A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (57 page)

The German November

The revolutionary upsurge in the West was not long coming in historical terms. It followed just 12 months after the Russian October—although these were very long months for starving, war-torn Russia.

The extortionate terms the German Empire imposed at Brest-Litovsk provided its rulers with a breathing space, but only a brief one. A great and bloody offensive in March 1918 took its armies further into France than at any time since 1914 but then ground to a halt. A second attempt to push forward in August failed, and then it was the German army’s turn to retreat. It was running out of reserves of manpower, while US entry into the war the year before had provided the Anglo-French side with fresh troops and access to vast supplies of equipment. The German high command panicked, and Ludendorff suffered some sort of nervous breakdown.
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In late September he decided that there had to be an immediate armistice and sought to avoid responsibility for this by persuading the Kaiser to appoint a new government containing a couple of Social Democrat ministers. But it was not possible simply to switch off the war which had convulsed all of Europe for four years. The rival imperialisms, particularly that of France, wanted a pound of flesh similar to that which German imperialism had demanded of Russia earlier in the year. For a month the German government tried desperately to avoid paying such a price and the war continued, as bloody as ever. British, French and US troops pushed into German-held territory in France and Belgium. In the Balkans a combined British, French, Serbian, Greek and Italian force routed the Austrian army.

The pressure was too much for the rickety multinational Austro-Hungarian monarchy, heir to the Holy Roman Empire born 1,200 years before. Its army collapsed and the middle class leaders of the national minorities seized control of the major cities: Czechs and Slovaks took over Prague, Brno and Bratislava; supporters of a unified ‘Yugoslav’ south Slav state took over Zagreb and Sarajevo; Hungarians under the liberal aristocrat Michael Karoly held Budapest; and Poles took Cracow. As huge crowds stormed through the streets of Vienna, demanding a republic and tearing down imperial emblems,
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power in the German-speaking part of Austria passed into the hands of a Social Democrat led coalition with the bourgeois parties.

Germany’s own high command, desperate to rescue something from the debacle, ordered its fleet to sail against Britain in the hope of a sudden, redeeming, naval victory. But its sailors were not prepared to accept certain death. Their mutiny the year before had been crushed and its leaders executed because it had been too passive—they had simply gone on strike, allowing the officers and military police to hit back at them. This time they did not make the same mistake. Sailors in Kiel armed themselves, marched through the town alongside striking dockers, disarmed their opponents and established a soldiers’ council. They lit a fuse for the whole of Germany.

Huge demonstrations of workers and soldiers took control of Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne, Leipzig, Dresden and scores of other towns. In Munich they took over the royal palace and proclaimed an anti-war reformist socialist, Kurt Eisner, prime minister of a ‘Bavarian Free State’. On 9 November it was Berlin’s turn. As vast processions of workers and soldiers with guns and red flags swarmed through the capital, the recently released anti-war revolutionary Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a ‘socialist republic’ and the ‘world revolution’ from the balcony of the imperial palace. Not to be outdone, the pro-war SPD minister in the Kaiser’s last government, Scheidemann, proclaimed a ‘republic’ from the balcony of the imperial parliament. The Kaiser fled to Holland, and the two Social Democrat parties presented a ‘revolutionary government’ of ‘people’s commissars’ for endorsement by an assembly of 1,500 workers’ and soldiers’ delegates. It symbolised the fact that soldiers’ and workers’ councils were now the arbiters of political power everywhere in Germany, and in German-occupied Belgium. The forces of revolution embodied in such councils, or soviets, seemed to be sweeping across the whole of northern Eurasia, from the North Sea to the North Pacific.

But the German councils had given revolutionary power to men determined not to use it for revolutionary ends. Ebert, the new prime minister, was on the phone to General Groener of the military high command within 24 hours. The pair agreed to work together—with the support of Hindenburg, the wartime ‘dictator’—to restore order in the army so that the army could restore order in society as a whole.
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Social Democrat politicians who had stood for reform via the capitalist state had logically supported that state when it came to war in 1914. Now, just as logically, they tried to re-establish the power of that state in the face of revolution. For them the old structures of repression and class power were ‘order’ the challenge to those structures from the exploited and dispossessed represented ‘anarchy’ and ‘chaos’.

