From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject Who Betrayed Us? The Failure of the German Revolution, 1918-19
Date February 12, 2021 1:00 AM
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[A new book on the ill-fated German revolution is exhaustive while
casting doubt on the possibility of a successful workers’ uprising.
The reviewer prefers an out-of-print work that faults the Social
Democratic right for saving the extant ruling class]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHO BETRAYED US? THE FAILURE OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION, 1918-19  
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Neal Ascherson
December 17, 2020
London Review of Books
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_ A new book on the ill-fated German revolution is exhaustive while
casting doubt on the possibility of a successful workers’ uprising.
The reviewer prefers an out-of-print work that faults the Social
Democratic right for saving the extant ruling class _

The Germman Revolution 1918/19 - Counter-revolutionary troops under
the command of Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard in Berlin the street "Unter
den Linden"., Bundesarchiv Bild 183-S60769, Berlin, Revolution is
licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

 

Romantic nationalists​ relish the idea of a national essence.
‘When was Serbia truly Serbian?’ Or as Gwyn Alf Williams put it,
with a historian’s affectionate irony: ‘When was Wales?’ German
nationalism, especially in the 19th century, answered this question
in several ways. ‘When Arminius/Hermann and his Teutons cut down the
Roman legions,’ or ‘When Rhenish castles echoed with knightly
combat and the lays of minstrels,’ were two possible responses. But
as the century drew on and the dialectics of Hegel became politicised,
a different essentialism gripped imaginations. The tense shifted from
past to future. Not ‘When was Germany?’ but ‘When will Germany
be?’

If ‘Germany’ was a Hegelian self-realising subject, ascending from
mere ‘phenomenal’ particularity to a destined universality, what
sort of statehood should it attain? Clearly, a precondition for the
true Germany was something like unity. The patchwork of principalities
must melt into one (even in Bismarck’s time, after the overarching
German Reich was proclaimed in 1871, 25 kingdoms, principalities and
statelets survived, along with their rulers). Real Germany would also
require modernity. But did that imply a liberal-democratic
constitution based on popular sovereignty? Or an autocracy, crowned or
tribal, based on racial supremacy and territorial expansion?

In 1848, the year of European revolutions, German reformers overthrew
their rulers and gathered in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt to create a
new order. The Frankfurt Parliament – badly split between
visionaries and pragmatists – managed to agree on a constitution for
a parliamentary democracy enshrining many civil rights, designed to
rule a Greater Germany that would include the German-speaking parts of
Austria. The Parliament was crushed by reactionary armed forces in
1849, but it left behind a noisy, reproachful ghost whose questions
have haunted German politics for more than a century. The Third Reich
presented Hitler as a Messiah bringing the nation at last to its
mighty, unfurling destiny – Frankfurt completed at last, but without
the petty detail of bourgeois democracy. In 1945, in a divided nation
of ruins, hunger and mass graves, the Nazi empire and its claims on
history seemed better forgotten. The postwar Bonn Republic, which
lasted until reunification in 1990, brought material wealth and
security, but never quite convinced those who still hoped for that
ultimate, fulfilled Germany. East Germany still less so.

 

November 1918: The German Revolution
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By Robert Gerwarth

Oxford University Press; 386 pages

September 1, 2020

Hardcover:  $25.95

ISBN: 9780199546473

Oxford University Press
 

So what about the Weimar Republic, the parliamentary democracy created
after Germany’s defeat in 1918 which lasted until Hitler murdered it
in 1933? Robert Gerwarth’s book adds to the recent revisions of
Weimar by historians out to rescue that particular Germany from
popular and international cliché. He refuses to see it as a state
doomed from the start by inflation, violence and the collapse of moral
norms (all those transvestite Berlin nightclubs beloved
by TV producers). On the contrary, he salutes a modernising republic
crowded with creative genius, which overcame terrifying threats in its
infancy to reach stability and even prosperity. Hitler’s triumph,
for Gerwarth, was not the inevitable product of Weimar’s weakness,
but of outside factors: above all, the Great Depression that began in
1929.

