Dreamers E-Book

Volker Weidermann

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

History that reads like a novel: the story of the writers and intellectuals behind the failed Bavarian Revolution of 1918, by the author of the acclaimed Summer Before the Dark The bloody war has lasted more than four years. They aren't just going to let it burn out... Something bright and new has to-has to-come out of the darkness. Munich, November 1918: in the final days of the First World War, revolutionaries open the doors of military prisons, occupy official buildings and overthrow the monarchy. At the head of the newly declared Free State of Bavaria is journalist and theatre critic Kurt Eisner, and around him rally luminaries of German cultural history: Thomas Mann, Ernst Toller and Rainer Maria Rilke. Yet the dream cannot last: in February 1919, Eisner is assassinated and the revolution fails. But while it survived, it was the writers, the poets. the playwrights and the intellectuals who led the way, imagining new ways of shaping the world. In his characteristically vivid, sharp prose, Volker Weidermann hones in on a short moment in history, revealing an extraordinary flourishing of revolutionary potential that could have altered the course of the twentieth century. The award-winning writer and literary critic Volker Weidermann was born in Germany in 1969, and studied political science and German language and literature in Heidelberg and Berlin. He is the cultural editor of the Der Spiegel, and the author of Summer Before the Dark, which is also published by Pushkin Press.

Leseprobe

DREAMERS

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGETHE SHOT A MUNICH OF POSSIBILITIES COUNTER-SHOT BEACH SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOUT THE PUBLISHERCOPYRIGHT

THE SHOT

IT HAD BEEN A FAIRY TALE, of course—nothing but a fairy tale that had become reality for a few weeks. And now it was over. It would have been ridiculous to cling to power any longer: the election results in January had been too devastating for that. Two per cent, it was a joke, a cruel, bad joke. Ever since, the press had been subjecting him not only to more of their frenzied hatred, but to mockery and scorn as well. A people’s king without a people, a jester on the king’s throne, un-Bavarian crackpot, Jewish upstart.

Kurt Eisner had given up. His negotiations with his archenemy Erhard Auer, the leader of the Social Democrats, had gone on late into the night. “Negotiations” was hardly the right word. He had nothing left to bargain with. Auer had offered him the position of Ambassador to Prague; he might as well have said Consular Secretary to Australia. It was over. He’d had his chance and done what he could to transform the Kingdom of Bavaria into a people’s republic, a land of solidarity and altruism.

It was a dream, to suddenly find himself sitting in the prime minister’s seat on the night of 7th November. Sometimes you just had to be quick-witted enough to recognize the moment when it arrived. And it arrived on 7th November 1918.

A sunny afternoon; tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, unionists and workers had gathered on the western slope of the Theresienwiese. The mood was tense. The Minister of the Interior, von Brettreich, had had the city plastered with posters announcing that order would be maintained. The Social Democratic Party’s Erhard Auer had given him his personal assurance of that the previous day. A revolution was not about to break out. Kurt Eisner, parliamentary candidate for the Independent Social Democrats, who had been invoking the coming revolution for days, would be “forced to the wall”, that was how Auer had put it. He said he had the situation in hand.

He didn’t have anything in hand. There was chaos that afternoon: more and more people arriving; soldiers streaming in from the barracks, most of them having torn off their insignia. The men—and a few women—stood in little groups, clustering first around one speaker, then another. Auer had secured the best position for himself, on the grand steps leading up to the statue of Bavaria. But when the crowds realized he was just trying to placate them, promising them jam in some far-off tomorrow, they moved on to the other speakers further down the slope.

Kurt Eisner was standing right at the bottom. He was almost yelling, waving his arms in the air. A crowd was forming around the man with the long grey hair, the pince-nez, the wild beard and the large hat. He had a good name among those who were hoping for revolution: he had organized the munition workers’ strike in January, had spent six months in prison for it.

His speaking style was not particularly rousing; his voice was scratchy and high-pitched. He had some trouble making himself heard above the other speakers. But the crowd sensed that, today, this was their man. He wasn’t going to send them home. He could feel the energy of the day, the rage, the will for some decisive thing to happen at last. The king had been seen that morning taking a stroll through the English Garden. Well, how much longer did he want to go on strolling? How much longer did he want to rule?

