…Over the next nine years, while the German Left became more bitterly divided than ever, the extreme nationalist and revanchist element in Germany was coalescing around a new mass party, the Nazis, who found increasing numbers of powerful supporters in the army and among the capitalists.
The Three Worlds of Social Democracy offers cutting-edge case studies to present a truly global exploration of the methods, meanings, and limits of social democracy. It also explores the potential for left alternatives to social democracy and the dangers of surging right-wing populism.
The communists of Germany now struggled to reconnect with the German working class and rebuild a revolutionary movement in the Weimar Republic, a society that was, on the one hand, striving to return to normalcy and, on the other hand, slipped easily and often into economic and political chaos. They fought, but they lost. In the process, the working class was divided and demoralized, the capitalist class went looking for a savior, and the foundations of Nazism were laid.
In it’s beginnings, the revolution in Germany appears very similar to the events in Russia the year before. Why was the outcome so different? We will try to answer many questions in the course of this reading group, but that is the essential question.