The Easter Uprising in Mansfeld (Franz Jung’s reminiscences of the March Action)

During my months of imprisonment, I didn’t just fill the empty time by writing books for the Malik Publishing House. More urgently and tormentingly with each passing day, I had to grapple with a question: What is it that fills an individual with conviction, that intoxication of being swept along by a powerful wave, and the fanaticism to even unleash such a wave?

I know it’s not something that most people quickly settle on: something that can be learned from books, absorbed from trivial talks, discovered, or invented—something that suddenly illuminates the previous darkness with radiant light. Nor is it something misunderstood or misinterpreted, which could later be unlearned or regretted. Where such conviction exists, there is no room for error.

I couldn’t answer this question. But I became aware that not answering it inevitably created a sense of distance. It would be harder for me to keep pace, already lagging behind in tempo. Whatever may have happened or will happen out there, I had to be clear about the degree and intensity of my involvement: What do I truly want? What binds me when I am merely swept along? What is it that I defend with my existence, and why, and for what purpose? I know I will leave no void; things will continue as though I had never been there—as though I had never been part of it.

This is something everyone must wrestle with when lying on their cot in a cell, once the light is switched off, until the dawn breaks through the barred window high on the wall.

Today, more than thirty years later, it’s hard to define this precisely. It is far from personal ambition. It doesn’t matter if I’m right, if I can convince anyone, or if I’m seen as a bothersome fool—a hanger-on. Especially since nothing has changed in the certainty of belonging—nothing.

It may be true that all the people around us learn, relearn, and forget—changing their convictions, beliefs, or whatever it is they hold dear. These are the people in office, the appointees and officials, the ones who administer justice, issue orders, the politicians, the priests, and the newspaper readers. They exist, but they are not real; they are shadows in the world of our experiences. You stumble over these figures everywhere—they block the door, their weight crushes you, their mere presence, movements, and masks of false security suffocate you. They latch onto you, devour you, and smother the victim. Perhaps it must be so.

For people collectively are no worse than individuals. It’s not only about the pillars of society in entrenched positions of money, influence, and power. Judging such people can be simplified by placing them on the opposing side.

But what about those who have fallen behind in one of these categories of experience, or feel that way—those who want to rise and expand this goal to include an entire group, or even the entire world, as they say—the world-improvers, the preachers, the prophets, whether they stammer or speak in tongues? Do the driven truly believe in their convictions?

That is the crux of the question. Are such people, who flock to an idea, spark a movement, and want to establish new laws, liars, frauds, fantasists, addicts to euphoria—or pigs and cowards when they change their convictions? Frankly, I cannot accept that. But it is hard to live in a society where the majority consists of such figures. Even more so, society is entirely composed of people who must forget something, regret something, and somehow seek or are offered salvation. That is hard to bear—it stinks.

It could be otherwise, but it isn’t. As everyone knows, I certainly felt that way back then. Society proceeds in an orderly manner, with everyone being each other’s friend, supporter, and executioner—in the pursuit of improvement, enlightenment, power, and control.

Just look at the people around you—I was forced to after being left alone on the open field. They all, having betrayed and annulled themselves, are engaged in something that will manifest itself in great and small ways, in global battles, adventures, inventions, and finally in a single glance or handshake—comrades all, marching in step, suffocating, and living in mortal fear.

I recount the following to confirm what I’ve said, though it is in no way significant.

In the back room of a pub near Berlin's Schlesischer Bahnhof [a train station in Berlin - K.V.], I received the assignment to go to the Mansfeld region, hold meetings, and call on the workers in the copper mines to strike—or rather, to force them into a strike. Present were the so-called leading figures of the Communist Party (KPD), the Independent Social Democrats (USPD), and the splinter Communist Workers’ Party (KAPD), for whom I had been summoned along with two others. The KAPD was no longer taken seriously by the other parties, including the Social Democrats (SPD). But in times of political stagnation, as around Easter 1921, it was convenient to use it for the false aggressiveness of the workers’ parties.
I went with the task of the three organizations to incite a strike in the Mansfeld region, to escalate it into a general strike that would spread across Germany—intended as a signal for a general assault on the government. I had the necessary contacts, a list of trusted individuals I was to meet in Halle, Hettstedt, and Kloster-Mansfeld. Specialists were supposed to join me and take over further actions. My job was to return to Berlin immediately after the operation began.

