January strike

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In the January strikes of 1918 in the German Reich , over a million workers demanded better living conditions, better working conditions , an end to the First World War and a democratization of the constitution of the German Empire.

The January strike in 1918 was the third in a series of mass strikes against the First World War and its aftermath. This was preceded by the Liebknecht strike in June 1916, a protest strike against the arrest of the socialist and war opponent Karl Liebknecht . The April strike , also known as the bread strike, followed a year later , as the protests were mainly directed against the inadequate food supply as a result of rationing . While the Liebknecht strike was still predominantly a Berlin phenomenon, the April strike and January strike had clearly taken on a supra-regional dimension.

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The wave of strikes in Germany immediately followed the January strike in Austria-Hungary, which lasted from January 3 to 25, 1918. On January 25th, the workers in the torpedo workshop in Kiel went on strike, which was then supported by a large-scale strike in all of Kiel's larger industrial companies. The Kiel strike lasted until February 1, 1918.

Essentially responsible for the organization of the January strike in Berlin were the Revolutionary Shop Stewards , mostly members of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), partly from their left revolutionary faction, the Spartacus League . In 1917, the USPD split off from it in protest against the attitude of its party of origin, the SPD, which approved the war, and thus distanced itself from the so-called truce policy . Like the Spartakusbund, the stewards were a relatively autonomous group within the USPD. Its leader Richard Müller , who presided over the strike leadership in January 1918, described the party several times as a “platform” for the activities of his group, which essentially pursued more radical goals than the majority of the USPD. Above all, however, the stewards were not oriented towards parliamentary work, but towards strikes. The April strike and the Liebknecht strike were largely the result of their organizational preparation, and the Berlin insurrection plan for the later November revolution was also drafted by the stewards.

The Spartakusbund and metal workers close to it had called for work stoppages on January 28, 1918, contrary to the intentions of the revolutionary leaders, who wanted to keep the strike preparations secret until the last minute. The reasons for the strikes were the famine, a disillusionment with the further development of the war and the October Revolution in Russia , which rekindled the hopes of a revolutionary development in the German Reich among Marxists . The strikes were not supported by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) or the trade unions . Although Friedrich Ebert and Phillipp Scheidemann went to the strike leadership for the SPD under pressure from the workers, they worked towards a weakening of the actions. Ebert then declared in a court case in 1924 that he had only gone into leadership to moderate the movement and to stop it as soon as possible.

During the strike wave in January 1918, workers' councils were elected on a large scale for the first time . The strikes took on enormous proportions, several hundred thousand strikers were involved in Berlin alone, and public life was almost paralyzed. Despite the ban on gatherings, there were daily marches and spontaneous demonstrations, in some cases riots. The strikes could only be ended after several days through the deployment of police and military. None of the strike demands were met. The leaders, such as the Bavarian USPD chairman Kurt Eisner , who organized the munitions workers' strike in Munich , were arrested, many workers were drafted into the military and sent to the front . This is the fate of the strike leader Richard Müller . Only in September 1918 was he able to free himself from military service and join his group again.

In fact, in the last year of the war, Germany was led less by the Kaiser or the official government than by the Supreme Army Command under Generals Ludendorff and von Hindenburg in the manner of a military dictatorship . It was not until October 1918, when the military collapse could no longer be concealed, that a parliamentary government with the participation of the Social Democrats was set up, thereby fulfilling one of the most important strike demands. At this point, however, the mood in the workforce had already radicalized. A little later, the events of the November Revolution overwhelmed any project that could have led to a reform of the monarchy, if it had ever been seriously considered. The January strike is considered to be an essential precursor of this revolution; many of the workers 'and soldiers' councils that were spontaneously formed in November 1918 were based on the model of the January strike in 1918.

With the November Revolution , the monarchy also overthrew ; the war, hated by the population, was ended by the armistice of November 11, 1918 .

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Volker Ullrich: The January strike in Hamburg, Kiel and Bremen. In: ZHG 71 (1985), pp. 59-61.
  2. Ralf Hoffrogge: Richard Müller - The man behind the November revolution, Berlin 2008, p. 38ff, p. 63ff.
  3. LeMO : The January Strike 1918 (accessed on January 27, 2018)
  4. See Ottokar Luban , The mass strikes for peace and democracy in World War I, in: Boebel / Wentzel, Strikes against the war, pp. 11-27.