Unlike other revolutions that have achieved greater resonance in the European social imaginary, the legacy of the 1918–1919 German Revolution in political thought has been deeply one-sided and unusually monolithic. Traditionally, only radical tendencies within the political left have historically staked a claim to “ownership” over the Revolution. The events of 1918–1919 in Germany are often bracketed with the better-known events of 1917 in Russia as part of the “origin story” or “founding myth” of the twentieth century revolutionary left. As a source of theoretical insight, they tend to be deployed overwhelmingly by adherents of “left communism,” especially in its “council communist” instantiation. At the same time, the memory of the German Revolution is marked with countless signifiers of tragedy, frustration, and resentment adopted directly from the radical-left imaginary, with the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht at the hands of Freikorps troops acting as a particularly visceral symbol for the “betrayal” of socialism, and of the wider lost opportunity for more drastic social transformation.

However, the hegemonisation of the German Revolution by narratives from the radical left does not fully describe—indeed, it even obscures—a range of possible alternative interpretations of the Revolution. In particular, the conflation of the entire Revolution—whose first tremors were felt as early as 1916, and whose effects continued until as late as 1923—with the narrow moment of the January 1919 Spartacist revolt, and to a lesser extent the short-lived council republics in various German states (like the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic), is largely a product of radical-left decontestation (Broué 2006; McElligott 2013). Above all, what is often missing from the view of the Revolution in left politics broadly construed are narratives from non-revolutionary socialist perspectives. These neglected narratives often emphasise a very different set of moments as significant milestones, including the collapse of cooperation between the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) on 29 December 1918, which paved the way for the Spartacist uprising; the elections to the Nationalversammlung (National Assembly) on 19 January 1919, whose outcome forced the SPD into a “Weimar Coalition” with non-socialist parties; and the inaugural Reichstag elections on 6 June 1920, where the left’s irreconcilable fragmentation effectively turned Weimar Germany’s fledgling government over to an uneasy liberal-conservative coalition, marking a definitive end to the revolutionary period.

This chapter seeks to offer an alternative view of the theoretical legacy of the German Revolution from a social-democratic or “reformist” socialist perspective, focusing on its reception in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. As the founder and chief advocate of the “revisionist” tendency that ended the hegemony of “orthodox” Marxism within socialist thought, Bernstein entered the period of revolutionary transition in Germany as one of the best-known and most controversial figures on the European left. And as one of the few prominent “revisionist” figures who had broken with the SPD and joined the more “orthodox” USPD over the SPD’s support for the war whose end the Revolution helped bring about, Bernstein approached the Revolution’s theoretical implications from the unique perspective of a thinker whose political aims and commitments were in equal parts sympathetic to and significantly at odds with those of both the radical left and the moderate right of German Social Democracy. This chapter traces the lessons Bernstein draws from the events of the German Revolution, exploring the dangerous role of myths in scientific-socialist thought, the need for left politics to be positive and constructive (not just critical and demonstrative), and the relationship between political theory and political practice in projects for progressive societal transformation.

Reform or Revolution, Revisited

During the early months of the Revolution, Bernstein played a central part in the German left’s attempts to effect an orderly transition from the chaotic decline of the Kaiserreich to the nascent structures of the German Republic. On 10 November 1918, one day after Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication and the declaration of the Republic, the SPD and USPD leaderships negotiated the formation of an interim coalition government, the Rat der Volksbeauftragten (Council of People’s Deputies), to manage the end of hostilities on the Western Front and establish new provisional political institutions. Many of the major figures on the German left secured positions within the Rat, and Bernstein himself was rewarded for his long career of tireless activism and parliamentary service by being appointed Assistant Secretary to the Reichsschatzamt (Reich Treasury), a position he held until January 1919 (Steger 1997, p. 224). At the same time, he doggedly pursued his longstanding objective of bringing about the reunification of the SPD and USPD, prefiguring this “left unity” project in person by rejoining the SPD on 24 December 1918 while remaining a member of the USPD, which he only left on 21 March 1919 when the party explicitly banned its members from holding dual party affiliations (Bernstein1919b; Vorwärts1918b). Throughout this time, and especially once he was free of his governmental duties, Bernstein also maintained an active presence as a journalist for the main party organs of German Social Democracy. No longer persona non grata in the SPD-loyal press after his “return to the fold,” he produced a succession of columns in Vorwärts—supplemented by occasional appearances in other periodicals such as the USPD organ Freiheit or the main socialist newspaper in his Breslau constituency, the Breslauer Volkswacht—that provide both a “live” chronicle and a retrospective assessment of the events of the revolution.

