"Of course I was not here myself when the War ended," said Christoph Keith, so all of this I have heard from others. It must have been just indescribable... the uproar, the confusion . . . It began with the sailors, the fleet had been sitting in ports, Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, doing nothing for years, the food was terrible, the discipline was harsh, then they heard they were to steam out for one last battle against the British, so this day in November they revolted, put out the fires under the boilers, and marched into the towns. It was like a match in dry grass, you know, the people were so exhausted, so tired of the War. The revolt spread to the workers, to the army, in every city there were mobs in the streets, sailors with rifles and red armbands, shrieking women from the tenement houses ... it was really a revolt of the working people against the established order. And of course, the symbols of the Kaiser's rule were who? The officers. And the people chased officers down the streets and tore their epaulets off!
"Well, to an American I think that is not so important. To a German officer those straps on his shoulder stand for ... I cannot explain it to you ... they stand for everything: his country, his honor, his rank in the world ... the epaulets have, what shall I say? A mystic importance. Everybody salutes the man with the higher epaulets. I remember as a little boy, walking along Unter den Linden with my father, every man in uniform saluted....
"All right, now imagine my little brother, sixteen years old, a cadet at military school, he is walking along the street with another cadet, and suddenly they are surrounded by a mob of people, deserting soldiers and sailors and women from the factories, and they grab those boys and knock them down and kick them and tear the epaulets off their uniforms and stand around screaming at them.
"Can you imagine how those boys feel? How they detest everything to do with workers and red flags and bolshevism or socialism?
"Now, in the meantime, what is going on? The country is in chaos. The Kaiser runs away to Holland. Karl Liebknecht proclaims a German soviet. The Social Democrats proclaim a republic. People are shooting at each other from barricades. Nobody knows what's happening. Liebknecht's Spartacus bands - the real Communists - are marching in the street, taking over public buildings - it was revolution, and I tell you, German people, even Socialists, they don't like revolution, they don't like workers breaking into stores and shooting in the streets - and so what did the Socialist government do? They called in the army.
"All right, now the army was coming home from France, coming home in good order, marching behind their officers, but they were touched by the revolution too. The ranks were full of Soldatenräte - I don't know what you call that, sort of soldier commissars - and they tried to remove the authority of the officers, hold elections ... Can you imagine elections in the German army? Well, the government wanted reliable troops, in other words troops that would shoot at other Germans, at their former comrades, at Soldatenräte, at the sailors.... Where are they going to find reliable troops? Most of the men coming back from France didn't want to shoot anybody, least of all other Germans. They wanted to go home, and that's what most of them did do, the moment they were back across the Rhine.
"Most of them. Not all of them. You have a saying in English, 'He found a home in the army'? Some people had been soldiers so long, they didn't want to do anything else. Some of them tried to go home, could not find jobs, could not stand the quiet life, perhaps they need the marching and the guns and the other men and the excitement ... and others, like my little brother - furious that the War was over, the War was lost, they wanted a chance to fight for their country, perhaps their epaulets had been ripped off....
"Well, what happened was they raised a lot of little private corps of soldiers. Free corps. Freikorps. An old expression, comes from the wars against Napoleon. Anybody who could find some money and some men to follow him. Generals, colonels, a captain in the navy, lieutenants, even a few sergeants did it. And the High Command let them have uniforms and rifles and ammunition, machine guns, some cannons and some armored cars. General Maercker's Landesjägerkorps was the first, they were sent down to Weimar to protect the professors and the politicians who were writing a new constitution. Here in Berlin there was heavy fighting, Guards Cavalry Division people killed Liebknecht, killed Rosa Luxemburg, they split her skull with rifle butts and threw her into the canal ... they broke the Spartacus."
Christoph stopped talking and extracted a silver case from his jacket pocket, offered me a French Gauloise, and lighted both of our cigarettes.
"I take it Kaspar joined one of these corps?"
Christoph nodded. "Marinebrigade Ehrhardt. I don't know how he got into that one, because it was mostly navy officers. They recruited among the cadets, and I think someone just persuaded him. Those boys saw terrible things. Not like in France, you know. Different terrible things. No trenches. Fighting in the streets, breaking into the workers' tenements, shooting from the rooftops, firing squads in courtyards ... They didn't take prisoners, they just shot them. The boy was seventeen by then. Fighting here in Berlin, fighting in Munich, fighting in Silesia, and then they came back here to Berlin and tried to make a revolution of their own - the so-called Kapp Putsch - to overthrow the Weimar Republic. It didn't work. They occupied Berlin, but all the workers went out on a general strike. Everything stopped. No trains, no omnibuses, no electricity - nothing. The High Command backed down, Dr. Kapp and the generals behind him flew off in aeroplanes to Sweden, and the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt marched out again.
"Captain Ehrhardt fled to Hungary, the Brigade was dissolved, all the korps were dissolved, the government did not need these people anymore. Kaspar just put on civilian clothes, got on a train, and came home. He's been home ever since, but he cannot seem to make a new life. He's supposed to attend the University, and sometimes he does go to the lectures, but he sleeps a lot in the daytime and spends his evenings drinking with other fellows from the Freikorps. They detest the government, they talk politics, and I think they do other things, too."
"What kind of things?" I asked.
Christoph looked at his watch and stood up. "I think I would rather not know what other things," he said. "Now I really must go to the Bank. I will be home for dinner, and then we'll walk about the town a little. All right?"
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