In the confusion and perplexity of those weeks, only the radical Left was capable of drafting a revolutionary program for the future. But it had neither a following nor, in Max Weber’s phrase, the spark of “Catilinarian energy.” On January 6, 1919, a crowd numbering tens of thousands of persons in a revolutionary mood gathered in the Siegesallee in Berlin and waited in vain until evening for some sign from the endlessly debating revolutionary committee. Finally, freezing, weary, and disappointed, the crowd dispersed. The gap between thought and deed was as insurmountable as ever. Nevertheless, the revolutionary Left, especially up to the assassination of its two outstanding leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, engaged in sufficiently violent struggles with counterrevolutionary soldiery to produce turmoil and internecine conflicts. What remained historically unsuccessful was not without its consequences.
For the bedeviled and directionless public soon blamed the battles and controversies of that period on the republic, which was only defending itself. Everything was equated with “the revolution,” and the political form that finally emerged from these troubled times was in the common mind obscurely connected with mutiny, defeat, national humiliation, street battles, chaos, and public disorder. Nothing so damaged the prospects of the republic as the fact that the public associated its very beginnings with a “dirty” revolution. Much of the population, including even the political moderates, remembered the inception of the republic with shame, sorrow, and disgust.
The terms of the Versailles peace treaty increased the resentment. The public statements of President Wilson had fostered the illusion that overthrow of the monarchy and the adoption of Western constitutional principles would soften the wrath of the victors and cause them to adopt a milder tone toward men who, after all, were only acting as executors of the legacy of a deceased regime. Many Germans also believed that the “order of world peace,” for which the discussions at Versailles were ostensibly laying the groundwork, excluded punishment, injustices, and any kind of coercion. This period of understandable but unrealistic hopes has been called “the dreamland of the Armistice period.” The country’s reaction at the beginning of May, 1919, when the peace terms were presented to it, was all the more dumfounded. There was a great outcry. The public consternation was expressed politically by the resignations of Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann and of Foreign Minister Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau.
One thing is certain: the victorious powers arranged the surrounding circumstances with deliberate desire to harass and insult the Germans. They had opened the peace conference on January 18, 1919, the anniversary of the day the German Empire had been proclaimed barely fifty years before; and they chose as the place for signing the treaty the same Hall of Mirrors in which that proclamation had been issued. Perhaps that could be borne with. But their choosing for the signing date June 28, the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo, stood in what was felt to be cynical contrast to the altruism of Wilsonian pledges.
In general, the psychological affronts rather than the material exactions were what produced the extraordinarily traumatic effects of the Treaty of Versailles, so that from Right to Left, running across all factions and parties, it produced a sense of unforgettable humiliation. The territorial demands, the requirements for compensation and reparations, which at first dominated public discussion, certainly did not have that “Carthaginian harshness” which was so much talked about. The terms in fact could stand comparison with the conditions Germany had imposed on Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and on Rumania in the Treaty of Bucharest. But certain clauses seemed intolerably insulting and soon figured in rightist agitation as the “disgrace” of Versailles. These were the clauses that struck at German honor: above all Article 228, which provided for the handing over of certain German officers for judgment by Allied military tribunals, and the celebrated Article 231, which placed sole moral guilt for the outbreak of the war upon Germany.
The contradictions and hypocrisies in the 440 articles of the treaty were all too evident. The victors assumed the pose of judges and insisted on the Germans’ confessing their sins, where in fact their interests were purely material. The pointless vengeful moralism was what awoke so much hatred and ridicule. Even in the Allied countries there was strong criticism of this hypocritical tone. The right of self-determination, for example, which in President Wilson’s proclamations had been raised to the height of a sacred principle, was quietly dropped whenever it might have worked to the advantage of the Germans. There was no question of the German remnant of the shattered Hapsburg monarchy becoming part of the Reich. Supranational states were destroyed and nationalism triumphantly confirmed; but, paradoxically, the League of Nations was created, whose essence was the denial of nationalism.
The treaty solved scarcely any of the problems that had led to the recent hostilities. Instead, it all but destroyed the sense of European solidarity and common tradition that had survived so long, despite the wars and angry passions of centuries. The new order imposed by the peace treaty diii little to restore this sense. For all intents and purposes, Germany remained excluded, seemingly forever, from the European community. This discrimination turned the Germans decisively against European co-operation. In challenging the victors, Hitler was able to build on this feeling. Actually, a large part of Hitler’s early successes in foreign affairs were gained by his posing as a firm adherent of Woodrow Wilson’s principles and the maxims posited by the Versailles Peace Treaty with regard to the self-determination of national and ethnic groups. “A terrible time is dawning for Europe,” wrote one clear-sighted observer on the day the peace treaty was ratified in Paris, “a sultriness before the storm which will probably end in an even more terrible explosion than the World War.”68
Within Germany, the bitterness over the terms of the peace treaty increased the resentment against the republic, for it had proved incapable of sparing the country the distresses and privations of this “shameful dictated peace.” How unwanted the republic really had been now became evident. It had been merely the product of embarrassment, chance, craving for peace, and weariness. Its impotence in domestic affairs had already lost it much credit. To this bad record was now added its weakness in foreign affairs. To a growing number of Germans the very term “republic” seemed synonymous with disgrace, dishonor, and powerlessness. The feeling persisted that the republic had been imposed on the Germans by deception and coercion, that it was something altogether alien to their nature. It is true that in spite of all its drawbacks it held a certain promise; but even in its few fortunate years it was “unable to arouse either the loyalty or the political imagination of the people.”69
These developments led to a surge of political consciousness. Large segments of the population, who previously had lived in a political limbo, abruptly and violently found themselves caught up in events that aroused in them political passions, hopes, and despairs.
Adolf Hitler, now some thirty years old, was seized by this general mood in the hospital at Pasewalk. A vague but furious sense of misfortune and betrayal swept over him. It brought him a step closer to politics, but his decision to go actively into politics, which in Mein Kampf is linked to the events of November, 1918, actually was made a year later, when he discovered his oratorical gifts. The overwhelming moment came to him in the haze of a small meeting; in a burst of rapture he suddenly saw a way out of a hopelessly blocked life and found that he had prospects for a future.