Читать книгу The New Germany - George Young R. - Страница 4

When, in January, 1919, I resigned my commission and made my way out to Berlin as correspondent for the Daily News, I had two purposes in view. One was to find out to what extent we had really won the war—in the only way it could be won—by forcing the German people into revolution; and incidentally to take any opportunity that might offer of furthering that revolution. My second purpose was to find out what prospects there were of making a more or less permanent peace—in the only way it could be made—by establishing the forces of reform in Germany; and incidentally to point out any openings favourable to the furthering of such a peace. The following book brings together and sums up conclusions communicated to the Daily News from time to time and is put forward as an answer to the double question: Have we won the war against Prussianism and have we made a permanent peace?

The answer to this question was only to be got in Berlin. The first mistake made by the soldiers and workers who had won the war was in not insisting on their representatives making peace with the German people and at Berlin. An experience of twenty years in diplomacy, beginning with the arbitration treaties of Lord Pauncefote and ending with those of Lord Bryce, followed by two years of war experience, beginning with political secret service and ending in the ranks, had convinced me from the first that true peace could only be got by developing the forces of democracy of the defeated peoples centering in Berlin, and not by any bickerings between diplomatic formulæ of the victorious Governments collected in Paris. That is why I preferred going as a journalist to Berlin rather than in any other capacity to Paris. And that is why the following papers are published. They show that anyone who spent the first six months of 1919 in Berlin and the big German towns would have seen easily enough how it was that, in spite of military occupations and religious thanksgivings and bonfires and bonuses all round, we were not winning the war but losing it: and how, in spite of territorial partitions and financial reparations, and signatures with gold pens and the setting-up of a League of Nations, we were not making peace but manufacturing wars. We have not yet won the war because we have not as yet supported in Germany the progressive—that is, the revolutionary—elements and suppressed the Prussian—that is, the reactionary—spirit: while we have, of late, been really losing the war by actually assisting German reaction against German revolution. And we are doing this just from the ignorance of our democracy and the insouciance of our diplomacy.

Our democracy has been prevented from ascertaining, and our diplomacy has been precluded from understanding what the German revolution really means, both to Germany and to Great Britain. Although we are slow to understand foreign movements, yet ignorance of such a movement as this would have been impossible but for the conditions under which the war closed. The German revolution, banned, boycotted, and blockaded, became to us a stone of offence, an odious ruin of the war, and so we failed to recognise it as the only possible foundation stone for peace.

The six months I spent in Germany were none too much to realise the radical and rapid changes going on; and I can see how difficult it has been for English readers to get an idea of what is really happening there from the little that has been written about it. They cannot do so at all unless they clear their minds of the cartoons and caricatures and clichés forced on them during the last five years by the propaganda and the Press. It is no use drawing Germany from the life for people who still have before their eyes the "Boches" and "Bolsheviks" of Punch and John Bull. One has, indeed, to clear away two strata of misrepresentation, that of our Government and Press and that of the German Government and Press; for the latter is as much opposed to the German revolution as the former.

It would have been better for Germany had it shown more courage and collapsed less completely last autumn. A few weeks' patient endurance under punishment in a losing fight would have gone far towards restoring it some measure of the sympathies of the civilised world. While the consequent occupation of the whole country would have brought us into direct contact with the German revolution, and would have prevented the fatal split between reformers and revolutionaries, between Majority and Independent Socialists. As it was, we English were left to draw such conclusions as we could from the reports of the few correspondents who penetrated to Berlin. But, with two exceptions, the English Press could at this time publish nothing about Germany that was not merely malevolent. And of the few Englishmen in Berlin as correspondents in January, almost all were replaced before the Treaty of Peace by foreign Jews who would supply the sort of propaganda poppycock with which public opinion is still being poisoned.

What people in England wanted to know was whether the German revolution was a real riddance of the evil we had been fighting and a real renascence of good that we could favour; whether it had gone far enough and deep enough to be a sincere repentance and a sufficient remediation. For, unless Germany was born again, it could not enter the community of nations, and until it did so, there could be no true peace.

They could guess that Kaiserism was dead and gone and Junkerism down and out. But even so picturesque and positive an event as the fall of Kaiserism had been only baldly mentioned in a bare telegram of a line or two. How could the British public realise that the Black Eagle of Prussia was no Phœnix and that the blaze of November 9 had left nothing of it but a bad odour and a white feather.

But in Berlin there could be no doubt. Kaiserism was dead—deader even than Tsarism—because the Kaiser was still alive. His shot-shattered and mob-swept palace was the only reminder of him. And every Berliner had more or less vivid recollections of his fall, recollections too lamentable, too ludicrous, to allow of any restoration of the Kaiser legend even now.

