Friedrich Ebert's disciple

I have read Schama's doorstop on the French Revolution, and Wright's sociology on Iran mostly-post-revolution. Now I am on Robert Gerwarth's November 1918.

Gerwarth didn't read Arthur Bryant, or at least didn't cite the man. (Google autofills that with some barbeque joint.) Theodore Abel's compilation Why Hitler Came To Power has also gone uncited... directly. I do note where Gerwarth has cited Abel indirectly, e.g. pp. 153, 258 n.43 via Richard Evans (London: 2003), 1.69 from Abel, 24 #4.3.4. Elsewhere I note where Gerwarth uses Current Year jargon like "gay" and "LGBT" which nobody was using in 1918, not in England and not in the Reich. I smell Oxford University's style-guide. So I must suspect that Oxford has pushed Gerwarth not to cite Nazi Apologetic, as a rule. You know and I know Abel and Bryant were no such thing, but Oxford doesn't know that - look at how AJP Taylor treated the two at the time.

I (mostly) do not see this tendentious bias in Gerwarth himself. He doesn't contradict what I find in Abel or Bryant. His book is under a socialist / liberal slant. But Gerwarth is writing a Babylon Berlin; he is trying not to let the 1930s cloud 1917-23 by hindsight. Germany had a socialist / liberal slant in late 1918. In that much, Gerwarth's slant is an improvement over Abel or Bryant... for the time at hand. Why focus on the minority at the time of the majority's rule?

Which is not to ignore the minority for this time. Gerwarth must account for the (neo-)Freikorps... and that's when he must turn to Abel, however laundered.

Gerwarth's prose is confused over defining this revolution. Here he's more like Wright, less like Schama - and since he's not writing a sociology like Wright, I must fault him for this. Gerwarth further tacks on a long spiel about the Jews to his penultimate chapter; he should have inlined that content with the rest of the book, like Bryant did.

I also fault our author for his framing of the Munich Soviet - there he breaks his alliance with the average local, as to deliver a near-apologetic for a brutal Bolshevism. It is this which, I am sure, accounts for a howler in the epilogue wherein Hitler is called an "anti-socialist" after his work with the Eisner government, and before he joins the Arbeiterpartei to change its name to... all together now... the National Socialist Arbeiterpartei.