The Kapp Putsch is a lesson to all those who think of revolutionary tactics in terms of politics and not of technique.

In the night of March 12-13, 1920, several divisions of Baltic regiments commanded by General von Luttwitz had collected near Berlin. They sent an ultimatum to Bauer’s Government threatening to occupy the capital unless the Government resigned in favour of Kapp. Even if Kapp prided himself on the parliamentary nature of his coup d’Etat and on being Von Luttwitz’s Siéyés, yet his attempt at revolution was a purely classic and military coup d’Etat from the start, both in conception and execution. Bauer’s Government turned down the request, and took the necessary police measures for the defence of the State and the maintenance of order. As always happens in such cases, the Government counteracted the military plan with a police plan. The two are alike and that is why military sedition is not revolutionary at all. The police defends the State as though it were a town: the soldiers attack the State as if it were a fortress.

Bauer told the police to barricade the squares and main streets and to occupy all public buildings. In order to carry out his coup d’Etat, Von Luttwitz substituted the policemen at the crossroads in the main streets, at the entrance of a square, in front of the Reichstag and the Ministries in the Wilhelmstrasse, by his own troops. A few hours after his entry into the town, he was master of the situation. The town had been taken over without bloodshed, as regularly as any changing of the guard. But if Von Luttwitz was a soldier, Kapp, the former Director of Agriculture, was a high functionary and a bureaucrat. Von Luttwitz thought he had captured the State merely by substituting his own men for the police in the maintenance of public order, while Kapp, the new Chancellor, was convinced that the occupation of the Ministries would sufficiently guarantee the normal working of the machinery of State and confirm the lawfulness of the Revolutionary Government.

Bauer was an average man but gifted with common sense, well acquainted with the generals and leading officials in the Reich. He saw at once how useless it would be to meet Von Luttwitz’s coup d’Etat with an armed counter-attack. The occupation of Berlin by the Baltic troops could not be avoided. Policemen would not have a chance against these hardened soldiers. They were a useful weapon against riots and conspiracies but hopeless where veterans were concerned. When the first steel helmets appeared in front of the barricade that blocked the entrance to the Wilhelmstrasse, the police squad there surrendered to the rebels. Noske himself, an energetic man and determined to hold out to the end, decided to support Bauer and the other Ministers when he heard of the first defections. Bauer thought quite rightly that the Revolutionary Government was weakest in its control of the machinery of the State. If the machine could somehow be stopped, or at least prevented from going, then the Kapp Government would be mortally wounded. If the pulse of the State could only be interrupted, then the whole of public life would necessarily be paralysed.

Bauer’s attitude was that of a small bourgeois educated in the school of Marx. He was the only man bold enough to attempt a thorough and violent upheaval of public life in order to keep Kapp from asserting his power with the help of constituted law and order: and such a man could only be a middle-class bourgeois, a man of order, full of Socialist ideas, accustomed to judge men and events quite foreign to his mentality, his education, or his interests, with an impartiality and a scepticism worthy of a Government official.

Before leaving Berlin to take shelter in Dresden, Bauer’s Government had launched an appeal to the proletariat, inviting the workers to proclaim a general strike. Bauer’s decision spelt danger for Kapp. A fresh offensive by the forces that were still loyal to the Bauer Government would have been much less dangerous for Kapp than a general strike, because Von Luttwitz’s troops could then have easily carried the day. But how could a huge crowd of workers be persuaded to go back to work? Surely not by the use of violence. At midday Kapp thought he had the situation well in hand, but that same night, on March 13th, he found himself hemmed in by an unforeseen enemy. The life of Berlin had been paralysed in a few moments. The strike was spreading all over Prussia. Darkness reigned in the capital, the streets in the centre were deserted although everything was perfectly quiet in the workers’ suburbs. A general paralysis had struck the technical services like lightning: even the nurses had left their hospitals. Communications with Prussia and the rest of Germany had ceased early in the afternoon: Berlin would be starving in a few hours’ time. There was no sign of violence or rebellion in the crowds and the workers had left their factories with the greatest coolness. The general disorder was perfect.

Berlin seemed to be plunged into a heavy sleep on the night of March 13-14, except in the Adlon Hotel where the Allied Missions had their quarters and where everyone stayed up all night awaiting more serious developments. At dawn the capital was quiet, though deprived of bread, water, and newspapers. In the most populated districts the markets were deserted: the railway strike had cut off the town’s food supplies and the general strike had spread like a plague among all the government and private employees. Telephone and telegraph operators never appeared at their offices. Banks, shops, and cafés were closed. Numbers of clerks in the Government offices refused to recognize the Revolutionary Government. Bauer had foreseen how infectious the strike would be. Kapp asked his own engineers and skilled workers to try to repair the delicate mechanism of the technical services, but it was too late. The machine of the State itself had already been struck with paralysis.

