Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism: Germany 1918-23
By Nick Shepley
()
About this ebook
Read more from Nick Shepley
The Russian Revolution 1917: A Student's Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStalin, the Five Year Plans and the Gulags: Slavery and Terror 1929-53 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hitler, Stalin and the Destruction of Poland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Paris Peace Conference 1919: A student's guide to the Treaty of Versailles. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sun Yat Sen and the birth of modern China: 20th Century China: Volume One Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hitler, Ribbentrop and Britain: The Breaking of Versailles Part One Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHitler, Chamberlain and Munich: The End Of The Twenty Year Truce Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Red Sun at War: Pearl Harbour and Japan's Pacific Gamble Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Russia's Struggle With Modernity 1815-1929 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Story of Cardiff Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAddiction & Recovery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRed Sun Rising: Japan, China and the West: 1894-1941 Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Explaining International Relations 1918-1939: A Students Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExplaining Britain and Her Empire: 1851-1914: A Student's Guide to Victorian Britain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRed Sun at War Part II: Allied Defeat in the Far East Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism
Related ebooks
Debates on the German Revolution of 1918-19 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLenin's Legacy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTen Days that Shook the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Socialism, Democracy and Human Rights Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMaking and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWriting 20th Century International History: Explorations and Examples Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Russian Origins of the First World War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leon Trotsky Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat's So Eastern About Eastern Europe?: Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLenin And The Russian Revolution Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Expansion of Europe 1642-1789 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReturn of the Dragon: Rising China and Regional Security Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFifty-Seven Years of Russian Madness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom Lenin to Malenkov: The History of World Communism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–1944 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Inside Russian Politics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBoris Yeltsin: The Decade that Shook the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStalin: The Murderous Career of the Red Tsar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOrdo Pluriversalis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCruise of the Lanikai: Incitement to War Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5There Is No Freedom Without Bread!: 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stalin’s Secret Police: A history of the CHEKA, OGPU, NKVD, SMERSH & KGB: 1917–1991 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Wars & Military For You
Sun Tzu's The Art of War: Bilingual Edition Complete Chinese and English Text Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the SS: The Hunt for the Worst War Criminals in History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Making of the Atomic Bomb Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Kingdom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art of War: The Definitive Interpretation of Sun Tzu's Classic Book of Strategy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Art of War & Other Classics of Eastern Philosophy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Daily Creativity Journal Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The God Delusion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unit 731: Testimony Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/577 Days of February: Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Nation’s Own Journalists Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Reaction, Revolution and The Birth of Nazism - Nick Shepley
damages.
Introduction
This ebook is really the study of three forces that clashed, conflicted and interacted in a desperate struggle from 1900 to 1933 (though our study only takes us up to 1923 for the time being). These forces were distinctively German, on the one had there was German Social Democracy, represented by the largest and most successful labour movement in the world, the German Social Democratic Party, and on the other there was both conservative Junker reaction and a series of more radical nationalist voices that endorsed a new set of ideas circulating at the end of the 19th Century based on nation and race. The Junkers were not so much German as distinctively Prussian, and the elites of German society, the aristocracy, the Chancellor, and most importantly the army came out to defend their own class interests increasingly from the turn of the century onwards. They looked at the growing labour movement in Germany with distrust and unease, it was the result of an explosion of industrialisation from the 1860s onwards, and had been almost exactly what Karl Marx had predicted.
Marx, from his desk in the reading room at the British Library had predicted that Germany would be the starting point of the workers revolution, largely because that was where the greatest accumulation of workers was. Not only had the working class population expanded rapidly, but they developed the kind of class consciousness, the awareness of ‘them and us’, and were educated enough to be able to grasp new revolutionary ideas in a way that was inconceivable further east in Russia.
Part One: The Revolutionaries
To fully understand the German Revolution in 1918, we must explore the history of the German Social Democratic Party or SPD, the largest socialist party in Europe by the end of the First World War, and the nucleus of Germany’s first republican government.
The party was the inevitable political consequence of half a century of German industrialisation and the growth of a large urban prolateriat. The SPD were the leading force not only in German socialist politics but in the international working class movement as well. Despite the best attempts of German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck in the 1880s to destroy the movement, it endured and by 1910 was the largest party in German politics, accounting for over a quarter of all votes cast, and with 110 deputies in the Reichstag. The party was founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863, initially titled the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, (ADAV) the German General Workers Association, but it was not until 1875 at Gotha when the party was properly established. The German Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP) was the meeting an amalgamation of the ADAV, with the new SDAP, led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The party emerged into a Germany transformed by political unification and industrial revolution. Three decades of explosive economic growth and development in heavy industry, a rapidly growing rail network, the end of internal tariffs between the Prussia and the Rhine states or Lander, booming exports and a highly educated workforce had made Germany the up and coming powerhouse of Europe. Britain, home of the industrial revolution, saw its comparative advantages slip away one by one, her industrialists ignoring the lessons being taught by Germany, particularly in the chemicals industry. Industrial dyeing, pharmaceuticals and fertilisers (all industries later suited to producing weapons of war), were new fields that saw rapid growth between 1870 and 1890. The result was the largest urban working class in Europe; of all the working classes on the continent that Karl Marx placed his hopes in for a revolution, the Germans were in his view most promising, he saw the degree of industrialisation in the country, the living conditions of the working class an the size and potential for organisation amongst them as ideal conditions to bring about revolution. Germans, however, had been relative newcomers to the revolutionary movement, even by the 1860s, as Liebknecht wrote in a report to the First International (the congress of European socialist parties), in 1865. He wrote:
In consequence of the slow development of our industry and commerce the working classes of Germany entered political life much later than their brethren in England and France. It was in the year 1848, after the Revolution of February, that for the first time the necessity dawned upon them to improve their social position. What had been thought, written, done before, had been thought, written and done almost exclusively either by men not strictly belonging to the working class or by workmen that were living or had been living in England, France or Switzerland. It had not grown out of the German working classes.
