Most Berliners went about their business as best they could during those chaotic days. Streetcars continued to run, though they sometimes made unscheduled stops to wait out firefights. The city’s entertainment industry also continued to function, despite strikes by some performers and a lack of fuel to heat the halls of culture. As the theologian Ernst Troeltsch noted in his Spektator newspaper column in mid-January: “The life of the big city went on more or less as usual despite all the horrors. Musicians and actors advertised upcoming performances on every poster-pillar, the theaters were filled to capacity with bullet-dodging crowds—but above all people danced, wherever possible, and in total disregard of the lack of heat and light.” On January 14, amid signs that the radical upheaval was winding down, Kessler wrote:
Today the band of the Republican Defense Force stood playing Lohengrin among the splintered glass in the courtyard behind the badly battered main gate of Police Headquarters. A large crowd collected in the street, partly to see the damage and partly to hear Lohengrin. Nonetheless shooting continues. No spot in the whole city is safe from Spartacist roof-top snipers. This afternoon several shots whistled past me as I was on the Hallische Ufer.
Finally, on January 17, when all was over but the occasional sniper shot, Kessler offered this observation on the effects that the chaos had had on the massive city:
In the evening I went to a cabaret in the Bellevuestrasse. The sound of a shot cracked through the performance of a fiery Spanish dancer. Nobody took any notice. It underlined the slight impression that the revolution has made on metropolitan life. I only began to appreciate the Babylonian, unfathomably deep, primordial and titanic quality of Berlin when I saw how this historic, colossal event has caused no more than local ripples on the even more colossally eddying movement of Berlin existence. An elephant stabbed with a penknife shakes itself and strides on as if nothing has happened.
At the time Kessler penned these lines the two central figures in the insurrection, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were dead. They had been captured on January 15 by the Cavalry Guards Rifle Division and taken to the Guards’ headquarters at the Hotel Eden, near the zoo. There they were interrogated under the direction of Captain Waldemar Pabst, a brutal thug who went on to become a Nazi and then a prosperous arms dealer in West Germany. When Pabst was finished with Rosa and Karl he turned them over to his troopers, supposedly for transport to prison in Moabit. A soldier waited by a side door and clubbed them over the head with his rifle as they emerged from the hotel. They were then bundled into two cars. The one with Liebknecht drove to the nearby Tiergarten, where Liebknecht was shot “trying to escape.” Luxemburg, almost dead from her clubbing, was finished off in the car by a shot to the head, then pitched into the Landwehr Canal. Her killers later reported that she had been abducted by a mob and carried off to an unknown location. About four months later thirteen-year-old Felix Gilbert joined a small crowd on the bank of the canal and watched a body being fished from its murky waters. It was the barely recognizable corpse of Rosa Luxemburg.
No one was fooled by the official story concerning Luxemburg’s and Liebknecht’s end, and the brutal murders shocked even jaded Berlin. The left became more sharply divided, since the martyrs’ radical followers held Ebert and Noske responsible for the murders. This division in the leftist camp persisted throughout the Weimar Republic, making genuine cooperation impossible even when the challenge of Hitler presented itself. At the same time, the killings helped to make murder an acceptable way of doing political business in Berlin. As one commentator has written, a “direct line runs from these crimes to the murders of the Gestapo.”
On January 19, as the last of the red banners and revolutionary posters were cleared away from the city center, Berliners joined the rest of the country in voting for a national assembly that would bring representative government to the nascent republic. On the national level, the SPD emerged as the clear winner in the election, taking 37.9 percent of the vote, while the USDP carried only 7.6 percent. In Berlin, however, the Independents won 27.6 percent, while the SPD totaled 36.4 percent. As under the empire, at the dawn of the republican era the capital was considerably more “red” than most of the rest of the country.
The violence of the January insurrection hardened convictions in other parts of Germany that Berlin was an impossibly unruly place. In an article entitled “Der Geist von Berlin” (The Spirit of Berlin), a commentator for the Schdbische Merkur (Stuttgart) complained that the national capital was filled with “visionaries, dreamers, and adventurers” intent upon remaking Germany in their own image. “Germany, be on your guard! The spirit of Berlin is a demon.” He went on to protest that the typical Berliner, in his arrogance, believed that
his and the German horizon are one. But Berlin is not Germany. . . . We in southern Germany will not go along with it. We want to have a nation. But now Berlin has forfeited the right to be the capital of the nation and to represent us; it has shown itself unworthy of leading. We must draw a line between Berlin and ourselves, and leave it to its quarrels and its fate. . . . To the spirit of Berlin another must be opposed, the spirit of Germany!
The influential Bavarian writer Ludwig Thoma was even more vehement in his denunciation of the Spree city, which for him was the cause of all Germany’s problems. If the nation ever hoped to pull itself out of the mire, he said, it would have to look to Bavaria rather than to Berlin: “We in Bavaria know that Berlin is at fault for all of Germany’s misery. . . . Berlin is not German, in fact, it’s the opposite—it’s corrupted and polluted with galizisch [i.e., Jewish] filth. Every good man in Prussia knows today where to look for the root-stock of honest Germandom—in Bavaria. No Jew will confuse us on this score.”
Because Berlin was perceived as corrupt and dangerous, Germany’s leading politicians decided not to hold their deliberations for a new constitution in the capital. Instead, the delegates met in the small city of Weimar, about 150 miles to the southwest in the province of Thuringia. Weimar, whose legacy of Goethe and Schiller seemed a welcome antidote to that of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, could be easily protected by government forces, ensuring that “the voice of the street” did not interrupt the proceedings. Voices from Berlin, however, did briefly disrupt the meeting: a group of Berliners calling themselves the Dadaist Central Committee of World Revolution burst into the hall and dropped leaflets saying, “We will blow Weimar up, Berlin is the place . . . Da . . . Da . . . Nobody and nothing will be spared.”
A month after opening their deliberations in Weimar, Germany’s constitutional framers felt vindicated in their decision to steer clear of Berlin because the capital erupted once again in political mayhem. On March 3 a coalition of Communists and Independents called a general strike in the city. This time the central figure in the upheaval was the new Communist boss, Leo Jogisches, a Polish-born intellectual and recent lover of Rosa Luxemburg. Like his martyred mistress, Jogisches hoped to engineer a proletarian triumph without excessive violence and bloodshed. But some of the other insurgents were not so fastidious. The People’s Naval Division abandoned its neutrality and laid siege to the police headquarters in Alexander-platz. Bands of young Communists ganged up on lone soldiers and policemen, beating and sometimes killing them. The Ebert-Scheidemann government (Ebert had been elected president by the constituent assembly, and he had chosen Scheide-mann as his chancellor) responded with as much force as it could muster. Defense Minister Noske was authorized to call in 42,000 troops armed with tanks, artillery, and flamethrowers.