A young radical pacifist in a black coat—a coarse-featured baker’s son from the town of Berg on Lake Starnberg, who works in a Munich biscuit factory and has been a successful black-marketeer for a few weeks now, who has written poetry and literary criticism for the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten—is also standing spellbound, listening to Eisner. It is Oskar Maria Graf. He’s there with his friend, the artist Georg Schrimpf, who painted the cover picture for Graf’s first poetry collection, The Revolutionaries. It contained a short verse called “Adage”:

Sometimes we must be murderers;

Humility has only defiled us all,

And time passed us by, mantled in too much weariness.

Hard-knocked, bowed by drudgery

Fate’s mercenary grits his teeth

And blindly hurls himself into the teeming flood

He will be purified

And rise again a raw, sleepless penitent,

Knowing his final mission…

For almost two years, the pair attended the pre-revolutionary Monday meetings at the Golden Anchor tavern in Ludwigsvorstadt, where Kurt Eisner was a regular speaker. That’s where they know him from, albeit at a distance. “Good God, the whole of Munich is here,” says Graf. “This is a real opportunity! I hope they don’t just go home again today without taking some action.” A bearded, uniformed giant hears and flashes him a supercilious smile. “Oh no, we ain’t goin’ home today… Goin’ somewhere else today… Any minute now.”

At that moment the people around them start shouting “Peace!” and “Long live the world revolution!” and “Long live Eisner!” Then silence descends for a minute and from further up the hill, from Bavaria, where the conciliatory Auer is speaking, the sound of cheering reaches them. Eisner’s close friend Felix Fechenbach, a twenty-five-year-old writer with a doughy face and a sparse beard, calls out to the throng: “Comrades! Our leader Kurt Eisner has spoken! There’s no sense in wasting any more words! If you’re for the revolution, follow us! Follow me! March!”

The crowd surges forward as one, up the slope, heading for the Westend. On they go, past shops with their shutters pulled down, on towards the barracks. Graf and his friend Georg, whom everyone calls Schorsch, are marching almost at the head of the column, just five paces away from Eisner. Graf will later say of the man who has suddenly become their leader: “He was pale and his expression deadly serious; he didn’t speak a word. It almost looked as if the sudden turn of events had taken him by surprise. Now and then he would stare straight ahead, half fearful and half distracted. He was walking arm in arm with the broad-shouldered, blind peasant leader Gandorfer, who strode along purposefully. His movements were much freer, he was heavy-footed and solid, and walked just as you’d imagine a Bavarian peasant might. The two of them were surrounded by a vanguard of loyal followers.”

There are more and more of them. The police have fallen back, windows are opening, people looking out, silent, curious. The first armed men join the march, the mood is bright, as if they’re going to a festival. Someone tells them the seamen have taken the Residence, there is an effervescent cheer, the excitement grows.

Where are they marching to? Their pale, determined leader seems to be following a schedule. They head resolutely further out of the city. Eventually the crowd plunges down a dark alley. Halt! comes the cry from the front. Where are they now? A school?

It’s the Guldein School, which for the past few years has been used as a war barracks. The first shot is fired, people are on the edge of panic, some rush into the school, most push their way back out. Before long a window on the top floor of the school building is thrown open, and someone waves a red flag and shouts: “The men are for the revolution! They’ve all come over! Onward! March! March on!”

That is the moment. From then on, everything seems to happen of its own accord. More and more soldiers join them, they have torn the epaulettes from their shoulders, tied scraps of red cloth to their uniforms, a new community is forming. Children walk alongside the crowd, cheering. At one point they meet a soldier coming the other way, a paymaster, still wearing his insignia. They rip off his epaulettes, shove him from one person to the next. A giant of a man wants to lay hands on him. The soldier starts to weep and the brawny Oskar Maria Graf steps in: “Let him go! Come on, it’s not his fault!” It takes some effort to placate the giant, who eventually mutters that Graf is right, but then also says: “Mind though, can’t afford to be too kind!”

They march on from one barracks to the next. The same scene plays out again and again. A few men go in while Eisner and the others wait outside, and at some point a window opens and a red flag emerges. Cheering in the street; the crowd waits for their own people and the men they are bringing with them from the barracks, and then on they go.

