When German troops admitted defeat and asked for an armistice, they were still deep in “enemy territory,” even on the Western Front. This situation had opposing effects on the Allies and the Germans. The populations of the victorious countries, particularly France, Belgium, and even England, must have seen this as particularly visible proof of the aggressive nature of the German war. They unanimously demanded compensation and reparation from the defeated and punishment for the aggressors. In the Peace of Frankfurt in 1871, France, which was only formally the aggressor and had decisively distanced itself from Napoleon III and his regime after its first defeat, had been forced to cede two rich provinces and pay the enormous sum of five billion francs for the time in reparations. The terms of the armistice of November 1918 had already conveyed to the Germans a terrifying image of the severity of the burdens imposed and still to be imposed, and “reparations” towards Belgium had already been a key focus of the war’s agenda from the beginning. But the “Wilson Peace,” which was believed to be awaited, corresponded in its objectives to the demands of the pacifists and socialists, as it seemed to exclude “annexations and war contributions.” The corresponding German hopes had some objective foundations.

On December 10, Friedrich Ebert gave a speech to the returning troops, beginning with some expressions that had just been used by General Field Marshal von Hindenburg: “Our indelible thanks go to all of you who have sacrificed yourselves to protect the fatherland... Your sacrifices and your actions are incomparable. No enemy has defeated you... You have protected the fatherland from enemy invasion. You have kept your wives and children, your parents, away from the murder and conflagration of war; you have preserved the fields and factories from devastation and destruction. The fatherland thanks you for all this with overflowing sentiment...”

But Ebert, in the continuation of his speech, expressed even those things that Hugo Haase, his co-president of the USPD, would have probably remembered with living examples: “You do not find your country like you left it. Something new has happened, german liberty was born… Nobody has suffered more harshly than you under the old regime, we thought about you when we conquered the freedom, for you we conquered the right to work…” But in his speech, the “Socialist Republic” did not occupy the forefront, compared to the appeal for solidarity among all combatants, for the fight against “the old misery of the small states,” for the preservation of the unity of the German nation; none of the officers needed to feel attacked, none needed to have the impression that the representatives of the new government would symbolically tear away their epaulettes and decorations, as had so often happened in everyday life.1

Ebert would never have even dreamed of receiving the troops with the accusations and invectives that Rosa Luxemburg and the “Spartacus Letters” had reserved even for the German proletariat in uniform. He knew that it was not the “old Germany” that was before him in the form of the soldiers: Groener was no Ludendorff, and the 270,000 officers who now occupied the army were also the result of a profound “democratization,” as was the government’s accountability to Parliament. Anyone who made such a significant group an enemy had to follow the Soviet example: he had to have some of these men shot and recruit the rest by threatening them and subjecting them to the command of the People’s Commissars. Ebert didn’t want this to happen, but he had to navigate a difficult path between the accusations of the left and the directives of the Allies. This path also made possible, though it was not initially perceived, a rebirth of the “old Germany”—certainly not the Germany marked by the “splendor of the imperial Reich,” which many were once again longing for, with great nostalgia, under the depressing impression of the present. It was, indeed, the “old Germany,” but above all a younger version of it, imbued with a new radicalism, the one that first emerged precisely in the Freikorps.

The road to the Treaty of Versailles was much longer and more arduous than anyone had initially expected. The armistice commission departed on November 7, headed by deputy Matthias Erzberger, who had replaced a general. The Allies, in fact, had refused to negotiate with representatives of the old regime. The conditions to which Erzberger had to agree on November 9 were extremely harsh and made a resumption of military action impossible. Nevertheless, Hindenburg covered this decision with the words: “Even if they fail to enforce these points, we will still have to conclude.” Not only did the occupied regions have to be evacuated extremely quickly, but the blockade was also to be continued. These conditions were particularly harsh and foreshadowed a famine even more severe than the “Turnip Winter,” the hunger winter of 1916/17, which had been a traumatic experience for the population.

Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, Foreign Minister of the Scheidemann government, which was formed in February 1919, placed the question of “war guilt” at the center of the debate from the outset. He shared the global consensus that the Allies were demanding reparations because they held Germany morally responsible for the war. The connection between reparations and moral responsibility for the war thus posed a question that could only be resolved by a transpartisan tribunal and historical research after all archives had been opened. The General Staff had indeed already considered that raising the question of guilt could undermine the enemy’s plans and that reviving the idea of ​​the League of Nations could constitute a first victory in the struggle “for our future position in the world.” These thoughts, however, were in no way motivated by a desire for a restoration of the “old Germany.” In fact, it was hoped that the working class would take power in enemy countries and an alliance with the USA was envisaged because, in human judgment, it was believed that the “future on earth” was in the hands of this power.2

The Peace Conference began on January 18, 1919: the Germans were not consulted. Public opinion also quickly realized that Wilson, despite his seemingly superior position, could not impose his ideas completely, or even the main part of them, against the “tiger” Clemenceau, a direct witness to the defeat of 1871 and the Paris Commune, and against Lloyd George, the powerful Social Liberal.

On May 7, the terms agreed upon between the Allies and Wilson were delivered to the German delegation in a harsh, accusatory speech by Clemenceau, which Brockdorff-Rantzau responded to with a self-conscious yet provocative response. Great excitement developed in Germany, and the arguments of the socialists and nationalists reached very similar conclusions. Both agreed that Entente capital was revealing its intentions to enslave its age-old enemy, along with its determination to annihilate it. Scheidemann formulated the situation impressively: “The hand that places itself and enslaves us in these chains can only wither!” There was considerable criticism in the Allied countries as well, especially from the socialists, who were smeared by their nationalist opponents as “friends of the Germans.” Berlin students added fuel to the fire when they seized French flags from the war of 1870-71 from the military arsenal and burned them. The German fleet, interned at the British naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, in an even more spectacular gesture, decided to sink itself. The tendency sometimes manifested among the Allies, especially the Americans, to make Germany a bulwark against Bolshevism had raised faint hopes.3 The German counterproposals could only be presented in writing and did not have the desired effect, although the Allies had granted a referendum in Upper Silesia. The Reichstag and the government were forced to unconditionally sign the treaty on June 23—undoubtedly a diktat—after an extremely harsh diplomatic summary note from Clemenceau, which unilaterally emphasized the singularity of the “German crimes,” and after several ultimatums. The very harsh discussions and disagreements that continued until the last moment ultimately found a sort of paradoxical conciliation. Indeed, those opposed to the signing, among whom was Prime Minister Scheidemann before his resignation, acknowledged “patriotic motives” in those who supported the necessity of signing the treaty.

The text of the treaty, which was very extensive, was divided into easily distinguishable sections. The first part, from Articles 1 to 26, contained the so-called “Charter of the League of Nations,” with its provisions on the future peaceful world, which was to be guaranteed by a “League of Nations.” This constituted, so to speak, the “Wilsonian part” of the treaty and even contained a paragraph that was supposed to allow for subsequent “revisions.” Therefore—temporarily—both Germany and its allies were not admitted to the League of Nations. Neither this section nor the treaty as a whole were ratified by the American Senate. The next two sections established Germany’s future borders and provided political provisions for Europe. What most affected the Germans was not so much the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, but the adjustment of the border with Poland, which separated East Prussia from the rest of the Reich with the “Polish Corridor.” Austria was also prohibited from joining the Reich. This veto, which was clearly incompatible with the principles on which the treaty purported to be based, was certainly a necessary product of Allied power politics. The provisions regarding the army and navy were extremely burdensome, placing Germany, a pre-war great power, below the level of Poland, a newly formed medium power. All these provisions also jeopardized the maintenance of internal political peace. From now on, Germany was a severely discriminated against power, even if not destroyed, a power subjected to heavy burdens in terms of material deliveries and financial reparations. Moreover, these burdens were not yet precisely defined in their scope and thus foreshadowed the worst.

However, the articles which in the future were more discussed and that a large portion of the german people felt like unbearable and humiliating were the articles 227-230. They were called the “Paragraphs of Shame,” demanded the surrender of the emperor and numerous “war criminals,” and implied an admission of criminal guilt. However, they quickly lost all practical substance, not least because the Dutch government refused to hand over Wilhelm II to the Entente. Nonetheless, throughout the Weimar Republic and even beyond Paragraph 231, the so-called “War Guilt Paragraph” was the cause of violent protests. Here it is: “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her Allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.” It is therefore impossible to separate this article, even simply on a linguistic level, from the following one, Article 232, which reads as follows: “The Allied and Associated Governments recognize that Germany’s resources are insufficient to fully compensate for all these losses and damages.” Article 231 was therefore simply a new formulation of the principle of responsibility that had already been formulated in the memorandum of Robert Lansing, Wilson’s Secretary of State, and which had therefore been accepted by Germany. A revocation of Article 231 by Germany would necessarily have resulted in a revocation of Article 232 by the Allies, thus burdening Germany with an even greater burden. In Germany, however, this obvious connection was not perceived, and consequently the entire protest against the “war guilt paragraph” became a clash of shadows. Clemenceau’s diplomatic note and countless declarations by the Allies, however, were something entirely different from a simple clash of shadows. The Germans could and should have felt attacked as a “people of criminals,” since in Germany it was not possible to draw a clear distinction between “the old government” and a people who had become victims, as was the case in Austria. Certainly, “Germany” and the “imperial government” did not therefore become identical, but the Allies themselves did much to make this identification appear correct, or at least plausible.

For Germany, which had remained united, the Treaty of Versailles meant a compromise peace that offered it considerable chances. These chances however were achievable provided that a new equilibrium and a new combined game of the world economy could be found. To a large extent, it was certainly this compromise peace that prevented this new state of the world economy from arriving, or rather, ensured its implementation in very imperfect terms. A peace that was harsh enough to be attacked as the “Peace of Carthage,” yet mild enough to damage the gigantic potential of the old world power only militarily, and therefore superficially. The Allies, and especially the French, understandably preoccupied as they were with reparations for consolidating their victory, failed to grasp the economic consequences of a world war4; the Germans, however, failed to grasp, victims as they were of a blindness we struggle to comprehend, what it means, politically, to appear before the world as the principal cause of a war they lost. Only in this sense can it be argued that the belief, still prevalent today, that Versailles is the beginning of all evils has a rational core. Precisely for this reason, we must now describe and analyze the political constitution, which is a fundamental fact. In its context, in fact, the inevitable battles between the Germans were defined and decided.

The Commune’s revolution came after a defeat that had already been sealed, but from a foreign policy perspective, it was a continuation of the Government of National Defense, and had it prevailed throughout France, it would undoubtedly have carried the fight against the Germans to the Pyrenees and the shores of the Mediterranean. The Russian February Revolution was, as it seemed, the revolution of a will to victory freed from its previous shackles, and even after the October Revolution, even within the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, the will to continue the struggle was very strong, as was soon to become apparent. By mid-1918, centers of resistance had formed in some places, consisting of members of non-Bolshevik parties and officers who, in agreement with the Allies, wanted to continue the war. German public opinion, by contrast, had been filled with strong and not unfounded hopes until the end of 1918, while an informal German empire stretched from the North Sea to Mesopotamia and from the vicinity of Reims to beyond Kiev.

