Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  And what of Rosa Luxemburg? On the morning the Vorwärts building is stormed some soldiers see a woman emerging from the rubble. They think it is Rosa and are on the point of shooting her when an officer intervenes. A case of mistaken identity, it turns out. So where is she, then? Has she fled the capital, in disguise, like Ludendorff and Lenin before her? Not a bit of it. Rosa may not be a front-line fighter, but nor can she leave Berlin: that is where the printing presses are. And what is Rosa without a printing press? As the Spartacist uprising crumbles, she is holed up in the working-class district of Neukölln, the guest of an increasingly nervous Spartacist-supporting family. Covert visitors besiege her to seek advice. ‘I wish I were back in jail’, she tells her friend Mathilde. ‘In prison, I had my peace.’ One evening Karl Liebknecht turns up and the assembled company read a fairy tale by Tolstoy and then a little Goethe before trying to catch an hour or two of sleep. Soon after, Rosa and Karl move to a new hiding place in the middle-class district of Wilmersdorf. Safer, they think.

  Rosa can sense that her time is running out. The bloodhounds are on her trail. Each hour brings news of the arrest or death of former friends or lovers. She knows that information leading to her capture will earn a pretty penny for whoever is ready to spill the beans. She cannot hide for ever. At least her writing has lost none of its energy. If anything, the uprising has made it more strident. ‘Future victories will spring from this defeat’, she thunders in the Rote Fahne, citing the failed uprisings of 1848 and 1871 which nonetheless provided both education and revolutionary experience for the masses. History cannot be halted. Luxemburg is scathing of government claims to have restored order in Berlin. ‘You foolish lackeys!’ she writes. ‘Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rise up again clashing its weapons and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!’

  The following day, acting on a tip-off, members of the local Wilmersdorf militia break into the apartment where the Spartacist leaders are hiding. Liebknecht is taken into custody immediately. (He protests that he is a Mr Marcussen, until the initials sewn into his clothing give him away.) Rosa Luxemburg is picked up a little later that evening. After some debate as to what to do with the prisoners–a call is made to government headquarters–they are handed over to a nearby military unit with a strong anti-Spartacist reputation. They are taken to the Casino-Hotel Eden, not far from the Kurfürstendamm, the temporary headquarters of the Guards Cavalry Division, where a man named Waldemar Pabst is in charge. No direct orders are required for a nationalist soldier who has seen action on both the Eastern and Western Fronts and whose unit was involved in the retaking of the Vorwärts building a few days before. Pabst will know what to do.

  While Liebknecht is questioned by Pabst and then beaten up by a group of soldiers, Rosa awaits her turn in a nearby room. She leafs through Goethe’s Faust, a tale rich in bloody pacts and devilish betrayals. A little after eleven, on the pretext of driving their prisoner to jail, the soldiers haul Liebknecht off to the Tiergarten park in central Berlin where they stop the car, take out their bloodied passenger, and shoot him dead. Returning to the Eden, they frogmarch Rosa Luxemburg through the hotel lobby and shove her through the swing doors onto the street outside, where she is set upon with rifle butts. Beaten unconscious, her limp body is thrown into a waiting open-top car. In the kerfuffle one of Rosa’s shoes and her handbag are left on the pavement. The engine revs. The car drives off. They have not got far before a soldier decides to finish the job with a shot, at point-blank range, into Rosa’s head. Her body is dumped in a nearby canal.

  The next day, the Guards Cavalry Division release their sanitised version of events. Liebknecht’s guards took a detour through the Tiergarten to avoid the crowds, they pretend, stopped because of a puncture and only shot the Spartacist leader when he tried to escape after first knifing one of his guards and ignoring several orders to halt. The official story claims that Rosa was shot by an unknown assailant and her body dragged off to God-knows-where by an angry crowd gathered outside the Eden. A public investigation is launched–but to be conducted under military rather than civilian law. Ebert is silent about the deaths. (Pabst later claims he met Ebert the day after the killings and was thanked for his service.) Scheidemann, the man who declared the German republic barely two months ago, tells a rally in Kassel that the Spartacist leaders were ‘victims of their own bloody terror tactics’. The suppression of the uprising, he bellows, was an ‘act of deliverance’.

