For all the antagonism toward Wilhelm II in Berlin, the revolutionary events that swept him from his throne and into exile began not in the capital but at the naval port at Kiel. In late October the admiral of the fleet stationed there ordered his ships to steam out on a suicidal mission against the British in order to salvage the honor of the German navy. The sailors quite sensibly mutinied. Then they formed a “Sailors’ Council,” which demanded an immediate end to the war and the abdication of the kaiser. It was somehow fitting that the first decisive actions against Wilhelm’s rule were taken in the navy, the branch he had been so keen to develop.
Inspired by the events at Kiel, Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils began sprouting up all over Germany. Munich in the south was a major flash point. There, on November 7, the venerable Wittelsbach ruling house fell victim to an uprising orchestrated by a USPD politician named Kurt Eisner. The fact that Eisner was a Jew from Berlin reinforced the conviction among conservative Bavarians that nothing but evil came from the Prussian capital. To a proud Berliner like Harry Kessler, it was a little disconcerting that his hometown was not, for the moment, on the cutting edge of German history. As he wrote in his diary on November 7: “The shape of the revolution is becoming clear; progressive encroachment, as by a patch of oil, by the mutinous sailors from the coast to the interior. Berlin is being isolated and will soon be only an island. It is the other way around from France: here the provinces are carrying revolution to the capital.”
But Berlin caught up soon enough. On November 9 a general strike spread through the city, and thousands of workers paraded down Unter den Linden calling for a republic. The Brandenburg Gate was sheathed in red flags, while next door at the Hotel Adlon radical soldiers set up machine guns, as if to make short work of the plutocrats inside. Civilians accosted military officers in the streets and tore off their insignia of rank. Although the assailants looked to Kessler like “schoolboys,” their act of military iconoclasm was no trifle in the town that had produced the “Captain of Köpenick.”
Alarmed by these signs of rebellion, Max of Baden concluded that the only way to prevent a full-scale revolution—one like that in Russia, where an entire social order was collapsing—was to announce the kaiser’s abdication, even without the kaiser’s consent. This he did on the morning of November 9, after which he resigned himself and turned power over to Friedrich Ebert, head of the SPD.
Ebert, who had an emotional attachment to the monarchy, if not to the ruling monarch, would have liked to save the institution, perhaps by bringing on one of the kaiser’s sons. But it was too late for such an option. At midday Karl Liebknecht, who had been released from prison in October as a goodwill gesture on the part of the new government, appeared on a balcony of the Royal Palace and proclaimed the advent of a socialist republic. Among the crowd below was Princess Blücher, who captured the historic scene in her memoirs:
Out of the great gateway a rider dashed on horseback, waving . . . a red flag, and at the same moment one of the windows opened on to a balcony in front of the castle, and on the same spot where four and a half years ago the Kaiser made his great appeal to the enthusiastic people, Liebknecht appeared, shouting to the masses that they were now freed from the bondages of the past and that a new era of liberty was opening out before them. History repeats, or rather mimics herself, in a somewhat tasteless way at times.
To the SPD leaders, Liebknecht’s act was more than tasteless; it was a direct challenge to their as yet very tenuous grip on power, and it threatened indeed to move Berlin in the direction of Moscow. Determined to prevent a Spartakus takeover, Philipp Scheidemann, the second-ranking member of the SPD executive, ended a speech at the Reichstag by shouting: “The Hohenzollerns have abdicated. Long live the great German Republic!” Scheidemann knew that the first part of this statement was not true, or not true yet, but this was a minor detail when the future of the nation was at stake. What he could not have known was that his and Liebknecht’s proclamation of rival republics anticipated Germany’s formal division into democratic and communist republics thirty years later.
Soldiers returning from the front march through the Brandenburg Gate, December 1918
4
THE GREAT DISORDER
“Look at me!” blared the capital of the Reich. “I am Babel, the monster among cities! We had a formidable army; now we command the most riotously wicked night life. Don’t miss our matchless show, ladies and gentlemen! It’s Sodom and Gomorrah in a Prussian tempo. Don’t miss the circus of perversities! Our department store of assorted vices! Its phe-nom-e-nal! An all-out sale of brand new kinds of debauchery!
—Klaus Mann, The Turning Point
WHAT REALLY MADE BERLIN extraordinary then was the extent— far greater than that of any other European capital—to which everything that happened there appeared as symptomatic of the crisis in modern civilization.” So wrote the British poet Stephen Spender in an article about Berlin in the so-called “Golden Twenties.” Spender was not alone in thinking of Weimar-era Berlin as crisis-central, a kind of laboratory of the apocalypse where modern Europeans tested the limits of their social and cultural traditions. People from all over the industrialized world flocked to Berlin to be part of this experiment, if only for a short while. Visitors found the German city to be open, brave, and honest, especially regarding sex. The erstwhile capital of Prussian militarism had become, in Wyndham Lewis’s phrase, “the Hauptstadt of vice.” According to a character in one of Spengler’s novels, The Temple, Berlin was a “city with no virgins. Not even the kittens and puppies [were] virgins.” But for the Berliners themselves, hosts to this enterprise both in the sense of sponsoring it and being devoured by it, the 1920s were not so much “golden” as red in tooth and claw.
This was especially true of the first years of the postwar decade, which were marked by coup attempts from left and right, devastating inflation, racially motivated riots, strikes, political assassinations, and a general dog-eat-dog rapaciousness. Looking back on this period from the vantage point of the somewhat more stable mid-1920s, the Berlin novelist W. E. Süskind could call it “an extraordinary time, when disorder seemed to be trump.”
Sheer Byzantine Conditions!
While much of the world celebrated the end of the war in November 1918, Berlin wallowed in misery. The armistice brought an end to the killing on the front but not to the suffering at home. The Allied blockade remained in place, ensuring continued shortages of food and fuel. Freezing and malnourished, Berliners perished in their thousands in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918/19. Over 1,700 died in a single day, their bodies piling up in the morgues. A band of soldiers returning to the city on December 11 was greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Friedrich Ebert, head of the provisional government, as heroes “unvanquished on the field of battle,” but they could hardly have felt like heroes when, as one of them complained, “there was little to buy, and what was available was bad.”
The political situation in the capital remained confused, to say the least. Ebert had titular power as head of the People’s Commissioners, but the Independent Socialists in his regime had their own ideas on how the nation should be run. So did another body, the National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, which convened in Berlin in mid-December and demanded full sovereignty for itself. A third faction, the Spartakus Union, which considered both the Councils and the Independents too tame, persisted in its dream of turning Berlin into another Moscow. The Spartacists had an unruly ally in the form of the People’s Naval Division, a motley band of about 3,000 mutinous sailors encamped in the Royal Palace, whose contents they were gleefully destroying or hawking in the streets. Among the items on sale was former Kaiser Wilhelm II’s correspondence with Queen Victoria. Berliners could be forgiven for wondering who ran the place.