Berlin

Because Berlin was perceived as corrupt and dangerous, Germany’s leading politicians decided not to hold their deliberations for a new constitution in the capital. Instead, the delegates met in the small city of Weimar, about 150 miles to the southwest in the province of Thuringia. Weimar, whose legacy of Goethe and Schiller seemed a welcome antidote to that of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, could be easily protected by government forces, ensuring that “the voice of the street” did not interrupt the proceedings. Voices from Berlin, however, did briefly disrupt the meeting: a group of Berliners calling themselves the Dadaist Central Committee of World Revolution burst into the hall and dropped leaflets saying, “We will blow Weimar up, Berlin is the place . . . Da . . . Da . . . Nobody and nothing will be spared.”

A month after opening their deliberations in Weimar, Germany’s constitutional framers felt vindicated in their decision to steer clear of Berlin because the capital erupted once again in political mayhem. On March 3 a coalition of Communists and Independents called a general strike in the city. This time the central figure in the upheaval was the new Communist boss, Leo Jogisches, a Polish-born intellectual and recent lover of Rosa Luxemburg. Like his martyred mistress, Jogisches hoped to engineer a proletarian triumph without excessive violence and bloodshed. But some of the other insurgents were not so fastidious. The People’s Naval Division abandoned its neutrality and laid siege to the police headquarters in Alexander-platz. Bands of young Communists ganged up on lone soldiers and policemen, beating and sometimes killing them. The Ebert-Scheidemann government (Ebert had been elected president by the constituent assembly, and he had chosen Scheide-mann as his chancellor) responded with as much force as it could muster. Defense Minister Noske was authorized to call in 42,000 troops armed with tanks, artillery, and flamethrowers.

If Berlin had evaded physical damage during the First World War, it certainly did not do so now, as the troops made ample use of their heavy weapons to smash Communist outposts. Reports of Communist atrocities prompted Noske to issue an order to execute anyone caught in possession of unauthorized weapons. Taking full advantage of this license to kill, troops of the Reinhard Freikorps and the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division ranged through the city rounding up suspected Communists and executing them on the spot. George Grosz, who identified with the Communist cause, managed to elude arrest by sleeping in a different flat each night. A band of soldiers gunned down twenty-four sailors whose only offense had been to demand their back pay. Especially bitter fighting took place in the proletarian quarter of Lichtenberg. The novelist Alfred Döblin, who was then working as a physician in that district, was appalled by the apparent indifference in wealthier parts of the city to the bloodshed in his neighborhood: “I was in Lichtenberg and witnessed the [Communist] putsch and the grisly, unspeakable tactics of the White troops in putting it down. But at the very moment that in our district houses were being demolished and men executed by the score, in other parts of the city people happily danced, there were balls and newspapers. Nobody protested the events in Lichten-berg; even Berlin’s thousands of workers kept quiet.”

The government’s efficiency in putting down the Communist uprising was evident in the final casualty tolls: Noske’s forces killed between 1,200 and 1,500 insurgents at a cost to themselves of 75 dead, 150 wounded, and 38 missing. Berlin’s central morgue became a very busy place, as relatives of the dead came to collect their loved ones. Käthe Kollwitz recalled the scene: “A dense crowd of people filing by the glass windows, behind which the naked bodies lie. Each has its clothing in a bundle lying upon the abdomen. On top is a number. I read up to number 244. Behind the glass windows lay some twenty or thirty dead.. .. Now and then some of the people waiting would be led out past me to the other room, and I heard loud wailing from that room. Oh, what a dismal, dismal place the morgue is.” Noske proclaimed “victory over the enemy at home” on March 12, 1919, but the victory simply papered over gaping social cracks. “In the northern and eastern parts of the city, seething hatred of the ‘West’ is said to be the preponderant mood,” observed Kessler on March 8. He might have said the same thing in 1929—or, for that matter, in 1995.