  Berlin carries on as if the uprising never happened–like an ‘elephant stabbed with a penknife’. Elections are held as planned. The Social Democrats are triumphant. The National Assembly meets in Weimar, far from any revolutionary unpleasantness. For now, at least, it looks as if Ebert’s Faustian pact with the Freikorps has paid off. But how long will the lull last?

  PARIS: Woodrow, suffering from an almighty cold, stays in bed all morning. The rain falls constantly outside. When he finally makes his way to the French Foreign Office for the official opening of the peace conference, trumpets and kettle-drums greet his car and film cameras record his arrival. Inside, the President rambles on about how welcoming the French have been. He terms the meeting ‘the supreme conference in the history of mankind’.

  The French premier, elected to the role of chairman, is not to be outdone. Clemenceau calls upon his fellow leaders to conduct themselves in the next few weeks not just as friends, but as brothers. He talks about the need for heavy enemy reparations, to restore northern France to its former glory before the Kaiser’s army turned it into a wasteland. This, he says, is a matter of justice. But hoping to win over the Americans, he also talks about Wilson’s favourite subject. ‘The League of Nations is here’, says Clemenceau solemnly, looking around the room: ‘it is in yourselves; it is for you to make it live; and for that it must be in our hearts’.

  SOLOHEADBEG, CO. TIPPERARY, IRELAND: They have been drilling young republicans for months, training them to fire a rifle or how to blow up a railway line. There have been confrontations. There have been deaths. But in January the Irish Volunteers truly go to war. Armed with a single rifle and a few pistols, a group of Volunteers–acting on their own initiative, it is said, but in the militant spirit of their organisation–raids a delivery of explosives to a quarry in south Tipperary. Two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary are shot dead.

  That same day, Sinn Féin delegates elected to the Westminster parliament last year–those not languishing in British jails, that is–meet together publicly for the first time in Dublin. They declare themselves the parliament of Ireland, the Dáil–the one true voice of all the people of the island. A Catholic priest intones a prayer to convey an appropriate solemnity to it all. Though not everyone can understand its cadences, the Irish language is used throughout the meeting–except when the audience is asked to quieten down, an injunction delivered, apologetically, in English. The number of elected Irish delegates actually present–a mere twenty-seven out of a total of one hundred and five Irish MPs–is exceeded many times over by the number of spectators craning their necks around marble sculptures to catch sight of the formal proceedings.

  That morning there was a luncheon at the Mansion House to celebrate the return of several hundred Irish soldiers from service with the British army in France. Now, as the roll is called for the Dáil, the response to over thirty names–including that of Éamon de Valera–is ‘Fé ghlas ag Gallaibh’: imprisoned by the foreigner, those same British. Other Irish parliamentarians elected to Westminster are simply declared ‘as láthair’–absent. (This includes Unionist MPs who view the Dublin gathering as a nationalist stunt and reject the invitation to take part.) There is a little subterfuge when the name Michael Collins is read out, and someone pretending to be him declares him present. In fact, Collins is across the water in Manchester, putting the final touches to an escape plan for his boss.

  Such play-acting can be forgiven. For the moment the Dáil has a single purpose: to reveal
, by its very existence, that Ireland’s independence is a reality, dependent on no one else’s say-so, its legitimacy drawn from the innate right of nations to rule themselves–the principle that Woodrow has proclaimed. It is a parliament for declarations and proclamations, not one for debate and argument. That will come later. On this Tuesday afternoon, the members present rise as one when called upon to hear a solemn declaration formally ratifying the establishment of an Irish republic, backdated to Easter 1916. A message is then read out for the benefit of the outside world–first in Irish, then French and finally in English: ‘To the nations of the world, greeting!’

  But what are words without deeds? Over the coming weeks and months, the Volunteers acquire a new name: the Irish Republican Army, or IRA for short. The Dáil has declared the will of Ireland, a Volunteer newspaper reads; but ‘the most drastic measures against the enemies of Ireland’ will be required to enforce it. People talk about a new rising in the making.

