An uprising passes by without trace in big cities.\nA revolution has to be great and victorious if the traces of havoc,\nits heroic abrasions and white bullet-scars on walls pock-marked by\nmachine-gun fire are to be preserved on stone and iron if only for a\nfew years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two or three days or two or three weeks later,\ntogether with shreds of newspapers and tattered posters either ripped\nfront the walls by bayonet points or washed off by dirty showers of\nrain, the brief memory of street battles, churned-up roadways and\ntrees thrown like bridges across river-like streets and stream-like\nalleyways also passes away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prison doors slam behind the convicted while\nfellow-fighters, thrown out of their factories, are compelled to look\nfor work in another city or a remote district; those who are\nunemployed following the defeat take refuge in the most far-flung and\nanonymous nooks; the women keep quiet, the children, wary of the\nsecurity policeman’s smarmy inquiries, deny everything. Thus the\nlegend of the days of the Rising dies away, forgotten and drowned by\nthe noise of restored traffic and resumed work. In corners of\nworkshops a new group of workers that has taken over at the deserted\nbenches in the factories may still repeat a name or two and recall\nthe particularly good shots — but that too is passing away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For a worker there is no history within the\nconfines of the bourgeois state; the list of his heroes is kept by\nthe drumhead courtmartial and the factory guard from a Menshevik [1]<\/a>\ntrade union. The bourgeoisie, once having cracked down with armed\nforce, stifles the hateful memory of the danger it has so recently\nescaped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Several months have already passed since the\nHamburg Rising. But, strange as it may seem, its memory stubbornly\nrefuses to vanish: yet the traces of barricades have been carefully\nsmoothed over, trains run peacefully along the embankments and\nviaducts that served as defensive or offensive parapets and seagulls\nrest on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three drumhead sausage-machines hastily shove the\nstreet fighters into jail; the doctors and prison inspectors have\nlong ago returned to the next of kin the last corpses mutilated\nbeyond recognition by brutality. And still the memory of that daring\nOctober endures. There is not a public house, workers’ gathering or\nproletarian family in the old free city of Hamburg in which the\namazing scenes enacted on those outlying streets are not recounted\nwith the pride of a participant or at least the involuntary\nadmiration of an onlooker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The explanation for the obstinacy with which the\ndockland proletariat maintains and watches over the memory of the\nOctober days lies in the fact that the Hamburg Rising was not smashed\nin a military, political or moral sense. The masses were not left\nwith the deep gall of defeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The protracted revolutionary process that had\nimpelled them to the barricades in October was broken neither on the\n24th when the whole police force and a crack Black Hundred unit of\nmarines and Reichswehr forces were mobilised, nor on the 26th when\ncompact police formations, thousands-strong cavalry and infantry\ndetachments and whole platoons of armoured cars finally burst into\nthe revolutionary suburbs which several hours before had been\nvoluntarily abandoned by the workers’ hundreds. On the contrary, the\nmovement that surfaced in October to rule the city for sixty hours,\ncracking the enemy’s head everywhere he dared to launch an assault\nupon the skilfully placed barricades, cost the workers only ten dead\nbut the police and troops dozens and hundreds of dead and wounded and\nafterwards calmly led its combatants out of the fire, saved and hid\ntheir weapons, brought its wounded into secure refuges in a planned\nretreat and then returned underground so as to be able to re-emerge\nat the first call of the all-German revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The beginning of the revolutionary movement has to\nbe counted not from October but from August of last year when Hamburg\nhad become the arena of successive bitter wage battles, for an\neight-hour day, pay based on the gold equivalent and a whole range of\nnot only economic but also purely political demands: a workers\ngovernment, control of production and so forth. These trade union\nbattles were accompanied by a rising strike fever and stormy\noutbursts of growing revolutionary hatred: raids on food warehouses\nand assaults on police and blacklegs. It was during these months\nespecially that Hamburg working women distinguished themselves,\nbeing, like all women from large ports, far more resourceful and\npolitically mature than their comrades in the majority of Germany’s\nindustrial centres. In the August of that year it was they who barred\ntheir husbands’ and workmates’ way into the striking shipyards.\nNeither police bayonets nor the weak-willed crowds of workers who\nwere ready to meet their employers on any conditions could thrust\ntheir human chain back from the Elbe tunnel. One of these dashes\nended with the disarming and beating up of a police detachment and,\nin particular, of the lieutenant who led it: for this he was drowned\nin the cold dirty waters of the Elbe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This movement starting in August could not have\nended in fiasco as the bourgeoisie crowed. Nor could it have fallen\nwith the brilliant military demonstration of 21-26 October but only\nwith the defeat or victory of the whole German working class. In this\ncontinuity and in this constant and protracted growth which marks the\nwork of the Hamburg comrades lies the crucial distinction between an\narmed uprising and the so-called political ‘putsch’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A ‘putsch’ has neither past nor future; only total\nvictory or an equally irrevocable and futile defeat. A revolution, if\nit is to be powerful and guided by a strong and elastic battle-ready\nparty, must be able to spring itself, pull back and recoil even after\nthe most reckless sally. But a weak, politically untrained and\nuntempered proletariat will live only in the hope of a brief blow, an\noutburst and very sharp, bloody but unsustained effort. Such a brief\nblow may well cost enormous sacrifices and the utmost effort but\nfragile and loosely-knit masses will face anything provided that\nbeyond that momentary assault there glimmers some hope of an\nephemeral but incontestably complete and final success. If after such\nan attempt at seizing power there follows a setback for one reason or\nanother these masses will fall out of line, drop out of any\norganisation and reinforce their defeat with acrimonious\nself-criticism. Regular cadres of politically mature masses will, on\nthe other hand, return from a storming operation to their old\nentrenchments still equal to long, gruelling, slow siege, sapper work\nin the underground and daily harrying operations. The Hamburg Rising,\nby virtue of the prolonged political process leading up to it and\neven more by the absolutely brilliant work carried out in the days\nand weeks immediately following its liquidation, forms the classic\nexample of a truly revolutionary uprising, evolving a quite\nremarkable strategy of street battles and a faultless retreat, unique\nof its kind, that left the masses with a sure sense of superiority\nover the enemy and an awareness of moral victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its results are unquestionable: never before has\nthe collapse of the old trade union organisations reached such\nelemental proportions as it did after those very October days. From\n25 October to 1 January more than thirty thousand members, each of\nmany years standing, dropped out of the ranks of the Menshevik trade\nunions. We shall go into detail below on the dastardly role played by\nthe trade union bureaucracy and its right wing during the October\ndays. The United Republicans and the Fatherland Defence Leagues,\nacting as a Menshevik household guard, publicly relieved the police\nin the quietest districts, thereby allowing the latter to concentrate\non subduing Hamm and Schiffbek. More about that below — here we\nshall just note that all these bellicose exploits by social democracy\nled to party cards being torn up and dumped in heaps at the doors of\nits recruiting offices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They lay in piles on the doorstep and hundreds of\nworkers, risking arrest or being shot by Reichswehr patrols, made\ntheir way to the trades union hall to toss their card at the\ntreachery-besmirched face of the bureaucracy. A whole number of the\nmajor trade unions in the coastal region such as, for example, the\nAmalgamated Union of Building Workers, came apart at every seam after\nthe October Rising. It was physically impossible to restrain members\nfrom a demonstrative mass exodus from the union. I managed to attend\nthe meeting of one of the builders’ branches that had,\neight-hundred-strong, decided to leave the union and organise its own\nassociation. Among those present were middle-aged men, not all party\nmembers, masters of their trade and not short of employment, men who\nhad paid their dues for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At such a meeting old men choking with fury\ndemanded a complete and immediate break with the ‘bonzes’. No\ncommunist could have more strongly hated or more deeply sensed the\nimmeasurable decline of the old party. Communist Party (KPD) members\nendeavoured in vain to dissuade the meeting from forming a ‘break\naway union’ and to insist on undermining the bureaucracy from the\ninside by forming a solid opposition that could increasingly extend\nits influence…<\/p>\n\n\n\n Workers disown the union as something utterly\nfilthy and unworthy of a single hard-earned penny contributed to its\nfunds. They have become deeply convinced that a worker who remains in\na Menshevik union for as much as a day forfeits his proletarian\nhonour and becomes party to the falsehood, murders and betrayal of\nthe SPD. After October, staying in the union, even for a middle-aged\nnon-party worker became tantamount to service with the Sipo [2]<\/a>\nor the Eins A.[3]<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Communist Party and the masses behind it have\ngrown infinitely stronger, externally as well as internally. Their\nactivity has not abated in spite of numerous arrests (incidentally\nthe majority of comrades were seized not during the Rising itself but\nonly when it was over and on the basis of voluntary denunciations\nmade by SPD workers and neighbours). On the contrary all the walls of\nHamburg are decorated with ineffaceable inscriptions. At every\ncrossroads and on the corner of every public building the inscription\nis invariably painted up:’The Communist Party lives. It cannot be\nbanned.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n Parliament may well vote for an Erm\u00e4chtgungsgesetz<\/em>\n(Enabling Act); Seeckt may well enjoy special powers and a White\ndictatorship may well gulp down the last dregs of tiny freedoms in\nlabour legislation, yet the walls of all the huts where the\nunemployed register are pasted over with new little communist posters\nlike wallpaper. They are sprinkled like snow from the gallery at all\nSPD meetings, stuck on pub walls and tram and underground train\nwindows. The women of the outlying areas, where all the male\npopulation is on the run or in various prisons, demand that posters\nand leaflets be sent out and if they have one grievance it is the\nlack of a cheap communist newspaper. All this so little resembles a\ndefeat that the drumhead court-martial judges, under pressure from\nthe masses’ silent threat, try to mitigate the sentences. The\nconvicted go to the fortress or hard labour camp with the pride and\ntranquillity of victors, in the unassailable certainty that the\nrevolution will never allow their five, seven or ten years of\nsolitary confinement to run their course, and with the most profound\nscornful disdain for the laws of the bourgeois state, the cowardly\nbrutality of its police force and the seemingly triumphant weight of\nits prison walls. Such a faith cannot mislead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So why didn’ t the whole country support the\nHamburg Risings?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the October days the whole of Germany was\ndivided into two camps confronting each other and awaiting the signal\nfor the offensive. But by then Saxony had already been inundated by\nthe police and the Reichswehr. Thus by the time of the Hamburg Rising\none of the revolution’s principal bridgeheads had in effect ceased to\nexist. Numerous groups of unemployed still filled Dresden’s nighttime\nstreets but hard on their heels, alongside and ahead of them,\nReichswehr units, armed, insolent and provocative, bit into the\nasphalt. A signal for battle given in Saxony at this moment would\nprobably have become the signal for the mass slaughter of Saxon\nworkers. During these very days a conference at Hamburg of workers\nemployed in the great shipyards of Hamburg, Lubeck, Stettin, Bremen\nand Wilhelmshaven was demanding the immediate declaration of a\ngeneral strike and the leaders only just managed to obtain from this\npolicy-making conference a postponement of the strike for a few days\n— yet the workers’ conference at Chemnitz turned down a general\nstrike. By now Saxony was under water and the proletariat, devoted to\nthe left social democrats to the last, turned instinctively away from\nan unfavourable collision that could perhaps have been fatal to the\nrevolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Berlin! Anyone who has seen Berlin in the October\ndays will certainly recall a feeling of astonishing ambivalence or,\nrather, ambiguity as the basic feature of its revolutionary turmoil.\nWomen and unemployed gave the streets a special tint. In the bread\nqueues and in front of butchers’ windows smart urchins whistling the\nInternationale pushed through between knots of despairing women. The\nslide of the mark, the derisory benefits paid out to the unemployed,\ndisabled and war widows, the inflated rates of pay, the breath-taking\nprices of immediate necessities, the ruination of the\npetty-bourgeoisie, the utter shamelessness of the Grand Coalition,\nthe cupping-glass that the Ruhr had become, the repressions by the\nFrench, the quiet mischiefs done by German capitalists that had been\ndragged into the light of day by the press and, overshadowing all the\nnewspaper columns, the spectre of the bloodied and coaldust-covered\nRuhr — all these were the clear portents of a revolution at hand.\nRich people’s motor cars were already avoiding the suburbs and the\npolice turned a blind eye to the looting of bakers’ shops. On the\noutskirts artillery kept rumbling over the stony wastes, edging ever\ncloser to the striking factories; the roar of lorries loaded with two\ntidily-formed lines of police did not moderate, but merely went to\nkindle the fury of the crowd besieging the markets and newspaper\nkiosk windows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet at the same time, vast and totally passive\nmasses of workers still subscribed to social democracy; hidden behind\nthe backs of the unemployed and communists were the extensive layers\nof the bourgeoisified proletariat, greedily clutching at a piece of\nbread, domestic comfort and a pound of margarine, however many hours\nit might be needed to earn all that. A cowardly, shrill, disgruntled\nmajority ready to sit out two or three days at home by the fire\nbehind a cup of lenten coffee and the latest little sheet of Vorw\u00e4rts<\/em>\nuntil the shooting in the street dies down, the dead and wounded are\ncarried away, the barricades dismantled and the victor, whoever he\nmay be — a Bolshevik, Ludendorff or Seeckt — has put the vanquished\nin jail and a lawful government in the seat of power. Alongside an\nextremely active vanguard there was this distended, decayed,\nexpectant rear ready in event of a failure to denounce a communist\nneighbour who had lain in a trench beneath the very window of some\nworthy socialist official concealed behind his net curtain. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Berlin as in Hamburg (only certain quarters\nwith a solidly working-class population excepted) the proletariat had\nto resist General Seeckt’s gendarmerie and troops in complete\nisolation without the active assistance of broad masses, without hope\nof rein forcements at the toughest moments and sometimes, as in\nHamburg, with virtually no weapons. Nevertheless the rising in\nHamburg undertaken in equally, or almost equally unfavourable\nconditions, not only did not lead to defeat but gave quite astounding\nresults. The truth is that behind it stood the whole of working-class\nGermany that, unbroken by the counter-revolution in an open\nbattle,<\/em> could materially and morally cover the heroic retreat of\nthe Hamburg pioneers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, the job of a party out to conquer is nor\njust to keep a feverish watch out for the historic moment, that\nso-called ‘twelfth hour of the bourgeoisie’, when the hands of the\nclock of history hesitate for an instant and then mechanically count\noff the first seconds of the communist era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is an old German tale: a valiant knight\nspent all his life in a magic cave waiting for a slowly swelling drip\nof water glistening from the tip of a stalactite to drop finally into\nhis mouth. At the last minute some absurdity would always stop him\nfrom catching the agonisingly awaited drip which would fall uselessly\non the sand. The worst part of course is not the actual point of\nfailure but the dead, hollow pause of disillusioned expectation\nbetween one burst and the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Hamburg they did not wait for dew from heaven.