by Simon Winder
Defeat and revolution
The war ended after more than four years of the most wearying and horrible fighting with a German defeat which structurally had been built in by the autumn of 1914. The conflict made a mockery of earlier wars, where the fighting had generally been a means of gaining political points. The Germans never had a coherent vision of what they wanted from the war beyond an ill-defined Mitteleuropa power-bloc, whereas for the British and the French the objective was clearly just to defeat the Germans and liberate northern France and Belgium. Kaiser Wilhelm was sidelined early in the war and never recovered. Germany converted itself into a military bureaucracy dedicated to promoting victory, channelling millions of young men to the different fronts with the right training and equipment. Because of the circumstances of the initial fighting and the static nature of the trenches the conflict was entirely different from traditional European wars in which at the first provocation armies from all over the Continent marched across a German landscape. In this sense unification proved a success – after the defeat of the French and Russian invasions the country itself remained safe throughout the war. The only clues that most Germans had to the war’s progress was their own progressive weakening from lack of food and a horrible rain of telegrams reaching into even the most dopey former princely towns with news of yet more deaths. Eventual German casualties came to some six and a half million, in other words every ten days or so they had as many dead or wounded as in the whole Franco-Prussian War.
The Austro-Hungarians suffered around five million casualties before their Empire fell to pieces. The idea that the Habsburg Empire had been a rotten entity in 1914 has little basis in truth – it was clearly heading for a heavy rearrangement on Franz Joseph’s death (which finally occurred, way too late, in 1916) but there was nothing to imply that it would become a mass of poisonous micro-states. It is probably fair to say that among the million and a half actual combat dead, in an Empire which had always had as much a military as a dynastic rationale, were many who had really valued the Empire and these could not be replaced. With the destruction of the army there was nothing left and it broke into some of its constituent fiefs – albeit with internal colonization in turn, so the Bohemian Czechs soaked up the Moravians, Slovaks and Ruthenes, and the Serbs soaked up Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians. The original late-medieval German-speaking base of the Habsburg empire became by default a new Austrian state, a subdued and potentially vicious little German nationalist dream come true with its instantaneously parochialized minor capital in Vienna. Some of the pre-war cultural life continued, but there was, even before the Nazi takeover, an unmistakable sense of everyone shutting up shop. Ludwig Wittgenstein had fought with heroism and distinction in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Russian and Italian fronts. On the latter he was fighting only a little west of the young Erwin Rommel and Friedrich Paulus, who would be so involved in the next war, and just missed Robert Musil, whose essays on fighting there (in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author) are some of the great miniaturist pieces of writing on the war. Wittgenstein wasted little time before heading to England; Schoenberg and Roth moved to Berlin; Loos lived a sad, isolated existence; Klimt and Schiele were dead. Some attempts were made to create a viable Austrian state, but it was always racked with political dysfunction and there was a German nationalist logic to joining the main German state – a logic which the Habsburgs had fought for so long to prevent.
The revolutions that engulfed Central Europe with the end of fighting on the Western and Italian fronts were little understood in Britain but played a disastrous role in explaining the unfolding of events over the following two decades.
Aside from a few, quickly killed French and Russian soldiers in 1914, the odd spy and some prisoners-of-war, nobody in the Allied military during the entire course of the Great War had stepped onto German soil. The Armistice of November 1918 was in effect an admission that this would always be too difficult – the Germans had undoubtedly been defeated and their army was falling to pieces, but there was to be no invasion of the kind that had previously marked failure in war (most obviously after the Napoleonic Wars or the Franco-Prussian War). This had a profound effect in turn on British and French military commanders in 1939–40, almost all of whom had fought in 1918, and who found the idea of successfully invading Germany with now far smaller armies psychologically quite impossible. In the short term this ambiguity – an armistice being a grand-sounding term for a ceasefire rather than a surrender – was to instil a catastrophic narrative into German life. Ludendorff had washed his hands of the war, assumed social revolution would follow defeat and headed off to Sweden to read detective novels in tranquillity. The hunt for traitors was almost immediate. Clearly the German ruling class had failed and they were swept away, with the Kaiser panicking and fleeing into exile in the Netherlands (perhaps needlessly; it is curious to think what might have happened if he had chosen to fight it out – he still had considerable resources, and the revolutionaries in Berlin were quickly and brutally defeated). All the other German royals fled or cut deals to allow them to live quietly in the countryside – an astonishingly speedy and total collapse for a system which had seemed so robust in 1914.