  MOSCOW: ‘Our enemy today is bureaucracy and profiteering’, the impatient revolutionary tells a conference convened to discuss relations between Moscow and the provinces. ‘We are being ground down by red tape’, he warns. Localism is a ‘quagmire’. For the moment, centralism must prevail. The following day he speaks at a rally to protest the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Germany’s Social Democrats have again revealed their true face, he declares: imperialist stooges and counter-revolutionaries, all. ‘Death to the butchers!’ he cries.

  The news from the Caucasian front, in Russia’s deep south, is bad. In late January, Lenin receives a telegram telling him that Red forces there have collapsed. ‘THE ELEVENTH ARMY HAS CEASED TO EXIST; THE ENEMY OCCUPIES CITIES AND COSSACK VILLAGES ALMOST WITHOUT RESISTANCE.’ From Moscow, war commissar Trotsky blames the persistence of ineffective partisan methods amongst the Reds for their defeat, calling the Red Caucasian army an unruly horde. The collapse reveals the need for the disciplined modern soldiering he has been advocating all along, led by professionals.

  With the Caucasus now secure behind them, Denikin’s White forces are free to advance towards Ukraine, where departing German forces have left a chaotic contest for power in their wake which the Red Army is rapidly exploiting. A race is on. Who will win: revolution across Europe or the White armies marching to decapitate Bolshevism in its lair?

  BERLIN: Nervous of a repeat attempt at a German Bolshevik revolution, Ebert’s government bars a funeral procession for Liebknecht and thirty other Spartacists in the centre of Berlin at the end of January. Machine guns and artillery pieces guard the republic’s citadels. At a hastily rearranged gathering on the outskirts of Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg is represented by an empty coffin. Her body has not yet been found. Marchers carry signs on which the word ‘murderer’ is scrawled. Her transfiguration into revolutionary martyr is complete.

  Over the next few weeks, as the newly elected National Assembly assembles in Weimar to deliberate the new constitution, Germany awaits the next explosion at home. In this, at least, Rosa Luxemburg was right: the crushing of the revolution in Berlin does not end matters. Instead, remarks one Communist, ‘hills of corpses’ now mark out its road ahead. A Soviet-style republic is put down in Bremen. On the Ruhr, the miners go on strike, organise themselves into workers’ councils, thumb their noses at government demands to disband and threaten to flood the mines. Across Germany, the ranks of the Freikorps swell with fresh recruits itching for a chance to fight the next Rosa or the next Karl, or else seek fame and fortune further east.

  The middle classes quake with rumours of Bolsheviks everywhere, with their sinister methods and Russian backing. A volunteer army is raised to secure the country’s northern ports. On the Ruhr, howitzers are used to subdue the miners: seventy-two are killed in a single bombardment. German cities fill with restless legions of the unemployed, while in the countryside, no one can be found to till the fields. Food aid from America is promised–but only if Germany first hands over its entire commercial shipping fleet.

  In Munich, Kurt Eisner’s political authority is obliterated by elections in which his party wins hardly any seats at all. And yet, for weeks, he clings on to power, trying to square the circle of Bavarian politics by mediating between those who demand that parliament’s full authority be restored and those who see this as a bourgeois plot to disempower the workers’ councils and turn back the clock. After the closure of the Traunstein camp, Adolf is sent back to Munich to take up guard duty for Eisner’s increasingly beleaguered regime.

  Back in Berlin, the dandy Kessler lunches with both former diplomatic buddies apoplectic at Germany’s international situation, and also with young intellectuals who see no future but with the Communists. But he is also drawn to the furious energy of the new Berlin. ‘In the evening friends abducted me to a bar where dancing goes on until morning’, Harry confides in his diary. ‘There are hundreds of such places now.’ In the first few months of 1919, doctors note a spike in cases of venereal disease.

  VIENNA: As the long first winter of peace bites deep, a visitor arrives for Sigmund Freud, from the peace conference in Paris. An American who claims to work for President Wilson. In the circumstances, Freud’s immediate interests in the man are basic. ‘He came accompanied by two baskets of provisions’, Freud writes to an astonished colleague, and was happy to swap the food for two signed copies of one of his books. Freud’s estimation of Woodrow immediately rises. In the Austrian capital, newspapers carry reports of animal hooves being boiled up and ground down to serve as ingredients for sausages to make up for the lack of meat.

