How did Munich and Budapest come to host soviet revolutions in 1919? This chapter presents the rapid growth of the two cities in the nineteenth century and looks at the dynamics of class and ethnic conflicts leading up to World War I. The chapter argues that although the cities were considered “bourgeois” the roots of the revolutionary labor movements and also the racial tensions of antisemitism were present in them both before the war.

Many residents of Munich and Budapest experienced the events of 1919 as both political upheaval and personal trauma. The supporters and opponents of the various political movements, as well as the “innocent bystanders,” witnessed the revolution and counterrevolution as violence and chaos, personal retribution, rumor, innuendo, denunciation, and misinformation. After the immediate crisis of counterrevolution, the interwar years were marked by account-taking, assessment of guilt, and searching for historical explanations, both on a personal and a societal level.

This chapter examines how the police and courts became the main audience for competing revolutionary narratives of guilt and victimization. People wanted to punish others and rehabilitate themselves. The courts functioned both as a sounding board for narratives through which one found resonance and affected verdicts and sentencing and also as a transmitter of new narratives to the public, as court verdicts seemed to be the official or “true” story of the revolutions. The transnational comparison of Budapest and Munich shows that the narrative developed in each was quite different and led to differential severity of verdicts and sentencing, with the courts in Hungary being more punitive. This situation in turn further radicalized Hungarians on the Left and the Right in the interwar period, with the “judicial terror” added to the fraught narrative of revolution and counterrevolution. In Bavaria, though memoirs such as Ernst Toller’s sought to rally supporters with examples of legal mistreatment, the revolution did not play as central a role in the symbolic world of Weimar German politics, overshadowed by even limited events such as the January 1919 Spartacus Uprising and the martyrdom during that revolt of the communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

In the deeply divided political environment of interwar Central Europe, memories of the 1919 revolutions were fitted into preexisting cognitive frameworks of both political Left and Right. My focus is on certain “acts” of remembering, such as the writing of memoirs, the celebration and memorialization of the dead, and debates about the past. This chapter focuses on the two main political “communities of remembering” which developed in the postrevolutionary period in Bavaria and Hungary, the Right and the Left. It in some ways leaves aside the majority of the population, for whom the 1919 revolutions often were simply rolled into the story of the many horrors of the time: war, hunger, displacement, personal loss, inflation, and disease. Perhaps partly because the events of 1919 were not universally viewed as pivotal, even at the time, and often were relegated to a minor role compared with the events of the world war, those with a strong political commitment on the Left or the Right fought not only for their interpretation but also for the historical significance of the revolutions.

Ideas about women and Jews shaped the experience of revolutionary events, and the actions of individual women and Jews were seen not as individual acts but as representative of larger truths.

Dickens’ novel famously begins with the paradox, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”; the 1919 revolutions in Central Europe evoked similarly dichotomous interpretations. Dramatic events since the end of the world war seemed poised to transform the world, but the form of that transformation was unclear and violently contested. The political perceptions of contemporaries, framed by gender stereotypes and antisemitism, reveal the sense of living history, of “fighting the world revolution,” that was shared by residents of the two cities. By examining how contemporaries experienced the contradictory “best of times” and “worst of times,” we uncover important information about the worldview and intellectual milieu that came to predominate in both interwar Germany and Hungary, playing an important role in their later national histories of antisemitism and fascism.

This chapter examimes the acute crisis of the world war and its role in destabilizing the political balance in both cities and in the overthrow of both the Habsburg Monarchy and the German Empire (as well as its constituent state, the Bavarian Monarchy). It compares the revolutions and counterrevolutions and the violence that accompanied the political struggles in both cities.

This chapter analyzes rumor and terror, both shaped by revolutionary scripts, and the political violence that erupted after the creation of council governments. These new governments, namesakes of the revolutionary government in Russia, deployed a revolutionary vocabulary that seemed to make concrete all the ideas of radical political discourse. Rhetoric about class warfare appeared to transform into reality with the appearance of armed workers' brigades patrolling the streets. This embodiment of previously theoretical concepts was empowering to those playing the roles of revolutionary heroes and was terrifying to those who suddenly found themselves cast as enemies in a dramatic new reality. As we explore events in Budapest and Munich we will see how expectations of violence shaped by revolutionary scripts influenced the ways in which residents of the two cities understood political events and provoked new rounds of violence.