November 1918
Richter, David H.
Books: THE DICTATES OF NIGHTKARE A T the 1918 armistice, Germany teetered at the edge of an abyss. The Kaiser had abdicated and fled to Holland and a German Republic had been declared....
...His novels brought him the respect of contemporades like Kafka but (till the success in 1929 of Berlin Alexanderplatz) very little fame...
...Each of the essays bristles with attacks on Lord Bauer's chosen adversaries, and they are a diverse lot...
...Ebert's government, evading the urban proletariat of Berlin, moved to Weimar...
...With verDtblin fled from Germany to France in 1933 and then to America, one jump ahead of the Wehrmacht, in 1940...
...According to the simplistic modernization theories the development of poor and stagnating countries must march to the tune of the rich and progressing countries...
...November 1918: A German Revolution was written in Pads and San Francisco between 1937 and 1941, though its German publication was delayed until 1950 and its English translation had to wait for Dbblin's posthumous recognition here via Rainer Werner Fasabinder's recent film, Berlin Alexanderplatz...
...In fact Ebert did...
...An Independent Socialist in politics, Dbblin worked for two decades as a physician in the Berlin slums while spending all the time he could snatch from his practice developing an original expressionistic fiction...
...As Gi~nter Grass, his fellow expressionist and his most renowned disciple, admits, DiSblin stands in the second rank of modern German writers below Mann and Kafka...
...in their retreat from the battlefields to the homeland they would be leading the frontline troops, armed and accustomed to obedience...
...On the fight were the generals and the Junkers, the military aristocracy of Germany, discredited by the disasters of the war, but nevertheless the traditional rulers of the Reich...
...Both novels are gnarled and knotty, bitterly funny, ambiguously ironic, psychologically profound, exasperatingly demanding of one's patience and intelligence...
...Nevertheless there is no absurdity in the comparison that has been made between November 1918 and Doctor Faustus...
...Apparently...
...Torn in conscience and driven to attempted suicide by guilt over the war, Becker undergoes a Christian rebirth...
...In DiSblin's narrative they blunder towards their fatal confrontation, Liebknecht at the mercy of his followers, Ebert always overtaken by events...
...But he is not allowed to attain the peace of God he seeks: joining the Spartacist revolt almost by accident, Becker survives the massacre to spend the Weimar years as a wandering prophet, In his handling of these spiritually tortured characters Dbblin is more akin to Dostoevsky than to Tolstoy...
...In fact Ebert's was a PyrNOVEMBER 1918: A GERMAN REVOLUTION VOLUME I: A PEOPLE BETRAYED VOLUME II: KARL AND ROSA Affred Dbblin Fromm International, $10.95 each vol., 642 pp...
...Ernest B a r t e l l L oGIc in the service of ideology is a weapon that P. T. Bauer has brandished with vigor over the years in defense of rudimentary neoclassical economics as the paradigm for global development policy...
...But as Dbblin tells it, the saga contains no heroes and few villains...
...One is Commonweal: 304 Rosa Luxemburg herself, for whom Dbblin fabulates a scarifying dream sequence externalizing her well-documented internal conflict between political ideology and personal passion...
...In that year DiSblin, like his character Becker, experienced a religious conversion and became a Roman Catholic, though one more existentialist than orthodox...
...The spectacle is one with which the distorted, expressionistic satirical drawings of Georg Grosz have made us familiar...
...But the public story is only half the story DiSblin tells, or rather less than half of it...
...One development economist, Nicholas Stern, rates an entire essay of rebuttal to his 1974 critique of Lord Bauer's development economics...
...He correctly observes that elements of these theories have disappeared from academic literature, but he fails to give his readers any indication of the evolution of development theory since its early Eurocentric phase...
...In his review of development literature Lord Bauer dissects the modernization theories popular in the fifties with arguments familiar to a whole generation of social scientists of all political persuasions...
...And both lead the reader to a devastating sense of a personal tragedy inextricably linked with the larger world-tragedy that is twentiethcentury Germany...
...The German Republic was saved...
...And when Spartacus made its move to seize power in the name of the workers in January 1919, the putsch was quelled within the week...
...Such omissions are, of course, the author's right, but they surely undercut his sweeping assertion that it is the discredited modernization theories which "have continued to dominate political and public discourse...
...He had licensed the Junkers' revenge, and, once they had tasted the blood of Karl and Rosa, they continued to silence their opposition from the democratic left to the Catholic center through assassination squads...
...Interwoven with these events are the private lives and the even more private nightmares of the men and women of Berlin, the exhausted ex-officers and military nurses, war profiteers and semi-prostitutes, thieves, and respectable laborers...
