“World Revolution” or “National Government” in Germany? The crisis year of 1923
Chapter 2 Section 5
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This below is Chapter 2 Section 5:
“World Revolution” or “National Government” in Germany? The crisis year of 1923
The defeat of the German Reich in the World War was not completed with the request for an armistice and the acceptance of the Versailles Peace. It was renewed twice more through attempts to resist further demands or measures by the opponents: in 1921, when the Fehrenbach government broke off negotiations after the first fixing of an outrageous amount of reparation and the Allies then forced the Wirth government to accept their ultimatum; and in 1923, when the French and Belgians occupied the Ruhr area with a justification that was little more than a pretext and thus began something like a war in peace. The decidedly bourgeois government of the Hamburg industrialist Cuno was in office in Berlin, although a sharp jolt to the left had passed across the country twice: after August 1921, because of the assassination of Erzberger; and after June 24, 1922 as a result of the assassination of Rathenau. Nevertheless, the Cuno government felt that it was strong enough to call for “passive resistance” and to appeal to the “national community.” In substance, this meant a general strike sanctioned and paid for by the state, which the French and Belgians, who now hardly received any coal deliveries, tried to counter with an host of coercive measures. The communists, however, called for the beating of Poincaré on the Ruhr and Cuno on the Spree. They thus excluded themselves from the national community as the Spartacus League had done during the World War, and again demanded a castle-war to replace the castle-peace [translator: i.e. calling for a civil war]. As early as April and May, they were able to take the lead in many places, not just in the Ruhr, in “wage movements, strikes, hunger demonstrations, looting of stores, food requisitions by urban workers in the countryside,” as Clara Zetkin later told the participants in the 5th World Congress of the Comintern in June/July of 1924. As inflation—caused primarily by extraordinary government spending but boosted by stock market maneuvers by German entrepreneurs and speculators—was spreading ever further and faster, and as separatist tendencies were emerging, the Communists believed the situation was revolutionary, and with great energy they began to prepare for civil war. This was also reported on with great frankness at the 5th Congress: “We organized combat cadres, we set up schools in the form of red officers to train our comrades with military skills, we formed partisan groups, special commissions for railroad workers, we went to organize for the first time an Intelligence service ... which had as its task counter-espionage, spy detection, etc…” In fact, a so-called M (military) and an N (intelligence) apparatus was set up on behalf of the Comintern, as well as a special military-political (MP) Organization launched as a cadre organization for a Red Army. A Soviet general became MP national leader, and Germany was divided into six MP upper districts, headed by Soviet generals as advisors in addition to the German officers. At the same time a terror (T) apparatus was created to eliminate informers and organize individual attacks in preparation for mass terror.
However, the communists were not the only ones who acted in a violent manner or prepared for military conflict. Sabotage squads of former Freikorps fighters went over to active resistance in the Ruhr area, and in Bavaria numerous national associations, among them the SA of the NSDAP, prepared for the civil war. In May, the French sentenced to death one of the men who had blown up bridges, former Baltic fighter Albert Leo Schlageter, and shot him near Düsseldorf despite vehement German protests. The unmistakable strength of the Right now prompted the communists to supplement their preparations with a new kind of political line, the so-called Schlageter course. On June 20, 1923, Karl Radek gave his famous speech “Leo Schlageter, the wanderer into nowhere” in Moscow, with which he tried to convince the activist Right that they must take the side of the fighting workers if they really wanted to initiate national liberation along the lines of Gneisenau and Scharnhorst [translator: Prussian generals during the War of Liberation against Napoleon]. Only when the cause of the people is made the cause of the nation can the cause of the nation become the cause of the people, because only then would that iron phalanx of intellectuals and manual laborers arise, which belong in the camp of labor and not in the camp of capital . Throughout the summer, communists and representatives of the national Right then discussed with each other, and Radek put forward extremely interesting theses such as the following: “…if the German working class will not be able to convince the great petty-bourgeois masses of this belief (in overcoming of hardship together as the only way out), it will be defeated or at least have to postpone its victory for a long time.” Radek named the “workers’ government” as the correct method, which would include left-wing socialists as well as communists and would win above all the sympathy of those petty-bourgeois masses, because it would “courageously prepare also, if necessary, the armed struggle against the Versailles bailiffs.” Even towards the actual fascists, the followers of Hitler and Ludendorff, Radek showed a certain respect: while the communists were approaching the conquest of the majority of the most active arbiters in Germany by constantly holding countless meetings, the Social Democrats were deathly quiet, and active force of counter-revolution was now among the fascists.
