|| Swastika (swastika). 1871 [Skr. svastika,f. svasti well-being, luck, f. su good + asti being (f. as to be).] A primitive symbol or ornament of the form of a cross with equal arms with a limb of the same length projecting at right angles from the end of each arm, all in the same direction and (usu.) clockwise.
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles
"Hakenkreuz am Stahlhelm,
Schwarz-weiss-rotes Band,
Die Brigade Ehrhardt
Werden wir genannt!"
I should have gone directly to bed. Light showed under the door of Kaspar's room, and as I passed I heard the faint sound of men singing, a band playing a marching song. The door opened, and there was Kaspar - red faced, tousled, in shirtsleeves and suspenders.
"Good evening, Kaspar." I whispered, because the music was louder now, coming from a portable gramophone on his bureau. His parents were sleeping at the other end of the house.
He lifted the needle and stopped the record.
"Do you have American cigarettes?"
I wanted to give him the whole pack, but as I stepped into the room he closed the door behind me. The place stank of cigarette smoke and beer. The bed and the table and the carpet were strewn with open photograph albums, unfolded maps and piles of handwritten letters. Green beer bottles with white porcelain caps were piled into a laundry basket.
"Please sit down," said Kaspar, indicating a wicker armchair, the kind I had in my room. "I can offer you a little schnapps and plenty of beer."
"Well thank you very much, but I've had quite a bit. .
Kaspar wasn't listening. He was already pouring clear liquid from a stone bottle into two small wineglasses, spilling some of it on the table. Shakily he passed one of them to me and raised the other: "Prosit!"
There was nothing to do but drink the stuff. It burned my throat.
Kaspar accepted one of my cigarettes, lighted it, and began to pour foaming beer into another empty glass. "And how are things on the island?" he asked, through the cigarette in his mouth.
"Very nice. It's a beautiful place."
"Not beer but plenty of good wine?"
"That's right."
"And you liked my brother's rich friends?"
"Yes. I liked them."
"And you met Frau Baronin Alfred von Waldstein?"
"Yes. I had dinner at her house."
"Oh, you had dinner at her house." His red face was getting redder. Wanting desperately to change the subject, I pointed to the open notebook on his desk. "Are you writing something?"
He nodded. "Beginning my memoirs. I'm twenty years old, it is time to begin my memoirs, don't you agree?"
I couldn't tell if he was teasing me. "Well, l'm older and I haven't begun mine, but I suppose it's never too soon." I moved the wicker chair close to the table. "May I look- at your photographs?"
He came over and stood beside me, talking about the pictures as I turned the heavy black pages of one album. "This is my company in cadet school. This is me with my brothers -when they were both home from the Front....This one was killed
"Christoph told me, I'm terribly sorry....
"This is my friend Brühl, shooting out of the window when the sailors attacked our school.... Frau Baronin von Waldstein is his sister....I took this picture."
"Why were the sailors attacking your school?"
"Why? Ask them why! Because they were mutinous Red swine, they walked off their ships and made a revolution and made us lose the War!"
"Who is this fellow?"
"That's Lieutenant Kern, a navy officer. He invited some of us to join the Second Marine Brigade, Captain Ehrhardt's Brigade, and he took us with him to Wilhelmshaven, where the Brigade was formed. Here we are drilling with our helmets and rifles. I don't know who took this picture.... I'm this fellow here, with the flag. . ."
Now Kaspar was turning the pages as he explained the shiny photographs, and it was like watching a film: helmeted men sitting in the door of a freight car; blurred figures running crouched along the storefronts of some German city; marksmen firing from rooftops; dead bodies on the sidewalk.. . . "This is Munich. See the towers, of the Frauenkirche? They had set up a Soviet of Bavaria down there, a bunch of filthy Russian Jews with beards were actually running the place, we went down there and really cleaned up. . . ." A brick courtyard, a pile of women in what looked like white uniforms, splattered with black blood.
"Are these nurses? Look at this one's cap, these are nurses!"
