"Our Struggle": What If Hitler Had Been a Communist?

[The Red]

'But the civilised human spirit, whether one calls it bourgeois or merely leaves it at civilised, cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny.'

~ Dr Faustus, Thomas Mann

​

‘The world is one of an ever present struggle, our struggle.


The German nation stands at a precipice, the working class stare down towards the pit, and as always the bourgeois industrialists threaten us with hell if we do not comply to their ever increasing demands. When we rise, they use the state organs of violence, their thugs in the police and the army, to crush our protests. It is a regime of oppression that continues to stumble between crises with seemingly no end in sight, exploiting each one to increase their dominance over the proletariat.

It is in this spirit that I write this work on the war being waged against the German worker, and how we must all fight back.The workers have grown in strength for over a century and the time is coming when they shall exercise their power.

The German proletariat cries out for power to be wrenched from the timid and feckless bourgeoisie, as is their right. Such is the role of the Communist Party. There are forces designed to impede the triumphant advance of the German worker that has been built on the popular uprisings at the end of the great imperialist slaughter. If we do not identify and eliminate these class enemies, they will bring our chariot of fate to a standstill just as it seems ready to reach its goal.

It is evident that our movement can gain the public significance and support which are necessary pre-requisites in this struggle of the classes, though only with a sacrosanct conviction in the hearts of its followers. There is no alternative in bringing about the great awakening of the German proletariat. This is not a case of introducing a new electoral slogan into the political field, our views are consistent, our justification immortal.

We must succeed, and we will.

The future demands it.’

~ Preamble to Our Struggle, Adolf Hitler

​

 

[The Red]

'"If you don't help me, I'll die," said the poor girl.

The businessman looked up again from his ledgers. Then he threw his quill pen onto the table impatiently.

"You don't figure in my accounts! So--be off with you--to the poorhouse!"

"If you don't help me, I'll set fire to the woods," the girl persisted.

That brought the man to his feet, but the girl had already struck one of her matches.

She held it to a tuft of dry grass which flared up instantly.

The man threw up his arms. "God help me!" he shouted. "The red cock has crowed!"

The girl looked up at him with a playful smile.

"You didn't know I was a communist, did you?"’

~ Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder

​

'At its best, socialism is a prophetic, passionate, generous creed, which brings longed-for justice for many people. But in its utopian varieties, it has a major flaw.

It does not believe in sin.'

Rev. Ron Ferguson

---

‘Reverend Ferguson would never be called a particularly leading scholar of socialism by its adherents, however his quote does catch the basis of the tragic truth about the world’s most destructive ideology. To this day it is a belief system that all forward thinking individuals must be wary of.

The basis of socialism can be found in the early texts of the Abrahamic religions. The disdain for greed and selfishness, whether in Allah, God or Yahweh was also matched with a strong emphasis on equality, all were equal in the eyes of their creator.

“Utopian” socialism as it was derided by its critics continued to emphasise a largely Christian overview of the world in the wake of the industrial revolution, this early stage of capitalism was ruthlessly exploitative in the pursuit of wealth and seemingly the most contrary attitude to Christianity despite its vices being ignored or even officially sanctioned by many leading Christian sects. Individuals such as Bruno Bauer and Wilhelm Weitling were involved in groups such as the “League of the Just” which was actively focused on returning society to a holier, more egalitarian basis.

It is an interesting thought experiment to conjure up images of what socialism may have achieved if it had stayed down this path, though of course we all know that it did not. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would soon sabotaged much of the good, Christian, work of socialism for their own ends.

It was on this basis that sin was forgotten about, for it was unscientific.

Christianity was replaced with Jean Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Hegel by these self-proclaimed "scientific" socialists. Rousseau’s projection that God had never existed was somewhat contradicted by his notion of an early society that bore similarities to the Garden of Eden, where men and women frolicked and copulated in a paradise, hunting and gathering in a state of true freedom. Hierarchies had been created in the name of advancement though in Rousseau's eyes these had ruined the basic spirt of humanity.

The notion that all people are fundamentally good might seem harmless, if naïve, yet in the first half of the twentieth century tens of millions saw that belief skewed to the extent that the bodies piled higher than ever during the revolutionary terror in France. Rousseau based his worldview on the notion of mankind existing in a state of dependency. Everyone had become reliant on everyone else, even the top of this hierarchy were 'in chains' as he put it, for all their worth was based on their tentative control of others. Whilst he was resigned to the fact that mankind could never return to the utopian 'state of nature' Rousseau had envisaged, the Swiss writer nonetheless argued that mankind could return to an egalitarian state that would allow us to be freed from the 'chains' hierarchy had forced us into.

On the basis of Rousseau being right, Europe would have to endure Robespierre, Stalin, and eventually Hitler. The logic became the basis of a new type of person who would actively seek friendship and harmony when freed from notions of class conflict. On this basis violence became fundamentally acceptable. Rousseau openly advocated violence against those opposed to the new society he envisaged, arguing without a hint of irony that people would in a sense have been 'forced to be free' by what he termed 'the General Will', the alleged incarnation of a governing morality of humanity that hierarchy prevented us from retaining.

Friedrich Hegel was not nearly as romantic, yet he nonetheless believed in the inevitably of a utopia that would be brought about by ideals similar to Rousseau’s. Where Rousseau, had his 'General Will', Hegel had his 'World Truth' which motivated a new notion of history. Society evolved in an conscious deliberate manner according to Hegel, the stronger elements replacing the weak to further advance the human race. Hegel was no idealist, and whilst Marx adopted much of his theory the father of modern, "scientific", socialism argued that Hegel's theories were backwards.

According to Marx there were no grand ideals of liberty occupying the mind of the industrial worker, material conditions exemplified the true hierarchy in society and harmony could only be achieved from this era of class conflict via violent revolution. Rather than using his often valuable analysis of inequality and exploitation to encourage dialogue and reform, Marx prepared to tear the world apart on the basis of restoring society to a proper equity.

We should not tar all socialists with the same brush, Marx’s ideology of violence was not the be all and end all of the socialist pantheon, the delusional creed of harmony via violence was not the only interpretation of worker’s rights. The British socialist movement has always been emphasised more by socialism’s early Christian principles rather than Marx’s chaos.

Amongst the discord of violent ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British socialists such as Keir Hardie had campaigned for a more equal and peaceful society, he would live to see the bastardisation of his own beliefs, though he did warn of what what was to come. Hardie died during the First World War, a murderous and fundamentally pointless conflict where millions died on the whim of political elites. Countless numbers of people killed in the name of those overwhelming ideals of Empire, Monarchy, and Nationalism that had each in their own way dominated the course of history in Europe and in much of the world during the nineteenth century. It was in this arena that Marx, and his adherents in Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler could expose the hypocrisy of those who decried their brand of socialism as dangerous when the old orders had led to such slaughter.

Throughout Europe, many workers wanted something new, an equal distribution of power and wealth to prevent such elites from ever starting a similar conflict. Few who were engaged in this slaughter contemplated the notion that their sons would be engaged in an ever larger conflict for even greater ideals. Those powerless masses who believed they had been abused by a powerful few for far too long would soon realise that they had placed their trust in individuals prone to far more destruction and violence than had been seen in the history of mankind. The existential reasons these men fought for allowed no quarter to be spared in their eyes.

If the First World War was a war of empires, the Second World War was one of class.’


~ British Papers on the Second World War, Prof. James Brown

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Sophie's World is a very enjoyable read and I'd recommend it to anyone.

The painting is simply Untitled by Malangatana Ngwenya, based on his experiences during the Mozambican War of Independence.

 

[The Red]

"Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness."


~ Carl Jung

​

‘It should be remembered that even from the start of his adult life Hitler was a washed out no-user, the epitome of the type of person who becomes infatuated with ideas that handily blame the problems of lazy individuals on anyone except themselves.

His father was as much of a moron as his offspring would turn out to be, peddling his family around the Austrian countryside before finally settling in Linz in the hope that the familiar surroundings of his relatives may have been able to give him some sort of assistance, probably monetary. Though his father had found a state career, in Austria these jobs were not the type of gold plated excuses for idleness that we see in modern Britain. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire a public sector wage was what it should be, enough to feed a family without a drinking habit at the same time, but the failed dictator's father seemed to end up continuously drunk regardless.

Much is often made of the fact that the young dictator was beaten as a child, the bleeding hearts would of course love a narrative that parents who correctly discipline their children are somehow at fault and some have even been accused of raising miniature dictators. Like most liberal warnings, this is garbage, Hitler did not lack slapping, he lacked a strong male role model in his drunken failure of a father and in this role comes the real contradiction of the left-wing do-gooders. His doting mother is the one truly to blame.

Yes, when the priggish moralists are using the example of the world’s most infamous murderer to pursue their remarkably similar agenda they should really do their research for whilst Hitler’s father drank himself into irrelevance, his mother gave him the upbringing most boneheaded bureaucrats insist upon these days. Permissive and weak, she raised a spoiled brat filled with delusions of grandeur and unable to understand the concept of “No.” This textbook case of liberal parenting left us with a continent enslaved and millions dead.

So whenever someone scolds you for spanking your misbehaving child, just remember, you just might be preventing the next Hitler.'

~ Article by Peter Hitchens, Action

​

The ringing in his ears had returned, a sound that had become increasingly common. His vision had already become blurred and despite the repetition of the blows the boy couldn’t quite remember why this was happening.

“You really are a worthless little shit”​

The classical school, that was it, he had wanted to go to classical school. He had thought of that school a lot despite the fact that his father had forced him to go to the technical school to follow in his footsteps, the school where Adolf was bullied every day because he wasn’t from Linz like the other students. Would his peers in the classical school have beaten him? He didn’t think so.

Adolf wanted to escape to that happy land, he had sabotaged himself in his lessons in the hope that his prayers were to be answered and his father would acquiesce and send him to pursue his dreams, the old mans reaction had been quite different.

“…deliberately trying to humiliate me again!”​

It hadn’t been long before he’d handed him his report card before he felt himself being carried into the air by his father’s fist. He had felt the urge to be sick as he had landed on the floor, now with his father kicking him in the stomach time and time again it felt like it would be inevitable. Adolf croaked with the air disappearing from his lungs, he tried to cry only to manage a bare gasp. The ringing in his ears grew louder all the time, he could feel the sick coming up from his stomach.

---

“Come on, get up! I want you all out of here in ten minutes!”

The chime of the bell continued to ring as Adolf and his fellow roommates sleepily gathered their belongings and trudged out of the door. He couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about when the ringing had interrupted him, only about where he would go now that the paltry six hours of sleep offered by the place he had spent the night in were used up.

His lodgings reminded him of a homeless shelter and given the smell of the place he wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the men were transients, it was hard to tell, like almost every other man he had slept in his coat to fight off the bitter cold in the draughty room. Adolf wondered what he might look like to the more respectable denizens of Vienna in his unshaven, unkempt garb. It was hard to continue to call himself a bohemian as he lugged his chalks, easels and papers around the city, looking for something gimmicky that he could sell to wealthy tourists. It was all rubbish really, but even in hard times he was at least doing what he loved. That’s what he continued to tell himself as he tightened his belt to stave off the stirring in his stomach.

It was a bright day in Vienna, and he couldn’t think about food. People would be out in the sun and he had paintings that needed to be sold. There was little question as to where to sell them on a day like this, the Stadtpark was something of a long walk for a hungry man but it was where both the locals and tourists of Vienna would flock to on what was already promising to be a beautiful autumn day. There was something about the greenery of the park and the sculptures within it that always seemed to make those people on walks or picnics more receptive to his work, perhaps there was an element of bohemian influence in the utopian scene, or perhaps it was just because the sun brought out a flippancy in people.

Despite the cold of the previous night Adolf hoped they were headed for an old women’s summer, if he couldn’t sell anything today he faced the prospect of sleeping outside. This was something he had occasionally been forced to do albeit sparingly, such was the bohemian lifestyle he liked to believe that he lived rather than the reality of struggling for his daily bread.

His journey from the boarding house in Mariahilf to the busy park took him through the Naschmarkt where the freshly baked cakes and rolls were on display and the sausages glistened with grease as they fried in public. The smells and the sights were torture for even in the busy streets of men and women beginning their jobs it seemed that amongst the cues Adolf was the only one who couldn’t afford some breakfast. That wasn’t true, of course, as he continued to walk he saw the ranks of people who couldn’t even afford a draughty boarding house. Germans, removed from their pride by their hunger and exposure to the cold, forced to beg alongside the multitude of Slavic immigrants who continued to move into the city despite the unemployment. He noticed that many of the workers were foreigners as well, and wondered not for the first time how many destitute Germans could be given jobs if all the immigrants were forced to return to their own countries.

As the city slowly brought itself to life Adolf wondered about those who didn’t have to get up so early, and why they were happy with immigration into the city. Depressed wages were naturally the answer, he’d heard that the immigrants would work for basically nothing and in turn forced the German worker to debase himself into lower and lower pay. Though Adolf regularly found himself looking for gainful employment there seemed to be little for aspiring artists beyond the odd day of manual labour. The only place for his sort was the place that unfortunately provided a shortcut to the park, the place that elicited a feeling even more painful than the smell of food on an empty stomach. The Academy of Fine Arts was enormous and in the same way Adolf couldn’t get it out of his mind he also couldn’t get it out his mind.

“Unfitness for painting” was what the examiners had decried Adolf as suffering from the second time they’d rejected him. Oh the buildings he had painted were supposedly fine but the people apparently lacked effort, as if this hadn’t been his dream since his father had kicked the shit out of him as a child.

Yes, that was the real truth. The wealthy in this city, gentile and Jew were just like his father, they were strong and whenever they saw something different to them they would crush it. In the same way his father hadn’t let him train as an artist the elites had prevented him from having a career once he’d managed to amass a portfolio regardless of his father’s wishes.

Adolf had decided he would continue to paint anyway, even after his mother had died and her financial support with it. His flatmate August had offered to support him, they had known each other from Linz and although Adolf knew he meant well he couldn’t help but feel that taking charity would be an admission of failure in comparison to his friend’s greater success as a musician.

Adolf was not particularly jealous of August’s success, or at least that was what he told himself, he simply struggled to be around someone who clearly felt he was an object of sympathy rather than would make his own way in life. In a way those in charge couldn’t hold him back and though he was hungry by the time he reached the greenery of the park Adolf was genuinely happy that he had his independence. Though his stomach growled, his devotion would win him favour with those who saw that he was pursuing his dream in the face of those who wanted to grind him down.

Adolf Hitler was an artist, and the people would provide for him.


---

The painting is a self-portrait by Adolf Hitler.

 

[The Red]

‘You have objections?—Enough! Enough! We know them… We’ve understood!… Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors—Perhaps!… If only it were so!—But who cares? We don’t want to understand!… Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!'


Lift up your heads!’

~ F. T. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

​

'The young Adolf Hitler suffered first hand from the corruption and incompetence of the old imperialist system that ruled tyrannically over much of central Europe. A regime which glorified aristocracy and crushed the freedom of thought that Comrade Hitler seeks to inspire!

As a young man he had excelled at the arts and upon encouragement from his family, journeyed to Vienna, the Hapsburg capital, to become an artist. As one might imagine, his art was considered far too radical for the conservative establishment and he instead made a living painting for tourists before finding his own way into the smaller, people's, galleries where he would often host shows for his fellow workers.’

~ Traudl Junge, The Emergence of our Hope

---


Franz had a cheery outlook, though unlike many peddlers and strivers amongst the Vienna populace his circumstances provided him with a justification to have one. His career in the School of Fine Arts allowed him to pursue his imaginative concepts for a living whilst discussing the latest trends with some of the world’s greatest artists. Best of all however, it had allowed him to teach, his classes were free to the children of Vienna and the notion of nurturing prospective talent thrilled Franz, the joy the children put into their work was not only rewarding but the notion that one day several revolutionary artists might point to him as their teacher made him feel as if he were leaving an investment to the future.

For someone like Franz, it was a job where Monday was almost as good as Saturday, yet he enjoyed his free time just as much and on a beautiful day like this it would be inexcusable not to have a walk in the park. It was hard not to be near the Stadtpark if you lived in central Vienna and though he would often walk through on his way home from the academy he enjoyed it for leisure as well, the great space hosted many different attractions, cafes, concerts, dances, plays, bars and even just idle conversation with strangers. It was a link between communities, and on a nice day you could find almost all of Vienna’s differing social and ethnic groups when walking through it; Austrians, Germans, Poles, Jews, Rich, Poor, Catholic, Protestant, military men, aristocrats, bourgeois, workers on half-day and, of course, the starving artists.

Franz could not take his eyes off the rather dreadful looking figure glaring at the concession stand nearby, he couldn’t tell whether the vagrant was annoyed that he’d been told to move himself and the rather ramshackle “all my own work” display he’d assembled or whether he was simply hungry. The man was too old for Franz’s art class but he was certainly young, possibly aged by what appeared to be hard times, he might have been in his early twenties or perhaps just a destitute tramp gifted with a young face, regardless there was something hypnotic about him and Franz decided to have a look at his little garden exhibition even if it were just to humour a fellow artist who had fallen upon hard times.

