ANN: Make Revolution Great Again: conference on the 1918-19 German Revolution

Make Revolution Great Again: The context and legacy of the 1918-19 German Revolution

9-10 November 2018, Old Library, All Souls College, University of Oxford, in conjunction with the Faculty of History, the Oxford Centre for European History, and the German History Society.

The 1918-19 German ‘November Revolution’, which catalysed the end of WW1 and prompted nearly a year of violent upheaval, saw the political institutions of one of the most advanced societies in Europe quickly and comprehensively overthrown by a combination of military revolts and civil unrest. While its immediate causes lay predominantly in the defeat of the German Reich at the hands of the Allied powers, the German Revolution took place within the context of a larger wave of socialist and anti-colonial revolutionary activity that gripped Europe and the wider world between 1916 and 1923—much of it inspired by the successful revolutions against tsarist rule in Russia in 1917. Similarly, while the rupture it brought about was a direct response to the exigencies of four years of wartime repression, censorship, rationing, labour requisitioning, and wage restraint, the Revolution also represented the long-awaited culmination of a long period of ideological debate and partisan pressure by a variety of democratic and socialist currents who aspired to a significant break with Germany’s absolutist, imperial, militarist past.

The aim of this conference, held on the centenary of the declaration of the new German Republic, is to explore the social and intellectual context and legacy of the German Revolution. It seeks to re-examine the reception of the Revolution, as well as the Weimar Republic and the interwar period, across a range of disciplines, including but not limited to European history, intellectual history, political theory, and political science. In light of the collapse of the nascent Republic into Nazi dictatorship, and shortly afterwards the abrupt end of two decades of uneasy peace with the outbreak of WW2, there has been a temptation to see the German Revolution and the Republic it inaugurated somewhat in block-colour terms. Either they are presented as a ‘false dawn’, an aberrant moment of superficial democratisation that failed to achieve lasting structural transformations in a recalcitrantly reactionary society, or a ‘lost opportunity’, a glorious first flowering of progressivism replete with idealistic creativity whose reversal represented one of the greatest tragedies in European history. Together, these views have contributed to a systemic neglect of a moment, and a period, whose effects reverberated around Europe for many years afterwards.

This conference intends to help redress this neglect by refocusing attention on the Revolution and the Weimar period as objects of study and sources of insight in their own right, and locating them within a more rounded picture of their geographical and temporal setting. On the geographical side, it hopes to use the occasion of the German Revolution centenary as a springboard to decentre the 1917 Bolshevik revolution as the paradigm case of interwar political transformation, in favour of a more comparative treatment of the revolutions that took place during and after WW1 and the regimes that emerged from them. On the temporal side, the conference aims to reconnect the German Revolution and its aftermath with the moments of socialist, anti-absolutist, and anti-colonial activism and unrest across Europe before and during WW1, and trace the continuities between interwar institutions within and beyond Weimar Germany and those that emerged in Europe after WW2. In particular, it seeks to regalvanise interest in neglected social and political thought from or about the German Revolution and the wider interwar period in Europe and beyond, as well as offer a new appraisal of the significance of the events of 1918-19 for the study of revolutionary practices and political violence.

Organisers: Ruth Harris (Faculty of History; All Souls College, Oxford), Stathis Kalyvas (Department of Politics & International Relations; All Souls College, Oxford), Marius Ostrowski (Department of Politics & International Relations; All Souls College, Oxford), Nick Stargardt (Faculty of History; Magdalen College, Oxford)

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Registration for the conference is now open. Please click here to register.

Registration is FREE for registered graduate students, £10 for early career researchers, and £20 for university postholders.

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CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:

Friday 9 November

12:45-13:00 Opening remarks (Marius Ostrowski)

13:00-15:00 Panel 1: Writing the German Revolution

Anthony McElligott (Limerick; Humboldt-Berlin), Germany 1918: Whose Revolution?

Nadine Rossol (Essex), “We don’t know yet if the revolution brings positive or negative changes”:  Expectations and Agency in the German Revolution of 1918

Ingrid Sharp (Leeds), Towards a gender history of revolutionary unrest 1914-1924

15:00-15:15 Coffee

15:15-17:15 Panel 2: The experience of the German Revolution

Rachel Hoffman (Cambridge), TBC

William Smaldone (Williamette), Grasping the Revolutionary Moment: Rudolf Hilferding and the German Revolution of 1918-1919

Marius Ostrowski (Oxford), ‘Reform or revolution’, redux: Eduard Bernstein on the 1918-1919 German Revolution

17:15-17:30 Coffee

17:30-18:30 Roundtable

Participants: Jane Caplan (Oxford), Ruth Harris, Stathis Kalyvas, Karma Nabulsi (Oxford), Nick Stargardt

19:00-21:00 Dinner in Hall (conference speakers/organisers only)

Saturday 10 November

10:00-12:00 Panel 3: The impact of the German Revolution

Helen Boak (Hertfordshire), The impact and legacy of the German Revolution on German women, 1918-1933

Marc Mulholland (Oxford), From strategy of attrition to class coalition: the end of Second International Marxism

Helen Roche (Cambridge), ‘The Cadets are Revolting’: Reactionary violence, the Freikorps, and the legacy of war and revolution for the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-15:00 Panel 4: The German Revolution and the constitution of interwar Europe

Thomas Clausen (Cambridge), ‘A child of two parents’: the Works Council Act of 1920 between revolution and constitutionalism

Dana Mills (Oxford Brookes), I was, I am, I shall be: Rosa Luxemburg and the German Revolution

Darrow Schecter (Sussex), The German Revolution and Democratic Legitimacy in the Mixed Constitution

15:00-15:15 Coffee

15:15-17:15 Panel 5: The theoretical legacy of the German Revolution

Caroline Ashcroft (Queen Mary), Revolutionary Freedom: Rosa Luxemburg and the German Revolution in the Thought of Arendt and Marcuse

Mark Blum (Louisville), The role of group dynamics in the transformation of society towards democratic “solidarity”

James Muldoon (Exeter), A Socialist Republican Theory of Freedom and Government

17:15-17:30 Coffee

17:30-18:00 Closing remarks (Ruth Harris, Stathis Kalyvas, Marius Ostrowski, Nick Stargardt)