Demise of the Moderates

THE KINGS DEPART by Richard M. Watt. 604 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.

At Versailles in 1919, the victorious Allied leaders assembled to make the world "safe for democracy." They succeeded only in making it safer for tyranny. The tragic peacemaking efforts of Georges Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson are an oft-told story. Yet their means and ends have rarely been presented in so finely detailed and lucid a book as this. The work is all the more remarkable because it was written by a 38-year-old part-time historian who doubles as an executive of a floor-materials company in Elizabeth, N.J. His only previous book: Dare Call It Treason, about the revolt of the French army after Verdun.

Watt's account ranges beyond Versailles to the tormented terrain under angry debate at the peace meetings--fast-changing, impoverished postwar Germany as it struggled to survive the chaos of surrender. Absorbed in private rancors, busy reshuffling peoples and national borders, the Allied statesmen paid little heed to the German scene. Historians have tended to follow their lead. Yet the obscure skirmishes for power that went on in Berlin and Munich may have done almost as much as the Versailles Treaty to shape the future course of Germany and Europe. The far left was pitted against the far right with hapless moderates caught in a dreadful crossfire.

History has often slighted such moderates, the well-meaning, badly organized Social Democrats in particular, perhaps because they ultimately proved to be the losers. Yet Watt makes a persuasive case that, given a little help from the Allies and their own countrymen, they might have steered Germany in the direction of a viable democracy.

They were not given much of a chance. In the despair and disorder of the surrender, mutinous soldiers and sailors swelled the ranks of bellicose far-left parties, above all one whose members were known as Spartacists. Spurred on by the example of the one-year-old Bolshevik success in Russia and supplied by Lenin with propaganda and trained agents, the Spartacists sought and expected total revolution. To achieve it, they tried to destroy all moderate reformers, early and late displaying a fatal blindness to the German right, which in the form of the Nazi party finally destroyed left and center alike.

The revolutionaries' aim in 1918 was to take over Berlin, where the police chief was an outright sympathizer and bands of sullen unemployed workers stood ready to riot. Despite warnings from the astute theorist Rosa Luxemburg that revolution was premature, the Spartacists kept urging revolt in the streets. In January 1919, they got what they asked for: an uprising. The desperate Socialists, who had done their best to cooperate with the far left, turned to the far right for help. Remnants of the Kaiser's army, informally organized into Freikorps, marched into Berlin, ruthlessly smashing the rebellion and executing Spartacist leaders, including Luxemburg.

"Heil" and Farewell. The same tragic cycle occurred in Bavaria. There a relative moderate, Kurt Eisner, seized power in a bloodless coup in November 1918. A Jewish drama critic who was far from being a thoroughgoing revolutionary, Eisner forbade terrorism. He even tried to practice absolutely open politics and diplomacy; all cables and memoranda, for instance, were left on display on his desk. The only thing he nationalized was the theater, mainly to ensure that parts would be equitably distributed among actors. When he felt his popularity slipping, he staged a spectacular at the Munich opera house. Bruno Walter, then resident conductor, led a Beethoven Leonore Overture. A chorus sang a hymn composed by Eisner, ending "O world, rejoice!" But when he tried to speak, the audience heckled Eisner off stage. Two months later he was shot to death by a youthful assassin who wanted to prove himself worthy of a new anti-Semitic political party. Its emblem was the swastika. Its members greeted one another with the cry "Heil!"

Stab in the Back. The Allies, Watt suggests, might have been able to prevent this vicious right-left polarization of Germany. Instead, by imposing a Carthaginian peace, they undercut the moderates and strengthened extremists. The Versailles Treaty ceded parts of German territory to other nations and burdened Germany with staggering reparations. Though the moderate Socialist government had no choice but to sign the treaty on Germany's behalf, it afterward came under incessant attack from the right for that "stab in the back"--the allegedly ignominious capitulation to the enemy. The Weimar Republic was already fatally weakened from its inception.

The Versailles Treaty did not even succeed in constraining Germany. The Allies developed such intense feelings of guilt about it that when, in the 1930s, Hitler began his reconquest of territory, they felt he was only redressing Germany's wrongs. Post-World War I Germany, as Watt makes clear, served as a most chilling example, very relevant today, of what happens when ruthless poltics are freely practiced: polarization; violence that feeds upon itself; final rule by savagery. Whether it comes from left or right makes little difference to he victims.

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