The weaknesses were ominous, all the same. Too few people had faith in
the Weimar Republic or loved it for itself. Too many people despised
it as a zombie state, its frontiers mutilated and its policies
dictated by the victorious powers at Versailles. Gerwarth quotes the
famous left-wing satirist Kurt Tucholsky:

We dreamt, under imperial restraint,

of a Republic – and now it’s this one!

One always fancies the tall slim one,

And ends up with the little fat one.

C’est la vie!

For Gerwarth, as for Tucholsky, the ‘little fat one’ was the
unglamorous Weimar state. If only, he implies, Germany’s dreamers of
perfection could have shelved their fantasies and been content with
its ‘clear benefits’. He complains that the 1918 Revolution
‘does not feature prominently on the list of events commemorated
with pride by German democrats today’, although it ‘transformed
the country into one of the most progressive democracies in the
world’, and won’t accept the view that the revolution was a
half-hearted failure, helping to push Germany down its ‘special
path’ towards ‘the abyss of the Third Reich’. His book, he
promises in the preface, ‘suggests an alternative interpretation of
the November Revolution – one that does more justice to the
achievements of the events of 1918-19’.

 

Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-19
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By Sebastian Haffner

Deutsch; First Edition (January 1, 1973)

Plunkett Lake Press, June 2013

 

 

 

 

 

But in attempting to persuade readers of his case, Gerwarth is up
against a book first translated into English almost fifty years ago:
Sebastian Haffner’s tremendous _Failure of a Revolution_. Haffner,
who spent the war in Britain, returned to West Germany in the 1960s to
become the giant of left-wing but non-Marxist commentary. When his
book was first published in German in 1969, it bore the title _Die
Verratene Revolution_ – the betrayed revolution – an adjective
much more in tune with his analysis than the ‘failure’ of the
English translation. In post-1945 Germany, he was a ferocious critic
of the Christian Democrat governments which in his view utterly failed
to stand up to the Allied occupiers and fight for the country’s
independence and reunification. But he was also unforgiving of the
Social Democrats (SPD), the main opposition party until 1966 when it
joined a coalition government. Haffner’s view of the SPD was
almost precisely the version Gerwarth now hopes to dispel: that in the
1918-19 revolution and subsequent civil war the party leaders betrayed
their mass working-class support – and that the ultimate outcome of
that betrayal was the disaster of Nazi triumph in 1933. For the sake
of ‘order’, Haffner argued, the SPD government called in the
most viciously right-wing and ultra-nationalist elements in Germany to
suppress its own followers by armed force.

The collective hero of the revolution, the German working class, never
recovered ... Socialist unity, for which they had fought and bled so
bravely, was lost for ever in 1918. From that great betrayal dates the
great schism of socialism and the inextinguishable hatred between
Communists and Social Democrats – a hatred as between wolves and
dogs ... The same workers who in 1918 – and again in 1919 and 1920
– fought so courageously and lucklessly, found their fighting spirit
broken when fifteen years later they would have needed it again –
against Hitler.

Haffner denounced three false legends about what happened in 1918. The
first: that it was just a ‘collapse’ and not really a revolution
at all. The second: that the upheaval was a Bolshevik import from
Russia, owing little to the tradition of German social democracy. And
the third legend: the famous ‘stab in the back’ myth that
Germany’s soldiers only lost the war because ‘socialists’
incited the workers at home to rebel. Gerwarth agrees, on the whole,
about the first and the last: this was a true revolution, and it was
the consequence of defeat – not the other way round. But on the
question of where the radical revolutionary spirit came from, and
whether it was spontaneous or fomented by a handful of
unrepresentative extremists, the two part company. Gerwarth’s
instincts as a historian are mildly conservative, or – more
accurately – marked by German attitudes formed during the Cold War.
He seems to assume that anything associated with communism or
revolutionary Marxism must have been alien to Germany’s homegrown
working-class tradition. For him, it is tragic that a large part of
the working class was misled by extremists into pushing beyond the
‘bourgeois revolution’ of 1918 – beyond a parliamentary
democracy under a government dominated by Social Democrats.

