The Berlin Wall (5 page)

When the Reichstag met after the 1912 elections, the SPD’s veteran leader August Bebel, who had faced off Bismarck during the period of illegality and sat for thirty years in a parliament where he was daily insulted and humiliated by the ‘patriotic’ establishment, made a chillingly prophetic speech about the dangerous international situation:

There will be a catastrophe…sixteen to eighteen million men, the flower of different nations, will march against each other, equipped with lethal weapons. But I am convinced that this great march will be followed by the great collapse (
at this moment many in the chamber began to laugh
)—all right, you have laughed about this before; but it will come…What will be the result? After this war we shall have mass bankruptcy, mass misery, mass unemployment and great famine.
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The record states that his words were drowned out by mocking laughter. A right-wing deputy called out: ‘Herr Bebel, things always get better after every war!’

The socialist patriarch would be dead within a year. Another year after that, booming, brilliant Berlin would be a city at war. A city of hunger. A city of despair.

When the guns fell silent on 11 November 1918, the Kaiser had been overthrown, and his people were no longer the envy of Europe. A ruthless
blockade by the British navy had all but prevented the importing of food into Germany.

Rural areas managed to survive, but the cities starved. Berlin suffered worst of all. Its huge population and its remoteness from fertile growing land contributed to a food crisis that was already a fact as early as the first winter of the war. In February 1915, Berlin saw the introduction of bread rationing. In 1917, the potato crop, on which the city had depended since the time of Frederick the Great, failed. For the first time since the Thirty Years’ War, rats became candidates for Berlin’s dinner tables.

By 1918, meat consumption was down to 12 per cent of pre-war levels, that of eggs to 13 per cent, and of fish to 5 per cent. Thousands died from hunger and from diseases associated with malnutrition. The rampant black market created vast resentment. Although many of Berlin’s large Jewish population served bravely at the front, Jews were perceived as complicit in increasing corruption.

In the end, even German technical know-how, discipline and courage could not overcome the numerical and industrial superiority of the Allies, especially after America joined the war in 1917. One last German thrust in the west during the spring of 1918 at first promised success, but the Allied line held and the advance petered out.

Though still fighting on enemy territory in France, Belgium, Italy and the Balkans, Germany had shot its bolt. In October 1918, a liberal ministry under Prince Max of Baden began to consider peace. By early November, there was open revolt in the streets of Berlin and other cities. The Kaiser went into exile in Holland. A republic was declared.

Peace on the battlefield brought no peace of mind. How could it be, asked those conditioned by the egoistic, ultra-nationalist assumptions of the pre-war years, that a nation with its armies still holding out on foreign soil, could suddenly collapse? Treachery, was their answer. The legend of the ‘stab in the back’—invincible Germany betrayed by Jews and revolutionaries—became accepted by many as fact.

Berlin in 1920, expanded by reorganisation, had a population of around four million. The working class part of it—mainly in the east—was thoroughly Red.

The problem was, the labour vote had split. In 1914, the majority of the SPD experienced a similar fit of patriotism to the rest of German
society. It voted for the war and joined the ‘siege truce’ (
Burgfrieden
) announced by the Kaiser. As the war dragged on, and the urban masses suffered, and the slaughter of Germany’s young men reached intolerable levels, the SPD split between the still-loyal main party and the USPD or Independent Social Democratic Party, which took a pacifist and subversive stance. And then there was the far Left, which coalesced around an extreme anti-war, revolutionary grouping led by a vigorous Russian apostle of ‘scientific’ political violence, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin.

When the monarchy fell, the Leninists, known as the Spartakist League (after the slave rebels in ancient Rome, followers of Spartacus), remained tiny in number. None the less, they enjoyed support in rebellious units of the army and navy. So risky was the situation in Berlin that the assembly set up to frame the new republic’s constitution had to be held in the provincial town of Weimar. The new state was known as the ‘Weimar Republic’.