Here and there, in the context of the Schlageter course, there were even outright offers of alliance. Ruth Fischer, one of the main representative of the left in the party, is said to have said to students on July 25, 1923 in the auditorium of the Dorotheenstädtisches Gymnasium: “Anyone who calls against Jewish capital is already a class fighter, even if he doesn't know it…That’s right! Trample down the Jewish capitalists, hang them on the lamppost, tread on them. But, gentlemen, what is your position on the big capitalists, Stinnes and Klöckner?” It may be that the reporter Franz Pfemfert allowed poetic license in his rendering of the expressions, but there are enough comparable statements both in 1923 and later, to justify the claim that in unguarded moments many communists would have considered National Socialist anti-Semitism welcome, insofar as it applied to bourgeois Jews, as an early and minor form of the actual communist intention of extermination.
But on the whole there can be no doubt that the Communist Party of Germany did not simply want to neutralize the actual fascists, the followers of Hitler and Ludendorff, but rather to exterminate them, although Radek, like Hitler and Ludendorff, saw Germany “in the deepest impotence and humiliation” and declared “pacifist phrases in the mouths of the representatives of a subjugated and dismembered people” to be “cowardice or a lie” which all healthy instincts of the people would have to revolt against. Thus, on July 12, the party leadership demanded that every fifth fascist be put up against the wall if the fascists wanted to shoot every tenth striking worker, and in April the Rote Fahne published the long report of a communist who had fled to Russia, which made it clear that the impending revolution was not viewed as a mere internal German event: “the Russian bourgeoisie in its hour of death” also tried with exactly the same means as the German bourgeoisie is doing today, namely with a nationalistic appeal to the proletariat to extend their lives for a reprieve. In conversation with the commander-in-chief of the Western Front, Comrade Tukhachevsky, the reporter, as the representative of the headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany, had convinced himself that the Red Army was enthusiastically ready to come to the aid of the German proletariat and that there were no obstacles whatsoever for it in doing so: “The Russian army will trample like a stalk the Polish rampart that would separate it from the German proletariat in the hour of destiny.”
The Communist Party achieved its greatest success when the mass strikes and demonstrations it led forced the resignation of the Cuno government on August 12. It seems that Gustav Stresemann, who succeeded him with the help of the Social Democrats, saw himself as the last card in a situation that could shortly bring about a revolutionary overthrow and thus the disintegration of the German Reich. But precisely because the Social Democrats were so heavily involved in the government, the resolute Right around the German Nationalists sought a more energetic government of the national dictatorship.
Thus three preparatory strands ran side by side. Stresemann broke off the passive resistance, which in the meantime had completely shattered the German currency on September 26th, and created great and general hope with the announcement of new and stable money. The German Nationalists put their trust in General von Seeckt, counted on Bavaria of the State Commissioner General von Kahr, or drafted plans for the National Directory. Heinrich Brandler went to Moscow and held long discussions with the Soviet leaders, who were equally enthusiastic about the impending German revolution. So the German October came.
Encouraging letters from Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Stalin appeared in the Rote Fahne. Stalin's letter was addressed to August Thalheimer and read as follows: “The coming revolution in Germany is the most important world event of our day. The victory of the revolution in Germany will have greater significance for the proletariat in Europe and America than the victory of the Russian revolution six years ago. The victory of the German proletariat will undoubtedly move the center of the world revolution from Moscow to Berlin…” Zinoviev published a long series of articles in the Inprekorr on “Problems of the German Revolution,” which in an almost touching manner speaks about the relief of the Marxists who have fallen into “underdeveloped conditions” to see a “classic proletarian revolution” is at last imminent, and so he managed to utter a sentence which may look generous from the Russian perspective, and yet demonstrates in clear light the profound implausibility of Radek’s wooing of the petty bourgeois or national masses: precisely because Germany has a majority of proletarians, the German proletariat, “at least in the beginning,” would not brutally disregard the vital interests of the urban petty bourgeoisie.