\nWhat they here so neatly and tersely call Die Aktion<\/em> was\nlinked into a strong chain of uninterrupted struggle, knitted to what\nhad gone before and finding its support in a future every day of\nwhich, be it one of success or failure, stands under the sign of a\nvictory that will smash the world like the head of a steam-hammer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides, the Rising occurred not in the province\nof Brandenburg, not in Prussia, and not in the Berlin of parliament,\nthe Siegsallee and Seeckt, but on the Wasserkante,<\/em> in English,\nthe seaside. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hamburg lies on the shore of the North Sea like a\nbig wet fish lifted still quivering from the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eternal fogs settle down on the pointed scaly\nroofs of its houses. Not one day remains true to its capricious,\npale, windy morning. With the tide’s ebb and flow there follow in\nsuccession damp, mildness, sunshine, the grey cold of the open sea\nand the interminable relentless rain that drenches the glistening\nasphalt like someone standing on the foreshore picking up from the\nsea an old ship’s bucket — the kind used for baling out leaky boats\nthat choke with water in a heavy swell– and swilling it out over gay\nHamburg; Hamburg, as impermeable as a pilot’s oilskins, steaming with\nmoisture, reeking like a seaman’s pipe, charred with the fires of the\ndockside bars yet standing firm under the torrential rain with legs\nset wide apart as if on deck, planted on the right and left banks of\nthe Elbe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All along the shores of this marvellous industrial\ninlet, nature has been universally eradicated like some prejudice\nleft out of our life by the eighteenth century. Not an inch of ground\nleft bare. Over a stretch of twenty or so miles are two trees, more\nresembling masts after a fire at sea than the useless living things\nthey are: the one on the jetty is hunched up like an old woman\nwalking against the wind on to whose thick woollen stockings and\nshivering legs the wind tosses shreds of angry foam; the other is at\nthe offices of Hamburg’s greatest shipyards, Blohm & Voss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This one only stays up out of fear; beneath it is\na disgusting black canal into which factory waste flows from gaping\npipes like inky vomit. A bridge, the guard’s cabin and, on the\nopposite bank in the pale light of five o’ dock in the morning,\nnothing but the shining windows of invisible blocks without walls or\nroofs in row after row up above the whole harbour, reaching out with\ntheir electricity to touch the very dawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the greatest of all these wonders, and the\nshapeliest forms in this realm of shapely metal, are the light\nshadowy jibs of the world’s largest cranes that arch over the\nharbour. Lying at their feet like toys are transatlantic liners,\nfully fitted-out with their illuminated rows of portholes and hideous\nparts below the waterline, like swans out of water which have equally\nugly underwater parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here they are working three shifts, convulsively\nand ruthlessly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, by wringing out the workers like wet\nwashing, the German bourgeoisie is making its last futile attempts to\nsurmount the crisis that paralyses it: building, creating new values\nand populating the oceans with its black-funnelled white ships from\nwhose sterns flutter the old imperial black-white-red banners with\nscarcely noticeable republican pock-marks on one of their fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As they say, Hamburg has everything — the smoke\nof factory chimneys, the elephant-trunks of the cranes with which the\niron mammoths ravage the holds and fill up the stone depositories,\nthe light, gently sloping bridges crisscrossing the new-born ships,\nwet beds, the howl of the sirens, the coarse yells of the hooters,\nthe ebb and flow of the ocean that makes sport with the jetsam and\nthe seagulls that settle on the water like floats, and the neat\ncubical dark red brick masses of the warehouses, offices, plants,\nmarkets and customs houses all built in straight lines and looking\nlike oblong piles of cargo recently stacked by the dockers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Armies and legions of workers are employed in\nthese shipyards, on loading and unloading the ships, in the\ninnumerable engineering, oil-refining and chemical plants, the\nseveral large-scale manufacturing works and the vast industrial\ninstallations that cover Hamburg’s rear, that marshy, sandy\nhinterland, with an unbroken crust of concrete and steel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Elbe, this ancient, dirty, warm-watered\ncoaching-yard for sea tramps, is continually extending and building\non to its concreted backyards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here the sea horses throw down their baggage, gulp\ndown oil and coal and get cleaned and washed while their captains\ngive in their bribes at the customs, touch up the bills and have a\nshave before going ashore to their families; meanwhile the crews go\noff and get nabbed en masse<\/em> in St. Pauli, a quarter for bars,\ngangs, ready-made dresses, pawnshops where the same garish,\nshoddily-made expensive dress can be lodged for half its price and\nfinally the most astounding brothels. Ever since medieval times the\nback streets of the St. Pauli neighbourhood have been screened off\nfrom the city by strong iron gates open only at night. They are\nfinely wrought with every conceivable device and whimsical detail,\nproudly decorated with the emblems and insignia of the craft’s guild.\nIn the evenings a lighted window opens up in every door that gives on\nto a back street and there, on display, smiling into the endless\nrainy darkness, are the queens of these seamen’s paradises. They wear\nlow-cut dresses, drawn in at the waist and trimmed with spangles and\nfeathers, dresses in which the fashions from the end of the last\ncentury have survived to the present, as on sweet-wrappers and in the\nimagination of woman-starved seamen, and have always been thought to\nembody the supreme joy of living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This line of living meat is sold with the utmost\nsimplicity. Customers pass from window to window, examine the goods\non display and disappear inside only to fly out into the road a short\nwhile later growling and cursing: St. Pauli’s doorkeepers are\nrenowned for their muscle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All languages echo and all nations mingle in the\nlittle taverns of this district. They are famed for their savage wit,\negg grog and a total immunity from police intervention — in short, a\nwonderful blend of valeur, alcohol, revolutionary ardour, tobacco\nsmoke and the latest hopelessly fallen, wilted sinner; she balances\non the edge of a table swamped in bitter beer hastily repeating over\na piece of bread and butter to some drunken Adam without name or face\nthat most divine lie — about love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The language spoken here is, as a rule, Hamburg’s\nlanguage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is thoroughly soaked in the sea; as salty as\ncod; as round and juicy as a Dutch cheese; as rough, pungent and\njolly as English gin; as slithery, rich and light as the scales of\nsome large rare deepsea fish slowly panting among the carps and plump\neels quivering their wet rainbows in a fishwife’s basket. Only the\nletter S, sharp as a spindle and as graceful as a mast, testifies to\nHamburg’s old gothic and the days of the Hanse and the piracy of the\narchbishops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only the lumpen-proletariat but the whole city\nis steeped in the lively, boisterous spirit of the port. It surrounds\non all sides in a tight ring the bourgeois quarters situated around\nthe Alster, a tidal lake in which the pulse of that same Baltic ebb\nand flow can still be felt. Villas hug the shore closely, leaving\nbarely enough space to run through the neat gardens clad in flowers\nlike swimming costumes, and tennis courts down the flight of steps to\nthe shore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everywhere the excited, unclean breath of the\nsuburbs blows down the necks of the patricians’ houses. A ring of\nelectric trains firmly binds in the outskirts and squeezes them\nagainst the smart quarters like a steel band; along it, filling the\ncoaches with the smell of sweat, tar and winey breath, a turbid\nstream of workers surges twice daily, bisecting the whole city on its\nway to the docks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consequently all of Hamburg is equally attentive\nto the lunchtime hooter at the shipyards, the boatswain’s whistle and\nthe morning and evening call-over on the bank of the Elbe just as the\nsmallest pool and the tiniest child-packed frog pond heeds the\nshudders of the distant ocean, the ocean that sends Hamburg its\nwealth and its winds that are as resilient as sails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bourgeois, the worthy burgher, is just as\nuninsured against contact and proximity with the proletarians as is\nhis home. A lady going to the theatre is squashed between two\nportworkers who quite naturally put their greasy bags down on the\nsoft seats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A young thing from St. Pauli sits herself coolly\ndown beside a civil servant’s wife, winks round at her neighbors and\ngets off at her stop on the arm of one of them; a worker cuddles his\nwife or girlfriend; a stevedore smokes out those around him with an\nincredible tobacco, some friends take a seaman home from a binge and\nthe whole coach chuckles with them, thinking, speaking and laughing\nin the purest Hamburg Platt <\/em>(dialect) that can turn any place\ninto a jolly seaman’s fo’c’s’le.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All this is not very consequential from our point\nof view. But after Berlin where a worker with his tools has the right\nto travel only in a specially dirty old coach; where the superiority\nof the first and second classes is all but defended by the police;\nwhere an unemployed worker, rubbing his cold violet ears dares not\nseat himself on one of the Tiergarten’s innumerable and always vacant\nbenches; after exultant bourgeois Berlin, the very air of Hamburg\nwith its free and natural spirit smells of revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At four or five o’ clock in the morning the\nlumpen-proletariat is asleep, wherever that might be, or is being\nforwarded on to the police station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At a quarter to six, still by the light of\nelectricity, the first high tide of workers begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Above the tramlines a railway hangs in the\ndarkness and above that the short gleaming ribbons of the electric\ntrains: all these thrust on to the pavement an army of dockers,\nhundreds of thousands of workers and hundreds and thousands more\nunemployed who besiege the wharves in hope of some casual employment.\nEach unit gathers around its foreman; in the blackness of tarry\njackets and from behind backs humped with tool-bags there shines an\noil-lamp like a colliery overman’s. After the call-over the regiments\nof workers split up for the hundreds of steamboats that distribute\nthem around the yards and plants. They pour into the industrial city\nover four bridges. Troops and police keep a sharp eye to see that not\none ‘civvie’ penetrates the industrial islands. But neither the\nbridges nor the hundreds of steamers that play their lamps and\nsearchlights upon the river in a sort of unique carnival in a black\noily Venice, suffice for the dense surge of the morning shift. A\nbright dry tube that pumps legions of workers across from shore to\nshore every morning and evening, has been laid deep beneath the\nElbe’s waters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At each end of the tunnel elephantine lifts raise\nand lower this human torrent to and from the concrete exits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They move, these two lifts, screeching in their\nscrew-like towers like two shovels unceasingly stoking living fuel\ninto hundreds of furnace-like factories. Out of this forge came the\nHamburg Rising. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hamburg workers live a long way from their\nfactories and shipyards, in a part of the city christened Barmbeck.\nThis is one enormous barracks for workers where all the dwellings\nlook like one another, common sleeping quarters in rented barracks\njoined together by the unclean, bare, damp corridors of the streets.\nOpening up at the ends of these streets like chinks are dreary\nsquares that look more like public kitchens or conveniences, each\nwith a dreary fountain under the tin sky. Across this already foul\nand filthy suburb crawls the gigantic caterpillar of the railway\nviaduct describing a steel semi-circle. Its slightly bowed legs cling\nto the asphalt with concrete suckers. A rattlesnake’s head tightly\nfitting between two blocks, vanishes amid the backyard crevices,\nblind walls and ravines crammed with bunches of giddy little\nbalconies from which flutter drying linen and strands of wilting ivy\nthat has had its fill of smoke and damp. The station building plants\na wide, flat foot on the railway line’s tail, leaving a crack for the\nstream of passengers to pour through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Directly opposite the station, behind a spiked\nrailing from which shreds of old decrees dangle, stands one of the\npolice stations with murky windows that resemble a detective’s shaded\nglasses. A guard on duty, that pock-marked monotony of police\nstations and the official’s tedious boredom and spite, chewed over\nlike an already twice smoked and discarded cigarette-end picked up\nfrom the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The port is open to workers only at certain times.\nIt sucks in an army of workers at dawn and spits every one of them\nout in the evening. Troops remain in this deserted industrial\nfortress to guard the swing-bridges, turnstiles, and subways through\nwhich the dense flood of workers pours to the quayside. Not one\nworker lives within the port itself. Only the old and proven servants\nof the seigneurs<\/em> of industry enjoy such a privilege; the\nsparse, obsequiously twinkling lights of their dwellings huddle\ntimidly against the gigantic shadows of factory blocks slowly\nexhaling into the night and fog the human warmth they have swallowed\nup during the day. The guards pace up and down the quays using their\nbayonets to block the way of any stranger they want to check on and\nshining their lamps straight into his face:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Who are you? Where’re you going? Why?\nPassword..”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Barmbeck the unrest began a week before the\nRising. On Wednesday 17 October working women and office workers’\nwives take over the markets and force the saboteur traders to\ncontinue business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Thursday and Friday they form a chain in front\nof the shipyards and send their shamed husbands back home. On the\nsame day fifteen thousand unemployed workers and women demonstrate at\nthe Heiligengeist Field. On Saturday an impressive rally at the Trade\nUnion House from which thousands proceed to the City Hall and break\nthrough into the restricted zone surrounding it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the streets that evening tens of thousands of\nworkers pace endlessly, stubbornly, intently and furiously along the\npavements. The police arrest over a hundred people but the sombre\npromenades do not cease. News of the Reichswehr’s onslaught upon the\nworkers of Saxony spreads like a fever. The masses are gripped by a\nterrible excitement. This is the eve of revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Sunday 21 October there is a conference of\nportworkers from the whole Baltic coast: from Bremen, Stettin,\nSchweinemunde, L\u00fcbeck and Hamburg. The majority of delegates are SPD\nbut many have been sent from plants already several days on strike.\nThey had already returned their membership cards to the metalworkers’\nunion which had declared these strikes to be ‘wild-cat’. There was a\nsharp clash between an old SPD-Mann,<\/em> a Stettin delegate, a man\ncovered in moss and mould from twenty-eight years of\nsocial-officialdom, and T. a square, big-boned, wide-browed worker\nwho would pound his clenched fist like a shaft and was to grasp the\nreins of the Hamburg Rising in his iron hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, at this conference, T. had to urge on and\nrestrain simultaneously. Like some old coachman, used to driving his\nheavily laden waggons up the steep icy slopes of the bridges, T. had\nboth to kindle and damp down, scarcely keeping on his box while\nbeating off the social-bureaucrats with piercing whipcracks, tugging\non the foaming bits with the whole weight of his authority and\ngrounding the rearing militancy that would argue no longer but was\nblind with rage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The conference only just permitted the\npostponement of a general strike for several days. Only thanks to\nthis resolution could a stormy meeting of full-time officials be\nconvinced and brought to order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Sunday night a courier brings (false) news of\nan eruption in Saxony. The order for a general strike is immediately\npassed round the various quarters. Dozens of major enterprises\nsupport the Deutschewerft shipyards which have been locked out since\nSaturday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second shift of workers leaves the workshops,\nbreaks through the police cordons and goes back to the city centre.