After the Revolution ended with the widespread defeat of the “revolutionist” elements, Bernstein devoted his intellectual energies during 1920 and 1921 to revisiting the questions it had raised in greater detail, in light of his experiences during the transition from Kaiserreich to Republic. This led to two works in particular, both of which are ostensibly historical but which, on closer inspection, embed many significant theoretical assumptions and insights that are key to understanding Bernstein’s political worldview. In the first, Die Deutsche Revolution: Geschichte der Entstehung und Ersten Arbeitsperiode der Deutschen Republik (TheGerman Revolution: A History of the Emergence and First Working Period of the German Republic), Bernstein (1921a) gives a highly detailed account of the events of the Revolution and their intellectual, economic, and political context, covering the period from the collapse of the Kaiser’s government in October 1918 to the Nationalversammlung elections in January 1919. In this work, originally written as part of a planned (but seemingly never completed) larger work, he revisits themes that he first considered earlier in his career, including reformist and revolutionary tendencies within socialism, the strategic importance of ideological and organisational party unity, the dangers of militarism and political violence, relations with non-socialist and bourgeois movements, and the defence of parliamentary democracy. Meanwhile, in the second work, Wie Eine Revolution Zugrunde Ging (How A Revolution Died), Bernstein (1921b) offers a historical analogy to the German Revolution in his account of the 1848 French Revolution, memorably analysed by Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, as well as an explication of the significant new theoretical and practical lessons that the events of the 1848 Revolution hold for the German experience. Across both works, a relatively new facet of Bernstein’s intellectual persona emerges—that of the memoirist and historiographer, to complement his established presence as a social activist and political theorist.

Given the context in which they were written, perhaps the most burning question these works raise is whether they reveal any transformation in Bernstein’s position within the “reform or revolution” debate that arose in the final years of the nineteenth century, prompted by the publication of his “Problems of Socialism” articles (1896–1898) and Preconditions of Socialism (1899). The short answer is a resounding no. While, of course, Bernstein was much too nuanced and refined a thinker to see the Revolution merely as confirmation of his Preconditions-era reformism, and hence offer no further statements on the “reform or revolution” question, it is certainly fair to say that he saw nothing in his experience of the Revolution to alter or weaken his reformist convictions. Instead, he seized the opportunity afforded by the Revolution’s events—and the subsequent public need and desire for authoritative accounts of these events—to elaborate his position in greater detail, updated to reflect more recent problems and examples.

Perhaps the clearest point of change in Bernstein’s “mature” reformism is that by 1920–1921 he was able to direct his criticism at a more concrete target than in 1896–1899. As he observes in a newly-written afterword to the third edition of Preconditions, an extract of which was published in Vorwärts in May 1920, Bernstein (1920a, b) saw in the emergent phenomenon of Bolshevism a clear realisation of the semi-abstract Blanquist tendencies that had been his bête noire in his earlier writings. For Bernstein (1919c; 1920b, c; 1921a, pp. 21–24, 40, 43, 68, 101–102, 128ff.; 1921b, pp. 65–66), Bolshevism—whether in its original Russian incarnation or in the imitant forms embraced by the Spartacists and the left-USPD—embodied everything Social Democracy ought to oppose: an undemocratic reliance on coups d’état by conspiratorial cadres to usurp political power, a dictatorial conception of rule based on selective class representation, and the mechanical application of a bastardised reading of early Marxist thought to vastly unsuitable social conditions. He amplified his scepticism towards the use of “uncivilised” political violence, maintaining that it was only likely to delegitimise the revolutionary cause, and that overreliance on coups de main would fail to secure revolutionary achievements in a lasting way (1921a, pp. 40–41). Further, he insisted that revolutions need both good leadership by experienced politicians with sound judgment and deep democratic accountability, arguing that the tried-and-tested structures of parliamentary representative democracy offered a better balance between these than the novel system of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. And he reiterated that socialists had to take into account social complexity and the underlying differences between countries, with a view to establishing a kind of epistemic hierarchy between socialist movements, whereby activists in less-developed countries learn revolutionary strategy from those in more-developed countries, and not vice versa (1919c; 1921a, p. 172). In other words, ultimately, Bernstein’s elaborations of his anti-revolutionary socialist position were very much in the same spirit as his original statements from the 1890s.

In this light, it is an especially great tragedy that the prospects for a serious continuation of the late-nineteenth century “reform or revolution” debate were dealt a crippling blow by the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, Bernstein’s most powerful interlocutor on the “revolutionist” side. Despite their intense strategic disagreements, Bernstein himself deeply respected Luxemburg, admiring her as much for her “selfless” activism and wholesale dedication to the socialist cause as for her “thoroughly poetical nature” and her romanticist view of the prospects for proletarian emancipation. It is clear that Bernstein would have relished a “second round” in their debate, and he mourns her death unconditionally as a great loss to Social Democracy, and to the new Republic:

In her, socialism has lost a highly-talented comrade-in-arms, who could have rendered the Republic inestimable services, if her wrong assessment of the available options had not led her into the camp of the illusionists of Gewaltpolitik [the politics of violence]. But even he who for that reason was her opponent in the party struggle will still cherish the memory of this restless fighter. (1921a, p. 171)

It is certainly true that, with Luxemburg’s murder, the “reform or revolution” debate suffered a serious theoretical setback, becoming agonisingly one-sided, and in effect defunct not long after. Whereas the early debate was largely encapsulated in Preconditionsfor Bernstein and Social Reform or Revolution? and The Mass Strike for Luxemburg, the later debate is missing an equivalent Luxemburgist text to match German Revolution, How A Revolution Died, and Bernstein’s other “mature” writings. Their places as the “leading” respective advocates of reform and revolution within the socialist movement have also remained vacant. Few other thinkers engaged with the question as directly or eloquently as Bernsteinand Luxemburg, and those that did typically presented their cases without the urgency that comes from facing a direct opposing interlocutor—such as the Fabians and Austromarxists for the reformist side, and the Leninists and their successors for revolution. Moreover, they often struggled to propel their localised debates beyond matters of parochial party disagreements, and thus—unlike Bernstein and Luxemburg—failed to attain the prominence required to influence socialist strategy on a truly global scale.

