Making History

POLITICAL HISTORY

Party animals

‘The Sterne Ker Brewery?’ Gloder repeated, striving to keep the contemptuous disbelief from his voice.

Mary smiled. ‘This is Munich, Rudi. Everything that happens in Munich has something to do with beer, you know that. Hoffman’s three thousand radicals met in the Lowenbrau. Levine began his April revolution in a beer hall, the unemployed Augsburg scum met in the Kind Keller, the last of the Jew Bolsheviks were shot in a beer hall. It is only fitting, after all: the politics of this city run on beer just as the war ran on petrol.’

‘And why should I spend a hot evening listening to yet another gathering of prankish professors and crazed Theists?’

‘Rudi, my department is short of men I can trust. I need reliable Vertrauensmanner, spokesmen, observers and organisers who can talk sense to all these groups and spot the dangerous ones. Only last week there was an ex-corporal whose dependability I could have sworn to — Karl Lenz, Iron Cross with Oak Leaf, impeccable references from his Brigade Major. I needed a man to go to Lechfeld, which we believed to be Bolshevistically and Spartacistically contaminated…don’t scowl, that’s the current jargon, not my fault…so I sent this Lenz as part of an Aufkldrungskommando to speak about the Terms and explain the army’s views on political groupings. Turns out he was secretly some sort of Red himself. Lauterbach tells me he persuaded half the people gathered there that Lenin was a better bet than Weimar. You see the kind of thing I’m up against.’

Gloder put up a protesting hand. ‘All right, all right, I’ll go. I shan’t promise to enjoy myself, but I’ll go.’

‘Find out who these people are, don’t address them or make them feel they’re being spied on. Just appraise them for me, find out what makes them tick, eh?’

So Rudi found himself later that evening, strolling along the Promenadestrafle and whistling to himself. He glanced amusedly at the slogans and drawings on the walls as he passed.

‘Rachel’

Yes, thought Rudi. Revenge. How politically acute. How mature.

‘Denkt an Graf Arco-Valley, ein Deutscher Held!’

Rudi looked around him to the other side of the street and recalled that this had been the very spot where Count Arco-Valley had drawn his pistol and shot the Jew Communist Kurt Eisner dead with two bullets to the head. A cold day in February it had been, more snow on the ground than had been seen in Munich for decades. Rudi had been standing not far away and was nearly struck himself by one of the three retaliatory shots fired at Arco-Valley by Eisner’s bodyguard. Then he had found himself placed in the laughably ironic situation of being forced to help Eisner’s Jewish secretary keep at bay a band of Spartacists and assorted red scum who wanted to beat the wounded Arco-Valley to death there and then. Rudi had travelled with the dying Count in a battered police-van to a surgeon (another Jew) who had managed to keep the patient alive long enough to deliver his rambling speech of self-justification. ‘Eisner was the grave-digger of Germany. I hated and despised him with all my heart,’ Arco-Valley had spluttered. ‘Keep fighting the fight for the deutsche Volk, Gloder. The Fatherland needs men like us.’

Rudi had patted the dying man’s hand and uttered a string of noble Teutonic nothings to comfort him. He only knew the man slightly, they were both highly decorated war heroes, the grand ribbons on whose fraying greatcoats were good for free beers in a now rapidly decreasing number of beer-cellars around Bavaria. The Count had done his glorious deeds on the Russian Front, Rudi in Flanders. Rudi never liked him however; he was one of those more-German-than-the-German Austrians who dripped with a sickly brand of mystical Pan-Germanism that Rudi found distasteful, like an overgenerous helping of Viennese Sachertorte. Arco-Valley had never overcome the bitter humiliation of being refused membership of the Thule Society on account of his mother being Jewish, a circumstance that amused Rudi hugely.

The Thules had now conveniently forgotten this however, and Arco-Valley was just one more fading martyred bloom in the garden of ultra-rightist, anti-Semitic, nationalist remembrance. The volkisch groups, the Thules, the Germanen Orden and three dozen other frenzied groups each claiming that their infinitesimal variations in nuance and emphasis amounted to major planks of doctrinal difference. My God, it made the tower of Babel look like an Esperanto conference.

Rudi walked past another message, painted in bright red letters two metres high.

‘Juden-Tod beseitigt Deutschlands Not!’

Well, maybe. Just maybe. It seemed to Rudi, however, that Germany’s pain needed more than the death of a few Jews to alleviate it. It needed Germany to grow up.

