The New Germany Part 2

Scheidemann, as Premier, opened the debate with a fighting speech for Social-Democracy. He threw the responsibility for the misfortunes abroad on the Right, the responsibility for misunderstandings at home on the Left, and proclaimed that the Government would work methodically at realising the results of the revolution.

He was followed for the Centrum by the venerable Grober, who preached a sermon to the effect that all Power was from on High, that the revolution came very much from below, and consequently the only things left of any importance were State rights, rights of property, and the Church of Rome.

Thereafter came Dr. Naumann, for the Democrats, with an eloquent funeral oration, in which he buried the monarchy, wept over the lost colonies and provinces, and prayed that all of Germany that was left might live in unity.

Here we have the three points of view--the Radical reconstructionist, the Clerical reactionary, and the Liberal rhetorical--red, black, and white.

And the Government's programme presented the same parti-coloured patchwork. In foreign policy: an early peace on Wilsonian principles, restoration of the colonies and prisoners, equal partic.i.p.ation in a League of Nations with mutual disarmament, compulsory arbitration and no secret diplomacy. In internal policy: democratic administration, ditto education and army, economic reconstruction, rationing, public control of monopolies, especially mines and power, right of a.s.sociation and wage boards, public health, rights for civil servants, agricultural development and settlement preferably on reclaimed land, taxation of war profits, income-tax, death duties graduated but not confiscatory, freedom of conscience, freedom of the Press, freedom of meeting--all sorts of freedom.

Obviously, there was nothing very red or revolutionary there, or rather the red was so cautiously peppered into the black and white that the net result was a colourless Liberalism. It was perhaps no less symbolic that the a.s.sembly subst.i.tuted the black, red and yellow of the Frankfort Liberalism of '48 as the new national colours. German Liberalism has always had a yellow streak in it.

The failure of Weimar is the failure of German Liberalism. German Liberalism always has failed Germany, and to this may be attributed the periodic catastrophes of Germany and the calamities they have brought upon Europe. German Liberalism fell an easy prey to French Imperialism in the Napoleonic epoch and to Prussian Imperialism in the Bismarckian epoch; and the one result of German Liberal movements has. .h.i.therto been to drive abroad the flower of the German "intelligentsia." The descendants of the "forty-niners" in England and America have been as valuable an element as were the Huguenots of France or the Flemings from the Netherlands, and they have joined heartily with us in overthrowing the despotism that exiled them. But if they had been a bit tougher and had fought their own fight out a half century ago they would have saved Europe and Germany the last five years. And the process is repeating itself. Weimar has failed, so far, more miserably than did Frankfort a half century ago. The failure of Frankfort was the failure of political inexperience--that of Weimar has been the failure of political impotence. Frankfort was over-confident in this power of popular idealism. It thought a revolution for right and reason could be made by righteousness and reasoning. Weimar was too cynical to think that the ideals of the November revolution could ever be a power at all in the Europe of the Paris Conference and of the Russian campaigns. Frankfort failed because its Liberalism was too young. Weimar is failing because its Liberalism is too old.

German Liberalism and its inst.i.tution parliamentary party government failed in the first place because they could not come to power before their day was already past. In the second place they failed because when their ideals did get realised they did so without opposition and consequently on too theoretic lines. The German system of proportional representation for example is the most accurately and equitably representative of all electoral systems. But it did not provide the one thing Germany wanted, a powerful and popular Government, and it did a fatal injury to Germany by helping to split the Socialist party.

Thirdly German Liberals failed because their leaders were men grown middle-aged and muddle-headed in hopeless opposition. They had consequently neither the energy nor the experience for popular leaders.h.i.+p. And fourthly they failed because the peculiar combination of nationalism and internationalism that const.i.tutes Liberalism was deprived of all prestige with the German people by the policy followed at Paris. This policy made it almost impossible for a German to hold any middle position between extreme nationalism and extreme internationalism. Weimar lost its best chance of acceptance when the German parliamentary State was excluded from the League of Nations.

