In Europe

by Geert Mak

  From May, the work of the Freikorps was more or less taken over by civil and military courts. Hundreds of death sentences were carried out. This was the Third Act.

  The Fourth Act was actually an intermezzo. On 18 August, 1919 President Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution. To a certain extent, the document met the wishes of all concerned: advocates of direct conciliar democracy were given the referendum, liberal parliamentarians received the national parliament, the old-school monarchists were given a president. The new parliament met at Weimar, a city intended to become the symbol of the new German unity, the city of such great minds as Herder, Goethe and Schiller, and also of the pleasant, unsullied German countryside. Weimar was also a city that could be easily defended, if necessary, by a handful of loyal troops, but no one mentioned that in public.

  Six months later, on 10 January, 1920, the Treaty of Versailles came into force. The German Army had to be reduced to a quarter of the size of the former Kaiserliche Armee. This meant the end of the Freikorps. The wild and rowdy mercenaries, however, had no intention of letting that happen; their generals, including Ludendorff, tried to seize power. The Ehrhardt Brigade mentioned earlier refused to be disbanded. On the night of Friday, 12 March, 1920, acting on orders from Wolfgang Kapp and General Walther von Lüttwitz, the Freikorps’ 5,000 members marched in formation into the heart of Berlin to occupy the government ministries and ‘crush without mercy every sliver of resistance’. The hours that followed were chaotic, the army refused to take sides, and finally – at their wit's end – the government called in the help of the former revolutionary forces. ‘Fight with every means to preserve the republic! Lay aside all internal differences. There is only one effective remedy for the dictatorship of Wilhelm II: a total shutdown of all economic activity!'Then the government ministers made good their escape.

  Nevertheless, the ‘Kapp Putsch’ was a miserable failure, the general strike called for in such desperation by the former government a resounding success. Never had Germany experienced a paralysis as complete as the one that followed. No trains or trams ran. No letters were delivered. No factory opened its gates. In Berlin there was no water, gas or electricity. Almost all government offices were closed. No newspapers appeared. The leaders behind the putsch had absolutely no grip on society. No decree made it past the minister's offices. Within a week, it was all over. It was the final, unified manifestation of a socialist Germany.

  Act Five, the drama's grand finale. The violent revolution went underground. After 1920, a variety of covert groups sprang up amid the ranks of the army and the Freikorps. They saw Versailles as an attempt to undermine the old German values, and anyone wishing to consolidate that peace was a traitor, particularly if he happened to be Jewish and an intellectual.

  ‘Everywhere, hatred was in the air,’ George Grosz wrote, ‘everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the nobles, the communists, the soldiers, the homeowners, the workers, the unemployed, the Reichswehr … the control boards, the politicians, the department stores and the Jews again … It was as though Germany had been split in two, and both halves hated each other like in the Nibelungensage. And we knew it, or at least we began to realise it.’

  The climate was described perfectly by Joseph Roth in his novel The Spider's Web, a story of intrigue. The narrative thread followed two protagonists: Theodor Lohse, a frustrated young middle-class man who gradually becomes a political criminal, and Benjamin Lenz, who ‘plays the pipes of the carousel’ undisturbed, forges reports for foreign missions, steals documents and stamps from government offices and has himself locked up with people in custody, pumps them for information, and waits for ‘his’ day to arrive. At the centre of the web is Munich. Important secondary characters are Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler.

  Roth spun his spider's web with such great care that something miraculous happened: his fantasy was outstripped by historical reality. Starting on 7 October, 1923, his book was published in serial form in Vienna's Arbeiterzeitung. The last instalment appeared on 6 November, 1923, and it was on 8–9 November that Ludendorff and Hitler attempted – unsuccessfully – to seize power. In Munich, of all places. But by then the most important switch had already been thrown.