At a closer inspection the vagrant’s initial look of deep thought appeared to be more of a bored sulk than any underlying brilliance waiting to be tapped. Nonetheless the work he had on display was at least better than much of the dross you got on the streets. Several “all my own work” style vendors would try and make some easy money by selling off sketches of buildings as postcards, offering to paint tourists who wanted a memory of Vienna or doing a rough sketch of someone’s house on the general pretence that the home inspired some sort of brilliance so as to attempt to solicit a sale out of vanity. Some of Franz's louder colleagues labelled it a form of prostitution yet this man clearly fell somewhere in between and as he gave Franz a disinterested look it was clear that amongst the usual postcard-type work there was some genuine talent. There were also indicators as to why he was sitting in a park rather than a classroom or a gallery if indeed he’d ever had such aspirations. Some people just had a knack for copying things they’d read or seen but there were always ways that this could be investigated, and Franz aimed to do so.

“I see that you’re a classicist”, Franz spoke neutrally, guessing that the man was the type of person who would sneer at praise but scowl at the most benign criticism. There were many like that in the art world and they were easy to spot, the man turned his head slightly, as if surprised that Franz was more than a gawking tourist. The vagrant did his best attempt at a smile in the miserable situation.

“Yes, well I believe that neo-classicism is the correct term”

Even as the young man appeared to think out loud Franz smiled, pedantry could be a pleasure when two individuals had a mutual interest.

”I’m not sure we’ll ever find a superior form of art, Austrian or German at the very least. The Italian renaissance has some interesting work mind you but nowhere near as good as a Carstens or a Fussli.” Fussli was Swiss, though Franz didn’t make anything effort to correct the young man despite his own neo-classical one-upmanship.

The conversation between Franz and the young man whose name turned out to be Adolf was more intellectual than Franz might have hoped for, though regrettably the young man seemed surprisingly sharp with someone who just wanted a conversation. Franz figured he must be impatient given that he was wasting the young man's time with discourse whilst potential customers might have been drifting by, yet when Franz bought a painting of Nurnberg town hall and went to leave the seemingly reluctant conversationalist went out of his way to shake his hand and thank him for the chat.

Franz was surprised at the sudden change in mood yet presumed he had simply mistook the man’s sharpness for impatience when in fact it was earnest intrigue. He decided he'd like to talk to his odd individual again.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to go just now but would you like to have lunch tomorrow?” Franz could have asked this Adolf character if he wanted to continue the conversation immediately but he had already completed his business after the inference that the seller had lost interest in his conversation and it would seem odd to hang around after motioning to leave. The young artist’s eyes lit up at the notion of a free lunch and before shaking hands again the two arranged to meet again in the park to have lunch in the Kursalon the next day.

As Franz left the park the sky began to darken and on his way home he found himself buying a paper bag to cover his painting in case the clouds did not cooperate on his way home. Though the rain held off until he was secreted within his small private studio, a closer inspection of the painting he’d bought made it seem as if the colours had run regardless.

It was a strange effect, for the town centre's buildings remained in the pristine and detailed form that had motivated him to buy the painting, but the centre itself was devoid of life. Yet again, Franz remembered why his new friend probably wouldn’t have been welcome in the academy, for Adolf’s people were ghosts of what should have been portrayed in the scene.

The figures hung on the canvass like silhouettes. They had form, though at first glance they didn’t seem to be there at all. They weren’t smudged, it was just that their bodies seemed to be as much part of the concrete and brickwork as the buildings around them. As if they were incorporated into the very fabric of the scene.

“Neo-classicist?!” Franz snorted to himself.

He had seen these shadow people before.

---


The painting is Before The Parachute Opens by Tullio Crali

The original futurist manifesto is rather tiresome and indulgent but it's nonethless important.

 

[The Red]

"People have the power to redeem the work of fools."

~ Patti Smith

​

'Though many other futurists have been credited for their influence in spreading the movement's influence beyond archetypal circles of "angry young men", in regards to the outside world there is very little challenge to Franz Cizek, Professor in the School of Applied Art’s Department of Experimentation and Research in Vienna and one of those few men who can claim to have personally changed the course of history.

It was Cizek’s job to be aware of the upcoming and progressing trends, even those officially frowned upon, and perhaps Hitler’s personal reservations about the genre were somewhat disarmed by Cizeks experience in dealing with those of similarly conservative views. He would have had argued with more than one self-proclaimed neo-classicist before his fateful meeting with the future dictator in Vienna's Stadtpark.

Regardless of Cizek's personal take on the futurist style, whether he was simply having a conversation with a fellow artist on a nice day or was a crypto-futurist furtively looking for adherents to share his secret beliefs we shall never know, only that his chance encounter would cause a relatively fringe sect of modernist art to change the course of history.

Cizek’s introduction of Hitler into a new world of contacts within the world of art, culture and most importantly politics would soon change the life of the man who was very much a wayward bohemian before being introduced into a new world of political intrigue and financial stability. Franz and Adolf would remain friends until Cizek’s death in 1946.

It is important to note that whilst Hitler came into contact with communists during his time as a member of Vienna’s café culture, he was not immediately taken with the ideology. This idle period of the dictator’s life left a great deal of time for him to debate political concepts, but accounts point to the fact that most of his musings remained based around the nationalist ideals of his youth. The futurist agenda did not make Hitler into a communist, though as a young man still he was now enabled to transform his rather folksy understanding of German culture into appreciating the new forms of nationalist thought, post-industrial and post-rational. A romantic blend of conflict and progress that was very much music to the young man’s ears amongst his muddled thoughts and the daily grind of life for this sporadically employed artist.

Of course, it could never last.'

~ Gunter Berg, The International Impact of Futurism


---


The Kursalon was never intended to be a place for gaiety, and perhaps the fact it was now one of Vienna’s go-to venues for culture and entertainment was something of a comment on the degrading power of the Hapsburgs who had designed it. Designed to supply mineral water that would offer curative remedies to park visitors it was now a place for escapism in the capital of a troubled nation.

Although Austria-Hungary notionally remained one of Europe’s most powerful imperial states, economic mismanagement and the rise of competing nationalisms both within and outside its own borders left many pondering the empire's continued existence. In the Kursalon one could enjoy some of the world’s finest opera, music, theatre and cuisine. As with any artistic expression of contemporary decline, the arguments could often become as heated as anything being served up to the voyeur. Including those of which culture belonged to whom.

Franz’s lunch partner had described only the “German” aspects of culture the day beforehand and whether or not his Bavarian accent meant he actually was from Bavaria, Franz was more than aware that there were as many Germans in the Hapsburg Empire who sought a greater Germany as there were Slavs seeking independence.

These issues might have been important but they were secondary in Franz’s mind as he greeted his guest outside and they entered the extravagant restaurant within the Kursalon’s Lehar Hall. Franz had seen something in the artist’s work and wondered whether his stylistically odd mix of man and landscape couldn’t be developed into something along the lines of a blossoming movement.

Franz had been somewhat hesitant to invite his new friend to the Kursalon. The Lehar Hall restaurant was largely tourist orientated and thus was not nearly the most exclusive dining scene in Vienna yet he feared Adolf might appear as he had done yesterday, they could always go somewhere else but he couldn’t help fear the scene of a shuffling tramp attempting to get into an expensive restaurant. Franz did not personally care, but working with children had given him a keen sense of how people could be when subjected to humiliation and from his experience of Adolf yesterday, the man didn’t seem to be in the best place mentally.

Adolf Hitler was actually in a fine modd. He had used to the money he had earned selling paintings to Franz and a few others to get his way into something resembling an actual boarding house for the next few days, allowing him to wash and to change his clothes. Adolf felt it was hard to put a price on the comfort of not having to walk around in his dirty overcoat smelling like an outhouse, nonetheless the walk was not nearly as pleasurable as the meal he was anticipating. All he had had to eat in the last two days had been a few slices of bread and butter every now and then, he was ready for his new friend to treat him though he continued to be puzzled by the nature of the man’s altruism.

Was he simply a fellow art lover who enjoyed conversation? Had he been impressed with his work? Or something else perhaps, Adolf hoped it wasn’t that he simply took pity on him. In his darkest days he’d accepted some occasional charity from the Christian soup kitchens but he hoped his trade yesterday had made it show that he was self-sufficient. He’d had to be.

The fact he was wearing the suit that he’d worn to his mother's funera had made that fact inescapable, though he was in a good mood nonetheless, he was going to have a fine lunch and discussion with his new friend and fellow artist. This was the sort of thing he had come to Vienna for.

Adolf and Franz noticed each other simultaneously, the latter waving and the former repeating the motion somewhat awkwardly. Franz wasn’t sure whether he was more glad to see Adolf or that his dining partner was dressed respectably, either way both had occurred even if the “All my own work” salesman remained awkward and seemed to have come straight from a funeral. Was a death of a loved one the case of this odd spell? Franz didn’t want to ask. He was here to talk about the shadow man.

Adolf seemed more concerned with whether there were liver dumplings on the menu, though he had been gracious enough to ask Franz what he did for a living. When Franz told him the young man seemed to sneer, yet conversation between the two remained relatively fluid in their conversation about various issues to do with the classics until Franz finally decided to press his query over yesterday’s purchase.

“Before I forget, I was wondering whether you get much of a chance to observe any of the newer movements?”

The young painter seemed disinterested as he held his hand over his wine glass to halt the waiter. In actuality, Adolf felt he had a bit more clarity about Franz’s motivations for bringing him here. An intellectual and some close-minded failed student from outside the city, what a joy to publicly humiliate, it wasn’t something Adolf would usually allow to play out. He’d suffered a lifetime of jokes at the expense, of these types but Franz was paying for lunch and he was ravenous.

“No, not particularly, as I was saying yesterday it’s only the classics that really interest me.”

“I remember you saying that, which is what fascinated me about the figures in the painting I bought off you yesterday, the buildings were well drawn and fairly typical of the style but the figures were very different indeed, quite…

As Franz stroked his beard and appeared genuinely lost for how to describe the individuals, Adolf knew what was coming, he remembered how frankly he’d been let down when he had appealed his second refusal from the academy. The figures in his art were apparently unsatisfactory, “statuesque”, “unfeeling”, and now here was another academy man luring him to lunch to tell him the same thing, was he some sort of running joke in the faculty?

“…brilliant.”

“I’m sorry?” Adolf almost choked on a sliver of dumpling.

“Your figures, quite brilliant, the way they blend so seamlessly into the background whilst keeping their own form, like shadows. It made me wonder whether you’d been inspired by the futurists?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t, in what way is my painting similar?”

As Franz elaborated, Adolf looked at his companions face, the man’s eyes having opened up alongside a more curious expression, and Adolf had a bizarre sensation. All this time he had been wondering about the man’s motives, what his agenda had been, Adolf had never considered that there was a genuine interest in his art behind Franz’s intrigue but here the teacher was, explaining how he had been inspecting his painting and comparing it to a movement Adolf hadn’t even heard of.

Few people had ever really been interested in Adolf’s work based around its own merits, there were tourists who wanted mementos of buildings, passers-by who had asked for portraits of themselves or their family, or had perhaps even seen a particular something in a work of his, but no genuine interest. His mother had loved him for certain, but had she really spoken about his work in any great depth?

This man was truly interested, and all of a sudden Adolf couldn’t find fault with him, his mood had improved greatly from the mometary dark spell and he smiled encouragingly whilst Franz continued to describe the basis of the movement and the similarities with Adolf’s own work.

“I must admit I always thought that the way I painted people was something of a handicap but now that you mention this ‘futurism’ I do wonder if I might try and find out some more. Do these men have a journal?”

Franz lit up, it seemed as if he had been expecting this question.

“They have a great deal more than that my friend, they have a manifesto!”

---

Patti Smith has recently been criticised for representing a class of artist who abandoned the collective action of the sixties to chase futile dreams of self-liberation via various media. Regardless of your stance on such an argument it is possible that this strategy would have worked if taken in regard to individuals who had a genuinely significant impact on history.

The painting, and the shadow men, are by Adolf Hitler.

 

[The Red]

'The youngest, aged twelve, could not conceal her disappointment, and turned away, feeling as so many of us have felt when we discover that our idols are very ordinary men and women.'

~ Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys

​

‘“Could Hitler have been a fascist had history gone a different way?” It was apparently a question Mussolini asked himself frequently at the time of his greatest adversity and whether or not this was an attempt to get into the head of the enemy or simply an idle exercise to distract away from the unpleasantness of the outside world, it is one that many historians have subsequently supported. This basis of this seemingly unlikely theory is based on Hitler’s experiences in Vienna and the pseudo-fascist ideology that he had dabbled with whilst there.

Hitler certainly appears to have identified as a futurist, despite allegedly being in contact with associates of Austrian socialist Karl Renner that he met via his friend and benefactor Franz Cizek. The basis of the future dictator’s views on the ideology appeared to be motivated by an attraction to the staunch nationalist principles and anti-elitism that futurism evoked, alongside a more mundane but common interest in technological advancements and how they could impact society.

Mussolini had always been vaguely aware of the futurist movement, with the Italian scene at its forefront it was very much part of the cultural zeitgeist, one which conveniently lent itself to the extreme right politics of the dictator’s program. Nonetheless it was a movement Mussolini had little real time for, and whilst futurist art was tolerated by the fascist regime it was never given any sort of official favour.

Futurism’s founder, Fillipo Marinetti, was an ardent supporter of Mussolini’s regime but their personal relationship was largely one-sided. Marinetti saw Mussolini as Italy’s champion if not perhaps the devout vision that was related to the Italian populace during the Duce’s reign via fascist propaganda. It appears as if Mussolini ultimately saw Marinetti as a useful idiot, instructing him to move away from futurism to more established forms of culture, relegating him to the role of propagandist for a regime that was very comfortable with indulging the institutions Marinetti despised before the poet’s eventual conscription during the Second World War. Despite the similarities in rhetoric, fascism has always trumped futurism when it comes to power.

This “classicist” basis for fascism was very much similar to the notions of fascism in German society at the time. If Gavrillo Princip had never fired his fateful shots it is certainly possible that a futurist Hitler would have emerged, yet his futurist ideals would have run rather contrary to the notions of Fichte and Nietzche even though many attempt to lazily reconcile these different trends.

The basis of Fichte’s work might have applied to the notions Hitler seemed to embrace in his youth yet even then there are questions, for example Hitler’s Bavarian dialect of German that carried an accent he would keep for the rest of his life was very much a contradiction against Fichte’s notion of German supremacy based on the supposed ‘purity’ of the German language whilst his separation of ‘noble’ and ‘ignoble’ men would have gone against the Catholic beliefs the dictator was purported to have had early on in his life.

As for Nietzche the distinction is rather less complex, the philosophy of the ‘Overman’ who would emerge from the culled herd of mankind might have been drawn from Fichte’s ‘noble’ man yet Nietzche saw nothing in the basis of nations to restrict his superior race. It is perhaps an irony that the internationalism of Nietzche’s would have been irreconcilable with the ultranationalist notions of Italian futurism and the reinforcement it had upon Hitler’s own pre-war ideals. Even if we cast aside the debate around the commitment of the young Hitler in this undoubtedly fluctuating period of ideological development, both for Europe and for the individual who would go on to shape much of the continent, there seems to be little basis for Hitler to have become the German Mussolini rather than the German Lenin.

Though we can arguably conclude that Hitler would never have become a fascist if he had held on to his futurist views, can we say with any certainty that fascism would have existed at all without the First World War?

If the slaughter in the trenches can be seen as the reason for Hitler’s abandonment of his nationalist and futurist ideals, might we not also argue that Italy would never have fallen to Mussolini if it wasn’t for the war?’

~ David Irons, Bridging the Horseshoe

---

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was barely aware of Franz, although Franz had heard a great deal about him. The poet was provocative, and alongside his entourage he had become both a notorious enfant terrible as well as a sensation in the European art community. His futurist ideas had built a large following and even many of his detractors were enthused. Stretching from England to Russia, his poetic manifesto was echoed by many in interpretations Marinetti was not always enthralled by. He was particularly disheartened by the eagerness of certain Marxists and other cancerous elements in society to attempt to subvert his movement. Nonetheless, the true talent continued to be inspired by the substance of his ideals. With an assembly of some the futurist movements greatest achievements and thinkers, he could not doubt that he had achieved much in the three years since the manifesto’s inception.

Despite Marinetti’s instinctive antagonism to those he viewed as illegally occupying Italian territory, he could not deny that the Austrian government had helped to put on a show. The Italian futurists outspoken support of the war against the Ottomans had gained them a favourable hearing from the Italian government and with tensions in Europe as they were it seemed as if the Austrians were inclined to celebrate their allies newest contributions to the art world.

Hence he now sipped champagne in the Belvedere, with nods, smiles and raised glasses wherever he seemed to float around the unveilied futurist exhibition. All of a sudden it seemed as if he were the toast of Vienna, and he increasingly felt like he wanted to be sick.

Whilst he had barely eaten or drank anything, he knew that his anguish wasn’t physical. The sight of this splendour and elitism arrayed to celebrate his movement was a double-edged sword, and even as he was toasted he couldn't but think of how many were muttering about hypocrisy under their breath.

Futurism was supposed to be a revolutionary movement, aimed at sweeping away the archaic and rotting institutions that the Hapsburgs represented perfectly. Part of him couldn’t help but feel that his own nation’s establishment was more interested in his opposition to the treacherous socialists rather than his patriotism and that the Austrians were simply rubbing his nose in it. He knew he was being paranoid, yet he winced all the same. He was thankful that his exhibition would be moving on soon, a gallery launched by the Der Sturm magazine wanted to introduce his work to Germany and he felt far more comfortable that the anti-establishment journal would be a far more appropriate venue to promote his ideals. Marinetti hoped it would be easy enough to smile and nod back until then but it was becoming rather exhausting. he needed some fresh air.

