Hello, you're very welcome to Longreads, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at

political topics and thinkers. My name's Daniel Finn, and the features editor here at Jacobin,

and I'll be presenting the show. We're listening to Louis Armstrong's version of Mac the Knife,

originally written in German by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Vile. The song was also covered by

Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and perhaps most famously by Bobby Darren. It's just one example

of a popular cultural export from Vimer Germany to post-war America. Badhouse chairs populated

the country's living rooms. Films like Cabaret swept the board at the Oscars. In recent years,

however, Vimer has more commonly been used as a political reference point. Anyone who stands to the

left of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden will find themselves compared to the Communist Party of Germany.

But the most remarkable invocation of German history came from Arnold Schwarzenegger after the

Capitol Hill rise earlier this year. As an immigrant in this country, I would like to say a few words

to my fellow Americans and to our friends around the world about their events of recent days.

Now I grew up in Austria and very aware of Crystal Nacht or the night of Broken Glass.

It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out in 1938 at the Nazi equivalent of the

Proud Boys. The Broken Glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol, but them opted not

just shattered the windows of the Capitol. They shattered the ideals we took for granted. They did not

just break down the doors of the building that housed the American democracy. They trampled the very

principles of which our country was founded. The more people talk about Vimer Germany as the master

key to our own time, the less we seem to know about its real history. I guess today is Sean

Larson, Sean is an historian who specializes in the German Revolution and the Vimer Republic.

How did the German monarchy fall at the end of 1918 and what were the key political actors

of that time? The German Kaiser was toppled by the November Revolution, the same November

...