And yet Weimar and German Liberalism had everything in its favour in the autumn of 1918. The reactionary factors that had so little difficulty in stultifying the Liberalism of Bethmann-Hollweg, von Kuhlmann, and their predecessors were cancelled for the time being.

Parliamentary government on the party system, the form of government developed by Liberalism on the English model, never having had a trial in Germany was accepted by nearly all political minds as the panacea.

The minority of extremists who already advocated Council Government on the Russian model as the only political system that could realise the revolution had not as yet converted any large body of workmen. The Trades Unions held the workmen to the parliamentary system, and only some of the soldiers and most of the sailors were really revolutionary. The idea that the Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils could be anything more than a mere improvisation for destruction and could have any constructive, still more const.i.tutional, function never entered the heads of any political thinker. Even Liebknecht joined the Coalition Provisional Government and only withdrew on second thoughts that were probably those of the much more far-sighted Rosa Luxemburg.

The surrender of their authority by the Peoples' Commissaries to the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly in December was received without criticism, and the subsequent similar surrender by the Central Council pa.s.sed almost without comment. Germany was to have the most liberal of const.i.tutions and that was to be enough for the realisation of the German revolution and for the reconciliation of the enemies of Germany. It was only as the weeks and months pa.s.sed and it became evident that German Liberalism, whether expressed in the diplomatic ideals or the democratic inst.i.tutions of Weimar, was doing nothing either for the revolution or the reconciliation, that the German workmen began to pa.s.s over to the revolutionaries. Then, before very long, this political process expressed itself in local strikes and street fighting. The centre of political disturbance and development moved away from the theatre at Weimar to the streets of Berlin and of the industrial towns.

No doubt it was good policy in one way to transfer the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly to Weimar. An a.s.sembly whose vitality is that of an elderly politician after a contested election and whose voice is that of a tired lawyer talking in his sleep, could not make itself heard, still less felt, against the violence, and volleyings of modern Berlin.

Whether its work will be worth much must depend on how slow things move. They could easily move too fast for the pace of the a.s.sembly.

But at least as Dr. Preuss said to me of his Const.i.tution--"it will not get in the way of anything better." One thing was certain, that the a.s.sembly rested for its sanction, even for its survival, on the Government, not the Government on the a.s.sembly.

And listening to a deputy in the Tribune reading a treatise on Const.i.tutional niceties as to federation and free-state-rights, I think of the previous afternoon, when I was listening to a street orator in Halle shouting very nasty and unconst.i.tutional tirades about food and freedom to an armed party of soldiers and workmen about to attack the Government troops. And then, again, I think of an afternoon in the Weimar Theatre a quarter of a century ago. A prominent member of the stock company of these days was an old horse blind of one eye--who was always led on with his blind side to the footlights. On this occasion he got turned round, and realised for the first time what a fool they'd made of him for years--and the rest was chaos and the curtain.

The Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly has determined the Const.i.tutional future of Germany, but the fate of Germany has not been decided there. The struggle between revolution and repression has not been fought out between the stalls and the stage of the Weimar Theatre, but in Berlin and the other big towns where the Government speaks with minenwerfer and machine-guns, and the Opposition obstruct with barricades. While the pressure of general strikes and local street fighting has won a const.i.tutional recognition for socialising property and for sanctioning the council system never contemplated by the most revolutionary Parliamentarians, on the other hand cla.s.s war has given reaction the support of the whole country against the working cla.s.s.

The stagnant stodgy atmosphere of Weimar was very different from the starved and struggling air of Berlin. Though at first sight Berlin did not seem any more alive than Weimar. For Berlin to-day is a town of deserted temples and of dethroned G.o.ds. All along Unter den Linden--from the Temples of Mammon--the great hotels, to the Temple of Moloch--the imperial palace--everywhere is decay and dilapidation, an abomination of desolation in every facade and on every face. Mammon has indeed come off better than Moloch; for the palace and public buildings are shattered with sh.e.l.l and starred with shots and the balcony where the War-Lord appeared to his wors.h.i.+ppers has a hole in the middle. Whereas the shrines of Mammon are full of wors.h.i.+ppers from all quarters of the world. The hotel lobbies are crowded with vulture-like profiles brooding over the carcase of German economic enterprise.