The living embodiments of this challenge were the best-known opponents of the war—Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Liebknecht in particular had massive support among the soldiers and workers of Berlin. The Social Democrat leaders manoeuvred with the military high command to destroy this. They provoked a rising in the city in order to crush it with troops from outside, blaming the bloodshed on Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The pair were seized by army officers. Liebknecht was knocked unconscious and then shot. Luxemburg’s skull was smashed by a rifle butt, she was shot in the head and then thrown in a canal. The Social Democrat press reported that Liebknecht had been shot ‘while trying to escape’ and that Luxemburg had been killed ‘by an angry crowd’. When respectable members of the middle class read the news, they ‘jumped for joy’.
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Nothing had changed since the days of the Gracchus brothers and Spartacus in the attitude of the ‘civilised’ rich towards those who resisted their rule.

However, subduing the revolutionary ferment was not an easy task for the alliance between the Social Democrats and the military. Historians have often given the impression that the German Revolution was a minor event, ended easily and rapidly. This is even the message conveyed by Eric Hobsbawm’s often stimulating history of the 20th century,
The Age of Extremes
. He writes that after a few days in November ‘the republicanised old regime was no longer seriously troubled by the socialists…[and] even less by the newly improvised Communist Party’.
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In fact the first great wave of revolutionary ferment was not brought to an end until the summer of 1920, and there was a second wave in 1923.

As with every great revolution in history, that of November 1918 led to vast numbers of people becoming interested in politics for the first time. Talk of revolution and socialism was no longer confined to the core of workers who had voted socialist before 1914. It spread to millions of workers and lower middle class people who had previously voted for the Catholic Centre Party, the liberal Progressives, the illiberal ‘National Liberals’, or even the agrarian party run by the Prussian landowners. In the course of the war many of the old Social Democrat workers had begun to identify with the left wing opponents of the pro-war leaders—around half the members of the old SPD went over to the left wing Independent Social Democrats. But for every one of these, there were many other people who had moved to the left from the bourgeois parties and still saw the Social Democrat leaders as socialists. Where in the past they had opposed the Social Democrats for this, now they supported them.

The Social Democrat leaders played on these feelings, continuing to make left wing speeches but insisting that left wing policies could only be introduced gradually, by maintaining order and resisting revolutionary ‘excesses’. They claimed it was Luxemburg and Liebknecht who endangered the revolution, while secretly arranging with the generals to shoot down those who disagreed.

They were helped in putting across this message by the leaders of the Independent Social Democrats. These had not been happy about the war, but most remained committed to reforming capitalism. Their ranks included Kautsky, Bernstein, and Hilferding—who would be economics minister in two coalition governments with the bourgeois parties in the next decade. For the crucial first two months of the revolution the party served loyally in a government led by the majority SPD and helped sell its policies to the mass of workers and soldiers.

But, as the weeks passed, people who had been enthusiastic supporters of the Social Democrat leaders began to turn against them. Troops, sent to Berlin to help the government assert control in November, rose against it in the first week of January, and many of the workers and soldiers who helped suppress the January rising were themselves in revolt in the capital by March. Elections in mid-January gave the SPD 11.5 million votes and the Independent Social Democrats 2.3 million. Yet in the next few weeks workers who had voted solidly for the Social Democrats in the Ruhr, central Germany, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich went on general strike and took up arms against the policies of the government. By June 1920 the SPD vote was only 600,000 higher than that of the Independent Social Democrats.

