Richard Müller, a leading figure of the German Revolution in 1918, is unknown today. As the operator and unionist who represented Berlin’s metalworkers, he was main organiser of the ‘Revolutionary Stewards’, a clandestine network that organised a series of mass strikes between 1916 and 1918. With strong support in the factories, the Revolutionary Stewards were the driving force of the Revolution. By telling Müller's story, this study gives a very different account of the revolutionary birth of the Weimar Republic. Using new archival sources and abandoning the traditional focus on the history of political parties, Ralf Hoffrogge zooms in on working class politics on the shop floor and its contribution to social change. First published in German by Karl Dietz Verlag as Richard Müller - Der Mann hinter der November Revolution, Berlin, 2008, this english edition was completerly revised for the english speaking audience and contains new sources and recent literature.

When it was originally published in 1982, this book presented pioneering new research into the everyday life of the German working class in the crucial decades between the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Nazi seizure of power. The authors document working-class attitudes to bourgeois convention, authority and the law in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The book includes studies of industrial sabotage, pilfering at work, working-class drinking habits, illegitimate motherhood and the violence of adolescent ‘cliques’ in pre-Hitlerian Berlin.

In six months bridging 1989 and 1990, the German Democratic Republic underwent a transformation that took the world almost completely by surprise. Yet unlike the revolution in Poland a decade earlier, only a small percentage of workers played apolitically active role in the fall of socialism in Germany. In this unprecedented study, Linda Fuller sets out to explain why the working class was largely missing from the 1989-90 revolution. Drawing on pre- and post-revolutionary visits to East German work sites and dozens of interviews, Fuller documents workers' day-to-day experience of the labor process, workplace union politics, and class. She shows how all three factors led most workers to withdraw from politics, even while prompting a handful to become actively involved in the struggle.

This is a powerful and original survey of German social democracy breaks new ground in covering the movement's full span, from its origins after the French Revolution, to the present day. Stefan Berger looks beyond narrow party political history to relate Social Democracy to other working class identities in the period and sets the German experience within its wider European context. This timely book considers both the background and long-term perspective on the current rethinking of Social Democratic ideas and values, not only in Germany but also in France, Britain and elsewhere.

Unlike previous histories which have generally described the uprisings of 1848-1849 as revolutions of "intellectuals," this shows that it was the economic distress of artisans and skilled craftsmen that caused them. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This text attempts to put the Spartakusbund into an objective context by examining its activities during the years 1914-1919.

This groundbreaking comparative study rediscovers the socialists of Russia’s borderlands, upending conventional interpretations of working-class politics and the Russian Revolution. Researched in eight languages, Revolutionary Social Democracy challenges long-held assumptions by scholars and activists about the dynamics of revolutionary change.