The Tragi-comedy of November

The action of the counter-revolution gave the Assembly a firmer basis than the Prussian bourgeoisie has ever enjoyed before or since.

In opposing the King’s command the Assembly was completely within its rights, in form and in substance, irrespective of whether or not ’agreement’ was theoretically valid. Even those, like the right-wing lawyer, Gneist, who recognized the validity of that theory, were forced to conclude with him, that: ‘The National Assembly was convened in Berlin to agree a constitution. It followed this call and constituted itself according to the law. Then and afterwards it approved the place thus determined in fact. A unilateral alteration of the place or of the time of its meeting is therefore impermissible either for the monarchy or for the Assembly, since both stand as independent powers, the one against the other. He who admits the right of an adjournment to Brandenburg must also permit an adjournment to Tilsit, Saarlouis or another friendly neighbouring territory; he who permits an adjournment of fourteen days must also admit an adjournment of fourteen years. Free agreement ceases where one party alone wishes to determine time and place. It is however a unilateral decision when one side alone gives the verdict on whether an alteration is essential and whether there is sufficient reason for it. It is not therefore a question of "obedience to orders", but the preservation of our rights.’ The legal question was now so clear that even the most conservative lawyers, like Bornemann, Minister of Justice in Camphausen’s ministry, had to answer it in the same way as Gneist, if they were not to twist the law deliberately.

The majority of the Assembly was also convinced that it was right. When Brandenburg left the hall on November 9, after his ‘formal protest’, not even the whole of the Right followed him. Individual members stayed with the Centre and the Left, either because of qualms of conscience, or for less worthy reasons. The approximately 250 members who did not submit to the coup d’état greatly increased the Assembly’s ability to take decisions. A resolution proposed by Gierke, the former Minister of Agriculture, which repudiated the monarchy’s right to adjourn, remove or dissolve the Assembly, and accused the minister responsible of dereliction of his duty to the monarchy, the country and the Assembly, won almost unanimous applause. After this decisive settlement of the legal question, the problem was how the Assembly was to defend its rights and ward off the injustice of the monarchy.

In itself, the question of what to do was as clear as the legal question, and arose immediately from it. If the monarchy attacked with force, the Assembly had to defend itself by force. Any question of the right to wage a revolution, which could have raised doubts in the minds of the ‘legal’ bourgeoisie, simply did not arise. It was simply a matter of lawful defence against an illegal attack, and the defender had to accept willy nilly the weapons the aggressor chose. A people whose territories a foreign conqueror invades by force of arms defends its hearth and home with the same weapons, and the traitors, Brandenburg and Wrangel, were more dangerous and detestable than any foreign invader. And if, after the King’s illegal action, the Assembly considered itself the only legally constituted authority in the land, which in fact it was, then it had to appeal to the people to rise up at any price, to call for armed resistance against its armed oppressor. That was its right and its duty once the monarchy tried to break it up by force.

Even if the Assembly feared that it had squandered the confidence of the people by its serious mistakes, and was worried because it possessed no forces superior to those of the monarchy, that changed nothing in this situation. To give up a fight for justice because it may possibly end in a defeat is the attitude of cowards, not of men. If Leonidas had led his three hundred away from Thermopylae on the excuse that the Persian army was bound to wipe them out, he would have gone down in history as a knave or a fool, not as a hero. What is true of war is also true of revolution. Marx later condemned the tactics of the Prussian Assembly in the November crisis, saying: ‘A hard-fought defeat is a fact of as much revolutionary significance as an easily-won victory’. Even if the Assembly had risked the fight in the certainty of a defeat, it could have wiped out its past guilt and saved its hope for the future: then Prussian parliamentarianism would never have been condemned to play for half a century like a shadow on the wall. Moreover, the fight was not at all hopeless, provided the Assembly was able to act energetically, clearly and quickly.

An opportunity to do so this was offered that very day. With true Prussian light-mindedness, the Minister of the Interior, through the Chief of Police, ordered the commanders of the Bürgerwehr to deny the Assembly access to the Playhouse. The commanders refused, correctly arguing that, in law, the Bürgerwehr had the duty to defend ‘constitutional freedom and legal order’ and not destroy it, and that the same law meant it took its orders neither from the Minister of the Interior nor from the Chief of Police, but only from the local authorities. Rimpler conveyed this correspondence to Unruh, and the latter as quickly as possible convened the Assembly for 5 a.m. on November 10, since the Chief of Police had declared that, if the Bürgerwehr did not declare its willingness to co-operate by 6 a.m. the royal authorities would themselves take ‘whatever measures seemed appropriate’.