The declaration of a republic did not satisfy the far Left. Lenin had seized power in Russia in November 1917, and his Soviet dictatorship was a beacon to idealists of all kinds. In January 1919, the Spartakists attempted a similar revolution in Berlin. To defeat them, the Social Democratic government had to find a strong arm, which it did not itself possess. It was forced to call on the former imperial army.

The Prussian army duly put down the rebellion. After its suppression, a group of officers abducted and murdered the Spartakist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Both had opposed the uprising but been overruled. Their bodies were found in the Landwehr Canal, between what would later be West and East Berlin. No one ever stood trial for the killings.

In 1920, a 27-year-old First World War veteran and member of the USPD joined a large chunk of his chosen party in peeling off to combine with the newly founded KPD (Communist Party of Germany), which had arisen from the ruins of the Spartakist movement. Many years later, he would claim that even while in the army he had been a firebrand Spartakist. In fact, Leipzig-born Walter Ulbricht had shown no previous sign of extremism. However, once he was in the new Leninist party he
rose rapidly and showed himself to be a true believer with a gift for organisation.

In 1924/5, Ulbricht was one of the first young German Communists to undergo ideological training at the new Lenin School in Moscow, established by the Communist International (Comintern) to educate future leaders of the international revolution. His exceptional loyalty to Moscow and its political line would characterise his entire career. Possessed of a high-pitched voice, the result of a severe throat infection in his teens, and a strong Saxon accent (mercilessly mocked by his enemies), his humourlessness and general lack of likeability were also the stuff of legend.

A fellow young party official at that time, Ernst Wollweber, recalled:

He was regarded as incredibly hard-working, always willing to take the initiative, extremely solid: he had no vices and no obvious weaknesses. He didn’t smoke, he did not drink, and he had no personal associates. He was not friends with anyone in the Party.
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Another contemporary recalled returning by train from a conference with several comrades, including Ulbricht. The earnest young activist from Leipzig spent the whole journey talking politics, while the others, having had enough of such talk during the long speeches and discussions, just wanted to enjoy the passing countryside and unwind. Ulbricht had no sense of these simple human compensatory mechanisms.

While with the KPD delegation that attended the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow in November 1922, Ulbricht was present at a meeting addressed by Lenin himself. Though only fifty-two, the great revolutionary suffered a stroke in May of that year, but had recovered sufficiently to speak at the congress. In December 1922, another, much worse, seizure laid him how. He withdrew from politics and died in January 1924. Walter Ulbricht never ceased to remind colleagues that he had breathed the same air as the founder of Marxism-Leninism, and discussed vital matters of world revolution in his sacred company.

At home, the KPD showed worrying signs of independence during the early 1920s, resisting ‘Bolshevisation’ (that is, Russification) of its
organisational structure and electing to senior posts comrades the Soviet leadership didn’t like. Ulbricht helped organise a counter-coup. Ernst Thälmann, a Hamburg-born transport worker and Moscow loyalist, became leader of the KPD. Henceforth, strict adherence to the Soviet line was enforced. In 1927, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Josef Stalin, made it official Comintern policy that any Communist, anywhere in the world, must hold the defence of the Soviet Union to be his or her unshakeable duty.

In 1926, Ulbricht was elected to the Saxon provincial parliament, and in 1928, he switched to Berlin as a KPD member of the Reichstag.

Ulbricht actually spent most of the next parliamentary session back in Moscow, representing the KPD at the Comintern. During his second sojourn in the Soviet Union, Ulbricht was admitted to membership of the CPSU as well as to the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Soon after his return co Germany, Ulbricht was elected to the Politburo of the KPD, the élite leadership. In November 1929, he became Party Secretary for Berlin and Brandenburg.

Ulbricht was now in charge of one of the real Communist strongholds. Recent elections for the Berlin city government had seen the KPD garner a quarter of the vote and become the second-largest party after the SPD. In some areas, its vote had exceeded 40 per cent. Ulbricht became one of Germany’s most controversial politicians, making inflammatory speeches and going head-to-head with the Nazi
Gauleiter
of Berlin, Josef Goebbels.
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The ‘limited civil war’ between Communists and Nazis in the streets of Berlin contributed powerfully co the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Ulbricht, a keen apostle of political violence, was as much responsible for this as Goebbels. The bruisers of the KPD’s paramilitary ‘Red Self Help’ fought pitched battles with Goebbels’ brown-shirted thugs.

