Hamburg at the Barricades

Editorial Note
Sources
Berlin, October 1923 (Berlin v oktyabre 1923 goda) was first published
by the M.O.P.R. (International Organisation for Revolutionary Fighters'
Aid), Moscow 1924, as an appendix to Hamburg at the Barricades.
Hamburg at the Barricades (Gamburg na barrikadakh) first appeared
in the journal Zhizn no. 1, 1924 although without the last chapter. Extracts
were printed in Izvestia no.40, 1924 (under the title 'Hamburg - Free
City') and in Molodoi Leninets, 25 and 29 October 1924 (under the title of
'Barmbeck in Struggle'). It was first issued in book form by M.O.P.R. in
1924 in the edition referred to above. Further extracts were later
published in Molodoi Leninets, 27 February 1926 (under the title 'Hamm')
and in the book In the Battles for the World October published in Moscow
in 1932 (under the title 'Elfriede from Schiffbek'). A film
entitled Hamburgbased upon the book was made at the V.U.F.K.U.
studios in 1926 with script by S.Schreiber and Y.Yanovsky and directed by
Ballyuzek.
The sketches that make up In Hindenburg's Country were first
published in Izvestia nos.185,187, 194, 201 and 227, 1925. Not included in
this series were 'Frau Fritzke', 'Slippers', and 'He a Communist and she a
Catholic' which first appeared in the book version of the sketches
entitled In Hindenburgs's Country: Sketches of Contemporary Germany
(V. strane Gindenburga: ocherki sovremennoi Germanii) published by
Pravda, Moscow 1926. 'In the Ruhr - Under the Ground' was not included
in this edition.
'Milk' was first published in the newspaper Gudok no.258, 1925.

All these works have been reprinted in various collections of Larissa

Reissner's writings published subsequently in the USSR namely,
the Sohranie Sochinenii (in two volumes but by no means a complete
edition) of 1928, the Izhrannye Proizvedeniya of 1958 and
the Izhrannoe of 1965. 'Junkers' has been omitted from the last two
editions. A short passage in'Krupp and Essen' referring to Karakhan's
diplomatic work in China has been cut out of the two postwar editions.
A German translation of Hamburg at the Barricades (Hamburg auf
den Barrikaden: Erlehtes und Erhrtes aus dem Hamburger Aufstand
1923) was published by Neue Deutsche Verlag of Berlin in 1925 but
without the last chapter. In 1926 the same publisher issued a collection of
the author's work entitled Oktoberwith the translator given as Eduard
Scheimann. This included the Hindenburg sketches with the exception of
'In the Ruhr - Under the Ground' and 'He a Communist and she a
Catholic' and contained a special preface to In Hindenburg's
Country which was given the subtitle 'A Journey through the German
Republic 1924'. Oktoberwas re-issued in 1910 with some of the contents
slightly re-arranged. A further collection in German translation, that
included the Berlin and Hamburg sketches as well, was published by Dietz
of Berlin in 1960.
By far the most detailed, though incomplete, bibliography of Larissa
Reissner's work and critical articles on her can be found in Sovetskie
Pisateli: Prozaiki, volume 7 part 2, Moscow 1972, pp. 65-83.
The texts used for the translations in this edition are as follows:
Berlin,
October
1923 in Izbrannoe 1965
Hamburg at the Barricades (except 'German Mensheviks After the
Rising')
in Zhizn 1924
German Mensheviks After the Rising' in Izbrannoe 1965
In Hindenburg's Country, Preface to the German Edition; Oktober 1926;
'Krupp and Essen', "The Barracks and a Cobbler's Wife','An Iron Goss',' In
the Ruhr - Under the Ground','Ullstein' and'Junkers', in Izvestia 1925;
'Frau Fritzke', 'Slippers' and 'He a Communist and she a Catholic'
in Sobranie
Sochinenii 1928;
'Milk'
in Izbrannoe1965

'Larissa Reissner': K. Radek, foreword to L. Reissner, Sobranie

Sochinenii, Moscow
1928
'A Most Absurd Death': V. Shklovsky, Gamburgskii Schet, Moscow, 1928
'In Memory of Reissner': B. Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniya i Poemy, Moscow
1965
'In Memory of Larissa Reissner': L. Sosnovsky, Lyudi Nashego
Vremeni, Moscow
1927
German words in the original Russian text have been translated in
parenthesis.
Identities in 'Hamburg at the Barricades'
Radek, in his article printed in the appendix to this volume recounts the
peculiar circumstances in which Hamburg at the Barricades was written.
Because of the police persecution of Hamburg communists and insurgents
Larissa protected the identity of most of the participants she writes about
referring to them by initials only. The first German edition was even less
specific, using only X. or 'a comrade' to denote individual fighters. The
personal anecdotes about K. and the scene of the respite in a Barmbeck
pub were also omitted from that edition presumably for security reasons.
Of the three men who formed the effective staff in Barmbeck, T., C. and
Kb, only T. is identified in later Soviet editions as Ernst Thlmann. Ruth
Fischer in herStalin and German Communism (New York 1948) names
the leader of the unsuccessful assault on Von-Essen Strasse police station
as Hans Botzenhardt, the man referred to by Larissa as C. Kb could
possibly be Hans Kippenberger, the head of the Communist Party's
military organisation in and Kippenberger's account of the Von-Essen
Strasse attack and of the course of the rising as a whole (see A.
Neuberg: Armed Insurrection, London 1970) suggests that Kippenberger
might have been the unnamed leader whom Radek tells us Larissa
checked her material with when she returned to Moscow early in 1924; for
Kippenberger had taken refuge there and wrote his own account in May of
that year.
The leading figure in the rising at Schiffbek was, according to one later
account, Fiete Schule: possibly he is Larissa's S.

Richard Krebs's memoirs (Jan Valtin, Out of the Night, Toronto 1941)
unfortunately shed no clear light on any of these figures. The other
published memoirs of an insurgent (W. Zeutschel, Im Dienst der
Kommunistische Terrororganisation, Berlin 1931) are, according to Ruth
Fischer, excessively romanticised and unreliable in detail although their
author did himself take part in the Von-Essen Strasse assault under the
alias of Burmeister.
Some more recent scholarly works appear to be unhelpful. Heinz
Habedank's monograph Zur Geschichte des Hamburger Aufstandes
1923 (Berlin 1958) concentrates on the supposedly decisive role of
Thlmann, and also of Stalin (sic), but does not once mention
Kippenberger's part let alone that of any other particular individuals.
Werner T. Angress in his Stillborn Revolution (Princeton 1963) is
exclusively concerned with how the order for the rising came to be given.
He also states incorrectly that Larissa Reissner was an eye-witness.

As an antidote to the invariably inaccurate and trite footnotes that

Larissa's life and work has provoked in the available material on early
Soviet history and literature we append to this, the first English edition of
her writings, a selection of more considered appreciations made by
distinguished friends and contemporaries.

In 1937 the poet Osip Mandelstham remarked that Larissa was lucky to
have died in time: all the people in her circle, as he put it, were being
'destroyed wholesale' by then. At her funeral on 11 February 1926, the
coffin was borne by Radek, Boris Volin, Enukidze, Lashevich, I.N.
Smirnov and Pilnyak. Four of them were murdered by Stalin's
bureaucracy some ten years later while Lashevich, like Larissa, 'died in
time'. Hermann Remmele, the communist leader referred to in Berlin,
October l923,Lev Sosnovsky, the writer of the final appreciation included
in this volume and Karakhan, the Soviet envoy to China alluded to in
'Krupp and Essen' were also shot in that slaughter. And as Hans

Kippenberger stepped off his train in Moscow in 1936 he was arrested as a

'Reichswehr agent' and executed.

I would like to record my thanks to the following people who in different

ways have given valuable assistance, advice and encouragement in the
production of this book: John Archer, Patrick Goode, Colin Ham, Iwan
Majstrenko, David Zane Mairowitz, Hermann Mller, Ann Pasternak
Slater, Anthony van der Poorten and Anita Wisniewska.
I have also with great personal sorrow to acknowledge the unique
contribution made to this and earlier jobs by my mother, Winifred L.
Chappell, whose unexpected death I learnt of as this book was in the final
stages of preparation. Over a period of years she readily brought the mind
of an unusually versatile linguist and dedicated teacher to bear on any fine
point of translation, though always offering any suggestion with the great
prudence and modesty so natural to her.
May I also take this opportunity to express my appreciation of the
courteous and helpful way the staff at the library of the School of Slavonic
and East European Studies, London, and the British Library have treated
my requests and queries.
R.C.

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Hamburg at the Barricades

Berlin, October 1923

In the Reichstag
What a parliament! If there is anything in it that can inspire respect it
can only be Wilhelm I's enormous marble boots standing in the middle of
the hall. The old soldier, from whom a constitution had been wrung with
such difficulty in his time, stands there with a disapproving look and
awaits the moment when he will be allowed to drive the chattering flocks
of deputies out of this house. The members of parliament peacefully
swarm around his celebrated jackboots, promenading singly and in
couples exactly like girls on the boulevard. From time to time their
carefree crowds are parted by an elderly functionary leading a few youths
clad in thick woollen stockings and hobnailed boots who have come,
sweating from this act of homage, to look over the House of the German
People. Screwing up their school caps, the youths servilely and bashfully
eye the oaken maidens with gilt navels that hold up the ceiling, the
torrents of frock-coats and those most excellent old footmen who
represent, like some lofty personage writing his memoirs, the only bearers
of the old parliamentary traditions. Alas, no traces and no semblance of
former grandeur! Not a single major figure who can attract even the
respectful hatred of all parties. Not a single man distinguished for his
personal integrity or for having a few decades of untarnished political
gaming behind him. When old Bebel passed through this hall his enemies
would stand up and even die- hard Prussian Junkers would clumsily raise
themselves out of their swampy armchairs to acknowledge his clean
name; today -- no one, not one face nor one name. There in the fog of
tobacco smoke is the insignificant profile of Levi, a grey, reserved face that
has been trained without stage make-up to endure the curiosity of people
scrutinising it with their private thoughts about the treachery that he
committed. Everything is from the past, members of previous ministries
thrown into convulsions by public disgust, belching states men,
yesterday's men retaining for all time the stains of an indelible filth on the
tails of their deputies' outfits.
By and large it is easy to pick several basic types of parliamentary fauna
out of the crowd. In the first place there are those who have already been
put to use, occupying ministerial posts and managing to fill in their

obscure names on some international form or on one of the tearful pleas

addressed to the Entente. Here are the socialists renowned for shooting
down workers and cabinet members who rook on the responsibility of
plundering the gold reserves of the German republic -- in short, men who
have been put into mass circulation.
The pattern on the back of the cards is well-known to every regular
player. Never again when a cabinet is being formed will the hand of a
great card-sharp pick them up and never again will he lay out Grand
Coalitions on the table. The card that has once been taken out of a player's
hand and thrown back in his face, a beaten and abused card, continues to
live on as a back-bencher. But his great days are past. Scattered across the
Reichstag's red carpet is a great multitude of these assorted played-out
hands. They continue to vote but the younger enthusiasts who have not
yet lost their political virginity reach forward for the political honours.
Behind the backs of the old buccaneers passing by they recall with awe
and envy the sums of the hand-outs the former had received, their
imaginative betrayals and their dazzling scandals. A gallery of disgraced,
crumpled physiognomies that had however managed to sip from the cup
of sweet power in good rime. They, the naked among the naked, walk
about with no sense of shame. Among these has-beens swarms of the
more mobile, stupid and persistent gather: they are the rulers of
tomorrow. A whole flight of them buzzes and clusters round Breitscheid
who is surrounded by the flower of political camp-followers. Just very
slightly like a black market but for the most part sweet-sounding, fragrant
and well modulated. Here too the pride and the adornment of the
Reichstag -- almost its only woman political correspondent, a tiny black
miscarriage wrapped up in the sheet of an indecent little stock exchange
bulletin-- is being put to pasture. The Rights walk about as if at the races.
White gaiters, spangles of glass under their arched brews and the triangle
of a handkerchief against the chest. In their half of the buffer, which is
completely separate from the Democratic Party's feeding-trough, they
pass up and down as if in a salon where there is no risk of encountering
anything ignoble. However, right alongside the aristocratic, stiff, hideous,
haughty genuinely Prussian ladies who have the habit of taking their five
o'clock tea amid the fug of political tittle-tattle, treading on their furs and

trailing withered tails like old lizards, there also roll in the plump banking
and industrial patriots who are so fat and garrulous that the pages of the
blackCrusader News sticking out of the right-wing deputies' pockets
ought to be bent round and the crosses on them, Christian-Fascist crosses,
turned right round. Alas, these are now the money bags, and the
luncheons they gorge during the intervals in the performance are more
copious, nourishing and expensive than those that sustain the pedigree
Junkers.
At the tables of the Social-Democratic Party there are sausages, coffee
and anxieties. All the Reichstag's entrances and exits have been cordoned
off. The police grab every passer-by by the scruff of the neck; in the
doorways stand the most senior footmen, eunuchs of the political harem
who, knowing the face of each one of its legal wives and each one of its
favourite concubines, check with their own hands and let through the
representatives of the people. Inside, by the newspaper kiosk, there stands
a jolly, strapping fellow, the Berlin Chief of Police who pins his clear
searching look on every deputy's face to try to detect the criminal element.
Messrs. delegates put on an open honest face and rush past him about
their business. Yet, in spite of all the precautions, the communists will
suddenly create some scene. A completely absurd, panic-stricken fear that
Remmele will suddenly burst in, cause an affray, toss a smoke bomb in
and blow up the whole Reichstag. Remmele's name is repeated like an
obsession. His appearance is awaited like a coup de theatre. It is chewed
over, swallowed, belched up and swallowed once more. Yet were that
Remmele to appear now with even a gramophone horn or the stone NCO
to give a cough from his marble stump this parliament would disperse in
shame. General Seeckt knows this too and so for the moment does not
make the classic knee movement, a gesture described with such
marvellous vividness in Voltaire's Candide.
The game of parliament has no relation to the fate of Germany and her
revolution. History, like the huge statues standing by the fountain in front
of the Reichstag, has long since turned its cast-iron backside upon it.
And so they plot, bargain and battle for power.

For power. Are you laughing, General Seeckt! Or isn't it so? Power has
long since left that tall house; but the tiresome, relentless, indestructible
swarms of politicking philistines still gather around the greasy marks left
by previous deputies' unwashed hands on the pages of the constitution.
Like flies. One black, screwed up, rejected slip of paper has been left
behind yet they plaster it, crawl over it and buzz round it...
The debating chamber. Someone speaks. A burst of laughter. He is
answered from the right. Prolonged, jubilant laughter. Cries from the left.
Hollow cynical laughter. That is the opening performance at the German
Reichstag, its great day.

Workers' Children
Berlin is starving. In the street every day people who have fainted from
exhaustion are being picked up on the trams and in the queues. Starving
drivers drive the trams, starving motormen urge their trains on along the
infernal corridors of the underground, starving men go off to work or
roam without work for days and nights around the parks and the city's
outlying areas.
Starvation hangs on the buses, shutting its eyes on the spinning
staircase to the upper deck while advertisements, desolation and motor
horns reel past like drunks. Starvation stands guard over Wertheim's
majestic counters, taking in twenty thousand million a week when a
pound of bread costs roughly ten thousand million. Starvation serves
fussily and attentively in the hundreds of deserted department stores that
are crammed with riches, golden in the light and as clean and as
respectable as the international banks. That young miss on whose pointed
triangle of a face there are only bluish recesses for eyes, a little powder
and an obsequious smile, points like a hunting dog to some l0-dollar
boots and a 30-dollar rug. While faint with hunger she is selling herself
for a penny ha'penny at the old rate and yet she can calculate with a
purely German thoroughness and at lightning speed the speculator's
billions and trillions, enter them in the account in that exquisite
handwriting possessed by this entire nation of highly literate people; as

she waits for the next round of staff cuts, she resignedly undoes her shop
assistant's overall but still without daring to detach that fawning hungry
smile from her face.
The walls of the huge blocks that turn their bare backs to the windows
of the trains flying past are painted with advertisements in which
yesterday's accumulated surplus of production exclaims and exults,
gulping down sweet grease from a tin of condensed milk while giant
children with round, rosy cheeks like buttocks and happy blond smiles
raise lamp-post-like bars of chocolate aloft over the city. But the real,
living children have stopped going to school because of hunger: the
mothers take them along and ask the teacher to let them go home if they
start to feel bad during lessons. For how can a small child last through the
classes if it has had nothing to eat either that morning or the night before?
In the last months infant mortality has made a sudden, high leap on the
black charts of German statistics. Thick tubercular spittle clings to the life
of such districts as Wedding, Riksdorf and Oberschneweide, the seats of
power of AEG electricity and the motor corporations, and the scenes of
the most massive lock-outs conducted under artillery cover and of the first
thousands-strong meetings where in these early October days so unlike
ours, German workers are learning to sing the 'Internationale'. This late
European autumn that so slowly wanes and so hesitantly freezes the clear
Berlin nights has carried away thousands of workers' children. At no time
since the war has lobar pneumonia eaten away so many lives, spitting and
coughing themselves out drop by drop in the bread queues or whiling
away the hours of fever, asphyxia and starvation in the never-ending
strolls of unemployment.
Unemployed! Not for weeks, not for months but for a year or even more.
And with it of course, the wife, the three or four children and all the
hundred and one misfortunes that burst into a man's life when he is
already down, worn out and torn to shreds; sickness, incapacity for work
or some involuntary weakness at the crucial moment in the wild scramble
for the chance piece of bread that turns up. But however crying their need,
the lowest layers of petty-bourgeois, utterly ruined and deprived of all

means of subsistence, still manage to bend and to try to adapt themselves

and somehow overcome the 'hard times'. They economise and hoard the
money that by tomorrow will have turned into a pile of rubbish, stinting
themselves in every way if only to keep up the appearance of a poor, but
decent, life of toil. Living in poverty, working for absolutely nothing and
yet, as they clutch at the cashier's grills from which every three days a new
derisory sum is spat out, sensing the soothing silence of a fireproof safe
stuffed full of the boss's money between themselves and the threatening
revolution. Ready for anything if only to avoid the social revolution.
Hence that handful of dictators, those lengthy discussions in the
newspapers about the true badge of a dictator and those portraits of highcheekboned, large-muzzled generals of the Wilhelmine era. The petty
bourgeois is still hoping that one of the marble idiots that stand with arms
presented in the Siegesallee will come to deliver the German people from
left-wing anarchy and right-wing putsches and economic ruination.
Although such a desperation has set in amid Germany's fine, civilised,
asphalt-carpeted cities that the soul of the little clerk, the office-worker
and the public official is ready to go on all fours and howl like an animal,
he or she will at the last minute go not on to the streets but to the cafe.
Yes, to the cafe for a thimbleful of coffee in exchange for the financial leftovers of the whole week, to bemuse his swollen, healthy anger with a
damp, reeling waltz, the gilt of little bow-legged baroque tables and the
illusions of tobacco smoke, saccharine and courtesans' hats.
Every one of the most humble office-workers and even of the top-grade
skilled workers invariably has his own furniture in his flat, gathered over a
lifetime of rigorous economising and self-denial. Several soft armchairs,
rugs with the Holy Scriptures on them, a winged angel, bunches of dried
grasses and always a Vertiko, a sort of truncated cabinet, that altar to
middle-class cosiness on which there stands the family portraits, a
statuette that is indecent when viewed from below and the wedding
bouquet under a bellglass. But until such time as the usurious policy of
the bourgeoisie takes the Vertiko and the five padded-backed armchairs
away and removes the heavy curtains that hang like huge velvet trousers
from the windows, their owner will not go out on to the street nor
abandon hope of that peaceful, bloodless overturn that for fifty years now

the Social-Democratic Party has called for at the expense of the German
proletariat.
But where there is no Vertiko there is no money or bread either, for in
the real depths of the working class while the husband spends his
unemployed hours walking the streets, the mother moves round one
philanthropic institution after another. If she is pregnant in addition, the
doctor will carefully examine her heavy tummy and an equally hungry but
highly respectable nurse will enter the unborn child in the register of the
poor, give it a number and inform her that in about two months' time it
might be possible to get hold of milk for the infant at twenty-five per cent
off the market price.
An unemployed man's wife who is pregnant now, in the winter of 1923,
is a corpse.
She lies slumped on the chair, her belly sticking out from her dark,
hungry, decaying body just as if a child's round head has been, for some
reason, hidden in her lap under her dress. Even the philanthropic young
lady is not quite at her ease at the sight of this living woman with her
living and already visible child, both of whom will certainly no longer be
living in a matter of three months, not having the slightest chance of
lasting out this winter in a country where the unemployed receives sixty
thousand million a week while a pound of bread cost eighty the day before
yesterday, a hundred and sixty yesterday and tomorrow may soar to three
hundred. She and her husband have been unemployed since last January,
that is for ten whole months. This January, right at the coldest and most
terrible time, he will stop receiving benefit altogether. And that's with four
children.
"Why didn't your husband go and work during the summer and dig
potatoes with the farmers?"
"He did, but injured his foot. He spent all summer in hospital with
blood poisoning."

In such cases misfortune knows no bounds and no reasonable limit but

tumbles in an absurdly hopeless heap on to the heads of those already
weakened. She has tuberculosis without a doubt: noisy difficult breathing
as if asleep.
"So where do you want to have it? At home or in the hospital?"
"At home."
Wisely, the doctor for a while tries to dissuade her, tempting her with
the cleanliness, warmth and food.
In the end with a quite unexpected and irresistible smile:
"Doctor, I want to die at home. I want my husband to see the child and
wrap it up in the linen himself."
Another woman: two plaits like ears of rye around a young head, a white
neck and a shawl tied across her full figure.
A jolly woman as clean and as strong as the hand-woven linen laid out
to dry in the mountain sun of the Black Forest or Bavaria. Out of work for
a year and two months. Her husband who brought her here is waiting in
the hall. She wears a strikingly clean blouse washed in cold water without
soap; large, healthy teeth keep flashing in her generous, cherry-lipped
smile.
In reply to the question put by a yellowing sister furrowed with wrinkles
like old-fashioned gothic handwriting, "What will you live on in the
winter!" she says:
"I don't know. Either we'll pass out or everything'll change."
Two girls. Both unemployed. Both pregnant. One is swollen with the
tears that accompany reproaches and hunger. The younger one, a franklooking child indifferent to everything, is brought in by her tiny irate
mother wearing a fancy hat and carrying a reticule. The sister purses her

thin lips and wants to dose the door through to the waiting room to
avoiding broadcasting the disgrace.
"Quatsch! (Rubbish!) There's no need. We're making workers not those
that we'd like to see dead."
The most downtrodden German working woman supports her children,
her ruined, plundered home and her pauperised, unemployed family with
an inconceivable strength.
The whole family has been starving: it has been starving for months.
But as long as there remains the least possibility, the baby will have a
quarter of a bottle of milk and fifty grams of gruel. Living in one room are
five or six people, two of whom have tuberculosis, but the baby that the
mother takes for an examination every week without fail is immaculately
clean and wrapped up in a clean piece of cloth. Only very gradually, over
six months and when the family that has been holding it up on
outstretched arms high above its own poverty, finally subsides into the
morass of starvation, only then will the colour leave its face, its weakened
bones protrude more sharply beneath its thin, greying skin and the
doctor's fingers feel the soft, swollen and slowly closing skull under the
light matted crop of hair. In each workers' hospital (and there are dozens
of them) pointers record the unabating weight loss of thousands of
working-class children every day. On these scales lies an entire
proletarian generation, squealing, waggling their thin little legs in the air
and twisting their weak toothless mouths from side to side; as they
become ever lighter and ever paler they drain away amid sickly infants'
tears and the yellow froth of starvation's diarrhoea. Germany's working
class has not been and will not be defeated. But today, just as its forces are
still being collected into a strong communist fist, the struggle against it is
waged by the most contemptible means, that is, by striking above all at
the future of the working class, its children. And here the German
proletarian woman has risen to her full stature in their defence.
Very often a man just cannot stand the ravages of hunger, the screaming
of unfed children, the starvation and the filth. Thousands of working
women are abandoned by their husbands and lovers after a few months of

unemployment. It is easy to spot in a crowd of others the woman who is

pursuing the frantic struggle for survival at her own risk and peril by her
peculiarly ashen face, the marks of a convulsed overstrain and her grimy
bloodless head, shrunken into a fist-like shape. From her, and only from
her, can the experienced eye tell whether unemployment started long ago
or recently, and whether it has been interrupted by occasional earnings
for two or three days or four to six hours. For the baby of the woman who
has just started to go hungry and the baby whose little head flops to one
side through weakness while the ominous ulcers that exhaustion brings
have already appeared behind its ears, under its armpits and between its
legs are identically clean, licked, laid out on pillows and covered up with
their mother's warm shawl. In the end, though, you can get nowhere with
just doctor's orders and painstaking care. They have to be fed and milk
has to be bought. Medicines have to be ordered when the first sores
appear on the baby's feeble body.
It begins with little trifles: scrofulous inflammations, a patch of moist
skin that has to be disinfected and powdered. The sickness spreads and
embraces the whole organism. Lying in nappies is a little old man of seven
or eight months with an inflamed mouth, the bridge of his nose
depressed, bowed legs and a pot belly. His excrement smells putrid.
That is the end of many months' heroic struggle. A freak instead of a
strong, well-formed healthy baby.
Every one of the unemployed mothers who comes invariably to the
hospital each week knows that sooner or later it must end like that. She
knows this and yet nevertheless fights -- with all the technical means that
science teaches for the fight against starvation and degeneration.
With all the forces of youth and love and all the grit and culture of the
only working class in the world in whose ranks there are no illiterate men
or illiterate mothers either.
When he has finished his examination of the child, the doctor turns to
the mother: "Show me your breasts."

Under her dress there is not even a vest. But at the first touch warm
white blood splashes from the high over-full nipple on to the papers and
the doctor's glasses and apron.

A Prosperous Worker's Family

The elephant pokes his trunk through the bars of the grille and for a few
second looks at our Hilda with wise and hungry eyes. No, she's not going
to give him anything!
That wisest of the wise goes off into the back of his cage rustling his dry
skin white with age and flapping his ears despondently. The zoo is empty
and cold and the animals are starving like the people. The elephant will
die soon, that is obvious from its ribs and flaccid trunk. A complete
skeleton, a complete zoological specimen of a wild beast that has spent a
hundred years standing in the middle of a museum yet can still walk and
eat a little hay. This specimen, which has yet to reach the moment of
expiration, is still draped in the rustling folds of his old skin until the
unveiling. Hilda is at first very scared and shuts her eyes. But after taking
a peep, she asks: "Do tell me, does he have a face!" Then she touches the
cold brass rail and feels quite secure when she knows that the mountain is
sitting in a prison.
"Uncle, isn't he sweet!"
Some Russian emigres standing in front of the monkeyhouse offering
empty matchboxes, pieces of litter and dog-ends to the clever old baboon.
He is deeply annoyed; catching the sound of somebody's family squabble
inside the pavilion he strains his ears with human curiosity and then runs
off to join the scene, slamming the little door and presenting the bluishpurple part of his anatomy to our Russian fellow-countrymen.
"Let's move a bit quicker, Hilda, otherwise we'll be too late for the coffee
house! Have you seen that creature?"
"Yes, but will you get me a piece of bread and butter?"

Hilda has never gone hungry. Her father is a top-grade skilled worker.
Her mother makes stockings, jerseys and warm gloves on a knitting
machine. Hers is one of those rare working-class families in which gravy,
bread, potatoes, lard and coffee are never absent from the table. And as
the whole planetary system of domestic worries, conversations, desires
and fears revolve around a warm Stulle (sandwich) spread thickly with
firm white margarine, sacks of potatoes hidden under the bed, and food
hanging up or stowed away in the box room, so too has Hilda's soul been
formed from nice fat sausages oozing lard; when this soul grows up she
will have the strong glossy crupper of a carthorse and the raw, nourishing
smell of beer.
Hilda doesn't want to look at the ibis or any of the sceptical-looking
long-feathered Egyptian birds that carry in outline, in every pleat of their
grey plumage, the style and conventions of past millennia. The ibis struts
up and down with the bald head and long nose of a wise old man wearing
a cape but no trousers -- so long and bare are its legs. Suddenly ecstasy
and utter delight: "Look, look, it's got feathers on its tail like Aunt
Wilhelmina's hat! Aunt Wilhelmina came round to see mummy this
morning to get a free cup of coffee. People are getting so cheeky these
days!"

A snowy night. By the Brandenburg Gate a snowy wind slices low across
the asphalt like a sickle. The Tiergarten lies in deep shadow, looking like a
dark wind-tossed sea. Parked by the empty pavements, as if alongside a
quay, are lines of motor cars with their wet headlamps gleaming.
At half past five there is a Communist Party demonstration. Along
Unter den Linden march the unemployed, musical instruments clanking
in bags on their backs, cold inflamed ears sticking out from under caps,
jacket collars turned up and wide bare gaps down their chests. The wind
whistles in their faces. In the dark side-streets police rip down the little
posters chat for one day had plastered all Berlin. In the side-streets they
hit out with rubber truncheons and break up the marches and then police
officers are carried out of the crowd with fractured faces. On this blizzard-

swept evening the ten thousand workers who flooded the Lustgarten and
Unter den Linden as far as Friedrichstrasse greeted an armoured car with
laughter whereas the police could not muster the courage to fire a single
shot on the communist demonstration. That evening Hilda's mother is
darning stockings under the lamp in the warm. Hilda is eating bread and
lard and when she is quite full she rinses her satisfied tummy with water.
"Hilda," says mother, "sing the Internationale to us." Hilda sings the
Internationale, then a song about a Christmas tree and then a favourite
medley of psalms.
"Hilda," says her mother, "tell us how good children greet their uncle on
his name-day." Aunt Wilhelmina, the wife of an unemployed worker, nods
enviously and lavishes heated praise.
"Hilda," I ask, "what would you like for Christmas? A doll, a picture
book or a real live camel like in the zoo?"
"Oh, uncle, give me some liver sausage!"
"Nonsense," Hilda's mother is saying to Aunt Wilhelmina, "I don't
believe now in any sort of demonstration. We need an armed uprising, a
real revolution, not those street processions out there."
The coffee pot sputters very quietly on the stove while the raging wind
rattles the shutters behind the windows and howls like a demon.
"No," says Hilda's mother, tapping the white oil-cloth with her darning
needle, "the eleventh hour has struck. You'll no longer lure us out into the
streets whatever the ringing phrases. We need a decisive battle, not a
demonstration. For five years all we've done has been to walk up and
down!"
Aunt Wilhelmina is undecided:
"My old man has gone out. Good heavens, what a horrible winter
night!"

"Come along to our silver wedding party, Wilhelmina! We'll be

celebrating. There'll be cheese pie, meat pie, egg salad, cold potatoes and
apples. And black pudding though I did have to sell the machine."
"Ooh, mummy, black pudding! Will I get some?"
"Everything's getting dearer and life's becoming impossible. All the
same you are a bit to blame yourself, Wilhelmina. Everything depends
upon the woman. If she is prudent, frugal and thrifty the home will never
completely collapse. You should look after your things, they need
perpetual care. Take that small crockery cupboard or the bed for example.
They are both twenty-five years old. But could you tell! Not in the least.
You need only wipe the dust off the shelves every morning, be careful how
you treat the lacquered legs and not sit too often on the soft furniture."
"Mummy, Auntie Wilhelmina's son has just stolen a lump of sugar from
our blue sugar bowl!"
"The main thing is to bear your misfortune bravely, don't let yourself go
to pieces and never in any event sell your furnishings. As long as your
things are intact the family will still hold out. What's more you shouldn't
fall for the government's provocations. Until we have a decisive battle, no
stupidities like these demonstrations. A bit more patience, endurance and
solidarity. We have to support each other. Take Uncle Kurt for example.
He'd been out of work for over a year of course and the whole family had
to live in summer chalets out of town. His poor Minna had been ailing for
two years until in the end she died of cancer. You can see from their
example how in the end so much depends upon the woman. Her
household fell totally apart. Absolutely everything went to rack and ruin.
Well, naturally we relatives chipped in and arranged a proper, decent
funeral for her. We workers have to help each other. I lent the poor old
boy my husband's old top-hat. Well, at least he was able to walk behind
the coffin dressed properly!"

Little Hilda is asleep on the corner of the bed, wearing a little white frock
and white slippers and with a half-eaten piece of egg pie lying in her lap.

This is pure enjoyment for Hilda: run round a bit, play a bit, eat her fill
and then whistle blissfully through her little pink nose while the splendid
pink bow on the top of her head quietly slips down on to Uncle Franz's
shoulder. The silver wedding party went off really well. And what
presents! Soap, margarine, flowers and two pounds of butter. The
relatives clubbed together and presented them with six table sets and six
teaspoons. The sewing-machine had had to be sold and the little boys
smashed one of the vases with dry grasses that stood on the ledge under
the mirror. But, for all that, the whole block knew that Hilda's mother was
celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of her marriage really well and
the whole street would be talking about it.
"The unions have folded up, of course. What do they still exist for,
where do they get their funds from? From the boss, the industrialist. But
we've outwitted our company, haven't we? And those gentlemen, they
imagine that former trade union officials will really uphold their interests
just for the couple of billion the management has doled out to them in
their hardship."
Little Hilda's uncle gives a sly wink.
"Oh, no, you can't buy off those chaps! They may collect their salary
from the capitalists but they are helping us, not them. We're closer to
them: for heaven's sake, we've worked together for thirty years and we
know each other. They'll win us those goldbased wages, don't you worry."
One of little Hilda's aunts is the widow of a communist killed last year.
She could not give them anything so instead did the washing-up all
evening at her wealthy relatives' home. She dries her hands that are red
from the hot water and, taking her apron off, stands at the kitchen table to
drink her glass of coffee and eat up the last two remaining sandwiches;
then she asks her nephew, who leads the family band (guitar, violin and
mandolin):
"Play me 'You fell a victim'."

In the back room the older folk had put out the light and by the
reflection of a street light sung over and again the songs of their youth, in
raucous unco-ordinated voices 'The Waltz of the Moon and 'The Rose in
the Glade'; now though there is just silence and the clink of coffee cups.
But here, in the front room that is usually let to a lodger, the younger
people press closely to each other, dancing their one-step to the speededup rhythm of the tragic funeral march of the revolution. Tiny Hilda is
asleep. She is dreaming of margarine and Aunt Wilhelmina hiding a
raisin-and-apple pie under her apron. 9 November in a Working-Class
District The anniversary of the November revolution. A vast, half-empty,
cavern-like hall. Several hundred unusually oppressed, taciturn and
motionless workers--members of the Social-Democratic Party.
On the platform with a ghastly clarity, gold inscriptions on red linen.
Much more like lines of verse -- on the model of those pious proverbs that
decorate tavern walls, greetings cards or a bridegrooms' braces.
"Long live the International!" Which one is not said.
"Down with the Tyranny of Capital!"
"Liberty and Labour!"
No one looks, no one believes. Behind those stained holy banners, the
red calico that mirrors the colour of fresh blood, and those offensive and
innocuous excerpts from the Holy Scriptures, none of which has ever
marched into battle at the head of the revolutionary proletariat, stand the
five years of a vile and dissapated bourgeois republic that has shot down
and sucked dry the workers of Germany under the cover of defused,
emasculated revolutionary phrases.
The round, jauntily upturned lid of a beer-mug cannot be seen on a
single table. Only here and there wisps of tobacco smoke melt into the
damp grey cold. Workers have stopped drinking and smoking long ago. A
piece of dry bread pulled furtively out of the pocket -- that is enough to
make the occasion.

