by Robert Moss
Former cavalry officers caught Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the two shining names of the German revolution, shot them in the back of the neck, dumped their bodies in the canal and made a marching song out of their exploit.
The Social Democrats in power, Ebert and Noske, turned to the monocles of the General Staff, just as Johnny’s father had foreseen. They even appealed to the ultranationalists and out-and-out monarchists of the Freikorps — the volunteer detachments — who hated their new rulers as much as they did the Bolsheviks, and possibly more. Together they shelled the rebel sailors out of the Schloss and marched from city to city, liquidating Workers’ Councils. Bremen, a Red fortress, was assaulted with heavy artillery.
Johnny returned to Hamburg as a hunted man, disguised in the cloth cap and drab overcoat of a worker.
He approached the family house cautiously. Instead of police agents, he saw a movers’ truck outside. Bertha puffed down the steps, carrying the lamp from his old room.
He whistled to her.
“You—” she gaped at him. “You must go away at once!”
“Have you been evicted? Where’s father?”
“Go away! Mama mustn’t see you!”
“Answer me, Bertha!”
“We’re going to Mama’s family in East Prussia,” she said nervously, looking over her shoulder.
“What about Father?”
“He’s gone.” She looked ready to burst into tears.
“Tell me!”
“They came for him. They had a list.”
“Who?”
“Freikorps. General Maercker’s detachment, I think. Willi Rausch was with them. They shot him at the front door.” Her chest heaved, and she could hardly get out the last words. “They put him down like a dog. Now go. Please. Before she comes.”
It was too late. Johnny’s mother was already hurrying down the steps.
“Bertha!”
“It’s Johnny, Mama.”
She turned her face away. “I have no son.”
“Mother—” Johnny appealed to her.
She faced him then, for an instant, and he saw that she had grown terribly old.
“You pulled the trigger,” she said.
He drank into the night at a whores’ bar off the Reeperbahn, where the lights of the honky-tonks burned brighter than ever, despite the misery outside. In that dead port you could buy any kind of sex for money or chocolates or cigarettes, or merely a bed and a chance of breakfast.
I have lost everything, he told himself. My family. God. (Nietzsche, before Marx, had persuaded him that God was dead, and even if he had never read either, the war might have had the same effect.) Country. Profession. Everything except my comrades and that will-o’-the-wisp — the revolution. All the more reason to cling tight to them.
It was past midnight when he went to the Rausch residence, on an elegant boulevard near the Binnen-Alster. He still had his pistol, confiscated from an unlucky member of the Berlin police. At least he could settle one score.
He banged on the door knocker until Herr Rausch leaned out of an upstairs window in his nightcap.
“What do you want?” he shouted down. “Go away or I’ll call the police.” The sight of the big man in a cloth cap made him nervous.
“Willi told me to come!” Johnny called back.
“Willi?” Herr Rausch’s flabby features creased in puzzlement. Then he added with pride, “Willi’s on the eastern border, fighting the Reds!”
One more stupidity, Johnny thought. He had heard that some of the Freikorps had gone east, dreaming of the Teutonic knights. That account would have to be settled later.
Trudging back to his bolthole, Klaus Behring’s dingy room in the Gangeviertel, he was accosted by a trembling woman with a daughter about his own age. The woman had a decent, homely face.
“We have nowhere to go,” she said. “You have a kind face. Will you help us?”
“I wish I could.” He thought of the rising damp on the walls of Klaus’s room.
“My husband was killed in the war. My daughter could warm your bed,” the woman implored. “Or I could, if you prefer.” The girl kept her face hidden.
“Here — take this—” he blurted out, handing them his last pack of cigarettes. He rushed on into the dark.
My God, he thought, has it come to this? His head was pounding. There must be tens of thousands of such women all over Germany. He had seen the packs of orphans by the docks, fighting over scraps of rotting fish. He had to help change all of that. But he would need to be part of an organization of professionals. The mutiny in the fleet, the risings in Hamburg and Berlin, had been a glorious amateur stunt and had captured the imagination of the country — for about as long as a traveling circus. Next time, it would be different.