"We didn't do that," said Kaspar, trying to turn the page. "Freikorps Lützow did that, these bitches were hiding wounded Reds, they had pistols -"
I held on to the page. "Who said they had pistols? Nurses with pistols? How do you know?"
"That's what the Lützows said. We only came along afterwards -"
'Did they have a trial of some kind?"
Kaspar snorted. "A trial? Nobody had a trial, there wasn't time for trials, we were putting down a revolution!"
I couldn't stop looking at the picture. "Did you take this?"
"Yes."
"Ever shown it to your father?"
Kaspar shook his head.
"Not proud of it, are you?"
Kaspar shrugged. "It's war."
"I've been in a war. I saw some bad things, some very bad things, but I never saw anybody shoot down two-four-six-nine nurses! And neither did Christoph. And neither did your father."
Kaspar poured himself another schnapps and drank it. "This was a different kind of war, a civil war inside our country -"
"Which means you had German soldiers shooting German nurses."
"They were hiding Reds."
"They were taking care of wounded men -also German, presumably".
" Bolshevik swine who stabbed our soldiers in the back. We don't call them Germans!"
I should have gone to bed and left him to his memoirs, but I couldn't stop turning pages. "What's going on here?"
"That's the Parade ground at Döberitz, right outside Berlin here. In the winter from 1919 to 1920, the government brought us back from Silesia to clean up Berlin. Döberitz was our base. We cleaned up Berlin. You know what the government was going to do then? Disband us! Send us home. Why? Because your Control Commission told them to. The treaty those bastards signed made Germany reduce the army down to one hundred thousand men by March of 1920, and the Control Commission said we counted as army. Now in this picture General Freiherr von Lüttwitz is reviewing the Ehrhardt-Brigade and the Baltikum Brigade at Döberitz. I don't know who took this picture. I am in here somewhere. My God, it was a splendid parade, with the music and the flags, just like before 1918. And von Lüttwitz, the senior general of the Reichswehr in Berlin - that is, regular army- he made a speech to us and he told us he would absolutely not allow the government to disband us.
"And the next thing that happened was the government tried to have us transferred out from under Lüttwitz to the Marineleitung - that is, the navy. That meant they were going to disband us. So that was the end. Lüttwitz and Captain Ehrhardt decided to take over the government.
"Here we are, this picture was taken at night, March twelve, 1920, the march to Berlin. Here we are the next morning, arriving at the Brandenburg Gate. These are imperial battle flags. Here is General Ludendorff welcoming us."
"Is this what they call the Kapp Putsch?"
"Yes, but Kapp was a fool, a civilian, a politician who had no ideas, no program .... We controlled the whole city and he didn't do anything, we all just sat around -"
"What are these white crosses on your helmets? Why does everybody have these white crosses painted on their helmets?"
"Those are Hakenkreuze."
"I think, we call them swastikas."
"They are Indian or something. . . ."
"Well, why have you all got Indian crosses painted on your helmets?"
Kaspar shook his head. "I will tell you truly, I don't know. I think it means something about the purity of the German race."
"Indian crosses?"
"I agree with you, and I don't know who started with those things, it was not Captain Ehrhardt, it was just something ... everybody was doing it, painting these crosses-"
"Well, here's a symbol I recognize." A group of helmeted men, Kaspar among them, perched atop an armored car that was painted with a huge white skull-and-crossbones- the same hollow eye sockets that stared from every photograph on the walls of the Villa Keith.
"I think it is a better symbol for soldiers," said Kaspar.
"What happened to your Putsch?"
"The Ebert government ran away. I think they went to Dresden. And they called a general strike. The workers just went home. Everybody. The whole city stopped running - no trains, no buses, no electricity, no water, all the stores closed, no food.... The banks were closed so we couldn't pay the men. Dr. Kapp told Captain Ehrhardt to break open the Reichsbank, but the captain said he was not a bank robber .... What we should have done was shoot a few of the strike leaders as an example ... but nobody told us what to do, we just sat there guarding this dead city."
More pictures, all much the same: soldiers standing guard, soldiers manning machine guns, bareheaded officers sitting around cafe tables with sluttish-looking women, everybody grinning and self-consciously puffing on cigarettes ....