They have come to this cheerless anniversary with their wives and
children. Looking like despondent emigrants sitting on a quayside in the
forlorn hope of a passage. The husbands are chatting with their wives; the
children, downcast and instinctively bored, cuddle up to their mothers.
Meanwhile the fascists have planned their coup for that very day, 9
November. Widespread demonstrations have been proposed for the
following morning with, possibly, street battles, mass shootings of
workers and pogroms -- in short, a White coup. This wretched November
celebration may turn out to be the last meeting between the rulers of the
Social-Democratic Party and the masses on which they lean for support
and whose interests they are pledged to defend -- the last encounter
between the governing bureaucratic top brass and the proletariat against
which the Whites have promised to unleash their thugs within twentyfour hours. But what did this 'workers' party' consider it necessary to tell
workers on the eve of the putsch? Did it give them arms? A worked out
plan of struggle? Assembly points, passwords, military and political
leadership? What would it have cost to organise revolutionary defence in
a city inundated with hundreds of thousands of unemployed, an entire
army of women thrown out on to the streets, the disabled to whom the
government pays a paltry benefit and finally the droves of organised
workers more than twenty thousand of whom are already condemned to
death by starvation? Surely what else but a call for mobilisation and
uprising could possibly be issued at this meeting by the party that styles
itself a workers' and socialist party and has only just been kicked
ignominiously out of the government by a soldier's boot?
The assembled people awaited the party's representative unusually
agitated, and greeted him in absolute silence with the unspoken question:
just what shall we do now?
He had arrived: a refined party intellectual, a sceptic and a sneerer, a
member of the group that forms the left wing of the SPD (not one right
social democrat had plucked up the courage to address any one of the
numerous meetings that day). He spoke eloquently and at length for
about two hours in all. What about? It is hard to recall. Not a word about

the Whites at any rate. Not a sound about the coup planned for the next
day. About the threat to the proletariat in such a coup, how to prevent it,
how to organise defence, avoid provocations and a bloodbath -- nothing.
A smooth, clean-shaven parliamentary tract.
A few whining phrases about how the celebration had turned out not to
be a cheerful one that day and that Germany had in fact no cause to
rejoice on 9 November. Bread was getting dearer and unemployment
growing, wicked generals were scheming against the republic and the
peasants did not want to exchange their good harvest for fake slips of
paper smeared with printing ink on one side only.
By now a completely funereal silence in the hall. Such cold hostility,
despair and confusion gusted into the deputy's face that he decided to
sprinkle the end of his speech with a few idealistic conclusions and then
straight away disperse to its homes this demoralised proletariat that
would in several hours' time have to encounter the Reichswehr's machineguns, artillery and bayonets with its bare hands, without faith in itself nor
even a right to such a faith.
Oh, what an ecstatic philosophical breeze that Doctor of Laws could all
of a sudden waft through the cold, hungry vigilant meeting! A cheap,
miserable yet seductive hope that can fool no one and never yet has
defended anyone but none the less crawls into a proletarian heart like a
louse on to the table only to be squashed by the iron fingernail of
bourgeois dictatorship. And yet that traitor of a party rotting alive on the
shoulders of the proletariat and poisoning it with its sugary ptomaine gets
yet another chance to dodge the clear and simple fighting slogans of a
break with the bourgeois government and for that hateful social
revolution.
Just listen.
"We are beaten, unarmed, unemployed and robbed by our vile
bourgeoisie. This celebration can rightly be called the funeral repast of the
revolution. But, dear proletarians, don't get upset or angry: time, history
and social destiny are on our side. The wheel of history cannot be turned

back and therefore, in spite of our complete unreadiness for battle, the
fascists will not triumph; go in peace and don't be afraid of Ludendorff.
The guns are on his side but the logic of history is on ours. Good night and
until we meet again -- not on the barricades but at the next jubilee which,
with the aid of social providence, will turn out happier than today's."
That's the lot.
Then a choir of at least fifty to sixty people sings sentimental songs for
an hour and a half; on the stage a fine company of workers, divided into
two lines by the flapping coattails of a socialist sexton, peer through their
glasses at the nice clean sheets of music and with zeal and fervour sing
exultations of pastoral bliss and pure love.
"0, swallow!" a fit-looking broad-shouldered building worker leads off,
his solid Adam's apple sticking painfully out over the sweaty stand-up
collar. His voice sounds as if his boots are too tight.
"O, those flowers of May!" a platoon of joiners and stevedores responds
tenderly from the left-hand choir. Their tight jackets rustle over their
magnificent bulging muscles. Not a stammer or a wrong note. Clearly the
men have been practising ensemble performance for at least two months
despite hunger, unemployment, the howling of unfed children and the
fascists' preparations for war. No, nothing can divert the SPD from
peaceful cultural and educational exercises.
To follow -- a real madhouse. On to the stage they dragged the children
of a whole working-class neighbourhood, a crowd of teenagers and a
detachment of women and children. With the utmost thoroughness they
gave themselves over to declaiming some sickeningly doleful play.
At a wave of the producer's baton hungry workers' children moan and
weep before an audience of hungry workers:
"Mummy, bread!"
And then men, women and children together:

"Brothers, we are dy-ing!"

In the hall tears and hysterical sobs from the women.
The crowd disperses in a weakened, irritated and helpless mood. Its
healthy anger and enormous discontent, the arsenal of revolution, have
been flushed down the sewer of a debilitating and depraved pseudo-art.
Cunning those SPDers! Towards the end the very same choir that had
heroically managed top C performs, among other lyrical songs, the
Internationale. This is to foster the impression in the proletariat that this
music is not indissolubly linked to revolutionary action and that its drums
do not have to sound out only amid blood and powder-smoke.
No, that dangerous battle-cry must be tamed in advance and cooped up
into the general hen-run of songs so that on the day of war, before the
assault, it will not stir the proletarian's ear nor unfurl over his head like a
fresh banner flapping in the wind.
Another SPD meeting. Hertz, a Reichstag member, attempts to speak.
The workers prevent him as far as they can. On the side of the Reichstag
member: the chairman's bell, statistics, history, political economy and
logic. On the side of the workers: piercing catcalls, unemployment, hunger
and a healthy social instinct. Hertz considers that over the last five years
the SPD has made certain mistakes but that they are not worth talking
about now. The audience on the other hand wishes to talk about nothing
but these mistakes and dozens of notes sent up to Dr Hertz put it in black
and white: "The SPD is a stinking corpse which it is high time to bury."
When the Reichstag member shows by his look that he cannot read out
what has been written down it is repeated to him aloud.
The platform do not want to give a communist the right to answer.
The workers vote solidly for him and the communist speaks for forty
minutes with the chairman's permission and for another forty despite his
ruling against. Then deputy Hertz surfacing somehow through the noise,
stamping and heckling, makes a frantic effort, suddenly takes a grip, and
is triumphantly afloat.

He has found allies and names names that turn the workers into pillars
of salt.
"Any resistance to the Whites is useless. (Whistling). For the five years
that Social Democracy has sat down with them in the government it has
attempted to uphold the interests of workers. (The noise rises. ) Social
Democracy did what it could but the Black Hundred ministers pressured
Stresemann and Ebert so much that these unfortunate comrades could
hardly refuse a huge monthly subsidy to Kahr's White Guard government
in Bavaria. (Abuse for the speaker.) Lenin ... (A deep silence; Hertz can
take a breath). Lenin proved that Germany does not exist as a selfsufficient political and economic entity. Her fate is linked with the
revolution or reaction in France, Belgium, Britain and Italy. Basing
ourselves upon Lenin's view we can safely state that the possibility of
social revolution in Germany at the present moment is absolutely
excluded.. ."
Dr Hertz is seen to be still speaking for his mouth is moving. But his
words can no longer be heard.

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Larrissa Reissner

Hamburg at the
Barricades

An uprising passes by without trace in big cities. A revolution has to be

great and victorious if the traces of havoc, its heroic abrasions and white
bullet-scars on walls pock-marked by machine-gun fire are to be
preserved on stone and iron if only for a few years.
Two or three days or two or three weeks later, together with shreds of
newspapers and tattered posters either ripped front the walls by bayonet
points or washed off by dirty showers of rain, the brief memory of street
battles, churned-up roadways and trees thrown like bridges across riverlike streets and stream-like alleyways also passes away.
Prison doors slam behind the convicted while fellow-fighters, thrown
out of their factories, are compelled to look for work in another city or a
remote district; those who are unemployed following the defeat take
refuge in the most far-flung and anonymous nooks; the women keep
quiet, the children, wary of the security policeman's smarmy inquiries,
deny everything. Thus the legend of the days of the Rising dies away,
forgotten and drowned by the noise of restored traffic and resumed work.
In corners of workshops a new group of workers that has taken over at the
deserted benches in the factories may still repeat a name or two and recall
the particularly good shots -- but that too is passing away.
For a worker there is no history within the confines of the bourgeois
state; the list of his heroes is kept by the drumhead courtmartial and the
factory guard from a Menshevik [1] trade union. The bourgeoisie, once
having cracked down with armed force, stifles the hateful memory of the
danger it has so recently escaped.
Several months have already passed since the Hamburg Rising. But,
strange as it may seem, its memory stubbornly refuses to vanish: yet the
traces of barricades have been carefully smoothed over, trains run
peacefully along the embankments and viaducts that served as defensive
or offensive parapets and seagulls rest on them.
Three drumhead sausage-machines hastily shove the street fighters into
jail; the doctors and prison inspectors have long ago returned to the next
of kin the last corpses mutilated beyond recognition by brutality. And still

the memory of that daring October endures. There is not a public house,
workers' gathering or proletarian family in the old free city of Hamburg in
which the amazing scenes enacted on those outlying streets are not
recounted with the pride of a participant or at least the involuntary
admiration of an onlooker.
The explanation for the obstinacy with which the dockland proletariat
maintains and watches over the memory of the October days lies in the
fact that the Hamburg Rising was not smashed in a military, political or
moral sense. The masses were not left with the deep gall of defeat.
The protracted revolutionary process that had impelled them to the
barricades in October was broken neither on the 24th when the whole
police force and a crack Black Hundred unit of marines and Reichswehr
forces were mobilised, nor on the 26th when compact police formations,
thousands-strong cavalry and infantry detachments and whole platoons of
armoured cars finally burst into the revolutionary suburbs which several
hours before had been voluntarily abandoned by the workers' hundreds.
On the contrary, the movement that surfaced in October to rule the city
for sixty hours, cracking the enemy's head everywhere he dared to launch
an assault upon the skilfully placed barricades, cost the workers only ten
dead but the police and troops dozens and hundreds of dead and
wounded and afterwards calmly led its combatants out of the fire, saved
and hid their weapons, brought its wounded into secure refuges in a
planned retreat and then returned underground so as to be able to reemerge at the first call of the all-German revolution.
The beginning of the revolutionary movement has to be counted not
from October but from August of last year when Hamburg had become
the arena of successive bitter wage battles, for an eight-hour day, pay
based on the gold equivalent and a whole range of not only economic but
also purely political demands: a workers government, control of
production and so forth. These trade union battles were accompanied by a
rising strike fever and stormy outbursts of growing revolutionary hatred:
raids on food warehouses and assaults on police and blacklegs. It was
during these months especially that Hamburg working women

distinguished themselves, being, like all women from large ports, far more
resourceful and politically mature than their comrades in the majority of
Germany's industrial centres. In the August of that year it was they who
barred their husbands' and workmates' way into the striking shipyards.
Neither police bayonets nor the weak-willed crowds of workers who were
ready to meet their employers on any conditions could thrust their human
chain back from the Elbe tunnel. One of these dashes ended with the
disarming and beating up of a police detachment and, in particular, of the
lieutenant who led it: for this he was drowned in the cold dirty waters of
the Elbe.
This movement starting in August could not have ended in fiasco as the
bourgeoisie crowed. Nor could it have fallen with the brilliant military
demonstration of 21-26 October but only with the defeat or victory of the
whole German working class. In this continuity and in this constant and
protracted growth which marks the work of the Hamburg comrades lies
the crucial distinction between an armed uprising and the so-called
political 'putsch'.
A 'putsch' has neither past nor future; only total victory or an equally
irrevocable and futile defeat. A revolution, if it is to be powerful and
guided by a strong and elastic battle-ready party, must be able to spring
itself, pull back and recoil even after the most reckless sally. But a weak,
politically untrained and untempered proletariat will live only in the hope
of a brief blow, an outburst and very sharp, bloody but unsustained effort.
Such a brief blow may well cost enormous sacrifices and the utmost effort
but fragile and loosely-knit masses will face anything provided that
beyond that momentary assault there glimmers some hope of an
ephemeral but incontestably complete and final success. If after such an
attempt at seizing power there follows a setback for one reason or another
these masses will fall out of line, drop out of any organisation and
reinforce their defeat with acrimonious self-criticism. Regular cadres of
politically mature masses will, on the other hand, return from a storming
operation to their old entrenchments still equal to long, gruelling, slow
siege, sapper work in the underground and daily harrying operations. The
Hamburg Rising, by virtue of the prolonged political process leading up to

it and even more by the absolutely brilliant work carried out in the days
and weeks immediately following its liquidation, forms the classic
example of a truly revolutionary uprising, evolving a quite remarkable
strategy of street battles and a faultless retreat, unique of its kind, that left
the masses with a sure sense of superiority over the enemy and an
awareness of moral victory.
Its results are unquestionable: never before has the collapse of the old
trade union organisations reached such elemental proportions as it did
after those very October days. From 25 October to 1 January more than
thirty thousand members, each of many years standing, dropped out of
the ranks of the Menshevik trade unions. We shall go into detail below on
the dastardly role played by the trade union bureaucracy and its right
wing during the October days. The United Republicans and the
Fatherland Defence Leagues, acting as a Menshevik household guard,
publicly relieved the police in the quietest districts, thereby allowing the
latter to concentrate on subduing Hamm and Schiffbek. More about that
below -- here we shall just note that all these bellicose exploits by social
democracy led to party cards being torn up and dumped in heaps at the
doors of its recruiting offices.
They lay in piles on the doorstep and hundreds of workers, risking
arrest or being shot by Reichswehr patrols, made their way to the trades
union hall to toss their card at the treachery-besmirched face of the
bureaucracy. A whole number of the major trade unions in the coastal
region such as, for example, the Amalgamated Union of Building
Workers, came apart at every seam after the October Rising. It was
physically impossible to restrain members from a demonstrative mass
exodus from the union. I managed to attend the meeting of one of the
builders' branches that had, eight-hundred-strong, decided to leave the
union and organise its own association. Among those present were
middle-aged men, not all party members, masters of their trade and not
short of employment, men who had paid their dues for decades.
At such a meeting old men choking with fury demanded a complete and
immediate break with the 'bonzes'. No communist could have more

strongly hated or more deeply sensed the immeasurable decline of the old
party. Communist Party (KPD) members endeavoured in vain to dissuade
the meeting from forming a 'break away union' and to insist on
undermining the bureaucracy from the inside by forming a solid
opposition that could increasingly extend its influence...
Workers disown the union as something utterly filthy and unworthy of a
single hard-earned penny contributed to its funds. They have become
deeply convinced that a worker who remains in a Menshevik union for as
much as a day forfeits his proletarian honour and becomes party to the
falsehood, murders and betrayal of the SPD. After October, staying in the
union, even for a middle-aged non-party worker became tantamount to
service with the Sipo [2] or the Eins A.[3]
The Communist Party and the masses behind it have grown infinitely
stronger, externally as well as internally. Their activity has not abated in
spite of numerous arrests (incidentally the majority of comrades were
seized not during the Rising itself but only when it was over and on the
basis of voluntary denunciations made by SPD workers and neighbours).
On the contrary all the walls of Hamburg are decorated with ineffaceable
inscriptions. At every crossroads and on the corner of every public
building the inscription is invariably painted up:'The Communist Party
lives. It cannot be banned.'
Parliament may well vote for an Ermchtgungsgesetz (Enabling Act);
Seeckt may well enjoy special powers and a White dictatorship may well
gulp down the last dregs of tiny freedoms in labour legislation, yet the
walls of all the huts where the unemployed register are pasted over with
new little communist posters like wallpaper. They are sprinkled like snow
from the gallery at all SPD meetings, stuck on pub walls and tram and
underground train windows. The women of the outlying areas, where all
the male population is on the run or in various prisons, demand that
posters and leaflets be sent out and if they have one grievance it is the lack
of a cheap communist newspaper. All this so little resembles a defeat that
the drumhead court-martial judges, under pressure from the masses'
silent threat, try to mitigate the sentences. The convicted go to the fortress

or hard labour camp with the pride and tranquillity of victors, in the
unassailable certainty that the revolution will never allow their five, seven
or ten years of solitary confinement to run their course, and with the most
profound scornful disdain for the laws of the bourgeois state, the cowardly
brutality of its police force and the seemingly triumphant weight of its
prison walls. Such a faith cannot mislead.
So why didn' t the whole country support the Hamburg Risings?
In the October days the whole of Germany was divided into two camps
confronting each other and awaiting the signal for the offensive. But by
then Saxony had already been inundated by the police and the
Reichswehr. Thus by the time of the Hamburg Rising one of the
revolution's principal bridgeheads had in effect ceased to exist. Numerous
groups of unemployed still filled Dresden's nighttime streets but hard on
their heels, alongside and ahead of them, Reichswehr units, armed,
insolent and provocative, bit into the asphalt. A signal for battle given in
Saxony at this moment would probably have become the signal for the
mass slaughter of Saxon workers. During these very days a conference at
Hamburg of workers employed in the great shipyards of Hamburg,
Lubeck, Stettin, Bremen and Wilhelmshaven was demanding the
immediate declaration of a general strike and the leaders only just
managed to obtain from this policy-making conference a postponement of
the strike for a few days -- yet the workers' conference at Chemnitz turned
down a general strike. By now Saxony was under water and the
proletariat, devoted to the left social democrats to the last, turned
instinctively away from an unfavourable collision that could perhaps have
been fatal to the revolution.
Berlin! Anyone who has seen Berlin in the October days will certainly
recall a feeling of astonishing ambivalence or, rather, ambiguity as the
basic feature of its revolutionary turmoil. Women and unemployed gave
the streets a special tint. In the bread queues and in front of butchers'
windows smart urchins whistling the Internationale pushed through
between knots of despairing women. The slide of the mark, the derisory
benefits paid out to the unemployed, disabled and war widows, the

inflated rates of pay, the breath-taking prices of immediate necessities,

the ruination of the petty-bourgeoisie, the utter shamelessness of the
Grand Coalition, the cupping-glass that the Ruhr had become, the
repressions by the French, the quiet mischiefs done by German capitalists
that had been dragged into the light of day by the press and,
overshadowing all the newspaper columns, the spectre of the bloodied
and coaldust-covered Ruhr -- all these were the clear portents of a
revolution at hand. Rich people's motor cars were already avoiding the
suburbs and the police turned a blind eye to the looting of bakers' shops.
On the outskirts artillery kept rumbling over the stony wastes, edging ever
closer to the striking factories; the roar of lorries loaded with two tidilyformed lines of police did not moderate, but merely went to kindle the
fury of the crowd besieging the markets and newspaper kiosk windows.
Yet at the same time, vast and totally passive masses of workers still
subscribed to social democracy; hidden behind the backs of the
unemployed and communists were the extensive layers of the
bourgeoisified proletariat, greedily clutching at a piece of bread, domestic
comfort and a pound of margarine, however many hours it might be
needed to earn all that. A cowardly, shrill, disgruntled majority ready to
sit out two or three days at home by the fire behind a cup of lenten coffee
and the latest little sheet of Vorwrts until the shooting in the street dies
down, the dead and wounded are carried away, the barricades dismantled
and the victor, whoever he may be -- a Bolshevik, Ludendorff or Seeckt -has put the vanquished in jail and a lawful government in the seat of
power. Alongside an extremely active vanguard there was this distended,
decayed, expectant rear ready in event of a failure to denounce a
communist neighbour who had lain in a trench beneath the very window
of some worthy socialist official concealed behind his net curtain.
In Berlin as in Hamburg (only certain quarters with a solidly workingclass population excepted) the proletariat had to resist General Seeckt's
gendarmerie and troops in complete isolation without the active
assistance of broad masses, without hope of rein forcements at the
toughest moments and sometimes, as in Hamburg, with virtually no
weapons. Nevertheless the rising in Hamburg undertaken in equally, or

almost equally unfavourable conditions, not only did not lead to defeat
but gave quite astounding results. The truth is that behind it stood the
whole of working-class Germany that, unbroken by the counterrevolution in an open battle,could materially and morally cover the heroic
retreat of the Hamburg pioneers.
Anyway, the job of a party out to conquer is nor just to keep a feverish
watch out for the historic moment, that so-called 'twelfth hour of the
bourgeoisie', when the hands of the clock of history hesitate for an instant
and then mechanically count off the first seconds of the communist era.
There is an old German tale: a valiant knight spent all his life in a magic
cave waiting for a slowly swelling drip of water glistening from the tip of a
stalactite to drop finally into his mouth. At the last minute some absurdity
would always stop him from catching the agonisingly awaited drip which
would fall uselessly on the sand. The worst part of course is not the actual
point of failure but the dead, hollow pause of disillusioned expectation
between one burst and the next.
In Hamburg they did not wait for dew from heaven. What they here so
neatly and tersely call Die Aktion was linked into a strong chain of
uninterrupted struggle, knitted to what had gone before and finding its
support in a future every day of which, be it one of success or failure,
stands under the sign of a victory that will smash the world like the head
of a steam-hammer.
Besides, the Rising occurred not in the province of Brandenburg, not in
Prussia, and not in the Berlin of parliament, the Siegsallee and Seeckt, but
on theWasserkante, in English, the seaside.

Hamburg
Hamburg lies on the shore of the North Sea like a big wet fish lifted still
quivering from the water.
Eternal fogs settle down on the pointed scaly roofs of its houses. Not
one day remains true to its capricious, pale, windy morning. With the

tide's ebb and flow there follow in succession damp, mildness, sunshine,
the grey cold of the open sea and the interminable relentless rain that
drenches the glistening asphalt like someone standing on the foreshore
picking up from the sea an old ship's bucket -- the kind used for baling out
leaky boats that choke with water in a heavy swell-- and swilling it out
over gay Hamburg; Hamburg, as impermeable as a pilot's oilskins,
steaming with moisture, reeking like a seaman's pipe, charred with the
fires of the dockside bars yet standing firm under the torrential rain with
legs set wide apart as if on deck, planted on the right and left banks of the
Elbe.
All along the shores of this marvellous industrial inlet, nature has been
universally eradicated like some prejudice left out of our life by the
eighteenth century. Not an inch of ground left bare. Over a stretch of
twenty or so miles are two trees, more resembling masts after a fire at sea
than the useless living things they are: the one on the jetty is hunched up
like an old woman walking against the wind on to whose thick woollen
stockings and shivering legs the wind tosses shreds of angry foam; the
other is at the offices of Hamburg's greatest shipyards, Blohm & Voss.
This one only stays up out of fear; beneath it is a disgusting black canal
into which factory waste flows from gaping pipes like inky vomit. A
bridge, the guard's cabin and, on the opposite bank in the pale light of five
o' dock in the morning, nothing but the shining windows of invisible
blocks without walls or roofs in row after row up above the whole
harbour, reaching out with their electricity to touch the very dawn.
But the greatest of all these wonders, and the shapeliest forms in this
realm of shapely metal, are the light shadowy jibs of the world's largest
cranes that arch over the harbour. Lying at their feet like toys are
transatlantic liners, fully fitted-out with their illuminated rows of
portholes and hideous parts below the waterline, like swans out of water
which have equally ugly underwater parts.
Here they are working three shifts, convulsively and ruthlessly.

Here, by wringing out the workers like wet washing, the German
bourgeoisie is making its last futile attempts to surmount the crisis that
paralyses it: building, creating new values and populating the oceans with
its black-funnelled white ships from whose sterns flutter the old imperial
black-white-red banners with scarcely noticeable republican pock-marks
on one of their fields.
As they say, Hamburg has everything -- the smoke of factory chimneys,
the elephant-trunks of the cranes with which the iron mammoths ravage
the holds and fill up the stone depositories, the light, gently sloping
bridges crisscrossing the new-born ships, wet beds, the howl of the sirens,
the coarse yells of the hooters, the ebb and flow of the ocean that makes
sport with the jetsam and the seagulls that settle on the water like floats,
and the neat cubical dark red brick masses of the warehouses, offices,
plants, markets and customs houses all built in straight lines and looking
like oblong piles of cargo recently stacked by the dockers.
Armies and legions of workers are employed in these shipyards, on
loading and unloading the ships, in the innumerable engineering, oilrefining and chemical plants, the several large-scale manufacturing works
and the vast industrial installations that cover Hamburg's rear, that
marshy, sandy hinterland, with an unbroken crust of concrete and steel.
The Elbe, this ancient, dirty, warm-watered coaching-yard for sea
tramps, is continually extending and building on to its concreted
backyards.
Here the sea horses throw down their baggage, gulp down oil and coal
and get cleaned and washed while their captains give in their bribes at the
customs, touch up the bills and have a shave before going ashore to their
families; meanwhile the crews go off and get nabbed en masse in St. Pauli,
a quarter for bars, gangs, ready-made dresses, pawnshops where the same
garish, shoddily-made expensive dress can be lodged for half its price and
finally the most astounding brothels. Ever since medieval times the back
streets of the St. Pauli neighbourhood have been screened off from the
city by strong iron gates open only at night. They are finely wrought with
every conceivable device and whimsical detail, proudly decorated with the

emblems and insignia of the craft's guild. In the evenings a lighted

window opens up in every door that gives on to a back street and there, on
display, smiling into the endless rainy darkness, are the queens of these
seamen's paradises. They wear low-cut dresses, drawn in at the waist and
trimmed with spangles and feathers, dresses in which the fashions from
the end of the last century have survived to the present, as on sweetwrappers and in the imagination of woman-starved seamen, and have
always been thought to embody the supreme joy of living.
This line of living meat is sold with the utmost simplicity. Customers
pass from window to window, examine the goods on display and
disappear inside only to fly out into the road a short while later growling
and cursing: St. Pauli's doorkeepers are renowned for their muscle.
All languages echo and all nations mingle in the little taverns of this
district. They are famed for their savage wit, egg grog and a total
immunity from police intervention -- in short, a wonderful blend of
valeur, alcohol, revolutionary ardour, tobacco smoke and the latest
hopelessly fallen, wilted sinner; she balances on the edge of a table
swamped in bitter beer hastily repeating over a piece of bread and butter
to some drunken Adam without name or face that most divine lie -- about
love.
The language spoken here is, as a rule, Hamburg's language.
It is thoroughly soaked in the sea; as salty as cod; as round and juicy as
a Dutch cheese; as rough, pungent and jolly as English gin; as slithery,
rich and light as the scales of some large rare deepsea fish slowly panting
among the carps and plump eels quivering their wet rainbows in a
fishwife's basket. Only the letter S, sharp as a spindle and as graceful as a
mast, testifies to Hamburg's old gothic and the days of the Hanse and the
piracy of the archbishops.
Not only the lumpen-proletariat but the whole city is steeped in the
lively, boisterous spirit of the port. It surrounds on all sides in a tight ring
the bourgeois quarters situated around the Alster, a tidal lake in which the
pulse of that same Baltic ebb and flow can still be felt. Villas hug the shore

closely, leaving barely enough space to run through the neat gardens clad
in flowers like swimming costumes, and tennis courts down the flight of
steps to the shore.
Everywhere the excited, unclean breath of the suburbs blows down the
necks of the patricians' houses. A ring of electric trains firmly binds in the
outskirts and squeezes them against the smart quarters like a steel band;
along it, filling the coaches with the smell of sweat, tar and winey breath, a
turbid stream of workers surges twice daily, bisecting the whole city on its
way to the docks.
Consequently all of Hamburg is equally attentive to the lunchtime
hooter at the shipyards, the boatswain's whistle and the morning and
evening call-over on the bank of the Elbe just as the smallest pool and the
tiniest child-packed frog pond heeds the shudders of the distant ocean,
the ocean that sends Hamburg its wealth and its winds that are as
resilient as sails.
The bourgeois, the worthy burgher, is just as uninsured against contact
and proximity with the proletarians as is his home. A lady going to the
theatre is squashed between two portworkers who quite naturally put
their greasy bags down on the soft seats.
A young thing from St. Pauli sits herself coolly down beside a civil
servant's wife, winks round at her neighbors and gets off at her stop on
the arm of one of them; a worker cuddles his wife or girlfriend; a
stevedore smokes out those around him with an incredible tobacco, some
friends take a seaman home from a binge and the whole coach chuckles
with them, thinking, speaking and laughing in the purest
Hamburg Platt (dialect) that can turn any place into a jolly seaman's
fo'c's'le.
All this is not very consequential from our point of view. But after Berlin
where a worker with his tools has the right to travel only in a specially
dirty old coach; where the superiority of the first and second classes is all
but defended by the police; where an unemployed worker, rubbing his
cold violet ears dares not seat himself on one of the Tiergarten's

innumerable and always vacant benches; after exultant bourgeois Berlin,

the very air of Hamburg with its free and natural spirit smells of
revolution.
At four or five o' clock in the morning the lumpen-proletariat is asleep,
wherever that might be, or is being forwarded on to the police station.
At a quarter to six, still by the light of electricity, the first high tide of
workers begins.
Above the tramlines a railway hangs in the darkness and above that the
short gleaming ribbons of the electric trains: all these thrust on to the
pavement an army of dockers, hundreds of thousands of workers and
hundreds and thousands more unemployed who besiege the wharves in
hope of some casual employment. Each unit gathers around its foreman;
in the blackness of tarry jackets and from behind backs humped with toolbags there shines an oil-lamp like a colliery overman's. After the call-over
the regiments of workers split up for the hundreds of steamboats that
distribute them around the yards and plants. They pour into the industrial
city over four bridges. Troops and police keep a sharp eye to see that not
one 'civvie' penetrates the industrial islands. But neither the bridges nor
the hundreds of steamers that play their lamps and searchlights upon the
river in a sort of unique carnival in a black oily Venice, suffice for the
dense surge of the morning shift. A bright dry tube that pumps legions of
workers across from shore to shore every morning and evening, has been
laid deep beneath the Elbe's waters.
At each end of the tunnel elephantine lifts raise and lower this human
torrent to and from the concrete exits.
They move, these two lifts, screeching in their screw-like towers like two
shovels unceasingly stoking living fuel into hundreds of furnace-like
factories. Out of this forge came the Hamburg Rising.

Barmbeck

Hamburg workers live a long way from their factories and shipyards, in
a part of the city christened Barmbeck. This is one enormous barracks for
workers where all the dwellings look like one another, common sleeping
quarters in rented barracks joined together by the unclean, bare, damp
corridors of the streets. Opening up at the ends of these streets like chinks
are dreary squares that look more like public kitchens or conveniences,
each with a dreary fountain under the tin sky. Across this already foul and
filthy suburb crawls the gigantic caterpillar of the railway viaduct
describing a steel semi-circle. Its slightly bowed legs cling to the asphalt
with concrete suckers. A rattlesnake's head tightly fitting between two
blocks, vanishes amid the backyard crevices, blind walls and ravines
crammed with bunches of giddy little balconies from which flutter drying
linen and strands of wilting ivy that has had its fill of smoke and damp.
The station building plants a wide, flat foot on the railway line's tail,
leaving a crack for the stream of passengers to pour through.
Directly opposite the station, behind a spiked railing from which shreds
of old decrees dangle, stands one of the police stations with murky
windows that resemble a detective's shaded glasses. A guard on duty, that
pock-marked monotony of police stations and the official's tedious
boredom and spite, chewed over like an already twice smoked and
discarded cigarette-end picked up from the floor.
The port is open to workers only at certain times. It sucks in an army of
workers at dawn and spits every one of them out in the evening. Troops
remain in this deserted industrial fortress to guard the swing-bridges,
turnstiles, and subways through which the dense flood of workers pours
to the quayside. Not one worker lives within the port itself. Only the old
and proven servants of the seigneurs of industry enjoy such a privilege;
the sparse, obsequiously twinkling lights of their dwellings huddle timidly
against the gigantic shadows of factory blocks slowly exhaling into the
night and fog the human warmth they have swallowed up during the day.
The guards pace up and down the quays using their bayonets to block the
way of any stranger they want to check on and shining their lamps
straight into his face:

"Who are you? Where're you going? Why? Password.."