When the Communist party of Germany was formed as the German section of a world movement, the Communist International, Johnny was one of the first to join. They gave him a membership card in his own name, and a pocket calendar with a questionnaire on the first page headed, “Important: To Be Filled in Immediately.” He gnawed on his pencil as he studied the page. “This book belongs to...(space for name). Address...Membership number...Union...”
He tore the calendar into strips, lit a match and watched it burn. Then he chopped the membership card into tiny pieces with his pocketknife and tossed them into the toilet. They were still amateurs — or worse, good Germans, sticklers for form. How could he, a man on the run with blood on his hands, go about with these lethal documents on his person?
Since the party was unable, or unwilling, to support him, he survived by doing odd jobs, first around the waterfront in Hamburg and later in the steel mills of the Ruhr. He made himself useful to the cause in little ways. He organized self-help groups, flying squads of men on bicycles who could be called in to save tenants from being evicted. Even the police were scared of them. He went on a gun-running assignment in the Baltic in a leaky old forty-footer, the Lisi. They met a disguised Soviet freighter in the middle of the night and collected a pile of antique tsarist rifles bundled up in tarpaulins and cartridges buried in barrels of flour.
The party gave him the sense of security that comes from belonging to a large family, and the women were easy. Many of them thought him handsome, now that the lines of his face had sharpened. More compelling than mere looks was the sense of danger that travelled with him. “When I kiss you,” one of his girls said, “I smell gunpowder.”
Committee meetings bored him with the endless quibbling over petty points of doctrine, and as the months passed his impatience grew. He felt that for some reason he had been marooned in the outer circle. He wanted to be inside. And he needed action.
6
He found lodgings nearer the harbour, above a curio shop. When he came home that night, the gas lamps were sputtering. The wail of a ship’s siren floated in from the sea, lonely and plaintive like a cat begging to be let in from the cold. He clenched his fists inside his pockets. He was restless and angry; as winter came on, he felt the days slipping through his hands. He had been out on recruiting work, trying to persuade the men coming off a freighter of the North German Lloyd to come to a party meeting. The sailors were nervous; they wanted to get home to their wives or girlfriends. Johnny recognized one of them, an old shipmate from the Thüringen. In the winter of 1918 the man had been ready for anything. Now all he could do was to mumble that he had mouths to feed and couldn’t risk getting his name on the blacklists. He fled from Johnny as he might have fled from a mugger.
They’ll become mules without action, Johnny told himself. We must have movement.
Greta, the landlord’s daughter, came out into the hall as soon as she heard the latch and fluttered her eyelashes at him.
She was round as a pumpkin and had no waist at all, but she was soft and giving and good to hold on a raw night when the harbour mists rose above the windows.
“How are you, Lovie?” He gave her a quick kiss on the lips, turning his hips as she slipped her ar
ms around him so she would not feel the angular bulge of the pistol that lay flat against the small of his back, hidden in the waistband of his trousers.
“Father’s out,” Greta announced, looking suggestively at the open door behind her. “And I’ve got some cherry brandy.”
“Later. I have work to do.”
“Those stuffy old books can wait.” She hung on his neck.
How could he explain to her that he was ravenous for the stack of dog-eared, broken-backed books that formed a barricade beside his bed? Books were weapons, no less than the gun he had carried since the mutiny. He had to master so many, with so little time. He had to make up for the schooling he had lost and prepare himself for the next stage of the fight. He had already worked his way through the two volumes of a selected edition of Marx. He revelled in the Promethean defiance of the early writings, the sense of stealing fire from heaven. From Marx he had learned to see history as a process of constant struggle. From Engels, from the Anti-Dühring, he obtained the answer to the moral question. Nothing was final, absolute or sacred; everything was relative. History, only history, would decide whether a man’s actions were good or evil. The murder of a thousand Erich von Arnims was justified if it accelerated the march of history.