  Not long afterwards, a second visitor from Paris arrives at Freud’s door. This time, a friend of his nephew, New York publicity man Edward Bernays, turns up with an even more valuable cargo than food: a box of Corona cigars from Havana. Freud lights up. Even at a time when survival seems to have replaced pleasure as the principle of life, all is perhaps not lost, Sigmund reflects warmly, cigar smoke curling up through the heavy coldness of his study. Freud sends back his nephew’s emissary with a book, in German, of the lectures he gave in Vienna in that bitter third winter of the war. ‘In grateful acknowledgement of a nephew’s thought of his uncle’, he writes by way of dedication.

  LINCOLN, ENGLAND: A cake baked by a Mrs O’Sullivan of Manchester is delivered to Lincoln jail by a young Irish teacher, Kathleen Talty. It is the fourth cake received by the Irish prisoners in recent weeks. And baked inside is the fourth attempt at a key to open the prison’s doors, fashioned according to de Valera’s imprint of the chaplain’s key, its outline drawn on a Christmas card.

  Seven-forty in the evening. From a field outside the prison grounds an electric torch lights up. Inside the prison, nervous hands light matches and extinguish them by way of a response. The message is conveyed: all clear. The escape takes place tonight.

  This time, the key works. Like a beauty, it turns through the locks from cell to corridor, and from corridor to the last door between the prison and the outside world. Michael Collins and another comrade from Ireland wait on the other side, impatiently stuffing their own duplicate key in the door to open it from the outside. Then panic. ‘I’ve broken a key in the lock, Dev.’ Hot words are uttered into the cold air. What now? Somehow the broken-off stub is pushed out. Divine intervention. Another key is inserted. Turn. Pray. A long, loud screeching sound as the gate swings open. Freedom.

  AMERONGEN: Security around Wilhelm is tightened up. At the beginning of the year, a former Senator from Tennessee takes part in a clumsy freebooting attempt to kidnap Wilhelm and present him to the American army on the Rhine as a belated Christmas present. A little later, warnings are received of a Belgian pilot’s plan to bomb the castle, leading the government to ban flying over Count Bentinck’s estate. Dutch public opinion has shown some sympathy to Wilhelm since the story of his illness was spread around. The government seems unwilling to turn him over. But what if the British and the French demand extradition, and back up their demand with the threat of force? The former Kaiser’s
position cannot be guaranteed.

  The nearby village now swarms with police. Passport checks are common. Journalists cannot get beyond the castle gates. ‘He remained in the open air more than an hour’, writes one journalist after observing the Kaiser from a distance, ‘and talked to his aide while making rapid gestures.’ The Dutch suggest Wilhelm move to a more remote part of the country, where his security and privacy can be more easily guaranteed (but they veto a large house near the German border).

  On the Kaiser’s birthday, Count Bentinck presents Wilhelm with a painting of William the Silent, their common ancestor. Bentinck’s daughter remarks on the number of beautiful flower arrangements which arrive that day, and wonders how the local postman is getting on with the new burden of all the postcards and letters (some supportive, some not). That evening at dinner, the table is decorated with white lilacs and red tulips.

  PARIS: At teatime on most days, the leaders of the victorious powers gather in the French Foreign Office and, like magnificent potentates of old, receive representations from the four corners of the earth. A British chemist named Weizmann makes a plea for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. One afternoon, a particularly long-winded presentation by a Syrian–in French–is cut short when it is realised that he has not actually lived in the land he professes to represent for more than thirty years. The Greek premier impresses with his recitations of Homer and announces that Greece is prepared to forgo its historic claims to Constantinople, as long as it is granted Smyrna, the Christian-majority city on the Aegean coastline of Anatolia which the Turks call İzmir.

  Much of the real work is done behind the scenes, by the thousand or so delegates to the conference: in the meeting rooms of grand hotels or over supper in the city’s restaurants. Once-intractable problems are again deliberated: the Polish question, the opium question, the labour question, the Arabian question, the League of Nations question. A kaleidoscope of expert committees, commissions and conclaves is formed to answer them. Predictably, Woodrow chairs one on the League of Nations. Fact-finding missions are sent out. Coal production statistics and population pie charts are used to adjudicate where Europe’s new borders should lie. A team of Americans roves Paris ensuring that the best libraries are at their disposal.