ABSTRACT
Bavarians of all stations in life struggled to come to terms with the new political order in the uncertain months following November 1918. In the emergency conditions of November-December 1918, the councils or soviets rather than the conventional parliamentary parties of reform initially set the political tone. Immediate and wrenching changes in the Bavarian party system reflected the general disillusionment with the former political establishment. Among the Bavarian political parties of long standing, only the traditional opposition groups, the Social Democrats and the small Bavarian Peasants’ League, were not forced into major realignment by defeat and revolution. The Weimar Constitution granted autonomy to the states, but all, like the Reich, were bound to a republican form of government—a decision which many Bavarians would have preferred left to the states themselves in view of their republic’s troubled existence and of their long monarchical heritage.
