Berlin

Committed as it was to ending the war with nothing less than a resounding (and profitable) victory, the German government demanded ever greater sacrifices from the people. Copper was stripped from the roofs of buildings along the Kurfürsten-damm to be melted into shell casings. Citizens were urged to turn in pots and pans and used clothing. But the most dramatic symbol of the last-ditch campaign was a huge wooden statue of Field Marshal Hindenburg, which was wheeled out in front of the Reichstag. Patriots were encouraged to purchase nails at a mark apiece to hammer into the flanks of this “Iron Hindenburg.” Thousands of people followed the call, but their efforts did little more than turn the effigy into a giant pin cushion. The government also resorted to sending high school students door-to-door to sell war bonds. Felix Gilbert and some of his classmates had the misfortune to be dispatched to Berlin’s proletarian districts, where residents generally slammed their doors in the boys’ faces. In order not to appear lazy or unpatriotic, Gilbert and his friends shook down their own families for generous donations. This rather pathetic campaign was emblematic of Germany’s determination to finance the war by subscriptions, bonds, and other public debt instruments rather than by higher taxes. No social group would suffer more from this decision than the middle-class patriots who dutifully bought war bonds as a sign of their faith in a glorious future.

In November 1917 the Bolsheviks overthrew Russia’s provisional government, a development with far-reaching implications for Germany and Berlin. In the short run it benefited the hard-liners because of Lenin’s determination to pull Russia out of the war. A truce with Russia would allow Germany to shift men and material from the Eastern to the Western Front, possibly facilitating the long-sought breakthrough in that quarter. In Berlin Lenin’s coup was celebrated with the ringing of church bells. Yet the city’s radical leftists were also emboldened by the events in Russia, which they hoped to emulate at home. On November 19 the Berlin police reported that the local USPD “stands solidly on the side of Lenin.” The police were unsure, however, whether the radicals would choose openly to display their enthusiasm, since in their view most of the leftist leaders lacked “the courage to stage powerful demonstrations.”

This assessment proved incorrect. Animated by the growing frustration among Berlin’s working classes, the USPD called for a protest march from the proletarian suburbs to the government district on November 26. About 2,000 protesters, many of them women and children, descended on the city center. However, when they sought to march to Unter den Linden via Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, they were turned back by troops wielding sabers.

The government’s use of force further alienated the workers. On January 21 a police observer reported increasing talk among the lower classes about an impending upheaval, though he continued to believe that the USPD leadership was unwilling to risk a major test with the authorities. In fact, most of the party leaders hoped to avoid a violent confrontation, fearing that this would result in the group’s suppression. Instead of a general strike across the nation, which is what the Spartacists wanted, the USPD called for a demonstration strike among munitions workers centered in the national capital. On January 28 some 400,000 Berlin workers laid down their tools. The strikers issued a list of demands including a peace without annexations, an end to the Law of Siege, improvements in food distribution, and reform of the Prussian suffrage system. The SPD had not wanted the strike, but it felt obliged to go along with it for fear of totally losing control over the masses.

Enraged by this action, which Ludendorff considered nothing short of treason, the government immediately militarized the striking factories and arrested key strike leaders. One of them, Wilhelm Dittmann, a USPD Reichstag delegate, was sentenced to five years’ incarceration by a military court. Strikers with deferments from military service were summarily dispatched to the front, their identity papers stamped with “B-18” (for Berlin 1918) to ensure that they never got a deferment again. On the kaiser’s personal orders, a battalion of battle-hardened riflemen patrolled the streets. Such tough measures managed to break the strike movement within one week. The workers’ willingness to end their walkout without achieving their demands suggested that they were not (or not yet) truly revolutionary, their fiery rhetoric notwithstanding.