Prelude to War: 1. From Empire to Republic: Germany’s Revolutionary Chaos (1918-1919)
The Collapse of Imperial Authority
On 9 November 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated. He had ruled Germany since 1888, thirty years during which Germany had become Europe’s most powerful industrial nation and built the world’s second-largest navy. Now he sat in German Army headquarters in the Belgian town of Spa, cut off from his capital, his authority evaporated, and his country dissolving into revolution.
The abdication announcement came not from Wilhelm himself but from Prince Max von Baden, Germany’s Reich Chancellor. Prince Max, a moderate aristocrat appointed in October to negotiate peace with the Allies, took it upon himself to declare both the Kaiser’s abdication and the renunciation of Crown Prince Wilhelm’s succession rights. This was constitutionally irregular. Under Germany’s system, only the Kaiser could abdicate and only the Crown Prince could renounce his claim. Prince Max’s unilateral declaration was technically illegal, but legality mattered little in the chaos consuming Germany.
Wilhelm departed for the Netherlands that same day, crossing the border into permanent exile. The Dutch government granted him asylum despite Allied demands for his extradition as a war criminal. The Hohenzollern dynasty, which had ruled Prussia, the dominant German state, since 1415 and had unified Germany under Prussian leadership in 1871, ended not with ceremony or formal process but with a chancellor’s declaration and a train journey across a border.
The Kaiser’s abdication resolved nothing. It merely confirmed what had already occurred across Germany over preceding weeks. The empire was already dead. The question was what would replace it.
Revolution Spreads Across Germany
Germany’s revolution began at sea. On 29 October 1918, naval commanders at Wilhelmshaven, Germany’s main North Sea naval base, ordered the High Seas Fleet to sortie for a final battle against Britain’s Royal Navy. Germany was losing the war. The armistice negotiations had begun. The naval commanders, who had spent four years watching their ships sit idle while U-boats did the fighting, wanted one last engagement to preserve the Navy’s honour.
The sailors refused. They had spent years confined to ships with little to do, subjected to harsh discipline, watching officers enjoy privileges while ordinary sailors lived in cramped quarters and ate poor food. They knew the war was ending. They saw no reason to die in a pointless battle days or weeks before peace. When the orders came, crews aboard several ships refused to raise steam. Officers arrested the ringleaders and transferred them to shore prisons. This triggered mutiny. On 3 November, sailors in Kiel, Germany’s main Baltic naval base, held a mass demonstration demanding release of imprisoned comrades. Police fired into the crowd, killing at least nine. The killing radicalised the protest. By 4 November, sailors controlled Kiel. They elected Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, armed themselves from naval arsenals, and declared themselves the city’s new authority.
The mutiny spread with remarkable speed. Sailors travelled to other ports and cities, spreading news of the Kiel revolt and encouraging workers to form their own councils. Within days, Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils controlled Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and other northern ports. The movement spread inland. Workers in Cologne, Hanover, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart formed councils and took control of their cities. Soldiers’ councils appeared in barracks and military facilities. By early November, councils controlled dozens of German cities.
The pattern repeated consistently. Existing authorities either stepped aside or were pushed aside with minimal violence. Councils declared themselves the new government. Red flags replaced imperial banners. The councils drew conscious inspiration from the Russian soviets that had taken power in Russia’s October Revolution in 1917. Most German participants, however, had limited understanding of events in Russia and even less interest in Bolshevik ideology. They wanted simple things: they wanted the war to end, they wanted food, and they wanted Germany to stop bleeding.
On 7 November, revolution reached Munich. Kurt Eisner, an Independent Social Democrat and journalist, led a demonstration that took control of Bavaria, Germany’s second-largest state. Eisner proclaimed a Bavarian Republic, deposing the Wittelsbach monarchy that had ruled Bavaria since the twelfth century. King Ludwig III fled without resistance. Bavaria became a republic overnight.
By 8 November, revolution was spreading through Berlin. Workers struck across the city. Soldiers joined demonstrators. The government lost control of the streets. Kaiser Wilhelm, still at military headquarters in Spa, Belgium, considered returning to Berlin to restore order. His military advisers informed him this was impossible. The Army would not fight to restore the Kaiser. Many units were already forming soldiers’ councils. If Wilhelm returned to Berlin, he might be arrested or killed. On 9 November, Prince Max informed Wilhelm that his abdication was necessary to prevent civil war and that he had already announced it.
Two Republics Proclaimed
The Social Democratic Party found itself inheriting power it had spent decades demanding but never expected to receive in such circumstances. The SPD, founded in the 1860s and 1870s, represented Germany’s industrial working class. It was the largest party in Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, before the war. SPD policy advocated gradual reform through parliamentary politics, improving workers’ conditions through legislation, and eventually achieving democratic socialism. The SPD leadership had supported the war in 1914, voting for the war credits that funded German military operations. They believed Germany fought a defensive war against Russian autocracy and that patriotic duty required supporting the nation even under the Kaiser’s authoritarian system.
