1. Leipziger Volkszeitung, 1 September 1917. Noted subsequently as LVZ.

2. Modelled after the Prussian three-class system, Leipzig voters cast their ballots based on legal class stratifications. No matter how overpowering their voting base, the commoners could never control more than one third of council seats. This also meant that both the working classes and the middle classes were lumped together into the single third class which the Socialists generally controlled by sheer force of numbers.

3. LVZ and Leipziger neueste Nachrichten, 7 December 1917. Referred to subsequently as LNN.

4. Defeat was so pervasive in fact that the SPD virtually ceased to exist even as a viable opposition party in Leipzig. Boasting Germany's third largest SPD local in 1914 with a reported membership of 50,352, the Leipzig Social Democrats at the beginning of 1918 could count only 428 members. Arbeiterführer für die Stadt Leipzig und Umgebung (Leipzig, 1914), 32–33.Google Scholar

5. Morgan, David W., The Socialist Left and the German Revolution. A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1923 (Ithaca, 1975), 71. “No other metropolitan area had such a one-sided majority for the Left; and though the SPD recovered somewhat after the war, the Independent organization in Leipzig had an unparalleled, lasting solidity in its local support.”Google Scholar

6. Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 6, The Institute for Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the SED (East German Communist party), 197. This is the official East German history of the revolution.Google Scholar

7. Miller, Suzanne, “Die USPD in der Revolution 1918,” in Die Deutschen und die Revolution ed. Salweski, Michael (Gottingen/Zurich, 1984), 359.Google Scholar

8. Pinson, Koppel S., Modem Germany, Its History and Civilization (Glashütten im Taunus, 1970), 230.Google Scholar

9. Rosenberg, Arthur, Imperial Germany. The Birth of the German Republic 1871–1918 (Boston, 1964), 121–22.Google Scholar

10. Tobin, Elizabeth H., “War and the Working Class: The Case of Dusseldorf 1914–1918,” Central European History 18 (09/12 1985): 257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Schorske, Carl E., Gennan Social Democracy, 1905–1917. The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge Mass., 1955), 322.Google Scholar

12. Rosenberg, , Imperial Germany, 121–22.Google Scholar

13. See for example Kocka, Jürgen, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg. Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 1973), 54. “[D]iscontent about economic shortcomings merged with social resentments and protest; it was in this way that they became politicized and turned into an important precondition of the revolution.”Google Scholar

14. Schorske, , German Social Democracy, 316.Google Scholar

15. Krause, Hartfrid, USPD, Zur Geschichte der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Frankfurt am Main and Cologne, 1975), appendix 6. There seems to be no correlation at all between wartime suffering and radical politics. Cities seemed to have political patterns as individual as the cities themselves. In Hamburg, Darmstadt, and Hanover, for example, the Social Democrats were never seriously challenged by the rebel party. In Cologne, the Independents were weak through the war and into the revolution, but 1924 found Communists the majority working-class party there. In Merseburg, the USPD took immediate control of city politics by 1920 and then yielded to the Communists in 1924. In Dresden and Magdeburg, the Independent Socialists did not challenge the established SPD until 1920 and then faded by 1924.Google Scholar

16. A major battleground in the war against Eduard Bernstein and the revisionists was the Leipziger Volkszeitung under the editorship of Bruno Schocnlank. Schoenlank provided an open forum in his paper for one of the most extreme antirevisionists, Luxemburg, Rosa. Ncttl, J. P., Rosa Luxemburg (New York, 1966),Google Scholar chap. 6; and Mayer, Paul, Bruno Schoenlank, 1859–1901 (Hanover, 1971), 78–87.Google Scholar

17. Masur, Gerhard, Imperial Berlin (New York, 1970), 6. “Prior to 1871, Germany had never had a capital. It is one of the many paradoxes of German history that the country lacked a focal point of organization for more than a thousand years.”Google Scholar

