Austerity or Death #3: The First Rejection
The rejection of the first vote presented a different face to every faction and every newspaper. The stock market, already sliding steadily downward since October 1929, plunged deeper as what little mobile capital remained simply froze. The journals owned by capitalists, of course, framed it in their own language: the day the German people murdered Germany.
To them it must have felt that way. For capitalists, the failure of austerity meant only a dent in their ledgers. For workers and ordinary citizens, it was a death sentence by starvation.
The National People’s Party’s betrayal was also trumpeted loudly after the vote—though the word “betrayal” itself was carefully avoided. The Adlerzeitung, the very face of German conservatism, published this verdict:
These were the same people who had always wanted to place both parliament and cabinet under the Emperor’s direct control. Alfred von Hugenberg’s own paper, the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, owned by the Brandenburg aristocrat who led the DNVP, went further and celebrated “the victory of the nobles and loyal subjects of His Imperial Majesty.”
Yes, of course. The SPD and KPD together held one hundred ninety seats. It was the victory of a people exhausted by capitalist tyranny. How exactly did that become their victory?
As usual, the Frankfurter Zeitung reported the news with clinical dryness: Austerity bill rejected. Parliament violently split between pro- and anti-austerity factions. DNVP takes unusual step of opposing the Chancellor’s policy. That was the headline. Nothing worth lingering over. The real interest lay in the editorial.
This time the contributor was Thomas Mann, the celebrated novelist who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature only the year before. Once a conservative, he had grown disgusted with the DNVP’s excesses and drifted toward the moderate left—an equally famous conversion.
The news that Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s austerity bill has been rejected is already the talk of every literary salon and writers’ circle. Most are wondering how the vote will affect their own fortunes and reputations. I prefer to look at the matter with different eyes.
Brüning’s austerity may be the path to national salvation, yet it lies on the same continuum as the crushing reparations the West has demanded of Germany—reparations I myself denounced in my conservative days. It is vital that we settle the postwar order, prevent another war, and deny power to the militarists and absolutists. Even so, austerity remains an inhuman policy.
Behind the numbers there are people. There are the poor who crane their necks each day for the bread the government might distribute, praying endlessly for work. There are laborers who give their whole bodies simply to keep the jobs they have. Is it morally right to kill them in the name of the national economy?
Mann was not saying austerity itself was mistaken, only that we still needed the moral courage to look at the suffering it would cause. My own task, then, was to draw people like him fully into the left, to make them understand both the necessity of revolution and the indispensability of communism.
Our own party paper, the Rote Fahne, took the expected line:
The usual rhetoric. I smiled despite myself and stepped into party headquarters.
“Already here?” Assemblyman Ottomar Geschke, the first to arrive, greeted me with a nod.
“It’s not as if I have anywhere else to go.”
“Didn’t you say you were returning to your hometown?”
“I did. I came back early this morning. It wasn’t for anything important—just a short visit with friends.”
Yesterday had been pleasant. We had laughed together, exchanged the latest gossip, asked one another whether anything interesting had happened lately.
“Nothing in particular on your side, Assemblyman?”
“Me? No, nothing much. In times like these, nothing happening is itself good news. No news is good news, isn’t that what they say?”
“Even so, too much silence can become its own problem. By that logic, becoming the target of every newspaper’s praise and condemnation in less than a month since entering politics makes me rather unusual.”
“Which is exactly why I keep saying you’re a special case, Comrade Heinz.” He gave a hearty laugh. “A freshman delegate who enters the Reichstag, dismantles the Chancellor with logic, and trades blows with right-wing demagogues. No one would believe it if you put it in a novel.”
“Oh, stop. Put that way it sounds as though I’m destined to fall into corruption at the final moment. I don’t like it.”
“Pfft. A cliché, I admit.”
We chatted a little longer until the other delegates began trickling in. Once everyone had gathered, Thälmann spoke.
“The Chancellor will not give up. The usual rule is non bis in idem—one does not ask the same question twice after a decision has been reached. But parliamentary votes on policy can be repeated. If Brüning manages to persuade the Social Democrats or the conservatives to join him, the result can be overturned. Therefore we must continue to prevent any defections. Clear?”
“Preventing the DNVP from crossing over—is there any way to do that?”
“We must drive home the conviction that supporting austerity means ruin. They will have weighed their interests before casting those no votes.”
“And the SPD?”
“Their position is ambiguous. They speak of workers and welfare, yet precisely because of that rhetoric the Social Democrats are always capable of betraying the left. We must watch them closely and keep the pressure of working-class anger on them so they cannot drift toward the Chancellor.”
Thälmann paused and looked at me. “Speaking of which, Heinz, I saw you talking with an SPD delegate the other day. Did you learn anything useful?”
He meant my conversation with Arthur Crispien.
“It was Chairman Crispien himself. Anyone who has been here long enough knows him.”
“Of course. He stood with Liebknecht and Luxemburg during the revolution.”
“The SPD seems less solid than people think. There is still a sharp divide between moderates and radicals inside the party. Even during the vote you could see it—some delegates rose to applaud while others stayed seated, sighing with relief.”
“And Crispien apparently trusts you a great deal.”
“Are you recruiting SPD members now? Good Lord, Comrade Heinz, is there any limit to your talents?”
“Will you stop talking nonsense?”
“In any case, if the vote holds and the Chancellor seeks another route, we might encourage a split inside the SPD or even bring the whole party over. When Crispien and I spoke, he suggested that since the entire left is one, we should combine our strength.”
“Hmm.”
“Of course I told him it was impossible for now…”
Thälmann fell silent, thinking. After a moment he said, “Yet honestly, to have lived through Spartacus and still remain in the Social Democratic Party—does that not prove they have no revolutionary will?”
“Exactly. It was the SPD-led government that sent the police to crush the Spartacist uprising and murder Liebknecht and Luxemburg.”
“Comparing the government of that time with the one we face now is not entirely fair, but they certainly lack a conscience.”
“Still, the idea that the left must be one is not wrong in itself. I did not reject him outright; I left the door open.”
Spartacus meant the uprising of January 1919, launched by Liebknecht and Luxemburg on the eve of the Great War’s end. Though it failed and drove the SPD’s radical wing and much of the left into the newly formed Communist Party, the memory remained vivid.
“This is not simply a question of whether or not to cooperate with the SPD,” Thälmann said, resting his chin on his hand. “We cannot yet know whether such cooperation would truly serve the revolution. You all understand that without revolution there can be no liberation of the people. The SPD opposes that principle on its face.”
“True.”
“We must also consider the Comintern’s position.”
“Would the Comintern really object to something like this?”
“Ordinarily, no. But even inside Russia there are certainly voices that view cooperation between our party and the SPD with suspicion.”
“Even so, that is for us to judge, not Moscow.”
“You are right, yet Russia is not a country where one man’s decision alone determines policy. If we are to launch a genuine revolution we will need Russian support, which means we must persuade the Russian people themselves. And the likelihood that cooperation with the SPD would help us is, in their eyes, small.”
He was right. In the Soviet Union the party’s decision was merely the transmitter; real legitimacy came only with the people’s consent.
“At least the Comintern will almost certainly give us material aid once direct action begins.”
“Let us put the question aside for now. There will be time enough to decide once Brüning’s austerity drive has been completely blocked.”
So the matter of an alliance with the Social Democrats was postponed. I did not know how it would turn out. Yet I remained curious how far the SPD’s dream of “reform within the system” could possibly go. When one looked at the present wreckage, it was hard to feel optimistic. Still, somehow it would have to be managed.
With that, I and the other Communists pulled on our coats and left for the Reichstag.