午夜剧场

Now that nearly a fifth of the 21st century has already passed, it seems that "revolution" is almost a dead word.

I vividly remember visiting a classmate's house in the spring of 1954, when I was a second-year student at Chutobu Junior High School, and seeing the morning newspaper in the room with the bold headline "Fall of Dien Bien Phu." As I later learned, that was the beginning of the Vietnamese Revolution.

I still maintain a close friendship with that classmate, but these days, when Vietnamese food can be easily enjoyed in Japan, few people likely give thought to that country's independence and revolution. The tragic path the Soviet Union took following the Russian Revolution is now nothing more than a distant haze in history.

The German Revolution may be even more distant. When I told my old friend that I was writing about the German Revolution, he muttered, "I understand the Russian Revolution, but I don't hear much about a German Revolution." Indeed, compared to the interest in Hitler and the Nazis, the German Revolution is likely so faint that its very existence is hardly recognized.

My interest in the German Revolution overlaps with my interest in the realms of literature and art. Why do human beings care so much about novels and poems, which are nothing more than fiction? It is because somewhere in our hearts, we feel that the real world we live in now is not the only possible world. Dreaming of another possible reality, or another reality that ought to be, is surely a superior human quality.

In the German Revolution, this dream of another reality sought not only transformation in the political sphere but also epoch-making new expressions in the cultural sphere. This cultural revolution was embodied not by the factions that advocated for the maintenance of the capitalist system and parliamentary democracy, but by the groups that aimed for transformation through "R?te" (councils). And it was the factions that crushed these people with military force that enacted the "Weimar Constitution." This constitution paved the way for Hitler's dictatorship.

Hitler made full use of the presidential emergency powers—which had been included in the Weimar Constitution to annihilate the R?te factions—to suppress critical forces. Thinking about the German Revolution also means fundamentally reconsidering Weimar democracy, which is usually spoken of only in positive terms.

Hiroshi Ikeda

Gendaishokan

384 pages, 3,000 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.