![[colored bar]](../images/Spectbar.gif)
Stephen Eric Bronner is a professor of political science at Rutgers University and a member of the New Politics editorial board.
1919 IS AN EXTRAORDINARY DATE IN GERMAN HISTORY. It abruptly brought the democratic revolution of 1918 to a close and opened the door for the 1933 Nazi seizure of power. 1919 is cloaked in myths of personal martyrdom and political betrayal. Too often forgotten, however, is the paranoia which gripped Germany in that year. Inspired both by the bitter reality of defeat on the battlefield and the radical specter of bolshevism, it produced a subtle shift in the common understanding of anti-Semitism and the fears motivating the anti- Semite. Indeed, 1919 was the year in which the preoccupation of the right-wing press with the "Jewification" (Verjudung) of German society essentially made way for the vision of a "Jewish-bolshevik conspiracy" (Traverso, pg. 48).
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, previously forged in Russia, had already made its appearance in Europe during the Dreyfus Affair about 20 years earlier. Anti- Semites also continued to bemoan the alleged dominance of Jews in certain professions, including banking, and reference was still made to Adolf Bartels, the noted 19th century philologist, and his list of 800 Jewish writers who were supposedly displacing German writers from their culture (Pachter, p. 262). But the war and subsequent revolutions transformed older concerns. The Jews were now considered not merely profiteers, the worst sort of capitalists, but also traitors working against the national interests of Germany and conspiring with the international Communist revolution. Indeed, their interests were identified with those of the new "Jew republic" of Weimar.
Was not this new order the result of defeat on the battlefield, was it not dominated by money-lenders, led by socialists, and willing to accept the provisions of the humiliating Treaty of Versailles? Was the new state not forged in the November Revolution of 1918? The November Revolution of 1918 had begun with the abdication of the Kaiser and the returning troops disgruntled and without hope for the future, whose plight was so well described by Erich Maria Remarque in novels like The Road Back and Three Comrades. The fall of the monarchy produced a power vacuum which was filled by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under the leadership of the pro-war "majority" faction led by Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, and Gustav Noske.
The SPD's rise to power was accompanied by strikes and mass disturbances; the uprising initiated by a group of sailors in Kiel was the first. The aristocracy and bourgeoisie feared for their status and their property. The military and bureaucracy felt betrayed by the defeat while peasants and the petty-bourgeoisie embraced what soon became the legend of the "stab in the back" perpetrated by Jews and Communists on the homefront. The situation was perilous and the possibilities of civil war real.
Social democracy had always held forth the promise of a republic. But it was now in a terrible position (Rosenberg, pp. 5ff.). The SPD could either compromise with the anti-democratic and reactionary classes of the Wilhelmine Monarchy and introduce a "republic without republicans" or risk civil war and possible invasion at the hands of the victorious allies by taking a more radical course. This would involve purging the military and state bureaucracy, liquidating the estates of the reactionary aristocracy in the East, and dealing with an insistent minority of the proletariat seeking a genuinely "socialist" republic based on the spontaneously erupting "workers' councils" (Rate) or "soviets," if not the more authoritarian tenets of bolshevik theory. The Social Democrats chose the less dangerous option and turned on those wishing to chart a more radical course.
None of this meant much to the far right. Its ideological attachment to xenophobia, militarism, authoritarianism, and anti-Semitism created the philosophical context in which Jews could appear as the root of the problem. They promoted the view that Jews' inbred lack of principle and national roots made it possible for them to dominate the liberal bourgeoisie, social democracy and international communism as well. The Jews were thus capitalists and "reds" at the same time. Inextricably connected with the forces supposedly dominating the Weimar Republic, or what the Nazis termed the "system," this seemingly explained why the "Jew republic" should have crushed the uprisings in which any number of Jewish revolutionaries played a highly visible role.
ROSA LUXEMBURG WAS CLEARLY THE PREDOMINANT FIGURE AMONG THEM. Born in 1871 in the city of Zamosc, Poland, to a middle class Jewish family, Luxemburg became a revolutionary while still in high school. Hunted by the police, she fled to Zurich before engaging in a marriage of convenience in order to enter Germany and work with the jewel in the crown of international social democracy.