Socialist Science Versus Anti-socialist Myth

Yet the absence of any major shift in Bernstein’s reformist outlook should not be taken as a sign that he saw the Revolution as devoid of any theoretical lessons. In fact, beyond the sometimes inhibiting parameters of the “reform or revolution” question, his writings on the Revolution contain several fertile elaborations on other themes that offer a fascinating deeper insight into his overarching theoretical perspective. The first of these is his profoundly negative view of the political role of mythmaking and fantasy. In Bernstein’s (1921a, pp. 76–77, 165–171) view, the immediate aftermath of the Revolution was—as with any sudden or drastic political event—characterised by the proliferation of exaggerated “legends” (positive and negative) around the parties and persons involved in it, often fuelled by the sensationalism of newly-formed radical media outlets who were jostling to gain a toehold among the proletarian readership of the new Germany. These legends, in turn, had percolated strongly into the “received” narratives of the Revolution, and he laments the absence of thorough and comprehensive historical accounts of its duration. Indeed, he finds that the only accounts available so far were summary descriptions of the Revolution’s emergence and first developments, writings on specific events or the actions of specific people, political critiques, accounts of legal proceedings, or official and unofficial reports—many of which were partisan, and which often falsified facts outright. Bernstein (1921a, pp. 5–6) argues that cleaving to such accounts, and integrating a substantively flawed account of “what happened” into their theoretical analyses, was a sure way for socialists to draw entirely the wrong lessons from their experience of the Revolution. Instead, socialists who claimed to be “scientific” in their outlook urgently needed to formulate truly objective accounts of the German Revolution, and he puts forward The German Revolution as his attempt to fill this gap—an attempt in which he claims to have tried to be “just but not impartial” towards the people and events involved, acknowledging his own position as a co-participant.

In this context, Bernstein’s writings on the Revolution play a didactic role: dispelling socialists’ partisan myths and fantasies about the Revolution’s events, and reminding them of the need for a sober scientific-socialist approach to political historiography that serves to reveal the deeper contradictions that underlie political events (Bernstein1921a, p. 6). Bernstein’s approach to this is twofold. First, he offers an anecdotal “worked example” of the potential theoretical and strategic significance of basing one’s worldview on different historical accounts of seminal events. In the foreword to How A Revolution Died, appropriately entitled “History and Legend,” Bernstein (1921b, p. 6) recalls that it was his own deeper study of the events of the 1848 February Revolution in France—prompted by an invitation to read the Swiss historian Louis Héritier’s (1897) then-newly-published account during the 1890s—that first caused him to question the received view of that revolution among orthodox Marxists. This further engagement with the history of 1848, he relates, convinced him that it was above all the irresponsible provocations of the Babouvists and the agitations of revolutionary socialists in April–May 1848, coupled with the reprisals that followed the failed workers’ uprising in June, that intensified class oppositions between the bourgeoisie and socialist workers to the point where monarchist reaction gained ground, and ultimately enabled the coup d’etat in December 1851 (Bernstein 1921b, pp. 7–8). Bernstein (1921b, pp. 9–10) suggests that Marx may have had valid tactical reasons for brushing over this core truth about 1848 in the Eighteenth Brumaire, but argues that Marx’s decision left contemporary socialists with a distorted view of the “legend of 1848,” as well as a host of “slogans and arguments derived from it,” that were actively detrimental to their cause. Though published in 1921, the bulk of How A Revolution Died consists of an essay dating from the start of Bernstein’s revisionist “turn” that he had previously hesitated to publish. In his commentary on it, Bernstein candidly describes his moment of disillusionment and disenchantment with orthodox Marxism. His experience of ideological rupture, when (in the idiom of modern ideology studies) the spectres of a stubborn reality that did not fit his familiar ideological map surged into his consciousness, forced a piercing moment of ideological reappraisal—a need to “make a complete break” with his prior commitments—that manifested in his “turn” towards reformism (Bernstein 1921b, pp. 9–10). In other words, Bernstein’s criticism of myth is also a self-critique. Bernstein treats the German Revolution as a confessional moment—an opportunity to revisit the instant where the “scales” of mythical illusion fell from his eyes—and he wants to encourage Weimar-era socialists to go through the same thought-processes, not just about the 1848 revolution but also analogously the events of 1918–1919 as well.

