Germany had set out on a road to ‘parliamentarization’. But would these first steps be enough to quiet popular unrest? And, if they did satisfy the left, might that provoke a backlash from the right? Since August 1917 the ultra-nationalist Homeland Party (Vaterlandspartei) had been mobilizing the right wing of German politics to fight the war to a victorious finish; if this required an open military dictatorship, so much the better.
