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Trail Sinister. Big Lies (17 Nov 1918): Revolutionsfeier
The German Revolution arrived in Munich exactly one year after the October Revolution / Bolshevik Coup in St. Petersburg. There it was led by Kurt Eisner, a 51-year-old bohemian intellectual dilettante, drama critic and communist who spent his time in the artists’ cafés around the University of Munich in Schwabing. 🧵
The German Revolution arrived in Munich exactly one year after the October Revolution / Bolshevik Coup in St. Petersburg. There it was led by Kurt Eisner, a 51-year-old bohemian intellectual dilettante, drama critic and communist who spent his time in the artists’ cafés around the University of Munich in Schwabing. 🧵
For the the uprising and establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, see my previous thread here:
https://x.com/ModernHeretic9/status/1721840192284168422?s=20
Again, those councils were what the Russians called soviets and German communists created them in November 1918 in conscious imitation of the Russian example. Indeed, Räte is the German word for council and soviet.
And Kurt Eisner was a communist. Most historians will tell you he was an Independent Socialist (USPD), which he was, but he and most of the USPD were communists. In Eisner’s case he was more of an anarcho-communist than a Leninist or Stalinist.
And he was a Jew. And he had been involved in a workers’ strike in January 1918.
This is important to note because Hitler would arrive in Munich in four days (21 Nov 1918) and Bavaria’s Räterepublik obviously influenced Hitler’s later Weltanschauung (Worldview).
The fact that it was led by serval Jewish Marxists obviously led Hitler to associate Jews with Marxism so that he often conflated the two and referred to Jewish-Marxism.
At which point I’ll link to a slide from my Red Rising in Munich thread:
https://x.com/ModernHeretic9/status/1721843120046768318?s=20
Like I keep saying, there’s always a grain of truth to totalitarian Big Lies like the infamous Dolchstoßlegende, or myth of the stab-in-the-back. Hardly anyone would buy into them if there wasn’t any truth to them at all.
But also note how Kershaw says “Nazi caricature.” It must be said that the Nazis hardly caricatured the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Eisner and his comrades caricatured themselves.
And we get a glimpse of what this experiment in communism in Bavaria was like in its early days by looking at the Revolutionsfeier (Revolutionary Celebration) on 17 November 1918.
Volker Weidermann’s new Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power is a very literary account of these events that often provides colorful details you won’t find in other histories:
P. 63-7
P. 63-7
“The 17th of November is the best, most splendid day of his [Eisner’s] brief reign. The new government has invited the people to a celebration of the revolution in the National Theater.”
It’s a very posh area in the center of Munich.
“The tickets have been allocated by ballot,” continues Weidermann.
You’re looking at one of them.
You’re looking at one of them.
Weidermann continues:
“The new ministers are distributed all around the auditorium — there is no VIP area. There are no military insignia to be seen, either. Just red sashes, red ribbons, red armbands.
“The new ministers are distributed all around the auditorium — there is no VIP area. There are no military insignia to be seen, either. Just red sashes, red ribbons, red armbands.
“The famous villa architect Emanuel von Seidl has decorated the opera house for the occasion. The theatrical city of Munich celebrates itself and its new Prime Minister.
“He has chosen Beethoven for the musical program.
"The Leonore overtures.
"The conductor is Bruno Walter, of course, Thomas Mann’s best friend, who very recently trembled in fear of losing his money and his life. It is a perfect concert.
“Afterwards the curtains part and Eisner appears, with his little spectacles, unkempt beard and high forehead. There is a thunderous swell of applause. The curtains close behind him. He pauses, he looks, he begins:
David Clay Large records him as also saying:
Where Ghosts Walked, p. 84: archive.org/details/whereg…
Where Ghosts Walked, p. 84: archive.org/details/whereg…
That’s how communists think. It’s what they call praxis.
“Kurt Eisner gets carried away and takes the whole auditorium with him,” continues Weidermann.
“That evening in the National Theater he lays out his dream, the utopia he wants to transform into reality — indeed, he thinks reality has already been transformed.
“He sees, and he wants everyone else to see, that overnight reality has miraculously taken on the character of his wildest dreams.”
He went on to speak about what he meant by democracy:
As Weidermann points out:
“That was what the councils [i.e. soviets] were for.”
“That was what the councils [i.e. soviets] were for.”
Indeed, this is what communists refer to as “true democracy” -- based on soviets. And remember there were only workers’ and soldiers’ and peasant soviets, not bourgeois small business owner soviets etc.
So obviously that’s not democracy but the dictatorship of certain minority groups.
Large continues:
“When Eisner finished, a group of actors played a scene from Goethe’s Epimenedes Erwachen, ending with the call ‘Upward, Onward, Upward! And the work, will be done!’
“When Eisner finished, a group of actors played a scene from Goethe’s Epimenedes Erwachen, ending with the call ‘Upward, Onward, Upward! And the work, will be done!’
“Next, some singers performed the section in Handel’s Messiah in which the chorus intones: ‘The people who wander in the darkness see a great light.’
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