The blockaded, entrenched, sealed space of Germany which gradually became accessible again in 1919 was scarcely recognizable. Ravaged by influenza, much of the population half starving and with millions of dead and wounded, there should have been no doubt that Germany had been defeated. Instead the idea grew up, propagated not least by the Kaiser from exile, that there had been a ‘stab in the back’: that the army had not been defeated, but had instead been betrayed by communists, profiteers and civilian parasites – and not by ‘true’ Germans (as this would have complicated the idea of who was betraying whom), but by the Jews. With horrible speed a small group, among whom there were so many individuals who had been, despite routine discrimination, among the most magical and innovative figures in the German empire, became singled out as un-German.
Chaotic fighting now broke out in many major cities, most emblematically in Berlin and in Munich. The fighting that broke out across Munich could not have been more shocking. A city that took pride in its hierarchical, orderly, Catholic and legalistic heritage, beautiful shops and civic spaces became a disaster area. Already ravaged by the blockade and with many thousands of its citizens dead, Munich now succumbed to street-fighting in the chaotic week leading up to the Armistice as Ludwig III dissolved the monarchy and fled abroad. The terror that Munich would now fall to Bolshevism (seen by many, including many of those who did not support it, as the unstoppable wave of the future) led to mayhem. Before 1914 genuinely insurrectionary groups in Central Europe had been almost irrelevant. It had just been fun for conservatives to frighten themselves with the idea. If anything anarchism had then been a more striking movement. Its inbuilt ineffectiveness had at least spun off the odd, unexpected success, such as the killing of the Empress Elizabeth. Joseph Roth’s derisive novel The Silent Prophet (written in the late 1920s) sums up the non-existent drama of the pre-1914 revolutionary in the figure of the hectic Galician communist Chaikin who, in his tiny Habsburg border town, tries to foment violent change, hectoring the municipal watchmen as ‘capitalist lackeys’ and stirring up the ‘proletarian masses’, in this case some hundred and twenty brushmakers. In Roth’s crushing formulation: ‘Nothing would have made him happier than to be arrested. But no one regarded him as dangerous.’ Until the collapse of the winter of 1918 the most significant revolutionary act had in fact been carried out by the German imperial authorities themselves, with the decision to allow Lenin out of Switzerland and on to his remarkable destiny in Petrograd (the same ministerial group—a cornucopia of smart thinking – had recently come up with a plan to contact the Mexicans to ask if they could attack the USA, and get Texas, Arizona and New Mexico back as their reward – a low-comedy telegram gleefully intercepted by the British and shown to the enraged and ever less neutral United States).
But now the social rev
olution that broke out across Germany was genuine and nowhere more so than in Munich, where, after months of violence, the Soviet Republic of Bavaria was declared in the spring of 1919. It lasted less than a month and had almost no authority outside a tiny area (it impotently declared war on Switzerland) and was suppressed with 1914–1918-inherited brutality, with a thousand or so supporters of the Soviet Republic being killed in action and several hundred executed after capture. Disastrously, there were a striking number of Jews supporting the Soviet Republic (as there had been in the failed Spartacist uprising in Berlin that January) and this provided a lot of chapter-and-verse for those trying to shape a plausible narrative to explain to a traumatized population why the German empire had lost the war and collapsed into anarchy. Of course, it could also have been emphasized that however many Jews were involved, the great majority had been non-Jews, but somehow this was missed.