In Barmbeck the unrest began a week before the Rising. On Wednesday
17 October working women and office workers' wives take over the
markets and force the saboteur traders to continue business.
On Thursday and Friday they form a chain in front of the shipyards and
send their shamed husbands back home. On the same day fifteen
thousand unemployed workers and women demonstrate at the
Heiligengeist Field. On Saturday an impressive rally at the Trade Union
House from which thousands proceed to the City Hall and break through
into the restricted zone surrounding it.
On the streets that evening tens of thousands of workers pace endlessly,
stubbornly, intently and furiously along the pavements. The police arrest
over a hundred people but the sombre promenades do not cease. News of
the Reichswehr's onslaught upon the workers of Saxony spreads like a
fever. The masses are gripped by a terrible excitement. This is the eve of
revolution.
On Sunday 21 October there is a conference of portworkers from the
whole Baltic coast: from Bremen, Stettin, Schweinemunde, Lbeck and
Hamburg. The majority of delegates are SPD but many have been sent
from plants already several days on strike. They had already returned
their membership cards to the metalworkers' union which had declared
these strikes to be 'wild-cat'. There was a sharp clash between an old SPDMann, a Stettin delegate, a man covered in moss and mould from twentyeight years of social-officialdom, and T. a square, big-boned, wide-browed
worker who would pound his clenched fist like a shaft and was to grasp
the reins of the Hamburg Rising in his iron hands.
Here, at this conference, T. had to urge on and restrain simultaneously.
Like some old coachman, used to driving his heavily laden waggons up the
steep icy slopes of the bridges, T. had both to kindle and damp down,
scarcely keeping on his box while beating off the social-bureaucrats with
piercing whipcracks, tugging on the foaming bits with the whole weight of

his authority and grounding the rearing militancy that would argue no
longer but was blind with rage.
The conference only just permitted the postponement of a general strike
for several days. Only thanks to this resolution could a stormy meeting of
full-time officials be convinced and brought to order.
On Sunday night a courier brings (false) news of an eruption in Saxony.
The order for a general strike is immediately passed round the various
quarters. Dozens of major enterprises support the Deutschewerft
shipyards which have been locked out since Saturday.
The second shift of workers leaves the workshops, breaks through
police cordons and goes back to the city centre. By four o'clock
harbour is paralysed. A crowd, one-hundred thousand-strong, roams
streets of Hamburg giving it the look of a city already in the grip of
Rising.

the
the
the
the

A second courier: he speaks at meetings in Altona and Neustadt giving

entirely fantastic news of the Russian Army mobilising and their
submarines sailing to the aid of Hamburg.
In the dead of night a conference of the'chiefs': the leaders of the
Military Organisation receive their combat orders, taking them with a
feeling of the deepest inner satisfaction. T., who has been fighting for a
postponement for several hours, stopping up all the holes through which
the movement might have spilled prematurely on to the streets, now lifts
all the sluices and opens all the taps that still hold back the torrent of the
Rising.
K. also was pleased. A few words about him.
A worker. A sergeant-major in the war who loathed with all his being
what is called der preussiche Drill (Prussian army drill) in the trenches.
He had received a commission for his bravery. Then, in one of the towns
of occupied Galicia a major incident that nearly cost him his nice new
epaulettes. Four weeks' jail for boxing a major' s ears in public. By 1918 K.

is a member of the Hamburg Council of Workers' Deputies. He takes part

in the March Action. He had already, just after the Unification Congress,
joined the KPD. One of the most active members of the Hamburg
organisation. Taken all together, military training, courage, roughness, a
portworkers' jollity, the old sergeant-major's precise abrupt speed and the
knack of 'delivering a rocket', all these unexcelled qualities won K.
popularity among the masses and a cautious, almost squeamish reaction
from die Intellektuellen. And well they might for philistines don't like
grinning people with an invariable smell ofKm (Kmmel spirits) about
them and the markedly crude language of the port.
Gaiety, roughness and a slight intoxication in the blood are considered
incompatible with the calling of a European party hack.
After the August riots the party was literally deluged with spies. One of
them, with the touch of an old provocateur, offered to supply a crate of
arms, receipt of which would have led to the dismemberment of the
military organisation. K. was charged with unmasking this police ruse. He
drove off with the agent to collect the arms. On one of the bridges he
coolly picked the man up by the scruff of the neck and dangled him over
the side.
"Own up, you bastard."
He owned up, got his due and vanished.
In periods of lull comrade K.'s wild energy turns him into a pub brawler
and tyrant, terror and pride of a whole neighbourhood.
He meets a bunch of SPD men in a pub: Hamburg's superb Km mixed
half-and-half with the excellent beer sharpens K.'s dialectic to the
extreme. In the end the Mensheviks, aroused to a fury by the silent taunts
of this giant with the narrowed, benign, crafty eyes, leap yelling into a
fight. Taking the ringleader as his target K. snatches him from amongst
his fellow-thinkers and flings him on to a grand piano. An incident, the
police, broken noses and unimaginable chords from the unfortunate

instrument. Inactivity is terribly dangerous for people like K. Yet in an

active struggle they move forward into the front ranks.
During the Rising it was that same K. and the communist officer Kb.
who saved Barmbeck from rout by a network of amazing barricades. More
about them below.
At midnight the leaders disperse to brief and assemble the members of
the workers' hundreds. The party as a whole was, like the wide layers of
workers not in the party, only to learn of the Rising during the morning
after the seizure of all police stations by the military organisation's
commandos. The storming of the Polizeibroswas scheduled for dawn on
21 October, i.e. simultaneously in all parts of the city at 4.45 a.m, and,
immediately following the takeover of the police stations, the capture and
disarming of Wandsbek barracks. Until that point the military leaders,
who had mobilised their men and had to spend the rest of the night with
them, could not allow anyone to go home, put a light on or on any pretext
go off to 'say good-bye to the family'. Only thanks to such precautions
were the police caught truly off-guard and disarmed with bare hands. The
credit must go to T. and the other comrades who worked out this battle
plan with him. The game was half won by prefacing the mass Rising with
this silent unexpected blow by the military organisation which: 1)
deprived the enemy of support points in the form of police stations; 2)
armed the workers at the expense of the police; and 3) produced in the
masses an awareness of victory already ensured, thereby attracting them
more easily to join a struggle that had hardly begun. The government paid
tribute to this dislocation caused by the Rising. Here is what
Hamburg Polizeisenator (Police Commissioner) Hense, a social democrat,
wrote about it:
"The worst thing about this Rising was by no means the numerical
weakness nor the inadequacy of the forces placed at our disposal. No,
what was so terrible(schreklich) was that this time, unlike all previous
putsches, the communists were able to carry though their lengthy and
thorough preparations in such secrecy that not a single squeak about it
reached us. Generally we tend to be informed of everything afoot in the

communists' camp. Not that we have to keep special spies in their ranks.
No, the Law-abiding public, in which I include workers who are members
of the Social Democratic Party, usually keeps us informed about
everything happening amongst the communists without any coercion.
This time the 'law-abiding' Mensheviks proved unable to forewarn the
authorities about the Rising in preparation. The latter knew nothing of it,
so little in fact that the state of siege that had kept the police on full alert
the week before had been lifted by the government on Sunday, that is on
the eve of the Rising.
But let us go back a few hours. Here are some trivialities that portray
the mood of the party at the moment of mobilisation, the time when
people are caught unawares, promptly shaken out of bed and led off by
the scruff of the neck to goodness knows where. This is the twilight hour
when, lying half-awake getting unbearably cold, you want to go back to
sleep and everything is painted in a drab muddy colour -- in short not
quite the time when you get up to adopt a heroic posture. Everything is, as
they say, rough and ready.
One of the leaders of the Rising goes round his Bezirksleiter (zone
leaders) to pass on the order for the morning's operation.
A street without life, a sleeping house, a somnolent, stuffy, snoring flat.
The family of a very poor worker. He rose and dressed without asking why
or lingering a minute. A calm handshake and a cigarette's slowly receding
ember in the dark.
Another nook -- in one of the working-class quarters. The door is
opened by the wife who helps her husband collect his things and holds a
candle-stub over the kitchen table on which a map is spread out. For some
time he primes himself and then, from the depths of his heart with a sense
of the deepest relief:
"Endlich geht's los ..." (At last it's beginning.)
In a third lair a wife to her husband who is dawdling over getting ready:

"Nu mock di man fertig" (Hurry up and get ready.)

Finally the St. Georg district. Here they're not asleep. In a back room a
lamp is alight, flicking the web of tobacco smoke. The landlady answers
evasively -- he's at home and he isn't and she doesn't know anything.
Cautious steps on the stairs and suddenly comrade R. appears in the
doorway, his face smeared with soot, barefoot, with a cluster of rifles
under his arm, his pockets stuffed with all sorts of ammunition. In
shadow is the merrily grinning physiognomy of a character known around
the dockland taverns as Rowdy (ruffian). What's this? They have cleared
out a whole armoury. This Genosse (comrade) is of course not quite
a Genosse, only a sympathiser. But the speed and dexterity with which he
unhooked the bolt and lifted the shop window ... Rowdy prides himself on
the simplicity of the great performer.
Meanwhile a comrade, having received the password and plan for
seizure of the neighbouring police staton and all its arms, says with a note
of deep regret:
"Mensch, den har ick dat jo nicht mehr neudig hat.'" (Hell, this is no
use to me any more!)
The entire Barmbeck struggle lasting three days was in its first phase
directed towards the railway line, the spinal column of the area, which the
workers could not smash due to insufficient weapons and principally
through lack of explosives. The position was complicated by the fact that
one of the most difficult police stations, Von-Essen Strasse, was situated
in the rear of the insurgents and had not been captured by them: it drew
off and pinned down considerable insurrectionary forces throughout the
struggle. This station stayed intact by a complete accident. When C., an
enormously big man distinguished by an unusually cool temper, as
impervious and as well rolled as fresh asphalt, had with two comrades
broken through the station's main entrance and rapped a stick on the
table demanding immediate surrender, and the Blues and Greens [4] were
already starting hesitantly to unfasten their stout belt-buckles, a second
detachment from the unit came round from the back of the building,
penetrated the yard and, puzzled by the utter silence reigning in the now

occupied mouse-trap, opened fire at the station windows. The Sipos and
Reichswehr men came to their senses, saw three unarmed workers in
front of them, threw two of them to the ground catching C. off guard,
barred themselves in the cellar and showered the invaders with hand
grenades. The workers' unit retreated. But at the very first intersection it
was halted by Kb. who had already had his stubborn network of
barricades put up to meet the troops.
One officer for the whole of the Hamburg Rising but how much he did
for it! There was not a street in Barmbeck, not an alley, crack or chink not
blocked up with a couple of plugs. Barricades seemed to sprout from the
ground multiplying at an incredible rate. If there were no saws and
spades, they were found. Residents were drawn into this excavation work:
sweating, they dragged stones, broke up pavements and selflessly sawed
up the sacred trees in the public gardens; they were ready to blow
themselves to dust if that would save their cupboards, chests of drawers,
beds and trunks from this frantic work of construction.
Only one old woman touched Kb.'s sleeve and beckoned him upstairs
after her to take a wide sturdy board that was extremely handy for a
barricade off her washstand -- the pride of the whole household. The
board was put into use and endured stoutly to the end -- though this was
an exception. The old romantic barricade has by and large had its day long
ago. A girl in a Phrygian cap does not hold a tattered banner over it,
Versaillaises in white galters no longer mow down the
courageousgamin nor does the student from the Latin Quarter clutch his
fatal wound in a lace handkerchief while a worker delivers his last bullet
from the long old-fashioned barrel of the last pistol. Alas! The art of war
has stuffed all this lovely romantic drivel back into the pages of schoolbooks where it lives on ringed with the legends and powder-smoke of
1848. Today fighting is different. As a fortified wall between revolutionary
rifles and government cannon the barricade long ago became a spectre. It
no longer serves as a protection to anyone but solely as an impediment. It
is a light wall assembled from trees, stones and upturned vehicles
covering itself with a deep ditch, pit or trench that bars the way to
armoured cars, those most dangerous foes of an uprising. It is in this

trench that the meaning of the modern barricade's existence lies. But the
old-time barricade, now backed up by the field-trench that has migrated
to the city from the dead fields of large-scale warfare, continues to serve
insurgents in all good faith even if it is in rather a different fashion from
its heroic great-grandfathers of 1791 and 1848.
Piled up across the streets impeding a proper view of what is actually
going on beyond its menacingly jagged wings it causes the enemy's
attention to be focussed on it as his only visible target. The barricade
courageously catches with its breast all the blind frenzied fire that troops
rain down on their unseen enemy. Yes, here again is another new feature
that has wholly changed the landscape of civil war and all its strategy and
tactics. The workers have become invisible, elusive and almost
invulnerable. For them the new method of warfare has devised a cap of
darkness that no quick-firing weapon can reach. The workers fight rarely
if at all in the streets, leaving these entirely to police and troops. Their
new barricade, a huge stone one with millions of secret passageways and
loop-holes is formed by the whole working-class area with all its
basements, attics and living quarters: in this unassailable fortress every
ground-floor window is an embrasure, every attic a battery and
observation post. Every worker's bed is a litter which an insurgent can
count on in the event of being wounded. It is only this that explains the
utterly disproportionate government losses, whereas the workers in
Barmbeck could count scarcely a dozen wounded and between two and
five killed.
The troops were forced to advance along open streets. The workers
joined battle from their homes. All attempts by the regular forces to take
Barmbeck on Tuesday were thwarted by this same straggling, invisible,
elusive formation of rifles which could coolly pick its targets from
somewhere at a first floor window while down below the helplessly
exposed crowd of police literally showered the empty barricades with fire.
Anticipating an armoured assault Kb. contrived to blow up a concrete
bridge, considered to be there for ever, with neither dynamite nor

gunpowder. Workers felt out its vulnerable artery, the gas main,
uncovered it and set it alight.
One of the vehicles blundered into a quiet deserted street. It stopped to
put something right in the engine. A barricade sprouted in front of it. It
turned round -- the fallen crowns of sawndown trees were already lying
criss-crossed on the roadway.
Vehicle no. M-14 steals forward cautiously underneath the railway
bridge. In it are the driver and five Sipos. From behind a pub or round a
corner, it is not known from where, but close by, a shot and then another.
The driver is killed and a policeman too. The vehicle is torn to shreds and
the debris scattered about by Young Communists.
Veritable pitched battles continued all day Tuesday. The first heavy
assaults can be placed at about eleven o' clock. The hardest fought of all
were around the Von-Essen Strasse police station and along the whole
line of barricades facing the railway embankment from both sides. The
police quickly win the railway station. Their detachments run along the
track trying to pick off the fighters from above. They are quietly drawn
past the first two ambushes. Over the third span of the viaduct a deadly
volley breaks out. They are firing not only from cover but from all the
neighbouring attics. Riflemen have been sprinkled across the rooftops,
keeping whole streets, the main intersections and squares under fire.
Below, an earthwork and a barricade. It has held now for several hours.
A Sipo detachment moves against it even more savagely. The position
becomes untenable. But from upstairs the cry: 'Die Barrikade frei' (Clear
the barricades). The people don't realise what's going on. A marksman
goes down to them, a worker of only about twenty-three, apparently
wounded as his shoulder is bleeding -- and his neck and waist. He gives
the order to clear the barricade because the squad ensconced on the roof
is afraid of hitting its own side. The worker disappears into a driveway
and a few minutes later fire from the roof forces the police to retreat.
Another barricade that put up stubborn resistance for hours. A quartet
of lone marksmen come downstairs from an attic. From their observation

turret they had already spotted an armoured car approaching from far
away and decided that it would be more convenient to greet it downstairs.
With a happy shot one of them manages to pierce the radiator, paralysing
the vehicle. The riflemen return once more to their pigeon loft.
Meanwhile the battles at the railway station are flaring up even more.
The workers not only succeed in dislodging several White columns one
after the other from the embankment but attempt to go over to the
offensive themselves. But the open space in front of the viaduct is under
bombardment from armoured cars. It is impossible to pass. No matter,
the workers confront the fire under cover of huge beams taken from a
nearby timber yard. A whole forest of masts gets up and moves forward to
form a perfect blockhouse from which the riflemen continue their steady
methodical work.
At this point the first massed attack is unleashed below. Two armoured
cars cover six lorries that toss a whole host of Greens on to the road. This
unit succeeds in cutting off comrade K. from Kb. and his men moving up
from the other side of the viaduct. Not only that. Kb., who has left his
soldiers some two hundred metres behind, is captured. He is searched
and locked up in the railway building. If only the police had known that in
the figure of this puny man with the inoffensive eyes of a young teacher
who might be rash enough to go out for a stroll among the barricades,
they held in their hands the heart of Barmbeck in revolt. Sitting nice and
quietly by a window Kb. conducted a general review of the enemy's forces.
He watched exhorted mobs of police go past, urged on by the few
courageous officers. Those hapless hirelings cheering themselves on with
shots and cries, throwing themselves on their bellies every four paces,
making desperate gestures towards a phlegmatic armoured car standing
several metres behind its 'vanguard'. From that same window Kb. could
also observe the cool self-possession of several workers, especially little D.
whose handiwork he could tell from the terrified faces of the orderlies
coming out of the fire eight times in a row with heavily swaying stretchers.
Finally to the sound of convulsed shouts and firing the last platoon of
Greens disappeared down the empty streets of the insurgent quarter
strange, absolutely empty streets, devoid of any sign of life as if

abandoned by occupants and defenders. The waiting lasts for four endless
agonising hours. At about five in the afternoon the wave of troops and
police rolls back noisily. Their losses are enormous.
Alas, the staff centre that was to have directed the Rising in Barmbeck
itself (led by three communist intellectuals, city councillors) is absent. For
two days no one can find them anywhere. The battles are directed by Kb.,
C. and of course T. who set himself up with his wireless equipment right
beneath the open sky in one of the public parks.
At about six o'clock in the evening Barmbeck is still standing, deafened
by the stillness -- a respite. Kb. finds his way to a friendly pub where D.,
the little marksman, is by now lying on a settee being fed with hot coffee.
W., and that splendid marksman C. come here for a breather too. And that
impetuous K. is as warm and jolly as if he has just been playing skittles in
a pleasant after-dinner break or has just completed one of his twenty-mile
strolls dragging a querulous exhausted wife along behind him; he chooses
this spot to give instructions to his workers' hundreds.
To sum up: all that was courageous in the Barmbeck pocket came here
to shake hands, wash the blood off and decide: what now? What does this
stillness mean, broken only occasionally by the clatter of a sash out of
which a white flag is flung into the street -- the appeal of someone
wounded or dying?
Meanwhile silent Barmbeck, with twilight descending on it like a foggy
sheet on to the stretchers formed by the maimed streets, is ever so quietly
split into two halves. Fifteen hundred troops separate North from South
Barmbeck. The strong points, at Wagnerstrasse, police station 46,
Friedrichstrasse station and Pfenningsbusch, silently stretch out their
arms to each other in the darkness like a police cordon forcing back some
innocuous street demonstration.
All of a sudden the ring snaps shut -- a muscular elastic ring in which
the bulky forms of armoured cars once again drawn up hard against the
barricades are set like dull stones in a bracelet. A solid lump rolls up into
Barmbeck's throat. True, our posts are still in place. But time is against

them. The enemy is gaining with every drop of darkness that night is
forcing between the quarter's fiercely locked teeth.
In the end the Whites are just as invisible, and therefore invulnerable,
as the insurrectionaries. And there are more of them.
Along either side of one of the streets there creeps a double file of
patrols. At some gateway the officer-in-charge grabs some innocently
intellectual-looking man and jabs a revolver into his ribs. He does not see
a second man who, with a rifle in his hands, has recoiled back into the
dark and is as motionless as a stone. For the second time that day
the Landsknechte (mercenaries) have caught hold of the mainspring of
raging Barmbeck and then let it slip through their fingers. An hour and a
half later Kb. was giving the order to his riflemen to melt away, disappear
from Barmbeck, now encircled, half-strangled and half-inundated with
torrents of unseen enemies.
Each cleared his own line of retreat independently; one took that
mountain path across the rocky ridges of rooftops and over the gulleys in
those man-made urban Alps. Not one put a foot wrong, not one was
caught.
On the following morning all thirty-five had already met again in North
Barmbeck and decided to dig in on the broad semicircle of the railway
embankment. Again for a period of several long hours, battles, frenzied
shooting, obstacles across the adjoining streets, barricades and many,
many fallen enemy. Fifty fresh rifles enter service -- alas, toy ones taken
from a local club: and in the face of this Rising pressed up against the
embankment on either flank, three defeated assaults, three hound-packs
forced to depart with shattered skulls: that day cost the Reds four men.
Four excellent comrades: and old Lewien paid for it in excruciatingly
painful blood. The baby's rattles, the sportsmen's rifles from the club,
were found in his garden. Old Mrs. Lewien, living in her little house with
its antiquated chests-of-drawers, cat, white goat, portrait of Liebknecht
the elder and the almost hundred-year-old tradition of courageous
atheism and the old party of the days of the Anti-Socialist Law, was first
given back the old man's blood-stained overcoat and then a completely

bloodless body. His elder son, a philistine and SPDer arrived to burrow
through the boxes, sell off the chattels and demand a signature on some
papers from old Mrs. Lewien. But she can recall one thing only: the old
man standing alone on a lorry in a crowd of Greens and that he was pale.
Here on the evening of the 24th the comrades learnt almost
simultaneously of the fall of Schiffbek and the calm reigning in the rest of
Germany.
That Wednesday, the 24th, having received no news of the start of the
German revolution the leading group was compelled to sound the retreat.
Not because the workers had been smashed but what was the point of
pursuing the struggle in Hamburg alone, of flaring up in isolation against
a backcloth of general collapse?!
It was not quite so easy to order the retreat in a city drunk with victory,
where the defence is ready at any moment to go over to the offensive and
hundreds of barricades and tens of thousands of workers are preparing
for an all-out assault and the terrible closing act of civil war -- the
triumphant seizure of power. The first courier who brought to the
barricades the order to retreat was knocked off his feet with a furious
punch. He was an honest old worker who, together with his family had
maintained the dangerous courier service throughout the Rising. When he
thought of that terrible punch so unjustly received from his comrades
Comrade P. almost did himself in, becoming as bloodshot as that battered
cheek of his. In just the same way all working-class Hamburg clutched its
jaw and turned blind with the pain when it received the order to liquidate
the Rising. You had to enjoy the confidence of the masses such as T. did
having grown up with his organisations and being so inextricably linked
to their proletarian core that he could make the abrupt swing of helm to
demobilisation with impunity.
All right, they retreated. Disappointed and grumbling, parting for the
last time yet having repulsed the enemy from their barricades for many
hours. Taking advantage of the confusion the riflemen abandoned the
earthworks, barricades and sentry posts without a sound. They went off
with their weapons taking with them the dead and wounded, covering up

all traces left behind them, and gradually scattered out into the now silent
suburbs. This planned retreat was carried out under the cover of
marksmen dispersed on the roofs. None of them left his aerial barricade
until five floors below the last fighter had left his trench and the last
casualty, supported under the arms by his comrades, had hidden himself
behind the gateway of a safe house. They held on all day, all the while
holding down the Whites, running across from one zone to another, along
slippery cornices hanging over ravines, past black staircases gaping like
trenches, past wells and dormer windows through which the police ever
more insistently surged upwards as they finally scented emptiness and
defeat behind the unmanned hushed barricades. The struggle had turned
into a chase. The whole population concealed and saved the heroic
rearguard of the Hamburg October, those wounded, blackened hounded
loners still firing somewhere over the city and then suddenly digging
themselves into some unknown working-class family; dressed in rags,
with bloodied hands, parched black mouths and a pack of huntsmen
careering, roaring and swearing past the scarcely slammed door.
One of the last to retreat was the old party comrade W. who, tottering
with fatigue and drunk with a desire to lie down and sleep, could no
longer cling to a slippery tile or the corner of a sharp chimney. At last
when down below an exit to freedom had opened up before him in the
shadow of some murky gateway, he stopped again and unslung his rifle to
let off his last cartridges with a malicious glee. The whole corner on which
he was leaning had been lacerated with bullets. By sheer chance not one of
them had grazed his head, now against the stonework a shadow wreathed
with scratches and holes. They only just managed to get him away.
Around his neck over an unbuttoned shirt and a shaggy sweaty chest a
dazzlingly smart tie was fastened.
"What's this Schlips (tie) on for, old chap?"
"Ich wollte festlich sterben." (I wanted to die properly.)

Schiffbek

Lying a little way out of Hamburg where a dreary line of telegraph poles
marches off in the direction of flat, denuded sandy Prussia is a small
working-class town by the name of Schiffbek. It ranges out between the
Bille brook, murky and smooth as tinplate, and hills on which grow sparse
trees that have run bare-headed and tousled into the wind and also
assorted little two-storey houses of a workers' settlement.
In the centre the evangelical church stands empty like a rusty umbrella
stuck into the ground to dry out after the rain and forgotten there for ever.
Not believing in God the cosmopolitan population of this working-class
town does not visit it. Today, after the battles, it stands there with a black
eye, without window-panes or doors -- a priest who has strayed and ended
up in someone else's fight.
A large chemical factory stands on a little island on the far side of the
Bille: cold, venomous and full of crystals that are deposited into the icy
black water, naphthaline and green poisons that seem to cover the riverbed with a film of fresh vitriolic moss. Some thousand workers are
employed there.
Inside the kilns that never cool off fire that is as dense as the molten
planets is poured out. It is observed through tiny windows. Sometimes the
white heat is coated with a light coaly haze but more often it is as white
and still as blindness. Naked to the waist, workers charge away from the
blazing kilns out into the frost, snow or rain to escape an atmosphere in
which the one-time gigantic mare's-tails and warm swamps that are now
stacked in the corners as heaps of coal might have grown and revelled.
Along either side of a narrow stone corridor lies a steammill and a huge
iron-rolling works. On Christmas Eve its chimney, higher than all the
others, is like a sullen smoker left suddenly without tobacco.
'Tin Shacks' are spread out along the fringe of the now frozen white
waste patches. This works has one long legless body pressing its belly
against the ground and seven equally tall chimneys set in a row like
minarets from which every morning a shrill muezzin of labour sounds.

Work at this factory is extremely damaging to the lungs. The toughest

cannot stand more than four years of it. You have to be like S., a hero of
the Hamburg Rising, to emerge unharmed after working several years in
the inferno. But then S. is a giant whose build all Schiffbek is proud of.
Ask any little urchin and he will tell you that S. can lift on his shoulder
six men clinging to an iron crowbar, that his hands are much bigger and
can hold much more than the purses that the good housewives of
Schiffbek take to market and that in the morning when he swings his
extraordinary legs out of bed the whole tenement creaks and shakes so
much that neighbours without watches know it is time to wake their
husbands for work. So then as we have said, since S. is such a colossus, a
bold spirit, a Bolshevik and generally devilish the 'Tin Shacks' have not
done him too much harm. But little C. came out of them with a leg seared
to the bone; K.with red spittle wrapped up in his dirty handkerchief.
Further up the Bille stand the smoky towers of Jute, one of Hamburg's
largest manufacturing plants. It is predominantly women who work here;
poorly remunerated and poorly organised, for whom the party has year
after year conducted a bitter struggle against the Menshevik trade unions,
the women' s remarkably clamorous, inflammable but easily intimidated
inertness, the employer and the priest.
The Jute women doggedly resisted any stable organisation. Where
possible they would moan about their wages and after the first few days of
a strike would go whining to make peace with the manager, first smashing
the office windows and then informing on the instigators. However, the
factory, in the course of its normal capitalist business, is itself combing
out of this tangled, unexacting, conveniently exploitable, female mass the
first strands of a strong proletarian solidarity. Amenable as the women
might have been their wages still slipped down and down. First one
department and then another was subjected to the frantic inflationary
race of prices and wages. Yet within the bounds of their own homes, their
own housekeeping and their own factory the women remain as united as
they are indifferent to political movements that go beyond those bounds.
They may not take any notice of a General Strike but they will never let

their workmates down in the next section. Thus, for over a year now, the
basically peaceable Jute has, thank goodness, worked no more than three
days out of six: the rest of the time the factory is out in the street
supporting the section on strike at the particular time.
"O, ha!" (that is a pet expression of every true Hamburger).
"O, ha!" say the workers who have been conducting propaganda at the
Jute factory for months and years, "hunger is making good communists of
them".
Here is one of the astonishing women to have come out of the Jute. Let's
call her Elfriede and say that she is the daughter of a Schiffbek nightwatchman. Father was well-known about the town as an orthodox
Menshevik and the owner of a superb carbine with which he maintained
order and tranquillity in the derelict areas and buildings in his care
called Hundebuden (dog-kennels) by the workers. And so it was.
But if the watchman faithfully upheld the law of private property with
his carbine then Elfriede in every way overturned and trampled down
those sacred bastions with her amazing beauty.
Elfriede was not only a perfect communist, an excellent workmate and a
heroic girl who fought at the barricades, raising Schiffbek's entire female
population its feet to set up field kitchens and herself taking out under fire
hot coffee and fresh cartridges fastened around her slim waist re, the
marksmen in the trenches; with her own hands she put her old man under
lock and key adding his old-fashioned rifle to the party's scanty war
material and was finally caught by the police in the heat of her criminal
activity, namely while cleaning potatoes for the insurgents with her
sleeves rolled up amid piles of fresh peelings; not only was she a
courageous active woman for ever dedicated to the party but also perhaps
one of the first examples of a new brave type so unsuccessfully faked in
the pages of the neo-proletarian novel and the homilies of armchair
revolutionaries.

There came with her into the poverty-stricken district of Schiffbek the
spirit of destruction and liberty. Elfriede refused to become anyone's wife.
Her name evoked the timid respect and furious hatred of legal wives
whose husbands she would take away for a day, a year or for life, of
fathers and lovers.
She would conquer whomever she chose, make love for as long as there
were no lies in that loving and then haughtily return her captive to
freedom. But she asked no one for a name, a shield or aid for herself or
her child. Never, neither in weakness nor in sickness, did she seek support
in the law that all her life she had despised.
From the bench she went to jail.
But first a scene, an astonishing scene that actually took place in a
corridor of the Hamburg City Hall from whose balcony Doctor Laufenberg
was carefully thrown in 1918 and where arrested communists were
brought on 23 October.
On that dreadful day there stood in the forecourt of Schiffbek police
station in rows of three, four or five, lorries loaded with captured workers
lying on their backs, heaped on top of each other.
The rebels! They had fought in open battle according to all the rules of
honest warfare, pitting life against life with an adversary a hundred times
stronger, yet still sparing prisoners and letting the wounded go. After the
defeat they were of course treated like hunted ruffians, renegades
standing outside the law. The police pounded their feet on those rows of
bloody, gasping bodies heaped upon each other. Lying men crushed by
their comrades on top lay underneath with faces squashed against the
coal-smeared boards while above the Wachtmeister (sergeants) of the
Reichswehr tugged hair out and with their rifle-butts cracked the napes of
the immobilised men who then lost consciousness.
Three men were overwhelmed there. S., that oak among men, a
superman in his astounding physical strength, spewed blood and lost his
senses. K. was dying and agile little L. beneath his pacifier's boot was

ready to leap out of his crushed existence just as an eye slips from its
socket full of fire and tears. About all this later: I don't wish to start on
Schiffbek with the phase of police atrocities. They are merely a bloody and
dirty epilogue to three days of the Rising that cannot be stamped out by a
soldier's boot from the history of a new working-class humanity. For
indeed how unattainable is the shining peak on which stands the struggle
of Hamburg labour above the bloody filth of police station floors, the vile
courtroom offices where the proceedings were written out and torn up,
torn up and re-written, the reeking stifling lavatories of that now
illustrious City Hall where the arrested were forced to wash and even take
a shower so that members of the city government, and Messrs. socialist
deputies who had come to be convinced of the police's kind and humane
treatment of its prisoners-of-war, did not become queasy at the sight of
the blood smeared everywhere or the smell of the clothes of an adolescent
member of the Hamburg Young Communists, beaten until he had lost
control of his physiological functions.
So it was that in that long white corridor where the drunken soldiery
drove the living piece of revolution that had fallen back through the lines
into its hands, men cowered by the walls under the lash and it smelt of
rubber and blood, in that corridor Elfriede who had so zealously and
laboriously upheld her lonely dignified life free from the prop of any
official morality, yet as pure and as straight as an arrow, in that corridor
she was swamped with the foulest, filthiest abuse and mockery.
Every quarter of an hour a new group of Reichswehr burst into the hall,
picked up off the floor those who had already collapsed, beat up again
those who had already been beaten up, revived those who had fainted so
as to knock them down again and then each of those gangs started once
again on her standing as if naked among wild beasts.
"Communist slut," they shouted. "Whore," they shouted.
"You're not a German woman but an animal," they shouted.
And in that ghastly interminable torture-chamber that lasted a day, a
night and another day, this girl recalled: yes, there had been a great

German woman, as great as a marble statue, and nothing since her ghastly
death had been quite so fine and wise in the German revolution.
And what's more she had left behind a small book of letters. A white
cover with red lettering. Letters from prison.
Rosa Luxemburg.
Elfriede stood in that satanic corridor and cried out about Rosa
Luxemburg until she was heard. When a girl arms herself with Rosa's
name she is as powerful and as dangerous as an armed man -- she is a
warrior and no one will dare touch her.
It is impossible to pick up what she said and how or what her words
were.
But some N.C.O. made an apology.
One of the gangs went off with tails between their legs saying that 'they
hadn't known'. Perhaps this interval was used to get one of the injured
men away from the soldiers and drag him out of the serum by the arm.
That is the tale of Elfriede from Schiffbek.

Portraits
1. A Pair
A couple. In Schiffbek they tell how there lived this pair, husband and
wife, both fine old communists. Several years ago they separated, led
independent lives with new families and did not meet each other. A
superb marksman, he was fighting in October in one of the trenches that
intersected the narrow bare little streets. It so happened that his former
wife was standing there fighting next to him. As before -- in the days of
the Spartacus Rising and the Kapp putsch. The worker was caught and his
wife gave herself up the next day. And so that family of fighters re-united
quite naturally at the first shot, under fire. They will stand trial together.

2. A Private House and the Rising

She was a short-sighted, normal, chaste Catholic nurse with poor
eyesight. Today after the war he is a communist. A remarkable
resourceful, earnest quick worker. He plugged into the party like those
tiny household batteries that can give light, turn a roller to sharpen knives
or can, in eights, drive a model railway and yet which remain but
miniatures or an enormous miracle of energy, the motor of a whole era of
machines but on a minuscule scale. When necessary the little battery can
emit real burning sparks bigger than itself.
This practical-minded highly-skilled worker was struck down with a
rather special and rare illness that takes one in ten thousand and is thus
incurable: he was struck with a great and tormenting love for the devout,
bony gawky nurse.
As is normal in such cases it set in quite mutually and in one minute
they were transfixed.
They got married, vaulting over his politics and her catechism and even
forgot about them for a while. Then, comrade L., who never flagged and
never moved away from the party, started to save money to build his own
little house on the outskirts of the outskirts, beyond the oasis of little
white houses with red roofs that members of the local authority, five old
Mensheviks, had donated themselves out of official funds. All in one spot,
just like one big family.
The wind gusts around them and the population passing by spies.
Anyway these people are living well and contentedly.
L. worked; he worked overtime and nights and on his days off he would
rush down to the site to erect his house with great patience and toil: brick
by brick, chip by chip, tile by tile.
The first baby came along and the second one too. The party faded into
a mist and became a theoretical outlook on life, an idea locked away in an
unoccupied corner.

Sometimes, in moments of domestic repose L. could hear its

monotonous tread and feel it standing and listening at the door of his
conscience.
The short-sighted industrious wife finally could start living in her own
home, to sew by her own brightly scrubbed fireplace, sleep in her own
bed, rear children, wash down the stove's Dutch tilework, wash the little
piglets and wash the gleaming floors. On Sundays L. would now read
aloud some romance of court life about the objectionably pampered child
of a count -- with a wedding at the end.
On the morning of 23 October L. had just stuck the pig for Christmas.
The blood had already been drained off into a barrel for the black
pudding. At that moment the shooting started. In spite of the house he
had put up with his own hands and pasted together with the sweat of his
brow, in spite of that extraordinary love for his wife, the communist took
his rifle and went. And then what happened?
He was captured, beaten up and released. A trial in a few days' time. So
what then? Stay at home or flee?
That same powerful revolutionary instinct that had previously driven L.
to the barricades now drove this well-set up, bourgeoisified, domesticated
German worker out into the streets amidst the cross-currents of bullets
whizzing past the corners of the workers' tenements and the wretched
covers; to confront the two thousand regular troops who stormed this
hornet's nest to take it empty. Ruthless class instinct now commanded: do
not leave the party any more, do not dare desert, you must go
underground and go on with the work.
But on the day following his flight the house and the belongings, even
Lumpi the guard dog, will be confiscated by the government. The wife,
two children and the newly-born third will find themselves turned out
into the street. Besides, for some reason his wife is going blind and has
started to pray often and at length.

Nevertheless one night they arrived at C.'s -- she without hat or glasses
-- and recounted their whole life to the comrade, including that wonderful
first look that had at one time decided their fate.
The next day L. made off.
3. The Eighteenth Century, the Joy of Living and the Rising
Actually this portrait does not concern the history of the Rising itself.
But there is invariably in every gallery as a matter of course 'Das Bildnis
eines Unbekannten'(the portrait of an unknown man) and such an
anonymous sketch can often tell more about the inimitable peculiarities of
its period than all the signed canvasses.
We have to draw a house, a sunken ship slowly settling down
somewhere on the seabed, in a dark side-street where from time to time it
is flooded with light from the white eyes of a motor car drifting past. The
lamp over the gate radiates a light resembling the glow of a rotting tree.
A stinking gateway and windows close to the ground for ever
eavesdropping on each other.
The bedroom, as cold as the North Pole with its numbed window-panes,
cupboard and gaping wash-basin, warms itself on a hot-water bottle
stuffed under an icy feather-bed. In the diningroom -- which is also the
sitting-room and workshop -- is the dense but rapidly escaping warmth of
an iron stove; on the lamp a gawdy silk shade looking like some cheap
tart's petticoat; in the kitchen a reeking sink, gas and the heavy smell of
dampness. The whole setting testifies to the indubitable prosperity of an
aristocratic worker: it belongs to comrade K., an artist in wood. He is
employed in one of the biggest furniture factories that make and imitate
antique pieces. His speciality is the eighteenth century which, without
ever having read anything about art, he feels to the tips of his fingers.
With his eyes shut the master can impeccably saw out the cherry-coloured
veneer inlaid with metal and tortoise-shell and the furniture whose effete
intricate gently-curving contours emerge from a deal board, a heavy moist
piece of wood that has fallen into these amazingly creative hands, as

effortlessly as if they had come from the workshop of the celebrated

Boulle. In each of the old-fashioned writing desks at which, presumably,
our grandmothers wrote their love letters, and in each of the card-tables
on which the Werthers broke their chalk scribbling out the names of their
beloveds after having placed a candle beside the weighty pistols, K., the
craftsman, fits, for the sake of style, secret drawers, little recesses and
hidden springs that, if accidentally pressed, deliver into the hands of the
admirable bourgeois a couple of yellowing papers, a bunch of dried forgetme-nets and that most rare aroma of someone else's secret. All these
items have been gleaned by that same craftsman K. with enormous taste
and sense of proportion.
Communism has for him been tucked away like a casket full of ideas,
words and generalities wholly inapplicable to practical life that form the
most priceless and intimate thing in life -- political style.
Need it be said that in the Rising K. took no active part unless of course
you count the broad hospitality he extended to comrades following the
battles.
K. is an Epicurcan. A true Renaissance man in his effervescent
irrepressible love of life, its pleasures and its palpably warm human
beauty, his sense of which is as infallible as his cabinet-maker's skill. K.
believes that the very process of life with all its physiological and
profoundly mundane functions will some day become the basis for the
greatest and truest beauty. This social aesthetic gives him an affinity with
the best things that Edgar Allan Poe wrote about -- the as yet non-existent
gardens and palaces to be inhabited by wise men. K. populates them with
workers.
'If the kingdom of the future were suddenly to arrive' (again a purely
German concept: only a utopian who does not believe in his day-dream
could express himself that way) he would fashion wonderful shelves, beds,
tables and chairs for the workers palaces. This is his ideal communist
'casket'.