Gerwarth thinks that, given a chance, the new reformist regime would
have given the workers almost everything they wanted. The 1918
revolution succeeded in its original aims: peace and democratisation.
The Kaiser, after blaming it all on Jews and strikers, fled to Holland
and abdicated. The military dictatorship which had in practice been
running imperial Germany was deposed. The local kings and princes
bolted or abdicated their thrones. Censorship was abolished. And with
political reform came cultural and social revolution. Universal
suffrage was introduced and included women over the age of twenty, now
– after the monstrous war losses – a substantial majority of the
population. Gerwarth gives full prominence to the advance of women and
their rights during and after the revolution. There was easier access
to birth control, and a general sexual liberation which, among other
things, offered at least the hope that gay sex might be
decriminalised. In the early days, there was that happy delirium, that
sense of sudden and infinite possibility, which ‘real’ revolutions
can uncork.

In the early summer of 1918, many Germans had thought the country
might win the war after all – or at least that it might not lose.
Defeat had loomed in the hungry year of 1917. But now Ludendorff’s
counter-offensive in the West (already failing, though the public
wasn’t aware of it), and the conquest of vast territories in the
East after the Russian Revolution, suddenly restored hope. Surely, a
just, even-handed peace could be negotiated, ending the war at last.
The year previously, Reichstag deputies had outraged the military by
voting for a ‘peace resolution’, and in January 1918
‘war-weariness and political discontent’ had led to the biggest
strike in German history. The public was at the end of its tether,
morally and physically: Gerwarth quotes an estimate that the British
blockade was the indirect cause of half a million deaths through
malnourishment.

Illusions vanished in the autumn of 1918, as Germany’s allies –
Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey – began to give up the fight.
Ludendorff went to the Kaiser on 29 September and told him that he
must instantly request an armistice. And that – to earn better terms
– Germany should become a constitutional monarchy and let the Social
Democrats into government. Addressing horrified staff officers next
day, he revealed a hidden purpose behind this ‘revolution from
above’: to shift the blame for defeat away from the army and onto
the civilian left. ‘I have asked His Majesty to bring into
government those circles whom we mostly have to thank for getting us
into the present situation.’ With those words, the ‘stab in the
back’ legend was born.

The SPD looked huge and formidable, but it was badly divided. A year
before, a minority who had always opposed the war broke away to form
the Independent Social Democrats (USPD). The pro-war policy of the
majority was rapidly losing popular support and its leaders, Friedrich
Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, welcomed the idea that a ‘just
peace’ might be granted by the Entente to a newly democratised
Germany. Gerwarth carefully shows how the peace/war split in fact
corresponded to an older and more profound ideological division in the
party over revolution. On paper, the SPD still subscribed to a
Marxist recipe of forceful proletarian revolution. In practice, over
the thirty or so years since Marx’s death, the majority leadership
had grown comfortable with the idea that socialist transformation
could be brought about by parliamentary reform. It was only a year
since the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia, and Western leaders
seriously feared that Bolshevism was about to flood across Europe.
Ebert, sturdy, bristle-haired and practical, had started life as a
saddle-maker; he knew his way round the party machine, but had no time
for utopias. Now, sensing that an exhausted, disaffected populace was
close to explosion, he shared middle-class fears: ‘I hate it
[Communist revolution] like sin!’

The pressure-valve blew on 30 October. In the naval base of
Wilhelmshaven, the crew of the battleship _Thüringen_ refused to
weigh anchor. Mutiny? As Haffner pointed out, the real mutineers were
not the sailors but the naval command itself. Defying the government,
it planned to steam the whole High Seas Fleet into the North Sea and
save its honour in a last, suicidal battle with the Royal Navy. Other
warships joined the protest against this insanity. The movement flamed
along the coast to the city of Kiel, igniting the rest of the fleet
and then spreading to dockyard and shipyard workers. Red flags ran up
masts. A Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council took over Kiel, and within
days great cities all over Germany were setting up councils as
industrial workers and home-front soldiers joined to make their own
revolutions.

