German revolution of 1918–1919
The German revolution of 1918–1919, also known as the November Revolution, 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. 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. 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.
The revolution began in late October 1918 with a sailors' mutiny 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, the Council acted as a provisional government that held the powers of the emperor, chancellor and legislature. It kept most of the old imperial officer corps, administration and judiciary in place so that it could use their expertise to address the crises of the moment.
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 MSPD had control of most of the workers' and soldiers' councils and blocked any substantial movement towards their goals.
The split between the moderate and radical socialists 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, an attempt to create a dictatorship of the proletariat. 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 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, 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, but the revolution remained in many ways incomplete. It failed to resolve the fracture in the Left between moderate socialists and communists, while anti-democratic voices from the imperial government remained in positions of power. 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.
Background
German socialist parties
When World War I started, the Social Democratic Party of Germany was the one socialist political party of any significance in the German Empire and as such played a major role in the revolution. It had been banned from 1878–1890 and in 1914 continued to adhere to the tenets of class conflict. It had international ties to other countries' socialist parties, all of which were ideologically anti-war. Patriotism nevertheless proved the stronger force when the war broke out, and the SPD threw its support behind the Fatherland.By 1917, some on the left of the party had become so outspokenly anti-war that they were expelled from the SPD and formed a new party, the Independent Social Democrats – from which the Communist Party of Germany broke off shortly after the end of the war. The SPD and USPD tried to work together during the early days of the revolution, but their differing goals – parliamentary versus council republics – proved irreconcilable. After the fall of the German monarchy, the increasing antagonism between the three socialist parties drove the violence of the revolution's second stage.
SPD and the World War
By 1912, the Social Democrats had grown into the largest political party in Germany, with 35% of the national vote and 110 seats in the last imperial Reichstag. In spite of its predominance, the party had no role in the imperial government. Its official espousal of Marxist revolutionary socialism aroused the distrust of the parties of the centre and right, and its members were often disparaged as "journeymen without a fatherland" because their class antagonism was seen to transcend national boundaries.The SPD had attended the congresses of the Second International beginning in 1889, where they had agreed to resolutions asking for combined action by socialists in the event of a war. Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, the SPD, like other socialist parties in Europe, organised anti-war demonstrations during the July Crisis that led up to the war's outbreak.
In contrast to the widespread enthusiasm for the war among the educated classes, the majority of SPD newspapers were strongly anti-war, although some supported it by pointing out the danger posed by the Russian Empire, which they saw as the most reactionary and anti-socialist power in Europe. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg turned down plans by high-ranking military officials to dissolve the SPD at the start of the war and exploited the party's anti-Russian stance to gain its approval for it.
After Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914, 96 SPD deputies, among them Friedrich Ebert, agreed to approve the war bonds requested by the imperial government. Fourteen deputies, headed by party co-leader Hugo Haase, and including Karl Liebknecht, spoke out against the bonds but nevertheless followed party discipline and voted in favour. The support was based primarily on the belief, actively fostered by the government, that Germany was fighting a defensive war. Haase explained the decision that the party had made with the words: "We will not abandon our Fatherland in its hour of danger!" Many SPD members were eager to show their patriotism, in part to free themselves from the charge of being "journeymen without a fatherland".
Since the SPD was the only party whose position was in any real doubt, its unanimous vote for the war bonds was greeted with great enthusiasm as a sign of Germany's national unity. The Emperor welcomed the political truce among the Reichstag's parties in which they agreed not to criticise the government's handling of the war and to keep their disagreements out of public view. He declared: "I no longer know parties, I know only Germans!"
SPD's split
As the war dragged on and the death toll rose, more SPD members began to question the party's support for the war. The dissatisfaction increased when the Supreme Army Command introduced the Auxiliary Services Act in December 1916. It proposed full mobilisation and deployment of the workforce, including women, and the "militarisation" of labour relations. It met with such strong criticism that the OHL had to agree to participation by trade unions and the Reichstag parties in the act's implementation. It accepted their demands for arbitration committees, the expansion of trade union powers and the repeal of the act at the end of the war.After the outbreak of the Russian February Revolution in 1917, the wartime's first organised strikes erupted in German armament factories in January 1918. 400,000 workers went on strike in Berlin and around a million nationwide. Their primary demand was an end to the war. The SPD took part in the strike in order to keep the Spartacists from having control of the strike's leadership, but its participation soured the SPD's relationship with the other parties in the Reichstag. The strike was put down by the military after a week.
Because of the increasing intra-party conflicts centering around the opponents of the war, the leadership of the SPD under Friedrich Ebert expelled them from the party in January 1917. The Spartacists, who had formed the SPD's far left wing, joined with revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein and centrist Marxists such as Karl Kautsky to found the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany under the leadership of Hugo Haase on 6 April 1917. After that point, the SPD was officially named the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany, although it was still generally referred to as the SPD. The USPD called for an immediate end to the war and a further democratisation of Germany but did not have a unified agenda for social policies. Both the USPD and the Spartacists continued their anti-war propaganda in factories, especially in armament plants.
End of the war
Impact of the Russian Revolution
In April 1917, the German government facilitated Vladimir Lenin's return to Russia from his exile in Switzerland in the hope that he would weaken the tsarist regime and its conduct of the war. After the 1917 October Revolution that put Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power, many in both Russia and Germany expected that soviet Russia would in return help foment a communist revolution in Germany. For Germany's far Left, it provided hope for its own success, and for the moderate socialists, along with the middle and upper classes, it was a source of fear that the kind of bloody civil war that was occurring in Russia could also break out in Germany.The moderate SPD leadership consequently shifted away from the party's official stance as revolutionary socialists. Otto Braun clarified the SPD's position in an article titled "The Bolsheviks and Us" in the party newspaper Vorwärts of 15 February 1918: "Socialism cannot be erected on bayonets and machine guns. If it is to last, it must be realised with democratic means.... Therefore we must draw a thick, visible dividing line between ourselves and the Bolsheviks."
On 3 March 1918, the newly established Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany to end Russia's involvement in the war. It arguably contained harsher terms for the Russians than the later Treaty of Versailles would demand of the Germans.