A People's History of the German Revolution by William Pelz (review)

Like E.P. Thompson and Howard Zinn, William Pelz, who died shortly before this book appeared in print, was a scholar whose left-wing politics shaped his research. Pelz spent most of his career at a community college while being an activist in the socialist movement in Chicago. He was especially committed to issues faced by working-class students; for most of his career, fighting for the rights of the disadvantaged was more important to him than output of scholarship. Only in the last four years before his death did he begin to publish books. His productivity in those years was remarkable: a biography on the revolutionary socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht; an edited collection of writings by American communist Eugene Debs; a survey titled A People's History of Modern Europe; and finally the book under review here. The titles of his last two books were references to Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

In the first third of the book, which covers the social history of German industrialization and World War I, Pelz liberally quotes autobiographies of workers describing their hard labor, bad housing, and mean bosses. In this narrative, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the savior who fought for the workers despite government repression. Pelz emphasizes that, already in 1914, working-class soldiers saw that the war was a swindle, and they had no confidence in their officers. Meanwhile, on the home front, women protested for bread and peace. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the mass strike in the armaments industries in January 1918 were inspirations to German workers everywhere.

This narrative sets the stage for portraying the German workers as tragic heroes. When the Kaiser abdicated, they tried to introduce social justice through mass protests and council democracy but were smothered by cowardly Social Democrats terrified of revolution. Pelz claims "there is overwhelming evidence that the SPD leadership did betray their members, the common people and socialism" (68). To support this point of view, he marshals evidence from many memoirs by people who believed the same. This literature details the brutality of the SPD in crushing the Spartacist uprising in January 1919, the general strike in March, the Bavarian Soviet in April, and the rebellions following the Kapp Putsch in March 1920.

In the historiography of the revolution, this book stands out for recognizing the agency of women and putting war and revolution into their material, everyday context of hunger. It does not contribute substantial original research on either topic, but no other book on the revolution argues as emphatically that working-class women helped bring down the regime by their protests demanding peace. Few other historians have speculated that the revolution failed in part because women were "pushed to the sidelines" (128). Written in a plain style, with a clear point of view and a narrative made readable through the extensive use of memoirs, the book is a breath of fresh air.

However, the sixty-six pages the book devotes to the revolution itself are one-sided. Few historians today would call the Social Democrats traitors, as the Communist Party and later the SED in the German Democratic Republic always held. In the end, this book identifies the "people" with the left-socialist working class. Farmers, artisans, white-collared workers, middle-class professionals, and laborers who supported parliamentary democracy but were skeptical of socialism—in other words, the majority of Germans—have no place.

Pelz did not consult the foundational German-language monographs on the revolution by Eberhard Kolb, Peter von Oertzen, Wolfgang Elben, Susanne Miller, and many others. These historians drew upon deep empirical research to argue that, as Pelz indeed suggests, the SPD made missteps, such as rushing to elections for a national assembly before purging the army and bureaucracy, as the soldier and worker councils wanted. But these historians contextualized the decisions of the SPD: The party lacked experts to staff the government offices that were overseeing the...