In Europe

28 December, 1918 the omnipresent Count Harry Kessler walked past a number of corpses lying in state. ‘No one would be able to tell you what these young lives have been sacrificed for, or for what they have sacrificed themselves.’ That same week was the first time Käthe Kollwitz saw young, blinded soldiers out begging in the cold with their barrel organs. ‘I was reminded of a cartoon in
Simplicissimus
that appeared years ago, showing an invalid from the war of 1870 playing his barrel organ and singing: “What I am, and what I own, is thanks to you, my fatherland!”’
    Around Christmas and New Year, Berlin was a ghost town. ‘The stench of civil war was in the air,’ George Grosz wrote. ‘The plaster had fallen from the houses, windows were broken, many shops had lowered their iron shutters … People no longer able to bear their frightened, confined existences had climbed onto the roofs and were shooting at everything that moved, be it birds or people.’
    During that same period, Karel Radek succeeded in bringing the Spartacus Movement (named after the gladiator and revolutionary leader) and a couple of other radical left-wing groups under the auspices of a new party: the Kommunistische Partei Deutschland, the KPD.
    On Sunday 5 January, 1919 the second revolution broke out at last. The reason was insignificant enough: Ebert had dismissed the self-appointed chief commissioner of Berlin, a radical socialist, and the Spartacists had called for a demonstration. Radical workers took to the streets by the thousand. Then Liebknecht turned up. Harry Kessler heard him from a distance, speaking ‘like an evangelist, singing the words with a soothing pathos, lento and with great feeling’. Later he ran into him amid an angry throng on Potsdamer Platz, orating again to an almost unanimously adoring audience. ‘I entered into discussion with him, and within a fewminutes the majority of the crowd was on my side, particularly the soldiers, because they noticed that he himself had never been in the army.’
    Accounts like this would seem clearly to show that most people in the streets of Berlin did not long for a replica of the Bolshevik Revolution. The minutes of the workers’ meetings held that week indicate that people were in favour rather of a replica of the German November Revolution, but that this time it should be done right. The ‘traitorous’ Ebert government was to be ousted. Armed groups were formed, railway stations and newspaper offices occupied. Meanwhile, Karl Liebknecht's followers drove him around the city, his convoy surrounded by trucks bearing red flags and machine guns like a Berlin variation of the triumphal progress of the great Lenin. Yet Liebknecht, as we have seen, was no Lenin. From the very start his career had been that of an activist, a militant, but not that of a political leader.
    At this point the situation became very murky indeed. A general strike in which 200,000 workers took part was held on Monday, 6 January. That morning Kessler saw two processions marching through central Berlin: one of social democrats, the other of Spartacists. ‘Both were made up of drab, identically dressed shopkeepers and factory maids, both waved red flags and marched in the same bourgeois cadence. The only difference was the text on their banners. They mocked each other in passing and may, perhaps, start shooting at each other before the day is done.’ Suddenly he heard yelling. ‘The Liebknecht boy! Liebknecht's son!’ Karl Liebknecht Jr, ‘a slender blond boy’, was almost lynched by the social democrats, until a group of Spartacists succeeded in carrying him off to safety.
    That afternoon a crowd gathered again on Alexanderplatz, ready to storm the surrounding government buildings. All was in readiness for the start of the Berlin Revolution. And nothing happened.
    There was no leadership, there were no decisions made. Radek, newly arrived in Berlin, had not had enough time to impose discipline on the gung-ho Spartacists. He was utterly opposed to the idea of bringing down the government, and behind closed doors demanded that the new KPD immediately withdraw from this ‘dead end’ struggle.
    Liebknecht was a brave, hot-headed lawyer, but no political genius. He had something quixotic about him, Kessler recorded in his diary, andsimply lacked Lenin's strategic gifts. Rosa Luxemburg was an exceptional woman, brilliant and poetic, but during those weeks she devoted herself only to her