The people I dealt with in that pub's back room were, with few exceptions, workers from Berlin factories, delegated to party action committees—typical, upright citizens one might find in savings or sports clubs. There may have been a few professional politicians [Berufspolitiker -K.V.] among them, or at least those aspiring to be, as well as some older party functionaries from before the war—the cashier type. I doubt any of them had a clear idea of how events would unfold, what should happen, or what to tell Berlin workers already called to mass meetings for the week after Easter—anything constructive beyond the well-worn slogans. To me, the matter seemed relatively simple: I just had to say, "Strike, strike!"—and then everyone across Germany would strike, and that would be the end.

Persuasion wasn’t necessary, and I had no means of coercion. Would the strike shake any part of Germany? What resistance could we expect? Someone should have thought about this—if not in Germany, then perhaps abroad—probably in Moscow. But we didn’t know, and no one asked.

It’s easy, of course, to analyze the atmosphere retrospectively. What’s more important is whether anyone at the time attempted an explanation—I doubt it. The members of the action committee sat around with serious, weighty expressions, offering each other cigarettes and paying for their beer, satisfied as though they had just decided to raise membership fees.

For my "support"—as I would soon learn—three individuals were placed as masterminds behind my initially harmless-looking efforts: Béla Kun, apparently sent from Moscow to spark a new revolution in Germany; Max Hölz; and Karl Plättner. The latter two each commanded a trained group of followers, disciplined for terror and tightly organized, including individuals with substantial prison experience.

I can be brief now, as much has already been written about the Easter Uprising in Mansfeld. I have no intention of competing with historical accounts, convincing anyone, or defending myself. Still less do I aim to recount a grotesque tale. I present the pieces as they remain in my memory, or rather as memory compels me to recount them, which is by no means a pleasure.

The idea that a political upheaval, amidst all the evident signs of disintegration, could be initiated by a handful of people gathering in a pub’s back room to discuss means at their disposal—it’s almost laughable. Their only leverage consisted of workers who would stop working, take to the streets, and then—do what? Stay on the streets, because party functionaries convinced them, or because unemployed workers were persuaded—of what? That overthrowing the government and reshaping society was necessary? If only everyone could be convinced, and so forth—all of it already said. Imagining such people still requires a good dose of imagination today.

Humans are easily convinced when not overly burdened with reflecting on what they are convinced of. Usually, it suffices to point out that there are others like them, who have certainly thought it through, who are in some sense better—higher positioned or better educated—and similarly convinced. Party functionaries may have heard of books or theories in circulation, some of which they mention or debate. It’s all part of the form—a kind of ornamentation that may be helpful or harmful, depending on whether the conviction changes or dissolves entirely. I am not here to delve into history or philosophy. I merely point to the distance that was already interposed.

I have always been easily persuaded, as I am naturally inclined to doubt everything. But when a conviction takes root in prepared soil, I hold on to it, even against better judgment and all doubts—perhaps a dangerous flaw, but an essential part of my way of experiencing life. I’ve had to witness people I dealt with changing their convictions—sometimes due to minor theoretical deviations in slogan interpretation, and sometimes more fundamentally. They abandoned their convictions, and when unwilling to fight for opposing beliefs, they simply fled—into some convenient illusion, severely shaken, repugnant in a state of decay, yet occasionally still acceptably dressed. They continue living, crawling around. To me, this seems to describe the vast majority around us. It may be simple to say: "I was wrong; I made mistakes," and so on. "I repent in the morning, throughout the day, and in the evening, and so forth." Perhaps this sustains society and makes history possible: the justification of error.

I oppose this, or rather, I would oppose it if I were ever again given the opportunity to be convinced. No one who is in motion makes mistakes. Only the connections can fall apart: the bond between individuals, and between them and the collective. These bonds disintegrate, although, in reality, they never existed to begin with. What politicians call camaraderie, marching in step—this all inevitably slips into disappointment as long as conviction cannot be sustained.

Disappointment is the bitter aftertaste of such conviction when it falters. The world and society are full of it—in fact, I would say they thrive on it; it is their support and their illusion. Illusion is a conviction on crutches.

