ABSTRACT
Researchers from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) have always claimed the German Revolution as the exclusive forerunner of the GDR while maintaining that the Federal Republic is the belated product of the anti-revolutionary forces of 1918/19. In the 1950s the already dated assumption that indirect influences as well as direct intervention on the part of Bolshevik Russia had had a significant effect of the course of the German Revolution was increasingly discredited. The councils were concerned mainly with protecting the new regime against a potential counter-revolution undertaken by the military forces. The cry for ‘nationalisation’, vague and emotional as it may have been, was, however, linked increasingly to bitterness about the military policy of the Majority Social Democrats. The Independent Social Democrats Party, which was prepared to drift with the tide, profited considerably, as a general party for malcontents, from the tidal wave of social protest; its successes, however, proved to be of an ephemeral nature.