Various writers have emphasized the effect of being a Jew or a woman on the identity of Rosa Luxemburg (Arendt, pp. 36ff; Dunayevskaya, pp. 79ff). She undoubtedly always hated bigotry of any sort and insisted on equality. Her thought grudgingly allowed for "national cultural autonomy" (The National Question, 251ff, 303ff.), and she saw social democracy as the natural home for the oppressed. But the argument originally made in her dissertation, The Industrial Development of Poland (1894), with its critique of the nationalism embraced by leaders of Polish social democracy like the future dictator Josef Pilsudski, extends by implication to any form of particularism. Luxemburg would consistently oppose any ideology capable of compromising proletarian unity, the struggle against imperialism, and what she considered the internationalist assumptions of Marxism.
Her principles were well known, but these early writings were not. Luxemburg's ascent in the world of international social democracy began with a contribution to what became known as "the revisionist debate" of 1898. Initiated by Eduard Bernstein with a set of articles, reworked into a book entitled The Preconditions of Socialism, orthodox Marxism was charged with ignoring the manner in which capitalism had stabilized, and the fact that the "inevitable" proletarian revolution anticipated by Marx was no longer on the agenda. Thus, emphasizing that "the movement is everything and the goal is nothing," Bernstein called upon social democracy to surrender its "revolutionary phraseology" and foster a policy of compromise with non-proletarian classes to insure economic reforms so that socialism might gradually "evolve."
Luxemburg's Social Reform or Revolution (1899) was the finest contribution to the debate made by any critic of "revisionism," which included the most famous theoreticians of orthodox Marxism like Karl Kautsky and Georgii Plekhanov. In this pamphlet, she noted that crisis was endemic to capitalism and expressed her fears about how an unrestricted politics of class compromise might justify any choice by the party leadership, and shift power to the trade unions. She also argued that reform could never transform the production process or eliminate the prospect of imperialism and political crisis. Without a political revolution, she argued, reforms granted under one set of conditions could also be retracted under another. A simple emphasis on economic reforms would thus result only in a "labor of Sisyphus." Indeed, without an articulated socialist "goal," she believed that the SPD would increasingly succumb to capitalist values and so surrender its sense of political purpose.
Just as Luxemburg rejected the idea of a democratic mass party run by bureaucratic reformists, and basically her Organizational Questions of Social Democracy criticized the idea of a "vanguard" party based on blind obedience and dominated by revolutionary intellectuals. Lenin and Bernstein were, for her, flip sides of the same coin insofar as both sought to erect an "absolute dividing wall" between the leadership and the base. If socialism is to transform workers from "dead machines" into the "free and independent directors" of society as a whole, she argued, then they must have the chance to learn and exercise their knowledge. Consequently, the Russian Revolution of 1905 inspired what is arguably her finest theoretical work, Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions (1906).
This pamphlet placed a new emphasis on the innovative talents of the masses in organizing society. It spoke about connecting economic with political concerns. It also articulated her organizational dialectic between party and base, which would gradually build the "self-administrative" capacities of workers by helping them develop new democratic institutions and then, at a different stage of the struggle, still newer ones.
Rosa Luxemburg retained this radical democratic vision during World War I, which she spent in a tiny prison cell. There, she wrote responses to her critics, translated The History of My Contemporary of her beloved Korlenko, and -- under the pseudonym Junius produced the great anti-war pamphlet, The Crisis in the German Social Democracy (1916), which mercilessly assaulted the SPD for its willingness to support the Kaiser's war, its obsession with votes, its cowardice in the face of public opinion, and its betrayal of working class interests.
Also written in jail were her beautiful letters to friends and lovers which portrayed her diverse interests, her courage, and her deep sense of humanity. A small volume of the more personal letters was published by Sonja Liebknecht the wife of Luxemburg's fellow socialist martyr Karl Liebknecht in 1922 and another followed a year later edited by Luise Kautsky. Interestingly enough, they served a political purpose. Their publication was meant to foster sympathy for the woman who was now castigated both by social democracy and a Communist movement undergoing "bolshevization" and attempting to rid itself of what its former leader, Ruth Fischer, called "the syphilitic Luxemburg bacillus."
There was good reason why this increasingly authoritarian movement should have turned on the first president of the German Communist Party. In jail, while in ill-health and with little information other than newspapers, Rosa Luxemburg wrote what was surely her most prophetic and intellectually daring work. The Russian Revolution (1918) exposed the compromises which would ultimately undermine the Soviet experiment. Opposed to Lenin's agrarian policy, continuing to reject the use of slogans implying the "right of national self-determination," her analysis is best known for demanding the extension of both formal and substantive democracy as well as the justly famous words:
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party -- however numerous they may be -- is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently... . Its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom" becomes a special privilege.