18. Nolan, Mary, Social Democracy and Society. Working-class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, 1981);CrossRefGoogle ScholarMitchell, Allen, Revolution in Bavaria, 1918–19: Tlie Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic (Princeton, 1965);CrossRefGoogle ScholarComfort, Richard A., Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic (Stanford, Calif., 1966);Google ScholarKuckuk, Peter, Bremen in der deutschen Revolution, 1918–1919 (Bremen, 1986).Google Scholar

19. A notable exception is Morgan's Tlie Socialist Left, which gives considerable attention to various city organizations. It is interesting to note, however, that Morgan confines his discussion of local revolutionary parties to a single chapter entitled “Patterns of Revolution outside Berlin.”

20. Liebknecht never developed a fondness for Berlin, seeing it as the capital of a Prussian state which he despised. Dominick, Raymond H.II, Wilhelm Liebknecht and the Founding of the German Social Democratic Party (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1982), 49–50.Google Scholar

21. A list of major labor disputes drawn up by Fricke, Dieter, Die deutsche Arbeiter-bewegung. 1869 bis 1914 (Berlin, 1976), fails to mention Leipzig: “8,000 workers in 1871 in Chemnitz, between 19,000 and 20,000 Ruhr miners in June and July 1872, approximately 150,000 miners in the hard coal industries in May and June 1889, the Hamburg harbor strike of 1896–97, the Crimmitschau textile worker strike of 1903–4, the strikes of Ruhr miners in 1905 and 1912, the Mansfeld miner's strike of 1909,” 757.Google Scholar

22. Tipton, Frank B. Jr., Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany during the Nineteenth Century (Middcltown, Conn., 1976), 30–38. Because women lacked the right to vote in imperial Germany, and because they were generally not found in positions of authority within the working class movement, any industry which changed its workforce from male to female lost political power.Google Scholar

23. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 1915–1918 (Leipzig, 1918), 275.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., 275.

25. Nolan, Social Democracy, chap. 5. For a general discussion of the DMV during the war see Opel, Fritz, Der deutsche Metallarbeiterverband während des ersten Weltkrieges u. der Revolution (Hanover/Frankfurt am Main, 1957).Google Scholar

26. Masur, , Imperial Berlin, 132.Google Scholar One need only look at the number of listings for Leipzig in the Adressbuch des deutschen Buchhandels (Leipzig, 1931) to realize the extent to which publishing houses in Leipzig exceeded those of any other German city.Google Scholar

27. Title of promotional pamphlet advertising the 1929 book fair in Leipzig. Leipzig, , The Book Centre, 2. “If it may be rightly said that among the States which form the German Reich Saxony is predominant in respect to graphic art, it is equally incontestable that Saxony owes here enviable predominance to LeipzigGoogle Scholar

28. Noyes, Paul, Organization and Revolution. Working Class Associations in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849 (Princeton, 1966), 195.Google Scholar For working-class habits see Lidtke, Vernon, The Alternative Culture (Oxford, 1985), 185.Google Scholar A discussion of working-class wage structures are Desai, A. V., Real Wages in Germany, 1871–1913 (Oxford, 1968), 108–10Google Scholar, and Bry, Gerhard, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton, 1960), 51–63 and 178–81.Google Scholar

29. The Verband der deutschen Buchdrucker, the national organization, was not founded until four years after the Leipzig organization.