The movement that would eventually emerge in Germany was sufficiently large, well organised and radicalised to leave German Chancellor Bismarck determined to destroy it, enacting anti socialist legislation in the 1880s. Describing the growth of the movement without first discussing the role of and the legacy of Marx and his influence on Lassalle, Liebknecht and Bebel would be to leave out a fundamental aspect of the history of the German Revolution, so it is to the life and works of Karl Marx that we must next turn our attention.
Marx was born in Trier in 1818, three years after the revolutionary upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, with the memory of revolution exported through military means still fresh, Napoleon’s grand re-ordering and rationalisation of the Germanic states when he conquered them was in many ways the first step to German unification. Marx, a German Jew was born into a family that, in order to shake off anti Semitic prejudice, converted to Lutheran Christianity prior to Marx’s birth. Marx’s father Heinrich was part of the upwardly mobile Prussian bourgeoisie, owning property and several vineyards, and like many Jews in an occasionally hostile culture, anxious to fit in and to be a productive part of society. As an educated middle class man living in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, Heinrich Marx, a practicing lawyer was unsurprisingly a quintessential enlightenment man in his outlook. He passed to his son an appreciation of Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and the other great minds of the late 18th Century. It was another philosopher, Georg Hegel, who would have a far bigger impact in Marx, however, and the structure of Hegel’s thought would create an intellectual model by which Marx would eventually explain the workings of society and history. Marx’s ideas would affect the 20th Century in ways that perhaps no other thinker has ever achieved, radical change and devastating destruction in the name of ideology would be signature themes of the age. He attended the University of Bonn in 1835, aged seventeen, his father had hoped he would take up a career in law but his son instead decided to study philosophy and literature, avoiding compulsory military service due to a weak chest. The wider social context to Marx’s early years was that of revolution. The aftershocks of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were still being felt across Europe and as a member young educated elite of Germany, Marx could not help but have centre stage to this drawn out series of struggles. In France in 1832, the July Revolution broke out into the streets of Paris, later fictionalised by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, and in Britain, rising tensions after two decades of poverty, protest and unrest after the end of the Napoleonic Wars were only diffused by the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, giving the middle classes the vote. This skilful legislative move deprived the working classes of their middle class leadership and brought Britain’s bourgeoisie firmly into the mainstream, giving them a role within government and the establishment and keeping them out of radical politics. In Greece a decade long struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire was coming to its victorious conclusion in the same year, as Greek nationalists, aided by Russia and Britain, finally defeated the ailing Turks. The struggle attracted idealists and romantics from across Europe, much as the Spanish Civil War would do with idealists a little over a century later, and its most high profile casualty was the English poet Byron, who died in Greece of malaria in 1824. The 1820s also saw the stirring of revolution in the most unlikely of places, in Russia, the home of autocracy and reaction itself. In 1825, following the death of arch reactionary Alexander I and the failure of his son Constantine to take the throne, a revolt by army officers, many of whom had fought Napoleon and had entered Paris at the end of the wars with France, nearly succeeded in deposing the new Tsar Nicholas I. The defeat of the revolt and the exile of its leadership to Siberia did not defeat or end revolutionary ambitions in Russia, these were to re-ignite three decades later in the crises of the aftermath of the Crimean War and Alexander II’s flawed attempts to emancipate Russia’s serfs (for a fuller discussion of this read my Russia’s Struggle with modernity).
Marx grew up in a Europe that had been forever changed by Napoleon, a Europe that had seen the reimposition of autocratic ancien regimes following the end of the emperor’s ambitions in 1815, but a restless Europe that never fully submitted to this resumption of the politics of the past. He grew up in a Europe of exciting intellectuals and idealists like Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian liberal nationalist, and younger figures later to be come under the scrutiny of Marx himself - anarchists Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin.
It is easy for us to mistakenly see such a titanic 19th Century figure such as Marx as simply anomalous, a philosophical giant who sprung seemingly from nowhere, but we must place him and his thought in the context of a world undergoing immense change, because not