Yet Berlin, though dirty and dilapidated, is by no means dead but the centre of the conflict between two faiths--two religions. For the revolution has ended the foreign war only to begin a civil war between nationalists and internationalists. On the one side, the Old Believers in the Orthodox Faith of nationalism, founded on wars of liberation, fomented by generations of political propaganda and excited to fanaticism by a war against the world. On the other side the new Dissenters of the revolution preaching internationalism and a Commune of Heaven in which only the poor shall have a place. In December internationalism was dominant in Berlin; nationalism was developing under pressures from Paris; while imperialism was dormant. For at this time in Paris the internationalism of Wilsonian principles was still counterbalancing imperialist and nationalist policies of the Allies.

It was curious to note as the issues at Paris were decided one by one against internationalism how nationalism ousted internationalism from control of policy in Germany. By the time the Treaty of Versailles was published the old orthodox factor was again firmly established and the dissenters--the revolutionary internationalists--had been driven into the wilderness.

Any Sunday morning in Berlin during the sessions of the Paris Conference would probably have given more than one opportunity of observing the revival of the only real religion existing in modern capital cities--nationalism. On one Sunday I have in mind there were several protest meetings against the proposals reported from Paris for part.i.tioning off German populations in the Saar district, West Prussia, Danzig, German Bohemia, and the Tyrol, and for preventing the union of German-Austria. For instance, you might have gone to the Sport-Palast with Erzberger in the pulpit. I myself did not. The rotund, rubicund, ebullient, emollient Erzberger, ex-Minister of Propaganda and delegate to Spa, who looks like Winston Churchill turned Papal Legate, was too ritualistic for me. I went to a "service"

at the Circus Busch, where the sermon was broader.

Come with me then along Unter den Linden past the gilt crosses and cupolas of the Evangelical Dom and the sh.e.l.l-shattered sham cla.s.sic facade of the Imperial Palace--deserted shrines of the faith--to a very dilapidated and dingy circus. There was a time when the Protestants of Germany were driven into the depths of the woods and the dens of wild beasts to hold their services. And to-day we find the pastors of protestant nationalism symbolically perched on pasteboard rocks amid woodland scenery, with a very realistic atmosphere of menagerie. The congregation is characteristically middle-cla.s.s and by no means so formidable in appearance as the hungry, haggard workmen and their women that we should have found in a meeting of the dissenting internationalists.

As we come in Freiherr von Richthofen is perorating a sort of commination service, each verse of which is received with a loud response. The Paris Conference is worse than the Congress of Vienna (ah). France is outraging and robbing Germany when wounded and a prisoner (aah). But not a yard of German soil shall be surrendered without consent of its population (aaah). Germany can be dissected alive, but England will be disgraced and America dishonoured (aaah), and a time will come when such outrages will find their retribution (AAAH). A roar of applause which rouses the wild beasts in their dens, so that they roar in unison. The Paris diplomats have at last succeeded in stirring up again the weary wolves of war where they were lying licking their wounds.

But then, like a thin trickle of cold water into a boiling pot, comes the aged, anxious voice of the patriarchal Bernstein. He begins by reading the resolution of the Berne Conference; but we are here to attack the Paris Conference, and get restless, shouting "Zur Sache"

(come to the point). He speaks of the fair-mindedness of the British delegates there, trade unionists as well as independents, and concludes that England as a people wishes to be fair to Germany; this can even be seen in developments at Paris. But we don't share this optimism--_Blodsinn_ (bosh), is about the mildest of our interjections. Still Bernstein, nothing daunted, maintains that if Germans bring facts before the English the English will be fair.

"Quite true," shouts an elderly man near by. "What do you know about it?" cries a youth some rows away. "I have been longer in England than you have in the world, _Lausbub_," retorts the man.