After reading your morning paper about revolution in Dublin and revolt in Glasgow and reconstruction in London, as you walk down to your office past the Dutch decorum of Kensington Palace, the Scotch skimpiness of St. James's, or the generous Germanosities of Buckingham Palace, does it ever occur to you to wonder what goes on in a palace when there is a revolution?

Well, this is what happened to the Kaiserschloss in Berlin on November 8.

The curious crowd that always collects outside the house of anyone mentioned in the papers, whether it's an absconded postmaster or an abdicated potentate, found that the sentries no longer challenged them, and first filtered, then flooded into the inner courts. Thereupon the police and guards left, and the palace remained in charge only of the Kastellan and a few servants and soldiers. All doors were kept locked, and beyond some shouting everything was orderly, for the prestige of the Imperial precincts still prevailed.

Then one Schwieringer, not otherwise distinguished, made his way to the Kastellan and got leave to address the crowd from a window. Having draped the balcony with a red cloth borrowed for the purpose, he declared the palace national property. This broke the spell somewhat. The rest of the soldiers left, and the crowd became noisy.

Late in the afternoon came Liebknecht, who engaged another balcony, borrowed more red curtains, made another speech, and after holding a sort of levée in the Throne Room left again. Later came soldiers and hoisted a red flag. So far the Kastellan had remained master of the situation, conducting his unwelcome visitors through the rooms, unlocking and locking behind him as on ordinary occasions with any ordinary tourists.

Then on November 10 came one Bujakowski, with a Slavonic eye for the possibilities of the situation. Having collected such soldiers and civilians as were hanging about, he made them a speech, and called on them to elect a council, and himself Commandant of the Castle, which they did. He then said he must have a suitable uniform. The council agreed, and appointed a delegation to make selections from the Imperial wardrobe.

Happy delegates—happy, happy Bujakowski! Five hundred uniforms and, say, five pieces to each. How many combinations does that give in which to find the perfect expression of a Spartacist commandant of a Hohenzollern castle. He did his best in the time no doubt. Delegate Schwartz, try a combination of those English and Hungarian uniforms! Delegate Schmidt, see if that hunting costume goes with a Turkish fez! History does not record the result, beyond a cavilling incrimination about a diamond-headed cane. But it must have been effective, for the Commandant returned from the Reichstag with his commission confirmed. The rest of the company played up to his spirited lead, and the next morning his "adjutant" attempted a coup d'état. Bujakowski suppressed it with a revolver, but was, however, deposed a day or two later by an ex-convict, who generously appointed him his secretary.

These three men then formed a triumvirate, which spent most of its time making excursions in fancy dress with the imperial cars, and, oddly enough, kept the castle in fairly good condition. It was not until the sailors' revolutionary corps turned them out that all order disappeared. Some ten commandants then succeeded each other rapidly. The seventh shot the sixth, and was knocked on the head by the eighth. The palace became a resort of bad characters, and was stripped bare. Eventually, it was retaken by force, and the sailors were ejected.

Berliners shake their heads over the loss, estimated in millions (of war marks). But I don't know that there is much to lament. Personally, I am grateful to Bujakowski. His burlesque buffoonery has exorcised the Imperial incubus that still brooded over the deserted shrine of departed littleness, and I forgive him for his share in destroying or dispersing some of the ugliest objets d'art in Europe.

Kaiserism died when William the Second fled to Amerongen and Bujakowski broke into his wardrobe. Nor has it been revived by the revulsion in favour of William of Hohenzollern that we have evoked by our proposal to put him on his trial in England. We have thereby rallied in his support many adherents of the monarchical principle who had previously abandoned him, and by persisting in making a martyr of him, by taking him out of this German pillory and by putting him on an international pedestal, we have already opened the door to a restoration of the Hohenzollern dynasty as a constitutional monarchy. This would mean a restoration of Junkerism and Prussianism, but not of Kaiserism. That peculiar blend of divine right and demagogy is gone for ever.

And what about Junkerism? That cannot be so shortly answered. Junkerism expresses itself in both regions of the ruling class to which Germany has been hitherto subjected—the civil and the military. It is the evil genius of both those great services; and seldom has the world produced public services with so much power for good in them and so much evil as in the German army and bureaucracy. And it is indisputable that the fate of Germany and the future of Europe now depend on whether the revolutionary spirit is strong enough to exorcise the evil genius of Prussianism and of Junkerism from the army and civil service. But the question as to how far, so far, Germany's good angel has fired its bad one out can only be answered as yet by a careful and impartial observation of events in Germany since the revolution. And if these events seem to suggest that the revolution has lost its impetus and that reaction has dominated it, let us remember that the results of a renascence of public conscience, such as occurred in the November revolutions, should be estimated by comparing the concrete conditions of to-day, not with the abstract principles then for a time extant, but with the concrete conditions existing before the upheaval.

