The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (9 page)

By 9 November, the Kiel mutiny had spread to most of the country.

The sailors had set off for other parts of Germany, on the way successfully calling on local people to set up their own revolutionary councils. In Munich on 7 November, the revolutionary movement toppled its first crowned head. Before a crowd of some 60,000 assembled on the Theresienwiese, site of the modern Oktoberfest, the left socialist leader Kurt Eisner demanded an end to the war, an eight-hour working day and improved unemployment benefits, the creation of soldiers’ and workers’ councils, and the abdication of Ludwig III of Bavaria. The seventy-two-year-old king quickly disappeared into exile.

There was scarcely a town or city of any size in Germany, during these dramatic and, to many, exhilarating few days in November, where the old authorities had not been pushed aside and the local government assumed by revolutionary councils. The exception, curiously enough, was Berlin. All the same, on 8 November, the breakaway Independent Socialists (USPD), who had split from the main party because of its leadership’s continuing support for the war, had declared a general strike and day of demonstrations for Saturday 9 November. It was a direct challenge to Max of Baden’s government, which had banned all public gatherings.

Calls for the abolition of the monarchy were becoming louder by the hour. Prince Max, nervous that the capital would dissolve into what he viewed as anarchy, decided to take action. He summoned from its base south of Leipzig the 4th Rifle Regiment, which had fought against the Bolsheviks in German-occupied Russia and was seen as a particularly loyal pillar of the Prussian royal house. These reinforcements arrived on 8 November. Early on the following morning, 9 November, the regiment’s officers began to distribute grenades to their men, with the obvious intent of suppressing any demonstrations by force. But the riflemen, or at least the lower ranks, were not quite the obedient tools of the palace the Chancellor had believed them to be. Few, it turned out, were prepared to massacre their fellow Germans for the sake of . . . what?

To the astonishment of their superiors, the men of the 4th Rifles insisted on engaging them in discussion. Not satisfied with the officers’ answers, they voted to send a delegation to the Social Democratic Party requesting political clarity. They were duly addressed by the Social Democratic Reichstag Deputy and party central committee member Otto Wels, who in an eloquent speech appealed to them to take the side of the people and of his party. His appeal succeeded. So convinced were the riflemen that they voted to send an armed unit to the offices of
Vorwärts
(‘Forward’), the Social Democratic Party’s official newspaper, charged with protecting its production.

When it became clear to Prince Max that even such elite troops could not be relied on, he realised that the game was up. Having secured the Kaiser’s somewhat ambiguous assent to abdication over the telephone line from Spa, the Chancellor did not wait for a formal written announcement before releasing the news to the press.

Then, at around midday, Friedrich Ebert appeared in the Reich Chancellery with a delegation of Social Democrats. Prince Max admitted that without any loyal troops at his disposal he could no longer control the masses. The government should be in the hands of a man of the people. Would the Social Democratic leader take on the job of Chancellor? But first, could they settle the question of who was to be regent, acting on behalf of the putative child-emperor who would succeed if the Kaiser and Crown Prince gave up their rights?

That same morning,
Vorwärts
had published, apparently approvingly, a declaration announcing the formation of a regency. Now, however, Ebert told Prince Max that the survival of the monarchy could no longer be guaranteed. After some show of reluctance, he agreed to take on the chancellorship.

Ebert remained prepared to keep the monarchy, subject to a parliamentary decision on the form the post-war state should take. For now, though, the priority was to keep control of events, which meant going with the flow of the popular demonstrations. As Philipp Scheidemann, chair of the Social Democratic parliamentary party and, since October, an appointed State Secretary, effectively a minister in Prince Max’s government, had said some days earlier: ‘Now it’s a matter of putting ourselves at the head of the movement, or there’ll be anarchy in the Reich.’
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Ebert, and other of the moderate Social Democratic leaders, were not – or were no longer – radical firebrands. Even before the war, the march of the moderates had been a feature of the party’s progression, to a point where in the last elections before the war it had been supported by more than a third of the population, far beyond the loyal ranks of the industrial proletariat.

