The New Germany

by George Young

However, partly for the better preservation of party, power, and place, partly from the pressure of constant "officious" admonitions from us that peace would only be made with a parliamentary government, the German Government did their best to falsify the character of the Congress and get as many Majority Socialists into it as possible by hook or crook. The hook used was a new electoral arrangement prepared by the Central Council which most of the great towns rejected. In some, as in Breslau, the delegates first elected were recalled, and real workmen's representatives substituted. And when the Government found its lost sheep weren't coming home, like Bo-peep, it took its little crook, determined for to find them; and found them indeed, but with the historical result. For if by hook and by crook you make workmen's delegates of country lawyers or country magistrates you cannot expect them to bring much of a working-class tail behind them. So when the Council came together it was distinctly rather parliamentarian than proletarian in its character. But if the Government's object was to cripple and control the Congress it failed. Because the first result of their gerrymandering was that the Communists refused to take part, thereby greatly facilitating the subsequent rapprochement between the two Socialist factions, the Majority and the Independents.

The Congress, when it met, was found to consist of 130 Majority Socialists, 64 Independents, 20 soldiers' representatives, and about 80 miscellaneous and absent; and of these quite a large number were not working men at all. But all the same the difference between the atmosphere of Parliamentary and Council government at once appeared when it got to work. For this much gerrymandered and very jerry-built Congress showed itself capable of adapting itself to pressures in a way that the National Assembly could not. It showed itself to be a real deliberative body, capable of coming rapidly to a joint decision radically different from the several views subscribed by its individual members before its meeting. In other words, the Congress had vitality enough to make its constituents real representatives instead of merely instructed delegates. Its response to the general trend of opinion to the Left and against "Government by the Frei-Corps" was shown by its first vote which, by 199 to 81 called for the release of Ledebour, an Independent "intellectual" imprisoned for alleged complicity in the January disorders. This was followed by a vote of congratulation to Hungary; while a similar congratulation to Bavaria, where a "Council Republic" had just been proclaimed, was very properly postponed as prejudging the whole question of Council government that was before the Congress.

The first days were passed in general debate, during which much negotiation between section leaders and a general alignment of forces were going on in the lobbies. A fictitious interest was given to this work of "realising the revolution" by the Congress having met in the Herren-Haus, the old Prussian House of Lords, the shrine of reaction. It was piquant to see a fervent Majority Socialist and a fiery Independent discussing whether Parliament and universal suffrage were not irretrievably reactionary, under the cold marble nose of a Prussian Princelet who had looked on them as the ultimate Chaos and Dark Night of Revolution. But as will be seen, the genius loci, won in the latter end.

The Congress took some days in making up its mind what line to take. The Majority leaders did not know which way to turn, associating themselves when they could with attacks on the Government, and when they could not, apologising. For though the Independents on one side and the small Democratic section on the other were disciplined bodies, the Majoritarian bloc was disorganised. When it came to a vote they obeyed the whip, but many slipped out, and the vote was very different from what was expected.

The Government's advisers in politics and in the Press, finding that so far from bringing over the Independents to the Government the Congress was fast drawing the Majority into opposition, strongly recommended the Government to close the Congress on the ground that it was only wasting time in futile and inflammatory agitation. The Independents countered this by forcing an immediate issue on the main question—the constitutional recognition of the Council system.

The opening of the discussion showed that a majority of the Congress favoured a combination of Parliament and Councils in which the latter should have political as well as economic functions. Whether the Majoritarian leaders in the Congress were genuinely convinced of the necessity of giving the Council system recognition or whether they were forced to compromise in order to retain command of their followers, and through them control their following among the workmen, I do not know. Anyway, after a series of speeches, in which the Majoritarian leaders, Kalinsky and Cohn-Reuss, vied in concessions, a compromise was put forward that represented practically the position held by their opponents the Independents a few weeks before. The compromise between the Parliamentary system and Council system they proposed was probably workable; though arrived at from an unsound position—that of regarding the Central Council as a controlling authority over the National Assembly; whereas it would really be supplying the driving power and the Assembly the brake.

Now, although the Independents, for the same tactical reasons that had driven the Majoritarians to the Left, were now proclaiming the principle of "all power to the Councils" (which had been until then the position of the absent Communists) they were rather embarrassed at finding themselves "Bolshevists," explicitly demanding the dictatorship of the proletariat. The spring running of German politics to the Left had been so headlong that the parliamentarian leaders of the Left had had to sprint hard to keep ahead of their followers. But if they had kept one eye anxiously gauging the pace of the avalanche surging at their heels they had kept the other guessing no less anxiously at the position of the abyss of "Bolshevism" ahead. And small wonder if they were a little bewildered and out of breath. For as late as December they had been still accepting the Assembly as the sole executant of the revolution, and looking on the Councils as practically extinct and politically eccentric. By January they had been forced to accept the Councils as a fact that had to be fitted in somehow. In February their periodicals were full of schemes for giving economic powers to the Councils, while reserving all political power, national and provincial, to the Assemblies. By March they had recognised that they must have political power as well and by April they had reached the compromise of a bi-cameral constitution now adopted by their conservative opponents, the Majoritarians. And now, in order to clear the leftward road for the Majoritarians and keep pace with the Communists, old parliamentary hands, like Haase, Oscar Cohn and Breitscheidt, found themselves condemning their newly born and much beloved parliamentary democracy to be smothered in its cradle for the benefit of a Bolshevist changeling. No wonder they were ready to join forces with their Socialist comrades of the majority in a compromise which found a place for their firstborn the Weimar Parliament and for their familiar world of party politics.

Thus the Socialist parties, still hopelessly divided in that cold storage of faction, the Weimar Assembly, had been re-fused and re-moulded by the volcanic fires of the Congress.

One Sunday afternoon, after the Congress had been a week at work, I heard that the leaders of these two sections had that morning privately agreed to reconstitute the Central Council on a principle of parity, i.e., twelve Majoritarians and twelve Independents, with a few Democrats and soldiers.

This private agreement, unreported until after it had been repudiated, was a political event of an importance second only to the revolution itself. It reunited the Socialist party on a platform of realising the revolution through the Council system by constitutional action. The Congress of Councils, for whose dissolution the whole Press were clamouring openly and every secret sinister influence was conspiring, had in six days gone further towards the reconstruction and re-orientation of Germany than Weimar had in six months.