The Lost Revolution: Germany, 1918 to 1923

A proper perspective on the question of the failed German revolutionary socialist opportunities starting in 1918 after the debacle of German defeat in World War I, the overthrow of the Kaiser and the establishment of a democratic republic until 1923 with the failure of the revolutionary opportunities resulting from the French reparations crisis is the subject of on-going controversy among revolutionaries. At the time most European revolutionaries, especially the Russians, placed their strategic aspirations on the success of those efforts in Germany. A different outcome during that period, with the establishment of a German Workers Republic, would have changed the course of world history in many ways, not the least of which would have been the probable saving of the isolated Russian socialist revolution and defeating German fascism in the embryo. Since then, beginning with the Trotsky-led Russian Left Opposition in 1923 and later the International Left Opposition, revolutionaries as well as others have cut their teeth on developing an analysis of the failure of revolutionary leadership as a primary cause for that aborted German revolution. Against that well-known analysis, more recently a whole cottage industry has developed, particularly around the British journal Revolutionary History, giving encouragement to latter day hand wringing about the prospects (or lack of prospects) at that time and drawing the lesson that a revolution in Germany then could not have happened. To buttress that argument the writings on the prospects of the 1923 revolution by August Thalheimer, a central theoretician and key adviser to party leader Brandler in this period, have been warmly resurrected and particularly boosted. This kind of analysis, however, gets revolutionaries nowhere. It is one thing for those on the ground at the time in Germany and in the Comintern to miss the obvious signals for revolution it is another for later `revolutionaries' to provide retrospective political cover for those who refused to see and act on the revolutionary opportunities at the time. The events surrounding the failed German revolution were also echoed in what was called the `literary debate' inside the Russian Communist Party in 1924 at a time when the internal struggle, after the death of Lenin, was getting to a white heat. While at this historical distance it is probably impossible to argue all of the specifics of the revolutionary crisis of 1923 some lessons stick out. A quick sketch of events beginning from the start of World War I with the famous treachery of the German Social Democratic leadership in voting for the Kaiser's war budget (and continuing to vote for it) are in some ways decisive for what happened in 1923. Later, facing the consequences of the defeat of the German army, war exhaustion and the possibility of harsh reprisals from the Allied forces the Kaiser's government was overthrown shortly after the armistice was signed and the fight was on in earnest f