At the same time, Bernstein is clearly keen to raise awareness among his fellow socialists of the dangers to which an indulgence of myths and fantasies can lead, and the consequent need to dispel them far more widely. He illustrates this by choosing a specific focal point of the post-Revolution “legends” in circulation and “unmasking” it repeatedly throughout his account: namely, the mythologies that grew up around Karl Liebknecht in the wake of his murder, including the brutal and dramatic circumstances of his death, and the lenient sentences meted out to his killers, which turned him into a martyr for the radical left. Against this view, and in stark contrast to his deep respect for Luxemburg, Bernstein (1921a, pp. 68–70, 165–171) has little patience with Liebknecht, whom he sees as a volatile, egotistical “desperado” suffering from a chronic lack of political responsibility and a limitless capacity to overestimate his own skills and importance. Above all, Bernstein criticises Liebknecht for repeatedly jeopardising the transformative project of the Revolution at several crucial junctures, fomenting unrest precisely at times when he should have been seeking to safeguard the foundations of the new Republic. The most egregious example of this, in Bernstein’s view, came during the fraught negotiations between the SPD and USPD on 9 November 1918 over the formation of a provisional government. Given the sizeable extent of the SPD’s popular support in rural and urban areas, its offer to the USPD to participate in a coalition “socialist unity” government was surprisingly generous, which contrasted sharply with the USPD’s rigid reticence to cooperate with people they denounced as “traitors to socialism.” But this tense situation was only exacerbated by Liebknecht, whose campaign of inciting oratory against the SPD “Scheidemänner” and “counterrevolutionary” demands for all executive, legislative, and judicial power to be transferred to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils nearly derailed the negotiations entirely (Bernstein 1921a, p. 34). Bernstein also pours scorn on the image of Liebknecht, a lawyer with a long family lineage of professional political involvement, as a hero of the German proletariat. Recalling his own personal encounters with Spartacists who were themselves disconcerted by Liebknecht’s increasingly inflexible radicalism, he observes that Liebknecht was far from the “voice of the people,” but rather a dogmatic outlier within a party that at the time enjoyed muted popular support (winning only 7.6% of the vote in the Nationalversammlung election, compared to the SPD’s 37.9%) (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 75–76). Bernstein accuses Liebknecht’s followers of inflicting collateral damage on the Republic in trying to unjustly exalt their dissatisfaction with the course of the Revolution. Fuelled by the radical press, the remaining Spartacists presented the SPD as accessories to Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s deaths—a portrayal that Bernstein (1921a, pp. 79–81, 165–171) utterly rejects, emphasising that the military sidelined the SPD and swiftly took over control of the interrogation and pursuit of the Spartacists. This misrepresentation risked causing irreparable damage to German workers’ view of the government, and had the capacity to produce a “Liebknecht myth” that might make the man more dangerous to the Republic dead than he would have been had he still been alive (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 170–171).

For Bernstein, the particular risk associated with reliance on fantasies, such as those fostered by the “legend of 1848” and the “Liebknecht myth,” is that socialist strategy becomes hopelessly divorced from its real material context. In his view, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) founded by Liebknecht and Luxemburg was especially guilty of this, as to a lesser extent was the USPD. The issue at stake was both parties’ overt desire to replace the democratic Republic with what Bernstein (1920c) termed a “dictatorship of councils [Rätediktatur]”—i.e., to bring about in Germany what the Bolshevists had achieved in Russia with the 1917 October Revolution. This, for Bernstein, was dogmatism trumping scientific assessment par excellence, and he saw his role in the post-Revolution period as delivering some hard truths to the more idealistic elements in German socialism (Vorwärts1918a). German communists seemed quite comfortable with the demonstrable economic damage the 1917 revolutions and “war communism” policy had wreaked on the parts of Russia under Bolshevist control, so long as rule by a centralised hierarchy of workers’ soviets remained assured. Moreover, they were also prepared to hazard similarly dire consequences in Germany, despite the vast differences between the two countries’ economic conditions:

The fact that such a dictatorship in industrialised Germany would have far more destructive economic consequences than in overwhelmingly agrarian Russia bothers them just as little as the fact that such a dictatorship in Germany, with a citizenry that is superior to the Russian one in number and in other respects, and with a peasantry so differently disposed to the Russian one, would meet much stronger and tenacious resistance than there. (Bernstein 1920c)

So strong was the pull of the mythologies surrounding Bolshevism that its German supporters were prepared to abandon core Marxist tenets about the determinant role of social-economic context in deciding the right use and applicability of anti-capitalist strategy, pushing them “back into the speculative method of pre-Marxian socialism”:

While, according to Marx, a backward country should learn from a more advanced country, now the advanced countries of Western Europe are supposed to adopt the methods of social-political action from the substantially backward countries of Eastern Europe. (Bernstein 1919c)

Ultimately, German communists were so “blinded by the Bolshevist slogans, which sound Marxist but which stem from conceptions that Marx himself has rebutted,” that they even sacrificed what should have been their central raison d’être—their commitment to truly improve the lot of working people—instead “hoping for world revolution and hoping to build a beautiful new society on the rubble it will bring” (Vorwärts1918a). It is above all for this reason, Bernstein (1920c) argues, that Social Democracy must “engage the enemy on the left” and defend the development of the Republic, the legacy of the Revolution, and the welfare of the German people against the “general impoverishment and servitude” that would ensue from the communist Gewaltpolitik. The incentive for socialists to appeal to myths, and their susceptibility to myths’ enticing appeal, can only be overcome via an uncompromising reassertion of the methodological principles of scientific socialism, updated to take into consideration the innovations of the burgeoning field of social science. For Bernstein (1921b, pp. 63–65), would-be social revolutionaries need to be “at home” in social science to ensure that their strategies and policies are appropriate for the conditions in which they find themselves—i.e., they must be intellectuals (by disposition, not in terms of their social status) who, not unlike in Karl Mannheim’s (2014, pp. 91–170) conception, can “cut through” myths to “lay bare” the realities they disguise.