Her lawyer, Paul Levi, with whom she was intimate toward the end of her life, convinced Luxemburg not to publish the piece for fear of aiding the reaction. She reluctantly agreed, possibly because she may not have had the strength to refuse. Alfred Doblin described her in his lengthy novel, Karl and Rosa, as suffering a nervous breakdown in prison. Following her release in 1918, her hair had turned white and she had become even more frail and thin. Nevertheless, she extended her support to the Spartacus group -- which would serve as the nucleus for the German Communist Party (KPD) -- and publicly advocated the creation of "soviets" (or "workers' councils").
Despite their almost legendary stature, however, the Spartacists never received the support of a proletarian majority -- and Rosa Luxemburg knew it. She warned against prematurely sparking the revolution in Germany and, after initially opposing the idea of a National Assembly, ultimately called for participating in the elections of the nascent Weimar Republic. But she was outvoted. The Spartacist Revolt broke out in 1919 and Rosa Luxemburg decided to remain in contact with the masses. Article after article in the bourgeois press called for her death and even the socialist Vorwarts printed the ditty:
Hundreds of proletarian corpses all in
a row -- proletarians!
Karl, Rosa, Radek and company!
All in a row -- proletarians!Luxemburg alone might have been able to counteract -- if ever so briefly -- the power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the international Left (Borkenau, p. 148ff). She also warned that a "military dictatorship" would soon supplant the Weimar Republic. But the forces of order got their wish. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered at the hands of proto-Nazi thugs employed by the socialist government of Ebert and Noske and while the fraudulent investigation into their deaths caused a sensation, the murderers of Liebknecht and "bloody Rosa, the Jewish sau" served little jail-time and all became heroes in the Third Reich.
Grimly, for a short time, Leo Jogiches took over the reins of Spartacus. Luxemburg had fallen in love with him during her time in Zurich and, though their affair was now over, he never lost his affection and admiration for her. Jogiches, who was born in 1867, always supported her position in crucial moments and, while their relationship was difficult, Luxemburg relied upon his political advice to the very end.
Leo Jogiches was a great and honorable revolutionary who had spent years underground and in jail. Neither a theorist nor a writer, he was a man of action who thrived during times of upheaval and used his family's considerable fortune to help finance the labor movement in Poland, Russia, and Germany. He participated in virtually every revolutionary uprising during the early years of the century, opposed World War I, and was instrumental in founding the Spartacus group. He begged Luxemburg and Liebknecht to leave the country when it was clear that the defeat was certain but they rejected his advice.
Ironically, however, Jogiches himself stayed in Berlin. With what must have been a rare smile, he supposedly said: "Somebody has to stay, at least to write all our epitaphs." The death of Rosa Luxemburg left Jogiches a broken man. Obsessed with bringing the murderers to justice, and preserving her papers, his own life lost all meaning in 1919. By all accounts, Leo Jogiches almost purposely left himself open to capture. While under arrest, he was shot in cold blood.
PAUL LEVI ASSUMED THE LEADERSHIP OF THE KPD after the death of Luxemburg and Jogiches. Born on March 11, 1883, he studied jurisprudence at the University of Berlin and the University of Grenoble and, after receiving his degree, quickly became one of the leading lawyers in the SPD; indeed, it was Levi who defended Rosa Luxemburg in her famous trial for engaging in anti-militarist activity in the months preceding World War I. Opposed to the conflict from the very first, by 1916, Levi had entered the executive committee of the Sparatcus group and represented Lenin's call to transform the conflict between states into a "class war" at the Zimmerwald Conference in 1917.
Levi pressed the investigation into Luxemburg's death following the defeat of the Spartacus Revolt. He also came into conflict with the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow which supported Bela Kun, the famous Hungarian Communist, in maintaining an "offensive" strategy of armed uprising. Levi argued instead for a "defensive" strategy. He believed that the cadres had been devastated, the masses exhausted by the defeats of 1919 and that it was now necessary to begin the task of rebuilding by entering the unions, attracting new members, concentrating on ideological work, and refusing to engage in romantic ultra-leftism.
