Absolutism and Revolution in Germany, 1525-1848

by Franz Mehring

English, German (translation)

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Germany

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Originally a liberal journalist, Mehring joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the early 1890s.

Mehring was originally incredibly anti-communist, but eventually after studying the writings of Karl Marx, Mehring changed his mind and was won over to the side of communism. He rapidly became acknowledged as an important theoretician. In the course of time he moved to the left and became associated with the current around Rosa Luxemburg.

With the outbreak of World War I he was, despite his advanced years, a prominent member of the revolutionary opposition to the war along with Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin. He was a founder member of the German Communist Party established on New Years Day 1919, but died later in the month shortly after the murder of his comrades Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

Reviews

[CivilWar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Franz Mehring was a very unique writer and that leads to the quality of this book - he was an academic historian, but also a Marxist. And I mean a real Marxist, not a Stalinist hack like Hobsbawm or the even worse pseudo-Marxists that use Marx as just "a thinker" from the big leftist melting pot, he was one of the earliest supporters of Rosa Luxemburg and a founder of the KPD, a real revolutionary.

As such, you have here a history of Germany from the Reformation to the 1848 revolution, written according to the real dialectical materialist method, but with academic rigour as well. Likewise, this book is extremely far from dry, being written with incredible wit, comparable to Marx - so many memorable quotes here!

"The Prussian bureaucracy meanwhile was grateful for such generous laurels, especially since the strict Hegelians clarified their master’s obscure words for the understanding of the common subjects, and one of them wrote a history of Prussian law and the Prussian state, where the Prussian state was proved to be a gigantic harp strung in God’s garden to lead the universal anthem."

"Military history only becomes comprehensible when it is traced back to its economic bases. If, on the other hand, one tries to make the greater or lesser ‘genius’ of the military commanders into its motive lever, it evaporates into historical romance."

Even events that I thought I knew well, like the 1848 revolution in Germany, I learned countless things from here.

This is the best single "national history" (not of the whole history of the country, of course, he would need to have gone back to the Germanic barbarians that fought the Romans for that, but in the sense of the formation of a nation) I have ever read, I wish there was a national history this good for every single country.

This book covers the Reformation, the German Peasants' War, the 30 Years War, the formation of the Prussian State that eventually dominated Germany, as well as Frederich II's career, putting away all mysticism about Old Fritz, the Napoleonic invasion and how they greatly benefited German development and revolution and finally the 1848 revolution that finally came from that new life breathed into it by Napoleon. If you are interested in the class struggles that really drove these events, you HAVE to get this book. It is an absolute masterpiece.

[Katherine Fraser · Rating 4 out of 5]

dull at times but history approached through historical materialism is always worth reading and often makes far more sense than anything else