The New Germany

by George Young

Before the war the life that filled the public places of Berlin was as vivid and vivacious as it was vulgar and vicious. Unter den Linden was like a scene in a second-rate revue; the company in one of the rococo restaurants was like the food, exuberant and cheap, but neither interesting nor choice. Nowhere were nouveaux riches so obviously new and so obtrusively rich. Everything was bright and loud, everyone looked overfed and over-dressed. Materially there was a sort of red-faced, raucous-voiced rotundity about Berlin. Morally it was in a decadence like that of the Second Empire at Paris when a charlatan despot and a cheap-jack Government were trying to dazzle the eyes and distract the ears of a half-deluded public.

But now, after four years' war, Berlin is like an Empire Exhibition that has been deserted and decaying through the storms of four winters. The stucco ornaments have fallen, the gilding is long gone, and the whole structure is rotting away.

Indeed, the first impression you get is that both city and people are dying of a decline. The people, like their houses, are dirty and dingy; everywhere crippled beggars and ruined or unroofed buildings show the direct effects of war. Clothes are threadbare, faces thin. Stalwart, straight-backed Americans, warmly clothed and well fed, stand out like solid shapes among shadows. As they stride through the streets you expect to see them pass through these grey, drifting figures as through ghosts.

Yet there is life still in Berlin, for men must be alive who can face death for a cause, whether it be for law or for liberty. But you must go further afield to find it than Unter den Linden where are haunting only ghosts of the past. We are hunting the genius of the future.

We shall be out all day on this hunt, and had better breakfast on bully beef and biscuit—a present from American friends—for black bread and substitutes are no foundation for a long walk; and of the vast transportation system of underground and overhead trains, electric trams, motor-buses, and taxis that used to carry over three million passengers daily, little indeed is now left. Moreover the wretched remains are to-day tied up by the general strike and street fighting. And so, avoiding the streets where sniping is in progress or barb-wire barricades threaten a search for arms and inspection for passes, we come to the General Assembly of Berlin Councils—that for the moment alone retains political control of the situation, since the Government took military command of it by the severest form of martial law and the general use of machine-guns.

Here we find a large music hall which before the war was a typical scene of flamboyant Berlin night-life. On this grey winter's morning it is crammed full of grimly earnest men—the delegates. On the stage is the Executive Council. The chairman the Independent, Richard Müller, is of the pastor or professor type—his colleague Däumig a heavily built, grey-haired man, might be an English engineer or merchant captain. On the left of the hall are the Communists, in the middle the Independents, and on the right the Social-Democrats, with a little knot of Democrats—the two latter parties supporters of the Government and opposers of the strike—but in a minority here. The business before the Assembly is the filling of the vacancies on the Executive Council left by the Communists who seceded from it when it declared the strike off, and the appointing of delegates to the National Congress of Councils which is to meet next month. But the Communists intend to force a discussion of the Government's policy as to the street fighting which is still going on at Lichtenberg, and the chairman has to concede this.

First come forward representatives of the Councils' Commissions delegated to investigate the stories of cruelties by the insurgents and to negotiate a cessation of hostilities between them and the government commanders. They give their reports in impartial and unimpassioned language, but indicate their impression that the military authorities they had to deal with were less concerned to restore order with as little loss of life and of time as possible, than to create the impression that the disorder was worse than it really was. They were exploiting a local "putsch" so as to carry out a general "pogrom."

The first speaker, Richard Müller, for the Independents, deplores the disorder, but denounces the Government for instructing its troops to shoot everyone found with arms, in reprisal for atrocities invented by its own secret service. The defence of the Government is undertaken by a Social-Democrat, who declares the Independents responsible for the disorders, amid stormy interruptions from the Communists. The chairman can hardly get him a hearing, and he leaves the stage, indignantly threatening that his party will secede unless it is better treated.

Next dashes on to the stage the Communist leader, who delivers an effective indictment of the Government's proceedings—at first interrupted by angry interjections from the Right. But as he develops the tragedy of what is going on outside, gives one name after another of comrades shot on no more than suspicion and describes the ring of howitzers firing into the crowded tenements of Lichtenberg, a silence falls over the meeting, and at last expressions of disapproval and dissociation come from supporters of the Government. For here is an Assembly that is alive enough, and though organised in parties, yet still open to the appeal of facts and to the force of arguments.

But suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, the speaker stops, leaps from the desk, and dashes off the stage at the back—while a confused uproar breaks out at the back of the hall, dominated by sharp military orders. The whole Assembly comes to its feet and faces about. The Left shout and shake fists at a row of steel-helmeted soldiers, with loaded rifles at the ready and a minatory machine-gun. The Right wave hands and shrug shoulders to assure the Left they are not accomplices. The platform proclaims that the proceedings will continue. A Democrat is put up to speak, but even his mind, conscious of right, and his courageous determination to express equal disapproval with the Left as to the entry of the troops are not enough to overcome the mesmerism of that machine-gun. The Assembly for the moment is reunited, but its vitality is gone.