But now the practice. Why did he not join the fight in October? Why
does he smile when you talk about strikes and distributing leaflets, Given
all this deliberate passivity and indisputable desertion from the field of
civil war where does that provocative arrogance and manner of a victor
over the bourgeoisie come from! Why in the end did this man, who was
created for great spiritual and physical pleasures and who thought
communism the only road by which he and his class could attain such
pleasures, not lift a single finger or once risk his neck during the Rising?
It turns out that he is thieving and plundering his bourgeois. He is
stealing almost openly, stacking away sums large by the standards of
cottage industry, putting unimaginable profits into his pocket while
looking provocatively into his boss's eye and keeping a watch on the
cowardly accomplices who assist him. Then after a week of the most
arduous labour, working a ten-hour day with continuous strain, come
several bottles of excellent beer, his little wife Eisa in her black silk
underwear and, from out of the stinking corner where the Roederer's cork
hits the low ceiling like a tall man who has wandered in and banged
himself against the bank of this pit, through the hate of a strong cigar,
through the fog of perspiring, sultry dampness, through the golden
illusions bursting in tiny bubbles on the surface of the earthenware mug
in which centenarian grape fizzes, comrade K., with the smirk of a
conquerer, contemplates the bourgeoisie he has deceived, deceived so
cunningly and boldly.
Those are his finest hours.
The old songs of Hamburg are older and more rollicking than ours.
There is one about a craftsman's daughter who loved three boisterous
apprentices thrown out by her father, another about sea-horses and
women, about brawls and dockside pubs. He sings them marvellously.
How do you tell K. that for the crumbs the boss permits his
irreplaceable craftsman to snatch off his plentiful table, the drop of stolen
wine and those few hours' blessed oblivion, he is as much giving his
enemy the marrow of his bone, his life and the mysterious trembling

fibres of the brain that we call talent as any labourer gives his sweat,
muscle and bones?

About Schiffbek Again

Schiffbek's police station, council offices, post office and in general all
the institutions and public buildings that personify state power in this
small working-class town with its cosmopolitan population were seized by
the communists at dawn on 23 October with the aid of one carbine and
one hunting knife with a serrated blade and a horn handle.
As in the rest of Hamburg, Schiffbek police station, packed as it was
with armed Sipos, was taken by surprise with bare hands, quickly and
without a sound. At the head of the whole Rising and of the military
organisation that worked out and implemented its plan was S. A giant and
a brave man, one of those truly revolutionary workers of whom modern
Germany can be proud. Perhaps it was that very physical strength and an
awareness that with one movement of his metallic muscles he could crush
any adversary that had developed in him that sense of caution so valuable
to a leader and an ability to calculate the precise effect of every discharge
of force. He could come down like a steam-hammer on an anvil carefully
splitting a nutshell without damaging the kernel -- and a minute later beat
out an iron bar.
His armed squad, formed of picked members of the local organisation,
stood and fought just as S. himself would fight: when surrounded on all
sides by an invading mob and pinned against a wall he would knock those
small fry off their feet one by one without checking the incredible reach
and power of his hammer-fists.
Having occupied the police station the Schiffbek insurgents did not
remain there but, seizing sixteen rifles and as many revolvers, left the
building which could have become the same trap for them as it had been
for the police they had just seized and disarmed.
One good marksman, by concealing himself behind the shrubs, garden
sheds and corners of the workers' barracks scattered along the length of

the hills on the left-hand side of the central highway linking Schiffbek
with Hamburg, could and did keep the road, bridge and railway
embankment under fire and hold at a respectable distance an enemy ten,
a hundred, and finally, during the last assaults of the morning of the 26th,
a thousand times stronger.
A marksman, or, as they are called here, Scharfeschtze, would, by
remaining secure behind his cover and firing at long intervals, every five,
ten or fifteen minutes, attempt to pick off at least one, and often two men
with a single bullet. To these isolated and always lethal shots the police
replied by sweeping whole blocks with drum-fire from their machine-guns
-- they mowed down a multitude of women and children that had
accidentally fallen within the sights of their impotent rage. Nevertheless,
after a brief lull, a cold, calculated sharp-eyed shot again rang out,
catching the driver of an armoured car who had just peeped out from
under the steel hatch, removed a fur mitten and lit up a cigarette with
relief, a Green who had leapt out from round a corner and a Reichswehr
soldier squatting behind a letter box who had just stopped in the middle
of the street a tram conductor's wife, whose face and loaf tucked under her
kerchief had seemed to him suspicious.
Reichswehr soldiers are recruited from among clumsy country lads.
They are the younger sons of rich peasants, a generation that matured
after the war and revolution. In the countryside they are a burden on their
fathers; greedy, lazy, pampered farmhands who will not put sufficient
horsepower into the land as they cannot count upon an inheritance in the
future. Such lads, political quadrupeds, readily become Landsknechte and
look upon civil war as a pogrom in the course of which they stand to gain
much with little risk. But instead of unarmed women and children
terrorised in bread queues and that cowardly city rabble of whom back at
home the priest with his plump chin resting on his white collar would tell
with such passion, the well-fed little peasants stumbled against workers'
hundreds and the cold-blooded, flawless fire of old soldiers who had come
out of the world war with every badge of distinction for accurate
marksmanship and sapper work under enemy machine-gun fire.

The roles have been reversed. In Germany the revolution draws upon
cadres of old soldiers who defend their barricades according to all the
rules of military science while the government has numerous but totally
inexperienced and untempered units, cowardly in battle though brutal
when facing a captive with his hands tied behind his back. It was not by
chance that one of the officers found it necessary to drive his detachment
of raw recruits forward into the attack revolver in hand just to smoke out
a lone rifleman ensconced in the attic of his house who was faultlessly
picking off one soldier after another; as he urged his cannon fodder on
this lieutenant swore aloud before the whole town:
"You scum of the earth, you cowards ...With twenty of them (a motion
towards the dormer window) I could sort out thousands like you!"
But even without the officer's assistance the Schiffbek workers, under
the command of their S. and his Chief of Operations and Chief of Staff, the
incomparable Fritz, resisted the onslaught of the regular troops. Adapting
themselves to the conditions of the locality they would constantly switch
their tactics. Where hills dominated the town or where the houses stood
like eases amid open wastes they split their forces into small combat
formations, each of which would defend itself at its own risk and peril,
advance, take cover and change from one ambush to another. But where
empty white fields flowed between narrow banks of the town's streets they
relied upon the old and proven technique of street barricades, blocking
the water-courses of the streets with firm dams and excavating
earthworks so preventing armoured cars from breaking through to the
central blocks.
At half past eleven the police, now in possession of the empty police
station, opened their first offensives against Schiffbek. A detachment of
fifty men advanced confidently along the main street; knocking down a
few chance passers-by they moved up to a white building with a long
stairway jutting out. Beautiful dark eyed Minna went past the soldiers
showing her gleaming teeth and making a count of the invaders. They did
not even notice the red badge on her ample bosom. Her headscarf tied at
the back disappeared calmly down a side-street. A boy, a pupil at the town

school, who had been running along beside her, turned round, hiccupped
and sat down on the pavement. A bullet had struck him between the
eyebrows.
In the insurgents' camp there was still the deepest silence until, at a
distance of only twenty paces, several shots knocked the sergeant-major
and half the soldiers out of the invading detachment.
An hour later, police now numbering some two hundred, moved in not
just along one line but from several angles simultaneously. The workers
drove them back from their barricades and earthworks; from all the
covers scattered along the hills they plastered the invaders with volleyfire. Fritz, the marksman, shot at the police from round the corner of his
own tenement, surrounded by women holding the supplies of cartridges
in torn aprons. A classic figure: a large-peaked cloth cap tied down with a
scarf under the chin, a jacket in tatters and beneath it a heavy grey
docker's jersey. His hair, which to this day that beautiful Minna cannot
recall without laughter, is like a bandit's: after five minutes' wait one, just
one shot. With it Fritz had picked off four of them.
It should be said that Schiffbek is rich in, and renowned for, its Fritzes.
A second one directed the defence of the barricades and earthworks.
Beside S. he is almost short. But while S. had grown haphazardly,
branching out on all sides with a good-natured, powerful voluble crown
right up in the sky, Fritz is a squat shrub firmly gripping the earth
somewhere between the stones under a strong sea breeze. Heels together,
a drum-like chest with his hands in pockets and one shoulder a little bit
forward, the shoulder of a trained boxer and athlete at that. A whistle,
insolent jibes and the ability to make a woman or a policeman blush
equally -- by looking them up and down. In addition an audacity that had
won him the untranslatable nickname of Didlein--a nickname both
contemptuous and flattering that means chap, rascal, smart alec, bold
spirit, liar, gunman, rogue and pastry-cook -- in fact a generally good
fellow. In peaceful times this Fritz had rather shocked the sedate party
functionaries with his sharp dockside smell and provocative unruly spirit
but in the days of battle he worked miracle after miracle. He would rush

from window to window, urge on, hold back, switch forces, swear and give
commands as the ganglion between S.'s calm strength and all the roving
knots of insurrecrionaries.
At half past one the government crept towards Schiffbek with five
hundred men plus a squadron of armoured cars. The fray lasted until six
o'clock that evening. Two first-rate marksmen may well be able to stand
fast for a long while but in the end courage and tenacity have their limits.
In order to win time the combatants very quietly left the earthworks,
dived through the nearest gateway and an hour and a half later the steel
noses of their rifles were poking over the edge of another barricade,
successively joining battle in the most hard-pressed areas.
Meanwhile the bewildered enemy was still flooding the now silent
ambush with fire. From time to time the heat subsided; the blind barrage
would break off and a scout crawl along the pavement on all fours. But
then, from somewhere in a nearby attic a solitary shot quacks out and the
bombardment~is resumed with renewed force against the empty pit full
of cartridge-cases, debris and charred soil. In the end the lieutenant
seizing his revolver with a heroic flourish led forth his musketeers into the
assault. Shooting blindly into the air and uttering war cries they tumbled
into the empty ditch.
Dusk was falling. Sunset like a sentry sloped its long pointed bayonetlike shadows across all the streets. A poster had already appeared on
Schiffbek's hoardings proclaiming a general strike and greeting the Soviet
government. The thirty-five communists, beset by thousands of soldiers,
were sure that all Germany was rising behind them. However, even
without appeals the whole population supported the communists. Eight
thousand people turned out on to the streets and if they did not take part
in the struggle it was simply due to the total lack of weapons.
But the sacred intelligentsia! It is worth noting that in little Schiffbek,
just as it used to be in Russia and everywhere else where the social
revolution ultimately takes up arms, the intellectuals fire alongside the
police and soldiers. Not a professor -- for what professors are there in
Schiffbek! -- nor a teacher, -- the teachers are well-meaning though timid

-- nor even a midwife -- in Schiffbek women bear their own children

without a hint of medical aid -- but only an aged school janitor to make a
stand for the fruits of European enlightenment. Left alone in his deserted
premises, the wretched sixty-year-old, his head sated with schoolroom
wisdom, a worker who had learnt to despise corns, the stench of poverty
and muscular young ignorance as deeply as he himself was despised by
the implacable blackboards, teachers' uniforms and plaster sages on the
bookcase in the headmaster's study, this old janitor grabbed his pistol and
decided to fire upon his own class, the pupils who were studying street
disorder instead of penmanship and the Holy Writ.
A knock outside the door. The janitor hid. They knocked once more and
then the gates left their hinges beneath S.'s angry shoulder. Then, raising
onearm as on the Schiller memorial,looking comical and menacing with
his hair dishevelled, the old man fired at the worker's broad chest and
missed. Here the majestic posture ended. The janitor made for the stairs
with S. after him. S. climbed up despite the drawn pistol and bellowed
across the entire establishment:
"Crazy old Karnikel (bunny). You just empty the chamberpots to
support their learning!"
"What use are you to anyone!!" and he removed the revolver from Uncle
Paulus.
The old man wept most bitterly, for the years in which he had rubbed
the white algebra and time-charts off the blackboards had made a true
intellectual of him: the desperate frantic martyrdom and then the
impotent tears proved it.
S. clipped him one round the head and let him off. This was the
situation: S., laughing and swearing dreadfully, holding the old man and
his unfortunate weapon in one hand while he wiped the soot off his face
that had been scorched by the shot. Amid tears Paulchen was forced to
tear his old and desecrated party card to shreds.
All around: urchins, shooting, death and laughter.

By evening the battles had abated. The workers were forced to retreat -to this day S. will talk about this with utter shame and child-like vexation
-- to retreat five hundred paces from their old positions. That was on the
Hamburg flank. But in the rear troops had managed to penetrate as far as
the main square where wealthy residents showered them with sausages,
margarine and congratulations. The encirclement closed in threatening to
become a stranglehold. A squad of insurgents coming to the rescue from
shattered Barmbeck could not break through the police blockade. By now
vehicles of the military command were racing through the streets of
Hamburg: General Staff officers rushed to inspect the network of
barricades and found their positioning to be superb.
At daybreak workers were again lying in the trenches, attics and behind
every possible cover. But the enemy whose three assaults had been
smashed the day before, did not show himself. Hooters started wailing
continuously and pointlessly from a few factories. Patrols paced up and
down at the end of every side-street emptying into the fields relieving
each other regularly. They were standing guard over the barricades from
afar as if over a captive prisoner. Then, a menacing stillness. At first they
were heartened by it. Then perturbed. And then they sensed enormous
danger creeping up on Schiffbek from those silent wastes and made ready
to meet it.
Thirty-five against five thousand.
At about one o'clock a unit of four armoured cars and six lorries
appeared from the direction of Horn dropping a large contingent of Sipos
on the road. From Uhlenfeld in the north twenty-six lorry-loads of
Greens. From the direction of Eimsbttel, cavalry. An aeroplane came
down very low and flew over Schiffbek raking its already bullet-riddled
walls with a grey curtain of bullets.
Although beaten by the Allies the German Army goes gallantly to war
against its own proletarians. But the example is evidently infectious for it
is now the workers who sting the government forces. Cavalry, infantry,
armoured cars, aircraft and, on the polluted little river Bille, a whole navy
made up of five launches of river police while a handful of workers,

scoffing at this technology and the bloated, rotten shell of that hired army
living off the employers' fat tips, continued to hold out until four o'clock in
the afternoon. In the end, having thrown the troops back along sprawling
unprotected fronts, beleaguered Schiffbek, driving before it crumpled up,
broken columns of blue, green and other valiantly coloured soldiers,
breaks through the ring of ambushes and emerges weapons in hand to
freedom through that bloody breach. It's funny to relate: three riflemen
form the rearguard of this miniature workers' army. They keep the 'Naval
Forces of the Republic' at a respectable distance while S. and his men
make their way into the country along the narrow gap between the river
and the main highway.
Then the victors' celebration. The pandemonium of denunciations,
searches, brutalities, arrests and church services. All this goes on for
nearly two months. Dozens of workers are set outside the law. Many are
arrested and await trial. Their families continue to tuck themselves away
in the dank workers' barracks: one by one the insurgents' wives are
thrown out of the factories on to the streets. Now and then a fast-talking
trade-union leader appears at their homes: swollen and yellow with iodine
and his head swathed in white. He had been seized near the 'Tin Shacks'
during the Rising and beaten to mincemeat by the police in error. Now he
replaces knocked-out teeth, conducts espionage and operates as a gobetween.
Hunger, snows, dirty icy beds, the rent, the caretaker shouting and
winter, beating its white bitch rods on the road between your own little
den that smells of gas, the lavatory and slushy filth, and the labour
exchange. The exchange is a grey building standing to attention and
saluting an open field. The back of this constable who has nodded off on
duty is plastered with our proclamations.
From time to time the women who have been subjected to every kind of
pressure and every kind of privation are confronted by a police searchparty or a pencil-and-paper gendarme for questioning. And then all that
helpless poverty bristles its spines and puts up the stiffest and most
courageous resistance to both the civil and the military power as they

rattle their ringing broadswords outside on the staircase slippery with

frozen slops.
The wife of a Schiffbek insurgent presses her arms to her sides, her face
red with anger, the stove or the wash-tub and with yelling at screaming
children and the shaggy dog that is furiously barking under the sagging
settee, raises her voice to a shrill, rasping pitch and pushes away the
papers laid before her as if brushing aside the obstinate perspiring hair
from her brow; she vehemently denies and dodges and will not put her
name to anything anywhere. Her abuse flies irresistibly down on to the
heads of the departing officialdom as if tipped out of a rubbish bin. These
women, for whom there is nothing to eat and who tomorrow will be
thrown out of their lairs, push the police around, contemptuously
pillorying them with their caustic jeers.
On Christmas Eve they get together to sew dozens of dolls for the
children of communists who have fled. C. fashions a dolls' house out of
old boxes pasting them over with newspaper and grubby kings and queens
from long ago cast-off suits.
Hungry neighbours come round with presents -- a bar of soap, a doll or
a pair of warm stockings.
Finally, at night, a detachment of workers from Hamburg with a wheelbarrow of flour and margarine from American comrades. Fifty kilos of fat
and twenty-five pounds of sugar for seventy families each numbering
three to five mouths.
Hunger reaches its apogee several days before Christmas. Following an
offer from a Dutch branch of Workers' International Relief Schiffbek is to
send fifty of its children to Holland to be bearded out with foreign
comrades.
A knock at the door -- some workers arrive with embarrassed faces; they
look at nothing but the washing hanging out over the cold stove or the
syphilitically green wall and ask about the weather, their health and this
and that.

From the vacant-eyed mother it is ascertained: whom they should take,

a boy or a girl and how old.' A quarter of an hour to get ready. No luggage.
A few minutes' bitter howling on mother's shaking knees. But the
stockings are by now firmly laced up, all buttons properly fastened and
mother combs her daughter's tousled crop with brusque, peremptory
movements that are at the same time dilatory and secretly drawn out. A
quarter of an hour later the child is for ever ripped from its roots in routed
Schiffbek.
Two mothers did not wish to give up their children.
One, burdened with four boys, two girls (her husband had been arrested
and her factory had turned her out) and a window with newspaper instead
of glass, keeps the six mouths above the water-line by means of
unimaginable economies. The other is at the summit of filth, lightheartedness, jollity and physical ruin. Children of every complexion from
many ardently, if briefly, loved fathers. The little girls come into the
world, unasked for, yet in splendour, just as a wonderful golden-yellow
sunflower appears on a dump from a seed accidentally fallen on a litterstrewn patch of ground. The little boys are hale and bright and once left to
themselves they will be like the firm green spikes of a maple grasping the
mould and flesh of an old factory wall with its Squat trunk. Amid tears,
curses and swearing at her unsought fecundity, amid children's howling
and distributing clips round the ear, all the while standing in a draught
with her thin skirt clinging round her knees and an infant sucking at the
edge of a dirty cardigan at one moment and at the exhausted bare breast
at another, this mother refused to send a single one of her spirited, hungry
band into exile.
Among these desperate families in their death threes in now subdued
Schiffbek, there is one so happy that women neighbours come round in
the evenings to listen to its unusual tranquillity. A small, dark woman,
prematurely aged but with the blackest eyes and the duskiest colouring
and something southern about her voice that crackles like well-baked ashcovered chestnuts snapping under the embers in the frost. Her children,
four of them, are as if planned, either quite blond with blue eyes or olive-

skinned with black eyes. Little Czechs and little Germans alternately. Her
husband is comrade R., an old communist who had been beaten up in the
army because of his Polish surname and his dangerously taciturn manner
behind which the sergeant-major sensed a pacifist; a member of the
Spartacus Group, one of the oldest fighters in the KPD and wounded in
the Kapp Putsch.
There are periods in every man's life when pus accumulates and festers.
Every abrasion -- baby's sickness, an unpleasant exchange with the boss,
meeting a spy just after coming out of an illegal gathering -- all take a
nasty, malignant turn. Comrade R., a foreigner and burdened with a
family, out of work half the week and long known as a communist, felt
keenly that he and his four could at any minute now slip under the wheel.
They were all very tired, growing terribly hungry and cold.
Then the battles. Yet October had not yielded the victory which
Schiffbek, that Verdun of the Hamburg Rising, had so fantastically
believed in. The police had not managed to catch R. who had taken such
an energetic part in the movement.
From abroad he sent his wife a letter and a visa. One of those rare
miracles that still do happen.
Everyone in R.'s flat thawed out, relaxed, took a breath and started to
talk in undertones.
That letter from abroad was like the scrape of a distant spade digging
those five human beings out of the avalanche that had crashed on to their
roof.

Hamm
The Hamm quarter. This district is highly inconvenient for street
fighting because of the lay-out of its broad straight streets.
It is difficult to tie its expansive avenues in a girdle of barricades. The
smooth, bare frontages of the workers' barracks fall sheer to the slippery

asphalt. The walls provide no cover for lone marksmen who prefer the
ledges, bays and lofty porchways of the older-style dwellings. Spades and
crowbars break their teeth trying to dig up that rolled-out lava. You need
to fell a few fully-grown trees to seal off such a street. But trees do not
grow in slum quarters. What's more Hamm's straight, empty, smooth
streets like stone channels, can easily be defended by one machine-gun
mounted at a cross-roads: there are miles of exposed spaces that
mercilessly betray to binoculars any crouching figure, in vain seeking
cover and protection in the mean shadow of those inhuman facades -- a
figure with a cap pulled down over his eyes, a woollen scarf wound round
his chin and a rifle in his hands.
All these unfavourable features did not prevent Hamm from becoming
the arena of brief but very intense battles. Not even the motley pettybourgeois nature of the population could dull them: to a man the students
that made up a considerable proportion of it offered their services to the
police -- not on their home ground but after they had stolen off to more
secure sectors of the city.
An armed rising presupposes the presence of people with weapons in
their possession. The Hamburg Rising was a rising of unarmed workers
confronted above all with arming themselves at the expense of the enemy.
In the Hamm zone there were five police stations permanently occupied
by Sipo units; apart from the weapons in the hands of the policemen the
military organisation was expecting to seize the small armouries in each
one.
Thus in Hamm as in other parts of the city the struggle started with
unarmed workers seizing the small police fortresses guarded by sentries
and packed with their military complement and ammunition of every
kind.
One of the toughest police stations was seized by twelve workers with an
antiquated pistol.

At the very doorway of the police station the detachment seemed to

waver. Then one of the comrades whose name, Rolfshagen, can be spoken
with pride -- the gates of a hard-labour camp have now slammed behind
him -- tossed out to his men: "Nun man los!" (Well, let's go!) and, without
looking to see if anyone was following or not, leapt over the three steps
with his huge legs and burst into the station. Behind him came his friend,
a young compositor, but no one else. The only revolver, unloaded at that,
was jabbed into the crowd of Sipos. Seeing their indecision, Rolfshagen
bellowed in a quite unreal voice and crashed his fist down meaningfully
on the table. Papers started to fly, the holy oil in the inkwells was
spattered about and state power tottered to its foundations.
"Man los, hier wird nicht lange gefackelt!" (Let's go, it's no time to
hang about!)
The police surrendered, put their hands up and were disarmed and
locked away by the comrades who had caught them up. What should they
do now! Hold out in the captured Revier (police station) or go out on to
the streets and dig in, or rush to the aid of Barmbeck from where the
sound of relentless gunfire reached their ears! And all the while there was
no contact with the centre.
When sitting in his corner at party meetings, sucking on his pipe silently
fluffing himself up in his bristly hunched waterproof docker's gear,
Rolfshagen would never chatter. He did not like phrases, silver as bicyclewheel spokes, and the calls to struggle of which party intellectuals are so
fond. He conceived of an uprising as something simple and
straightforward, without retreats, without the slightest vacillations and
deviations, like the sweep of a crane snatching up its prey, the
straightness of a compass needle and the unerring course of a ship. And
so, without receiving any instructions, Rolfshagen loaded his rifle, stacked
up the cartridges in handy piles and made ready to fight it out and die
beside a window whose ledge afforded a slight cover.
His comrades tried in vain to draw him along with them, arguing the
whole danger of a position that could be surrounded and cut off. Rolf
decided to stay.

"Dat is Befehl ick blieb " (That's an order, I'm sticking to it) and he
stayed. An hour later this man's duel with the police who had flooded into
the district began. Having fired his last cartridge he finally fell, wounded
in the head, chest and stomach, losing consciousness from a terrific boot
to the ribs.
Rolfshagen did not die in the hospital where they had removed six
pieces of lead from his body. Confident of the revolution's speedy victory
he refused to run but with a grin accepted the ten years' hard labour
which Scheidemann's mercy had granted him. Even in the doorway of the
court he turned round to the crowd and shouted to his friends
interspersed among the thick wad of bourgeois in the audience:
"Don't forget to keep my revolver clean; I'll be coming out to get it
soon!"
That was the capture of the Fort Street police station.
Now, Mittelstrasse. To begin with, Charli Setter, a member of the
provincial parliament who had been entrusted with the leadership of a
combat unit, did not show up until right at the very end of the conflict and
displayed a shameful lack of resolution, diffidence and faintheartedness.
Secondly, a worker, no longer young but extremely agile and, as they say
in German, aufgeweckt, whose narrow anaemic face was framed by a
small black beard like a black-edged mourning envelope and twitched
with the vague tremble of neuralgic pain. He had sat out the entire war in
the trenches and came out a cripple, gravely wounded in the head,
susceptible to agonising pains, epileptic fits and hysteria. His disability
had not however stopped his injured head from re-considering and
reviewing his old convictions as a social democrat and party official.
Cursing the war and the workers' party that had acted as its livestock
supplier he courageously broke with the organisation he had belonged to
for over fifteen years.
The comrades were afraid to rely too much upon K. whom simple party
discussions had caused to recant. But during the Aktion he not only

remained in the battles and risked the greatest danger but never gave free
rein to his fractured nerves. His conduct was irreproachable from start to
finish.
In the assault on police station no. 23 two remarkable brothers marched
alongside K. Rott, a curly-headed giant and building worker by trade. I
cannot remember the exact description of his Branche (trade). Anyway it
was a short tradesman's formula that included iron, concrete and coal. It
had a proud ring like the motto on an order of labour. In reply to all my
questions this comrade merely shook his Siegfriedian head and refused at
any price to disclose any information about his personal role in the
business. So a long shadow continues to lie across that stern regular face:
one like those of the caryatides dumbly holding up a whole structure.
Beside him was L., a highly-skilled joiner and a man of exceptional culture
and courage. The swarthy colour of his face, the southern vivacity of his
eyes and the mock romanticism with which he defaces and gouges out the
planed, lacquered commonplaces of political jargon (just as the craftsman
tests the blade of his tool on the edge of his bench), seem to point to Slav
and possibly Jewish blood. A fiery political temperament and a cool
inward sobriety thanks to which L., as one of the finest and most
remarkable Hamburg fighters, never for one instant forgets deep within
himself that the revolution's most flaming words are in fact written in
crude oil paint on cheap red calico. An enthusiast with a small,
hermetically-sealed ice-box in his heart. His conscious self-abnegation
and the fury with which he can at the requisite moments cast aside the
cool rationality which bugged him, are far more valuable than any innate
valour.
Three anarchist brothers fought alongisde Rott and L. Brave men who
had left the party a few months earlier because of Its inactivity, but who
took up rifles as soon as the password for the Rising was issued. Their
whole family consists of communists. The sixty-year-old mother, the
sisters and the two brothers-in-law also took part in the movement. In
short, a family cell, a Soviet knot of which there are quite a few deep down
among German workers. This group (twenty-eight workers with two
revolvers and one rubber truncheon) overran their police station quite

brilliantly, surrounding it on either side, disarming the police and availing

themselves of its store of arms.
Meanwhile, around seven o'clock, day began to break. Street traffic had
come to a halt (to be sure, only for a few hours in this part of the city) and
detachments of armed workers stopped their workmates who were going
off to work without suspecting a thing and sent them home.
"What's happened?"
"The dictatorship of the proletariat has been declared."
"Dat kun jo sen, ook io nich wieder gohn. (Maybe, but it won't last.)
"Dan got wi werra nochs." (Then let's go home.)
Not to the barricades, not to the aid of the workers hundreds but home.
Very typical too.
In spite of the lack of further orders from the Staff Centre the majority
of insurgents quit the ravaged police stations and moved off in the
direction of smoke-shrouded Barmbeck where frantic shooting would nor
cease. The only sensible tactic had been arrived at by instinct. There was
no way of lifting the asphalt. There were almost no trees. There were too
few weapons for them to bring in wider masses; therefore the armed
groups dispersed in different directions so as to percolate individually to
the embattled quarters.
Rott, L. and the anarchist brothers' detachment (nine rifles and twelve
revolvers altogether) proceeded in the direction of the heaviest exchanges.
In one of the stone corridors they were peppered with machine-gun fire
from a lorry. The riflemen threw themselves to the ground and then under
the canopy of ever closer fire took over down a side street. One of the
comrades dropped down on one knee and raised his rifle to his shoulder.
It fell instantly from his hands. L. recalls a stream of blood trickling from
the pavement, washing into the gutter a cigarette-end someone had
dropped. From one side came the roar of a second vehicle. Not noticing

the partisans it stood self-assuredly across the end of a small street its
heavy undefended flank facing down it. The insurrectionaries fairly swept
it with carbine fire. Then the little detachment adopted a mobile square
formation switching from place to place for many hours, finally giving real
battle on the Central Canal bridge. It was a collapsible, sprawling square
which, at the required moment, would roll up and disappear like water on
sand. In the centre, three or four first-rate marksmen. They occupy an
intersection or the main junction of several major streets. On every
adjacent corner look-outs armed with revolvers are posted, each covered
by a newspaper kiosk, telephone box or tree-trunk. They fire only at close
range during hand-to-hand skirmishes and warn the carbineers of an
imminent encirclement. Dashing from place to place, defending and
surrendering successive nodal points, this flying squad of marksmen
eventually consolidates by the bridge over the Central Canal where the
stone creases of the surrounding streets converge in a broad fan. The
bridge gently arches its broad back in order to step primly over the course
of a wan, ebbing factory canal that is like a thorn in its flesh. The
marksmen lie down so that only the barrels of their rifles protrude over
the bridge's hump. Growing up in corsets of iron rods much thicker than
their own trunks are a few miserable trees that have not fled this spot only
because the concrete has squeezed their sapling roots into clods; they and
an emaciated lamp-post provide the only cover for the combatants set out
to the right and left of the three sharpest shooting hunters.
All along the bank uninhabitable buildings drop murkily into the water.
Only occasionally does a cellar peep-hole open up in a wall spread
through with damp. It looks like a shivering gaping mouth surfacing to
take a gulp of air only to disappear once again. This is a working-class
Venice; where palaces of cotton, fat and iron have no wide marble
staircases and embankments; where brick and concrete lapped by
poisonous sewage is covered with deposits of regal beauty, coatings of
pale green, grey and pinky-brown tints more whimsical and varied than
porphyry, marble and malachite -- the blood, pearl and ash of the high
Quattrocento The grandeur of the craggy cul-de-sacs is underlined not by
time but glistening coal. Its shadows are more tragic than those
Tintoretto's hand painted for blossoming Venice. This lagoon that washes

round industrial Hamburg knows neither gondolas nor romantic nights. It

carries out to sea factory waste, dampness, cold and all the diseases that
soak through the walls into the life, dreams, labour and blood of millions
of workers. Like doges the factory chimneys look at themselves in cloudy
mirrors. Smoke drifts down from their shoulders like resplendent robes
and they are betrothed to their grey, cold, polluted sea not by the gold ring
of the Adriatic but by the wail of ships' sirens heralding the arrival of
precious raw materials. The nereids have long ago died off in the cold filth
of the canals. Now and again urchins fish out of the water the white corpse
of a fish floating belly upwards with painfully distended gills.
Over this canal they fought it out. Suddenly the look-outs reported
vehicles. They had to change position again. Marksmen once more in the
middle of the square and scouts on the corners. A lorry packed with
soldiers flies unexpectedly round a corner. With one well-aimed shot Rott
manages to damage the engine. The Sipos abandon their vehicle and carry
off their wounded. The detachment again makes a desperate sprint and
occupies the hub of the next quarter. This time it is attacked by an
armoured car under cover of which a line of Greens spreads out. The
partisans pick off the lieutenant -- a plucky but stupid lieutenant who had
sprung forward courageously to rally his men for the assault at the top of
his voice. Panic among the Sipos succeeded by a numbing stillness; a
stillness quite appropriate to that ghostly realm of deserted canals picked
out by the silently fluttering banners of factory smoke and the far-off
salves of the Rising being quelled.
The insurgents continue to advance along empty streets, by motionless,
glassy rivers, past idle factories locked up like monasteries and eyeless
houses with mouths hostilely shut tight; at crossroads they break their
formation that was as light and convenient as a nomad's tent. Finally
amid an utter absence of life the rumble of wheels came again across the
dead roadway. This time, though, it was only a loaded newspaper truck.
Forgetting danger, they fumbled with the tightly lashed bundles and then
looked through Fremdenblatt's soft pages nowhere finding the only words
that throughout that day they had been expecting with more tension and
torment than their own victory: news of the revolution throughout

Germany and the new Republic of Soviets. Rott screwed up one paper and
grabbed another. L. read it and went white. Otto wrapped up his wounded
hand in that dirty rag refusing to believe its reports and contemptuously
nodding his head. It was lying. Yes, it was deliberately keeping quiet about
the victorious rising in Berlin, Saxony and everywhere else. It couldn't be
otherwise.
Then they threw the bundles down on to the asphalt and set fire to
them. The wind snatched up the blazing sheets and carried them off into
the canal. There they drifted like flaming birds, swans set alight.
Volleys crackled in nearby streets. The detachment retreated slowly,
illuminated by the ruddy glow of the enormous bonfire that the soldiers
were trying in vain to stamp out and break up with their rifle-butts.

