A key figure in the rightist resurgence was Admiral von Tirpitz, who perhaps wanted to make up in belligerent bluster for the puny wartime performance of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, which, with the exception of the Battle of Jutland in 1916, had stayed bottled up in port, reluctant to challenge the British. Only the Kriegs-marine’s submarines had made a significant impact on the war by sinking an impressive number of enemy vessels. In February 1917 the decision was made to extend the submarine campaign against neutral shipping, especially American, in hopes of depriving Britain of the supplies it needed to continue the war. According to a police report, Berliners on the whole welcomed this step as the best means of bringing the conflict to a rapid end. The fact that it increased the likelihood of an American declaration of war did not diminish its attractiveness, for few Germans believed that America could make much of an impact before Britain was forced to surrender. However, once the United States had in fact entered the war, Berliners increasingly began to fear that this might be a “fateful” development, after all, which of course it proved to be.
While Berlin’s patriots celebrated the declaration of “unrestricted submarine warfare,” the city’s radical left was encouraged by the collapse of the czarist regime in Russia in spring 1917. In the eyes of the far left, the upheaval in Russia signaled the first crack in the edifice of world capitalism and imperialism. It also undercut the SPD’s justification of the war as a defense against czarist reaction. Writing from prison in April, Rosa Luxemburg argued that the events in Russia “faced the German proletariat with a vital question of honor.” The radicals, she said, had to step up their campaign against the war or be complicit in a conflict that was “no longer against Gzarism, but against the Russian revolution.” Russia had liberated itself from an authoritarian regime, she noted, “but who will liberate Germany from military dictatorship, from Junker reaction, from the imperialist slaughter?”
In mid-April 1917 a group of shop stewards from Berlin’s metal industry demanded that the German government inaugurate peace talks with the Russian provisional government. To put some muscle behind this demand, and to protest recent cuts in the bread ration, they organized a one-day strike in the city’s metalworking plants. According to a police report, some 148,903 workers laid down their tools, though fewer participated in the accompanying mass march mounted by the strike leaders.
Worried that the growing domestic discord might generate more far-reaching disruptions unless some movement was made toward ending the war, a group of moderates in the Reichstag, which heretofore had compliantly backed the government, launched a belated peace offensive in summer 1917. A Center Party representative, Matthias Erzberger, introduced a resolution calling for a compromise peace, without annexations or indemnities. The resolution carried the house but did not significantly affect the government’s policy. Germany was not a parliamentary democracy, and Ludendorff and Hindenburg could safely ignore the legislators’ appeal. The main result of this initiative was the dismissal of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, whom the generals blamed for not keeping the parliamentarians in line. He was replaced by Georg Michaelis, a Prussian civil servant who was not likely to cause the military any trouble. Upon taking office he said: “I do not consider a body like the German Reichstag a fit one to decide about peace and war on its own initiative during the war.”
The “Iron Hindenburg” statue on the Königsplatz
Committed as it was to ending the war with nothing less than a resounding (and profitable) victory, the German government demanded ever greater sacrifices from the people. Copper was stripped from the roofs of buildings along the Kurfürsten-damm to be melted into shell casings. Citizens were urged to turn in pots and pans and used clothing. But the most dramatic symbol of the last-ditch campaign was a huge wooden statue of Field Marshal Hindenburg, which was wheeled out in front of the Reichstag. Patriots were encouraged to purchase nails at a mark apiece to hammer into the flanks of this “Iron Hindenburg.” Thousands of people followed the call, but their efforts did little more than turn the effigy into a giant pin cushion. The government also resorted to sending high school students door-to-door to sell war bonds. Felix Gilbert and some of his classmates had the misfortune to be dispatched to Berlin’s proletarian districts, where residents generally slammed their doors in the boys’ faces. In order not to appear lazy or unpatriotic, Gilbert and his friends shook down their own families for generous donations. This rather pathetic campaign was emblematic of Germany’s determination to finance the war by subscriptions, bonds, and other public debt instruments rather than by higher taxes. No social group would suffer more from this decision than the middle-class patriots who dutifully bought war bonds as a sign of their faith in a glorious future.
In November 1917 the Bolsheviks overthrew Russia’s provisional government, a development with far-reaching implications for Germany and Berlin. In the short run it benefited the hard-liners because of Lenin’s determination to pull Russia out of the war. A truce with Russia would allow Germany to shift men and material from the Eastern to the Western Front, possibly facilitating the long-sought breakthrough in that quarter. In Berlin Lenin’s coup was celebrated with the ringing of church bells. Yet the city’s radical leftists were also emboldened by the events in Russia, which they hoped to emulate at home. On November 19 the Berlin police reported that the local USPD “stands solidly on the side of Lenin.” The police were unsure, however, whether the radicals would choose openly to display their enthusiasm, since in their view most of the leftist leaders lacked “the courage to stage powerful demonstrations.”
This assessment proved incorrect. Animated by the growing frustration among Berlin’s working classes, the USPD called for a protest march from the proletarian suburbs to the government district on November 26. About 2,000 protesters, many of them women and children, descended on the city center. However, when they sought to march to Unter den Linden via Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, they were turned back by troops wielding sabers.
The government’s use of force further alienated the workers. On January 21 a police observer reported increasing talk among the lower classes about an impending upheaval, though he continued to believe that the USPD leadership was unwilling to risk a major test with the authorities. In fact, most of the party leaders hoped to avoid a violent confrontation, fearing that this would result in the group’s suppression. Instead of a general strike across the nation, which is what the Spartacists wanted, the USPD called for a demonstration strike among munitions workers centered in the national capital. On January 28 some 400,000 Berlin workers laid down their tools. The strikers issued a list of demands including a peace without annexations, an end to the Law of Siege, improvements in food distribution, and reform of the Prussian suffrage system. The SPD had not wanted the strike, but it felt obliged to go along with it for fear of totally losing control over the masses.
Enraged by this action, which Ludendorff considered nothing short of treason, the government immediately militarized the striking factories and arrested key strike leaders. One of them, Wilhelm Dittmann, a USPD Reichstag delegate, was sentenced to five years’ incarceration by a military court. Strikers with deferments from military service were summarily dispatched to the front, their identity papers stamped with “B-18” (for Berlin 1918) to ensure that they never got a deferment again. On the kaiser’s personal orders, a battalion of battle-hardened riflemen patrolled the streets. Such tough measures managed to break the strike movement within one week. The workers’ willingness to end their walkout without achieving their demands suggested that they were not (or not yet) truly revolutionary, their fiery rhetoric notwithstanding.