In Europe

wait in a doorway at Hallesches Tor until the shooting stopped. A westbound S-Bahn train pulling into a station might seem empty, until it stopped.But that was an illusion: the passengers had simply sought shelter under the seats to avoid stray bullets.
    Despite all this, general elections were held on 19 January, 1919 and Ebert's centre-left coalition won three quarters of the votes. The independent parties were buried beneath the landslide. In the People's Republic of Bavaria, Kurt Eisner and his people received only three per cent of the vote. Eisner was no Lenin either, and he resigned graciously. He never got the chance to hold a farewell speech, however: just as he was about to enter the Bavarian house of parliament, he was assassinated by a radical right-wing officer.
    After these elections, and despite the violence in the streets, Ebert was able to rely on solid political backing: from parliament, the trade unions, the employers and the generals. And still the fighting went on. The conflict now had to do with better terms of employment, more money and greater autonomy for the councils. The
Freikorps
ran amok through the country in their own special fashion. One of their leaders, quite correctly, compared them to fifteenth-century mercenaries: ‘The landsknechts, too, cared little what they were fighting about, or for whom. The most important thing was that they were fighting. War had become their calling.’ In the end there were about seventy such corps, totalling 400,000 soldiers. Many Germans cities were the scene of widespread torture and random executions, atrocities that have survived only occasionally in individual family histories.
    From May, the work of the
Freikorps
was more or less taken over by civil and military courts. Hundreds of death sentences were carried out. This was the Third Act.
    The Fourth Act was actually an intermezzo. On 18 August, 1919 President Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution. To a certain extent, the document met the wishes of all concerned: advocates of direct conciliar democracy were given the referendum, liberal parliamentarians received the national parliament, the old-school monarchists were given a president. The new parliament met at Weimar, a city intended to become the symbol of the new German unity, the city of such great minds as Herder, Goethe and Schiller, and also of the pleasant, unsullied German countryside. Weimarwas also a city that could be easily defended, if necessary, by a handful of loyal troops, but no one mentioned that in public.
    Six months later, on 10 January, 1920, the Treaty of Versailles came into force. The German Army had to be reduced to a quarter of the size of the former
Kaiserliche Armee
. This meant the end of the
Freikorps
. The wild and rowdy mercenaries, however, had no intention of letting that happen; their generals, including Ludendorff, tried to seize power. The Ehrhardt Brigade mentioned earlier refused to be disbanded. On the night of Friday, 12 March, 1920, acting on orders from Wolfgang Kapp and General Walther von Lüttwitz, the
Freikorps
’ 5,000 members marched in formation into the heart of Berlin to occupy the government ministries and ‘crush without mercy every sliver of resistance’. The hours that followed were chaotic, the army refused to take sides, and finally – at their wit's end – the government called in the help of the former revolutionary forces. ‘Fight with every means to preserve the republic! Lay aside all internal differences. There is only one effective remedy for the dictatorship of Wilhelm II: a total shutdown of all economic activity!'Then the government ministers made good their escape.
    Nevertheless, the ‘Kapp Putsch’ was a miserable failure, the general strike called for in such desperation by the former government a resounding success. Never had Germany experienced a paralysis as complete as the one that followed. No trains or trams ran. No letters were delivered. No factory opened its gates. In Berlin there was no water, gas or electricity. Almost all government offices were closed. No newspapers appeared. The leaders behind the putsch had absolutely no grip on society. No decree made it past the minister's offices. Within a week, it was all over. It was the final, unified manifestation of a socialist Germany.
    Act Five, the drama's grand finale. The violent revolution went underground. After 1920, a variety of covert groups sprang up amid the ranks of the army and the
Freikorps
.