By July, however, the great battle in France was militarily lost, and the Allies were so exhausted that they prepared for the capitulation that they actually did in Bulgaria and Austria. Ludendorff then forced the government of Prince Max von Baden to immediately request an armistice. Prince Max strongly opposed it1, and Walter Rathenau also strongly warned him: one must be able to defend oneself if dishonorable conditions were imposed. Objectively, Germany could defend itself for a few more months, as even Ludendorff soon recognized, and it still possessed a major, almost intact, weapon: the High Seas Fleet, which it could no longer win, but could certainly inflict severe damage on the enemy. A final battle of this kind, however, would have brought the political and even physical demise of Germany, and in modern times the ethos of “honorable decline” cannot apply to an entire people; unlike non-Bolshevik Russia, Germany no longer had allies. However, it seemed to have a helping hand among the Entente in American President Wilson. His “Fourteen Points” of January 1918 were explicitly invoked because, despite a certain skepticism, there was hope that the American ideology of democratic progress could lead to the right of self-determination for peoples and guarantee Germany a bright future in a peaceful world. But without defeat, Germany could not accept these “14 Points,”2 and the exchange of notes with Wilson during October made it clear that the transformation into a “parliamentary monarchy,” which had been achieved at the end of October, was not considered sufficient. The Allies continued to demand the regime change that the Kaiser’s abdication3 would bring with it. Among the German population, the desire for peace must have prevailed over all other sentiments, especially if the suspicion arose that the German “war party,” which had so openly given up its cause, was still considering resistance. And so, almost without resistance, the entire power structure under which Germany had been founded collapsed, a structure which had undergone astonishing evolution for four decades and which, as had been repeatedly emphasized, had for four years opposed “the entire world.” It collapsed when the fleet’s sailors, refusing to follow orders to depart, seized the city of Kiel, and sent advance guards to the major cities of northern Germany and to Berlin. Concern had spread in Bavaria that an Allied invasion from the south was imminent. On November 7, an insurrection broke out, led by Kurt Eisner, an independent Social Democrat, and accompanied by a large demonstration. The centuries-old Wittelsbach dynasty abandoned the battlefield without resistance. The same thing happened in all German regions: everywhere the kings, grand dukes or dukes abdicated without a fight.

On November 9, the government of Prince Max von Baden, with its “bourgeois” secretaries of state such as Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, and Matthias Erzberger, was still in power in Berlin. Prince Max tried to secure the emperor’s abdication to save the dynasty and finally announced it personally; in the afternoon, in a manner equally not entirely legal, he transferred the chancellorship to Friedrich Ebert, co-president of the German Social Democratic Party. However, the primary real role was played by workers, other civilians, and soldiers, who demonstrated in huge masses on the streets or passed resolutions in factory assemblies and elected “workers’ councils” or “soldiers’ councils.” This was to be the hour of that group that had most resolutely rejected war and had most unequivocally declared as its goal something “entirely different.” This was undoubtedly the “independent social democracy” with the “Spartacus League,” its far-left wing, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who remained in prison for a short time. The two enjoyed a reputation among socialists throughout Europe second only to that of Lenin and Trotsky4, and had published the “Spartacus Letters,” which, as early as September 1916, revealed what had proven to be true: decisions about war and peace, about the international, and about the reputation of the masses could not be made in parliament, but in factories, workshops, and on the streets. Nowhere had the horror of war been described so persuasively, nowhere had the hope for “socialism” been so impressively articulated as for “another beginning of world history,” hope for the dominion of human reason, of organized will, and therefore for a real “cultural period.”5 But the unbridled hatred against the “authors” of the war had been no less intense; and yet the German proletariat, which had abandoned the Russian Revolution, was not spared from the accusations against the guilty—especially the militarists, the Junkers, and even the “capitalists” of all countries. At the end of December, at the founding congress of the German Communist Party, the tender lady, who before the war had been one of the most important theorists of Social Democracy and who during the war in her “Letters from Prison” had shown herself to be a sensitive friend of art and nature, demonstrated the unbridled extent of her hatred when she called the German Social Democrats and trade unionists “the most infamous and greatest scoundrels” the world had ever seen.6 She and Liebknecht received extraordinary support from the messages that the Soviet government, namely Lenin, sent to the German workers. These specifically urged workers not to allow a national assembly to be foisted upon them. Not since the French Revolution, with its universal call for “war against palaces and peace for huts,” had there been any attempts by the leadership of a foreign state to intervene and influence another state. But this very fact could be seen as a sign that the realization of the “totally other” had now become possible in history. The fact that “Spartacus” was spoken of far more widely than the relatively small number of his followers would warrant was therefore neither coincidence nor the result of staged propaganda.

But at first the decisive successes led the “government socialists” of the social democratic majority, violently attacked by Liebknecht and Luxemburg7, to place themselves at the head of the hated popular movement to prevent “Bolshevism” from winning in Germany. By “Bolshevism,” they meant the violent, uncoordinated, primarily negatively oriented mass movement, centered on a core of genuine revolutionaries, the size of which no one had a precise idea. It was unclear whether, in addition to the Spartacus League, a large number of “Independent Social Democrats” or only a small number of them belonged to the USPD. And above all, everyone involved viewed the Russian example positively or negatively: the successful upheaval and the “introduction of socialism” on the one hand, and the violent dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the existence of the Cheka, and the mass murders of officers and hostages on the other. Those who focus solely on Germany might speak of “propaganda,” while those who consider the international context, and in particular the Russian-Soviet example, will better understand the radical reactions of contemporary Germans.

However, the majority Social Democrats around Ebert initially seemed to clearly gain the upper hand: together with the three USPD representatives, they formed the “Council of Deputies” composed of equal numbers, but they left the “bourgeois” State Secretaries in office and delegated Hugo Preuß, State Secretary of the Interior, a member of the then emerging left-wing Liberal Party, to draft a constitution. Above all, they advocated for the earliest possible convocation of a National Assembly, which was to be elected by a very broad suffrage. Of the six elected deputies, only the independent Emil Barth was a true radical, who, like Rosa Luxemburg, declared the National Assembly to be an anti-socialist entity.8 Not without difficulty, the majority Social Democrats managed to secure a large majority in the “Central Council” of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which met from December 16 to 20. This council endorsed both Ebert’s intention to have the National Assembly elected in the near future and his desire to put an end to the turmoil caused by the local councils.

Even then, it was clear that even the mainstream socialists were acting for a world-historical cause, albeit a less spectacular one: namely, the renunciation by the largest socialist party of the claim to absolute dominance of Marxist ideology. They were also willing to collaborate with the “bourgeois” parties, which thus lost their character as a bloc opposed to the bloc of believing socialists. To justify this attitude, they could rely on the social developments that the syndicalist August Winning translated into the formula “From the proletariat to the world of labor.”9 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, on the contrary, continued to uphold the old concept of the “mortal hostility” between the two blocs, which was to end with the definitive triumph of the “proletariat” in the “class struggle” (i.e., in class warfare and civil war). The example of France (not to mention England and the USA) indicated the first possibility, that of Russia the other one.

But when Ebert seemed to have achieved a major victory at the end of December, when the three independents, due to their manifold differences and conflicts, left the Council, the opposite trend was gaining traction among the masses. The members of the new homogeneous Council had, according to Scheidemann’s later statement, “almost no protection.” Ebert slept night after night in friends’ homes so that the Spartacists would find the chancellery empty if they arrived10. Only Gustav Noske, the new member of parliament, still seemed to hope for a favorable outcome, having managed to rally disbanded soldiers from Berlin’s western suburbs into the Freikorps. These had very little in common with the regular troops of the “old army,” which General Wilhelm Groener, Ludendorff’s successor, wanted to place at his disposal in a “supreme army command,” which practically did not exist. By Christmas, however, these corps had dissolved into small remnants. The so-called “pact” between Ebert and Groener and the much-discussed “secret telephone line” that was supposed to implement it, did not have at all the importance that has been attributed to them.

And yet the government of the majority socialist deputies was undoubtedly the legitimate government of Germany, since it had a considerable, though not absolute, majority in the nation, as was made very clear by the outcome of the elections to the National Assembly on January 19. Ebert’s socialist enemies, on the other hand, wanted to openly create fait accompli under the banner of their ideal, before the empirical will of the people could be articulated.

From December 30, 1918, to January 1, 1919, the founding congress of the German Communist Party met in Berlin. Karl Radek, one of Lenin’s most important collaborators, had come from Moscow. Rarely had a speech succeeded in blending “humanitarian” and bellicose socialism as he did. Bolshevism was defined as an expression of “the tears of widows and children,” yet a decisive battle on the Rhine between the Russian and German Bolsheviks on one side and the Allied armies on the other was envisioned.11

Even the program written by Rosa Luxemburg and approved at the party congress contains a humanitarian and democratic statement, namely that the Communist Party will take power only on the basis of the clear, unequivocal will of the vast majority of the proletarian masses in Germany. However, it echoes in an unequivocal battle cry against the entire “non-proletarian” world, and therefore especially against all other German parties: “Up, proletarians, to the fight! It is a question of conquering one world and fighting against another. In this last class struggle in world history for the supreme aims of humanity, the enemy’s word is: Thumb over eye and knee on chest!”12 This did not clearly postulate a decades-long struggle to win over the vast majority of the German proletariat, but rather heralded an imminent battle of annihilation.

Indeed, from January 5, 1919, for relatively coincidental reasons, huge masses of “Spartacists” took to the streets, and the government announced, “Spartacus now fights for all power.” For a time, it seemed that only Wilhelmstrasse remained in government hands. On January 6, an appeal signed by Liebknecht announced the government’s dismissal. Spartacist groups seized important buildings in the press district and seized the “Vorwäts,” the organ of the Social Democracy. At the party congress, Rosa Luxemburg had spoken out against the majority’s boycott of the elections, but had clearly stated that she supported the assembly in order to keep it under pressure, disrupt it, and finally disperse it, as Lenin had done. And during the fighting of the second week of January, in the “Roten Fahne,” she had written with extreme passion about escalating the civil war: “Don’t negotiate! Act!” But the leaders of the uprising, especially the “revolutionary delegates,” sought a compromise, and among the wavering masses, there was no energetic individual capable of rallying several hundred enthusiastic followers to seize the Chancellery, as had happened in Petrograd with the Winter Palace. There were probably many objective causes that determined the failure of the revolution in Germany, but there were many perceptive observers and participants, including Gustav Noske himself, who, looking back on these events, were convinced that a communist seizure of power was then a real possibility.13 Of course, the revolution was not only prevented by the “procrastination of the leaders”, but also by an active factor: those military units and the Freikorps, which Gustav Noske had gathered, managed to assert themselves after a fierce resistance in the centre of Berlin and from then on the entire radical left referred to them simply as Noskids or “Noske’s dogs”.

After the end of the fighting, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg hid in the home of acquaintances in Wilmersdorf. There they were arrested by soldiers, and on the evening of January 15th, in front of the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Cavalry Rifle Division, they were killed by ordinary soldiers on the orders of their officers. It was an illegal execution and therefore murder. Nonetheless, for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, it represented a more dignified end to the civil war and to the (more promising) attempt to seize power in Germany than a sentence of many years in prison would have been. They thus ended up as fallen soldiers and martyrs for their cause, not as prisoners who had hidden while their followers were still dying.

Thus the first fundamental event of the Weimar Republic had come to pass: by mid-February, Ebert was not only still in office, but had been elected “Reich President,” and there were no longer any “people’s deputies,” but a regular government led by Philipp Scheidemann, “Reich Minister President.” A “bourgeois coalition” had been formed, consisting of the parties of the wartime parliamentary majority—the SPD, the Zentrum, and the “German Democratic Party,” the “DDP.” Of course, Germany was by no means “normalized,” nor even merely sedated. In mid-March, a second Communist uprising occurred in Berlin, and the brutality was far greater than in January, on both sides, especially among the troops; if ever there was real, not merely postulated, deadly hostility in Germany, it manifested itself this March between the residents of the eastern parts of Berlin and “Noske’s troops.” In several large cities, such as Bremen and Braunschweig, local council republics were formed, political formations that were ultimately destroyed by the Freikorps. For a time, the Ruhr region was almost paralyzed by massive strike movements, and the Munich council republic, the most important and most consequential, was born. The assassination of Kurt Eisner by the young Count von Arco-Valley had sparked the revolt that brought to power a less than transparent mix of anarchists and libertarian socialists. Eisner had already succeeded in establishing dialogue between Munich and Bavaria, because he was one of the most credible supporters of the League of Peoples and was not an enemy of the Entente socialists, before whom he had harshly attacked the German Social Democrats at the first pre-war meeting of the International in Bern, Switzerland, accusing them of being responsible for the war. He was a close friend of Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, a “bourgeois pacifist,” one of the most vocal critics of the tradition of Prussian state power. At the same time, as early as November, he had made it clear to a conference of the state ministers that the desire to preserve Bavarian sovereignty was not based solely on the dynasty. His reductive publication of diplomatic documents had aroused great hatred against him among the slowly developing right. When he was fatally wounded, he was on his way to the regional parliament to resign after his party’s severe electoral defeat. Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam, anarchists and libertarian socialists, presumably wanted to follow his lead, but the situation changed fundamentally when the Communists, whose leaders included several Russian-Jewish Bolsheviks such as Eugen Leviné and Tobias Akselrod, succeeded in establishing their own council republic in place of the anarchist one. Probably never before in history has a foreign statesman attempted to shape the development of another country with such concrete proposals as Lenin did in his greeting to the Bavarian Council Republic on April 27, 1919: “We earnestly request you to inform us as often and as concretely as possible what measures you have taken to fight the bourgeois hangmen Scheidemann & Co. Have you set up workers’ and peasants’ councils in the districts, have you armed the workers, disarmed the bourgeoisie... have you limited the living space of the bourgeoisie in Munich in order to immediately settle workers in the homes of the rich, have you taken all the banks into your own hands and imprisoned hostages of the bourgeoisie?...” Thomas Mann’s diaries make it clear what a shocking and terrifying impression the measures and, not least, the speeches of these men made on the “Munich bourgeoisie.”14 Yet already at the beginning of May, the Freikorps under the leadership of General von Epp put an end to what has often been called, in the usual downplaying manner, a “spectre.” In truth, this had been the only genuine “Bolshevik” seizure of power within Germany, and its memory lived on, not only in Bavaria, for many years to come.

