As middle-class boys, who moreover had only just been roughly jolted out of a four-year-long patriotic intoxication with war, we were naturally against the Red revolutionaries; against Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and their Spartacus League.2 Although we only vaguely knew that they would ‘rob us of everything’, probably liquidate those of our parents who were well-off, and altogether make life frightful and ‘Russian’, we had thus to be in favour of Ebert3 and Noske and their Free Corps. But, alas, it was impossible to work up any enthusiasm for these figures.