From Lenin, Johnny learned what revolution required: an elite corps of legionnaires, secret and disciplined, utterly divorced from the sticky web of comforts and constraints that made lesser men slaves of the social order. He believed his own destiny belonged with that secret order.
But here was little Greta, grazing on his neck.
“Later,” he repeated.
“I know what’s on your mind,” she pouted. “You’ve got a new one, haven’t you? Your taste’s gone off a bit. Black as a witch and flat as an ironing board. Four eyes to boot. My poor mother used to say men will make love to the back of a bus.”
Johnny was mystified. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“She came round here looking for you, didn’t she?”
Johnny’s alarm showed in his face. Nobody knew his address except Klaus and Harold Beer, the district party chief.
“What did she want?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Johnny.” His expression scared the girl. She dipped into her bodice and pulled out a folded square of paper. “Here. She left you this.”
Johnny snatched it from her.
Nothing more than a place and a time. He knew the place, a hall in a workers’ district just outside Altona.
“What did she say?”
“Nothing — just her name.”
“What name?”
“Ula. She said you’d remember. Silly kind of a moniker, if you ask me.”
Johnny remembered. The Ula had been his first boat. He consulted the paper again. Eight o’clock. That gave him less than an hour.
There were guards outside the hall, and one of them wanted to frisk Johnny before letting him in. He was rescued by a girl in wire-rimmed glasses and a short leather coat, with kinky black hair that flew off in all directions from under her beret.
“You’re late,” she greeted him.
“And you must be Ula.”
She didn’t return his smile. “I’m Magda,” she said curtly, and wrung his hand like a man trying to prove something.
She might be pretty, he thought as he followed her past the guards, if she were ever prepared to let on she’s a woman.
He sat next to her, on the aisle. The faces around him were those of workers and seamen like himself, people living on the waterline. It would take little to sink them, but then again they had nothing much to lose. The man on the platform, however, looked different. He wore a decent suit and a watch chain across his vest and talked through his nose about the theory of surplus value.
There was some whispering behind the rostrum. Then the chairman got up, tugged at the speaker’s coattails to signal that his time was up and announced, “The comrade from Russia is here!”
This revived the audience. While the pianist banged out a few bars of the Internationale, people craned to get a good look at the new arrival. A burly figure in a brown leather coat like Magda’s, his cap rakishly askew, he marched across the stage and vaulted right onto the table at which the party leaders were seated, sending pencils and ashtrays flying.
“We sit talking while Germany starves!” he roared at his audience. “But every one of us knows what’s required! The rich must die so the poor can live!”
The previous speaker fidgeted and rubbed his nose, but several men jumped up and chorused their approval. Johnny got on his feet too, trying to get a better look at the speaker. The beard was gone, except for a bluish shadow. The face was leaner and harder, with deep lines scored between nose and chin. But there was no mistaking the man. The comrade from Russia was Heinz Kordt.
“You know my voice!” Kordt went on. “It’s the voice inside every one of you. A man can take so much before he breaks — or breaks out. I’ve been in Petrograd, and in Moscow. I’ve seen the future. I’ve seen a country without monocles or profiteers, where men are equal and earn the fruits of their labour. I’ve seen a place where children don’t go hungry while their mothers hawk their bodies for bread.
“Comrades, the revolution in Russia is still imperilled. The capitalist world, terrified of the future, has conspired to strangle it. The Russian people need our help. Their final victory, which is inevitable, will bring ours closer — until a Soviet Russia and a Soviet Germany stand together as the mightiest power on earth! Then no cabal will be able to stand against us. Together we shall ignite the world! It’s not a dream of the next century, it’s a dream of tomorrow!
