Witness to the German Revolution Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Note on Translation

  Acknowledgments

  Chronology

  Abbreviations and German Terms Used in Text

  Letter from Germany to a French Comrade - Correspondance internationale, ...

  II

  III

  Conference Impressions - Bulletin communiste, April 29, 1922

  Balance Sheet of a Year - Correspondance internationale, January 3, 1923

  The Anniversary of January 15: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg - ...

  News from Germany - Correspondance internationale, February 9, 1923

  A Document on German Patriotism - Correspondance internationale, July 1, 1923

  Amid the Collapse of Bourgeois Germany - Correspondance internationale, July ...

  Reports from Germany - Disturbances at Wroclaw and Frankfurt Correspondance ...

  July 29

  Ehrhardt and Noske

  Scarcity in Berlin - Correspondance internationale, August 4, 1923

  The Bourgeoisie are afraid

  Herr Cuno leaves…

  Comparing Germany and Russia

  Phynances, the gold loan, etc. - Correspondance internationale, August 15, 1923

  The evaporation of wages continues

  The last defender of the German bourgeoisie

  The General Strike in Germany - The Great Coalition: ...

  Some causes and effects of bankruptcy

  The general strike

  A battle won

  Reports from Germany - The Great Coalition at work Correspondance ...

  The official campaign against wages

  By unemployment and by repression

  Hail the fifteenth zero!

  The bourgeoisie won’t let a halfpenny go

  Phynances and stupidity

  Herr Helfferich proposes

  The Ruhr profiteers - Correspondance internationale, September 15, 1923

  The victims of the Ruhr

  A bluff: the confiscation of foreign currency

  A truth of Herr Stinnes

  Journeys

  In the social democracy

  In Thuringia…

  …not a halfpenny!

  The Sorau massacre - Correspondance internationale, September 22, 1923

  Herr von Knilling threatens

  On the streets of Berlin

  Murder of the hungry

  Starvation wages

  And the libertarians?

  Fascists and Communists - Correspondance internationale, September 29, 1923

  Towards civil war

  Dilemma

  What would that mean?

  Between two dictatorships

  Von Kahr and Gessler—imitation dictators

  The fascist advance

  Figures

  Red Sunday in Düsseldorf - Correspondance internationale, October 6, 1923

  Pseudo-dictatorship to the right

  Genuine dictatorship to the left

  Those who understand nothing

  Well above the dollar

  The great assault on the eight-hour day

  Küstrin

  The reactionaries benefit from martial law—a great deal

  Social Democracy judged by its allies

  Correspondance internationale, October 13, 1923

  Interregnum

  Constitutional dictatorship - Correspondance internationale, October 20, 1923

  Eve of battle in red Saxony

  Why Social Democracy is changing

  Provoke in order to repress

  Towards a German Commune

  Social Democracy in a dead end

  Hunger riots

  Significant episodes

  Munich versus Berlin - Correspondance internationale, October 27, 1923

  In Saxony: Russian intervention and “Tartar News”

  A visit to Hitler

  Hunger on the streets

  In the fray

  Double standards

  City without bread

  Hunger and rioting everywhere

  Inflation to cure inflation

  The failure of the left Social Democrats - Correspondance internationale, ...

  The ultimatum to Zeigner

  Buchrucker and Thorell

  Ministerial Marxism

  “Real value” paper and wages

  They are complementary

  One more betrayal

  The threat against Thuringia

  In the Social Democracy: The wave of nausea

  The avalanche

  Two anniversaries: November 7 and 9 - Correspondance internationale, November ...

  For a right wing dictatorship

  The financial muddle

  Effects and causes

  The suicide of the German republic

  The fruits of Social Democratic treachery

  Pogroms in Berlin

  Via bankruptcy to capitalist dictatorship

  Hitler: A fascist ideology - Correspondance internationale, November 17, 1923

  The Munich tragicomedy

  The first week of the new inflation

  The Berlin printers’ strike

  The disarming of red Thuringia

  The abandonment of the Rhine and the Ruhr

  To break the Berlin printers’ strike

  Arrests, arrests, arrests…

  A comic paper

  The fate of the eight-hour day - Correspondance internationale, November 20, 1923

  Rentenmark and wage-mark

  Wanted: a chancellor - Bulletin communiste, December 6, 1923

  The Communist Party legally illegal

  Acts of white terror

  Herr Severing’s opinion

  A Marx government

  The balance sheet: formidable powerlessness - Correspondance internationale, ...

  Unemployment, a revolutionary problem

  Humor

  The Rich against the Nation - Berlin, October 1923 Clarté, November 1923

  The Rich against Culture - Writers and Artists Clarté, December 1, 1923

  Way of life

  The arts and sciences...

