Fear of Mirrors. Tariq Ali

by Count Arco. Even the moderates, men like David Stein’s father, wanted revenge. They pleaded with the SPD leaders to do something, but were told to leave the decisions in tried and trusted hands.

‘Tried and tested in murder!’ old Stein had shouted in anger as he walked out of his party offices in Munich. The workers were, without doubt, in an angry mood, but did they want a revolution? Eugen Leviné did not think so. He had been despatched to Munich by the Comintern^* to help prepare and organize the revolution.

      Munich was full of dreamers and utopians. Gertrude and David were certainly not alone. There were several thousand others and they wanted to seize power immediately. Poor Leviné! He knew the attempt was doomed. Gertrude was half in love with him. She used to talk of how he would sit up the whole night trying to deflate their dream-filled heads. Leviné warned them that they were still isolated. He wanted the uprising postponed, but Gertrude and her friends outnumbered him.

      When news reached Munich in March 1919 of the uprising in Budapest and Bela Kun’s proclamation of a Hungarian Soviet Republic, David told Gertrude that this was their first real chance to make history, to avenge the deaths in Berlin, to move the revolution forward. And so it happened. To the great horror of the middle classes and the Catholic peasants, the Bavarian Soviet Republic came into existence.

      Moscow was overjoyed. Lenin and Trotsky were hard-headed men, but they were also desperate. They knew the price of isolation. Lenin firmly believed that without a revolution in Germany, the infant Soviet Republic could not last for long. He was right, wasn’t he, Karl? I mean, the historical space occupied by seventy-five years is next to zero. It’s nothing. So Lenin and Trotsky sent Munich their solidarity in the shape of hundreds of telegrams. They were hoping that Vienna, too, would fall and had already instructed the Red Marshal, Tukachevsky – the Tuka whom my father loved so deeply – to investigate the military possibilities of a corridor from the Soviet Union to Bavaria. Their man in Munich suffered from no such illusions. Levine bade farewell to his wife and new-born child and prepared to sacrifice himself for a cause that had no hope of success.

      The Junkers could have taken Munich painlessly, but that might not have been a sufficient deterrent to the rest of the country. Blood had to be shed. It’s the same today. Serbs and Croats could capture a village peacefully and spare their civilian opponents, but they rarely do so. Bloodlust. The animal instinct that still echoes in human biology.

      General von Oven crushed the Bavarian Republic with exemplary brutality. Citizens were pulled out of their beds, then shot, knifed, raped and beaten to death. Gertrude fled to her parents in Schwaben. David was given refuge by his professor. Levine went into hiding. He thought of his wife and child and then all he could think of was flight, but he was betrayed, captured, tried and executed. His trial was a big show. Gertrude, dressed as a bourgeois Fräulein, attended the court every day. Till her dying day, your grandmother never forgot Leviné’s final speech to the court. She used to recite it to me when I was still a child, growing up in what they once called the Soviet Union.

      We communists are dead men on leave. Of this I am fully aware. I do not know whether you will extend my leave or whether I shall have to join Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I await your verdict in any case with composure and inner serenity. I have simply done my duty towards the International, and the World Revolution …

      The words continued to haunt her long after the system to which she’d sold her soul had degenerated beyond recognition. They tell us now that it was always so, but I don’t believe them, Karl, and nor should you. There was a nobility of purpose. It may have been utopian, but for a majority of the foot-soldiers it was never malignant. Otherwise it is impossible to understand the motives of those men and women who sacrificed their lives in those early years. People for whom the map of the world had no meaning if Utopia was not inscribed on each continent. These are the people whose lives I’m trying to reconstruct for you.

      They executed Leviné early one morning. Two soldiers in the firing party had to have alcohol poured down their throats before they could pull the trigger. That same afternoon Gertie told her parents that she had become a Communist. She was never to forget the look of horror, mingled with fear, that transformed their faces. Her father left the room and a few minutes later she heard him being violently sick. Her mother simply sat down on a chair in the hall and wept.

      A young officer, Otto Müller, who had been slightly wounded during the street battles, was bivouacked in their house. He came up behind her as she was staring out of the window at the old cedar and the swing and whispered in her ear.

      ‘I heard everything. I greatly admire your decision. I wish I had been on Leviné’s side. He refused to plead for mercy. His face was proud and held high just before they shot him.’

      The initial shock gave way to amazement. If men like him, men on the winning side, could say things like that to her at such a time, then all was not lost. Strange, the trivial incidents that leave such an impact. Your grandmother was sure that the young officer’s encouragement made up her mind for her. Many years later she met Müller in Berlin, where he was practising as a doctor. He was in a hurry. It was 1933 and he was helping to get his best friend’s furniture to Denmark. The name of his childhood familiar was Bertolt Brecht.

      When Gertie’s father recovered he spoke to her in a hard but trembling voice. ‘You are no longer my daughter.’

      Her mother did not speak. Gertie went to her room and wept. ‘Mutti, Mutti,’ she sobbed. ‘Why did you not speak? Why?’

      Then she packed a few clothes, a framed photograph of Heinrich and herself, her books, and a tiny green shawl that had once belonged to her grandmother. Her brother was away on a school trip. She sat down at her desk and wrote him a farewell note: My dearest Heiny, I have to leave now, but I will miss you terribly. Don’t forget me. I will write and give you my address in Berlin. Many kisses and a big hug from your loving Gertie.

      She walked out of the house and down the drive. As she reached the bend after which the house became invisible she was desperate to turn round one last time, but she was proud and resisted the lure. Heiny later wrote and told her that their mother’s tear-stained face had been pressed to the first-floor window, watching Gertie leaving her family house. She had told him so when he returned from his trip. I’m sure that none of them really believed in the finality of the breach, but then none of them knew what lay ahead.

      Some years after the war, when she had returned to Berlin, Gertie wanted to return to Munich and see the house again. That was before the Wall was built. Travel between the two zones was easy. She took me with her. I was eleven at the time. I remember well our trip to Schwaben. The house was still there, just like it used to be. Gertie held me close and began to cry. She, a Communist, had fought the Nazis and survived. Her father, a staunch German nationalist, a man of the Right, perished in the camps with Heiny, her mother and the rest of the family. Gertrude and I were the sole survivors. We had been staring at the house from the driveway. Gertie was too frightened to go in. Slowly we turned round and as we began to walk out we noticed an old man on crutches who had stopped and was observing us from outside the gate.

      ‘Who are you?’ he asked Gertie.

      She tightened her hand on mine. ‘I used to live here a long time ago.’

      The old man came close and stared right into Mutti’s eyes. ‘Fräulein Gertrude?’

      She nodded.

      ‘Haven’t you recognized me? Frank. The gardener. I used to give you and little Heinrich rides on my back.’ The old man’s eyes filled with tears. Gertrude hugged him. When finally she moved away she was going to ask him what had happened, but he read the question in her eyes even before she spoke and shook his head.

      ‘I was conscripted in ’36. They were still here. The Doctor had many influential patients. Nazis who respected him, wouldn’t change doctors for anything. When I returned in 1942 – I was one of the first casualties on the Russian front – they had all disappeared.’

      We nodded. ‘And the house, Frank?’

      ‘You