‘It probably would be better if I’d died last fall’, Woodrow Wilson tells his doctor. His reputation is under fire. A book by a British economist who was at Versailles, called John Maynard Keynes, describes Woodrow as a ‘blind and deaf Don Quixote’, tragicomically tilting at windmills, bamboozled by the French. Woodrow’s advisers urge him to compromise to let the treaty pass the Senate. Wilson refuses.
HAMBURG, GERMANY–VIENNA: In northern Germany, influenza claims its latest victim: a young mother named Sophie Freud. Sigmund learns of Sophie’s death the same afternoon, in Vienna. ‘We had been worried about her for two days’, he writes to an old friend, ‘but were still hopeful. From a distance it is so difficult to judge’. It is not possible for Sigmund to travel to his daughter’s funeral. There are no available trains. ‘The undisguised brutality of our times weighs heavily upon us’.
In the depths of melancholy Freud finds, at last, a new word–Todestrieb, or death-drive–to describe the fantastical idea growing in his mind: that there is in life an instinct not only to seek pleasure, but also for self-destruction. Death now takes its rightful place alongside sex in Freud’s model of the mind.
AMERICA: By midnight on the second day of the year, over two and a half thousand have been arrested in anti-radical raids across America. Mitchell Palmer is said to be considering a run for President in 1920.
No community, large or small, is untouched. Eighteen are arrested in Oakland, six in Denver and twenty in Portland, Oregon. In New York the total stands at seven hundred. In Los Angeles, a thirty-three-year-old Lithuanian machine worker named Benjamin Ling is hauled in, accused of being the organiser of a local Communist cell. A search of his apartment turns up revolutionary song books, in Spanish. A newspaper in Utah applauds the ‘Greatest Raid in History of U.S.; Tons of Literature Taken will Prove Guilt of 4,500 Anarchists’.
But the initial impression of efficiency and organisation soon frays. There are not enough warrants for those detained. Nor are there enough police to separate the Americans from the rest, meaning that US citizens are held without charge for days. In Boston, prisoners are herded into unheated cells. In Chicago, a group of Italians protest that the only reason they joined the Communists was to play music and learn English. (Their story is confirmed when the minutes of the local party’s meetings are finally translated–but by then the Italians have been incarcerated for several weeks.)
The public mood begins to shift. ‘There is a danger in the dragnet methods of rounding up alleged revolutionists’, the Chicago Daily News editorialises. ‘Not every radical is a “red” and not every “red” is a criminal anarchist, bomb manufacturer or advocate of physical force.’
MUNICH: The sports journalist has been pushed out of the party leadership. A man called Drexler is now its chairman. Hitler increasingly sees the party as his.
In January, he speaks at a huge event convened by a number of different right-wing organisations in Munich’s largest beer hall on the Jewish question. It is an opportunity for Adolf to fly the flag of the German Workers’ Party. ‘We fight against the Jew’, he says, ‘because he stands in the way of the struggle against capitalism.’ A few days later, he calls the Versailles Treaty nothing more than the tool of capitalists to keep the workers down, enslaved by taxes and interest. ‘Every drop of our sweat flows not for us but for enemies’, he declares. But this cannot last: ‘The day will come when the eyes of the workers will be opened and their leaders will go to hell.’
Adolf begins to sketch out ideas for a manifesto, to lead Germany out of darkness and into the light. He found a party last year. Now he has found a mission.
SUNDERLAND, ENGLAND–THE URALS–IRKUTSK, SIBERIA: ‘Was there ever a more awful spectacle in the whole history of the world than is unfolded by the agony of Russia?’ Winston asks a rally in the north of England. Europe’s grain factory is now starving. Wolves roam through Russian villages: ‘and this is progress, this is hope, this is Utopia!’
En route to the Urals to spread his latest idea–the militarisation of the labour force; compulsory work in the service of building socialism–Trotsky’s train is derailed in a snowstorm. The train is left in the snow for a whole day. No one comes to help.