Outside the towering building various people were chatting and though some nodded to him it seemed as if he were somewhat more inconspicuous amongst these intimate evening gatherings, a blessing when he had been enduring the establishment’s faint praise all evening. Outside he couldn’t fully escape however, yet the praise had seemingly come to an end.

Two men were discussing him and it wasn’t particularly complimentary.

“I still can’t help but feel the man’s a hypocrite.”

“His theories are in ascendancy, you can’t blame them for paying attention.”

Marinetti couldn’t understand the relationship between two, the younger man’s complaining and the somewhat authoritative attitude of the elder individual might have implied a father-son relationship, yet the difference in their ages was not that great and in sneaking a glance at the relationship going on behind him there seemed to be little resemblance between either of them.

“Oh they’re paying attention but why are they praising him?”

“Because they like his movement?”

“It can’t be that simple!”

Marinetti found himself agreeing with the younger man, whilst he would never declare it in public he had feared he would be seen as something of a hypocrite by coming here on the Italian government’s request. It was a time for patriotism, even though he also agreed with the young man that the enthusiasm for his work in Vienna was little more than pandering to a friendly nation in the midst of a continent preparing for war.

This was something the older man didn’t seem to care about.

“It’s not important whether it is or not,” he scolded the younger man, “this isn’t just a visit for leisure remember, if you’re going to make a living on your art then you need to start talking to people with expendable income, and as much as you enjoy it that isn’t readily found in the cafes amongst your socialist friends!”

Marinetti had heard enough, he hadn’t bothered about the eavesdropping as such, it was actually rather refreshing to hear someone criticise him for his own internal doubts but the fact that even amongst this Hapsburg charade there were Marxists hanging around to misinterpret his work was the final straw. This entire exercise had become a fraud, he would back inside and make his excuses.

Had he waited a second longer he would have heard Adolf’s retort.

“They aren’t my friends because they’re socialists, you know that.”

And Franz’s clarification of their relationship,

“I know that I’m your friend because we disagree on a lot, I don’t care about what a man’s politics are as long as they’re willing to discuss them, hence why I’m a teacher but you’re going to end up broke if you don’t come across as an enthusiast.” Franz knew this was an exaggeration, since explaining the concepts of futurism to his friend Adolf had genuinely developed an interest in the art form, though he remained contrarian and apprehensive all the same. If baiting him would put his friend on better financial ground then that was all that mattered, even if Franz wished it wasn’t so easy to make him see red.

“I am an enthusiast, the ideals are exactly what Germany needs, I know you disagree with me on that but you’re a long term case, I'll bring you round eventually. I certainly won’t get anywhere with supporters of this decrepit regime however!” Adolf was naturally grateful to Franz for all his help, though recently it had seemed that they were drifting in different circles. Their disagreements were the fire of their friendship but he felt his cultural sparring partner seemed somewhat too inclined to use his superior position in society over him whenever Adolf had a better point to make.

“Just remember your place and smile and nod, you can complain when you’re a famous artist, now come on, let’s get back in and pitch your work.”

That had been Franz’s reply, it wasn’t one that gave Adolf much confidence that he was being overly paranoid in regards to his friend. Adolf was no more inclined to smile and nod than Marinetti had been, though the young Austrian was not a man of influence.

He had no such pretensions.

---

The painting is 'Pillars of Society' by George Grosz, though actually a satire on Nazism I feel it works quite well in capturing the pretence of the scene above.

 

[The Red]

'My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.'

~ Wilfred Owen

​

‘What I knew of futurism thanks to Franz was very appealing, for at the time I was still young.

I remained focused at that time on the struggle between nations and peoples. Even though my understanding of these concepts were rooted in fallacies I did not yet understand, futurism offered a bridge between my convictions about the nation state and my hatred of the Hapsburg tyranny. In the same way the Italian futurists declared that the Austrian Empire was oppressing its Italians I found common cause in the Hapsburg oppression of their Germans, but the basis of their outlooks provided a greater emphasis. It seemed that this could be the way forward for the ten million Germans trapped in chains.

The advancement of technology, the expansion of industry and the new evolution of mankind that would be brought with it would not only free the German-Austrian people. In its wake, the old mother country could be brought into the twentieth century, mightier than she had ever been. This was before it became evident to me that socialism was the only true way of harnessing such advancement, a fact that has been proven time and time again by the power of the worker's industries in comparison to the decay of fascist-capitalism. As for many fellow workers, as a young man I was more focused on the caricature of the German rather than the true plight of the German worker. My enemy was not just the Hapsburgs, they lived amongst me.

I was not betrayed, though these futurist ideals were very attractive to me. The fact that the movement aimed to improve not only the nation itself but also the harmony within it seemed to be a great strength. These aims are not wrong, though it became clear in time that the movement was not interested in them. The disgraceful courting of the bourgeois and international capital had become apparent before I'd left Vienna, I who accepted their stated aims of advancement and empowerment without realising how easily those forces could be manipulated towards the enslavement of the common man.

Hence, prior to the beginning of the great imperialist slaughter you might indeed have called me a futurist but I would have protested, as I still protest. For even before the futurists disgraceful alliance with fascism or their willing veneration of the great slaughter of European youth between 1914 and 1918 they were already revealing themselves to be a cancerous element in both the Viennese intelligentsia and proletariat.

Marinetti, the self-proclaimed leader of the movement has become a mere lackey of Italian fascism. He dare not speak about against Mussolini nor does he wish to. He is content with being a higher caste of slave. He has been made a jester. ’

~ The Degeneracy of Fascist Culture, Adolf Hitler


‘Though it is officially claimed that Hitler had lost any identification with futurist ideals prior to his leaving Vienna in 1913, it seems likely that the basis of this epiphany was motivated by a bitterness over being fooled that he was being sent to defend Germany during what he refers to as 'The great imperialist slaughter' in his infamous Our Struggle and various other writings.

Hitler’s ideological zealotry is claimed to have been formed in his own words by three complementary factors, his experiences of union politics and mistreatment in the building trade whilst in Vienna, his discussions with socialist intellectuals introduced to him via Cizek, and his experiences of the war, where he suffered with millions of others in the mud of Belgium and France. There is undoubtedly some truth to these claims, despite the tenuous nature of Hitler’s autobiographical accounts and their slavish echoing for the organs of the Worker’s Republics propaganda. Though far too many, especially on the left, have contented themselves with these accounts it is not quite the full picture, as recently discovered correspondence has shown.

Hitler’s experience of trade unionism is something of a mixed bag according to letters to his half-sister in the period between 1912 and 1913, his conversations with intellectuals are also mentioned but the young Hitler seems to stress the art-related nature of the content of these discussions. It seemed that much of the political content of these discussions were mere background noise for a painter who wanted to emphasise his work. Furthermore Hitler continues to write to his friend Franz of the strength and appeal of futurist ideals despite the hypocrisy of their advocates. They detail a man in high spirits about a conflict to ensure German domination of Europe rather than a devotion to the defence of the mother country.

It seems that a man resigned to the slaughter of “great betrayal” might have been even more duped than he let on’


~ Hitler: The Man Behind the Infamy, Michael Green

---

The pai,...,sorry, the youtube video is sometimes going to serve as an opening rather than a painting. I hope everyone likes Blue Oyster Cult.

 

[The Red]

'I am not a man who believes that we Germans bled and conquered thirty years ago...in order to be pushed to one side when great international decisions call to be made. If that were to happen, the place of Germany as a world power would be gone for ever, and I am not prepared to let that happen. It is my duty and privilege to employ to this end without hesitation the most appropriate and, if need be, the sharper methods.'

~ Kaiser Wilhelm II upon launching the SMS Wittelsbach

​

‘Even as they busied themselves in union affairs and café culture, the workers and petit bourgeoisie of Vienna were not blind to the major events unfolding in Europe. By the second decade of the twentieth century many feared that a conflict would be inevitable and it seems that as a young man, having recently received his inheritance, Hitler was one of those people as he witnessed Europe drifting into two massive alliances.

Joined by the hip on the European continent sat the aptly named Central Powers, with Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire principal amongst them. All these nations had their different and occasionally contrasting aims, seeking each other out as allies of convenience. The German Empire was keen to make their mark on the world after decades of Bismarckian diplomacy aimed at securing a peace in Europe. A new generation of Germans had become self-assured, harbouring imperialist ambitions and a new order in Europe more advantageous than that which had been brought about by the unification of Germany in 1871. Austria-Hungary was a lumbering giant that aspired to survive as much as conquer. The state was a multicultural community under joint oppression via the Hapsburg monarchy, threatened by internal economic and ethnic strife from within as well as from the outside. The Ottoman Empire was already collapsing and sought relief, they found reassurance in the German Kaiser, the self-proclaimed protector of Islam. The Germans were equally impressed by the actions of Enver Pasha and his fellow ‘Young Turks’, whose overt proclamations echoed a nationalist ethic that was well underway in the Balkans. In Slavic form, it was the albatross around the Hapsburg’s neck.

This threat principally came from the newly assertive Kingdom of Serbia, emboldened by its victory in the Balkan Wars and the patronage of its Russian ally. The Russian Empire faced its own internal strife but unlike the Hapsburg’s the Tsar saw this as all the more reason to rock the boat. A missionary pan-Slavism in the Balkans conveniently fit in with Russia’s goal of access to the warm water of the Adriatic Sea and influence over the straits of the Bosporus that had been threatened by the growing German-Ottoman friendship. With their pride far overextending their reality, Austria-Hungary had spread itself across the Balkans in a fit of malaise and bureaucratic inertia, emboldened by its German ally despite the growing threat from both the Russians and the Serbs. In many ways, Bismarck’s warnings of the German frigate tying itself too closely to the worm infested Austrian gallion had come true, though most within the German establishment seemed ambivalent towards this liability.

Despite his beliefs being rather contrary to our contemporary assumptions, Hitler nonetheless hated the Hapsburgs. This hatred likely stemmed from the Austrian sovereignty over lands he saw as rightfully German rather than any resentment over aristocracy or class conflict. Hitler wanted to avoid conscription into the Austro-Hungarian, not out of an unwillingness to fight in what he would eventually decry as “imperialist slaughter” but because he wanted to fight for the Kaiser rather than his Hapsburg allies, or at the very least a rather idealistic portrayal of the German nation inspired by his upbringing and contemporary futurist political beliefs.

Whilst Austria saw the danger to the east, Hitler likely held the popular opinion of most other Germans that the threat was in the west and that as such Germany needed all the allies she could gather, even if it was a moribund imperial state. Having been diplomatically isolated in the wake of German and Italian unification, France had gradually built an anti-German alliance with the Russian the British empires out of collective disdain for the intransigence of the German Kaiser. Most Germans were well aware that in France’s case containment was not enough, there were scores to be settled dating back forty years, a French lust for revenge that posed an existential threat to most Germans.

Ofically it is stated that with the new means granted to him by his inheritance, Hitler moved on from his artistic and political experiences in Vienna towards Munich, where he did not have to wait long before he got his wish to fight for Germany.’

~ Steven James The Making of the Man: Hitler in the First World War

---

The café debate was alive as always and Adolf found himself less uncomfortable in sparring than he had once been, his views would now be regularly denounced as vile by his friends and he loved them for it. He realised his strength was in their opposition, and their tendency to occasionally buy his paintings or “loan” him cash when he couldn’t sell one anywhere, although that was increasingly rare these days. Franz’s connections had finally allowed Adolf to rent out an apartment and though the two rooms weren’t much on paper it offered more respectability than the couch of a friends and more stability than the boarding house.

He was happy, as it were, even though he was becoming increasingly conflicted. It was a shame it was all coming to an end.

He had been raised to venerate German nationalist ideals, for a while they had played in the back of his mind, with his poverty they had become far more ingrained in his character. His belief in an innate superiority of being German made him feel strong inside but had it also not made him and many others overtly malleable to the ideals of those in power who also claimed to be German? Why did so many argue for the greater Germany he had been brought up to believe in when no-one was acting on it, even as Britain, France and Russia slowly encircled the Kaiser and the Hapsburgs alike?

Why had so many establishment types indulged an Italian radical like Marinetti, and why had Marinetti tolerated them even though they were exactly the sort of people he had outlined as being inhibitive in society? The answer was perplexing but it nonetheless shone light upon an inarguable that there was something dispossessing about this current form of German nationalism.

His socialist friends sneered upon all nationalisms of course despite being more German than they like to admit. Could he make them see sense when he was having his own doubts?

Rudolf was the perfect example, supporting a united Germany despite his desire for it to be socialist, their differing political views hadn’t mattered a great deal since Adolf had first met him, his friend remained relaxed in his breaks from activism and party work and preferred to talk art in any case. If there was any strong disagreement it would be in regard to foreign affairs, a topic which was difficult to escape in the early months of 1913. Both men faced the draft, though each had his own solution.

“I don’t care what the conflict is started over, be it Africa, the Balkans or China, we all know how these wars go, death and destruction for the working class and profits for the rich.”

Adolf scoffed, he enjoyed his friends conversation but his tendency to find conspiracy everywhere was tiresome. Rudolf's plans to go to Switzerland were equally frustrating.

“Come on, we’re talking about national sacrifice here. War isn’t pretty but it drives progress, we wouldn’t have had a Germany otherwise and that victory has been to the benefit of all Germans, rich and poor.”

"And you think this war will unite Germany further? Even if we're going to war to prop up this decrepit feudal state?"

Adolf had to admit he had doubts about that one, though it seemed the die had been cast already. Germany was joined at the hip with the Hapsburgs, it was better to scoff at the thought than let it sink in.

"German victory is the end of the Hapsburgs, they cannot maintain their grasp on power even if we succeed together but if we allow Russia to topple them for us they will be the beneficiaries, not the German people."

"So you'll fight with the Hapsburgs but not for them?" Rudolf was smiling but Adolf could tell that he was angling at genuine, his socialist friend could sense his discomfort and he wondered not for the first time if he wasn't coming over to his side, even unwittingly.

"If I fight for the Hapsburgs who knows if I'll be fighting Russians or suppressing German uprisings when the time comes." If Adolf's dig at Rudolf's pan-German sympathies had any impact it didn't show, his friend appeared quite happy that he'd mentioned the subject if anything.

"Oh I agree about that, I just don't see why you what the difference is with suppressing Germans for the Hapsburgs or suppressing Germans for the Kaiser?"

Rudolf had expanded on this theory before, the claims of secret deals between the French socialists and German social democrats to mutually opt out of the war sounded like treachery, especially if it left Russia unchecked in the east. Adolf could never be sure if Rudolf was teasing him, though he would play along regardless before they bid each other farewell.

"If that ever happens, we'll be on opposing sides of the barricades regardless of whether or not I'm the army!"

The days for talking would some come to an end across Europe.

---

The cartoon is originally by Punch magazine, arguably somewhat one-sided.

Though the Wittelsbach was rendered obsolete by the Dreadnought era it did see some service in the First World War before having to retreat in the face of British submarines. The ship's remaining skeleton crew were present at Kiel during the mutiny.

 

[The Red]

'The long one does seem simple enough. It ought to mean: “Who is this who is coming?” Well, the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him.’

~ M. R. James, 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You My Lad'

​

‘Hitler had been in Munich for little over a year when the news of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo sent shockwaves across Europe. It had been a time of harassment for the man who would later make a great show of his German patriotism, and regardless of the popular enthusiasm for war in the 1914, he was likely happy to headed away from the police.

Many reasons have been given as to why Hitler left Vienna for Munich in 1913, the dictator’s own explanations have changed over time and have often come across as contradictory. As far as official suspicion was he was attempting to avoid being drafted into the Austrian army, perhaps an understandable motivation given Hitler’s lifelong disregard for the Hapsburgs, though perhaps not the most glamorous one. “Draft dodgers” were given very little sympathy post-war, even if the individual could qualify their motivations for avoiding the fight.

Hitler resided in Munich for some eight months, continuing to paint his vaguely futurist style alongside various watercolours for tourists and a handful of clients. This business was not especially lucrative and Hitler could not enjoy the contacts he had benefitted from in Vienna. Nonetheless, he was apparently noteworthy enough for his business in Munich to be questioned by the Bavarian police. Hitler ultimately avoided deportation, it seems that his antipathy towards Austria-Hungary may have been mutual.

Nonetheless it seems as if Hitler did want to fight, simply not for the Hapsburgs. Though there is little testimony on his reactions at the time it is appears to be evident that he was not particularly apprehensive to the impending crisis in regards to the news coming from Sarajevo. Even prior the outbreak of war he had already enlisted in the Bavarian army.

There has been some speculation as to why it was so easy for a foreigner to join up, given that he had already been deported in early 1914 over allegations of avoiding the Austrian draft. At such a time of heightened national hysteria it would not be impossible to imagine any able bodied man being rushed into the military, there are stories of boys as young as 13 being accepted into fighting for Germany, but it is likely a definitive reason will never be found. The German establishments mix of anticipation and resignation towards a European conflict was expressed on the streets by a groundswell of pan-German nationalist sentiment that even swept up many of those sceptical about the war. It would have been an easy time for a German who just happened to have spent almost all of his life in Austria to be granted the ability to serve his ‘true’ fatherland without what might have been seen as bureaucratic dithering.