As most have already got or can easily get a general knowledge of what general conditions in Germany were before the revolution of November and of what were the general principles promulgated by the revolution, much of what follows will consist of evidence as to how far the revolution has so far failed in realising those principles. For revolution has now resulted in a reaction in which every vantage point gained by the first revolutionary rush is counter-attacked and every early victory is contested again. As every consequent loss cannot be referred back to the deadlock before the offensive the general impression is that of failure. But the Prussianism that now fills German prisons with political suspects is rather a reflection of reaction abroad than a revival of the ancient régime.

By the first rush of revolution in November 1918, the military power of the officer caste was broken and the political power of land and money was reduced to insignificance. But there was no strong obstacle to their recovery, and the power of the bureaucracy was unimpaired. Though the instigators of the crimes of the old régime had been removed, the instruments remained; while the 'Independent' intellectuals, the public prosecutors of those crimes, were before long voted down. And yet before we refuse absolution to the new German democracy we must be quite sure that these relapses are real unregeneracy and not reactions caused by fear of Russian revolution on the one side or Allied retribution on the other. We can only judge of this by reviewing the revolution.

The history of the German revolution can be shortly described and sharply defined. After the first explosion on November 9 came a month of equilibrium between revolution and reaction. Then a month of which the first fortnight was a swing slowly to the right until the breach with the Independents on December 24, and a swing swiftly the second fortnight until the fighting with the Spartacists in January. Thereafter a month of rapid return to the point where it was before the explosion, a point reached with the formation of the Coalition Government by the National Assembly on February 13. Indeed the Government of Scheidemann only differed from that of Max von Baden in being one degree more to the left, a development which was due in any case apart from the revolution.

The German revolution is peculiar in having reached its highest point at once and in having then relapsed to where it started from without any positive reaction. This in itself suggests that it was due in its origin to external forces—propaganda from Russia on the one side and pressure from us on the other. Our military and naval pressure broke first the prestige then the power of Kaiserism and Militarism, while the Russian precedent gave the forces of rebellion and revolution a practical example how to express themselves in co-ordinated councils of workmen and soldiers—the Soviet system. We knocked German Kaiserism out of the saddle, and Russia gave German Socialism a leg up. And that's why it went so far so fast.

That's also why it never got anywhere. For it came to power before it developed its own personalities and policies, and it had, therefore, to put its trust in pre-revolutionary politicians. The Council system had no time to produce leaders—men with enough confidence in their own position and enough character to impose themselves on the permanent officials. The Central Council—the true revolutionary Executive—and the Congress of Councils—the true revolutionary Legislature—never got any power. It was all monopolised by the People's Commissioners, who were not really a revolutionary institution at all, but an ordinary Provisional Government of parliamentarians. And though they nominally held their mandate from the Congress of Councils a majority of them considered themselves as trustees for a Constituent Assembly. Such parliamentarians could work well enough with the permanent officials, and, indeed, welcomed their assistance. Whereas the councils, of course, came into violent collision with them.

Where the council system prevailed, as in the army, it made a real revolution, and broke the officer caste until the Frei-Corps replaced the conscript army. But the workmen were not so drastic in the civil service as were the soldiers in the cadres, and they allowed the parliamentarians to spare the Amalekite. Only the political heads of departments were replaced by Social Democrats; and, in one case I know, a revolutionary Minister allowed his predecessor, out of courtesy, to keep his official residence. This was, of course, all very nice, but it meant that the old machine was not broken up, nor even brought under control. The result was that a coalition between the mere reformers among the commissioners and the civil servants was enough to counter-balance the more revolutionary commissioners and the councils; until finally external circumstances determined the deadlock in favour of the former.

The German revolution never took its Bastille in the Wilhelmstrasse. The sentries set by the Soldiers' Councils at the doors of the Government offices, who loudly demanded your pass and only looked foolish if you ignored them, were symbolic of the failure of the German revolution. So insignificant were these sentinels of revolution that no one saw the significance when they were finally replaced by steel-helmeted Frei-Corps mercenaries last April. By the first week of December it had become evident that the course of events was leading away from the Congress of Councils to the Constituent Assembly, and away from social revolution to political reconstruction. The Central Council that should have been the driving-wheel of the Socialist engine was becoming no more than a drag shoe on the old State coach.