In this decisive session there were three statements to be considered which could determine their actions. A deputation from the city council offered itself as a mediator between the monarchy and Parliament, demanding ‘conciliatory steps’ on the part of the Assembly and especially the avoidance of bloodshed. The Bürgerwehr handed over to the Assembly the letters exchanged between their commanders and the Chief of Police without attaching any specific demands, tacitly hinting therefore that it would not, indeed, permit itself to be misused in an assault on the Assembly, but asking that its heroism should be regarded as being exhausted beyond that point. Finally the organized workers of Berlin, ‘The Berlin District Committee for the Brotherhood of German Workers’, ‘to which’ – as Unruh said when reading out the address – ‘to go by the signatures a large part of the workers here belong’, summoned the Assembly to armed resistance. The short address said: ‘The workers of Berlin are armed and ready to follow your call if anyone dares to injure the people in the person of their representatives; they offer you their arms and their hearts’ blood against any enemy who seeks to betray you and the freedoms of the people.’ Without opening these statements to debate, Unruh declared that the Assembly could no longer take ‘conciliatory steps’, but that bloodshed must by all means be avoided. The Ministry, he said, must not be given any excuse for violent and coercive measures, for the declaration of a state of siege, and so forth; passive resistance should be offered, and it would be sufficient if the Assembly ‘only’ permitted itself to be driven from its seats ‘by violence’. He said that the real decision lay in the hands of the country. As long as the freedom of association and of the press was not suppressed once more, the country could defeat reaction without bloodshed. If the country failed to protest sufficiently, then it only had itself to blame if its recently-flowered freedom faded again.

Since Unruh knew better than anyone else what the very sparrows were piping from the rooftops, that is to say, that the counter-revolution was in the process of ‘once more suppressing’ the freedom of the press and of association and declaring, with or without valid reason, a state of siege, the thoughtful heroism of his declaration of principle speaks for itself. In fact he attached to it a request to the Bürgerwehr that, if the Assembly was threatened by military force, they would not defend it actively, but only offer passive resistance. And of the workers’ address he said: ‘If I have understood your opinion correctly, Gentlemen, we are very far from ordering or even permitting these men, whose strength and whose blood belong to the Fatherland, to sacrifice that strength they have dedicated to the Fatherland at the wrong time and in the wrong place.’ Unruh was too wily a bourgeois not to think that those workers’ fists were in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if they only wanted to smash feudal despotism in the interests of the bourgeoisie; in his opinion the blood and the strength of the proletariat belonged exclusively to the ‘Fatherland’, by which he understood the profit of capital.

The Assembly received its President’s comments with a ‘general bravo’. No opposition was raised. Indeed, in the very same session, it uttered an appeal to the people ‘at this difficult moment, when the legal organ of popular representation is being broken up by bayonets, not to stray from the basis of legality for a single moment’. It then proceeded, in order to prove its independence of the government by discussing the organic law in the absence of ministers, to debate the law concerning feudal burdens, but under conditions that were bound to cool the ardour of the rural proletariat as much as Unruh’s declaration had cooled the ardour of the urban proletariat. The few members of the Right who had remained in the Assembly demanded that amendments amplifying the law should be referred back to the commission if even a single member raised objections, and the Assembly approved their demand. They abandoned the interests of the peasants in order to maintain the rights of those members who had forgotten their duty and turned their backs upon the Assembly.

And now this so-called National Assembly acted out a farcical parody of the great historical drama the French National Assembly had presented sixty years previously.

The government proposed the abolition without compensation of unlimited labour-services that were of purely feudal origin and had no contractual basis, and which even the Vormärz legislation had recognized as consequences of serfdom, but only in those few corners of the Provinces of Saxony and Westphalia where they still existed although in the rest of those parts of the country the French foreign conqueror had already thoroughly cleared out those remnants of Christian-Germanic splendour. However, an amendment cancelling all unlimited labour-service everywhere without compensation – including, therefore, the Eastern Provinces – had to be referred back because a member of the Right objected. In addition, the government proposed to abolish, without compensation, obligatory service as huntsmen, drivers, whippers-in and messengers and also all dues raised under the names of hound-bread, hound-corn, hound-oats, houndacre-corn, houndacre-oats, the houndacre-tax and hound-fees. A series of amendments proposed to throw into this feudal mish-mash for good measure all baiting-corn, hunting-money, spinning-tax, knitting-money, woodcutting-money, the obligatory supplies of flax and quills, hemp-money, wick-money, bog-money, refreshment-money and labouring-money, chaff-cutting and covering fees, fronde-oats and grazing-oats, pepper-money etc., etc. But none of these amendments were debated because every time a member of the Right objected. And so it went on for hours.