However, in the spring and summer of 1919, other events became the focus of German interest. These too involved fundamental events of the Weimar Republic that stretched back into the distant past.

The first event, which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht would also have to painfully confront after a potential seizure of power, was the path leading to the peace treaty or “peace diktat” of Versailles. No less important were its consequences, which were absolutely grave.

The second event was the establishment of the National Assembly and the approval of the Weimar Reich Constitution.

We have good reason to assert that all major European political developments stemmed from the French Revolution, whether they supported it and referred to it, or denied it and countered it. The revolutionary upheavals of 1830 and 1848 were widely understood as resumptions or continuations of the “Great Revolution” of 1789, from which the Jacobin Reign of Terror of 1793–1794 was mostly sought to separate. The “party of movement” and the “party of continuity or resistance,” the two major political tendencies of the 19th century, defined themselves through their contradictory relationship with the French Revolution. The liberals and their radical wing, the democrats, were certainly part of the “party of movement,” and the followers or sympathizers of Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, were until 1848 the main force of the “party of continuity.” The young Bismarck was one of the most determined advocates of the party of continuity, but as a statesman, driven by circumstances, he demonstrated that not only was the party of the movement itself differentiated according to whether it was inspired by “1789” or “1793,” but that conservatives were capable of appropriating “progress,” indeed, and “the Revolution,” thus rendering the simple division into “progressives” and “reactionaries” problematic. Like Bismarck, Napoleon III surprised the liberal masses by wanting, like his great uncle, to be the heir and continuator of the Revolution, and after taking power, he sent more revolutionaries into exile than Bismarck or even Cavour. The regime of the eighteen years of his Empire was therefore, in the eyes of most liberals, both “revolutionary” and “reactionary,” and the simple distinctions of the first half of the century lost their persuasive force. In any case, it demonstrated remarkable stability, and the first serious signs of weakness appeared only when it transformed into the “Empire libéral” in the late 1960s. Internal political opponents could now move relatively freely, and among them were the socialists, who constituted the newest and youngest political group.

Even before 1848, there had been much talk of “socialists,” and Proudhon’s short formula “property is theft” had already aroused much heated criticism. In the struggles of 1848 and 1849, socialists like Louis Blanc had played an important role, and the great “workers’ uprising” of June 1848 had often been attributed to socialist agitation. This statement wasn’t literally true, but it was true in that the socialist trend in thought and action could be based on a fundamental event: the slow transformation of the mass of the urban population from artisans into “workers,” who had rejected the old class ideas and had become increasingly numerous following the development of industry. In 1848/49 they had still been members of a “popular revolution”, but during the Empire era, émigré theorists like Proudhon reworked their doctrines and more and more men even in Paris, the capital of luxury artisans, designated themselves as “workers”.

Thus it happened that the very first theorists of socialism, those of the early days of the revolution, especially Babeuf, became relevant again. They were clearly referring to the earliest origins.

François Noël Babeuf, who called himself “Gracchus,” was never forgotten as the author of the “Conspiracy of the Equals” of 1796 and as a victim of the post-Jacobin “Directory.” Filippo Buonarroti, for his part, passed on his ideas to subsequent generations. For Babeuf, the focus was “the war of the poor against the rich”: he accused wealth of being a fundamental injustice, which had destroyed the original constitution of society, that of equality, and had handed humanity over to a “caste of profiteers and violators of the law.” This caste was the patricians or aristocracy, and it was marked by “criminal vices,” while the common people retained the virtues that were still prevalent in the uncorrupted state of nature: justice, love of humanity, and a spirit of sacrifice. The revolution must restore these virtues to universal qualities, after history has long developed in the opposite direction, that is, toward the unhappiness of the people and the happiness of a small number of privileged individuals. The supreme goal of the war that has now broken out between the poor and the rich, between the good and the bad, is therefore the equality of all and, consequently, the restitution of all that has been stolen. Babeuf, however, admits that individual inequality can also arise from undeniable differences in talent and diligence, but he sets this observation aside, observing that a higher degree of intelligence or diligence does not increase the “capacity of the stomach” of the individual in question. The condemnation of inequality even makes it an anthropological characteristic: it is a murderous folly peculiar only to the human species, to “distinguish according to merit and worth,” since from them arise “unhappiness and privations,” unknown to all the rest of nature. It is therefore necessary to “chain destiny” and eliminate all private property, which puts men in competition with one another and necessarily produces inequality. The future revolutionary government will put history back on track and establish a simple administration of distribution, which keeps accounts of all individuals and all things and distributes the latter with the most painful equality. This government will achieve the goal of society, universal happiness: “It will do away with the agricultural lands of the communes, fences, walls, door keys, quarrels, trials, thefts, and crimes... in a word: all vices.”

In this war manifesto, we find, rarely concentrated in a few pages, so much past and so much future, so many desires and so many impossibilities, so many attitudes contrary to history and so much historical certainty, so many postulates and so many unethical implications. These are not the long narratives typical of political novels and modern utopias. Nonetheless, they are essentially utopian pages because they seek to remove, in a sea of ​​pure happiness and justice, the conflict between ethics and immorality, between activity and inertia, between historical progress and imperishable moral substance, between individuality and common spirit, rather than postulating the constant burden of contrasts and the attenuation of extreme denominational forms. Babeuf evidently takes as his model the age-old family conditions that survive at most in “village communities,” but he proposes to all humanity a goal that can inspire a universal movement aimed at “greater equality,” but which in itself is inimical to history and culture when it strives to produce “equality.”

The fundamental principles developed by Babeuf, however, constitute the framework within which the idea of ​​socialism was later shaped so broadly and diversely. Consider the concepts of the “rule of money” or the idea of ​​modern “alienation,” private property as the “root of evil,” the maxim (valid for every family): “To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” and so on. The most important evolution, particularly that paved the way for the Saint-Simonians within socialism, was that undertaken by Marx and Engels. They removed the simple opposition between “socialism” and “capitalism” and made the latter the indispensable prerequisite for the former, so that the aspect of hostility toward history seemed to disappear. Nonetheless, in the innermost recesses of Marxism, which revels in progress, affirms modern technology, and combats all “obtuseness,” there remains alive and active that generally socialist “utopian core” that always looks to the “original community that works and decides together without exchange, without money, and without apparatus.” Something other than simple progressivism, which, at different times and in different conditions, is capable of arousing enthusiasm and a willingness to fight of an extraordinary nature1.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first political formation that was strongly (though not exclusively) influenced by socialists and socialist tendencies – so much so that later both Marx and Lenin expressed themselves unequivocally in this sense.

It was born as a sort of “second revolution” from the defeat of Bonapartist France in 1870. The Parisians greeted the capture of the emperor after the Battle of Sedan with astonished indignation: how could it happen that “Papa Wilhelm’s” beer drinkers defeated the soldiers of the Grande Nation that dominated Europe? On September 4, outraged masses entered Parliament, and a “government of national defense” was formed, including Jules Favre and Léon Gambetta. However, it soon became clear that not only had the emperor been defeated, but that all of France was in grave danger, for a few weeks later, Paris found itself surrounded by German armies, and Gambetta was forced to leave the capital in a hot-air balloon to organize resistance outside the city. It soon became clear, however, that the new government, despite its decisive words, was willing to conclude peace with Bismarck; even Gambetta did not escape the reproach of his more radical followers for not attacking “the reactionaries.” The government also faced internal political dangers, and in several large cities, particularly Lyon, but also in Paris itself, which was forced to capitulate at the end of January, “anarchy” seemed to be spreading. The great mass of the French population was therefore weary of war and ready to conclude peace. During the armistice granted by Bismarck, elections for a National Assembly were called, which gave the monarchists a large majority. The majority of the population of Paris violently revolted against the “shame” of the harsh peace terms, but at the same time against the government, which increasingly featured Adolf Thiers, the revolutionary of 1830 and 1848. The new revolution, sparked by certain government measures and leading to the establishment of the “Commune,” was both a national and social revolution: a revolt against the Germans, who dared only make a brief and symbolic entry into Paris, but also against the government, which had moved to Versailles. The result was a full-blown civil war between the National Guard remaining in Paris and “those of Versailles,” who received significant support from Bismarck through the timely release of prisoners of war and other measures.

The Commune itself was by no means completely dominated by the various socialist factions—the Proudhonists, the Blanquists, and Leo Frankel, a Marxist member—nor even by the neo-Jacobins. It also included “federalists,” who rebelled against centralism and oriented themselves toward medieval-style communes. The press outside Paris, however, spoke of radical demands and measures: workers should own the means of production; the rank and file should command the top, not vice versa; the entire old world of militarism, exploitation, privilege, and monopolies, to which the proletariat owes its slavery and the fatherland its misfortune, should disappear. Bakunin argued that the state as such was the negation of humanity. However, it was certain spectacular acts that aroused a greater, excited and fearful attention throughout the country: for example, certain spectacular acts, however, attracted a much wider, excited and fearful attention throughout the country, above all the shooting of six hostages, among whom was the Archbishop of Paris, and the demolition of the column dedicated to the first Napoleon in the Place Vendôme.

And so the first battles were fought with mutual exasperation, and when, after a failed sortie, a column of prisoners approached General Vinoy, he asked if there was a leader among them. When the leader appeared, Vinoy said, “You are horrible scoundrels,” and gave his officers the order to “shoot”2. They had been treating one another like “horrible scoundrels” ever since the fighting broke out in Paris on May 20. However, the “Versailles” were far superior in numbers and weaponry, and so during the “Bloody Week” a terrible massacre took place, in which only a few were taken prisoner and 20,000 “Communards” died, some in places with great symbolic power, such as the “Père Lachaise” cemetery or the “Communards’ Wall.” The subsequent repression was also extraordinarily harsh: hundreds of death sentences were handed down, including those of women, and the widespread deportations to New Caledonia created situations that foreshadowed some of the worst tragedies of the 20th century. We can therefore understand why Prosper Lissagaray, a follower of Marx and the very first historian of the Commune, wrote with a significant “Platonic” simplification: “And during these atrocities, a thousand times more Bulgarian, the bourgeoisie raised its bloody clenched fist toward heaven and incited the world against this people, who after two months of government and the massacre of thousands of its own had shed the blood of sixty-four prisoners.”3

Manipulation by the French bourgeoisie was not necessary to create a profound impression throughout Europe, one that had far-reaching effects. It arose above all from the stories and images of the great fires that had raged in the heart of the city, which, as everyone believed, had been started by the pétroleuses and which, it was said, had even destroyed the Louvre. In Basel, upon hearing this news, the two great scholars, Nietzsche and Burchkardt, ran to each other and embraced in tears, recalling this monstrous cultural destruction. They were victims of false, or at least greatly exaggerated, information, but they had the right feeling that something new had arrived in the world—new thoughts, new possibilities for action—something that had not even been seen in this form during the first French Revolution.

