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war, responded accordingly. As late as November 2, 1918, there was agrand rally of the self-styled People’s Committee for National Defense (Volksausschuss für Nationale Verteidigung) in Dresden, which united all the patriotic, racist, and conservative groups. Bloodcurdling calls were made for “total war.”
    The calls went unheard. In the second week of November revolution broke out in Dresden. The post office and telegraph offices, the police headquarters, and the main government buildings were occupied by armed left-wing insurgents, many of them soldiers and led by rebellious airmen from the Grossenhain airfield. They were in touch with revolutionary soldiers and sailors elsewhere in Germany via the new communications phenomenon, radio. The red flag was hoisted on the royal Schloss . A hastily assembled Council of Workers and Soldiers crammed into the landmark big top of the famous Circus Sarrasani on the banks of the Elbe. The delegates declared the king deposed.
    The conservative-nationalist elements, which had talked boldly just a week or so earlier of repression and national salvation, seemed to melt away. The king fled by boat to the royal pleasure palace at Moritzburg, an hour or so from Dresden, then on to the castle of a relative farther east.
    On November 13, 1918, Frederick Augustus III Wettin, the last king of Saxony, officially abdicated, ending 829 years of rule by a single dynasty. A few days later he crossed the border into Prussian Silesia, where he settled at Sibyllenort, one of his family’s ancestral estates. There he lived quietly as a private citizen until his death in 1932, respected even by many of those who had overthrown him. His former subjects still recount a well-known—though probably apocryphal—story that Frederick Augustus remarked wryly in Saxon dialect as he left his capital for the last time: “ Also, Kinder, dann machd eiern Drägg alleene! ” So, children, make your muck alone!
    The “children,” excited as they might be to find themselves in charge at last, were not to experience the time after 1918 as a happy one. The mix of revolutionary idealists and nervously hopeful democrats who had declared the “Social Republic of Saxony” had only short-term aims in common. In the longer term, they were ill-suited for cooperation.
    As for the far right in Dresden, it was not dead but lying low, waiting for the tide to turn.
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    AFTER THE 1918 REVOLUTION there was a joke in circulation that went like this: If you told German workers to seize the railway station, they would, of course do so—but first they would obediently get in line to buy platform tickets. Considering the enormity of events in Germany and Saxony in the last months of 1918 and the beginning of 1919—national defeat, the overthrow of dynasties, rioters on the streets, radical political change—the process was relatively orderly and bloodless compared with other times and places in history.
    Not that there were no casualties. In May 1919, after the moderate socialists had won the elections, a war veterans’ demonstration against rising prices and lack of state help got out of hand in Dresden. Neuring, the Social Democrat minister of war in Saxony, was dragged from his office by rioters and tossed off the historic Augustus Bridge into the river Elbe. When the unfortunate politician tried to swim to the bank, an unidentified marksman from among the veterans gathered on the bridge shot and killed him as he floundered in the water. Within days martial law was declared, and with the aid of the army the remaining “workers’ councils” in Dresden and Leipzig were dissolved.
    Saxony was now supposedly a model parliamentary regime, founded on the moderate social democracy that for many years dominated politics there. All the same, conflict between extreme left and extreme right was as bitter as elsewhere in Germany, perhaps more so. The Saxon middle