\nBy four o’clock the harbour is paralysed. A crowd, one-hundred\nthousand-strong, roams the streets of Hamburg giving it the look of a\ncity already in the grip of the Rising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A second courier: he speaks at meetings in Altona\nand Neustadt giving entirely fantastic news of the Russian Army\nmobilising and their submarines sailing to the aid of Hamburg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the dead of night a conference of the’chiefs’:\nthe leaders of the Military Organisation receive their combat orders,\ntaking them with a feeling of the deepest inner satisfaction. T., who\nhas been fighting for a postponement for several hours, stopping up\nall the holes through which the movement might have spilled\nprematurely on to the streets, now lifts all the sluices and opens\nall the taps that still hold back the torrent of the Rising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n K. also was pleased. A few words about him. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n A worker. A sergeant-major in the war who loathed\nwith all his being what is called der preussiche Drill<\/em>\n(Prussian army drill) in the trenches. He had received a commission\nfor his bravery. Then, in one of the towns of occupied Galicia a\nmajor incident that nearly cost him his nice new epaulettes. Four\nweeks’ jail for boxing a major’ s ears in public. By 1918 K. is a\nmember of the Hamburg Council of Workers’ Deputies. He takes part in\nthe March Action. He had already, just after the Unification\nCongress, joined the KPD. One of the most active members of the\nHamburg organisation. Taken all together, military training, courage,\nroughness, a portworkers’ jollity, the old sergeant-major’s precise\nabrupt speed and the knack of ‘delivering a rocket’, all these\nunexcelled qualities won K. popularity among the masses and a\ncautious, almost squeamish reaction from die Intellektuellen.<\/em>\nAnd well they might for philistines don’t like grinning people with\nan invariable smell of K\u00f6m<\/em> (K\u00fcmmel spirits) about them and\nthe markedly crude language of the port.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gaiety, roughness and a slight intoxication in the\nblood are considered incompatible with the calling of a European\nparty hack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the August riots the party was literally\ndeluged with spies. One of them, with the touch of an old\nprovocateur, offered to supply a crate of arms, receipt of which\nwould have led to the dismemberment of the military organisation. K.\nwas charged with unmasking this police ruse. He drove off with the\nagent to collect the arms. On one of the bridges he coolly picked the\nman up by the scruff of the neck and dangled him over the side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Own up, you bastard.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He owned up, got his due and vanished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In periods of lull comrade K.’s wild energy turns\nhim into a pub brawler and tyrant, terror and pride of a whole\nneighbourhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He meets a bunch of SPD men in a pub: Hamburg’s\nsuperb K\u00f6m mixed half-and-half with the excellent beer sharpens K.’s\ndialectic to the extreme. In the end the Mensheviks, aroused to a\nfury by the silent taunts of this giant with the narrowed, benign,\ncrafty eyes, leap yelling into a fight. Taking the ringleader as his\ntarget K. snatches him from amongst his fellow-thinkers and flings\nhim on to a grand piano. An incident, the police, broken noses and\nunimaginable chords from the unfortunate instrument. Inactivity is\nterribly dangerous for people like K. Yet in an active struggle they\nmove forward into the front ranks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the Rising it was that same K. and the\ncommunist officer Kb. who saved Barmbeck from rout by a network of\namazing barricades. More about them below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At midnight the leaders disperse to brief and\nassemble the members of the workers’ hundreds. The party as a whole\nwas, like the wide layers of workers not in the party, only to learn\nof the Rising during the morning after the seizure of all police\nstations by the military organisation’s commandos. The storming of\nthe Polizeib\u00fcros<\/em> was scheduled for dawn on 21 October, i.e.\nsimultaneously in all parts of the city at 4.45 a.m, and, immediately\nfollowing the takeover of the police stations, the capture and\ndisarming of Wandsbek barracks. Until that point the military\nleaders, who had mobilised their men and had to spend the rest of the\nnight with them, could not allow anyone to go home, put a light on or\non any pretext go off to ‘say good-bye to the family’. Only thanks to\nsuch precautions were the police caught truly off-guard and disarmed\nwith bare hands. The credit must go to T. and the other comrades who\nworked out this battle plan with him. The game was half won by\nprefacing the mass Rising with this silent unexpected blow by the\nmilitary organisation which: 1) deprived the enemy of support points\nin the form of police stations; 2) armed the workers at the expense\nof the police; and 3) produced in the masses an awareness of victory\nalready ensured, thereby attracting them more easily to join a\nstruggle that had hardly begun. The government paid tribute to this\ndislocation caused by the Rising. Here is what Hamburg Polizeisenator\n<\/em>(Police Commissioner) Hense, a social democrat, wrote about it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The worst thing about this Rising was by no\nmeans the numerical weakness nor the inadequacy of the forces placed\nat our disposal. No, what was so terrible (schreklich)<\/em> was\nthat this time, unlike all previous putsches, the communists were\nable to carry though their lengthy and thorough preparations in such\nsecrecy that not a single squeak about it reached us. Generally we\ntend to be informed of everything afoot in the communists’ camp. Not\nthat we have to keep special spies in their ranks. No, the\nLaw-abiding public, in which I include workers who are members of the\nSocial Democratic Party, usually keeps us informed about everything\nhappening amongst the communists without any coercion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This time the ‘law-abiding’ Mensheviks proved\nunable to forewarn the authorities about the Rising in preparation.\nThe latter knew nothing of it, so little in fact that the state of\nsiege that had kept the police on full alert the week before had been\nlifted by the government on Sunday, that is on the eve of the Rising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But let us go back a few hours. Here are some\ntrivialities that portray the mood of the party at the moment of\nmobilisation, the time when people are caught unawares, promptly\nshaken out of bed and led off by the scruff of the neck to goodness\nknows where. This is the twilight hour when, lying half-awake getting\nunbearably cold, you want to go back to sleep and everything is\npainted in a drab muddy colour — in short not quite the time when\nyou get up to adopt a heroic posture. Everything is, as they say,\nrough and ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the leaders of the Rising goes round his\nBezirksleiter<\/em> (zone leaders) to pass on the order for the\nmorning’s operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A street without life, a sleeping house, a\nsomnolent, stuffy, snoring flat. The family of a very poor worker. He\nrose and dressed without asking why or lingering a minute. A calm\nhandshake and a cigarette’s slowly receding ember in the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another nook — in one of the working-class\nquarters. The door is opened by the wife who helps her husband\ncollect his things and holds a candle-stub over the kitchen table on\nwhich a map is spread out. For some time he primes himself and then,\nfrom the depths of his heart with a sense of the deepest relief:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Endlich geht’s los<\/em> …” (At last\nit’s beginning.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a third lair a wife to her husband who is\ndawdling over getting ready:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Nu mock di man fertig”<\/em> (Hurry up\nand get ready.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally the St. Georg district. Here they’re not\nasleep. In a back room a lamp is alight, flicking the web of tobacco\nsmoke. The landlady answers evasively — he’s at home and he isn’t\nand she doesn’t know anything. Cautious steps on the stairs and\nsuddenly comrade R. appears in the doorway, his face smeared with\nsoot, barefoot, with a cluster of rifles under his arm, his pockets\nstuffed with all sorts of ammunition. In shadow is the merrily\ngrinning physiognomy of a character known around the dockland taverns\nas Rowdy <\/em>(ruffian). What’s this? They have cleared out a whole\narmoury. This Genosse<\/em> (comrade) is of course not quite a\nGenosse,<\/em> only a sympathiser. But the speed and dexterity with\nwhich he unhooked the bolt and lifted the shop window … Rowdy<\/em>\nprides himself on the simplicity of the great performer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile a comrade, having received the password\nand plan for seizure of the neighbouring police staton and all its\narms, says with a note of deep regret:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Mensch, den har ick dat jo nicht mehr\nneudig hat.'”<\/em> (Hell, this is no use to me any more!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The entire Barmbeck struggle lasting three days\nwas in its first phase directed towards the railway line, the spinal\ncolumn of the area, which the workers could not smash due to\ninsufficient weapons and principally through lack of explosives. The\nposition was complicated by the fact that one of the most difficult\npolice stations, Von-Essen Strasse, was situated in the rear of the\ninsurgents and had not been captured by them: it drew off and pinned\ndown considerable insurrectionary forces throughout the struggle.\nThis station stayed intact by a complete accident. When C., an\nenormously big man distinguished by an unusually cool temper, as\nimpervious and as well rolled as fresh asphalt, had with two comrades\nbroken through the station’s main entrance and rapped a stick on the\ntable demanding immediate surrender, and the Blues and Greens[4]<\/a>\nwere already starting hesitantly to unfasten their stout\nbelt-buckles, a second detachment from the unit came round from the\nback of the building, penetrated the yard and, puzzled by the utter\nsilence reigning in the now occupied mouse-trap, opened fire at the\nstation windows. The Sipos and Reichswehr men came to their senses,\nsaw three unarmed workers in front of them, threw two of them to the\nground catching C. off guard, barred themselves in the cellar and\nshowered the invaders with hand grenades. The workers’ unit\nretreated. But at the very first intersection it was halted by Kb.\nwho had already had his stubborn network of barricades put up to meet\nthe troops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One officer for the whole of the Hamburg Rising\nbut how much he did for it! There was not a street in Barmbeck, not\nan alley, crack or chink not blocked up with a couple of plugs.\nBarricades seemed to sprout from the ground multiplying at an\nincredible rate. If there were no saws and spades, they were found.\nResidents were drawn into this excavation work: sweating, they\ndragged stones, broke up pavements and selflessly sawed up the sacred\ntrees in the public gardens; they were ready to blow themselves to\ndust if that would save their cupboards, chests of drawers, beds and\ntrunks from this frantic work of construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only one old woman touched Kb.’s sleeve and\nbeckoned him upstairs after her to take a wide sturdy board that was\nextremely handy for a barricade off her washstand — the pride of the\nwhole household. The board was put into use and endured stoutly to\nthe end — though this was an exception. The old romantic barricade\nhas by and large had its day long ago. A girl in a Phrygian cap does\nnot hold a tattered banner over it, Versaillaises in white galters no\nlonger mow down the courageous gamin<\/em> nor does the student from\nthe Latin Quarter clutch his fatal wound in a lace handkerchief while\na worker delivers his last bullet from the long old-fashioned barrel\nof the last pistol. Alas! The art of war has stuffed all this lovely\nromantic drivel back into the pages of school-books where it lives on\nringed with the legends and powder-smoke of 1848. Today fighting is\ndifferent. As a fortified wall between revolutionary rifles and\ngovernment cannon the barricade long ago became a spectre. It no\nlonger serves as a protection to anyone but solely as an impediment.\nIt is a light wall assembled from trees, stones and upturned vehicles\ncovering itself with a deep ditch, pit or trench that bars the way to\narmoured cars, those most dangerous foes of an uprising. It is in\nthis trench that the meaning of the modern barricade’s existence\nlies. But the old-time barricade, now backed up by the field-trench\nthat has migrated to the city from the dead fields of large-scale\nwarfare, continues to serve insurgents in all good faith even if it\nis in rather a different fashion from its heroic great-grandfathers\nof 1791 and 1848.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Piled up across the streets impeding a proper view\nof what is actually going on beyond its menacingly jagged wings it\ncauses the enemy’s attention to be focussed on it as his only visible\ntarget. The barricade courageously catches with its breast all the\nblind frenzied fire that troops rain down on their unseen enemy. Yes,\nhere again is another new feature that has wholly changed the\nlandscape of civil war and all its strategy and tactics. The workers\nhave become invisible, elusive and almost invulnerable. For them the\nnew method of warfare has devised a cap of darkness that no\nquick-firing weapon can reach. The workers fight rarely if at all in\nthe streets, leaving these entirely to police and troops. Their new\nbarricade, a huge stone one with millions of secret passageways and\nloop-holes is formed by the whole working-class area with all its\nbasements, attics and living quarters: in this unassailable fortress\nevery ground-floor window is an embrasure, every attic a battery and\nobservation post. Every worker’s bed is a litter which an insurgent\ncan count on in the event of being wounded. It is only this that\nexplains the utterly disproportionate government losses, whereas the\nworkers in Barmbeck could count scarcely a dozen wounded and between\ntwo and five killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The troops were forced to advance along open\nstreets. The workers joined battle from their homes. All attempts by\nthe regular forces to take Barmbeck on Tuesday were thwarted by this\nsame straggling, invisible, elusive formation of rifles which could\ncoolly pick its targets from somewhere at a first floor window while\ndown below the helplessly exposed crowd of police literally showered\nthe empty barricades with fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anticipating an armoured assault Kb. contrived to\nblow up a concrete bridge, considered to be there for ever, with\nneither dynamite nor gunpowder. Workers felt out its vulnerable\nartery, the gas main, uncovered it and set it alight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the vehicles blundered into a quiet\ndeserted street. It stopped to put something right in the engine. A\nbarricade sprouted in front of it. It turned round — the fallen\ncrowns of sawndown trees were already lying criss-crossed on the\nroadway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vehicle no. M-14 steals forward cautiously\nunderneath the railway bridge. In it are the driver and five Sipos.\nFrom behind a pub or round a corner, it is not known from where, but\nclose by, a shot and then another. The driver is killed and a\npoliceman too. The vehicle is torn to shreds and the debris scattered\nabout by Young Communists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Veritable pitched battles continued all day\nTuesday. The first heavy assaults can be placed at about eleven o’\nclock. The hardest fought of all were around the Von-Essen Strasse\npolice station and along the whole line of barricades facing the\nrailway embankment from both sides. The police quickly win the\nrailway station. Their detachments run along the track trying to pick\noff the fighters from above. They are quietly drawn past the first\ntwo ambushes. Over the third span of the viaduct a deadly volley\nbreaks out. They are firing not only from cover but from all the\nneighbouring attics. Riflemen have been sprinkled across the\nrooftops, keeping whole streets, the main intersections and squares\nunder fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Below, an earthwork and a barricade. It has held\nnow for several hours. A Sipo detachment moves against it even more\nsavagely. The position becomes untenable. But from upstairs the cry:\n‘Die Barrikade frei’<\/em> (Clear the barricades). The people don’t\nrealise what’s going on. A marksman goes down to them, a worker of\nonly about twenty-three, apparently wounded as his shoulder is\nbleeding — and his neck and waist. He gives the order to clear the\nbarricade because the squad ensconced on the roof is afraid of\nhitting its own side. The worker disappears into a driveway and a few\nminutes later fire from the roof forces the police to retreat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another barricade that put up stubborn resistance\nfor hours. A quartet of lone marksmen come downstairs from an attic.\nFrom their observation turret they had already spotted an armoured\ncar approaching from far away and decided that it would be more\nconvenient to greet it downstairs. With a happy shot one of them\nmanages to pierce the radiator, paralysing the vehicle. The riflemen\nreturn once more to their pigeon loft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile the battles at the railway station are\nflaring up even more. The workers not only succeed in dislodging\nseveral White columns one after the other from the embankment but\nattempt to go over to the offensive themselves. But the open space in\nfront of the viaduct is under bombardment from armoured cars. It is\nimpossible to pass. No matter, the workers confront the fire under\ncover of huge beams taken from a nearby timber yard. A whole forest\nof masts gets up and moves forward to form a perfect blockhouse from\nwhich the riflemen continue their steady methodical work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point the first massed attack is unleashed\nbelow. Two armoured cars cover six lorries that toss a whole host of\nGreens on to the road. This unit succeeds in cutting off comrade K.