On the afternoon of 9 November, Prince Max transferred the chancellorship to Friedrich Ebert, the SPD’s co-chairman. Ebert was fifty-seven years old, a saddler’s son from Heidelberg who had risen through trade union work and party organisation. He was competent, pragmatic, and fundamentally moderate. He wanted Germany to transition peacefully to parliamentary democracy, maintain social order, and secure the best possible peace terms from the Allies.
Philipp Scheidemann, another senior SPD leader, proclaimed the German Republic from a Reichstag window that afternoon. Scheidemann acted without consulting Ebert. He feared that Karl Liebknecht, leader of the revolutionary Spartacus League, would declare a socialist republic first. Scheidemann’s proclamation was brief and improvised. He announced that the Kaiser had abdicated, that Prince Max had transferred power, and that Germany was now a republic.
Two hours later, Liebknecht did exactly what Scheidemann had feared. From the balcony of the Berlin Palace, the Kaiser’s former residence, Liebknecht proclaimed a Free Socialist Republic to a crowd gathered in the Lustgarten, the square in front of the palace. Liebknecht called for a socialist Germany, for power to be held by Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, and for Germany to follow Russia’s revolutionary path.
Germany now had two republics, declared within hours of each other by socialists who despised one another’s vision for the country’s future.
Ebert’s Bargain with the Army
Ebert despised revolution. He had watched the SPD split in 1917 when the party’s anti-war faction, opposed to continuing support for the war, formed the Independent Social Democratic Party, the USPD. He had mourned when his own sons died fighting in the war. He viewed the councils, the strikes, the red flags, and the calls for a German soviet republic as threats to everything he had worked for. Revolution threatened social order, played into Allied propaganda portraying Germany as descending into Bolshevism, and empowered the radical left that Ebert considered dangerous and irresponsible.
Worse, some Germans intended exactly what the Allies feared. The Spartacus League, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, wanted communist revolution modelled on Russia’s Bolshevik takeover. They wanted the councils to seize permanent power, the old state apparatus to be dismantled, and Germany to become a soviet republic. Ebert viewed this as catastrophic for Germany’s future.
On the night of 9-10 November, Ebert made his fundamental choice. General Wilhelm Groener telephoned Ebert at the Reich Chancellery. Groener was Quartermaster General of the German Army, the second-highest position in military command. He had replaced Erich Ludendorff, who had resigned in late October after demanding an immediate armistice. The two men, Ebert and Groener, had never met. They spoke by telephone from separate cities and negotiated an informal agreement that would define the revolution’s outcome.
The Army would support Ebert’s government and help maintain order. In exchange, Ebert would preserve the Army’s internal structure, protect officers from interference by soldiers’ councils, and resist the radical left’s demands for socialisation of the economy and dissolution of the old state apparatus. Groener spoke for the Supreme Command, the small group of generals who controlled German military operations. His authority rested on officers’ assumptions that the alternative to cooperation with Ebert was Bolshevik revolution, civil war, and the destruction of the Army’s institutional structure.
The agreement bound together two forces that fundamentally distrusted each other. The Army, or at least its officer corps, despised the revolution and despised socialism. Officers blamed civilians for Germany’s defeat, believed the Army remained undefeated in the field, and were already constructing the mythology that would poison German politics: that the Army had been stabbed in the back by the home front. Ebert and the SPD knew this. They allied with the Army anyway because they feared the alternative more. They believed that without the Army’s support, they could not prevent communist revolution, could not maintain order, and could not secure a stable peace.
The bargain meant that Germany’s revolution would be limited. The Kaiser was gone but the generals remained. The monarchy was abolished but the Army’s officer corps, drawn overwhelmingly from the aristocracy and upper middle class, retained their positions. The old civil service, the judges, the professors, the police, all the institutions of the imperial state continued functioning with the same personnel. This was Ebert’s choice and it was deliberate. He believed preserving these institutions was necessary for stability. The cost would be borne by others.
The Council of People’s Deputies
On 10 November, the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, the largest and most important council in Germany, met to determine the structure of the new government. The council theoretically held supreme power. Revolutionary authority derived from the councils, not from the old imperial structures. But the council was divided and uncertain about what to do with its power.
The council established a Council of People’s Deputies to serve as the provisional executive government. It consisted of six members: three from the SPD (Ebert, Scheidemann, and Otto Landsberg) and three from the USPD (Hugo Haase, Wilhelm Dittmann, and Emil Barth). This coalition government satisfied neither party. The SPD wanted rapid elections for a constituent assembly that would draft a democratic constitution and establish a parliamentary republic. The USPD’s left wing wanted power transferred permanently to the councils and opposed elections that would inevitably produce a majority for moderate parties.