In Irkutsk, in Siberia, Admiral Kolchak is betrayed, arrested and interrogated. He is not put on trial. Execution by firing squad. His body is shoved through the ice in a Siberian river.
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Nationwide prohibition comes into effect.
New York’s saloon bars shut their doors just after midnight. Liquor stores are emptied in a last rush to beat the cut-off. Protestant churches across the country hold prayer meetings to celebrate. In rural areas, and in states where the sale of alcohol has been banned for years already, there is particular jubilation at the thought of big-city types finally brought to heel by this latest triumph in the morality crusade.
Off the east coast boats piled high with liquor depart for the Bahamas and Cuba to avoid the risk of their cargo being impounded on American soil. One of these is the Black Star Line’s only vessel, the Yarmouth–though it heaves and rolls so much in a storm that five hundred cases of whiskey have to be unceremoniously dumped overboard before the ship has even reached the high seas.
In Chicago, the first major crime of the prohibition era is committed that very night when one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of whiskey is stolen from a freight-yard where the now-illicit substance was being stored. Crime and alcohol have always gone together in America. Prohibition simply raises the stakes.
BERLIN: Enver Pasha, the dynamo of the triumvirate which ruled the Ottoman Empire during the war, resurfaces in the German capital. A lady calls on a British military officer late one evening with a message from a Monsieur Enver, asking if he is able to meet at an undisclosed location on the morrow. The British officer is duly taken to an address in Grunewald, on the western side of the city. ‘He fully understood my surprise,’ the officer writes of Enver, ‘firstly at his being in Germany at all and secondly at his wanting to get in touch with the British government.’
Enver, sentenced to death in Istanbul last year, explains that he is a simple patriot and that as such he is prepared to deal even with the English to try and save his country. He proposes a long-term alliance, in return for only limited border adjustments for Turkey. (It is at this moment that both men realise neither of them has a map.) Of course, his old political party would have to be resurrected, allowing him to regain power.
He tells the British officer that the Italians and French are also keen to make some kind of deal with him if London will not, and helpfully points out that he has recently returned from discussions in Moscow. He asks that his proposition be put directly to the one man he considers to have the kind of wild imagination required to see the brilliance of such an alliance: Winston Churchill.
London declines the offer. At a subsequent meeting the following week Enver offers a fresh incentive: to use his influence to douse the problems the British are having amongst the Muslim populations of Egypt, the Middle East, India and Central Asia, turning his wartime advocacy of anti-British jihad on its head. The British will have no trouble pacifying Afghanistan with him on board, Enver says. He suggests that an independent Turkestan stretching from the Caspian to the Himalayas is created as a buffer between Russia and British India.
Enver avers that the new strongman of Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal, will work under him ‘as a sergeant’ if needed. The British officer is impressed by his chutzpah. ‘The fact that he led Turkey into a disastrous war, that he should presumably be a discredited man in consequence, that he has been condemned to death and is a fugitive in hiding does not cause him the slightest misgiving as to his influence and power’.
MOSCOW: The impatient revolutionary’s approach to solving administrative problems–pester, prod, cajole, check, double-check–remains the same. In January, he finds himself looking through the Russian dictionary and deciding it is out of date. ‘Is it not time to produce a dictionary of
the real Russian language’, he wonders: ‘a dictionary, say, of words used nowadays and by the classics, from Pushkin to Gorky?’ He suggests thirty scholars be put on to it, with generous soldiers’ rations as the ultimate incentive.
Vladimir is increasingly frustrated by red tape and corruption. The thought that he himself might be part of the problem does not cross his mind. The Kremlin is a Bolshevik village these days. The Communist Party is like one big and rather unhappy family, with Vladimir Ilyich as its slightly autocratic father: indulgent to those closest to him, but a man who, in the end, expects to be obeyed. Those closest to the leader enjoy the benefits of his position. Vladimir’s brother regularly visits to go on hunting trips or joins Lenin down in Gorki, where the two men play skittles together. His younger sister lives in the Ulyanovs’ apartment. Inessa is given a place nearby, connected by special telephone to the closed-circuit Kremlin system (once, her daughter Varya impresses her friends by calling up Lenin directly). In time, both Stalin and Trotsky will be given country houses outside Moscow; Stalin’s is a Gothic dacha, Trotsky’s a palace. The Kremlin elite enjoy special privileges. The administration’s chief inspector is none other than Comrade Stalin.
