LITMIR.BIZ

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      The trouble was that Esser never properly evaluated his opposition. It had been like that right from the time the naval mutinies began. Fritz Esser was usually the first to spot an opportunity, but he lacked the skill and cynicism to follow through his advantage.

      For instance, the Spartacists and the left-wing radicals of the Independents had always expected that the revolution, about which they’d talked for years, would begin amongst the tired, frightened and exhausted front-line soldiers, rather than amongst sailors or civilians. It was Fritz Esser who’d persisted with his secret meetings and inflammatory leaflets directed at the crews of the battleships and battle cruisers of the High Seas Fleet, which had spent almost the entire war anchored in the Northern ports.

      It was Esser – in a secret report to one of Liebknecht’s acolytes – who’d told them that fighting men would be the last ones to mutiny. That was evident here in the seaports, where there was little interest in Karl Marx amongst the U-boat crews or the men who’d chosen dangerous duty with the torpedo boats and destroyers that regularly sailed out to fight the enemy. The men who came to his meetings were the crews of the big ships: conscripts from the cities, bored, discontented men who chafed at the restrictions of military life and had nothing to do but parade, chip rust and paint their towering steel prisons. These men, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were the ones who listened to Esser’s dreams of tomorrow.

      Even the previous summer, after Esser had encouraged men of the battleship Prinzregent Luitpold to walk ashore at Wilhelmshaven in defiance of orders – a crime for which two of Esser’s fellow believers faced an army firing squad – the Spartacists did not believe that the High Seas Fleet was a fertile ground in which their agitators could scatter the seeds of revolution. Esser’s reports were ignored. In September a Spartacist leader told Esser that the Naval High Command’s reforms – ‘food committees’, elected by the sailors, were henceforward to distribute the rations – had removed the promise of further revolt.

      It was only when, posted to Kiel, Esser had got the real mutinies going there that the Spartacist leadership started to take notice. But even then they were lukewarm and pointed out that the mutiny was only a reaction to being ordered to sea for a final suicide battle with the British navy. The Spartacists’ political committee in Berlin seemed offended by the fact that the sailors lacked political motivation. They insisted that this mutiny would never become the workers’ revolution they wanted.

      Esser and his friends ignored the dicta from Berlin. It was one of Esser’s young disciples whose speeches prompted the stokers on the battleship Helgoland to draw their slicers through the coals, bring them out on the floor plates, and damp the fires with the hoses. Without heat enough to make steam Admiral von Hipper’s order to put to sea could not be obeyed.

      And when the U–135 threatened to torpedo the Thüringen unless its mutineers surrendered, it was one of Esser’s converts who persuaded the Helgoland’s gunners to level their sights at the submarine. That Esser wasn’t present for this fiasco, which ended with the mutineers in prison, did not change his proud claim to have started the revolution. For within a few days not only Kiel but dozens of other towns and cities as well were under the control of workers’ and sailors’ councils. The army did nothing to put down the revolt: it was too widespread.

      And so, when Esser got to Berlin with the vanguard of the mutinying sailors who now called themselves the Volksmarine or People’s Naval Division, he expected to be greeted with praise and thanks by the Spartacist hierarchy. But Esser was brushed aside as the politicians took control of the revolution in which they had shown so little belief. Esser became no more than a minor party functionary, a chairman for a committee that until today was asked to do nothing more important than arrange duty rosters for the cleaning of the billets and settle disputes between the numerous drunks, thieves and petty criminals who soon attached themselves to the sailors.

      The important decisions about Spartacist policy – or lack of any – were being made by the same people who’d given Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg such bad advice in the past. Self-serving men with hard eyes, dark suits and sharp city accents dismissed Esser and his like as country bumpkins without the sort of political sophistication that was needed to steer the forthcoming revolution, which would sweep the temporary socialist government from power and replace it with uncompromising authoritarian rule.

      And yet the men and women who could hear only Esser’s country accent would have done well to study his conclusions, for Esser was shrewd and perceptive. Esser’s report on the irregular army formations – Freiwillige Landesjägerkorps or Freikorps – now springing up all over Germany was something that Spartacist leaders would have done well to read. Esser had become an expert on discontent, and he was able to distinguish the discontent of the sailors he’d helped to bring to a state of mutiny and the sort of discontent that was furnishing the Freikorps with more men than they could properly clothe and arm.

      Few sailors of the Naval Division had seen any action in the war. Typically they were unmarried ex-factory workers with no fixed addresses. Some of them went on regular forays of looting and housebreaking and even demanding money from well-dressed people in the streets, always disguising their crimes with neat political labels. The sailors remained in the Imperial Palace because they were being provided with payments by the government – who were frightened of them – and because it was warmer and more comfortable than the street to which they would otherwise be relegated. As long as Liebknecht and Luxemburg encouraged them, they would cheer the Spartacists’ speeches.

      The men of the Freikorps were a totally different proposition, as Esser pointed out. The Freikorps recruits came largely from front-line soldiers. For these men the world was divided into ‘the front’ and ‘the rear’. The rear were the civilians who’d made so much money in the war factories and the bosses who owned them. The rear were the bankers and the financiers, the pacifists who’d made speeches against the war, and the ‘November criminals’ who’d signed the armistice. Although officers were excluded from the People’s Naval Division, the Freikorps soldiers readily included their battle-hardened officers as part of their exclusive fraternity.

      Perhaps it was while compiling his neglected report that Fritz Esser began to discover something about himself. Esser had never been in battle. His naval service had been spent in the comparative comfort and the indisputable safety of Imperial Naval barracks. And although he’d never admitted it, Esser felt uneasy about his passive role in this great ‘war to end wars’, for Esser – despite his revolutionary declarations – had the inborn respect for the warrior that so burdens the German soul.

      Endless bickering, inarticulate committees meeting long into the night without reaching any conclusions, had wearied and disillusioned him. And on this Monday evening, the 23rd day of December, 1918, Esser had reached the end of his patience. The prospect of the Imperial Palace coming under attack by loyal units of the army frightened him, and he made no secret of his fear. Even the light artillery that informers said were being readied at Potsdam would be enough to blow the main doors in, and the effect of shrapnel fire in these confined spaces would not bear thinking about.

      And yet trying to get this simple fact understood by his committee had proved far beyond his power. Not that any of the committee members offered a sensible alternative to his suggestion that they open talks with Ebert and release their hostages – Otto Wels in particular – as a gesture of good faith. He was shouted down by cries of ‘Traitor!’ and ‘No surrender!’ rather than defeated in rational discussion. Finally Esser exploded with rage. He yelled obscenities at these pompous pen-pushers – Bonsen, he called them – and stormed out of the meeting. It was then that the messenger came to say that two army plenipotentiaries were waiting for him downstairs. This was the beginning of the end. He felt frightened. Now what was he supposed to do? Temporize, yes, but how?

      ‘I am Esser, committee chairman. What is it?’ Esser fixed them with his dark, piercing eyes. Pauli immediately recognized his friend, who’d grown into a barrel-chested giant, pea jacket open, red neckerchief at his throat and sailor cap on the back of his close-cropped head.

      ‘Fritz! Remember me, Pauli Winter? Travemünde.’

      Esser didn’t recognize Pauli.

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