by Simon Winder
If De Stijl began behind the north of the wartime trench line, then beyond the southern end of the Front there was a matching outfit in Zürich, the Cabaret Voltaire. It had a related function to De Stijl, incubating much of the post-1918 world. In itself Dadaism is almost unrecoverable. Much of it seems to have consisted of people in funny hats making machine-like movements while babbling random words. I don’t think I have ever seen a photo of an event at Cabaret Voltaire and not felt an instinctive sense of relief that I was not there. But Arp, Ernst, Kandinsky, Klee, de Chirico pass through its unfunny doors, and personal heroes like Kurt Schwitters and his collages and Oskar Schlemmer and his fabulous Triadic Ballet could not have existed without it. De Stijl and Dada even joined forces through the endlessly various Theo von Doesburg.
Unfortunately for us all, the greatest of all early twentieth-century performance artists was also lurking just round the corner from the Cabaret. Lenin had, like the Conrads, been stuck in Galicia in 1914 and had with difficulty got to neutral Zürich. Here he wrote Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism and lived a life of harmless absurdity, glowering through the windows of his favourite cafe3 and dreaming of world revolution, harmlessly trapped and irrelevant while the Great War ground on. But help was at hand from the Foreign Office in Berlin. This is a scene which needs ideally to be shown like a silent film, with lots of uneasy, jerkily walking characters with big moustaches, black coats and derby hats, to a soundtrack scored for an out-of-tune pub piano and swannee whistle. As millions died, Arthur Zimmerman, head of the German Foreign Office, did more perhaps than anyone to accidentally destroy his own country. In a short space he and his associates came up with two brilliant plans. The first was to send a telegram to the Mexicans suggesting a treaty with Germany whereby, in the event of the USA declaring war, Mexico would get back Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. As the British had control of all transatlantic cables, this insane proposal was immediately decrypted and gleefully passed to the US, releasing a wave of fury which contributed to the American declaration of war. Only a few weeks after this coup, Zimmerman agreed to the equally brilliant plan that the Germans should spring Lenin from Zürich, transport him on a sealed train across Germany and through Sweden to St Petersburg to help foment revolutionary unrest and thereby undermine the Allies. So even as the most terrible war in human history ground on, strange Lotharingian exceptionalism first protected Lenin and then unleashed him on the world.
Lenin’s train trip was itself a sort of Dadaist exercise, with a chalk mark on the carriage floor to show which bit was Russian territory, very limited toilet facilities and Lenin banning smoking – which of course meant a huge toilet queue as everyone smoked in there. As the train pulled into a southern German station locals stared speechlessly into the carriage as Lenin and his friends wolfed down fresh white bread rolls from Switzerland, a fairy vision for Germans whose bread for years had mostly been made of wood-pulp and potato peelings. As usual, historical what-ifs are a bit futile, but in retrospect neutral Switzerland’s great service had been to provide Lenin with bread rolls, coffee and a nice warm library where he could have dozed harmlessly for the duration. Instead Zimmerman, having helped doom his own country in one world war, had laid the groundwork for its destruction in a second at the hands of the Soviet state Lenin made. Rather like Schlieffen, he would have the luck to die himself (in 1940) just before the full impact of his long-term miscalculations became evident.
Kaiser Wilhelm, still under the impression that he could win, spent an enjoyable 1918 doing some very retro mulling of a kind that Henry the Fowler or Otto the Great would have found congenial: putting together fresh monarchies. He thought the Saxon monarchy should take over a revived Lithuania and tried to persuade the King of Württemberg to take on Poland – a part of the world Württemberg had no links with whatsoever and which the king viewed as a distraction compared to his eager plan to take over Alsace on the tipping-over-into-insane basis of this including the Württemberger ‘lost lands’ that had many years before scattered the area (and including old Mömpelgard). All these fun discussions about precedence, medals, honour guards, uniforms, possible wedding bells came to a sudden stop as armistice and revolution swept over Germany, disposing of the whole world of emperors, kings, dukes and others. In November 1918 at the German military headquarters in Spa, as Kaiser Wilhelm resigned in a fury and fled into exile, he memorably snarled that ‘The Foreign Office has completely filled its pants.’ Little did he know that there would be plenty more where that came from.
