Munich, to me the most lovely city in Germany, seemed the most prosperous of any I had visited. I noticed a difference immediately; the streets were cleaner, the people less hungry-looking. There was more food, more clothing in the shops, and much greater activity. It had always been synonymous in my mind with music and Liebfraumilch, and I was delighted to be asked to dine at a hotel which I was told was the smartest and gayest in town. “Oh, we envy you. You’ll have dancing, you’ll have wine, you’ll have everything.” But it turned out to be a night club in the most blatant New York style, one table elbowing another, the people—Germans, not tourists—dancing to last year’s jazz, the whole place shrieking nouveaux riches. This, too, was part of post-War life.
Bavarian Gemütlichkeit could not be altogether downed. On Saturdays the trams were literally jammed with men and women, young and old, who had put on their climbing clothes, donned their packs, and here hieing themselves away to near-by resorts or to the hills. With them went their guitars or accordions, and when the singing began everybody knew all the words—no tum-de-tum-de-tum. If they did not have their own instruments there was sure to be a wandering musician to play, and the floors of every hostelry or open-air Biergarten were literally filled with whirling, waltzing figures. Everyone seemed able to enter into the folk dances, although to me they appeared complicated—many steps, much precision, and a great deal of dignity.
Hunger and poverty existed in plenty, however, in the city. Hospitals were lacking in the simplest and most ordinary articles—no soap, no cod-liver oil, no rubber sheets, insufficient clean linen. Even the babies had to lie all day in wet diapers, and consequently the poor little waifs were a sad, miserable lot. Another tragic thing which gave me nightmare for weeks was to see children’s mouths covered with running sores, because the sole available meat and milk came from cattle suffering with hoof-and-mouth disease.
Here at Munich the “birth strike” was most violent. The former medical chief of the Communists told me the women of Bavaria were determined to stop having babies; he himself had given information to thousands and had intended to establish clinics all over the state had the Communist Republic remained in power.
Only the preceding spring the Communist red flag had for three weeks flown from the house tops of Munich. I met representatives from both sides of the political arena. The middle- and upper-class conservatives claimed the revolutionists had not been capable of managing affairs, being good agitators but not good organizers—able to start things but not knowing how to finish them. They had not given up their guns; money had been put aside and peasant costumes and boots were ready for escape, because the existing bitterness made it likely the struggle was not yet settled. Communist leaders, on the other hand, claimed they had allowed their enemies to flee and then had been tricked and fooled, and knew at last they could expect no quarter. Their ideals, their faith in humanity, their consideration, had cost them their lives and liberty, and they would not forget this valuable lesson.
At a meeting of the Communist Party I was introduced to Mrs. Erich Mühsam who, with her husband and their friend Landau, had gone to the front and distributed leaflets to call the boys back home. Landau, a gentle soul who so believed in the goodness of man that he had pleaded with the soldiers to be brothers and not to take life, had been kicked and clubbed to death by the White Guard, which had afterwards marched to the Mühsam apartment and, when they could not find anybody there, had wrecked it with machine guns. Fortunately for the Mühsams they were already in jail.
Though the Revolution was supposed to be over, Erich Mühsam was still imprisoned. In every country during such upheavals thousands are cast into jail and, unless some other upheaval occurs to get them out, they remain there; many pacifists in the United States were not freed until long after the Armistice.
In 1928 I saw Erich Mühsam—every inch a poet, an artistic and delicate organism, almost helpless-looking. In 1935, under Nazi rule, he was returned to a concentration camp—a hangover on the black list.
The account of his fellow prisoners ran something like this: One afternoon he had been told to “report at headquarters and bring a rope.”
“Where can I find a rope?”