Bernstein again becomes audible, talking about Alsace-Lorraine. Once we might have appealed to foreign fairness there, too, he says, but now it is too late. Alsace-Lorraine is lost, and we lost it. This is too much for us, and we shout: "But you're speaking for part.i.tion.

_Quatsch!_ (bosh). _Parteibulle!_ (party claptrap), etc." Bernstein dominates the storm enough to shout: "You have been so long fed on lies you can't swallow the truth." But we are not here to have truth shoved down our throats.

Eduard Bernstein withdraws--a prophet without honour, he has this week both left the opposition party and lost his Government post. He is followed by the representative of German-Austria, the new type of professor-politician, with a Victorian appearance and a Wilsonian address--very earnest and emphatic. The union of Germany and German-Austria is, he maintains, an internal affair and quite inevitable. We give Professor Hartmann a rousing reception, and file out into the cold, clear winter weather of Berlin.

Outside is a large black, red, and gold Republican flag, and a number of enthusiasts carrying placards, "No part.i.tioning of Germany," "No peace of violence," and so forth. A long procession forms and moves off. Look at that group, mostly elderly men and women of the middle cla.s.s, thin and threadbare with the look given by hards.h.i.+p and hunger that once in Germany one saw only in paintings of the Middle Ages--dull faces, but not without devotional fervour. So they shuffle along round a placard inscribed "Wilson's Fourteen Points," as their ancestors once shuffled in procession for Luther's theses. Unhappily Wilson did not succeed in nailing his theses to the portals of the Quai d'Orsay.

We reach the Wilhelmstra.s.se, where we join the processions from the other meetings. All learn with gratification that the Sport-Palast has hooted Erzberger because he won't declare for a restoration of Posen to Germany, and that the officers' meeting pa.s.sed a resolution calling for the exclusion from the peace delegation of the internationalist Professor Schucking. The procession from the officers' meeting is headed by a band playing "Deutschland uber alles," and by the old black, white, and red national flag, which is fast becoming the standard of reaction. After the Finance Minister, Schiffer, has welcomed our quite un.o.bjectionable resolution from a balcony of the Reichskanzlei, a young officer suddenly appears in another balcony waving a black, white, and red flag, and adjuring us to swear loyalty to it. We are prepared to swear anything by now without much bothering what it is, and find ourselves being moved along towards the Tiergarten.

As we pa.s.s the British Emba.s.sy suddenly the officers' procession begins to shout and wave to a flabby-faced portly person bowing and smiling on the kerb. Ludendorff! By the undying jingo! Well! what next? Then to Bismarck's statue, where officers offer tributes of rhetoric and wreaths, and finally a schoolboy, climbing the pedestal, calls for cheers for the Kaiser, while a claque below start up "Heil Dir im Siegerkranz." But this is a bit too much for the bystanders.

"Where's your Kaiser? Where's your Victory?" shouts one. "You give us the Kaiser," growls a soldier behind me, "and we'll give him a wreath all right--round his neck, and pulled tight."

The German dynasties exploited Luther and his Protestant movement. I doubt they will succeed in exploiting the national protestants of Germany, who are revolting against the infallible imbecilities of diplomacy. But undoubtedly our demagogues and diplomatists have succeeded in setting up again the idols our soldiers and sailors had overthrown.

The scene described above took place in March and then it was already becoming difficult to see the other side of Berlin political life--the internationalist and revolutionary. Reaction had begun to drive revolution underground and revolution was resisting spasmodically in eruptions and explosions. Let us take another day in March, one during the street fighting, to see what this other side of life in Berlin was like.

Before the war the life that filled the public places of Berlin was as vivid and vivacious as it was vulgar and vicious. Unter den Linden was like a scene in a second-rate revue; the company in one of the rococo restaurants was like the food, exuberant and cheap, but neither interesting nor choice. Nowhere were nouveaux riches so obviously new and so obtrusively rich. Everything was bright and loud, everyone looked overfed and over-dressed. Materially there was a sort of red-faced, raucous-voiced rotundity about Berlin. Morally it was in a decadence like that of the Second Empire at Paris when a charlatan despot and a cheap-jack Government were trying to dazzle the eyes and distract the ears of a half-deluded public.

