In Europe

trade and industry as well. At the same time – and this double role was one the Soviet mission always retained – the embassy was a permanent jamming station for the German powers-that-be, producing a constant flow of agitprop both open and covert. In this, one man played a vitally important role: Lenin's former travelling companion, Karl Radek. He had come into the city in December 1918, disguised as a wounded German soldier, along with a group of returning prisoners of war. By then he had become a key figure in the Socialist International, and could ‘stammer away’ – as he himself put it – in ten languages. Yet at the same time he remained a caricature of himself, full of jokes and sillyideas, always bearded and bespectacled,‘his pockets bulging with newspapers and magazines’.
    Radek immediately established contact with the radical wing of the German revolutionaries, the group around Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. He held court almost every day in the Ukrainian restaurant Allaverdi, where the Soviets had their own table and where Radek bantered with the former country gentlemen and landowners who waited on tables. All paths crossed in that restaurant, those of the old regime, the nobility, the middle class, the monarchist officers, the local revolutionaries and the new Soviet leaders. Radek adhered to the pure Bolshevik line, including the use of terror against ‘classes condemned to death by history’. Rosa Luxemburg was having none of that. Others joined in the debate. All the schisms that had arisen among the revolutionaries of Petrograd were reiterated in Berlin. In this way there arose German Trotskyites, Bucharinists and Zinovyevites, and more than that. The stylistic motifs of the Soviet Union were imitated as well: the constructivist fonts on the posters, the
russe-bolchevique
fashion, everything that happened in Russia was repeated on a smaller scale in Berlin. Except for the revolution itself. That went on in its own, German way.

    Every country and every political movement prefers to write a history that makes it feel comfortable, a portrait in soft pastels, a story that does no violence to the self-image. The losers are usually unable to paint any portrait whatsoever. They simply fade away, and their story is eradicated along with them.
    Only a hair's breadth separated Germany from becoming a kind of Soviet republic. In November of 1918, mutinies began among the sailors in the ports of northern Germany and the revolt quickly spread to other parts of the country. From that moment, a wave of uprisings, demonstrations and riots swept the country from north to south, from east to west and back again. In Berlin, a full-scale war in the streets was carried on in spring 1919. For three months, Munich was governed by a Soviet-style republic. It was only in 1920 that relative calm returned to the country.
    The German legend concerning those painful years remained in place until 1945. After then, no one felt like thinking about that popular rebellion. It was the story with which Hindenburg and Ludendorff poisonedpublic opinion after 1918. Both men, as mentioned earlier, announced that it was this social-democratic revolution that had brought defeat to Germany and twisted the knife in the back of the victorious front. That was the charge levelled against Chancellor Friedrich Ebert and his SPD party.
    Thanks to letters, affidavits and sections of diaries discovered since, we now know what really happened. On that crucial day of 29 September, 1918, the day on which both army and kaiser suddenly accepted defeat, it was not the ‘whining’ social democrat Ebert who organised the capitulation, but courageous General Ludendorff himself.
    When Ludendorff realised that defeat was inevitable, he manipulated matters in a way that would protect the army and the imperial elite. He advised Kaiser Wilhelm to ‘give the government a broader foundation’ by granting the social democrats ministerial responsibility. A government with such a broad popular base would then have to establish a truce, and responsibility for the capitulation could be foisted off on others. In this way the army's ‘honour’ could be preserved, a matter of utmost importance to its Prussian officers. ‘They [the social democrats] will have to bring about the peace that must now absolutely be established,’ Ludendorff told his staff. ‘Those who have mixed this concoction will now have to drink it themselves.’ It was a