The Council of People’s Deputies operated from the Reich Chancellery, the seat of imperial government. This symbolism was not accidental. Ebert insisted on using the established institutions of government rather than creating new revolutionary structures. The councils existed but they functioned parallel to, not replacing, the old bureaucracy.
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils throughout Germany held no unified position on fundamental questions. Some wanted a German soviet republic modelled on Russia, with councils holding permanent power and the old ruling class dispossessed and suppressed. Others wanted the councils to serve as temporary revolutionary organs until proper elections could occur. Many simply wanted practical outcomes: demobilisation of the Army so soldiers could return home, food distribution to address shortages and prevent starvation, and protection of gains won by the revolution, particularly the eight-hour working day that had been conceded.
The SPD manoeuvred to marginalise the councils. Ebert and his allies argued that Germany’s future must be decided by democratic elections, not by self-appointed councils that represented only a portion of the population. They pointed out, correctly, that the councils were dominated by urban industrial workers and soldiers from cities, while rural areas and the middle class were barely represented. They emphasised that the Allies would view council power as Bolshevism and that this would harden peace terms and possibly provoke Allied intervention.
These arguments were effective because they contained truth. The councils did represent a narrow base. Rural Germans, who formed approximately 40 percent of the population, were largely absent from council politics. The middle class, shopkeepers and office workers and small business owners, feared the councils and associated them with Bolshevism and economic chaos. The Allies did view the revolution with suspicion and feared Bolshevism spreading from Russia to Germany. The armistice had been signed on 11 November but a final peace treaty remained to be negotiated. Germany’s bargaining position was weak, and appearing to embrace Bolshevism would weaken it further.
The First Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils met in Berlin from 16-20 December 1918. Delegates from councils across Germany gathered to determine the revolution’s direction. The SPD dominated the congress through careful organisation and exploitation of soldiers’ councils, which were generally more conservative than workers’ councils. The congress voted to hold elections for a constituent assembly on 19 January 1919. It voted against immediate socialisation of industry. It voted to preserve the Supreme Command’s authority over the Army while establishing a committee to monitor military affairs. The congress, which theoretically represented the revolutionary councils’ supreme authority, voted to surrender power to an elected assembly. The councils would commit suicide voluntarily.
The Spartacist Challenge
The Spartacus League operated within the USPD as a distinct radical faction pushing for soviet-style revolution. Its most prominent leaders were Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, two of German socialism’s most brilliant and uncompromising figures.
Karl Liebknecht was fifty-seven years old in 1918. His father, Wilhelm Liebknecht, had been one of German socialism’s founding figures, a close associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and one of the SPD’s creators. Karl had inherited his father’s radicalism and his commitment to revolutionary socialism. He had voted against war credits in the Reichstag in December 1914, the only SPD deputy to do so initially, breaking party discipline and isolating himself from colleagues. He organised demonstrations against the war, published illegal pamphlets, and called for civil war against the Kaiser’s government. In May 1916, he led a May Day demonstration in Berlin where he publicly denounced the war. Police arrested him immediately. He spent two years in prison before his release in October 1918 as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners.
Rosa Luxemburg was forty-seven years old in 1918, though decades of political struggle and repeated imprisonments had damaged her health. She was born in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, to a Jewish family. She had been involved in revolutionary politics since her teens, fleeing Poland to avoid arrest and studying in Switzerland. She moved to Germany in 1898 and quickly became one of the SPD’s leading intellectuals and theorists. She wrote extensively on economics, imperialism, and revolutionary strategy. She was brilliant, uncompromising, and contemptuous of reformist politics that sought gradual change through parliamentary means.
Luxemburg had opposed the war from the start. She wrote and spoke against it despite censorship and harassment. She was imprisoned repeatedly, spending most of the war years in prison. She wrote prolifically from her cell, producing economic analyses and revolutionary theory while her health deteriorated. She was released in November 1918 convinced that Germany stood at a revolutionary moment requiring Bolshevik-style leadership.
The Spartacists published Die Rote Fahne, The Red Flag, a newspaper that appeared daily from 9 November onwards. The newspaper denounced Ebert’s government as betrayal of the revolution, warned that the old ruling classes remained intact, and called for immediate socialisation of industry, arming of the proletariat, and establishment of a German soviet republic. Luxemburg wrote many articles herself. Her writing combined theoretical sophistication with revolutionary urgency. She argued that the councils represented authentic working-class power and must not surrender authority to a bourgeois parliament. She criticised the Bolsheviks’ authoritarian methods even as she shared their strategic goals. She believed revolution required mass action, not conspiracy by small groups, and that the German working class must develop revolutionary consciousness through struggle rather than having it imposed from above.
