Berlin

But Berlin caught up soon enough. On November 9 a general strike spread through the city, and thousands of workers paraded down Unter den Linden calling for a republic. The Brandenburg Gate was sheathed in red flags, while next door at the Hotel Adlon radical soldiers set up machine guns, as if to make short work of the plutocrats inside. Civilians accosted military officers in the streets and tore off their insignia of rank. Although the assailants looked to Kessler like “schoolboys,” their act of military iconoclasm was no trifle in the town that had produced the “Captain of Köpenick.”

Alarmed by these signs of rebellion, Max of Baden concluded that the only way to prevent a full-scale revolution—one like that in Russia, where an entire social order was collapsing—was to announce the kaiser’s abdication, even without the kaiser’s consent. This he did on the morning of November 9, after which he resigned himself and turned power over to Friedrich Ebert, head of the SPD.

Ebert, who had an emotional attachment to the monarchy, if not to the ruling monarch, would have liked to save the institution, perhaps by bringing on one of the kaiser’s sons. But it was too late for such an option. At midday Karl Liebknecht, who had been released from prison in October as a goodwill gesture on the part of the new government, appeared on a balcony of the Royal Palace and proclaimed the advent of a socialist republic. Among the crowd below was Princess Blücher, who captured the historic scene in her memoirs:

Out of the great gateway a rider dashed on horseback, waving . . . a red flag, and at the same moment one of the windows opened on to a balcony in front of the castle, and on the same spot where four and a half years ago the Kaiser made his great appeal to the enthusiastic people, Liebknecht appeared, shouting to the masses that they were now freed from the bondages of the past and that a new era of liberty was opening out before them. History repeats, or rather mimics herself, in a somewhat tasteless way at times.

To the SPD leaders, Liebknecht’s act was more than tasteless; it was a direct challenge to their as yet very tenuous grip on power, and it threatened indeed to move Berlin in the direction of Moscow. Determined to prevent a Spartakus takeover, Philipp Scheidemann, the second-ranking member of the SPD executive, ended a speech at the Reichstag by shouting: “The Hohenzollerns have abdicated. Long live the great German Republic!” Scheidemann knew that the first part of this statement was not true, or not true yet, but this was a minor detail when the future of the nation was at stake. What he could not have known was that his and Liebknecht’s proclamation of rival republics anticipated Germany’s formal division into democratic and communist republics thirty years later.

Soldiers returning from the front march through the Brandenburg Gate, December 1918

4

THE GREAT DISORDER

“Look at me!” blared the capital of the Reich. “I am Babel, the monster among cities! We had a formidable army; now we command the most riotously wicked night life. Don’t miss our matchless show, ladies and gentlemen! It’s Sodom and Gomorrah in a Prussian tempo. Don’t miss the circus of perversities! Our department store of assorted vices! Its phe-nom-e-nal! An all-out sale of brand new kinds of debauchery!

—Klaus Mann, The Turning Point