Of course, political myths do not all come from the communist left, and even in his most vitriolic moments of hostility to Bolshevism and its acolytes, Bernstein never loses sight of the fact that some of the most dangerous myths were manufactured by the reactionary right. The myths around the end of WW1, for instance, were a prime case of illusion and disillusionment. Bernstein recounts the key moments of the end of the war, including the abject collapse of the German army in July–August 1918 due to the influx of new manpower, tanks, and flier squadrons on the Allied side. He argues that the consequent total loss of morale among German soldiers when they realised the war was lost severely undermined their capacity to believe the censored news and tightly-controlled militarist propaganda they were fed by the Oberste Heeresleitung (Supreme Army Command), which had taken on de facto dictatorial authority by the end of WW1, and instead made them sympathetic to agitations for socialist-revolutionary change (Bernstein1921a, pp. 9–13). In this context, the attempts by militant nationalist rabble-rousers to blame the German military collapse on the new civilian government and the effects of the Revolution—now better known as the “stab-in-the-back myth”—should be seen as a new, desperate way of trying to re-superimpose a militarist ideological “mask,” premised on a blatant falsehood, on a stubborn reality that refused to fit their ideological “map” (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 11–13; 1922). Such myths from the right were, in Bernstein’s (1922) view, designed to disguise the dangerous threat that resurgent militarism and reaction posed to the Republic—whether in the form of attempted coups d’état like the failed Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch, rising electoral support for fascism in Bavaria, Silesia, and elsewhere, or cynical tax avoidance and price manipulation strategies by major agrarians and industrialists that hollowed out the young Republic’s weak economic power. On this basis, Bernstein (1919a) insists that his fellow socialists had to stop deceiving themselves about the future safety and stability of the Republic. One symptom of the fact that the Republic was a “civic republic” [bürgerliche Republik] that acted as a kind of hybrid of a “bourgeois republic” [Bourgeois-Republik] and a “workers’ republic” [Republik der Arbeiter] was that its political system contained a range of parties whose commitment to maintaining German democracy was highly uneven, and often tenuous. The national-conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), for instance, was explicitly hostile to the Weimar regime; the support of the national-liberal German People’s Party (DVP) was unreliable at best; and even the other “Weimar Coalition” parties, the Christian-democratic Centre Party (Zentrum) and the social-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) were at best “rationally but not emotionally committed to the Republic, and cannot be relied upon to defend it with all their force in times of serious danger.” The uncomfortable reality Bernstein (1921c) wants to impress on other socialists is that “only the socialist parties are republican in the character of their policy and goals.” Even if they are republican in different ways in practice, he recognises that in extremis—as happened in the general strikes that ended the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch—the non-SPD socialists could just about be relied on to support the Republic and resist its enemies energetically. But he takes small comfort from this, arguing that socialists must do everything necessary to avoid matters coming to such extremes, and avoid leaving the fate of Republic to the uncertain outcomes of such confrontations.

Constructive Politics Versus Protest Politics

Although the ancien régime and its trappings of imperialism and militarism were still an ever-present threat to the new Republic, either in their original guise or mutated into new forms, Bernstein (1919a) is also at pains to stress the important role the Kaiserreich played in bringing about the conditions in which the Republic and its attendant societal transformations could emerge. He reminds his fellow socialists that, in accordance with the precepts of scientific socialism, every societal form lays the preconditions for its successors. Every advancing human society, he argues, is a complex organism that is subjected to certain laws of development, which cannot—contra the “interventions” of the Bolshevists and other Blanquists—be reformed at will into a desired form, but can only be further developed into a certain new form after fulfilling certain changes in the foundations of its living process (Bernstein 1919c). For Bernstein (1921a, pp. 7–8), what brought about the collapse of the Kaiserreich were the unintended consequences of its own “blood and iron” policy. More immediately, the revolutionary situation in Germany was brought about by a combination of the delayed electoral reform for Prussia, the one-sided terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the Entente’s refusal to conclude peace terms with an increasingly compromised Wilhelm II (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 19–20, 24–25). The particular socialist (as opposed to liberal) tenor of the Revolution, moreover, was due to the fact that the German army leadership unwittingly enabled socialist-revolutionary agitation among the soldiery by sending arrested socialist activists to serve in penal battalions at the front (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 9–10). Bernstein (1921a, pp. 7–8) also insists that the Revolution would have been impossible, and the Republic a far-off aspiration, if the Kaiserreich had not laid down certain longer-term useful foundations as well: fostering political unity within Germany, tearing down its internal political-economic borders, and pursuing trade according to a “most-favoured-nation” principle that led to industrial development and turned Germany into a rich country by 1914. At the same time, however, Bernstein (1922) warns socialists not to misrecognise and overestimate the historical opportunities afforded them by the conditions in which the Republic had emerged:

Four years after the German Revolution, we feel more clearly than ever before how differently the transition to the republican state form took place in Germany than we social democrats hoped for and aspired to.

Socialists had been dealt the task of constructing the Republic in a profoundly “unsuitable moment”—“not as a result of our victory over a form of society that had developed up to its last implications, […] but as the result of the collapse of the backward part of this society in itself” (Bernstein 1922). It was the states that had retained the most pronounced elements of feudalism that had been defeated in a struggle with more developed capitalist powers, and it was only in the former, not the latter, that opportunities for socialist transformation had so far arisen at all.