After a while the group splits. They have heard the Maximilian II Barracks on Dachauer Straße is going to give them trouble. Shots are being fired there. That spurs on the group around Oskar Maria Graf, and they hurry on. When the sentry at the gate catches sight of the men, he drops his gun and runs away. The revolutionaries walk in. An officer has assembled a small troop in the exercise yard and is putting them through their paces, his back to the main gate. He doesn’t even manage to turn around before someone hits him full-force over the head, ramming his helmet down far below his ears. At the same time, the soldiers abandon their weapons and run to the revolutionaries. “It’s over! Revolution! March!” they cry.

Events are gathering pace, the people finding a sudden energy despite their exhaustion. The bloody war has lasted more than four years. They aren’t just going to let it burn out and leave them in this twilight. Something bright and new has to—has to—come out of the darkness.

An Alpine herdsman whoops as if he is dancing a thigh-slapping Schuhplatteln, and a soldier on the fringes of the crowd gives an impromptu speech calling for the formation of soldiers’ councils. The crowd presses on, to the military prison. Soldiers batter the locked gate with hatchets and rifle butts until it gives way, seemingly of its own accord. Later, Graf recalls: “I can still see in my mind’s eye the cell doors opening and the prisoners coming out. One looked at us, wide-eyed and strange—he flinched and then suddenly broke into heartbreaking sobs. Then he fell wearily onto the breast of a short man and clung to him. Over and over, he howled: ‘Thank you! Thank you! God bless you, God bless you!’”

Cell after cell is opened. The inmates stream out and join the crowd, which finally turns back towards the city centre. On Isartorplatz, Graf bursts into a hair salon where his friend Nanndl is working. He calls out to her: “Revolution! Revolution! Victory is ours!” She beams and drops the curling iron, but Graf is already gone.

The procession splits up; people keep stopping at the roadside to give speeches, and the streets of Munich’s old town are too narrow to hold them all. Where now? Where will the republic be proclaimed?

Graf and Schorsch have come adrift from the main crowd. They cross over the River Isar to the Franziskaner beer hall. People are saying Eisner will speak there later. They order sausages and beer, ready for Eisner’s revolutionary speech. But conviviality still reigns in the Franziskaner. Someone shouts: “Hey Wally, a pork knuckle over here!” No one is talking about politics, councils, the king, the war. Just beer and sausages and tobacco. Is no one here going to get fired up? What a comfortable, convivial people the Bavarians are!

When the two revolutionaries leave the Franziskaner, sated and merry, and turn back towards the old town, the streets are a bustle of activity. Everyone has heard some rumour or other. Evening promenaders are promenading up and down outside the Residence. Is the king still there? Will they see him one last time? Will they be present when the last of the Wittelsbach line leaves his city palace, where his family has reigned uninterrupted for 900 years? Oskar Maria Graf savours the new air and the possibilities hanging over the city, and above all the approaching end of this long, long war.

In the meantime, the main contingent has moved on to the Mathäserbräu beer hall, between the central railway station and Stachus Square. Nine in the evening, and there are sausages and beer and pork knuckles here too, but no cosy conviviality, only an industrious hum, eager concentration, astonishment and resolve. A workers’ council is voted in, a soldiers’ and a peasants’ council too, organs of self-government, modelled on the Russian Soviets.

The blind peasant leader Ludwig Gandorfer is always at Kurt Eisner’s side. Eisner is adamant that the peasants should be involved in the new government. The food supply situation in Munich is already difficult. If the peasants are not on their side and the people go hungry, then the revolution will be over in just a few days.

Outside, in front of the Mathäserbräu, lorries loaded with guns and ammunition are arriving and leaving. When soldiers and workers turn up, they are given weapons and sent off in small groups by the revolutionary council to occupy the city’s public buildings.

Ministries, the central station, the army headquarters—one site after another falls into the revolutionaries’ hands. Men wearing red armbands stride around the city. They are going to turn all of Munich red, red and new and peaceful and free.