Beneath the slogan he saw crudely daubed, dribbles of red paint dripping from each hook, the sacred Teutonic fire whisk, the Hakenkreuz that every soldier in Colonel Erhardt’s Second Naval Freikorps Brigade had been forced to paint on their helmets when they had marched down to crush the feeble self-styled Bavarian Soviet in the first week of May. It was the badge of every right-wing group in Germany. As the hammer and sickle to the Marxist, so the swastika to the nationalist. They had taken the place of the eagles as totems of allegiance.

Sweating in the late September heat, Rudi turned into the maze of little medieval streets that led eastwards into the old town.

The meeting, it seemed, was being held in the beer-serving back room of Sternecker’s poky little brewery. Rudi’s heart sank. From what he could remember of this room, it would be unlikely to hold more than a hundred. This evening was going to be a bore. A bore conducted in the hot, sweet stink of malt and brewer’s yeast.

There was an open book laid out on a small table by the door to the meeting-room.

‘What is this?’ asked Gloder, with a disdainful wrinkle of the nostrils.

‘Guest register, sir,’ said a ginger-headed, one-armed young man sitting at the table, nervously eyeing the medal ribbons on Rudi’s coat.

Rudi signed his name and underlined it with a flourish. ‘Remind me of the name of this particular caucus?’ he said in a lazy drawl. ‘Pan-German People’s Party? National Workers’ Party? German National Party? People’s National Party? German German Pan-German German Party?’

The young man flushed. ‘The German Workers’ Party, sir!’

‘Ah, yes, of course,’ murmured Rudi. ‘How foolish of me.’

The young man looked at the signature and sprang to his feet. ‘Forgive me, Herr Major!’ he said. ‘Colonel Mayr told us to expect you at seven. I had thought perhaps you were not coming after all.’

Rudi sighed, straightened the coat across his back — the night was hot, but he enjoyed wearing a greatcoat over the shoulders, arrogant Prussian style — and followed the young man slowly into the room.

‘The speaker is Herr Dietrich Feder,’ the young man whispered before bowing and leaving the room.

Rudi nodded, dusted the seat of a wooden chair with a flick of his glove, sat down and looked lazily around him.

There could not have been more than forty or fifty men present. And a woman too, Rudi noticed. He thought he recognised her as the daughter of a district judge. Pleasant, round breasts, but a most appalling short-sighted, peering intensity.

The gathering appeared to be giving Feder more attention than he deserved. Rudi knew him of old, a fanatic when it came to the subject of economics. He was peddling his bizarre concoction of warmed-over Marxism served up with standard anti-trade unionism and Jew hatred. Really, listening to political speakers these days was like watching a cheap circus show of mutated freaks. Wonder at the Leopard-Goat-Woman! Thrill to the Ape-Cat-Boy! Gasp at the Ambiguities of the Marxist Anti-Communist! Marvel at the contortions of the pro-Weimar Secessionist!

There was a cheaply printed square of yellow paper on the floor which Gloder picked up and studied. If this flier were to be believed, he was listening to a talk entitled ‘How and By What Means Can One Abolish Capitalism?’

Rudi wondered idly if in fact this party, for all its right-wing paraphernalia and rhetoric, were not a cover for the Marxerei. There was no doubt that Moscow interested itself deeply in the internal politics of Germany. They were not above infiltrating even the smallest and meanest of political splinter-groups. And look at how they had sent Bela Kun into Budapest with a cadre of commissars, a roll of money and instructions to report by radio to Lenin personally. Almost overnight the Kirolyi government had collapsed and Hungary had entered the Bolshevik fold. Europe was a rotting corpse, ripe for the communist carrion-crow.

Feder presented himself openly as a Socialist, but a nationalist, anti-Communist, anti-Semitic Socialist. Was this a Bolshevik ploy, or was there perhaps some real point here? He spoke without guile or apparent political savvy, but there was something in this melange of ideas that appealed to Rudi. Feder was making a distinction between what he called Good Capitalism, the capitalism of mines, railways, factories and munitions, and Bad Capitalism, the capitalism of financial dealing-houses, banks and credit institutions: in short, the Capitalism of the German worker pitted against the Capitalism of the Jew blood-sucker.

