Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Two of our buildup arc is Germany: The Crown Falls, the Republic Bleeds.

The most dangerous moment in a collapsing empire is not the day it loses. It’s the day it loses and then must decide what the loss means. Because meaning is power. Meaning determines who is blamed, who is trusted, who is allowed to rule, and what violence is permitted in the name of restoration.

Germany in late 1918 is not simply defeated. It is unmade.

The Kaiser is gone. Wilhelm II falls out of history like a crown tossed into cold water. The monarchy that once felt like the natural shape of Germany suddenly looks like a costume that has been ripped off in public. And the country does not experience that as a calm transition. It experiences it as a shock. A nation that has lived inside imperial certainty is suddenly handed the unfamiliar problem of being responsible for itself.

The war ends, and immediately the war continues inside Germany.

The soldiers come home, but they don’t come home into gratitude and stability. They come home into hunger, inflation, unemployment, resentment, street violence, and a sense of moral vertigo. They come home to a political argument that is not polite, because the argument is fueled by grief and humiliation and fear. The argument is this: did we lose because we were beaten, or did we lose because we were betrayed?