratic tradition were flanked by young workers and intellectuals radicalized by their experience of war and revolution. The latter were full of revolutionary élan but incapable of soberly assessing the political realities, as became evident in the debate over whether the Communists should take part in the elections for the national assembly on January 19. A clear majority at the convention thought they should not.
Luxemburg threw her entire authority behind the contrary position. “I’m convinced you want to make your radicalism a bit comfortable and hasty,” she shouted at delegates, adding that the masses needed to be educated before there could be any thought of socialism. “That’s what we want to do using parliamentarism.”80 Luxemburg was supported by her ally Käte Duncker, who reminded delegates that half of all voters would be women going to the polls for the first time ever. “Do you really think,” Duncker asked, “that after telling these women for decades that they should fight for their right to vote, they’ll follow us now if we tell them not to exercise it?”81 But it was no use. In the end, the party convention decided by a margin of 61 to 23 to reject the recommendations of the Spartacus League leadership and boycott the election of the national assembly. Luxemburg tried to console her friend Clara Zetkin, who was horrified by the decision, by saying, “Our ‘defeat’ was only the triumph of a somewhat childish, immature, one-dimensional radicalism…. Don’t forget that the ‘Spartacists’ are mostly from a fresh generation, which is 25free from the stultified traditions of the ‘old, proven’ party—we have to see both the light and dark sides of that.”82
Karl Liebknecht had spoken forebodingly at the party conference that the next few days would “bring surprises” and that the events might “go over the heads of the so-called leaders.”83 That was precisely what happened with the Berlin riots in January 1919, which went down in the history books incorrectly as the “Spartacus Uprising.”84 They were sparked by the dismissal of Berlin Police President Eichhorn on January 4. He was a member of the USPD, and his was one of the last positions not controlled by the MSPD leadership. Moderate Social Democrats particularly resented him for deploying security officers to support the People’s Navy Division in the battle for the City Palace around Christmas, while radical members of the working classes in Berlin were incensed when he was fired. The USPD board of directors, the Revolutionary Stewards, and the KPD leadership jointly called for a demonstration on January 5, and more people than expected turned out to protest. DieRoteFahnewrote of the “most massive crowd the Berlin proletariat ever mobilized.”85
During that demonstration, things got out of hand, as groups of armed revolutionaries occupied the printing presses of the newspapers Vorwärtsand the BerlinerTageblatt