"Weren't the cafes closed too?"
"They were closed, but we opened them. With rifle butts. And the girls came in .... They were the only Berliners not on strike."
Kaspar walked across the room and sank back into the leather sofa.
"I tell you something, it was a very strange time. Just a few days. We didn't know what was happening. When we weren't on guard we sat around and drank and talked about what would happen .... You know, there was a song then, they played in all these Dielen, these dance halls where people came to dance in the afternoon. . ..."
Kaspar got up again, wavered across the room, poured a little schnapps for me, another for himself, knocked back his one, approached the gramophone, fumbled in a stack of records, found the title he wanted, put it on the gramophone, cranked the handle viciously, and then sang along -with the music, piano and saxophone and a girl's voice:
Warum denn weinen, wenn man auseinander geht,
Wenn an der nächsten Ecke schon ein Andrer steht -
"Can you understand that?" Oh, I could understand it:
Why should we cry, when we part,
when on the next corner . . . and so forth
Kaspar said: "We sat around and waited and waited for orders, so we made up new words to this song. He picked up the tone arm, moved it back to the beginning, and sang with the music:
Why should we cry if the Putsch goes wrong,
There will be another one before very long!
So say goodbye, but remember, men,
It won't be long 'til we do it again!
He stopped the record and rubbed his hand across his eyes.
"And the Putsch did go wrong?"
He nodded. "Everybody betrayed us. In Dresden, General Maercker was supposed to arrest the cabinet officers, but he didn't do it, he just sent them on to Stuttgart. The British had promised to support us; they denied they ever promised such a thing. The Prussian security police told Kapp he would have to resign, and he did. He simply ran away. He got into a taxi and drove to the airport. Then the people at the General Staff, the Bendlerstrasse, they saw we would not win, so they sent a colonel over and told General von Lüttwitz he must resign. So be resigned, turned over his command to General von Seeckt ... and there we were, in complete control of the capital city, with no leaders, no orders, nothing. Nothing!"
Kaspar was sitting on the sofa again, His face in his hands. I just let him sit this way for a minute, and when he looked up again his eyes were wet.
"But they let us march out. Von Seeckt gave Captain Ehrhardt permission to march the Brigade out, with our music and our flags, and as we did that, you know what happened? All these bastards, these workers and bus drivers and shopkeepers who were on strike, they came pouring out into the streets and they shouted and whistled and threw beer bottles at us, so we had to stop and shoot at them. My God, you should see them run, the swine! I wish we could have shot them all! We marched out across Pariser Platz, through the Brandenburg Gate, with our band playing and everybody singing."
"Where did you go?"
"Back to our base. Döberitz."
"And did the government punish you?"
Kaspar shook his head. "On the contrary, they still wanted to use us against the Communists. They paid a bonus that Kapp had promised us. Then they ordered us to Münster. I knew they were going to disband us, so I just went home. And I was right. In May of 1920 they disbanded the Brigade, sent the men out on the streets to look after themselves." Kaspar emitted a sigh and sat back in the sofa, his eyes closed.
"What was the point of it all?" I asked.
"The point? What does that mean?" His eyes were still closed.
"What did you want when you made your Putsch? Did you want to bring the Kaiser back?"
"God, no! Nobody wanted the Kaiser back."
"But you carried the Kaiser's flags. You wore black-white-red armbands. If you didn't want the Kaiser, what did you want?"
"We wanted to get rid of those bastards, those Socialists and Jews who signed the Versailles treaty, who ruined our country, who humiliated our country -"
"But who did you want instead? You apparently didn't like Kapp -"
"Kapp was nothing."
"And General von - what's his name? Lüttwitz? Did you want him to run the country?"
"No, he gave up too easily."
"Your Captain Ehrhardt?"
"No, the Captain isn't interested in politics."
"He isn't interested in politics? Here he was trying to take over the government!"
"Only as a soldier. He wanted to sweep out these traitors who want to give everything to the Allies."
