The German Revolution of 1918 has long been overshadowed by its more thunderous elder sibling, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This is a pity, as Robert Gerwarth contends in his new history, November 1918. The German Revolution may lend more perspective to our own period of crisis, or at least to our failure to think soberly about it, than many other analogs on offer. In a period when liberals have cried “Weimar” at every plot twist of the past four years, it’s salutary to have a fresh account of the birthing pains of that vaunted republic rather than another autopsy of its demise.
The surrender of the German army on the Western Front in November 1918 came as a shock to the German population, which still hoped for victory or, at worst, a compromise peace. Gerwarth finely evokes the scene in a Belgian train car in which the chief German negotiator of the armistice, Matthias Erzberger (a tragic figure who was against the war at the onset and would later be murdered by a right-wing terror cell) realized to his horror that no compromise whatsoever would be forthcoming from the Allies. The German troops who saw the most action on the front lines (where a young Adolf Hitler served as a message runner) were the least keen on surrendering, while the troops farthest from the violence were most adamant about ending the war. When the command of the High Seas Fleet ordered a final major attack on the British navy, ordinary German sailors revolted. Many of them correctly sensed that they were being sacrificed to win better terms in the peace negotiations. Their mutinies tripped the wire of the revolution, which spilled out of the Hanseatic port of Kiel to the rest of the country. Soon, soldiers’ and workers’ councils were springing up across the German-speaking lands. For Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, history was falling into place: Here was a left-wing revolution sweeping one of the most advanced industrial nations in the world.
On the surface, the German Revolution reads like an alternative script of the Russian Revolution, one in which the moderate socialists prevail over the radical Bolsheviks. In Germany, this was achieved by the Social Democrats under the cunning, conniving leadership of Friedrich Ebert. Ebert managed to lure the representatives of the radical Left into a government with him when they were strong enough to storm the Reichstag, all the while biding his time until he could crush them with the aid of old imperial army leadership, whom he had supported during the war and with whom he remained in secret contact. Faced with communist uprisings in Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, and elsewhere in 1919, Ebert and the Social Democrats enlisted the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps to annihilate the Left. In Berlin, Communist leaders Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood.
While noting these excesses of state terror, Gerwarth believes Ebert and the Social Democrats had few alternatives in the circumstances. The Weimar Republic, he argues, surmounted many more obstacles than is commonly appreciated: It managed to survive an epic financial crisis, a right-wing putsch in 1920, and a left-wing challenge that made the Red Army Faction (Cold War West Germany’s version of the Weather Underground) look like child’s play. It was also, as Gerwarth points out, the most advanced liberal regime on offer. “Hardly any other country in the world at the time had a more liberal constitution and more progressive legislation,” he writes. Weimar Germany ended censorship, legislated an eight-hour workday, and was the first major industrial country to give women the vote. Such was the republic’s apparent success that it acquired the trappings of manifest destiny. Gerwarth reminds us that the whole idea of an Anschluss, a unification of Germany and Austria, originated during the Weimar years with the Social Democrats, who had no premonition that the idea would eventually be wrested from them by the Nazis.
One of the most extraordinary episodes of the German Revolution was the short life of Red Munich. In early November 1918, the oldest ruling house of Europe, Bavaria’s House of Wittelsbach, was replaced by the People’s State of Bavaria, a left-wing council government presided over by the grandfatherly Jewish drama critic Kurt Eisner. (The contemptuous treatment of Eisner by German liberals such as Viktor Klemperer bears a certain similarity to the fate of Bernie Sanders). Eisner, who was committed to electoral democracy, held elections in January 1919, in which his Independent Social Democratic Party lost disastrously — Eisner himself was assassinated by a right-wing aristocrat before he could resign from office. The ensuing chaos led to the establishment of two successive Bavarian Soviets, but both failed to expropriate the bourgeois of the city or bind themselves effectively to Moscow. Red Munich was finally obliterated by the Freikorps in May 1919, in full coordination with the Social Democratic government in Berlin, laying the groundwork for Munich to become a leading cesspit of Nazism.
The legacy of November 1918 has reverberated through the decades of German history. The German Right was convinced that their country was on the verge of victory before it was “stabbed in the back” by the “November criminals” — the civilian leaders, including, ironically, militarists like Ebert, who signed the armistice with the Allies following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. In 1920, Prussian Gen. Walther von Luttwitz and journalist Walther Kapp launched a coup in Berlin that failed after the population went on strike and refused to do their bidding. For the Left, meanwhile, the revolution of 1918 exposed the poverty of its strategy. After the deaths of Luxembourg and Liebknecht, the German Left was at sea in the more stabilized years of the Weimar Republic. As the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci recognized, it made the mistake of thinking that industrial Germany was ripe for the same type of revolutionary overthrow as agrarian Russia. The German communists failed to realize that they were facing a much more indomitable opposition: not a sclerotic aristocracy as in Russia, but a hydra that was part radical Right, part bourgeois liberal, and part social democratic. It would require different tactics and more patient work of ideological conversion to defeat such a foe.
Gerwarth’s history is conventional in that he more or less sides with the Social Democrats in the revolution. There is nothing in November 1918 that would raise an eyebrow in the press department at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. He repeatedly describes the decisions of Social Democrats, including voting for war credits at the onset of hostilities in 1914, as “pragmatic,” but pragmatic for whom? The book also leaves some questions unanswered: How likely were the Allied powers to move on Germany if the country had lurched farther to the Left? Were the revolutionary soldier councils, which have inspired figures from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, actually plausible as a form of political rule? And while Gerwarth makes a few nods toward the wider geopolitical canvas of 1918, one would like to know more about how the revolution registered across the German Empire, from German Southwest Africa to Neukamerun.
Where Gerwarth most excels is deftly weaving together the impressions of contemporary commentators, of whom he has assembled a rich banquet: Victor Serge, Thomas Mann, Kaethe Kollwitz, Alfred Doeblin, Harry Graf Kessler, and Joseph Roth, among others. The only figure I found missing was the great medievalist scholar Ernst Kantorowicz, who, when he was hauled in by red-baiting Cold Warriors on the Berkeley campus several decades later for refusing to sign a McCarthyite loyalty oath, pointed out the inconvenient fact that he had killed communists on the streets of Munich in 1919 — what had they done?
Thomas Meaney is a fellow at the Max Planck Society in Gottingen, Germany.