Though still in his mid-thirties, Ulbricht was already a key member of the German Communist Party’s leadership. He was linkman
par excellence
between Moscow and Berlin, as familiar with Red Square as with the Potsdamer Platz. To Walter Ulbricht, the sufferings or joys of the people of Berlin were then, and would be thirty years later, strictly subordinated to the needs of international Communism.

Germany had been knocked to the ground by defeat in 1918.

In the years immediately following, the horrors of hyperinflation devastated Germans’ savings. In June 1920, the rate of exchange stood at 50 marks to the dollar, a year later 101 marks, and by July 1922 550 marks. Then the French invaded the Ruhr industrial area to enforce payment of reparations, and the whole German economy went crazy. In June 1923, the dollar stood at 75,000 marks and two months later at 10,000,000. By the autumn the rate of exchange reached that of one dollar="4,200,000,000" marks. The far Right claimed the Jews were responsible; the far Left, including the KPD, blamed the militaristic Prussian aristocrats, known as Junkers, and the war-profiteering capitalists.

On 9 November 1923, an obscure ex-serviceman with the gift of the gab tried to talk the authorities in Munich into supporting his planned coup against the ‘Reds’ in Berlin. His name was Adolf Hitler. In Saxony, the Communists attempted their own putsch. Ulbricht was heavily involved.

Both rebellions failed. The right-wing seizure of power, however, was put down with kid gloves. Hitler received a couple of years’ comfortable imprisonment, where he wrote a confused and toxic memoir called
Mein Kampf
(My Struggle). The Communist rebellion was suppressed much more brutally. It was clear which violent radicals the establishment considered the greater danger.

Something had to happen to stabilise Germany. A government enjoying wide support across the political spectrum came to power. The talented banker Dr Hjalmar Schacht organised a revaluation of the mark that gave domestic and foreign creditors some confidence again.

By the mid-1920s, with the currency stabilised, the economy buoyed by foreign loans, and the country enjoying relative political and social peace, Germany made a recovery. The arts and sciences flourished Germany supplied more Nobel Prize winners in the 1920s than any other nation—and with the dead hand of the imperial censors removed, Berlin became the freest, frankest—some would say, most licentious—city in Europe. By May 1928, Hitler’s National Socialists, who had briefly flourished in the middle of the decade, won only 2.5 per cent of the vote and were down to a mere dozen Reichstag deputies, less than the tiny Bavarian People’s Party.

None of this brought back the property and the savings that millions of Germans had lost in the inflation, but at least there were jobs and money moving around the system. Germany had got back on his feet and was walking upright, albeit with a slight limp.

The 1929 American stock-market crash and the consequent economic depression hit Germany harder than any other European country. Foreign loans were called in, banks collapsed, and export markets (always a great source of German prosperity) shrank drastically. The country seemed to fall even lower than before. Hopelessness spread once more throughout Germany, like a cancer thought beaten that returns with new virulence.

The depression hit skilled working-class and white-collar workers especially hard. The political extremes began to recruit successfully. In September 1930, the Nazis won 107 seats to the KPD’s 77; in July 1932, 230 to 89; in November 1932, 196 to 100. Almost half the deputies in the Reichstag represented parties that rejected parliamentary democracy. The situation was even worse in Berlin. Although in the capital, with its strong socialist and liberal traditions, the Nazi vote never reached 30 per cent,in July 1932 the Communists were not far behind them on almost 25 per cent. The once-dominant Social Democrats now ranked third. Berlin’s streets were in constant uproar. Knives, knuckle-dusters, firearms, and even explosives were used in battles that really did resemble engagements between armies in a vicious little civil war.
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