Shame on the Rhine
For anyone who gets a funny feeling when they hear the words ‘epaulette’, ‘shako’ or ‘regimental silverware’ the Badenese military museum in Rastatt is the equivalent of the Folies Bergère. Room after room is crammed with the pommels, spurs and cross-beltings of yesteryear. The entire history of the rise and fall of Imperial Germany could be told from objects here: how a small state such as Baden became swept up in it, was provided with just over forty years of enjoyment, but was then led to total ruin. There is a heavy silver banqueting centrepiece commemorating German troops who died in South-West Africa in 1904–5: a source of pride then, but which we would now entirely associate with the genocide carried out by those troops on the colony’s inhabitants.4 One room dedicated to the First World War is so striking that it should be compulsory for anyone wanting to understand Europe’s twentieth century. I can only quickly mention three things, but these are enough: a fawning painting of Ludendorff as military visionary; a series of deft life sketches of Germans in the trenches shooting down their British attackers; and, most startling, an elaborate painting of Goltz Pasha’s coffin lying in state in Baghdad in 1916. Goltz was a Prussian who as a young man fought the Austrians and was at the Siege of Metz. In his seventies he became in 1914 the notably brutal governor of occupied Belgium and then went to the Middle East where he died, having humiliated British forces at the Iraqi town of Kut. The painting shows a coffin draped in a huge Imperial flag with a spiked helmet and fez placed on top, flanked by monstrous candles, heaped flowers and a matching Ottoman and German honour guard.
These pictures are all so unnerving because they were prepared for a world which did not happen: one in which Germany emerged from the Great War victorious. Goltz Pasha’s painting, in the palace built by ‘Turkish Louis’, was meant to show the continuity of German glamour and power in the Islamic world. Under other circumstances children today would have been reverently shown the portrait of a visionary Ludendorff and admired the drawings of an earlier generation defending their trenches bravely with their old-fashioned machine guns. Standing, freaked out, by these images, I could see how the wreckage of the hopes in these pictures might have become an indelible problem for some Germans – indeed how even the continuing existence of the absurd South-West Africa table decoration, once the Allies had taken all of Germany’s colonies, might have contributed to the survivors of the Great War’s disastrous sense of bitterness and wish for revenge.
The focus on 1918 as the end of the First World War is incorrect. Some American war memorials (like the huge one in St Louis) give it as 1919 to include the Siberian intervention. But in many ways, given such era-defining events as the Battle of Warsaw (1920) and the capture of Smyrna (1922), the war really only ends with the post-Smyrna Chanak Crisis, when the British decided they could not defend the neutral zone around Istanbul and the Straits against a resurgent Turkish army. On the Western Front, the calling of an ‘Armistice’ in November 1918 proved an absolutely terrible decision. The Germans had effectively surrendered in the face of total military defeat, but the term ‘Armistice’, with its implication of a soldierly and honourable ceasefire, allowed German opinion to see it as more of a peace between equals. The enraged Kaiser went into Dutch exile and the revolution that ended Imperial Germany seemed to most Germans to have fulfilled Allied wishes. They no longer lived in Bismarck’s country. In a huge ceremony at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the new socialist President of the Germa
n Republic, Friedrich Ebert, uncontroversially said to returning troops: ‘I salute you, who return unvanquished from the field of battle.’
Of course, there were many Germans who understood the defeat – indeed some who welcomed it as the end of a terrible and delusive era of imperial braggadocio and who looked to the renewal of a more modest ‘small German’ state. The Allies understood it quite differently though. The Armistice was just the beginning, and a mere change of regime would not let the Germans off the hook. The implacable blockade continued, allowing the British to control all the neutrals, permitting them just sufficient imports to keep their own economies going, but nothing left over to sell on to the Germans. Gradually the blockade had brought the Central Powers to an abject state, with everyone by 1918 underweight and exhausted and all the once great cities shabby and decaying. The unprecedented movement of millions of troops around the world generated the devastating ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic of 1918.