After two months of training, eventually under the command of the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division, Adolf Hitler eventually set out towards the front with his new comrades. There is little knowledge of Hitler’s time at training other than one or two mentions of daydreaming as black marks on a fairly unproblematic record. Not much of a report card for what would soon become a budding revolutionary but it was unlikely we will know much more than what the Bavarian bureaucracy has already shed light upon.

Within the first day at the front, the vast majority of Hitler’s new unit had been wiped out.’

~ Steven James, The Making of the Man: Hitler in the First World War


---

‘It is perhaps tempting in writing this work to put a particularly German spin on events. I fought for the German nation for four years in the Great War but I can assure you that the fate of the Kaiser was always the least of my interests.

My interest was in the German nation and its people, and so it remains, nonetheless this work would not be complete without a frank understanding of the causes of the great imperialist slaughter. It is important to acknowledge the motivations of international capital, a crime which was not purely the burden of the exploitative Entente that now shackles German industry and emboldens the Weimar state to enslave the German worker.

In this way I am referring to what I have previously termed the Military-Industrial complex. The tragic merging of the military aristocrats to the industrial bourgeoisie in a marriage of convenience that spread as a mutually beneficial ideal throughout Europe until it inevitably broke out in mutual disaster, not for the perpetrators of the conflict but for the global proletariat forced into fighting their war for them.

In regards to Versailles to it is often dictated to the German population that the building of our previously vast navy was a needless provocation. A disgusting hypocrisy from those who flaunt their dominance of the high seas but an interesting statement nonetheless, for if German “provocation” needlessly antagonised the British why was it not considered such a blunder at the time?

The reason is simple, a giant naval campaign was sponsored by those who would benefit!

In this I refer of course to Admiral Von Tirpitz and the various business interests gathered to support the Navy League, the basis of supporting the Fleet Acts was to create profit for those who would build them and to do this an enthralling narrative was required, one of competition with the British Empire.

This alliance of industry and state was repeated throughout Europe in all major powers, the vitriol used not only to promote ever larger armies but also to cement this alliance’s dominance over any group that would have attempted to thwart them. The communists rallied against militarism throughout Europe and were accused of treachery, whilst those who lined their pockets continued to needlessly antagonise one another, blind to the risk as long as it provided greater profit.

The establishment that calls us traitors now was the same one that started the war and the same one that lost it amidst their greed and corruption. It is important that every comrade emphasise this fact.

The German people have been betrayed, it is time to mark this treachery!’

~ Adolf Hitler, Our Struggle

---



“Why are we here?”

It was a question Adolf had asked himself many times beforehand in these last months. The nights had become dark again and as he sat crouched waiting for someone to take over his watch he became all the more wary, for the grand ideals that had brought him to this point did not echo as nearly as loudly as they had in that great rush to war several months beforehand.

In the Munich square he had joyously chanted “War” along with what seemed to be all of Germany. There he was, only recently arrived, freed from the overbearing Hapsburgs to live amongst the real Germans and suddenly he had the chance to participate in the great struggle that had been predicted by so many. He had partly left Vienna in fear that he would be forced to fight for a foreign aristocracy, in Munich he had been free to prove that he was not a coward but that in this great struggle he would fight for the nation of his heritage. Such sentiments rung in his mind as he had journeyed west, now they rang very hollow indeed.

Adolf dearly missed his friends in Vienna, for it was far more difficult to have companions at the front. His unit had already been all but wiped out twice. He was not a weak sort, but he missed the luxurious chairs in the cafes where he would sit and debate the issues of the day. Now he was part of a global conflict that used artillery and mortars rather than words, and his voice was unsurprisingly silenced. The early advances of August and September had declined into stalemate and with it the entire reality of the conflict became readily apparent.

Futurism had promised the world a birght future, one which men and technology would be seamlessly combined to create a better future. Now he had seen the implications, he was beginning to wonder whether Marinetti should have been warning people rather than encouraging them. He had seen men from torn limb from limb by hot metal as their dwellings blew up around. Sometimes it was hard to tell what the remains were. Did heads have a hinge? The real winners of this war didn't seem to care.

The rats were everywhere, they were eating the corpses and with plenty to feast upon the vermin had become as large as cats. Even in this giant size they could usually be beaten away easily enough when directly discovered, the same could not be said for the lice. Even as he sat stationary he could feel them all over him, most of his comrades in the damp trench had driven themselves had mad trying to beat them out, Adolf included. In the end all had realised the notion was futile. The lice and rats were here to stay for as long as the Germans were, and that amount of time seemed to be indeterminate.

Adolf had been swayed along with the triumphant proclamations of a short war despite his deeper feeling that the conflict would allow a national consciousness to emerge, a popular uprising that would sweep out the old institutions and replace them with a new Europe under German guidance. It wasn’t a dream that had died as much as one that had been replaced by mundanity. Keeping socks dry, boots repaired, your stomach vaguely filled on meagre rations. These trumped his greater nationalist concerns and he couldn’t help but feel resentment towards the men that put him there, not because the war wasn’t necessary, but why were the old orders still being allowed to stuff their faces whilst he and his comrades always seemed to be half-starved.

His comrades, the new comrades who might be dead tomorrow just as soon with new men coming to replace them, such was the reality of the trench. He pondered whether Franz would have approved of their conversations. He was popular for different reasons here. Adolf didn’t smoke, though he still received a tobacco ration and by default he was a popular man. There were endless reasons to smoke amongst the eternal hellfire of the British and French artillery.

For a fleeting moment he wondered whether it was worse that they were firing upon him, or that their commanders had put them there to be fired upon in the knowledge they were exposed. He tried to cancel out such a thought immediately.

Nothing good could come of such doubts.

---

The painting is a part of La Mitrailleuse by Christopher Nevinson, like many futurists he served in the First World War and lost all idealism during it. His technological utopias have now become apocalyptic scenes of men who've lost their humanity.

There is at least one recorded case of a thirteen year old joining the German army. Josef Zippes' body lies in Neuville-St. Vaast, near Arras, in the German war cemetery. His gravestone is written in Hebrew.

 

[The Red]

'You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.'

~ Siegfried Sassoon

​

‘Historians usually conclude in their overviews that 1915 was a terrible year for the entente alliance. With Gallipoli evacuated, disaster on the eastern front with the loss of Poland, and Serbia being abandoned the situation may indeed have seemed bleak. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that this is from a global perspective and these facts would not necessarily be the on the minds of German troops on the western front, including Adolf Hitler and his comrades.

Having been promised a quick, clean victory before the end of the 1914 German troops now found themselves in a vicious stalemate amongst a barren no-man’s land. Artillery was a constant source of alarm, enemy snipers appeared omnipotent, lice infested everyone’s clothing, it seemed as if there were rats everywhere. It was in this atmosphere of demoralisation and deprivation that enabled the so-called ‘Gutmann Petition’

Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann was Hitler’s regimental commander and was by all accounts a competent and respected officer whose professionalism had seen him rise through the ranks of the Bavarian army despite the often anti-Semitic nature of the establishment. It was perhaps no surprise that Gutmann’s luck would run out. The Lieutenant had acquitted himself well despite his regiment enduring horrific casualties, this did not go unrecognised. By the end of 1914 he had been awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and had been informed in the autumn of 1915 that was due to receive the First Class distinction for his continued valour. When this honour was surprisingly rescinded no reason was given, other than vague comments about conflicting evidence over Gutmann’s heroism. It has been suspected by many that anti-Semitic elements in the military were attempting to prevent too many Jewish war heroes from being created.

The basis of the petition was innocent enough, if the Lieutenant’s deserving of the medal was truly an issue of witnesses then individual troops within the regiment decided that they would get as many names as possible to speak up for his professionalism. Though the idea for the petition was not Hitler’s, as some accounts have suggested, the young Corporal did sign it, as did hundreds of others. Its aims were fairly mundane, simply praising the Lieutenants professionalism and valour whilst concluding that this made him deserving of the First Class honour.

Whether or not the petition had been a means of implicitly protesting the broader conditions at the front or not, it was treated as such when handed over to Gutmann’s superiors. Though the Lieutenant had only been vaguely aware of the petition he was immediately accused of arranging the ‘stunt’ and of stirring up dissent amongst his men, despite protest that he had had nothing to do with the document he was informed that he was being sent to a post at a training academy within Germany and away from the front. Though Hitler had not been directly involved in the organisation of the petition he was swept up in the backlash alongside its creators and found himself being withdrawn from the line shortly before his regiment was annihilated in the Battle of the Somme.

Behind the frontline he and the other plotters were subject to a harsh interrogation as to their purposes all the whilst being deprived of sleep, with lights being shone in their faces from solitary cells. After a week of this treatment Hitler was informed alongside his fellow petitioners that he was to be sent north to aid the push at Verdun. German propaganda proclaimed that victory there would win them the war, that the mass attrition would bleed the French to death. Of course, this strategy would also require a great German sacrifice and even subversive elements would make useful cannon-fodder.’


Steven James, The Making of the Man: Hitler in the First World War


---


The parade ground was typical of this war, mud soaked with an acrid stench of various atrocities. The sounds of buzzing flies and the faint rumble of artillery in the background likely remained prevalent everywhere, though they seemed more emphasised in Verdun than anywhere else.

What was supposed to have been Adolf’s fresh start had turned out to be a worsened version of the conditions on the Somme. The landscape resembled a muddy abattoir where everything seemed to have been given a paint job of blood and dirt. Even the Imperial Flag had smudges on it. It was not the sort of scene had the cameramen chose to capture. Adolf suspected that the leadership didn’t want people seeing the reality of war. This was either out of fear of damaging morale or, as he increasingly suspected, because the people would rise up if they saw how horribly their brothers and sons were being treated.

Who exactly was in charge of Germany these days was increasingly unclear if the rumour mill was anything to go by. There was a growing consensus that the country was being run by the military as the war continued with no end in sight. The British and French advance on the Somme River had been checked at great cost though there were stories of disaster on the Russian front. Officially none of this was true, though Adolf wondered why the Kaiser was being paraded around the frontline like a gaudy ornament if he was still in control of the empire.

The gleam and shimmer of his many medals and gold braid stood out amongst the dirt and lethargy of the assembled troops, so many of whom were suffering for their Kaiser to be driven around in splendour. As he drove by there were cheers and shouts of adulation but Adolf could not help feel these displays of gratitude were somewhat tempered, either out of apathy or perhaps due to the Kaiser’s companion.

It seemed that the more Crown Prince Wilhelm featured in the news the more unpopular he became. The Kaiser’s son had become notorious for his incompetence as an officer despite officially being praised in all media outlets and perhaps it was this continued adulation, alongside his father’s unwavering benevolence in regards to medals and titles that made the supposed celebrity so poorly regarded.

If the crown price was aware of this he didn’t show it, he seemed cool and unfazed as he and his father went by. It was an arrogance that Adolf found contemptuous. Was there any wonder why this war was slipping away from Germany when the fatherland was being led by such men? Marinetti hadn’t just been right about the Hapsburgs, it was increasingly becoming clear in his own mind that all aristocracy was abhorrent.

“I sometimes wish I could throw my iron cross at that butchering bastard, it would be another medal he hasn’t earned but it would be satisfying nonetheless.”

Adolf’s friend Friedrich had an uncanny way of echoing out the thoughts that others wouldn’t dare speak aloud. When Adolf had been inexplicably moved into their unit after the petition debacle some had suspected him of being from military intelligence, Friedrich had been the only one to speak freely to him and after Adolf had revealed what had really happened he gained something resembling confidence from the others. At least a subversive couldn’t be a spy.

Discontent was spreading amongst the ranks regardless, Adolf had largely kept to himself but Friedrich’s remark about the crown prince wasn’t the first time he had heard authority being challenged recently. The war wasn’t going well, casualties continued to mount, the food was horrible, these were all grumbling complaints rather than outcries yet he wondered how long they would stay that way. The French apparently had it worse, but why was it taking so long to defeat them?

As the Kaiser and his heir disappeared, Adolf began to wonder if the soldiers might not be better running the army by themselves. The aristocracy blundered and then rewarded itself anyway, the professionals retired brave officers for their religious background and punished those soldiers who tried to speak up for them. Meanwhile those who were actually fighting the war died in vast numbers to little or no recognition, living each day as if it were their last in the knowledge that the papers back home were announcing that everything was milk and honey and that the final victory was in sight.

There was talk of traitors everywhere, but Adolf’s own run-in with sedition had made him question to what extent these rumours weren’t designed to keep everyone second guessing about each other, to ensure that those who made them scream “Hoch!” for an incompetent ruler weren’t given the blame that they truly deserved.

Adolf tapped Friedrich on the shoulder, it was time to have a proper chat with him about his remarks. Perhaps they had more views in common than those about the crown prince, and perhaps some of the others shared some of those opinions. Adolf hadn’t been offered any jam since he’d been moved down up the line but he had been continuing to collect his tobacco rations, the time had come to share them out.

Friedrich turned to see who had tapped him on the shoulder and returned Adolf’s smile with blackened teeth as he took the offered cigarette.

There was much to discuss.


---

The painting is Dead Sentry in the Trench by Otto Dix, whose unapologetically bleak portrayals of his experience in the First World War were denounced as "degenerate" by the Nazis.

Both Dix and Sassoon went to war highly motivated by patriotism for their respective nations, by the end both were disgusted with the slaughter they'd taken part in.

 

[The Red]

'You can blame me,
Try to shame me,
And still I'll care for you'

~ Irma Thomas

​

‘By 1917, the situation had grown perilous for both the French and the Germans. Anger over meaningless large-scale attacks provoked desertion and mutiny across the French ranks, whilst the German army was rife with a whispering campaign of protest. Though the cause of this cannot be solely linked to Adolf Hitler, the disgraced private was certainly involved in attempting to spread rebellious thoughts throughout the ranks.

The debacle around the Gutmann Petition had left him with an education that the army would come down hard on anything appearing to be subversive, though it also encouraged him to ensure that whilst the fighting continued there would be a mass protest movement ready to spring up at the end of the war, whatever that conclusion might have been.

Said conclusion did not come in 1917, though the outcome was no longer in doubt with the entry of the United States in the Spring. It would take time for the Americans to have a significant impact on the battlefield though it was time the Entente had. In what had become a conflict of attrition, the odds were now heavily stacked against the German Empire.

Germany was now doomed, though the situation did not seem entirely bleak. The collapse of the Russian Empire and subsequently Kerensky’s provisional government had finally enabled an armistice to be signed with Lenin’s Bolsheviks, freeing up troops to take part in one final effort to break the British and the French before the Americans could arrive in force.

It is not known to what extent Hitler was inspired by either the French mutineers or Lenin at this time, though despite what was due to unfold it would seem that he had greater sympathy with the latter. The disgruntlement within the German ranks remained largely around perceived incompetence and the perpetually dismal conditions. Ideology seems only to have been ascribed later on. For this reason, most Germans prepared for the promise knockout blow without much complaint. Most were aware it was their last chance to end the conflict on their terms and whilst most might have grown apathetic to the Kaiser or the greater German establishment, few saw Entente victory as a preferable alternative. Though attempts have been made to say that Hitler was actively engaging in sabotage of his own side at this time, he appears to have remained focused on German victory even though he was not directly involved in the Spring Offensive.

It is unlikely that said offensive could ever have worked, though in the Spring of 1918 the Heer’s general staff had no other options. Unlike the German rank and file they were not only concerned about the fate of their nation, for their reputations were also on the line.’

~ Steven James, The Making of the Man: Hitler in the First World War

---


The turbulent imagery emblazoned on the posters made an impression despite the fog of the early morning, though Gerda felt that things were perhaps becoming a bit too melodramatic. French artillery shelling peaceful German villages, a warning of might happen if they crossed the Rhine, this was something Gerda had little trouble imagining. John Bull posing as a hangman putting a noose around the neck of a German youth, perhaps a more metaphorical warning but an apt one nonetheless. Like most Germans the ache in her stomach was a daily reminder of the crippling British blockade. The third poster seemed too incredulous however, a demonic rabbit snarling at the viewer, encouraging people to keep rabbits, eat the meat and give the hides to the military.

The imagery struck her as bizarre, with all the talk of subversives on the home front it was hard to imagine what rabbits had done to deserve public ire. Not when there was a more dangerous enemy now in the conflict.

The war was going into its third year and the country was growing ever wearier. It had been a small comfort to imagine that the enemy were suffering from the same issues and might soon break but now the Americans were in the fight and it was hard for propaganda to resonate about the German resolve in the knowledge that the Entente were receiving fresh supplies of men and material. It was not the only message that was disheartening.

Gerda had seen other posters that had warned of an Entente victory causing economic ruin and mass unemployment but it seemed that that would be her future regardless. Having grown up in a farming community she had been no stranger to hard work, at times it was back breaking and she had went without pay. She was entirely reliant on her parents for everything despite contributing greatly to the work and though she did not resent them it had been a bleak thought that the only way she could ever escape the household would be to marry one of the neighbouring farmer’s sons, the thought hadn't exactly thrilled her. As terrible as the war was, it had offered a release from her life’s seemingly inevitable trajectory.