The debate came to a head over the failed March Action of 1921, an uprising called by Moscow against the pleadings of Levi. In a complicated give and take, Levi demanded that the Moscow leadership take responsibility for the inevitable disaster. Lenin himself was skeptical about the revolutionary attempt. But, when Levi levelled his criticisms publicly, the Russian leader showed no hesitancy in purging him from the Comintern in 1921 for breach of discipline even while integrating the policy proposals of his victim into Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In the aftermath of this controversy during 1922 Levi, Luxemburg's disciple, released her pamphlet, The Russian Revolution, for publication.
Levi ultimately rejoined the SPD and tried to remain active but he was an outcast without power or influence. The Social Democrats had little use for him -- or for memories of Luxemburg either. He died in 1930 in what might have been an attempt at suicide.
AN ORGANIZED ANTI-COMMUNIST WITCH-HUNT HAD ACCOMPANIED THE BIRTH of the Weimar Republic. Bavaria, which sought to preserve its independence and remained relatively free from the influence of the Ebert and Noske government in Berlin, witnessed uprisings like so many other cities in Germany. The reformist politician, Kurt Eisner -- a Kantian pacifist and longtime socialist parliamentarian, a newspaper editor as well as a writer of socialist lyrics and fairy tales -- wound up leading a demonstration of 200,000 people and then, in the aftermath of the monarch's flight from Germany, heading a minority government which introduced numerous progressive reforms.
Eisner was the first of the "five literati" who would dominate the Munich events of 1918-19. His assassination while on the way to hand in his resignation, coupled with the emergence of a short-lived Hungarian Soviet, generated the desire for a Bavarian Soviet. It was believed by many on the international left that a soviet in Bavaria would induce the Austrians to form one of their own (Carsten, p. 219). Thus, the summary declaration of a Bavarian Soviet on April 7, 1919 made a certain degree of political sense even if the material conditions for its success were lacking.
The Bavarian "soviet" was initially ruled by independent socialists like Ernst Toller along with a sprinkling of anarchists like Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam, in coalition with representatives of the SPD. But the independents were organizationally weak and the majority socialists were increasingly disgraced by the actions of their comrades in Berlin. And so, this regime found itself supplanted by a Communist government whose most visible leader was Eugen Levine. Communist rule, however, lasted only two weeks. It was displaced by a new "dictatorship of the natives" led by Toller and his friends, which lasted only a few days before capitulating to the forces of right-wing reaction.
The Bavarian Soviet never had a chance. Its base in the working class was countered by the capitalist class, the petty bourgeoisie, and the peasantry. The new soviet was also a perfect target for the "philistines." Munich was, after all, a center of the expressionist avant-garde before World War I. Perhaps for this reason, especially at the beginning, the Bavarian "soviet" was strongly influenced by representatives of the literati including, among others, Lion Feuchtwanger and Oskar Maria Graf. And these intellectuals did not make the best politicians. The Bavarian Soviet never produced leaders on a par with Luxemburg, Liebknecht, or Levi. Its foreign minister, in fact, was a certifiable lunatic by the name of Franz Lipp who, in all seriousness, decided to declare war on the Pope. Nevertheless, for better or worse, the Bavarian Soviet was unique in attempting to fuse cultural with political liberation.
ITS GUIDING SPIRIT WAS UNDOUBTEDLY GUSTAV LANDAUER who withdrew from active participation when the Communists took power. He was a pacifist and an anarchist noted for his nobility and commitment. Born in 1870 in Karlsruhe, Landauer entered politics very young. "I was an anarchist," he liked to say, "before I became a socialist." And that was true enough. Landauer joined the social-democratic movement and edited a journal called The Socialist around 1900 but, from the start, he had little use for the reformism of the SPD and quickly became a leading figure of an ultra-left faction, known as "the young ones," which was summarily expelled in 1894.
Proudhon and Kropotkin would always play a far greater role in Landauer's thinking than Marx. His anarchist vision was directed less toward the institutions of the economy and the state than the human condition. He became interested in the "life reform" movement and, by 1902, his work had already influenced those concerned with founding the journal, New Community, to which any number of major Jewish intellectuals like Martin Buber would contribute. Indeed, also around this time Landauer formed what would become a lasting friendship with Erich Mühsam.
