Dictatorship and Democracy in the Age 
of Extremes

An overview of one hundred years of history: 
“Dictatorship and Democracy in the Age of Extremes” is the name of an exhibition that was 
created jointly by the Munich Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ), Deutschlandradio Kultur and the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship to commemorate 2014, the year of anniversaries. “Dictatorship and Democracy in the Age of Extremes” describes the history of Europe in the 20th century as a dramatic story 
of freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship. It invites people to take stock, to engage in the kind of historical review that the year 2014 encourages. The show presents a large number of photographs from European archives. Its authors are Prof. Dr. Andreas Wirsching, Director of the Munich Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ), and his colleague Dr. Petra Weber. The highly informative exhibition was curated by Dr. Ulrich Mählert of the Federal 
Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship. Deutschlandradio Kultur contributed 25 historical 
audio recordings, which can be located on the Internet with the aid of QR codes. During the course of the year 
the exhibition will be shown at 3,000 venues in Germany as well as locations abroad. The exhibition first went on display in February in the atrium of the Federal Foreign 
Office. On the following pages we have reprinted the main exhibition texts with the kind permission of the publishers. They present a concise overview of the history of the last 100 years focusing on Germany and Europe. (The panel 
illustrations of the exhibition in German can be ordered from the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the 
SED Dictatorship for a token fee of 50 euros; print data in 
more than 10 different languages can be made available 
to cultural mediators abroad free of charge.)

www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/ausstellung2014

The “seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century

1914

The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was shot on 28 June 1914. The assassination prompted a diplomatic crisis and led to a spiralling escalation of military tensions. Germany, which wished to become a world power, bore a large and decisive measure of responsibility for this development. This was the beginning of the First World War, in which Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire fought against 
almost all of the other European states, and later against the USA. The European working-class movement, which had already warned about the threat of war, was not able to have any meaningful influence on the developing situation. Germany strove for supremacy in continental Europe and planned to carry out extensive annexations, especially in the East. But the other Great Powers of Europe also hitched their imperial power interests 
to the war. When the Western front already became bogged down in 1914 in trench warfare, which turned into a bloody war of attrition, the early wartime enthusiasm gave way to disillusionment on all sides. More than 1.5 million people died in 1916 alone during the offensives at Verdun 
and the Somme. The First World War 
was the first industrial war in Europe in 
which people were annihilated en masse by machine guns, tanks, planes and submarines as well as by flamethrowers and poison gas. Approximately 9 million 
soldiers lost their lives. No war in Europe had ever before claimed so many civilian lives: their number is estimated to be 
6 million. The violent experience of the war would have a lasting effect on contemporaries and turn out to be a heavy burden for postwar Europe.

The beginning of a new epoch

1917

The USA entered the war in 
April 1917 after Germany’s resumption of unlimited submarine warfare in 
the Atlantic, which had already led to the loss of American lives in 1915. For 
the Western powers, the utterly inexhaustible resources of the USA would be decisive for the outcome of the conflict. American President Woodrow Wilson justified the war as a decisive ideological battle for democracy and freedom. In March 1917, after the overthrow of the tsar, it seemed that Russia had also joined this fight for freedom. But the liberal provisional government lost power that November following a coup by 
the communist Bolsheviks. Despite the immediate introduction of extensive 
social reforms and the promise of a rapid peace agreement, only one quarter of the electorate voted for the Bolsheviks during the November 1917 election for the National Assembly. The Bolsheviks subsequently dissolved the National 
Assembly and set up a Communist dictatorship under Vladimir Lenin’s leadership. A bloody four-year civil war now ensued, which the Bolsheviks were able to win despite intervention by the 
Western powers. Initial signals notwithstanding, their hope that the spark of revolution would carry over to the West did not come to fruition.

The appearance of the USA on Europe’s political stage and the assumption 
of power by the Communists in Russia, which was glorified as the October 
Revolution, became epochal caesuras that carried in them the seeds of the 
systemic antagonism of the later 
Cold War.

Revolutionary upheaval in Germany

1918

Germany’s defeat was inevitable in the summer of 1918, and the peace treaty signed with Russia in March could not change that. In an attempt to improve the terms of the peace, 
the German military leadership introduced a transition to parliamentary monarchy. Sailors mutinied in October when the German navy was to set sail one last time. That was the signal for revolution, which reached the capital Berlin on 9 November. A republic was proclaimed that same day, and Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate. Friedrich Ebert, the head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), became Chancellor. As a result, it was democrats – and not those who had been responsible for and conducted the war – who signed the armistice on 11 November. The Social Democrats had previously split in two because of a quarrel about the war. The SPD championed parliamentary democracy in 1918 and thus rejected the “dictatorship of soldiers’ and workers’ councils” demanded by the German Communist Party (KPD), which was established on 1 January 1919. A National Assembly charged with drafting a constitution met in February in the town of 
Weimar, the venue that gave the first German democracy its name. The republic was attacked from the very beginning, 
and the government, led by Social Democrats, deployed the military against large-scale strikes and attempted coups organised 
by the extreme Left. In the wake of all this, radical right-wing fighting units tried to launch a counterrevolution. They enjoyed the blatant support of nationalists and conservatives, who had voted against the new constitution. When a reactionary putsch attempt led by Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz took place in March 1920, the democrats could just barely hold on to power.

