Witness to the German Revolution (3 page)

Reichsbank:
National Bank.

Rentenbank:
National Mortgage Bank, established October 1923, basing German assets on industrial and agricultural land rather than on gold (of which Germany had little).

Rentenmark:
Temporary currency (November 1923 to August 1924) replacing marks made worthless by inflation.

Stahlhelm:
Steel Helmet. An ex-servicemen's association which became a far right organization.

Thirty five million workers, on the right bank of the Rhine, are anxiously awaiting the “winter that kills poor people.” In less than two months the average cost of living in Germany has more than tripled, the prices of essential goods (shoes and clothes) have gone up five times. As from October 1 rents go up five times, the cost of postal communications three or four times (a letter abroad which today needs a six mark stamp will cost 20 marks), and the price of telephone calls, railway and tram tickets are going up at a preposterous rate. It has been announced that the price of bread will be quadrupled!

These are the facts. As for wages, the increases are always slow and inadequate, lagging far behind the rise of prices. The most fortunate wage earners have seen their wages doubled since the calamity of the mark. That means that in relation to food prices they have lost a good third, and in relation to the price of clothing more than two thirds…

And this is continuing, it comes on top of years of undernourishment, constant hardship, deep poverty for many. Our comrades Ludwig and A. Friedrich from
Die Rote Fahne
¹¹
have calculated that out of a total annual wage bill for working Germany
¹²
of between 100 and 120 billion
¹³
paper marks,
¹⁴
taxes of at least 40 billion are deducted, that is more than 40 percent. Our comrade Varga
¹⁵
has published figures based on scientific statistics drawn up by bourgeois experts showing that German workers are eating half as much bread and meat as they ate before the war. Hence the productivity of their labor is falling. And hence in the streets of Neukölln and Moabit
¹⁶
you see so many ashen young faces, bearing the marks of tuberculosis and hunger.

People have noted in Germany “the man with no shirt,” the worker who conceals the absence of garments behind a miserable shirt front. They have noticed the children with no shoes: in the working-class districts the great majority of children, even in wind and rain, go to school with bare feet and bare heads. This winter they won't go to school. A certain percentage will die of bronchitis… You've heard about those suffering from shell shock, the pathetic disabled ex-servicemen wearing the macabre ribbon of the Iron Cross,
¹⁷
who sell matches in the wealthy thoroughfares of Berlin and are insulted by the police. And the beggars who swarm round the approaches to cafés, shabby, humiliated, jeered at in this country of order where all the doors to respectable homes have an enamel
plate reading, “No beggars, hawkers or musicians.” These are the shocking but superficial aspects of an immense, incurable poverty.

There are others, more tragic, which you only see if you live in Germany. The countless prostitutes, at the doors to every café, in all the dark streets at night, in all the apartment buildings; and they're hunted down, cooped up, put on a register, and persecuted with methodical ferocity… The corruption of hungry minor civil servants who are willing to sell any imaginable export license to a cosmopolitan speculator for a piece of bread… The proletarianization of a whole working class made up of former petty bourgeois whose prosperity was once the pride and the strength of the nation… Speculation drives out trade, business becomes stock exchange gambling, credit is impossible, since the slightest article no longer has a fixed exchange value but is the object of frenetic outbidding. And the big stores get visibly more and more impoverished, week by week.—And the feasting, the feasting of the rich amid this social decay, every night lighting up the windows of the restaurants where you can dine modestly for 2,000 marks (more than a week's wages for a working woman in Berlin), while the American bars and the cafés with musicians are filled with revellers and expensive whores in fur coats, a rich harvest of assignations. Just as on decaying corpses you see flourishing hosts of enormous black and green flies, so on the corpse of German society you see swarming and also flourishing, a whole rabble of those fishing in troubled waters, of crooked capitalists, of organizers of trusts, of thieves, of international spies, from the Marquis de Lubersac
¹⁸
to Stinnes and from Stinnes to the grocer from round the corner.

Such is Germany, comrade.

Of course all the misfortunes of capitalist Germany in decay fall only on the working classes. The others live ruthlessly—and consume greedily. There is plenty to be found in a shipwreck—so long as you are a good predator.

Now the German working class, whose growing poverty is exhausting its strength and killing its children, is—second only to the Russian working class—the one which in the last few years has done the most for the liberation of humanity. If it had not risen up in 1919, generously spilling its blood on all the public squares of its great cities, what foul reaction would now be ruling over capitalist Europe? What rival “national blocs” would be carving up the world in fraternal hatred?

