The day before the end of the First World War, Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and Hugo Haase, leader of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), established the Council of the People’s Deputies as the new provisional government of a humiliated Germany. It marked the end of Imperial Germany and began the transition to the much-troubled Weimar Republic.
In January the following year, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was founded by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, absorbing the Marxist Spartacist League they’d established in 1914. Luxemburg urged her fellow communists to seek power through elections. However, many preferred a policy of inciting agitation through workers.
In December, sailors of the Volksmarinedivision (People’s Navy Division) took Otto Wels, the military commander in Berlin and member of…