Tellingly, when on 7 November Ebert had pressed Prince Max for the Kaiser’s abdication and his replacement by a regency, his reasons had been far from revolutionary. According to Prince Max’s later account, as the two men walked around the autumnal setting of the Reich Chancellery’s garden, he told Ebert of a plan to travel, if necessary, to the Imperial Headquarters at Spa and persuade the Kaiser to abdicate in favour of regency by the Kaiser’s second son, Prince Eitel Friedrich. ‘If I succeed in persuading the Kaiser, then do I have you on my side in the fight against social revolution?’ the Prince asked Ebert. The Social Democrat leader did not hesitate in his answer: ‘If the Kaiser does not abdicate, then the social revolution is unavoidable. But I don’t want it, I hate it like sin.’
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In the end, Prince Max did not go to Spa. The wildfire of revolution was sweeping the country and threatening Berlin. The Chancellor could not leave the capital. Instead, the not strictly accurate announcement of the Kaiser’s abdication two days later followed an untidy sequence of long-distance phone calls.

So, at around noon on 9 November, Germany had no Kaiser, but technically remained a monarchy. For about an hour and a half, that is. For, while on 7 November it had been possible to discuss questions of monarchy or no monarchy as if these were debatable alternatives, events outside the Chancellery were well on their way to changing the country for ever.

While these conversations were going on in Prince Max’s office, vast crowds, numbering hundreds of thousands, had assembled in the heart of the city. Demonstrators surrounded the Reichstag and the parkland adjacent to it, pouring over into Unter den Linden and from there to the nearby Berlin
Stadtschloss
(City Castle), the Kaiser’s official residence when he was in the capital. The masses as represented at that moment in the streets were calling with one voice for the end of the monarchy. By the time Friedrich Ebert accepted Prince Max’s offer of the chancellorship (with no monarch, no regent and no other kind of head of state to formally appoint Ebert, they had to simply ignore the rules and just do it), rumours were spreading throughout the government quarter that the crowds were to be addressed by various far-left figures. The speakers would include Karl Liebknecht, anti-war firebrand, veteran leftist leader and co-founder of the ultra-radical ‘Spartacist’ group (named after the slave rebellion in ancient Rome), who was well known for his support of the Bolshevik regime in Russia.

It was not Ebert who personally took control of the crucial moment, however. He had returned from his meeting with Prince Max and was having a meagre wartime lunch of potato soup in the restaurant of the Reichstag. Meanwhile, the crowds took the famous phrase carved two years earlier beneath the main pediment of the building,
Dem Deutschen Volke
(To the German People), seriously, and it was into the building that they swarmed to make their feelings clear.

It was now shortly before 2 p.m. A group of demonstrators entered the deputies’ restaurant. Ebert was urged by the intruders, who were Social Democrat party loyalists, to address the crowd. Liebknecht was planning to declare a socialist republic on Bolshevik lines, they said. The moderate left had to assert control of the situation. The newly minted Chancellor, not a natural orator, declined. However, also among the deputies having lunch was Philipp Scheidemann. At fifty-three, the former printer from Kassel was one of the main leaders of the party, chair of the parliamentary faction and vice-president of the Reichstag. An easily recognisable figure with his bald dome and goatee beard (strangely similar to that affected by the departing Kaiser), Scheidemann, unlike Ebert, was known as a rousing orator.

According to his memoirs, Scheidemann learned enough in the minutes that followed to convince him that the talk of a regency was no longer realistic. Clearly, if Scheidemann did not take immediate action, then someone else – someone with much more radical plans – would do so.