However, the military defeat of the state and the phenomenon of the Commune had a profound impact on French thought. Quinet remained predictable when he wrote that it was not France that had been defeated, but Bonapartism, Caesarism, Catholicism, and Jesuitism, while Catholics proclaimed that God had punished France and that long before the Uhlans, certain liberal intellectuals like Cousin, Quinet, and Renan had “Prussified” France. Ernest Renan was not satisfied with such simple theses, but rather provocatively overturned the prevailing French conception, articulating in his book on the Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France the thesis that France had committed suicide when it beheaded its king, while Prussia had successfully resisted the evolution of all of Europe toward mediocrity, socialism, and the baseness of economism. Hippolyte Taine embraced Montesquieu’s concept of the birth of freedom in the Germanic wilderness, called the Jacobins a “cursed speck of France,” and attributed the entire history of France, which had apparently never known true freedom, to the Commune. Even at the turn of the century, this chapter of French self-criticism was not concluded; the complaints about France’s backwardness compared to Germany, its irregular and fragile parliamentarism, and “French decadence” simply did not end. France was even urged to become a moderate and peaceful nation, rejecting Latinism and embracing Protestantism. It must reject all conquest, must not desire a large army, and yet must be able to be a “great nation.” Only after the Dreyfus Affair did the exaltation of the French Revolution and parliamentary democracy regain vigor4.

But with the defeat of the Commune, the internal political fate of France was not yet decided. It was widely believed that the Commune had had no serious chance of seizing power, either against Thiers and Bismarck or against the vast majority of peasants throughout the country, and then perhaps building a terrorist regime against its enemies. However, even in retrospect, the anguish and concerns were great, and the monarchists were convinced that only the restoration of the Kingdom could avert the threat of a reconstitution of the Commune. However, “the monarchists” were not united among themselves (nor were the bourgeois), since they were divided into two factions: the “Legitimists” and the “Orleanists,” that is, the followers of the older branch of the Bourbons, that of Louis XVI and Charles X, and the followers of the “bourgeois reign” of Louis-Philippe. The two pretenders, the last scion of the elder branch, Count Chambord (”Henry V”), and the head of the younger branch, sought a pact. But this pact could not be concluded because the Count of Chambord stubbornly refused to accept the tricolor instead of the “fleur-de-lis flag.” Thus, the monarchist restoration failed due to a “question of flags,” and although “Marshal-President” MacMahon was elected head of state in 1873, the republicans, divided into several parties, made progress in all the elections and passed a new constitution in 1875, which made a restoration very difficult. The monarchists had already “become increasingly convinced of the irresistible evolution toward a democratic republic”5. After the last attempts at resistance, President MacMahon was forced to resign in 1879. The path was now definitively clear for the “Third Republic,” which still had to endure difficult crises, such as those continually produced by the nature of a “libertarian” system that grants individuals ample space. However, with the help of half the world, it survived the First World War intact, only to collapse with Hitler’s victory in 1940.

b) Russia: The “Democratic Period” of 1917 and the “October Revolution”

Of all the states that fought in the First World War, Russia had the most unmistakable enemy and the clearest goals, yet it found itself in the most difficult situation. The enemy was Austria-Hungary, which prevented Russia from becoming the protector of all the Christian states of the Balkans and thus the undisputed preponderant power of this universal religion; its goal was the conquest of the Straits and thus of Constantinople; the difficulty of the situation arose from Russia fighting alone against two great powers that, however, could only commit a portion of their forces to the eastern theater of war. France had the British Expeditionary Force on its territory, and Italy, after its declaration of war on Austria in May 1915, received extensive assistance from its allies, but Russia, after the failure to breach the Dardanelles, was virtually cut off from its allies. It was also felt that the defeat in the war with Japan in 1904/1905 and the events of the revolutionary era that followed were a very heavy burden; Prime minister Stoylpin’s attempt to modernize the collectivist agrarian structure of the community (”mir”) and transition to an individualistic system had achieved promising, but also shocking, beginnings. Severe defeats in East Prussia clouded the beginning of the war, yet they were offset by considerable successes against the Austrians in Galicia. At times, the Russians seemed to be advancing through the Carpathians into the deep Hungarian plain. But from the time of the Gorlice Breach, in which von Seeckt, the future commander-in-chief of the Weimar Republic’s army, played a prominent role, the Russian armies were increasingly pushed back through Warsaw to the east, and the death toll among the mostly illiterate peasant soldiers was enormous.

Thus, in March 1917, the “February Revolution” (according to the old calendar) took place. Much more than the French uprising of September 1870, it presented two contradictory aspects: it was a revolution of will for the continuation of the war, and it simultaneously enabled the resistance of the great masses of the people against this continuation. The “Provisional Government,” which was formed in St. Petersburg on the basis of a parliamentary committee, could not and would not prevent the overthrow of the Tsar and the dynasty and attempted to deduce from the end of “Despotism” the certainty that Russia, as a genuine part of the “democratic world,” in agreement with France, Great Britain, Italy, and the USA, would achieve a complete triumph over the remaining “Despotisms” in Germany and Austria. More powerful than this government, however, was the “Council of Workers and Soldiers,” which had been established at the same time. This Council radically undermined the cohesion and discipline of the army by granting, with its “Order No. 1,” to all the soldiers’ committees that were to be formed everywhere, such a degree of power that it pushed officers and even army leaders to receive orders instead of giving them. It is astonishing that this army, increasingly weakened by desertions and refusal of orders, still managed to win considerable victories in June 1917, which, however, could not be transformed into lasting successes. And at this point, it was no longer possible to stop it: in many places, officers were arrested or killed, and at least their epaulettes were stripped from them; many of the peasant soldiers expected the main demand of the confiscation and distribution of the aristocrats’ land to be fulfilled at home, and deserted en masse to return to their villages at an opportune time. But even in many of the country’s major and minor cities, a sort of spontaneous “popular revolution” took place, in which the many social tensions often manifested themselves in bloody and atrocious ways.

Alexandra Rachmanova, a doctor’s daughter, recalled many of these episodes in her diary, which she published after emigrating and which greatly contributed to conveying a terrible image in the West of this first popular revolution, still largely disorganized. As early as 1916, she recorded cries such as “Vengeance for all, all the bourgeois, all the satiated, all the rich, all the parasites!... Death to all, Death!” Shortly thereafter, the city was filled with soldiers and deserters shouting: “We don’t care about victory... we want peace... peace... To hell with the provisional government, only workers’ and soldiers’ councils will bring us peace.” In September 1917, her city was dominated by “a dehumanized, drunken mob,” and hateful outbursts could be heard everywhere, with expressions like: “To hell with the Burzhus! Break their faces! Let’s get them out of their tents! Let’s finish with them! Hang them! Shoot them!” A mill owner, whom he refused a wage increase, was thrown into the mill by his workers, where he was crushed piece by piece. But as late as April, Alexandra received a letter from her fiancé, officer cadet Vadim, who wrote from Petersburg: “I will never forget this splendid day. We officer cadets marched in proud columns through the city, singing and playing musical games, and all around the people greeted us.”6

We can characterize the almost omnipresent undercurrent of this “February Revolution” with these words: “A popular insurrection with the applause of a large part of the educated classes and with radically contrasting expectations.”

But the real policy pursued in the capital, Petrograd, was twofold. After the supporters of the “victorious peace” had been ousted from government in March, they united in the desire to reach an agreement with the Allies, but also with the enemy powers, on a “peace without annexations and without indemnities.” The fall of tsarism was widely regarded as a “peaceful revolution” that created a strong positive impression. But the popular uprising aimed for an unconditional peaceful conclusion, that is, a separate peace with the Central Powers. Therefore, the Allies, but also the internal political forces, were very uneasy. Initially, these forces were certainly still united; there was no fundamental conflict between the parties now clearly forming: from the right-wing Octobrists and the Constitutional Democrats (”Cadets”) to the left-wing Peasant Party of the Social Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats, who had differentiated between minority (”Mensheviks”) and majority (”Bolsheviks”). Everyone, initially even the Bolsheviks, was convinced that the governing coalition of socialists and “bourgeois” was the right one, since not the introduction of socialism, but the establishment of a “bourgeois democracy” was on the world agenda for Russia. However, doubts were growing as to whether this multi-party system, oriented towards the “Western” model under the banner of the “dual dominion” of government and councils, was actually capable of concluding the long-awaited peace in agreement with the allies.

One man raised this very doubt, against all politicians, but in agreement with a strong current within the people, to the point of even turning it into a negative certainty: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the undisputed leader of the Bolsheviks, who had spent the war years in Swiss exile and had already called for the transformation of the world war into a civil war. On April 3, he returned to Petrograd and, initially through the power of his convictions and his speeches, won over his party to a policy of bitter hostility toward the Provisional Government and the socialists’ collaboration with “the bourgeoisie.” He resisted the reproaches leveled against him even from Georgy Plekhanov, the “father of Russian Marxism,” who accused him of being an agent of Germany, since he could not have returned “in the sealed carriage” to Russia without the consent of the enemy imperialists. He did not give up after the failure of the ill-prepared putsch undertaken in July by the Bolsheviks against the socialist Kerensky government, even though he had to flee to Finland and go into hiding. Shortly beforehand, he had clashed sharply with Kerensky, when, in front of a large audience, he responded to a question by saying the Bolsheviks were ready to seize complete power. Horrifying the head of the government, who lived in socialist-humanitarian traditions, he added that his party would completely expropriate the capitalists responsible for the war, leaving them little more than bast shoes to live on. However, he and his party quickly regained respect and visibility, because Cossack General Kornilov, supreme commander of the army, marched troops against the capital at the end of August—apparently with Kerensky’s agreement—to put an end to the spreading anarchy and the progressive dissolution of the army. Now yesterday’s rebels were recognized by the entire left as “defenders of the revolution,” while all developments, it seemed, were pushing toward the second, “socialist” revolution, which would dissolve the alliance with “the bourgeoisie,” hold elections to the National Assembly, grant land to the peasants in accordance with the Social Revolutionaries’ program, and conclude a final peace. However, the revolutionaries’ hopes were not at all focused on absolute Bolshevik power, but on a government “of all socialist parties.” There was little doubt that the upcoming Second All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, scheduled to begin on October 26, would fulfill these desires of the masses and make Russia a “socialist democracy.”

However, on October 10, Lenin, having returned incognito from Finland, imposed, against the obvious and initially almost universal desire of the masses, at a meeting of twelve members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, despite the resistance of his close collaborators Zinoviev and Kamenev, the decision not to wait for the start of the congress and to seize power by force. Lenin’s decision likely arose from a desire for personal power and the conviction that a coalition of socialist parties with very different goals and character would be incapable of truly ending the war and introducing socialism in the service of the “world revolution.” Capitalizing on widespread fears of the dangers to the revolution from the German troops, who had advanced far, and the “reactionary” government, the Bolsheviks now prepared a coup against the “all-socialist” government that was being formed, which later earned the name “The Great October Socialist Revolution” and was soon labeled a “counterrevolution” by its socialist opponents. No one, however, could doubt that the decrees “On Peace” and “On Land and Soil,” signed on October 26 by Lenin, “Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars,” fulfilled the wishes of the masses and secured the Bolsheviks (who initially welcomed the “Left Social Revolutionaries” into their government) the overwhelming majority of popular support. However, serious warnings came from the party leadership itself: only terror could establish absolute rule, and the Allies declared the Bolsheviks traitors, while the Germans saw them as allies. Internal political enemies seemed to regain the upper hand when the Bolsheviks lost a minority in the National Assembly elections. However, Lenin had the “Cadets,” his main opponents, declared “proscribed” in December, violently closed the National Assembly in January, and in March concluded the separate Peace of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans—again against stiff resistance from his own ranks. This was an admission of defeat, yet it brought only a fleeting peace, as both the members and followers of the dissolved National Assembly and the Allies waged civil war against the party, which in countless declarations had made itself known as the party of international civil war or “world revolution.”7

Both the facts and the demands were bound to arouse not only the strongest emotions in the countries waging the war. It had long been clear that this war was not only not a “fresh and cheerful war,” as it had initially been perceived, especially in Germany, but that it could no longer be considered an “element in the divine world order,” because in no other war in world history had several million soldiers fallen and many hundreds of thousands of civilians died of starvation, including many children. The view that modern, technological warfare and the modern civilization of human coexistence were incompatible was already widespread. Therefore, in Russia and in large parts of the rest of the world, the “October Revolution” was seen as the victory of the most resolute peace party, accompanied by a combination of such powerful emotions as had probably never before been seen on earth.

