In Europe

newspaper and her writing. She was quite furious with Liebknecht when she heard that he had started a revolution with no preparations whatsoever: ‘How could you? What about our party programme?’ The soldiers’ council remained neutral: they were in favour of the revolution, but also in favour of public order. By the end of the day most of the demonstrators had simply gone home. Their revolution was over.
    After that, Berlin's mood took a drastic swing: the Ebert government received the support of a number of conservative army units. By dint of furious door-to-door fighting they resumed control of one occupied building after another. The building housing the offices of
Vorwärts
was taken, and when the commanding officer asked the chancellor's office what to do with the 300 people who had been occupying it, the answer was: ‘Shoot them all.’ Being an officer of the old school, he refused. In the end, seven of the occupiers were executed, the others severely beaten. That afternoon the first
Freikorps
marched into the city, led by the proud Gustav Noske. He was aware of the historic role he was playing: ‘What do I care? Someone must play the bloodhound; I will not shirk my duty.’
    This turn of events marked the start of a wild round-up of radicals and communists. Of the Spartacists who resisted, 1,200 were shot down in Berlin alone. Radek got off easily. He was sent to the Moabit, the huge Prussian prison in the centre of town, and there he remained for a year. As special representative of the new Russia, he was soon granted privileged status. His cell became a well organised distribution point for agit-prop, and he was allowed to receive whomever he chose, ranging from radical activists to prominent figures such as Walter Rathenau. Everyone in Berlin spoke of ‘Radek's salon in the Moabit’. Here new ties were forged between a Germany and a Russia in transition.
    Luxemburg and Liebknecht, however, did not enjoy the protective support of a major power. They were arrested on 15 January, 1919, close to the Eden Hotel, beaten almost unconscious with rifle butts and then shot through the head. Liebknecht's body was taken to the morgue. Luxemburg, still alive, was thrown into the Landwehrkanal. Their deaths united them at last in the history books, although in real life they hadlittle to do with each other, save for their frequent differences of opinion. Käthe Kollwitz was given permission to draw a final portrait of Liebknecht: ‘A garland of red flowers had been laid across the shattered forehead, his face was proud, his mouth open slightly and twisted in pain. His face bore a rather astonished expression.’ Runge, the soldier who had beaten Liebknecht's brains in, was the only man in his unit to receive a (brief) jail sentence. Lieutenant Vogel, who had shot Luxemburg, was convicted only of illegally disposing of a corpse; he fled to the Netherlands and was granted amnesty there. Their commanding officer, Captain Waldemar Pabst, remained unpunished and died in his bed of natural causes in 1970.
    That was the end of Act Two.
    Act Three of the drama comprised the civil war which spread across Germany that winter and on into the summer, flaring up here and there like a peatland fire: in Bremen, in Munich, in the Ruhr, and then again in Berlin. It was a civil war that has been largely erased from European memory, but one fought with great cruelty and violence.
    ‘Strangers were spat upon. Faithful dogs slaughtered. Coach horses eaten,’ Joseph Roth wrote of that period. ‘Teachers beat their pupils from hunger and rage. Newspapers invented atrocities by the opposition. Officers sharpened their sabres. College students fired shots. Secondary-school students fired shots. Policemen fired shots. Little boys fired shots. It was a nation of gunmen.’
    The struggle was an uneven one: unorganised resistance groups from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils against highly trained and well-armed volunteer corps. At times it was even unclear who was fighting whom. In late January, Harry Kessler noted that the socialist movement had obviously split into two camps,‘because even the troops guarding the [administrative] centre [of Berlin] are socialists, and would probably not support any civil government whatsoever.’
    In the capital the war became a normal part of daily life. One eyewitness recounted how schoolchildren excused themselves when they came home late from school by saying that they had been forced to