Though he took issue with the extremist leaders of the Spartacists and other such agents of world revolution as Lewien, Eugen Levine, and Axelrod, though he repudiated the anarchistic ravings of the writer Erich Mühsam, and made at least verbal concessions to the separatist sentiments so widespread in Bavaria, none of these moves to the middle could improve his situation. At a socialist conference in Berne he was so impolitic that he spoke of German guilt for the outbreak of the war, and at once found himself the target of an organized campaign. There were loud cries for his elimination and dark threats to the effect that time was running out for him. A staggering electoral defeat shortly afterward forced him to resign. On February 21, as he was on his way to the Landtag to declare his resignation, he was shot in the back and killed by a twenty-two-year-old count, Anton von Arco-Valley.
It was a senseless, superfluous, and disastrous crime. Only a few hours later, during a memorial service for the victim, a radical leftist butcher and waiter named Alois Lindner forced his way into the Landtag and, firing wildly, shot down three persons, including a government minister. The horrified assemblage scattered in panic. But public opinion now took a great swing to the left. Coming so soon after the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the murder of Eisner appeared to be the act of reactionary conspirators bent on regaining their lost power. A state of emergency was imposed on Bavaria, and a general strike proclaimed. When part of the student body hailed Arco-Valley as a hero, the university was closed. Large numbers of hostages were taken, a rigorous censorship introduced, banks and public buildings occupied by Red Army men. Armored cars drove through the streets, swarming with soldiers who blared through bullhorns “Revenge for Eisner!”
For a month executive power was wielded by a Central Council (i.e., soviet) under Ernst Niekisch. Then a parliamentary government was formed. But at the beginning of April news came from Hungary that Bela Kun had seized power and proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here was evidence that revolution could succeed outside Russia. Once more the uneasy stability of Bavaria was shaken. A minority of radical leftist enthusiasts, without a mass basis and against the clear will, traditions, and feelings of the public, cried, “Germany is next!” and proclaimed a soviet republic. The poets Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam, in a decree all too revealing of their romanticism, unworldliness, and weakness as leaders, announced the transformation of the world “into a meadow full of flowers in which each man can pick his share.” Work, subordination, and legalistic thinking were to be abolished. The newspapers were to print poems by Hölderlin or Schiller on the front page alongside the latest revolutionary decrees. The government retreated to Bamberg; Ernst Niekisch and most of the ministers resigned; and the leaderless state was left to the muddled gospel of the poets, who soon found themselves supplanted by a group of hard-boiled professional revolutionaries. Chaos and terrorizing of the citizenry followed.
It was an experience that could not be forgotten. The arbitrary confiscations, the practice of seizing hostages, the curbs on the bourgeoisie, revolutionary whim, and increasing hunger accorded all too well with recent horror stories of the October Revolution in Russia and made so deep an imprint on the popular mind that the bloody atrocities committed by the units of the Reichswehr and Free Corps, which advanced on Munich at the beginning of May, faded into oblivion by contrast. The rightists murdered fifty released Russian prisoners of war near Puchheim, slaughtered a medical column of the soviet army near Starnberg, arrested twenty-one innocent members of a Catholic club in their Munich clubroom, took them to the jail on Karolinenplatz and shot them all down, likewise lined up and shot twelve innocent workmen from Perlach. In addition, there were the leaders of the soviet experiment who were beaten to death or shot: Kurt Eglhofer, Gustav Landauer, Eugen Levine. About these victims little was ever said. On the other hand, eight hostages—members of the conspiratorial radical rightist Thule Society—had been held in the cellar of the Luitpold Gymnasium. A minor functionary, reacting to the crimes of the rightist troops, had them liquidated. For years their memory was repeatedly invoked as an example of the horrors of the Red regime. Wherever the Reichswehr and Free Corps troops appeared, a contemporary diary notes, “the people wave cloths, applaud; everyone looks out the windows; the enthusiasm could not be greater…. Everyone is cheering.”2 Bavaria, the land of revolution, now became the land of counterrevolution.
For certain bourgeois groups the experiences of the early postwar months brought a new sense of confidence. For the short-lived revolution revealed the impotence and want of ideas of the German Left, which obviously had more revolutionary enthusiasm than revolutionary courage. The Left as represented by the Social Democrats had proved a force for order; but the leftists who attempted to introduce soviet rule in Bavaria proved to be visionaries who knew nothing about power and nothing about the people. During those months the bourgeoisie, or at any rate the calmer portion of it, for the first time realized that its fears were unjustified, that it could well hold its own beside the supposedly invincible but really naive German working class.
The army officers of middle rank, action-hungry captains and majors, led the way in infusing new spirit into the bourgeoisie. They had enjoyed the war like a wine and were still intoxicated. Although they had often faced superior forces, they did not feel themselves defeated. Called to the aid of the government, they had tamed rebels and refractory soldiers’ councils and crushed the Bavarian soviets. On the unsecured eastern border of Germany they had stood guard against the Poles and Czechs. Then, as they saw it, the Versailles Treaty cutting the army down to 100,000 men had cheated them of their future, reduced their social status, and disgraced their nation. A combination of self-assurance and haplessness sent them into politics. Many of them clung to the glorious freedom of the soldier’s life or hated to give up the profession of arms and the company of males. With their knowledge of organization and the planned application of violence, they now set about combatting the revolution—which had long since been destroyed by the nation’s fears and craving for order.
The private military bands that appeared everywhere soon transformed the country into a bivouac of brutish soldiery who wore the nimbus of political militancy and patriotism. Secure in the possession of machine guns, hand grenades, and cannon kept in an extensive network of secret arms depots, they profited by the impotence of the political institutions and claimed for themselves a considerable share of power—although the size of the share differed in the various regions. In Bavaria, in reaction to the traumatic experiences of the soviet period, they were able to pursue their ends almost unhindered. During the rule of the soviets, the Social Democratic government had called for “organizing the counterrevolution by all possible means.” With such official encouragement, the paramilitary movements sprang up alongside the Reichswehr, intertwined with it in various obscure ways. Colonel (later General) von Epp organized the free corps called the Einwohnerwehr (militia). There were also the Bund Oberland (Oberland League), the officers’ association Eiserne Faust (Iron Fist), the Escherich Organization, the Deutschvolkische Schutz-und Trutzbund (Defense and Defiance League of the German Race), the Verband Altreichsflagge (Flag of the Old Reich Association), the Bayreuth, Wurzburg, and Wolf Free Corps, and a variety of other organizations. Taken together, they represented an ambitious politico-military autonomous power averse to any return to normality.