No More Learning

" In this way, they wandered for months between the hands of death until they could say neither "yes" nor "no" to anything, until they did it without a word, a look, without a thought. . . .
They could be interchanged arbitrarily. . . . In these burning smelt- ing ovens they stripped off all differences and became like each other, until only the German front-soldier remained, who, ossified, took everything upon himself: deed and hunger, exhaustion and dirt, rain and fire, blood, horror and death. (Schauwecker, p. 228)
They sacrificed themselves day after day, night after night. . . . Many choked to death in the mud of the shell craters because they did not want to let go of the machine gun.
. . . They died in the roar, the smoke, mud and rain. They died in the dugouts, buried and suffocated. They died, gnawed away by gas. They died with gangrene in their wounds. They died everywhere, on the ground, in the ground, in the air, in dead forests, on hills, in craters.
In the end, they fought without hope. They were abandoned and each stood alone.
The only thing they possessed was this: they knew who they were. (Ibid. , p. 353)
This existentialism of the fighter at the front is already a belated retrospective bestowal of meaning from the populist perspective, as was depicted in thousands of novels and treatises. This knowing-who-they-were was carried over by the sur- vivors of the war into the Weimar peace or, more precisely, was invented in retro- spect in the latter. It is the basic figure in any bestowing of meaning from the right: Absurdity is exchanged for identity; one gains ego feelings through the denial of critical experience. "Composure. " To the present day, the neoconser- vatisms have not done anything differently.
When the regiment described by Schauwecker withdrew to German soil, it had to, on command from above, destroy all remaining weaponry, shoot it off, or sink it in a pond. Albrecht, the hero of the story, experiences this literally as self- castration. "Here, the nation, on command, deftly cut off its private parts" (p.
DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III ? 421
369). In the Bengal light of the last flares, an old war grave lights up before his eyes--a cross, nailed together, with the inscription:
"Rifleman Fritz Bredenstoll Infantry Regiment No. 162, 4th Company
He fell on 26 August 1914 for his Fatherland. He became a little giddy. He suddenly became a bit weak in the knees. . . . . . . a perfectly patriotic illumination over the grave of Fritz Bredenstoll who, according to the inscription, in 1914 chose to die for his Fatherland and to give himself up to this grave, while the others preferred to explode flares in the air and to throw away their ammuni- tion or organize some revolution or steal what they could get.
It was freezing. He became cold. Yes indeed --what did I want to say --I don't know anymore --it makes me so violently ill--that is all so repugnant to me --damn it! --leave me alone--it's all so horrifyingly stu- pid and childish, (pp. 370-71) Schauwecker's tortured, sarcastic tone betrays the effort of trying to outdo the objective cynicism of death in war with the subjective cynicism of nausea. His hero returns home --with a picture of "revolution" in his head that would be noth- ing other than the overcoming of absurdity through grand politics: He dreams of a "revolution on the front" in which the survivors rise up for the sake of the dead.
The "Fiihrer" of this revolution found motivation for his political mission in a similar way. Hitler lay in the Pasewalk infirmary in Pomerania as the other revolution in Germany began. According to his own account, he was blinded by mustard gas "in the English gas bombardment on the South Front at Ypern" in mid-October. A recent psychological interpretation says, on the contrary, that Hitler's problems with his eyes at this time were a case of hysterical blinding with which he somatically staged the decision "not to look on. " Be that as it may, Hitler records that on November 10, he learned from the infirmary's chaplain the truth about "out there" (i. e. , the capitulation in the West and revolution in
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Berlin):
When things started to go black again, I felt and reeled my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk and buried my burning head under the blanket and pillow.
Since that day when I stood at my mother's grave, I had not
wept . . . but now I could not do otherwise. So, everything had been for nothing . . . the death of the two million who died was in vain. Would not the graves of all those hundreds of thousands have to open, those who had once set off with a belief in the Fatherland? . . . Would they not have to open and send the mute, muddy and bloody heroes home as ghosts of revenge who had been so shamelessly deceived into making the greatest sacrifice a man can make for his people in this world? Had they died for that? . . . Did these boys of seventeen sink
422 ? DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III
into the Flemish earth for this? . . . Had he lain in the hell of the drumfire and in the fever of gas warfare for this? . . .
