The battle for Berlin

I cannot rightly judge from Gerwarth's text who putsch-ed whom. It may not matter.

Gerwarth does state this much: Liebknecht's side of the Left - the Spartakists - shattered their sinn-fein shell of a party, the USPD, forming instead the Kommunist Party KPD which scorned the democratic process. Ebert and Scheidemann then ordered troops against a naval cadre allied with the KPD. The Republic lost, and the KPD counterattack took over some important buildings. Ebert saw this as a repeat of how the Bolsheviks took all Petrograd the previous year.

So Ebert called in the Freikorps. In this battle between two fundamentally antidemocratic forces, the Right could at least pretend to be shoring up democracy which, I repeat, most Germans wanted. The Freikorps won - without taking prisoners for trial. Inter enim arma, mein gute Kamerad.

Gerwarth doesn't like it but he must admit the KPD would have behaved no better.

THE OTHER GIRL 10/3: I didn't know what to make of Fraulein Rozalia. Now I know enough to be contemptuously dismissive.