For a moment we can ignore the temporal course of events if we are to sketch this enthusiasm in broad terms, since these feelings in their essence did not change when the war ended and hopes for the future seemed to have found a better foundation.

John Reed, an American journalist who had followed the development of the upheaval with great sympathy in Petrograd and who in 1920 published his account of the Ten Days That Shook the World with great success, describes his experiences during the first session of the Congress of Soviets, at which Lenin published the decrees “On Peace” and “On Land and Soil,” in the following words: Suddenly, by common impulse, we found ourselves on our feet, mumbling together into the smooth lifting unison of the Internationale. A grizzled old soldier was sobbing like a child. Alexandra Kollontai rapidly winked the tears back. The immense sound rolled through the hall, burst windows and doors and seared into the quiet sky. “The war is over! The war is over!” said a young workman near me, his face shining. And when it was over, as we stood there in a kind of awkward hush, some one in the back of the room shouted, “Comrades! Let us remember those who have died for liberty!” So we began to sing the Funeral March, that slow, melancholy and yet triumphant chant, so Russian and so moving. The Internationale is an alien air, after all. The Funeral March seemed the very soul of those dark masses whose delegates sat in this hall, building from their obscure visions a new Russia—and perhaps more.

You fell in the fatal fight
For the liberty of the people, for the honour of the people…
You gave up your lives and everything dear to you,
You suffered in horrible prisons,
You went to exile in chains…

Without a word you carried your chains because you could not ignore your suffering brothers,
Because you believed that justice is stronger than the sword…
The time will come when your surrendered life will count
That time is near; when tyranny falls the people will rise, great and free!
Farewell, brothers, you chose a noble path,

You are followed by the new and fresh army ready to die and to suffer…
Farewell, brothers, you chose a noble path,
At your grave we swear to fight, to work for freedom and the people’s happiness…8

Later, after the German collapse, a German comrade gave a speech at a crowded prisoner-of-war meeting in Kiel, according to a local newspaper report, saying, among other things: “Brothers, as the sun rises in the East, so freedom has blossomed in Russia... Russia, to you belongs the honor and glory. Russia, you have annihilated this terrible militarism, this atrocious capitalism... Now Germany too is a socialist republic, and we hope that the international proletariat will annihilate international capitalism. Then the world will be free, then it will be possible to found a fraternal league of all the peoples of the world...”9 He concluded, amidst thunderous applause, with an enthusiastic appeal to tear down all border posts and establish a homeland for humanity.

Ultimately, the manifestos, appeals, and directives that the first congress of the new, Third International approved in early 1919 said nothing different—a small group of ragged, half-starved men and women, some of whom had found, amidst immense hardship and danger, their way to Moscow through a Russia plunged into civil war. Formulated by Nikolai Bukharin, the “Directives of the Communist International” heralded the beginning of an entirely new period in world history: “...The imperialist war is being transformed into civil war. A new era has dawned, the era of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration, the era of the communist revolution of the proletariat... It must shatter the rule of capital, make war impossible, annihilate the boundaries of states, transform the world into a community working for itself, achieve the brotherhood and liberation of all peoples...” To those assembled, this aim appeared to be nothing other than the logical consequence of all world history, certainly only of its genuine revolutionary traditions, from which Social Democracy was energetically excluded: “Rejecting the mediocrity, falsity, and decay of the surviving official socialist parties, we, Communists gathered in the Third International, see ourselves as the direct continuators of the heroic efforts and martyrdom of a long series of revolutionary traditions, from Babeuf to Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg.”10 We could cite countless other testimonies to a “belief” that in the early postwar years had nothing of equal force. A single sentence from the 1920 congress report might suffice: “Civil war is the order of the day throughout the world. Its banner is the Soviet power... working men and women. There is only one sign on earth worth fighting and dying for: that sign is the Communist International!”11

Indeed, no other event in the twentieth century was capable of sparking such enthusiasm and such great hopes as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. No other event was built on such a solid foundation of largely antecedent convictions and hypotheses, namely, on the global socialist movement and the doctrine of Karl Marx, which could in turn draw on age-old sensations and ideas. In this sense, it truly expressed a “thought of humanity,” and it can be considered the fundamental event of the twentieth century. But it quickly became clear that this party was not exclusively the “great party of peace,” that it would have to become the “great party of (civil) war” if it did not succeed in “introducing socialism” throughout Europe—as it had clearly and officially promised in 1919. Lenin, in 1922, shortly before his death, wrote to Gorky, who had expressed his concern about the arrests and expulsions of intellectuals known as Nikolai Berdyaev: “For these gentlemen, the imperialist war with its ten million dead is a good thing, which must be defended... On the other hand, the deaths of several hundred thousand men in a just civil war against the landowners and capitalists infuriate them... In reality, the so-called intellectuals, these lackeys of capital, who delude themselves into thinking they are the brains of the nation, are merely its excrement.”12 And this party of the great peace and the last war expanded its concept of the enemy so broadly that it included not only “the militarists,” “capitalism,” and “the bourgeoisie,” but even the masters of yesterday, the most famous socialists, who like Karl Kautsky and George Plekhanov had become “defenders of the fatherland.” It was therefore a declaration of war on “the whole world,” just as the determination of positive objectives involved that universal tendency that today is called “globalization” or even “democratization.”

It is highly probable that such a comprehensive undertaking is possible only if it is based not on prudent calculations and realistic assessments, but on a goal that transcends all present reality and an exorbitant hope—in other words, if “utopia,” which is entirely absent from everyday life and which constitutes that “eternal thought of humanity,” is brought into play. It is legitimate and inevitable to ask whether even Lenin, who as a politician and statesman could make such realistic and perceptive judgments, was ultimately enthused and driven by the idea of ​​Utopia.

The clearest answer is given to us by his work State and Revolution, written on the eve of the October events. In it, he writes that modern development has simplified all social functions to such an extent that they are accessible to anyone who is not illiterate. Therefore, the specific functions of certain groups of people are no longer necessary, and in the future, people will respect the rules “preached for millennia” without the presence of that coercive apparatus called the “State.” Everyone will therefore quickly become accustomed to seeing everyone, even the cooks, participating in the leadership of the community. Precisely for this reason, “no one governs.”13 It is nothing other than Babeuf’s community without a fixed division of labor, without policemen and executioners, without immorality and crime, which for Lenin too constitutes the goal of world history: the fundamental utopian thought of the “eternal left.” And the intermediate stages, or descriptions of the final stage, which Lenin, like Marx, usually shies away from, also have a utopian character: as early as July 1918, he wrote in “Pravda” that the Russian communists could consider themselves happy to “have been the first to defeat the wild beast of capitalism, which was suffocating the earth in blood.”14 Some time later he sees the future of the world in these terms: “we”, after the definitive final triumph, “will build public latrines of gold”, to show all men what that metal, which has played such an important and fateful role in history, has deserved.15

But Lenin, less than other socialists, could have imagined that the declaration of the enemy, in ideal terms, would lead world history down a simple and enlightening path. For Marx, the “capitalist system” was the enemy, and he conceived of history as the great rescuer who, on the basis of fully developed capitalism, would reduce the number of entrepreneurs and money-owners in Europe to such an extent that the overwhelming majority of proletarians would be able to overthrow the system and introduce socialism without resorting to extensive violence. Nevertheless, Lenin had already written an essay before the World War on “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia,” in which he envisioned an alliance between the oppressed countries of Asia and the European proletariat, which would give “the world revolution” a completely different course than Marx had envisioned. And hadn’t the young Lenin already scandalized all orthodox Marxists by wanting to build the Russian Social Democratic Party as a “stable organization of leaders,” of professional revolutionaries, even though it was clear to him at this time that in Russia it was a question of introducing “bourgeois democracy” and ensuring that capitalism developed in a “European” and not an “Asiatic” way?

Was not Lenin’s Marxism radically revisionist and was not Lenin an unscrupulous ruler who, as Gorky argued in 1918, had an “openly despotic, devoid of compassion” relationship with the popular masses?16 Or perhaps his constant push for more terror, for larger-scale executions, for the merciless annihilation of the “bourgeois” and the “enemies of the people” had, in the first instance, another motive: the memory of the Paris Commune, which had behaved too indulgently towards its enemies and had therefore been the victim of an enormous bloodbath?

Whatever answer one gives to this question, one thing is certain: the Bolshevik revolution was not only an incomparably enthusiastic and thrilling revolution, but it was also the terrifying upheaval par excellence.

What moved in the final days of October to resist the “illegal and counterrevolutionary insurrection” was crushed with ruthless resolve, and there was no precedent for an entire party to declare itself “criminal.” In just a few months, the Cheka, founded in January 1918 and placed under the command of the Pole Dzerzhinsky, executed far more men—officers, bourgeois, and anarchists—than the tsarist Okharan had eliminated in decades. It soon became clear that the “Red Terror” encouraged the popular insurrection of the more recent past and systematized it, aiming at the annihilation of entire social groups. This annihilation was indeed desirable based on Marxist principles, albeit reconceived in an entirely different way. For example, a Cheka newspaper read: “We reject the old systems of morality and ‘humanity.’ They were invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress the ‘lower classes’ and exploit them. Our morality has no models, and our humanity is absolute, for it is based on a new ideal: the destruction of every form of oppression and violence. We are permitted everything, for we are the first in the world to raise the sword, not to oppress and enslave, but to free humanity from its chains... Blood? It can flow like rivers! For only blood can transform the black flag of the pirate bourgeoisie into a red flag, the flag of revolution...”17 When on August 30, 1918, two left-leaning attackers (of Jewish origin) fired shots in St. Petersburg at Urychsky, the head of the Cheka, and in Moscow at Lenin, in avenging the hangings of the Cheka and the dissolution of the National Assembly, Urychsky was killed and Lenin was wounded. At this point, not only did a storm of revenge erupt across the country against officials and bourgeois, chanting “For one of us, a thousand of you must die,” but the government legalized and radicalized these actions with its “Decree on Red Terror.” It wasn’t long before Lenin himself called for the “death” of the large class of kulaks, the wealthiest peasants, and spoke of “the dogs and pigs of the dying bourgeoisie.” A sympathetic German observer, Alfons Paquet, correspondent for the “Frankfurter Zeitung”, wrote full of indignation about the “atrocities” taking place in Russia, about the “annihilation of an entire social class”, and coined the concept of “Lenin’s totalitarianism”.18

On the other hand, Hans Vorst, the correspondent of the “Berliner Tageblatt”, particularly highlighted the fate of the countless, completely innocent hostages, who were shot in their thousands, indeed tens of thousands.19 Even in Germany, the public was thus very well informed about the absolutely unprecedented events taking place in Russia. It was a true “cultural rupture,” as “absolutists” had seized power. Their openly proclaimed ultimate goals could inspire enthusiasm, and their concrete actions demonstrated that, when one attempts to eradicate all inhumanity in the spirit of the age-old utopia, extreme inhumanity is the consequence.20 In mid-1918, General Alekseev, Kornilov’s former representative who had fled Moscow, announced: if the Bolsheviks continue to arrest and kill citizens, in 60 years not a single Jew in Russia will come out of this alive.21 In fact, he could rely on the universally recognized and easily understood truth that members of the “foreign peoples” - Jews, Latvians, Georgians - had played and continued to play in the Bolshevik revolution a very surprising role, largely disproportionate to their actual numbers.22 But isolating the Jews and threatening reprisals solely for their sake was even less justifiable than the corresponding accusation of collective guilt leveled by the Bolsheviks against the Burzhui. But since the Jews had a much longer and more significant history than the Latvians or Georgians, it could not be ruled out from the outset that the absolutists for the annihilation of capitalism and entrepreneurs would find themselves facing the new absolutists for the annihilation of the Jews as enemies. Had this possibility become a reality, the entire European history of the following period could have been understood as the struggle between two hostile absolutisms, to the extent that it would certainly have been possible to push this struggle to the extreme, highlighting merely political events or everyday occurrences.

