An interesting and ambitious attempt to convey a period of history in a novelistic way - which I'm sure will work for some people, but for me there were 2 problems. I had some knowledge of the period but not sure I had enough for the novelistic approach to work. It's certainly a very interesting period but personally, I would've preferred the history delivered in more conventional manner.

Another problem with the novelistic approach is that it tends to encourage expectations that you will be more drawn in than by a more conventional historical account e.g. you will sympathise with certain characters or at least feel sufficiently swept along by the plot and a sense of what is at stake to care what happens. But it didn't do that for me. Although it tries hard to sweep you along with a sense of the excitement of the times, ultimately I felt quite distanced from the narrative because most of the personalities covered are not particularly sympathetic and the events often have a slightly absurdist feel to them.

If there is a general lesson here, it is that writers and artists generally make lousy politicians - although even that feels like a massive generalisation e.g. I think Vaclav Havel did reasonably well as President of what was then Czechoslovakia following the Velvet Revolution (perhaps he is just the exception that proves the rule - I don't know). But a comparative analysis of that type was not what the author set out to provide here, so it's unfair to judge it by reference to that. ( )

Dieser Roman über die Münchner Räterepublik ist wirklich faszinierend: Toll recherchiert und gut zu lesen. Was für eine Zeit!
Und doch würde ich dazu raten, originale Bücher aus jener Zeit zu lesen, „ Eine Jugend in Deutschland“ von Ernst Toller etwa und „Wir sind Gefangene“ von Oskar Maria Graf. ( )

Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany 1918 by Volker Weidermann is a narrative history of the often overlooked Bavarian Revolution of 1918. This reads almost like a novel which makes it both an enjoyable read and one that presents the people and ideas as well as the events and outcomes.

Well researched, the information is conveyed to the reader almost casually. Rather than simply quote letters or essays or memoirs, the thoughts from those texts are incorporated into the action so that we experience what is happening at the same time we are learning about what any one of them might have been thinking or expecting.

I was caught up in the narrative itself as much as I was interested in learning about the events. When I say it felt like reading a novel, I mean that in a good way. It was like reliving the events rather than just reading about what happened.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )