Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and over a century since the fall of the monarchy, the “November Revolution” of 1918–1919 still remains a controversial topic in German public life. Recent commemorations of the one hundredth anniversary were fairly sympathetic to these events, though this also underlined the degree to which the “revolution” and its history have today become little more than a museum piece.

Some see the uprising as a transition to Germany’s first democracy, while others view it as a “revolution betrayed” — an attempt to create socialism that was violently repressed. The murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919 are generally seen as the decisive turning point.

But much less well-known are the decisive battles of March 1919, when a nationwide general strike called for the socialization of heavy industry and the anchoring of workers’ councils in the German constitution. The revolution was ultimately crushed by bloody force — over a thousand people were killed in Berlin alone. Yet its failure owed, more than anything, to deep-rooted contradictions within the workers’ movement itself.