The Social Democrat leaders rapidly discovered that they could not rely simply on their own popularity to ‘restore order’. Late in December 1918 the Social Democrat minister of the interior, Noske, boasted that ‘someone has to be the bloodhound’, and agreed with the generals to set up a special mercenary force, the Freikorps. Drawn from the officers and ‘storm battalions’ of the old army, it was thoroughly reactionary. ‘It was as if the old order rose again,’ observed the conservative historian Meinecke. The language of the Freikorps was vehemently nationalistic and often anti-Semitic. It banners were often adorned with an ancient Hindu symbol for good luck, the swastika, and many of its members went on to form the cadres of the Nazi Party.

The history of Germany in the first half of 1919 is the history of the march of the Freikorps through the country attacking the very people who had made the November Revolution and voted Social Democrat in the January election. It met repeated armed resistance, culminating in the proclamation in April of a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic with its own Red Army of 15,000.

‘The spirit of revolution’

The months of civil war in Germany were also months of unrest throughout much of the rest of Europe. The British prime minister Lloyd George wrote to his French equivalent, Clemenceau, in March:

The US representative in Paris, House, expressed similar fears in his diary: ‘Bolshevism is gaining ground everywhere…We are sitting upon an open powder magazine and some day a spark may ignite it’.
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The immediate cause for their concern was the taking of power by a soviet regime in Hungary, led by Bela Kun, a former Hungarian prisoner of war in Russia. The liberal nationalist regime established at the end of 1918 had collapsed, unable to prevent Czechoslovakia and Romania seizing parts of the country, and a Communist-Social Democrat government had taken power peacefully. It pushed through domestic reforms and nationalisation, and attempted to wage revolutionary war against Czechoslovakia and Romania, hoping for support from the Russian Red Army to its east and an uprising of Austrian workers to its west.

Nowhere else did revolutionary governments come to power, but nowhere was the situation stable, either. The newly formed nationalist republics of central and eastern Europe all contained ethnic minorities who resented the new order. In Czechoslovakia, German speakers were in the majority in some sizeable regions and Hungarian speakers in others. Romania and Yugoslavia contained large Hungarian speaking minorities. Yugoslavia and Austria had bitter border disputes with Italy, and Bulgaria with Romania. There was continual fighting between Polish and German forces in Silesia, and all out war erupted between Turkey and Greece, with large-scale ethnic cleansing on both sides. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria contained large numbers of workers with revolutionary sentiments opposed to the middle class nationalism of their governments.

Revolutionaries led unemployed workers in an attempt to storm the Austrian parliament in April 1919. For a moment it was not absurd to conceive of the revolution in Hungary linking with Russia to the east and, through Austria, with soviet Bavaria to the west, overturning the entire setup in the former German and Austro-Hungarian empires.

It was not to be. The Austrian Social Democrats used a language somewhat to the left of those in Germany, but they were just as adamantly opposed to further revolution. They persuaded the Viennese workers’ councils to allow the protests to be crushed, ensuring the survival of Austrian capitalism. Meanwhile, the Communist-Social Democrat government in Budapest did not form real workers’ councils. It relied on the old officers to run its army, and made the fundamental mistake of alienating the peasantry by failing to divide up the great estates which dominated the countryside. The regime collapsed after 133 days when the Social Democrats abandoned it, opening the door to a right wing dictatorship under Admiral Horthy.

The ferment in 1919 was not confined to the defeated empires. It affected the victors too, even if not usually to the same degree. The British and French armies were shaken by mutinies among troops forced to wait before returning home. The armies sent against the Russian Revolution were not immune to the unrest—British, French and US troops in Archangel refused to go into battle, while French forces had to be evacuated from Odessa and other Black Sea ports after staging a mutiny.
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At the same time there was a rising wave of industrial unrest in Britain itself. Engineering strikes at the beginning of the year led to bitter clashes with the police in Glasgow and to a near general strike, uniting Catholics and Protestants, in Belfast. There were police strikes in Liverpool and London. The government narrowly averted a miners’ strike by making promises it later broke, but it could not avoid a nine day shutdown of the railway network. The formation of a ‘triple alliance’ between the mining, transport and railway unions in January 1920 terrified the government. ‘The ministers…seem to have got the wind up to a most extraordinary extent,’ wrote the head of the cabinet secretariat.
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