In these nights, the hate grew in me, the hate against the culprit be- hind this deed.
In the days following, my destiny also became clear to me. I now had to laugh(\) at the thought of my own future that a short time before had still caused me such bitter worries. Was it not a laughing matter, to want to build houses on such ground? . . .
There can be no pact with the Jew, but only the hard either-or. But I decided to become a politician. (Mein Kampf, pp. 223-25)
In these pictures, the lived myth of the Weimar Republic speaks: Politics changes into the caring for war graves by the survivors. Those who got out alive seal a pact with the dead. Hitler composes an imaginary testament of the fallen by forcing himself on them as executor. Those who had sunk into the earth and mud stand up within him and return to their people as ghosts of revenge, out of the mud, home to the purity of ideals; instead of sinking into the Flemish soil, they would storm forward in populist movements. Hitler's conceptions of the blitzkrieg that he realized from 1939 onward were a staging of this image of graves that open up in order to transform those who had sunk into them back into storm troopers. Viewed psychopolitically, the Fiihrer was such a storm trooper,
2an emissary of the war graves. The politics of the militaristically and Fascisti-
cally inspired Right rested on the motif of a double--just as Brecht has depicted it in his Ballad of the German Soldier (see also Beumelburg, Voice from the Grave, etc. ).
The pact with the dead is the psychological dynamo of the arch-Fascist. At that moment when he makes himself into the executor of those buried in the mud ("But Idecided . . . "),hisprivateneurosisdiscoversthemagicalcontactwiththena- tional neurosis. What had previously been only an individual structure-Hitler as emissary and revenger of the dead mother (see the new psychoanalytic interpreta- tions of Hitler by Stierlin and Miller) --now becomes politically generalized; Hi- tler as emissary of a higher order. He is sent, he thinks, by the war dead. They are the millions who stand behind him from the beginning. They cannot save themselves from having such a delegate. In 1930, millions of living stand behind him, the war dead of the future who gave the double their vote; only then did those millions, too, stand behind him who mustered German industry to support Hitler. (See the well-known montage by John Heartfield: "Motto: Millions stand behind me"; Hitler raises his hand for the "German salute"; a corpulent donor, larger than life, lays a bundle of thousand-mark notes in his hand; Heartfield calls the mon-
3 tage "The Meaning of Hitler's Salute. " )
In his poem Stimmen aus dem Massengrab (Voices from the Mass Grave, 1928), Erich Kastner formulated another testament of these dead millions:
DEAD SOULS WITHOUT TESTAMENTS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS III D 423
We have dirt in our mouths. We have to be silent. And want to scream until the grave breaks open! And want to climb out of the graves screaming! We have dirt in our mouths. You cannot hear us.
There we lie, our dead mouths full of dirt.
And things went differently than we thought as we were dying. We died. But we died without purpose.
You will let yourselves be slaughtered tomorrow, like we
did yesterday.
Notes
1. Bernd Weyergraf drew my attention to these points particularly in the case of several paintings by Otto Dix. See Katalog zur Ausstellung im Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 1979 Otto Dix--zwischen den Kriegen, ed. H. V. Heppe, T. Kempas, and B. Weyergraf, in particular pp. 14ff.
2. One should look at the tombs of Unknown Soldiers with this in mind. The traditional forms show heroic constructions, towering warrior statues, pyramids for the dead, flags waving, obelisks. The Munich tomb for the
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Unknown Soldier, erected in 1923 in the courtyard of the residence in front of the Army Museum, depicted the new experience. The soldier lies in a kind of crypt; he is the sunken one; his resting place is half sanctuary, half artillery dugout. All about, entrances to the monument have been left open. One has to descend to honor the dead one. But what is more, he lies in such a way that he can arise again at any time. See Die Zwanziger Jahre in Munchen. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Munchner Stadtmuseum May-September 1979, ed. C. Stolzl, p. 469.
