Military defeat brought turmoil and revolution to Austria-Hungary and Germany, as it had to Russia. The independent states of Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and a larger Romania, were carved out of the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (Map 25.4). A greatly expanded Serbian monarchy gained control of the western Balkans and took the name Yugoslavia.

In late 1918, Germany likewise experienced a dramatic revolution that resembled the Russian Revolution of March 1917. In Germany, however, moderates from the Social Democratic Party and their liberal allies held on to power and established the Weimar Republic — a democratic government that would lead Germany for the next fifteen years.

There were several reasons for the German outcome. The great majority of the Marxist politicians in the Social Democratic Party were moderates, not revolutionaries. They were also German nationalists, appalled by the prospect of civil war and revolutionary terror. Of crucial importance was the fact that the moderate Social Democrats quickly came to terms with the army and big business, which helped prevent total national collapse.

Yet the triumph of the Social Democrats brought violent chaos to Germany in 1918 to 1919. The new republic was attacked from both sides of the political spectrum. Radical Communists tried unsuccessfully to seize control of the government in the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin in January 1919. In Bavaria, a short-lived Bolshevik-style republic was violently overthrown on government orders. Nationwide strikes by leftist workers and a short-lived, right-wing military takeover — the Kapp Putsch — were repressed by the central government.

By the summer of 1920, the situation in Germany had calmed down, but the new republican government faced deep discontent. Communists and radical socialists blamed the Social Democrats for the violent suppression of radical unrest. Right-wing nationalists, including the new Nazi Party, despised the government from the start. They spread the myth that the German army had never actually lost the war — instead, the nation was “stabbed in the back” by socialists and pacifists at home.