Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Community, authority and resistance to fascism
- 1 The German revolution defeated and fascism deferred: the servicemen's revolt and social democracy at the end of the First World War, 1918–1920
- 2 Dangerous communities and conservative authority: the judiciary, Nazis and rough people, 1932–1933
- 3 The anti-fascist movement in south-east Lancashire, 1933–1940: the divergent experiences of Manchester and Nelson
- 4 Spain 1936. Resistance and revolution: the flaws in the Front
- 5 The Blueshirts in the Irish Free State, 1932–1935: the nature of socialist republican and governmental opposition
- 6 Town councils of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais region: local power, French power, German power
- 7 Structures of authority in the Greek resistance, 1941–1944
- 8 Nazi Austria: the limits of dissent
- 9 ‘Homosexual’ men in Vienna, 1938
- 10 ‘The years of consent’? Popular attitudes and forms of resistance to Fascism in Italy, 1925–1940
- 11 Saints and heroines: rewriting the history of Italian women in the Resistance
- Notes
- Index
1 - The German revolution defeated and fascism deferred: the servicemen's revolt and social democracy at the end of the First World War, 1918–1920
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Community, authority and resistance to fascism
- 1 The German revolution defeated and fascism deferred: the servicemen's revolt and social democracy at the end of the First World War, 1918–1920
- 2 Dangerous communities and conservative authority: the judiciary, Nazis and rough people, 1932–1933
- 3 The anti-fascist movement in south-east Lancashire, 1933–1940: the divergent experiences of Manchester and Nelson
- 4 Spain 1936. Resistance and revolution: the flaws in the Front
- 5 The Blueshirts in the Irish Free State, 1932–1935: the nature of socialist republican and governmental opposition
- 6 Town councils of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais region: local power, French power, German power
- 7 Structures of authority in the Greek resistance, 1941–1944
- 8 Nazi Austria: the limits of dissent
- 9 ‘Homosexual’ men in Vienna, 1938
- 10 ‘The years of consent’? Popular attitudes and forms of resistance to Fascism in Italy, 1925–1940
- 11 Saints and heroines: rewriting the history of Italian women in the Resistance
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The November revolution of 1918 was the culmination of a series of struggles protesting against the political and social conditions brought about by the world's first war of industrialised mass slaughter. Strikes, mass desertions and mutinies led to the collapse of the discredited Wilhelmine political system and thwarted the plans of generals, admirals and politicians to prolong the war. Thus the Weimar Republic was born during a revolution to end the First World War.
The main feature of the foundation of the Republic was the disintegration of the entire armed services, together with the powers of the officer corps, the army High Command and its civil service offshoots, that formed the central pillars of the authority of the state. In this chapter, the servicemen's revolts and the interventions by the social democrats are examined from contemporary reports, proclamations and press accounts and from subsequent memoirs and debates. They reveal the widespread advance of the revolution in the army when the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD) and the left-wing Independent Socialist Party (USPD) took office, initially with the general approval of the revolutionaries. After the removal of the Kaiser, however, the social democrats maintained the structures of the central state that the revolutionaries sought to abolish.
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- Information
- Opposing FascismCommunity, Authority and Resistance in Europe, pp. 12 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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