3. See Eckard Siepmann, Montage: John Heartfield. Vom Club Dada zur Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung. Dokumente, Analysen, Berichte, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1977), pp. 204ff. : "Die Millionen- Montage. "
Chapter 17
Conspirators and Dissimulators. Political Cynicisms IV: Conviction as Disinhibition
In Germany after the war there was no revolution, but there was a counterrevolution. What is commonly designated as revolution is only the fact that on 9 November 1918, all the monarchs fled in fear of a revolution. When they assessed the real situation, it was too late to keep up the fiction that they were still monarchs. Into the vacuum that had thus arisen, as the bearer of official force, stepped the army, represented by the soldiers' councils. They delegated their power to the Na- tional Assembly and thereby committed suicide.
The monarchists, after 9 November, played dead, so to speak, and claimed that they only wanted to intervene to estab- lish calm and order. Therefore, they supported the Social Democratic government in the struggle it wanted to have with the Left. In this way, the politically anemic forces and the resolute opponents of the republic again gained power. Im- mediately, the dictatorship of means revealed itself. The government of 1919 could not get rid of the spirits it had sum- moned. The armed forces removed the soldier's councils, they removed the leader of the republic, literally, by having him murdered.
E. J. Gumbel, Verschworer. Zur Geschichte und Soziologie der deutschen nationalistischen Geheimbunde 1918-1924, new ed. (Heidelberg, 1979, p. 13; see also the new edition of Vier Jahre politischer Mord [1922], 1980)
With a steady hand, Emil Julius Gumbel, a privatdozent in statistics in Heidel- berg, as well as pacifist, radical democrat, and documenter of the injustice current in his time, sketches the outlines of the German Revolution of 1918- 19. Its course was dominated by the interplay of social democracy with the reactionaries, the anemics with the bloodstained forces. What crystallized as the new political order
424
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 425
in Germany was a dubious interaction of official parliamentary forces with an- tidemocratic and secret organizations. In the latter gathered those who wanted to pursue a politics of refusal. The officials allowed themselves in all this to bite into the sour apple of the given facts: capitulation, the Weimar National Assembly, extorted acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles.
Social democracy had let itself be made a fool of by the political opponent or had offered itself as fool and stopgap measure. It took over the opponent's political inheritance without having looked to see whether it was really dead. Whereas those who were responsible for the war and the defeat had settled outside the country or had submerged in the blustering national opposition, the Social Democrats, with Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske at the helm, risked presenting themselves as the force of law and order in a situation of volatile revolutionary- counterrevolutionary ambiguity. They allowed themselves to be used to perform the work of the reaction. An older social democratic conviction complex seemed to emerge here once again. As early as 1914, social democracy had proved that it was prepared to fall into the patriotic line when it was a matter of clearing the way for the war. Thus, in 1919, it wanted to prove how efficient it was at ruling when it was a matter of administering the catastrophes of the other side. Twice within four years it said yes, gritting its teeth, to things that were irresponsible. Both times it showed itself to be the party of tragic illusory realism in Germany. In order to appear completely responsible and realistic, it accepted the responsi- bility for the mistakes and crimes of others, became a collaborator of Wilhel- minianism, and then, after the war, the business partner of military, bourgeois, and populist reaction. In its behavior, it carried to the point of absurdity the an- tithesis described by Max Weber between the ethics of conviction ("the pure line") and the ethics of responsibility ("the view of what is given"). For it practiced a conviction of responsibility, a readiness to accept responsibility as a substitute for conviction, formal realism as substitute for constructive, relevant action. It did not try to understand that even a simple real reform needs a revolutionary core, and thus after 1918, it bloodily choked off the democratic forces in Germany that wanted change. It wanted reforms without real interventions and thereby achieved the highest possible degree of conservation, indeed, restoration.
In this, a basic feature of Weimar mentalities is reflected: illusory realism, false sobriety, self-deception under the facade of the grand overview, positive conviction about the innermost disorientation, nihilistic antinihilism, a reckless readiness to assume responsibility. The naive pretended to be respectable and without illusions. The vengeful
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disappointed played innocent.