  The Stinnesation of intellectual life

  At the turning point

  A 50-Day Armed Vigil - Clarté, February 1 & 15, 1924

  The march towards civil war

  On the threshold...

  Chemnitz, Munich

  The KPD criticizes itself

  The retreat is not a defeat

  The situation is still revolutionary

  Postscript

  Further Reading

  Key Figures

  Appendix

  About Haymarket Books

  Also from Haymarket Books

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  A successful workers’ revolution in Germany in 1923 would have changed the entire course of the century’s history. A second workers’ state—in one of the most advanced industrial countries—would have made nonsense of Stalin’s slogan of “socialism in one country” and enormously enhanced the chances of spreading the revolution to France, Britain and Italy. And Adolf Hitler, even if he had escaped summary execution, would have found it hard to make any impact on events. The two great tyrannies of the century, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany—with their host of imitators and would-be imitators—would have been aborted. Of course, there would have been other dangers, other possibilities of defeat still to face. But the scales would have been shifted significantly in favor of socialism.

  One person who had the opportunity to observe and analyze the events of 1923 at first hand was Victor Serge. Serge was still a young man—32—in 1923, but he h
ad an extensive revolutionary past behind him. Born in Brussels to Russian revolutionary parents in exile, he went to Paris while still in his teens and became active in anarchist journalism. He spent the years 1913 to 1917 in jail after defending the anarchist bank robbers of the notorious Bonnot Gang. He went next to Spain, where he participated in the unsuccessful 1917 Barcelona syndicalist uprising. Then he made his way to revolutionary Russia, where he soon decided to become a member of the Communist Party (though he never abandoned political dialogue with his former anarchist comrades). His experiences in revolutionary Russia are described in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary ,1 and in the pamphlets he wrote at the time.2

  By 1922 Serge was feeling considerable disillusion at the way events were developing in Russia. He believed that only by spreading could the revolution survive: “Relief and salvation must come from the west. From now on it was necessary to work to build a Western working-class movement capable of supporting the Russians and, one day, superseding them.”3 With Zinoviev’s assistance he got a job in Berlin with the Comintern [Communist International] press agency Inprekorr (Correspondance internationale), which provided reports for the Communist press around the world. He spent most of 1922 and 1923 in Berlin, then worked in Vienna and elsewhere before returning to Russia in 1926. He became a supporter of the Left Opposition, and was sent into internal exile before being expelled from the USSR. Back in the West he continued to be an intransigent anti-Stalinist writer, who also produced a series of outstanding novels. With the German occupation of France, he left Europe for Mexico, where he died in 1947.

  In his Memoirs Serge gives only a relatively sketchy account of his activities in Germany.4 Even before the major clampdown of November 1923 his activity was at best semi-legal. Many articles under his name appeared in the Comintern press of the time, but they generally dealt with Russian affairs. It was doubtless useful to let the German authorities think “Victor Serge” (itself a pseudonym; he was born “Kibalchich”) was in Russia. But for German matters, on which Serge wrote a weekly column between July and December 1923, he adopted the pseudonym “R. Albert.” As a result, Serge’s writings on the German revolution lay for many years ignored and forgotten in the files of Comintern publications.

  Albert was first identified as Serge by Richard Greeman after a study of the style and content of more than 20 articles in Correspon-dance internationale and the Bulletin communiste.5 And in 1990 the French Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué,6 in collaboration with Serge’s nephew Bernard Némoz, published a collection of Serge’s writings from 1923.7 The selection in this book is inspired by Broué’s edition, but I have added eight additional pieces not included by Broué (see the appendix for details of the comparison between the two books). In fact, on close study Serge’s authorship becomes obvious. His style, his eye for significant detail, are unmistakable. Even his characteristic punctuation—the way in which he frequently, and often irritatingly, ends a sentence with three dots—is there. Doubtless the German police did not employ experts in literary analysis.

  Much that has been written on Germany in 1923 has focused on the relations between the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Russian leadership of the Comintern. Serge tells us nothing new on this—even if he had been aware of such discussions, they would not have been suitable matter for publication. What he does give is a vivid account of events in Germany during 1923, and in particular a picture of the consciousness and mood of the working class, the crucial factor in evaluating any revolutionary situation. Serge is describing the German events for an audience abroad—and especially for the French left—his former comrades and the people whose solidarity would be crucial if German workers made a bid for power.

  Working in a press agency, Serge read the entire range of the German press from far left to far right. He also had access to the KPD’s internal channels of communication. But on top of that he found time to walk the streets and observe daily life. He documented the inflation of 1923 with lists of figures that sometimes become wearisome. But he always quickly returned to the concrete—what did it mean for a worker with two children who wanted to buy some bread and an egg? The major events of the year—the French occupation of the Ruhr, the rise of Hitler, the creation of “workers’ governments”—were followed through week by week.

