Jonathan Rabb - Rosa

Hoffner hopped out of the ambulance and motioned for the medic to continue driving through the main gate, or at least what was left of it. For a place he had been coming to six days a week for the past eighteen years, it was almost unrecognizable. The once-imposing line of redbrick archways looked ashamed of itself. Four days removed from the final assault, and the crumbling masonry-chalk-white-was doing little to hide the naked slats of wood that pockmarked the faade. Worse were the iron gates that skulked behind, all at wild angles, bent like spoons for a child’s amusement. And along the lower floors, turreted windows peered out blindly from empty sockets, shards of broken glass still clinging to their disfigured panes. Such was the crowning achievement of Alexanderplatz in the wake of revolution.

A trio of soldiers stood lazily by the gate, guns resting on the ground, their collars pulled up tight to fight back the chill. Each sucked on a cigarette, though the tobacco-where they had managed to scavenge that was anybody’s guess-was clearly too harsh for their young lungs. For a fleeting moment Hoffner thought of his own boys, younger still. He would have to teach them how to smoke properly one of these days. None of the soldiers took even a moment’s notice as the ambulance moved past them.

Hoffner had lost track of the different uniforms now strewn about the city-Guard Fusiliers Regiment, Republikanische Soldatenwehr, Section Fourteen of the Auxiliary, so forth and so on-the names and insignia all melding into one another. The majors and colonels who had once led them no longer seemed to matter. These were simply boys with guns in a once-civilized city.

The trouble had all begun quite innocently some ten weeks ago, when the sailors and stokers in Kiel had decided that they, like the great General Ludendorf, had had enough. Ludendorf had fled to Sweden at the end of October. They, unwilling to suffer through another humiliation at the hands of the British, had simply left their ships. On the fourth of November-in a moment of genuine socialist spontaneity-they formed a Workers’ and Sailors’ Council and took their defiance beyond the naval base to the city hall. Naturally, soldiers were sent in to suppress the uprising, but when the boys arrived-for they were mostly boys, after all-they discovered that it was not a wild mob that they had come to destroy, but a group of the dedicated proletariat. And so the soldiers joined them, and the word spread: Munich, Bremen, Hamburg, Dresden, Stuttgart. By the time the Kaiser declared the armistice on the eleventh, Germany was already comfortably ensconced in revolution.

Berlin, of course, was not one to miss out. On the ninth, Karl Liebknecht-son of the late socialist leader Wilhelm, and himself a recent political guest of Luckau prison-took to the streets with a legion of striking workers behind him. They marched under the banner of Spartakus-the new communist party-and declared the birth of the Free Socialist Republic from the balcony of the Royal Palace. Within days, Rosa Luxemburg was with them. She had spent the better part of four years in Breslau prison, her virtual isolation having done nothing to shake her devotion to the cause. There had been rumors-bouts of hysteria, the possibility that little Rosa had slipped off into madness while caged at the far reaches of the Empire-but she showed none of it on her return to Berlin. She had come to take the revolution as far left as humanly possible, and it was there that the real difficulties had begun.

Had the revolutionaries been of one mind, thousands of innocents might have been spared the fighting. But the revolutionaries were socialists: Karl and Rosa wanted the genuine article, workers of the world rising as one, the death of capitalism, so forth and so on; Chancellor Ebert and his Social Democrats-terrified of a Soviet-style putsch-wanted a National Assembly, elections, and perhaps even a bit of help from various capitalist concerns so as to get the country up and running again. They might have called themselves socialists, but they were a peculiar breed willing to bring back the monarchy-in name only-in the hopes of restoring order. And then there were the sailors-the People’s Naval Division-just back from the front, leftists through and through, so long as they got their pay.

Revolution, however, matters only when the soldiers decide to take sides. In early December Prince Max von Baden and the General Staff chose Ebert, and while there were brief moments of hope for Spartakus after that-Christmas Day on the Schloss Bridge, cannons at the ready, hundreds of armed civilians forcing the government troops into retreat; January sixth, thousands more marching along the broad Siegesallee toward the War Ministry-they were only moments. Karl and Rosa made speeches and printed articles and convoked meetings, but in the end they were left to live on the run and on borrowed time. Troops had been spilling in from the front like so much dirty scrub water since late November. They were hungry for a fight, and needed someone to blame for their recent defeat. Who better than the Soviet-styled Spartakus? Oddly enough, it was Police President Emil Eichorn who was the one to give Ebert his opportunity to mop everything up. Eichorn’s allegiance to the Spartakus movement had never been much of a secret. The new government could ill afford that kind of official opposition, and so, on the eleventh of January, it was Eichorn’s politics that ultimately turned the police buildings on Alexanderplatz into the last battleground of the revolution. Refusing to leave his desk after receiving his dismissal papers-and with a group of Spartacists on hand to defend him-Eichorn gave Ebert no choice but to send in a battalion. It was only yesterday morning that the morgue had removed the last of the corpses.

The men of the Kripo had been elsewhere on the fateful day: they had known what was coming and had left Eichorn alone with his revolutionaries. Even so, there was still bad blood between the government soldiers and the men of police headquarters. It was why Hoffner now chose not to meet them head-on.

He sidestepped his way through several clumps of fallen brick and, turning right with the building, headed down Alexanderstrasse. Hoffner pulled open the outer gate and then made his way to the third door down. The building had lost power on the twelfth, the corridors once again lit by gas lamps. Hoffner followed his shadow to the back stairwell and headed up.

It was on the third floor that he finally ran across another human being. As it turned out, first contact came in the form of Ludwig Groener, distant nephew or cousin or something of the great General Wilhelm Groener, who had played so pivotal a role in December by placing the army in Ebert’s hands. Unlike his epic forebear, however, Groener the lesser marched to the rear, still a detective sergeant at fifty-one, with fewer and fewer cases coming his way. He had become quite proficient with paperwork, and now rarely left the building. Not that he was unpleasant, or embittered by his place in the grand scheme: he was, but that wasn’t the problem. Groener simply had the most notoriously foul breath. It seemed almost inconceivable that such a small man could produce so overwhelming a stench. Hoffner kept to his side of the hall as they passed.

“I hear you’ve found another one.” Groener’s voice trailed after him.

Hoffner stopped and turned around. Groener had gotten the hint over the years: he kept at a healthy distance during these conversations. “Really?” said Hoffner. “And who’d you hear that from?”

“The KD wants to see you.”

“The KD? Dropping off some files, were you, Groener? Overheard a little something?”

Groener ignored the comment. “He’s waiting in his office.”

Hoffner turned and headed down the corridor. “Then it’s lucky I ran into you,” he said over his shoulder. “Otherwise I would have been completely at a loss.”