Germany’s armed forces were dismantled and its colonies gifted to various of the Allies. The least noticed and most uncontroversial of these hand-outs were the hundreds of small Pacific islands from the old Spanish East Indies which the Germans had bought in 1899 and which were now (as it turned out ruinously) Japan’s. The Belgians took over two small pieces of land from Prussia (partly through an antiquarian claim based on the old Principality of Stavelot-Malmédy) as well as Neutral Moresnet, giving them a small, completely pointless and aggrieved German-speaking minority. Belgian troops occupied Germany from Kleve down to Aachen. They also took the small, densely populated part of German Africa adjacent to the Congo known then as Ruanda-Urundi.
The French of course took back Alsace-Lorraine (some 300,000 Germans would leave). Straßburg became Strasbourg again, lots of streets were renamed again. The giant statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I was wrenched down and a crashed German fighter-plane fixed mockingly on its plinth. Some odd things were allowed to stay: the Kaiser-Wilhelm University while (fair play) renamed, still to this day on the front of its university library has carvings of characters like Lessing and Goethe to inspire its students. The Germans in Schlettstadt (now renamed again Séléstat) had built the wonderful Humanist Library (celebrating the town’s great period in the sixteenth century) with an external cladding of polychrome tiles incorporating the words STADTBIBLIOTHEK-MUSEUM. Short of chiselling out a large part of the facade the French could do nothing much about this. Various ingenious attempts to at least partly cover it up failed, so as it was being rebuilt in 2017 the German text prevailed in a highly attractive if accidental comment on the confused nature of Alsace’s cultural patrimony.
The Rhineland was taken over by the Allies. The French botched together a bit of Prussia and a bit of the Bavarian Palatinate to invent the Saarland, a coal-producing area which they occupied and which, through a number of twists and turns, has continued stubbornly to exist as a separate if very small German province to the present day. The French army also occupied a great swath of land from Wiesbaden southwards and three key bridgeheads. The British controlled Cologne and the Americans an area between Verdun and Koblenz.
Huge gangs of workmen around the former Allied frontlines began to build the cemetery sites that would enshrine the Allied dead (the Isle of Portland supplied 600,000 British gravestones), while other gangs were, further to the east, demolishing any sort of fortification that could possibly help the Germans in a further war, even though these structures had on the whole not been involved in any way in the actual course of 1914–18. Some of these forts were of great antiquity and the Rhineland was denuded of many striking objects. The only exception was made for Ehrenbreitstein, where a huge stars-and-stripes flew, and whose American commander (the extraordinary General Henry T. Allen) refused to be involved in such historical vandalism. Thanks to his stubbornness this gnarled, sprawling and startling object still frowns down on Koblenz.
The only other major military survival was Metz, because it was now again part of France. Its endlessly proliferating fortifications, the work of thousands of men over decades, had also played no role at all in 1914–18. This strange displacement activity showed a basic Allied problem: because the Armistice had happened before their troops had entered Germany, they had never needed to engage with the issue of how you would in fact invade such a big, densely populated and complex country without taking the most terrible casualties. After all, the Germans – famously – had just spent four years finding it impossible to invade France. This nightmarish quandary would emerge even more bleakly in 1939–40.
As the Allies had never invaded Germany, many Germans themselves felt the entire occupation to be illegitimate, and even before the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were known (with its German signatories obliged to march past a long row of hideously mutilated French veterans) the inhabitants of the Rhineland felt as much tricked and lied to as defeated. Almost every family had its own disaster – dead or wounded soldiers, victims of the flu, malnourished children. Inflation, dislocation and the collapse of any real economy criminalized the entire population. A country once known for its meticulous, fair bureaucrats and public services collapsed into a welter of fur-coat, sex and jewellery bribes. For traditional middle-class families with savings and pensions everything melted away in a few weeks, the choice being between starving to death and plunging into the black market. Protection rackets sprang up everywhere. From 1921 hyperinflation finished the last traces of pre-war Germany. It was estimated that the money needed to buy an egg in 1923 would have bought 500,000,000,000 eggs back in 1914. Starving crowds roamed the countryside outside Cologne attacking farms and pulling up half-grown crops. This moral collapse, even when Germany briefly stabilized between 1924 and the Wall Street Crash of 1929, meant that there was no serious trace left of the stuffy, proud Wilhelmine empire – except within parts of the army and the memories of those who had fought in it. The more I think about it, the more it feels that the Second World War happened just as soon as it was possible.