It was a bloody but well-deserved irony of fate that, in the middle of this unworthy game, the announcement came that the Playhouse, guarded by the Bürgerwehr, was now also surrounded by troops. A Homeric struggle of words between Rimpler and Wrangel at the head of their respective hosts ended with the General’s assurance that he would not go away until the deputies had left the building, even if he had to bivouac for eight days, and that he intended to close it down after their departure. Then the Bürgerwehr refused to withdraw without the Assembly, and so the President declared that the military had forcibly intervened. Amid the ‘general bravo’ that was bestowed so freely and lavishly in those days the Assembly announced that it gave way ‘only in the face of military force’ and withdrew with the Bürgerwehr. Thereupon the troops occupied the Playhouse and made it their patriotic pastime to scatter the archives of the Assembly.

On November 11 the Ministry dissolved the Bürgerwehr, which the King was formally entitled to do ‘for serious reasons which must be detailed in the Order of Dissolution’. In the material sense the measure was rendered all the more emphatically illegal by the single reason given in the Order: the Bürgerwehr was dissolved because it had refused to obey the Police Chief’s order to close the Playhouse, which was both materially and formally illegal. The Assembly, which met the same day at the Shooting Gallery, declared that the dissolution of the Bürgerwehr was illegal and that any official or citizen who colluded in it was a traitor to the Fatherland. They cautiously added a clause calling on the Ministry to withdraw the Order, and promising that the Bürgerwehr and the population of Berlin would respond peacefully. Rimpler immediately resigned his command. The Majors of the Bürgerwehr went further by meeting in the night of November 11-12 to discuss whether active or passive resistance was called for. A delegation of the Workers’ Brotherhood summoned them to active resistance and guaranteed the powerful support of the proletariat, but Waldeck appeared too with some Left deputies and said that it was not his business to give the Majors advice, that he was no man of arms, and knew nothing of military science, that everyone must make up his own mind, and all sorts of other conciliatory phrases. The very poorly attended meeting broke up after some confused gossip and the disarmament of the Bürgerwehr proceeded ‘peacefully’.

The military moustaches had once again had the wind taken out of their sails. They wanted to and had to impose a state of siege in order to throttle the freedom of the press and of association, but the Bürgerwehr permitted itself to be disarmed in all good humour and no one was hurt by the paper protests of the Assembly. In these straits, bourgeois impertinence came to the assistance of military perplexity. On November 12 a deputation from the municipal authorities appeared before the assembled Ministry of State to suggest its resignation. Brandenburg retained enough composure to refuse this demand, whose charming humour did not escape even his powers of comprehension, with ‘quiet dignity’, as the eye-witness Gneist reports. Then however the spokesman of the civic authorities burst out with the words ‘that many thousands of the Bürgerwehr’s weapons, we knew not how, had just fallen into the hands of the democratic clubs and the workers, and that we therefore had, in order to prevent a fearful bloodletting, to protest against the dissolution of the Bürgerwehr and the threatened state of seige.’ With these words, whose factual content had been plucked purely out of the air, a satisfied grin – ‘a ray of happily surprised sunlight’, the courteous Gneist called it – appeared on the faces of the assembled ministers, and they answered immediately that, precisely in consideration of this highly pressing situation, a state of siege would have to be declared, which then happened on that very day.

All clubs were immediately closed down, meetings of over twenty people forbidden and the publication of placards, newspapers and other printed matter tied to police approval. The police extinguished on the spot the life of all the organs of the press that had incurred their disfavour. They impressed upon all the old philistine rags that their lives were in danger if they printed anything in favour of the Assembly or against the government. This was followed by a mass of illegal searches, arrests and other chicanery, such as the authority vested in the police, and immediately applied against Rodbertus, to expel within twenty-four hours all foreigners ‘who could not show sufficiently good reason for their presence in these parts’, and the introduction of courts-martial to which all those were subjected whose ’seditious activities’ hampered or endangered the troops.

When these events became known the Assembly hastened to the Shooting Gallery. They found the Gallery itself and the part of the town in which it stood overrun with armed men, not from the Bürgerwehr, but from the Mobile Corps, which, consisting of younger merchants, technicians, artists and students, had always proceeded with more vigour. They categorically demanded permission to defend the organ of popular representation. Unruh answered equally categorically that the Assembly did not require their protection, and Waldeck, as Vice-President, agreed. Unruh drove the armed men away by refusing to open the session before they withdrew. During the session itself, the state of siege that had been imposed was declared illegal, but this time the usual line asking the people not to offer violent resistance was not attached to the declaration. Jung, a member of the Left, brought himself to declare that they should not treat the people like a schoolmaster and, with such warnings, create the impression that they did not have the right to oppose illegal farce with violence. If the Assembly did not want to call the people to arms, he said, they should not warn them off doing so either. Gradually a feeling of shame was awakened in the Assembly. While hundreds of rousing Addresses were flooding into it from all parts of the country, it had been devoting itself to trying to square the circle, trying to defend freedom provided that not a drop of blood was shed.

As early as November 11 the Left had moved refusal to pay taxes, although it must be admitted that the motion was referred to a commission after Unruh had promised that, even without this ‘ultimate peaceful step’, the voice of the country would drown out the ‘squeaking of reaction’. But since the reaction did not ‘squeak’, but plunged into more and more illegal violent measures, while the ‘voice of the country’ rang louder and louder, on November 12, the Left once more introduced the motion that the Ministry was guilty of high treason and was not entitled to spend state money and raise taxes. In addition, Bucher proposed a resolution that the oath of loyalty was not binding if the army was ordered to impose illegal actions such as a state of siege, and several members of the Left wanted to have a Proclamation issued in this sense, which called upon ‘our brothers in the army’ to recognize the ‘legal attitude’ of the Assembly. But all this went too far for the few remaining members of the Right who threatened to make the Assembly, which was only just quorate at that session, inquorate by their departure if such plans were not dropped. The motions that referred to the army were withdrawn, and even Ziegler, overcome by his fanatical support for the Prussian state, which he was to pay dear for soon enough, hurried them on their way, praising discipline as the mother of victory. The majority of the commission had already declared itself to be opposed to a refusal to grant taxes, and a decision on the issue was adjourned until they reported in writing. The few right-wingers who decided the Assembly’s formal right to exist, simultaneously voided this right of any material content.

When the state of siege had been imposed, the government proceeded more vigorously against the Assembly as a private club of more than twenty people. It still managed to hold three more sessions on November 13, 14 and 15. The stenographic reports of these sessions give an absolutely disgraceful impression. The ministers were once again declared guilty of high treason and denounced to the State Prosecutor. Addresses were read out amid stormy applause. In between them a Vice-President and a couple of secretaries, who had remained in the hall of the Shooting Gallery after the session of November 13 in order to receive and deal with delegations, described the unexpected courtesy with which they had been shown to the door by the military. The Vice-President declared with emotion that he had, it is true, been treated roughly, but not with brutal violence; one of the secretaries depicted touchingly how a soldier, ‘a big strong man’, had hauled him downstairs, ‘as tender as can be, arm in arm, more like a brother than an enemy’, and the other secretary added that that soldiers’ ‘eyes were full of tears’. A member of the Left did, it is true, protest against this admiration of Prussian tyranny the moment it sneaked up on stocking feet, but he was punished for such frivolous contempt by the ‘disapproval’ of the Assembly. Every rude word that some Lieutenant uttered to some member or other was, meanwhile, carefully minuted. These pleasant but incompetent gentlemen all behaved as if it what was at stake was not a historical process between the monarchy and the people, but an exchange of insults, the validity of which required demonstration. Only the high melodrama of refusing to pay taxes still stuck in the Assembly’s throat. Since time after time they had declared Brandenburg and company guilty of high treason, they could, indeed they had to, deny him the right to raise taxes and spend state money. But, under these conditions, to refuse taxes would have been not the final step in passive resistance but the first step in active resistance. If the refusal of taxes was to remain a peaceful measure, then there could be all sorts of constitutional nit-picking over whether, despite the fact that the law of April 6 reserved for future parliaments the right to approve taxes, the Assembly could refuse taxes already fixed for the current budgetary year.