At the beginning of October, the communists joined the workers’ governments in Saxony and Thuringia, where proletarian hundred-men squads had already been formed for some time. The party leader Heinrich Brandler then, in his new capacity as ministerial director of the State Chancellery in Dresden, according to his own later testimony, thereafter dealt almost exclusively with the procurement of weapons. At a work council conference in Chemnitz on October 21, the general strike was to be called, setting into motion the struggle for power. But although the slogans of defense against the “Bavarian Fascists” were very popular, the allied left-socialists and basically also the masses refused to start a civil war with the offensive intention that was guiding the Soviet as well as the German party leadership. Only in Hamburg did the uprising break out as a result of an error in information transmission, which the local police were able to put down, though with difficulty and with considerable losses. Stresemann acted quickly and with great decisiveness: he ordered Reichswehr troops to deploy into Saxony and Thuringia and put a Reich commissar in the place of the Saxon government of the left-wing Social Democrat Dr. Pointer. 23 people died in Freiberg when an excited crowd insulted the Reichswehr troops and tried to attack them with their bare hands or with primitive weapons. Meanwhile, there was no significant active resistance offered. An important consequence, however, was that now the Social Democrats left the Stresemann government because they were offended by the fact that Stresemann did not act as vigorously against the Bavarian reactionaries and National Socialists as he did against the Saxon communists and left-wing Social Democrats. But the planned national revolution in Bavaria failed, as did the German October. However, one was related to the other, and both attempts at revolution were both offensive as well as defensive. Whoever focuses only on one of them, sees only the half of the most crisis-ridden years of the German nation-state.
Admittedly, there is a great temptation to view the Hitler putsch and its prehistory as a local Bavarian event and, in this context, even as a kind of macabre celebration: the English term “beer hall putsch” inevitably leads in this direction. And the events cannot be recounted in detail if one does not look at the names and the location of certain brewhouses i.e. taverns: the Löwenbräukeller was not far from the main train station, the Hofbräuhaus was near the town hall, the Bürgerbräukeller was across the Isar between the Deutsches Museum and the Maximilianeum. Here a good part of Bavarian politics was actually made at regulars’ tables and in large gatherings, their popular outer skin, so to speak, was full of local color. In truth, however, Bavarian politics was always German and European politics at the same time, also in its monarchist and separatist tendencies, which were generally geared towards something like a Danube alliance. Between the end of the soviet government and the Hitler putsch, a plethora of patriotic associations of very different character were active: the Teutonic Order, the Thule Society, the Bavarian League, the Bavaria and Reich League, the German People’s Protection and Defense League, the Oberland League, the Reich Flag, the Organization Escherich, etc. In this context, the NSDAP was only a small component, which, however, from mid-1922 onwards, through stronger militancy, more and more achieved a certain, but by no means unambiguously clear, predominance. Nevertheless, hardly more than half of the Munich population sympathized with it, even if you include the ruling Bavarian People's Party, because even after May 1919 Marxism remained a strong force, and the communists had by no means disappeared. On May 1, 1923, they dared to unfurl Soviet flags inside the trains of demonstrating trade union members, the stars of which were mistaken for Jewish stars not only by Adolf Hitler. The mass meetings of the NSDAP had longed since ceased to be disturbed by them, but in the spring of 1922 there were still heated discussion and that Adolf Hitler turned to a “comrade of the German Communist Party” to enlighten him.
The entire Ministry of the Free State of Bavaria was therefore involved in a struggle on three fronts: against the encroachments of the Reich government on Bavarian statehood, against Marxism, which was constantly viewed as a great danger, and finally against the nationalist combat groups, including the NSDAP. They came to terms with the Reich again and again: in 1921, the Bavarian People’s Party replaced Prime Minister von Kahr with Count Lerchenfeld, because he had taken too harsh a position, and at the end of 1922, Lerchenfeld was replaced with von Killing because the shift towards Reich piety had gone too far. There were no great differences between social democrats and communists, and that is why the Bavarian People’s Party politician Fritz Schäffer could say that he did not love the NSDAP, but that he was in full agreement with them in their opposition to Marxism. The government considered Ludendorff, the Quartermaster General of the World War, to be the greater danger because all the military associations seemed to listen to him, and the only really good relationship was with the emphatically federalist associations such as the “the Bavaria and Reich League” of the Pittinger Medical Council.
All the events of 1923 actually took place in close connection with the events in the Reich.
Hitler took an extreme position on the occupation of the Ruhr, which was an exact complement to the communist demand for civil war: first a general settlement of accounts with the “November criminals,” the “louts in their own country,” was necessary, and only then could the defensive fight against France have a prospect of success.
On May 1, 1923, there was almost a serious clashes between the national associations, the Reichswehr and the demonstrating trade unionists, and Hitler suffered a considerable loss of prestige.
On September 1 and 2, “German Day” took place in Nuremberg with great pomp. After that, a “combat alliance” of several military associations was created, including the SA of the NSDAP, which had developed more and more into a military association since its beginnings as a hall protection and “gymnastics and sports department.” Lieutenant Colonel Kriebel became military leader and Adolf Hitler took over political leadership. At the same time, military divisions were made by two civilian sides, by the Communists and by the National Socialists.