\nfrom Kb. and his men moving up from the other side of the viaduct.\nNot only that. Kb., who has left his soldiers some two hundred metres\nbehind, is captured. He is searched and locked up in the railway\nbuilding. If only the police had known that in the figure of this\npuny man with the inoffensive eyes of a young teacher who might be\nrash enough to go out for a stroll among the barricades, they held in\ntheir hands the heart of Barmbeck in revolt. Sitting nice and quietly\nby a window Kb. conducted a general review of the enemy’s forces. He\nwatched exhorted mobs of police go past, urged on by the few\ncourageous officers. Those hapless hirelings cheering themselves on\nwith shots and cries, throwing themselves on their bellies every four\npaces, making desperate gestures towards a phlegmatic armoured car\nstanding several metres behind its ‘vanguard’. From that same window\nKb. could also observe the cool self-possession of several workers,\nespecially little D. whose handiwork he could tell from the terrified\nfaces of the orderlies coming out of the fire eight times in a row\nwith heavily swaying stretchers. Finally to the sound of convulsed\nshouts and firing the last platoon of Greens disappeared down the\nempty streets of the insurgent quarter strange, absolutely empty\nstreets, devoid of any sign of life as if abandoned by occupants and\ndefenders. The waiting lasts for four endless agonising hours. At\nabout five in the afternoon the wave of troops and police rolls back\nnoisily. Their losses are enormous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alas, the staff centre that was to have directed\nthe Rising in Barmbeck itself (led by three communist intellectuals,\ncity councillors) is absent. For two days no one can find them\nanywhere. The battles are directed by Kb., C. and of course T. who\nset himself up with his wireless equipment right beneath the open sky\nin one of the public parks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At about six o’clock in the evening Barmbeck is\nstill standing, deafened by the stillness — a respite. Kb. finds his\nway to a friendly pub where D., the little marksman, is by now lying\non a settee being fed with hot coffee. W., and that splendid marksman\nC. come here for a breather too. And that impetuous K. is as warm and\njolly as if he has just been playing skittles in a pleasant\nafter-dinner break or has just completed one of his twenty-mile\nstrolls dragging a querulous exhausted wife along behind him; he\nchooses this spot to give instructions to his workers’ hundreds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To sum up: all that was courageous in the Barmbeck\npocket came here to shake hands, wash the blood off and decide: what\nnow? What does this stillness mean, broken only occasionally by the\nclatter of a sash out of which a white flag is flung into the street\n— the appeal of someone wounded or dying?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile silent Barmbeck, with twilight\ndescending on it like a foggy sheet on to the stretchers formed by\nthe maimed streets, is ever so quietly split into two halves. Fifteen\nhundred troops separate North from South Barmbeck. The strong points,\nat Wagnerstrasse, police station 46, Friedrichstrasse station and\nPfenningsbusch, silently stretch out their arms to each other in the\ndarkness like a police cordon forcing back some innocuous street\ndemonstration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of a sudden the ring snaps shut — a muscular\nelastic ring in which the bulky forms of armoured cars once again\ndrawn up hard against the barricades are set like dull stones in a\nbracelet. A solid lump rolls up into Barmbeck’s throat. True, our\nposts are still in place. But time is against them. The enemy is\ngaining with every drop of darkness that night is forcing between the\nquarter’s fiercely locked teeth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the end the Whites are just as invisible, and\ntherefore invulnerable, as the insurrectionaries. And there are more\nof them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along either side of one of the streets there\ncreeps a double file of patrols. At some gateway the\nofficer-in-charge grabs some innocently intellectual-looking man and\njabs a revolver into his ribs. He does not see a second man who, with\na rifle in his hands, has recoiled back into the dark and is as\nmotionless as a stone. For the second time that day the Landsknechte\n<\/em>(mercenaries) have caught hold of the mainspring of raging\nBarmbeck and then let it slip through their fingers. An hour and a\nhalf later Kb. was giving the order to his riflemen to melt away,\ndisappear from Barmbeck, now encircled, half-strangled and\nhalf-inundated with torrents of unseen enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each cleared his own line of retreat\nindependently; one took that mountain path across the rocky ridges of\nrooftops and over the gulleys in those man-made urban Alps. Not one\nput a foot wrong, not one was caught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the following morning all thirty-five had\nalready met again in North Barmbeck and decided to dig in on the\nbroad semicircle of the railway embankment. Again for a period of\nseveral long hours, battles, frenzied shooting, obstacles across the\nadjoining streets, barricades and many, many fallen enemy. Fifty\nfresh rifles enter service — alas, toy ones taken from a local club:\nand in the face of this Rising pressed up against the embankment on\neither flank, three defeated assaults, three hound-packs forced to\ndepart with shattered skulls: that day cost the Reds four men. Four\nexcellent comrades: and old Lewien paid for it in excruciatingly\npainful blood. The baby’s rattles, the sportsmen’s rifles from the\nclub, were found in his garden. Old Mrs. Lewien, living in her little\nhouse with its antiquated chests-of-drawers, cat, white goat,\nportrait of Liebknecht the elder and the almost hundred-year-old\ntradition of courageous atheism and the old party of the days of the\nAnti-Socialist Law, was first given back the old man’s blood-stained\novercoat and then a completely bloodless body. His elder son, a\nphilistine and SPDer arrived to burrow through the boxes, sell off\nthe chattels and demand a signature on some papers from old Mrs.\nLewien. But she can recall one thing only: the old man standing alone\non a lorry in a crowd of Greens and that he was pale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here on the evening of the 24th the comrades\nlearnt almost simultaneously of the fall of Schiffbek and the calm\nreigning in the rest of Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That Wednesday, the 24th, having received no news\nof the start of the German revolution the leading group was compelled\nto sound the retreat. Not because the workers had been smashed but\nwhat was the point of pursuing the struggle in Hamburg alone, of\nflaring up in isolation against a backcloth of general collapse?!<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was not quite so easy to order the retreat in a\ncity drunk with victory, where the defence is ready at any moment to\ngo over to the offensive and hundreds of barricades and tens of\nthousands of workers are preparing for an all-out assault and the\nterrible closing act of civil war — the triumphant seizure of power.\nThe first courier who brought to the barricades the order to retreat\nwas knocked off his feet with a furious punch. He was an honest old\nworker who, together with his family had maintained the dangerous\ncourier service throughout the Rising. When he thought of that\nterrible punch so unjustly received from his comrades Comrade P.\nalmost did himself in, becoming as bloodshot as that battered cheek\nof his. In just the same way all working-class Hamburg clutched its\njaw and turned blind with the pain when it received the order to\nliquidate the Rising. You had to enjoy the confidence of the masses\nsuch as T. did having grown up with his organisations and being so\ninextricably linked to their proletarian core that he could make the\nabrupt swing of helm to demobilisation with impunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All right, they retreated. Disappointed and\ngrumbling, parting for the last time yet having repulsed the enemy\nfrom their barricades for many hours. Taking advantage of the\nconfusion the riflemen abandoned the earthworks, barricades and\nsentry posts without a sound. They went off with their weapons taking\nwith them the dead and wounded, covering up all traces left behind\nthem, and gradually scattered out into the now silent suburbs. This\nplanned retreat was carried out under the cover of marksmen dispersed\non the roofs. None of them left his aerial barricade until five\nfloors below the last fighter had left his trench and the last\ncasualty, supported under the arms by his comrades, had hidden\nhimself behind the gateway of a safe house. They held on all day, all\nthe while holding down the Whites, running across from one zone to\nanother, along slippery cornices hanging over ravines, past black\nstaircases gaping like trenches, past wells and dormer windows\nthrough which the police ever more insistently surged upwards as they\nfinally scented emptiness and defeat behind the unmanned hushed\nbarricades. The struggle had turned into a chase. The whole\npopulation concealed and saved the heroic rearguard of the Hamburg\nOctober, those wounded, blackened hounded loners still firing\nsomewhere over the city and then suddenly digging themselves into\nsome unknown working-class family; dressed in rags, with bloodied\nhands, parched black mouths and a pack of huntsmen careering, roaring\nand swearing past the scarcely slammed door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the last to retreat was the old party\ncomrade W. who, tottering with fatigue and drunk with a desire to lie\ndown and sleep, could no longer cling to a slippery tile or the\ncorner of a sharp chimney. At last when down below an exit to freedom\nhad opened up before him in the shadow of some murky gateway, he\nstopped again and unslung his rifle to let off his last cartridges\nwith a malicious glee. The whole corner on which he was leaning had\nbeen lacerated with bullets. By sheer chance not one of them had\ngrazed his head, now against the stonework a shadow wreathed with\nscratches and holes. They only just managed to get him away. Around\nhis neck over an unbuttoned shirt and a shaggy sweaty chest a\ndazzlingly smart tie was fastened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What’s this Schlips<\/em> (tie) on for, old\nchap?” \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Ich wollte festlich sterben.”<\/em> (I\nwanted to die properly.) \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lying a little way out of Hamburg where a dreary\nline of telegraph poles marches off in the direction of flat, denuded\nsandy Prussia is a small working-class town by the name of Schiffbek.\nIt ranges out between the Bille brook, murky and smooth as tinplate,\nand hills on which grow sparse trees that have run bare-headed and\ntousled into the wind and also assorted little two-storey houses of a\nworkers’ settlement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the centre the evangelical church stands empty\nlike a rusty umbrella stuck into the ground to dry out after the rain\nand forgotten there for ever. Not believing in God the cosmopolitan\npopulation of this working-class town does not visit it. Today, after\nthe battles, it stands there with a black eye, without window-panes\nor doors — a priest who has strayed and ended up in someone else’s\nfight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A large chemical factory stands on a little island\non the far side of the Bille: cold, venomous and full of crystals\nthat are deposited into the icy black water, naphthaline and green\npoisons that seem to cover the river-bed with a film of fresh\nvitriolic moss. Some thousand workers are employed there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inside the kilns that never cool off fire that is\nas dense as the molten planets is poured out. It is observed through\ntiny windows. Sometimes the white heat is coated with a light coaly\nhaze but more often it is as white and still as blindness. Naked to\nthe waist, workers charge away from the blazing kilns out into the\nfrost, snow or rain to escape an atmosphere in which the one-time\ngigantic mare’s-tails and warm swamps that are now stacked in the\ncorners as heaps of coal might have grown and revelled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along either side of a narrow stone corridor lies\na steammill and a huge iron-rolling works. On Christmas Eve its\nchimney, higher than all the others, is like a sullen smoker left\nsuddenly without tobacco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘Tin Shacks’ are spread out along the fringe of\nthe now frozen white waste patches. This works has one long legless\nbody pressing its belly against the ground and seven equally tall\nchimneys set in a row like minarets from which every morning a shrill\nmuezzin of labour sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Work at this factory is extremely damaging to the\nlungs. The toughest cannot stand more than four years of it. You have\nto be like S., a hero of the Hamburg Rising, to emerge unharmed after\nworking several years in the inferno. But then S. is a giant whose\nbuild all Schiffbek is proud of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ask any little urchin and he will tell you that S.\ncan lift on his shoulder six men clinging to an iron crowbar, that\nhis hands are much bigger and can hold much more than the purses that\nthe good housewives of Schiffbek take to market and that in the\nmorning when he swings his extraordinary legs out of bed the whole\ntenement creaks and shakes so much that neighbours without watches\nknow it is time to wake their husbands for work. So then as we have\nsaid, since S. is such a colossus, a bold spirit, a Bolshevik and\ngenerally devilish the ‘Tin Shacks’ have not done him too much harm.\nBut little C. came out of them with a leg seared to the bone; K.with\nred spittle wrapped up in his dirty handkerchief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Further up the Bille stand the smoky towers of\nJute, one of Hamburg’s largest manufacturing plants. It is\npredominantly women who work here; poorly remunerated and poorly\norganised, for whom the party has year after year conducted a bitter\nstruggle against the Menshevik trade unions, the women’ s remarkably\nclamorous, inflammable but easily intimidated inertness, the employer\nand the priest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Jute women doggedly resisted any stable\norganisation. Where possible they would moan about their wages and\nafter the first few days of a strike would go whining to make peace\nwith the manager, first smashing the office windows and then\ninforming on the instigators. However, the factory, in the course of\nits normal capitalist business, is itself combing out of this\ntangled, unexacting, conveniently exploitable, female mass the first\nstrands of a strong proletarian solidarity. Amenable as the women\nmight have been their wages still slipped down and down. First one\ndepartment and then another was subjected to the frantic inflationary\nrace of prices and wages. Yet within the bounds of their own homes,\ntheir own housekeeping and their own factory the women remain as\nunited as they are indifferent to political movements that go beyond\nthose bounds. They may not take any notice of a General Strike but\nthey will never let their workmates down in the next section. Thus,\nfor over a year now, the basically peaceable Jute has, thank\ngoodness, worked no more than three days out of six: the rest of the\ntime the factory is out in the street supporting the section on\nstrike at the particular time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “O, ha!” (that is a pet expression of\nevery true Hamburger).<\/p>\n\n\n\n “O, ha!” say the workers who have been\nconducting propaganda at the Jute factory for months and years,\n“hunger is making good communists of them”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is one of the astonishing women to have come\nout of the Jute. Let’s call her Elfriede and say that she is the\ndaughter of a Schiffbek night-watchman. Father was well-known about\nthe town as an orthodox Menshevik and the owner of a superb carbine\nwith which he maintained order and tranquillity in the derelict areas\nand buildings in his care called Hundebuden<\/em> (dog-kennels) by\nthe workers. And so it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But if the watchman faithfully upheld the law of\nprivate property with his carbine then Elfriede in every way\noverturned and trampled down those sacred bastions with her amazing\nbeauty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elfriede was not only a perfect communist, an\nexcellent workmate and a heroic girl who fought at the barricades,\nraising Schiffbek’s entire female population its feet to set up field\nkitchens and herself taking out under fire hot coffee and fresh\ncartridges fastened around her slim waist re, the marksmen in the\ntrenches; with her own hands she put her old man under lock and key\nadding his old-fashioned rifle to the party’s scanty war material and\nwas finally caught by the police in the heat of her criminal\nactivity, namely while cleaning potatoes for the insurgents with her\nsleeves rolled up amid piles of fresh peelings; not only was she a\ncourageous active woman for ever dedicated to the party but also\nperhaps one of the first examples of a new brave type so\nunsuccessfully faked in the pages of the neo-proletarian novel and\nthe homilies of armchair revolutionaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There came with her into the poverty-stricken\ndistrict of Schiffbek the spirit of destruction and liberty. Elfriede\nrefused to become anyone’s wife. Her name evoked the timid respect\nand furious hatred of legal wives whose husbands she would take away\nfor a day, a year or for life, of fathers and lovers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She would conquer whomever she chose, make love\nfor as long as there were no lies in that loving and then haughtily\nreturn her captive to freedom. But she asked no one for a name, a\nshield or aid for herself or her child. Never, neither in weakness\nnor in sickness, did she seek support in the law that all her life\nshe had despised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the bench she went to jail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But first a scene, an astonishing scene that\nactually took place in a corridor of the Hamburg City Hall from whose\nbalcony Doctor Laufenberg was carefully thrown in 1918 and where\narrested communists were brought on 23 October.