Liebknecht lacked Luxemburg’s theoretical depth but possessed considerable personal courage and oratorical skill. He spoke at demonstrations, organised protests, and pushed for immediate action against Ebert’s government. The split within the socialist movement pained him personally. Ebert had been a comrade and friend before the war. But Liebknecht considered the SPD’s cooperation with the military a fundamental betrayal. The revolution remained incomplete. The Kaiser had gone but the generals, the industrialists, the Junker aristocrats who owned vast estates in eastern Prussia, the judges, the professors, the entire structure of imperial Germany remained in place. Changing the constitutional form while preserving the ruling class was not revolution but its prevention.
The Communist Party is Founded
The Spartacists founded the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, at a conference in Berlin from 30 December 1918 to 1 January 1919. Approximately 127 delegates attended, representing Spartacist groups from across Germany. The party adopted a programme calling for dictatorship of the proletariat, socialisation of the means of production, and dissolution of the Army and police in favour of workers’ militias. This was revolutionary programme that rejected parliamentary democracy as bourgeois fraud.
The delegates debated whether to participate in elections for the constituent assembly scheduled for 19 January 1919. Luxemburg argued for participation. She believed the party must engage with workers wherever they organised, including parliamentary elections. She recognised that most German workers still believed in parliamentary politics and that boycotting elections would isolate the KPD from millions of workers. The majority disagreed. Delegates distrusted parliamentary politics as counterrevolutionary distraction. They voted to boycott the elections. The decision isolated the KPD from workers who intended to vote, including many who sympathised with revolutionary goals but believed electoral participation was necessary.
Events were already moving beyond the KPD’s control. On 24 December 1918, Christmas Eve, violence erupted at the Berlin Palace. The People’s Naval Division, a revolutionary military unit of approximately 1,000 sailors, occupied the palace and the nearby Royal Stables. The sailors demanded back pay that the government had promised but not delivered. They took hostage Otto Wels, the SPD official responsible for Berlin’s military affairs. Ebert, under pressure from his military advisers, ordered regular Army troops to suppress what military commanders portrayed as mutiny.
Fighting broke out around the palace. Army units used artillery to shell the building. Several dozen sailors died before the Army units withdrew. The attack failed to dislodge the sailors, who continued occupying the palace. The Christmas Eve violence shocked Berlin. It demonstrated both the Army’s willingness to use force against revolutionary soldiers and its limited capacity to do so effectively. The troops involved had obeyed orders but showed little enthusiasm for fighting fellow Germans. Officers recognised that using frontline divisions against internal unrest risked their disintegration.
The USPD representatives in the Council of People’s Deputies resigned in protest over the violence. The coalition government collapsed. From 29 December onwards, the Council of People’s Deputies consisted only of SPD members. Ebert had lost his left-wing partners but gained freedom of action.
The January Uprising
On 4 January 1919, Ebert dismissed Emil Eichhorn, Berlin’s Police President. Eichhorn was a USPD member who had used his position to protect revolutionary activities and refused to disarm workers. Ebert replaced him with a more compliant official. The USPD denounced the dismissal as counterrevolutionary, an attempt to reverse revolutionary gains and restore the old order. The KPD called for mass demonstrations.
On 5 January, hundreds of thousands of workers marched through central Berlin. The demonstration was enormous, possibly the largest in Berlin’s history. Marchers seized the Vorwärts newspaper building, the SPD’s official newspaper and a symbol of the party’s institutional power. They occupied other newspaper offices. The Revolutionary Shop Stewards, a network of radical trade unionists who had led strikes during the war and opposed the SPD’s moderate course, joined the protests.
Marchers called for Ebert’s government to resign and for power to transfer to the councils. An improvised Revolutionary Committee formed, including Liebknecht and other KPD and USPD leaders. The committee declared itself in charge of an uprising whose goals remained undefined and whose participants expected different outcomes. Some wanted the councils to seize permanent power. Others wanted to force new elections. Some simply wanted Eichhorn reinstated.
The occupation achieved nothing beyond occupying buildings. The Revolutionary Committee issued no coherent demands beyond vague calls for council power. It organised no strategy for what to do next. It commanded no military forces beyond unarmed or poorly armed demonstrators. Luxemburg opposed the uprising from the start. She recognised it as premature and disorganised. The workers were not prepared for insurrection. The councils outside Berlin were not rising in support. The uprising would fail and the repression would be brutal. But party discipline prevented her from publicly breaking with Liebknecht. She published articles urging caution but did not openly denounce the action.