Landauer was more than a political figure or a bohemian. He was also a noted historian of literature, who wrote an extraordinary study of Shakespeare, and a novelist whose works like Macht und Machte brought him wide acclaim. His world was unbounded and that was also true of his wife -- Hedwig Lachmann -- who translated Oscar Wilde and Rabindranath Tagore. Landauer spoke of himself as a German and a Jew in essays like Der werdende Mensch (1913). But he deemed the whole of his personality more than the sum of its parts just as humanity was, for him, more than the various nationalities and ethnic communities comprising it. A presumption of human goodness and a striving for a utopian condition of harmony, a respect for the individual and the community, informed his ethics. These beliefs also played a role in his somewhat less notable political writings like A Call to Socialism, where economic equality along with a new direct form of proletarian democracy would eliminate violence.
Marta Feuchtwanger -- the wife of the great realist writer Lion Feuchtwanger -- recounts a shocking story about Landauer's death. Arrested following the collapse of the Bavarian Soviet, he started talking about the goodness of humanity to the soldiers escorting him to prison. Suddenly, they grew tired of walking and his talk and summarily beat him to death (Nur eine Frau, p.133). Baron von Gagern, the officer responsible, was never punished or even brought to trial, which speaks volumes about the judiciary in the Weimar Republic, and provides a deep insight into Landauer.
He always considered himself an educator and spoke to the best in people. His concern was less about institutions than the manner in which people treated one another. His aim was to provide the working class with a new consciousness and a new democratic worldview. And, as Minister of Education in the Bavarian Soviet, Landauer attempted to introduce a set of radical reforms ranging from allowing any 18-year-old to become a full-time student at the University of Munich, to setting up a "students' soviet" and abolishing examinations. His general perspective, in fact, becomes abundantly clear from his striking claim: "Every Bavarian child at the age of ten is going to know Walt Whitman by heart. That is the cornerstone of my educational program."
RIMBAUD HAD CALLED UPON HIS GENERATION TO "CHANGE LIFE." Erich Mühsam heartily agreed. And why not? Mühsam was for Germany, according to another famous anarchist, what Rimbaud was for France (Souchy, pg. 10). Born in 1878, the son of a Jewish pharmacist in Berlin, he was expelled from high school for socialist agitation. An "outsider" from the beginning, Mühsam naturally gravitated to the anarchist circles of Berlin and Munich. Max Nordau described him as an inveterate sponger during these early years (pp. 16ff). But in 1904, The Desert, his first collection of poems was published and, soon, Mühsam began making his name as the author of cabaret songs, anecdotes, and sketches. He riddled social democracy with sarcasm in poems like Die Revoluzzer, and important journals like Die Weltbuhne and Simplicissmus began publishing his work.
"Let us make room for freedom" was a line in one of his poems. And that was what Mühsam sought to do when, in 1911, he became the editor of Kain, which he described as a "magazine for humanity." It was, of course, nothing of the sort. Based in Munich, this journal was sophisticated and avant-garde, and Mühsam, like his Viennese friend and counterpart, Karl Kraus, the editor of The Torch, wrote every line, advocating pacifism, sexual liberation, and an apocalyptic notion of revolution. He defended his friends and castigated the status quo. When World War I broke out, he published a collection entitled Deserts, Craters, and Clouds in which he made the plea: "drink, soldiers, drink ... ."
In keeping with his pacifist convictions, Mühsam refused either to serve in the army or register as a conscientious objector and, for this, he was jailed. Following his release, he opposed the National Assembly and sought to found an Association of International Revolutionaries in Munich, which came to little. Its program was somewhat unclear and organizational questions bored Mühsam. Never particularly concerned with the class struggle, like Landauer, he spoke to the "exploited" and even attempted to proselytize among the lumpen-proletariat. Mühsam's vision of socialism, like Landauer's and Toller's, was essentially aesthetic and visionary.
After the fall of the Bavarian Soviet, Mühsam was condemned to 15 years at hard labor, a sentence that was later commuted to five years. He continued his anarchist activities after his release but grew more sober. His new journal, Fanal, no longer criticized social democracy, but the Nazis as the main enemy. Mühsam spoke out against the abuses of the Weimar judicial system and supported organizations like Red Aid which raised money for political prisoners and sought their liberation. He wrote a play, Reason of State, about Sacco and Vanzetti and an account of the Bavarian Soviet entitled From Eisner to Levine: A Reckoning in which his humanistic values and hopes for the Bavarian Soviet become clear and he details the arrogance and stubbornness of the Communists. Nevertheless, even here, Mühsam could not adequately deal with the shortcomings of his own political voluntarism or the institutional and social reasons for the failure of the Bavarian experiment.