Despite this caveat, Bernstein (1921a, pp. 14ff.) insists that socialists need to make the most of any such moments, however “unsuitable,” to effect a radical break with the destructive logic of the ancien régime. In his view, the experience of the Revolution showed that the only movement capable of doing so was Social Democracy, and he considers it a key expression of the movement’s intrinsic identification with (and representation of) the interests of the working class that the SPD “took upon itself [the] hard and rough work … [of] constructing and expanding the Republic” during and after the Revolution (Vorwärts1920). In that context, the refusal of the socialists in other parties—especially USPD and KPD—to “collaborate in the expansion of the Republic and the socialist reform work” over what he saw as comparatively petty complaints over leadership personnel utterly infuriated Bernstein (1920c), and he dedicated significant efforts to resisting the detrimental effects of such “splittist” tendencies (Vorwärts1918a). For Bernstein, the task of building a new society like the Republic required socialists to abandon their familiar oppositional disposition and “demonstration politics,” cultivated through long years of suppression, and embrace “constructive politics, the politics of positive creation” (Freiheit1920). The SPD had recognised this, and risen to the occasion, whereas the USPD and KPD had “chosen the comfortable role of the external critic, … keep[ing] themselves free of blame easily”—content to carp from the sidelines and, worse, “explode” the new regime wherever possible from within (Vorwärts1920). In Bernstein’s (1920c) view, left-socialists like the USPD and KPD missed the fundamental point that the advent of the Republic called them from merely protesting against government to participating in it—a lack of realisation brought out particularly acutely during the first post-Revolution elections in 1919 and 1920:

What is the election about in the first instance, demonstrating or opposing? Opposing only makes sense against an existing government, but it makes no sense against a government that is still to be formed. One should demonstrate, of course, but in a positive rather than a negative sense. One ought to demonstrate for what should be; all other forms of demonstration are worse than worthless. (Bernstein 1920d)

Bernstein blames the persistence of this demeanour of “negating demonstration” on the radical press in the urban centres where USPD and KPD support was at its strongest:

A press that lives off critique, so that about all criticism it loses any measure in its judgment. […] The consequence is a strong blasé attitude, an urge to deny for denial’s sake, and a low estimation of all creative work that does not immediately bring about perfection. (Bernstein 1920d)

While such a blasé attitude might occasionally be right when it realises imperfections, Bernstein (1920d) finds it ultimately unfruitful, arguing that “everything great in the world is only brought about by work which creative enthusiasm lends motivation and endurance.” In this light, if the USPD and KPD were unwilling to form a pro-Republic Einheitsfront, they had to be challenged at every opportunity, and in a letter to the Volkswacht that received some traction on both sides of German Social Democracy, Bernstein committed himself to just such a struggle in the USPD-leaning territory of Potsdam (Teltow-Beeskow constituency)—expressly to ensure maximal SPD influence over the Republic’s “legislation and administration, [its] general interest, its political integrity, and its economic and social development” (Vorwärts1920).

For Bernstein (1919c), the drive for productive creativity in the construction of the new Republic is inseparably tied to the central role of parliamentarism and the democratic franchise. He reiterates his support for parliamentarism, drawing support—as he did in Preconditions—from the later thought of “the founders,” and arguing that Friedrich Engels especially had turned shortly before his death from seeing electoral democracy as a “means of swindling [Prellerei]” into one of emancipation for the proletariat. Won round to the potential “social force” of democracy by the unexpected efficacy of “the parliamentary action of Social Democracy” in wringing concessions from the Wilhelmine regime on issues of unemployment insurance and other similar legislation—“despite all the hurdles that the military state sought to put in its way”—Marx and Engels

could not have envisaged that a time would come again where socialists would declare the democratic franchise unsuited to socially emancipating the proletariat, and wish to throw it on the scrapheap in favour of a dictatorship of the proletariat exercised exclusively by workers’ councils. (Bernstein 1919c)

Bernstein even goes so far as to suggest that the first generation of Marxists “never imagined that dictatorship in any other way than that it would be exercised through democracy,” and dismisses the Bolshevist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a centralised soviet republic—echoed in the KPD and USPD’s endorsement of the “council republic” model—as inevitably at risk of degenerating into a system where “the proletariat does not rule, but rather a minority exercises its rule with the help of hired guards” (Vorwärts1918a). Democracy under a general franchise, he insists, is the surest way to ensure that the working class can exercise decisive influence over all areas of public life—and this will become only ever more the case as capitalist production achieves ever greater maturity, and as the size and social significance of the proletariat (and Social Democracy) grows as a result. All in all, Bernstein (1919c) defends parliamentary democracy as a “guarantee of organic proceeding” in society—yet he also recognises that democracy under the new Republic requires a transformation in the electorate’s approach to voting, compared to its impoverished instantiation under the Kaiserreich. In the Republic, voting is much more meaningful than simply choosing who opposes the Kaiser’s government and his Reichskanzler: it is voters on whom the character and composition of the government depends, in that the government is the “commissary agent [Beauftragte]” of the popular assembly, which is in turn the “commissary agent” of the electorate. It is above all this systemic change in the constitutional function of parliamentarism that necessitates a change in left strategy away from critique and opposition, and towards positive construction. As Bernstein (1920d) phrases it in a front-page Vorwärts article on the day of the 1920 Reichstag election:

To put it drastically for democratic and socialist voters who have not yet freed themselves from the way of taking a position they were used to under the Kaiserreich: you do not have to elect naysayers anymore, but yeasayers!