The fragile peace 
settlement

1920

The ceasefire began in Europe in November 1918, yet a contractual peace arrangement would not be reached until August 1920. The treaties, signed in various Paris suburbs, changed the European map. After 123 years Poland finally achieved its long desired independence; the Baltic republics, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia were all recognised as new states. The Habsburg monarchy was dissolved, and Hungary lost a third of its territory. The Ottoman Empire was broken up. According to the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 28 June 1919, Germany had to cede its colonies and almost one-fifth of its territory. Its army was limited to 100,000 volunteers. In addition, Germany was forced to pay high reparations and was, along with its allies, assigned sole guilt for the outbreak of the war.

The harsh peace settlement provoked outrage in the defeated states, especially in Germany. The leading political parties of the Weimar Republic, which, as the “receivers” of the now bankrupt country, had to sign the treaty, were denounced as “November criminals” and “traitors to the Fatherland”. The signing of the Versailles Treaty included recognition of the Covenant of the League of Nations. But the organisation, which was established in 1920 and joined by Germany in 1926, did not live up to its peacemaking role. Power politics on the part of the major European states could not be prevented and ethnic conflicts in the newly formed multinational states could not be solved.

Stalinist Soviet Union

1921

The Bolsheviks tried to reinvigorate the country’s 
devastated economy after their victory in the Russian civil war. Approximately 5 million people died during the hunger crisis of 1921–22. In an attempt to shore up the party’s power, Lenin temporarily allowed some market incentives. Joseph Stalin, who, step-by-step, established one-man rule after Lenin’s death in 1924, proclaimed the construction of “social­ism on one country”. 


At the same time he controlled all communist parties around the world through the Communist Interna­tional (Comintern). Their polices were subordinated to Moscow from the mid-1920s. Using dictatorial powers and an army of slave labourers, Stalin brought about the industrialisation of the backward agrarian country. In the wake of forced collectivisation in 
the countryside, it was above all large landowning farmers 
(kulaks) that were deported and thrown into the ever growing network of labour camps, later known as the Gulag Archipelago. Stalin willingly accepted the consequences of these policies: 
approximately 6 million people died during the hunger cata­strophe of 1932–33. Stalin then unleashed the Great Purge be­ginning in 1936. This also involved ethnic purges and was 
directed above all against members of his own party as well 
as Soviet elites, who were arbitrarily and mercilessly persecuted. The creation of a “new man” and the forced transition to Socialism (and eventually Communism) were to be brought about through ideology and terror. The Russian human rights organi­sation MEMORIAL believes that at least 5 million people were arrested for political reasons and more than 6 million deported by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953.

Democracy in retreat

1926

An increase in the number of 
European states was not the only result of the First World War. The con­flict seemed to help democracy achieve a breakthrough as well, because most of the newly formed states were initially 
set up as democracies. The fledgling democracies did not just suffer from postwar hardship, however, but also from a lack of democratic ex­perience and from weak democratic institutions. This fostered conflicts involving minority groups, especially in eastern and southeastern Europe. Discrimination was part and parcel of daily life. More than a fifth of the inhabitants of Czechoslovakia were ethnic Germans. Ukrainians, Germans, and Polish Jews made up significant 
segments of the population in Poland, where, thanks to political instability, Marshal Józef Piłsudski came to power 
in 1926 following a military coup.

Conflicts between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croatians in Yugoslavia were so explosive that King Alexander I set up a dictatorship supported by the military 
after a Serb member of parliament shot three Croatian colleagues dead. Following the bloody defeat of leftist Béla Kun’s dic­tatorial Soviet Republic in Hungary, Miklós Horthy set up an authoritarian regime that protected the privileges of the nobility and large landowners, while severely restricting the right to vote. Antisemitism spread there as well at the time. 

The territorial losses that Hungary was forced to accept, according to the terms of the Treaty of Trianon, were dramatised as a national trauma. Democracy would not last long either in the newly reconstituted Baltic states: Lithuania was ruled in an 
authoritarian fashion from 1926, Estonia and Latvia from 1934.

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© „Diktatur und Demokratie im ­Zeitalter der Extreme“, Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/ausstellung2014