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On that dreadful day there stood in the forecourt\nof Schiffbek police station in rows of three, four or five, lorries\nloaded with captured workers lying on their backs, heaped on top of\neach other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rebels! They had fought in open battle\naccording to all the rules of honest warfare, pitting life against\nlife with an adversary a hundred times stronger, yet still sparing\nprisoners and letting the wounded go. After the defeat they were of\ncourse treated like hunted ruffians, renegades standing outside the\nlaw. The police pounded their feet on those rows of bloody, gasping\nbodies heaped upon each other. Lying men crushed by their comrades on\ntop lay underneath with faces squashed against the coal-smeared\nboards while above the Wachtmeister<\/em> (sergeants) of the\nReichswehr tugged hair out and with their rifle-butts cracked the\nnapes of the immobilised men who then lost consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three men were overwhelmed there. S., that oak\namong men, a superman in his astounding physical strength, spewed\nblood and lost his senses. K. was dying and agile little L. beneath\nhis pacifier’s boot was ready to leap out of his crushed existence\njust as an eye slips from its socket full of fire and tears. About\nall this later: I don’t wish to start on Schiffbek with the phase of\npolice atrocities. They are merely a bloody and dirty epilogue to\nthree days of the Rising that cannot be stamped out by a soldier’s\nboot from the history of a new working-class humanity. For indeed how\nunattainable is the shining peak on which stands the struggle of\nHamburg labour above the bloody filth of police station floors, the\nvile courtroom offices where the proceedings were written out and\ntorn up, torn up and re-written, the reeking stifling lavatories of\nthat now illustrious City Hall where the arrested were forced to wash\nand even take a shower so that members of the city government, and\nMessrs. socialist deputies who had come to be convinced of the\npolice’s kind and humane treatment of its prisoners-of-war, did not\nbecome queasy at the sight of the blood smeared everywhere or the\nsmell of the clothes of an adolescent member of the Hamburg Young\nCommunists, beaten until he had lost control of his physiological\nfunctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So it was that in that long white corridor where\nthe drunken soldiery drove the living piece of revolution that had\nfallen back through the lines into its hands, men cowered by the\nwalls under the lash and it smelt of rubber and blood, in that\ncorridor Elfriede who had so zealously and laboriously upheld her\nlonely dignified life free from the prop of any official morality,\nyet as pure and as straight as an arrow, in that corridor she was\nswamped with the foulest, filthiest abuse and mockery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every quarter of an hour a new group of Reichswehr\nburst into the hall, picked up off the floor those who had already\ncollapsed, beat up again those who had already been beaten up,\nrevived those who had fainted so as to knock them down again and then\neach of those gangs started once again on her standing as if naked\namong wild beasts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Communist slut,” they shouted. “Whore,”\nthey shouted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You’re not a German woman but an animal,”\nthey shouted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And in that ghastly interminable torture-chamber\nthat lasted a day, a night and another day, this girl recalled: yes,\nthere had been a great German woman, as great as a marble statue, and\nnothing since her ghastly death had been quite so fine and wise in\nthe German revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And what’s more she had left behind a small book\nof letters. A white cover with red lettering. Letters from prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rosa Luxemburg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elfriede stood in that satanic corridor and cried\nout about Rosa Luxemburg until she was heard. When a girl arms\nherself with Rosa’s name she is as powerful and as dangerous as an\narmed man — she is a warrior and no one will dare touch her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is impossible to pick up what she said and how\nor what her words were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But some N.C.O. made an apology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the gangs went off with tails between their\nlegs saying that ‘they hadn’t known’. Perhaps this interval was used\nto get one of the injured men away from the soldiers and drag him out\nof the serum by the arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the tale of Elfriede from Schiffbek. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. A Pair<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A couple. In Schiffbek they tell how there lived\nthis pair, husband and wife, both fine old communists. Several years\nago they separated, led independent lives with new families and did\nnot meet each other. A superb marksman, he was fighting in October in\none of the trenches that intersected the narrow bare little streets.\nIt so happened that his former wife was standing there fighting next\nto him. As before — in the days of the Spartacus Rising and the Kapp\nputsch. The worker was caught and his wife gave herself up the next\nday. And so that family of fighters re-united quite naturally at the\nfirst shot, under fire. They will stand trial together. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. A Private House and the Rising<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n She was a short-sighted, normal, chaste Catholic\nnurse with poor eyesight. Today after the war he is a communist. A\nremarkable resourceful, earnest quick worker. He plugged into the\nparty like those tiny household batteries that can give light, turn a\nroller to sharpen knives or can, in eights, drive a model railway and\nyet which remain but miniatures or an enormous miracle of energy, the\nmotor of a whole era of machines but on a minuscule scale. When\nnecessary the little battery can emit real burning sparks bigger than\nitself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This practical-minded highly-skilled worker was\nstruck down with a rather special and rare illness that takes one in\nten thousand and is thus incurable: he was struck with a great and\ntormenting love for the devout, bony gawky nurse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As is normal in such cases it set in quite\nmutually and in one minute they were transfixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They got married, vaulting over his politics and\nher catechism and even forgot about them for a while. Then, comrade\nL., who never flagged and never moved away from the party, started to\nsave money to build his own little house on the outskirts of the\noutskirts, beyond the oasis of little white houses with red roofs\nthat members of the local authority, five old Mensheviks, had donated\nthemselves out of official funds. All in one spot, just like one big\nfamily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The wind gusts around them and the population\npassing by spies. Anyway these people are living well and\ncontentedly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n L. worked; he worked overtime and nights and on\nhis days off he would rush down to the site to erect his house with\ngreat patience and toil: brick by brick, chip by chip, tile by tile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first baby came along and the second one too.\nThe party faded into a mist and became a theoretical outlook on life,\nan idea locked away in an unoccupied corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, in moments of domestic repose L. could\nhear its monotonous tread and feel it standing and listening at the\ndoor of his conscience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The short-sighted industrious wife finally could\nstart living in her own home, to sew by her own brightly scrubbed\nfireplace, sleep in her own bed, rear children, wash down the stove’s\nDutch tilework, wash the little piglets and wash the gleaming floors.\nOn Sundays L. would now read aloud some romance of court life about\nthe objectionably pampered child of a count — with a wedding at the\nend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the morning of 23 October L. had just stuck the\npig for Christmas. The blood had already been drained off into a\nbarrel for the black pudding. At that moment the shooting started. In\nspite of the house he had put up with his own hands and pasted\ntogether with the sweat of his brow, in spite of that extraordinary\nlove for his wife, the communist took his rifle and went. And then\nwhat happened?<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was captured, beaten up and released. A trial\nin a few days’ time. So what then? Stay at home or flee?<\/p>\n\n\n\n That same powerful revolutionary instinct that had\npreviously driven L. to the barricades now drove this well-set up,\nbourgeoisified, domesticated German worker out into the streets\namidst the cross-currents of bullets whizzing past the corners of the\nworkers’ tenements and the wretched covers; to confront the two\nthousand regular troops who stormed this hornet’s nest to take it\nempty. Ruthless class instinct now commanded: do not leave the party\nany more, do not dare desert, you must go underground and go on with\nthe work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But on the day following his flight the house and\nthe belongings, even Lumpi the guard dog, will be confiscated by the\ngovernment. The wife, two children and the newly-born third will find\nthemselves turned out into the street. Besides, for some reason his\nwife is going blind and has started to pray often and at length.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless one night they arrived at C.’s — she\nwithout hat or glasses — and recounted their whole life to the\ncomrade, including that wonderful first look that had at one time\ndecided their fate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next day L. made off. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. The Eighteenth Century, the Joy of Living\nand the Rising<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Actually this portrait does not concern the\nhistory of the Rising itself. But there is invariably in every\ngallery as a matter of course ‘Das Bildnis eines Unbekannten’<\/em>\n(the portrait of an unknown man) and such an anonymous sketch can\noften tell more about the inimitable peculiarities of its period than\nall the signed canvasses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We have to draw a house, a sunken ship slowly\nsettling down somewhere on the seabed, in a dark side-street where\nfrom time to time it is flooded with light from the white eyes of a\nmotor car drifting past. The lamp over the gate radiates a light\nresembling the glow of a rotting tree. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n A stinking gateway and windows close to the ground\nfor ever eavesdropping on each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bedroom, as cold as the North Pole with its\nnumbed window-panes, cupboard and gaping wash-basin, warms itself on\na hot-water bottle stuffed under an icy feather-bed. In the\ndiningroom — which is also the sitting-room and workshop — is the\ndense but rapidly escaping warmth of an iron stove; on the lamp a\ngawdy silk shade looking like some cheap tart’s petticoat; in the\nkitchen a reeking sink, gas and the heavy smell of dampness. The\nwhole setting testifies to the indubitable prosperity of an\naristocratic worker: it belongs to comrade K., an artist in wood. He\nis employed in one of the biggest furniture factories that make and\nimitate antique pieces. His speciality is the eighteenth century\nwhich, without ever having read anything about art, he feels to the\ntips of his fingers. With his eyes shut the master can impeccably saw\nout the cherry-coloured veneer inlaid with metal and tortoise-shell\nand the furniture whose effete intricate gently-curving contours\nemerge from a deal board, a heavy moist piece of wood that has fallen\ninto these amazingly creative hands, as effortlessly as if they had\ncome from the workshop of the celebrated Boulle. In each of the\nold-fashioned writing desks at which, presumably, our grandmothers\nwrote their love letters, and in each of the card-tables on which the\nWerthers broke their chalk scribbling out the names of their beloveds\nafter having placed a candle beside the weighty pistols, K., the\ncraftsman, fits, for the sake of style, secret drawers, little\nrecesses and hidden springs that, if accidentally pressed, deliver\ninto the hands of the admirable bourgeois a couple of yellowing\npapers, a bunch of dried forget-me-nets and that most rare aroma of\nsomeone else’s secret. All these items have been gleaned by that same\ncraftsman K. with enormous taste and sense of proportion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Communism has for him been tucked away like a\ncasket full of ideas, words and generalities wholly inapplicable to\npractical life that form the most priceless and intimate thing in\nlife — political style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Need it be said that in the Rising K. took no\nactive part unless of course you count the broad hospitality he\nextended to comrades following the battles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n K. is an Epicurcan. A true Renaissance man in his\neffervescent irrepressible love of life, its pleasures and its\npalpably warm human beauty, his sense of which is as infallible as\nhis cabinet-maker’s skill. K. believes that the very process of life\nwith all its physiological and profoundly mundane functions will some\nday become the basis for the greatest and truest beauty. This social\naesthetic gives him an affinity with the best things that Edgar Allan\nPoe wrote about — the as yet non-existent gardens and palaces to be\ninhabited by wise men. K. populates them with workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘If the kingdom of the future were suddenly to\narrive’ (again a purely German concept: only a utopian who does not\nbelieve in his day-dream could express himself that way) he would\nfashion wonderful shelves, beds, tables and chairs for the workers\npalaces. This is his ideal communist ‘casket’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But now the practice. Why did he not join the\nfight in October? Why does he smile when you talk about strikes and\ndistributing leaflets, Given all this deliberate passivity and\nindisputable desertion from the field of civil war where does that\nprovocative arrogance and manner of a victor over the bourgeoisie\ncome from! Why in the end did this man, who was created for great\nspiritual and physical pleasures and who thought communism the only\nroad by which he and his class could attain such pleasures, not lift\na single finger or once risk his neck during the Rising?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out that he is thieving and plundering\nhis bourgeois. He is stealing almost openly, stacking away sums large\nby the standards of cottage industry, putting unimaginable profits\ninto his pocket while looking provocatively into his boss’s eye and\nkeeping a watch on the cowardly accomplices who assist him. Then\nafter a week of the most arduous labour, working a ten-hour day with\ncontinuous strain, come several bottles of excellent beer, his little\nwife Eisa in her black silk underwear and, from out of the stinking\ncorner where the Roederer’s cork hits the low ceiling like a tall man\nwho has wandered in and banged himself against the bank of this pit,\nthrough the hate of a strong cigar, through the fog of perspiring,\nsultry dampness, through the golden illusions bursting in tiny\nbubbles on the surface of the earthenware mug in which centenarian\ngrape fizzes, comrade K., with the smirk of a conquerer, contemplates\nthe bourgeoisie he has deceived, deceived so cunningly and boldly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those are his finest hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The old songs of Hamburg are older and more\nrollicking than ours. There is one about a craftsman’s daughter who\nloved three boisterous apprentices thrown out by her father, another\nabout sea-horses and women, about brawls and dockside pubs. He sings\nthem marvellously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How do you tell K. that for the crumbs the boss\npermits his irreplaceable craftsman to snatch off his plentiful\ntable, the drop of stolen wine and those few hours’ blessed oblivion,\nhe is as much giving his enemy the marrow of his bone, his life and\nthe mysterious trembling fibres of the brain that we call talent as\nany labourer gives his sweat, muscle and bones? \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schiffbek’s police station, council offices, post\noffice and in general all the institutions and public buildings that\npersonify state power in this small working-class town with its\ncosmopolitan population were seized by the communists at dawn on 23\nOctober with the aid of one carbine and one hunting knife with a\nserrated blade and a horn handle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As in the rest of Hamburg, Schiffbek police\nstation, packed as it was with armed Sipos, was taken by surprise\nwith bare hands, quickly and without a sound. At the head of the\nwhole Rising and of the military organisation that worked out and\nimplemented its plan was S. A giant and a brave man, one of those\ntruly revolutionary workers of whom modern Germany can be proud.