Schwarz-Rot-Gold: An Interwar Germany Quest
Let us lift Germany, so to speak, into the saddle. Surely when that is achieved, it will succeed at riding as well
-Otto von Bismarck to the Parliament of Confederation, 1867
This is a continuation of the thread here - it is not needed to read that thread to participate here.
The Unter der Linden is cold in March, in the year of the Lord 1920. The leaves fall like tears from the weeping trees, on the places where the protesters fell. The wind almost seems to howl a lament, a song of wailing cadence akin to saga-song sung of vengeance and grief. The streets near the Unter der Linden in the city of Berlin are empty, bare of the people that normally would throng it to meet under the linden trees. Here in March there are no couples walking hand-in-hand to welcome in the spring and celebrate their closeness, there are no aged or elderly walking slowly with cane in hand as if to simply take in the air before they no longer can. Here in March, there are patrols of gray-uniformed infantry with rifles in hand and twitchy trigger fingers, walking as always in pairs.
For here in Berlin in March of 1920, it was not advised to walk alone.
It began two weeks ago, as anyone in the city would have told you. It was two weeks ago that General Luttwitz and Herr Kapp decided that the government was in the wrong and the nation had been wronged, that the fragile experiment of Weimar's liberal democracy was an easily corrected mistake.
They acted ahead of the police, the same black-uniformed police that warned them off and told them to run. All of them, the National Association as they called themselves, acted fast but not quite fast enough. When General Luttwitz led his Freikorps, his former soldiers, against the Reichstag – there was nobody there. When Wilhelm Kapp, civil servant and nationalist, led his contingent to the high offices of state – they found the doors barred and the offices under guard.
Naturally, they fired. They were fired upon.
There was something of a fracas.
There was more of a disturbance when General Ludendorff secured the Berlin telephone exchange. There was a disturbance across all of Germany when the General spoke of what was to come. A return to the structures of the Second Reich, absent the monarch. A strong, federal state under the guiding hand of the military. A clean, new Germany, shorn of the same politicking that had lost it the war.
First Army Corps in East Prussia raised their banners in homage, and with them half the army.
The banners in the Ruhr were red. In the wake of the same uprising that had almost decapitated the Communist Party, the Party went underground to bide its time. To agitate. To wait for a mistake.
Everyone in the leadership agreed that a coup d'etat was just such a mistake. A mistake that opened the doors to potential revolution.
As if not wanting to miss the chance, like someone desperate not to miss their train, the Communist Party seized northwestern Germany. The red flag flew over the Ruhr while a steady simmering of discontent began underneath it.
A letter went to Moscow. The bearded, neat little man in the Kremlin signed an order. Soviet ships began to dock at Lubeck.
By this time the shooting had already begun.
It took five more months for the guns to fall silent, for peace to return to Germany once more. The nation has mortgaged everything it has to win the war, to secure the future of the Weimar Republic, and that future looks shakier by the day. In the east, the Soviet Union has secured its southern regions and has armies headed for Warsaw. In the west, Germany faces a hostile France, a hostile Belgium and an occupation of the Rhineland by foreign forces that are waiting for an excuse to move.
Germany, moreover, is devastated. The eastern reaches have seen atrocities and worse, the Kapp-Luttwitz-Ludendorff putschists seizing Germany from the Oder-Neisse Line eastwards and holding the Polish border with extreme prejudice. The western parts of Germany have starved, the SPD Government making sure to purchase possible food supplies and deny them to the KPD.
The guns have fallen silent, by the beginning of August 1920. An uneasy peace born of exhaustion reigns over Germany.
The guns have fallen silent, and the long uneasy unstable peace has just begun.
This is a sequel to the thread on Spacebattles, Schwarz-Rot-Gold
Choose play options below:
Each turn will have ground-level perspectives as well as an overview, and some of those will recur. Choose three ground-level perspectives, three lives to follow through the chaos of Weimar Germany, that I will do my best to shoehorn into every turn:
[]The Soldier: Fritz Muller has known little but war for most of his adult life. He was drafted at seventeen, and went to the front in 1914. Muller survived the war, survived the civil war that followed, and has put down his rifle in August 1920 to face a brave new world that he doesn't know how to navigate. His section is dead or crippled, his army has dissolved once more and the Kaiser that he took an oath to serve in 1914 is in Germany no longer. Fritz Muller has been naught but a soldier at war, and now he is one no longer.
[]The Merchant of Death: Gustav Krupp made a deal with the Devil in 1920, a deal to sell arms in conjunction with Sir Basil Zaharoff and Vickers Corporation. Sir Basil has sold arms the world over to anyone who can pay, and with Krupp's former war-plants now disassembled and being 'scrapped' in France by Zaharoff, German-pattern arms will be seen in every war from China to the Balkans. A brave new world, full of rich markets, now beckons.
[]The Communist: Ernst Thalmann is a former soldier, a decorated one, who did a bunk from the Army in 1918 for the sake of the November Revolution and the Uprising that followed it. Thalmann's side of the war has lost...this time. The next time will be different, and that is why Ernst Thalmann has remained in Germany – to organize the workers and make sure that they are in a position to take what is theirs by right. Weimar is unstable, and presents opportunities.
[]The Doctor: Professor Emil Fischer is a practicing surgeon and teacher at the Katharinenhospital in Stuttgart, and has seen the war close-up. Most of the severely wounded were dispatched to his wards for reconstruction, and before that he was a surgeon on the Western Front. Emil Fischer has seen death and conducted triage for five bloody years, and now comes peace. Dr. Fischer has doubts as to the durability of that.
[]The Detective: Detective Arthur Biermann is part of the Berlin Special Branch, trained by a Belgian detective and now coming to terms with his new duties – the Special Branch was founded to deal with terrorism, insurrection and sensitive tasks. With the new peace in the republic, that task will hopefully be of less importance. Biermann wouldn't bet on it.
I will also allow one major timeline change:
[]Eagle Unbowed: Poland has won on the Vistula, at a terrible cost in men and munitions. The eagle is as yet unbowed and unbroken, and the Soviets have been thrown back out of Poland – a peace of mutual exhaustion now reigns in eastern Europe, as the Soviet armies head east to deliver a coup de grace to the White Armies on Russian soil.
[]The Heir is Dead: Yakov Sverdlov was Lenin's protege, and he survived his influenza infection in 1919 to direct the decossackization of Ukraine in 1919-1920. Upon his death, the succession in the Soviet Union has been thrown once more into doubt, as the moderate internationalist Sverdlov has left a vacancy that Lenin has hesitated to fill.
![[Continuation] Schwarz-Rot-Gold: An Interwar Germany Quest](/data/threadmark-index-icons/l/54/54998.jpg?1615857010){kind=icon}