I allow no excuses today, just as I allowed none back then, for those who change their convictions.

What I don't understand is—what goes on inside these people? They seem so normal, so uniform, so close and familiar, and often so lovable. My own experiences were filled with these figures and, to a good extent, still are. The great misunderstanding lies in seeing and realizing that they both move and are moved—even when they are determined to see me perish. I do not deny them the right, nor even the ability; they are the same as all of us. The exception is always the one who is hunted down.

Then there is this action I began recalling into memory—ongoing, yet so insignificant and actually so unreal that it is almost shameful to speak of it. The same things are repeated here and in other countries, regardless of time and new inventions: the same people, in structure and nature, with the same convictions, the same renunciations, and, if you will, the same betrayals. The world, they say, moves on.

Let me finish these notes now:

In Halle, Béla Kun was already at work. I could not reach him. The meeting of delegates convened at the union house had just been canceled when I was on my way to meet my contacts there.

Rumors of a conspiracy were circulating. Béla Kun had allegedly made preparations to blow up the union house with his people, sacrificing the three hundred delegates gathered there. The idea was to stir up the masses, spark spontaneous demonstrations: a general strike against the provocateurs of the Reichswehr and the government, and so on. The plan had leaked, possibly even been betrayed to the SPD and to a factional opposition within the USPD. The fight between factions was in full swing.

Workers stood in groups in the streets leading to the union house, waiting for Béla Kun, who was scheduled to be the main speaker—they would have beaten him to death. Demonstrations had already begun. Béla Kun was hiding in a wooded area on the outskirts of the city.

The access points to his headquarters were guarded by a sizeable bodyguard. Gunfire broke out, but no one knew who was shooting at whom. In Berlin, during the Kapp Putsch, workers were to be driven from the streets by locomotive smoke; in Halle, they were to be lured onto the streets by shootings; both plans famously failed. Béla Kun’s headquarters issued no more orders. The situation had become completely chaotic; the strike would probably not materialize. That was the prelude. I continued on to Fettstedt.

There, Max Hölz and his followers had already arrived earlier. Hölz was not fond of meetings. We held one in the morning as planned. Hölz appeared on the podium after the discussion had already begun.

A young man dressed like a forestry assistant [Forstadjunkt, interestingly enough, this being a very uncommonly used word, it is the same one George Grosz uses for one of his pieces, satirizing typical German hunting culture. It is quite likely that both him and Jung used the word with the same intention. Here is the link for the Grosz piece. - K.V.], some kind of employee from a nearby estate, was speaking, calling for calm. Hölz kicked him in the backside and threw him off the podium to loud laughter; the meeting was over, and no vote was taken.

In the garden of the inn, a table was set up. I registered people who declared themselves willing to join a fighting group. A company of considerable strength came together. I distributed rifles that had been stored in the town hall, which had already been a KPD stronghold. Additionally, ammunition and boxes of dynamite, organized from the supply depots of the surrounding potash companies, were distributed.

Before the company could be taken over by the designated leaders, we heard rifle fire coming from the lower town center along the street leading to the inn on a hill. The Reichswehr had meanwhile entered Hettstedt. My people scattered, caught in a whirlwind; rifles lay everywhere. I was left sitting alone at the table with the lists.

Meanwhile, Hölz's group was active in the town.

Hölz had seized a bicycle shop at the marketplace, driving the owner out onto the street; his people equipped themselves with bicycles. As a warning, he simultaneously blew up the adjacent municipal savings bank. The facade collapsed, and the roof frame caved in. News of the advancing Reichswehr left no time to destroy the depots or search for cash.

Max Hölz disappeared over the ridges surrounding the town and vanished into the distance. It was also time for me to evade the increasingly close gunfire. The path up over the heights was already blocked.

I ended up at the side entrance of a house, facing the courtyard. I was pulled into the courtyard as the Reichswehr advanced along the street on both sides of the house, shooting. In the yard stood a large manure pile. At the back entrance to the house, residents gesticulated wildly, a woman weeping loudly. Women pulled me into the hallway. Upstairs, I was told, the old father lay dead, shot. He had leaned out the window to see what the shooting was about.

I was told I could not stay there; the Reichswehr was searching every house. They hid me in the manure pile, where they had dug a hole at head height. I was lifted in and carefully covered again.