Munich has now so completely recovered its self-satisfied facade that it is very hard to see it as this irredeemably poisoned city – a poison only finally removed with its destruction and the arrival of the Americans in 1945. It has rebuilt itself as a pleasurable, student-filled and wealthy place – and now seems a twenty-first-century version of the city described in Thomas Mann’s pre-1914 fiction (even down to the shops selling talent-free paintings). But, far more than Berlin, Munich was the laboratory experiment that destroyed Europe – a polarized, violence-obsessed society completely adrift from its old roots in the opportunistic but enjoyably unsuccessful world of the Kingdom of Bavaria, but with no plan for how it should comport itself as simply a regional German city.
The violence which periodically convulsed Germany and Austria in the 1920s and 1930s (and indeed other former Habsburg states) can perhaps best be seen as a series of civil wars which, unlike the one that eventually broke out in Spain, were overwhelmingly heavily weighted in favour of the right. Attempts to copy the Soviet Union failed dismally, with only weeks needed for the ‘forces of order’ to destroy the left. Munich was a perfect example – both in the left’s futility and in the lesson it provided for a huge swathe of middle- and working-class people that it was better to connive with illegality and street violence than risk Bolshevism. Despite all its efforts the Weimar Republic could never compete with this visceral fear, a yearning for military protection against the monster that had been briefly unleashed in Munich. Many Germans still thought of themselves as standing by the law-abiding, polite and stratified pre-war society that they grew up in, but in practice this was often merely empty habit and wishfulness.
The British had set up the blockade in 1914 despite its illegality, simply because it was a clear way to damage Germany and a means of bringing Britain’s main weapon, sea-power, to bear. As a purely military expedient it was meant to add to the difficulties Germany faced in fighting the war. As with everything else to do with the war, what started off as clever became something absolutely out of control. By 1918 the principal champion of free trade had destroyed free trade. Germany, which had been such a vital factor in global trade before 1914, was now just a mass of run-down factories dedicated to churning out ersatz foods and trench weapons (the Freikorps and the new Central European states could live off these stockpiles for years). Its main markets were now either an impoverished shambles (the former Habsburg Empire) or unhelpful enemies such as Britain, France and Italy who had switched to the United States as their supplier of comparable goods. World trade was also confronted by the USSR as a new autarky – another huge market for many countries now permanently shut.
This catastrophe was not really resolved until 1989 and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc – since then most of the world has traded normally with countries vying for position in the traditional way, as before 1914. In 1919, however, the situation was new and many among the Allies saw it as an amazing opportunity that so formidable a competitor had been knocked out, apparently forever. This was reflected in the Treaty of Versailles, which among many other things, saddled Germany with dizzying ‘reparations’, a hugely inflated version of what the Germans had done to France in 1871. The justification was based around German ‘war guilt’ – a disastrous piece of victor’s justice which both absolved the Allies for all responsibility for 1914 and which rang completely untrue within Germany, thereby fermenting further a sense of almost overwhelming grievance across an alarming cross-section of society.
The links between reparations and the hyper-inflation of 1921–3 are confused, but the twin pressures of having to pay, for example, a quarter of all export earnings to the Allied commission and trying to restabilize a country ravaged by layer upon layer of economic headaches combined to generate a two-year horror movie which overlaid the war dead, the influenza and the revolutionary fighting to sever for many Germans any sense of belonging to a coherent political entity. There is no little local museum that does not have an exhibition on the appalling local effects of the inflation. Like the layer of iridium which marks the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary eras, hyper-inflation marks perhaps a change even more fundamental than the war itself. If defeat had shown that Germany’s leaders were worthless and if the failed revolutions had given the country’s social fabric a disturbingly provisional pattern, then hyper-inflation trashed the bases on which families and individuals planned their lives – pensions disappeared, savings became a mockery, an entire German tradition of thrift and the authority of the country’s banks dissolved. Behind the famous photos of people keeping themselves warm with stoves burning banknotes as a cheaper alternative to wood, or using banknotes as wallpaper, lay an absolutely traumatic event that scars Germany even today. It shows the inadequacy of historical narrative that propels events forward into the later 1920s, then into the 1930s, when what stayed stuck uppermost in many minds remained the memory of hyper-inflation.
