Witness to the German Revolution by Serge Victor

Author:Serge, Victor [Serge, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608461721
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2011-07-26T07:00:00+00:00

This bourgeoisie feels strong enough to refuse any compromise with the democratic middle classes and with social democracy. It wants a military decision within a short space of time: the crushing by force of arms of the working class of central Germany. It has revolted against the Berlin government only because it is still striving to delay the advent of social war.

In Saxony: Russian intervention and “Tartar News”

The break between Munich and Berlin is a victory for red Saxony: it would not have happened if successive Berlin governments had told General Müller “to act with the utmost severity,” which was what was demanded by Bavaria, Stinnes’ party,152 the nationalist press and even the papers controlled by Herr Stresemann. Faced with the determination to resist on the part of the Saxon workers, the ministers in Berlin hesitated. Perhaps not for long. Perhaps long enough to cause their downfall.

For red Saxony is defending itself well. On October 18, in the Dresden Landtag, Herr Zeigner made quite a peremptory response to General Müller’s ultimatum: he made his revelations about the “black Reichswehr.”153

The trial of the German National People’s Party in the Leipzig High Court has revealed the existence of this clandestine army commanded by Generals Ludendorff, Lettow-Vorbeck and Maercker (the Maercker of the Kapp putsch). For months, students have been receiving military instruction in the Königsbrück camp. The same thing has been going on at Küstrin where, moreover, seven political assassinations have taken place within a short time. Stralsund, Döberitz and Lubben are other centers for “black” military detachments. The same thing in Pomerania, Silesia, Mecklenburg. In Leipzig, fifteen hundred young men from the “black” Reichswehr have just been incorporated into the official army… “There would be no point in revealing more,” Herr Zeigner has said. “France has been fully informed about this,” he added.

Poincaré’s France certainly sees no disadvantage in arming the German bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

For his part, the Communist finance minister in Saxony, our comrade Böttcher, has taken measures against food shortage. He had undertaken a survey which showed that seven hundred thousand inhabitants of Saxony—manual and white-collar workers, peasants, people on small unearned incomes, pensioners, war wounded—amounting to one seventh of the total population, were in such difficulties that it was the urgent duty of the community to give them assistance. The banks and industrial circles refused any assistance to the state with a view to the organization of substantial assistance to the poor, so Böttcher turned to the International Workers’ Aid, which immediately made available to him two thousand tons of corn; then he was in contact with the Soviet government from which he hopes to receive within the next month, in exchange for manufactured goods, twenty thousand tons of cereals. This will be, we believe, the first Soviet intervention in Germany. The intervention of Russian corn against hunger and fascism.

Alarmed by the determination and skill of the workers’ government, the German bourgeoisie is concentrating all its forces against it. Some major newspapers, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Tag, Zeit,

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