PDF file: History - Advanced Higher - Germany - Education Scotland

alternatives available to the revolutionary government in 1918 and 1919. Secondly
there were the mid years of the Republic between 1924 and 1928.
This was a time when Germany’s new democracy enjoyed a period of relative
political stability and economic prosperity. These, the least ‘dramatic’ years of the
Republic have not, historically and historiographically speaking, attracted as much
interest from historians as the other two periods. And yet the 1990s has seen a
growing level of research into this period. This research has shown that social,
economic and political conflict was much more in evidence in the so-called ‘golden
years’ than had previously been thought possible. The final years of the Republic
understandably dominated and continue to dominate much post-war research.
Historians have tried to explain the long-term and immediate short-term reasons as to
why to the Weimar Republic collapsed in 1933.
The German Revolution has been the subject of much historical debate. Historians
have argued and continue to argue about the immediate post-war situation in
Germany. Historians still debate the possibility of using the term the ‘German
Revolution’ about the years 1918-1919. There are those who have argued that
significant political changes had already taken place towards the end of the war and
even before 1914. Debate also continues as to whether it was feasible for major
social, economic and political changes to take place in a country that that was still
essentially ‘conservative’. Perhaps in the past historians have focused too much on
what was going on in Berlin and the other major cities and not looked enough at small
town and rural Germany. Research into the early years of the Republic produced
books in German by historians like Eberhard Kolb and Reinhard Rurup and in English
by Francis Carsten (Revolution in Central Europe, 1918-1919, 1972). The consensus
view of historians is that the social basis for change in Germany at this time was
wider than had previously been believed. Moreover the forces for change on the
extreme left were less strong than they appeared in reality, and therefore the ruling
authorities had more freedom of action than had previously been thought possible.
The timidity of the Social Democrats can be explained in terms of trusting the old
elites and distrusting the spontaneous mass movements that existed in the immediate
post-war years. Research in the last two decades has argued that the democratic
potential of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, was decidedly contentious. Work on
the economy (G. Feldman, The Great Disorder. Politics, Economics and Society in
the German Inflation 1914-1924, 1993) and on business (H.A. Turner, German Big
Business and the Rise of Hitler, 1985) has done much to shed light on Germany in the
years after the end of the Great War. Viewed from the late 1990s, there has not yet
been published a comprehensive and wide ranging English-language history of the
November Revolution. From the East German perspective, it is significant that there
have been two detailed accounts of the German Revolution, published in 1968 (J.
Drabkin, Die Novemberrevolution 1918 in Deutschland, 1968) and 1978 (Illustrierte
Geschichte der deutschen November-revolution 1918-19, 1978). Until the late 1950s
the Marxist-Leninist line in East Germany was that the German Revolution had been
an unsuccessful proletarian revolution. However, from the late 1950s East German
historians began to view the Revolution of 1918-1919 as being ‘by its character a
bourgeois-democratic revolution’. Marxist orthodoxy argued that the masses had not
yet been sufficiently organised, and this organisation was to be provided by the
founding of the Communist Party at the beginning of 1919. (A worthwhile study of
the historiography of the German Revolution from the East German historiographical
History: Germany: Versailles to the Outbreak of World War II - 1918-1939 (AH) 40