1 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. It began the day after the German defeat in the Great War. Over four savage and disillusioning years, the initial exaltation, the patriotic intoxication, the promise of glory, with which the conflict began all ended in a hell of rationing, hunger, plague, and one million seven hundred thousand dead soldiers, four million wounded, and one million prisoners. While the fate of Germany depended on France, England, and the United States (Bolshevik Russia had made peace with Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), the old order collapsed forever. In Weimar, a republic was declared on November 9, to be led by the Social Democratic Party, the SPD. But parliamentary democracy was an inadmissible outcome for the German revolutionaries who sought to emulate — and correct, and surpass — Lenin’s recent feat. Several pockets of rebellion were ignited in ports and cities. In Berlin, two legendary leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, founded the Spartacus League aimed at creating a free socialist republic. On January 15, 1919, they were murdered by soldiers of General Gustav Noske, whose army, notable for its discipline and ferocity, included four thousand paramilitary Freikorps, composed of the Sturmtruppen, elite troops hardened in war. But by then a peaceful revolution had triumphed in Munich, capital of the independent kingdom of Bavaria. Two months earlier, the ancient Bavarian monarchy had fallen in five days under the impetus of a peaceful mobilization of tens of thousands of workers and soldiers, led by the least likely of political leaders, a fifty-one-year-old Jewish intellectual named Kurt Eisner. Imprisoned in early 1918 for his militant pacifism and released in October, Eisner became the hero of the hour. In the squares, auditoriums, assemblies, and beer halls of Munich, his speech electrified “the masses,” a key term in the vision and the vocabulary of the revolution. (It should be noted that, at the height of the revolution, those mobilized masses numbered perhaps ten percent of the population). On November 8, pending elections in the Bavarian parliament, the Provisional National Council declared Kurt Eisner the first minister-president of the Free State of Bavaria. Suddenly that peaceful, cultivated, and dynamic city became the stage on which the twentieth century was being rehearsed. The novelty of a revolutionary government took everyone by surprise. And the effects were immediate. Eisner espoused women’s suffrage and an eight-hour workday. Elated, the workers’ councils, headed by intellectuals, won allies among the soldiers recently returned from the front. But the main parties from the center to the right, the bureaucracy, the middle classes, the majority press, the Catholic clergy and other religious groups (including the Jewish community), the ultra-nationalist secret brotherhoods, a significant portion of the university teachers and students, the diplomatic legations of the countries allied to Germany, and most of the farmers (predominant in Bavaria) — all saw the revolutionary government as an intolerable anomaly. An almost unbelievable cast gathered in that Babel of ideas and ideologies. Alongside Eisner, a major presence was the great anarchist thinker and editor Gustav Landauer. (If he is remembered at all today, it is as the unlikely grandfather of Mike Nichols.) Several other prominent intellectuals, literati, and bohemians, but also economists of renown such as Edgar Jaffe, Lujo Brentano, and Otto Neurath, and pedagogues such as F. W. Foerster, would join the government, believing that the revolution was nothing less than a new dawn in history. The most fierce critic of the revolution and its leaders was Max Weber, who dissected their political romanticism in a legendary lecture delivered to the Munich Liberal Students Union, entitled “Politics as a Vocation”. Among the students in his audience were the young philosopher Karl Löwith and Max Horkheimer, who would be one of the founders of the Frankfurt School. Also attending was Carl Schmitt, who would become one of the main political theoreticians of Nazism. The hotbed of Munich included Spartacist revolutionaries and Lenin’s agents, as well as several future Nazis, such as Rudolf Hess and Ernst Röhm. Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, sent back reports to the Vatican. The first-hand witnesses of the turbulence included Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Victor Klemperer, Martin Buber, and Lion Feuchtwanger. And an obscure twenty-nine-year-old veteran soldier of the war named Adolf Hitler, a failed painter, was wandering confusedly around the rallies and barracks looking for where and how to pour out his hatred. In Munich he found the answers he was looking for. The Munich revolution was a dizzying theater of ideas — not pure ideas but armed ideas. Yet the violence was slow to break out. When Weber delivered his lecture on January 28, 1919, barely ten weeks had passed since Eisner’s accession to power. The revolution was seeking its course and the republican order was being maintained with difficulty. Weber considered Eisner’s government disastrous. Before addressing his audience, he remarked, “This does not deserve the honorable name of revolution: it is a bloody carnival.” In fact, his rejection of the present was the measure of his anguish for the future. He was persuaded that the history of his country, and that of Europe, would be decided there and then. In 1919 in Munich, Weber saw the Aleph of the century, and was horrified. A historical drama and a personal drama came together to imbue
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