30. Stärke, Wolfgang, contributing author in Neue Deutsche Biographic, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1969), 643–44. The offices of the Leipzig SPD, the headquarters of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, and Lipinski's printing operation shared the same building on Taucher Strassc. Lipinski also published the Arbeiterführer für die Stadt Leipzig und Umgebung, the leading directory of party and union organizations in Leipzig.Google Scholar

31. Stampfer, Friedrich, Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse (Cologne, 1957), 44–45.Google Scholar

32. LNN, 7 December 1917, 9. Comparing the 1917 results with those of 1912 suggests that the only shift in voting patterns between the two years was from the SPD to the USPD. The combined total for both socialist parties in 1917 of 78 percent was five points higher than the SPD vote in 1912, though these votes did not seem to come from the bourgeois party. The coalition bourgeois party, the Gemeinnutziger Burgerwahlausschuss, also raised its total vote from 18 percent in 1912 to 22 percent in 1917. The fact that both ends of the third-class spectrum increased probably indicates a sharpening of class sentiment due to the war which expressed itself in a gravitation toward the extremes. See Kocka, , Klassengesellschaft, 54.Google Scholar

33. See note 32 above.

34. A database drawn from death notices in classified advertisements raises a number of serious yet legitimate questions concerning such factors as randomness and representativeness of the sample when compared to Leipzig's overall population. The absence of women in a military sample and age limitations due to the type of men called into service are only two of these concerns. The shortcomings of the database, as well as statistical devices for overcoming the shortcomings, are discussed in great detail in David McKibbin, “The Leipzig Working-Class and World War I: A Study of the German Independent Social Democratic Party as a Manifestation of Urban Historical Evolution,” (Ph.D. diss., The State University of New York at Buffalo, 1991), 180–88.Google Scholar

35. Further confirmation of the representativeness of the death notice sample is provided by the fact that population figures for residency patterns show similar polarizations of the Leipzig workforce. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 1915–1918 (Leipzig, 1918), 12.Google Scholar Contemporary accounts of the city also note the presence of the polarization in Leipzig. See, for example, Engelbrecht, Karl, 50 Jahre Geschichte des Vereins LeipzigerBuchdrucker- und Schriftgiessergehilfen (Leipzig, 1912), 83.Google Scholar

36. A study of the interrelation between employment and residential patterns is Greenfield, Richard R., “The 'Journey-to-Work': An Empirical Investigation of Work, Residence and Transportation, Philadelphia, 1850 and 1880,” in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Croup Experience in the 19th Century, ed. Hershberg, Theodore (Oxford/New York, 1981), 128–73.Google Scholar

37. Zwahr, Hartmut, Zur Konstituierung des Proletariats als Klasse. Strukturuntersuchung über das Leipziger Proletariat wahrend der industriellen Revolution (East Berlin, 1978), 198.Google Scholar

38. Goetz, Ferdinand, Dr. Karl Erdmann Heine, Sein Leben und Schaffen (Leipzig, 1897), discusses the role of Heine in the development of Leipzig's western suburbs in the mid-19th century.Google Scholar

39. A list of the representatives to the Leipzig worker's council in November 1918 includes Richard Lipinski, Fritz Gcycr, Karl Voigt, Hermann Gcidcl, and Hermann Licbmann. This represents a broad spectrum of socialist opinion in Leipzig. LVZ, 11 November 1918.

40. Further evidence supporting the volatile nature of the western suburbs is seen in labor strike activity in Leipzig during the spring and summer of 1917. Seventy-one firms in the western sections of the city, 54 percent of all firms, suffered strikes involving 18,096 workers, 42 percent of the workforce. The cast on the other hand saw strikes in only eight firms, 6 percent, in which only 1,540 workers participated, only 4 percent of the total workforce. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 1915–1918 (Leipzig, 1918), 276–77.Google Scholar

41. Geyer, Curt, Die revolutionäre Illusion. Zur Geschichte des linken Flügels der USPD (Stuttgart, 1976), 73.Google Scholar Geyer first heard of the arrival of the sailors and the collapse of city government through a tapped phone line at party headquarters. It is interesting to note here that after the war ended, socialist politics in Leipzig turned away from radical politics. When the USPD formally died in 1923, most of Leipzig's USPD leaders made their way back into the SPD rather than to the German Communist party (KPD). In contrast, Independent Socialists in neighboring Halle turned that city into a KPD stronghold after 1923