On 9 November, the uprising reached Berlin. This was to become the day
of days (and, strangely, the day the Berlin Wall was breached 71 years
later). In the morning, a general strike began. Columns of armed
workers marched towards the city centre as a leaflet by Karl
Liebknecht, a former member of the SPD who was now leader of the
militant Spartakus League, urged them to reject ‘parliamentarisation
and other rubbish’. The elite army unit that was supposed to
‘restore order’ sat down to discuss politics with the marchers.
The appalled SPD leaders, seeing no other way out, declared support
for the strike and hinted that they would back a wider revolution.

Chancellor Max von Baden, an inoffensive patrician, spent that morning
on the telephone. He thought the crisis might be defused if the Kaiser
would abdicate. But he couldn’t get a coherent answer from
Wilhelm II, who was at army headquarters in Belgium, so at midday von
Baden simply announced the abdication himself. As Germany started to
celebrate, he handed over the chancellorship to Ebert and gratefully
left history. All of this happened before lunch. Ebert, now head of
the government, stumped across to the Reichstag canteen and sat down
to his usual potato soup. By about two, a gigantic crowd had gathered
outside. Without telling his boss what he was going to do, Ebert’s
lieutenant Philipp Scheidemann left his soup, went out onto the
balcony and off his own bat proclaimed the republic. ‘The old and
rotten has collapsed; militarism is finished ... Long live the
German Republic!’ Ebert, furious, banged the table and yelled at
him, but they had preempted Liebknecht, who about two hours later
appeared on a balcony of the old Royal Palace and proclaimed the Free
Socialist Republic of Germany. Capitalism had been broken, he shouted,
and would be replaced by ‘a government of workers and soldiers, a
new state order of the proletariat, of peace, of happiness’. In the
evening, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards stormed the Reichstag and set
up their own parliament, complete with a speaker and an elected
executive. As the chaos mounted, Ebert agreed to the Shop Stewards’
demand for a mass meeting next day to elect a Council of Peoples’
Deputies to govern Germany. Far to the west, that same day, French
generals in the forest of Compiègne rejected German pleading for
milder armistice terms.

The Berlin meeting was wordy and turbulent but, to the dismay of the
left, the delegates elected Ebert to head the council. The man who
hated revolution like sin was now leading one, and it was swelling.
The millions behind him, working men and women, trade unionists and
servicemen, were overwhelmingly Social Democrat voters, not Bolshevik
extremists, but they were determined to finish the social and
political transformation they had begun.

Ebert began to play a double game. Perhaps he had no option. Anyway,
that night he took a long phone call from General Wilhelm Groener,
Ludendorff’s successor in the army high command. Groener offered
Ebert the support of the army if he would suppress Bolshevism,
guarantee the survival of the old officer corps, and call elections
for a National Assembly, a conventional parliament, to replace the
revolutionary council. Ebert gladly accepted the deal (Groener called
it an ‘alliance’). And the two men agreed to keep in touch daily.

That was the tipping point. Gerwarth is determined to stay calm and
impartial about it. There was a danger, he writes, that embittered and
heavily armed ‘front soldiers’ might use their guns to overthrow
the new republic. ‘For that very reason, and in order to tackle the
extraordinarily difficult task of demobilising some six million men
within a few months, Ebert had come to a pragmatic agreement.’
Haffner, writing more than fifty years earlier, did not stay calm.

Real power had its seat in the administration, in police headquarters
and the ‘general command’ [of the armed forces] ... if the old
entrenched powers were left untouched, they would grasp the first
opportunity to take their revenge on the revolution ... And on this
field Ebert and the SPD leadership took up positions clearly on the
side of the counter-revolution. They were anxious to save what the
revolution was anxious to overthrow: the old state and form of
society, embodied in the bureaucracy and officer corps. They wanted to
parliamentarise the old state and form part of it.

For Ebert in 1918, and for Gerwarth today, the revolutionary councils
were blocking the idea of a National Assembly. Haffner flatly denied
this. He believed it was not the parliament but the executive, that
vengeful gang of ‘old entrenched powers’, that the councils wanted
to destroy. There wasn’t at any point a threat of Bolshevik
dictatorship. No German Communist Party yet existed. It would be
founded in December by Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartakus
League. They were admired for their courage and eloquence, but the
mass membership of the councils was reluctant to vote for Spartacist
candidates. ‘In Germany in the autumn of 1918, the “Bolshevik
danger” was a bogey.’