Postscript:
German Mensheviks After the Rising
During the recent rising in Hamburg the dockworkers, who had already
been on strike for several days, did not join forces with the fighting
masses. They roamed the streets, hands thrust in pockets and with
innocent curiosity questioned comrades returning from the districts
under police siege: what's up and why? Thousands of workers organised
by the social democrats remained peaceful spectators of the Hamburg
events. The port workers (with the exception of the shipyards and plants
processing petroleum waste, where earnings have fallen to ridiculous
levels) are aristocrats compared to the mass of the Hamburg proletariat.
They receive more than the highest grade of inland worker, like, for
example, building workers, engineering workers or railwaymen, and of
course several times more than those pariahs of Hamburg port, the men
employed in the shipyards. During the war this contented layer worked
zealously for the war department earning excellent rates of pay; they were
exempted from military service and entered the revolution as a cold,
reactionary current, perfectly combining their flabby, cosy, contented,
petty-bourgeois way of life with an innocuous SPD card In 1918 this

Menshevik-organised mass of well-to-do workers fought might and main

against the Council of Workers' Deputies (Soviet), wishy-washy and
ambivalent as its policy was. To the demonstrations of unemployed, the
banning of bourgeois newspapers and the wrecking of the SPD rag, The
Hamburg Echo, which had splashed its yellow pages with daily slanders
against the Soviet, these workers had replied with a powerful reactionary
counter-demonstration, the arrest of the Soviet's chairman, the
restoration of the bourgeois Senate and a railwayman's strike that
prevented the despatch of strong volunteer units mobilised by the
Hamburg proletariat to aid the city of Bremen under siege by General
Herstenberg's officer division. In short it was not the first time that
dockers and other workers in the countless port warehouses rendered
valuable service to the German counter-revolution.
And well they might! From throughout the world merchant vessels
converge upon Hamburg's convenient harbour. Shipowners have no time
to wait, nor time to haggle about a few irrelevant pfennigs. For every day's
delay they have to pay demurrage; delivery dates cannot wait; agreed
freightages and rail charges lapse. Due to all these circumstances the
stevedores and warehousemen enjoy unquestionable economic privileges
while other categories have long since lost both -- the eight-hour day and
half their pre-war wage! In the course of the revolution's first two years
the reactionary influence of the port never ceased to make itself felt. It
was against the socialisation of industrial undertakings, the restriction of
private commerce and any social turmoil that might weaken the Free
City's credit-worthiness abroad, strengthen its foreign competitors and
de-populate a port that lives on the ebb and flow of the world market.
Back in 1919 Hamburg Mensheviks imagined that Britain would spare
the capital of the Uferland (coastal region) in return for their righteous
suppression of communism. Today nothing remains of such hopes. The
Entente has concertedly chewed up the left-overs of bourgeois-socialist
Germany and utterly ruined not just the communists but the most
moderate Mensheviks too. Their well-being has faltered, their trade
unions gather in alms and their leaders, now chucked out of the Grand
Coalition, vote for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie -- yet old traditions

die hard. The port has been pauperised, but still it is the best-fed of
paupers, and fed without painful interruptions. The grateful labour
aristocracy assists the police in clearing away the barricades and visits
SPD meetings and rallies en masse.
Yesterday was a field-day for them. The Free City of Hamburg was
honoured with a visit from the eminent Berliner, the editor
of Vorwrts, Genosse Stampfer. Hundreds of workers came to listen.
Possibly not a single Russian worker would have the patience to read
through to the end an article detailing all the distortions of Marxist
thought that the experienced Menshevik had the temerity to put before a
working-class audience; in a city, what is more, where trenches that had
criss-crossed the suburbs in every direction had only just been filled in,
where tenements in workingclass quarters are lacerated with bullets,
where dead policemen number dozens and injured, arrested and beaten
workers hundreds. And yet you must have a clear conception of the entire
decay and headlong decline of working-class and petty-bourgeois
Germany, corrupted by half a century of castrated, emasculated pseudosocialism, to appreciate the tremendous act of heroism that, under such
conditions, Hamburg's armed uprising represented. To rise up in that
swamp, that cowardly, deeply reactionary quagmire, was a thousand
times harder than beneath our old Tsarist soldier's boot or against a
distinct, easily recognisable, renegade black Fascist shirt.
Doctor Stampfer was not trying to be particularly logical. After all he felt
himself to be in the provinces where a good player can without
embarrassment cheat with a clearly marked card. In the first place all
Germany's misfortunes stem from the endless multiplicity of regional
parliaments. They should be abolished and centralised. Secondly, only a
strong state power is capable of protecting the working class from the
offensive of capital. Only the state (shouts: 'what sort?''bourgeois?') can
uphold the eight-hour day for the workers. Even worthy, portly, greying
SPD members started to feel ill at ease somehow, but German Mensheviks
have the orator's ingenuous and always effective remedy: as soon as the
gallery begins to whistle and the old men start looking round at each other
restively and mutter:'Oh, yes? Well I never!', the speaker drags Wilhelm

out on to the stage. Alive, in moustache and full military dress. The
speaker need only punch him on the nose, tell a couple of anecdotes about
the ex-emperor's stupidity and have the unprecedented courage to abuse
Wilhelm as a fool, idiot and maniac for the philistine to quake rapturously
in the face of such blasphemy and the audience to be conquered. Having
spat at Wilhelm the SPDer passes on to the communists.
It turns out that it is they who have smashed the sacred chalice of the
Republic. Lacking any esteem for the legal forms of democracy and the
noble philanthropic methods of parliamentary struggle they have sullied
the skirts of that innocent maiden, the Republic, with the blood of their
own brother proletarians.
Amid a deep hush Stampfer hurls his accusation:
"In Prussia communists brutally tortured two police officers. Isn't the
poor Schupo (policeman) as much a proletarian as ourselves?"
From somewhere above a very shrill mocking wail stifled by virtuous
grunting:
"Down with Scheidemann! Hang Ebert from the lamppost! "
"Ebert," says the Vorwrts editor beating his starched breast, "Ebert,
that son of the people, has attained the supreme responsibilities of state
thanks to his talents! The German proletariat can be proud that a son
from its own depths has reached such a peak!"
Pope Ebert appears aloft in the clouds of parliamentarism. The Republic
stretches forth over him the crown of victory, and signals to the ballot
box: one out of millions can win two hundred thousand pounds or become
president. Democracy's divine lottery.
Stampfer admits to some of the party's mistakes with a disarming
frankness. The party has been learning. Nothing is gained without trials
and suffering. "But why do we always only condemn our own party -- it
debilitates us. We should make our criticisms in private, face to face.

Take, for example, Dr. Hertz, Breitscheid and myself." A note of

confidence and intimate simplicity. "They voted against the motion of
confidence in the Marx government but I was for it. So what? Did we
quarrel over it? You just don't! We travelled in the same compartment and
didn't talk politics -- we were up to here with it (a gesture of having had
his fill) and on the station we had some sausages together. But think how
we had argued about it in the faction -- almost coming to blows."
The electors are always flattered when they are allowed to take a peep
through the keyhole into the kitchen of big-time politics. Ten or twelve
speakers, one after another, spoke against the worthy Vorwrts. They
demonstrated the following elementary truths: 1) the social democrats
have safely delivered the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; 2) such a
dictatorship will be directed exclusively against the working class; 3) the
SPD bears not only moral but also formal responsibility for this.
All those speakers who, in their ten allotted, fast-flowing minutes
punctuated by the chairman's bell, attempted tortuously to substantiate
their most profound disillusionment with the party and their rage at its
crimes were met with clapping, nodding and loud pre-arranged ovations.
Then, with exceptional uniformity and an overwhelming majority, a
motion of confidence in the SPD's parliamentary faction was carried.
Having given their deputy a chewing-over, shoved his nose in the sins of
the SPDers and revealed their complete understanding of his sharkish
tricks, the electors wiped Stampfer's broken nose clean and let him go off
home with a vote of full confidence. A card-sharp must not dupe his own
side for then he will be beaten. But cheat for the benefit of that dear
middle class and outplay the hated revolution -- he can and should.

Footnotes
'Menshevik' is used in Hamburg at the Barricades in a general
colloquial sense of 'right-wing-dominated' or 'reformist'. (R.C.)
[1]

[2]

Sicherzeitspolizei -- security police. (R.C.)

[3]

Unit A, the plain-clothes branch of the security police. (R.C.)

The Blues are the security police who wore blue uniforms while the
Greens are probably Reichswehr soldiers. (R.C.)
[4]

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Reissner's Hamburg at the

Barricades

In Hindenburg's Country
Preface to the German Edition
I have travelled through Germany, 'Hindenburg's country', and seen it
with the unclouded eyes of a visitor from the country of workers and
peasants, Lenin's country. You have castles and museums, government
palaces where ministers sit, victory avenues and victory monuments,
madhouses, war memorials, barracks, schools, prisons and factories -millions of people sucked dry and a bourgeoisie with culture, technology
and all the comforts of a good life.
But I did not merely wish to learn about German streets and who was
begging, starving, strolling, motoring or parading in them, but rather to
see the places from where it is all being invisibly ruled and where the
millions of threads and cables come together: the power centres of public
opinion and the industrial workshops of the German spirit, German
culture and German guns.

I have looked for Germany within her national sanctuaries.

Krupp and Essen

The cities of the Ruhr with their streets, plants and pits are marked with
the name of Krupp just like the teaspoons and pillowslips of a propertied
family. Essen is but a hereditary estate, a family possession passed down
from generation to generation. The family, as if in its own home, casually
puts up memorials to its deceased members in the public squares and
gardens. Grandma orders one monument, the cousins or sons or
grandsons who have tastes and pleasures of their own, another. At every
junction, a bronze Friedrich-Albrecht, an Albrecht-Franz or a Franz
Friedrich. The buildings, tramlines, people and vehicles meekly give way
to their iron masters. The cult of ancestors reigns over the greatest of
Europe's industrial centres. The last male of the reigning family died long
ago and the outrageous scandal that accompanied him to the grave has
long since been forgotten. The daughters, widows unknown to anyone,
have inherited thousands of millions by right of blood and become the
autocratic sovereigns of hundreds of factories, pits, shipyards, railways
and harbours; they are given husbands for the continuance of the line and
petty officials turned prince-regents adopt their wives' name and multiply
so that the great city of Essen shall not be left without thoroughbred
masters, and hundreds of thousands of workers with millions of machines
can quietly settle to work for real, pure-blooded little Krupps. Life, of
course, has long since outgrown the patriarchal economic forms with
which old Adolf started half a century ago; business is managed by the
board of a joint-stock company instead of a monarchical lord and the
Krupp colossus strides out in a direction fixed and ultimately guided by an
army of expert officials rather than by the will of the brilliant organiser
and builder that Krupp II had been.

On the site of the city of Essen thirty or forty years ago--where today the
giants of metallurgy work so closely crowded together; where plants jostle
each other and factory chimneys crane their necks so as not to lose sight
of each other partitioning the soot-black sky with thick strips of smoke;

where far beneath the city's feet pits gnaw at every piece of coal (between
them black covered ways are stretched like cables: each colliery grabs
them with a hundred hands and pulls them over to its side); where the
great smelting furnaces that knit the Ruhr cities into the body of one
gigantic plant are never extinguished -- on the site of this Essen were once
open fields and scattered peasant farmsteads. You can still see today how
the city has grown up from a mine. Concrete and asphalt have merely
overlaid its age-old disorder. Streets have formalised the winding,
crooked paths trodden by the first miners between pub and works. The
city has reconciled itself to wild ungainly houses that will not recognise
any discipline. Like tramps turned millionaires overnight they loaf around
with pipes between their teeth, without gardens (or without trousers),
with the wind blowing freely across their bare stone chests. The city,
crushed down with wealth and overcome with the smell of money, rushes
on its way pretending that there is nothing here and building bridges to
avoid those feet in rough miner's boots stretched out across the street.
Essen has from that time onwards retained a passion for reconstruction
and large useless earthworks. It loves to sit down and sort through its bag
of odds and ends, its old kit-bag. To pull forty-pound stones out of the
road surface, dig over the soil so that the stench of bare earth that has not
removed its stone shirt for decades hangs over the city and then put
everything back in place, open a tramline and light up street-lamps. The
city, like the web of a goose's foot, lies mostly between the works. Its
dwelling-houses are squeezed in between the factory blocks, huddling
against the fences and afraid to be the first to take a single patch of vacant
land without permission from the coal syndicate. Any narrow multifamilied back-street has only to take a run forward to find at its end a
factory chimney standing like a watchman waving a smoky flag:
"Go back, this is Rhine Steel" or "this is Herkules" or "this is AEG".
So the very smallest houses have such a cramped look and bulging eyes.
Black, half-blind, round-shouldered and capped with tiny roofs they cling
to the walls of banks, plants and commercial offices. They are pits full of
people which creep upwards because the terrible pressure is forcing them
up from the ground.

All the plants in Essen city belong to Krupp and all its housing is the
property of Stinnes. The ineffable squalour of the latter was until recently
still entered as an asset in that concern's fabulous accounts.
But even where factories are compelled to move aside to let streets and
tramlines through the fissures they still remain masters; the alleyways are
so narrow that women could dry their washing on lines thrown across
from one window to another. But instead, the works has stretched its own
cables, pipes and bridges across the pavements. It strides over the roofs
and blocks of flats like a giant across Lilliputian cottages. Quite
unashamed, this lord and master: it ejects its waste directly on to the
street, spitting steam, ash, water and grime on to the heads of passers-by.
Every one rushing past the wide-open windows can see it beating its
constant wife, pliant but unyielding steel, with a hammer. Children in
their beds are awakened by her screeching and shrieking. Day and night
the dormitories that hug the factories hear iron crying out like an infant in
pain. Every object in workers' homes shudders like an anvil -- even
though the blows are falling far away -- and adjusts its breathing to those
sighs borne on the wind. The worker unconsciously puts his heart and his
watch-- a silver miner's watch like an onion and with a fat black hand like
a finger -- forward or back so as to be right by the works' hooter.
Everything keeps the same time. Hundreds of thousands, an army of
miners and metalworkers, move about, sleep, work, wake up and have
their dinner without missing the pace, falling out of the column or
breaking their march and never, even in the moments of deepest oblivion,
cease to hear that martial music of labour issuing from the factories on to
the city, its outskirts and the whole workpeople.
In all Essen there is only one spot where deep solemn stillness reigns.
And that is not by any means the so-called'estates for the works long ago
caught them up, swallowing them whole with their flower-beds and the
bees that died from the coal-dust. Nor is it the country club where a speck
of nature with grass, leaves and a fishing-pond has been specially set aside
for loyal office workers and their children. (This club looks at everything
with one eye, screwing the other tightly up and turning away so as not to

see the factory chimneys that waft their dirty clouds of smoke even here,
to this garden of delights for sixth-grade officials.) No, real stillness, one
so deep that not even the best lift gliding down past every floor can plumb
its depths, stillness insulated and shut off from the outside world by glass
walls of silence, is in the main office and board room of the Krupp works.
Not an office but, strictly speaking, a ministry. Not a board but a
government. Oak, leather and halls as if for coronations. The portraits of
kings are only incidental. In places of far greater honour are guns with
their wives and godmothers; samples of steel and certificates awarded at
international exhibitions. Something about the whole of it -- those
expanses of officialdom, the deep pools of secrecy and staid respectability
-- is more appropriate to both the Quai d'Orsay and the Foreign Office, or,
in Petersburg, the old embankment or the gloomy house by the canal
where the Reichswehr mission is today. Applicants who have gulped that
atmosphere fall lifeless into the armchairs. Nearly everyone, even
specialist technicians with top references, go away without achieving
anything. Krupp has a crisis so Krupp has the pick. The firm's internal life
is known to very few. Even his own people make mistakes.
"May I see Major von R.?"
The old functionary answers with a grin:
"You mean Colonel von R.?"
"What, since only last year?"
"Yes, Mr. Consul.. ."
They continue to move up the ladder of ranks that is not supposed to
have existed after 9 November. They walk in single file or overtake each
other in the slow promotion race while in the shadows someone shifts its
faithful servants from one step to the next. Second lieutenants become
lieutenants; lieutenants, captains; captains, majors. Quite young men take
up the vacant posts in this force without fighting men, this army without
lower ranks.

His own General Staff so, naturally, his own diplomatic corps. Over recent
years it has shrivelled in size and been sharply reduced. The cannon king
recalled his ambassadors long ago. Today they sit around the small houses
built by Madame Krupp for her old domestic retinue, receiving tiny
salaries and eating herring-tails with the daintiest family silver, while in
drawing rooms where the crown prince's horsey face with its pair of
bubbles under the eyes looks on they reminisce about the days when one
word from the Krupp representative in Peking meant more than all the
assurances of official envoys. Yuan Shih-kai would pay regular trips to a
little Chinese house far from the hated European quarter where he would
purchase advice and order guns. Then came the war -- and all was lost!
Yet to this day what sources of information and what contacts Krupp has!
In the Essener Zeitung brief items on foreign and, particularly, eastern
affairs are indicative of a vast operation that is quietly in hand. While the
Foreign Ministry gropes to find a route for German exports, here in Essen
they have long understood what a Chinese market can mean for German
industry. Her revolutionary struggle is followed with the closest attention,
prices offered, relations renewed; they watch and they wait. I happened to
get into an argument about China with one of the Krupp managers. To
add the final telling weight to his argument he snatched open a desk
drawer with an impatient motion, unfolded a fresh report and revealed
first odd lines and then odd pages -- it was a resume of every movement
and every word of Comrade Karakhan in Peking!

The rectangular tower on the roof of the main administrative block has
outgrown all the other factory buildings on its skyward path, outreaching
the sharp pinnacles of an old monastery that laboriously sends up to
heaven its peals and laments about the machines whose constant
vibration crumbles the church walls: 'O Lord, who shall come unto my
fourth-century Christ with beads of sweat on his brow when a 25,000-ton
blast furnace is smoking next door? O Lord, grant that this be not so!' But
Essen's heaven has changed. It is just the cloudy vault of a railway station,
the ceiling of an immense factory. Where the glass panes have been

smashed you can see a bit of blue. But high up there a celestial ventilator
quickly slams it out again.
A lift cuts a thick slice off the house of Krupp like a razor. First the
applicants are left behind, then the lower floors fall away and finally, in
the building's head, the corridors are grey and still like the coils of a brain.
A young girl with a yellow complexion who drops up and down in her box
for ten hours a day pushes the door back. How strange. Here is a diningroom set for ten people, as bright as a lighthouse around which the
whistling wind lashes rain and soot against walls of glass. "Here", our
escort whispers, a former officer with a scar-like mouth and a black glove
on his wooden hand, "here the demigods dine".
Sitting at the table you can see Essen and all Krupp's kingdom. The
history of German imperialism written out in lines of factory blocks with
chimneys as punctuation marks. All around the horizon is scribbled over
with them like notes in the margin of a ledger. Like a stock-jobber, the
wind rubs them off the sky's board every minute and washes it down with
a rainy sponge to write up new signs and figures. The smoke creeps up in
long erratic lines as if representing the level of Krupp's yearly dividends.
The sky is playing the stock-exchange, the sky is buying and selling.
Far below amid concrete and granite is the little wooden house with two
windows where the first Krupp set to work a hundred years ago. He had
wanted to take advantage of the weak state of British industry during the
Latin American Wars of Independence and forge a powerful rival upon
German anvils but lost all his fortune, was ruined and died in the little
house while British steel ruled the world market undefeated. The crisis
had ended too soon, the German bourgeoisie was still in nappies and its
prophet who lacked both credit and cash was crushed together with his
experiments and his one blast furnace. His son started from the
beginning. For twenty-five years he worked to prepare steel's victory over
iron. The victory of the steel gun cast in one piece over the old bronze
cannon. He sent a top-quality steel ingot weighing 2,000 kilos to the
London Exhibition of 1851. That lump, which gained a gold medal, was a
warning that no one understood. It was destined twenty years later to

flatten the French war industry. Within that ingot, before which the
thousands of visitors had stood in ecstasy, was Sedan.
On the eve of the Franco-German War a prototype of the modern steel
gun was already complete. Krupp had become a world name. Short and
cast in one piece like his steel it boomed out first in Europe and then in
Asia. It was uttered wherever thunder-clouds gathered. 'Krupp'
meant'war: A new war whose horrors were still unknown to mankind, a
new mode of death and a new strategy unlike those before. On the Ruhr,
over in the west of Germany, all day and night plants smoked, furnaces
blazed and the metal poured and cast to produce heavy guns, rifles,
mortars, howitzers and explosive devices for anyone who could pay. It was
the arsenal of the world.

Krupp was born a German and a patriot, in so far as any businessman can
be a patriot of one country. That meant that the German Kaiser would be
received at the Krupp court more frequently and informally than others
seeking his friendship. Any new invention would be offered first to him.
The fatherland was the first among customers. But if the fatherland could
not pay or requested a deferment the goods would pass into enemies'
hands. Pinner writes: 'In the days when Krupp threw the barrels of his
guns on to the market for the first time, nobody was tormented with
pangs of conscience or prejudices of a political nature. Everyone would
without hesitation sell his instruments of murder to both friends and foes.
Bismarck's wars were but a proving ground, the ordeal by fire, for his
guns.'
Had the French government realised the superiority of Krupp's guns
and hastened to re-equip its army the war of 1870 might well have ended
differently.
The subsequent forty years were the period of the coming of age of
German industry and its imperialism. Krupp turned into a whole state. He
was one of the first to reconstruct his whole industrial process in the form
of the vertical trust. Everything from coal-mines to engineering plants,
from ore deposits to power stations. Everything at first hand, everything

his own product. He made his rear secure and waged war against
middlemen and whole alliances of middlemen for the independence of the
raw material: ore, fuel and chemicals. His furnaces, plants and workshops
acquired their own foreign colonies. Krupp conquered for them whole
territories and seas of oil. He strangled his neighbours like chickens,
swallowing up their assets or forcibly merging them with his own in the
form of joint-stock companies.
On the very eve of the war, in 1913 probably, Krupp uttered a brilliant
remark at a press banquet which passed as unnoticed as that lump of steel
sixty years before:
"A factory must create its own demand."
Krupp made guns and war was his customer. In 1914 it broke out.
Never had the works flourished as it did in the first years of the war.
130,000 workers were employed in armaments manufacture. 40,000
would sit down at a time to eat in the factories. The old buildings were
finished and new ones shot up at an incredible speed. Taking the first year
of the war alone the firm's turnover rose from 33.9 million gold marks in
1913 to 86.4 million in 1914. Finally, on the outskirts where nowadays
French soldiers have their firing practice and sing those merry songs,
there grew a flat-roofed lizard, a dark red barn beneath which the earth
shook night and day. The greatest gun plant in Europe. This, the
Hindenburg Works, had arisen thanks to that celebrated plan for the
militarisation of industry whose father the Field Marshal was considered
to be. Simple, this plan: flood heavy industry with gold and cram the
country's last resources into its maw but force it to turn out more guns
than all the allies' plants put together. Krupp was beaten at this game.
Vickers-Armstrong and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation proved the
stronger. Today, the day the Hindenburg programme was implemented is
regarded as the day of the German mark's final decline, the beginning of
the fall and the beginning of the inflationary years.

No one had been so enriched by the war as Krupp. No one was dealt such

a blow by the Versailles Peace as he. The machines that had produced the
arms were blown up. Tools in the shell shops were wrecked or removed.
Whole districts fell silent and dozens of chimneys stopped smoking. The
pits and mines in Alsace, Luxembourg and the Saar passed mostly into the
hands of French industrialists who treated them exactly as Krupp would
have done in the event of victory. The sites of the now destroyed or
paralysed installations have become yawning gaps. Fresh reserves of the
raw materials, lost for ever at home across the Rhine, had to be found
abroad.
Krupp made an attempt to switch over to peacetime rails. Hitherto he
had never made things in the accepted sense of the word. But now he is
largely following his original path: you can't make soup or sew dresses
with his products. His plants produce not goods for consumption but the
means of production. Krupp is a nursery for pedigree horse power, the
breeding-ground for siring machines that will in turn beget countless
generations of motors. His looms are like queen-bees from which the life
of entire beehives springs. Their slim steel bodies toss out millions of feet
of cloth and his lorries and cranes shift thousands of tons. Railway wheels
are but bobbins around which space is wound self-emptying wagons,
diesel engines, struts for overhead railways, harvesters and machines for
potato-planting and spreading fertilisers. Rakes and mowers, shovels and
locomotive boilers, oil storage tanks and pipes -- all are embryos of
factories, the sperm of new airways and towns and the tonnage of fleets
that will carry the crops of the next decades.
Nonetheless there are no trifles for Krupp today. Krupp scorns nothing.
He has been forbidden to make guns. All right. He will make false teeth -light, durable, stainless, odourless,tasteless steel jaws. Ten times cheaper
than platinum and just as good. He fell upon the dairy maids, took away
the rags and strainers through which they used to pour milk into the
bottle and gave them lovely separators for twenty marks each. The great
Krupp struck up a friendship with the smallest and darkest cinemas
where the boss's daughter plays the piano. Now they will buy their
projectors only from him. He tempted doormen's wives, little post-office
clerks, old maids, schoolteachers and chemists into buying his magic

lantern. He supplied thousands of grocers with their cash registers. Yet all
these are still trifles, even all this is insufficient to stop the gap. Krupp has
been caught off-balance. He must take a new stride forward and carry out
a technical revolution if he is to beat the foreign competitor without guns
and bayonets.
But there they still are, visible from the tower. At lunch every day the
directors count up the dead shells with their eyes: the long flat roofs of the
Hindenburg Works; there they lie in the midst of plants with a smell that
seems to turn fouler every day like the carcass of a rotting whale. A silent
polygon resembling a cemetery. A dead building beneath a dome looking
like a dormant, black, Petersburg Admiralty: that's the factory that
worked for the navy. There are the endless workshops of the gun plant
lying drawn out like a gun's barrel, sealed up on the outside and empty
inside with flights of stairs showing through the glass walls like bones
through skin. Somewhere there booms not a cannon but a hammer -- a
hydraulic press is stamping out cisterns and boilers for chemical plants.
But this work too will soon come to a halt. Today boilers but tomorrow
cannon again. No, it's better all blown up. The Control Commission is
implacable.
The engineering plant that suffered so cruelly now works at half
capacity and is the largest in Europe occupying an area 47,000 square
metres. Its last big order was for locomotives for Russia. But many
months have passed since then and Russia is making her own
locomotives.
Away to the west are open-hearth furnaces with their clear yards, a
square grey lake of water from underground, towers with the racing
wheels of winding gear -- a few of those pits that are still operating -gasometers, garages for hundreds and thousands of vehicles, a
hunchbacked house -- the laboratory where a rustproof iron was
discovered this year -- steel mills, more open hearths, blast furnaces,
chemical works, textile machinery plants, all fanning outwards. Some of
these have been snuffed out, others are half-empty, while yet others are

working three shifts flat out, setting world productivity records with the
lowest possible wages and the longest possible working day.
From this height it is all quite plain: these plants, factories and
workshops are not standing still at all. They are moving and their
movements are co-ordinated like on a chessboard or a battle plan. Some
edge round their own corpses, stepping over their empty yards and
structures, while others, weakened and unable to keep their feet, are
assigned to the rear to re-arm and replenish themselves with new energy.
The burden is being wholly shifted off their shoulders on to the stronger
ones. The latter have to bear double the load as the clouds of smoke hang
over Krupp' s camp like banners of the armies.
A crisis. Yes. Elsewhere, for the press, creditors and the workers at
whose expense the silent technical revolution is being prepared, it is a
palace coup by machines. But for these latter merely an acute coal crisis.
Apparently German coal can no longer compete with British coal. The
Ruhr's newspapers are full of the news that Russian coal which no one
had taken seriously before, is beating German and British coal in the
Balkans and throughout the Near East. Production costs must be brought
down otherwise the economy will collapse -- that is the catchphrase of all
the rightwing, democratic and social-democratic press. And so down with
miners' pensions, down with their leave and public holidays, away with
national insurance and pit safety legislation and away with all the
proletariat's rights gained in a fifty-year battle.
In order to demonstrate the gravity of the crisis to the workers the
Krupp family has resolved upon drastic measures. It has dismissed no less
than forty footmen from its castle and moved from its palace, which was
as large and ugly as a covered market, to a well-appointed town house.
The magnanimous gentlemen are sharing their travails honestly with their
workers. By saving on the wages of a couple of stable-lads Krupp can
throw another few score thousand on to the streets with a clear
conscience. Heavy industry's wounded body is convulsively shrinking. It
rationalises its production and discards everything superfluous,
everything with little or no profitability. Over the last few months some

forty thousand men in Essen and the surrounding district alone have been
thrown on to the street. Krupp feels no need to conceal the fact that a
hundred thousand more will be sacked this winter. The state -- that
means the taxpayer and that means the worker -- will feed these armies of
unemployed and their families at its own expense so as to give Krupp and
Stinnes a chance to hatch their conspiracy without undue losses: a
conspiracy for an uprising of manufacturing industry. Coal -- yes, that's
what the uprising is directed against. Coal is the black bread of industrial
plants which for just over a hundred years has kept the world dependent
upon its prices and quality. In order not to be totally overthrown it must
adopt a constitution, accept concessions, dissolve itself, turn liquid and
share equal rights with the brown coal it had hitherto held in contempt.
The Versailles Treaty exploded and halted half Krupp's works. But it did
leave in the hands of the German bourgeoisie its great and inexhaustible
source of wealth: that sinewy backbone of Ruhr miners and metalworkers.
Krupp, by supporting himself on this spinal column, today makes
convulsive attempts to drag himself out of the crisis. Not just to darn
holes but to take a new step forward. German social democracy and its
trade unions are assisting Krupp's stabilisation as loyally as they had
assisted him during the war. For only under their cover can the uprising
of the machines be carried out, metallurgy's Ninth of Thermidor.

A Concentration Camp of Poverty

The Barracks and a Cobbler's Wife
In Germany a man out of work is not threatened with starving to death.
The benefit that he receives from the state is, as they say here, too little to
live on but too much to die on. An unemployed man will continue to exist
on the brink of utter poverty. He has nothing except a piece of dry bread.
A family man is in no position to afford a flat, however small, out of this
assistance. Once thrown out of his factory he automatically flies from the
block, neighbourhood and district where he has lived for many years and
where a communist may maintain dangerous contacts. Then the city
authority will allocate him accommodation somewhere on the outskirts in

an empty abandoned barracks, a regimental stable converted into a hostel

or an unoccupied ordnance depot. These are the special concentration
camps of poverty: godforsaken stone barns that the Empire had built for
the soldiery but which the republic now settles with unreliable workers.
No grass grows on these fields trampled by decades of Prussian drilling.
Ragged children play in sewage puddles around the sentry-boxes.
These huge structures that spat entire armies on to the battlefields,
stand empty, murky and desecrated. With what bile must the hearts of the
former officers who have moved on to the neighbouring Reichswehr
barracks be filled when they see a worker's hand-cart, laden with shabby
goods and chattels, jingling and trundling in the heat of the day over the
field of Mars towards this drab, dismal hermitage.
The wives of the poor folk attach washing-lines to the old eagles on the
gates and dry their rags on the sacrosanct window ledges of the officers'
former quarters. A lame red-haired cobbler, now eighteen months out of
work 'because of politics' has dragged a soldier's old stove out of the
ruined barracks and saws it in half in the sunshine, making ready for a
hard winter.
All efforts to make these dead buildings warm and human have been in
vain. Objects have been taken from their natural intimacy and spread out,
standing heavily to attention along the naked wall. It is impossible to fill
barns designed for forty soldiers each with this debris from shipwrecks.
The emptiness swallows them up. A bare-footed, bandy-legged child
shuffles around on the mucky parquet floor, part of which went for fuel
last year when there were not enough panes in the vast and always open
windows like eyes without lashes. The second child has died.
Two beds side by side where the father and mother and the boy with his
fourteen-year-old sister sleep. A cheerless cur sits in between and yawns.
Every day the communist cobbler's wife washes down the endless
corridor out of fear and a desire somehow to appease the hostile house
whose walls repeat footsteps and words aloud but without expression. She

does this in order to try and come to terms; paying the barracks a pledge
of human warmth which the walls accept with as much indifference as a
field-marshal accepts a naive bribe from a raw recruit.
But Frau Schumacher need only lift her head to lose her last hope. The
old barracks with its dead face repeats from its walls the only words left to
it: "Lerne leiden ohne zu klagen" Learn to suffer without complaining)
or "Ordnung regiert die Welt" (order rules the world).
And wherever the poor Frau turns with her bucket and floor-cloth,
barrack-room virtue greets her at every step with a fist to her head.
Receiving seven marks a week for four, living on this isle of the dead
and knowing that in the evenings in the cramped space her little girl
cannot get to sleep for a long time but listens morbidly to every movement
and every sigh of her parents-- all that's nothing. But hearing that
incessant voice from the past prattling with a sluggish tin tongue about
valeur and obedience, yellow Uhlan uniforms and dashing Hussars who
have long ago rotted away somewhere on the Marne or in the Russian
snows is just too much.
This winter one more rickety little boy will perhaps no longer be.
Perhaps the cobbler himself will pass away for it is hard for him to drag
himself along in the rain and cold, damp spells to the labour exchange on
his skidding crutches. Yet those spectres will live on and another
proletarian family which comes to perish in this unlocked prison where
the gates have been ripped from their hinges, where the wind from the
field sweeps the crumbling stonework down the corridors and from where
there is as little escape as from any other prison, will be greeted by those
Fredericuses and the drum-beat of dead bones.
"Furchtlos und treu fr Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland." (fearless and true
for God, Kaiser and Fatherland) Only one window shines in the dark of
the unlit buildings -- one gold tooth inside big dead jaws. When it is dark
and particularly cold the eagles painted on the ceiling find their way out
into the black yard and scratch up the scraps among the rubbish that the
cobbler's hens did not manage to peck out.

Into the filthy heaps they dip their pedigree heads adorned with the
bald down of the old empire.
Frau Fritzke
Madame Fritzke runs around in stockinged feet so as not to make a
noise down those corridors. She is a Ninon de Lenclos of the wastes and
on her face love life is packed up in large grey bags.
The atmosphere of this building harms her life: her hairnet, ear-rings
and 'Kasan' face-powder all dissolve in it. In the sober light the pipes of
her long narrow trousers show horribly clearly through her torn skirt.
Madame Fritzke was widowed during the war. Everyone will sell what
they have: since then hundreds have tugged at her breasts, just as the
chain is tugged in the lavatory, until they have become long and always
seem to be wet. If you were to cut through the lace of her collar they might
drop on to the floor and melt away into two large puddles. In this way
Frau Fritzke had saved her children from starving to death in the years of
the war and inflation. The state that had taken their father from them and
spent their orphan's benefit on subsidies to Krupp and Stinnes, has now
decided to take them away from their immoral mother. A policeman will
arrive in a few days' time and remove the stubborn plump boy and the
twelve-year-old girl, an imbecile who has continual fits, to a Catholic
orphanage.
August, Frau Fritzke's last friend, had married these relies of love in
order to save the family. They had gone along in triumph to the registry
office; she, ski-ing over the dust in her narrow lacquered slippers, he in a
paper collar reeking of petrol looking as solemn as fate. This heroic
measure was the talk of the whole camp but was of no avail.
Fritzke collected together references from her previous employers from
which it was clear that she had not only been a prostitute but also a
charwoman and that if the morality police gathered up all the filth, muck,
soot and cobwebs she had carried out of other people's flats on her back
they would have a pyramid in honour of her scorned labour.

But the assessors are adamant. Frau Fritzke weeps. The rings round her
eyes are like those drawn with an umbrella in the sand.
An Iron Cross
If you land in the barracks sit down in their depths and don't stir. It's all
right for Frau Fritzke to wear her crepe-georgette dress and put special
rubber pads on her corns so that they do not break through her shoes but
that's her profession.
The cobbler's wife is entitled to heat her curling-irons on the communal
stove until her hair--and its nits--crackle, because she married the cobbler
(everyone knows this) out of pure love when he was already legless. But
nobody else dares raise a comb. Here there is no point in putting on an
appearance to impress people with a false idea of your supposed income.
Everyone lives in a complete nakedness like snails squashed on the road
weakly twitching their horns surmounted by never despairing eyes. So
when someone like Mr. Boss is ashamed of his pawnshop receipts and
allows no one in his room in case they find out about his feather-bed
without a slip and the red pillows out of which the feathers are spurting
(which everyone long ago knew about anyway), the affectation is
offensive.
In this house, as in paradise or the precinct of a country church, middleclass shame stays behind the gates guarded by the fiery sword of the angel
of poverty. If anyone attempts to feel ashamed he at once upsets the
others and they too must waste their energies on fig-leaves of pretence
which can fool no one. The house, for its part, despises Boss along with
the collar on his bare body, the medal on his tummy and that voice
sounding as if he'd dined today.
But were it known how much smarting humiliation and bitterness had
accumulated right inside those former field marshal's quarters of his! If
anyone had slept on nails and gone grey with hot ashes it was that same
Boss who for thirty-four years had worked in a War Department powdermill.