After the pause for reflection until May 1919-by which time the German ex- periments with council-republics also had failed-the men of the reaction had set their sights more clearly on their goals; Down with the props of the republic. The heads of the national and military camps were dreaming, already quite some time
426 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
before the first serious counterrevolutionary coup, the Kapp putsch (March 1920), of a great blow.
From a memorandum for General von Lossow
It is divided into a purely military part and a civil-political-economic part. The aim of both parts is to prime the entire people for the blow and to psychologically prepare them for the work, for the spirit re- quired after the executed blow.
I. Military Part
. . . An improvement of the state of affairs can only rely on weapons. The armed forces execute the first blow, clear the air, eliminate
quickly and ruthlessly everything that through weakness and criminality suffocates the people. After the executed blow, the part of the people at
arms builds the tatorship. . . .
a) Mobilization b) Mobilization d) Compilation
main force for the so-called civil and economic dic-
3. Preparations
of the armed forces and students(! ) . . , of the citizenry . . .
of black lists
II. The Civil Part The Press
Certain signs and mute indications, often quite harmless hints, as soon as they again and again race(! ) through the pages of the press, will to a large extent help solve the task of the education of the people. (Gumbel, Verschworer, pp. 28-30) Under the cover of secrecy, the military Right finds its true language. The con- spiracy suspends the compulsion to dissemble in its interior. Outwardly innocent; inwardly, cynicism as the normal tone. On February 11, 1920, a certain Lieu- tenant Mayerl wrote from Wurzburg to the commander of the Berthold Armored Division, a volunteer corps, which around 1919-20 mulled over plans for a great "blow. "
It is to be hoped that the coming dictatorship will not forget to declare open season on the Jews. --One night would suffice to exterminate these dogs. Here, I have already started compiling a black list so that the "right ones" will be beaten to death. . . .
For many a non-Jew also deserves it. (Gumbel, Verschworer, 23)
From the start, the German conspirators practice a game with masks. Only those who can look innocent will be in a position to let fly when the moment is ripe. The philistine cynicism, as it is revealed in Lossow's memorandum, presup- poses for its dictatorship of means a propaganda of pure conviction; the civil
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 427
preparations for the "blow" are thus necessarily respectable and publicly idealis- tic, apparently innocent. "The work is carried on publicly under the sign of the 'Antibolshevist League' " (Gumbel, p. 30). ' The higher the public goals, the more secretive the cynical means.
Just how strongly the ways of acting and thinking of the German Right were imbued with military cynicism is revealed by documents on the most spectacular action of the populist "idealists"--the murder of the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, in Berlin on June 24, 1922.
Just as Rathenau . . . wanted to drive from his villa in Grunewald to the Foreign Office, his car was overtaken by another car, driven by a student, Ernst Werner Techow, in which the former first lieutenant, Er- win Kern, and Hermann Fischer also sat. Kern and Fischer fired a ma- chine gun at Rathenau and threw a hand grenade at him. Rathenau was killed instantly. . . .
. . . After the deed, Techow reported, "It came off. Rathenau is dead. We did it to provoke the reds to an attack. We were out of money. " (Gumbel, Verschworer, p. 48)
The felons were recruited from the former Ehrhardt Brigade, later known as Organization C, as well as from other populist, conspiratorial, and antirepubli- can associations. Fischer committed suicide. Kern, the principal culprit, died in
2a shoot-out as he was about to be arrested. Giinther--"who was the most likely
to spill the beans"-suffered an attempted assassination with arsenic-laced chocolates.
The most interesting personality is Willy Giinther [who had helped work out the plan;-Author]. In the war, he distinguished himself as deserter and forger of documents, impersonated a Turkish lieutenant,
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3was exposed, punished for desertion. . . .