  In October 1914 Walther Rathenau wrote to his Dutch friend Frederik van Eeden: ‘Who among us knows whether he will live to see peace? We will experience more difficult things than those we have seen as yet. A hard generation will arise, and may even crush our hearts underfoot.’ Today a little monument stands at a bend in the shady Königsallee where Rathenau was shot and killed by members of that ‘hard generation’ on 24 June, 1922. By then he was Germany's minister of foreign affairs and had succeeded in reducing by almost half the reparation payments to be made under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and he was doing his best to restore faith in Germany. His greatest mistake was his apparent success at doing just that.

  People like Rathenau were in constant danger. According to the propaganda of the extreme right, they were responsible for every disaster that had overtaken Germany since summer 1918: the stab in the back to a victorious army, the humiliation of Versailles, and after that the collapse of the economy in the stranglehold of the reparation payments. ‘Knallt ab den Walter Rathenau / Die gottverfluchte Judensau’ was a text sung openly by members of the Freikorps. Rathenau himself was particularly worried by the way hatred was becoming a commonplace social phenomenon.‘When the war was over these people were unable to find their way back to normal life,’ he told the society journalist Bella Fromm. ‘Now they don't even want to go back to normal life. The desire to kill and loot has taken possession of them.’ Two days later he was dead.

  The murder was carried out by three young students, led by a young ex-lieutenant. This officer was also part of a spider's web, the Organisation Consul, led by the same Captain Ehrhardt who had organised the Kapp Putsch. The schoolboys had convinced each other that Rathenau was one of the Elders of Zion. They shot him from a moving car while he was on his way to work.

  Rathenau's corpse was at his home for viewing. Count Kessler went there: ‘He lies in an open coffin in his study, where I have spent so much time with him, his head turned slightly to the right, a very peaceful expression on his deeply lined face, a handkerchief of fine material draped over the lowest, shattered part of it.’

  The killers made a run for it right away: one of them was arrested quite quickly, the other two cycled through a great part of Germany, hid in an abandoned castle, were discovered there and killed in the gunfight that followed. A few years later the Nazis elevated them to the status of martyrs.

  Historians are always faced with questions that cannot be asked. What would have happened to Europe, for example, if Winston Churchill had been killed in 1931 by the New York cab which only nicked him? Or if Corporal Hitler had been asphyxiated during that last mustard-gas attack in late summer 1918, instead of merely blinded? Or if the attack on Rathenau had only …

  But Rathenau was killed, and Churchill was not.

  Rathenau's assassination was probably the most important political killing of the twentieth century. He was every bit as exceptional a character as Churchill or Charles de Gaulle, every bit as brilliant and charismatic. He possessed the vision of Jean Monnet, the clarity of Alfred Einstein. ‘You sensed,’ Haffner wrote, ‘that if he had not been a minister of foreign affairs in the year 1922, he could just as easily have been a German philosopher from 1800, an international financier from 1850, a great rabbi or a hermit.’ Like Hitler, he possessed the magic power needed to move masses; the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets after his assassination bore witness to that. His power, though, was a positive one, a power that could have made the twentieth century turn out quite differently for Germany and for Europe.

  For years, Rathenau had stood at the helm of the Allgemeine ElektrizitätsGesellschaft (AEG), a huge German concern his father had helped to found. He was one of the few people to recognise the imminent approach of the First World War, and did e
verything in his power to turn the tide. That was why he also supported the British arms-control proposal of 1912, a proposal that was immediately scuppered by the kaiser. Rathenau realised that a country's influence was based not only on military force, but every bit as much on economic power and moral authority. In late 1913 he launched a plan to arrive at an economic merger with the countries of Central and Western Europe: Mitteleuropa, an early forerunner of the European Union. During the First World War he was responsible for raw materials distribution, afterwards he was an extremely successful minister of reconstruction. But the most important thing was his vision, his style, his way of thinking.

  Joseph Roth, too, visited Rathenau's house to pay his respects. ‘Throughout the house and throughout this man's entire being, a conciliatory spirit reigned,’ he wrote. Downstairs was the ‘desk of the public official’, upstairs ‘the quiet writing table of the private man and writer,’ but all of it was surrounded by books: Kant, Goethe, Plutarch, the Bible in all forms and translations. There was ‘almost no name from the history of philosophy, the great, endless history of the mind, that was not represented here. And everything he read and wrote breathed that same conciliatory urge … ‘I come past the place where he was murdered. It is not true that every murder is a single murder. This murder here was a thousandfold, incapable of being forgotten, incapable of being avenged.’