A citizen of a democratic republic must, in Bernstein’s uncompromising view, “vote for the party that comes closest to his convictions, and is thereby willing and able to give the Republic a government,” while any “socialist and democrat who leaves this outside consideration commits a crime against the Republic.” Of course, not just any government will do. The Republic “needs a government that is determined to practise a forceful politics in the sense of modern democracy, encompassing the tendencies of the working class”—and that, for Bernstein (1920d), is “unthinkable” without Social Democracy.

Political Theory and Political Practice

The close imbrication of positive, creative politics with electoral democracy in the Republic is, for Bernstein, a particular reflection of the weighty historical significance that attaches to all watershed revolutionary moments. Politics, he suggests, is not just characterised by patient gradualism—the “strong and slow boring of hard boards” of Max Weber’s conception—though this often works to provide the preconditions for political transformation, but can also happen in short, sharp bursts. In the trajectory of the Revolution, such “burst” moments are not hard to identify, and Bernstein (1921a, pp. 21, 82ff.) himself highlights the Spartacists’ embrace of the Bolshevist political-economic model in early October 1918 and the first Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils on 16–21 December 1918 as (in his view) slightly underappreciated milestones. Moments such as these were truly social and democratic, in that they gave ordinary citizens the opportunity to take part in shaping history—even though, ironically, they might not themselves be at all aware they were performing the role of historical protagonists. Outside such moments, however, the decisive points in even the most grassroots-driven social transformations tended to fall within the purview of a very reduced subset of the population: trade-union and party leaders, military commanders, high-level judges and bureaucrats—but rarely if ever the actual working population that would bear the brunt of these social changes. In this context, Bernstein sees elections as, in effect, systematised versions of such “short, sharp burst” moments, and more-or-less regularised opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate in the shaping of their collective history. Voting under a general franchise in a democratic republic is, he argues, the best and most reliable way of preserving the revolutionary moment—both in the sense of its momentousness and its momentum. This historical weight, of course, not only gives voting potent political force, but also imposes on voters a high level of political responsibility. Bernstein (1920d) is very doubtful that many German voters—habituated as they were to the comparative façade of elections under the Kaiserreich—were aware of this force and this responsibility, and he warns of the risk that voters with an insufficiently-developed democratic self-conception would “let the command over [their] vote be determined by side issues”:

For some the election day was only an opportunity to vent their displeasure about some event or some lack of drastic satisfaction; others allowed themselves to be influenced by provocations about certain personalities when they cast their vote; yet others believed that the act of voting was their opportunity to give an individual confession of faith in some abstract or fantastical doctrine, and more along similar lines.

Bernstein sees in this tendency a serious danger to both the health of democracy and the prospects for socialist reform, and argues that “to keep Germany on the path of decisive republican politics,” its newly-empowered voters must be educated to see the act of voting as “not a matter of questions of personality, not individual questions of policy, not about the proclamation of ideologies, but about decisions over quite specific comprehensive types of policy.” For voters to treat democratic elections with the seriousness they deserve, they must consider every party and every policy “as a whole from its leading points and with a view to all its consequences,” and act “in accordance with the fact that they hold the fate of their people in their hands” (Bernstein 1920d).

Of course, the historical weight of democratic elections imposes responsibilities not just on voters but also on political parties and movements—especially Social Democracy—to collectively rise to the occasion. Bernstein saw the birth of the new Republic as a clear “moment of truth” for German socialists, who could no longer continue to simply try and “ride out” the decades-long tension between the demands of “orthodox” Marxist doctrine and the behaviour of trade-union and parliamentary Praktiker. The divide had already been damaging to Social Democracy when Bernstein first sought to bridge it in the 1890s in Preconditions—but now that the movement had taken over the reins of government and needed to prove its superiority to the discredited conservative establishment, it had become unsustainable. Socialists, in Bernstein’s view, needed to introduce some long-absent consistency between their theory and their practice, and the responsibility for this lay evenly on both sides of the divide. On the one hand, the SPD had opened itself up to legitimate criticisms of amorality and hypocrisy—not least from Bernstein himself—by simultaneously trying to criticise the war conduct of the Heeresleitung during WW1 while continuing to approve war credits in successive Reichstag votes. On the other hand, the leftist elements in the USPD had abandoned Social Democracy entirely and turned towards anti-parliamentarism (e.g., Gruppe Internationale) or outright Blanquism (e.g., the Spartacists and later KPD) (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 19–28; Freiheit1920). Neither of the extremes within Social Democracy had covered themselves in glory in the late stages of the Kaiserreich, and—importantly—neither had the right to claim to be “in all points the sole correct interpreter of the social-democratic idea and the infallible representative of the policy conforming to it” (Bernstein 1919b). In this respect, the Revolution was something of a dénouement in the contest between the rival conceptions of socialism and social development represented by the Praktiker—who were more-or-less committed to some form of revisionism and parliamentary reformism—and the various leftist tendencies—who adhered to Marxist orthodoxy and endorsed various forms of “councilist” revolutionism (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 65–82). While Bernstein was clearly convinced that the two extremes clearly held barely-reconcilable positions on the “methods of socialist struggle,” he nonetheless held out hope that some kind of alignment on at least some fundamental principles might be reached as a kind of initial gateway to achieving a semblance of consistency within the German socialist movement (Vorwärts1918a, 1920). He felt that there was a clear basis for unity, at least for a majority of the SPD and USPD leadership and party members, around principles of securing and expanding democracy, the gradual socialisation of industry, and interim measures to ensure the health and stability of the German economy (Vorwärts1918a). Of course, he does not dispute that there are heavy differences of opinion between the various sections of the socialist movement, and he is hardly optimistic that they will disappear overnight, but he does not think that these differences should prevent common struggle in moments where it is important to act practically, and where agreeing policy guidelines and necessary programmes of action takes precedence over theoretical background disputes—especially when far more than elections are at stake (Bernstein 1919a).

