German Revolution of 1918–1919
The German Revolution of 1918–1919, also known as the November Revolution (German: Novemberrevolution), was an uprising started by workers and soldiers in the final days of World War I. It quickly and almost bloodlessly brought down the German Empire, then in its more violent second stage, the supporters of a parliamentary republic were victorious over those who wanted a soviet-style council republic. The defeat of the forces of the far left cleared the way for the establishment of the Weimar Republic.
"German Revolution" redirects here. For other uses, see German revolution (disambiguation).
The key factors leading to the revolution were the extreme burdens suffered by the German people during the war, the economic and psychological impacts of the Empire's defeat, and the social tensions between the general populace and the aristocratic and bourgeois elite.[1][2]
The revolution began in early November 1918 with a sailors' mutiny centered at Kiel. Within a week, workers' and soldiers' councils were in control of government and military institutions across most of the Reich. On 9 November, Germany was declared a republic. By the end of the month, all of the ruling monarchs, including Emperor Wilhelm II, had been forced to abdicate.
On 10 November, the Council of the People's Deputies was formed by members of Germany's two main socialist parties. Under the de facto leadership of Friedrich Ebert of the moderate Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD), the Council acted as a provisional government that held the powers of the emperor, chancellor and legislature. Most of the old imperial officer corps, administration and judiciary remained in place. The Council needed their expertise to resolve the crises of the moment and thought that handling them was more important than ousting many key government figures to ensure that the new democracy was firmly anchored against its opponents.[3]
The Council of the People's Deputies' immediately removed some of the Empire's harsh restrictions, such as on freedom of expression, and promised an eight-hour workday and elections that would give women the right to vote for the first time. Those on the left wing of the revolution also wanted to nationalise key industries, democratise the military and set up a council republic, but the SPD had control of most of the workers' and soldiers' councils and blocked any substantial movement towards their goals.
The split in the socialist parties erupted into violence in the last days of 1918, sparked by a dispute over sailors' pay that left 67 dead. On 1 January 1919, the far-left Spartacists founded the Communist Party of Germany. A few days later, protests resulting from the violence at the end of December led to mass demonstrations in Berlin that quickly turned into the Spartacist uprising. It was quashed by government and Freikorps troops with the loss of 150 to 200 lives. In the aftermath of the uprising, the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered extrajudicially by the Freikorps.
Into the spring, there were additional violently suppressed efforts to push the revolution further in the direction of a council republic, as well as short-lived local soviet republics, notably in Bavaria (Munich), Bremen and Würzburg. They too were put down with considerable loss of life.
The revolution's end date is generally set at 11 August 1919, the day the Weimar Constitution was adopted. The revolution, however, remained in many ways incomplete. A large number of its opponents had been left in positions of power, and it failed to resolve the fracture in the political Left between moderate socialists and communists. The Weimar Republic as a result was beset from the beginning by opponents from both the Left and – to a greater degree – the Right. The fractures in the German Left that had become permanent during the revolution made Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 easier than it might have been if the Left had been more united.[4]
Background
SPD and the World War
In the decade after 1900, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was the leading force in Germany's labour movement. With 35% of the national vote and 110 seats in the Reichstag elected in 1912, the Social Democrats had grown into the largest political party in Germany.[5] Party membership was around one million,[6] and the party newspaper Vorwärts attracted 1.5 million subscribers.[7] The trade unions had 2.5 million members who were affiliated with socialist unions.[8] In addition, there were numerous co-operative societies (for example, apartment co-ops and shop co-ops) and other organizations either directly linked to the SPD and the labour unions or at least adhering to Social Democratic ideology. Other major parties in the Reichstag of 1912 were the Catholic Centre Party (90 seats), the German Conservative Party (41), the National Liberal Party (45), the Progressive People's Party (41), the Polish Party (18), the German Reich Party (14), the Economic Union (8), and the Alsace-Lorraine Party (9).[5][9]
At the congresses of the Second Socialist International that began in 1889, the SPD had agreed to resolutions asking for combined action by socialists in the event of a war. Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the SPD, like other socialist parties in Europe, organised anti-war demonstrations during the July Crisis.[10] After Rosa Luxemburg as a representative of the left wing of the party called for civil disobedience and rejection of war in the name of the entire party, Friedrich Ebert, one of the two party leaders since 1913, travelled to Zürich with Otto Braun to save the party's funds from being confiscated.[11]
After Germany declared war on the Russian Empire on 1 August 1914, the majority of SPD newspapers, in contrast to the widespread enthusiasm for the war among the educated classes (the "Spirit of 1914"), were strongly anti-war, although some supporters invoked the fear of the Russian Empire as the most reactionary and anti-socialist power in Europe.[12] In the first days of August, those who supported the war saw themselves in agreement with the late August Bebel, who had died the previous year. In 1904, he had declared in the Reichstag that the SPD would support an armed defence of Germany against a foreign attack. In 1907 he even promised that he himself would "shoulder the gun" if it was to fight against Russia, the "enemy of all culture and all the suppressed".[13] German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg rejected plans by high-ranking military officials to dissolve the SPD at the start of the war[14] and exploited the anti-Russian stance of the SPD to procure the party's approval for it.