  The monument on Königsallee was built a quarter of a century later. The street is narrow, the old trees have been cut down, most of the mansions have been replaced by modern villas, only the bend in the road is still recognisable. A few hundred metres before this bend is where Rathenau's house must have stood. The cars race by, the birds sing songs of spring. This is how oblivion works.

  I, Bertolt Brecht, hail from black forests old.

  My mother bore me through the streets of town

  As I lay hidden in her womb. And the chill of forests cold

  Shall gnaw within me, till death does cut me down.

  In the asphalt city I have my home.

  Berlin grew cynical. In the 1920s a separate Berlin began to arise, consisting of artists and the new moneyed classes, with parties that bore no resemblance to the rough-and-tumble soirées of the Mackie Messers and Polly Peachums from right after the war. Now they were snobbish gatherings, ruled by the motto ‘Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and the other.’ After the revolution and death, the Berliners were, in their own way, reinventing sex.

  Stefan Zweig, an Austrian, was flabbergasted to see how the Berliners ‘practised perversion with all the systematic thoroughness in them,’ and with all the pathetic eroticism that went along with that. ‘Painted boys with artificial bosoms paraded up and down Kurfürstendamm, and not just the professionals: every high-school boy wanted to earn a little pocket money … Young girls liked to brag about being perverse: at any school in Berlin, to think that anyone might still be a virgin at the age of sixteen would have been considered ridiculous.’

  The American composer Nicolas Nabokov described an evening's carousal with the exotic dancer Isadora Duncan and her brand-new husband, the brilliant and thoroughly unbalanced Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, seventeen years her junior. They ran into Count Kessler, ‘accompanied by a dark-haired girl by the name of Judith or Ruth or something, wearing only a dinner jacket, a starched shirt and a top hat, leaving the extremely seductive parts below her waist covered only most imperfectly.’ At the party the next evening at Kessler's home, the guests could admire a young black exotic dancer just in from Paris: Josephine Baker. Yesenin would commit suicide in 1925, Duncan was strangled two years later on the French Riviera, when her scarf became tangled in the wheels of her sports car.

  ‘The near future has determined that I am to be ground to sausage meat,’ sighed Stephen Labude, one of the main characters of Erich Kästner's novel Fabian (1931), during one such wild evening. ‘What shall I do in the meantime? Read books? Chip away at my character? Make money? I was sitting in a huge waiting room, and it was called Europe. The train would be leaving in eight days, I knew that. But where it was going and what would become of me, no one knew. And now we are back in the waiting room again, and again it is called Europe! And again we have no idea what is going to happen. We live from day to day, the crisis knows no end.’

  That was indeed the crux of it: day by day. Day by day, because every day the country's politics could change, day by day too because every vestige of economic stability was disappearing. In September 1922, Käthe Kollwitz complained for the first time in her diary about inflation and financial difficulties. ‘How unbelievably expensive things are. This year Karl will earn approximately 300,000 marks, less than half of what we need. If I did not earn the other half, we would also go under, like countless others. So many are becoming impoverished.’

  The figures on German hyperinflation are well known: in 1918, the rate was 4 marks to the dollar; in 1922, 400 marks; after the assassination of Rathenau that quickly became 1,000 marks; and by late November 1923 you could get 4,210,500,000,000 marks for a dollar. The Berlin daily newspaper the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung cost 30 pfennigs in May 1921; in December 1922, 50 marks; on 1 February, 1923, 100 marks; on 1 June, 300 marks; on 1 July, 1,500 marks; on 1 August, 5,000 marks; on 15 August, 20,000 marks; on 29 August, 60,000 marks; on 12 September, 300,000 marks; and on 19 September, 800,000 marks. The million-mark mark was reached on Thursday, 20 September. The next day it was 1.5 million. The Sunday edition on 28 October cost 2.5 billion marks. The paper of Friday, 9 November, bearing news of Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, cost 60 billion marks.

