Book review: Dreamers: When The Writers Took Power, Germany, 1918

Pushkin Press, £16.99

Review by Russell Leadbetter

On the BBC last month, the historian David Olusoga noted that, just before the end of the Great War, Germany was in the early stages of a revolution. There was a rebellion in the navy and the red flag flew over several cities. The situation, he added, “was febrile”.

This fascinating book, by the award-winning German writer Volker Weidermann, reconstructs an extraordinary few months, over 1918 and 1919, when a number of left-wing writers and intellectuals sought to establish a people’s republic in Munich. Aside from the those who tried and failed to make it happen, there are key roles or cameos for players as diverse as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, B Traven (nom de plume of the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), the Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, the great novelist Thomas Mann and a lonely lance corporal named Adolf Hitler.

The book more or less opens in giddy fashion, on November 7, 1918, days before the Armistice is signed. In Munich many, weary of war and privation, had been hoping for a revolution. The man who obliged them was Kurt Eisner, a journalist and theatre critic, a Jew, and member of the anti-war Independent Social Democrats, who had just spent six months in prison for organising a munition workers’ strike. His aim, writes Weidermann, was to transform the Kingdom of Bavaria into a people’s republic, a land of solidarity and altruism.

Erhard Auer, the leader of the ruling Social Democratic Party, had taken his eye off the ball, having assured the Bavarian king there would be no revolutionary uprising. Eisner seized the moment. “He could feel the energy of the day,” Weidermann writes, “the rage, the will for some decisive thing to happen at last.” So, supported by an

ever-increasing crowd, Eisner headed on that day to the war barracks, where the soldiers elected to join him. Other barracks followed suit, as did ministries and the army headquarters. “Men wearing red armbands stride around the city. They are going to turn all of Munich red, red and new and peaceful and free,” writes Weidermann.

Armed soldiers occupied public buildings. The king and his family took flight under cover of darkness. In the middle of the night Eisner and his elated followers reached the state parliament; he became prime minister and work began on drafting a proclamation.

Days later, Eisner proclaimed the birth of a new form of revolution and spoke of plans for permanent democracy, peace and countless liberal reforms.

His revolutionary government, however, was opposed from the outset on all sides and was unable to provide the people with even basic services, and it faltered with astonishing speed. On November 25 Eisner caused secret documents to be published proving Germany’s war guilt. He asserted that the war had been started by “a small horde of mad Prussian military”. His cards were now marked by right-wing German patriots. Early January saw a disastrous election result for Eisner and his government, and on February 21 he was shot dead by a German nationalist as he made his way to parliament to resign.

Despite the failure of his government, there was a huge outpouring of grief in response to news of the assassination.

In the weeks thereafter, there were two governments. And into the city poured further dreamers, from “winter-sandal-wearers, preachers, plant whisperers, the liberators and the liberated, long-haired men, hypnotists and those who have been hypnotised, drifters”.

At length, a new government, the Council Republic, sought to fill the void but it could not last and thereafter this becomes a story of Bolshevik violence, bloodshed, reprisals, courts-martial. The Freikorps played a major part in the latter stages. “The murdering, hunting and denunciation continue,” writes Weidermann.

This is a vivid tale, crisply narrated, with insight and dark humour, with, at the end, the spectre of Nazism hovering above it. But for a few short months, idealistic writers had dared to dream.