were covered with tattoos: serpents, girls’ names and expressions of fidelity in elaborate scrollwork.
‘Get more beer,’ said Pauli.
‘It’s my turn,’ said Fritz Esser. He was the oldest of the three men and determined to pay his way. He got up and walked to the counter with only the slightest unsteadiness.
With Esser out of earshot, Alex Horner whispered, ‘You’ll never recruit this wretch to your damned Freikorps Graf.’ Alex didn’t like Captain Graf, the diminutive homosexual who ran his private army like some medieval war-lord, but he was cautious about voicing such thoughts to Pauli who’d become something of an apologist for this strange man.
‘There’s not one there who could take on the job of a sergeant major,’ said Pauli.
‘Not one where?’
‘In the company that I’ll take over next month. Good soldiers, good fighters, good comrades, but no skewer upon which I can fix them.’
‘You’ll never do it, Pauli. The fellow’s a Spartacist.’
‘He’ll see reason,’ said Pauli complacently. ‘Fritz is a sensible fellow.’
‘You mad fool. Did you have this in mind right from the start?’
Before Pauli answered, Esser was back with three foaming steins of beer. He slammed them on the table. ‘Drink, drink, drink,’ he urged. He looked round to see who was seated nearby. ‘And then there are a couple of things you must tell me about this Freikorps business.’
Fortified with several litres of Guggenheimer’s beer, the trio went down Leipziger Strasse, visiting various bars, until they turned north along Friedrichstrasse, where the nightlife was even more raucous: male and female prostitutes mingling with beggars, drunks, and pickpockets, and from every side the frantic sounds of recently arrived American jazz.
Fritz Esser never went back to the Imperial Palace. When, early on that Christmas Eve morning, the army’s artillery opened fire on the palace, Esser didn’t even hear the gunfire, for he was in an upstairs room over a club behind the Schiffbauerdamm Theatre, asleep in the arms of a half-undressed nightclub hostess.
As 1918 tottered to a close, Fritz Esser was enrolled in the Freikorps. On the other side of the city, Liebknecht joined his Spartakusbund to the Independent Socialists and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, called his new political entity the Communist Party of Germany, and began arming his supporters.
Everywhere in Berlin the madness continued: lines of hungry people formed outside the bakers’ shops, and butchers’, too, and stared into expensive restaurants, where war profiteers and their gloriously attired women gobbled champagne and caviar. On the Western Front the Allies had stopped fighting but their naval blockade continued, and thousands of Germans died of malnutrition. Throughout Europe the influenza virus decimated the tired and hungry population; it brought death to seventeen hundred Berliners in a single day.
Whatever reservations Fritz Esser had had about serving under the command of his young friend they soon evaporated as Pauli Winter led his company across the rooftops of Wilhelmstrasse despite Spartacist snipers across the street. Soon Pauli had repaid any debt he owed Esser for hauling him from the sea so long ago. More than once Pauli saved his sergeant major from death or injury. Once his strong arms saved Esser from sliding off the rain-swept slates into the street below. Esser had followed Graf and the others along the ridge of a saddleback roof. It required balance, daring and speed, and Fritz Esser, burdened with rifle, bandoliers, and a heavy bag of grenades, had none of these in adequate amounts. He slipped on the icy ridge tiles, and his rifle went across the slates and down into the street far below. As Esser started to fall, Pauli grabbed him by the greatcoat collar and held him spread-eagled across the steep roof, while men on the roof on the far side of Wilhelmstrasse fired at him. Only with great difficulty was the unfortunately heavyweight Esser dragged to safety. Pauli laughed about it. Under fire the clumsy Pauli became another man: not just commander of ‘Winter Company’, he was also the most audacious and skilled fighting man in that very formidable unit, Freikorps Graf.
Once, during the heavy fighting in the centre of the city, the two men met briefly with Leutnant Alex Horner. It was during the violent fighting of January 11, 1919, when Freikorps units battled their way into the Police Headquarters on Alexanderplatz, where Spartacist resistance was fierce. It was something of a massacre. The defenders’ morale was weakening as they realized that Liebknecht’s communists were not going to win power by force. Pauli and Esser were amongst the first inside the Police Headquarters courtyard. Esser lobbed a stick grenade through a downstairs window, and both men scrambled into the smoke-filled wreckage; the others followed without hesitation. Now the defenders fell back, room by room, floor by floor, but the merciless Freikorpskämpfer slaughtered everyone they found.
Alex Horner protested at the slaughter. He took his formal objections to Captain Graf. But the Freikorps men were in no mood to listen to technicalities from the regular army. They left no one alive.
The regular army, too, had men who gave no quarter. A few days later an informer reported the presence of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht in a middle-class apartment in Wilmersdorf. The captive pair were taken to the Eden Hotel, near the Memorial Church, which the Horse Guards were using as their head quarters. After a brutal interrogation they were murdered, and with their deaths ‘Spartacus week’ ended.
During this respite the Freikorps reformed and refitted, and Lieutenant Pauli Winter lost his sergeant major. Fritz Esser had, in his brief service with his company, shown only moderate aptitude for infantry tactics, and unless Pauli was at his side he didn’t have the combat experience or the reckless bravery that most of the others showed. But there had been time to recognize the administrative skills he’d learned during his naval service. Fritz Esser was promoted to be an assistant to the battalion adjutant. Then, just two weeks later, after the adjutant was hospitalized, Esser was made battalion adjutant.
Whatever extravagant claims are made for the democratic style of the Freikorps units, there was strong opposition to making Esser an officer. So he became adjutant with that strange compromise rank that the German army invented for such social dilemmas. He was made a Feldwebel-Leutnant, so that he could do an officer’s job with officer’s badges and shoulder straps and officer’s pay without being the social equal of his peers. It was an arrangement that made all concerned very satisfied.
The man that Fritz Esser now worked alongside was Captain Georg Graf, and he was not an easy man to get along with. Despite first appearances, the little Munich-born career officer with big ears, red nose, and unconcealed homosexual preferences wasn’t a figure of fun to anyone who’d fought alongside him, anywhere from Verdun to Alexanderplatz. He was mercurial, violent and unforgiving.
Fritz Esser and Captain Graf – both men difficult and argumentative by nature – worked amicably together. Pauli Winter teased Esser that Graf had fallen in love with him, because that idea made the unmistakably heterosexual Esser nervous. Esser stoically replied that he admired Graf for his physical bravery under fire and appreciated the very real concern he showed for the men under his command. But, whatever the exact nature of the relationship, the mutual regard Esser and Graf showed for each other was genuine and lasting. And that was just as well, for Feldwebel-Leutnant Esser became Graf’s de facto second in command. When Graf was not available, Esser was always consulted. ‘What would Captain Graf probably want…?’ The question was always phrased in such a way that Esser gave an opinion rather than an order, but his underlying authority was undisputed, and Graf supported his adjutant’s decisions, whatever his true feelings may have been.
Feldwebel-Leutnant Esser’s assignment