In 1843 in many places of the “German Confederation” many feasts were held to remember the “Treaty of Verdun” of 843 which had divided the Carolingian Empire between the three sons of Louis the Pious. Louis “the German” had then obtained the eastern part and all of that looked sufficient enough to proudly remember the millenarian existence of a German state. Of course, those who mantained alive the memory and desired to reawaken it were mostly liberals and to do so they didn’t address the past but the future, because they wanted to create a unitarian Germany which should have had very few analogies with that “German Confederation” created in 1815 with its 35 sovreign prince and its four free cities, This German Confederation was certainly an unusual formation, far from the unitary character of a “modern Nation state” like France and England were, which contained in itself Prussia and Austria, two great rival powers, and which had as members three foreign kings which exercised the “feudal” lordship over three of its states: the king of England as king of Hannover, the king of the Netherlands as Grand Duke of Luxemburg and the king of Denmark ad Duke of Holstein. The liberal patriots were thus above all scandalized by the impotence of this state formation in terms of foreign policy. Nonetheless, if it had been attacked as such and the two hegemonic powers had done their duty it would have demonstrated, at least potentially, their superiority in face of the attack from every coalition of other European States. That German Confederation could have been called “force of european peace” and almost none of those patriots would have confessed to instead wanting to create a “war power”. Of course, important parts of the statal territories of Prussia and Austria were not part of the “German Confederation”: eastern and western Prussia for example or Lombardy and Veneto, and so it was not exluded that the German Confederation would have been involved in war conflicts. Therefore one could not blame the concerns and desires of those who in 1843 celebrated the millenium, presumed or such, of Germany.

But they were in front of another contradiction.
Was it possible to qualify in general as “german” the Western Frankish empire - or was it not rather a casual rally of ethnic groups and regions organized under the feudal law, an Empire of Franks, Saxons, Bavarians under dukes, counts and many other nobles of their ethnicity? But for how much these man certainly felt themselves much more members of a respublica christiana than “germans”, nonetheless we can’t contest that the linguistic barrier between the eastern and western frankish regions was solidified by the year 1000 and by 919 saxon kings had dominion over the empire. We must also consider that during the rest of the Middle ages the Popes in Rome had crowned only german kings as “Holy Roman Emperors”, and near the end of the Middle Ages, when the era of imperial splendor had long passed, the formula “Of the German Nation” was fairly often added to the title of “Holy Roman Empire”.

If we can then assign to the German confederation after 1815 a markedly “european” character, it also applies to the Empire of the centuries starting from the second millenium. The Empire considered itself as a continuation of the Roman Empire of antiquity and included great parts of Italy and with Burgundy even parts of eastern France. Therefore all of those markers that must be considered “commonly europeans” were charateristics to it.

Between those characteristics the distinction between Papacy and Empire cannot be missing, a supreme “spiritual” power and a supreme “temporal” power. The two powers could affirm themselves in the course of long and heavy struggles their independence, but they also weakened each other, so much that independent states could be born, like France and England which recognized to the Emperor, at most, an honorifical predominance. As a consequence in western and central Europe a unity or a mixiture of the two supreme powers never occured, unlike in both Byzantium, the “Eastern Rome”, and in Islam and later in Russia. The co-presence of a strong regal power and a self-conscious warrior aristocracy, which did not let itself reduce to a nobility by merit of service, like it happened later in Russia, constituted another difference which derived from the times of the barbarian invasions. Not less important and singular was the existence of relativly independent cities, that self-administered themselves, in which the ones who governed were not aristocrats but the great commerical bourgeoisie or the patriciate. Both in Germany and in Italy such cities played an important role while their development in France was significantly hindered by the growing power of the monarchy. The cities of “Hansa” had long been even politically an authentic great power. In all of the States the presence of the jews was very visible, a group of non christians which had an importance that was difficult to evaluate. The dominant religion had a very special relationship with them, partly hostile, partly respectful and reverent, In many places the jews were from time to time persecuted, in fact hunted and nevertheless esteemed precisely from those who had the political power, as representatives of the monetarian economy which was gradually gaining ground. In any case they were not, as it happened in islamic countries, simple “protected” (“dhimmni”).

Already towards the end of the Middle ages “Europe” was therefore an articulate system of powers, of States and of classes more rich than any other great area on earth. But exactly a “system” that, regardless of its differences and the resulting struggles and wars , mantained a considerable unitary structure, so much that the most used name to define it continued being that of “Christianity”. Only through the Reformation this system became pluriconfessional since with luterans, calvinists and catholics it showed even on a dogmatic plane diverse shapes of the christian faith .

In Germany, the original country of the Reformation, this pluriconfessional character appeared more marked than in any other place and right here, in 1555, the religious peace of Augusta was concluded. For the first time this peace made reality that concept of “tolerance” which until then had mostly been proscribed.

Of course, the absolute pretense of truth and domination, the opposite of tolerance, characteristic of the single denominations, dominated the following decades of religious and confessional wars that followed. In particular the absolutly catholic Spain of Philipp II became the flag bearer of the old unity of the catholic West after the conquering muslim and the jews were kicked out. But it could not even tame the Netherlands in the north, the protestant part of its own empire, and its attempt to subdue England, the hegemon power of protestant States, failed in 1588 with the defeat of the Armada. Within Germany the catholics, the lutherans and the calvinists formed their own states under the principle of cuius regio eius religio. Protestant Brandenburg was hostile to catholic Austria in a way that could not or would not sever from the unity of the “Roman empire of the German nation”. However this own empire demonstrated its total impotence when in the Thirty Years’ War foreign powers conducted, on german soil, their wars more for power politics reasons than religious reasons and devasted the country in such a way that the trauma lasted for many centuries. France remained a pluriconfessional country only for a limited time and under Louis XIV, with the renunciation of the Edict of Nantes and the end of tolerance for the calvinists, it became again a unitarian catholic State. However, the Brandenburg-Prussian military state itself, after the Hohenzollern’s conversion to calvinism, made tolerance the fundamental law of the State (in regard of the lutheran population) and was passionately considered from many of the “Enlighteners” oppressed in absolutist France, last but not least Voltaire, as a model to imitate. The “Age of Enlightenment” therefore was not born in France or in England only because of the abhorrence for the religious wars but also because of the sensibilities of those spirits which, following the experience of competing confessional truth claims, were looking for an intermediate space, that was later called “liberal”. In this way great spirits, like Newton and Leibniz, were able to move on to an autonomous science, released from the bond with theology, which became a new fundamental characteristic common to all of Europe, even if very different in its manifestations. Furthermore from 1760 there were the beginnings of that “Industrial Revolution” which at first was considered an “english” phenomenon, but then, after the conquest of South and North America by the Spanish, the Portuguese and the English, it took a further step becoming for 150 years one of the most important factor of the “global european dominion”.

In comparision, how decrepit and mortally sick appeared the “Roman empire of the German nation”, whose Habsburg emperor resided in Vienna around 1800! It was Napoleon Bonaparte, the son, the heir and winner of the French Revolution, that in 1806 brought this Empire to the miserable end of the deposition of the imperial crown by Francis II, which from now on will be called “Austrian emperor”. And nonetheless, in 1815, this empire, after the defeat of Napoleon, which for a certain period seemed to become the only lord of a unified Europe, was reborn in a certain way in the form of the “German league”. And if it could have taken its last chance, after the failure of the european revolutions of 1848/49, it could have been certainly said to be “rejuvenated” and “full of future”. In fact in august of 1863, the austrian emperor Franz Joseph, impressed both by the italian unification, just achieved by Cavour and the House of Savoy, and the German force of the national movement, invited all the german princes to Frankfurt in order to participate to a “Diet of princes”, in which decisions about the formation of a German league in a confederation under the leadership of Austria and Prussia were to be held. This confederation would have been more than a league of States and less than a federal State - it would have, ante festum, constitued something analogous to our “European Union” a century after. All the german princes accepted the invite and even Wilhelm I, king of Prussia, was very inclined to do the same. But Otto von Bismarck, its newly appointed Minister President, which in the “constitutional conflict” was attacked very harshly by the liberals on the permanent presence of a “royal army”, in the end imposed the refusal of the invite, threatening otherwise his resignation. In this way Germany chose a direction which eliminated the lasts remains of that “european path” and made it become, even also with some incisive modifications, a national State like France, England and Italy.

Bismarck, with three wars, that in fact, even if not all de jure, were three aggressions, established a prussian predominance on “Little Germany” expelling Austria from Germany. At first he, allied to Austria, conquered the Land of Schleswig, which belonged to the danish crown but was not juridically “incorporated”. He then used the differences on the politic of occupation in order to conclude an aggression path with Italy against Austria. He applied the postulate of the Revolution of 1848, when he proposed to the Frankfurt parliament to start the reformation of the German League with popular elections on the base of universal suffrage, conferring to a german parliament an important role. In this way he made his own one of the principal requests of the internal opposition and attracted the reproach of the old prussian conservatives for having made an alliance with “the revolution” and having acted against the principles of legitism. So Bismarck unleashed a massive german civil war in which Prussia not only confronted itself with Austria, as the old fortress of the German League, but also with the four kingdoms of Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and Hannover and then the smaller southern States. The decision was made on july 3rd at Königgrätz with the victory of the prussian army under general Von Moltke, chief of the general staff, over the austrians led by general Benedek. But Bismarck also imposed himself against the victorious enthusiasm of the generals and even against the desire of his kings by signing with Austria the magnanimous peace of Prague, which envisioned as a possibility a future reconciliation. On the contrary Bismarck was very harsh with his northen german adversaries, in particulary Hannover. When the Northen German League was founded , with the collaboration of the Parliament, elected in 1867 under universal, equal and direct suffrage, it could have been said that Bismarck had led the revolution of 1848 to realize one of its principal objectives, even if under the service of the prussian State; At the same time, however, he had forced the Prussian conservatives, whose advocate he had once been, to renounce their fundamental intention of the unlimited preservation of Prussia and its traditional royal constitution. Nevertheless, by annihilating and annexing three German states, including the Kingdom of Hanover, for Prussia’s benefit, he had followed the traditions of Frederick the Great to the fullest. Bismarck’s achievement was thus a paradoxical synthesis between the old and the new, the traditional and the future, “reaction” and “revolution.” Precisely for this reason he was the object of opposing criticisms from the right and the left: his regime was in fact a “Bonapartist” regime, since since the time of the French Revolution only Napoleon III made skillfully manipulated universal suffrage the foundation of his “reactionary” rule by the military and the landowners east of the Elbe; his “regional parliament” continued to be elected with the “suffrage of the three classes”.

Bismarck waged his third war, the “German War,” against Napoleon III, just as Cavour had waged the “Italian” War against Austria with Napoleon ten years earlier. The result of the surprisingly rapid and complete victory, to which the southern German states had also made a significant contribution, was the foundation of the “German Empire.” On January 18, 1871, the Prussian King Wilhelm I was acclaimed Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Thus was completed the small German nation-state, which, unlike the Habsburg state of Austria-Hungary, included only Germans—with the exception of the Poles in the eastern Prussian provinces and the Danes in Northern Schleswig. Then there was the exceptional case of Alsace-Lorraine, which for the most part was German-speaking and historically German, but which had turned politically to France since the French Revolution. These minorities, however, were not large enough and strong enough to spark “nationality struggles” and they too participated in the extraordinary economic development experienced by unified Germany despite some temporary crises. This development, not least a consequence of the French war reparations of five billion francs, transformed Germany within three decades, in the estimation of contemporaries, into an “America on European soil”, which in industrial achievement was no longer inferior to England.