Before the German revolution was a month old—that is, by the end of the first week of December—it was entering its second phase, in which the Parliamentary Commissioners having ousted the proletarian councils from control, then divided among themselves into reformers and revolutionaries. And at the end of the second phase, early in January, we find that the reformers have ousted the revolutionaries.

This came about thus. The German Social Democratic Party was professedly revolutionary. Its political attitude had been traditionally one of refusal of all co-operation or even compromise with the imperial political system. On this negative basis it had been possible to combine in a common front comrades of very different points of view and of political thought. But this superficial solidarity could not stand the strain of the war. A sense of patriotism carried one section—the Majority Socialists—first into countenancing and then into supporting the Government; while pacifist sentiment against war in general, and this war in particular, carried the minority into more obstinate opposition. This finally split the party much as it split our Labour Party. The Majority Social-Democrats moved towards the Government, while the Government towards the end of the war came to meet them. Until finally the Ministry of Prince Max of Baden, that ended the war, not only represented the Reichstag majority, but also the Majority Social-Democrats.

When Prince Max went down in the revolution, he remitted the reins of government to Ebert and Scheidemann. They, knowing that alone they could not rule the whirlwind, called in the Minority Social-Democrats—the Independents, offering them equal representation in the Cabinet, then called the People's Commissaries, and in the Central Council. This arrangement was ratified by the Congress of Councils, though very perfunctorily, as it was considered only a provisional makeshift.

Now, while the Social-Democrats of the Majority were just parliamentary reformers, the Independents of the Minority, Haase and Kautsky, were revolutionaries. Liebknecht was a radical revolutionary who would not come into the Coalition. Consequently, whereas Ebert and Scheidemann considered themselves as merely Commissioners to prepare a Constituent Assembly, the Independents considered themselves Commissaries for the Congress of Councils. The former considered the revolution was probably unnecessary, and in any case had done its work in preparing the way for universal suffrage and a united Germany. The latter considered that the revolution had only begun, and could only do its work through the Soviet system and a general socialisation.

The first serious difference came over the Poles, with whom the Independents had practically concluded an arrangement which was, however, upset by Landsberg, a Jew from Posen, one of the People's Commissaries. Then came serious differences over German policy towards the Entente. The Independents were in favour of admitting culpability in the war crisis, Belgium, submarine warfare, etc., and of accepting such liability as might be shown to be equitable, while frankly discussing such assets as could be realised in payment. This the Majority rejected, preferring a negative policy of passive inaction. But the final breach came over internal policy and the use of force against the revolutionaries, the Communists, who were trying to force the revolution out of the rut of parliamentary reform into which it was slipping.

This Communist Left, commanded but not controlled by Liebknecht, was working for a second revolution in alliance with Russian agents. Its fighting faction, that called itself "Spartacus"—with the accent on the second syllable—was strong in the industrial districts of the centre and west, among the sailors in the coast towns, and in Berlin. Its ranks were filled rapidly with discontented workmen, disbanded soldiers, and "derailed" youths. Rifles were plentiful, and against such irregulars, supported by sailors, the Government was at first helpless. But as the regulars that had kept their ranks returned from the front it was found that some regiments were ready to act against the mob. Such a policy was denounced by the Independents, Haase and Kautsky, while Ebert, perhaps also Scheidemann, had doubts; but Landsberg, who had found a strong man in Noske, the Prussian War Minister, drove matters to a breach. On the first fighting with the sailors at the Marstall on December 23, Haase and Kautsky resigned. Thus the intellectual and idealist element of the revolution was removed from all influence over the conduct of affairs. The result was to cause in January a fight to a finish between the Real-politikers of the Government and the Radicals of the Opposition.

Police precautions against the Russian agents, combined with a Press propaganda against the Spartacists, provoked the latter to action. They seized the offices of the Vorwärts and other papers most offensive to them, and used them for publishing their own pamphlets. They had not apparently planned anything more than a demonstration, and did not anyhow exploit the success they had seized by surprise. The Government, however, after some difficulty in concentrating and supplying sufficient troops, converted the "putsch" into a pitched battle. Noske regulars with all the machinery of modern war, made short work of the half-hearted half-armed irregulars of Eichhorn, the Spartacist Police Commissioner. The revolution was crushed in Berlin and driven back to the coast ports, whence it came and whither it could later be pursued. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, its Berlin leaders, were arrested and at once brutally murdered by their escort with the approval and assistance of the officers in charge. This murder, perfectly well known in Berlin at the time, was only proved by court-martial four months later, after which the culprits were allowed to escape abroad.

So the Independents having committed hari-kari and the Spartacists being hoist with their own petard, middle-class and moderate Germany heaved a sigh of relief, and hoped that the bogey of Bolshevism was buried. The elections to the National Assembly were held a few days later without disturbance, and the German revolution entered its third and last phase.