putsch and gained through this contact with Colonel Bauer and Luden- dorff. He was a member of the League of the Righteous, the German League, the German Officers' League, the League of Loyalty, the League of Protection and Defiance, and the German National Youth League. At a "nest evening" of the latter league, he let himself be celebrated as Rathenau's murderer. Letters from Helfferich, Luden- dorff. . . were found in his possession. . . . One of ten letters from Ludendorff began "Dear Giinther" and ended familiarly "With cordial greetings. " (Gumbel, Verschworer, p. 49)
In his defense, Techow, who was presented as a "populist idealist," claimed that he had believed that the trip was only a test drive. With threats, Kern had "persuaded him to become an accomplice. " He had acted in a subjective situation of distress. The young Ernst von Salomon, who was implicated in the prepara- tions for the murder, also swore that he had believed that the plan had to do with
He took part in the Kapp
428 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
"setting a prisoner loose. " The tenor of the defense ran: Admittedly, they had the "noble convictions" that would suffice for political murder, but in detail, it "wasn't intended that way. " Techow enjoyed strong public sympathies. At the Technical University in Berlin, a public collection was organized on his behalf.
The art of political dissimulation saturated the ways of thinking of the right- wing conspirators. Since they regarded themselves as having been duped, in other words, since they used the duping as the basic lie to justify their actions, they demanded for themselves the right to declare a secret war on reality. Because they wanted to save populist illusions, traditional privileges, and patriotic megalomaniac fantasies, they proclaimed cunning to be the true morality. With a crafty hyperrealism, they set about defending their illusions. This resulted in several remarkable strategic plans. Gumbel notes that Organization C also sur- rounded itself with "political fantasies" of the following kind:
By the way, an entire system of political fantasies belongs to Organiza- tion C. The best example is a book by the former Major Solf, which appeared as early as 1920, entitled: "1934, Germany's Resurrection. " Colonel Bauer, for whose arrest a warrant had been issued, wrote the preface. Here, as a means for Germany's resurrection, everything is affirmed that the opponents of present-day Germany accuse it of as a proof of the will to wage war.
For starters, there is a Club of the Innocent. It has contacts in the whole country and its goal is a war of retribution against France. Its head has no name but is called the General. (Just as in the national as- sociation Ludendorff was called Dictator L. and Ehrhardt simply "Con- sul. ") The club also has innocent members who, until the last minute, do not have a clue about what is going on. (Just as the Organization Es- cherich or the People's Militia. ) Former officers' boys serve as contacts among the workers. For the officers, mobilization lists are compiled. A famous physicist invents a new means of war, a kind of radiation that causes all ammunition within a certain radius to explode. Disguised as cinema projectors, the individual parts are manufactured in factories (just as now in Schiebungen weapons are declared to be machines). . . . On the decisive day, the General holds a speech: "We will rid ourselves of undesirable elements without many pangs of conscience. . . . " The storm breaks loose. The Reichstag, which is nationalist to the bones, receives the General. The Reich president abdicates, the General receives unconditional power (Enabling Act, state of emergency). The enemy troops of occupation are defeated everywhere. In 1921, 10,000 copies of this book were already sold. (Gumbel, Verschworer, pp. 80-81)
The fantasizers of 1920 will prove to be the realists of 1933. Major Solf s sce- nario contains the politics of murderous innocence in embryo. The deceitful,
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 429
crafty, and upright partisans of the Club of the Innocent project the spirit of simu- lation also onto everything surrounding them--particularly the political oppo- nent, even when it is already sitting in jail. From Niederschonenfeld, the notori- ous Bavarian fortress for "political prisoners" (Toller, Miihsam, etc. ), it is reported:
The Bavarian parliamentarian Hagemeister suffered unspeakably. He suffered from a very weak heart. The prison doctor adjudged him to be a malingerer who wanted to be transferred to a hospital so as to be able to escape. In mid- January 1922, a high fever set in. The prison doctor said, "Herr Hagemeister, you are so healthy that if you were my private patient, I would advise you to refrain from further treatment because I wanted to save you the cost. " The next Hay, Hagemeister was found dead in his cell. (Gumbel, Verschworer, p. 123)
Excursus 3. The Reasonable Bloodhound: A Social Democratic Elegy
Someone has to become a bloodhound;
I do not shrink from the responsibility.
