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    Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism: Germany 1918-23
    Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism: Germany 1918-23
    Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism: Germany 1918-23
    Ebook128 pages5 hours

    Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism: Germany 1918-23

    By Nick Shepley

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    About this ebook

    By the end of the First World War Germany was in a state of anarchy as rival political forces battled to determine her fate. Since Germany's birth in 1871 the ideas behind the revolution the broke out in 1918, socialism, communism, anarchism, had been countered by a growing reactionary nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism, and it would be in the crucible of war that these conflicting beliefs would finally clash. This ebook tells the story of the German Revolution of 1918, an often overlooked event that had consequences every bit as far reaching as its Russian counterpart in 1917. It is the first part in a series that will look at the German Century. Explaining History is a series of ebook titles dedicated to making 20th Century history accessible for all readers, ideal for enthusiasts, students and readers who want to know more.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAUK Academic
    Release dateDec 7, 2015
    ISBN9781783331154
    Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism: Germany 1918-23

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      Book preview

      Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism - Nick Shepley

      damages.

      Introduction

      This ebook is really the study of three forces that clashed, conflicted and interacted in a desperate struggle from 1900 to 1933 (though our study only takes us up to 1923 for the time being). These forces were distinctively German, on the one had there was German Social Democracy, represented by the largest and most successful labour movement in the world, the German Social Democratic Party, and on the other there was both conservative Junker reaction and a series of more radical nationalist voices that endorsed a new set of ideas circulating at the end of the 19th Century based on nation and race. The Junkers were not so much German as distinctively Prussian, and the elites of German society, the aristocracy, the Chancellor, and most importantly the army came out to defend their own class interests increasingly from the turn of the century onwards. They looked at the growing labour movement in Germany with distrust and unease, it was the result of an explosion of industrialisation from the 1860s onwards, and had been almost exactly what Karl Marx had predicted.

      Marx, from his desk in the reading room at the British Library had predicted that Germany would be the starting point of the workers revolution, largely because that was where the greatest accumulation of workers was. Not only had the working class population expanded rapidly, but they developed the kind of class consciousness, the awareness of ‘them and us’, and were educated enough to be able to grasp new revolutionary ideas in a way that was inconceivable further east in Russia.

      Part One: The Revolutionaries

      To fully understand the German Revolution in 1918, we must explore the history of the German Social Democratic Party or SPD, the largest socialist party in Europe by the end of the First World War, and the nucleus of Germany’s first republican government.

      The party was the inevitable political consequence of half a century of German industrialisation and the growth of a large urban prolateriat. The SPD were the leading force not only in German socialist politics but in the international working class movement as well. Despite the best attempts of German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck in the 1880s to destroy the movement, it endured and by 1910 was the largest party in German politics, accounting for over a quarter of all votes cast, and with 110 deputies in the Reichstag. The party was founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863, initially titled the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, (ADAV) the German General Workers Association, but it was not until 1875 at Gotha when the party was properly established. The German Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP) was the meeting an amalgamation of the ADAV, with the new SDAP, led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The party emerged into a Germany transformed by political unification and industrial revolution. Three decades of explosive economic growth and development in heavy industry, a rapidly growing rail network, the end of internal tariffs between the Prussia and the Rhine states or Lander, booming exports and a highly educated workforce had made Germany the up and coming powerhouse of Europe. Britain, home of the industrial revolution, saw its comparative advantages slip away one by one, her industrialists ignoring the lessons being taught by Germany, particularly in the chemicals industry. Industrial dyeing, pharmaceuticals and fertilisers (all industries later suited to producing weapons of war), were new fields that saw rapid growth between 1870 and 1890. The result was the largest urban working class in Europe; of all the working classes on the continent that Karl Marx placed his hopes in for a revolution, the Germans were in his view most promising, he saw the degree of industrialisation in the country, the living conditions of the working class an the size and potential for organisation amongst them as ideal conditions to bring about revolution. Germans, however, had been relative newcomers to the revolutionary movement, even by the 1860s, as Liebknecht wrote in a report to the First International (the congress of European socialist parties), in 1865. He wrote:

      In consequence of the slow development of our industry and commerce the working classes of Germany entered political life much later than their brethren in England and France. It was in the year 1848, after the Revolution of February, that for the first time the necessity dawned upon them to improve their social position. What had been thought, written, done before, had been thought, written and done almost exclusively either by men not strictly belonging to the working class or by workmen that were living or had been living in England, France or Switzerland. It had not grown out of the German working classes.