The question came much too close to the knuckle for many other Assembly members as well as the Right not to feel uncomfortable. After further discussion, the commission once again voted not to refuse of taxes by three votes to five. But the deputations and Addresses became more and more pressing, and so Unruh hit upon a particularly sly tactic. During the session of November 14, which took place in the hall of the City Council, when rumours spread that the military were approaching, he declared that, if the Assembly was driven out once more, it should not reconvene until it could meet in safety, since it was not in accord with its dignity to let itself be hunted from one part of the town to the other. But the soldiers did not come, and when Waldeck, amid vehement protests from the Right, demanded a decision on the refusal to pay taxes, the President asked him to have patience for another day so that no disunity might disrupt the Assembly’s ‘glorious position’. Unruh promised that, since the Assembly had not been broken up, he would convene it for the following morning in the same hall. Waldeck allowed himself to be pacified by this promise and agreed to it being deferred. At the end of the session, however, the hall was occupied by soldiers, and Unruh thought that now, by burying the organ of popular representation, he had also buried the debate on the refusal to permit taxes.

But the Assembly had ideas not quite as unworthy as those of its worthy President. By a written demand, signed by more than the quorum of 202 members, the President was forced to convene the Assembly once more, on the evening of November 15 at the Hotel Milentz. The supporters and the opponents of refusing taxes both turned up in large numbers. On the one hand, even the commission was now of the opinion that the actions and measures taken by the government had gone to such an extreme of violence, trickery and injustice, and that the Assembly was entangled in such a web of violence and duplicity, that nothing remained for it to do but to turn to the most extreme measures, even if this was to plunge the country into anarchy. On the other hand, the opponents of what had now become a highly inflammable question wanted to stamp it out before it burst into flames, or at least wrap the decision in so many clauses that it would mean nothing. They came prepared with a motion that the taxes should continue to be raised as before and the payments already determined be paid out of them, but that any surpluses should not be placed at the disposal of the Brandenburg ministry, but should be retained by the authorities that raised them on their own responsibility. There could be no better exposure of passive resistance than this, that the resistance to the coup d’état was laid on the shoulders of the most unresistant of all classes, the bureaucracy, which depended body and soul on the Ministry.

The Assembly was saved from this ultimate indignity by the timely arrival of the soldiers. During a thunderous philippic delivered by one of the members against the withholding of the taxes, Major Herwarth, later Field Marshal, occupied the building with a picket of soldiers. Scarcely had Unruh seen the saving presence of the helmets, when he announced that he would not proceed to a vote in the presence of bayonets. After a short parley with Herwarth he was just uttering the sacramental formula that ‘we are once more giving in to force’, when, in a passing fit of temper, the Assembly protested and demanded a vote. Rodbertus showed the Major out for a moment in his friendliest manner, and the withholding of the taxes was now carved unanimously in the weakest form yet proposed, in which the Brandenburg ministry was not to have the right to have state money at its disposal as long as the Assembly was not allowed to continue its discussion undisturbed in Berlin. The president declared that the decision was ‘legally enacted’ and closed the session.

This prudent man, however, immediately called a conference with the officers of the Assembly, in which it was established that the decision was no decision at all because the motion received should have first been presented in writing, and paragraph such-and-such of standing orders laid down that when oral motions are approved they have to be printed and then presented for a further formal vote. The President had, it is true, ruled only the day before that the non-observance of this purely formal condition in no way prejudiced the validity of decisions, but he may of course have had second thoughts overnight. In that case he would naturally either have had to reconvene the Assembly to carry out that formality, or, if he really did not want to do so, at least inform the taxation authorities publicly that the decision which he had just declared publicly to be ‘legally enacted’ was nonetheless not valid in law. Even the slightest sense of honour and duty would have prevented him from deliberately misleading the voters, who naturally could not follow all the minutiae of formal procedure. Nevertheless the conference decided that it was no concern of the Assembly to publish elucidations of its standing orders. Once these brave bourgeois had saved their own valuable skins they were no longer concerned, cost their voters what it might, to play the resolute hero in the face of death.