Few were hated with the same degree of passion by the nationalist right which continued to vilify Mühsam during the years of the Weimar Republic. This anarchist Jew somehow stuck in the craw of the far right. Henry Pachter even suggested that Hitler probably remembered the young bohemian playing chess in the famous Caf‚ Megalomania in Munich after the war, and making fun of the future chancellor's drawings (p. 252). But the philistines ultimately had their revenge. Following the Nazi seizure of power, Mühsam was immediately captured and transported to Oranienburg, where he died in 1934, after being slowly and systematically beaten to death.
Mühsam was one of the best-loved figures of the Bavarian Soviet and there are reports about workers and soldiers shouting his name and even carrying him on their shoulders. He never showed favoritism toward any party and acted responsibly as a leading politician of the Bavarian Soviet. Mühsam sought unity, proved willing to compromise with the Communists, and even appeared as their spokesperson on one or two occasions without surrendering his principles or his various utopian ideas for reform. Because he knew who he was, his "identity" was never a problem for him. Thus, Mühsam could write:
I am a Jew and will remain a Jew so long as I live. I never denied my Judaism and never even walked out of the religious community (because I would still remain a Jew and I am completely indifferent under which rubric I am entered in the state's register). I consider it neither an advantage nor a disadvantage to be a Jew; it simply belongs to my being like my red beard, my weight, or my inclinations (Briefe 2:422-3).
IT WASN'T MUCH DIFFERENT FOR ERNST TOLLER. The most famous and perhaps prototypical leader of the Bavarian Soviet was born in Posen in 1893 and his autobiography -- I Was A German -- speaks eloquently of anti-Semitism in Germany. But still he joined the military in a mood of "emotional delirium" to fight in World War I. On his release in 1916, in the wake of a nervous breakdown, he soon became a staunch pacifist and ultimately a socialist. After studying at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg, where he came to know Max Weber and various other distinguished academics, Toller wrote his autobiographical play, Transformation (1917). Dream sequences, abstract figures, and various other expressionist techniques are employed in this work whose main character experiences any number of "transformations," each of which liberates him from a prior ideological prejudice, until finally he finds "redemption" (Erlosung) in a utopian vision of "revolution." Based on a fundamental "faith in humanity," concerned less with workers than with an image of the oppressed, this "revolution" would necessarily prove non-violent and bring about a change in the very "essence" of "man" beyond all externalities.
Toller -- like Eisner -- was a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which had split from the SPD in 1916 over the latter's pro-war policy. The USPD, small and poorly organized in Munich, had aligned itself with the councilist movement. Toller quickly became a leading figure in the Bavarian Soviet. His remarkable oratorical abilities didn't hurt; indeed, it was said that "he carried the people by the force of his own convictions... . They wanted a mission in life; Toller supplied them with one." (cited in Flood, p. 4)
The creation of the Bavarian Soviet was accompanied by planting freedom trees, singing Jacobin songs, and a great deal of libertarian rhetoric. In fact, the contemporary German writer, Tankred Dorst, has argued that Toller identified the events of 1919 with the expressionist apocalypse his works depicted. Whether that is true or not remains an open question. But it is true that Toller knew nothing about economics and not much more about institutions. His grasp of political priorities was also somewhat suspect. In the aftermath of the allied blockade, while Bavaria was experiencing a food shortage, Toller's first speech to the soviet concerned the new forms of architecture, painting and drama by which humanity might express itself more fully. Administrative services collapsed and the organization of revolutionary soldiers was a shambles; indeed, with a mixture of affection and sarcasm, Max Weber once remarked: "God in his fury has turned Toller into a politician."
But, in fact, Toller remains a great symbol for socialist libertarians. Brave and humane, he fought courageously with the defenders of the Bavarian Soviet against the reactionary forces and saved many hostages from the revenge sought by various Communist leaders like Rudolf Engelhofer. With the downfall of the Bavarian Soviet, Toller was captured and spent five years in prison. There, he wrote his beautiful collection of poems entitled The Swallow's Book, which brought him great popularity. He attempted to unify respect for the individual with solidarity in works like Man and the Masses (1924) and Broken-Brow, which concerns an impotent war invalid abandoned by society.
