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Sometimes the great moments of history are the small moments of history. Such is the case with the short-lived Munich Revolution. Compared to the world wars or the Russian Revolution, it seems like a footnote about a failed adventure. But its significance is far greater: it was a social earthquake whose aftershocks marked the twentieth century, and whose ideas and reasons remain pertinent to our own volatile and unjust century. It unfolded from November 1918 to May 1919 in three stages of increasing radicalism —social-democratic, anarchist, communist — until it led to a military, nationalist, and anti-Semitic reaction that gave rise to the Nazi Party. Perhaps no other European episode of its time contains a similar historical density.