ABSTRACT
Historians often succumb to the temptation of seeing the First World War as marking a clean break; they place a full stop after the Empire and begin a new paragraph with the Weimar Republic. The SPD, the Centre and the German Democratic Party joined in a coalition which became known as the Weimar Coalition because the National Assembly met in Weimar rather than in revolutionary Berlin. The German democrats had had a majority since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but the very year after they finally came to power they lost that position and in subsequent elections never regained it. If the monarchists had then been returned to power Germany would have had almost the same government as it had before the war, and it would have appeared that the wheel had turned full circle and things had returned to normal.