The pathos in Toller's work increased along with his despondency. And yet, following his release, he joined The German League for Human Rights and participated in various pacifist organizations. Even while writing for prestigious journals like Die Weltbuhne, which published his prison writings, and using an innovative expressionist style, he always considered himself a "people's poet" (Volksdichter). Like Mühsam, he was another who bravely castigated the criminal justice system for its right-wing bias and Hooray! We're Alive remains one of the most trenchant criticisms of the materialistic and chauvinistic underside of the Weimar Republic. Along with Mühsam, Toller was also one of the very few intellectuals who immediately realized the danger posed by the Nazis and what differentiated them from other "bourgeois" and even "reactionary" parties.
He fled Germany when they came to power, going from Switzerland to France, to England and, finally, to the United States. But he hated exile. He never made it in Hollywood and, feeling his powers diminishing, he despaired as Hitler won victory after victory. Toller, the pacifist and humanitarian, committed suicide in New York in 1939. He never saw the end of the regime he so despised.
BUT, IF TOLLER DIED TOO EARLY, HIS COMMUNIST COMPETITOR FOR POWER in the Bavarian Soviet -- Eugen Levine -- died just in time. He would certainly have perished even more cruelly under Stalin. Levine was not quite the saint Rosa Levine-Meyer portrayed in her biography. But he incarnated the best of the bolshevik spirit. He was unyielding and dogmatic, but an honest intellectual and totally committed to the most radical utopian ideals of international revolution.
Born on May 10, 1883 in St. Petersburg into a wealthy Jewish family, he was brought up in Germany where, as a youth, he actually fought a duel against someone who had made an anti-Semitic remark. (Levine-Meyer, pp. 6ff) He returned to Russia in 1904 where he gained revolutionary experience and participated in the 1905 Revolution before being arrested. Levine was apparently severely beaten and, after bribery secured his release, he moved back to Germany. There he worked as a propagandist for the SPD and naturally gravitated to the circle around Rosa Luxemburg before ultimately finding his way into Spartacus.
Soon, Levine found himself in disagreement with her. Enthralled by the Russian Revolution of 1917, in contrast to Luxemburg, he took an ultra-left stance. He was critical of the alliance between Spartacus and the USPD. But, even more important, he vigorously opposed participating in the National Assembly and ultimately embraced Lenin's new Communist International. Believing the masses would follow an inspired vanguard, in keeping with the bolshevik example of 1917, he and his close comrade Max Levien were instrumental in causing the defeat of the more moderate proposals of Luxemburg and the leadership of Spartacus, thereby exacerbating the ill-prepared revolutionary events in Berlin.
Nevertheless, Levine acquitted himself valiantly during the uprising. The police hunted for him and at the urging of Paul Levi, the new leader of the German Communist Party (KPD), Levine was sent to Munich to put the small, disorganized party cell in order. Levine's first article warned workers not to engage in any "precipitous" actions and he opposed forming a Bavarian soviet. When the soviet was proclaimed anyway, he was appalled by its circus-like character, and was successful in calling upon the KPD to remain in opposition. He feared working with representatives of the SPD and recognized, perhaps more fully than any other of its prominent figures, the lack of support -- especially among the peasants -- for the Soviet.
Why should Levine have called upon the Communists to reverse their position? He knew the Soviet was doomed. Perhaps his new stance derived from a desire to take power and use the occasion to make propaganda and identify the Communists with the soviet. His policy surely did not find its source in Moscow; indeed, no bolshevik emissaries were active in Munich. Most likely, following Rosa Luxemburg, Levine had decided to preserve the soviet ideal and "stay with the masses" in the face of the reaction.
Interestingly enough, Levine was no less utopian than his opponents. His Communists may have introduced censorship, but they also sought to revamp the schools, and proclaimed the famous Frauenkirche a "revolutionary temple." All this was a desperate attempt to mimic what has been described as the "heroic period" of War Communism in the Soviet Union. Communist workers, however, soon turned against Levine's disastrous policy and his heritage is tainted by the useless shooting of hostages and arbitrary confiscations carried out by members of his own party. Yet, Levine remained true to his beliefs. He participated in the street-fighting and his defiant death before a firing squad testified to his nobility of character. Indeed, with a dying cry of "Long Live the World Revolution," the tragic-comedy of the Bavarian Soviet came to a close along with the most radical hopes of 1919.