Workers throughout Berlin, even those sympathetic to the left, largely stayed home or went to work. The demonstration had been massive but it dissipated. The garrison troops declared neutrality, refusing to support either side. The councils across Germany, rather than rising in support, held meetings debating what position to take. Most decided to wait and see what happened. After two days, the occupation simply dissipated. Workers drifted home. The Revolutionary Committee dissolved. The uprising, such as it was, failed because it had never actually begun as a planned insurrection with defined objectives and organised forces.
Noske and the Freikorps
Gustav Noske, an SPD member and former military administrator, accepted appointment as Minister of Defence on 6 January. Noske was fifty years old, a pragmatist who believed in using whatever means were necessary to maintain order. He reportedly announced that someone must be the bloodhound and that he would not shirk the responsibility. Whether he used those exact words is disputed, but the sentiment captured his role perfectly.
Noske authorised recruitment of Freikorps units to restore order in Berlin. The Freikorps were volunteer paramilitary formations composed primarily of demobilised soldiers. Many were frontline veterans who had spent years in the trenches fighting on the Western Front or Eastern Front. They returned to Germany in autumn 1918 to find their world dissolved. The Kaiser was gone. Revolution filled the streets. Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils claimed authority. The Army was being demobilised rapidly under the armistice terms. Allied demands limited Germany’s military to 100,000 men, far smaller than the millions Germany had fielded during the war. These men experienced the revolution as catastrophe and humiliation, the destruction of everything they had fought for.
The Freikorps attracted multiple types of recruits. Some were career officers who saw service in the Freikorps as continuation of their military careers. Some were working-class veterans who genuinely believed Bolshevism threatened Germany and that defending order was patriotic duty. Some were young men, often from middle-class backgrounds, who had missed the war or served only briefly and romanticised combat. Some were criminals, sadists, and thugs attracted to violence and the breakdown of legal restraints. The units varied in size from a few hundred to several thousand men. They adopted their own insignia, often using symbols from Germanic mythology or imperial military tradition. They were paid by the government but operated with minimal supervision. Their commanders answered nominally to Noske but exercised considerable independence in how they operated.
Several officers played key roles in organising the Freikorps response. Major Kurt von Schleicher, a staff officer who would later play a significant role in Weimar politics and ultimately serve as the Republic’s final chancellor before Hitler took power, helped coordinate Freikorps recruitment. General Walther von Lüttwitz commanded Freikorps operations in Berlin. The most notorious units included the Reinhard Freikorps, the Potsdam Freikorps, and the Horse Guards Cavalry Rifle Division. Cavalry Captain Waldemar Pabst served as chief of staff to the Horse Guards Division. Pabst combined military efficiency with political fanaticism and contempt for legal restraint.
On 10 January, Freikorps units entered Berlin. They moved systematically through the city, retaking occupied buildings. They faced sporadic resistance from armed workers but the fighting was brief and brutal. Freikorps units shot prisoners after they surrendered. They executed wounded defenders. They looted buildings they captured. Government troops used artillery and machine guns against workers armed with rifles or nothing at all. The military disparity made combat grossly one-sided. By 12 January, the uprising was over. Hundreds of workers lay dead. Thousands were arrested. The Freikorps suffered minimal casualties.
The Murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht
Liebknecht and Luxemburg went into hiding on 5 January as the uprising collapsed. They moved between safe houses in Berlin, staying with supporters who risked their own safety by sheltering them. They continued writing and organising, but their effectiveness was limited by isolation. The uprising they had not wanted but could not prevent had failed. The repression was underway. They knew they were in danger but continued their work.
On the evening of 15 January, Freikorps troops arrested both at a house in the Wilmersdorf district, an affluent neighbourhood in western Berlin. Someone had informed on their location. The troops brought them to the Eden Hotel in Charlottenburg, which served as temporary headquarters for the Horse Guards Division. What followed was not a judicial process but a premeditated murder dressed in the thinnest procedural forms.
Officers interrogated Liebknecht and Luxemburg separately. Pabst, commanding in Lüttwitz’s absence, coordinated with his officers. The official story was prepared in advance. They would claim that an angry mob had attacked the prisoners during transport to prison and killed them. This would absolve the military of responsibility. The reality was simpler and more brutal.
Shortly after interrogation, a Freikorps soldier struck Luxemburg twice in the head with his rifle butt, fracturing her skull. Soldiers carried her unconscious body to a waiting car. Lieutenant Hermann Souchon shot her in the head during the drive from the hotel. The soldiers threw her body from the Liechtenstein Bridge into the Landwehr Canal, a waterway that ran through Berlin. The body was not recovered until 31 May 1919.
Liebknecht’s murder followed a similar pattern but with less pretence. Soldiers forced him into a car and drove towards Moabit Prison. They stopped in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s large central park. They ordered Liebknecht to exit under the pretence of a vehicle breakdown. When he did, they shot him in the back multiple times. His body was delivered to a morgue as an unidentified corpse.