"But who did he want to put in their place? If you don't want a monarchy and you don't want the Republic, what do you want?"
Kaspar finally opened his eyes, and his eyes were blazing. "We want a strong proud Germany!" he shouted.
"You're going to wake the house."
"I wish I could wake the country! Look what they've done now. They've made a Jew our foreign Minster, a Jew who wants to crawl on his knees to the Allies, pay them 'reparations' of 132 billions gold marks.... Reparations for what? I mean, it would be a joke if it were not a tragedy. And now he signs a peace treaty with Moscow! We spent sixteen months marching back and forth across Germany shooting Communists, getting shot by Communists-- Herr Rathenau signs a peace treaty with them!"
"Christoph thinks it was a good idea. He thinks your army will be able to train in Russia."
Kaspar belched. "Is that what they tell him at Waldstein's? You know what my brother's former comrades call him now? Der Judenknecht - the Jews' servant."
I finally had enough of Kaspar. "He's hardly a servant. He's a bank trainee. And as I understand it, his salary is supporting you and everybody else in this house." I stood up. "I'm pretty tired, Kaspar, it's been along day -"
"You're quite correct, Christoph is supporting this house. The pension of a major general who served his country from the age of fourteen will not support him and his wife today, and there are no jobs for twenty-year-old infantry officers. But you found no shortage of money on the island, did you? The Tea House and the motorboats and the Schloss and the stables and the Little House on the hill ... servants everywhere, and all the Moselle you can drink. And that's only their summer place, my friend. Wait until you see the town house on the Pariser Platz. The rest of Germany may have suffered from the World War, but the Baron von Waldstein and his tribe-"
"I believe they lost a son in France."
Kaspar's eyes were closed again. He wasn't listening to me, he was listening to his own voice. Or maybe to his own heart. "And l'm sure you met Her Highness the Princess Hohenstein Rofrano. Such a beautiful widow. Such a merry widow. Such a good friend of my brother. Such a good friend of Minister Rathenau. Such a good friend - -while my brother was a prisoner-of haIf
77 /
the General Staff Corps. But nothing less than full colonel, you understand. Unless it was a cabinet minister" - Kaspar's head suddenly slumped forward and his eyes closed - "or a theatre director...." The empty glass fell out of his hand and rolled across the rug.
I turned the light off.
PROLOGUE - THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1922
I. HOW I GOT THERE
1. PARIS 1922
2. VERDUN 1916
3. IT'S STEALING MONEY, ISN'T IT
4. WHERE WERE YOU IN 1919?
5. RELIABLE TROOPS
6. AN ISLAND
7. BISMARCK FOUND THEM USEFUL
8. INTRODUCTIONS
9. THE LITTLE HOUSE
>10. INDIAN CROSSES
11. ANOTHER PART OF TOWN
12. A VIEW OF THE GENDARMENMARKT
13. TWO FOR TEA
14. ON THE TOWN
15. A VIEW OF THE HAVEL
16. REIGEN
II. WHAT HAPPENED
17. THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1922
18. MONDAY, JUNE 19, 1922
19. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 1922
20. FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 1922
21. SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1922
22. WHAT HAPPENED?
III. THE WITCHES' SABBATH
23. SILENCE WITH VOICES
24. THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS
25. SAME SONGS, DIFFERENT SINGERS
26. THEY'RE ONLY GOING TO HIRE HIS VOICE
27. INFLATION WORKS IN DIFFERENT WAYS
28. SMALL CHANGE
29. WHY NOT PAINT LILI?
30. COLD WIND IN MAY
31. ROLLING THUNDER
32. WALDSTEIN'S VOICE
33. THE MATTER OF A DOWRY
34. A RUSSIAN WORD AND A GERMAN WORD
35. THE MARCH ON BERLIN
36. A PIG LOSES MONEY ALL THE TIME
37. THE ARTISTS' BALL
IV. STRIKE TWELVE ZEROs
38. AMYTAL DREAMS
39. LETTERS
40. PROFESSOR JAFFA'S PROGNOSIS
41. THE OTHER SUBJECT
42. ROLLING HOME