Proclamation of the republic in Germany
The proclamation of the republic in Germany took place in Berlin twice on 9 November 1918, the first at the Reichstag building by Philipp Scheidemann of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD) and the second a few hours later by Karl Liebknecht, the leader of the Marxist Spartacus League, at the Berlin Palace.
Because of the constitutional change, the MSPD was at first willing to preserve the monarchical form of government as such, in part because it was concerned with continuity and wanted an accommodation with the elites of the Empire.
The party leadership, however, soon began to push for the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II, whose position had become untenable due to his responsibility for Germany's defeat in the war.
On the evening of 8 November, MSPD leadership in Berlin learned that the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), a more antiwar and left-leaning breakaway from the original Social Democratic Party (SPD), had called for meetings and mass demonstrations on the following day.
The Reich Chancellor will remain in office until the questions connected with the Emperor's abdication, the renunciation of the throne by the Crown Prince of the German Empire and of Prussia, and the installation of a regency have been settled.
[4] After the Emperor learned of the announcement, he and his family fled into exile in the Netherlands where, on 28 November 1918, he and Crown Prince Wilhelm signed the document of abdication.
At noon on 9 November Max von Baden, acting in violation of the constitution, unilaterally transferred the office of Reich chancellor to Friedrich Ebert.
He in turn asked von Baden to act as imperial regent until a successor to Wilhelm II as German emperor had been appointed.
In the dining room of the Reichstag building, Philipp Scheidemann, who had been state secretary under Max von Baden since 3 October and was one of the first Social Democrats to hold a government post in Germany, sat eating lunch at a separate table from Friedrich Ebert.
Therefore, shortly after 2 p.m. – according to his own account "between soup and dessert" – he stepped up to the second window of the second floor north of the main portal of the Reichstag building and proclaimed the republic.
On 9 November 1918, under the headline "Proclamation of the Republic", the Vossische Zeitung quoted Scheidemann's speech as follows:We have triumphed all along the line; the old is no more.
Ebert has been appointed Reich chancellor, and Lieutenant Göhre, a Reichstag member, has been assigned to the minister of war.
The military governor of Berlin and Brandenburg, Alexander von Linsingen, and the minister of war, Scheuch, will each have a representative attached.
[9]In contrast, the version of the speech that Scheidemann recorded on a phonograph disk on 9 January 1920 and that was reproduced in his memoirs in 1928, shows significant deviations from the texts of the contemporaneous sources:[10][11] Workers and soldiers!
They were the home warriors who perpetuated their demands for conquest until yesterday, just as they waged the most bitter fight against any reform of the constitution and especially of the shameful Prussian electoral system.
[12]Scheidemann's text was considered authentic until the historian Manfred Jessen-Klingenberg, in a source-critical analysis in 1968, was able to plausibly prove the authorship and reliability of Friedegg's anonymously published stenographic notes.
[14] In the afternoon of 9 November 1918 at about 4 p.m., Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the "Free Socialist Republic of Germany" in the Lustgarten in front of the Berlin Palace.
We want to raise the red flag of the Free Republic of Germany on the site where the emperor's standard flew!
[16] After the troops surrounding the Palace had abandoned their posts in the face of the growing crowd, Liebknecht spoke a second time from the large window of Portal IV directly above the gate.
With split skulls, bathed in blood, these victims of tyranny stagger by, and they are followed by the ghosts of millions of women and children who perished in grief and misery for the cause of the proletariat.
Whoever among you wants to see the Free Socialist Republic of Germany and the world revolution fulfilled, raise his hand in oath."
[19] His words, however, did not have a lasting effect since the left wing of the revolutionaries did not have a sufficient power base and continued to lose influence after the suppression of the Spartacist uprising in January 1919.
[17] The MSPD leadership initially succeeded in persuading the USPD to join them in an interim government, the Council of the People's Deputies.
January 1919 saw the Spartacist uprising, in the course of which the MSPD leadership deployed right-wing Freikorps troops against the left-wing revolutionaries.
Despite both the strong desire among many Germans to restore the monarchy and the failure in 1933 of the Weimar Republic, there were never any serious efforts to return to an imperial form of government.
In the course of the Spartacist uprising, on 15 January 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered, with Friedrich Ebert's approval, by members of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division.