Rudi made a series of notes with a silver-cased pencil in his slim black notebook. ‘Investigate Dietrich Feder. Is he not the b-in-law of historian Karl Alexander von Muller? Is he from same Feder family that worked for Prince Otto of Bavaria, later King of Greece? Known affiliations? Influence of Dietrich Eckart?’

He closed the notebook and listened with amusement as a new speaker arose, apparently a Professor Baumann, who after a few sentimental words of praise for Feder had started to argue passionately that Bavaria should secede from Germany and form a Jew-Free Holy Catholic Union with Austria.

Rudi had promised Mayr that he wouldn’t speak, but this kind of nonsense could not go unchecked.

He rose to his feet and cleared his throat.

‘Gentlemen! May I be permitted to speak?’ he said, and was gratified to note that an immediate silence fell. Turning to the judge’s daughter he executed a small bow and clicked his heels with a polite ‘Genaddiges Fraulein!’ It pleased him to see a small blush light up in the girl’s pale cheeks. It came into his head as he walked into the centre of the room that her name was Rosa, Rosa Dernesch, and he congratulated himself on the smooth working of his mind, that a part of it could isolate such a small detail while the rest was preparing a public address.

‘Permit me to introduce myself,’ he said, smiling politely as a rather confused Professor Baumann sat down, clearly with far more to say on the subject of Bavaria. ‘My name is Rudolf Gloder. You may see from this coat that I am an army major. I have been sent here to observe you by Colonel Mayr of the Bavarian Army propaganda unit. It is not in that capacity however, that I wish to address you, so…” he dropped his coat and officer’s cap to the floor, ‘…now it is not a soldier who speaks to you but a German. A Bavarian as it happens, but a German.’

Rudi paused and looked around the room, taking in the eyes of those who watched him. Some regarded him with distrust, others with contempt, a few with sympathy and one or two with nodding approbation.

He took a deep breath and then roared at the top of his voice. ‘WAKE UP! Wake up, you complacent fools! How dare you sit here and talk away the future of Germany? WAKE UP!’

The volume of his voice startled everyone into shocked amazement, Rudi included. One old man in the corner had taken his words quite literally and woken up with a dribbling, coughing start, and was now staring around in panic, as if afraid that fire had broken out.

Rudi pulled down his tunic and cleared his throat. A huge buzzing bolt of energy, excitement and joy was surging though his body, as if he had taken a great pinch of cocaine, as cavalry officers in the Habsburg regiments used to do before a charge. He was fully aware, as he spoke, of every detail of every face he looked into and felt a massive sense of power and ease.

‘Herr Feder talks of the Jews in the banks and the Jews in Bolshevik Russia,’ he said in a quieter voice, almost a whisper, but one which he knew with confidence carried into every ear in the room. ‘He pours his scorn upon them with eloquence and with erudition. But I wonder how the Jews respond to this? Are they trembling in fear? Are they packing their bags to leave? Are they falling at our feet craven with apology and erupting with humble promises to mend their ways? No, they are LAUGHING, my friends. They are laughing up their gabardine sleeves.

‘And what has Professor Baumann, with all respect to that learned gentleman, what has he to say to this? He says Bavaria must leave Germany and join with Austria. Do I need to give you a history lesson? Do I need to remind you what we all heard on the ninth of May? Do I? Do I? Every German colony in Africa and the Pacific to be given up. No discussion, no appeal. Thirteen per cent of German territory in Europe to be eaten up by other nations. Non-negotiable. Prussia cut in two by a corridor to the Baltic Sea. Danzig to be given to the Poles. No argument. Two hundred thousand tons of shipping a year to be built in German yards and given, given to our conquerors. And money? How much money? A blank cheque. Reparations to be paid on a sliding scale. The more prosperous we become, the more we pay. Every drop of sweat’ that flies from the exhausted brow of every German worker is to join in the great torrent that will flow abroad to our enemies while we struggle in our parched desert of shame. All guilt, all blame for the war to be accepted by us, the German nation. Der Dolchstofi, it has been called, this dagger that the Hagens of Berlin have stuck into Siegfried’s proud back, with the help of Levien, Levine, Hoffman, Egelhofer, Luxemburg, Liebknecht and the other Jews, Communists and traitors.

‘And what is Baumann’s answer to this catastrophe? The greatest catastrophe that has faced any nation in the history of our earth? That Bavaria, proud Bavaria, should run cringing from under Germany’s skirts and slip between the sheets with the barren, shrivelled whore Austria, while the Holy Father, like some overblown brothelkeeper, looks on in glee and blesses the bastard issue of this harlotry, this craven fornication?

