Berlin

At the time Kessler penned these lines the two central figures in the insurrection, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were dead. They had been captured on January 15 by the Cavalry Guards Rifle Division and taken to the Guards’ headquarters at the Hotel Eden, near the zoo. There they were interrogated under the direction of Captain Waldemar Pabst, a brutal thug who went on to become a Nazi and then a prosperous arms dealer in West Germany. When Pabst was finished with Rosa and Karl he turned them over to his troopers, supposedly for transport to prison in Moabit. A soldier waited by a side door and clubbed them over the head with his rifle as they emerged from the hotel. They were then bundled into two cars. The one with Liebknecht drove to the nearby Tiergarten, where Liebknecht was shot “trying to escape.” Luxemburg, almost dead from her clubbing, was finished off in the car by a shot to the head, then pitched into the Landwehr Canal. Her killers later reported that she had been abducted by a mob and carried off to an unknown location. About four months later thirteen-year-old Felix Gilbert joined a small crowd on the bank of the canal and watched a body being fished from its murky waters. It was the barely recognizable corpse of Rosa Luxemburg.

No one was fooled by the official story concerning Luxemburg’s and Liebknecht’s end, and the brutal murders shocked even jaded Berlin. The left became more sharply divided, since the martyrs’ radical followers held Ebert and Noske responsible for the murders. This division in the leftist camp persisted throughout the Weimar Republic, making genuine cooperation impossible even when the challenge of Hitler presented itself. At the same time, the killings helped to make murder an acceptable way of doing political business in Berlin. As one commentator has written, a “direct line runs from these crimes to the murders of the Gestapo.”

On January 19, as the last of the red banners and revolutionary posters were cleared away from the city center, Berliners joined the rest of the country in voting for a national assembly that would bring representative government to the nascent republic. On the national level, the SPD emerged as the clear winner in the election, taking 37.9 percent of the vote, while the USDP carried only 7.6 percent. In Berlin, however, the Independents won 27.6 percent, while the SPD totaled 36.4 percent. As under the empire, at the dawn of the republican era the capital was considerably more “red” than most of the rest of the country.

The violence of the January insurrection hardened convictions in other parts of Germany that Berlin was an impossibly unruly place. In an article entitled “Der Geist von Berlin” (The Spirit of Berlin), a commentator for the Schdbische Merkur (Stuttgart) complained that the national capital was filled with “visionaries, dreamers, and adventurers” intent upon remaking Germany in their own image. “Germany, be on your guard! The spirit of Berlin is a demon.” He went on to protest that the typical Berliner, in his arrogance, believed that

his and the German horizon are one. But Berlin is not Germany. . . . We in southern Germany will not go along with it. We want to have a nation. But now Berlin has forfeited the right to be the capital of the nation and to represent us; it has shown itself unworthy of leading. We must draw a line between Berlin and ourselves, and leave it to its quarrels and its fate. . . . To the spirit of Berlin another must be opposed, the spirit of Germany!

The influential Bavarian writer Ludwig Thoma was even more vehement in his denunciation of the Spree city, which for him was the cause of all Germany’s problems. If the nation ever hoped to pull itself out of the mire, he said, it would have to look to Bavaria rather than to Berlin: “We in Bavaria know that Berlin is at fault for all of Germany’s misery. . . . Berlin is not German, in fact, it’s the opposite—it’s corrupted and polluted with galizisch [i.e., Jewish] filth. Every good man in Prussia knows today where to look for the root-stock of honest Germandom—in Bavaria. No Jew will confuse us on this score.”