But now, after four years' war, Berlin is like an Empire Exhibition that has been deserted and decaying through the storms of four winters. The stucco ornaments have fallen, the gilding is long gone, and the whole structure is rotting away.

Indeed, the first impression you get is that both city and people are dying of a decline. The people, like their houses, are dirty and dingy; everywhere crippled beggars and ruined or unroofed buildings show the direct effects of war. Clothes are threadbare, faces thin.

Stalwart, straight-backed Americans, warmly clothed and well fed, stand out like solid shapes among shadows. As they stride through the streets you expect to see them pa.s.s through these grey, drifting figures as through ghosts.

Yet there is life still in Berlin, for men must be alive who can face death for a cause, whether it be for law or for liberty. But you must go further afield to find it than Unter den Linden where are haunting only ghosts of the past. We are hunting the genius of the future.

We shall be out all day on this hunt, and had better breakfast on bully beef and biscuit--a present from American friends--for black bread and subst.i.tutes are no foundation for a long walk; and of the vast transportation system of underground and overhead trains, electric trams, motor-buses, and taxis that used to carry over three million pa.s.sengers daily, little indeed is now left. Moreover the wretched remains are to-day tied up by the general strike and street fighting. And so, avoiding the streets where sniping is in progress or barb-wire barricades threaten a search for arms and inspection for pa.s.ses, we come to the General a.s.sembly of Berlin Councils--that for the moment alone retains political control of the situation, since the Government took military command of it by the severest form of martial law and the general use of machine-guns.

Here we find a large music hall which before the war was a typical scene of flamboyant Berlin night-life. On this grey winter's morning it is crammed full of grimly earnest men--the delegates. On the stage is the Executive Council. The chairman the Independent, Richard Muller, is of the pastor or professor type--his colleague Daumig a heavily built, grey-haired man, might be an English engineer or merchant captain. On the left of the hall are the Communists, in the middle the Independents, and on the right the Social-Democrats, with a little knot of Democrats--the two latter parties supporters of the Government and opposers of the strike--but in a minority here. The business before the a.s.sembly is the filling of the vacancies on the Executive Council left by the Communists who seceded from it when it declared the strike off, and the appointing of delegates to the National Congress of Councils which is to meet next month. But the Communists intend to force a discussion of the Government's policy as to the street fighting which is still going on at Lichtenberg, and the chairman has to concede this.

First come forward representatives of the Councils' Commissions delegated to investigate the stories of cruelties by the insurgents and to negotiate a cessation of hostilities between them and the government commanders. They give their reports in impartial and unimpa.s.sioned language, but indicate their impression that the military authorities they had to deal with were less concerned to restore order with as little loss of life and of time as possible, than to create the impression that the disorder was worse than it really was. They were exploiting a local "putsch" so as to carry out a general "pogrom."

The first speaker, Richard Muller, for the Independents, deplores the disorder, but denounces the Government for instructing its troops to shoot everyone found with arms, in reprisal for atrocities invented by its own secret service. The defence of the Government is undertaken by a Social-Democrat, who declares the Independents responsible for the disorders, amid stormy interruptions from the Communists. The chairman can hardly get him a hearing, and he leaves the stage, indignantly threatening that his party will secede unless it is better treated.

Next dashes on to the stage the Communist leader, who delivers an effective indictment of the Government's proceedings--at first interrupted by angry interjections from the Right. But as he develops the tragedy of what is going on outside, gives one name after another of comrades shot on no more than suspicion and describes the ring of howitzers firing into the crowded tenements of Lichtenberg, a silence falls over the meeting, and at last expressions of disapproval and dissociation come from supporters of the Government. For here is an a.s.sembly that is alive enough, and though organised in parties, yet still open to the appeal of facts and to the force of arguments.

But suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, the speaker stops, leaps from the desk, and dashes off the stage at the back--while a confused uproar breaks out at the back of the hall, dominated by sharp military orders. The whole a.s.sembly comes to its feet and faces about. The Left shout and shake fists at a row of steel-helmeted soldiers, with loaded rifles at the ready and a minatory machine-gun. The Right wave hands and shrug shoulders to a.s.sure the Left they are not accomplices.

