Berlin

WHAT REALLY MADE BERLIN extraordinary then was the extent— far greater than that of any other European capital—to which everything that happened there appeared as symptomatic of the crisis in modern civilization.” So wrote the British poet Stephen Spender in an article about Berlin in the so-called “Golden Twenties.” Spender was not alone in thinking of Weimar-era Berlin as crisis-central, a kind of laboratory of the apocalypse where modern Europeans tested the limits of their social and cultural traditions. People from all over the industrialized world flocked to Berlin to be part of this experiment, if only for a short while. Visitors found the German city to be open, brave, and honest, especially regarding sex. The erstwhile capital of Prussian militarism had become, in Wyndham Lewis’s phrase, “the Hauptstadt of vice.” According to a character in one of Spengler’s novels, The Temple, Berlin was a “city with no virgins. Not even the kittens and puppies [were] virgins.” But for the Berliners themselves, hosts to this enterprise both in the sense of sponsoring it and being devoured by it, the 1920s were not so much “golden” as red in tooth and claw.

This was especially true of the first years of the postwar decade, which were marked by coup attempts from left and right, devastating inflation, racially motivated riots, strikes, political assassinations, and a general dog-eat-dog rapaciousness. Looking back on this period from the vantage point of the somewhat more stable mid-1920s, the Berlin novelist W. E. Süskind could call it “an extraordinary time, when disorder seemed to be trump.”

Sheer Byzantine Conditions!

While much of the world celebrated the end of the war in November 1918, Berlin wallowed in misery. The armistice brought an end to the killing on the front but not to the suffering at home. The Allied blockade remained in place, ensuring continued shortages of food and fuel. Freezing and malnourished, Berliners perished in their thousands in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918/19. Over 1,700 died in a single day, their bodies piling up in the morgues. A band of soldiers returning to the city on December 11 was greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Friedrich Ebert, head of the provisional government, as heroes “unvanquished on the field of battle,” but they could hardly have felt like heroes when, as one of them complained, “there was little to buy, and what was available was bad.”

The political situation in the capital remained confused, to say the least. Ebert had titular power as head of the People’s Commissioners, but the Independent Socialists in his regime had their own ideas on how the nation should be run. So did another body, the National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, which convened in Berlin in mid-December and demanded full sovereignty for itself. A third faction, the Spartakus Union, which considered both the Councils and the Independents too tame, persisted in its dream of turning Berlin into another Moscow. The Spartacists had an unruly ally in the form of the People’s Naval Division, a motley band of about 3,000 mutinous sailors encamped in the Royal Palace, whose contents they were gleefully destroying or hawking in the streets. Among the items on sale was former Kaiser Wilhelm II’s correspondence with Queen Victoria. Berliners could be forgiven for wondering who ran the place.

Anxious to reestablish a modicum of order, Ebert decided in late December to discipline the People’s Naval Division. He offered to pay the sailors 125,000 marks back pay if they would reduce the size of their force and vacate the palace in favor of the royal stables next door. They promised to consider this offer if Ebert would pay them another 80,000 marks as a “Christmas bonus.” When he balked, they invaded the Chancellery, ransacked several offices, and took Otto Wels, the civilian city commandant of Berlin, as a hostage. “What gives you the right to detain an official of the government?” asked one of Ebert’s men. “Our power,” was the sailors’ answer. In exchange for Wels’s release, the sailors demanded not only the 80,000 marks’ bonus but official recognition as the permanent garrison of Berlin.