On September 26th, von Kahr was appointed “General State Commissioner,” i.e. dictator alongside the continuing government within the non-military state of emergency. The corresponding state of emergency in the Reich followed immediately on its heels, and severe tensions developed between Munich and Berlin. The crux of the matter was that several concepts of national government existed side by side. Should it come about in the extremely difficult situation through a reshuffle of the Stresemann government, should Stresemann be replaced by a “national directorate,” or should a “march on Berlin” from Bavaria under the orders of Kahrs and the commander of the Bavarian Reichswehr Division von Lossow be set in motion? In the third case, what would the position of Hitler and Ludendorff be, without whose support the enterprise could not succeed?
Hitler was convinced that only he was up to the situation, because he already felt that he was no longer merely a “drummer.” In his speeches one can still distinguish between the rationally conceived experience and the interpretation that goes beyond it and is used as a key. At the end of October 1922, for example, he said that the members of the people who had a Marxist stance were not less than 40%, and that they were the most active and energetic. In doing so, he was essentially claiming the same thing as Radek: the active majority of the working class had already been conquered by the communists. A statement made at the beginning of September 1923 had the same meaning: the will of the communists directed by Moscow was tougher than that of such squishy philistines as Stresemann. Communist statements also corresponded to the statement that for Marxists, as Russia shows, there were only the winners and the exterminated. It can be assumed that Hitler was really convinced that a Kerensky government was at the helm in Berlin and that in Central Germany there was already the Soviet Saxony. Nevertheless, he always insisted that this truly desperate situation had the Jews as its originators.
Also informative is an article by Max von Scheubner-Richter, which the Völkischer Beobachter published on September 21 under the title “Germany's Bolshevization” in four columns on the first page. Scheubner-Richter begins by expressing his deep bitterness over the blindness of the leading German men who do not want to see “how dangerously and systematically the Bolshevization of Germany is from Moscow by the Moscow representative, Mr. Radek.” He said that this danger had been clear to him since he noticed in the last year of the war what dangerous effects the German propaganda for the disintegration of the Russian army must have on his own soldiers. His urgent advice to set up a friendly Russian national government was not heeded. Since then, the internal enemy has been spreading its poison almost unhindered, and business circles are heavily to blame. So today the day is probably not far off “when the blood-red banner of Mr. Radek will rise on the palace of the Reich President in place of the black-red-yellow standard of Mr. Ebert.” But in the last hour a new prophet had arisen for “volkish Germany,” namely Adolf Hitler, and so the closing words sound confident in spite of everything: “And the battle will be fought under the slogan ‘Here the Soviet star—here the swastika.’ And the swastika will win.”
Almost on the same day, September 26th, the Inprekorr carried the following sentence: “The Soviet star is already gaining more and more weight over the swastika.”
Hitler took no notice of the far-reaching measures taken by Stresemann regarding Saxony and Thuringia: he lived in the dichotomy, no different from the communists.
His coup on the evening of November 8 must be seen as an attempt to shift the leadership of the struggle from the incompetent hands of the Kahr, Lossow and Seisser to those of the prophet i.e. into his own. The curious circumstances and the inadequate preparation of this coup should not lead to the judgment that it was hopeless from the outset and that it was merely a local event. In the rest of Germany, too, quite a few men and units were ready to join a march on Berlin, and no one knows with certainty whether this time there would have been “Reichswehr on Reichswehr” fire if the Bavarian division had moved north. Undoubtedly, remarkable analogies can be drawn to the coup d'état by the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, although in Munich the main motive was not a yearning for peace, but a national and social self-assertion in a dangerous situation. Even Hitler’s repeatedly attested fear that his people might “radicalize themselves to the left” and go over to the communists had a counterpart in Petrograd insofar as Lenin apparently not a little feared the prevalence of an unconquerable wave of anarchism and separatism. The failure was by no means inevitable; its immediate cause was the frivolous trust Ludendorff placed in von Lossow’s word of honor of an officer that that he do nothing against the “new government.” But if Hitler, as a far more popular Kapp, had actually been able to establish himself in Berlin alongside Ludendorff, the commander-in-chief of the army, the Western Allies would undoubtedly have intervened, and the German Reich did not have the Russian spaces to successfully defend itself against well-armed intervention troops. The alternative given of the Soviet star or the swastika turned out to be wrong, but the result of the fight that did not take place was, figuratively speaking, far closer to Munich than to Dresden or Moscow: On the evening of November 8, based on the news about the Hitler coup, Berlin implemented a version of those national plans, namely the transfer of executive power to the chief of army command. In the four months during which von Seeckt exercised the dictatorship, the new currency unit of the Rentenmark was introduced, separatism was crushed and a kind of liberating capitulation was made to France: the Weimar Republic embarked on the path of stabilization.