All his life he was separated from ordinary men by an oath. Men who
had taken this soldier's vow of silence entered neither trade union, party
nor workingmen's pub. Even reading newspapers of any tendency
whatsoever was regarded as improper and suspicious within the gates of
the power-mill. What General Staff officers kept quiet about for big
money, high ranks, plumed helmets and tiers of decorations on their
chests, workers in the powder-mills and munitions plants kept quiet
about for nothing, content with the confidence placed in them. That
seemed to have turned them from mere hired workers into partners in
government. The Kaiser himself was, as it were, indebted to the
armaments workers for their modesty and disinterestedness. They loved
the dynasty like paupers whose hard-earned pennies a millionaire had
deigned to accept from them as credit. And when the war came and gold
was smelted into powder and iron, the government actually did do Mr.
Boss a great honour by reaching its hand out for his savings book. When
that most confidential adviser, the manager's wife, visited his flat with her
daughter and servant to offer the old worker a few war-loan bonds, how
great was the trepidation and self-sacrifice with which Boss threw all his
savings into that abyss!
Ten-pfenning pieces evaporated into thin air like dew. Marks turned to
smoke before Boss had time to wipe away his tears of emotion.
As for gold coins-- there were 132 of them -- no one heard even a slight
sound as they fell to the very bottom of the inflation. But Boss was happy.
Since then five, no, more--seven whole years have passed.
The world was drenched in blood, made a convulsive bid to free itself
but was finally skinned over with a thin membrane of stabilisation broken
by black ice-holes of starvation and unemployment.
When the Vertiko (a small cabinet), rocking-chair and clock, received
from the works for twenty-five years of irreproachable service, were
loaded on to a hand-cart Boss still believed in God and justice.

When his wife came home from the pawnshop with a receipt instead of
the personally inscribed silver clock with the imperial monogram, he still
held out and did not let her talk at table about their elder son killed in
action.
But when all the sacrifices had been offered up and the still patient and
devoted Boss began to be overcome by the great tiredness that suddenly
descends upon a worker when he is nearing sixty -- his eyes were growing
dim, his hands became weak and dithery and his saliva, poisoned with
alcohol and ether, began to come out as rank yellow spittle -- then Boss
received his notice. Two billion in fake money and a room in a dead
barracks. Suddenly it occurred to him that he too was a worker. What a
fright! What loneliness! Stripped bare and crushed in the wheels of a
blind machine, Boss, a grain of sand, Boss, a splinter, all at once tumbled
into the great sea of his class, right to its bed where there is neither light
nor hope.
Above him rolled dark waves, 1919 and then 1921. Boss lay still and saw
only revolutionary ships wrecked in battle coming to the bottom from
time to time and settling down beside him. With flags on their broken
masts and dead men on shattered decks. The best sons of mankind, its
stormy petrels, the madly brave Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
In those long hours of miserable idleness, Boss would take a box stuffed
with now worthless money out from under the bed, and sit over it for
evenings and sit over it for days.
The wallpaper in the room is grey with red specks faded with time -- as
if here and there had gushed a fountain of human life which spattered it
and ran dry.
The veins in Boss's legs swelled up: his tired blood was begging to go
back to the earth.
Tall and dressed in a coffee-coloured jacket, with a medal on his watchchain and leaning on a crutch, he goes to meet his wife who, despite her
grey hair, has started as a worker at the tobacco factory. Everyone in the

area knows Minna -- there are no other faces like hers. It is a whiter-thanwhite mask of such beauty that you want to stand up before it and bow to
the ground. In his youth Boss was shrill, imperious and insistent,
considering it his duty to torment her to keep the family's equilibrium.
After work this face with tiny beads of sweat on the forehead shines like
plaster-of-paris.
Through the walls of basements and attics, prisons and factories, there
seeps and oozes the still, quiet river of labour solidarity, drops gathering
into streams, streams into rivers and seas. With infinite patience it laps
against stones and iron bars, undermining, gouging and washing away
grain after grain of sand to break surface at the right day and hour in a
torrent of indignation.
Such a day came for boss, too. His neighbour, the cobbler, raised
himself up to the first floor, took a rest, got himself to the second, knocked
at the door and opened it. He had come to offer Boss an Arbeiter
Zeitung (a communist newspaper).
A deep silence fell upon his lodging. The white Minna turned even
whiter and hid in the kitchen. The cobbler sat down. The paper cost
twenty pfennings. Boss, nearly choking in his tie, paid the twenty for it
and flung on the table another, grey, spiked coin with a little ring on one
side.
"Take that sh-t! That's all I've earned in my life."
The Iron Cross.
"Fr Kriegshilfsdienst" (for war service behind the lines.) WR and a
crown.

Slippers
These are warm comfortable slippers made of camel hair. Everyone
thinks they are foreign, most often English, because of their checkered

design and takes them in carriages on international trains. Four marks

fifty pfennings a pair.
As a matter of fact these luxurious 'Anglo-Saxons' are made in the town
of Hanau by special slipper seamstresses and at home what's more. The
slippers are haughty, fearing to open their mouths and breathe lest they
betray their lowly origin. They reek of poverty. Frau Kremer gets four
marks for a hundred slippers. In an hour she can complete five. Her
daughter, in only her second year in this job, can sew seven slippers in
fifty-five minutes. To learn for forty years only to be beaten by the
automatic advantage of energy. Like a cabman's horse. However many
years it may have clattered its hooves on the road, its skill does not
thereby increase. If she jabs the needle in at lightning speed, pressing it
with her pet corn, it make no odds -- she's already an old jade. Any
country foal will outjump her simply because it is twenty years younger.
The maximum straining of effort cannot increase her earnings. The
faster the needle flies, the more often the cheap, weak thread breaks and
her employer gains also. It is all calculated and measured out so meanly
that the seamstress not only cannot save a single pfenning but has to put
in some herself.
It is very tempting to sew slippers padded with cotton-wool. A young
working girl ignorant of the craft easily falls into that trap. For every
warm pair the factory owner pays not ten but all of fifteen pfennings. But
you won't catch Mrs. Kremer with such a bait. Let others burn their
fingers: for she knows that it is all a matter of needles. Pushing through a
double sole is harder than a normal one. But for both types you are
supplied with exactly the quantity of needles. Three per hundred. As if she
didn't know that with cotton-wool the most dexterous seamstress will
break at least ten. And that's not all. The tricks and ruses by which the last
drop of energy can be squeezed out of a human being are endless. It is
easier to sail a ship around the Cape of Good Hope than to stitch a bulky
sole so that not a single stitch can be seen.
Add it up: how many plain ones can a woman sew in an hour? Five. But
with the padding, only three. An extra pfenning will go on needles but for

the same sixty minutes the boss will give ten pfennings less. It is not for
nothing that Frau Kremer with her hunched back, black rags and a wad of
cotton-wool in her ear oozing with pus, resembles a statue of sorrow and
distrust. If life itself passed right by her today with outstretched arms she
would only purse her lips and hide her store of finished slippers further
out of the way.
This room, with its sideboard without crockery, purple feather-beds
which the fluff leaks out of, uncleared chamber-pot and a kitchen, with no
water and no lavatory, whose ceiling, unpainted and unpatched for ten
years, is peeling with soggy scabs and Frau Kremer herself, like a mouse
fallen into an anthill and half-gnawed to pieces, all have but one means of
defence: total distrust. They vote against everything. Frau Kremer says:
the SPD are rogues, every word they say is a lie, and the communists are
cowards. They let 1923 slip by. What does it matter to her whether the
party was ready for struggle or how many more months or years of petty
boring work might still be necessary in order to lead the proletariat to
victory? And when will that be?!
She needs help now, at this minute, or otherwise never, because Frau
Kremer's energies are coming to an end and she is 'dying in harness'.
When a mouse is mortally terrified it stares to sweat. It becomes wet all
over with fear. So where should Frau Kremer await the revolution,
covered as she is with the perspiration of the final weariness?
"I cannot join a trade union. It is forbidden to work for such a low rate
in the union. Then they'll demand that I give up the job."
But in Frau Kremer's home it's a big labour holiday: her one son, a
fifteen-year-old boy employed at a cigar-box factory, is on strike for the
first time in his life. The strike began three weeks ago and 135 people are
taking part. Without a hope of success-strikebreakers are converging from
neighbouring villages in droves.
The old woman is silent. Neither a word of reproach nor a single
complaint. To be true to herself she acts as if nothing has happened, as if

she does not notice his presence. After all, she doesn't believe in strikes, or
socialism or even smallpox. Everything that originates from the masters is
a big swindle. For a whole year she hid her grandson from the municipal
doctor. Anyway they dragged him off to hospital the other day and pricked
him all over and there, wasn't she right? Four pock-marks had opened up
under the dirty shirt on his little arm.
But how Frau Kremer puts out her son's plate on the table and how she
gazes at his tall manly back leafing around the larder! How she tells the
neighbours, raising her eyebrows and guardedly expecting a rebuke:
"My son's on strike."
For being true to his class, for the solidarity that passes from generation
to generation and the young courage that does not remember past defeats,
the old dead tree waves its last branch to him without a sound.
He a Communist and She a Catholic
Workers who have been deprived of their livelihood because of their
political unreliability belong mostly not to the younger but the older
generation. The young peasant lad who is in the way in the house will go
off to the factory whatever the wage a nd however long the hours if only to
get himself a couple of marks for his beer, a bicycle and a fashionable suit
with knee-breeches for Sundays. He eats and drinks at his father's for
nothing. The older generation of workers that has passed through a
twenty-five year school of trade union and revolutionary struggle is, in
spite of its relatively high rates of pay and its position as an aristocracy of
labour, far less compliant, having no desire to yield its final positions
without a battle.
The result of any resistance, however cautious and moderate, is
dismissal. At first the worker is not depressed. He has excellent references
covering twenty or twenty-five years, a revival can be discerned in his
trade and to-morrow if not today a vacancy will be created somewhere.
Anyway his wife is working as a domestic help for the family of some wellto-do person and earns quite a decent wage.

At the beginning no one reminds him of the cruel law of unemployment.

It comes into force by itself. The one who feeds the family becomes the
head of the household. Returning from a hard day's stint he likes to sit
down to a good spread laid on the table in a clean tidy dwelling. The
children must be washed and brushed before his return, their noses wiped
and their homework checked. But then, three days later, father slams the
front door behind mother, meekly puts her apron on and sets about the
housework. He does the dusting, cleans the windows with a cloth, washes
the dishes, rinses out the rags he cleaned the pots and pans with, takes out
the slops, sluices down the kitchen floor, makes the bed, hangs out the
feather-bed over the window sill and when it has been warmed through in
the sun puts it back in its place with meticulous care.
We Russians haven't the least conception of the ritual of cleanliness and
order which the wife of an average or even the poorest German worker
performs every day in her home. You can sit and watch her for hours,
cleaning, washing and scrubbing her kitchen, crockery and linen. Not just
flipping a wet rag round now and again like we do. No, under the divan,
behind the stove, along the window-sill and in the farthest corners where
no one ever peeps. All this must now be carried out by her reluctant
husband. And just as in good times past he would run his finger along the
stove to check that there was not a speck of dust and not forgive his wife
for a single grain or a single spot missed, so now it is he who must answer
to her. She is the head of the household who feeds the family. He is the
subordinate, obedient domestic help, a nanny in trousers, a washer-up in
his own hearth and home. In the depths of his soul every German regards
his wife as his servant and looks down on her work. As he shuffles the
wife's mop into the corners, sits over a bag of potatoes and gets the dinner
ready the husband feels degraded beyond measure. These workers see
things just as any petty-bourgeois does. One very good comrade who had
been unemployed for several years said to me with deep bitterness,
pointing to his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, with a brush in one hand
and the wife's boot in the other:
"See what wretched humiliation unemployment brings us. I, a man,
have to clean the old woman's shoes."

Insulted and injured in his masculine pride, a father attempts to restore

the balance by other means. On pay day, when his wife will lay out her
week's earnings on the table with a feigned modesty, he walks up and
down ail day, gloomy, irritable and pained. A furious scene erupts over
dinner:
"Who's master in the house -- you or me?"
The thump of a fist on the table. An old lash comes off the wall. The
children scream. Mother begs forgiveness. After dinner the parents go off
to the bedroom. He makes her beg for a long time. She gets undressed,
staring at him with imploring eyes. He violates her with hatred and makes
her cry out so loud that it can be heard on the staircase and finally sends
her downstairs for some cigarettes. Never, even in the days of good
money, had he loved his wife with such a jealous love; never had she
fancied caresses more than now, when they had in effect to be bought.
A husband gradually turns into his wife's souteneur.
"I'll soon become her Alphonse," said little Kamm, the one who was
cleaning the boots. His situation is further complicated by the fact that his
wife springs from an old-established catholic peasant family, with
portraits of the Kaiser and Kaiser's wife, Augusta, masses on Sunday and a
grandfather who is the standardbearer of the veterans' association of the
166th Regiment of blue-and-yellow Uhlans. They had been against the
marriage all along. Why on earth had he, a short, restless foundryman
who changed bosses like gloves, married the tall, fine honest peasant
maid! A little husband cannot keep a family! ...
Now that Kamm has fallen into material dependence on the old folks,
her family seeks to review the whole family constitution to the advantage
of the wife and children and at the expense of the dissolute husband. Yes,
little grandaughter Lieschen can spend the whole summer with grandpa
and grandma and it won't cost a penny. On Saturdays they will send
dumplings, lard and goose to the town but granddaughter must go to
church and not miss a single mass. If the young ones want to be
supported, father must tell the child that God exists and that all godless

ones will land in hell. What can you do! You have to put up with it.
Fortunately Lieschen shares her father's sceptical mind and his French
guile. They understand each other by hints.
"Lieschen," says Kamm to his daughter, sitting her on his knees, "you
remember I told you there isn't a God and that heaven is just a silly tale
for children! Lieschen, look at me in the eyes: I made a mistake, I told you
an untruth. He's really sitting up in the sky and he sees and knows
absolutely everything."
The old folk are standing by him and watch their son-in-law's mouth
like a card-player's hand. The little one nods:
"I see, daddy.
Kamm knows his own sort. "What a good thing the child is as cold as a
dog's nose to all these tricks," he thinks.
Kamm has been out of work now for three years. He does the washing,
bakes the bread and has learnt to darn stockings. There is no end to the
reproaches. With continual talk about how the poor chap has driven his
family to poverty, how the party makes use of men when they're working
in the factory but abandon them in poverty, you can go out of your mind.
"What have you got for your privations? They haven't even appointed
you as a minor official in the party!" He escapes from all this into work. In
the winter he goes round the villages as a roving agitator; he ascends the
Vgelsberg and climbs the Spessart hills. He is the first to have dared
speak as a communist in public in a settlement of old Waldensians,
erstwhile partisans of the great peasant wars and now rich peasants
secludedly living a viciously miserly life far away from the world. Each of
them is in fact wealthy, with up to sixty acres a piece but not a horse or a
labourer to work them. Inflation has gobbled down their money but
without machines and fertiliser how can you wring a crop out of the cold
brutal ground? Deceived by the faith of their fathers and themselves, the
village commune drove from the settlement both the priests and the
recruiting agents of the various parties, the votehunters for the

presidential elections. Kamm has not yet won a single supporter from
among these embittered Old Believers, but it is only to him that the grimlooking old men in broad-brimmed medieval hats and their womenfolk in
white caps looking like starched kites, give their greetings.
In the remotest upland settlements where it is almost impossible to till
the soil because of the frequent rain that washes all the manure downhill,
they know his face, which could pass for either eighteen or forty years of
age, his satchel of newspapers and halting step.
"That chap's not satisfied with watching beans come up," the hewers
from the basalt mines say of him, wild men, farmhands, forest poachers,
the dearest friends of the prince' deer that enjoy an immunity in the
forests along the Rhine as if they were diplomats. It is quite true that
Kamm does not have even a kitchengarden or an allotment out of town
with a summer-house and a lettuce-bed where the German proletarian
potters about so happily after his day's work. The vicar of Griesheim
whom they get tied up with on Sundays after the sermon once said of him:
"A spiteful, biting mouth" and "a poisonous little spider".
But all the mountain tracks lead down to the valley again.
After the long wanderings he has to go home. And at home there waits
the pious, wicked wife, the tall beautiful peasant girl with the perpetually
downcast eyes, imperious, greedy and burning. Twenty times Kamm has
left never to return and twenty times he has turned back for Lieschen's
sake -- for "his own blood". If he goes off who will protect her from the
priests, the old women and her mother's false beliefs?
The most horrible part, the retribution and punishment, begins when
the children are already asleep, the door locked and the windows corked
up; the whole middle-class house is obligingly silent and turns a blind eye.
Now she is undressing. An iron corset and savagely tightened,
unpuncturable, fireproof breastplates. Alien in spirit, hostile to his every
thought and booklet on his table, she is happy in his defeats and rejoices

with his enemies yet she is more unscrupulous in bed than any street-girl.
Would they ever! What prostitute could conjure up what the devout
middle-class girl is up to on the quiet on a legal footing in her own home
with the blinds down; with a husband obliged to love and satisfy her even
though for her, he is, God forbid, not fit for anything else because of his
idiotic communist ideas! He that does not work, neither shall he eat!
The sharper the encounter, the deeper the defeat that follows. Having
taken her fill the woman sinks back like a swollen tick only to show at
once, with her hair scarcely straightened and her nightdress still creased
up, that "all that" can change nothing in their relationship. Everything
remains as before.
"Don't forget to remind me, Hans, that tomorrow we have to buy a
prayer-book for Lieschen, are you listening! The Old and the New
Testaments."

In the Ruhr -- Under the Ground

"Sit down here and don't move! if anyone sees you and starts talking to
you, keep your mouth shut!"
The door slammed and a miner's lamp tilted in the direction of the
miners' shed. Shafts of light from the windows of the nearby generating
plant lie like white leaves across the Works Committee's table. The walls
are bare and a loud snore resounds from the shadows. Or so at least it
seems. That's the compressor breathing, forcing air down underground.
You count and measure those sighs with infinite jealousy. Is it better or
worse than in Russia! The engineers pass by on their way underground for
the night. Their shadows wave sleeves across the floor.
"Well, let's go. Take longer steps. Right hand in your pocket. And your
cap further down."
Now the lift is hurtling into an abyss. A modest little cage. For the pit is
not a large one. About eight hundred men are employed here -- it has

survived only because its coal can be tossed straight on to the Rhine. Yet
this is the Ruhr, Germany's most technically developed region.
Two hundred, three hundred metres. Down the shaft's black gullet
twinkle golden fissures marking the different levels. They clank with the
sound of tub wheels and again the platform stands still while the damp
slime of the walls, humming gloom and the depths rush to meet it at
indescribable speed. Longer than a whole flight of stairs yet lasting only a
few seconds during which the cage pulls up and settles carefully upon
some levers which stretch upwards to meet it. It gropes blindly for the
floor level although an underground station with bright lighting, trains
and people stands right in front of it.
The air which had been stuffed into your ears like cottonwool has now
leaked out.
From the black galleries somebody seems to be calling out in Russian,
so intelligible are the sounds of the pair of rails disappearing into the
darkness, converging towards the sloppy churned-up mud between them,
the pony's neighing, the smell of dung from a stable nearby and the quiet
singing of water braiding its streams into plaits over the coals. No matter
where he comes from the foreigner will read the signs of international
labour on these German walls with a private shiver and a sure and deep
excitement. For the stillness of the pit is filled with a wordless tongue
common to all the world. The earth's alphabet is even simpler than
tapping on prison cell walls. Its runic characters are made of tough pine
and the branches and crowns of oak. You find yourself smiling! What thin
trunks are used here for the pit's backbone, what slender graceful trees.
They stand as if on a forest fringe in the calm before a storm, bent to one
side. On them lies the weight of mountains. They heed the course of these
ranges and are bent by their imperceptible motion. The cavity behind the
bulkheads has to firmly be stopped up with boulders. The overman walks
up and down these coops woven out of the wood. The stones peep
between the twigs and touch his hands with their dumb muzzles and cold
animal snouts. Isn't there more space out there! Has that demonic gravity,
crushing down to entomb, squeezed in from behind! Can he really not

throw open this grave, stick his feet into the earth's belly and push it back
with his untiring hands?

Beware! On the wet wall the pit writes one warning after another with its
wooden joists, just as a deaf-mute forms letters from matchsticks. Can't
you see how badly the work has been done here, Stonefalls give a hollow
ring. Cold leaks out of the cracks. Here there is nothing, there is a void
and over there it will fall out, pour through and slide down. And pressing,
pressing down unbearably.
At a glance all is in order. The neat and carefully made pit almost
resembles an underground farm. There are no luxuries or signs of special
opulence but everything is in place and fits well. The concrete areas are
bright as gold and fresh straw gleams in the stables. The plump well-fed
ponies can each pull fifteen loaded tubs and push up to four in front with
their chests. The water brought here from the other levels murmurs
peacefully as in a village mill. At the end of the western gallery a dam
stands like a bastion. Behind it a well has been sealed off: a few years ago
a drunk drank himself silly and drowned himself. They had tried to push
forward in that direction but snakes of water shot out with such an evil
hiss and an unexpectedly high pressure that the breach had to be plugged
quickly with a concrete cork. Since then there has been order and calm in
that sector too; the pony-men, like shepherds, have simply stopped
driving their flocks that way.
But alarm signals persist from the steps along the very first offshoots
branching off the main trunk. Why hasn't the timbering been replaced for
so long! Nearer the light stand dry trunks treated with a special
compound that protects them from damp. Oak is like iron. But this costly
method has evidently been dropped years ago. Dampness happily flowers
in frothy sponges everywhere. Whole rows of clean trees suffer from it like
a bad disease. They stand in silence not letting each other down. Only the
water quietly sniggers as the overman unpicks their porous skin with his
lantern hook to reveal immediately soft wet reddening flesh.

Keep walking. You are soon in a dark side-burrow. My legs, spread

apart, fumble along the upper joist; the roof pressing on my head comes
down lower. Here are the old corridors where coal is no longer won. They
look like drunkards, wandering now to one side and now the other,
getting booted back by the mass pressing on either side. Barely managing
to make the exit, they drop their rotting crutches and feel the ceiling settle
down on to their necks. Broken, snapped, crushed props are everywhere.
As if after a pogrom. A naked imprint of neglect, miserliness and poverty
lies upon it. You stumble at every step on traces of a criminal thrift and a
wretched fear of expenditure.
The footsteps that passed slowly by us behind the wall belonged to the
boss's son-in-law, a former Prussian officer. During the coal crisis
economising extended even to the staffing of the pit. In 1918 this young
man knew nothing about mining. Although he did not manage to
complete his course and gain a qualification he can now in these hard
times replace a dismissed overman. Ever since economising on wood,
nails and even lamp-oil started anxiety has increasingly often driven this
man with his old soldier's sense of duty underground. He shouts at the
workers, telling them off for extravagance and for not knowing how to
save on materials. That is why as soon as the men turn away he rushes to
the face, studies the joists, squeezes himself into its every corner, taps and
eavesdrops on the danger with a quaking heart. This individual surprises
the workers day and night with his unexpected appearances and it's hard
to say what they hate him most bitterly for: the affected coolness with
which he drives them to work in dangerous, poorly reinforced places,
those miserable pangs of conscience and fear of responsibility oozing from
every pore of his pale, puffy face, or that infinite lack of self-confidence
that saps the courage of others. A boorish animal that cares nothing for
itself and cuts short other men's fear would be better than this miserable
sergeant-major in whom an antiquated sense of honour rots and stinks
like a bad tooth.
In that night of subterranean roving we nevertheless ran into him at one
of the crossroads. He was sitting on the ground propped up against the
wall, his lamp between his sharp knees. Two workers were silently

clearing stones that had collapsed on the railway track to the

accompaniment of his monotonous, persistent droning. Sweat shone on
their bare backs trickling down their ribs to wash out white gashes in their
black skins. Meanwhile the manager went on sitting and scourging them
with the birch rod of his tedious discourse. The muscles of the men at
work swelled and crawled in front of him in silence.
"Let me tell you: had you not stabbed us in the back in 1918 everything
would have been different. Yes, the seven-hour day too and we wouldn't
have had to save on every pfenning. Look, for instance, this ceiling could
cave in and kill one of you. Who would be to blame? In your opinion, the
boss. No, not the boss. Yourselves. You should not have had the
revolution."
The overman fell silent all of a sudden and his ears pricked up like an
animal's. What did he take fright at? True, there is a boiler nearby where
rising air deposits its moisture. Every tap, every blow resounding in the
most remote part of the pit echoes through its depths with a quiet rustle.
The boiler lies still, listens, and rings like a seashell in the stillness.
What was it? Or did I imagine it? Of course I did. The cast-iron vessel
again hisses as if rocking a baby crying in its sleep. A nauseating fear. You
can see someone else spew up and you feel queer yourself. One of the
workers lifts his eyes, filled with deep hatred, towards the overman but he
had moved off in time.

The pit is a black book. Telling how the earth makes war on man and also
how, here under the ground, man, the boss, makes war on his own
workers. Water washes away walls, erodes ceilings and rots wooden
structures. While behind the miners' backs walks the owner, forcing them
to work rapidly and carelessly, plundering the wood of the timbers for his
own use, dragging out every superfluous prop from the face, tugging every
bit of wood from the creeping walls and snatching every spare joist from
menacingly overhanging ceilings. He looses danger from its chain and
unties death's hands to gain the extra penny. He is a marauder looting his

own army and sending it into battle with rotten weapons into positions
that he himself has undermined, weakened and surrendered.
The Works Committee does everything possible to obstruct such
'business activity' by the pit-owner. My escort, I won't mention his name
or his face -- let the brim of his miner's cap conveniently cover his coalsmeared features -- swings his lamp to the right and left to dispel the
importunate blackness weighing in on all sides, and from time to time
slaps the wall with his hand and strokes the coal like a black horse with a
dewy-wet mane. He says with pride: "This is our doing. Sec those iron
brackets that secure the steep ladders? Before, they stood free. A miner'd
risk his life using them. See the oblong manhole in the floor covered by
the wooden hatch? Management bargained about it till one of the workers
whose lamp had gone out fell through and was killed. See those steel
bolts: the two bars jutting up where the railway track suddenly breaks off
at the edge of the shaft? They cost the lives of several of us and were got at
the cost of a strike. They weren't there before. A pony would trot gaily
forward with its tub, put its coal on the platform and then go back.
Sometimes the lift would be late and then the tub, pony and driver would
drop into the void. Over there in the wall is a new strut. Several nails stick
out of it. I have the authority to rip those clean out and fine the overman
for negligence because in the event of the smallest landslide this thing
with nails on the end could kill a man. Only two or three years ago I
couldn't have done so."
Throughout the colliery there is evidence scattered of the Works
Committee's small victories but down the deep shafts lie its defeats in
graves. Drifting up from those cellars sealed up by reaction comes a
hollow groaning. Down below, those buried alive raise their fists to the
roofs of their earthen coffins in impotent rage. There all is crushed,
disillusioned, filled with distrust and despair.

The coal face. From far off the miners' movements seem somehow
strange. Or do they just appear so through the dim lamplight? If lunatics
can go on with their work without opening their eyes, their arms

constrained by deep slumber, they would undoubtedly move like those

face-workers repairing the coal-shute. The oldest of the three workmates
sits a little on one side on a pile of new boards and watches our approach
with completely white eyes. He is fast asleep and his eyelids, unsoiled by
coal-dust, stand out in the middle of his face like two cataracts. He can
now hear his name mentioned and the light from our lamps strikes those
pale shades; yet he still cannot open them. Eventually they lift slowly like
an iron curtain.
"Why are you still here?"
"We're not leaving tonight."
"Your shift finished a long while ago."
"We're now on the third shift here. He didn't let us off."
Previously the boss had permitted these three workmates, who lived
some fifty kilometres from D. and came to work by rail, to leave the face
ten minutes before rime. Not out of the kindness of his heart but because
the gang is virtually the best in the mine and to lose such men just for the
sake of a few minutes was not worthwhile. Today the foreman met them
by the lift and sent them back. Their train left without them of course. To
go home by the next one in the middle of the night would mean being late
for the morning shift. Lateness means dismissal. Having waited at the
station for two hours they went back below ground. So they crept back
here not knowing what to do, humiliated, tired, perhaps already
unemployed. The coal sparkles under their hacks like the snow of this
hard winter they are all thinking about, lifting their heads longingly
towards a narrow crack as if morning would dawn through the thickness
of the earth.
Two were not in any party and one was an old convinced SPD man.
When he realised what was afoot, the Menshevik worker quickly put his
implement down and lowered himself so as to stand guard at the nearest
corner.

"But relieve me when you lot have had your say. I want to hear about
Russia too."

Three times night had swung the heavy gong of its clock and above the
bell had rung three times, but the pit in its dark depths could not hear this
ring. Dangling their legs over the edge of their hole and bringing their
lamps closer in, the face-workers, the night-lights of their coal-ringed eyes
gleaming, read out but were unable to conclude an indictment that was at
the same time a long night's story-telling. They took it in turns, passing
the tale from one to another in the same way as one tired worker passes
his pick to the next. None of them could remember the experience of the
revolution as a whole. For them it was a history that stretched back over a
whole decade, one of strikes badly fought and lost. A man does not die
from all the wounds he receives. Each of the miners had lost faith in
socialism from one specific betrayal or one single act of treachery. Here,
the old man had been poisoned by the toxic gases of Vorwrts articles
against Russia; there the fragments of a smashed strike had crippled the
young worker. A speech by Noske had burst like shrapnel over the third.
There are also very recent injuries, no more than a few days or weeks old.
For example the SPD worker who was standing on guard had been lost
recently, in 1924, when the unions broke the last big strike of Ruhr
mineworkers only three days prior to the verdict of the conciliation
commission, despite the feeling of the masses and notwithstanding the
fact that the strike had lasted twenty-five days and could have held out as
long again. They smashed the moment's solidarity, preventing the
transport workers' union from coming to the aid of the coalminers; in this
way they helped the metalworkers betray their comrades so that to this
day the treachery has not been forgotten among workers.
They whipped up discord, sowing a caste hostility between the different
branches of labour, salting and teasing this wound on the body of the
proletariat. Comrade T., forgetting all caution, no longer spoke but
shouted at the top of his voice. His coal-matted beard stuck out from his
face like a stake.

"The Saar goes on strike but we work. Didn't you see! Hundreds of
trains ready at all the stations! They started to move as soon as the strike
in England began. They even called it 'English coal."
"I'm an old social democrat and these two here are honest working men
but together we were strikebreakers. And our party urges workers to do
the work of traitors. Oh yes, the unions talk to us like the Kaiser used
to: 'Kumpels, raus oder du kriegst eine.' (Get out, mate, or you'll get one.)
Where's all this going to end? What will they do with a hundred thousand
unemployed?" The old man laughs, the face around his eyes has grown
dim like a piece of raindrenched canvas. "Well, they'll put us in a
compound and set the machine-guns up around. Sie haben noch Mtzger
genug! Darum kriegen wir Schlag wie junge Hunde." (they've got enough
butchers so we'll be beaten up like puppies.)
Communists had been to see the old man and had offered him in vain
their own world-view, unstained by betrayal of the proletariat. After the
great disappointment that social democracy has brought them people are
so distrustful and fearful that they will no longer take anything from
others. Let's see if communism hits the capitalist like a good rifle. They
break it up into pieces(to see if there are ally tricks in it) and string
together out of the assorted damaged pieces a naive home-made weapon,
the trade union. The defeats of the last years have shown: struggle is
impossible without them. So the Kumpels, digging themselves into their
dark lairs, had dreamt up a utopia. It was built up around Lenin's name
and the fragments of his teaching which had already penetrated down
here underground. Lenin had said that the cell must be at the point of
production. In one way or another he had expounded this idea many
times. Why is it that the party goes after workers in the factories and
mines and is not afraid of their dirty flats, while the unions sit somewhere
up on high beyond reach and just give orders! They ought to come down
here underground to the face so that it'd be just as easy to grab the union
by the scruff of the neck as to reach up for your bottle on the wall for a
drink.

"Kein Berlin, keine grossen Menschen. Hier, hier, mit uns!" (No Berlin,
no big shots. Here, with us here!) Not knowing how better to express his
idea, comrade T. lifted his lamp up to some new props driven into the
wall. There in the twilight some blind grey subterranean butterflies were
swarming round the pine-log. Wherever you have timber you have this
semi-translucent moth as well; eating the moisture and sipping the
darkness together, dwelling together and rotting together. "That's how our
unions ought to be!"
"Goodbye, comrades!
circumstances."

Maybe

we'll

meet

again

in

different

"No. We pretty certainly won't live that long."

I can't remember at which end or whether it was deeper or higher in that

underground labyrinth: possibly it was on a pony- man`s plank-bed in a
hidden corner where the overman doesn't peep very often and you can
stretch out for half an hour, blissfully resting your legs and sense just the
draughts and a peculiar chill seeping up like the earth's breath through
the cracks into the hard bed, through your clothes to the body -- possibly
it was on just such a plank-bed that there was a burly old man, a Bavarian
peasant. Standing behind in rows like stooks in a field are the years he has
worked. He has not counted them and has not looked back. He has not
known politics but cut coal clinging to the ground with his peasant's
clamp-like feet. He has twice been to war but even then did not wake up -a worker without thoughts, all his life a farmhand. Only the recent
Reichstag law on invalids forced him even to raise his head. Under this
law sixty-year-old miners will receive nothing from the state. They will
have to go back to the pit for a further five years to await the alms-giving.
Old G. had walked towards his pension over mountains of coal like an ox
going home from the field dreaming of rest and a night's sleep. But
suddenly right at the gate where he could scent habitation, hear the dogs
barking and see lighted windows, he had to turn round and go back into
the night, the cold, deep earth. G's huge hands, rakes with which he has
raked up so much coal during his life, lie heavy on his knees and he stares

at them: they are too heavy. He'd like to take them off and lay them down
on the coal by his shovel and pick.
"After work I'll have to have a glass of vodka in the tavern." Then
suddenly pain wells up through his whole body: there's no money for that
glass. But how had it been reckoned! He's worked for sixty years but
hasn't got himself enough for some Schnapps. "Schuften und schuften auf
meine alte Tag." (Slaving and slaving until my old age.) His grandfather
and great-grandfather had been peasants. He is a ploughman too and has
ploughed his whole life: he has turned over and dug the earth and thrown
into the mine's black furrows the seed of his strong peasant years. He has
sown and sown and nothing has grown. Not a single grain has come up.
Not one has borne a crop. Deep down in that ravine there lingered a
confused thought about the absurdity and ugliness of life and an irony
chat bursts through the clods of his benumbed brain like a brook from
under a stone.
'Wait till I pass away, then I'll stick my hands in my pockets!"
Only after having wandered like this under the ground, warming
yourself first at one lamp and then another shining like a watch-fire in the
middle of the coal-face, peering into dozens of faces emerging one after
another from the gloom and listening to those voices coming out of the
dark keyholes of the earth do you begin to realise what today, in these
years of defeat, connects the German worker with Russia. There was no
crevice, no lair at the bottom of which they would not be talking about the
Land of the Soviets, like exiles abroad talk of a distant homeland.
Even the gloomiest, the most backward and the most defeated men on
whom the whole burden of stabilisation lies. Linked to the idea of Russia
is another hope which they cherish and nurture in the pits' deep darkness
and thousands, each in his own way, think about and jealously guard from
the corrupting contact of the victors. At present it is but a pale, weak shoot
growing up without sunlight, by the light of a wretched miner's lamp. The
idea of working-class unity.

On the first face: "Man alone made war -- so why is unity impossible in
the world'" "Let our delegation come back. What it says will settle
everything. Nach dem wird sich alles richten." (After that everything will
be all right.)
On another: "Wenn die Verband nicht in einem Topfgekocht werden -sind wir kaput." (If the unions don't all get in together, we've had it.)
"Why are the capitalists united and not us?"
"Why did the railwaymen laugh when we were on strike?"
"Mensch, man hat a Spass daran, wenn die Hand gehen." (It'll be
pretty good, pal, when we march together.)
On a third, the deepest and blackest: "Please convey our thanks to the
Russian workers for the grain sent in the 1924 strike, for it reached us in
time of need. Everything else has been stolen by our unions; they gobbled
from the strike fund with big spoonfuls."