Only modest remnants remained that recalled the “European” character of the old Empire and the German League: the dignity of the emperor and the name of the “empire”, which were therefore for a long time still felt to be inorganic and not truly credible1. The federal structure of the Reich state granted Bavaria in particular important privileges and formally placed the “Federal Council” as the governing body above the Parliament, which had only limited rights and could not overthrow the Reich Chancellor.

The founding of Bismarck’s Reich was undoubtedly a world-historical event of the first order, and Prime Minister Disraeli declared it more important and potentially more fraught with consequences than the French Revolution itself. Bismarck’s Germany was almost universally credited with a “semi-hegemonic position” on the European continent. As president of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, which averted the threat of war between Russia and England and resolved numerous other European problems, he proclaimed his leadership role to all his collaborators. However, Bismarck himself was filled with grave doubts about the future of his Reich: as early as 1872, he told an acquaintance of a dream in which he saw numerous unsightly stains on the map of Germany, and toward the end of his life, he said he saw a bleak future for Germany.

In the spirit of the constitutional state, Catholics, the representatives of that older idea of ​​Germany, also had to be given a voice. They had now become a minority, and a disadvantaged one at that, and initially, their very situation was the main source of his doubts. The Catholics founded the Centre, their own party, in a defensive reaction that was easily understandable, especially since many Protestants were proud of the “Evangelical Empire” of the Hohenzollerns. However, Bismarck considered the political action of a religious denomination through the formation of its own party to be illegitimate in principle. The Kulturkampf, the great clash between the state and the Catholic Church, however, only came about because the First Vatican Council in 1870 proclaimed the new dogma of “Papal Infallibility” (for solemn decisions on matters of faith). All liberals, even those in Catholic states like Austria and Bavaria, saw the basic principles of the modern, secularized state in jeopardy. Not only state measures, but also the attacks of liberal journalism and the press—which was often already branded “Jewish”—united almost all Catholics into an electoral bloc led by Ludwig Windthorst. Bismarck soon considered a “compromise,” which was achieved with the help of Leo XIII, the new pope. Thus, it became possible for the Catholic (liberal) Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst to become Reich Chancellor in 1894, and the Zentrum party to become the governing party shortly thereafter. Of course, Catholics for the most part continued to feel discriminated against in terms of civil rights.

The Social Democratic Party, which had the absolute ambition to make radical changes and not share power with others, was incompatible with the constitutional state for Bismarck and constituted for him the measure of his willingness to make peace. This party, which considered itself the “workers’ movement,” but which was increasingly distancing itself from Lassalle’s old workers’ party and fully embracing the doctrine of Marxism, wanted to conquer political power and replace “a mortal enemy” of bourgeois society. This doctrine of the opposition between the workers’ party and the “reactionary class state” remained officially in force until the outbreak of World War II. Bismarck quickly became convinced that he had to defend his state against a world-historical danger and that the crucial issue should not be resolved “in a superficial manner.” After several dubious attempts on the Kaiser’s life, he passed the “Socialist Law,” which remained in effect from 1878 to 1890 and severely hampered the party’s activity without preventing its participation in elections. The failure of this law, no less than the accession to the throne of the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, was one of the causes of Bismarck’s downfall in 1890. The party subsequently continued to increase its support, becoming the strongest German party in the 1912 Reichstag elections and the most important socialist party in the world. At this point, “Reformist” tendencies emerged at the heart of the party, which did not exclude the conclusion of a peace between the party and the state, similar to the one signed between the Center and the state. Similar things can be said for the left-liberal party of the “Progressivists” or “Liberals,” the third party “hostile to the Reich” led by Eugen Richter.

Bismarck had early established the broad lines of the Reich’s foreign policy, and they remained valid, albeit with some important modifications, after his resignation. Had Bismarck conceived of the German Reich as a nation-state with “nationalist” or irredentist pretensions, similar to Italy and Serbia, he would have concluded a solid alliance with Russia and abandoned Austria to the fate of disintegration into its national components, to the point that the “Greater Germany” of many revolutionaries in 1848 would have emerged. Had he been a liberal, he would have aimed for a safe compromise with Great Britain, which around 1900 seemed poised to attack. But he concluded the “Triple Alliance” with Austria and Italy, which moved the two “German powers” from a “closer” alliance to a “broader” one that had already been considered in 1848. In doing so, however, he encouraged, against his will, the formation of an alliance between republican France and absolutist Russia. England approached this alliance, influenced by the naval construction encouraged by Wilhelm II and, no doubt, by Germany’s astonishing industrial development. Thus, Germany, too, could feel “encircled” as the “Central Power” of continental Europe, and despite its economic dynamism and military strength, it objectively found itself in a position of struggle to “play the game,” since Russia, Great Britain, the USA, and Japan, and even France, were increasingly intervening as “imperialist” powers in the world, while Germany had only a modest colonial possession.

This Germany, however, despite its internal tensions and despite the often rash speeches and statements of its Kaiser, was indicated as the peaceful European power - and Wilhelm II himself was celebrated as the “Kaiser of peace” -, since in the four decades and more of its existence it had not conducted nor been involved in serious colonial wars like Great Britain and France2. Nowhere was there any doubt that Germany was among the “leading cultural states,” given the achievements of its scholars. And the 1914 World War did not break out, as many anti-imperialists and socialists had prophesied, because of the construction of the “Baghdad Road” through Germany, but because of a terrorist attack against Austria in the Balkans, whose geographical map had shortly before been profoundly altered by the war of aggression waged by the small “Christian states” against Turkey.

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, successor to the throne, and his wife on June 28, 1914, sparked widespread indignation throughout Europe. It’s likely that support would have outweighed criticism had the Austrians, in retaliation, occupied Belgrade and, at the same time, preempted their later declaration that they did not intend to annex any part of Serbia. But such a coup would not have solved the fundamental problem, since the supranational Danube Monarchy was confronted by the irredentist national state. The awareness of being on the historically defeated side in the struggle against the “revolutionary” forces of nationalism and democracy likely contributed to the Austrian government’s protracted delay. It let the favorable moment pass and only addressed Serbia on July 23 that ultimatum, which, due to its extensive demands, now aroused indignation, or at least scandal, almost everywhere. The support of the Germans had been secured, and they certainly pushed for rapid action in vain, so as not to lose control of the possibility of localizing the conflict, since an intervention by Russia in favor of the “Serbian brothers” could not be excluded, and then very probably the automatic mechanisms of the opposing alliance systems would have been triggered.

And this is exactly what happened, even though it shouldn’t have happened, and on August 4th Europe found itself in the First World War, which immediately became a “war of wars”, starting with the Russo-Turkish War as a link in a long chain up to the German-British War, an unprecedented clash3. An age-old rule immediately became valid, as soon as total mobilization resulted in the “encirclement” of Germany. A power surrounded on two or even three sides by equally powerful enemies can only successfully defend itself by attacking, whether through a preventive war or a genuine defensive war. However, the strategic plan of von Schlieffen, the previous Chief of Staff, called for a march through neutral Belgium, and thus a declaration of war by Britain became inevitable. It would have occurred even if the attack had been undertaken along the same routes as 1870/71. A strange and paradoxical situation thus arose. Germany was condemned by almost the entire world for its attack and saddled with “war guilt,” even though its enemies had quickly made it known that they had very serious war aims. Germany, on the other hand, through its Chancellor Bethamm-Hollweg, had solemnly assured that Belgium would be completely rebuilt and compensated after the war. France demanded the return of Alsace-Lorraine, even though the country had been part of the Reich for forty years; Russia wanted to conquer the Straits and dismember Turkey into its parts; England openly declared that it would now use the opportunity to prepare a “Copenhagen” for the German fleet, that is, to annihilate it, as eminent figures, led by Admiral Fisher, the fleet commander, had been demanding for years.

While German public opinion unequivocally supported the “assault” thesis, it seemed inconceivable that the three enemy powers would dare or even be able to conduct a coordinated attack against Germany. The German armies contributed significantly to ensuring that their opponent’s propaganda, despite its exaggerations and exaggerations, was more credible and effective than their own. German soldiers reacted with great severity to the sniper resistance of part of the Belgian population, which they found completely surprising, and the partial destruction of the university city of Louvain also aroused great and genuine irritation in France and England. In any case, the question of “war guilt” immediately acquired overwhelming force, even though existing international law granted each state the right to conduct the war sovereignly, and no one was shocked that Russia had risked a general war to aid Serbia, and that England’s will was intolerable for a German victory over France. Furthermore, Serbia’s attack on Austria had not been conventionally military in nature, and nearly a century had to pass before a comparable, despite all the differences, non-state-state aggressive act had warlike consequences. In any case, Germany, along with Austria, had long been condemned by world opinion before paragraph 231 of the Treaty of Versailles explicitly articulated the verdict of condemnation. As early as 1915, a particularly apodictic statement was made in Switzerland by one of the German emigrants opposed to the war: “Germany is guilty of having provoked the European war together with Austria.” Some time later, a French author was able to report in a book on “Annexationist Germany” statements by individuals such as Gustav Stresemann, future Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, or by important associations announcing far-reaching military objectives, such as the conquest and incorporation of Russia’s Baltic provinces or the annexation of the French Channel coast. However, for both the Frenchman Salomon Grumbach and the German Richard Grelling, it was obvious that the main culprits had to be sought in a specific group or class, namely the “reactionaries, the Junkers, the soldiers and the parish priests” who continued to govern, against the democratic spirit of the times, over that Prussia which constituted the core of Germany4.

Had the reactivated General von Hindenburg and his Chief of Staff, Ludendorff, not succeeded in annihilating the Russian armies, which had already largely conquered East Prussia, at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September, Germany would have lost the war within the first few months. Had the German armies—not least because of the refusal of General von Moltke, the Chief of Staff, nephew of the victor of Königgrätz—not suffered the defeat at the Marne and instead captured Paris, which was already in sight on the horizon, England would not have been able to prevent a repetition of the military triumph of 1870-71. The consequence was something unexpected, something no one wanted: a war of position and material destruction, with its enormous, incomprehensible casualties, not least in the “blood mill” of Verdun and the heavy devastation in North Africa and Belgium, which must have made the idea of ​​a “peace of understanding” seem unrealistic.

But while on the one hand the idea of ​​”German guilt” was gaining visible coherence, on the other hand the Germans could feel proud of having successfully resisted the thousand vicissitudes of the greatest of all historical wars in the “world” and even won a military victory over Russia in the East. It had to be ruled out from the outset that a small group of “Prussian Junkers and militarists” could have led a completely unruly people to “the slaughter”: the war was an extraordinary community achievement, although, admittedly, from 1916 onwards war weariness and criticism of the advocates of a “victorious peace” were spreading, not least due to the influence of the British blockade, which was as contrary to international law as the German advance in Belgium or the radical period of U-boat warfare, and which in the “hunger winter” of 1916-17 caused tens of thousands of victims among the population.

Nonetheless, even if it was certain that the German people would not repentantly submit to the accusations of its enemies even in the event of a defeat, that section of its ruling class was undoubtedly mistaken in holding the “pacifist and Marxist contamination” at home and later among some troops at the front responsible for the repercussions and failures, and thus ended up blaming the socialist and left-wing liberal parties, whose deputies, in reality, through the initiative of Matthias Erzberger, drafted that “peace resolution” that all the supporters of the victorious peace later regarded as a betrayal. But this resolution of the “Reichstag majority,” which anticipated the party constellation of the “Weimar Republic,” only reinforced what had been the official policy of the Reich in 1914. In doing so, it simultaneously confirmed what had been perhaps the most extraordinary event at the outbreak of war: the followers of the “Marxist” SPD, the strongest and most anti-war party in Germany, had sided unreservedly and almost entirely with the threatened and endangered homeland. There were not a few who felt this consensus as a liberation from the chains of dogmatic prejudices and an old left-wing radical, looking back, found effective and convincing words: “Until... suddenly the terrible tension dissolved, until people dared to be what they really were, until - in the face of all the rigid principles and wooden theories - for the first time... they could intone, with all their heart and in good conscience and free from any fear of thereby becoming traitors, the enthusiastic, thunderous, foaming song: ‘Germany, Germany above all’ “5.

What Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg perceived as a “betrayal” and a “collapse” was, in any case, a great event, demonstrating the power of national consciousness that transcends class. All socialist parties in Europe had been enemies of the war, not least the French one under the leadership of Jean Jaurès, and all, with the exception of the Russian and Serbian ones, had sided with their homelands, approving the war credits. The socialist left’s pacifist agitation had long been stronger and more active in France than in Germany, so much so that even Malvy, the Interior Minister, had to resign over the “Le Bonnet Rouge” magazine affair. In Germany, there was nothing comparable to the widespread mutinies that broke out in the French army after the failure of the offensive led by Nivelle, the “bloodthirsty” general and new commander-in-chief. If there was a “stab in the back,” we can find it in all war-torn countries, and nowhere did pacifist and anti-war propaganda play a decisive role. Nevertheless, we cannot reject from the outset the thesis that Germany’s defeat was also determined by the presence on its soil of the strongest of all the world’s Marxist parties, which could operate freely without excessive controls. We will return to this question.

Finally, when we ask ourselves whether Germany still had a chance of winning the war in 1917 and 1918, or at least avoiding defeat, we do well to consult The Birth of the Weimar Republic, a book by a Marxist who served for a time as a Communist Party member of the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. Since the defeat is well known, even historians are tempted to see inevitable processes and accuse those leaders of refusing to recognize this necessity, despite the threat of the United States entering the war, which indeed occurred.

According to Rosenberg, the February 1917 declaration of unrestricted U-boat warfare was by no means hopeless from the outset, since “the outstanding military performance of the German U-boat commanders could not be denied,” and it continued to be so. Even regarding the planned but rapidly aborted attack on the High Seas Fleet just before the end of the war, Rosenberg does not employ the usual accusatory tone: from a purely military perspective, it was “neither an adventure nor a voyage of death,” but “a carefully prepared undertaking, which with small losses could inflict serious damage on the enemy.” The first undertaking failed due to circumstances and not, like the second, out of necessity, but the Army Supreme Command, under the de facto leadership of Ludendorff, was nevertheless capable of planning a major offensive, which justified such a decision, even though considerable numbers of American troops had already arrived in France. In Rosenberg’s judgment, “the decisive German victory in the West, which the supreme commander of the army was aiming for, was hanging by a thread. If Ludendorff had had twenty more divisions than were necessary for his eastern policy, he would probably have won in the West.” Certainly, “the German tactical victory in the Battle of March was one of the greatest in military history”6, but in the end, the decisive reserves were lacking. Rosenberg’s criticism is not aimed at Ludendorff’s personality, for whom he clearly admired him, but at the Ostpolitik of the ruling groups of Germany and Prussia, aimed at conquest and territorial acquisitions, who, out of aversion to Bolshevism, rejected any possible collaboration with Lenin’s Russia and thus made defeat in the war inevitable.

Ludendorff, of course, thought differently. When he had decided to request the immediate submission of an armistice offer and the formation of a new government led by Prince Max von Baden, on September 30 or October 1, he told his staff officers, who listened to him in deep dejection: “The supreme command of the army and the German army are at their end... Our army is unfortunately already heavily infected by the poison of Spartacist-socialist ideas... (Without an armistice)... this Western army will lose its last foothold and... will bring revolution to Germany... For the reasons mentioned above, it can no longer be defeated... However, I have asked His Majesty to now also bring into the government those circles that we owe to have reached this point... They must now conclude the peace, which must be signed now. Now they must eat the soup they cooked for us.”7

Ludendorff thus formulated his own conception of guilt and implicitly refused even to admit his mistakes. To do so, he did not use the activist term “stab in the back,” but the Medici term “infection.” But one might have expected that his thesis of guilt would soon be drowned out by a deluge of reproaches and accusations against himself, Prussian militarism, the Junkers, and the German ruling classes, indeed, the German people as a whole. It was to be expected that this would result in a collapse, similar to that which occurs when a large firm declares bankruptcy, when the shocked and dismayed employees seize the abandoned desks of the former directors and attempt to save themselves with their own inexperienced efforts. But could this collapse be called a “revolution”?

In any case, the transition from a strong and vital regime to “something different” was imminent, and this “other” and new could be a democracy, embodying and continuing the liberal elements and tendencies of the Empire, or it could be a dictatorship—perhaps a dictatorship of a new, previously unknown type. However, these transitions had already occurred in recent European history, and now, before describing the events, we must first outline these prefigurations, after considering the historical preconditions for the Weimar Republic. These were the transition from the eighteen-year regime of Emperor Napoleon III to the Third Republic in France, and the transition from the “First Republic” of Russia under the government of the Social Revolutionary Kerensky to the monocracy of the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

WARNING.

The many parties which animated the political life of the Republic of Weimar are cited in the text mainly by their corresponding acronyms. To ease the reader’s experience we offer, as a sort of prologue of the main text, a legenda of the acronyms, their complete denominations and the relative translation of these political parties.

KAPD: (Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands - Communist Workers’ Party of Germany), founded in april of 1920 from the far left wing of the KPD which did not recognize itself in the Leninist form of organization of the party led by Paul Levi.

KPD: Kommunistische Partai Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany)

USPD: Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany)

VKPD: Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Unified Communist Party of Germany): The KPD from the december of 1920 assumed this new denomination, after the big left wing of the USPD entered in the Communist International (Komintern) and it therefore merged with it’s german section. This name lasted for 2 years and in 1922 returned to being KPD

SPD: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany)

DDP: Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party): (Left-leaning liberals)

Zentrum: From 1874 to 1914 the Zentrum was the only party to always have between 90 and 100 deputies in the Reichstag (Centrist aggregation of catholic inspiration)

BVP: Bayerische Volkspartei (Bavarian People’s Party): (centrist)

DVP: Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party): (Right-leaning Liberals)

DNVP: Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party): (Nationalists)

DVFP: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei (German Völkisch Freedom Party): (Result of a split inside the DNVP)

KVP: Konservative Volkspartei or, more commonly, Volkskonservative Vereinigung (Conservative People’s Party o Conservative People’s Union): (Another party result of a split inside the DNVP)

NSDAP: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party): (The party of Hitler)

DAP: Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party): (Precursor of the NSDAP)









PREFACE

The science of history needs to treat the Weimar Republic as a clearly defined domain, because it is full of events, personalities, parties and upheavals, How could it be otherwise possible to grasp this richness? The curriculum and the actions of men, like Gustav Stresemann and Heinrich Brüning, can today, alone, fill half of an historian’s life.1

Even considering the necessity of the specialization, we must nevertheless point out a surprising disequilibrium. Those who can still remember those distant times, or those who have studied in dept articles or contemporary documents, know that considerable parts of the population in 1918-19, in 1923 and again in 1930-1932 were dominated by the fear of communism2 ; many journals were full of terrible news from Soviet Russia; Brüning, the Reich’s chancellor, still in 1931 feared the KPD more than the NSDAP and the Berlin police themselves, led by the socialdemocrats, assigned to the communists a number of violent actions significantly higher that those assigned to the nationalsocialists. In the current history books all of this has completly dissappeared or it gets acknowledged negatively; on the foreground are placed, in a completly prevalent way, the development and the character of nationalsocialism which often gets also labeled as “Nazism”. Almost always, and this is the sign of the disequilibrium, the Boxheimer Dokumente are remembered with much vigor, in which a young author, that later became a high ranking SS officer3 developed plans for the nationalsocialists use of power after the repression of a previous communist insurrection. On the contrary, the communist magazine “October” isn’t usually cited, even if it was used to prepare, clearly, a civil war. We never forget to remember that Hitler in 1930, in his so-called oath of allegiance before the Reich’s court, would have told that after his party’s legal seizure of power “heads would have rolled”, but the chants and the bloody theatrical pieces of the communist troops, which were never stigmatized by the leadership group of the KPD4, are never mentioned.

However not only specialization it’s an imperative of science, but so is the change of prospective. If a sector and a way of viewing were strongly on the foreground for a too much long period of time, what is insufficient in this procedure is elaborated and the “other aspect” is highlighted, since, despite the inevitable limits of the singular researchers, it’s a scientific imperative to draw a picture as big as possible of the object and not to articulate instantly, at the beginning, political or moral value judgments, but justify them at the conclusion, widely and as late as possible. The historian must be guided by the will to “comprehend” and form a judgment, not with partisanship but in a detached manner, as it should be for all the historians.

One should be very optimistic to affirm that these postulates, largerly evidents, are put in practice for what concerns the Weimar Republic. This did not happen, because we are dealing with an experience, a tradition so deep that those which appears otherwise obvious, ends up with being, in this case, achieved with difficulty and not without danger. The “crimes of nationalsocialism”, that today are indicated often as “german crimes”5 and above all the crime of “jewish annihilation”, but naturally even the horrors of the catastrophic end of the war, which only enormous and not always credibles efforts can classified under the concept of “liberation”, they have inspired in the contemporaries and in the posterity a very deep impression. Consequently, an author is not even forgiven for asking “ justice even for Adolf Hilter” o at least he is accused of “Nationalsocialism apologia”, even if it’s only about the application of a absolutely general rule of historical science and even if it should be clear to all that “historical justice” can bring about, in conclusion, to a judgement of moral reprobation, or even historical refusal.

My objective in this book is in any case that of examining and maybe to fix that disequilibrium. I don’t want to hide then a fondamental hypothesis of both general and historic character; the many millions followers and electors of Nationalsocialism, among which I was not present, they could not have been wrong in this absolute manner, like a consisten part of their sons and nephews think. Even a very bad phenomenon cannot be strong and “historic”, if it does not contain some good elements. I’m convinced that, for countless germans and europeans, the first world war was a shocking subversion. For very many of them however the greater and most important experience, that shocked them more than anything else, was the triumph of bolshevism in Russia and the revolutionary attempt of it’s followers, both in Germany and in other parts of Europe. In a short time the conservatives found themselves before an attack that aimed to annihilate the institutions, not last the churches, which were object of their maximum esteem. The liberals saw the birth of a forced economic system which eliminated, and in part physically sterminated, the representatives of the market economy. Even the major worker’s party felt it’s political and intellectual existence negated. The system of class and system annihilation was the authentically new element, without precedents in Europe, which fell in a different category from that of horrors and bloody loss of the war. The followers of this vast revolutionary attempt were in great parts men which supported with enthusiasm and dedication, fact that makes this equally disturbing, their cause, although they were often tried to be considered murderers and bandits.

To revision and correct, I will not start with Germany and I will not start with the “november revolution” in Kiel, in Munich and in Berlin and in many other german cities. I would rather bring up events and areas which, according to the general conception, do not “have anything to do” with the Weimar Republic. At the beginning I place Babeuf as the representative of that Utopia which expresses that very ancient hope of humanity, the hope that one day a just and pacific community of all men will replace the States with their originary inner inequalities and their external wars. A community which existed in the first times of humanity, - even if only in the form of small scattered groups - and which would then dissappear due to unfortunate circumstances. After the incomprehensible sufferings of the great war, that utopia which Marx gave a “scientific” form needed to demonstrate an attraction force that did not limit itself only to “proletarians”. In this way the disequilibrium is not affirmed, but without dubt much is done to comprehend it. At the same time it’s about understanding the “radicalfascist” Nationalsocialism of Hitler, that is the greatest and most violent feat that moved on the opposite sense. Hitler had to pone himself on the same level of the enemy if he wanted to achieve the destruction of bolshevism, his fundamental objetive. He had to found an “antibolshevism which had the same bolshevik resolution” and so depended intimately and deeply from the enemy. Becoming an imitator in order to be a radical enemy.

This book, in it’s long sections that narrates the history of the Weimar Republic, has a focus on some things which are not found in most books about this argument6 . Those readers that find superflous the first sections and consider “speculative” the conclusive reflections, can limit themselves to read the first four chapters. In this way they will find a “History of the Weimar Republic” non far from the ordinary. They could then ignore even scandalous theses, such as the relationship between “Antisemitism” and “Anticapitalism” and the underestimation of those “intrigues” that, so it is said, helped Hitler take power7