Opinion of ingemann

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A very convincing refutation of the whole 'the pre-Godesberg Programme SPD were a bunch of pedantic zealots who would have had difficulty running a whelk stall let alone a government' argument exists. And that is the record of the SPD-dominated Prussian state government that lasted from 1918 until the Preußenschlag in 1932.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I might have exaggerated my argument a bit, but you can't deny that the way Ebert&co handled the 1918-1921 phase was grotesquely catastrophic.

So it is often argued. I would point out that there is a tendency to let hindsight dominate; we all know what happened next* (so to speak) and so the temptation is to read this into the difficult birth of the Republic (as if antidemocratic forces didn't already exist in German society, as if political violence could have been prevented, as if the Right could ever have been prevented from exploding into an apoplectic fit over Versailles, and so on). I wouldn't personally defend everything that Ebert and the Majority SPD did, but they came to power in extremely difficult circumstances and acquitted themselves a lot better than (for instance) the Provisional Government in Russia.

_{*What makes German historians so prone to teleology? Perhaps there is a special path of German historiographical development, the roots of which can be found in the... (cont. page 838).}