Ullstein
No one runs to fetch the news from the telegraph office: it arrives on its
own. Wild swallows beat against the floor right in front of the editor's
desk and lie down before him already complete and translated into the
human tongue and printed out by a little gadget on to a narrow ribbon of
paper. Ten small machines receive and tap out continuously. A dark
monastery with a hundred cells. A hundred telephone booths. A hermit in
each invoking the god of sensation with a wild cry:
"This is Berlin, B.Z. [Berliner Zeitung] This is Ullstein. Hallo! Speak
up!"
Messengers are dozing like the unemployed on park benches. Like
passengers waiting for trains that are always arriving, every minute
departing but never standing still. A train of news girdling the globe.
Many have been waiting since the previous evening. They have already

met the specials from America and the Entente Express packed with
flighty little stock-exchange bulletins, those bewitching adventuresses that
slip unnoticed over the border with a skimpy luggage of fake news, that
priceless contraband so hunted by newspapermen.
Well, Ullstein's home is large enough to accommodate all comers. 4,500
rooms, six floors, staircases like elevator chutes, a dozen separate printshops -- the best mills in Germany grinding a daily harvest of lies and
truth -- and six newspapers that bake the daily bread for Berlin's millions,
all its layers of population, both sexes and all ages, for Germany as a
whole and for each of her cities individually. Cologne does not eat what
Berlin likes; Dresden's favourite dish will not find a customer in
Frankfurt. For the Hamburg docker, Knackwurst with porter, for
Dresden, Eisbein and cabbage while for the southerners anything that is
light, nourishing and dainty.
Nobody travels on foot in Ullstein's house. Idlers can climb the stairs.
Here people fly by lift. Running past all the floors are its open cages. The
door has been done away with and the liftman gone the way of the
ichthyosaurus. This lift stops nowhere and waits for no one. People leap
on to one of its platforms while moving and leap off it while moving.
Proofs, copy and telegrams follow a course in practical gymnastics.
Leading articles, weighty feuilletons and paunchy, corpulent, shortbreathed political commentaries have all become acrobats and circus
artistes. They run from building to building, crossing the yard on a wire,
flying up and down at a hair-raisins speed hardly catching hold of the
electric postman's wire basket. From the day that Ullstein senior built his
first shed on the Kochstrasse -- a small print-shop -- his business has
grown ceaselessly. Once it reaches a certain level of perfection it stops and
gobbles up its old body. The day that the ever self-renewing spirit of
industry dare not and cannot club its own skull or digest in its own
stomach obsolete modes of organisation, technique and business
management it will become breakfast for a more flexible and powerful
competitor. Take the old Berliner Morgenpost: it had grown up out of a
cemetery -- not of its obsolete methods but of the entire social-democratic
press destroyed by Bismarck. It was then that Ullstein proved able to

throw hundreds of thousands of copies of his moderate street news-sheet

on to a deserted newspaper market -- into the breach made by the AntiSocialist Law. It was a paper aimed at the broadest mass of the petty
bourgeoisie.
How often have methods of work changed since then! From hand
setting to mechanical setting, from drawings to photography and then
from anaemic smudgy colourless photos to artistic montage. After each
technical revolution, a brief incapacity for the whole concern as after a
vaccination. Then a frantic leap forward -- the prey: hundreds of
thousands of new subscribers, new buildings, workshops, staff, drivers,
lorries and telephones. Over the recent post-war years appendicitis has
again set in the newspaper plant's body: now it is the old type-casting
machines, English machines that run on gas and have to be always full of
molten tin otherwise they don't work. German machines have been
brought in to replace them: they devour plain and simple coal and can be
topped up when you wish -- from one cardboard mould you can get thirty
metal castings.
The works knows no gratitude nor remembers past services rendered.
Life has left the old section. It is cold and empty and a lazy fire lit in the
furnace of its rivals is reflected in its dead window-panes. The merry clank
of matrixes and files brushing their hot edges drift up to the now banished
section like the clatter of knives on plates.
At one time only one newspaper was produced and they were afraid to
put out an evening one lest its circulation be reduced. Today Ullstein, like
a clever madame, sends dozens of papers into the street, distinctly
dressed, speaking different tongues, landing on the pavement at different
times and not getting in each other's way. Like prostitutes, they share the
street between them and do not quarrel. Each one has its customers. In
the morning, Vossische Zeitung, intended for the stock exchange and the
banks. She latches on to the smart operators as they stand in Aschinger's
with sandwich in cheek and mug of beer in hand. She gets into the car
with them and has time to do her business with them in the five minutes
between restaurant and stock exchange or station and office. A clever,

prudent and very well-informed newspaper, edited by one of the best

German journalists. Every speculator hopes his fifteen pfennings will
elicit something useful from it.
While the husbands are in town, Ullstein's Die Praktische Berlinerin,
Die Dame or Blatt der Hausfrau call at their wives' doors. The lastmentioned is a masterpiece of technique. For this commercial traveller to
run from house to house, inflaming appetites with whispers about the
cheapest coffee-pot, a house-coat at 3.70 marks, a double-bed and a
pregnancy remedy, typographical technique has accomplished a real
miracle and human genius has arisen to a new level. In one shot the
machine not only prints 96 pages of text and cover but also cuts, collates
and folds them ejecting the completely finished issue into a tray. In this
way 3,500 copies can be produced in an hour. What can be said about the
needlework section and the patterns for cheap night-caps which Die
Dame supplies its subscribers free of charge? Before anything has time to
take shape in the mind of the woman instinctively putting money by for a
future purchase as a bird gathers straw for a nest, her day-dreams have
been already anticipated and snipped out in cigarette paper by Ullstein's
cutters. The spirits of overcoats to be, spirits of blouses and trousers to be,
nod towards the customer from out of the fog of the future and the tinsel
never-never land of fresh cliches.
There are horses that can solve problems and dogs that know geography
but what inconceivable intelligence a machine may acquire no one yet
knows. Hoffmann's mechanical Olympia sang romantic songs and took
her curtsey -- but that's nothing. At Ullstein's a worker sits in front of a
machine and types on a keyboard. He has pressed a letter. It immediately
breaks out of its place and lies down at the beginning of the line. That is
the first cross of the game. Next to it a second, a third and then in two
seconds the whole line is moulded from the tin and leaps on to the galley.
What do the letters do once the word they have formed is no longer
needed! They demobilise. They go off to their homes. The machine lowers
its long black arm, snatches up the used composition and places it on a
special track along which each letter runs until it tumbles like a key into a
keyhole.

Old Ullstein's youngest daughter comes on the streets at noon. She is a

newspaper like a lizard or a fly: the fastest, most persistent and accessible
of the sisters. Anyone can catch her on the wing and for next to nothing.
She has neither her own opinion nor her own voice; she is a little puddle
in which the whole world is reflected. In two minutes in a language
intelligible to anyone she can re-state in the simplest crudest form what
the big press is saying and thinking that day. Don't chew this news over: it
has been well chewed up already, moistened with saliva and fully cooked
by the B.Z. One swallowing action and you are informed. The man who
has no time to think or collect his own information cannot live without
this final, lowest and handiest intermediary, this echo of big cities, this
flying street gramophone. She is born from the waste pipes of all the
newspapers and lives for half an hour. Her appearance is eagerly awaited.
Millions of people look at their watches as they await their rendezvous
with B.Z. Yet no one is so quickly for gotten and no one is abandoned with
such disdain on bus seats, cafe tables, the floor or underfoot. Every day
there emerges from the froth of the streets this queen of the left-overs, a
little tigress with a million customers.
12.10 p.m. The first bulletin is posted at the stock exchange. 12.12 p.m.
The last telegram is received in the composing room. 12.15 p.m. The
editors stop accepting copy. 12.16 p.m. The rotary press puts on its
armour of gleaming plates. 12.17 p.m. The duty engineer switches the
current on. The continent's largest rotary presses are beginning their
morning's work.
The pages flow like water on a mill-wheel. A word is no more than a
microbe in their torrent. The first finished, collated copies edge into view.
And off they trip into the world with the staccato bark of machine guns.
This is the morning assault, the crossfire of the press, shooting that
neither misses nor misfires. Every sheet will be read by someone. Every
cartridge will fall on somebody. The boom of the offensive hangs over the
walls. They steam like waterfalls or like the brink of a mountain in
eruption. The paper slowly revolves in the fire of this speed like a white
whale on a spit. Rolls of it cover all the floor, gigantic cocoons of lies from
which millions of ephemeral butterflies will flutter.

The factory is like a fortress. Its deep yards, separated from the city by
mountains of granite, resemble those of a prison. In the event of siege a
fortress must have a stock of water and bread. Ullstein has an energy
source independent of the city that can feed his besieged machines for a
week. A strike or an uprising. Armour plated doors will close and within
three minutes of the alarm signal generators will be sending thousands of
horse-power of electric strikebreakers to the machines. None of the
employees will go in or out of the gates unnoticed. The doorkeepers have
been drilled on people and objects. But at 12.18, that is eight minutes after
receiving the last urgent telegram, all the sluices are raised and all the
doors opened wide. The newspaper plant overflows into the street.
Conveyor tubes vomit bundles straight on to lorries. Light motorbikes
stand throbbing, waiting their turn. Cyclists hold open their bags. The
couriers who travel with the newspapers to the station or to the provinces
drop their unfinished lunches. On a Saturday 400 tons are loaded in all.
Twenty mail trains taking a single lunch-time paper. Counting the other
publications that means 75 mail coaches in three-quarters of an hour.
A newspaper outstrips time. A newspaper overtakes the hands of the
clock. A human being sleeps for half his life. He steals the night hours for
himself. Clearing the hurdle of speed, the newspaper stumbles over an
insuperable obstacle: it cannot surmount a barricade of snoring nightcaps. But in the cities and on the asphalt that gleams like ice everything is
relative. Dawn can put on pyjamas instead of its out-moded morning
clouds; from now on Europe will be like Greenland or the Arctic Ocean.
Its electric day is continuous. At half past eight in the evening the news
vendors come to do their morning turn outside Aschingers (and
Aschingers are everywhere). The provincial edition of the Vossische
Zeitung, without the final telegrams that are printed and transmitted at
night, goes on sale in Berlin at 8.40 in the evening. A piece of tomorrow, a
piece of the future, with football results, the names of the dreamers who
have fallen under motor cars and English House of Commons debates can
be bought for fifteen pfennings.
Ullstein is one of the great powers levying a duty on any vulgarity that
can be imported into man's consciousness. His place is like a wharf where

they discharge ocean-going ships of phrases that fit on to the

consciousness like rubber protectors on down-at-heel boots, unloading
witticisms that are as flat as the soles, smutty anecdotes and political
slogans. The masterpiece in this genre, one without par, is of course
the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, the most widely distributed magazine in
modern Germany. 1,600,000 readers. And still growing. In six months it
will probably reach two million. The foundation upon which Ullstein
stands today is a propaganda machine of vulgarity. In reality it is a cipher,
a nothing, a zero. Thirty-two pages of laxative ease. A peephole drilled
into the boudoir of a celebrated film star, a chink through which anyone
can spy on beautiful women in the bath from Spitzbergen to the Cape of
Good Hope. A fragment of a novel so racy and banal that you can read it
in the lavatory. Adverts. A prince's wedding. Another advert. Ten pages of
adverts.
The Illustrierte has never been an enemy of Soviet Russia. German
workers may have learnt more from it about the real, true face of the
USSR than from anywhere else. It provides everything interesting and
unexpected. Russia is a sensation. The Illustrierte provides Russia. Her
streets, demonstrations, crowds, leaders, avenues, army and children's
homes.
The practical, sober-minded businessman more readily believes in an
established stable government than in one still existing only in the heads
of Kurfurstendamm and Tauentzienstrasse residents. If the Bolsheviks
can hold out another five years Ullstein will treat the White emigres just
as his previous government treated Russian students after 1905: anyone
subverting the legal power, even if Soviet, will be a revolutionary, a bombthrower and a crook. Yet while Ullstein insures himself for all risks and is
generally friendly towards the USSR he quietly prints the White
Guard Rul in one of the secluded corners of his home.
Friendliness is all very well but when the entire press raises a hue and
cry against Bolsheviks Ullstein cannot remain silent. After printing news
items that are amicable towards us in Russia for a whole year, he suddenly
pounds away with all his heavy guns and, when repeated 1,600,000 times,

his words echo more loudly than Moses' Commandments from the
ancient mountain of the Hebrews. 'A New Crime of Bolshevik Justice'
'Three German Scholars Sentenced to Death'. Not just 'three scholars' but
three times 1,600,000 'Kindermanns' and three times 1,600,000
'Bolshevik murderers'. And here it is not a zero any more but a social
motor of a power and capacity of which there are few in Europe.
The Illustrierte does not give its brief, acid, political formulas in
statistical columns and curves -- no, it tattooes them on a music-hall
artist's velvet skin, a celebrated ballerina's underwear or a bottle of
scented water for removing foul odours from the armpits. This is where
the indelible words 'War on Bolshevism','War on World Revolution' and
'War on Murderers of Innocent Shortsighted White-haired Kindermann
with his Travelling First-Aid Kit' are in fact branded, stitched and written.
Whatever the slogan Ullstein might launch -- for or against Russia, for or
against the Chinese Revolution, for the pact or against the pact -- footballs
fly into the sky with these slogans. B.Z.'s motor boats and yachts furrow
the seas, its racehorses leap barbed-wire fences, B.Z.'s favourite cracks a
top American boxer's nose and B.Z.'s motor-cycle sets a new speed record
-- in preference to any political watchword. A dog show, tennis,
swimming, a prize for the best pedigree bull. Europe follows such things
with the closest attention. Every proper newspaper has a page of sport
each day. Its champions are far better known than the most important
political figures. Ullstein was about the first to discover this gold-mine. He
established a special department while others still had the fire reporter
covering the races and matches. He took on a special editor, despatched
plenipotentiaries to all Europe's totalisators and attached special
correspondents to all the famous stables.
Ullstein understands nothing about art. For such subtleties and for the
editorial board of Querschnitt, an aesthetic magazine printed on vellum
paper for a few hundred subscribers, he has hired himself a gentleman, a
connoisseur of old porcelain and all the eighteenth century snuff-boxes
the world has seen. This magazine is a lily that seems to be wholly
unconnected with the midden from which such vulgar grasses as B.Z. and
the Illustrierte grow. It floats on the surface of Ullstein's millions,

fragrantly smelling of negro sculpture and the shine of old Friedrich's

jackboots in Menzel's pictures. It presents very artistic and very naked
drawings intended for the connoisseur. When old Ullstein sees all this
refinement, he snorts and curses. But the other editors, manufacturers of
that terrible pulp literature, are forbidden to interfere in the aesthetes'
affairs. Leave the Apollos to root around on their own for although they
might not bring in any income they do attract people of circumstance and
taste into the building. It's always good to keep a classical Venus in the
entrance hall.
But for the manufacture of such goods as Die heitere Friedolin, old
Ullstein has no need for assistants. Here he is the craftsman and
specialist. Nobody knows better than he how much suer, margarine and
sugar should be sprinkled into those little ten-pfenning booklets with a
cycling dog on the cover, specifically designed to pollute, poison and
degrade children's fantasies. They go out in 35,000 copies; 700,000 a
month. A mixture of Pinkerton, circus, and a newsreel of crimes and
slush. Its hero is a police dog with the soul of a Vossische Zeitzung Sunday
supplement reader.
Now about those romances. before the war a little 250-page book with a
wedding or a noble suicide would cost about a mark. Today two. Never
will any 'immortal' be read as these hacks are. Who is Tolstoy and who is
Goethe by comparison with the Mr. Weber who wrote Yes, Yes,
Love? Good old Ullstein deals with literature as a camel does a date. He
makes his reader pull back and chew it over again. Immediately upon
publication all Ullstein's romances are filmed in Germany's studios. The
shop-girl, school-mistress and post-clerk require a faith in good fortune.
The petty-bourgeois must learn that an honest man can achieve anything
-- a villa, a motor car, his own shop -- without bloodshed, without violence
and without struggle. Reading it is not enough. You have to see it. So
Ullstein shows it. Anyone can go along and be convinced about how
honest Alice with her neatness, good figurework and rather pretty little
mug, could find her way into the world of the financiers. Stinnes marries
her. Except that this Stinnes is as young and handsome as an assistant in
the outfitting department at Wertheim's. Old people who have worked for

a hundred years die rich. Look at their funeral corteges. Isn't it worth
being obedient your whole life if it means that you can drive to 'rest' with
those pompons and white top-hats! Not to mention the workers and petty
clerks who all regularly win 200,000 and marry the boss's daughter. Why
have a revolution, What's the point of politics? Millions of European
workers live with a dream about Russia. Millions of SPD workers privately
cling to a hope for it ...Workers send their delegations to Russia. But
Ullstein`s reader, the petty-bourgeois, goes to the pictures to see his
promised land.
Ullstein is not alone of course. Competing with, and possibly
outgrowing him, are newspaper publishers like the former Scherl Verlag
that created in Germany a sort of 'non-party' paper now in the hands of
Hugenberg, a former Krupp manager. Having seized what had belonged
to a king of newspapers, Hugenberg converted these old'non-party'
papers, to which the average German philistine had grown accustomed,
into mouthpieces of the most vehement and rabid counter-revolution.
Following them are Messe and many others who are more and more
monopolising the newspaper and book market. There are many
Ullsteins ...
The tribute that these factories of bourgeois ideology rendered the
government during the war cannot be overestimated! There were no pores
in the social organism and no cells in its brain which they could not
penetrate and for which a special toxin was not developed. Ullstein, Messe
and Hugenberg drove more than a few nails into the great wooden
Hindenburg that then stood beside parliament opposite the Victory
Column. Under the cocaine of their literature armies of men allowed
themselves to be slaughtered. And without the aid of the newspaper trusts
the government could never have pumped out of the petty bourgeois mass
all the millions it extorted for the war loan.

Junkers
Like any true scientist, Professor Junkers had to break out of the
university and leave its walls for ever in order to devote himself to science.

This he did in 1909 along with his colleague and assistant, Doctor Mader,
whose slighty askance, motionless gaze was fixed upon internal
combustion engines as much then as today, nearly twenty years later.
Yet neither scientist had left the gymnasium at Aachen to take up
aviation. The flying machine interested them no more than any other
machine. But the university demanded that they teach certain subjects to
ignorant little boys. So they gave up the university and pursued their
experiments in peace and quiet.
If flying had ever been an art rather than a craft it was surely in those
years. It engaged dreamers, sportsmen, adventurers and martyrs. They
fashioned funny little boxes out of sail-cloth, a few brittle wires and
matchboard and upon these paper kites flew or fell wholly at the will of
fate -- from the standpoint of 1925, a year of calm reckoning -irrationally, brilliantly and in profound ignorance. Nearly every contest
ended in disaster. Two or three times a day spectators would jump over
the fence and run across to the spot where a heap of fragments lay
smouldering in the middle of the field. As many front-line aviators
perished in a few days as in a whole year today. Mankind cleared its path
to the sky on paper wings spattered with blood.
Professor Junkers had nothing in common with that noble lunacy. After
many years' toil in the quiet of his office he just took one of technology's
commanding heights and as a result of the conquest a most interesting
and unresearched area fell to him. When the prisoners were being
counted, there appeared that capricious aviation that had never before
surrendered to anyone' s hands. So Professor Junkers decided to give it a
thoroughly scientific upbringing.
One of the basic ideas of this scientist who produced a revolution in the
field of aeronautics was extremely simple. Think of this: what bird,
butterfly or fish in whose image the aeroplane should be built, flies
without a skin with bare bones and nerves? Where can you see a living
creature carrying its innards on its exterior? Yet the old-time aeroplane
did just that. Its heart lay on top with no protection at all. The wind
moaned and whistled through its extensive rigging, clogged it with dust,

soaked it with rain and dried it with sun. All those webs, strings and
boards increased the surface area and its resistance tenfold despite their
obvious lightness. Junkers decided to cover the aeroplane's nakedness,
make a chest for the machine's heart and a tummy for its guts. Count
Zeppelin's stupid sausages still occupied the attention of the public and
the Imperial Court. Wilhelm, greatly fancying the scale and altogether
militaristic look of those flying contraptions launched them into the air in
whole packs while Professor Junkers took out a patent for the first
machine made entirely of metal. The pilot and fuel tanks were both
hidden inside a silvery-white oblong aluminium body.
The war brought the professor resources and world fame. Satisfied that
he could at last work without worrying about the pennies, the kindly,
humane Junkers who seems more like a vicar than a scientist, sent model
after model and flight after flight to the fronts. His fighters became, after
submarines, the favourites of Admiral Tirpitz. The buzzing of his silver
dragonflies left an indelible scratch of fear in the memories of millions
still alive and millions who fell.
After the Versailles Peace, the Entente commissioners arrived in the
quiet little town of Dessau and smashed up with hammers anything that
might serve the aims of war. The plans for an unbuilt torpedo-carrying
plane went to Paris. The plant halted. At the high noon of the inflationary
crisis, Stinnes and AEG, the big sharks, gathered in the murky waters
around Junkers. Those were the years when you could become the chief of
any concern if you were smart enough to send a couple of thousand
dollars with your visiting-card.
The professor had had enough experience with war department officials
to have any illusions as to the fate awaiting him in the pocket of a private
businessman. The merchant is an enemy of innovations not forced upon
him by competition. He must make the most of what already exists and
milk as intensively as possible an idea that has already won its market. It
would not enter the merchant's head to compensate him for the
experiments that had by now swallowed up all the professor's means and
all his government grants.

At this tough moment God sent Junkers two guardian angels to deliver
him from the voracious jaws of the speculators: an aluminium pot furnace
and Sachsenberg First, about the pot furnace. Every Don Quixote has his
Sancho Panza. To enable the scientist's thoughts to range freely, commit
stupidities, make mistakes, drop what has been started and begin all over
again whatever the cost, a docile devoted donkey of practical common
sense must follow behind him. Its broad back will carry him out of any
situation and on days of setbacks will seek out its hero in a roadside ditch
licking his muddled face with the heavenly caress of its warm rough
tongue.
A workshop for advanced aluminium smelters had nestled on the fringe
of the plant for a long time. In the days of the revolution when soldiers
suddenly started ripping the epaulettes off their smart lieutenants, this
furnace emerged from its workaday garb; its broad shoulders and
industrious fists were extracted from the wreckage of the frail aerodragonfly. And to this day it tamely repays all the professor's costly
ventures into the land of the unknown.
After the war Germany's heavy industry suffered a major crisis: the
change to peace-time production. Krupp started making mincingmachines and milk separators; heavy Stumm, the battleship king, took up
children's toys. The change came easier to Junkers's plant than to others.
The Versailles Peace only made him expand in a new direction. That tiny
bird of prey, fleetingly glimpsed as a scarcely noticeable spot in the sky of
war, descended, grew bigger and its whole body was gradually reborn. Its
head was enlarged, its trunk extended and its wings threw themselves out
into a strong metallic cross. And, impelled by hunger, the eagle of war
entered the service of the post office.
Was it alone? The waves of revolution rose high and white-haired
people with thoroughbred noses had to live more and more badly. They
joined foreign legions and were hired as soldiers by the little Baltic states.
Deeply concealing their pride as officers of the Imperial Fleet it was they
who begrudgingly did the dirty work of hunting down Bolsheviks for the
Latvians and Estonians. But the governments of small shopkeepers and

retainers had no intention of letting this picked guard of German

imperialism make itself at home in their countries for ever. For Latvian
peasants still remember the agrarian riots of 1905 and the country folk
hanged by the ribs on the baronial lands; they remember the Ostsee
bureaucracy, that bulwark of Russian autocracy, and the keys of the city of
Riga handed over to Wilhelm II by the head of the Baltic nobility. In short,
these Landsknechte were used and then booted right out. Thousands of
German peasants who had been promised land and a house if they would
make a little war on the Bolsheviks paid for the adventure known as the
Baltikum with their lives.
In 1919 one of these detachments returned to Germany virtually on foot.
The wolves that had been cut down in war decided to take up farming if
only to avoid serving the cursed republic that to them still appeared to be
revolutionary. They planted potatoes, carted muck and when they lifted
their heads from the plough or spade they followed a Junkers mail plane
flying over their fields with a longing gaze. Sachsenberg, the founder of a
farm for officers and an organiser of exceptional ability, very quickly
contacted Dessau and offered the professor his services and an elaborate
plan for international air lines. That select bunch from the old imperial
officer-caste, hated by the proletariat and the finance aristocracy and of
no use to anyone at home, took to the sky. Russian emigres in Paris are
reputed to be first-class hairdressers, waiters and chauffeurs especially.
But these people were soon to become the best coachmen of the
international sky, travelling the horizons of Europe and Asia as calmly as
the former did the Paris boulevards.
The commercial side of the business requires that the citizen can board
an aeroplane as easily as a lift or motor car. Aviation must be dethroned
and have all its romantic features plucked so as not to scare off the shy
bourgeois. That's why the modern aeroplane is so infinitely vulgar in its
interior decor. Its armchairs have been taken from the smoking-room of a
bank, its mirrors transplanted from a middling restaurant and the whole
cabin is full of the habitual dusty luxury of the European railways. The
toilet with its white board on the door is soothingly familiar and utterly
down to earth; imperturbable, obliging paper bags for queasiness beckon

from their nails. So rare are accidents, so convenient the spittoons and so
calm the pilot's mittens on the control column that the passengers no
longer offer him their hands. One more step forward and he will be the
equal of the servant and the chauffeur. The bourgeois will finally be freed
from his fear when he sees an aviator in livery. Flying will become ten
times more popular the day they start to accept tips in the air.
There is a special irony in the fact that this de-mystifying and
uncrowning of aviation has attracted the last romantics of the old regime.
With impassive faces they bring their machines up to the 'apron' and then
calmly wipe the traces of their passengers' seasickness off the silver wings.
There are among these men fliers who had their legs torn off several times
during the war: first their own and then the wooden ones. Even now they
carry them out of the cockpit in their hands. Yet ...
The land belongs to the republic. It has been cut out for many years and
divided up without any to spare. The stitches put in by the Versailles
Peace and Dawes will not be unpicked by a bayonet for the time being. But
the sky, a great blue continent, is not fully discovered or fully conquered.
Here are unsounded depths and untravelled roads through which no one
has passed. Clouds crawl across it like opulent caravans open to plunder.
And, morever, what has been already seized cannot be retained.
Command of the air is a result of the changing balance of power. The very
boldest flight does not leave a trace -- not even the light strands of foam
running after a ship across the ocean.
The great powers launch fleet after fleet into the air but their ships are
for the present swallowed up in the world-wide expanse, minute in
comparison with the millions of miles that have to be covered. The night
sky is the setting for the new war; to shower Russia's snowy expanses with
dynamite and nail China to the ground, the enemy's air forces have to
stand like stars over the great agricultural plains.
Furrowing through a foreign sky Junkers planes are continuing to
expand in empty space an empire that no longer exists. China has been
lost, Kiaochow seized, the Baghdad railway torn from Germany's hands
and the Congo gone. But there is China's sky, open to all winds. They can

see the flag of the lost Pacific fortress hoisted on its clouds. High in the air
hostile routes of the airways criss-cross and cut each other. The struggle
for these colonies is only just warming up.
Junkers planes are winning them not for themselves nor for their
country. The knots of Versailles bind them tightly. They work for any
client and every customer.
Deruluft's [1] tentacles stretch into Italy, Scandinavia and Switzerland;
Sachsenberg has conducted an offensive into the Balkans and through the
Balkans into Anatolian Turkey.
Not so long ago Dessau began to stir like an alarmed beehive. Airmen
who had flown in from all parts sat down gloomily at the table in their
pub. Strictly by rank and by the list in the officers' mess. One has come
back from Persia, another had come down on the Gobi sands while on a
third is the dust and sunburn of a Russian summer.
"How's the health of the Crown Prince?"
"Very well, thank you, His Highness has bought a new horse."
"The King of Saxony .. ." But this is not the big news after which these
men are usually prepared to chase and comb through the skies of the
whole world. The bombshell bursts.
"Haven't you heard? Junkers has signed a concession with Poland. We
are to build a fleet for those rascals." For a whole week the lieutenants
drink dismally around the grail and with loathing set their coachmen's
accounts in order: they measure out miles to the nearest yard -- pieces of
space chopped off infinity. There's nothing else to be done. Such is the law
of capitalist development. Trade is a member of no party and
internationalised.
Homeless German imperialism will run little fighters nurseries for both
its enemies and friends. Always hoping that the pupils will not grow too
quickly into teachers, that its own people will, at the decisive moment,

find themselves at the helm and that the shadow of machines built by
these same German engineers will never hang over the fields of Germany.
A vain hope.
The war industry of foreign countries is avidly learning from Junkers's
pilots and designers. But scarcely having learnt to walk it is already
driving from their command posts men in whom it senses irreconcilable
enemies. Futile are all attempts to strengthen his position by honest and
entirely disinterested work. The better the school the sooner the pupil
reaches maturity and casts off his foreign tutelage. The more
conscientiously Junkers fulfils his obligations the quicker they endeavour
to be free of him. The gates of plants that he had built and put into
operation one by one slam behind him. The self-assurance and youthful
ignorance of his pupils only accelerates his collapse.
No one is enduring these catastrophes with as much pain as the
professor himself. At the first disquieting telegrams he redoubles his
efforts. He invests ever fresh resources into the threatened enterprises.
This has brought him several times to the verge of ruin. Nevertheless, one
fine day, embittered and once again unemployed aircraft builders will
again appear on the doorstep of his quiet little house in Dessau.
Junkers is the purest scientist. For him air services are in the final count
as necessary as the furnace. He runs them in order to nourish his
experiments without perhaps suspecting the colossal political significance
of the international organisation he has created. Of course he gives his
contractors more than they him. For what is money compared with that
culture of knowledge, experience and organisation that he scatters
throughout the world like Mechnikov with his yoghourt.
But in the final analysis the professor cannot complain of lack of
success. Under whoever's flags his ships may fly today not a single
government has at its disposal such an integrated staff or magnificently
trained, educated airmen, engineers and workers. Not one of his men had
arrived ready-made. The majority began their service as volunteers,
receiving no pay for months, suffering hunger and hardship. They grew up
with their machines. Each step forward and every new invention was

checked by them in practice. The pilots were a sensitive monitoring

apparatus without which the professor could not have worked. How useful
to him was even little Jterbog, an indefatigable coachman of the air
endlessly roving somewhere in the East. He flies low, hugging the earth
tight. In stormy weather the Caspian Sea spits foam almost on to his
wings, he creeps along through fogs, stumbling over the telegraph poles of
the East India Company but there has never been an occasion when wind
or fog has halted him somewhere en route. He roams on for days on end
but he will without fail get his sack of letters and his two or three Persian
merchants, yellow with the pitching, to their destination. That's Juterbog
and there's nothing he doesn't know about tropical dew, the finest desert
dust and the effect of air, sun and humidity upon an aeroplane's
organism.
Take another man: promoted from a mere mechanic to one of Junkers'
most brilliant airmen today. He is not drawn to the East. He still circles
round the lushest, dampest, cheeriest bit of Europe. An ex-sailor, he's
happy in thick fog, on the damp wind of Holland. Over hundreds of miles
through dense haze the golden fires of Amsterdam's taverns beckon to
him. Mr. N. is a night pilot. His bulging eyes, flush with his face, can see
in the dark. He can feel the nocturnal earth beneath him like the sea-bed
under a fishing-boat. And he avoids danger with amazing sensitivity.
For speed and altitude records there are the cold idlers. They board
their machines without changing their suits and emerge unstained.
Formerly higher gentry, overfed with life, lovers of a risk that is frozen like
a bottle of wine in the rarified atmosphere. For them the value of life can
be equated with the maximum of acute, nervous pleasures still to be
squeezed out of it. The result is immaterial. The object once achieved is
not even worth talking about. Yet how delectable are those minutes of
single combat at an altitude of 5,200 metres where danger lies dissolved
in the air like a diamond in a glass of water.
But it is not in new air lines, nor in agents' offices and aerodromes, nor
even in the main shops of the renowned aircraft factory at Dessau that the
tap-root of the business lies. The heart of Junkers is hidden away in an

unprepossessing little single-storied house standing apart from the

commercial offices, where Sachsenberg and his lads run the business side
and the aerodrome swept bare by the propellors' whirlwinds. Here is his
scientific research institute, chemical laboratory and archive. Experts say
that there is nowhere like it in Europe.
All the work of the scientists gathered here is founded upon the deepest
mistrust of materials. Their laboratories are an arena where metals fight
for supremacy like champions. Anyone can take part in the contest. From
specimens from the best-known firms down to unheard-of young fighters
coming on to the market for the first time. Krupp's proud steel must prove
its advantages every day. The first chance tramp to be met on the street
can challenge it to a duel. The metal that wins first prize in junkers'
modest laboratory will become a celebrity by the morning.
Bright white aluminium triumphed over all its rivals and only then
would the professor decide to cast his aeroplanes from it. To date over
twelve competitors are scrapping over the tough material for the engine,
for a wheel that gives off heat more readily than others, an axle that does
not snap on landing, a steady frame and a light wing. One metal shows off
the skin of an eskimo fearing no amount of cold, another is a negro
created for African heat.
Investigation of raw materials does not begin with the finished article
but with atoms. The metal lies down under a microscope and then is
shone through with X-rays. The slightest irregularity in the alignment of
its crystals is enough for the whole batch to be rejected. Steel is a terrible
thief. Minutes are sufficient for it to snatch up any alloys. A special gadget
in the laboratory forces it to yield everything it has gathered up and
concealed. Stolen carbon is burnt up in its stubbornly clenched fist.
Thus, over the years, absolutely priceless scientific material has been
accumulated. The resumes of these experiments, each of which is strictly
recorded, grow up into entire libraries. Outstanding scientists collate
them. Before setting to work the young practitioner studies all the
literature existing on the subject in question. He stands directly upon the
shoulders of his predecessors.