This is the crucial argument. Later, Ebert and his ruthless party
colleague Gustav Noske brought in the forces of the extreme right, the
army and the savage Freikorps militias, to crush the Revolution.
Germany entered a dreadful year of civil war and bloodshed, and the
dimensions of the conflict changed. The working-class left grew more
radical and ‘Sovietic’, while the right bred a murderous extremism
which eventually fuelled the Nazi cult of hyper-nationalist violence
and sadism. But how should we now judge the events of November to
December 1918? Was the German Revolution ‘betrayed’ by its Social
Democrat leaders? Or did those leaders, by resorting to desperate
means, save the valuable democratic achievements of that November?

Haffner​ celebrated the spontaneity of it all, as ordinary working
men and women all over Germany began to take charge of their own lives
and futures. Gerwarth, in effect, retorts that spontaneity is not the
same as democracy. ‘Although the extreme left had never had any
chance of gaining a majority, once the revolution had begun, it
encouraged certain expectations among many workers and agitators.’
He points out that Lenin’s comrade Karl Radek was sent into Germany
to ‘Bolshevise’ the masses and help to found the German Communist
Party (KPD). (Gerwarth finds it necessary to tell readers that ‘his
real name’ was Karol Sobelsohn, and that Rosa Luxemburg was born as
‘Rozalia Luksenburg’.) Unlike Haffner, Gerwarth gives a full and
impressive record of the modest economic revival in Weimar’s first
years, before the currency collapsed, and of the introduction of
industrial ‘partnership’ with worker representation on company
boards, the compromise which was to be such a feature of West
Germany’s success after 1945. Politically, too, he sympathises with
Ebert, who ‘had seen how, in autumn 1917, the minority of the
Bolsheviks in Russia had chased off the parliament and plunged the
country into a devastating civil war.’ (This is an odd account,
given that the Russian civil war did not begin until 1918 and that the
Whites, not the Bolsheviks, did the ‘plunging’.)

Berlin came to the boil again at the end of the year. The People’s
Naval Division, occupying the Royal Palace in the name of the
revolution, threatened to evict the Ebert government if they were not
paid. The ‘forces of order’ attacked the palace, but were beaten
off in the Battle of Christmas Eve. Armed workers and journalists took
over the newspaper district; the seat of government, the Chancellery,
was besieged. In the first days of January 1919, a second wave of
revolution, higher than the first, flooded Berlin with colossal
crowds, angry enough for anything. They waited for leadership. None
came. A ‘revolutionary committee’ dithered, and eventually the
demonstrators drifted home.

Lenin in the autumn of 1917 had a corps of professional
revolutionaries ready, some with up to fourteen years of training
behind them. Nothing like that existed on the German left. A few days
after the crowds went home, Freikorps men seized Liebknecht and
Luxemburg, battered their heads with rifle butts, shot them and dumped
Luxemburg’s body in the canal. Haffner wrote that ‘today one
realises with horror that this episode was historically the most
potent event in the drama of the German Revolution.’ He used the
word ‘Golgotha’. But he conceded that the pair and their vision of
achieving uncompromising social revolution by force had contributed
‘little or nothing’ to the course of events. ‘Everything would
have happened exactly as it did if they had not existed.’ Gerwarth,
who gives a detailed and shocking narrative of these murders and the
enormous funeral that followed, makes different points. The killings
(and dozens of other Spartacists were shot by the Freikorps in the
same weeks) were ‘a prominent example of the brutalisation of
political life as a result of the war and its legacies’. Many other
assassinations would follow; ‘murder as a means of political
conflict was no longer an exception but rather an integral feature of
postwar European culture.’ Gerwarth adds that the fate of Liebknecht
and Luxemburg ‘would have long-term consequences for the
relationship between Communists and Social Democrats’.

