From the series Pages from the history of the workers' movement
The Munich Soviet Republic
With the Munich Soviet Republic, the German Revolution, which began on November 9th, 1918, seemed to be flickering its last.
In the Bavarian capital, after the fall of the Wittelsbachs, power had fallen into the hands of Kurt Eisner, a pacifist intellectual, member of the USPD, and contributor to the revisionist newspaper Münchner Post since 1910. Eisner had managed something unheard of in Germany – to gain the support of the farmers, in particular Karl Gandorfer, head of the Bavarian Peasants' League.
Workers, soldiers, and peasants
"Traditionally a stronghold of Catholicism and reaction"
, Bavaria "had declared early for the November Revolution, largely because its people hated the Prussians and rejoiced in the fall of Prussian autocracy"
, notes G.D.H. Cole in A History of Socialist Thought. Bavaria was the only German region where peasants' councils had formed. While privately expressing antisemitic views and of reactionary inclinations due to the property-owning spirit that tied them to their land, these councils had put their trust in the Jewish socialist Eisner to "maintain their regional autonomy"
and "to dissociate themselves from the Prussian disaster"
.
As both prime minister and foreign minister of Bavaria, in a government where independents and the major parties cooperated, Eisner played to regionalist sentiment by publishing documents hostile to the Reich, emphasising how Prussian militarism was heavily responsible for the war, and thereby hoping to obtain favourable peace terms from the allies.
His opportunistic policy of forming a coalition with the SPD and his ambiguity towards the workers' councils, to which he actually had no intention of relinquishing power, fuelled the internal opposition of the Anarchist left, which was firmly embedded in Munich's intellectual circles, particularly in the Schwabing district around the figures of Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam. On the other hand, because he presented himself as the Bavarian face of the November Revolution, Eisner attracted violent attacks from the bourgeois right.
The elections of January 12th, 1919, were disastrous for Eisner: independents obtained only 2.5% of the votes, while the SPD and the other bourgeois parties obtained 33% and 65% respectively. Eisner, however, refused to dissolve the government, which led to increasing tensions with Bavaria's Interior Minister Erhard Auer, a member of the socialist majority, who urged an agreement with the bourgeois parties. Finally, on February 21st, the day he resigned, Eisner was assassinated outside the Landtag by a young Bavarian nationalist, Count Arco-Valley. His death was soon followed, in the wake of popular anger, by an assassination attempt in which Auer, Bavarian People's Party Deputy Osel, and Major Jaffréis were shot.
The SPD and USPD then agreed to form a government led by the majority-social democrat Johannes Hoffmann, who was elected to the Landtag on March 17th. However, this marked the start of a period of extreme confusion. The cabinet demonstrated impotence right from the start in Munich, where the Workers' and Soldiers' Council grew in strength, forcing Hoffmann to move the government first to Nuremberg and then to Bamberg in northern Bavaria.
Petty-bourgeois anarchism
Meanwhile in Munich, on April 7th, partly due to the external impact of the revolution in Budapest, the Soviet Republic was proclaimed.
However, it was a somewhat peculiar "revolutionary" government, which included independents, anarchists, and even the SPD minister Schneppenhorst. The SPD was pushed to support the Bavarian Soviet Republic by popular pressure, but with the underlying intention of bringing it down.
In the book Die Bayerische Räterepublik. Tatsachen und Kritik ["The Bavarian Soviet Republic. Facts and Critique"
, Frankes Verlag, Leipzig, 1920], Paul Frölich, under the pseudonym Paul Werner, offered a sharp critique of the Bavarian experience, in particular of the maximalism of the intellectual circles in Schwabing: "Anarchism found fertile ground in Munich, thanks to the strong petty-bourgeois presence and the solid bohemian tradition of the artistic and literary community. It embodied the radicalism of an intellectual stratum whose deep – vaguely revolutionary – disgust with capitalism had made it available for any political adventure; a social stratum, however, incapable of political reflection and that would prove cowardly in the face of any difficult situation. In this environment, showy gestures and bombastic phrases replaced political seriousness and discernment. Its influence on the working class of Munich should not be underestimated, an influence that proved particularly harmful, especially in creating an addiction to phraseology that appealed more to emotion than to reason"
.
The Bavarian newspaper of the KPD, the Münchner rote Fahne, described the Soviet Republic as "a creature of conciliatory compromise – both dependent and independent – and of anarchist fantasy"
. Frölich also recalls that on April 7th "Munich gave itself over to mad joy in an orgy of red flags and red cockades, of parades and military bands, and of words, words, words! [...] A vain jubilation hid the reality. No one realised the harshness of the class struggle that the workers' movement had to prepare to face; no one reflected on the serious consequences of this undertaking"
.
