The putschists were in no way equipped to deal with resistance of this magnitude, and their problems were compounded by their own ineptitude. It took them two days just to find someone to type their manifesto announcing their seizure of power. Other paperwork was delayed because Ebert’s officials, in a brilliant act of sabotage, had taken away the rubber stamps necessary to the functioning of any German administration. Lacking money to pay the troops, Kapp ordered Ehrhardt to take the necessary funds from the State Treasury, but the latter refused on the grounds that he was “an officer, not a bank robber.” After four days Kapp issued a decree saying he had accomplished all his aims and decamped for Sweden, deeding his “authority” to Lütt-witz. The general had no opportunity to exercise his dubious powers because the military command, seeing that the putsch had failed, forced Lüttwitz to resign his command and called for the return of the legitimate government.
As Ebert and company prepared to reclaim Berlin, Ehrhardt’s disgruntled men began their march back to Döberitz. When a young boy mocked them near the Brandenburg Gate, several troopers broke ranks and clubbed him with their rifle butts. Someone in the crowd hissed, whereupon the soldiers fired point-blank into the mass, killing twelve and wounding thirty bystanders. (Ebert later granted the killers an amnesty and paid them the 16,000-mark bonus that Kapp had promised them for marching on Berlin.) Elsewhere in the city, battles between strikers and Freikorps units claimed several hundred casualties.
Although the Kappists had focused their action on the national capital, news of the putsch excited counterrevolutionaries across Germany, including Munich, where Adolf Hitler was working to build up the fledgling Nazi Party. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the putschists, Hitler, accompanied by one of his Munich backers, the racist publicist Dietrich Eckart, flew to Berlin. This was the future Führer’s first time aloft, and he was sick throughout the flight. As it turned out, the men landed in Berlin just as the putsch was collapsing and its leaders were fleeing. Disgruntled, they returned to Munich.
Visiting Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the Kapp Putsch, Edwin Embree, an American physician, was struck by how “orderly” the city seemed. Moreover, the food shortages, in his view, had produced some salutary effects. “No longer is the flowing belly and the swine-like neck the predominate feature of the Berliners,” he wrote in his diary. “With a diminution of their overfeeding has also come, happily enough, a sharp decline in suffering from cancer and appendicitis.” What Embree failed to notice was that Berlin’s dearly purchased “order” was highly tenuous and superficial.
Walpurgis Night
“[The Kapp Putsch] has thrown everything achieved so far into question,” wrote Ernst Troeltsch on March 23, 1920. So it had. One had to wonder about the loyalty of an army that had chosen to sit on the fence during the coup, and about the long-term viability of a political system that inspired so much hatred among its own citizens. The Kapp Putsch turned out to be the last of the violent postwar insurrections to ravage Berlin, but its failure hardly brought genuine tranquillity, for a new crisis in the form of extreme economic destabilization was fast taking shape.
In the period between 1919 and 1923 the German mark lost virtually all its value, first gradually, then with dizzying speed. With the collapse of the mark a whole way of life disintegrated; old virtues like thrift and saving became suicidal, and wild spending became a national obsession. As the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung put it in July 1923: “People throw themselves on the stores, buy what is there to buy. They hoard necessary and superfluous things. . . . Illogic, blind emotion, and panic rule the hour.” When the insanity had finally run its course in late 1923, millions of people were left destitute. For many Germans, the Great Inflation proved to be a catastrophe they could never overcome or forget. Like the internecine political wars of the immediate postwar era, the experience saddled the young republic and its beleaguered capital with a lasting trauma.
As if in anticipation of the mark’s dramatic inflation, Berlin itself inflated at the beginning of the Weimar period. On October 1, 1920, a law combining Old Berlin with its principal suburbs greatly expanded the city’s population and area. With the incorporation of eight formerly independent towns—Charlottenburg, Köpenick, Lichtenberg, Neukolln, Pankow, Schöneberg, Spandau, and Wilmersdorf—along with fifty-nine rural communities and twenty-seven estates, Berlin jumped in population to 3,858,000, thereby becoming the third largest city in Europe. In area it increased thirteenfold. Its 878 square kilometers, which embraced lakes and forests in addition to built-up sections, made it the roomiest European city. The municipal officials who engineered this expansion, which had become possible only because of the defeat of the imperial order, were proud of “Greater Berlin’s” new status, but many residents of the wealthier boroughs were not at all pleased to be thrown in the same pot with the worker- and immigrant-dominated districts of Old Berlin.
Berlin had always been a difficult city to govern and it became even more so with the expansion, since the various boroughs had considerable autonomy and the city parliament was too fragmented to function effectively. The SPD and USPD controlled the largest number of seats in the city parliament but had to form coalitions with the moderate middle-class parties to achieve governing majorities, which produced endless wrangling. From 1921 to 1930 the lord mayor was Gustav Böss of the Democratic Party. He was a competent administrator and a generous patron of the arts, but the powers of his office were too limited to allow him to exercise much control over the contending factions.
Gustav Böss, governing mayor of Berlin, 1921–1930
By the time Böss was sworn in as mayor, Berlin was already in economic trouble. Municipal budgets were under increasing strain because local officials had repeatedly given wage hikes to city employees even though tax revenues were down. Another source of financial hemorrhage was unemployment relief, which escalated as thousands of outsiders streamed into the city looking for work. Finding itself strapped for cash, Berlin took out short-term loans with foreign banks payable in foreign currency. Just to service these loans the city had to secure new loans at increasingly unfavorable rates.
In February 1920 the mark stood at 99.11 to the dollar; in November 1921 it stood at 262.96. The Allies accused the German government of willfully pushing the mark down in order to gain concessions in reparations payments, a charge the Germans vehemently denied. The government’s deficit spending, mirroring Berlin’s on a grander scale, undoubtedly contributed to the inflationary spiral, but the heart of the problem was that the German people increasingly took flight from their own currency either by selling marks abroad or by buying up material goods in anticipation of further depreciation, which of course made such depreciation inevitable.
The mark’s uneven slide in the first three years after the war was certainly unsettling, but things got much worse between mid-1922 and November 1923 during the so-called hyperinflation, a currency crash the likes of which the modern world had never seen. At this point Germany’s inflation escaped all rhyme or reason, growing like some rampant cancer or jungle-fungus, consuming the body politic.