Living the German Revolution, 1918-19

Expectations, Experiences, Responses
Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-0-19-889820-7
Verlag: Hurst & Co.

Buch, Englisch, 380 Seiten, Format (B × H): 143 mm x 219 mm, Gewicht: 732 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dillon, Christopher

Wünschmann, Kim

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Revolutionen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction

- 1: Christopher Dillon and Kim Wünschmann: Historicizing the German Revolution of 1918-19

- 2: Benjamin Ziemann: The Missing Comedy and the Problem of Emplotment: New Perspectives on the German Revolution of 1918-19

- Part I: Living at Revolutionary Flashpoints

- 3: Christopher Dillon: 'The revolutionary flame burns also in the provinces': The Bavarian Revolutions of 1918-19

- 4: Wiebke Wiede: An Experience of Extremes: The Revolution in Wilhelmshaven, 1917-19

- 5: Christina Ewald: 'As long as people are dancing, they are happy': Everyday Life and Leisure in Revolutionary Hamburg 1918-19

- Part II: Revolution as Lived Experience and Emancipation

- 6: Andrew Donson: Arbeitsunlust: No Desire to Work in the November Revolution

- 7: Daniel Siemens: Ambivalent Expectations in Times of Crisis: The Revolution of 1918-19 and the German Jews

- 8: Matthew Stibbe, Corinne Painter, and Ingrid Sharp: History beyond the Script: Rethinking Female Subjectivities and Socialist Women's Activism during the German Revolution of 1918-19 and its Immediate Aftermath

- Part III: Institutional Mediations of Revolution

- 9: Margarete Tiessen: 'Fateful enormity': The Berlin Publishing Firm S. Fischer and the German Revolution

- 10: Benedikt Brunner: An Unsettled Church: Experiences of Revolution and Planning for the Future in German Protestantism, 1918-20

- 11: Ulrike Ehret: 'Christian Government' vs. 'Jewish Revolution': Antisemitism and Catholic Responses to the 1918-19 Revolution in Munich

- Part IV: Revolutionary Violence in Perspective

- 12: Mark Jones: Sites of Memory, Sites of Mobilization? Political Funerals in November 1918

- 13: Anita Klingler: Attitudes to Political Violence in Early Inter-War Britain and Germany: Maintaining Law and Order in Glasgow and Munich, 1919

- 14: Thomas Blanck: Revolutionary Violence in Munich and Fiume, 1918-20

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

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 Wünschmann 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).