The German Revolution and Political Theory

Gaard Kets, James Muldoon, Gaard Kets, James Muldoon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030139162
• eBook ISBN: 9783030139179
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is the first collection within political theory to examine the ideas and debates of the German Revolution of 1918/19. It discusses the political theorists and actors of the revolution and uncovers an incredibly fertile body of political thought. Revolutionary events led to the proliferation of new political strategies, theoretical insights and institutional proposals. Key questions included the debate between a national assembly and a council system, the socialisation of the economy, the development of new forms of political representation and the proper role of parliaments, political parties and trade unions. This book offers novel perspectives on the history of the revolution, a thorough engagement with its main thinkers and an analysis of its relevance for contemporary political thought.

Part IRethinking the Revolution

© The Author(s) 2019

Gaard Kets and James Muldoon (eds.)The German Revolution and Political TheoryMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_2

Begin Abstract

Women in the German Revolution

Helen L. Boak¹

(1)

University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK

Helen L. Boak

Email: [email protected]

Days of Revolution

Women in the Councils

Women’s Participation in the Revolution Beyond Berlin

Rosa Luxemburg as Symbol and Actor

Meaning of the Revolution for Women

References

End Abstract

In the early hours of Saturday, 9 November 1918, Cläre Casper-Derfert, a manual worker and member of Germany’s Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD ) who had been on the Action Committee during the January 1918 strike, woke up a fellow party member, Arthur Schöttler, with the words, “Get up, Arthur, today is revolution !” They had been tasked with distributing leaflets to workers going into the first shift at the munitions factory on Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee in Charlottenburg, Berlin , asking them to down tools at 9 a.m., and join a demonstration into the city centre (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, pp. 434–435; Fritzsche 1998, p. 85). They were to join thousands of other workers, soldiers and sailors converging on the city in processions, which included, observers noted, large numbers of women and children (Fritzsche 1998, p. 86; Blücher 1920, p. 281). The presence of large numbers of proletarian women among the marchers would have come as no surprise to the authorities, who would have become accustomed to women protesting publicly about the deficiencies in the food provisioning system from late October 1915, and participating in the waves of strikes that shook German industry in spring 1917 and January 1918 (Davis 2000; Stibbe 2010, pp. 52–53). Benjamin Ziemann has, however, claimed that “[w]hen the revolution came in 1918, its gender was male” and, indeed, the historiography of the German revolution is overwhelmingly male, with the notable exception of Rosa Luxemburg (Ziemann 2011, p. 387). And yet, it is now over forty years since Bill Pelz claimed that if it had not been for proletarian women, “there might have been no revolution in Germany” (Dunayevskaya 1996, p. 85). This paper seeks to explore women’s role in the German revolution of 1918/1919.

The fact that women participated in the German revolution of 1918/19 is evident from memoirs, eye-witness accounts and photographs, although it is also clear that few women obtained positions of power during the revolution and hence are absent from many political accounts. Some women were activists, while others were enthusiastic bystanders and, of course, there were many women from the middle and upper classes anxiously watching events unfold, fearful that their property might be attacked. Evelyn, Princess Blücher, from her house near the Brandenburg Gate “with its iron blinds pulled down and doors locked” watched from the one open window on 9 November:

when at about two o’clock a perfect avalanche of humanity began to stream by our windows, walking quietly enough, many of them carrying red flags. I noticed the pale gold of young girls’ uncovered heads, as they passed by with only a shawl over their shoulders. It seemed so feminine and incongruous, under the folds of those gruesome red banners flying over them. One can never imagine these pale northern women helping to build up barricades and screaming and raging for blood. (Blücher 1920, p. 280)

The last sentence is, of course, how she envisaged a revolution , and the Germans had been expecting a revolution for months, and many expected it to be violent (Davis 2000, pp. 97, 118–119, 229, 234; Jones 2016, p. 72). The fact that the uprising started with a sailors’ mutiny in Kiel came as a surprise, but very quickly the revolution spread across the coastal towns and cities of Northern Germany, often facilitated by the arrival of groups of revolutionary sailors and soldiers. The format seemed to be the same everywhere: strikes would be called, mass demonstrations held and workers’ and soldiers’ councils set up. Public buildings were occupied and political prisoners freed; policemen and loyal troops were disarmed and the councils took over the administration (Bouton 1921, pp. 142–143; Storer 2013, p. 33). There were reports from Kiel that common criminals, including sexually infected prostitutes and the mentally ill, had been freed, too (Jones 2016, p. 76).

The revolution was not the work of a single, uniform movement sweeping all before it, though a social democratic delegate to the Soldiers’ Council Congress of Württemberg on 17 November 1918 acknowledged that the Independent Socialists, aided in part by the Spartacists, had been the revolution’s shock troops (Berlin 1979, p. 170). The USPD had been formed in April 1917 by former members of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), who had been expelled because of their failure to support the party’s backing for the war and the war credits; the Spartacists were an independent, loose grouping of revolutionary socialists within the USPD who believed that the SPD had betrayed international socialism in August 1914 (Morgan 1975). Ernst Toller later wrote:

The people wanted peace but what they got was power which fell into their hands without a struggle. The people shouted for Socialism, yet they had no clear conception of what Socialism should be […]. They knew well enough what they did not want; but they had little idea of what they did want. (Toller 1934, pp. 133–135)

Days of Revolution

The revolution spread swiftly—Hamburg, Bremen , Wilhelmshaven, Rostock on 6 November, Hannover, Braunschweig, Cologne, Munich on 7 November, and Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Dresden, Leipzig and Magdeburg on 8 November and the early days of revolution witnessed little violence, after troops had misguidedly opened fire on protesters, including women and children, in Kiel on 3 November, killing seven and injuring 29. A woman also died, having fallen under a tram (Lindau 1960, pp. 228–230; Harman 1997, p. 42). Mark Jones claims that five people died in Hamburg and none in Munich (Jones 2015, p. 38).