Naturally, jobs are handed out on the basis of loyalty, party service, personal connection. This is only logical: loyalty to the revolution should be rewarded and party members are surely more trustworthy than others. Older party members, those who were Bolsheviks when the movement was little more than a sect, are considered particularly worthy. Stalin’s wife is one of Lenin’s secretarial staff: a useful way for the Georgian bank-robber to keep tabs on the boss. The Commissariat of Enlightenment, responsible for education and culture, employs half the wives of the Bolshevik top brass, including Trotsky’s wife Natalya (museums and ancient monuments department), Vladimir’s sister Anna and his wife Nadya (in charge of deciding what books to remove from Soviet libraries).
Opportunities for favouritism run right through the system from top to bottom. In February, Vladimir wants his wife’s nephew be accepted onto a course for naval commanders. ‘The answer should come to me’, the impatient revolutionary writes to the appropriate department overbearingly. ‘If there are any obstacles what are they?’
NEW YORK: A few weeks after prohibition comes into effect a novel named This Side of Paradise is published, granting its author instant fame as the fashionable interpreter of the sexual mores and alcoholic indulgence of America’s upper crust–the kind that small-town folk despise and envy at the same time. Both the author and his wife come from smallish American cities themselves (his blue-blooded friends think her a trifle tacky when they first meet). F. Scott and Zelda now set out to live the big-city life as fully as possible, whirling their way through prohibition’s party scene in New York. There will always be whiskey for those who can pay.
MOSCOW: Inessa Armand is ill. Vladimir wants to speak to her on the telephone he arranged to have installed for her, but it is out of order. The impatient revolutionary pesters her to see a doctor. ‘Please write me what is the matter’, he orders. ‘The times are bad: typhus, influenza, Spanish flu, cholera.’ A few hours later, he checks to see whether the doctor has been. She must tell her children–‘from me’–to not let her leave the house.
When Inessa does not immediately recover, Vladimir insists that Varya call him every day between the hours of twelve and four with an update on her mother’s situation. Does she have wood? Who is making the fire for her? Does she even have food? The shortages in Moscow are still bad. Has her telephone been fixed yet? ‘You are evading my questions’, Vladimir writes to Inessa. ‘Answer immediately on this sheet, answer all my points’.
BERLIN: ‘Since the light deflection result became public’, Einstein writes to a friend, ‘such a cult has been made out of me that I feel like a pagan idol’.
Einstein’s handsome mug graces magazine covers. ‘A New Great Man of World History’, runs the caption under one in Germany. A Prague philosopher becomes so obsessed with relativity that he talks about it non-stop in his sleep, waking up his wife and turning both into virulent anti-relativists. Albert receives petitions from all over, asking him to lend his prestige to new campaigns for international friendship, on the future of European libraries or for German food relief. Men of the cloth ask for Einstein’s guidance on the impact of relativity on religion. (Fed up of such pseudo-philosophical nonsense, he curtly tells the Archbishop of Canterbury that the two are separate domains, one of facts and the other of belief.) Inevitably, a journalist from the Daily Mail eventually gets around to asking Einstein’s view on extraterrestrial life. Albert pronounces it quite likely, suggesting that if the aliens did want to get in touch, they would use the medium of light, rather than the wireless, to do so. A fund is set up to raise money for an Albert Einstein Tower, a new observatory outside Berlin. In Russia, the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky engages in serious-minded conversations about the meaning of it all. Einstein is everywhere. He is a gift to the media: friendly, not bad-looking, a touch eccentric, quotable.