The government announced that both had been killed by angry mobs. Nobody who mattered believed this. The official story was transparently false. Noske ordered an investigation but ensured it led nowhere. Several officers eventually faced courts-martial. Verdicts were acquittals or light sentences of a few years that often went unserved. Pabst fled to Austria briefly but later returned to Germany and lived freely. He was never prosecuted seriously. In interviews decades later, he confirmed ordering the murders and expressed no remorse whatsoever.
The murders eliminated the revolutionary left’s most capable and internationally known figures. Luxemburg especially was irreplaceable. She was the movement’s most brilliant theorist, its best writer, and one of its most effective organisers. Liebknecht’s death removed a charismatic leader who could mobilise demonstrations and articulate revolutionary demands. The murders demonstrated that the Ebert government, for all its socialist credentials and working-class base, would kill socialists who threatened its authority. They gave the young KPD martyrs whose memory would shape German communist politics for decades.
Elections and the Weimar Coalition
Elections for the National Constituent Assembly occurred on 19 January 1919 as scheduled, four days after Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s murders. Turnout reached 83 percent. German voters, including women voting for the first time in a national election, participated in enormous numbers despite revolutionary chaos and ongoing violence.
The SPD won 37.9 percent of the vote and 165 seats out of 421, making it the largest party but far short of a majority. The Catholic Centre Party won 19.7 percent and 91 seats. The Centre Party represented Catholic voters across class lines, from Catholic workers to Catholic aristocrats. The liberal German Democratic Party won 18.5 percent and 75 seats. These three parties formed the Weimar Coalition supporting parliamentary democracy. Together they commanded a comfortable majority.
The USPD won 7.6 percent and 22 seats, less than its leaders expected. The result demonstrated that most workers preferred the SPD despite or because of its moderation. The SPD’s alliance with the military and suppression of the January uprising had not destroyed its working-class base.
The nationalist and conservative parties also performed reasonably well. The German National People’s Party, representing conservative nationalism, monarchism, and opposition to the revolution, won 10.3 percent and 44 seats. The German People’s Party, representing business interests and moderate conservatism, won 4.4 percent and 19 seats. The right’s showing surprised some observers who expected revolutionary sentiment to dominate, but German society was more conservative than revolutionary activists believed.
The Assembly convened in Weimar on 6 February. Berlin remained too unstable for parliamentary proceedings. Revolutionary violence continued. The government chose Weimar, a small city in Thuringia in central Germany, approximately 280 kilometres southwest of Berlin. Weimar was associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, two of Germany’s greatest writers and cultural figures. The symbolism was deliberate. Weimar represented German culture, enlightenment, and humanistic tradition. It offered a setting free from revolutionary violence. The symbolism was also somewhat absurd. Germany’s first attempt at democracy began not in its capital but in a provincial theatre town.
Friedrich Ebert was elected Reich President on 11 February. He received 277 votes from the 379 deputies present. Philipp Scheidemann formed a coalition government as Chancellor, leading the Weimar Coalition of SPD, Centre Party, and German Democratic Party.
The Weimar Constitution
The Assembly’s primary task was drafting a constitution. Hugo Preuss, a liberal constitutional lawyer and legal scholar, prepared the initial draft. The resulting document established a federal republic with a strong presidency, proportional representation in parliament, and significant social rights.
The President was directly elected by voters for seven-year terms. The President appointed the Chancellor and could dismiss him. The President commanded the armed forces. Most significantly, Article 48 gave the President emergency powers. If public order and security were seriously disturbed or endangered, the President could take measures necessary to restore order, including suspending civil rights and ruling by decree without parliamentary approval. The Reichstag could demand that emergency measures be withdrawn, but during an emergency the President held enormous power. This article was included as a safety valve, a way to maintain government function if parliamentary politics broke down. It would later be used to destroy parliamentary democracy.
The Reichstag was elected through proportional representation. Voters cast ballots for party lists rather than individual candidates. Seats were distributed proportionally based on each party’s vote share. The system ensured that even small parties gained seats corresponding to their electoral support. It guaranteed no party would dominate and ensured coalition governments would be necessary. Critics later argued this made government unstable, but defenders pointed out that coalition government was inevitable in any democratic system given Germany’s political fragmentation.
The constitution included extensive articles on social and economic rights. It guaranteed freedom of expression, assembly, and association. It guaranteed religious freedom. It included provisions on workers’ rights, the right to organise unions, the right to economic participation in industry. These articles reflected the SPD’s influence and the revolutionary period’s social demands. They were more aspirational than enforceable but they indicated the constitution’s social democratic character.
The constitution established Germany as a federal republic. The states, called Länder, retained significant powers over education, police, and local administration. Prussia, by far the largest state, containing roughly 60 percent of Germany’s population and territory, remained dominant. This created ongoing tension between Prussian interests and those of smaller states.
