Abstract
Reviewed by: Christopher Dillon, King’s College London, UK
On 9 March 1919, the Berlin press thundered in unison against ‘a dreadful mass murder’ perpetrated by militants of the far-Left Spartacist League in Lichtenberg Police Presidium, to the east of central Berlin. As many as two hundred captured policemen had been executed by the Spartacists, many of them butchered ‘like animals’ (268–70). Gustav Noske, the social democratic Defence Minister, declared that the gloves must now, finally, come off. He issued an order permitting government soldiers to execute any captured Spartacist without trial, on the spot. His troops made extensive use of this Schieβbefehl (Execution Order) in the months ahead. The Lichtenberg atrocity, and Noske’s unyielding response, united social democratic, liberal and conservative opinion against the hard Left. This coalition of support for Noske’s use of lethal violence, Mark Jones argues, was foundational for the new republican state, perhaps more fundamentally than the contemporaneous deliberations of the National Assembly drawing up the new democratic constitution in Weimar.
Yet it soon transpired that the ‘Lichtenberg atrocity’ was fake news. True, gunfire had been exchanged during the Spartacist assault on the Presidium. But when the government troops arrived three days later they found no butchered corpses. Most of the supposedly murdered policemen were soon back at their desks. As Jones demonstrates throughout his conceptually innovative and highly informative monograph, the political culture of the German revolution was suffused with rumour, exaggeration and manufactured outrage. Drawing primarily on contemporary newspaper reports, a source not yet adequately exploited by historians, Jones is able to cut through the layers of myth and counter-myth which have accrued around the events of revolution and to excavate the subjective perceptions and emotions of contemporaries.
This represents an important contribution to historical knowledge. For despite its significance as one of the great turning points of German history, scholarship on the German revolution has made only faltering progress since the high political histories of the 1960s and 1970s. Jones’ monograph is set to become part of a centennial wave of scholarship placing the familiar institutions, ideologies and political leaders of the revolution in cultural and transnational context. It begins by looking at the naval mutiny on the Baltic coast in late October 1918, showcasing its methodology in an emotional cartography of Kiel on the eve of the revolution, revealing the many paranoid rumours and fantasies animating the rebels and military establishment alike (51–5). After a brief glance at Kurt Eisner’s triumph in Bavaria, the book’s focus then settles resolutely – a little too resolutely – on Berlin, where the high political and constitutional direction of the revolution was initially set. Jones’ comprehensive screening of press reports yields fresh detail on the violence over the revolutionary Winter, particularly ‘Bloody Friday’ on 6 December 1918, when a busy tram stop was raked by the machine guns of jumpy government soldiers at the cost of 16 civilian fatalities (104–10).
Jones’ approach also casts fresh light on the better-known Spartacist uprisings of January and March 1919. Inspired by the scholarship of George Rudé and others on the French Revolution, he pays close attention to the formation and agency of crowds, key revolutionary actors whose usurpation of public space rendered street politics more important than at ‘any other point in the history of modern Germany’ (333). The founding Weimar coalition noted and hated the ‘rule of the streets’, its media exhorting Noske’s forces to end the supposed tyranny of a deracinated urban minority. In some intriguing analysis, Jones argues that newspaper depictions of counter-revolutionary violence fuelled the nascent, redemptive cult of the front soldier, most especially of the fabled storm troops whose modern hardware and sharp tactics had already captured the public’s imagination (230–3). It was also constitutive of the hardy founding myth of Weimar – flattering in the extreme to Noske and social democracy – that the German revolution had been above all a heroic defensive operation against Bolshevism, one which remained dominant in historiography until the 1960s.
In the final chapter, Jones does move beyond Berlin to the bloody denouement of the German revolution in Bavaria in early May 1919. His treatment of the violence in Munich is strong, updating the venerable standard work by Heinrich Hillmayr and making compelling use of judicial testimony as well as press coverage. But the chapter is also a reminder that the German revolution was a nationwide, as well as transnational, phenomenon. And Berlin, as Benjamin Ziemann has reminded us, was not Weimar. In this respect alone, Jones’ book feels slightly regressive, a return to the earliest scholarship on the revolution. A model conclusion, nevertheless, positions the research immaculately in recent historiography on the collapse of Continental dynasties in the twilight of the Great War, and offers plausible, if still necessarily tentative, hypotheses for the legacy of counter-revolutionary violence to the eventual demise of the Weimar republican project. Founding Weimar is an accomplished feat of scholarship and marks an important step on the way to answering this most pertinent of questions.