The party leadership and its deputies were split on the issue of support for the war: After Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914, 96 deputies, among them Friedrich Ebert, agreed to approve the war bonds requested by the imperial government. Fourteen deputies, headed by the party co-leader, Hugo Haase, and including Karl Liebknecht, spoke out against the bonds but nevertheless followed party discipline and voted in favour.[15] The entire SPD membership in the Reichstag thus voted for the war bonds on 4 August 1914. Haase explained the decision that the party had made against his judgment with the words: "We will not let the fatherland alone in the hour of need!"[16] The Emperor welcomed the political truce among the Reichstag's parties (Burgfrieden), declaring: "I no longer know parties, I know only Germans!"[17]
Revolution, second stage: defeat of the radical Left
10 November: revolutionary councils and Armistice
On the evening of the ninth, the SPD leadership heard about the plans for the elections and the councils' meeting. Since they could not be prevented, Otto Wels used the party apparatus to influence the voting in the soldiers' councils and won most of them over to the SPD. By morning it was clear that the SPD would have the majority of the delegates on its side at the councils' meeting that evening.[75]
USPD chairman Hugo Haase returned from Kiel the morning of the 10th and was able to broker a compromise in the negotiations with the SPD about the new government. The revolutionary government, to be called the Council of the People's Deputies (Rat der Volksbeauftragten) at the USPD's insistence, gave the USPD much of what it wanted. The Council was to be made up of three representatives of the SPD (Ebert, Scheidemann and Otto Landsberg) and three from the USPD (Haase, Wilhelm Dittmann and Emil Barth).[76]
Impact on the Weimar Republic
The Revolution of 1918/19 is one of the most important events in the modern history of Germany, yet it is poorly embedded in the historical memory of Germans.[148] The failure of the Weimar Republic that the revolution brought into being and the Nazi era that followed it obstructed the view of the events for a long time.
Both the radical Right and the radical Left – under different circumstances – nurtured the idea that a communist uprising was aiming to establish a soviet republic following the Russian example.[149] The democratic centre parties, especially the SPD, were also only minimally interested in fairly assessing the events which turned Germany into a republic. At closer look, the events turned out to be a revolution supported by the social democrats and stopped by their party leadership. The processes helped to weaken the Weimar Republic from its very beginning.
After the Reich government and the Supreme Command refused at an early stage to acknowledge their responsibilities for the war and the defeat, the majority parties of the Reichstag were left to cope with the resulting burdens. In his autobiography, Ludendorff's successor Groener states, "It suited me just fine when the army and the Supreme Command remained as guiltless as possible in these wretched truce negotiations, from which nothing good could be expected".[43]
Thus, the "Myth of the Stab in the Back" was born, according to which the revolutionaries stabbed the army, "undefeated on the field", in the back and only then turned the almost secure victory into a defeat. It was mainly Ludendorff who contributed to the spread of the falsification of history to conceal his own role in the defeat. In nationalist circles, the myth fell on fertile ground. They soon defamed the revolutionaries and even politicians like Ebert, who never wanted the revolution and had done everything to channel and contain it, as "November Criminals". In 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff deliberately chose the symbolic 9 November as the date of their attempted "Beer Hall Putsch".
From its very beginning, the Weimar Republic was afflicted with the stigma of the military defeat. A large part of the bourgeoisie and the old elites from big industry, landowners, the military, judiciary and administration never accepted the democratic republic and hoped to replace it at the first opportunity. On the Left, the actions of the SPD leadership during the revolution drove many of its former adherents to the Communists. The incomplete revolution gave birth to what some have called a "democracy without democrats".[150]