If you take a look at the city of Munich now, and you take a look at it back when the First World War was coming to an end, you are going to see a huge contrast between the two. Now, they have their beautiful football arena and they are hosting Oktoberfest every year, but back in the day, this was the place where the Bavarian Soviet Republic was established. That is just one example of how things changed.
There was a chance that Germany takes the same route that Russia did, but the German Revolution didn’t quite begin at the end of the First World War.
End of the war
In 1918, everybody knew that the war was coming to an end. The example of what Germany became in just four years of war goes to show you how things can change quickly. It’s just sad to think about how many people had lost their lives, the psychological impact that the war had on the nation.
You can forget about the economic hit that this country took as well. Went from being a powerful, industrial nation, to a nation that is on the verge of collapsing, on the verge of The German Revolution.
On the edge of the German revolution in 1918
Discontent and hunger were real back when the war had ended. Workers’ councils have already come to life in Berlin. Munich was already established as the separate socialist republic. Not only the city but the whole region of Bavaria.
A large number of communists wanted to overthrow the government that was created after Prince Max Von Baden resigned, but those attempts were unsuccessful, thanks to the Freikorps, who stopped them and killed the two leaders that were leading this charge. Freikorps were victors against the ailing revolution in Munich as well.
German revolution not happening after all
In the end, Imperial Germany was gone, and in its place was this new, democratic Germany. Just when everybody thought that Germans were going to do the same thing that Russians did and have their own German Revolution, that did not happen.
All this chaos and turmoil that took place just goes to show you how big of an impact the First World War had on Germany. A negative one.
But, since we now know what happened in the 1930s and who were the people calling the shots for Germany, you can see that the suppression of communist revolution was not the end of Germany’s problems of trying to find its political and ideological identity.
Source: historyinanhour.com