In the Wittelsbach palace, the family seat of Ludwig III, there is chaos, dissolution, horror, bafflement. Where is the palace guard? Disbanded. Where are the royal troops to put an end to the terror outside? Prime Minister von Dandl and Minister of the Interior von Brettreich report to the king. No, this could not have been anticipated. Yes, Auer, the leader of the Social Democrats, assured them there would be no revolution. No, there is nothing to be done now and it would be best for the king and his family to leave the city immediately.

Then everything happens very quickly. The queen is ill with a fever; her physician has just been to see her. That doesn’t make matters any easier. Where should they flee to? They settle on Castle Wildenwart near the Chiemsee. But how to get there? The first chauffeur has gone over to the revolutionaries. The second is with his sick wife. He is called in. The ailing queen learns of their imminent flight at her dressing table. The king has an old valet help him into his grey hunting coat, lined with possum fur. He tucks a box of cigars under his arm and is ready. The princesses Helmtrud, Hildegard, Gundelinde and Wiltrud, the queen, two gentleman courtiers, a baroness and the lady-in-waiting come to join him. The little royal group slips out of the city under cover of darkness.

By then, Kurt Eisner and his faithful followers have left the Mathäserbräu and are on their way to the Landtag, the state parliament in Prannerstraße. The night porter stops them on their way into the labyrinthine building, a large bunch of keys in his hand. No, he’s not letting anyone in now, it’s the middle of the night, and he’s not about to surrender the keys either. A worker steps up and claps him on the shoulder: “Now then my friend, let’s not cause a scene. Don’t you know what hour is at hand?” The confused porter looks at his watch to check; the worker grows impatient, says no, he wasn’t asking for the time, calls the porter an old fool and snatches the keys from him.

The small revolutionary troop leaves the bewildered key-master behind and heads towards the debating chamber. The worker tries a few keys, finally finds the right one and they go in, Eisner, purposeful and self-assured, striding straight up to the prime minister’s rostrum. At his side are Felix Fechenbach and the dramatist and journalist Wilhelm Herzog, the husband of the celebrated film diva Erna Morena, who has just been appointed by Eisner as the new government’s Press Secretary and Chief Censor.

Eisner sits down in the prime minister’s seat; Fechenbach and Herzog take the secretaries’ chairs to either side. Workers stream into the chamber, a few women carrying red parasols. “It was a picturesque scene,” Herzog later recalls. The noise, the excitement, the whispering, the shouts, the expectation, the disbelief, the joy, the Bavarian parliament in the middle of the night.

Kurt Eisner looks down at all the people. He brushes his long hair back from his forehead. He is standing up now, and soon he will speak, proclaim himself provisional Prime Minister and Bavaria a free state.

But for a moment he just watches. Is he casting his mind back? To his early days as a writer, his first book about Friedrich Nietzsche in 1892, when very little had been written about the man and his philosophy? To his critique of what he had called Nietzsche’s “religion of hardness”, which was “anti-socialist in its misanthropy”? When Eisner, even then, had considered socialism “a clear and achievable goal”.

He had worked as a journalist for the Herold telegraph service, then as a sub-editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but already his ambition was driving him towards higher things. He wanted to review books, write leading articles, he asked for an interview with Leopold Sonnemann, the founder of that renowned paper. To no avail.

Eisner went to the regional Hessische Landeszeitung in Marburg and wrote articles that were admired throughout Hessen, in which he confidently mocked Wilhelmine politics, landed gentry and the feudal system. At the start of 1897, when one of his articles was a little over-confident, he was sent to Plötzensee prison for nine months for lèse-majesté. He had written: “Give us a population of free, strict and demanding judges, and we might become king ourselves.”

Is he recalling these lines now, as he suddenly finds himself on the throne? Or is he thinking of what came after his imprisonment? He had been hired at once by Vorwärts, the influential newspaper of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He was responsible for the Sunday supplement, which he called “Sunday chatter”, a mix of private and political topics, family and party.

But he had numerous enemies on the paper, especially among the elite and the party functionaries. Rosa Luxemburg, Victor Adler, Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring: they called him a fanatic, a madman, a fantasist, a literary aesthete. Once, when he had heaped overly fulsome praise on a speech by August Bebel, Bebel wrote to him saying that Eisner’s admiration was exaggerated, and that his enthusiasm embarrassed him. He was sacked from Vorwärts in 1905.