The search came. I heard loud voices, complaints, and curses, and then silence. Oddly, I remember little of the hour I spent in the manure pile. Perhaps the overriding thought was why these women did not betray me. After all, I was partly to blame and had brought great misfortune to their home—I imagine I might have grinned sheepishly had the soldiers caught me. I would have been shot on the spot.

So far, our side had lost about half a dozen Hettstedt workers.

They then sent me off, pointing me to field paths toward a place where I could catch a direct connection to Berlin. On the way, a student joined me—someone I vaguely knew from my Berlin days. I hadn’t known he had also been in Hettstedt and hadn’t seen him there until now. He was probably sent by the Berlin Action Committee to monitor me.

He reported that Hölz had retreated to Kloster-Mansfeld, where he had blown up the mining railway; the copper workers were thereby relieved of the need to vote on the general strike’s political demands in the simplest way possible.

It was early afternoon by then. Easter Sunday—I could almost hear the bells ringing in Neiße. We walked along narrow paths through the fields. The crops were in their first green. Radiant sun, no breeze. Spring. No sound of human activity, no vehicles, peace all around. The monotonous trill of larks ascending into the blue. They climbed and climbed, then suddenly dropped—a tear, a hole opened up. Silence. But after a while, they would rise again, climb, trill, and fall once more—I had never heard it with such intensity. End of the first act.

By the same evening, I was back in Berlin, in a similar backroom of a tavern, this time near the Görlitzer Bahnhof [another train station -K.V.]. The same people were gathered, the same faces, discussing as before. I answered a few questions and was dismissed; Béla Kun had already been there before me.

The following day, the positions of the parties had to be decided—the call for a general strike, the action program for the coming week. The mood in Berlin was bleak, apathetic, disinterested, and skeptical. It was already clear that the Berlin workers would not strike.

In the Central German district, up to the Leuna works, where the Plättner group was supposed to operate, sparks of rebellion crackled. The Plättner group, which at times grew to over a hundred armed members, engaged the Reichswehr between Halle and Bitterfeld in regular battles, capturing machine guns and mortars. War-hardened Reichswehr soldiers ran like rabbits as soon as serious shooting began.

Berlin and the rest of the Reich remained untouched. Although the newspapers would resume publication on Tuesday after Easter, expectations for the outcome of the Berlin mass meeting regarding the general strike had dropped to zero. This ended the second act.

On the evening of Easter Monday, the Berlin KPD local leader, [Ernst Reuter-]Friesland, sought me out. We barely knew each other; I generally had no contact with such leaders. Friesland, who had heard my report the day before, implored me to select individuals from the so-called military organization of the KAPD who could be tasked with terrorist missions. I agreed—not many people in my life had so urgently and fervently asked me for something.

It was deemed necessary to cover the political retreat with a terror campaign and similar arguments in case the strike resolutions were rejected in the next day's meetings. At the very least, we would have shown the Berlin workers our willingness to resist.

That same night, with the help of the KAPD, we assembled half a dozen people willing to participate.

We received the materials, addresses, and the program for the planned actions: to blow up the railway track in Oberschöneweide and disrupt the connection; to destroy the switching mechanism at the Charlottenburg railway bridge junction toward Halensee; and finally, to bomb the apartment of Staatssekretär [Anton] Weißmann, a particularly hated SPD member among communist workers.

The explosives were ready. Two men went to Oberschöneweide, and two others to Charlottenburg. I trusted the people—war veterans, upright family men, no big talkers. One, a former pioneer sergeant and now a beer delivery driver, was pulled from his bed in the middle of the night; the others were fetched from pubs in their neighborhoods.

The Weißmann operation was more complicated. We couldn’t quickly procure ready-made concentrated charges, so we had to make do with egg grenades. I also wasn’t fond of the two individuals presented as suitable candidates for the job; they were loud and boastful. It quickly became apparent that they were unwilling to carry out the task on their own.

So, I went along with them. We took the streetcar to Grunewald, where the Weißmann villa was supposed to be located on a side street not far from the Grunewald train station. A map sketch marked an escape route through a neighboring villa property that was currently unoccupied. The closer we got to our destination, the more subdued my companions became.

