The Hour They Became Human: the Experience of the Working Class In

THE HOUR THEY BECAME HUMAN THE EXPERIENCE OF THE WORKING CLASS IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION OF NOVEMBER 1918 Nick Goodell University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of History Undergraduate Thesis, 2018 The Experience of the Working Class in the German Revolution of November 1918 1 Acknowledgements This project was completed under the supervision of Professor Mark D. Steinberg at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Without his constant devotion, input, and belief in my capability to complete it, this project would simply not exist. For all the untold number of hours of his time through advising both in and outside the office, I owe him a lifetime of thanks. He is one of the many people without whom I would not be the historian I am today. To history department at UIUC, I also owe much for this project. The many professors there I have been lucky enough to either study under or encounter in other ways have had nothing but encouraging words for me and have strengthened my love for history as a field of study. Without the generous grant I was given by the department, I would not have been able to travel to Berlin to obtain the sources that made this project possible. In particular, thanks is owed to Marc Hertzman, director of undergraduate studies, for his direction of the project (and the direction of other undergraduate theses) and his constant willingness to be of assistance to me in any capacity. I also owe great thanks to Professor Diane Koenker, who formerly taught at UIUC, for fostering my early interests in history as a profession and shaping much of my theoretical and methodological considerations of the history of the working class. The librarians and archivists who helped me along the way are many, but I would especially like to thank Geoffrey Thomas Ross, a collections specialist at the UIUC library, for his early help in pointing me to sources for this project. Also to be thanked is the general staff at the library, whose persistence in helping me to track down books at other libraries, remaining pleasant to me after daily seeing my face and dealing with my requests, and overall courtesy and helpfulness cannot be understated. The Experience of the Working Class in the German Revolution of November 1918 2 To the Office of Undergraduate Research at UIUC, much thanks is also owed. Without their large grant, travel to Berlin would have not been possible, and this project would not be in its present state without the sources I obtained there from the archives. Karen Rodriguez offered great advice for travel and was important in helping me to secure this grant. Thanks is also owed here to the Financial Aid Office and Thomas Bedwell at the History Department for ensuring that my grants were coordinated with each other and with my federal aid. To the excellent staff in the reading room at the Bundesarchiv at Lichterfelde I owe also an untold amount of thanks. Their tireless devotion to helping me find all the materials I needed, and their remarkable ability to put up with my bad German made me feel very welcome during my stay in Berlin. Without, too, the assistance of archives specialist Grit Ulrich, I would have been unable to find any of the sources in the Erinnerungen collection that were so critical to my research. Last, I want to think my friends and family for their support of my research and love for history. They have all shown extraordinary patience in listening to me discuss my project, offering proof reads, edits, suggestions, and welcome distractions and relaxation away from the project as well. A special thanks is owed to both my father, Thomas Goodell, and to my very close friend Grant Neal, who have both fostered and developed so much of my love for history in the past few years of my life. In short, this project was a series of helpful suggestions, insights, edits, thoughts, criticisms, and grants that I merely compiled to the best of my ability into one, cohesive text. Any errors, faulty logic, poor grammar and translation, or bad analysis of sources are entirely reflective of my faults alone, and are not the responsibility of the dozens of people who helped me to create this work. The Experience of the Working Class in the German Revolution of November 1918 3 Introduction 1. Prelude: A Chat with an Old Comrade at the Cemetery It was a cold, windy, January day in Berlin. My father and I departed the U-Bahn station and walked, a long, lonely walk alongside the train tracks, past subsidized gardening plots owned by Berlin residents, not sure if we were headed in the correct direction. Then, we saw a sign— "Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten 700m”—and felt a little relieved. Perhaps the journey through the harsh wind in this less than stellar looking area of Berlin will have been worth it, we thought. We eventually made our way to the gate to the cemetery and around the bends in the path to our destination, the Memorial of Socialists. The place was deserted. A bleak, large stone with the words “DIE TOTEN MAHNEN UNS” (“The Dead Remind Us”) stood amidst some greenery, with graves wrapping around it in a circle. There lay the graves of the Germany’s most famous socialists and communists: Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Thälmann, Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, Franz Mehring, and others. On most of these graves were many red roses, especially Rosa’s, which was covered with them. In a broader, concentric circle, further out from this one—Die Ringmauer—lay more graves along a brick wall, forerunners and other famous radicals: Wilhelm Liebknecht, Hugo Hasse, Paul Singer, Luise Zeits, Carl Legien, and more. Symbols of peace, the triumph of reason, and brotherhood adorned many of the graves and tombstones, some more complex, some simple. I explained to father who some of these people were. It was strange to be so near the embodied presence of what for many months had been only names in books and texts online that I had been rigorously studying. There lay people to whose lives I had given, and still am giving, a considerable amount of my own life researching. The Experience of the Working Class in the German Revolution of November 1918 4 As we stood their pensively, taking in the remains of German socialism, an old man, accompanied by what was probably a college age man and woman, approached the Ringmauer and began to go around the graves. At each, they stopped, the old man explaining in quiet German to them who they were standing over. Eventually, I worked up the courage to go and ask him what his connection to this place was, to spark up a conversation with him. If nothing else, it would be an excellent opportunity to practice German speaking skills (skills I had since coming to Berlin discovered were not so good). Hesitantly, I asked him if he was a historian or a professor—a question I do not recall him ever really answering—for once I started speaking, I became a little nervous and did not stop, explaining to him in broken German that I was a history student researching the German Revolution of 1918 and 1919, that I was interested in the experience of the working class, that the old man keeping his distance as his son made a scene was my father, that we were from America, from Illinois, that no, we were not from Chicago….The old man patiently listened, and then explained to me in half-English, half-German, that he was here with his grandchildren touring the cemetery. I asked if he could tell me about the people here—we were then standing over the grave of Wilhelm Liebknecht. He proceeded to describe to me and his grandchildren the symbolism of the grave, the man and woman in Roman dress, the wreath, the glorious imagery of the progress of human kind, peace, and enlightenment. Though he knew the English word “wreath,” his thick German accent caused him to pronounce it “wreet,” causing amongst us all much confusion for some time as he tried to explain the word to me by spelling it, first spelling it wrong. The more he talked, I grew bolder. I asked him if he was from Berlin, and he said he was, gesturing that he had been born just over there in Treptower Park. I told him how fascinated I was The Experience of the Working Class in the German Revolution of November 1918 5 by the city’s history between East and West, the divide, and how it was memorialized in different ways across town. The man then asked me if we had been to the DDR Museum (the East German History Museum) which we had been to just the previous day. What did I think of it, he wanted to know. Again, hesitating, I slowly explained that, while I liked the items on display and admired the research that had gone into the museum, I thought that the presentation was a little much. I pointed out how in the sets of East German apartment buildings that the windows showed only gray, cloudy skies, that the emphasized over and over again how there was not a variety of consumer goods, how they seemed to make farce out of a way of life for millions of people. The old man smiled, held out his hands for emphasis, and said in his weak, shaky voice: “It’s propaganda!” I laughed and agreed.

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