      The movement that would eventually emerge in Germany was sufficiently large, well organised and radicalised to leave German Chancellor Bismarck determined to destroy it, enacting anti socialist legislation in the 1880s. Describing the growth of the movement without first discussing the role of and the legacy of Marx and his influence on Lassalle, Liebknecht and Bebel would be to leave out a fundamental aspect of the history of the German Revolution, so it is to the life and works of Karl Marx that we must next turn our attention.

      Marx was born in Trier in 1818, three years after the revolutionary upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, with the memory of revolution exported through military means still fresh, Napoleon’s grand re-ordering and rationalisation of the Germanic states when he conquered them was in many ways the first step to German unification. Marx, a German Jew was born into a family that, in order to shake off anti Semitic prejudice, converted to Lutheran Christianity prior to Marx’s birth. Marx’s father Heinrich was part of the upwardly mobile Prussian bourgeoisie, owning property and several vineyards, and like many Jews in an occasionally hostile culture, anxious to fit in and to be a productive part of society. As an educated middle class man living in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, Heinrich Marx, a practicing lawyer was unsurprisingly a quintessential enlightenment man in his outlook. He passed to his son an appreciation of Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and the other great minds of the late 18th Century. It was another philosopher, Georg Hegel, who would have a far bigger impact in Marx, however, and the structure of Hegel’s thought would create an intellectual model by which Marx would eventually explain the workings of society and history. Marx’s ideas would affect the 20th Century in ways that perhaps no other thinker has ever achieved, radical change and devastating destruction in the name of ideology would be signature themes of the age. He attended the University of Bonn in 1835, aged seventeen, his father had hoped he would take up a career in law but his son instead decided to study philosophy and literature, avoiding compulsory military service due to a weak chest. The wider social context to Marx’s early years was that of revolution. The aftershocks of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were still being felt across Europe and as a member young educated elite of Germany, Marx could not help but have centre stage to this drawn out series of struggles. In France in 1832, the July Revolution broke out into the streets of Paris, later fictionalised by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, and in Britain, rising tensions after two decades of poverty, protest and unrest after the end of the Napoleonic Wars were only diffused by the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, giving the middle classes the vote. This skilful legislative move deprived the working classes of their middle class leadership and brought Britain’s bourgeoisie firmly into the mainstream, giving them a role within government and the establishment and keeping them out of radical politics. In Greece a decade long struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire was coming to its victorious conclusion in the same year, as Greek nationalists, aided by Russia and Britain, finally defeated the ailing Turks. The struggle attracted idealists and romantics from across Europe, much as the Spanish Civil War would do with idealists a little over a century later, and its most high profile casualty was the English poet Byron, who died in Greece of malaria in 1824. The 1820s also saw the stirring of revolution in the most unlikely of places, in Russia, the home of autocracy and reaction itself. In 1825, following the death of arch reactionary Alexander I and the failure of his son Constantine to take the throne, a revolt by army officers, many of whom had fought Napoleon and had entered Paris at the end of the wars with France, nearly succeeded in deposing the new Tsar Nicholas I. The defeat of the revolt and the exile of its leadership to Siberia did not defeat or end revolutionary ambitions in Russia, these were to re-ignite three decades later in the crises of the aftermath of the Crimean War and Alexander II’s flawed attempts to emancipate Russia’s serfs (for a fuller discussion of this read my Russia’s Struggle with modernity).

      Marx grew up in a Europe that had been forever changed by Napoleon, a Europe that had seen the reimposition of autocratic ancien regimes following the end of the emperor’s ambitions in 1815, but a restless Europe that never fully submitted to this resumption of the politics of the past. He grew up in a Europe of exciting intellectuals and idealists like Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian liberal nationalist, and younger figures later to be come under the scrutiny of Marx himself - anarchists Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin.

      It is easy for us to mistakenly see such a titanic 19th Century figure such as Marx as simply anomalous, a philosophical giant who sprung seemingly from nowhere, but we must place him and his thought in the context of a world undergoing immense change, because not

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