After that, he wrote for the Fränkische Tagespost and the Münchener Post, and moved to Munich with his family. In recent years he has appeared in public, speaking out against the war, with increasing frequency. His own party, the SPD, was pro-war. It approved war bonds in parliament, and any opposition to them from within the party’s ranks was viewed as treason against the Fatherland.

Then, in April 1917, there was a split. A new national Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) was founded in Gotha. The new party’s main aim was to end the war and win back international trust. Kurt Eisner attended the first party conference, kept taking the floor, and became one of the leading personalities in this new anti-war party.

And the war was really over! It was finally over! Had everything now suddenly become reality? Had art become reality? His dreams of art, which he had written about in all his theatre criticism? His speech in Berlin that year, when he talked about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and recalled that, “On 18th March 1905, to commemorate the March Revolution and Friedrich Schiller, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was performed to the proletariat in a Berlin brewery hall, in the middle of the workers’ quarter. For the first time in history. Almost 3,000 people were packed into the hot, overcrowded hall—silent, reverential, doing their best to understand.” The proletariat, he went on, was now too strong and too mature to keep allowing itself to be patronized in matters of high art. “Everywhere, it is reaching for great heights, for the stars.” And: “A sense of release welled up from the depths. Joy!”

He had put all his dreams and convictions into this Beethoven speech. All that he wanted to fight for. “Art is no longer an escape from life; it is life itself,” he proclaimed. And finally, he laid out his vision: “If mankind, having achieved freedom and maturity through the struggle of proletarian socialism, is one day reared on the global hymn of the Ninth, if it should become the catechism of their souls, then and only then will Beethoven’s art have returned to the home from which it once fled: to life.”

His new book, which he had completed and prepared for printing while he was in prison following the strike in the munitions factories, is to bear the title Dreams of the Prophet. Yes, Kurt Eisner is a dreamer and a prophet. And he has spent a long time fighting and writing for this moment in the Bavarian Landtag.

He has to pull himself together. He has to give his speech. At his side, Fechenbach is a little nervous. Eisner is not a good public speaker. He thinks too much, his thoughts lack structure and all too often he flounders, surprised by his own pathos.

But when Kurt Eisner starts to speak he is assured, firm and clear, “with a fiery temper, and the effect of his words could be read on every face”. He talks for twenty minutes, completely off the cuff. Even the two men in the secretaries’ seats to either side of him are so captivated that they fail to take notes. No one takes notes. Kurt Eisner’s revolutionary speech, in which he declares Bavaria a free state and himself the head of its government, is undocumented.

Later, Herzog recalls a few lines. He says that Eisner began: “The Bavarian Revolution has triumphed. It has swept away the dead wood of the Wittelsbach kings.” And then he hands power to himself: “The man who is speaking to you at this moment presupposes your agreement to his assuming the role of provisional Prime Minister.” Cheering breaks out on the benches below. Eisner takes that as confirmation that he is now Prime Minister; he goes on, calling on everyone to stand united and keep the peace.

When he has finished, he lowers himself back into the prime-ministerial seat. Then he beckons Herzog to him and whispers in his ear: “We’ve forgotten the most important thing. The proclamation. Draft the wording, please. Quickly. Then we’ll go into a side room and look through it together.”

While Wilhelm Herzog is drafting the proclamation and Eisner is gazing pensively down at his people, far away on the Trudering road the royal family is slowly making its way towards Rosenheim. The night is foggy, the driver can hardly see the way ahead, and the car suddenly comes off the road and gets stuck in a potato field. All efforts to heave it out are in vain. The king, his cigars, his wife and his daughters are not going anywhere. The chauffeur sets off on foot to fetch help. The royal family is left in a field, in total darkness. Eventually the chauffeur comes back with some soldiers who are billeted in a nearby farmhouse, and a couple of horses. He also has a paraffin lamp. The sick farmer’s wife, whom he met in the yard, didn’t want to give it to him, but he finally managed to buy it from her for twenty marks. The horses pull the car out of the field—it immediately threatens to sink back into the mud on the other side of the road, but after a while they manage to right it. They drive on, cautiously and quietly, through the night.

