Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [45]
The new government avoided giving the Reichstag, or anyone in it, even the faintest chance of expressing an opinion, by dissolving it immediately and calling for new elections at the soonest possible constitutional moment, 5 March. Within days a suitable Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People restricted press freedom and provided for ‘protective custody’. On 24 February the brownshirt and blackshirt paramilitary forces of the Nazi Party were enrolled as ‘auxiliary police’. On that day the police raided the Party headquarters, claiming to find great quantities of treasonable materials, though actually nothing of significance was discovered. Such were the conditions under which the last nominally free multiparty elections of the Weimar Republic were to be held. And then, less than a week before the vote, an utterly unexpected joker was slipped into the cards already stacked against the opposition. On the night of 27 February the Reichstag building was burned down. Whoever did it, the Nazis immediately exploited the occasion to such spectacular effect that most antifascists came to believe that they must have planned the fire.2 An emergency decree on the next day suspended freedom of speech, association and the press as well as privacy of post and telephone services. For good measure, the decree also allowed the autonomy of the Länder by the right of the Reich government to intervene to restore order. Göring had already begun to round up communists and other undesirables. They were dragged into improvised prisons, beaten up, tortured and in some cases even killed. By April 25,000 were in ‘protective custody’ in Prussia alone.
The immediate reaction of the SSB, or at least my part of it, was to bring the duplicating apparatus to my aunt’s flat. I like to think it may have been the very one on which the last issues of the Schulkampf had been produced. The comrades concluded that, since I was a British subject, I would be less at risk; or perhaps that the police would be less likely to raid our flat. I kept it under my bed for some weeks, a largish brown wooden case of that now antediluvian type where specially typed stencils had to be placed on a permeable inked surface, and each leaf had to be printed singly. Then someone came to take it away. I don’t think any printing was done on it while it was in my charge, for if there had been any, even my undomestic aunt would have protested at the almost inevitable spreading of fatty ink in my bedroom. It was that sort of machine.
Presumably a more efficient printing press must have been used to produce the leaflets which we were supposed to use for the election campaign. I suppose taking part in that campaign was the first piece of genuinely political work I did. It was also my introduction to a characteristic experience of the communist movement: doing something hopeless and dangerous because the Party told us to. True, we might have wanted to help in the campaign in any case, but, given the situation, we did what we did as a gesture of our devotion to communism, that is to say to the Party. Much in the way that I, finding myself alone in a tram with two SA men, and justifiably scared, refused to conceal or take off my badge. We would go into the apartment buildings and, starting on the top floor, push the leaflets into each flat until we came out of the front door, panting with the effort and looking for signs of danger. There was an element of playing at the Wild West in this – we were the Indians rather than the US cavalry – but there was enough real danger to make us feel genuine fear as well as the thrill of risk-taking. A year or so later I described it in my diary as ‘a light, dry feeling of contraction, as when you stand before a man ready to punch you, waiting for the blow’. What might happen if a door opened on a hostile face, if a brown uniform came down the stairs, if our exits to the street were blocked? Distributing election appeals for the KPD was no laughing matter, especially in the days after the Reichstag fire. Nor was voting for