With so many men having gone off to fight, women had been increasingly called in to make-up the deficit. Whilst at first there was some hesitation towards this the war had become increasingly drawn out to the extent there was now a compulsory draft as the entire economy, and in many ways German society, became based around the war effort. Despite the backward attitudes of industry not being women’s work, Gerda actually found the work in one of Essen's many armaments factories somewhat easier, if the claustrophobic environment and the general lack of fresh air could be excused. The work itself was not the problem, it was the attitudes of those in charge that she found overbearing.

Although she and her colleagues had strived to outperform the increasingly overambitious targets set by the army, it was a thankless task. For all of the talk of German society being united in the fight she and her colleagues faced constant reminders that their lives as wage earners were temporary and that after the war they would be expected to hand their jobs over to men returning for the front before going back to their homes and raising the next generation of Germans. It was a particularly demoralising thought for Gerda and many of her colleagues, women who had experienced independence for the first time.

Her friend Christina waved at her as the shadow of the large factories loomed overhead, already beginning to belt out smoke. It would be a few minutes before the whistle bellowed to signal the start of their shift but they quickened their pace all the same as they walked together.

“I’ve begun to hate Saturdays” Christina moaned despairingly.

“There is a war on you know, perhaps if you hadn’t stayed so long in the club last night you wouldn’t hate the morning so much” Gerda patted her hungover friend on the back but her scolding wasn’t entirely jovial. There was a war on and it wasn’t going well, industrial workers couldn’t afford to be indulgent when they had work the next day.

“It’s not the shift, it’s the fact that we’re bound to get another lecture.” Gerda knew what she meant.

“Oh God, Frau Heidemann could darken anyone’s day.” Their ‘Shift Leader’ was not particularly popular on-site, especially due to her "motivational" speeches.

“Remember ladies, soon we will have victory and that will mean that you’ll all have grateful husbands returning home! I know you hate this work but think of your country, your Kaiser, and the household you’ll be running some day!” Even whilst hungover, Christina’s impersonation of Heidemann's high-pitched squeal was perfect. Gerda couldn’t help but laugh.

“It’s odd how victory’s been “soon” for over two years now, she really needs to get her watch fixed. We do need to win soon mind you.”

Christina scoffed at Gerda’s urgency.

“Finish off the Froggies, push the Russkies into the ice, starve out the Island Monkeys, tell the Yanks where to get off. Easy. No problem at all.” Gerda could never tell whether her friend was being sarcastic, as that exaggerated list of priorities was becoming the reality of Germany’s situation.

“I hope you’re right, if this war goes on for much longer, we won’t have anyone left to fight it. And then were would Frau Heidemann be?” Christina shrugged in regards to Gerda's concerns.

“I guess we’ll just need to fight it ourselves.”

---

The poster states Women workers, take up your rifles!, encouraging women to help defend the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

There were German posters featuring demonic rabbits but they felt a bit out of place here.

 

[The Red]

'Among other things, the wound of our enemies in the west is so deep today that it can never heal again.

I should be telling a lie if I said that the latest German successes surprised me; of these victories I was confident.'

~ Arz von Straussenberg on the German Spring Offensive

​

‘Throughout this work I have striven to make it clear that the 1918 Spring Offensive was clearly the most decisive battle of the First World War.

The German attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat very nearly succeeded and it is a indignity to those who fought on either side of this climatic showdown to suggest that the offensive was merely a hopeless roll of the dice by a nation already defeated. I hope I have succeeded in making this case, though it is also important to consider some of the greater repercussions that followed.

Many of the offensive’s implications are often misattributed to the Entente’s Hundred Days Offensive that followed the failed German effort. Whilst Ludendorff should be acknowledged for his identification of weak points and using heavy artillery and Stoßtruppen to destroy them, it would be the massed concentrations of airpower and armour seen in that summer of 1918 would be a prelude to the standard offensives of the Second World War.

The real implications of the Spring Offensive lie not in the ingenuity of the German staff but in their failures. A young Adolf Hitler, the man who would ignite an even more destructive conflict less than three decades later, found himself amidst these failures and swore vengeance not just on the entente but on the aristocratic establishment that had abandoned himself and so many others to wither on the vine.

From the safety of his headquarters General Ludendorff had been all too aware that Germany couldn’t win a war of attrition. Even before the Entente offensive began tens of thousands of fresh American troops were appearing each week whilst Germany couldn’t even afford to make-up their own losses in new recruits.

With his remaining forces spent in the failed offensive it wasn’t long before he began looking for ways to spin Germany’s inevitable defeat into someone else’s failure.’


James Beatty, The Kaiser’s Last Gambit


---


The figure had looked almost comedic to begin with, one side of the body relatively neat, the other side ragged and smouldering.

One side of the face had a stunned look like the comedic foil in a movie picture, the other side covered in so much blood and dirt that it was hard to see any expression underneath.

His walk was similarly reminiscent of the movies, shaking and jittering as if electricity were going through this body with large exaggerated steps away from the scene of the explosion that had done this to him. The shock compelled him to ignore the round that landed nearby, and the resulting collection of screams and torsos that flew everywhere. The man seemed fixated on getting somewhere but seemed to have forgotten where he was going. He stood still for a moment before the exaggerated steps began again.

It was no longer any surprise that these sights could be disturbing and hypnotic at the same time. Adolf had had four years of this trauma by now. The bloodied automaton that went by the name of Probst was simply the most recent entry into a long list of similar events. Whilst Adolf had survived this far he remained distracted by what could have very easily been his own fate. He’d learned to shake these thoughts off but he still couldn’t get rid of the ringing in his ears.

Adolf grabbed Probst by his collar and pulled him backwards into the trench, he curled up into a ball and attempted to put the stub of what had been a thumb into his mouth, only to realise there simply wasn’t enough of it left to suckle on. His remaining muscles contorted into a look of utter despair as he removed the shaking claw-like appendage from what was left of his face. The eye had could still open was full of a very infantile sadness. Everything seemed to get a return for those in their last moments. Adolf feared the regiment would all be facing the same fate soon enough, this was no ordinary offensive.

The German infantry had withdrawn during entente attacks countless times throughout the course of the war, either in temporary setbacks or as a deliberate ploy to rack up enemy casualties before countering with greater force. This wasn’t helpful experience, for the present situation was unprecedented.

There would be no counter-attack to relieve them as far more crucial areas of the line were being sacrificed with the abandonment of huge supplies of weaponry and material amidst the chaotic retreat. There were stories of mass surrenders, hundreds of weary men allowing themselves to be led away by a single enemy guard. Adolf couldn’t blame those who had given up for their leaders, and his, were nowhere to be seen.

Rumour had it that the high command was suffering from a collective nervous breakdown. Adolf wouldn’t have been surprised at all. Those at the top didn’t mind keeping men yoked in a situation that deteriorated by the moment provided they were nowhere near the danger. Now after years of comfort the armchair generals had gone weak kneed at retracting lines on a map.

The scene around Adolf and his surviving comrades, the sights, sounds, and smells, were not anything particularly worse than what they’d gotten used to over the years of conflict. Flares lit up the night sky almost pointlessly as fire spreading across the horizon, giving everything an orange glow. The collective stink of mud and cordite were mixed with reeks of unimaginable origin. His mouth was heavy with blood and phlegm. There was nothing out of the ordinary in this situation, other than the fear that it would never stop.

In previous battles there had always been some reprieve, even if temporary, from the shelling and the slaughter. The relatively static nature of the front had been a mix of lingering before spontaneous moments of horror. Even the most detached and sadistic of officers realised that everyone needing to catch their breath eventually, in the last few weeks this situation had changed dramatically.

The entente were on the offensive and they were showing no signs of stopping until they had rolled over the entirety of the Heer. After years on the back foot they finally had finally broken the German line and there no longer seemed to be any escaping from them. Adolf and Friedrich had been sent behind the line beforehand everything had gone wrong, their discussions with their fellow troops about the real motivations of this war and the overwhelmingly low opinion of their commanders had been deemed too incendiary for the front. Despite their experience they had been ordered away from the active fighting for the first time since Adolf had been interrogated for his supposed collusion with Lieutenant Gutmann. After several days of being forced to clear away the dead he had begun to pine for the days without food and sleepless nights in his bright cell. Friedrich had seemed resigned to it at the time, Adolf had only grown angrier.

He felt like he was being taunted, that his earnest attempts at fighting for Germany had been thrown back in his face mockingly. For in trying to improve the situation he was now carting away bodies and trying to sort which limb should go where, an ever present reminder of the failures of Germany’s leadership. Adolf had felt that things couldn’t get any worse, until the enemy planes had flown so low that they had almost taken his head off, announcing the beginning of the offensive that seemed as if it would never end.

It hadn’t been long before the enemy had caught up with their planes, they had brought their monstrous metal machines as well. Adolf and Friedrich had been thrown into the line alongside the rest of the punishment battalion. They had fought without a second thought, even Friedrich took the enemy seriously, the line had collapsed around them nonetheless and now they didn’t know if there even was a line left to hold.

Friedrich shook Adolf from his reminiscing. His comrade still had that earnest look in his eyes that confirmed that everything was still going wrong.

“We need to get out of here. Now.”

There was no-one left to tend to the fires burning out of control or to the helpless wounded, they crackled and shrieked respectively. There was a silence of sorts nonetheless, the firing had stopped, in the past this had been a relief now it was only a sign of warning. For the last few weeks the entente had repeated the creeping barrage over and over again, never allowing more than a few minutes for Adolf and others to compose themselves. Now he could already hear whistles and guttural shouts in the distance, too far away to make out whether they were in English or French yet coming closer all the time. There were rumours that they had been ordered to take no prisoners and whilst some had discarded these as false stories to try and put a stop to the vast number of surrenders, neither Adolf nor Friedrich were going to put them to the test.

Probst was still gibbering as Adolf took a helmet from someone who didn’t need it any longer and put it on what was left of the injured man’s head. Both men took one of Probst’s arms and put it over their shoulders before pulling him out of the hastily dug trench and began to move as quickly as they could whilst crouching, their feet constantly getting stuck in the churned up mud and pieces of things they didn’t want to dwell on. Adolf had mindlessly chosen Probst’s heavily burned side whilst he had been pre-occupied by the nearing enemy. Having regained his focus he realised that there was now a pattern to the man’s whimpering, before becoming aware of the clicking sound his arm was making. With every muddy step Probst’s bones were shattering.

His whimpering was the only protest he could make as the three made their escape.


---

The painting is Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas Attack by Otto Dix

Though you may attribute Von Straussenberg's hubris to the Germans exaggerating their successes to their allies, the apparent victory of the Spring Offensive was met with equal joy on the German Home Front and arguably contributed to the 'Stab In The Back' myth later on.

 

[The Red]

“These people can ingest the soup they’ve brewed up for us”

~ Erich Ludendorff, 26 October 1918

​

‘Ludendorff had bemoaned his lack of confidence in any future success in the wake of Germany’s catastrophic defeats, going as far as to blame the German soldiers at the front for failing him.

Though he had promised he could win the war in the spring of 1918, before the summer was over he was privately declaring that peace must be sought as quickly as possible. He quickly regained his nerve.

The general still had no illusions to the emergency of the situation but he now began to construct a narrative that would aim to exonerate himself and the army as a whole from any blame.

It does not take long to deconstruct the ‘Stab In The Back’ myth, Ludendorff’s private statements months beforehand indicate that he himself knew that the writing was on the wall, but he had bluster, and prestige. He could count on people listening when he spoke.

Despite having increasingly lost influence in German society during the conflict, the left-wing and liberal elements soon found themselves being blamed for everything, first by Ludendorff and soon by many of his adherents on the right. It was their fault that morale had collapsed at the front, it was their fault that the economy had overheated, it was their fault that there were so few new conscripts. These accusations were in full swing even prior to the mutiny at Kiel.’

~ James Beatty, The Kaiser’s Last Gambit

---

‘In the decades following the war there have been several theories put forward in the historiography of those last stages of the First World War as to the motivations of the Imperial German Navy in planning to stage a confrontation with the British Grand Fleet in the final weeks of the conflict.

Some have incorrectly argued that those in command of the navy were simply delusional, that they had not been party to the true extent of the defeat on the ground and as such believed that they could force the war to be fought on to a victorious end by unilaterally bringing an end to the armistice negotiations. This myth has largely been put to rest, though it continues to linger in popular retellings of the war. In reality, despite exhibiting a chilly relationship with their colleagues in the Army, it was clear that the war was already lost. They were well aware that whilst the fighting continued, the front was collapsing abroad and that the old Imperial state was quickly falling apart at home.

Apologists for the navy’s motivations have argued that they saw the planned battle as their role in the armistice negotiations. The argument broadly goes that although the army had failed Germany that the navy, its surface fleet largely intact having seen little action since the battle at Jutland, might be able to force a more favourable bargaining position for Germany by inflicting a decisive defeat against the Royal Navy. This argument states that the Navy’s thinking was dominated by the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667, where the seemingly defeated republic had achieved a better settlement than they might have hoped to achieve in the wake of one final decisive victory against the English. This is also incorrect, the German surface fleet was still formidable in 1918 though it would have been no match for the British Grand Fleet, a fact that the high command were well aware of.

A cynical line puts forward the case that the Navy were resigned to German defeat and feared its implications given their fears that the fleet was either to be given away to the victorious powers as a form of reparation or simply scuttled. Allegedly the logic was it was better that the Germans take at least some British ships with them even if there was no hope of victory or on having a greater impact on any future peace.

There is some truth to this latter argument, for naval historians have reached a consensus that such a battle could only have ended in disaster for the German fleet. Nonetheless, the motivations behind going ahead with the battle were even more dastardly. The true behind the ordering of German sailors to stoke the boilers and head out to sea came from a warped sense of honour on behalf of those in command. It was viewed as more honourable to see the fleet destroyed in a heroic last stand than to wait for the end in port. In the words of Captain Von Levetzow, the intention was to ensure ‘immortal fame at the bottom of the ocean’. It may not be surprising that the sailors chose to have no part in this suicidal quest for glory. It certainly shouldn’t have been for their commanders.

The German surface fleet is generally concluded to have had the better of the day in the Jutland battle though the high command was uncomfortably aware that they had narrowly escaped a catastrophic defeat. Shortly after, the ships had largely been retired for the rest of the war, having been written-off as a ‘risk fleet’. The risk did not just refer to the Royal Navy. Morale was notoriously poor amongst the German sailors, they lived a life of confinement and strict discipline that at times resembled a vast prison rather than a military force. Leave was limited and the food was wretched.

That autumn the sailors had huddled together as the chill of the Baltic blew in, listening to their officers enjoy far better prepared and larger rations in warmer cabins. It was a demoralising existence, increasingly so as the grim news from the front continued to pour in. Having been informed of the high command’s plans for their destruction, they mutinied at Kiel on the 29th of October.

There was a great deal of support for the sailors amongst the soldiers garrisoned within the port, alongside many of the local workers. Large numbers of both joined their rebellion and soon the events at Kiel were repeated at Lubeck and Wilhelmshaven. Military units still loyal to the Kaiser were sent in to Kiel to suppress the mutineers and violent clashes quickly broke out. Germans fired on Germans with at least seven deaths and several dozen casualties.

The government now attempted to defuse the situation, sending a delegation to Kiel under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party leader Gustav Noske. It was hoped that improvements to the sailor’s conditions could restore order though it quickly became clear that the incident had taken on a far more political tone. By the end of the first week of November Kiel was in the hands of the sailors, soldiers, and workers now openly calling for the abdication of the Kaiser and an immediate end to the war. This revolutionary wave soon spread to Cologne, Munich, and eventually Berlin.’

~ Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler’s First Revolution

---

​

From below the Reichstag balcony the crowd was a melting pot of emotion. Hope and distress hung in the air amidst the developing situation and the anxiety seemed near universal. Ernst could sympathise with them. The thousands gathered in Berlin’s main public squares were full of so much uncertainty but so much promise at the same time, waiting for a sign of what would happen next.

The war was still ongoing, a war Ernst had managed to avoid participating in directly due to his secretarial work for the Social Democratic Party. Ironically it was a role that had given Ernst a keener insight into the ins and outs of the conflict than most soldiers on the front could expect to have. Thanks to this, he knew that the war would have be brought to an end as quickly as possible, though if the latest reports from the front were anything to go by that should have been apparent to most German troops as well .

Thankfully there was now a general consensus around ending the war, though German society was rapidly falling apart in the wake of apparent defeat. There were stories that the revolution that had sparked at the Baltic coast was now spreading across the country at an alarming rate. Rumour had it had that large groups of men and women with dubious motivations were marching on Berlin and despite his insider knowledge Ernst was as much in the dark as anyone else in regards to this. He only hoped that the declaration from the Reichstag balcony he had just witnessed would help bring Germany back together before calamity struck.

The Kaiser had abdicated and Ernst’s colleague Philip Scheidemann had been the one who proclaimed the new republic that would follow. There was no doubt he was present at the making of history, though the future seemed more in doubt than ever before. Some within the party were muttering that Schiedemann was an opportunist but Ernst felt that was rather blind in the face of the unravelling situation. Friedrich Ebert, their fellow social democrat, had been handed the Chancellorship hours beforehand and Ernst feared that being the inheritors of a nation in chaos and a peace that was likely to be harsh was a dubious gift. Many felt that the army and their friends in the old establishment were passing on these unpopular tasks not out of any belief in the competence of the SPD but to absolve themselves of any blame when things inevitably went wrong.

