Berlin

Revolutionaries man a machine gun atop the Brandenburg Gate, January 1919

Over the course of the next few days bands of radicals seized the capital’s main railway stations and newspaper offices, including Vorwärts. A red flag appeared atop the Brandenburg Gate, which was occupied by militants taking potshots at people on Unter den Linden. The leftist upheaval, however, was poorly organized; the insurgents failed to take over key government offices, supply depots, and the streetcar system. Nor did the action have the support of all the leading figures on the left. Rosa Luxemburg opposed the uprising as premature. Many of those who joined in the strikes and demonstrations had no clear view of what they wanted, save for food and jobs. Liebknecht was not Lenin, and Berlin was not Moscow, despite all the revolutionary rhetoric.

Noske and his allies in the military, on the other hand, knew precisely what they wanted: to bring “order” to Berlin by smashing the Spartacist upheaval and cutting down its leadership. From his headquarters in a girls’ boarding school in Dahlem, Noske, assisted by General Walther von Lüttwitz, military commandant of Berlin, orchestrated assaults on the primary Spartacist outposts. Government forces quickly blasted their way into the Vorwärts

building and, after accepting the surrender of its occupants, summarily executed a number of prisoners. A similar scenario unfolded at the police barracks in Alexanderplatz, where Noske’s men killed defenders who were trying to surrender. The People’s Naval Division, which earlier had been rescued from possible slaughter by the intervention of proletarian Berliners, proclaimed its neutrality and remained safely bunkered down in the Marstall throughout the duration of “Spartakus Week.”

Most Berliners went about their business as best they could during those chaotic days. Streetcars continued to run, though they sometimes made unscheduled stops to wait out firefights. The city’s entertainment industry also continued to function, despite strikes by some performers and a lack of fuel to heat the halls of culture. As the theologian Ernst Troeltsch noted in his Spektator newspaper column in mid-January: “The life of the big city went on more or less as usual despite all the horrors. Musicians and actors advertised upcoming performances on every poster-pillar, the theaters were filled to capacity with bullet-dodging crowds—but above all people

danced, wherever possible, and in total disregard of the lack of heat and light.” On January 14, amid signs that the radical upheaval was winding down, Kessler wrote:

Today the band of the Republican Defense Force stood playing Lohengrin

among the splintered glass in the courtyard behind the badly battered main gate of Police Headquarters. A large crowd collected in the street, partly to see the damage and partly to hear Lohengrin. Nonetheless shooting continues. No spot in the whole city is safe from Spartacist roof-top snipers. This afternoon several shots whistled past me as I was on the Hallische Ufer.

Finally, on January 17, when all was over but the occasional sniper shot, Kessler offered this observation on the effects that the chaos had had on the massive city:

In the evening I went to a cabaret in the Bellevuestrasse. The sound of a shot cracked through the performance of a fiery Spanish dancer. Nobody took any notice. It underlined the slight impression that the revolution has made on metropolitan life. I only began to appreciate the Babylonian, unfathomably deep, primordial and titanic quality of Berlin when I saw how this historic, colossal event has caused no more than local ripples on the even more colossally eddying movement of Berlin existence. An elephant stabbed with a penknife shakes itself and strides on as if nothing has happened.