My PDS, if it is still there, will argue that the Berlin tragedy of 1918-19 paved the way for the catastrophe of 1933. Engels once remarked, in a letter to a friend, that history is the result of conflicts of many individual wills, who have been affected in different ways by a host of particular conditions of life. The final result is often something that no one willed. As a general statement I think he’s right, but Hindenberg and Ebert wanted to crush the revolution in Berlin. And they did.
So you see, Karl, my century began with a tragedy and is ending on the same note. Our generation was brought up on stories of how it might have all been different if the revolution had triumphed in Berlin. You might think I’m still trying desperately to cling on to something, to anything, even if it is just the debris of failed revolutions. You might even be right but, if only for a few minutes, forget I’m your father. Let me assume the guise of a professor of comparative literature and suggest that you read one of the great novelists of this century.
Even though Alfred Döblin was not a favoured author of the DDR commissars, I often used him in my lectures at Humboldt. I read passages from his works and had the following proposition by him put up in large type on my noticeboard:
The subject of a novel is reality unchained, reality that confronts the reader completely independently of some firmly fixed course of events. It is the reader’s task to judge, not the author’s! To speak of a novel is to speak of layering, of piling in heaps, of wallowing, of pushing and shoving. A drama is about its poor plot, its desperately ever-present plot. In drama it is always ‘forward!’ But ‘forward’ is never the slogan of a novel.
Döblin was not simply the author of Berlin, Alexanderplatz. He wrote two other epic novels. When you have some time you should try and read A People Betrayed: November 1918: A German Revolution and its sequel Karl and Rosa: A German Tragedy. I’m not alone in this opinion. Your very own Gunter Grass, the lyric poet of German Social Democracy, is in full agreement with me on the Döblin question. He has acknowledged his own debt to Döblin, putting him on an even higher pedestal than Mann, Brecht and Kafka. I’m not sure that Grass likes the two novels I want you to read. I’ve not read anything by him on them, but don’t let that bother you.
Like Brecht, Döblin found refuge in Los Angeles during the bad years. He worked under contract to MGM, waiting impatiently for the end of the Third Reich. Brecht returned to the East, Döblin to the West. Much of this you’ll find in Schichsalreise, his memoirs, which affected me greatly thirty years ago.
Read him, Karl. Read him. It will make a refreshing change from those interminable Bundesbank reports which are clogging your brain. Of course, you have to study them in order to feed the jelly-fish who employ you, but give yourself a break.
Gertrude and her lover, David Stein, were making plans to run away together. They were thinking lofty thoughts. Your generation does not understand this, but for most of this century there have been millions who thought lofty thoughts. In those times large numbers of people were prepared to sacrifice their own future for a better world.
David and Gertrude were obsessed by the fate of their comrades in Berlin. They knew that the survivors of the Berlin massacre were traumatized. People from other cities were needed to help rebuild the Berlin organization. People like them.
Even as they were mapping their future, a revolution erupted in Munich. The very thought is unthinkable today. Bavaria? Which Bavaria? The land of beer cellars where Hitler’s audiences became intoxicated on hatred and which later became a fascist stronghold or, in our own post-war times, the fiefdom controlled by Franz Joseph Strauss? I’m talking of another, older Bavaria.
In November 1918, Kurt Eisner, leader of the Independent Social Democrats, proclaimed a Bavarian Republic and was elected its prime minister. Three months later Eisner was executed by Count Arco. Even the moderates, men like David Stein’s father, wanted revenge. They pleaded with the SPD leaders to do something, but were told to leave the decisions in tried and trusted hands.
‘Tried and tested in murder!’ old Stein had shouted in anger as he walked out of his party offices in Munich. The workers were, without doubt, in an angry mood, but did they want a revolution? Eugen Leviné did not think so. He had been despatched to Munich by the Comintern* to help prepare and organize the revolution.
Munich was full of dreamers and utopians. Gertrude and David were certainly not alone. There were several thousand others and they wanted to seize power immediately. Poor Leviné! He knew the attempt was doomed. Gertrude was half in love with him. She used to talk of how he would sit up the whole night trying to deflate their dream-filled heads. Leviné warned them that they were still isolated. He wanted the uprising postponed, but Gertrude and her friends outnumbered him.
When news reached Munich in March 1919 of the uprising in Budapest and Bela Kun’s proclamation of a Hungarian Soviet Republic, David told Gertrude that this was their first real chance to make history, to avenge the deaths in Berlin, to move the revolution forward. And so it happened. To the great horror of the middle classes and the Catholic peasants, the Bavarian Soviet Republic came into existence.
Moscow was overjoyed. Lenin and Trotsky were hard-headed men, but they were also desperate. They knew the price of isolation. Lenin firmly believed that without a revolution in Germany, the infant Soviet Republic could not last for long. He was right, wasn’t he, Karl? I mean, the historical space occupied by seventy-five years is next to zero. It’s nothing. So Lenin and Trotsky sent Munich their solidarity in the shape of hundreds of telegrams. They were hoping that Vienna, too, would fall and had already instructed the Red Marshal, Tukachevsky – the Tuka whom my father loved so deeply – to investigate the military possibilities of a corridor from the Soviet Union to Bavaria. Their man in Munich suffered from no such illusions. Levine bade farewell to his wife and new-born child and prepared to sacrifice himself for a cause that had no hope of success.
The Junkers could have taken Munich painlessly, but that might not have been a sufficient deterrent to the rest of the country. Blood had to be shed. It’s the same today. Serbs and Croats could capture a village peacefully and spare their civilian opponents, but they rarely do so. Bloodlust. The animal instinct that still echoes in human biology.
General von Oven crushed the Bavarian Republic with exemplary brutality. Citizens were pulled out of their beds, then shot, knifed, raped and beaten to death. Gertrude fled to her parents in Schwaben. David was given refuge by his professor. Levine went into hiding. He thought of his wife and child and then all he could think of was flight, but he was betrayed, captured, tried and executed. His trial was a big show. Gertrude, dressed as a bourgeois Fräulein, attended the court every day. Till her dying day, your grandmother never forgot Leviné’s final speech to the court. She used to recite it to me when I was still a child, growing up in what they once called the Soviet Union.
We communists are dead men on leave. Of this I am fully aware. I do not know whether you will extend my leave or whether I shall have to join Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I await your verdict in any case with composure and inner serenity. I have simply done my duty towards the International, and the World Revolution …
The words continued to haunt her long after the system to which she’d sold her soul had degenerated beyond recognition. They tell us now that it was always so, but I don’t believe them, Karl, and nor should you. There was a nobility of purpose. It may have been utopian, but for a majority of the foot-soldiers it was never malignant. Otherwise it is impossible to understand the motives of those men and women who sacrificed their lives in those early years. People for whom the map of the world had no meaning if Utopia was not inscribed on each continent. These are the people whose lives I’m trying to reconstruct for you.
They executed Leviné early one morning. Two soldiers in the firing
