Several lively street battles marked the course of Tuesday, January 7th. The Spartacans succeeded in driving the government troops from the Brandenburger Tor, but after a short time were in turn driven out. Spartacan and Independent Socialist parades filled the streets of the old city. The government did nothing to stop these demonstrations. Haase and the other members of Monday's delegation spent most of the day trying to induce the government to compromise. Their ingenious idea of a "compromise" was for the entire cabinet to resign and be replaced by a "parity" government made up of two Majority Socialists, two Independents and two Spartacans. This, of course, would have meant in effect a government of four Bolsheviki and two Majority Socialists. Despite their traditions of and training in party "solidarity," the cabinet could not help seeing that the "compromise" proposed would mean handing the government over bodily to Liebknecht, for Haase and Dittmann had long lost all power to lead their former followers back into democratic paths. The bulk of the party was already irrevocably committed to practical Bolshevism. The scholarly Eduard Bernstein, who had followed Haase and the other seceders from the Majority Socialists in 1916, had announced his return to the parent party. In a long explanation of the reasons for his course he denounced the Independents as lacking any constructive program and with having departed from their real mission. They had become, he declared, a party committed to tearing down existing institutions. Other adherents of the party's right wing refused to have anything to do with the new course.
The night of January 7th was marked by hard fighting. Spartacans repeatedly attacked government troops at the Anhalt Railway Station in the Königgrätzerstrasse, but were repulsed with heavy losses. They also attacked the government troops defending the Potsdam Railway Station, a quarter of a mile north from the Anhalt Station, but were also repulsed there. Government soldiers, however, had considerable losses in an unsuccessful attempt to retake the Wolff Bureau building at Charlottenstrasse and Zimmerstrasse. On Wednesday, the section of the city around the Brandenburger Tor was again filled with parading Bolsheviki, but the government had plucked up enough courage and decision to decree that no parades should be permitted to enter Wilhelmstrasse, where the seat of government is situated. Spartacans attempted to invade this street in the afternoon, but scattered when government soldiers fired a few shots, although the soldiers fired into the air. The Independent go-betweens again assailed the cabinet in an effort to secure the "compromise" government suggested the day before. The delegation was hampered, however, both by the fact that the cabinet realized what such a compromise would mean and by the fact that the Independents could promise nothing. The Spartacans stubbornly refused to surrender the captured newspaper plants, and the Independents themselves were committed to the retention in office of Eichhorn.