But socialist alignment on principles and the consistency it would bring also depended on the willingness of the relevant party leaderships and members to exercise the strategic flexibility necessary to cooperate with one another—and above all, to cooperate within the democratic institutions of the new Republic. In this respect, from Bernstein’s perspective, it was a matter of basic political acumen—not some heroic concession, nor an act of treachery—that the USPD accepted the SPD’s offer to enter a governing coalition in the Rat der Volksbeauftragten. A refusal would, he argues, have been nothing short of a “crime against Social Democracy,” as it would have split the socialist movement between government and opposition, and forced the SPD to take power alone or (worse) alongside members of bourgeois parties, which would have made the situation in Germany even more uncertain than it already was in the early months of the Revolution (Vorwärts1918a). Yet, for Bernstein (1919b), the preparedness of the SPD and USPD to work together in the coalition, however reluctantly and temporarily, gave two strong signals about the immediate future of the socialist movement in the Republic. First, the coalition was the first step on the way to burying the “party strife [Parteihader]” between SPD and USPD, as it indicated the possibility for both sides to move towards a rapprochement. Of course, the political differences between the parties were still too great to effect an immediate fusion, but Bernstein argues that, at least as a contingent measure, they urgently needed to consider forming electoral pacts or running common candidate lists in order to avoid the worst aspects of mutual internecine campaigning, and to stave off the threat of counterrevolution. Second, the fact that the majority of USPD members had supported the decision to enter the coalition was a vital sign that a commitment to democracy was deeply rooted in the German proletariat. This, in Bernstein’s eyes, legitimated and vindicated the decision to hold elections for the Nationalversammlung as the best way to achieve “firm, ordered conditions” in Germany—and proved beyond doubt the fundamental unpopularity of transitioning to exclusive rule by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils after the Bolshevist model (Vorwärts1918a).

Ultimately, Bernstein saw the cooperation, alignment, and eventual reunification of the various left-oriented tendencies as the only way for socialists to secure the “unreserved trust of workers in the honesty, capability, and unity of Social Democracy” as the movement that best represented their interests. The prevailing party strife only served to call forth distressing emotional ructions among the great mass of the workers, who had “no understanding for the dispute” between SPD and USPD, to waste a vast amount of labour power that would be better directed elsewhere, and to risk the loss of vital constituencies to bourgeois-reactionary parties. Meanwhile, he argues, a united socialist movement would be well-placed to “engage with much greater conviction those workers who have ended up in wrong ways of thought through the destructive influence of the war,” and to “deprive powers hostile to the Revolution of much more recognition among waverers and the undecided” (Bernstein1919a; Vorwärts1918a).

Conclusion

Bernstein’s writings on the German Revolution offer an insight into a neglected family of socialist narratives about the end of the Kaiserreich and the rise of the Weimar Republic. His experiences in 1918–1919 confirmed the reformist views he had first articulated in Preconditions of Socialism, albeit now contrasted with the specific target of Bolshevism, both in its Russian instantiation and in its echoes in USPD and KPD ideals and commitments. Bernstein opposes the proliferation of myths on left and right in the post-Revolution period, and reiterates that socialism must remain sensitive to material conditions, taking its cue from innovations in social science. He exhorts socialists to move beyond the critical opposition of their Wilhelmine days, and engage in constructive projects of creative societal transformation, especially to build and sustain a healthy socialist democracy in the new Republic. Finally, he argues that the dawn of the Republic places new demands on voters to recognise the social import of their electoral decisions, and on socialist parties to put aside their theoretical and strategic disputes in order to achieve tangible results for the working class they purport to represent. Bernstein’s overarching concern is to “pick up the pieces” after the ruptures of WW1 and the Revolution, and to restore Social Democracy as a viable political movement that can rise to the challenges of this period of profound societal crisis. His admonitory comments regarding the threats facing the Republic were somewhat prophetic, and the spectre of the eventual collapse of Weimar Germany hangs broodingly over them. Nevertheless, his writings are a rich source of insights for socialist theory and strategy that hold enduring value well beyond their original context, and remain acutely relevant to the problems facing Social Democracy in contemporary society.