War and Propaganda
Secret History: When Munich Went Communist
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
When Munich Went Communist
After the Nazi period, the impression we have of the southern Mediterranean-looking Germans called Bavarians is that they are beer swilling (Oktoberfest) fascists, and that progressives and lefties in Germany tend to be the northern blond Teutonic-looking Germans, but that impression is spoiled by a blot in history. Following the first World War, the Bavarians proclaimed themselves first an independent republic, then a socialist republic, and finally a communist, soviet style republic.
In the confusion of defeat in WWI, and the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, workers and soldiers all over the German and Austrian empires began setting up self governing councils during the summer of 1918. The war itself might have been lost but perhaps a new way of life could be won from the ruins. It looked, at last, as if socialism had arrived. In November 1918, the Kaiser abdicated and power in Berlin was handed over to the two socialist parties, the official SPD and the independent socialists, the USPD, a breakaway peace party formed in 1917 to which, at the time, the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht both belonged.
Throughout December, rifts between the socialist parties grew wider, and doubts arose among the members of the Spartacus League about whether it was possible to cooperate with the Social Democrats at all, even to the extent to participating in the forthcoming election campaign. Things came to a head when the Social Democrats tried to dismiss the Berlin police chief, an independent socialist called Emil Eichorn. Thousands of people stormed through the streets of Berlin to occupy public buildings.
On 5 January, they seized the offices of the Social Democrat paper Vorwarts. By 11 January, the doomed rising—like that of the eponymous Roman slave—had been put down with terrible ferocity. On 15 January, Rosa and Liebknecht, who had disapproved of the rioting but had to accept it as a fait accompli, were arrested and later “shot while trying to escape”—as it was put, not for the first time.
The movement was not finished. Eugen Levine, a Russian Jew of good family from Petersburg, who was born the year Marx died, 1883, inherited it. In March 1919, he was despatched from Berlin to Munich to see what role the communists could play there—to guide, indeed to create, a Communist Party. According to the German historian and columnist Sebastian Haffner, he was the only real communist in Munich.
There had been a putsch in Munich in 1918, when thousands of people—fed up with the war, with the Prussians for getting them into it, with hunger and unemployment—gathered on the Theresienwiese, the great meadow where major political meetings were traditionally held. Enthralled by their own rhetoric, they decided to depose king Ludwig and declare a republic. Ludwig left hastily, that same evening. The crowd was led by an independent socialist, Kurt Eisner, who believed passionately that you could combine parliamentary democracy with the workers’, soldiers’, and, in the Bavarian case, peasants’ self governing councils. But, his party did disastrously in the elections, and his right-wing opponents did not believe him when he said he would abide by the majority decision. He was assassinated on his way to the Diet on 21 February, 1919. A letter of resignation was found in his bloodstained pocket. A hundred thousand people followed his funeral. Martial law was declared.
When Levine arrived in Munich early in March, the city was outwardly one of the most quiet in Germany. You could, according to one of the survivors, “actually read the Rote Fahne (the Communist Party paper) in the street without being attacked”. Nevertheless, there were some 45,000 people unemployed and no government. Demands issued forth for everything from bread to a Red Army. Eventually the impotent Landtag—parliament—issued an enabling act giving all authority to a cabinet led by an SPD man, Johannes Hoffman, and then prorogued itself.
Hoffman also could not cope with the economic and political complexities of the situation. By April, the choice lay between recalling the Landtag or doing what the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils wanted, declaring a soviet republic. The SPD and USPD decided, on 5 April, that they were for a soviet republic. They had the backing of a lot of romantics and anarchists—but not the communists. Levine said no soviet could be declared from above, “from a green table”, as he put it, and turned down the idea, because—according to his widow, who was also called Rosa, and who eventually lived in London—he knew it had no chance. It would be certain to be crushed by the White Guards and Free Corps, either from within Bavaria itself, or, even more likely, despatched from Prussia. No genuine soviet republic could exist, he believed, in which Communists were outnumbered and dominated by Social Democrats. It would only be worthy of the name if it adopted a communist programme. As it was, the so-called phony soviet (Scheinriterepublik) literally nationalized artists’ studios rather than factories—they lived in a dream world which was all too soon to be destroyed.
Meanwhile, the White Guards and Free Corps were, as Levine had forecast, advancing on the city, slaughtering whoever they fancied as they came, and the Communists decided that, since the republic was under military attack, however imperfect it might be, it was their duty to defend it. They must go down fighting. The first thing was to form a Red Army. Weapons were no problem, as so many people had recently returned from the front, and so many of the soldiers garrisoned in Munich were sympathetic—even if for no better reason than hatred of the Prussians.
Their first trial of strength came on Palm Sunday, 13 April, against opposition within the city that Hoffman had organized—from a safe distance in Nuremburg. According to the historian, Allan Mitchell, 20 people were killed. Levine put the figure at seven and said:
The enemy are not even fighting properly any more.
Soon, however, the city was in a state of siege and so short of food that by 26 April it had become a capital offence to provide milk for anyone but the dying. The Whites planned their final takeover for 2 May, hoping to avoid confronting a mass workers’ demonstration on 1 May. But on 30 April, 10 hostages, held in a school by the Red Army, were murdered, and this incensed the Whites so much that they broke into Munich on 1 May after all. At a conservative estimate, some 600 people were killed. Others believe the numbers ran into thousands—and no nonsense about sparing women and children.
The story of the hostages assumed an importance which, as an incident, it seems not to have merited. Is there something qualitatively different about murdering hostages and slaughtering innocents in the street? In any case, the question of who ordered the deaths is still a mystery. Some Communists said they were counter-revolutionaries condemned to die, but the suggestion that Levine ordered their deaths has done his reputation great damage. His widow says vehemently that apart from any other considerations, he would never have done anything so foolish, so calculated to play into the enemy’s hands. If he had done so and there were any proof of it, the court-martial before which he eventually stood trial would have charged him, and it failed to do so. Nevertheless, the slander is used against him still.
Many of Levine’s supporters, like Rudolf Egelhofer, the 26 year old sailor who was in charge of the Red Army, and Gustav Landauer, an anarchist scholar who had supported the revolution for romantic reasons, were killed without trial. Levine went into hiding, was trapped and court-martialled. German law was curious in that it was not illegal to conduct revolutionary activities, but it was illegal to conduct them for “dishonorable motives”. It was for this that Eugen Levine, whom many people feel might have become the German Lenin, was tried. His speech from the dock, in which he used the unforgettable phrase:
We communists are dead men on holiday,
so impressed his hearers that the soldiers who were guarding him crowded round the dock begging to hear more. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. The officer who conducted him back to his cell said to him:
We had to kill you, of course, but to say you were dishonorable is quite wicked.
His last words, as he faced the firing squad, were “Long live the world revolution”.
in The Observer supplement, May 1972.