The working class population in the suburbs was no longer so quiet as in the first days: small signs of impatience, unrest, and revolt were beginning to be noticeable everywhere. The news coming in from all the Southern States compelled Kapp to choose one of two alternatives: either to surrender to Germany, which besieged Berlin, or to surrender to Berlin which held the illegal Government as its prisoner. Should he hand over the power to Bauer or to Workers’ Councils which had already obtained a majority in the suburbs? Only the Reichstag and the Ministries had been won over in the coup d’Etat. Kapp’s position was getting more serious from hour to hour: his Government was slowly being deprived of the very possibilities and chances of a political move. Negotiations with the parties of the Left or agreement with those of the Right seemed to be out of the question. A violent move might have led to unforeseen consequences. When Luttwitz’s troops made an attempt to compel the workers to go back to work, the only result was useless bloodshed. The first victims were lying dead on the pavement here and there as a proof of the fatal mistake of a Revolutionary Government that had forgotten to seize the main electric plants and railway stations.

These first drops of blood produced an indelible rust on the wheelwork of the State, and by the third day the lack of discipline had evidently eaten its way into the bureaucracy to judge by the arrest of several high functionaries in the Foreign Office. On March 15th, the National Assembly was convened in Stuttgart and Bauer said to President Ebert, when speaking of the bloody incidents in Berlin: “Kapp made his mistake when he interfered with the disorder.”

The master of the situation was Bauer, the moderate Bauer, with his respect for order. He alone knew that Kapp’s attempt at revolution could be decisively quelled by widespread disorder. Neither a conservative full of authoritative principles, nor a liberal with a respect for law, nor yet a democrat loyal to Parliament as a channel for political struggles, would ever have dared as he did to rouse the illegal intervention of the proletarian masses and defend the State by trusting to a general strike.

Machiavelli’s Prince would have boldly summoned the people to fight against either a sudden attack or a Government conspiracy, and Machiavelli’s Prince was surely more Conservative than a Tory of Queen Victoria’s day, even though the State was not responsible for his moral prejudices or his political education. But then he was schooled in those common historical examples of the tyrannies of Asia, Greece, and the Italian Signories of the Renaissance.

On the other hand, the tradition in conservative or liberal European Governments forbids any appeal to illegal action by the proletarian masses, whatever the peril that has to be faced. Later on people in Germany wondered what Stresemann would have done had he stood in Bauer’s shoes. We may be sure that Stresemann would have considered Bauer’s appeal to the proletariat as a most incorrect procedure.

Bauer’s upbringing, it must be remembered, was Marxist, so that he naturally had no misgivings as to the choice of means with which to fight a revolution. The idea of using a General Strike as a legal method of defending a democratic State against a sudden attack from military or Communist quarters could not be alien to a man brought up in Marx’s teaching. Bauer, however, was the first to apply one of the Marx’s fundamental principles in the defence of the State. His example is of the greatest importance in the history of modern revolutions.

The faith of the German people in Bauer during the five days of illegal Government began to waver and gave place to unrest and fear when Kapp proclaimed on March 17th that he was relinquishing power because “Germany’s extremely critical condition demanded the union of all parties and citizens in order to face the danger of a Communist Revolution.” The Socialist Party had lost control over the General Strike, and the real masters of the situation were the Communists. The Red Republic had been proclaimed in some of the suburbs of Berlin. Workers’ councils were springing up here and there all over Germany. In Saxony and in the Ruhr, the General Strike had ushered in revolt and the Reichswehr came up against a perfectly good Communist army, provided with cannon and machine-guns. What would Bauer do? Kapp had been turned out by the General Strike—was Bauer to disappear in a civil war?

Faced with the need of suppressing a workers’ revolt, Bauer’s Marxist education revealed its weakness. Marx said that “Insurrection is a fine art.” But his art is the capture of power, not the defence of it. Marx’s revolutionary strategy aims at the capture of the State; his method is class warfare. Lenin had to upset some of the basic principles of Marxism in order to stay in power, as Zinoviev observed when he wrote: “Henceforth true Marxism is impossible without Lenin.” The General Strike had been Bauer’s weapon in defending the Reich against Kapp: if the Reich was to be spared a proletarian insurrection, the Reichswehr must be called in. Von Luttwitz’s troops were nonplussed by the general strike but they could easily have overcome a Communist revolution. Kapp, however, had relinquished power at the very moment when the proletariat gave him an opportunity to fight on his own ground. Such a blunder on the part of a reactionary like Kapp is incomprehensible and unjustifiable. But a Marxist like Bauer could not see that the Reichswehr at that moment was the only possible weapon with which to meet a proletarian insurrection, and his mistake is easily explained. Meanwhile, after several useless attempts to agree with the leaders of the Communist revolt, Bauer handed over to Muller. It was a wretched end for a man of such fearless honesty and moderate ideas.

Both European conspirators and liberals still have a great deal to learn from Lenin and Bauer.