The Allies were never able to create a united front. The Americans wanted to go home as soon as possible; the British, once the German fleet was in their hands, had again become strategically without real enemies. Blame has been heaped on the French for their enshrining hatred and revenge in the Treaty, but it was their territory which had been wrecked. There are so many figures, but among the more striking ones would be the 448 million square yards of barbed wire that needed to be dismantled; the 33,000 miles of roads and 700,000 houses rebuilt; the thousands of poisoned wells; the blown-up coal mines and wrecked industrial equipment. And who would pay the pensions of 700,000 French widows? Entire cities, formerly prosperous and successful, such as Cambrai and Arras, were going to have to be rebuilt from scratch, while the equivalent German cities along the Rhine had not received so much as a dent.
The formerly German-occupied north was in ruins: during the war some of its inhabitants had been resettled outside the zone through Swiss intermediaries, and Herbert Hoover’s famous campaign had kept alive millions of starving Belgians, but in 1919 it was quite clear to the Allies which country should now pay for all these ruins. There were several clumsy attempts by the French and Belgians to create satellite states on the Rhine with bribes, short-sightedly poured into local communist parties on the grounds that they could be relied on to make things even worse. But the impulse to collaborate in return for becoming an Allied satellite was almost always trumped by German solidarity, although the young Konrad Adenauer was briefly tempted. The violent 1923 occupation of the Ruhr by the French and Belgians left the Allies isolated and morally in an ever worse state. Many pessimists felt that their only protection from a second war was to keep Germany economically wretched and militarily feeble, but the colossal reparations demanded by the Allies (which would guarantee German weakness) could only be paid by an industrial and financial powerhouse (which would not be weak).
One curious aspect of the Rhine occupation was how German anger came to focus on the French use of African troops. By
1918 the Allies were drawing in forces from all over the world (with, for example, tens of thousands of Chinese working as stevedores in the Channel ports). But even in 1914 the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, drawn from all over French West Africa, from Mauretania to Togo, were already on the Western Front and some 135,000 fought there throughout the war. The Germans were unable to use their own colonial forces as their colonies were so quickly over-run or bottled up by the Allies. A pathological racism gripped the German army, with countless cartoons and posters deriding such things as ‘the 5th Gorilla Regiment’, ‘the latest addition to the Grande Armée ’. The Germans were outraged that a ‘white’ war for the future of Europe was being undermined in this way. Captured African troops were fitted into the fake scientific obsessions of the period. A remarkable if horrifying exhibition in Frankfurt in 2014 focused on this issue. German scientists had analysed and photographed the black prisoners of war producing a powerful series of photos of faces so detailed that every cicatrice and pore has an unnerving clarity and in some the photographer and his equipment can be seen reflected in the subject’s eyes. One truly terrible photo shows a POW with his entire head covered in plaster, his hands stiff with distress, for some futile collection of ‘African facial types’.
The French attitude towards their own African troops was confused, but a mixture of standard-issue racism and admiration: after all, some thirty thousand African troops were killed. A great monument to the Tirailleurs was put up in Rheims (and quickly taken down by the Occupation authorities in 1940) but it would be too much to suggest it was a colour-blind relationship. Black troops were extensively used in the occupation of the Rhineland, partly because troops from metropolitan France were desperate to be demobilized, but partly indeed to humiliate the Germans. Except under very limited circumstances (circuses; world fairs; a Cameroonian kettle-drummer in a Badenese regiment) this was something new for Germany. There were many cases of rape by Allied soldiers, but the handful that involved Africans caused ‘the Horrors on the Rhine’ – a welter of salacious and appalled reporting across Germany about ‘black bastards’, part of the same pathology that saw ‘Jewish profiteers’ in every agony of the hyperinflation. An ever more elaborate theory of defilement and treachery came to dominate much of the German explanation for 1918: an army betrayed, the war dead mocked, an undefeated nation brought low by the bullying and lies of the mongrel Allied coalition.