From now on, the battle was not between radical workers’ councils
and a ‘moderate’ elected parliament. It was between revolution and
increasingly determined counter-revolution. In late 1918, the Congress
of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils had ordered army reforms,
including the election of officers and the abolition of rank insignia.
The officer corps and the armed right wing took this as a life or
death challenge. The newspaper district in Berlin was stormed; Noske
decreed that anyone with a weapon or who usurped an official post
should be shot. Fighting flared up across the country as working-class
risings (the Soviet Republic of Bremen among the first) were crushed.
In the March Uprising in Berlin, more than a thousand insurgents were
killed.

Gerwarth and Haffner both describe in detail the separate and
astonishing eruption in Munich. This drama began in October 1918, and
it produced – was indeed produced by – the most unexpected and
appealing character in the whole revolution: the bearded, middle-aged
Berlin drama critic Kurt Eisner. At once a thrilling revolutionary
orator and an intelligent political realist, Eisner was no Bolshevik.
Unlike Ebert or Liebknecht, he saw that what the masses wanted was
neither an improved status quo nor Lenin’s communism, but an
elective democracy that would throw out the old ruling class and
install a new one drawn from ordinary working people. Eisner also saw
the need for a system of ‘checks and balances’ to moderate between
the revolutionary councils and a parliament. But he was gunned down by
a right-wing fanatic in February 1919 and the Bavarian revolution
began to disintegrate. It ended in May, when counter-revolutionary
troops under Noske’s orders stormed Munich with artillery and
bombing aircraft. A ‘White Terror’ followed, worse than anything
seen in Berlin.

In the same month, the Versailles peace terms were published. Hopeful
fantasies about a ‘just’ settlement were shattered as Germany was
stripped of its overseas empire, lost territory all round its
frontiers and was loaded with a gigantic reparation debt as punishment
for ‘war guilt’. Gerwarth, whose book constantly tries to set
German events in their international context, urges readers to
understand Versailles as a European metamorphosis – from empires to
national self-determination – rather than as just a German
grievance. Germans, all the same, asked bitterly why
self-determination was denied to their own nation. Fury at the cuts in
armed forces demanded by Versailles, and reluctantly accepted by the
government, helped to fire the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, when a
Freikorps brigade marched on Berlin and sent the cabinet flying to
Dresden and then Stuttgart. But the putschists controlled Germany for
only a day before a general strike paralysed the whole country. Ebert,
now president of the republic, sent out a panicky strike call which
reverted to the SPD’s old class-war language: ‘Proletarians,
unite! Down with the counter-revolution!’

Four days later, the rebels gave up and were allowed to march away
unpunished. But the strike continued, and turned into the last and
most tragic uprising of the whole revolutionary period, as the
military attacked pickets and armed workers once again set up councils
to govern themselves. In the Ruhr, an improvised Red Army took over
the whole industrial basin and demanded nationalisation of the coal
mines. Now the SPD leadership, back in Berlin but terrified by this
fresh proletarian challenge, ordered the army and the Freikorps into
battle against the workers whose support had just saved their skins.
As Haffner grimly puts it, they ‘found their way back into their
familiar role of fig-leaf for the counter-revolution’. Troops under
the orders of a mainly Social Democrat government blasted and
massacred their way across the Ruhr, slaughtering not only armed
workers but civilians – even hospital nurses begging for their
lives.

That was the final peak of revolution. Then, jerkily, matters began to
stabilise. President Ebert passed fierce emergency decrees,
criminalising verbal or written attacks on the republic. The
apocalyptic hyper-inflation of 1923 was overcome, as Germany
negotiated its way to milder reparations terms. Left and right
launched futile coup attempts, like Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch
in Munich in November 1923, but the Weimar Republic survived and,
until the Depression in 1929, secured reasonable security and living
standards for most of its citizens.

