Fear and rumors of violence structure Mark Jones's remarkable new account of the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Using Georges Lefebvre's work on the Great Fear during the French Revolution as a model, Jones meticulously reconstructs how the actors in 1918 and 1919, from the kaiser to the sailors in Kiel, from the radicals in Berlin to the Social Democratic leadership and the press, constructed narratives that eventually pushed the new republic into a violent abyss. The street violence that later plagued the Weimar Republic did not, Jones argues, have its origins primarily in the brutalization of the war, but in the experience of civil war.

Some of Jones's conclusions are familiar: the Spartacist threat was a myth, since Karl Liebknecht had, in fact, few followers; the Social Democratic Party (SPD) overreacted and thereby mortgaged the future of the republic. The book's significance lies less in these general points than in Jones's account of how fear and rumors of atrocities and violence, often unsubstantiated, spread across society and shaped perceptions. He delves into the individual violent events of the revolution, making use of newspaper accounts, private diaries, and public statements, as well as police, military, and governmental records, to show how murky their origins were. Local decisions made by people with limited and often faulty information drive the narrative; there is little room in this book for refined arguments about parliamentary democracy, or workers and soldiers’ councils, or proletarian dictatorship. Voices questioning the role of fear and rumor are seldom heard, and, in the case of Rosa Luxemburg, for example, they are contradicted by the simultaneous use of the language of the revolutionary Endkampf (final struggle).

The fear of violent radicals led Kaiser William II to flee to Holland. The sailors’ revolt in Kiel turned first on rumors that turned out to be true—that naval officers were planning a violent final struggle with Great Britain—and then on false rumors that aristocratic troops were organizing to smash the uprising. On November 9, 1918, and afterward in Berlin, fear of a Communist uprising spread from the SPD to the right of the political spectrum. Fears of Communism focused on the person of Liebknecht, who seems to have had a remarkable ability to stage his own revolutionary presence despite the Spartacists’ small following. Jones documents how the media echoed and magnified the fear of Liebknecht felt by most of society, including the SPD leadership, reinforced by the recent “script” of the October Revolution in Russia. Liebknecht played to that script with his visits to the Russian embassy and with his revolutionary oration on November 20 at the funeral for the victims of the November 9 revolution.

A “language of revolutionary Armageddon” (78) developed, Jones argues, which was a discourse of fear that contributed to the expansion of violence after the crisis of December 6. On that day, a confrontation between government troops and leftists led to violence after gunfire reportedly erupted and government troops responded with a machine gun, resulting in the death of innocent civilians. Much of the press blamed the violence of “Bloody Friday” on the Spartacists rather than on the troops who actually did the killing, and Liebknecht obliged the fearmongers by parading through town with his own machine gun. These details matter, since they lay the groundwork for the descent into much wider violence, mostly carried out by government troops, after the Spartacist uprising of January 5–6, 1919. Jones stresses that the SPD's decision to use soldiers (including far-right soldiers connected to the insidious militias) was part of a more general decision to use violence symbolically, as a kind of pedagogical performance to teach the rebels a lesson—without first attempting any negotiation. Jones does not shed new light on the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, but he does show how their killings fit within the general pattern of escalating violence. The final scenes of the revolution then began, including the atrocities in the Berlin working-class district of Lichtenberg in March 1919 and the massacres in Munich one month later. The SPD leadership gave soldiers the right to carry out summary executions of civilians—the infamous Schießbefehl.

Whatever its cultural and political accomplishments, Jones concludes, the Weimar Republic “was also founded on excessive violence” (326), a point with which most historians would agree. Jones's most important contribution, however, lies in his opening up the study of the German Revolution to the methods used by historians of the French Revolution of 1789 to study the role of rumor and autosuggestion in crowds and mass violence. Not only were fear, rumor, and the role of the media essential aspects of this revolution, but also the staging of violence as performance, whether in the form of the “pedagogic violence” (173) of the SPD or of Liebknecht's violent rhetoric. Jones manages to mix military and political history together with social and cultural history in a book that merits a wide readership.