Robert Reinert's frenetic film Nerven was conceived as World War I ended and revolutions broke out throughout Germany in November 1918. Spearheaded in large part by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and the communist Spartacist League, the uprisings consisted of exploited workers, unwilling sailors, pacifist soldiers, and other war-weary Germans who sought to overthrow the Kaiser's military regime. They dismantled the monarchy and paved the way for watershed political developments to take place throughout the empire, including the founding of the socialist Räterepublik in Munich. For a few months it seemed a socialist state would be implemented. On November 7, over sixty thousand workers and soldiers assembled in the Theresienwiese for the one-year anniversary of the Russian Revolution. They forced the abdication of the Bavarian King and, filled with revolutionary zeal the following day, declared the new Soviet Republic, the “Freistaat Bayern.”

The socialist aims of the revolution would ultimately not be realized. However, its democratic goals would inform specific articles of the Weimar constitution, drafted in early 1919. Germany's first attempt at a republican form of government represented a definitive break from the assumptions of the old Wilhelmine order. Its founding document, however, was hastily drafted and too ambitious, as its many provisions permitted massive compromises between the political extremes. And in what would become one of its most fatal flaws, Article 48, the so-called Notverordnung clause, expanded the power of the Chancellor to suspend civil liberties under certain “states of emergency.” One week after Lenin sent a message of greeting to the Bavarian Soviet Republic in early May 1919,2 the Freikorps and other soldiers still loyal to the German Army stormed Munich and defeated the Socialists in a series of intense street fights. When the Weimar constitution was signed and implemented in August of that year, Munich became a hotbed for extreme right-wing politics, mobilizing those who felt betrayed by the government and who demanded a return to the nationalist Fatherland. One of these movements would manifest itself in Hitler's beer hall putsch in 1923.

The crowd scenes in the first two acts of Nerven were filmed on location in the summer of 1919 in Munich.