In Berlin the authorities were doing their utmost to stave off the revolution . The SPD, part of Prince Max von Baden’s government since early October, publicly emphasised the achievements of the October reforms which included the ending of Prussia’s three-tier election system and making the Chancellor and government responsible to the Reichstag, the national parliament, while stressing to their cabinet colleagues that unless the Kaiser abdicated there would be revolution, which Friedrich Ebert, their leader, claimed to “hate like sin” (Harman 1997, p. 42; Smaldone 2009, p. 3). Military presence was strengthened, rail links between Berlin and Hamburg and Hannover were cut, and telephone and telegraph communications interrupted (Bouton 1921, p. 151; Luban 2009). But it was to be the mass of workers asked to strike on the morning of 9 November who were to bring the revolution to Berlin. On 8 November, Revolutionary Shops Stewards from the metal industry met with representatives of the USPD, to finalise arrangements for the general strike and demonstration the next day. Lucie Gottschar-Heimburg, a youth leader, was present and allocated to one of the processions. After the meeting, she went with others to a local pub on Alexanderplatz and was shown how to take apart and clean a revolver and then to load it. At first, they were reluctant to give girls guns, she said, but she was eventually given a revolver (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 428). The procession containing Cläre Casper-Derfert, who after handing out leaflets went to a local pub and helped unpack guns and put cartridges into magazines, marched to the Reichstag, joined briefly en route from the Brandenburg Gate by the artist Käthe Kollwitz (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 434; Fritzsche 1998, pp. 42–43). Another group, with the Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht at its head, walked to the Imperial Palace, while yet another, with the Independent Socialist Emil Eichhorn at its head, marched on police headquarters, where a woman, Helene Zirkel, raised the red flag (Luban 2009; Grebing 1994, p. 6). The processions had armed men at the front, furnished with guns and rifles, many bought with Russian funding, then unarmed men, then women and children (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 434).

While the demonstrators had taken over the streets, facing little or no opposition, changes were taking place at the heart of government. Prince Max von Baden handed over the Chancellorship to the SPD’s Friedrich Ebert and that afternoon, at 2 p.m., his colleague Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the Kaiser’s abdication and that Germany was now a Republic to the crowds amassed before the Reichstag. Two hours later Karl Liebknecht, the Spartacist leader, proclaimed the Free Socialist Republic of Germany from the Imperial Palace (Harman 1997, pp. 44–45). Ebert set about forming a government, the Council of People’s Representatives, composed of three members of the SPD and three of the USPD , “men who enjoy the trust of the working people in the cities and in the countryside, of workers and soldiers”; the government would remain in power until a Constituent Assembly could be elected (Vorwärts 1918). Karl Liebknecht, invited to join the Council, refused when his demand that “power should reside exclusively in the hands of elected representatives of the entire working population and soldiers” was rejected (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, pp. 458–459). The next day, following elections held in the morning, representatives of workers’ and soldiers’ councils met at the Circus Busch in Berlin to elect an Executive Council, comprised of 14 soldiers’ and 14 workers’ representatives, the latter made up of seven from the SPD and seven from the USPD (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 475; Bouton 1921, pp. 170–173). It, too, claimed political authority and oversight over the work of Ebert’s Council. The two councils wanted fundamentally different things; while the SPD wanted a parliamentary democracy , the Executive Council sought “a transformation of Germany’s political and economic institutions through a republic of councils.” The Executive Council could not, however, claim to represent the councils throughout Germany (McElligott 2014, pp. 28–30). The relationship between the two councils was fraught, and Ebert, who had secured the support of the military on 10 November, came to dominate.

On Monday, 11 November 1918 Evelyn, Princess Blücher had written: “one cannot help admiring the disciplined and orderly way in which a revolution of such dimensions has been organised with until now the least possible loss of life” (Blücher 1920, p. 290). On 15 November, the very first edition of the USPD ’s newspaper Die Freiheit claimed that 63 people had died throughout Germany during the revolution, some of whom had been mere observers. Its 20 November edition claimed that fifteen had died in Berlin on 9 and 10 November 1918 (Baudis and Roth 1968, pp. 75, 78). Two of those killed in Berlin were women: 17-year-old Charlotte Nagel, a worker killed in fighting at the Alexanderplatz and 19-year-old Paula Plathe, a domestic servant (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 575).

On 12 November 1918, the Council of People’s Delegates published its programme, lifting the state of siege, reintroducing freedom of expression, abolishing censorship and introducing the eight-hour day and universal suffrage for men and women over the age of 20 (Stackelberg and Winkle 2002, p. 49). By that date, the revolution , or some might say the first stage, was over, with cities like Freiburg am Breisgau quietly following Berlin’s example; here the setting up of a soldiers’ council was quickly followed by a workers’ council which together combined with four city councillors to administer the city (Chickering 2007, pp. 567–568). Just as there was no uniform experience of the revolution, so, too, the composition, powers and aims of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils who took over local administration varied (Berlin 1979, p. 183; Hagemann and Kolossa 1990, p. 48). The councils have been referred to as a man’s movement, per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• The “Forgotten” German Revolution: A Conceptual Map
• Part I. Rethinking the Revolution
• Part II. Political Theorists of the German Revolution
• Part III. The German Revolution in Contemporary Political Theory
• Back Matter