Living the German Revolution 1918 to 1919

The German Revolution of 1918-19 marks a historical turning point at which, following the catastrophe of the Great War, soldiers and civilians rose up to overthrow the German Empire’s political and military leadership. The prospect of radical change evoked diverse hopes and fears in Germans young and old, female and male, rural and urban, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. The essays in this volume, which are all based on fresh archival research, analyse their various expectations, experiences, and responses towards the revolution. Whereas much of the existing scholarship concentrates on the high politics and institutional contests of the revolution, these essays are concerned with revolutionary culture and subjectivities. They seek to historicize the revolution not so much from above, or from below, but from within, as a lived and open-ended civic experiment. This volume’s cast of protagonists encompasses sailors mobilizing in north German naval bases, women storming town halls in provincial Bavaria, youngsters pounding Hamburg dance floors on wintery evenings, factory workers savouring the new eight-hour day, publishers grappling with shifting readerships, theologians debating constitutional arrangements, and journalists writing to make sense of a world seemingly turned upside down. The essays explore how the German Revolution unleashed the political imagination of a newly empowered citizenry. Their collective contention is that this socio-cultural approach best registers the revolution’s popular mobilization and societal penetration, its destruction of inherited patterns of authority, and, ultimately, its complex and contested legacy for the Weimar republican project.

Christopher Dillon, Senior Lecturer in Modern German History, King’s College London, Kim WÃ1/4nschmann, Director, Institute for the History of the German Jews

Dr Christopher Dillon is Senior Lecturer in Modern German History at King’s College London. His research focuses on Bavaria during the Weimar and Nazi periods, with particular interest in the history of political culture, gender, and violence. He studied for his Ph.D. at Birkbeck, University of London, as part of an AHRC-funded project on the pre-war National Socialist concentration camps. His publications include the monograph Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence (Oxford University Press, 2015). Christopher is currently writing a socio-cultural history of the 1918-19 revolution in Bavaria.

Dr Kim WÃ1/4nschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London and subsequently held positions at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, and LMU Munich. Her research centres on Holocaust Studies, European-Jewish history, legal history, and comic studies. Publications include: Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and co-written with Stefanie Fischer the forthcoming Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past. A Graphic History (Oxford University Press).