Despite the common German belief in themselves being an inherently harmonious and level headed people there were forces emerging on both left and right that threatened to plunge the nation into chaos. The military had prosecuted the war with the SPD’s tentative support but now that they had lost there were already rumours of Ludendroff and his supporters stirring up a new narrative that the public had failed the army via some fault in the German character caused by foreign peoples and foreign ideals. Germany, a country which contributed so much to liberalism and then socialism had apparently been spoiled by these very ideas. There were certain socialists who now seemed determined to prove them right.

Ernst had some sympathy for the communist’s beliefs, he too wanted to see a Germany built upon equality and fairness just as much as they did but their methods were another matter entirely. Rather than make the case for the German worker in the Reichstag, many of them appeared hell-bent on emulating Lenin in Petrograd and tearing down the entire system because there were parts of it they didn’t like. The thought made Ernst shiver, the war had already plunger Germany into a hunger and depravity, did they honestly think that the German working class wouldn’t be the most likely to lose out from a prolonged period of chaos.

He hoped they would see sense and so far it seemed that they might. He had met Rosa Luxemburg a few times and although they didn’t see eye to eye she had a reassuring air that gave Ernst the confidence that she truly wished to progress her ideals in a democratic context. Then there was Karl Liebknecht, a man recently released from prison that spoke and acted like an arsonist who had stolen a decent suit. Ernst had feared that Liebknecht’s followers would prove just as dangerous as anything the right had to offer in given the chance though now he felt somewhat more confident. It seemed as if the communists had missed the bus, the republic had now been proclaimed and despite the uncertainty of the future there was at least the chance of a stable balance going forward.

Ernst continued to idly watch the crowd from the balcony as he noticed the people beginning to thin out, they too had been a part of history but the demands of daily life would always take precedence. Those afraid of what was to come had been reassured that they now had a government which would move forward in their interests, a good first step. Now the real work would have to begin.

From behind Scheidemann said something Ernst couldn’t quite make out, something about going home?

He turned to his colleague with a smile, “You deserve to have a rest, it’s a great thing you’ve done today. I was just thinking to myself that the real work begins tomorrow.

Scheidemann looked at him with a curious frustration, “What? I said I might need to lie low. We need somewhere adjacent from the city to make sure things stay intact. Can you think of anywhere where we might-“

“You can’t leave. You’re the face of the republic, at least for the moment, surely whatever business we have outside of Berlin can be settled here? We might be seen as running away!”

A look of realisation appeared upon Scheidemann’s face, man that had seemed so confident a moment ago had had the wind taken out of him. All of a sudden Ernst realised there was something he didn’t know. He turned again to look out to the balcony and realised that the crowd wasn’t thinning out, it was moving. Marching in the direction of the Royal Palace.

A huge roar broke out though Ernst couldn’t make out where from exactly. Nonetheless, he suddenly felt he could emphasise with Scheidemann’s look of alarm.

Something was going wrong.

---

The painting is Explosion by George Grosz

 

[The Red]

'They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades'

~ Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

​

‘On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the First World War finally came to an end. After four years the guns went silent but even as the victors mulled over the peace they would largely dictate to the defeated Germany, the survivors of the conflict would not rest. Germany’s future remained in the balance and those who had signed the armistice handed to them in Marshal Foch’s private railway carriage realised that power was very quickly slipping away from themselves as well. They had signed on behalf of a Kaiser who had already abdicated, a man who had ingloriously fled to the Netherlands to allow the new provisional republic to sort out the chaos he had left in his wake. The situation would remain unstable long past the Kaiser’s death from Spanish Flu.

The revolution emanating from Kiel had spread with astonishing speed, though the way in which it presented itself varied widely. In some areas workers councils were formed as little more than advisory boards to the general management, others demanded more radical and arguably unfeasible changes to their hours and wages. Artists formed their own collectives and attempted to become the vanguard of a new cultural beginning for Germany. Others settled scores, unpopular managers were thrown into rubbish piles, punched, and in one case thrown down a mineshaft.

Despite being characterised as a conservative region, Bavaria was not immune to this revolutionary wave and though initially bloodless, events there would soon give the young Hitler his first taste of a genuine revolutionary conflict. ’

~ Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler’s First Revolution

​

The barracks were draughty though the troops inside had patched them up the best they could. The war was over, yet unaccountably they remained in the army and remained garrisoned. Some pondered their fate, most just seemed relieved to have survived the war and to be back in Germany.

The soldiers largely busied themselves in small groups, swapping pieces of bread for cigarettes, cracking dirty jokes, telling each other presumably exaggerated tales of heroism and survival. Every now and then there was even a ghost story in the dark afternoon. Adolf sat amongst those he had come back with, calculating in silence.

An opportunity had arisen, one that couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

He hadn’t seen Friedrich since their near escape from the collapsing Hindenburg Line. The two had been separated shortly after they’d reached safety by a highly strung lieutenant who accused them both of cowardice, seemingly ignoring the badly injured man they’d brought with them. Probst had died shortly after, though Adolf had sat in wait on the sliver of French territory the German Empire still held until ordered to evacuate. Allegedly Friedrich had broken his interrogators nose and had been sent behind the line. He would have been immediately shot for that previously, though developments had made it clear that the army was now terrified of its own shadow.

It was a fear that was vindicated, and on the march back home Adolf had become aware of what had unfolded on those last days of the war. The sailors at Kiel had refused to be used as cannon fodder like he had been and had been organised enough to throw out the old regime entirely. All around Germany people had begun to follow their example, the war had been a devastating experience and it seemed that most now agreed with Adolf that those who had caused so many Germans to die for nothing would never be allowed to make the same mistake again. What he had often wondered about on the front was now appearing in front of his eyes, the soldiers were taking things over for themselves and the German people were following their lead.

He wasn’t sure what this phenomenon was exactly, he had heard lots of talk of communism recently though there seemed something far more organic about this German revolution and Lenin’s actions and decrees. He’d read that Marx had predicted it should be this way, a natural conclusion of the old system, and the theorist had been German after all. The people had outgrown the old system of conquest and elitism, it was too bad said system had had to take so many millions with it as it destroyed itself.

He was glad to be alive but he knew that surviving also carried new responsibilities. What exactly those were he wasn’t quite sure about but in this new world where everything seemed to be fluctuating who knew which opportunities might knock on door?

The figure who actually entered the barracks looked much like the rest of the soldiers, khaki-clad, weary, half-starved and half-dead. All that distinguished him from the rest was the red armband tied around his shirt and a fire in his eyes to match.

“Comrades,” he bellowed despite the fact he didn’t look as if he had such volume in him, “I’ve come with a proposal that needs to be decided upon. Its details can be discussed in time but a provisional decision needs to be made immediately.”

A look of confusion went through the shed as the “Comrade” took what appeared to be an unfolded cigarette packet out of his jacket and began to read from it.

“We, the soldiers of Bavaria, formally reject both the new authority of the Bavarian state and the Berlin provisional republic. He hereby declare allegiance to the Bavarian Soviet Republic and swear to defend it for the duration of the coming struggle.” The lofty didactics did not particularly resonate but most already knew what was going on. The communists had already taken over Munich by the time Adolf arrived. They had largely left the soldiers to themselves, but he supposed it could only have been a matter of time before they sent out feelers to see if they had mutual aims, though it was immediately clear that not everyone did.

“I ought to drag you out into the courtyard and kick the shit out of you, you treacherous wretch! It wasn’t bad enough that your sort lost us the war but now you want us to help dismantle what’s left of Germany?! Go to hell!”

Adolf didn’t know the man, but he knew such an argument had to be countered, nonetheless few spoke up against him. He realised that the opportunity may have come quicker than expected as he felt himself shouting amongst the murmurs

“Whose Germany do you think they’re dismantling? It certainly wouldn’t be ours!” The huddled solders turned to face Adolf, as did the man at the door. The men had had travelled with still sat, surprised the man who kept to himself had shouted, looking at him as he was a paralysed man who had just realised he could walk. There was no such confusion from the heckler.

“I fought for Germany for four years, I held off the froggies all that time, even if it meant not eating for days, even if meant using my dead comrade’s bodies as cover and you think that it was all for nothing? You honestly believe that millions of our fellow Germans died for nothing?!” There was snarl in his speech, his face contorted with rage, this was a man who had fought, there was no doubt about that but he was still wrong and despite the initial embarrassment of shouting down the barracks Adolf realised that there was no going back now.

“I also fought for Germany for four years on the front, I realise that you and I both have likely seen things that no man should ever, endured suffering that no-one should ever have to endure but why was that so? Those in charge, they’re the ones who put us through that hell! Those who believed us to be no better than the vermin that they made us live amongst in the trenches! The aristocracy, the fat cats, the high command, everyone who sent us to fight whilst they sat far behind the line in comfort! Those who sent us to fight for a lie! I don’t believe I fought for nothing, oh no, the clarity that I found on that front will never leave me and that rage has spread itself amongst the German people. Now it is time to act before they put us back in the cage!”

There were murmurs of approval, someone shouted their agreement, it seemed to show that the rage was infectious, at least amongst these defeat outcasts. Some were immune of course, and the heckler was certainly not placated.

“We were screwed all right, there’s no denying that. Idiots at the front and weaklings back home got us into this mess. Germany must be rebuilt but it must rise again in strength, I’m not going to be a party to this con, the communists will lead us to ruin and then the foreign powers will eat us alive!” There was agreement to this as well, albeit not by many of those who had seen eye to eye with Adolf. The man had gone silent now but he still stood, looking suspiciously, as Adolf composed himself. The hut was quiet now and he spoke slowly and quietly.

“I agree. Germany needs to be strong, we must face down our enemies even in temporary defeat but that can’t be accomplished by maintaining the current order of things. The Kaiser may be gone but his cronies remain, if they continue to lead this country then we will be no better than when they led us before and all the while they will continue to treat us as vermin. Kurt Eisner tried to talk to them, tried to work with them for a better Germany and their agents show him down! There can be no parley with these people, they will only see it as submission. It is time to set them straight!”

This time there was actual applause, the rant was incoherent but it had captured a mood. The anger was widespread and soon the entire hut that broken out into individual arguments, the heckler wading past several others to scream in Adolf’s face. The two hadn’t quite finished comparing who was braver and more patriotic based on their war experiences before the booming voice from the man at the door echoed around the room once again in an attempt to restore order.

“Fellow comrades…comrades! Gentlemen! Please!” There was silence at last, the heckler had been so close to Adolf that he could smell his greasy blonde hair but now even he turned round to listen.

“This idle bickering will get us nowhere, we need to act fast. We need to know your stance on the proposal.”

“Here’s a proposal, find a bridge and jump off it!” Adolf winced as the heckler screamed right past his ear, he got a few laughs.

“That won’t help anything!” Adolf was trying to address the crowd though he purposefully screamed right in the heckler’s face, the man wrinkled his brow and covered his nose. Is my breath that bad? Adolf pushed the thought away, it seemed as if he were some sort of spokesperson now.

“Let’s put it to a vote! Do we want to throw the comrade off a bridge or do we want the bastard’s who got us into this mess to throw us all off one?”

Without missing a beat, the man at the door responded with a request for hands in favour of the proposal. Adolf immediately raised his right arm, though at a slant to make sure he didn’t accidentally bat the heckler in the face and cause a brawl. It appeared that the majority of the hut had raised their hands in favour as well.

“That’s settled then!” The man at the door’s voice boomed again and he seemed even more confident than before. Adolf could feel him smiling at him, if just for a moment. “You’ll need to form a soldier’s council, you won’t take your orders from anyone but yourselves but the revolution will need discipline nonetheless. Would anyone like to put themselves forward as a provisional convener?”

“I nominate this bastard!” Adolf merely fell forwards to the ground as the heckler slapped him on the back. “He’ll see how smart he is when he doesn’t need to sit at the back and make speeches.” The snarl was still in the man’s voice but as he looked round Adolf could see that he was smiling at him now as well.

---

The painting is Picking Up The Banner by Gely Korzhev

 

[The Red]

'In periods of prosperity proletarian women’s movements have fought for higher wages and better jobs; in periods of economic crisis women have had to fight to retain the right to work.'

~ Marlene Dixon

​

‘The Spartacist Revolt was likely always doomed to failure in the January of 1919, however the stillborn revolution’s impact on the future direction of the KPD, and especially Hitler’s ideological and organisational outlook, leave it arguably more relevant today than it ever could have been in the early months of 1919.

On the 9th of November the peace campaigner and socialist Karl Liebknecht declared the birth of “the Socialist Republic of Germany”. Unlike Kurt Eisner’s bloodless coup in Bavaria it was not an immediate victory, for it had occurred almost simultaneously alongside Philip Schiedemann’s declaration of the provisional government that would eventually form the Weimar Republic. Nonetheless both Liebknecht and Luxemburg remained active in the period between the proclamation of their “Socialist Republic” and their eventual demise in trying to implement it by force, in doing so they built what would be their true impact on both Germany and eventually the world.

The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was born near the end of 1918. In its early form the party was very much an expression of the times and its aim was to ensure that the revolution that had emanated from Kiel would progress to a victorious conclusion. In this regard the republican institutions being woven by the social democrats and liberals were to be disregarded. The soldiers and workers councils that had sprung up across Germany were to the basis of the new society.

Decision making would be formed collectively from the lower level. Workers would be released from long hours and poor conditions by having the power over their workplaces and in shorter hours provided by the inclusion of all into the new economy. This ‘socialisation of labour’ would also eradicate class barriers and free women from bondage by putting them on an equal footing with men in both the economy and in wider society. It was an image that inspired many across the country, though inevitably it was one that caused sleepless nights amongst those who regarded the ‘flame of revolution’ as no more than a promise to engulf Germany in the same revolutionary chaos that was taking place in Russia.’

~ Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler’s First Revolution

---

The train was unbearably warm even amidst the winter misery, it was not the sort of experience that Gerda would have deemed cosy. She and her fellow passengers found themselves crammed together in the carriage like sardines and with each stop things seemed to get worse. She was glad to be relatively near the window amidst this crush, although it was so fogged over with condensation that she struggled to see anything of the outside world at all.

The train had been packed since it had left Essen and it seemed as if all the passengers were either laid off factory workers like her or soldiers who had made their way back from what had been the front. The atmosphere was tense, not helped by the fact that most of the soldiers still seemed to have their rifles and who knew what else. The traditions of men returning from the front were in play though amidst the defeat they took a bleak and spiteful nature.

There was no cat-calling, no flirting, no joviality whatsoever though she had felt herself being caressed and grabbed all over her body by invisible hands whenever the train had entered a tunnel. She had shouted the first few times only for no-one to react, several other women had screamed as well but whenever the light returned there were only grim looks and vacant expressions. Germany was undoubtedly a depressed and shaken nation but there was little sympathy amongst these men for the people who had made sure they were kept equipped and replenished on the front. Every sense in her felt a desperation to get off but she feared it would be no better on any other train. There seemed to be soldiers on the move everywhere and unemployed women with them.

The armistice had barely been declared before Krupp announced that there was no longer any place for female workers in the factory. The war was over and the men would soon be returning home to take up their old jobs. With two week’s pay and a hastily scrawled reference Gerda was told to get on her way.

She had sat idle for several days in her small flat, waiting for her a rent bill that she wouldn’t be able to pay, pondering going back to the farm and to her old pre-destined future. Then her old friend Christina had sent her a letter. Christina had left Essen in the spring beforehand, back when everyone had been so certain of victory that the Kaiser had declared a new public holiday to celebrate the inevitable drive towards Paris. Christina had run afoul of the celebrations based around that fact and an “unladylike” incident with Frau Heidemann on the Saturday shift had seen her being sent to another armaments factory in the outskirts of Berlin, in a twist of fate this had apparently been a blessing in disguise.

Whilst Krupp were busily laying off their women workers in Essen Christina’s letter told of companies in Berlin that were actively looking for them, Gerda suspected this was due to the fact they felt compelled to pay women less for the same work, though a job was a job. She had left Essen in high spirits, though the arduous journey was not helping to keep her upbeat. Now all she could wonder was whether her fellow women passengers were looking for work like her, going home, or simply getting out after it was rumoured that a French occupation force would be arriving shortly.

Eventually, after what seemed to be an eternity, Gerda pushed through the huddled passengers to emerge in Berlin. It did not take long for her to notice that the atmosphere in the city was noticeably different from Essen. The platform and station both seemed to be alive, such was the great number of activities ongoing amongst the large crowds both arriving and departing. Several different newspaper vendors shouted various and occasionally contradictory headlines about the events of the day whilst accordions and trumpets from street buskers joined them in a melody that, though confused and loud, seemed to convey to her an overwhelming sense of life and joy. Having barely left the station, Gerda had already fallen for the city.

Amongst the general noise and bustle a number of street stalls offered various food, trinkets, religious salvation and, most commonly, some sort of political message. The busiest had a banner that sat atop it declaring its message to those not within earshot.

‘THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF GERMANY WILL TRIUMPH WITH YOUR SUPPORT ‘​

The flag next to the banner was a vivid scarlet and there was something captivating in the way it fluttered in the breeze, the banner did not have the same effect though Gerda was curious all the same. She wasn’t aware that there was a ‘Socialist Republic of Germany’ though as she walked towards the group gathered around the stall she did recall that she had heard various mutterings in the latter stages of her work at Essen about communists and how they wanted to tear up the country. These had usually been derogatory though it was curious to see them in the flesh, why would someone proclaim such views if they were openly subversive?

