Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic, Pt. 4: The Sparticist Uprising.
The Weimar Republic almost died soon after it began.
Conditions were bad in Germany during the first months of the Weimar Republic. Food and fuel shortages continued after the end of the war and many Germans were cold and starving. The economy was in disarray. Unemployment was high, as both the army and the industries that supported it were demobilized. The third-wave of the worldwide flu pandemic showed no signs of ending. And the imperial government had left the leaders of the new republic the humiliating and thankless task of signing the Versailles peace treaty, earning the nickname the “November Criminals”.
The Weimar Republic would go on to create an innovative and far-reaching social security net, but they had barely had time to get themselves organized when a small, determined group of Marxist revolutionaries made a bid to re-create the Russian Revolution in Germany.
On January 5, 1919, a group who called themselves the Spartacists* staged an uprising against the Weimar republic, armed courtesy of the recently fired Berlin police chief, a radical sympathizer who provided the Sparticists with weapons. Led by “Red Rosa” Luxemburg and Karl Lieibknecht,** the Spartacists called for a general strike that brought thousands of demonstrators to the center of Berlin, where they erected barricades in the streets and seized the offices of socialist newspaper that was pro-Weimar and anti-Sparticist.*** They tried to get army regiments to repeat the glory days of the Kiel mutiny and join the revolt, with no success.
Instead of joining the revolt, the army and right wing volunteer militias**** attacked the revolutionaries with the full approval of Ebert’s cabinet. The army and the Freikorps re-captured the buildings the rebels had seized (including the police headquarters and the war ministry) and shot hundreds of the demonstrators, including many who had surrendered.
On January 15, a Freikorps unit captured Luxemburg and Liebknecht. They smashed in Luxemburg’s skull with a rifle butt, then shot her and threw her into the Landwehr Canal. (Her body was found and identified four months later.) Liebknecht was shot in the back and his corpse taken to the morgue.***** The official account of their deaths said that Liebknecht had been shot while trying to escape capture and that Rosenburg had been killed by an angry mob. The Freicorps unit commander later admitted, with some pride, that he ordered them executed.
The defeat of the Separatist revolt saved the republic in the short run, but in fact that defeat held within it the seeds of the republic’s death fourteen years later.
*After the Roman gladiator Spartacus, who led a slave rebellion in Rome in the first century BCE. In retrospect, naming themselves after the leader of a rebellion that failed and ended in the crucifixion of six thousands of its participants was perhaps not such a good idea.
**You met Liebknecht several weeks ago, when he declared the creation of a socialist republic republic from the balcony of the royal palace.
***If you have any doubts about the fact that socialists and communists are not the same thing politically, spend some time reading about the Weimar republic. The two parties disagreed on just about everything–loudly, often, and occasionally with the use of violence.
****Known as the Freikorps, these militias were made up of former soldiers of the imperial German army. They were trained and equipped by right-wing officers of the Weimar army. Despite the fact that they were used in putting down the Spartacist revolt, these units were not citizen soldiers with official standing. They would remain a problematic element of society throughout the Weimar Republic and became stalwart supporters of the Nazi movement.
*****Nothing I’ve read explains, or even asks about, the difference in how their assassins treated the bodies. Personally, I believe it was rooted in the disdain for women that became part of the Nazi ethos. But I am just making this up.
In which I recommend a women’s history newsletter
I had planned to tell you another story from the Weimar Republic in today’s post, but quite frankly the post is at the Hot Mess stage*, a regular part of my process for writing articles and books but one I usually manage to avoid in blog posts. I’ve been working at it for the better part of a week. And I’ll keep poking at it.
In the meantime, I’d like to share a women’s history newsletter that I’ve been enjoying for several months now, Julia Carpenter’s A Woman to Know. It comes out more or less daily** and it’s one of the few newsletters that I read as soon as I see it in my inbox. In each issue, Carpenter shares the story of a relatively unknown woman from history. (At best I’m familiar with one in ten.) And she includes a list of references in case you want to know more. (This is actually a problem as it contributes to my To-Be-Read list/pile/shelf, which is spiraling out of control. )
With any luck, my next post will be the story of the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin. In the meantime, enjoy a few stories about kickass women you probably haven’t heard of.
* Several years ago I accepted that the Hot Mess Draft is an official part of my process. It is the stage after the initial research and just before the Shitty First Draft that Anne Lamott describes so vividly in Bird By Bird. (Essential reading for anyone who wants to write.) I pour everything I know about the subject–and everything I don’t know but need to find out–onto the page. (Or more accurately, the screen.) I highlight things in yellow and ask questions in ALL CAPS. I try to clump similar ideas into a rough structure that may or may not bear a resemblance to the final shape of the piece. I repeat myself. Worse, I contradict myself.
**How does she do it???
A Great Book About American Immigration Law
I have often complained that one of the failures of American history class as I experienced it in high school* was that everything after the civil war was taught as a series of legislation punctuated by two world wars. The world wars were taught as story, and subsequently stuck with me . But the history of legislation was essentially a list: a name, a date, a paragraph about what the law in question accomplished. Here’s what stuck: anti-trust legislation, labor rights legislation, and, inexplicably, the Taft-Harley Act (the name, not the content).**
It turns out that the history of legislation can be pretty thrilling in the right hands.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 began as an attempt by journalist and second-generation American Jia Lynn Yang to understand the law that allowed her parents to come to the United States, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The result is a gripping account of forty years of Congressional wrangling over immigration law in the United States.
Yang successfully argues that the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is a relatively new one—and demonstrates that laws controlling immigration are even more recent. The book centers on the passage of three major immigration laws—in 1924, 1952 and 1965—and the competing ideas about ethnicity, race and the nature of the United States as an entity that shaped those laws.
Yang never loses sight of the fact that laws are passed by people. She introduces us to the often colorful and sometimes awful politicians and activists who lobbied for and against changes in immigration policy, clearly evoking each man’s character as well as describing his political career. She outlines ugly relationships between immigration laws and the eugenics movement, isolationism, anti-Communist rhetoric, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, and calls to keep the United States true to its “Northern European roots.”
Yang ends where she began, with the impact of the 1965 bill, which opened the door to non-white immigration, closed the border with Mexico for the first time and changed the United States in ways that its promoters had never anticipated.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is an important and sometimes surprising history of American immigration policy and the people who made it.
*I realize that this is not a universal experience. It wasn’t even my universal experience. My world history teacher did an excellent job of capturing my imagination despite the challenges inherent in the concept. Fabulous high school history teachers exist. My hats off to you all.
**I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up: formally known as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, it restricted the power and actions of labor unions. The 80th Congress passed it over President Truman’s veto.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.