Leaving Ebert at the table, Scheidemann and some companions navigated their way through the Reichstag’s labyrinthine corridors until they reached a big window overlooking the front of the Reichstag, where many thousands of noisy demonstrators were gathered. Perched on the narrow balcony in front of the open window, Scheidemann addressed the crowd in an improvised oration that ended with the words:

The Kaiser has abdicated. He and his friends have disappeared, and the people have proved victorious on all fronts. Prince Max of Baden has transferred the office of Reich Chancellor to Deputy Ebert. Our friend will form a workers’ government to which all socialist parties will belong. The new government must not be impeded in its work for peace and its concern for work and bread. Workers and soldiers, be aware of the historic importance of this day: unheard-of things have occurred. Great work lies ahead of us, a task that cannot be shirked. Everything for the people! Everything through the people! Nothing can be permitted to happen that brings the workers’ movement into disrepute. Be united, loyal and aware of your duty. That which is old and rotten, the monarchy, has collapsed. Long live the new! Long live the German republic!
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The speech might have sounded radical in tone. Except for Scheidemann’s historic, off-the-cuff proclamation of the Republic, however, it was nothing of the kind. Essentially, the routine socialist rhetorical devices aside, Scheidemann was telling the war-weary masses to knuckle down, stop revolting and get on with the disciplined work of saving Germany under the new, democratic regime.

When Scheidemann got back to the restaurant, a furious Ebert - ‘livid with fury’ by Scheidemann’s description
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- banged the table in outrage at his colleague’s presumption. The future form of the German state was something for a Constituent Assembly to decide! But it was, of course, too late for such niceties. There is little question that Scheidemann’s prompt action was, under the circumstances, correct.

It was not, in fact, until around four in the afternoon that the firebrand Karl Liebknecht addressed another crowd from another balcony – this time, in a piece of deliberate stage-setting, on an upper floor of the royal
Stadtschloss
– and made his call for a far more profoundly revolutionary change.

Liebknecht declared a ‘free socialist republic’, based on the soldiers’ and workers’ councils that had been established in the past few days. The new Soviet-style state would reach out to ‘our brothers throughout the world . . . and call on them to complete the task of world revolution’.
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After his speech, according to the American journalist Ben Hecht, the Spartacist leader went and lay down, in his underwear, on the bed in the Kaiser’s private chamber, where he caused the bedside table to collapse under the weight of his briefcase full of files.
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For all Liebknecht’s passion, and for all the enthusiasm of his supporters, his proclamation turned out be something of a damp squib. The overwhelming majority of the crowds that day in Berlin did not want a repeat of the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. There were big crowds around the so-called ‘government district’, but no truly transformational uprising occurred that day. Scheidemann’s unauthorised proclamation, and the news that Ebert, a Social Democrat, had assumed the chancellorship, were sufficient for most of the people thronging the streets, eager for change. Many Berliners recalled only too well that Lenin and his comrades’ seizure of power had been followed, in January 1918, by their violent dismissal of the freely elected parliament – the first in Russia’s history – and the rapid establishment of a one-party dictatorship. Certainly the likes of Scheidemann and Ebert were acutely aware of the danger of the quasi-tyranny of the old monarchy being replaced, as in Russia, by an absolute tyranny of the far left.

While all the speech-making was going on, one eyewitness – a businessman just trying to get to a meeting with his lawyer at his office on the Wilhelmsplatz – noticed this strange passivity and contrasted it with the potentially world-changing events taking place.

Young boys of sixteen and eighteen had opened fire at the war ministry with shotguns because no one would open the doors. There was said to have been answering fire from the windows. Pointless, infantile behaviour. Serious men are calling for calm, and commanding the shooting to stop. It is a real revolution, but strange – the great, world-changing thoughts and events, and these boys, children with red, hot faces contorted into unpleasant expressions, who look more like they are players in a game of cops and robbers than bearers of a revolutionary power that will move the world.

There is a complete lack of enthusiasm among the masses on the street. The public is standing curiously to one side, and being entertained by the commotion as if it were at the theatre. Motor vehicles roar past, and the well-dressed middle class people in the Leipziger Strasse humbly edge away to the side of the street.
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