The platform proclaims that the proceedings will continue. A Democrat is put up to speak, but even his mind, conscious of right, and his courageous determination to express equal disapproval with the Left as to the entry of the troops are not enough to overcome the mesmerism of that machine-gun. The a.s.sembly for the moment is reunited, but its vitality is gone.

We have been present at the first scene of the forcible suppression of the Councils movement in its const.i.tutional centre--a suppression that has since become continuous.

The next covert we have to draw in our hunt is a club of intellectuals, mostly Independents, meeting weekly at a private house. Berlin never had a club life, and this is only an embryo of a political club before it emerges from a social gathering. The members sit round in a great ring, sometimes all joining in a general debate, sometimes breaking up into small discussions. They are of all types and tendencies. The well-bred, well-dressed man with a Balliol manner is a Rhodes Scholar and a successful diplomatist of ultra-radical views--for such an anomaly is possible under Count Brockdorff-Rantzau. The soldier in faded field grey describing a scheme for educating workman members of Councils in their duties, is a Communist. The diplomat is maintaining that Germany should join the League of Nations, even if it and the peace conditions are unsatisfactory. The worse the material position of Germany the better its moral position for taking the lead in a revision of the peace and of the League. The Communist brushes this aside as sophistry. How can you found internationalism on national Governments or even on national Parliaments? Wilsonism and Weimarism are both out of date and off the mark. An international Soviet of washerwomen would be of more real value and vitality. He is interrupted by cheers greeting the arrival of a famous fighting flying man, who was believed to have been one of the twelve hundred arrests of opposition leaders. An early Victorian middle-aged man in side whiskers and a frock coat, an ex-Minister in touch with the Government, begins to explain the necessity of reconstructing the Cabinet by eliminating the men most compromised by the loss of life, and including new men from the Left. He considers that while opinion is moving to the Left the Government is moving to the Right, and that as the breach widens the outbreaks will get worse. He fears, however, that men who have grown old in opposition and have only just tasted power will not be torn away from it and will find it simple to govern by machine-guns. But the young men are not interested in the Cabinet--they drift off into discussing their schemes for the Councils.

Here, too, is life--the life radiated by young men who feel that power is coming to them before youth has gone, the life reflected from middle-aged men who have broken the dull crust in which circ.u.mstance was encasing them.

When this club was suppressed shortly after, Berlin could ill afford the loss of vitality. For the absence of all healthy, happy and youthful faces made it like a world of gnomes and goblins. In the case of the men this was mainly owing to the war, and in the case of the women and children to the blockade. Over a million of the fittest men had been killed, and the result was a survival of all the unfit; while the food and fuel hards.h.i.+ps had fallen heaviest on the women and children of the towns.

But there was another reason for the disappearance of all young men that had youth and manliness. Their warfare was not yet accomplished, and they had only come back from fighting the whole world on three fronts for four years to fight against each other in the streets of their capital cities. They went to war against the world for two ideals--patriotism and progress; and now these two ideals had themselves collided in civil war.

Of the two German ideals, that of patriotism is the one we know best.

That dull devotion and forced fervour that fights in ma.s.sed formations to sentimental songs. It is a form of patriotism that does not appeal to us. To Athens Sparta is anti-pathetic. But there were fine fellows among the Spartans as well as tyrants and helots, and now that the tyrants are gone such as are left of the fine fellows have a chance of realising their Spartan ideals. Now that those trumpery tinsel tyrants, the Kaiser and his courtier generals, have retired to scribble and squabble and scuffle over dirty linen--a Valhalla of washerwomen--the men of the real Spartan breed, who carried the German arms from conquest to conquest until the catastrophe was complete, are working hard to restore ideals shattered by rout and revolution.

Of the real fine fellows that I've met in Germany half were officers and men who had responded to the various appeals for home defence and who were working to revive the old Spartan tradition in the war-wearied youth.