The moment she stood trying to make sense of it was apparently enough to attract the attention of the stall. A woman not much older than her was walking towards her with a bunch of leaflets in her hand. There seemed to be an odd air of sincerity to her, she was dressed in dirty overalls as if she had just finished a shift in a factory though not nearly as worn out as most would be after a day’s work.

The woman asked Gerda if she was new in the city and Gerda responded in the affirmative, it must have been fairly obvious by the way that she had been looking about at the surroundings of the new environment. She introduced herself as Hilda, though Gerda had only just told her own name before she launched into a spiel about a women’s event that night that would explain their position on full employment and women’s. Gerda asked her who exactly “they” were but she seemed very short with detail, only that there would be food and drink and that it would be a good place to meet new people.

“You should definitely come”, Hilda broke out into an even larger smile with this further encouragement. Gerda felt that there was something off about this woman, she was obviously eager but the more positive she became the more relaxed she also appeared, as if she had just heard that everything was going to be alright forever. That alone counted for something in these troubled times.

Gerda didn’t have the heart to tell her she wasn’t interested, and promised to ask her friend when she got to her new lodgings. Soon she had plans for her first night in the new city, she just hoped that Christina wouldn’t react too badly to her press ganging them both into the KPD.

---

The painting is The Funeral by George Grosz

 

[The Red]

'And just because he's human, he doesn't like a pistol to his head,'

~ Ernst Busch, Das Einheitsfrontlied

​

‘Whilst Liebknecht and Luxemburg crafted their image of a new society, those in the newly formed republican establishment hurried to ensure that their dreams would be strangled in the cradle. The SPD leaders Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske were very much the principal actors in this suppression. Though both believed in socialism they maintained that capitalist society would have to transition towards a socialist economy gradually and legislatively to ensure the greatest possibly strength for the new society. To this effect they gave reassurances to the old aristocratic establishment and the industrial magnates that there would be no sudden seizures of industry or land by the new state.

At the same time they were allying themselves not only with the regular army but also the increasingly large numbers of Freikorps militia, discharged soldiers who had kept their weapons and remained active under increasingly reactionary leadership. Though the Freikorps incoherent political stances were almost always anathema to the social democrats and their formations were anything but disciplined both Ebert and Noske viewed them as the lesser evil, or at least a faction that would have to be temporarily brought on side.

Both men were broadly successful in their efforts, a reactionary counter-revolution was nipped in the bud and temporary stability had been assured for Germany’s new institutions to grow and for a coherent stance to be made towards the victorious entente but their strength was reliant on actors who were largely ambivalent or actively opposed to the republican project. In forging these alliances they had also alienated the far-left, who now took the fatal decision to take matters into their own hands.

Rosa Luxemburg had become somewhat disaffected by Lenin’s actions by January 1919 despite rhetorically advocating many of the measures that the Bolsheviks had implemented in those portions of Russia that they controlled, Liebknecht took a separate conclusion from events to the east and began to push for a workers uprising to topple the new republic and the old establishment. Said action took place in the German capital with the intention of spreading the revolution across the country yet little real success was achieved in this objective before the uprising was brutally crushed.

Ebert had been expecting such a move since Liebknecht’s declaration from the Royal Palace and having safely evacuated their provisional government to Weimar the Freikorps were ordered into Berlin to suppress the revolution. Though Social Democrats would later distance themselves from the atrocities that took place in their name at the time the leadership was ardent in their belief that the Spartacists had to be made an example of.

Gustav Noske, who had previously gone to Kiel in October to try to prevent an armed confrontation, now issued a decree that “everyone found fighting with arms in the hand against government troops is to be immediately shot”. No quarter was to be given in the ensuing bloodbath.’

~ Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler’s First Revolution

---

​

“Looks like this is it!” The man’s voice sounded frantic and as Gerda also peaked over the barrels and sandbags she realised why.

“Oh well, never did want to live forever”, the voice behind her was full of brevity but she could also hear the fear under it as well, they were all afraid. The sight coming down the street had assured that.

Gerda had heard stories about the metallic monsters that had dominated the battlefields of France but she had never expected to see one on the streets of Berlin, let alone gradually advancing against her and her friends but, then again, it had been an odd couple of weeks.

She had met many of those already dead or about to die shortly after that first KPD meeting on the day of her arrival in Berlin. It had turned out that Christina was happy to go along with her and they had both joined the new party shortly after. Initially they did very little, Christina had got her a job at a textiles factory that was still employing women and outside of work they had spent much of their free time making the most of the capital with its numerous bars, parks, and cabarets. There seemed to be meetings all the time and they had attended as many as they could, many were related to their work in the textile factory and although Gerda didn’t consider herself much of a speaker she found many of her colleagues willing to see what the party was about.

There was a political atmosphere in the air and even outside of the party their participation in the workers council at the textile factory left her wanting to know more about what the realities of what the party promised, the liberation of women in society with better working conditions and shorter hours for all. In the practical side of this she had made a name for herself on the council and in a matter of weeks found herself earning extra money in organising for the party, helping to make banners and flags for what she assumed would be some sort of mass protest. She had already heard weaponry being discussed and had seen a few rifles but she had thought little of it. Given that so many soldiers had come back with their rifles it was no longer a surprise to see people carrying them about.

It was in the middle of the night that Christina and herself were woken up with a knock on the door and one of their comrades standing there informing her that the revolution was moving on to a more assertive stage, the communists were seizing control of Berlin and both women were now expected to be a part of it.

She wasn't quite able to enjoy those few initial days of peace, she had barely slept in doing party work trying to help the new administrators of those parts of the city that were in their hands, nonetheless she was motivated. The Socialist Republic of Germany would soon be a reality, something she had continued to reassure herself of when the first sounds of gunfire could be heard in the outskirts of the city.

As the tank rolled onto Leipzigstrasse where she had helped build the temporary barricade she noticed that it had a large skull and crossbones on its side, like an old pirate ship out of a book of stories, the large numbers of men huddled behind her wore their helmets and uniforms from the front, as many of them ran out to find cover in the alleys and the broken shopfronts. A few shots barked out from her comrade's small collection of rifles but none of them hit anything important. It was clear that these men knew what they were doing, Gerda wouldn’t have said the same for those on her side and she couldn’t escape the dread that they had badly misjudged this situation. She lacked a rifle of her own as she had no experience in firing one though she feared that that was the same for those bearing them.

It was ironic to think that only a few months beforehand she was helping to make sure the men advancing up the steeet had a ready supply of ammunition, now they were advancing alongside the giant machine to murder her and everyone else. She couldn’t help pondering whether or not it would be a bullet that she had pressed that would kill her, it was a thought she had to cut short as several bullets slammed into the sandbags and the stone wall behind her.

She shook the dust off her coat and reached for the kitchen knife she had brought from Christina’s flat, she didn’t know where her friend was in the city or even if she was still alive but Gerda had resolved that if she had to die it wouldn’t be out of a lack of being able to defend herself. If the barricade was going to be stormed then she would go out trying to stab something important.

As the firing ended she tried to peak out of the barricade again, only her a large hand to force her head down. She turned to see one of her comrades, a man named Friedrich staring at her with a determined look in his eyes.

“These bastards have got us outgunned, they’ll cut us to pieces if we try to run now but you should go, you don’t have a weapon and you’re no good to us without one.”

She protested as more bullets ricocheted off the wall behind them. She lost her words as one of her comrades was sent flying backwards, one had gone straight through his eye. Gerda had seen several people die in the last few days and she couldn’t help feel more annoyed that the man didn’t at least have a rifle for her to take. Friedrich didn’t even seem to notice.

“The movement won’t die today, not if there are still comrades left alive to avenge us, there’ll be other opportunities, believe me!"

He tried to laugh only to cough on the mist of dust. Everyone seemed to be shouting now, Gerda couldn’t see but it appeared the monster's cannon was beginning to move.

Friedrich told her to run and without thinking she did, ducking as more bullets surely aimed at her screamed over her head. She ran down in alleyway into a small street where civilians huddled together waiting for the nightmare to end, they beckoned her to come inside though their calls were drowned out by a nearby explosion.

Glass shattered, a smoke plume began to appear behind and Gerda only began to run again when the screams of her comrades began to fill the air.

---

Youtube have unfortunately taken down kampflier.de and Ernst Busch's english version of Das Einheitsfrontlied with it but the German ones nice to listen to as well.

The painting depicts the crushing of the Chicago commune in Jack London's The Iron Heel, unfortunately I couldn't find an artist but it's not too uncommon for it to be used as the book's cover art so I'm going to keep trying.

​

 

[The Red]

"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"

~ Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

​

Though the Spartacists were in high spirits going into their clash with the Freikorps they were largely made up of civilians who lacked adequate weapons and training. The Freikorps on the other hand were both heavily armed and comprised entirely of veterans. Though the revolutionaries fought bravely there was little doubt in the inevitable outcome of the battle and within a short time of the Freikorps entering the city the revolt was crushed. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were shot without trial prior to their bodies being unceremoniously thrown into the Landwehr canal.

Even with order nominally restored in the capital, the provisional government no longer felt it safe to be the birthplace of their new republic. The city of Weimar would have that honour not only out of the virtue of boasting some of Germany’s greatest historical artists but also because it was securely in government hands.

It was hoped that new elections would ensure future stability, and though the capital still bore the visible scars of revolution Berlin went to the polls alongside the rest of the country to elect a constitutional assembly that would temporarily act as the Reichstag until the new republic was formally established. This first election was a disaster for the far-left, though the resulting chaos in Bavaria cannot be entirely ascribed to the communists feeling that liberal democracy wasn’t working for them.

The traditionally conservative region had been run by Kurt Eisner and his far-left colleagues in the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) since November. Eisner had not been elected, he had asserted himself as being that man in charge when revolutionary activity had swept Germany and the Bavarian establishment had been willing to accept his leadership in exchange for a peaceful regime. Eisner’s time as Prime Minister had promised great things but was largely uneventful, alienating many on the left whilst the right remained greatly suspicious of the socialist politician. Some radical right-wingers suspected that Eisner was taking his orders from Russia and developed plans to remove him forcefully. No conspiracy has ever been conclusively proven but Eisner’s eventual assassins were well known for their anti-socialist and extreme nationalist views.

Ironically for the right, their caricature of Eisner as a chaos inducing communist had no basis in reality though in assassinating him they provoked the forces they were attempting to silence. Eisner had kept the peace throughout his tenure but his death would spark a far more potent revolutionary force that would be Adolf Hitler’s first taste of revolutionary action.

Though largely under Eisner’s control, Bavaria had taken part in the assembly elections that would unofficially be the first in the Weimar Republic’s history. Despite their incumbency, the USPD were hammered coming far behind their more moderate conservative and social democratic opponents. In another feat of irony, Eisner had no intention of ignoring the result and was actually on his way to officially resign from power when he was gunned down in the by right-wing radicals. In trying to remove socialism from Bavaria they had only convinced many that the communist’s revolutionary agenda was the only true democracy available to the region.

Eisner’s murder would turn out to be the opening shots of the Bavarian revolution.

Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler's First Revolution

---

​

Peter hadn’t been enjoying school recently, it seemed that the teachers didn’t seem to know anything more than he did all of a sudden.

Maths hadn’t changed much but history and even religious studies had taken on a sombre note all of a sudden. It had been made clear that the Kaiser was gone and that had scared him at the time, now he was just confused and it seemed almost everyone else was as well. All except his mother, who had kept up her cheery demeanour in spite of everything seeming to change around his family.

Today however, as she came to pick him up, he noticed that same look of fear in her face that the headmaster had had when he informed the school assembly that the war was over. As they walked back home she didn’t speak and neither did he, even though he wanted to complain that she was grasping his hand too tightly. He feared she was angry with him, even amongst the red banners everywhere that made him hope there was a fair in town. As they came closer to the house he began to realise why she was anxious.

The men standing outside were individuals Peter had never seen before though by his mother’s attitude towards them he knew they meant nothing good. The fact his father wasn’t to be seen increased his alarm and he suddenly felt like he wanted to cry.

Peter held back the tears alongside his wish to tell his mother that he really didn’t want to go closer to these men but he remained silent all the same. He could see that she was scared too and didn’t wish to worry her further though it seemed as if she had sensed it regardless.

Before they went in she knelt down in the courtyard and spoke to him face to face, she told him that Munich had been taken over by bad men and that whilst they would be gone soon he must stay close to his mother and father at all times and try to act as if everything was normal. He held his mother’s hand tightly as they walked past the odd soldiers at the door. How could they be bad men if they were wearing German uniforms? Could it have been something to do with the red armbands they were all wearing? It wasn’t long before Peter found out.

There was a great deal of noise and clutter in the house, as if the Christmas decorations were being packed up all over again, except none of the household staff where to be seen. Instead it seemed as if the house was full of vagrants, the sort of people his mother and father would pull him away from when they would go walking in Munich. He had been warned that they were dangerous but they seemed well behaved enough, albeit with several more of the soldiers watching them as they moved his family’s chairs and tables about the house. Amidst this confusion he could smell a rich soup wafting out from the living room, where his father and another one of the soldiers now emerged. His father’s face was red, like when he raised his voice but he looked more distressed than angry. His eyes opened wider upon seeing Peter and he ran over to hug his son.

“Don’t worry Peter, everything’s going to be alright, these people are just going to be here for a little while and-“

“What a fine young lad you have Herr Klompf!” The odd soldier who had been next to his father interrupted him and knelt down to speak to Peter. The man was smiling yet there was something in his eyes that didn’t match happiness. They seemed full of rage despite his perfectly calm demeanour.

“You must be very excited to meet all your new friends my young comrade!” Before Peter could ask what he might meant his father put a hand on his shoulder, his mother held both of them close.

“We haven’t had a chance to tell him yet.” The solider looked up at his father but continued to kneel and quickly looked back to Peter with that same odd smile. As he introduced himself as “Comrade Adolf” Peter realised how terrible the man’s breath was but he worried about how this odd man might take that so kept silent as the man told him about how he’d be sharing his house with a lot of people who didn’t have houses to make sure that everyone was looked after.

Peter wasn’t sure what to say, he had been taught in school that Christian’s must always think about other people and share things with those who didn’t have anything but now he was scared. A lot of the people around him were bigger than him and he was worried that if he shared his toys then he wouldn’t get them back. He tried to ask the man if he would be allowed to keep some of his toys for himself but could only whimper. Soon he was in tears with his mother consoling him. The man called Adolf walked away.

He didn’t seem to care.

---

The scene pictured above is Scrooge being directed to his future by The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come from 1951's Scrooge.

 

[The Red]

"...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?”

― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Eisner’s assassin was an Austrian man named Anton Arco-Valley, like Hitler he had moved to a Germany which he believed to be his true fatherland, only to see his ideas crumble in the wake of German defeat in the First World War. Whilst Hitler was disillusioned with his old beliefs about the German nation, Arco-Valley believed that the German people had betrayed said beliefs rather than the other way around and that Eisner was one of the most prominent culprits. Despite his own Jewish heritage on his mother’s side, Arco-Valley also made it clear that Eisner’s Jewishness made it impossible for him to be German and, in the young fanatic’s warped mind, unfit to live.

Eisner would become a martyr. Prior to the death of Bavaria’s temporary leader the communists and other radical elements had been preparing for a far more definitive solution to Bavaria’s problems than those proposed by what they had seen as the fairly tepid governance from the USPD and the decrees from Weimar, the latter of which they were actively hostile to. Eisner’s government had protected private property and many of the trappings of the capitalist system, but in the wake of his death his memory would be used for far more radical reforms. The communists, led primarily in Bavaria by Eugene Levine, realised that they may not get another opportunity.

The communists in Munich and across southern Germany had been caught off guard by the three events that had shaken German society that January, the death of the former Kaiser, the establishment of the new republic, and the Spartacists failed revolution in Berlin. The first of these held largely symbolic value but was significant all the same. The face of the old establishment was gone and would not be returning, the grave being far more distant than the central Netherlands. The establishment of the Republic and the failure of the Spartacists to supplant were more alarming pieces of news, leaving the KPD to consider whether it could fare any better than their fallen comrades in Berlin. Levine had actually taken charge as a calming influence, distancing the Bavarian members of the KPD from the more radical anarchists who wished for an immediate and violent revolution.

Despite a period of some hesitancy, Eisner’s death created the motivation required to attempt to finish the revolution begun by Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The news from Eastern Europe served as further inspiration as Hungary collapsed under the revolutionary wave engulfing Russia. It seemed, temporarily, as if the KPD had gotten its second wind. By early April almost all of Bavaria was under communist control.

Though Rosa Luxemburg and many of her adherents had partially distanced themselves from Lenin in the weeks leading up to the Spartacist revolt, Levine saw the man only as a hero and an example for all revolutionaries everywhere. Lenin sent instruction on how the newly christened Bavarian Soviet Republic should proceed and the new government was eager to follow his advice to the letter.

Lenin’s instructions contained ambitious programs for the socialisation of industry, the commandeering of all motor transport, the implementation of a wealth tax, and the appropriation of housing for the homeless. In regards to this final point, the young Hitler found his role in socialist Bavaria.


~ Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler’s First Revolution


---


The river seemed to glisten as the bright sun of spring shone down upon it. The flow and motion of the river was far older than the bridge George was standing on, not to mention those who joined him, whether to cross or to simply admire the beauty of the scene. Families and couples rested on the sands of each bank as if everything was entirely normal, the river was as much part of their lives as it had been for the Red Army soldiers now in possession of it. They were representatives of a philosophy that claimed to have its roots in a history even older than the river, but unlike the calm erosion of a river bed, George had found himself fighting for a cause that aimed to destroy the old order in one fell swoop.

George wasn’t sure how to feel at the moment, everything seemed to have gone so fast. It hadn’t seemed too long ago that he had despised the communists and now he was doing their dirty work for them. It was hard to get his head around it, though he knew he could ascribe much of that to the fact that everything seemed to be in flux at the moment, regardless of whether you were a part of something or not.

The front had been hell, death and misery everywhere, though at least there was some sort of consistency to the endless offence and defence he and his comrades had been put through. Back then he knew what he was fighting for, now he wasn’t sure whether he would be strung up as a traitor tomorrow or even whether he’d deserve it. George had feared that Germany would have changed when he returned but he didn’t expect to be a part of that change. He had come back home full of hate for the revolutionaries that he suspected had been responsible for them losing the war. Though he hadn’t been blind to the setbacks on the front but they had still been on foreign soil when the war was over and as such it was hard to believe that Germany needed to throw herself at the mercy of her former enemies.

On this basis George had been ready to fight the communist who had knocked on the barrack door to ask them all to join a cause he believed was responsible for Germany’s current plight and though he had eventually gone along with the rest of his fellow soldiers it hadn’t been without argument, especially against one loud mouthed private with bad breath and crazed eyes. He had secretly wanted the whole effort to fail and looked for a way to disappear before the Freikorps inevitably arrived but he had been unable to deny the good they were doing as a unit.

Rather than killing Frenchmen they were now forcing the fat cats to hand over food they had stockpiled for themselves to the hungry Germans who were going without. Even better, they were informing tenants would no longer be paying their extortionate rents, in front of the landlord. Telling workers that they now owned their factories was a task that was especially pleasing. It was a fever dream, but he had never smiled so much in his life. Not in the last four years at least.

The war had scarred him, he supposed it had scarred most people who had fought in it. So many had come back to Germany feeling angry and confused as to how their sacrifice had been for nothing. George felt that he was still confused but at least he was active.

At least he would be until the Freikorps came for him.

He was not a member of the KPD but he attended meetings all the same, as Bavaria’s constitutional position had been flown into flux, national papers were hard to get hold of and it seemed that the local press had become increasingly escapist and parochial. The news that could be gleaned from the communists talked of the success of the revolution in Bavaria yet inevitable reactions panic from the new German government.

George had hated the social democrats and the communists in equal measure as he had returned home but now he couldn’t deny that the latter were at least attempting to get things done. It seemed that the new republic’s leadership were more content to sit back and let the Freikorps do their dirty work for them, as they had done in Berlin. The martyrdom of the Spartacists seemed to be one of the few things that all KPD members could agree on.

Even as he wondered if he would have to return to fighting once more, there was a buzz in the air. A sound he hadn’t heard since the panicked retreat from the entente advance. He had never taken much notice of the war in the air, there had been enough on the ground to worry about. The entente had changed that in the final days of the war when they had used more planes than ever before to create a sort of hovering artillery barrage. It had been terrible, and though these planes were unmistakably of German design he wasn’t sure whether the government would now be using aircraft against him and comrades.

No bombs fell, only pieces of paper that fluttered down to earth in their thousands. Many were hypnotised by the sight, the pieces fluttering down like large snow-drops in spite of the beautiful clear sky. As they fell to the ground people ran to pick one up and

George joined them, all novelty was lost as he read what the planes had dispersed.

“BOLSHEVISM WILL LEAD US ALL TO RUIN.”

The rest of the pamphlet followed very much the same themes, George and his comrades were all murderers apparently, agents of chaos who had set out to destroy Germany. George wouldn’t have been surprised if they were being proclaimed as demons sent by the devil himself in some quarters, he was no more shocked that these claims were coming from the provisional republic, made up of those who had sold Germany down the river in the first place.

In much the same thread, he scrunched up the propaganda and threw it in the Isar.

If the weaklings wanted an agent of chaos, then he was only too happy to oblige.

---

A Merry Christmas to you all!

 

[The Red]

“We Communists are all corpses on holiday”

~ Eugen Levine

​

Though there had been a great deal of sound and fury from the KPD in Bavaria there was a great deal of work to be done. When Levine had arrived in Munich he had found a form of anarchy reigning, the communists claimed to be implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat when in fact workers still toiled for long hours in the factories for little to no wages whilst thousands of homeless shivered in the streets.

With Lenin’s instructions to hand, a vast program of expropriation and socialisation began. It was an aim that never really saw its end but was nonetheless pursued with a great deal of vigour by, amongst others, Adolf Hitler.

Having spent a few, largely idle, weeks representing his regiment on the soldiers council, Hitler had grown bored and as the chance came up to work in the more proactive side of the revolution he jumped at the chance. Working in the offices on Munich’s old police station, the ‘Housing and Resettlement Council’ soon came under Hitler’s notional control as he pushed continuously to expand its remit as the revolution developed

The Conservatives and Social Democrats who had fled the city had taken steps to disrupt the supply of food, medicine and other essential supplies into the areas of communist control. In an attempt to counter this Hitler ordered the round-up of any available food to give a soup kitchen element to the larger buildings being socialised by the Council. A few angry encounters with those who refused to share their homes with strangers also brought an enforcement element in, with Hitler commissioning troops to forcefully remove homeowners who resisted from their premises.

Arguments about the extent of these removals continue on this day, though there is a consensus around some facts. Hitler never ordered an execution on behalf of the Council, that was too great an expansion of his remit even for the opportunistic ideologue. Nonetheless, many beatings reportedly took place, arguably placing a further strain on Bavaria’s already stretched medical services.

These activities in the brief lifetime of the Bavarian Soviet Republic gained Hitler notoriety amongst the Bourgeoisie establishment but did gain him some popular support amongst the local populace. In a society where horses were being slaughtered to stave off the shortages, many non-homeless people came to his soup kitchens were many would later explain that he helped pass the time by regaling them with war stories and Grimm fairy tales and occasionally some futurist poetry whilst encouraging others to share their own talents. Though he would be very critical of much of the organisation of the Republic in his writings, Hitler nonetheless mentioned his civic work as ‘the happiest time of my life’ in Our Struggle.

His work did not escape the notice of the politburo, first in Bavaria and eventually the national KPD. Though he remained a relative unknown the name ‘Hitler’ soon became one of those that many German communists were intrigued by.

Geoffrey Corbett, Hitler's First Revolution

---

The basis of the barricade was fairly ramshackle but they had done their best. Adolf thought so at least, the comrades around him made rather doubtful of any protection it might afford. It was hard to understand why it was so hard to fill the ranks with anyone who had some sort of military experience. The war had only been over for a few months!

Those veterans that had joined the ranks of the KPD were doing their best to try and achieve some basic training but cohesion was difficult when drills and ranks were subject to ideological disputes, though the most recent news had silenced the squabbles to some degree. Thousands of Freikorps had been spotted making incursions into the territory of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, it wouldn’t be long before they realised how weak the revolutionaries were and pushed on directly to Munich.

Adolf had been going through the registers of the remaining spacious and heated buildings in Munich when the news had come, that all veterans were required for the immediate defence of the city. The thought was initially alarming, the stories of the Spartacist’s failure and the subsequent atrocities of the Freikorps in Berlin had hung heavily amongst many. Adolf was dedicated to freeing Germany from the old elites but he wasn’t quite sure that he was ready to martyr himself for that cause.

As he had walked past the disgruntled Bavarian civil servants, those who still hung around the housing office even with the red flag fluttering above it, and out into the rainy day he even considered whether it might be best for him to disappear before the forces of reaction arrived.

There was no dishonour in retreating from superior odds after all, there were many times during the war where he and his comrades and fled to fight another day, why would this be different if the rumours were true about an army of tens of thousands preparing to engage their handful of fighters?

It had only been a temporary thought but it had dwelled in his mind due to the scene that had stifled it. Adolf hadn’t seen Munich this frantic since the pro-war hysteria in 1914 that he had been a part of. Now the battle would be coming to the city and as the gossip of the approaching Freikorps spread throughout the urban areas large groups of people were either heading home or hurrying to the shops to stock up on supplies. The blonde and unkempt figure he had spotted was a fair distance away amidst the rabble of people but the heckler had also spotted Adolf. The man from the barracks that Adolf had argued with, a man who was now grinning with a vicarious glee.

Adolf briefly wondered if this was a look of happiness, he had said he wanted the revolution to fail after all, but only a moment later he raised his left arm into the air and clenched his fist. The smile was on his face still but there was a glimmer of something in his eyes that Adolf could make out even his far away.

It looked like determination.

A moment later the man was gone but the scene had removed any doubts from Adolf’s mind, if that blowhard had decided to fight then so would he, to the death if necessary.

Adolf was experienced but he knew this would be a new type of fight all the same. There had been very little urban fighting in France, most towns covered by the frontline had been so badly hammered by the artillery of each side that it was hard to tell that anyone had lived there at all. Munich hadn’t been visited by war and as such it had several advantages that could benefit a defence, tall buildings could become sniper’s nests, public squares could become death traps, every block of flats could be converted into a fortress. Adolf had been confident that even with a numerical disadvantage, Munich could become the graveyard of the Freikorps.

His suggestions had fallen on deaf ears all the same and many of his military peers had subsequently complained that similar proposals were being ignored. It seemed that whilst the politburo was eager to embrace military experience, they had remained wary of any actual military input into the new society, even in matters regarding defence. There seemed to be a naïve confidence amongst some that confrontation with the Freikorps could be avoided altogether. It was a nice thought but Adolf felt it was far too optimistic.

As such he was helping to construct a barricade of boxes and barrels that had more of a place in the revolutions of 1848 than against a foe that reportedly that armoured cars and tanks that would smash through them with little effort. He had complained once again about this strategy only to be warned about demoralising the men by his comrades. It was a dressing down that carried weight, there were rumours that suspected traitors were being imprisoned and that some had already been executed alongside some of the other counter-revolutionaries. Adolf shed no tears for those guilty of oppressing the people but he was wary of coming across as a wrecker all the same. The barricade would have to do.

It was not an ideal location, Pacell street ran parallel to Maxburg and Maffei street on either side with the Marienplatz behind all three. Even if his men had howitzers to destroy the Freikorps from afar they were still far too exposed to encirclement. Nonetheless, this granted one opportunity at least. Adolf had ordered “lookouts” to be posted in the Hotel Bayerischer to track enemy movements, when the time came they would pour fire down on the enemy. Though he had personally moved homeless families into the hotel, he was not particularly concerned for them, the Freikorps were hardly likely to burn one of the most aristocratic hotels in Munich.

It would not be enough to help his hopeless barricade for long but it would be something, he only wished he could have put more of his ideas into action.

Perhaps, if he survived this, there would be another chance.

---

Hope everyong enjoyed the holidays, back to regular updates now!

 

[The Red]

'My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.'

~ Ani Difranco

​

Although the Bavarian Soviet Republic’s revolution was of a far larger extent to the Spartacist’s revolt in Berlin, a combination of distraction, ignorance, and eventually over-caution on behalf of the Weimar government had stalled any meaningful response till the late spring.

Though a communist insurgency taking over large parts of an entire region would have been enough to cause major panic in the governments of most nations, the provisional republic remained focused on the formation of its own institutions and how the new regime would face the victorious Allied powers who were already busily redrawing the map of Europe in the wake of the First World War.

The persistence of revolutionary Bavaria and the government’s distraction proved to be a boon for those who had survived the massacre of the Spartacists and their allies across Germany. Hitler would famously remark later on in his life that had Weimar chosen to fully crush the KPD in this moment of weakness it is unlikely that the party could have ever rebuilt itself.

Nonetheless, for a brief period it did seem as though the party might simply wither away. Given the sorry state of the KPD in the early months of 1919 is perhaps understandable why contemporary Weimar politicians saw no need to put more stress on the proclaimed liberalism of the new state by removing a newly formed parent. Regardless of its complicity in the Bavarian revolution, the KPD was given space to rebuild and reorganise. It is also possible that this apprehension by Weimar was strengthened by the party’s electoral irrelevance.

Amidst two revolutions and a lack of local organisation across much of the country, the KPD did not run in the 1919 elections. Officially they rejected the ballot as an endorsement of a bourgeois state though plans for future Reichstag elections were already underway even whilst the Bavarian revolutionaries were still executing “gendarmes and saboteurs” and preparing for the government’s inevitable response.

~ Andrea Clark, “The Revolutionary Hammer”: A History of the RFB


---


The square was one of Berlin’s rowdiest, though Gerda was keen to keep her head down all the same. Despite the fact that the Spartacists had been defeated months beforehand, the agents of the republic remained paranoid about any potential resurgence. Though she hoped that the stories of comrades disappearing were exaggerated she did not wish to put the rumours to the test. It certainly wouldn’t be the worst thing she’d seen supporters of the republic do.

The Freikorps had been adamant that the Spartacists would never rise up again in the wake of their victory and that meant that taking prisoners was to be frowned upon. Even after the last elements of resistance had been declared crushed there had been days of gunshots in the city. It seemed that anyone who had fought for the ‘Socialist Republic’ was being executed on the spot if they had been captured. Gerda had jumped whenever she had heard even a faint gunshot, imagining that it could have been Christina, or Hilda, or perhaps herself. She couldn’t sleep for the anxiety, anything she ate would immediately come back up when another gunshot rang out. For a brief time, she was even afraid that her fear of death would lead to a form of self-destructive paranoia that would do her in anyway.

Gerda felt better now, but she continued to watch her back for recently that had been good for her health. The Freikorps were gone but their atrocities continued to hang over the city, and that was even if there weren’t any plain clothes agents lurking around her now. She heard they had even infiltrated the party, if that was true Gerda would have preferred them in their shabby uniforms from the war they had lost. At least that way she would know who was after her. Discharged soldiers continued to fill the streets but these men weren’t Freikorps, they were trying to rebuild their lives only to realise that their former comrades in arms had left their homes in ruins.

Those who had selflessly taken her in during the chaos had reassured her that there was nothing to worry about. The Linges were refreshingly upbeat in that sense. The old couple were far from devout communists though they seemed to hate the Freikorps even more. Both of them had called out and waved her towards them as she had hid from the Freikorps advance and when the soldiers had arrived at the door they had fed them a made-up story about how there were no communists hiding in the flat but that they had seen some running down the lane. They explained to her later that day that they hated bullies but suspected the Spartacists would have been just as bad as the Freikorps given half the chance. Conversely, she had found her own belief in the ideology strengthened by them. Perhaps it was because she had been so much of a nervous wreck that they couldn’t really distinguish her by any other aspect of her personality but, nonetheless, she was ‘the Spartacist girl’ until the mood was considered calm enough in the city for her to leave their small flat.

The city had become demoralised, that was clear. It was hard for Gerda to think she had barely lived there for a couple of months as she walked down its streets, so much had changed since then. Though the bustle continued, it was hard to ignore evidence of the failed revolution and even in areas where there had been no fighting it seemed as if everyone was downtrodden.

Revolutions could sweep up many sceptics in the initial burst of enthusiasm and zeal, in the same way their defeats could depress even those who despised everything about their aims. It was hard to tell if the people truly were sad to see the defeat of the Spartacists or whether she was simply projecting her own sadness. She had to believe the former, or else she would be entirely lost.

Gerda had never felt particularly evangelical about communism, but she now realised that her actions had stuck her with the ideology. The worldview of class struggle had come true on the streets, those trying to kill her were trying to kill her for her beliefs, but more importantly they were trying to crush the strength of all workers. They were cogs in a machine, not to get ideas above their station.

She thought back to her rural life and its inevitable trajectory, her disappointment at being laid off and her initial excitement of going to Berlin, she was already set on staying but she realised that if she abandoned what she had fought for then ultimately the decision wouldn’t be her own, regardless of whether or not she kept her head down. Communism wasn’t just a nice idea, it was her salvation, it had to be.

For so long her life had felt directionless because she was never truly in control of it, she realised it couldn’t ever be that way again. Was this the “self-actualisation” she had heard people talk about at meetings? She wasn’t sure but she would soon, she would read everything she could, and help rebuild the party in the image of all those people who, like her, needed to take control of their lives.

This would be her direction in life from now, there was no going back.

Gerda was smiling to herself, making her stand out in the depressed city. She realised that in all of her reflection that she had actually forgotten where Christina’s flat was. She had stopped to get her bearings, though as she froze she saw a poster about Bavaria, freshly plastered. Bavaria, a land she wasn’t much aware of than it being pastoral, catholic and now apparently in the midst of a far more extensive revolution than anything the Spartacists had achieved. It would undoubtedly be torn down whenever a policeman spotted it, but for now it gave her hope.

Gerda couldn’t help herself in life with nothing to believe in, even if her principles were all that she had. She would continue to fight for a better life, or die trying.

---

The photomontage is 'Made for a Party' by Hannah Hoch.

​