...Within that mass spectacle, though, Dbblin focuses on two tragic figures, both posses r demons within...
...De facto Chancellor of the fallen empire, Ebert faced challenges to his rule from both the left and the right, and both groups potentially possessed far more power than he...
...He had saved the name of the Republic at the cost of its essence and assured that, after the social upheavals of hyperinflation and Depression, Germany, lacking experience with genuine democratic institutions, would be ruled either by the generals or the Nazis...
...The man in the middle was Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social Democratic Party and of a shaky coalition of liberals and independent socialists...
...On the left was Spartacus, the Communist party of Germany, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, with their power to inspire revolt in the workers of Berlin...
...The structuralist analyses of development, the rise and decline of dependency theory, global interdependence, the "basic needs" policy literature, and the interdisciplinary attempts to identify alternative, often culturally indigenous, strategies for development plus the policies that have sprung from them are mostly ignored in Lord Bauer's literature review...
...Spartacus was more idealistic than the Junkers but perhaps equally disciplined and inspired by Lenin's victories...
...and 547 pp...
...As both a Socialist and a Jew, Laissez faire lives...
...In destroying Spartacus he had put himself into the hands of the army...
...He died in Alsace in 1957...
...The other is a fictional creation, the idealistic schoolmaster Friedrich Becker...
...Born in 1878, Alfred Dbblin was trained as a neurologist and,psychiatrist...
...Lord Bauer has also discovered the Christian churches to be fiddled with challengers to his beliefs, so there is a recently published essay provocatively titled "Ecclesiastical Economics: Envy Legitimized" in which his principal adversary is the late Pope Paul VI...
...From the 1950s there are development economists and local policy makers in the newly independent nations carved out of colonial "British Afri...
...Comically absurd chance happenings seem to dictate the course of the struggle as much as the impersonal forces of history: DiSblin's story reads at times like a cross between War and Peace and Catch 22...
...This, in brief, is the public side of the story Alfred DiSblin tells in November 1918: A German Revolution, and in it he makes the case that the nine weeks between the Armistice and the murders of Karl and Rosa constituted the crucial moment in German history between the reunification under Bismarck and the formation of Hitler's Third Reich...
...Lord Bauer, like many other commentators, notes that this picture "does not do justice to the rich variety of humanity and experience in the less developed world...
...Two thousand revolutionaries died in the fighting, and on January 15 Spartacus was effectively decapitated when, on their way to prison, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by their captors...
...Erzberger, Rathenau, and over three hundred others were murdered in the following years...
...Ebert himself was well-intentioned and no fool...
...The panorama of the German folk is even more essential here than in the author's more celebrated novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, for in Dbblin as in Tolstoy history is no product of the will of great men but a summation of the decisions of thousands...
...like Hannes Diisterberg, the dead lover who haunts Rosa Luxemburg's dreams, he spent World War I as an army doctor...
...Liebknecht was more a Hamlet than a Lenin...
...When the armies of the Western Front converged on the capital in December, far from supporting a royalist coup, they could not even maintain their integrity: the organism of the old order melted away into solitary cells, single ex-soldiers seeking their homes...
...Advocates of devel. opment planning and foreign aid of all types are led to Lord Bauer's verbal slaughter...
...How could Ebert and his government survive this dual challenge...
...It would be more correct to say that policy makers are still caught in the complexity of a development process that contains conflicts between the exigencies of national and intern~.tional r :integration and the as18 May 1984:305...
...Books: THE DICTATES OF NIGHTKARE A T the 1918 armistice, Germany teetered at the edge of an abyss...
...REALITY AND RHETORIC STUBIES IN THE ECONOMICS OF BEVELOPMENT P. T. Bauer Harvard, $15, 184 pp...
...Reality and Rhetoric consists of eight such assaults published as essays over the past thirty years, some in revised and expanded form, plus previously unpublished opening and closing chapters...
...David H. Richter rhic victory...
...Lord Bauer explicitly professe s "a reluctance to formulate a theory of economic development," so his defense consists principally of swashbuckling attacks upon those he perceives as his challengers in the worlds of academe and public policy...
...Workers' and soldiers' councils dominated the Berlin streets: was a Communist revolution such as had convulsed Russia in the offing...
...And in the process he had fatally alienated the center-left coalition which supported true democracy in Germany, and the masses who supported that coalition...
...bal assaults rather than with positive proposals for theory and policy, Lord Bauer has called his readers over the years to share his cherished beliefs in the sufficiency for humankind of an economic order defined by unconstrained private ownership of property and by the unhampered pursuit of private profit through an all-encompassing system of free markets for goods and services, labor, and financial capital...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 10