At four o’clock the next morning, the family reaches Castle Wildenwart. They left home as royalty and have arrived as ordinary citizens.

“The Wittelsbach dynasty is hereby deposed.” These are the final words of the proclamation that Wilhelm Herzog has written out in a side room off the debating chamber. He rushed it to Kurt Eisner just before midnight; the latter read it over and, to Herzog’s surprise, largely approved it. There were just two or three sentences he wanted to change. And then: out with it to the telegraph offices and the newsrooms. Eisner has added a handwritten note: “To be printed on the 1st page (front page).”

“Fellow countrymen!” it says in giant letters at the top of the page. “In order to rebuild after long years of destruction, the people have overturned the power of the civil and military authorities and taken government into their own hands. The Bavarian government is hereby proclaimed.”

Looking at the little group who were left in the debating chamber, did Eisner have a moment of doubt as to whether these people were really “the people”? Perhaps not. His happiness was too great, the chance to realize his dreams had come to him too suddenly and too easily. And there was no time for reflection now, in any case: he had far too much to do.

For example, the editor-in-chief of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, the large Munich daily paper, now bursts into the parliament building. He is denied entry to the chamber, and a worker brings Eisner the irate man’s visiting card. “You talk to him,” Eisner tells Wilhelm Herzog. “And by the by, we don’t have a press censor yet. As of now, that will be your responsibility.” And he writes down the new post he has just given Herzog on a slip of paper. An impromptu identity card for the Chief Censor of the new People’s Republic.

Very well then: Herzog agrees, and strides out to see the furious editor, who roars that the whole of his publishing house and print works are occupied, it’s a catastrophe, if this situation continues the paper won’t come out tomorrow, or at least not punctually, which would be the first time that has happened since it was founded in 1848.

“Yes, well,” says Herzog, “we haven’t had a revolution in Bavaria since then, either.” In any case, he says, it really wouldn’t be such a catastrophe if just this once people got their morning paper at nine or ten o’clock rather than six. “At least then, they will notice something has changed.”

The Chief Censor is handed some copies of the proclamation. He gives one to editor-in-chief Müller, tells him to print it, and says his paper can come out as normal.

But how? The whole place is still occupied by those ruffians with the red armbands. When Müller gets back to the editorial offices and the printing shop, he does at least see that everything is once again running in an orderly fashion. The revolutionaries are allowing his staff to get on with their nocturnal work.

But where is he going to put the proclamation? The editor in charge of the machines has an idea. There is currently a full-page advert on the second page. He stops the machines, swaps the current page one to page two, and the news of the day goes on the front page, as instructed by the new government: “To the people of Munich!” it begins. There follows a brief account of the night’s events from the revolutionaries’ point of view, and then: “From this moment on, Bavaria is a free state. A people’s government, borne up by the faith of the masses, shall be appointed without delay.” It goes on: “A new age is upon us! Bavaria wants to prepare Germany for the League of Nations. The democratic and social Republic of Bavaria has the moral strength to bring about a peace for Germany that will protect it from the worst.”

This text is also designed to have a placatory, reassuring effect on the populace, assuring it that the “strictest order” will be maintained through the Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Councils. “The safety of people and property is guaranteed.” It is an appeal to everyone, to every man and woman in Munich: “Workers and citizens of Munich! Trust in the great and mighty future we are shaping in these momentous days! You can help to make the unavoidable transformation quick and easy […] Every human life is sacred. Keep the peace and play your part in building this new world!” Signed by Kurt Eisner, in the early morning of 8th November 1918, in the Bavarian Landtag.

Shortly before this, at around midnight, the leader of the Social Democrats Erhard Auer and the union secretary Schiefer come to see Brettreich, the Minister of the Interior. The minister has summoned Auer. Hadn’t Auer given him his word that he need fear no revolutionary uprising? That order would be maintained? A demonstration, a little music, and then everyone would disperse peacefully. Had Auer lied to him? Did he not have his people under control?

In fact, Brettreich already knows what has happened. Auer really did lead his calm, well-disciplined little group back into the city that afternoon and send his people home. No one was angrier than Auer at the fact that the Independents and the Communists had gone to the barracks with Eisner and then, like the denouement of some beer-hall comedy, had got themselves elected to government in the Mathäserbräu by a few of their fighting comrades and drinking companions, with shouting and tankards held aloft.