\nPerhaps it was that very physical strength and an awareness that with\none movement of his metallic muscles he could crush any adversary\nthat had developed in him that sense of caution so valuable to a\nleader and an ability to calculate the precise effect of every\ndischarge of force. He could come down like a steam-hammer on an\nanvil carefully splitting a nutshell without damaging the kernel —\nand a minute later beat out an iron bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His armed squad, formed of picked members of the\nlocal organisation, stood and fought just as S. himself would fight:\nwhen surrounded on all sides by an invading mob and pinned against a\nwall he would knock those small fry off their feet one by one without\nchecking the incredible reach and power of his hammer-fists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having occupied the police station the Schiffbek\ninsurgents did not remain there but, seizing sixteen rifles and as\nmany revolvers, left the building which could have become the same\ntrap for them as it had been for the police they had just seized and\ndisarmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One good marksman, by concealing himself behind\nthe shrubs, garden sheds and corners of the workers’ barracks\nscattered along the length of the hills on the left-hand side of the\ncentral highway linking Schiffbek with Hamburg, could and did keep\nthe road, bridge and railway embankment under fire and hold at a\nrespectable distance an enemy ten, a hundred, and finally, during the\nlast assaults of the morning of the 26th, a thousand times stronger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A marksman, or, as they are called here,\nScharfesch\u00fctze,<\/em> would, by remaining secure behind his cover\nand firing at long intervals, every five, ten or fifteen minutes,\nattempt to pick off at least one, and often two men with a single\nbullet. To these isolated and always lethal shots the police replied\nby sweeping whole blocks with drum-fire from their machine-guns —\nthey mowed down a multitude of women and children that had\naccidentally fallen within the sights of their impotent rage.\nNevertheless, after a brief lull, a cold, calculated sharp-eyed shot\nagain rang out, catching the driver of an armoured car who had just\npeeped out from under the steel hatch, removed a fur mitten and lit\nup a cigarette with relief, a Green who had leapt out from round a\ncorner and a Reichswehr soldier squatting behind a letter box who had\njust stopped in the middle of the street a tram conductor’s wife,\nwhose face and loaf tucked under her kerchief had seemed to him\nsuspicious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reichswehr soldiers are recruited from among\nclumsy country lads. They are the younger sons of rich peasants, a\ngeneration that matured after the war and revolution. In the\ncountryside they are a burden on their fathers; greedy, lazy,\npampered farmhands who will not put sufficient horsepower into the\nland as they cannot count upon an inheritance in the future. Such\nlads, political quadrupeds, readily become Landsknechte and look upon\ncivil war as a pogrom in the course of which they stand to gain much\nwith little risk. But instead of unarmed women and children\nterrorised in bread queues and that cowardly city rabble of whom back\nat home the priest with his plump chin resting on his white collar\nwould tell with such passion, the well-fed little peasants stumbled\nagainst workers’ hundreds and the cold-blooded, flawless fire of old\nsoldiers who had come out of the world war with every badge of\ndistinction for accurate marksmanship and sapper work under enemy\nmachine-gun fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The roles have been reversed. In Germany the\nrevolution draws upon cadres of old soldiers who defend their\nbarricades according to all the rules of military science while the\ngovernment has numerous but totally inexperienced and untempered\nunits, cowardly in battle though brutal when facing a captive with\nhis hands tied behind his back. It was not by chance that one of the\nofficers found it necessary to drive his detachment of raw recruits\nforward into the attack revolver in hand just to smoke out a lone\nrifleman ensconced in the attic of his house who was faultlessly\npicking off one soldier after another; as he urged his cannon fodder\non this lieutenant swore aloud before the whole town:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You scum of the earth, you cowards …With\ntwenty of them (a motion towards the dormer window) I could sort out\nthousands like you!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n But even without the officer’s assistance the\nSchiffbek workers, under the command of their S. and his Chief of\nOperations and Chief of Staff, the incomparable Fritz, resisted the\nonslaught of the regular troops. Adapting themselves to the\nconditions of the locality they would constantly switch their\ntactics. Where hills dominated the town or where the houses stood\nlike eases amid open wastes they split their forces into small combat\nformations, each of which would defend itself at its own risk and\nperil, advance, take cover and change from one ambush to another. But\nwhere empty white fields flowed between narrow banks of the town’s\nstreets they relied upon the old and proven technique of street\nbarricades, blocking the water-courses of the streets with firm dams\nand excavating earthworks so preventing armoured cars from breaking\nthrough to the central blocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At half past eleven the police, now in possession\nof the empty police station, opened their first offensives against\nSchiffbek. A detachment of fifty men advanced confidently along the\nmain street; knocking down a few chance passers-by they moved up to a\nwhite building with a long stairway jutting out. Beautiful dark eyed\nMinna went past the soldiers showing her gleaming teeth and making a\ncount of the invaders. They did not even notice the red badge on her\nample bosom. Her headscarf tied at the back disappeared calmly down a\nside-street. A boy, a pupil at the town school, who had been running\nalong beside her, turned round, hiccupped and sat down on the\npavement. A bullet had struck him between the eyebrows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the insurgents’ camp there was still the\ndeepest silence until, at a distance of only twenty paces, several\nshots knocked the sergeant-major and half the soldiers out of the\ninvading detachment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An hour later, police now numbering some two\nhundred, moved in not just along one line but from several angles\nsimultaneously. The workers drove them back from their barricades and\nearthworks; from all the covers scattered along the hills they\nplastered the invaders with volley-fire. Fritz, the marksman, shot at\nthe police from round the corner of his own tenement, surrounded by\nwomen holding the supplies of cartridges in torn aprons. A classic\nfigure: a large-peaked cloth cap tied down with a scarf under the\nchin, a jacket in tatters and beneath it a heavy grey docker’s\njersey. His hair, which to this day that beautiful Minna cannot\nrecall without laughter, is like a bandit’s: after five minutes’ wait\none, just one shot. With it Fritz had picked off four of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It should be said that Schiffbek is rich in, and\nrenowned for, its Fritzes. A second one directed the defence of the\nbarricades and earthworks. Beside S. he is almost short. But while S.\nhad grown haphazardly, branching out on all sides with a\ngood-natured, powerful voluble crown right up in the sky, Fritz is a\nsquat shrub firmly gripping the earth somewhere between the stones\nunder a strong sea breeze. Heels together, a drum-like chest with his\nhands in pockets and one shoulder a little bit forward, the shoulder\nof a trained boxer and athlete at that. A whistle, insolent jibes and\nthe ability to make a woman or a policeman blush equally — by\nlooking them up and down. In addition an audacity that had won him\nthe untranslatable nickname of Didlein<\/em>–a nickname both\ncontemptuous and flattering that means chap, rascal, smart alec, bold\nspirit, liar, gunman, rogue and pastry-cook — in fact a generally\ngood fellow. In peaceful times this Fritz had rather shocked the\nsedate party functionaries with his sharp dockside smell and\nprovocative unruly spirit but in the days of battle he worked miracle\nafter miracle. He would rush from window to window, urge on, hold\nback, switch forces, swear and give commands as the ganglion between\nS.’s calm strength and all the roving knots of insurrecrionaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At half past one the government crept towards\nSchiffbek with five hundred men plus a squadron of armoured cars. The\nfray lasted until six o’clock that evening. Two first-rate marksmen\nmay well be able to stand fast for a long while but in the end\ncourage and tenacity have their limits. In order to win time the\ncombatants very quietly left the earthworks, dived through the\nnearest gateway and an hour and a half later the steel noses of their\nrifles were poking over the edge of another barricade, successively\njoining battle in the most hard-pressed areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile the bewildered enemy was still flooding\nthe now silent ambush with fire. From time to time the heat subsided;\nthe blind barrage would break off and a scout crawl along the\npavement on all fours. But then, from somewhere in a nearby attic a\nsolitary shot quacks out and the bombardment~is resumed with renewed\nforce against the empty pit full of cartridge-cases, debris and\ncharred soil. In the end the lieutenant seizing his revolver with a\nheroic flourish led forth his musketeers into the assault. Shooting\nblindly into the air and uttering war cries they tumbled into the\nempty ditch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dusk was falling. Sunset like a sentry sloped its\nlong pointed bayonet-like shadows across all the streets. A poster\nhad already appeared on Schiffbek’s hoardings proclaiming a general\nstrike and greeting the Soviet government. The thirty-five\ncommunists, beset by thousands of soldiers, were sure that all\nGermany was rising behind them. However, even without appeals the\nwhole population supported the communists. Eight thousand people\nturned out on to the streets and if they did not take part in the\nstruggle it was simply due to the total lack of weapons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the sacred intelligentsia! It is worth noting\nthat in little Schiffbek, just as it used to be in Russia and\neverywhere else where the social revolution ultimately takes up arms,\nthe intellectuals fire alongside the police and soldiers. Not a\nprofessor — for what professors are there in Schiffbek! — nor a\nteacher, — the teachers are well-meaning though timid — nor even a\nmidwife — in Schiffbek women bear their own children without a hint\nof medical aid — but only an aged school janitor to make a stand for\nthe fruits of European enlightenment. Left alone in his deserted\npremises, the wretched sixty-year-old, his head sated with schoolroom\nwisdom, a worker who had learnt to despise corns, the stench of\npoverty and muscular young ignorance as deeply as he himself was\ndespised by the implacable blackboards, teachers’ uniforms and\nplaster sages on the bookcase in the headmaster’s study, this old\njanitor grabbed his pistol and decided to fire upon his own class,\nthe pupils who were studying street disorder instead of penmanship\nand the Holy Writ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A knock outside the door. The janitor hid. They\nknocked once more and then the gates left their hinges beneath S.’s\nangry shoulder. Then, raising onearm as on the Schiller\nmemorial,looking comical and menacing with his hair dishevelled, the\nold man fired at the worker’s broad chest and missed. Here the\nmajestic posture ended. The janitor made for the stairs with S. after\nhim. S. climbed up despite the drawn pistol and bellowed across the\nentire establishment:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Crazy old Karnikel <\/em>(bunny). You just\nempty the chamberpots to support their learning!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What use are you to anyone!!” and he\nremoved the revolver from Uncle Paulus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The old man wept most bitterly, for the years in\nwhich he had rubbed the white algebra and time-charts off the\nblackboards had made a true intellectual of him: the desperate\nfrantic martyrdom and then the impotent tears proved it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n S. clipped him one round the head and let him off.\nThis was the situation: S., laughing and swearing dreadfully, holding\nthe old man and his unfortunate weapon in one hand while he wiped the\nsoot off his face that had been scorched by the shot. Amid tears\nPaulchen was forced to tear his old and desecrated party card to\nshreds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All around: urchins, shooting, death and laughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By evening the battles had abated. The workers\nwere forced to retreat — to this day S. will talk about this with\nutter shame and child-like vexation — to retreat five hundred paces\nfrom their old positions. That was on the Hamburg flank. But in the\nrear troops had managed to penetrate as far as the main square where\nwealthy residents showered them with sausages, margarine and\ncongratulations. The encirclement closed in threatening to become a\nstranglehold. A squad of insurgents coming to the rescue from\nshattered Barmbeck could not break through the police blockade. By\nnow vehicles of the military command were racing through the streets\nof Hamburg: General Staff officers rushed to inspect the network of\nbarricades and found their positioning to be superb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At daybreak workers were again lying in the\ntrenches, attics and behind every possible cover. But the enemy whose\nthree assaults had been smashed the day before, did not show himself.\nHooters started wailing continuously and pointlessly from a few\nfactories. Patrols paced up and down at the end of every side-street\nemptying into the fields relieving each other regularly. They were\nstanding guard over the barricades from afar as if over a captive\nprisoner. Then, a menacing stillness. At first they were heartened by\nit. Then perturbed. And then they sensed enormous danger creeping up\non Schiffbek from those silent wastes and made ready to meet it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirty-five against five thousand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At about one o’clock a unit of four armoured cars\nand six lorries appeared from the direction of Horn dropping a large\ncontingent of Sipos on the road. From Uhlenfeld in the north\ntwenty-six lorry-loads of Greens. From the direction of Eimsb\u00fcttel,\ncavalry. An aeroplane came down very low and flew over Schiffbek\nraking its already bullet-riddled walls with a grey curtain of\nbullets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although beaten by the Allies the German Army goes\ngallantly to war against its own proletarians. But the example is\nevidently infectious for it is now the workers who sting the\ngovernment forces. Cavalry, infantry, armoured cars, aircraft and, on\nthe polluted little river Bille, a whole navy made up of five\nlaunches of river police while a handful of workers, scoffing at this\ntechnology and the bloated, rotten shell of that hired army living\noff the employers’ fat tips, continued to hold out until four o’clock\nin the afternoon. In the end, having thrown the troops back along\nsprawling unprotected fronts, beleaguered Schiffbek, driving before\nit crumpled up, broken columns of blue, green and other valiantly\ncoloured soldiers, breaks through the ring of ambushes and emerges\nweapons in hand to freedom through that bloody breach. It’s funny to\nrelate: three riflemen form the rearguard of this miniature workers’\narmy. They keep the ‘Naval Forces of the Republic’ at a respectable\ndistance while S. and his men make their way into the country along\nthe narrow gap between the river and the main highway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the victors’ celebration. The pandemonium of\ndenunciations, searches, brutalities, arrests and church services.