Behold the flag of Bavaria, circa 1918.
Per the Dark and Mighty Warren Ellis, Finder of Such Things, who says in the most recent newsletter to myself and the rest of his acolytes:
I'm now reading DREAMERS: WHEN THE WRITERS TOOK POWER, GERMANY 1918 by Volker Weidermann, trans. Ruth Martin.
Munich, November 1918: in the final days of the First World War, revolutionaries open the doors of military prisons, occupy official buildings and overthrow the monarchy. At the head of the newly declared Free State of Bavaria is journalist and theatre critic Kurt Eisner, and around him rally luminaries of German cultural history: Thomas Mann, Ernst Toller and Rainer Maria Rilke.
It is entertaining so far, even though you know it's going to end in tears. And this is all something I knew next to nothing about, and I enjoy learning. A bloodless revolution run by a journalist! I imagine you can see the appeal.
“Art”, he goes on, “always promises the most distant future—the one after next, at the soonest—and for that reason a crowd which is passionately reaching for the next one will always be iconoclastically minded.”
and
“Art is no longer an escape from life; it is life itself,” he proclaimed.
and
On 24th October 1918 he wrote to his ex-wife, Clara Westhoff-Rilke, with a motto to be written on the hand-carved beams of her house in Fischerhude, near Bremen: When all was falling, self-belief began. The future says I may. I know I can.