The 1918â19 German Revolution, which saw the militaristic Kaiserreich of Wilhelm II overthrown and replaced by the nascent democracy of the Weimar Republic, has a justifiable claim to be one of the neglected transformative moments of European history. Its effects for Germany were abrupt and radical. What began as a series of strikes and mutinies among the sailors stationed at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven in late October 1918, in response to orders to prepare for a final, suicidal confrontation with Allied naval forces in the North Sea, rapidly metastatised into all-out insurrections in most of the major cities across Germany. By 9 November, as revolutionary workersâ and soldiersâ councils sprang into existence all over the country, the growing unrest had forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and his Chancellor Max von Baden to transfer power to a transitional government, the Rat der Volksbeauftragten (Council of Peopleâs Deputies). This initially took the form of a coalition between the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and its smaller rival, the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), but by the end of 1918 was led solely by the SPD. The shock of this transition unleashed nearly a year of violent upheaval, with aftershocks lasting as late as 1923 in the guise of periodic military revolts and prolonged civil unrest, which saw the political institutions of one of the most advanced societies in Europe quickly and comprehensively transformed. The German Revolutionâs effects for Europe as a whole were no less profound. Most immediately, it catalysed the end of World War 1 by confirming the military defeat of the German Reich and the Central Powersâwhich had become increasingly inevitable since the failure of the German March 1918 Spring Offensive (the Kaiserschlacht), and the subsequent collapse of the German front under the Alliesâ counterattack during the August 1918 Hundred Days Offensive. More deeply, it precipitated the creation of the conditions for democracy as a form of government to flourish on the European continent for the first timeâmoving from the minority pursuit of Europeâs Atlantic and Nordic fringe to the system under which the majority of its population now lived.
But the clear significance of the Revolutionâs events at the time has become obscured by the way its legacy has been portrayed in the European political imaginary. Its reception has been overwhelmingly shaped by particular features of its geographical and temporal setting, and by the later trajectory of European political transformation. First, the German Revolution took place against the backdrop of a larger wave of socialist, anti-absolutist, and anti-colonial revolutionary activity that gripped Europe and the wider world between 1916 and 1923: Ireland 1916 and 1919â21, Finland 1918, Hungary 1918â20, Italy 1919â20, Egypt 1919, and Argentina 1919â22, to give only a few examples. Within this wave, the events of 1918â19 in Germany have been largely eclipsed by the successful revolutions against tsarist rule in Russia in 1917 as the perceived paradigm case of interwar political transformationâand it is particularly the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution that is typically centred as the defining political caesura of the time. Second, the Revolution represented the culmination of a long period of ideological debate and partisan pressure by various democratic and socialist currents who aspired to a significant break with Germanyâs absolutist, imperial, militarist past. Of these, it is predominantly adherents of revolutionary strands who have claimed the Revolutionâs events as part of their âorigin storyâ or âfounding mythââalbeit marked with tragedy, frustration, and resentment at Germanyâs failure to successfully implement radical-left social transformations. Lastly, the ultimate collapse of the nascent Republic into Nazi dictatorship, and the brutal end of two decades of uneasy peace with the outbreak of World War 2, has driven assessments of what the Revolution did achieve into one of two fairly simplistic directions. Either it is presented as a âfalse dawnâ, an aberrant moment of superficial democratisation that failed to achieve lasting structural transformations in a recalcitrantly reactionary society; or as a âlost opportunityâ, a glorious first flowering of progressivism replete with idealistic creativity whose reversal represented one of the greatest tragedies in European history.
These three intersecting factors have contributed to a retrospective context of dismissal and neglect that, for modern readers, instinctively frames any works that cover the Revolutionâs events from a vantage-point of immediate contemporaneity or recent direct experience. As with other interwar texts, especially from Weimar Germany, it is now impossible to read them without at least a feeling of desolation at how comprehensively their fervent aspirations and earnest visions were thwarted by totalitarian annihilation. However, simply discarding or discounting such works on that basis risks doing them a grave disservice. It holds them to an impossibly high standard of judgment for not having been able to predict what came after. At the same time, it skates over the many subtle ways in which they did detect warning-signs and actively sought to counter them. It also runs the risk of poor historicism, by exaggerating the extent to which WW1 and WW2 actually acted as categorical and irretrievable epistemic and institutional breaks between (in the German context) the Kaiserreich , the Weimar Republic, and the Bundesrepublik (and to a lesser extent the Democratic Republic).1 In a similar way, it is not possible to treat the intellectual outputs of this period as merely a form of purgatorial hiatus between Past (pre-twentieth-century) and Present (post-1945). They form part of the European heritage of ideasâsometimes for better, sometimes for worseâand they must be assertively reinserted into the overarching continuity of the canon, insofar as âcanonicalâ designations are still a desirable signifier in modern scholarship. In other words, it is important for modern historians to knowâdespite, or rather precisely because of, the Republicâs later failureâhow those who lived through the German Revolution and its aftermath viewed what they had experienced, not least because their efforts represent, by definition, the first steps in the formation of a historiography of its events.
One of the earliest of such historical perspectives on the Revolution was that of the socialist thinker, journalist, campaigner, and parliamentarian Eduard Bernstein (1850â1932). Best known as the theoretical forefather of modern Social Democracy, Bernstein first achieved acclaim in the 1880s as one of the main defenders of orthodox Marxist thought. His rapid rise to prominence within the socialist movement then turned to notoriety in the late 1890s, when he published several articles, entitled âProblems of Socialismâ, and a seminal book, The Preconditions of Socialism, in which he outlined a sustained critique of both orthodox Marxist theory and revolutionary socialist practice.2 After successfully weathering the storm unleashed by his advocacy of revisionism and reformism, Bernstein became a dominant figure on the right of the SPD, making significant contributions in the years prior to WW1 on the ânational questionâ in socialist ideology, and the role of the mass strike in social-democratic strategy.3 In the immediate lead-up to the Revolution, Bernsteinâs main intellectual preoccupation was with issues of international law, trade, diplomacy, and international relations raised by the increasingly unrestrained and barbaric war conduct that characterised the latter years of WW1. Here, he busily expanded the depth and coverage of nascent social-democratic thought, both making the case for socialists to integrate insights and expertise from legal and constitutional theory into their intellectual arsenal, and taking pains to distinguish his position from the more limited, state-centric thinking of his liberal rivals.4 When the Revolution broke out and the Republic was formed, Bernstein used his personal close, high-level involvement in the events of late 1918 and early 1919 as a basis to return to another of his intellectual mĂ©tiers: that of the politically-committed historian. Apart from Preconditions, and in addition to his prolific journalistic output, Bernsteinâs most significant works prior to WW1 were historical. They included a study of proto-socia...