Gerwarth argues that it is unfair – hindsight history – to
attribute the catastrophe of Hitlerism to the weaknesses of Weimar.
His book is instructive about the social achievements of Weimar –
the changes in the position of women especially – and enlightening
about the European and global context in which the new republic
overcame the horrors of its infancy. But the Nazi triumph in 1933 did
not come from nowhere, even if Gerwarth avoids searching the ruins of
Weimar for its causes. Haffner is in no doubt about the link. He was
writing his book in 1968, at the height of the German student
uprisings, for which he had strong but critical sympathy. I was a
reporter at the time and I can still hear the grey torrent of
demonstrators thundering their chant: ‘Wer hat uns verraten?
Sozial-Demokraten!/Wer hatte Recht? Karl Liebknecht!’ (‘Who
betrayed us? Social Democrats! Who was in the right? Karl
Liebknecht!’)

That was absurdity in 1968. Willy Brandt – nobody’s class traitor
– was leading the SPD. But in 1918 and 1919? The revolutionaries
wanted not only peace but a new kind of state in which the old ruling
elites – the officer corps, the bureaucrats, the titled landowners
and the big capitalists – would be replaced by a grassroots
people’s democracy. But Ebert wanted to stop the revolutionary train
at its first station. He settled for a parliamentary democracy,
perhaps even preserving a Hohenzollern regency, in which he and his
party could lead a reforming government. He had no wish to turn the
world upside down. To keep it the right way up, to suppress Bolshevism
and ‘chaos’, he was prepared to invoke the bayonets of
the SPD’s traditional arch-enemy, militarist reaction, against his
own supporters.

Ebert and his colleagues in the government earned no gratitude from
the right-wingers and nationalists. For them, they were still traitors
– the ‘November criminals’. But what would the history of
Germany have been if the SPD leaders had let the revolution take its
course? Perhaps a radical but generous and democratic socialism,
Marxist but not Leninist or Stalinist in its treatment of dissent.
Perhaps – but would such a socialist state have been able to resist
the vengeance of those who had lost power?

For Haffner, the ‘betrayal’ led to the calamitous split between
communists and Social Democrats which fractured resistance to the
Nazis. Liebknecht and Luxemburg became the founding martyrs of
the KPD, which grew to number almost half a million members. Many of
them believed firmly that the SPD had ‘betrayed’ their
revolution in 1918. In the late 1920s the KPD surrendered to a blind
Stalinism which rejected (until it was too late) a common front
against Hitlerism with the ‘Social Fascists’ – Moscow’s
prescribed description of the SPD.

‘To this day Germany is crippled by the betrayal of 1918,’ Haffner
ended his book. Those words can no longer stand, even if they do
describe the divided, uncertain nation of 1968. While Angela
Merkel’s Germany endures many epithets, ‘crippled’ isn’t one
of them. But that a brave and brilliant revolution of expectations a
hundred years ago did not fail but was betrayed – and by the leaders
of the oldest and mightiest working-class movement in Europe – that
remains true and terrible.

 

_Book author ROBERT GERWARTH is a German historian and author who
specializes in European history, with an emphasis on German history.
Born in Berlin, Gerwarth earned a master's degree in history and
politics from Humboldt University of Berlin in 2000. In 2003, GERWARTH
received his Doctor of Ph.D. from Oxford.  HEis currently Director of
the Centre for War Studies at University College Dublin._

_SEBASTIAN HAFFNER, the author whose work the reviewer prefers, is the
pen name for RAIMUND PRETZEL), a German journalist and historian. As a
wartime émigré in Britain, Haffner argued that an accommodation was
impossible not only with Hitler but also with the German Reich. Peace
could be secured only by rolling back "seventy-five years of German
history.". His intervention in the Spiegel affair
[[link removed]] (1962), and his
contributions to the anti-fascist efforts of the student New Left,
sharply raised his profile. His posthumously published pre-war memoir,
Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933 (Defying
Hitler: a Memoir) (2003) won him new readers in Germany and abroad. _

_[Essayist NEAL ASCHERSON is a Scottish journalist and writer, once
described as "one of Britain's leading experts on central and eastern
Europe".  Ascherson is the author of several books on the history of
Poland and Ukraine. The Death of the Fronsac, his first novel, came
out in 2017. He was for many years a foreign correspondent for the
UK’s Observer and wrote scripts for the documentary series Cold War
and The World at War.]_

 

 

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