The KPD in Bavaria
For these reasons, the communists initially decided not to participate in the Munich Soviet Republic, judging that the venture was premature, artificial, and unrealistic. Frölich writes: "The communists [...] refused to endorse the proclamation of a Soviet republic which would have been merely the artificial creation of a clique of politicians. A Soviet republic could only arise from the action of the masses and for this reason the situation in Germany, or at least in Bavaria, was not yet mature, nor would they become accomplices to a putsch"
.
However, when the Republican Guard attempted to overthrow the Government of the Soviet Republic to reinstate the Hoffmann cabinet, the communists, albeit reluctantly, decided to intervene. On April 13th, under the leadership of Eugen Leviné, a Russian émigré sent to Munich by the KPD central committee, the communists defeated the attempted putsch of the Republican Guard, forcing it to abandon the city. This led to the first Soviet government being dissolved and a new one being created, in which the communists energetically participated. Pierre Broué, in The German Revolution, 1917-1923, investigates the reasons that led the KPD to defend the power of the Munich councils when it was clear to the Communist leaders that it represented the "organisation of a hopeless defence"
. For Broué, "it is difficult to understand"
this choice. In the book Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Germania 1918-1920 ["Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany 1918-1920"
, Pantarei, 2001], the authors Paul Frölich, Rudolf Lindau, Albert Schreiner, and Jakob Walcher argue that, by deciding to intervene, the KPD recognised that the fight, however desperate, was already underway. The communists judged that it was their historical duty to fight in order to turn the probable defeat into a revolutionary lesson.
On April 12th, the day before Leviné's intervention, the Münchner rote Fahne had indeed written: "The Soviet Republic is a premature organism and no amount of heroism can make it survive. But we cannot just turn away and pretend nothing is happening. One cannot escape the consequences of what has been done. The forces of reaction move against the Soviet Republic to strike at the revolutionary proletariat, to nail it to the ground. As they enter the central Soviet to contribute to the defence of the proletariat, to take part in the struggle as soldiers of the revolution, the communists point out to the working masses the crucial issue: the illusions raised by this Soviet Republic must be abandoned, every energy, every will must be focused on the defence of the working class. If the masses understand this, it will mean that we have turned an adverse situation into strength, into a promise of victory for the proletariat"
.
The counter-revolution in Munich
However, as anticipated, it was a desperate defence. The Bavarian Red Army, led by the youthful poet Ernst Toller, achieved a minor initial success. However, this only had the effect of prompting the Hoffmann government to request Gustav Noske's intervention. The violence of the Freikorps, which had been ravaging Germany for months, then fell upon Bavaria. In Munich, after a massacre that caused around a thousand victims, the soldiers destroyed the last pockets of resistance with flamethrowers.
The defeat of the revolutionaries and the subsequent establishment of a military regime provided fertile ground for reaction in the years to come. Cole notes that, following the repression, Munich turned "into a stronghold of counter-revolution in its most extreme forms. Munich became the chief breeding-ground of Nazism and the scene four years later of Hitler's first abortive attempt to seize power as the ally of Ludendorff and the extreme nationalist right"
.
In 1922, the year before the Munich Putsch, the German statistician and publicist Emil Julius Gumbel published a book whose title provides a quantitative and temporal measure of counter-revolutionary violence: Vier Jahre Politischer Mord, four years of political assassinations, which had been drenching Germany in blood since November 9th, 1918.
Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Germania 1918-1920 documents the barbarity of the counter-revolution in Munich: "The entire city fell under the axe of the most savage 'purge', more brutal than the March massacre in Berlin. [...] Martial law seized its victims on the streets, in their homes, in cellars, and in prison. [...] The corpses were stripped of everything and piled up at collection points, indecently stacked. [...] On May 6th, 21 Catholics, accused of being 'Spartacists', were brutally massacred in an inn at Karolinenplatz and stripped of all belongings"
. Landauer was beaten to death, Leviné was shot. The slaughter was compounded by the courts, which issued thousands of sentences.
With the bloody end of the Munich Soviet Republic, the last outpost of the German Revolution launched in November 1918, the European revolutionary wave receded without having spread beyond the territories of the defeated countries. Nevertheless, in Germany, within the class minority, fervent expectations remained. They struggled to grasp the change of phase, the beginning of a cycle of the retreat of revolutionary struggles at both the European and German levels, which Lenin and the more perceptive leaders of the International understood. The strategic inadequacy of the German communists, though understandable historically and even psychologically in the heated context of those years, would in the following years give rise to misjudgements and futile adventures, such as the "Blanquist" coup of the March Action in 1921.