No metal passes unrecognized through the monitoring section. Any

alloy can, like a criminal by his fingerprints, be recognised by a little
imprint inflicted with a ball in the testing apparatus. As strict as the party:
materials that have passed the first purge are not exempted from the
second. Every idea suggested, however persuasive it might be on paper, at
once puts on its metallic body and defends it in practice. There are long
thin pipes that have promised to sustain the whole weight of a wing. An
unlikely load is lowered on to a fragile-looking reed. It withstands 9,000
kilos, over 40 per square millimetre, and fractures only after that. Steel
veins twang on a torture rack: they snap at 5,200 kilos (50 per square
millimetre). Mechanical scissors bite through threads used for sewing up
parts of the apparatus. From thousands of skeins iron hands select the
one that will take 127 kilos, 25 kilos per square millimetre of crosssection.
A metal in this department is like a sinner in hell. It is cut, ground,
stretched, torn and snapped. A special machine does not let it go to sleep.
Day and night it shakes the strips under trial, which, crated with
insomnia, tremble a light feverish tremble, the trembling of an aeroplane
travelling at full speed. In another corner the spring of a skittle-like valve
keeps squatting down and getting up for hours on end and an observer
peers at its glowing core through a special tube and notes the slightest
changes. Here all the accidents that could ever happen to an aeroplane are
induced. The effect of any wear and tear and any catastrophe upon each
individual component is calculated. Thousands of objects undergoing the
effect of weight, heat, cold, impact and stress are in essence but one
aeroplane dismantled into its smallest parts. This aeroplane makes a
journey round the world, fights storm and fire, smashes, drowns and
burns, experiencing a thousand most perilous adventures without moving
from the spot or leaving the tiny laboratory.
The Chinese do not cherish their ancestors as much as the laboratory its
bits of iron mangled during experiments. They are safeguarded in the
most perfect order -- set out along the path of aviation like a row of
unforgettable warnings. An error can be corrected but science's retentive

memory will for ever remain alert and attentive, if only because of one
unsuccessful experiment out of a thousand successful ones.
The aeroplane is very young. Not even its life expectancy has been fixed
yet. At Dessau there is a machine that has been flying since 1919 and no
one knows how much longer it will hold out. What does it eat, what food
is healthiest for its delicate constitution? For years chemists have hovered
round fuel. But no supervision or warnings were of any help. So you have
old men who have all their lives been led by the nose, deceived and duped
by that frivolous, fickle petrol to whom in their old age has now come the
idea of divorce. They have turned their glances towards the heavyweight,
reliable, uncapricious diesel oil, towards those fatty liquors that the motor
vehicle drinks in the Alps, Russian snows and Arctic ice.
"But," says the quiet little old man who reports every day to the
professor on the behaviour of the oil in a jar, "Das sind nur
Anhaltspunkte, Wir wissen noch nichts!" (This is only a basis. We still
know nothing.)
Nothing! After so many years of toil, improvements and discoveries!
Look at the scientist X-raying some microscopic membrane and you
suddenly go cold inside. How on earth did those first men fly with
no Anhaltspunkte apart from their own willpower? Junkers has many
courageous men but which of them would have dared ascend on those
wings of heavy iron now hung around the walls like the hauberks of
medieval knights?
With all its perfection Junkers's plant still resembles a university or a
craftsman's workshop rather than a factory. Production is hardly
mechanised. The machine is the worker's spare hand, assisting and taking
over one of his many actions but not carrying a single operation through
to the end. It is surprisingly difficult to maintain strict uniformity of type
using the hand. One rudder-cable guide must be absolutely identical to
the other; one claw under the rail on which the machine rests when it
lands should in no way differ from the other. The men cannot turn away
from what they are doing for even a minute. Their whole intellect is
necessary for each separate seam and every nut. The engineer with the

close-set eyes, flat face and infantry officer's cheek-bones can walk round
as much as he wishes and beat his brow against the unknown; let him
track down all items coming our of the workshop, rummaging through
and scrutinising them as if in a barracks. A worker's slightest negligence
will lead to a catastrophe a day, a month or a year later. The fear that goes
with responsibility slows the work down dreadfully. A man will sit for
hours over a trifle and will not dare let it slip out of his hands. The
workers, engrossed, cultured and accustomed to relying upon themselves,
are becoming as individualistic as the airmen. Every little hammer speaks
its own language. Bench-mates do not understand one another.
Why was I reminded of the professor's house with its light rooms full of
the cries and scampering of children when in the very section of the works
where such a reverential stillness reigns and only the scratch of a
drawing-pen occasionally unpicks the silence like a piece of taut silk? The
children of Professor Junkers. You recall them not only in the drawingoffice but even before, at the aerodrome where twenty machines lie out on
an earthy meadow like the plumage of swans. Not one looks like the next.
Each has evolved from its own embryonic idea and is not prevented from
growing up and testing its strength. A scientist's enormous patience is
required to rear children, machines and ideas the way Junkers does. Of
course it is hell for him at home. If one of the adjutants arrives with a
paper he has trouble finding a corner where the vivacious chatter of the
marvellous, self-educating, model children growing up as their inner logic
dictates does not reach. Any serious conversation over the table is
unthinkable. There is always an age at which any situation seems madly
comical. And the child dances a wild tribal dance over his father's wise
head. But take a look at this same principle in the drawing-office. A few
dozen highly talented designers hired only to think, draw or do nothing in
front of their tables; they are not daunted by their assignment. Any one of
them can take any detail or basic principle and stand it on its head. The
works causes an artificial selection of men unafraid of independent
thought.
Among the taciturn drawing-boards before which the designers stand in
white aprons like the anatomists of ideas, a font has been set up for new-

born ideas, a bureau that registers all the findings. A meticulous clerk
writes out the birth certificate of a new idea as soon as the
mathematician's heavy head begins to shine through the light fabric of
figures and formulas. This section regards as its most talented young
engineer a former worker, an apprentice who out jumped all his
professionally qualified contemporaries in the feverish competitive race.
He is a puny, mobile and unusually nervous man. In putting him on to
one of the most responsible jobs Junkers was able to evaluate not only his
talent but his whole physiology which was imbued with a sharp aversion
to brute force and brute physical toil. No one will eliminate the remnants
of the aeroplane's animal nature with greater delight than the upstart exworker who despises his 'low-brow' class. The future belongs to brain.
Aeroplanes, like engineers and scientists and all creatures of the higher
ruling stratum as a whole, should not have a body. So there before him
upon a wide sheet of Bristol board the final touches are already being put
to Junkers's pet idea: the machine has been castrated, truncated and
pruned. Its trunk, whether long like a dragonfly's or short and fat like a
bee's, has been reduced to nothing.
All the passengers, and the interior of the plane for that matter too, are
hidden away in its wing, tucked under its arm.
In this shipyard of the air, these new fliers stand almost finished. Over
them hangs the heady smell of paint and the day is not far off when,
drunk with the spirits and oil which they are fed and rubbed down with
during the final preparations, they are rolled out on to the field.
The bang of hammers resounds like a triumphal march: an armless
machine tries on its wings and stands sensing for the first time the
unprecedented weight, toughness and flexibility of its shoulders. Then,
although not knowing what to do with them, it suddenly realises what the
visible patch of sky in the square of the doorway means.
Workmen with nails between their teeth are still crawling through the
empty eye-sockets in a skull which is upholstered with soft leather on the
inside, while a pool of petrol is already lying on the bare floor.

It's peeing so it's alive.

Milk
With present-day unemployment and current price levels a German
working-class family has to strain every effort to fight for its children's
lives.
The drops of milk are counted out and eagerly sucked up if not every
day then every other day and if it's not first grade then it's second grade.
While they are drinking milk there is hope. It is only today that is wasting.
The future sucks away at its fat teat and has rosy cheeks. In life's wretched
game children are the last stake. Vaguely bound up with them is the idea
of ultimately winning: well, if we can't our children will'.
The milkman's steps on the stairs of a reeking tenement are the steps of
fate.
The milkman comes round at daybreak: the first herald of the day
ahead. His ring gets people up from bed. They drowsily open the door to
him wearing just their vests but without any embarrassment. The door
may be open for only a minute. Through the narrow slit he can see
everything: what left-overs there are from last night's supper, whether
there is lard gone cold on the plates or a piece of stale bread on an empty
oil-cloth, dirty beer glasses, the meagre sediment of acorn coffee -- that
illusion of food, the first substitute -- or the thick pallid flabby-faced
margarine that makes its appearance wherever money's coming in and the
father or son is still working. The milkman casts one glance around the
room. Aha! A heap of dirty washing in the corner, the stink of miners'
boots drying out on the stove. To his nose that smell is sweeter than
incense. They are working so they are living.
"I'll pour you first grade, shall I, Madam?"
And he's not wrong.

With sufficiency comes joy. Sometimes bare feet patter so gaily across
the floor to the door, which is opened to the smart milkman with such a
cheerful smile. What a disappointment! Warm sleepy eyes hit the bib of
my starched apron as if it were icy armour-plating.
"Oh, Mr. Milkman, you are late today! I'm going to have a word with
your neighbour. What's this then, you've got a new helper?" And the slam
of the door echoes like a shot.

That was lyrical. In the majority of the flats there was nothing lyrical. At
first sight it had seemed to me that the Essen miner or metalworker lives
better than ours in Russia do. A collar and a stiff shirt front, clean shoes
and a smart hat. Lunch in a tidy bag. It wouldn't hit you in the eye so
much now that workers and peasants are getting more comfortable in our
country. For us growing prosperity goes towards boots, fur coats, warm
shawls and mittens. A heavy, shaggy, sheepskin-smelling comfort. In the
West glittery department stores with their annual sales are at the worker's
service. Mountains of smart, gaudy, hastily run-up rags. The price: five
roubles a coat, 80 kopecks for stockings and three roubles for perfectly
decent-looking boots. All these moult at the first rain, fade in the sunlight
and have a mortal dread of air, wind and rain. The German worker will
deny himself the most necessary things and go short on food and sleep if
only to dress smartly and not stand out in the crowd by his poor clothes.
His day-to-day requirements are infinitely more sophisticated than ours.
For, as long as poverty does not break his bones in two he will not put on
a dirty shirt or tolerate a bug or cockroach in his home.
"I think you wanted to meet a railwayman? Well, look, on the third floor
they take six bottles of milk and one of cream. He's a Lokfhrer (enginedriver), twenty years on the railways; his old woman is a comrade of ours.
Go on up, the old dog probably won't be back yet." And indeed he wasn't.
A charming young lady opened the door.
"Comrade.. ."

Her unlined face, the face of a thirty-year-old girl who had not given
birth or been close to the heat of a kitchen stove, an office girl's podgy
white face, winced and turned hostile:
"I'm not your comrade. Go and see mother, she's in the kitchen."
After the holes where I had only just been what a paradise this labour
aristocrat's bright warm spacious flat seemed.
The kitchen was as white as snow. Shelves, chairs, cup boards, towels
and table cloths -- all snowy. An entrancingly fragrant cloud over the
coffee pot, butter, ham and white bread on the table. A grand piano in the
sitting room, paper flowers, curtains, a carpet, two magnificent beds in
the bedroom, a mountain of feather-beds and, once again, snowy linen.
Frau Rotte, the mistress of all this prosperity and abundance, was a stout
but anxious woman of about fifty with a kindly face on which there leapt a
neurotic flicker: her left eye twitched with a nervous tie. Her husband
wasn't in. He had left behind him objects loathed by all the family: his old
formal dress -- a blue jacket with red cuffs and a sword presented to him
for the quarter of a century's service that Frau Rotte would sourly say had
'made a man' of her husband.

Frau Rotte's unconscious communism had its origin at the time when she
was roughly three years old and her mother, the widow of a labourer, left
with little children on her hands, would on Sundays prepare to entertain
the minister on whom she depended for financial assistance. As soon as
his heavy steps sounded on the staircase the whole family would settle
down around the Bible and start to sing psalms. That comedy went on for
many hate-filled years.
Ever since then Frau Rotte could not look at a priest's clothing without
shuddering. She married early and, as the local women said, couldn't have
done better for she married a Lokfhrer, a man of honest, sober, steady
character in good standing with his boss. Depression gripped her after
having the first children. Her husband religiously brought home all his
pay keeping nothing back for himself. Notwithstanding those visiting days

at the clinic which he never missed Frau Rotte was left with a feeling of
such bitterness and frustration that even thirty years later she could not
forgive. Herr Rotte held the whole family in an iron grip. He would drive
to church and on Saturdays wouldn't let them have a single newspaper. At
times it seemed to Frau Rotte that she was re-living her mother's life. The
footsteps of the parish vicar resounded continually in her head. Old Rotte
drove his sons to their education with his fists and lash. They all ended up
as accountants and technicians. Heinrich handles all the correspondence
at Mannesman's. Otto is a cashier with a big bank. All of them are loyal
servants to their masters -- any class instinct firmly stamped out by their
father's heels -- pen-pushers for whom the sight of a worker's jacket
arouses nothing but revulsion. Back in wartime Heine had made an
attempt to go along to some workers' meeting. The poor lad forgot to take
off his monocle, which he really did wear for short-sightedness, and was
beaten up. He never forgave his class the misunderstanding and did not
resume his coy attempt to return 'to his own'. For long years Frau Rotte
had quietly watched her husband crippling, politically emasculating and
selling her children one by one to the employers. Only in 1917 did she
quite by accident run into a communist meeting, take a gulp of revolution
and come home drunk on it. It was now too late for the older children. But
she did save her youngest son: she made him into an ordinary
metalworker and sent him to the Young Communist League.
Since then the old Rottes had an agreement not to argue about politics
over the table in order to preserve the family. But the loss of the daughters
causes the old woman untold pain. In this family which shows a crosssection of the social stratification of the highest-paid workers, the girls
represent all the bourgeois republics from Scheidemann to Seeckt. They
hate their father who has not given one of them an education. They hate
his monarchy and his uniform, his voice and his fist.
But mother's communism is likewise infinitely amusing to them. Their
father's broad back has after all lifted them up and set them down on the
next rung of the social ladder. They have not swallowed factory fumes or
choked over black bread. Admittedly a boss treats his typist no more
courteously than he does a labourer. The beautiful girl who can type in

three languages and knows bookkeeping is out of a job today because she
dared to rebuff an overture by her chief.
Mother sought to exploit her sorrow.
"Come with me to the meeting!" Minna just stiffened her smooth, still
fresh neck.
"You get such horribly ordinary people there, mother. A girl who can
earn 125 marks can't allow herself such idiocies. No, it's better for me to
go to a cafe!" And then the old woman lost her temper and with a
feminine sensitivity struck her in the most painful and well padded place:
"You're thirty now, just you wait and in five years you'll be finished.
None of those rich people'll marry you. You're waiting for nothing. You
don't want to marry a worker. But soon workers won't want you either.
You'll be pattering round from office to office like a lone dog. You've fallen
between two stools. And then, go and see yourself in a mirror -- tired, grey
and played out. A plain jaded charwoman like any other. You're worse
than your father. The old man's got some sort of convictions even if
they're false. But you've nothing. You'd be quite happy to give up the work
you despise so much, and your body what's more, just for someone to call
you in the dark gnedige Frau quite unintentionally. But they won't! You'll
go to bed a worker and get up a worn-out hide."
"Du Klassenlose!" (You traitor to your class!)
That's the strongest abuse one worker can throw at another. Through
the powder on her mealy-white cheeks a blush rises ...

Footnotes
Deutsche-Russische Luftlinien -- the joint German-Soviet airline
operating in the 1920s. (R.C.)
[1]

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Reissner's Hamburg at the

Barricades

Appendix: Larissa
Reissner
by Karl Radek
We are now approaching the tenth anniversary of the day when in a
dark night for mankind the red star of the Soviets rose over the trenches
of war. Out of the gunfire, the blood of the fallen, the sweat of munitions
workers and out of the sufferings millions who wondered what the
purpose of those sufferings was, the October Revolution was born. The
roar of artillery and the yelping of the bourgeois and social-democratic
press tried to drown it; but it stood firm and unwavering and all mankind
timidly turned its glance towards it: some with blessings and hopes;
others with curses and calumnies. It was the boundary between two
worlds: a world perishing amid filth and a world being born in turmoil. It
was a touchstone of the spirit. All that had been the'spirit' of the bourgeois
world- not only its priests and scholars, not only its writers and artists but
all the 'intellectual' elements in the labour movement and that meant the
vast majority of those bourgeois intellectuals who had condescended to
'save' the proletariat-all of them took fright at the countenance of
proletarian revolution. People like Kautsky, Plekhanov and Guesde who
had been invoking revolution all their lives, now turned away from it.

The section of the western European intelligentsia that took a

sympathetic attitude to the October Revolution saw in it only an end to
the war, a revolt against war. Only a few saw in it the beginning of a new
world and saw this trembling with excitement. In Russia only a minute
portion of the intelligentsia joined the Bolsheviks. Russian intellectuals,
even counting those who, like Gorky, stood close to the proletariat, could
not envisage how this backward country could breach the front of world
capitalism.
Among the few who resolutely joined forces with the proletariat in
struggle with a deep awareness of the world-wide significance of what was
taking place, an unassailable faith in victory and a cry of ecstasy was
Larissa Reissner. She was only twenty-two when the death knell of
bourgeois Russia struck. But she was not destined to see the tenth
anniversary of the revolution in whose ranks she had fought courageously
and whose battles she had described as could be described only by one in
whom the soul of a great poet was joined with the soul of a great warrior.
A number of articles and small books - that is all of Larissa Reissner's
literary legacy. Her one theme is the October Revolution. But as long as
people fight, think and feel and as long as they are drawn to find out 'what
it was like' they will read those books and will not put them down until
they have reached the last page for they have the smell of revolution about
their breath.
It is not yet time to write the biography of this outstanding woman.
Such a biography would include not just gripping pages from the political
history of the October Revolution but would also need to probe deep into
the history of the cultural life of prerevolutionary Russia and the history
of the birth of the new man. Here I can only jot down a few thoughts
which may serve as guidelines for such a work.
Larissa Reissner was born on 1 May 1895 in Lublin, Poland where her
father was a professor at the Pulawa Agricultural Academy. Her father's
Baltic-German blood mingled happily with her mother's Polish blood, the
heritage of several generations' training in the German legal profession
combining with the fiery passion of Poland.

She was brought up in Germany and France where her father travelled
on professional business and stayed later as a political exile. In her
parents' home a bitter spiritual conflict took place before her eyes.
From a conservative lawyer and monarchist her father turned himself
into a republican and a socialist. The environment in which Larissa grew
up changed abruptly. Russian professors were replaced by the German
democrats, Earth and Trger and the social-democrats.
The little girl's clever sharp eyes spotted many things. She saw Bebel
and the jolly Karl Liebknecht whom Professor Reissner as chief consultant
in the Konigsberg trial, had to meet often. Throughout her life Larissa
would recall how she would go round to visit 'Auntie' Liebknecht. The
steaming coffee-pot that would appear on the table during such visits and
the shortbread to which 'Auntie' would treat her - she could recall all this
as if it were yesterday. These recollections formed the basis for the warm
affection that Larissa nurtured towards Germany. The workers' children
in Zehlendorf whom she went to school with, the tales of Theresa Bent,
the working-class woman who helped her mother about the house all lived
on in Larissa's memory so that in 1923 when staying illegally in Berlin in a
worker's family she felt at home there. Both the old domestic help who
used to wash her hair and her granddaughter whom Larissa would go out
with to the Tiergarten saw her as a human being and not some foreign
intellectual.
The first Russian revolution, whose waves rolled across the German
frontier, found a response in the little girl's soul. Father and mother
maintained constant friendly contacts with Russian revolutionaries in
exile. Of course the little lass could not have known that Lenin's letters to
Professor Reissner would subsequently become a source of pride. The
comrades who appeared and disappeared mysteriously naturally stirred
her imagination more deeply. When the 1905-1906 revolution came her
father could go back to Russia and Larissa found herself in Petrograd. So
far the path had lain straight towards the revolution. But here it turns
aside: and yet it is striking how she was never really diverted from the true
road, the road of her whole life. Her father, a professor of constitutional

law and a Marxist, entered into a struggle against the liberal circles of
professors at Petersburg University. The great world of learning is
essentially a tiny world of learned men. Therefore there is no muck,
pettiness or meanness that great scholars will not use against an enemy.
They become suspicious of the socialist and of what do you start
suspecting a socialist.,Why, of course, of being a secret agent of the
reactionaries. The old gossipmonger Burtsev, latched on to this bit of
slander and had in addition his own private grudges. For years Professor
Reissner struggled for his political honour, against the 'one-eyed monster
from Peer Gynt, against slander, myths, whispering campaigns and
insinuations that could not be challenged or brought to legal proceedings.
He leaves political life. In the home, need, worry and, finally, bitterness
and despair take over. The little girl, being closely attached to her parents
with bonds of love, understood perfectly well why their home was
becoming emptier, her father's voice was heard less and less often and
why he paced up and down for hours. Such recollections left a deep mark
on her heart and although they built a wall between her and revolutionary
circles they did not distract her from questions of socialism. While still at
secondary school where her stay was a real agony for the lively talented
girl, she writes the play Atlantis (published in 1913 by Shipovik) which,
although not consistent in form, already indicates the direction of
Larissa's ideas. She portrays a man who, by his death, wishes to save
society from its doom. A child's play! A 'man' can never save society from
doom. But the girl who had written this play had sat up in bed for many
nights pondering mankind and its sufferings. The theme of this first work
of Larissa's comes from Poehlmann's History of Ancient Socialism and
Communism. This is all the more interesting in that at that time Larissa
had fallen under Leonid Andreev's direct influence. That major
individualist writer was not only her literary tutor but also influenced her
spiritual development. But he could not divert her from the path that she
had chosen for herself. Neither he nor the poets of the Acmeist circle, like
Gumilev who had influenced her in form, could do this. In 1914 when all
these poets became the Tyrtaeuses of the imperialist slaughter, without a
moment's hesitation she and her father came out in defence of
international socialism.

They pawned their last belonging to obtain the means to publish the
journal Rudin and start a fight against the traitors to international
solidarity. Only the political isolation of the Reissner family, who were
perfectly well known to the security police, accounts for the appearance of
such a journal. Otherwise the malicious caricatures of Plekhanov, Burtsev
and Struve would have been enough to have it closed down. The struggle
against censorship and financial hardship was conducted by the 19-yearold Larissa. Inside the journal she likewise conducted a struggle of ideas
with brilliantly cutting verse and sharp sarcastic comments. But this
struggle had to end. Like any war it required money and they had no
money. When there was nothing left to pawn, the journal ceased to exist.
Larissa started collaborating on Letopis, the only legal internationalist
journal at that time.
From the first moment of the February Revolution Larissa sets to work
in the workers' clubs. Besides that she writes for Gorky's Novaya
Zhizn which, while not deciding clearly to advance the slogan of Soviet
Power, did wage a campaign against the coalition with the bourgeoisie.
Her piece against Kerensky showed that thanks to her acute artistic
sensibility she could at once appreciate the decaying hollow nature of
Kerensky's government. Her terse jottings and sketches describing the life
of the workers' clubs and theatres in the days leading up to October are
most interesting. In those sketches you are struck by her deep
understanding of the masses' natural urge for creative activity. In the
awkward attempts by workers and soldiers to represent life on a stage,
which the arrogance of the intellectuals found a subject for contemptuous
sneering, she could perceive the emergence of the creative efforts of the
new class and new social layers that wished not only to perceive reality
but to represent it and pass it on. Her profoundly creative nature sensed
the creative impulse of the revolution and she followed its summons.
In the first days after the October Revolution she worked on assembling
and cataloging art treasures for the museums. As a connoisseur of art
history she helped save and preserve much of the legacy of bourgeois
culture for the proletariat.But now the first battles against the counterrevolution began. We first had to defend our lives and our right to exist so

as to lay a foundation for the future creative work of the revolution.

Having joined the party Larissa now leaves for the Czechoslovak front.
She could not be a mere onlooker in the struggle between the old and new
worlds. She serves at Sviyazhsk where the Red Army was forged in the
battle against the Czechoslovaks. She takes part in the struggle of our
Volga fleet. But she does not tell of this in her book The Front. There she
relates the battles of the Red Army, passing modestly over her own role.
So another participant in those battles, Larissa's comrade, A. Kremlev,
must tell us about her. On the occasion of her death he wrote the
following in Krasnaya Zvezda, organ of the Revolutionary War Council:
"Before Kazan. The Whites sweep all before them. We learn that at
Tyurlyama the Whites have broken through in our rear, wiped out the
sentries and blown up eighteen wagon-loads of shells. Our sector is cut in
two. The Staff is here but what has happened to the men cut off?
The enemy is moving towards the Volga, in the rear of not only our
detachment but of the flotilla as well. Trotsky's train was stuck near
Sviyazhsk.
Order: slip through, locate and establish contact with those cut off.
Larissa goes off taking Vanyushka Ribakov, a sailor lad(a boy !) and
someone else I don't recall and the three are off.
Night, shivering with cold, loneliness and the unknown. Yet Larissa was
marching so confidently along that unfamiliar road !
At the village of Kurochkino somebody spotted them, they are fired on,
they spread out, it's hard to crawl- a tight spot ! And Larissa is joking and
her hidden anxiety only makes her voice more velvety.
They slipped out of the line of fire and they were through !
'Are you tired, my lad ... Vanya? And you?'

Through her concern she reached an unattainable height in that

moment. They wanted to kiss that marvellous woman's hands black as
they were with the grime of the road.
She walked along quickly with long strides and they almost had to run
so as not to lag behind her...
And by morning at the base of the Whites. Charred ground, corpses Tyurlyama.
From there, almost dropping on their feet, they made for Shikhrana and
where the Red Latvian regiment was positioned and contact could be
made with Trotsky's train.
The front had been tied up. And that woman with the wan smile was the
knot of that front.
'Comrades, look after my boys. Me? - no, I'm not tired!'
Later, scouting by Verkhnii Uslon, near the two Sorkvashes and as far
up as Pyany Bor. Eighty versts on horseback without flagging !
In those days pleasures were few enough. Yet the smile never left
Larissa Mikhailovna's face in those tough campaigns.
And then Enzeli, Baku and Moscow !
And that was what a sailor from a landing-party recalled."

On the campaigns the sailors came to love her warmly and as one of
themselves because her courage was combined with a naturalness and
humanity; there was no falsity in the masses attitude towards her for it
never entered anyone's head that at the front she was not only a comradein-arms but the flotilla commander's wife - she had married Raskolnikov
in 1918. In just the same way while she was a commissar at the Naval Staff
Headquarters in Moscow in 1919 she knew how to establish and maintain
excellent and friendly relations with the naval specialists, Admirals

Altwater and Behrens. Her good breeding, sensitivity and tact would not
permit the admirals from the Tsar's fleet to feel that they were under the
control of an outsider.
In 1920 she travels to Afghanistan where her husband had been
appointed plenipotentiary. She spent two years at an Eastern despot's
court taking the obligatory part in glamorous diplomatic occasions,
playing a diplomatic game in a struggle to influence the Emir's wives.
'Glamorous' if dirty work in which it would have not been hard for a
young woman cut off from the struggling proletariat, to have become
divorced from the revolution. But Larissa Reissner is reading serious
Marxist literature. She studies British imperialism, the history of the East
and the struggle for freedom in neighbouring India. Away in the
mountains of Afghanistan she feels herself a particle'of the world
revolution and prepares for a new struggle. Her book Afghanistan shows
how her horizon is broadening and she is turning from a Russian
revolutionary woman into a fighter in the international proletarian army.
In 1921 she returns to Soviet Russia. The land of workers and peasants
has now a totally different aspect from when she had left. The stern
Spartan war communism that had seemed to be a direct leap from
capitalism to socialism gave way to New Economic Policy. Larissa
understood, as we all did, the necessity for such a step. Scope had to be
given to the business initiative of the peasant not just to obtain the raw
materials for industry but if only not to die of starvation. Larissa
understood this in theory. But could you arrive at socialism by this route?
The answers that she and the party could provide could not still her inner
anxiety. She realised that it was impossible to go on with the old regime of
war communism. But in her heart of hearts she yearned for a heroic
attempt to break through to the new social order with arms in hand. Yes,
of course the streets of our towns had come back to life. Lorries laden with
goods, shops open, factory hooters calling people to work, but perhaps the
bourgeois elements will grow stronger besides ourselves? Will we be able
to cope with them? Will our industrial managers, compelled now to
engage in commerce, become infected by the poison of capitalist morality?

Might the rot even reach the body of the party? Throughout the summer
of 1927 Larissa is uneasy and looks around with an inward apprehension.
In September she comes to me with a request to help her go to
Germany. That was after the mass strikes against the Cuno government,
at the time Germany's proletarian masses were once again seeking to cast
off their chains. Poincar occupied the Ruhr, the mark fell at breakneck
speed and the Russian proletariat followed the German situation with
bated breath. Larissa was itching to get there. She was itching to fight in
the ranks of the German proletariat and make its struggle more
intelligible to Russian workers. Her proposal pleased me greatly. Just as
German workers were unable to gain a clear idea of what was going on in
Russia, Russian workers thought of the German proletariat's struggle in
rather an over-simplified and schematic way. I felt convinced that Larissa
better than anyone else could establish a link between these two
proletarian armies. For she was not a contemplative artist but a fighting
artist who sees a struggle from the inside and knows how to convey its
dynamics - the dynamics of humanity's destiny. Yet at the same time I felt
that her trip to Germany was also an escape from unsettled doubts.
Larissa arrived in Dresden on 21 October 1923 at the point when
General Mller's troops were occupying the capital of Red Saxony. As a
soldier she understood the need for a retreat. But when, a few days' later,
news of the Hamburg rising arrives, she springs to life. She wanted there
and then to leave for Hamburg and grumbled about having to remain in
Berlin. She whiled away many days at the shops among the crowds of
unemployed and starving people attempting to buy a bit of bread for
millions of marks and she sat around in hospitals packed with dead-beat
working women deep in bitter thoughts and cares. At the time I was living
clandestinely, meeting only party leaders who had no opportunity
themselves to mix with the masses. Larissa lived the life of those masses.
Whether chatting with unemployed in the Tiergarten, going on 9
November to a social-democratic requiem for the German Revolution or
else attending a silver wedding party in a communist family, she could
always find a way into people's hearts and always snatch up a piece of
their lives. She lived among Berlin's working masses who were as close to

her as the masses of St. Petersburg or the sailors of the Baltic fleet. She
proudly returned from a demonstration in the Lustgarten where the
Berlin proletariat had visibly proven the existence of the 'banned'
Communist Party to General Seeckt and his armoured cars.
Larissa finally had the chance to go to Hamburg to describe and
immortalise for the German and world proletariat the struggle of the
Hamburg workers.
'After all that sluggishness and flabbiness you find here something solid,
strong and vital', she wrote immediately upon arrival in Hamburg. 'At first
it was hard to fight off their distrust and prejudices. But as soon as the
Hamburg workers saw me as a comrade, I could learn about each and
every one of their simple, great and tragic experiences.
She lived with the abandoned wives of the Hamburg freedom fighters,
sought out the fugitives in their hideouts, attended court hearings and
social-democratic meetings. At night she would read Laufenberg, the
historian of Hamburg and the Hamburg movement. The stocks of
material she gathered in those weeks indicate how she worked-with a
deep sense of responsibility and the feeling of a person for whom the
smallest episode in that struggle had the sound of humanity's Song of
Songs. Back in Moscow she spent many hours with one comrade who had
led the rising and had been forced to escape. She checked over all this
material with him and corresponded with comrades when doubts arose
with regard to particular facts. The little book, Hamburg at the
Barricades, was not written by a keen artist but by a fighter and for
fighters. The German proletariat has given hundreds of clashes, battles
and skirmishes to its enemies but none has been described with such love
and deference as that struggle of Hamburg proletarians. Larissa treated
those she loved with generosity and the worthy Reichstribunal was not
wrong to order that slim little book consigned to the flames. [1] Larissa
Reissner returned from Germany unbroken by the defeat. In Hamburg
she could see the fire beneath the ashes. She could see how defeat rears
strong people for future battles. But she nevertheless learnt that a quick
victory of the revolution could not be depended upon.

After her return to Soviet Russia she had to find out what was going on
in the depths of the masses who in the final count dictate the course of
history. And being a person with an immediate grasp of reality she could
not gain such insight by reading and debates. She goes off to the industrial
and coal-mining districts of the Urals and the Donets Basin. She goes to
the textile region of Ivanovo-Voznesensk and to petty-bourgeois
Byelorussia. She spends entire weeks in railway carriages, wagons and on
horseback. Once again she lives in workers' families, goes down pits and
takes part in meetings of factory boards, shop committees and trade
unions and has conversations with peasants - daily, hourly. She is feeling
a way through the gloom, lending an ear close to life. Her book Coal, Iron
and Living People was the fruit of this work and here was a work tough
both physically and morally which few writers have undertaken; yet it
forms but a small fraction of what she experienced, thought and felt.
With this book begins a new artistic and ideological phase in the work of
Larissa Reissner. In this work she, as a communist, takes a stand on firm
ideological ground and finds her style as a writer. Her doubts disappear.
She sees the working masses engaged in construction. They are building
socialism, whether drenched in sweat at a blast furnace, descending halfnaked down the pits or cursing their low wages while the best part of them
are stoutly convinced that these torments and forced labour are all in the
name of socialism. In a clumsy uncouth manager she recognises an old
comrade from the front who here too has to tighten the reins with an iron
hand but at the same time listen attentively to the masses to take all
factors into account. She sees the colossal energy that the revolution has
aroused in the deepest layers of the people and this strengthened her
confidence that we could surmount all the difficulties connected with the
revival of capitalist tendencies. She knows that the spontaneous pettybourgeois element forms a swamp that can swallow up the greatest
projects and sees what strange flowers blossom in this swamp. Hut she
also sees clearly the path of struggle against the dangers menacing the
republic of labour and the bulwarks with which the proletariat and the
Communist Party can safeguard themselves. When she has gained this
clarity and decides that her place is in that struggle she sets about
sharpening her weapon. Her weapon is her pen. Hitherto Larissa has not

thought much about whom she is writing for. She has an excellent
knowledge of the history of literature and the arts and her style, rich and
refined, reflects not only her keen power of observation but also the ageold culture that found such a fine embodiment in her. She is not however
trying to be 'popular' for the working-class reader. She wants to create a
fully valid work of art for the proletariat.
Larissa works a great deal at the end of 1924 and during 1925. She sits
on Trotsky's commission for the improvement of the standard of
industrial products. She reads many books on Russian and world
economics. I will not pretend that she liked figures. When she had worked
through two or three tedious text-books, she would implore me to give her
something 'tasty' about petroleum or cereal crops and would relax over
Delaisi's book on oil trusts or Norris's epic work on wheat. She was
moreover making a thorough study of the history of the revolution. She
prepared lectures on the 1905 revolution for the party cell at the
armoured-car school; and when, after studying the specific material she
came on to Lenin's articles of that period (1905-1906) she discovered
greatness in the simplicity of our teacher's style and found the key to an
aesthetic appreciation of his works that had formerly seemed too dry.
Thus her art absorbed new elements. It is enough to read the descriptions
of the Krupp plants and the Junkers works in her In Hindenburg's
Country or her Decembrists. The first two descriptions are in a sustained
technical style. That does not mean that she padded out her language with
technical terms. But her interest in economics had taught her to think in a
technical way. She perceives a machine or a factory building not just
visually but as a concept. The style of The Decembrists is influenced by a
historical perspective. Here again though we do not have an imitation
article nor an artificially archaic style. She sees the people in historical
focus.
But history and economics for her were not ends in themselves. In them
she investigates human inter-relations - how man lives and how he fights
under specific conditions. Side by side with a colossal Krupp plant she
sketches a miserable working-class barracks; in the Decembrist
Kakhovsky she shows us a man insulted and injured' and draws a

remarkable profile of the German jurist who had devised an ideal

bureaucracy for the Tsar but ends his life in the snows of Siberia derided
and forgotten. She shows us pathetic worms squashed by a giant of
technology or the wheel of history.
Once matured as an artist and revolutionary Larissa Reissner prepared
a new work. She conceived a trilogy about the life of the workers of the
Urals: the first part about a serf factory at the time of the Pugachev revolt,
the second on the exploitation of the worker under Tsarism and the third
on the building of socialism. Simultaneously she was planning a portrait
gallery of the precursors of socialism: not only portraits of Thomas More,
Mnzer, Babeuf and Blanqui but also portraits of the revolution's unsung
heroes' starting from the first steps of the handicrafts proletariat and
finishing with the titanic struggles of our day. At times she took fright at
the tasks she had set herself. She was very modest and often doubted the
power of her talents. But she would without doubt have accomplished
these tasks for that power was growing with every new day.
But she was not destined to reveal all that was sleeping within her. She
fell not in the fight against the bourgeoisie, where she had often stared
death in the face, but in the fight against the nature she so passionately
loved. When gravely ill, amid her last flickerings of consciousness, she
exulted in the sun whose rays were sending her a last farewell. She spoke
of how good it would be for her in the Crimea where she was going to
convalesce and how lovely it would be when her weary head filled up
again with new ideas. She vowed that she would fight for life to the end
and she only abandoned that fight when she finally lost consciousness.
A number of articles and small books - that is all of Larissa Reissner's
legacy. Articles scattered through newspapers and magazines, a few dozen
letters all of which have yet to be collected. But they will live as long as the
memory of the first proletarian revolution lives. They shall proclaim what
the revolution meant for all peoples, for the West and the East, for
Hamburg and Afghanistan, for Leningrad and the Urals. And this warrior
woman in whose heart and mind everything found an answering chord

will arise from her books after her death as a still living witness of the
proletarian revolution.

Footnotes
Elsewhere (in an article for the Encyclopedia Granat) Radek notes
that an aesthete protested against the ban in the liberal Frankfurter
Zeitung in view of the book's great artistic merit'. He also observes
that Hamburg at the Barricades 'is a unique work of its kind for neither
the Finnish rising or Soviet Hungary has produced its equivalent'. RC.
[1]

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