The merciless quest for reparations meant that French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, so that instead of waiting for the German economy to recover, physical goods and supplies could simply be put on trains and diverted west. This occupation, which had been successfully fended off in 1918, was a humiliation which both radicalized a generally liberal part of Germany and reawakened historical nightmares of German weakness in the face of French predation. This anxiety was also stoked by French rule over the Saarland, a small chip of coal-rich territory which – through various twists and turns – only finally returned to Germany in 1957. Added to French attempts to foster a separate Rhineland state independent of the rest of Germany (this was not a success), it implied to many that the era in which Germany was not frightened of the French had lasted less than a lifetime.
When Germany’s currency was finally fixed at the end of 1923 the damage had been done. Many individuals’ lives had been ruined by the hyper-inflation, but others had prospered and, as with the revolutions of 1918–19, some of those had been Jews. Among extremist circles both on right and left, but also casually in conversation and in newspaper cartoons, a terrible set of assumptions about the Jews as puppet-masters, aliens, plotters, as the root of Germany’s humiliation became plausible. Despite forming a mass movement the left turned out to remain feeble and vulnerable. The communists were easily disposed of in Germany in 1933 and in Austria in 1934. It was therefore right-wing anti-Semitism that proved so significant – with Nazism absorbing much of the left’s old fantasies about Jews and capitalism.
Remembering the dead
I always feel compelled when turning up in any new German town to track down at once its First World War memorial. For very obvious reasons there are almost none to the Second World War beyond general expressions of distress and regret. The shame after 1918 lay in defeat rather than a level of moral dismay not previously experienced by a beaten power. Some Austrian war memorials (such as the one in the town of Rust, in the Burgenland) disconcertingly follow the British pattern of a memorial of a soldier statue with a list of names, with a further list of Second World War names tacked on, as though this was a straightforward matte
r. In Germany the only comparable example I could find was a beautiful snarling lion statue in Darmstadt, a broken spear stuck in its chest (a stab in the front, at least). This monument is irretrievably soiled by the bizarre decision to add on the battlefields of 1939–45 – the mutual, almost exclusively military disaster of the earlier conflict now tangled up in the civilian massacres and genocide of the second. The unimaginable level of private grief within Germany after 1945 was otherwise rightly expressed in private memorials, remembrance books, lists tucked away in town halls, church services – but not by major public memorials.
The bitter atmosphere after 1918 meant that each town came up with its own solution as to how to memorialize its appalling numbers of dead. This resulted in extraordinarily interesting, or banal, or sometimes lastingly brilliant works in stone, wood, glass and metal which began as focuses for deep distress but rapidly became highly political and vexed and then neglected after the even greater disaster after 1939. With none of the national memorial guidelines issued in Britain and France, German responses were fascinatingly various. They respond to the existing genre of monuments to the Franco-Prussian War (which tended to use extravagant amounts of bronze and feature annoying allegorical figures plus reliefs of Wilhelm I and Bismarck) but in the very different atmosphere of national crisis and failure. Some are enjoyably backward – cavalrymen on horseback; some are madly historicist – such as a sort of neo-Assyrian bowl in Lübeck. Others attempt to follow in the great tradition of civic decoration – such as a beautiful but oddly overtangential fountain in Speyer. For many years I felt the greatest of these monuments was the memorial garden and statues in Worms – three stone figures in greatcoats and helmets. What was so moving was that under the ledge provided by the fronts of the statues’ stone helmets a form of black moss had grown, covering the figures’ eyes. I was, as an editor, once very involved in the publication of a new translation of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, and made frantic and unsuccessful attempts to find photos of these moss-blinded statues for the jacket, even though their mournful message was quite at odds with the text. On a recent visit to Worms I found to my dismay that the statues had been cleaned up and without the moss were merely clunky and unoriginal.
