NOVEMBER 1918
THE GERMAN REVOLUTION
ROBERT GERWARTH
OUP, 329pp, £20
This ‘deeply researched and concise book deals with what brought the Second Reich to its knees’, explained Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph, ‘but then describes the strange revolution that took place in Germany in the six months after the war, and the hopes – sadly unfulfilled – for the new republic that grew out of defeat’. Once defeat was inevitable, the Kaiser abdicated and a new republic was formed.
‘But this was an unconventional revolution, and certainly unlike the one that had happened a year earlier in Russia. The traditional ruling caste hardly put up a fight, and some of them turned tail – notably the Kaiser, who went into exile in Holland. Thus the politicians took over, in retrospect almost seamlessly: it was almost as though the German people were too stunned by defeat to cause trouble, at least to begin with.’ Despite poor editing and proofreading, Heffer found that ‘Gerwarth’s scholarship cannot be faulted’. Martin Ivens, reviewing it for the
Times, admired Gerwarth’s ‘polished narrative drawing on the eyewitness testimony of famous writers and thinkers that Weimar was not “the doomed republic” of legend, a hopeless 14-year interval between a warmongering kaiser and Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship, but a success in its own right... Weimar democracy would not have survived several attempts by the extreme left and right to seize power from 1919-23 unless it had genuine popular support, Gerwarth convincingly argues.’ Gerwarth’s account ends with Hitler’s abortive Bierkeller Putsch in 1923. Nonetheless, Gerwarth ‘can’t quite dispel the air of doom hanging over the republic’.