Under such conditions, the decision to withhold taxes was shadow-boxing. In individual revolutionary centres, such as the Rhineland and Silesia, it was used to fan armed resistance, but these fires consumed themselves, since the Assembly had no intention of lighting a big fire by organizing the withholding of taxes. When afterwards several dozen tax-withholders faced prosecution for allegedly inciting their voters, they convincingly proved their complete innocence. Schulze-Delitzsch could even boast that he had held the citizens of his home town back when they were already on their way to attack the Landwehr armoury. Bucher alone was convicted of calling on the voters, and particularly the municipal authorities of his native province, to drive out officials loyal to the treacherous ministers, to defend themselves with arms against armed attacks, and in short of having demanded everything the members of the Assembly should have done if they intended their decision to withhold taxes to be anything other than buffoonery.

Once Unruh and company had succeeded in making a complete muddle of things, they thought they could make their way to Brandenburg town to continue their parliamentary shadow-boxing. But they did not reckon on the Brandenburg ministry. As soon as the latter were certain that the masses no longer stood behind the Assembly, they showed that practical and tactical superiority over the politics of the Prussian bourgeoisie that is proper to the politics of the Prussian Junkers. On December 5 the Ministry dissolved the Assembly, but simultaneously issued a version of the Assembly’s own constitution which was to be revised by an Assembly elected by general suffrage. The constitution was, it is true, badly mutilated in some of its essentials, and it is also true that a chamber elected on a narrowly limited suffrage was to be called to revise it alongside the new Assembly, but the lustre of libertarian principle shone so bright in this document, granted by the royal hand, that it was easy to overlook the obstacles over which all this magnificence could come to grief.

At the same time the government promised to place before the new popular Assembly a long series of specifically enumerated laws that were to place the Prussian state on a bourgeois basis. As a proof of its good will, it now scratched the bourgeois press where it itched most by abolishing the newspaper stamp duty, filled the brave citizens with magisterial pride with a decree on trial by jury and finally tried to extinguish the most dangerous focus of the peasant revolution with a decree for the interim settlement of landlord-peasant relations in Silesia. They succeeded in the latter thanks less to the rather mild conditions of the decree than to the flying columns that patrolled Silesia and particularly to the way Palriament had dashed the peasants’ hopes. The counter-revolution was speculating on this. They sang the peasants a melancholy dirge about how they could not give them final satisfaction until the new chamber assembled, but how the guilt lay at the door of the dissolved Assembly, which, instead of worrying about the well-being of the peasants – so close to the heart of the monarchy – had wasted its time over ‘all sorts of interpellations on things very far from their true function’. It was an unusually shameless pretence, since it was particularly the Assembly’s zealous discussion of the law to relieve feudal burdens that had driven the monarchy and the Junkers to their coup d’état. Of course, the Assembly only had itself to blame if they even dared to spread this pretence at all, and with a certain appearance of truth at that.

And now it turned out that it had not only been caught between two stools, but even between three. It was deserted by its own class. The Ministry generously granted more or less everything the Assembly had tried to enact, and if this or that was still missing, then these gaps were more than compensated for by the hope of a revival of credit and a restoration of calm, which allowed the undisturbed functioning of the machinery of exploitation. The good citizens imagined that what the counter-revolution found it politic to promise at the moment would become permanent.

Worse even than that of the bourgeoisie was the behaviour of the educated classes who had principally provided its parliamentary pioneers: the urban bureaucracy, the universities and particularly the courts. With few exceptions, the larger city councils outdid one another in their servile proclamations, and eighty professors of Berlin University, including men like the two Grimms, even managed to discredit the dispersed National Assembly by saying in an address to the King that it had ‘sullied the honour of the German Nation’. How the courts, to expiate to some extent their rebellious sins, submitted to the bayonet, how, in open and conscious contempt of the law, they clad in the splendour of legality every single atrocity, is written in indelible letters in the history of Prussian justice, not the first and not the last example of this kind in that temple of justice which, with incorrigible servility, the honest German citizen never dares approach save with holy awe.

Perhaps the most miserable behaviour of all in the tragi-comedy of November was that of the German National Assembly, however. It sent a number of commissars to Berlin to mediate between the monarchy and the Parliament, but they made themselves impossible either, like Simson, by their vain self-importance, behind which there was nothing, or, like Bassermann, by the stupid inventiveness with which they depicted Berlin as a Sodom and Gomorrah teeming with uncanny figures. The Frankfurt Assembly then whispered its demand that the Brandenburg ministry should resign and thundered out that the decision on the withholding of taxes was null and void. This enlightened Parliament did not even grasp that it was thus declaring itself null and void, for its dispersal followed that of the Berlin Assembly as B follows A.