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himself
    Spartacus, whose party was as red as raw beef and demanded a soviet republic immediately, a
    working-class dictatorship with all necessary violence. Between these two came a rather
    nebulous minority party who also wanted a soviet republic, but were prepared to be a little more
    genial in their methods. Klaus’ private opinion was that they all made his head ache, but that
    Ebert’s Social Democrats were faintly less offensive than the others. Klaus was addressed on the
    subject one day early in January, by the elderly scarecrow from whom he bought his daily paper.
    “That there Spartacus,” said the old man, “regular upsetting firebrand. Wants to turn
    everything upside down as though they wasn’t bad enough already.”
    “Just so,” said Klaus. “Him and his Rosa Luxembourg! Huh!”
    “Oh, quite.”
    “And them left-wing minority lot, neither soap nor cheese as they say. Minority’s all
    they’ll ever be, in my opinion.”
    “It sounds probable,” said Klaus, only deterred from walking away by the fact that he had
    nowhere particular to walk to.
    “Ebert’s the man for me,” said the paper-seller. “Parliamentary democracy on the votes
    of the whole community. What could be fairer?”
    “What indeed?”
    “I only hope that when we has the elections at the end of the month they gets in with a
    thumping majority. Show them rowdy Communists where they gets off, that will.”
    “Yes, won’t it?”
    “Something we’ve never had before, that is, parliamentary democracy on the votes of the
    whole community. I says to my old woman—”
    Klaus drifted off, for something had just occurred to him as strange. A democracy based
    on universal suffrage was something Germany had never had before, yet to him it had seemed so
    natural as to go without saying. Where, then, had he been brought up? Was it possible that he
    was not a German after all? No, that was an absurd idea.
    The next man he talked to, or rather, who talked to him, was a young workman waiting
    for a tram, to whom Liebknecht was the builder of the New Jerusalem and Rosa Luxembourg a
    greater Joan of Arc.
    “I think I will go back to Aunt Ludmilla in Haspe for a little while,” thought Lehmann. “I
    will if I don’t get that post office job,” for his money was running short and he was looking for
    work.
    Two days later the Spartacists revolted and there was savage fighting in the streets,
    flaring up and passing, leaving crumpled bundles, which till that moment had been men and
    women, lying in the road or crawling painfully to shelter. Ebert’s Government called up the
    remnants of the old Imperial Army, and a fortnight of hideous terror followed in Berlin till the
    revolt was put down with the strong hand. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg died at the
    hands of the police on their way to prison. Klaus Lehmann’s headaches became so insupportable
    that he could not have taken the post office appointment even if it had been offered to him, so he
    went to Haspe again. Here the great news was that Hanna had become engaged to the postman,
    and under the fallen leaves in the garden were snowdrops showing white. Here it was only as a
    rumour of half-real happenings that Ebert won his elections and there was established the well-
    intentioned Constitution of Weimar.
    Eventually Klaus obtained a post teaching mathematics in a school at Dusseldorf, where
    for a couple of years he was not unhappy. He was earning enough to keep himself and to take the
    old lady presents when he went home—he had learned to call it home—to Haspe at week-ends
    and in the holidays. Hanna married the postman, fat smiling Emilie took her place, and the world
    was not too bad till the mark began to fall in value.
    “I cannot understand it,” said Fräulein Rademeyer. “The price of everything is rising so
    rapidly that one’s income cannot keep pace with it. I think it is very wicked of people to be so
    greedy and charge so much.”
    Klaus tried to explain