  But, despite their fragmentary appearance, Serge’s reports were not just random impressions. Serge’s account was in fact structured by a rigorously Marxist, materialist method. At the very core was the theme to which he returned again and again—the need for German capitalism to restore its profits. There was only one way it could achieve this—by increasing the level of exploitation. Hence the key aims of cutting real wages and extending the working day from eight to ten hours (reversing the one real gain of the 1918 revolution). It is this that makes sense of the otherwise confusing political fluctuations of the period. Would the bourgeoisie opt for parliamentary democracy (with or without the social democrats), for military dictatorship, or for the Nazis? The answer: whichever would best enable it to increase exploitation and raise profits.

  Around this central core Serge accumulated a mass of detail which illuminated the crisis. A trial verdict made clear the balance of class forces. An art exhibition revealed the way in which capitalist decline dehumanized. (It is hard to know which is more surprising: that art exhibitions still took place in 1923, or that Serge found time to attend them.) When he observed a policeman watching a bread queue and looking miserable, he speculated that the cause of the misery was the fact that his wife was in the queue. In one sentence Serge said more about the contradictory nature of the bourgeois state than many learned tomes.

  For many years Serge’s reputation has rested on his novels and his Memoirs. But his earlier writings from his period as a Bolshevik activist show that before being a remarkable novelist he was a remarkable journalist.8 At a time when we have seen so many journalists, during the recent Balkan War, acting as mere transmitters of the government line, it is important to remember that revolutionary journalism has a quite different history—that it can combine passionate commitment with honest observation. Serge wrote with wit, humor and irony, but above all it was anger that motivated his writing—anger at a system in which the rich got richer while, over ten years, working people faced first slaughter in the trenches, then armed repression, and finally starvation. It is Serge’s anger, controlled but never suppressed, which makes this book such a striking testimony to the experience of a revolutionary year.

  Serge could not tell all he knew in these articles. He was writing under the gaze of the enemy, and the KPD’s secret activity (especially its plans for insurrection in October 1923) was not a matter for the public press. Nobody could blame Serge for being deliberately misleading. But, as he made clear in the later articles, a major defeat had taken place. It was the responsibility of a revolutionary party to exercise the most rigorous self criticism. Lenin was on his deathbed, and the Comintern was now in the hands of Zinoviev, a man Serge aptly described as “Lenin’s biggest mistake.”9 But the tradition of honest accounting had not yet been destroyed, and Serge’s attempts at evaluating the causes of failure were in marked contrast to the blustering, triumphalist style that characterized the Comintern in the Stalinist epoch.

  Serge wrote as an activist working with the KPD, and as such he brought out the party’s heroism, its resolute opposition to the corruption and injustice of crisis-ridden capitalism, the dedication of its rank and file. But, reading between the lines, it is also possible to see the fundamental weakness of the KPD. The year 1923 was a frantic one. From demonstration to strike, and from crisis to arrest, militants scarcely had time to sleep. The preceding years since 1918 had been equally hectic. Amid such frenetic activity it was not possible to build a stable and consistent leadership, and to establish the necessary relations of intelligent trust between leadership and rank and file activists. The KPD had come into existence only in 1917; no organization had been built in advance of the crisis. Hence th
e rapid changes of leadership, the hesitations and tactical zigzags that marked the years of upheaval.

  In retrospect it is easy to point to things that Serge missed. He was far too pessimistic about the cultural decay of postwar Germany. While he was very much aware of the rise of anti-Semitism, he tended to see it as a throwback to a more backward society like tsarist Russia rather than as a grim portent of much worse to come.

  It is also possible to detect a certain ultra-leftism in Serge’s account, perhaps deriving from his anarchist past, but also reflecting a continuing weakness of the German revolutionary tradition. He was quite right to denounce the cowardice and betrayals of the SPD—the party of Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske had since 1918 pursued a policy that was not only treacherous but murderous. But denunciation was not enough. No revolution could be made in Germany without winning over the mass of workers still under the influence of social democracy, and although Serge described the various attempts to implement a united front policy he sometimes underestimated the need to win over social democratic workers.

  Like so many Marxists before and since, Serge compressed the timescale. Often he wrote as though German capitalism had no way out in 1923. In fact, the Wilhelm Marx government did achieve temporary stabilization—there was even a brief period of prosperity in the mid-1920s. But on the essential point Serge was all too right—the choice was socialism or fascism, and the failure of socialism, in 1923 and later, as the KPD lurched into Stalinism, left no alternative to the triumph of Hitler. An understanding of the failure of 1923 is essential to seeing why and how Hitler came to power, and Serge was a lucid witness of that failure.