\nAll this goes on for nearly two months. Dozens of workers are set\noutside the law. Many are arrested and await trial. Their families\ncontinue to tuck themselves away in the dank workers’ barracks: one\nby one the insurgents’ wives are thrown out of the factories on to\nthe streets. Now and then a fast-talking trade-union leader appears\nat their homes: swollen and yellow with iodine and his head swathed\nin white. He had been seized near the ‘Tin Shacks’ during the Rising\nand beaten to mincemeat by the police in error. Now he replaces\nknocked-out teeth, conducts espionage and operates as a go-between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hunger, snows, dirty icy beds, the rent, the\ncaretaker shouting and winter, beating its white bitch rods on the\nroad between your own little den that smells of gas, the lavatory and\nslushy filth, and the labour exchange. The exchange is a grey\nbuilding standing to attention and saluting an open field. The back\nof this constable who has nodded off on duty is plastered with our\nproclamations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From time to time the women who have been\nsubjected to every kind of pressure and every kind of privation are\nconfronted by a police search-party or a pencil-and-paper gendarme\nfor questioning. And then all that helpless poverty bristles its\nspines and puts up the stiffest and most courageous resistance to\nboth the civil and the military power as they rattle their ringing\nbroadswords outside on the staircase slippery with frozen slops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The wife of a Schiffbek insurgent presses her arms\nto her sides, her face red with anger, the stove or the wash-tub and\nwith yelling at screaming children and the shaggy dog that is\nfuriously barking under the sagging settee, raises her voice to a\nshrill, rasping pitch and pushes away the papers laid before her as\nif brushing aside the obstinate perspiring hair from her brow; she\nvehemently denies and dodges and will not put her name to anything\nanywhere. Her abuse flies irresistibly down on to the heads of the\ndeparting officialdom as if tipped out of a rubbish bin. These women,\nfor whom there is nothing to eat and who tomorrow will be thrown out\nof their lairs, push the police around, contemptuously pillorying\nthem with their caustic jeers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Christmas Eve they get together to sew dozens\nof dolls for the children of communists who have fled. C. fashions a\ndolls’ house out of old boxes pasting them over with newspaper and\ngrubby kings and queens from long ago cast-off suits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hungry neighbours come round with presents — a\nbar of soap, a doll or a pair of warm stockings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, at night, a detachment of workers from\nHamburg with a wheel-barrow of flour and margarine from American\ncomrades. Fifty kilos of fat and twenty-five pounds of sugar for\nseventy families each numbering three to five mouths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hunger reaches its apogee several days before\nChristmas. Following an offer from a Dutch branch of Workers’\nInternational Relief Schiffbek is to send fifty of its children to\nHolland to be bearded out with foreign comrades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A knock at the door — some workers arrive with\nembarrassed faces; they look at nothing but the washing hanging out\nover the cold stove or the syphilitically green wall and ask about\nthe weather, their health and this and that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the vacant-eyed mother it is ascertained:\nwhom they should take, a boy or a girl and how old.’ A quarter of an\nhour to get ready. No luggage. A few minutes’ bitter howling on\nmother’s shaking knees. But the stockings are by now firmly laced up,\nall buttons properly fastened and mother combs her daughter’s tousled\ncrop with brusque, peremptory movements that are at the same time\ndilatory and secretly drawn out. A quarter of an hour later the child\nis for ever ripped from its roots in routed Schiffbek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two mothers did not wish to give up their\nchildren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One, burdened with four boys, two girls (her\nhusband had been arrested and her factory had turned her out) and a\nwindow with newspaper instead of glass, keeps the six mouths above\nthe water-line by means of unimaginable economies. The other is at\nthe summit of filth, light-heartedness, jollity and physical ruin.\nChildren of every complexion from many ardently, if briefly, loved\nfathers. The little girls come into the world, unasked for, yet in\nsplendour, just as a wonderful golden-yellow sunflower appears on a\ndump from a seed accidentally fallen on a litter-strewn patch of\nground. The little boys are hale and bright and once left to\nthemselves they will be like the firm green spikes of a maple\ngrasping the mould and flesh of an old factory wall with its Squat\ntrunk. Amid tears, curses and swearing at her unsought fecundity,\namid children’s howling and distributing clips round the ear, all the\nwhile standing in a draught with her thin skirt clinging round her\nknees and an infant sucking at the edge of a dirty cardigan at one\nmoment and at the exhausted bare breast at another, this mother\nrefused to send a single one of her spirited, hungry band into exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among these desperate families in their death\nthrees in now subdued Schiffbek, there is one so happy that women\nneighbours come round in the evenings to listen to its unusual\ntranquillity. A small, dark woman, prematurely aged but with the\nblackest eyes and the duskiest colouring and something southern about\nher voice that crackles like well-baked ash-covered chestnuts\nsnapping under the embers in the frost. Her children, four of them,\nare as if planned, either quite blond with blue eyes or olive-skinned\nwith black eyes. Little Czechs and little Germans alternately. Her\nhusband is comrade R., an old communist who had been beaten up in the\narmy because of his Polish surname and his dangerously taciturn\nmanner behind which the sergeant-major sensed a pacifist; a member of\nthe Spartacus Group, one of the oldest fighters in the KPD and\nwounded in the Kapp Putsch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are periods in every man’s life when pus\naccumulates and festers. Every abrasion — baby’s sickness, an\nunpleasant exchange with the boss, meeting a spy just after coming\nout of an illegal gathering — all take a nasty, malignant turn.\nComrade R., a foreigner and burdened with a family, out of work half\nthe week and long known as a communist, felt keenly that he and his\nfour could at any minute now slip under the wheel. They were all very\ntired, growing terribly hungry and cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the battles. Yet October had not yielded the\nvictory which Schiffbek, that Verdun of the Hamburg Rising, had so\nfantastically believed in. The police had not managed to catch R. who\nhad taken such an energetic part in the movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From abroad he sent his wife a letter and a visa.\nOne of those rare miracles that still do happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone in R.’s flat thawed out, relaxed, took a\nbreath and started to talk in undertones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That letter from abroad was like the scrape of a\ndistant spade digging those five human beings out of the avalanche\nthat had crashed on to their roof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Hamm quarter. This district is highly\ninconvenient for street fighting because of the lay-out of its broad\nstraight streets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is difficult to tie its expansive avenues in a\ngirdle of barricades. The smooth, bare frontages of the workers’\nbarracks fall sheer to the slippery asphalt. The walls provide no\ncover for lone marksmen who prefer the ledges, bays and lofty\nporchways of the older-style dwellings. Spades and crowbars break\ntheir teeth trying to dig up that rolled-out lava. You need to fell a\nfew fully-grown trees to seal off such a street. But trees do not\ngrow in slum quarters. What’s more Hamm’s straight, empty, smooth\nstreets like stone channels, can easily be defended by one\nmachine-gun mounted at a cross-roads: there are miles of exposed\nspaces that mercilessly betray to binoculars any crouching figure, in\nvain seeking cover and protection in the mean shadow of those inhuman\nfacades — a figure with a cap pulled down over his eyes, a woollen\nscarf wound round his chin and a rifle in his hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All these unfavourable features did not prevent\nHamm from becoming the arena of brief but very intense battles. Not\neven the motley petty-bourgeois nature of the population could dull\nthem: to a man the students that made up a considerable proportion of\nit offered their services to the police — not on their home ground\nbut after they had stolen off to more secure sectors of the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An armed rising presupposes the presence of people\nwith weapons in their possession. The Hamburg Rising was a rising of\nunarmed workers confronted above all with arming themselves at the\nexpense of the enemy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Hamm zone there were five police stations\npermanently occupied by Sipo units; apart from the weapons in the\nhands of the policemen the military organisation was expecting to\nseize the small armouries in each one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus in Hamm as in other parts of the city the\nstruggle started with unarmed workers seizing the small police\nfortresses guarded by sentries and packed with their military\ncomplement and ammunition of every kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the toughest police stations was seized by\ntwelve workers with an antiquated pistol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the very doorway of the police station the\ndetachment seemed to waver. Then one of the comrades whose name,\nRolfshagen, can be spoken with pride — the gates of a hard-labour\ncamp have now slammed behind him — tossed out to his men: “Nun\nman los!”<\/em> (Well, let’s go!) and, without looking to see if\nanyone was following or not, leapt over the three steps with his huge\nlegs and burst into the station. Behind him came his friend, a young\ncompositor, but no one else. The only revolver, unloaded at that, was\njabbed into the crowd of Sipos. Seeing their indecision, Rolfshagen\nbellowed in a quite unreal voice and crashed his fist down\nmeaningfully on the table. Papers started to fly, the holy oil in the\ninkwells was spattered about and state power tottered to its\nfoundations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Man los, hier wird nicht lange\ngefackelt!”<\/em> (Let’s go, it’s no time to hang about!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The police surrendered, put their hands up and\nwere disarmed and locked away by the comrades who had caught them up.\nWhat should they do now! Hold out in the captured Revier<\/em>\n(police station) or go out on to the streets and dig in, or rush to\nthe aid of Barmbeck from where the sound of relentless gunfire\nreached their ears! And all the while there was no contact with the\ncentre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When sitting in his corner at party meetings,\nsucking on his pipe silently fluffing himself up in his bristly\nhunched waterproof docker’s gear, Rolfshagen would never chatter. He\ndid not like phrases, silver as bicycle-wheel spokes, and the calls\nto struggle of which party intellectuals are so fond. He conceived of\nan uprising as something simple and straightforward, without\nretreats, without the slightest vacillations and deviations, like the\nsweep of a crane snatching up its prey, the straightness of a compass\nneedle and the unerring course of a ship. And so, without receiving\nany instructions, Rolfshagen loaded his rifle, stacked up the\ncartridges in handy piles and made ready to fight it out and die\nbeside a window whose ledge afforded a slight cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His comrades tried in vain to draw him along with\nthem, arguing the whole danger of a position that could be surrounded\nand cut off. Rolf decided to stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Dat is Befehl ick blieb “<\/em>\n(That’s an order, I’m sticking to it) and he stayed. An hour later\nthis man’s duel with the police who had flooded into the district\nbegan. Having fired his last cartridge he finally fell, wounded in\nthe head, chest and stomach, losing consciousness from a terrific\nboot to the ribs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rolfshagen did not die in the hospital where they\nhad removed six pieces of lead from his body. Confident of the\nrevolution’s speedy victory he refused to run but with a grin\naccepted the ten years’ hard labour which Scheidemann’s mercy had\ngranted him. Even in the doorway of the court he turned round to the\ncrowd and shouted to his friends interspersed among the thick wad of\nbourgeois in the audience:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Don’t forget to keep my revolver clean; I’ll\nbe coming out to get it soon!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was the capture of the Fort Street police\nstation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, Mittelstrasse. To begin with, Charli Setter,\na member of the provincial parliament who had been entrusted with the\nleadership of a combat unit, did not show up until right at the very\nend of the conflict and displayed a shameful lack of resolution,\ndiffidence and faintheartedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Secondly, a worker, no longer young but extremely\nagile and, as they say in German, aufgeweckt,<\/em> whose narrow\nanaemic face was framed by a small black beard like a black-edged\nmourning envelope and twitched with the vague tremble of neuralgic\npain. He had sat out the entire war in the trenches and came out a\ncripple, gravely wounded in the head, susceptible to agonising pains,\nepileptic fits and hysteria. His disability had not however stopped\nhis injured head from re-considering and reviewing his old\nconvictions as a social democrat and party official. Cursing the war\nand the workers’ party that had acted as its livestock supplier he\ncourageously broke with the organisation he had belonged to for over\nfifteen years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The comrades were afraid to rely too much upon K.\nwhom simple party discussions had caused to recant. But during the\nAktion <\/em>he not only remained in the battles and risked the\ngreatest danger but never gave free rein to his fractured nerves. His\nconduct was irreproachable from start to finish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the assault on police station no. 23 two\nremarkable brothers marched alongside K. Rott, a curly-headed giant\nand building worker by trade. I cannot remember the exact description\nof his Branche<\/em> (trade). Anyway it was a short tradesman’s\nformula that included iron, concrete and coal. It had a proud ring\nlike the motto on an order of labour. In reply to all my questions\nthis comrade merely shook his Siegfriedian head and refused at any\nprice to disclose any information about his personal role in the\nbusiness. So a long shadow continues to lie across that stern regular\nface: one like those of the caryatides dumbly holding up a whole\nstructure. Beside him was L., a highly-skilled joiner and a man of\nexceptional culture and courage. The swarthy colour of his face, the\nsouthern vivacity of his eyes and the mock romanticism with which he\ndefaces and gouges out the planed, lacquered commonplaces of\npolitical jargon (just as the craftsman tests the blade of his tool\non the edge of his bench), seem to point to Slav and possibly Jewish\nblood. A fiery political temperament and a cool inward sobriety\nthanks to which L., as one of the finest and most remarkable Hamburg\nfighters, never for one instant forgets deep within himself that the\nrevolution’s most flaming words are in fact written in crude oil\npaint on cheap red calico. An enthusiast with a small,\nhermetically-sealed ice-box in his heart. His conscious\nself-abnegation and the fury with which he can at the requisite\nmoments cast aside the cool rationality which bugged him, are far\nmore valuable than any innate valour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three anarchist brothers fought alongisde Rott and\nL. Brave men who had left the party a few months earlier because of\nIts inactivity, but who took up rifles as soon as the password for\nthe Rising was issued. Their whole family consists of communists. The\nsixty-year-old mother, the sisters and the two brothers-in-law also\ntook part in the movement. In short, a family cell, a Soviet knot of\nwhich there are quite a few deep down among German workers. This\ngroup (twenty-eight workers with two revolvers and one rubber\ntruncheon) overran their police station quite brilliantly,\nsurrounding it on either side, disarming the police and availing\nthemselves of its store of arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, around seven o’clock, day began to\nbreak. Street traffic had come to a halt (to be sure, only for a few\nhours in this part of the city) and detachments of armed workers\nstopped their workmates who were going off to work without suspecting\na thing and sent them home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What’s happened?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The dictatorship of the proletariat has been\ndeclared.” \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Dat kun jo sen, ook io nich wieder gohn.<\/em>\n(Maybe, but it won’t last.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Dan got wi werra noch\u00fcs.”<\/em> (Then\nlet’s go home.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not to the barricades, not to the aid of the\nworkers hundreds but home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Very typical too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In spite of the lack of further orders from the\nStaff Centre the majority of insurgents quit the ravaged police\nstations and moved off in the direction of smoke-shrouded Barmbeck\nwhere frantic shooting would nor cease. The only sensible tactic had\nbeen arrived at by instinct. There was no way of lifting the asphalt.