This chapter examines the impact of anticlericalism and secularism on German politics. It charts the significance of secularism in the relations between radicals, revisionists and liberals in the period between the church-leaving campaign 1906-14 and the end of the German revolution in 1923. It examines how factions of the SPD clashed over the church-leaving movement of 1909 to 1914. Special attention will be given to the cooperation of secularist revisionists around Eduard Bernstein with left liberals and anti-political leaders of cultural reform efforts, such as Eugen Diederichs.

Hitler’s seizure of Austria heightened awareness of the international danger. Churchill pointed to the weakening of France’s Eastern European alliances, but was deterred from advocating the use of force to reverse Hitler’s action by fear of air attacks on London. Instead he called for greater RAF expansion, and the government took steps to maximise aircraft production, including allowing rearmament contracts to divert industry from civil trade. On the other hand, whereas Churchill thought a grand alliance of European powers, including the Soviet Union, would deter German aggression, Chamberlain persisted in believing alliances would lead to war and instead pursued bilateral negotiations with Hitler on the basis of self-determination for the German-speaking minority in Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain’s decisions not to seek Soviet support against Germany or to fight over Czechoslovakia are placed in the context of advice from the Foreign Office and the chiefs of the armed forces. Churchill’s opposition to surrender to Hitler’s threats is explained in terms of the effect the fall of Czechoslovakia would have on the balance of power and also of his reduced fear of air attack following reports of the effects of bombing in the Spanish Civil War. Reactions to the Munich settlement show that both Chamberlain and Churchill’s positions had considerable public support.

From 1938, French policy suddenly pivoted from a policy of appeasement to one of confrontation with Nazi Germany. But once war was declared on 3 September 1939, Anglo-French governments seemed unable to articulate a strategy to win it. Gamelin’s strategy was to build up an impregnable defense of the Hexagon, mount an economic blockade of Germany, and fight a war on the periphery – la guerre ailleurs – until the enemy was enfeebled and the Allies had amassed enough military power take the offensive. But without a Soviet alliance, this strategy failed to pressure Germany and was vulnerable to preemption. The frenzy of mobilization followed by the serenity of Sitzkrieg hollowed out civil resolve and basically neutered the “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity” of the population which Clausewitz argued was essential to the successful waging of war. The drôle de guerre seemed to offer evidence of the drift of Allied policy that portended a lack of national resolve. Daladier stood as a bulwark against military reform and the removal of Gamelin, and encouraged wishful thinking about the ability of Poland to defend itself and the unpopularity in Germany of Hitler’s aggressive policies, which would restrain German aggression. While it appeared on the surface that France had recovered its nerve, the spirit of appeasement in the guise of “victory without combat” hovered over the French declaration of war and lingered in the form of an absence of urgency that affected morale in the long winter of 1939–1940. It also encouraged a flirtation with peripheral operations that culminated in the Narvik fiasco in May 1940, which offered a curtain raiser for the Fall of France.

How did Munich and Budapest come to host soviet revolutions in 1919? This chapter presents the rapid growth of the two cities in the nineteenth century and looks at the dynamics of class and ethnic conflicts leading up to World War I. The chapter argues that although the cities were considered “bourgeois” the roots of the revolutionary labor movements and also the racial tensions of antisemitism were present in them both before the war.

This chapter examines how the police and courts became the main audience for competing revolutionary narratives of guilt and victimization. People wanted to punish others and rehabilitate themselves. The courts functioned both as a sounding board for narratives through which one found resonance and affected verdicts and sentencing and also as a transmitter of new narratives to the public, as court verdicts seemed to be the official or “true” story of the revolutions. The transnational comparison of Budapest and Munich shows that the narrative developed in each was quite different and led to differential severity of verdicts and sentencing, with the courts in Hungary being more punitive. This situation in turn further radicalized Hungarians on the Left and the Right in the interwar period, with the “judicial terror” added to the fraught narrative of revolution and counterrevolution. In Bavaria, though memoirs such as Ernst Toller’s sought to rally supporters with examples of legal mistreatment, the revolution did not play as central a role in the symbolic world of Weimar German politics, overshadowed by even limited events such as the January 1919 Spartacus Uprising and the martyrdom during that revolt of the communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

This chapter examimes the acute crisis of the world war and its role in destabilizing the political balance in both cities and in the overthrow of both the Habsburg Monarchy and the German Empire (as well as its constituent state, the Bavarian Monarchy). It compares the revolutions and counterrevolutions and the violence that accompanied the political struggles in both cities.

This chapter analyzes rumor and terror, both shaped by revolutionary scripts, and the political violence that erupted after the creation of council governments. These new governments, namesakes of the revolutionary government in Russia, deployed a revolutionary vocabulary that seemed to make concrete all the ideas of radical political discourse. Rhetoric about class warfare appeared to transform into reality with the appearance of armed workers' brigades patrolling the streets. This embodiment of previously theoretical concepts was empowering to those playing the roles of revolutionary heroes and was terrifying to those who suddenly found themselves cast as enemies in a dramatic new reality. As we explore events in Budapest and Munich we will see how expectations of violence shaped by revolutionary scripts influenced the ways in which residents of the two cities understood political events and provoked new rounds of violence.

This article explores Brecht’s origins and life in Augsburg from the time he was born in 1898 until he left Augsburg for Berlin in 1924. Brecht came from a well-educated and prosperous middle-class family, and he was raised as a Lutheran by his mother, although he soon rejected any form of Christian religious belief. From an early age he demonstrated great promise and ambition as a writer and soaked up influences from all around him, including the fairs that occurred in Augsburg on a regular basis. He read widely and was influenced by what he read. Among his most important influences were Frank Wedekind, Georg Büchner, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine.In his adolescence Brecht became the center of a group of friends in Augsburg devoted to literature, music, and a nonconformist approach to life. In Augsburg Brecht experienced the Bavarian Revolution after the end of World War I.Brecht’s first plays Baal and Drums in the Night reflect some of his experiences and thoughts while living in Augsburg, and his revolutionary first book of poetry, Domestic Breviary, also emerged above all out of his life in Augsburg.

Strauss’s early life was dominated by his father, Franz, the leading horn player of his day, who rose from poverty to marry a rich heiress, Josepha Pschorr. Franz oversaw his son’s music education, keeping any modern tendencies firmly in check, while Josepha’s family helped to finance Richard’s early publications. Richard’s youthful works show little individuality, but great facility and a systematic approach, as if he were absorbing the repertoire of his Austro-German predecessors in chronological fashion, starting with Haydn and reaching Brahms by the age of twenty. Richard benefitted from the tuition of his father’s musician colleagues and from the excellent local education system, which instilled in him a love of the classics (both Greek and German). Family life was complicated, however, by his father’s violent temper and his mother’s mental illness: from 1885 onwards, she spent her life in and out of clinics.

This chapter deals with Munich and Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), two central places in the life of Richard Strauss. It focuses not only on the phases during which he lived and worked there, but also the significance of both cities in terms of Strauss today. Munich and Garmisch changed considerably over Strauss's lifetime, which spanned from the reign of Ludwig II and influence of Richard Wagner in Munich to the destruction of World War II and the early post-war period, offers a complex, changeful picture. The chapter focuses on the interpenetration of cultural, social, political, and artistic structures and Strauss's interaction with their representatives. By locating the composer and conductor in different milieus, life and work are to become graspable as part of multi-layered contexts that are characterized by interdependencies as well as tensions and contradictions.