Word: lefts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...workers stood ready to riot. Despite warnings from the astute theorist Rosa Luxemburg that revolution was premature, the Spartacists kept urging revolt in the streets. In January 1919, they got what they asked for: an uprising. The desperate Socialists, who had done their best to cooperate with the far left, turned to the far right for help. Remnants of the Kaiser's army, informally organized into Freikorps, marched into Berlin, ruthlessly smashing the rebellion and executing Spartacist leaders, including Luxemburg...
...Bavaria. There a relative moderate, Kurt Eisner, seized power in a bloodless coup in November 1918. A Jewish drama critic who was far from being a thoroughgoing revolutionary, Eisner forbade terrorism. He even tried to practice absolutely open politics and diplomacy; all cables and memoranda, for instance, were left on display on his desk. The only thing he nationalized was the theater, mainly to ensure that parts would be equitably distributed among actors. When he felt his popularity slipping, he staged a spectacular at the Munich opera house. Bruno Walter, then resident conductor, led a Beethoven Leonore Overture. A chorus...
Stab in the Back. The Allies, Watt suggests, might have been able to prevent this vicious right-left polarization of Germany. Instead, by imposing a Carthaginian peace, they undercut the moderates and strengthened extremists. The Versailles Treaty ceded parts of German territory to other nations and burdened Germany with staggering reparations. Though the moderate Socialist government had no choice but to sign the treaty on Germany's behalf, it afterward came under incessant attack from the right for that "stab in the back"-the allegedly ignominious capitulation to the enemy. The Weimar Republic was already fatally weakened from...
...only redressing Germany's wrongs. Post-World War I Germany, as Watt makes clear, served as a most chilling example, very relevant today, of what happens when ruthless poltics are freely practiced: polarization; violence that feeds upon itself; final rule by savagery. Whether it comes from left or right makes little difference to he victims...
...Left to his own prose, Dunne is apt to say "vicissitudes" when he means "troubles." But he is a good reporter who unobtrusively sets scene after scene, constructing his book out of quotes that show the moviemen to be innocent of cruelty or dirty dealing, but guilty (in an engagingly matter-of-fact way) of venality and grossness...