The Assembly adopted the constitution on 31 July 1919. It took effect on 11 August. The new system was called the Weimar Republic, named after the city where the constitution was drafted. Historians would spend decades debating whether its institutional design contained fatal flaws or whether external pressures and internal enemies doomed it regardless of constitutional provisions. The debate continues.
The Versailles Treaty Poisons Politics
The Treaty of Versailles overshadowed all domestic political developments in 1919. While the Assembly met in Weimar drafting the constitution, Allied representatives met in Paris dictating peace terms that Germans found devastating.
The treaty assigned sole war guilt to Germany through Article 231, required massive reparations payments with no specified limit, imposed severe military limitations reducing the Army to 100,000 men and prohibiting submarines, tanks, and military aircraft, transferred territory containing millions of Germans to Poland and France, prohibited union with Austria, and demanded war crimes trials of German officers and officials including the Kaiser.
The German delegation, led by Foreign Minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, arrived at Versailles on 7 May 1919 and was presented with a printed treaty. Germany was not permitted to negotiate. The Allies allowed written comments but rejected substantive German objections. On 16 June, the Allies delivered an ultimatum: sign within five days or face resumption of hostilities.
Scheidemann’s government resigned rather than accept the terms. Scheidemann declared he would not sign the treaty even if his hand were cut off. Gustav Bauer, another SPD politician, formed a new government and recommended signing under protest. The alternative was Allied invasion, continued starvation through the blockade that remained in effect, and possible partition of Germany. The Assembly voted to accept the treaty on 22 June 1919. The vote was 237 in favour, 138 against. Germany signed at Versailles on 28 June, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that had triggered the war.
The treaty poisoned Weimar politics from birth. The right denounced the politicians who signed it as traitors, the November Criminals who had stabbed Germany in the back by making revolution, forcing the Kaiser’s abdication, and accepting humiliating peace terms. The left denounced the treaty as imperialist peace imposed on a revolutionary republic. The centre defended signing as unavoidable given Germany’s military defeat but struggled to explain why defeat required such humiliation.
The SPD, which had supported the war in 1914, negotiated the armistice in 1918, and accepted responsibility for the peace treaty in 1919, bore particular hatred from the right. Ebert, Scheidemann, and other SPD leaders received death threats routinely. Several politicians who supported the treaty or who represented the Republic would be assassinated in subsequent years by right-wing terrorists who viewed treaty acceptance as treason punishable by death.
Revolutionary Violence Continues
The January uprising’s suppression was neither the last revolutionary outbreak nor the last Freikorps intervention. Throughout 1919 and into 1920, Germany experienced repeated left-wing uprisings and right-wing suppressions, creating a cycle of violence that normalised political murder and paramilitary force.
In Bremen, a port city in northern Germany, left-wing councils had controlled the city since November 1918. The Gerstenberg Freikorps, a unit of approximately 500 men, entered Bremen on 4 February 1919. They crushed resistance within hours, executing dozens of captured fighters. The pattern was familiar: brief fighting, overwhelming Freikorps superiority, massacre of prisoners.
In Munich, revolutionary developments took a particularly tragic course. Kurt Eisner’s Independent Socialist government faced opposition from both right and left, satisfying neither. On 21 February 1919, a right-wing nationalist named Count Anton von Arco auf Valley shot Eisner on his way to submit his government’s resignation to the Bavarian parliament. Eisner’s assassination triggered chaos. Left-wing revolutionaries, fearing rightist takeover, proclaimed a Bavarian Soviet Republic on 7 April. The Soviet Republic lasted less than a month.
Freikorps units and regular Army forces invaded Bavaria in late April. They defeated the revolutionary forces easily and entered Munich on 1-2 May. The repression that followed killed at least 600 people, possibly more than 1,000. Exact numbers were never established. Freikorps troops executed prisoners en masse, sometimes after mock trials, sometimes without any pretence of legal process. They shot hostages, including several members of the Thule Society, a right-wing occultist group whose members had been killed by revolutionary forces. They murdered anyone suspected of revolutionary sympathies. Bodies lay in the streets for days.
The pattern repeated in the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland in the west, in Saxony in the east, in Thuringia in central Germany. Workers struck, formed councils, seized factories or government buildings. Freikorps units arrived. The government ordered restoration of order. The Freikorps killed workers, arrested survivors, and departed. Prosecutions of Freikorps members for atrocities were rare and sentences were light.
The Kapp Putsch and Its Aftermath
By early 1920, the Freikorps themselves became a problem for the government that had created them. The Treaty of Versailles required Germany to reduce its military forces to 100,000 men. This meant dissolving most Freikorps units. Freikorps members resented being disbanded after serving the government against revolutionaries.