And now, three men look helplessly at each other. Auer says that the government should have brought order over the course of the day. Brettreich says he no longer has any power over his people. Auer says the government needs to put down the uprising before morning. After that, the workforce will restore order by itself. The men part company. There is nothing for them to do. What will happen, will happen. Without them.

The revolutionaries still have much to do on this night.

The police headquarters is not yet in the hands of the uprising. Eisner sends Fechenbach off to see to that. Fechenbach sees to it. He hurries over to the headquarters, which is full of policemen standing around in little groups, discussing the events of the previous day and night. His red armband opens all doors to him. He goes from room to room, until he finally reaches the office of Chief of Police Rudolf von Beckh, who has gathered his section heads there for a meeting. Fechenbach explains that the councils have just taken provisional control of the government and would like to instruct him, the Chief of Police, to continue as head of the security services until they are reorganized. A police supervisory board will be appointed in the course of the night. And right now, he must sign a declaration for Fechenbach stating that he will follow all orders issued by the councils. The Chief of Police requests some time to think. There is complete silence in the room as the section heads look at each other awkwardly, then he makes up his mind, writes a declaration of loyalty on a sheet of paper and adds: “If I should be unable to fulfil this commitment, I must reserve the right to step down. Munich, 8th November 1918, 1 a.m. Chief of Police von Beckh.”

That night Josef Staimer, a former warehouseman, union secretary and current head of the Soldiers’ Council, is assigned to von Beck to oversee his work; the next morning, this man is made Chief of Police himself.

On this curious night, things seem to happen of their own accord. Power over the state simply falls to Kurt Eisner and his people.

And who is this now, arriving at the Landtag at two in the morning and getting through to see the Prime Minister? A young artillery officer, out of breath, red-faced, stands before Eisner and says: “I’ve come from Schleißheim, where there are eight hundred men, twenty guns and a few howitzers. All at your service!” To which Eisner replies: “Excellent! Bring them all here and station the artillery outside the building.”

So this forgotten problem also appears to have solved itself, for the time being. The city’s troops were, after all, disbanded in the afternoon. And even if many of the soldiers are on the side of the revolutionaries, or at least not on the side of the old king, there still isn’t a single functioning unit under the new government’s command. The soldiers are all just roaming around or sitting in beer halls, or they’ve gone home. Now the Schleißheim troops will provide a minimal level of protection for the first days of the regime.

And now it is three o’clock in the morning. Kurt Eisner, the new ruler of Bavaria, the wild-haired theatre critic who recognized his moment so quickly and seized it with such determination, is tired. His friend Fechenbach has found a sofa in one of the meeting rooms for parliamentary groups. He and Wilhelm Herzog counsel the Prime Minister to sleep for a little while.

“Where?” asks Eisner. “On the benches, where the honourable members of parliament liked to sleep?”

“No,” says Fechenbach. “We’ve found a room with a day bed for you. You can lie down for an hour there.”

He takes Eisner to the meeting room. As the people’s king flops exhausted onto the sofa, he says: “Is this not miraculous? We have staged a revolution without spilling a drop of blood! There has never been such a thing in history.”

Outside on the streets of Munich, silence has long since fallen. An occasional shot is fired in the night. The stars are out. A drunk man in a dark overcoat staggers alone through the streets of Schwabing. “Movement! Bang! Bang! Bang!” he crows into the night. “Mooove-ment!” Does anyone hear him?

It is Oskar Maria Graf, filling the night with noise. In the evening he lost sight of the action, getting to the Mathäserbräu too late and then hurrying over to the royal Residence just as the king was leaving through another exit.

There, Graf met his best black-market customer, Anthony van Hoboken, a fabulously wealthy Dutchman. In the last few weeks he has bought ox tongues, wine, butter and other rare delicacies from Graf, who gets them from a shady wholesaler. Hoboken—Graf just calls him the sheep-faced Dutchman—comes from a Rotterdam banking family. He has a great love of literature, an even greater love of music, and most of all he loves private parties with female artists, painters, witty writers who live large and drink heavily. After concluding their business, he has often asked Graf to stay and have a drink. And Graf has had a drink. Every time.