As befits a modern celebrity, Albert is increasingly asked about his views on current affairs. His well-attested internationalism and pacifism make him suspect to many Germans, though he is at pains to point out to interviewers that he is neither the Bolshevik nor the anarchist some make him out to be. To his friends Albert is more candid, confessing: ‘the Bolsheviks are not so unappealing to me, however funny their theories are’, expressing admiration for the effectiveness of their publicity machine, and rather wishing he could go to Russia to look at the Soviet system up close. Shocked at the rise of anti-Semitism, Einstein feels himself increasingly Jewish, and called upon to defend his people in public. For the first time in his life, he expresses strong public support for the Zionist cause. He accuses old-fashioned assimilationists–Kaiserjuden, or Kaiser-Jews, such as Fritz Haber or Walther Rathenau, the industrialist–of being both naive and selfish, concerned more about their position in Western European societies than with welcoming in their poor brethren from the East. As in almost every year since 1910, Einstein is nominated for the Nobel Prize. If Haber can get one, why not him? Will 1920 be his year? (Not yet–the anti-relativists scupper it.)
In January, there is uproar at the university when hundreds of people swarm in off the street to see this Einstein for themselves. The crowd is broken up by students crying abuse at the uninvited masses. Some blame nationalist anti-Semites for trying to disturb the lectures of the most famous Jew in Germany. Others blame Einstein himself for the uproar, claiming he more or less invited the crowds to occupy the university. They accuse him of being a self-publicist looking for a little succès de scandale to keep his name in the headlines and distract from the hollowness of his theories. The more famous Einstein becomes, the more some people seem to hate him for it.
Around the same time, a first German edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is published in Berlin, complete with a picture of one of Kaiser Wilhelm’s illustrious forebears on the inside cover, and a line expressing the hope that one day a saviour may arise from the bones of the dead to avenge the evil calumnies of the present. The introduction reads like a breathless true-life spy story, recounting how the top-secret Protocols fell originally into the hands of the Russians, and then made their way to Germany, despite attempts to suppress and denounce them along the way. The Jews are blamed for starting the war. The book immediately becomes popular in nationalist circles. The poison is spreading.
PETROGRAD: Having secured Moscow’s blessing for the newly created United Communist Party of America, John Reed is to return home. To disguise himself, he grows a moustache. The Comintern provides one hundred and two small diamonds to take as a nest-egg for the new, merged party. Jack travels once more under the assumed identity of stoker Jim Gormley, making his exit with letters from the Burford deportees in his pocket and a personal endorsement of Ten Days that Shook the World from Lenin. He is only halfway to the Baltic before he is forced to turn back. War intervenes.
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br /> THURLES, CO. TIPPERARY, IRELAND: A policeman is shot on his way home. The town in which he died is smashed up by security forces in reprisal. ‘It is clearly established that four hand grenades were thrown into houses,’ the Manchester Guardian reports, ‘fortunately with no more effect than the destruction of glass and furniture’. The offices of a local Sinn Féin-supporting newspaper are particularly targeted.
A new vocabulary of violence emerges: of outrages and retaliation, each side calling the other terrorists, each side blaming the other for the disorder and for the growing number of the dead. Every attack is claimed as a counter-attack. No end and no beginning. Not quite war, but certainly not peace. Newly elected Irish councils–Sinn Féin wins even in parts of the north–announce that they recognise only the legitimate authority of the Dáil.
In America, de Valera’s combination of sanctimony and deviousness has begun to test the patience of his hosts. The man takes on airs of such unconscionable grandeur, as if he were the mediator between an Irish God and the people of the world. In his own letters he refers to himself increasingly as ‘we’, not ‘I’. He seems to think himself infallible. Irish-American leaders chafe under his presidential pomposity, his inflexibility, his presumption that he should be able to simply commandeer their organisations for his purposes, however obscure. They worry that his attempts to meddle in domestic American politics, calling upon Irish-Americans to only vote for candidates he endorses, may bring into question where the first loyalties of Irish-Americans lie. They start plotting ways to get him to leave.
PARIS: Let the klaxons sound! At long last, here he is. Having finally given up on Zurich, Tristan Tzara, Dada’s great instigator-in-chief, steps off his train at the Gare de l’Est and looks around him at the French capital. A disappointment, he sniffs. What is to be done?
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