\nThere were almost no trees. There were too few weapons for them to\nbring in wider masses; therefore the armed groups dispersed in\ndifferent directions so as to percolate individually to the embattled\nquarters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rott, L. and the anarchist brothers’ detachment\n(nine rifles and twelve revolvers altogether) proceeded in the\ndirection of the heaviest exchanges. In one of the stone corridors\nthey were peppered with machine-gun fire from a lorry. The riflemen\nthrew themselves to the ground and then under the canopy of ever\ncloser fire took over down a side street. One of the comrades dropped\ndown on one knee and raised his rifle to his shoulder. It fell\ninstantly from his hands. L. recalls a stream of blood trickling from\nthe pavement, washing into the gutter a cigarette-end someone had\ndropped. From one side came the roar of a second vehicle. Not\nnoticing the partisans it stood self-assuredly across the end of a\nsmall street its heavy undefended flank facing down it. The\ninsurrectionaries fairly swept it with carbine fire. Then the little\ndetachment adopted a mobile square formation switching from place to\nplace for many hours, finally giving real battle on the Central Canal\nbridge. It was a collapsible, sprawling square which, at the required\nmoment, would roll up and disappear like water on sand. In the\ncentre, three or four first-rate marksmen. They occupy an\nintersection or the main junction of several major streets. On every\nadjacent corner look-outs armed with revolvers are posted, each\ncovered by a newspaper kiosk, telephone box or tree-trunk. They fire\nonly at close range during hand-to-hand skirmishes and warn the\ncarbineers of an imminent encirclement. Dashing from place to place,\ndefending and surrendering successive nodal points, this flying squad\nof marksmen eventually consolidates by the bridge over the Central\nCanal where the stone creases of the surrounding streets converge in\na broad fan. The bridge gently arches its broad back in order to step\nprimly over the course of a wan, ebbing factory canal that is like a\nthorn in its flesh. The marksmen lie down so that only the barrels of\ntheir rifles protrude over the bridge’s hump. Growing up in corsets\nof iron rods much thicker than their own trunks are a few miserable\ntrees that have not fled this spot only because the concrete has\nsqueezed their sapling roots into clods; they and an emaciated\nlamp-post provide the only cover for the combatants set out to the\nright and left of the three sharpest shooting hunters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All along the bank uninhabitable buildings drop\nmurkily into the water. Only occasionally does a cellar peep-hole\nopen up in a wall spread through with damp. It looks like a shivering\ngaping mouth surfacing to take a gulp of air only to disappear once\nagain. This is a working-class Venice; where palaces of cotton, fat\nand iron have no wide marble staircases and embankments; where brick\nand concrete lapped by poisonous sewage is covered with deposits of\nregal beauty, coatings of pale green, grey and pinky-brown tints more\nwhimsical and varied than porphyry, marble and malachite — the\nblood, pearl and ash of the high Quattrocento The grandeur of the\ncraggy cul-de-sacs is underlined not by time but glistening coal. Its\nshadows are more tragic than those Tintoretto’s hand painted for\nblossoming Venice. This lagoon that washes round industrial Hamburg\nknows neither gondolas nor romantic nights. It carries out to sea\nfactory waste, dampness, cold and all the diseases that soak through\nthe walls into the life, dreams, labour and blood of millions of\nworkers. Like doges the factory chimneys look at themselves in cloudy\nmirrors. Smoke drifts down from their shoulders like resplendent\nrobes and they are betrothed to their grey, cold, polluted sea not by\nthe gold ring of the Adriatic but by the wail of ships’ sirens\nheralding the arrival of precious raw materials. The nereids have\nlong ago died off in the cold filth of the canals. Now and again\nurchins fish out of the water the white corpse of a fish floating\nbelly upwards with painfully distended gills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over this canal they fought it out. Suddenly the\nlook-outs reported vehicles. They had to change position again.\nMarksmen once more in the middle of the square and scouts on the\ncorners. A lorry packed with soldiers flies unexpectedly round a\ncorner. With one well-aimed shot Rott manages to damage the engine.\nThe Sipos abandon their vehicle and carry off their wounded. The\ndetachment again makes a desperate sprint and occupies the hub of the\nnext quarter. This time it is attacked by an armoured car under cover\nof which a line of Greens spreads out. The partisans pick off the\nlieutenant — a plucky but stupid lieutenant who had sprung forward\ncourageously to rally his men for the assault at the top of his\nvoice. Panic among the Sipos succeeded by a numbing stillness; a\nstillness quite appropriate to that ghostly realm of deserted canals\npicked out by the silently fluttering banners of factory smoke and\nthe far-off salves of the Rising being quelled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The insurgents continue to advance along empty\nstreets, by motionless, glassy rivers, past idle factories locked up\nlike monasteries and eyeless houses with mouths hostilely shut tight;\nat crossroads they break their formation that was as light and\nconvenient as a nomad’s tent. Finally amid an utter absence of life\nthe rumble of wheels came again across the dead roadway. This time,\nthough, it was only a loaded newspaper truck. Forgetting danger, they\nfumbled with the tightly lashed bundles and then looked through\nFremdenblatt’s<\/em> soft pages nowhere finding the only words that\nthroughout that day they had been expecting with more tension and\ntorment than their own victory: news of the revolution throughout\nGermany and the new Republic of Soviets. Rott screwed up one paper\nand grabbed another. L. read it and went white. Otto wrapped up his\nwounded hand in that dirty rag refusing to believe its reports and\ncontemptuously nodding his head. It was lying. Yes, it was\ndeliberately keeping quiet about the victorious rising in Berlin,\nSaxony and everywhere else. It couldn’t be otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then they threw the bundles down on to the asphalt\nand set fire to them. The wind snatched up the blazing sheets and\ncarried them off into the canal. There they drifted like flaming\nbirds, swans set alight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Volleys crackled in nearby streets. The detachment\nretreated slowly, illuminated by the ruddy glow of the enormous\nbonfire that the soldiers were trying in vain to stamp out and break\nup with their rifle-butts. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the recent rising in Hamburg the\ndockworkers, who had already been on strike for several days, did not\njoin forces with the fighting masses. They roamed the streets, hands\nthrust in pockets and with innocent curiosity questioned comrades\nreturning from the districts under police siege: what’s up and why?\nThousands of workers organised by the social democrats remained\npeaceful spectators of the Hamburg events. The port workers (with the\nexception of the shipyards and plants processing petroleum waste,\nwhere earnings have fallen to ridiculous levels) are aristocrats\ncompared to the mass of the Hamburg proletariat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They receive more than the highest grade of inland\nworker, like, for example, building workers, engineering workers or\nrailwaymen, and of course several times more than those pariahs of\nHamburg port, the men employed in the shipyards. During the war this\ncontented layer worked zealously for the war department earning\nexcellent rates of pay; they were exempted from military service and\nentered the revolution as a cold, reactionary current, perfectly\ncombining their flabby, cosy, contented, petty-bourgeois way of life\nwith an innocuous SPD card In 1918 this Menshevik-organised mass of\nwell-to-do workers fought might and main against the Council of\nWorkers’ Deputies (Soviet), wishy-washy and ambivalent as its policy\nwas. To the demonstrations of unemployed, the banning of bourgeois\nnewspapers and the wrecking of the SPD rag, The Hamburg Echo,<\/em>\nwhich had splashed its yellow pages with daily slanders against the\nSoviet, these workers had replied with a powerful reactionary\ncounter-demonstration, the arrest of the Soviet’s chairman, the\nrestoration of the bourgeois Senate and a railwayman’s strike that\nprevented the despatch of strong volunteer units mobilised by the\nHamburg proletariat to aid the city of Bremen under siege by General\nHerstenberg’s officer division. In short it was not the first time\nthat dockers and other workers in the countless port warehouses\nrendered valuable service to the German counter-revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And well they might! From throughout the world\nmerchant vessels converge upon Hamburg’s convenient harbour.\nShipowners have no time to wait, nor time to haggle about a few\nirrelevant pfennigs. For every day’s delay they have to pay\ndemurrage; delivery dates cannot wait; agreed freightages and rail\ncharges lapse. Due to all these circumstances the stevedores and\nwarehousemen enjoy unquestionable economic privileges while other\ncategories have long since lost both — the eight-hour day and half\ntheir pre-war wage! In the course of the revolution’s first two years\nthe reactionary influence of the port never ceased to make itself\nfelt. It was against the socialisation of industrial undertakings,\nthe restriction of private commerce and any social turmoil that might\nweaken the Free City’s credit-worthiness abroad, strengthen its\nforeign competitors and de-populate a port that lives on the ebb and\nflow of the world market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in 1919 Hamburg Mensheviks imagined that\nBritain would spare the capital of the Uferland <\/em>(coastal\nregion) in return for their righteous suppression of communism. Today\nnothing remains of such hopes. The Entente has concertedly chewed up\nthe left-overs of bourgeois-socialist Germany and utterly ruined not\njust the communists but the most moderate Mensheviks too. Their\nwell-being has faltered, their trade unions gather in alms and their\nleaders, now chucked out of the Grand Coalition, vote for the\ndictatorship of the bourgeoisie — yet old traditions die hard. The\nport has been pauperised, but still it is the best-fed of paupers,\nand fed without painful interruptions. The grateful labour\naristocracy assists the police in clearing away the barricades and\nvisits SPD meetings and rallies en masse.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yesterday was a field-day for them. The Free City\nof Hamburg was honoured with a visit from the eminent Berliner, the\neditor of Vorw\u00e4rts,<\/em> Genosse Stampfer. Hundreds of workers\ncame to listen. Possibly not a single Russian worker would have the\npatience to read through to the end an article detailing all the\ndistortions of Marxist thought that the experienced Menshevik had the\ntemerity to put before a working-class audience; in a city, what is\nmore, where trenches that had criss-crossed the suburbs in every\ndirection had only just been filled in, where tenements in\nworkingclass quarters are lacerated with bullets, where dead\npolicemen number dozens and injured, arrested and beaten workers\nhundreds. And yet you must have a clear conception of the entire\ndecay and headlong decline of working-class and petty-bourgeois\nGermany, corrupted by half a century of castrated, emasculated\npseudo-socialism, to appreciate the tremendous act of heroism that,\nunder such conditions, Hamburg’s armed uprising represented. To rise\nup in that swamp, that cowardly, deeply reactionary quagmire, was a\nthousand times harder than beneath our old Tsarist soldier’s boot or\nagainst a distinct, easily recognisable, renegade black Fascist\nshirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doctor Stampfer was not trying to be particularly\nlogical. After all he felt himself to be in the provinces where a\ngood player can without embarrassment cheat with a clearly marked\ncard. In the first place all Germany’s misfortunes stem from the\nendless multiplicity of regional parliaments. They should be\nabolished and centralised. Secondly, only a strong state power is\ncapable of protecting the working class from the offensive of\ncapital. Only the state (shouts: ‘what sort?”bourgeois?’) can uphold\nthe eight-hour day for the workers. Even worthy, portly, greying SPD\nmembers started to feel ill at ease somehow, but German Mensheviks\nhave the orator’s ingenuous and always effective remedy: as soon as\nthe gallery begins to whistle and the old men start looking round at\neach other restively and mutter:’Oh, yes? Well I never!’, the speaker\ndrags Wilhelm out on to the stage. Alive, in moustache and full\nmilitary dress. The speaker need only punch him on the nose, tell a\ncouple of anecdotes about the ex-emperor’s stupidity and have the\nunprecedented courage to abuse Wilhelm as a fool, idiot and maniac\nfor the philistine to quake rapturously in the face of such blasphemy\nand the audience to be conquered. Having spat at Wilhelm the SPDer\npasses on to the communists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out that it is they who have smashed the\nsacred chalice of the Republic. Lacking any esteem for the legal\nforms of democracy and the noble philanthropic methods of\nparliamentary struggle they have sullied the skirts of that innocent\nmaiden, the Republic, with the blood of their own brother\nproletarians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amid a deep hush Stampfer hurls his accusation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “In Prussia communists brutally tortured two\npolice officers. Isn’t the poor Schupo<\/em> (policeman) as much a\nproletarian as ourselves?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n From somewhere above a very shrill mocking wail\nstifled by virtuous grunting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Down with Scheidemann! Hang Ebert from the\nlamppost! “<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Ebert,” says the Vorw\u00e4rts editor\nbeating his starched breast, “Ebert, that son of the people, has\nattained the supreme responsibilities of state thanks to his talents!\nThe German proletariat can be proud that a son from its own depths\nhas reached such a peak!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pope Ebert appears aloft in the clouds of\nparliamentarism. The Republic stretches forth over him the crown of\nvictory, and signals to the ballot box: one out of millions can win\ntwo hundred thousand pounds or become president. Democracy’s divine\nlottery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stampfer admits to some of the party’s mistakes\nwith a disarming frankness. The party has been learning. Nothing is\ngained without trials and suffering. “But why do we always only\ncondemn our own party — it debilitates us. We should make our\ncriticisms in private, face to face. Take, for example, Dr. Hertz,\nBreitscheid and myself.” A note of confidence and intimate\nsimplicity. “They voted against the motion of confidence in the\nMarx government but I was for it. So what? Did we quarrel over it?\nYou just don’t! We travelled in the same compartment and didn’t talk\npolitics — we were up to here with it (a gesture of having had his\nfill) and on the station we had some sausages together. But think how\nwe had argued about it in the faction — almost coming to blows.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The electors are always flattered when they are\nallowed to take a peep through the keyhole into the kitchen of\nbig-time politics. Ten or twelve speakers, one after another, spoke\nagainst the worthy Vorw\u00e4rts. They demonstrated the following\nelementary truths: 1) the social democrats have safely delivered the\ndictatorship of the bourgeoisie; 2) such a dictatorship will be\ndirected exclusively against the working class; 3) the SPD bears not\nonly moral but also formal responsibility for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All those speakers who, in their ten allotted,\nfast-flowing minutes punctuated by the chairman’s bell, attempted\ntortuously to substantiate their most profound disillusionment with\nthe party and their rage at its crimes were met with clapping,\nnodding and loud pre-arranged ovations. Then, with exceptional\nuniformity and an overwhelming majority, a motion of confidence in\nthe SPD’s parliamentary faction was carried. Having given their\ndeputy a chewing-over, shoved his nose in the sins of the SPDers and\nrevealed their complete understanding of his sharkish tricks, the\nelectors wiped Stampfer’s broken nose clean and let him go off home\nwith a vote of full confidence. A card-sharp must not dupe his own\nside for then he will be beaten. But cheat for the benefit of that\ndear middle class and outplay the hated revolution — he can and\nshould. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1]<\/a>\n‘Menshevik’ is used in Hamburg at the Barricades<\/em> in a general\ncolloquial sense of ‘right-wing-dominated’ or ‘reformist’. (R.C.) \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/a>\nSicherzeitspolizei — security police. (R.C.) \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3]<\/a>\nUnit A, the plain-clothes branch of the security police. (R.C.) \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n [4]<\/a>\nThe Blues are the security police who wore blue uniforms while the\nGreens are probably Reichswehr soldiers. (R.C.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Larrissa Reissner Hamburg at the Barricades An uprising passes by without trace in big cities. A revolution has to be great and victorious if the traces of havoc, its heroic abrasions and white bullet-scars on walls pock-marked by machine-gun fire … Continue reading Hamburg<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Barmbeck<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Schiffbek<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Portraits<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
About Schiffbek Again<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Hamm<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Postscript:
\nGerman Mensheviks After the\nRising<\/h4>\n\n\n\nFootnotes<\/h4>\n\n\n\n