I positioned the men on either side of the villa. I planned to give the signal for throwing the grenades while I positioned myself at the street intersection. Each man had two of these heavy grenades. On my signal—arm raised—one threw his grenade into the front yard, where it was found by the police the next morning. The other threw his grenade through the window I had indicated. There was a tremendous crash: window frames ripped out, a shower of glass shards. Then he bolted, with the second grenade still in his pocket. Neither followed the prearranged escape routes and both disappeared, never to be seen again, even later.

I returned through the villa district to the city. The streets were deserted—no people, no police, no ambulances. There was a deep stillness in the dawning morning.

I went to George Grosz’s apartment. He had vacated it during the night and offered me his studio. I had arranged to use this as my headquarters to coordinate and shelter our people in case any pursuit began. I brewed the pre-prepared coffee on the stove and lit a fine cigar.

Nothing happened, not then nor afterward—peace and quiet.

To cut to the chase: The Weißmann address was wrong. The villa housed an artist on the upper floor, who was thrown out of bed by the explosion. Property damage, but at the wrong target.

The beer delivery man in Oberschöneweide had climbed from the street onto the railway embankment. He placed the charge at a suitable spot but detonated it prematurely to avoid endangering a train that was already approaching in the distance. “Innocent people, workers commuting to the morning shift—” hence only minor damage to the tracks, though there was some disruption to operations.

The two others assigned to the Charlottenburg bridge failed to get the charge to the top. They settled for placing it in the corrugated metal urinal underneath the bridge. The result? The urinal was blown to bits, but no other damage was caused.

Before the operations began, we drafted a leaflet, a poster with the text in large letters:

Max Hölz is here! A call to the Berlin population! A call for a general strike!

The poster was printed the same night and pasted on billboards and suitable walls throughout the city. Over a hundred people from all districts were out distributing them from the early morning hours.

We didn’t disturb anyone further. The morning papers reported the events in the Mansfeld region, framed as the bulletins from the war we knew so well: "Cleansing operation against communist gangs by the Reichswehr."

Our single great success was with the B.Z. am Mittag [Berliner Zeitung am Mittag/Berlin Newspaper at Noon (1904-1943) -K.V.]: the Hölz poster was printed in full, complete with a photograph. Headlines followed: "Bombing in Grunewald, bombing in Oberschöneweide, bombing at Charlottenburg railway bridge." Five-centimeter-high letters. Police and security forces were said to be intervening. Martial law? But nothing else happened. Not even the Berliner Mittagsblatt could launch a revolution by scaring the bourgeoisie.

The prepared strike resolutions didn’t even make it to a vote at the evening meetings of the district representatives. The failure was so catastrophic that the entire party apparatus of the USPD and KPD was on the verge of collapse. Friesland resigned as secretary of the Berlin KPD and shocked the Berlin press by issuing a statement to the editorial offices, declaring that he considered the workers' parties' provocative politics a crime against the German people. He joined the SPD, interned there for a time before being accepted as a full member, later entered parliament, resumed his legal [bürgerlich has two meaning, one being legal, the other being bourgeois -K.V.] name of Reuter, and played a significant role as mayor of Berlin after the Second World War. I never saw him again, though I had plenty of opportunities. I didn’t want to embarrass him.

I’ve hardly seen any of the people I was connected with during this operation again. Some, under special and changed circumstances—behind bars.

Fritz Rasch, the chairman of the committee, was spotted years later on Hamburg’s Mönckebergstraße, selling shoelaces. Willem, the treasurer who had displayed visible skepticism and dissatisfaction from the start, remarked with pride, a year and a half earlier: "As workers, we’ve come so far. We can even go to the movies in the afternoon!" [Wilhelm] Pieck went even further, becoming president in Pankow!

The others fell one by one.

Béla Kun, with his trail of 20,000 dead, 12,000 imprisoned, and thousands of refugees in Hungary alone, fell out of favor with the Comintern and was exiled to the Urals. I met him in Yekaterinburg (modern-day Sverdlovsk) [now Yekaterinburg again -K.V], where I was tasked with organizing a pool of American agricultural machinery lent by the Case Company for famine relief on behalf of the International Workers' Aid. Kun attacked me with intrigues and ridiculous slanders, claiming I was preparing a counter-revolution in the famine-ridden steppes near Uralsk and selling tractors on the black market.