Now they spot each other from a distance, wave, and Graf calls out to him: “The glory days are over now!” He actually means the Dutchman and his money and grandeur and high living. But the Dutchman himself seems to be in fine spirits, splendidly entertained by the city’s revolutionary mood. The lover at his side cries out in a little girl’s voice: “Yes, isn’t it fabulous!”

She is a sparkling person who calls herself Marietta of Monaco. Her real name is Maria Kirndörfer and she is a petite, fine-boned twenty-five-year-old who grew up with foster parents in Munich, attended a convent school, spent some time on the streets and was discovered by chance as an elocutionist in 1913 in the Schwabing cabaret bar Simplicissimus. During the war she went to Zurich and became one of the founding members of Cabaret Voltaire. She used to introduce herself with a little piece she called “Who am I?”

I am a bright bouncing ball.

Rich boys roll me across silken rugs.

Children coo over me.

I slip through the elegant fingers of notable people.

But sometimes rough lads come and play football.

Then I sail from their shoes into the crystal bowl of

The most noble queen.

She has been back in Munich for some time, singing and declaiming in the Schwabing bars favoured by artists, which are now all revolutionary bars, and slipping through the elegant fingers of this notable Dutchman. People call her the “muse of Schwabylon”. Everyone who sees her is entranced.

Marietta and the Dutchman, then, are delighted by the night’s events, and Graf, who was convinced that the primary targets of this revolution would be the bigwigs, parasites and millionaires, is momentarily surprised. How terribly his poverty has made him suffer! He became father to a baby girl in June and is unhappily married to Karoline Bretting—very unhappily married, from the first day on. But until he came up with his black-market scheme, his greatest suffering was caused by always being short of money. “Over time, money really became something like a demon for me, and it ruled my life. Everything the poets and philosophers went on about was all nonsense: morality, ethics and strength of character, idealism and God knows what other good qualities. These qualities were ultimately all subordinate—money made them or snuffed them out. Mankind had invented something to which, over time, he inevitably surrendered himself, body and soul,” he wrote later.

Might the revolution now take this devilish invention and simply—abolish it? Wasn’t that inevitable, in fact? So why were this sheep-faced man and his muse of Schwabylon so cock-a-hoop?

But Graf didn’t care now. The world had begun to teeter, a new world was emerging at long last, and he just wanted to celebrate. He went home with the Dutchman and Marietta, they drank and drank late into the night, and Graf finally staggered home in the early hours of the morning. The streets of Schwabing were empty and silent; now and then a shot echoed through the night. The revolution was asleep.

When Graf gets home, he writes a letter to his wife: “I don’t like you any more! I never liked you! It was all just lies and pity! Let me be! Let us go our separate ways!” Everything has broken open, in the city and within him, too; outside everything has changed, and now he has to change as well. He is in love with someone else, he calls her “the girl”, or sometimes “the black girl”: Mirjam Sachs, with her black eyes and her soft face. She is studying in Munich but comes from Berlin, and is a friend of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She, the black girl, is who Graf wants to live with. No more lies, no more pity, no more compromises. The letter is finished. He leaps up from the table. What he has written is sheer madness. He tears it up, gets into bed and falls asleep, the night’s last revolutionary. Drunk. Married. Ready for a new land. A new life.

A slender, delicate man with large eyes and large lips spent the evening in quite a different way. With a young woman who calls herself Elya, Elya like the king’s daughter from the old Augsburg St George mystery play that she had acted in a few weeks earlier. He had seen her in it. “Rilke’s here,” her partner had whispered to her while they were still on stage. And the next day: “Rilke’s here again.” And on the day of the final performance: “Rilke wants to come up to the stage after the show. He wants to meet you.”

But then he had not come after all, and she had written him a letter, the man whose poems she knew by heart—they had been a life to her. She knew him already from his words, was close to him without ever having met him: “Rainer Maria,” she wrote, “once I loved your soul almost as one loves God. That was when I first read the Book of Hours.” And she ended: “Can just one soul not live larger, this depressing workaday life—larger and more inwardly.”