Page:William Z. Foster - The Revolutionary Crisis of 1918-1921 (1921).djvu/5



The German workers began their supreme try for emancipation in November, 1918, just before the end of the world war. The military and political position of the old regime was desperate. The Austrian army had been hopelessly crushed and the German army was in general retreat. The soldiers, deeply infected with radical propaganda and convinced that the war was lost, were ready for revolt. The Allied Governments were declaring that the Kaiser must be overthrown before peace could be had.

It was a most critical situation. Only a spark was needed to cause an explosion. And the spark came on November 2nd when the sailors at Kiel refused to participate in a suicidal attack on the British navy. They overcame their officers and set up a soviet. Like a flash the uprising spread, and in a few days the old authorities had been overthrown and soviets of workers and soldiers established in Hamburg, Lubeck, Hannover, Braunschweig, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Dresden, and many other cities. The revolutionary movement swept all over Germany swift as a prairie fire. The old regime was utterly powerless before it.

The climax came in Berlin on November 9th. The Government, headed by Prince Max of Baden, had seen for a month past what was coming and tried to forestall it by throwing the aroused workers a few sops in the way of political reforms. In this they were aided by the Majority Socialists, several of whom accepted portfolios in Prince Max’s cabinet. But the efforts of Prince Max and his pseudo-Socialist allies to preserve the old regime were unsuccessful. The masses, deeply stirred by the Independents and Communists, demanded drastic action: the work-