On 13 March 1920, Wolfgang Kapp, a nationalist politician, and General Walther von Lüttwitz, the same general who had commanded Freikorps operations against the Spartacists, launched a coup attempt. Freikorps units, including the Ehrhardt Brigade, a notorious unit that wore swastika symbols on their helmets, marched on Berlin. They occupied the government quarter without resistance. The regular Army, when ordered to resist, refused. General Hans von Seeckt, the Army’s chief of staff, informed the government that the Reichswehr, the new name for Germany’s reduced military, would not fire on other soldiers.
The government fled to Stuttgart in southwestern Germany. Kapp declared himself Chancellor. He announced that the Weimar Republic was dissolved and that Germany would return to authoritarian rule. The coup appeared to have succeeded.
It failed within days because workers launched a general strike. Trade unions called for a strike to defend the Republic. Workers across Germany stopped working. Transportation ceased. Utilities shut down. Government offices closed. Kapp’s government could not function. He could occupy buildings but he could not govern without the cooperation of workers and civil servants. After four days, Kapp fled. Lüttwitz resigned. The coup collapsed.
The episode demonstrated contradictions at the heart of Weimar politics. The Freikorps, created to defend the Republic against the left, attempted to overthrow it from the right. The Army refused to defend democratic institutions. Workers, many of whom distrusted the SPD government that had killed their comrades in 1919, defended the Republic through collective action when the military would not.
The government’s response to the coup’s aftermath revealed its priorities. Workers in the Ruhr formed a Red Army, a workers’ militia of approximately 50,000 men, during the strike. After the Kapp Putsch collapsed, these workers refused to disarm. They demanded political reforms, punishment of coup participants, and dismissal of anti-republican officers. The government sent Freikorps units and regular Army forces to suppress the Ruhr Red Army. The same forces that had attempted to overthrow the Republic were now used to crush workers who had defended it. Approximately 1,000 workers died in the fighting that followed.
Kapp fled to Sweden and died before facing trial. Lüttwitz received no serious punishment. Officers who participated in the coup faced no consequences. Workers who took up arms to defend the Republic against the coup were prosecuted when they resisted disarmament afterwards. The lesson was clear: the Republic would tolerate right-wing rebellion but would brutally suppress left-wing resistance.
The Revolution’s Balance Sheet
By late 1920, Germany’s revolutionary period had ended. The councils, which had held power in many cities in November 1918, were dissolved or reduced to advisory roles with no real authority. The KPD remained a small party, isolated from the majority of workers who voted SPD or USPD. The USPD itself split in October 1920. Its left wing, approximately half the membership, joined the KPD. Its right wing eventually rejoined the SPD. The split reflected the unbridgeable division between those who accepted parliamentary democracy and those who sought revolutionary transformation.
The Army remained intact with its officer corps fundamentally unchanged. The General Staff was officially dissolved under the Treaty of Versailles but its functions continued under different organisational names. Officers who had commanded imperial armies now commanded republican forces. The civil service continued functioning with the same personnel who had served the Kaiser. Judges who had sentenced war protesters to prison now sentenced communists to prison or death. Professors who had celebrated German imperialism and militarism now taught in the Republic’s universities.
The Social Democrats made a choice in November 1918 that shaped everything that followed. Faced with revolution from below and collapse of state authority, they preserved the existing state apparatus by allying with its most conservative elements. They believed this necessary to prevent Bolshevism, maintain order, and secure a stable peace. They may have been correct that the alternative was civil war and possible Allied intervention. They were certainly correct that many Germans, particularly in rural areas and the middle class, feared Bolshevism more than they valued democracy.
But the cost of this alliance was borne in dead revolutionaries, unpunished murderers, and a republic defended by men who despised it. Hundreds died in political violence during 1919 and 1920. Thousands were imprisoned. The Freikorps and right-wing terrorists who committed atrocities faced minimal consequences while left-wing activists received harsh sentences. The judiciary, staffed by judges appointed under the Kaiser, treated right-wing violence as understandable excess but left-wing resistance as criminal conspiracy.
Germany entered the 1920s with a democratic constitution, regular elections, political freedoms, and a government legitimised by popular vote. It also entered the 1920s with hundreds of political murders, an officer corps loyal to nationalist mythology rather than republican institutions, paramilitary organisations experienced in violence and contempt for law, and a left convinced the Republic was a bourgeois fraud that had betrayed the revolution. These contradictions were not reconciled. They were deferred, and the deferral was temporary.
The Weimar Republic was born in defeat, revolution, and violence. Its founders made choices they believed necessary for survival. Those choices created a system that functioned but never achieved genuine legitimacy among significant portions of the population. The Republic would survive for fourteen years, longer than many expected. But it would never escape the circumstances of its birth or resolve the fundamental conflicts that attended its creation.