  The key effect of this inflation was the disappearance of every sense of value. Musicians and performers were paid after the show with suitcases full of banknotes. They took them to a shop right away to buy the most necessary items, for by morning the money would be worthless.

  The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, living in Berlin at the time, was dragged along one evening ‘to an interesting place’. He arrived in a neat and tidy middle-class apartment, with paintings of family members in uniform on the walls. ‘We were given lemon phosphates with a shot of alcohol in them. Then the host's two daughters came in – naked. They started dancing. One of them began talking about Dostoyevsky's novels. The mother looked hopefully at the foreign guests: perhaps they would let themselves be seduced by their daughters and pay for it, in dollars, of course.’

  At the same time, many people became exceedingly rich during this same period, particularly if they were young and good at playing the money markets. Part of the city's youth lived in a world that somewhat resembles that of the New Economy bubble of the late 1990s; school parties flooded with champagne, twenty-year-old millionaires supporting their parents. While the ‘old rich’ had saved their money, the ‘new rich’ spent theirs as fast as possible. That turned the world completely upside down. The old Germany, after all, had been a culture of the frugal.

  What was the economic background to these odd times, when everything – including love – was mercurial and relative? It was all because of the reparation payments demanded by that damnable Versailles, the right-wing Germans shouted. (They conveniently forgot that there actually was a great deal to be compensated for: in Belgium in particular, Germany had caused unbelievable damage for no good reason at all. In addition, the total sum to be paid was lower than the damage claims France had been forced to pay Germany less than fifty years earlier.) According to the terms of the treaty, Germany would have to pay 1.8 billion marks in damages annually, up to the year 1988.

  In truth, however, the reparation payments had only a minimal effect on inflation. The collapse of the mark was due primarily to the enormous public debts engendered by the Germans themselves between 1914–18, for a total sum of 164 billion marks. Of that, 119 billion had been raised with the sales of patriotic war bonds – those who put their savings into such bonds never saw their money again – while the balance was funded by simply printing more m
oney. The Germans had hoped to set everything right once they had taken Paris and could demand damages from the French and British. Germany's tight squeeze, therefore, was not caused solely by the reparation payments, but also and most importantly by the country having gambled on themselves receiving reparation payments.

  The crowning blow was the damage the country had incurred in the war. For example, in the late 1920s the German government was paying benefits to 761,294 war invalids, 359,560 war widows, 73,781 fatherless children, 56,623 orphans and 147,230 parents who had lost one or more sons, for total expenditures of more than a fifth of the national budget. The final blow to the economy was dealt by the primitive way in which the government tried to deal with the problem. They printed more money. And printed it faster and faster.

  Then, suddenly, the whole crisis was over. Within three months a new chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, had the Germany economy back on its feet. On 15 November, 1923 a new currency was issued: drab little banknotes on which was printed ‘Rentenmark’. The value of the new currency was supposedly based on collateral consisting of Germany's total gold reserve, ground and other property. In reality, none of that was true, but the fact that the Germans believed it turned out to be enough. On Saturday, 17 November the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung cost ‘90 billion marks = 15 Goldpfennige’. On Friday, 22 November the paper cost ‘150 billion marks = 15 Goldpfennige’. Two weeks later, it was still 15 Goldpfennige. The currency held its ground. Within a month the new mark was back on a normal footing with the dollar, at an exchange rate of 4.2:1.

  With the arrival of the Rentenmark, things quieted down. The pressure imposed by the reparation payments was eased by means of an ingenious plan drawn up by the American banker Charles Dawes. American money was actually being invested in the country. In 1925, Stresemann was replaced as chancellor, but continued to play an important role until 1929 as minister of foreign affairs. General Hindenburg was elected president in 1925, and even the conservatives began gaining a little confidence in Weimar under the reign of this surrogate kaiser.