‘That is a solution? That is Realpolitik.’

‘GROW UP! GROW UP and WAKE UP! Our enemies are laughing and dancing in delight even as we weep and thrash in our childish tantrums.

‘Yet there is an answer to our ills, you won’t like it, but it lies before us. There is one solution, one hope, one certain path to German pride and German survival. You know what it is, you all know what it is.

‘It is the disbandonment of parties like this. Wait! Before you tear me to pieces, before you howl me down as infiltrator, saboteur, agent provocateur and traitor, listen to what I have to say. It is one word. Exactly one word. The one word. The one word. The one word is—

‘Unity!

‘Yes, we can splinter ourselves into petulant little groups like this German Workers’ Party of yours, we can refine and refine on political theory and economic theory and racial theory and national theory all we like and call ourselves clever and call ourselves patriots. We can sharpen our ideas until the razors of our minds are blunted. But the more we scrabble at straws, the more we howl at the moon, then the more our enemies gloat and giggle and grin.

‘There are more than fifty separate political parties in Munich alone, most of them far larger than this one. Think about that. Think about that and weep.

‘Look at Weimar. In their water-willed desperation to lick the arse of Woodrow Wilson, they have a government of such liberal benevolence, such magnanimity, that it too is comprised of dozens of different parties, each allowed a say in our national policy. Think about that and weep.

‘But think now about one German party. Imagine such a thing. A single German party for the single German worker, farmer, housewife, veteran and child. A single German party that speaks with one single German voice. Think about that and laugh. For I tell you now, with all the power of prophecy and love of fatherland, I tell you now that such a party can rule not only Germany, but the whole earth.

‘Shall I tell you how I know that I am right? There is an old rule of soldiering, of politics, of chess, of card-play, of statecraft, of all sorts and forms of engagement.

‘Do not do what you most want to do: do only what your enemy would least like you to do.

‘We know our enemies: the Bolshevik Jews, the Financial Jews, the Social Democrats, the liberal intellectuals.

‘What would they like us to do?

‘They would like us to argue amongst ourselves as to who has the purest German soul, who has the best economic plan, who has the cleverest ideas, who speaks most for the average German.

‘If we do that, they are happy, our enemies. The disaffected worker will find nothing in his politicians but schism and dissent, so he will join the Moscow-backed trade unions. The interest payments will keep rolling into the Jewish banks, Germany will still be in their grip.

‘But what would our enemies least like us to do?

‘To speak with one voice. To emerge, as one German people, in one party, to control our own destiny. To look after our own workers. To develop our own engineering, science and national genius to one aim, the emergence of Germany as a powerful modern state, dependent upon no one but its own people for its future.

‘The Bolshevik Jew is denied influence. The financial Jew is shown the door. The liberal intellectual and the social democrat are shamed out of existence.

‘All it takes is unity. Unity, unity, unity.

‘But it will never happen, will it? It will never happen, because we all want to be the king rooster of our own little dunghill. We will fail to do the one thing we need to do.

‘Because it is hard. So hard. It will take patience and work and planning and sacrifice. It will take unity within to create unity without. It will take a massive effort of organisation.

‘I know the kind of unity the German is capable of. I have seen it and shared its sacred power in the trenches of Flanders. I know the kind of disunity the German is capable of. I am looking at it now in a smelly back-room in Munich.

‘Those are our choices. To divide and weep, or to unify and laugh.

‘Myself, I am a Bavarian. I love laughter.

‘There! I have had my say. Forgive me. In recompense, allow me to buy a glass of beer for every man here.’

Rudi bent to pick up his greatcoat, threw it back over his shoulder and returned to his seat.

The silence before the ovation reminded him of the breath-held pause that followed the final notes of Cotterddmmerung the first time he went with his father to the Bayreuth Festival. He had thought for a terrible moment that the audience had disapproved and that they were going to leave the theatre in silence. But then had come the applause.

So it was now.

A man, perhaps ten years older than Rudi, pushed himself forward ahead of the others, extending a pink-jacketed pamphlet.

‘Herr Gloder,’ he shouted above the cries of Einheit! Einheit! and the stamping of feet. ‘My name’ is Anton Drexler. I founded this party. We need you.’