On November 9, 1918, the German working class overthrew the rule of the Kaiser. In January the following year it courageously tried to make its social democratic government take the major industries into public ownership—in other words to commit central Europe to embarking on the socialist road. Workers' blood flowed in torrents. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg fell on the threshold of the future which had been postponed. In March 1919, a second rising, put down by the Socialist Noske, in the style of a Galliffet.
¹⁹
Jogisches was murdered. So much blood, so much blood! But in March 1920 the German working class broke the back of reaction, during the coup by von Kapp and his ruffians.
²⁰
Immediately afterwards SPD ministers had them shot at.
²¹
In March 1921, a third insurrection, deliberately provoked so it could be drowned in blood.
²²

Do we have to recall here some of the other great men and women who died in the German revolution—Leviné, Gustav Landauer, Sylt, Dorrenbach—or give numbers, which run into tens of thousands? Must we remember that hundreds of brave revolutionaries are every day walking in circles in the courtyards of German prisons, under the eyes of a warder from the old regime, who takes pleasure in bullying these defeated men? Must we remember the thinker Erich Mühsam,
²³
in prison—the poet Ernst Toller
²⁴
—in prison—the intractable Max Hoelz,
²⁵
imprisoned for life? We must certainly do so, although it is unjust to pick out a few individuals from so many brave men.

The living and the dead, fighters from three revolutionary years, prove what great potential for violence and sacrifice the German working class has. And they remind us of our duty towards it—that is, towards the revolution that is ripening within it.

Now here is the vital question:

Will this German working class, energetic and combative, with great revolutionary experience, whose wounds from the civil war have not yet healed, will it allow itself to be debased, weakened and exploited in times of famine and social disintegration, without reacting with all its strength?

What is certain is that the status quo in Germany—and in Austria, where the problem is exactly the same—
cannot last.
No conservative power has the ability to prevent the unfolding of events. There are three possible outcomes:

On the one hand, the German proletariat, contrary to everything that its past leads us to foresee, contrary to its vital interests, will, betrayed by the social democracy, remain generally passive, will work itself to death, undernourished, in order to produce badly. All we can glimpse at the end of this road is irreparable degeneration, the end of a race.—But isn't it absurd to admit that the most powerful proletariat in continental Europe could end up like this?

Or else reaction will break all resistance, will behead the revolutionary party, will tame—with a whip—the accommodating social democracy, and establish a dictatorship of hunters protected by a firing squad. And that would mean for some years the triumph of white terror in central Europe, with the consequence of perpetuating the victory of fascism in Italy, and in France the omnipotence of a military caste in the service of a handful of financiers.

Or else revolution.

Since German reaction could triumph only by beheading the revolution, in the two most likely hypotheses we are facing the German revolution.

And that, comrades, is what we must turn our minds to. Tomorrow, perhaps, red flags will be flying over Cologne; the orgesch
²⁶
of Germany, in cooperation with the black troops of the army occupying the Rhineland,
²⁷
will try to put down the fourth
rising of German socialist workers. What will you do, comrade, when that day comes?

Do you know that last February, during the magnificent general strike by German railway workers, the command of the occupying forces on the left bank of the Rhine intervened to stop the strike in the occupied regions?

Do you know that in April 1918 French troops “restored order” in Luxemborg?

Do you know that the reformists in Germany have no better counter-revolutionary argument than the threat of foreign intervention, French invasion and repression?

Do you know that as of now the occupied territory is treated as conquered territory; that newspapers considered to be subversive are suppressed (among other things, for publishing birth control information); that “suspect” inhabitants are driven out; that our publications are banned; that postal censorship is in operation; that a reactionary separatist movement is being deliberately encouraged by the occupiers so that when the time comes red Germany will be the victim of the same blow as was struck against Soviet Russia from white Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Georgia?

Do you know, comrade, and do the people you are in contact with know it?

When the barricades go up in Berlin, what will you do, knowing that the defeat of your German brothers will confirm, perhaps for another generation, your enslavement? When you are called up either to co-operate with their capitalist masters in making an exhausted people “pay,” or to put down their revolt, what will you do?

You must prepare yourself for these possibilities. One who knows what Germany is like at present has the duty to tell you. The fate of the whole European working class will depend on the struggles developing there.

Are you a Communist, a syndicalist or a libertarian? I haven't enquired, for in the face of the practical conclusions—or better to call them obligations—imposed by this situation, I don't think that your personal opinions are of any great importance.

On the day when the action starts, whatever your political alignment, you must support with all your strength the German Communists: because they will be, as they always were, the first to face the danger. To act yourself, you will need an organization that is strong, large, flexible, disciplined, and clearly aware of its aims and its methods. It's obvious that this is the condition necessary for victory. For you cannot hide from yourself the real strength of your enemies: the bourgeois state, the bourgeois army, bourgeois justice, the bourgeois press—all formidably organized for repression, and disciplined by centuries of religious and secular education backed up by frequent applications of the military law.

Build the strong revolutionary organization which tomorrow will enable the French proletariat to save the German revolution—that is the urgent great task to which you must contribute with all your strength, if you don't want to play into the hands of international reaction by your passivity or your incompetence!