576 THE CLASS STRUGGLE NEW GERMANY 577 New Germany By LUDWIG LORE.
Suddenly as the war began it has ended. And the military rulers of Germany, whose insane lust for power thrust a world that was tottering on the brink of war for years into its horrible maelstrom, have fled from the wrath of their own revolutionary proletariat. The immediate causes of the sudden collapse of a seemingly invincible nation are obvious enough.
The German people were suffering untold misery. They were starved and freezing. Their men and their boys were dying like flies on the battlefield. Their autocratic rulers, drunk with power, were showing with brutal frankness how utterly they despised the men and women who had given all they had to satisfy the insatiable greed of their capitalist classes. After four years of war Prussia still had its odious election laws, the Kaiser still ruled as the all powerful lord over the German people. The great enthusiasm of the first period had given place to dumb, helpless apathy. The army at the front was fighting its last desperate battle. They, too, were sick to death of the endless slaughter. And the signs of misery at home, that crept into their letters and seeped through into the ranks at the front in spite of the stern measures adopted by the government broke the spirit of men who had gone without flinching through the bloodiest battles. The Allied forces found an army that had only one wish, to end it all, to be done with this fearful misery. The military power of Germany was broken. victory of the Allied armies was inevitable. The horrors of warfare on their own soil stared the German people in the face. Their unbounded faith in the war lords was shattered.
And yet, to day Germany is not a nation of vanquished people. In spite of hunger and military defeat, the morale of the German people is not broken. Its working class has emerged from this war in spite of the awful price it paid in blood and suffering, the victor. It has suffered complete military defeat, but it has gained the mastery over its own destiny.
Defeat was turned into victory, because, for generations, men and women of the working class have been preaching to their brothers and sisters the power of the proletariat. Defeat became victory because, through the days of darkest reaction, a small handful of men and women nursed the weak flame of revolutionary understanding in the hearts and minds of the people, because they sowed the seed of the revolution in the stony soil of a victorious nation, and waited for the fruit to ripen, with boundless faith in the ultimate awakening of the working class. Defeat became victory, because the splendid example of the Russian working class had shown them that nothing can crush a proletariat that believes in itself.
It would be difficult to overestimate the part that the Russian Revolution played in the revolution of the German working class. The appeals of the Russian leaders at BrestLitovsk, and the shameful role played by the German war party, left an uneasy sense of shame in the hearts of men who had almost forgotten the meaning of internationalism. The soldiers that were sent to hold the conquered Russian provinces in subjection, came back filled with the new spirit of their vanquished captives. Russian aeroplanes dropped appeals and messages down upon the German soldiers. Newspapers in the German language were printed in Russia and smuggled over the border for distribution among the German people. The Russian embassy in Berlin became the hotbed of anti monarchial and proletarian revolutionary agitation; from the tower of the building that only a few years ago was the horror of every social democrat because it personified the regime of the bloody Tsar, fluttered the red flag of brotherhood, stirring long forgotten hopes and memories in the breasts of the German workers. Great printing presses turned out tons of literature, in the halls once sacred to the interests of the Russian Black Hundred, leaflets and appeals that were distributed everywhere by the adherents of the radical socialist movement. German Junkers had taken possession of