JUDAISM NEVER FIGURED PROMINENTLY IN THE WRITINGS OR THE POLITICS of these activists. All were cosmopolitans and, essentially, assimilationists. But, in keeping with the Old Testament, they considered themselves prophets of justice, equality, and democracy without much sense of the institutions necessary to sustain these values. Each condemned the decadence of the status quo and identified with those whom Ernst Bloch, in biblical language, liked to call "the lowly and the insulted." Each prized the moment of action and sought to provide the masses with a new sense of their own possibilities. Each also exhibited exceptional bravery and remained true to his or her convictions. Each, after his or her fashion, incorporated the idealism and romanticism with which to challenge an alienation whose source is the story of Adam and Eve. Each sought to realize utopia.
For all that, however, these Jewish revolutionaries spanned the spectrum of radicalism and seemingly little united them. Mühsam and Toller were leading figures of the expressionist avant-garde. But the first was an anarchist and the second a left-wing socialist. The same was true for Eisner and Landauer even if both were influenced by Kant. Levine was a Bolshevik. As for Luxemburg, Jogiches, and Levi, they had little use for moralism and less for bohemians.
Judaism is not much help in explaining their particular form of revolutionary commitment. Viewing the matter this way, however, is perhaps overly academic. The anti-Semites certainly didn't feel that way. Judaism has a certain importance when considering the uprisings of 1919, but less with respect to its impact on the revolutionaries themselves than on the activists of the counter-revolution who could now point to the visibility of these Jews and promote the idea of a Jewish-bolshevik conspiracy intent on destroying Germany and the Aryan race.
Anti-Semitism doesn't disappear simply because Jews don't define themselves as such. 1919 is a case in point. The Enlightenment values embraced by these Jewish revolutionaries, in fact, only heightened the fervor and brutality of those most intent on eradicating their heritage. And, in a way, the forces of reaction succeeded. All of these remarkable individuals were essentially forgotten long before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the emergence of a right-wing cultural climate in its aftermath. The Communists had as little use for them as their mainstream opponents. The alternative they offered to both the impoverished cultural landscape of contemporary capitalism and what increasingly became a socialism of grey is now almost a memory. But this is precisely what makes it important to preserve a sense of their visions and contest the darkness permeating the beautiful words of Erich Mühsam:
Who will remember me when I am dead?
The sad day has snatched my youth.
Evening came too soon. Rain fell.
Happiness passed me by; I remained a stranger.
My poor heart has its fill of suffering.
Soon comes the night which had no stars.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Franz Borkenau, World Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981). F.L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe 1918-1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1972). Marta Feuchtwanger, Nur eine Frau (Munchen: Knaur, 1984). Kurt Eisner, Sozialismus Als Aktion: Ausgewahlte Aufsatze und Reden hrsg. Freya Eisner (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). Charles Bracelen Flood, Hitler: The Path to Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). Gustav Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1967). Paul Levi, Zwischen Spartakus und Sozialdemo- kratie: Schriften, Aufsatze, Reden und Briefe hrsg. Charlotte Beradt (Wien: Europaische Verlasanstalt, 1969). Rosa Levine- Meyer, Levine the Spartacist (London: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1973). Rosa Luxemburg The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg ed. Horace B. Davis (New York: Monthly Review, 1976); Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg ed. Dick Howard (New York, Monthly Review: 1971); Rosa Luxemburg Speaks ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder, 1970); The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg ed. Stephen Eric Bronner (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992 2nd ed.). Erich Mühsam, Briefe 1900-1934 2 Bde. (Darmstadt: Topos, 1984); Prosaschriften 2 Bde. hrsg. Gunther Emig (Berlin: Verlag europaische Ideen, 1978); Max Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues: Reminiscences (New York: Waldon, 1964). Augustin Souchy, Erich Mühsam: Sein Leben, Sein Werk, Sein Martyrium (Reutlingen: Trotzdem Verlag, 1984). Henry Pachter, Weimar Etudes (New York: Columbia, 1982). Arthur Rosenberg, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlasanstalt, 1961). Ernst Toller, I Was a German trans. Edward Crankshaw (New York: Paragon, 1990); Seven Plays (London, 1935); The Swallow Book (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1974). Enzo Traverso, Les juifs et l'allemagne: de la "symbiose judeo-allemande" a la memoire d'auschwitz (Paris: Decouverte, 1992).