“But the monocles and the profiteers and their lapdogs in Weimar won’t give up without a fight. We must arm! We must build a Red Army in every German city! Each man among you, every woman, has to make your choice. Es geht im die Wurst. The sausage depends on it.”
The old man sitting in front of Johnny nodded his head at this. But at the end of Kordt’s speech, which returned to the theme of a new man in a new society, he tugged at his beard and muttered, “And ye shall be as gods.”
Curious, Johnny tapped his shoulder. “What did you say?”
The old man turned in his seat. His eyes were watery. He sucked on his pipe and said, “It’s what the serpent said to Eve. It’s what they always promise. You’ll see what comes of it.”
“Fool!” Magda snapped at him. “You don’t belong here.” She jogged Johnny’s elbow, coaxing him into the aisle.
She took his arm and steered him around the crowd, through a side door.
The old man’s words left a sour taste.
It was my father’s warning too, Johnny thought. Beware of building a false church. But they’re wrong. Of course they’re wrong. If only my father had lived to see Russia...
“You must call him Viktor,” Magda was saying.
She escorted him across a courtyard, up a treacherous flight of steps. The biblical gloom evaporated the moment Heinz Kordt erupted from a circle of admirers and seized Johnny in a bear hug.
“Let me get a good look at you.” He thrust Johnny back, still hanging on to his arms. “By God, you’re a man. Isn’t he, Magda?”
“There’s no contrary evidence,” she shrugged, and sidled off to the table where tea and whiskey were laid out.
“She’s from Cracow.” Kordt watched her trim backside as she moved away. “A cold-assed bitch, but very reliable.”
“Heinz — I mean Viktor—”
“Listen. We drink. Then we get rid of the others and we talk, you and me. I’ve got plans for you.”
The night was as long as the last one they had spent together almost six years before, in the world before the war. Sometime before dawn, Kordt dragged out a Victrola and put on a recording of the mercenary marching songs of the Thirty Years’ War. He hooked one arm around Magda’s, the other around Johnny’s, and turned a little jig, as he boomed out the chorus of the famous song of Der verlone Haufen, the Lost Ban
d:
Let the flags blow wide,
We are going into battle...
This was the Heinz Johnny remembered.
“I got your address from Harold Beer,” Kordt announced at one point.
“I guessed as much.”
“Harold says you’re a good man, but impatient.”
“Beer’s an old woman. He spends all his time bitching about his rivals. He’s scared to move. He won’t understand that this business is like riding a bicycle. If you stop pedalling, you’ll fall off.”
“I see you’ve learned a thing or two.” Kordt stared at the younger man for a moment, appraising. He seemed to like what he saw. He turned up the volume on the Victrola and leaned close to Johnny. “I’ve been sent here on a special job,” he confided. “We’re going to build a Red Army here in Germany. A hundred thousand armed men, enough to sweep the monocles into the Baltic. The Russians are sending their best instructors. Trotsky promised me personally that he will arrange shipment of all the rifles we need. I’m in charge in Hamburg. Within a year — two years at the outside — we’ll be ready to seize power, with twenty times the resources the Bolsheviks had when they took St. Petersburg. We can’t fail. What do you say?”
Johnny was on his feet, his eyes shining. “Tell me what I can do.”
For the next two years he worked for Kordt in the underground party — the Apparat — building a revolutionary army. In the woods outside Hamburg he helped train recruits for the Red Hundreds, the workers’ militia, under the scrutiny of a tall, imposing Russian Jew who called himself Waldemar. It was rumoured that Waldemar had seized the telegraph office in St. Petersburg in 1917 and routed the cossacks in the civil war. Under his direction each clump of trees became a barracks, a police station, a government office.
Again and again Waldemar hammered on the theme that political struggle was different from conventional war.
“Psychology is the key,” he told Johnny. “A military setback can be a psychological victory, if it mobilizes support for our side. When you take on the police, make sure there are lots of people around. Get them in the middle if you can. If innocents are killed, the workers will be outraged and join us in their thousands.”