Such rumors only found an audience with the Berlin Workers' Aid. They initiated an international investigative commission against me, led by Arthur Holitscher. Fed up, I left the operation.

Holitscher later wrote a glowing tribute to my work at the tractor station [the reminiscences concerning his work there are in another part of his memoirs -K.V.] in his book about the trip to Russia, though he had initially refused to speak to me without a witness in Moscow. His constant companion during the investigation was an English auditor named Whitehead, who authored a popular astrology handbook for the masses.

In hindsight, Kun wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to me. What drove a petty clerk of a rural cooperative bank to throw himself into the revolution? The man was heart-stricken, glandularly deficient with a tendency to obesity, hysterical, asthmatic, and a glutton—his bulldog face was a frightful sight.

If anyone ever spoke a kind word to this Béla Kun — I can hardly imagine it. Rarely has a man been so hated by the people of his own circle. He should have been helped, but how—?

Béla Kun was killed during the later party purges; the party did not even bother to fake a trial.

Max Hölz mattered much less to me. I found him arrogant and self-serving. His authority as a bandit leader from Vogtland wouldn’t have lasted long if he had been left alone. Despite all his grandiose talk, he didn’t know how to assert himself, neither upwards nor downwards. The moment he became politically inconvenient, he shrank away.

We could have easily gotten him out of the country at that time if he hadn’t insisted on making personal accusations against his main competitor, Karl Plättner, before a tribunal set up by party representatives. The question was: who had stolen the platinum spoons from the Leuna works? Who had the right to the spoils? Well, who had now stolen the platinum spoons? The Leuna works had gone on strike without any involvement from Hölz or Plättner. Hölz insisted on a compensation for his share of the Leuna spoils. On the way to or from one of these meetings, arranged by Franz Pfemfert as an intermediary, Hölz was arrested in front of Pfemfert’s bookstore on Kaiserallee. The platinum spoons later surfaced in Holland, where they were sold for the party fund of the KAPD by a long-time friend of Lenin’s. It didn’t surprise me when, decades later, someone in New York claimed that people in their circle had believed at the time that I had stolen the spoons and drunk away the money.

Max Hölz, after being sentenced to death, was very quickly amnestied, went to Soviet Russia, and died there, as was to be expected.

I really sympathized with Plättner. His role in the Easter Uprising was larger than Hölz's, though it was less publicized. Karl Plättner knew how to organize bank robberies in the provinces when there was no urgent political mission and the party treasury was low. A special auxiliary corps had formed around the Plättner group, consisting of the wives and fiancées of gang members, suitable for scouting a target and later covering up the robbery. Plättner always appeared at meetings accompanied by two or three girls, inconspicuously ordinary, typical women from the people — his bodyguard. Hölz would have used actresses for this purpose.

I never saw Karl Plättner again. He stayed free longer than Hölz, later went to prison without an amnesty procedure, and wrote a strange book there with deep-analytical insights: Eros in Prison. [The preface to this book was written by none other than Magnus Hirschfeld. -K.V.]

Plättner is said to have been shot by border guards in the spring of 1933 while crossing into Czechoslovakia in the Giant Mountains.

Was all this real?

I am against the figures who write history. I myself described details from the Easter Uprising in a novel in the same year: The Conquest of the Machines [Die Eroberung der Machinen, here is a link. -K.V], which was published at the time by Malik Verlag. I can’t remember many of these details today.

I didn’t play a very pleasant role in this action.

I would say I didn’t play any role at all, other than the one that was ascribed to me. I hadn’t thought about whether the whole action was right or wrong or had any political meaning, such as pretending to have a politically revolutionary action on which others could later build—today, I know that such considerations would not have concerned me. For me, the dominant desire seems to have been the notion of conquering the machines, shaking society to its core; what happens within the existing social order doesn’t matter. It was just a piece of fantasy that was interpreted into a dubious reality and was never fully thought through.

Nevertheless, it turned out that I had to leave Germany. I tried to escape via Holland, was interned there, and later extradited to Russia instead of Germany — it ultimately depended on the lawyer fees.

Thus, I ended up in Moscow again in late summer of 1921.