The New Germany

by George Young

Next day we extract the following from the advertisement sheet of our daily paper:—

"Reinhard Brigade. Mine-Throwers."

"Officers, non-commissioned officers and men with mine-thrower training urgently required. Comrades! Consider the crisis! Come and help! Spartacus must be crushed with every weapon. Report to the Brigade Reinhard, at the New Criminal Court, Turmerstrasse 91."

"Obituary."

"On the 12th March, innocent victims of these troubled times, through the destruction of my house by a mine-thrower, my little Adolf and Bertha, aged 12 and 8 years."

The behaviour of the Government can only be explained by their having left the whole matter to Noske, who, in turn, left it to his military advisers, Majors Gilsa, Pabst, and Hammerstein, who again were agents only of the militarist reactionary faction. This faction intended to exploit the crisis by killing two birds with one stone—the anti-Bolshevists at Paris and the pro-Bolshevists at Berlin. Their policy was to make an excuse for raising a large professional army with which to suppress the revolution and, if the gods were kind, to restore Germany's ancient régime and its racial frontiers. For this purpose atrocities were invented as a pretext for reprisals and for recruiting and raising the pay of the Frei-Corps. The Government could have kept order of a sort through the revolutionary corps if it had kept in touch with the revolutionary councils; but it fought the corps with flying columns of under-trained over-armed boys, and it fought the councils with its patched-up majority of old parliamentary hands and party hacks.

In the resultant civil war that raged, and still rages, all over Germany one may distinguish certain combats more decisive than the others. There were the conflicts in Berlin—of December against the Marine Division, of January against the Spartacists, and of March against the Republican Guard and other corps. In the provinces, the expeditions against Bremen, Halle, Brunswick, and Munich. I saw nothing of the first of these, but something of the fall of the revolutionary movements of Halle, Brunswick, and Munich. And with each of these failures ended some distinctive element of the German revolution. With each of these failures the German revolution took a fresh impetus and a more extreme form.

The trouble at Bremen was merely a collision between the centre of the renascent reaction at Berlin and the original source of the revolution among the soldiers and sailors of the seaboard towns. The revolution first broke out at Bremen and was spread from there by parties of sailors who established themselves in the leading towns of the interior, including Berlin; and wherever they settled they became the "Red Guard" of the revolution. Bremen was therefore not only the Bethlehem of the new gospel, but was also the key position to the control of the coast. And this control was indispensable to the Government, which was negotiating with the Allies for the importation of foodstuffs in mitigation of the blockade. For the revolutionary extremists, recognising that the blockade was breeding revolt, kept throwing every difficulty in the way of importing food. They first refused to allow the German steamers to sail under the agreement, and then refused to allow foodstuffs to be unloaded. The Government were thus forced, probably not unwillingly, into military action against the revolution in the interests of famine relief. When Gerstenberg's flying column occupied Bremen in February with little serious fighting, the revolutionary policy of barring off Germany from the conservative West and turning it towards the Council government of Russia finally failed. The desperate plan of strangling and starving Germany into revolution was defeated by the German middle class, who preferred, even at the cost of immediate civil war, to go into economic slavery to France and England rather than to go into political outlawry with Russia. The fall of Bremen really finished all immediate chances of Russian "Bolshevism" in Germany.

The Halle affair in March was a less crucial business, though critical enough for a time. The Saxon towns had been in a state of economic unrest that increased as the impotence of the Weimar Assembly became more obvious. Thus the smaller towns in the immediate neighbourhood of Weimar, like Erfurt and Jena, became outposts of revolution, permanently menacing the deliberations of the Assembly in the classic groves of the Ilm. Small bands of revolutionaries even penetrated Weimar itself, until the roads and railways were barred. It was some weeks before the Saxon Frei-Corps of Jagers, under General Maerker, were strong enough to attempt expeditions against the smaller Thuringian towns. And the General himself had, in these early days, more than one narrow escape. His small force was still very weak in numbers and discipline when a general strike was declared at Halle, with the avowed political object of cutting communications between the Legislature at Weimar and the Administration at Berlin. Obviously, if Weimar could be seized, or even surrounded by the revolutionaries, the parliamentary system of government must collapse and a revolutionary Saxony would divide the Prussian bureaucrats from the South German burghers. This plan—if plan it was—and not merely a process of inchoate and unconscious forces, was defeated by the Maerker expedition to Halle; and those who are interested in the outside as well as the inside of political events may learn something of what the civil war in Germany was like in the following diary of my experiences with this expedition.

Friday Afternoon.—The green room of the Weimar Theatre—now the National Assembly—and the War Minister Noske on a sofa, a big beetle-browed, bullet-headed type of German, a Bismarck Mk. II., but evidently underfed and overstrained. On a chair a sharp-nosed intelligence officer, for War Ministers must be careful these days who they see and what they say. After some talk I ask leave to go with the Government troops who are to reopen the rail to Berlin by occupying Halle. The intelligence officer demurs, but Noske good humouredly agrees to my arguments, scribbles a word or two on the back of my card, and hurries off to catch the Berlin train. He will have to spend all night going round by Chemnitz and Dresden.