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History of Germany from 1806 to Reunification
demonstrations for peace at the end of July 1914, and the decisions
which led to war were not taken by the elected representatives of the
German people.
Winkler describes vividly the disastrous impact of the war on
Germany’s political culture, exacerbating as it did social tensions and
racial hatred, and dividing both working-class and middle-class
Germans into hostile camps. Although the course of the war finally
pushed a reluctant imperial government to grant concessions in the
direction of parliamentary control over the Reich government and
the reform of the lop-sided franchise in Prussia, events in October
1918 demonstrated that no serious will for change existed in military
or court circles. It is difficult to see how, without the collapse of the
Wilhelmine Empire as the result of the catastrophic war, there could
have been a democratic revolution in Germany. As it was, this revolution
was only made possible by the fact that the Social Democratic
movement had split, and that the majority party was willing to collaborate
with middle-class colleagues to create a genuinely parliamentary
Republic. Winkler firmly rejects the older left-wing critique
of Weimar, which reproved the Social Democrats for their failure to
carry out root-and-branch socialization in an advanced industrial
nation, the civil institutions of which had not collapsed to anything
like the extent of those in Russia. The only result of such a revolution
would have been chaos and civil war.
As one would expect from a distinguished historian of the
German labour movement, Winkler has much that is interesting to
say about the SPD in the Weimar Republic. He is perhaps overly critical
of its leaders for not doing more to collaborate with moderate
‘bourgeois’ parties. One problem Weimar had was that the values
which inform the �ederal Republic today—commitment to a market
economy and free trade, a belief in pragmatic compromise as a way
to overcome sectional conflicts, scepticism in the face of utopian ideologies—were
not at all powerful in Germany during the 1920s. �or
many rank-and-file SPD supporters ‘socialism’ was a more important
objective than parliamentary democracy. This attitude was strengthened
by the open fear and contempt for the ‘Sozis’ exhibited by their
middle-class compatriots. SPD leaders also had to look over their
shoulders at an increasingly popular and viciously disruptive
German Communist Party. But they did what they could to defend
the Republic, and in this respect it is noteworthy that relatively little
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