1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [41]
The building's basement, just as was true of the city's official Rathaus, was given over to a huge tavern. And, just as with the one in the basement of the Rathaus on Hans Richter Strasse—or the now famous Thuringen Gardens in Grantville—that tavern was a social and political center.
German traditions of self-organization were already deeply rooted. The up-time Americans, smugly certain as Americans so often were that their own customs were unique, had been surprised to discover the ubiquitous town and city militias with their accompanying shooting clubs. They'd thought the tradition of armed self-defense—not to mention the National Rifle Association—to be quintessentially American.
The up-timers could claim considerable credit for inspiring some of the rapidly growing voluntary associations, true enough, especially the trade unions and the credit unions. Others seemed to them somewhat outlandish. Americans were certainly familiar with sports clubs, but they were quite unaccustomed to seeing such clubs—as with most of the insurance cooperatives—so closely associated with a political movement. But they would have been perfectly familiar to the German Social Democrats of the nineteenth century who had surrounded their powerful political party with such organizations.
Gretchen herself took the situation for granted, including the informal give-and-take between the CoC headquarters and the Rathaus. At any given time of the day or night, you were just as likely to find a city sanitation official discussing his business with CoC activists in their tavern as you were to find CoC activists in the tavern at the Rathaus wrangling over issues involving the city militias with one of the mayor's deputies.
She'd experienced that sort of informal dual power before, during the siege of Amsterdam. There, too, the CoC she'd organized had been as much the center of authority as the city's official government. And the reason had been much the same: military weakness on the part of the official authorities combined with very real if often informal military strength on the part of the radical plebeians.
When Gretchen entered the meeting room and saw the uncertain and dubious expression on the face of the woman from the Vogtland, it was obvious to her that the Vogtlander did not know what to make of it all. Gretchen was not surprised. The Vogtland, because of its terrain and being under Saxon control, had been isolated from the political developments which had transformed much of the Germanies since the Ring of Fire. The region had shared in those developments, true. In some ways, in fact, the political struggle was even sharper than most places, especially since the Saxon elector had placed Holk in charge of pacifying the region. But the Vogtlander rebels were programmatically limited—"down with the elector!" pretty much summed it up—and were tactically one-sided.
Gretchen took her seat across the table from the Vogtland woman, whose name was Anna Piesel. She was apparently betrothed to Georg Kresse, the recognized leader of the Vogtland rebellion. Tata sat down beside her.
Gretchen had to be careful here. The Committees of Correspondence were the largest and best-known—certainly the best-financed and organized—of Europe's revolutionary organizations. But they were not the only one. In Franconia, for instance, the dominant organization was the Ram movement.
The CoCs were the only revolutionary organization with a national scope, even an international one. So it was inevitable that they would overshadow the other groups, all of whom were regional in character. In times past, overbearing attitudes by CoC activists ignoring local conditions had produced some bad clashes. Gretchen had had to intervene personally in one such conflict, in Suhl, when the local CoC tried to run roughshod over the gun manufacturers who, whatever their political faults,