The German Revolution at War’s End

Abstract

This chapter considers the revolution that broke out in November 1918 in Germany that encompassed a naval and army mutiny, the spread of sailors, soldiers and workers’ councils across Germany and the declaration of the republic. The chapter assesses the contested readings of the German revolution on its centenary and tries to make sense of the event through the lens of contemporaries. In particular, amongst several other observes, it probes Alfred Döblin’s rich literary account of the revolution, an author most famed for Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). At a conceptual level, the chapter analyzes the German revolution through a comparative typology: revolution of the people, revolution for the people, and revolution without the people. These three frames help to explain the contested meanings of, and uses to which, the revolution has been put. Rather than a singular revolution, then, the German Revolution was the sum of different understanding of revolution of both observers and participants.