The German revolution which began in November—in old German the "Month of Fogs"—and ended in February—the "Month of Fools"—was fogged from the beginning and fooled to the end. Its third and last phase began about the middle of January with the establishing of provisional government by the moderate Majority Socialists, the crushing of Spartacus, and the elections. The radical opposition had tried to delay the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, partly because it was for the moment discredited by its secession from the Coalition and its connection with the Communists, and partly because it recognised that a reaction towards nationalism and conservatism had already been set up by the attitude of the Allies and would be given exaggerated expression at the polls. The drift of a weakened and wearied mass can raise a dictator to "save society"; only the driving power of a devoted and determined minority can realise a social revolution. But the Independents had missed their opportunity of seizing power and securing such foreign support for the revolution as they had earned by their attitude on the war. Their subsequent policy of obstruction had as little success as it deserved.

By the middle of February, when the new Government was proclaimed at Weimar, a communist revolution had been converted into a constitutionalist reconstruction; and that this corresponded with the desire of the majority of the people was shown by the election result. Every man and woman over twenty was entitled to vote, and a high percentage did so; while the system of proportional representation employed, whatever its defects, at least gave a fair numerical representation of the party presentments of public opinion. As in the English election, nationalism decided the issue in favour of the party in power. The Independent opposition was discredited by Bolshevism, the Conservative opposition by Kaiserism. Apart from the women the Social-Democrats would probably have had an independent majority; but, as was shown by the Pfalz results in which the women's voices were kept separate, they were more conservative and clerical than the men. As it was, the Majority Socialists with 163 out of 423 members were forced into alliance, not with the Independent Socialists who had only 22 votes, but with the Democratic Liberals who had 75. And as this relieved them of all responsibility to the revolution there was no reason why they should not further strengthen their parliamentary position by taking in the Clerical Centre with its 55 votes as well. And thus Germany got from losing the war a coalition as strong parliamentarily and as weak politically as that which winning the war gave to us.

While the revolution was being side-tracked in Parliament, it was being sandbagged in the Proletariat. A division of Frei-Corps with all the machinery of modern war, tanks, aeroplanes, etc., was sent against the north-western coast ports where the revolution had originated and where Spartacus was pursuing its policy of aggravating the food difficulty by preventing the sailing of food ships as arranged under the armistice. Bremen was entered by force, after fighting; and the other towns opened negotiations. On the eastern frontier a front was formed against the Poles, who had occupied nearly all Posen province, and fighting continued until the Allies stopped it. Great efforts were made to get together some sort of effective force as a basis for government; and the resultant Frei-Corps, though at this early date still few and inferior, were already enough to give check to the "Bolshevist" menace within and without the frontier. Meantime the whole "soviet" system of councils was practically 'frozen out' and politically 'snowed under.' The Central Council was got to abdicate in favour of the Constituent Assembly: the Socialisation Commission to which execution of the economic revolution had been referred, resigned re infecta: while the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils were quietly ignored. A Provisional Constitution was published in which all ideas of a centralised Socialist republic were abandoned, and the federal Reich was restored with the substitution of presidents for princes. Finally the seat of the Assembly was transferred to Weimar, professedly to steep it in the sedative atmosphere of the old pre-Prussian "Kultur" of the philosophers and poets, and practically to withdraw it from the too stimulating atmosphere of Berlin, which was still an Independent stronghold. Even so might a demoralised and democratised England placate a victorious and Victorian America by transferring parliament to the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon.

All these strong measures were really signs of weakness. Spartacus had to be put down to please the Allies, the Poles pushed back to please the nationalists, the Clericals bribed with Government posts to counteract French bids for their support in separatist intrigues. The constitution had to conciliate particularist sentiment in Prussia and the southern principalities because this sentiment prevailed in the general exhaustion of national and revolutionary forces. The old driving power of national sentiment, so much abused during the war and that might still have been called on for a desperate national defence, was worn out. The new energy of the revolution had been wasted; and the country, so far as its government was concerned, was back where it was when the revolution broke out, materially much the worse for its three months' excursion into revolution. In a word, the spirit of the new German Government was diplomatic not democratic. The revolution had come full circle and the Scheidemann Government of April might have been the Government of Max von Baden of six months before.

Morally, however, it was not the old Germany that had bowed before the "forty-seven Princes hats." It had brought back with it from the perilous peaks and bottomless abysses of revolution a wider outlook and a deeper insight. And if it returned from its adventure only more weary and wasted it had at least learned to lift up its eyes to the hills.