4
On 9 November 1918, the head of government under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Prince Max of Baden, knew that the situation
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for the Hohenzollern was hopeless. "We can no longer beat down the revolution, but only suffocate it. " Suffocate the revolution --that means: Grant it a fake vic- tory, let it occupy deserted, exposed positions in order to trap it in a position in reserve prepared for this purpose. Said concretely, the kai- ser had to abdicate, the half Social Democratic government had to be- come completely Social Democratic, and the chancellor had to be called Friedrich Ebert. It fell to Ebert then to send the apparently victorious revolution, startled and disconcerted at the ease of its own victory, home and to recreate order --in the words of Prince Max: to do on a macrolevel what Noske had already done on a microlevel in Kiel.
Ebert was thoroughly willing to do this, and Prince Max knew it. General Groener suspected it at least. All three men were, at the latest since the morning of 9 November (! ) tugging on the same rope. (Sebas- tian Haffner, Die verratene Revolution 1918/1919 [Bern, Vienna, Munich, 1969], p. 77)
The fateful days of the German revolution lasted from January 9 to 12, 1919. At Ebert's command, in these days and nights, the Berlin Revolution, which pointed the way for the development of Germany, was shot to pieces. After "Ebert's bloody Christmas" (there had already been heavy fighting on Christmas Eve, 1918, between reactionary officers from the Reichswehr and revolutionary
Gustav Noske
430 ? CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV
naval troops, which ended with the sailors' victory), it now came to a bloody deci- sion. Should the new order in Germany be created with the aid of forces that wanted something new, or should only a stalling "order" be created that amounted to a conservation of the old deplorable state of affairs? Ebert had decided to place the slogan Law and Order higher than the promising revolutionary reshaping of the German situation.
Legend has it that the fighting of January 9-12 was a "Communist uprising. " It has been recorded in history as the "Spartacus uprising. " However, neither the former nor the latter can be taken seriously. It was not the case that Ebert and Noske drew together the reactionary volunteer troops to fire on "Communists. " It was not groups of ultraleft conspirators on whom these units of right-wingers had to fire in the name of the Social Democratic chancellor. For the most part, it was Social Democratic masses of workers, for whom it seemed self-evident that after the bankruptcy of the feudal-bourgeois Hohenzollern state, a new democratic social order that served the interests of the people should arise. They had not the slightest understanding for the semiconservative tacking of the Ebert government. Ebert,
Scheidemann, Noske-in the eyes of the masses, they were no longer genuine Social Democrats. For the Social Democrats, as far as the popular and not the official basis was concerned, were for clear relations and for a revolutionary break with the old powers.
On January 11, the Maercker Gendarme Volunteer Corps ("at last, real sol- diers again") marched in a demonstration through the suburbs of bourgeois west- ern Berlin. At its fore a lanky and bespectacled civilian: Gustav Noske, "Social Democrat. " This is how he understood what he called "carrying responsibility": putting himself at the head of irresponsible, emotionally explosive, reactionary troops incapable of thinking politically. A few days later, the Social Democratic protege killers of the "Garde-Kavallerie-Schutzendivision" (Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division) murdered the best minds of the revolution: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
The name Noske from then on became the trademark of Social Democratic il- lusory realism. The "Noske period" is a phrase that recalls innumerable murders for the sake of "law and order. " It designates the bloody months from January to May 1919 in which in Germany a Social Democratic government "suffocated" a principally Social Democratic mass movement with a clear tendency toward re- form, in the way in which Prince Max had predicted.
Through his role, Noske qualifies himself as a cynic of the coarsest kind. His concept of "responsibility" had the tone of a cynical disinhibition that strengthens itself by confessing to its own "unfortunately necessary" brutality. "Someone has to become a bloodhound . . . " This tragic password of the Social Democratic counterrevolution already breathes a Fascist spirit. The latter equates responsibil- ity with willingness to make decisions, which in turn disinhibits those responsible in a brutal direction, and the brutality is reflected once more in itself by express-
CONSPIRATORS AND DISSIMULATORS. POLITICAL CYNICISMS IV ? 431
30 Pf. I, Jahrgang, Nr. 3 Der Malik-Verlag, Berlin-Leipzig Anfang April 1919 30 Pf.
Prost Noske! ? das Proletariat 1st entwaffnet!
The Bankruptcy: "Congratulations Noske! The proletariat has been disarmed! " ((C)S. P. A. D.