Well written informative a book that drew me in.A book I will be recommending historical eye opening a very interesting read.#netgalley #pushkinpress.

With thanks to NetGalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review. This is actually closer to 3.5 than anything else. I started reading this just after the incident in America. It reads halfway between a fairytale and a style of narrative journalism that goes some way to explaining how things can get very strange very quickly. It begins with the bloodless revolution of Bavaria after WW1 and shows (in their own words in some cases) the political mess that came of it. Sometimes we hear directly from the writers - like a documentary. This is the kind of history we should be being taught.

Written in such an engaging way that it could have been entirely fictional, this book describes and analyses a fascinating aspect of events in WWI. The writing style is extremely impressive - sharp, descriptive and immersive. I suspect this made the book more appealing to me than the plot alone would have done.

Dreamers is a book about a not so well known part of European history and talk about Munich in 1918 and 1919. It is a well-written book, with a lot of information, which will take you in a middle of the post-war country, in middle of a revolution, where people are tired of fighting and want to make things right. It is an intriguing story of big ideas and dreams.
I enjoyed the style the book was written - although taken from various sources, it reads almost like a novel, rather than a book full of facts.

A clear case of "it's me, not you". I had a hard time following what was going on and sometimes found myself confusing one person for another. Maybe if I had had more knowledge about the subject before diving into this book, it would've been easier for me to understand. I'm sure it also would've made it easier for me to appreciate the style choices. Rather than a straight historical narrative, this was written in a novelistic present-tense narrative. The lack of chapters also made it harder to keep going.

I also wonder to what extent the translation factors into the readability of this one. Some of the sentences felt clunky, perhaps because of juggling between facts and style.

History is one of the more recent genres I love. Dreamers by Volker Weidermann takes readers into a glimpse in time during the German revolution back in 1918 when the writers took power. It’s interesting how writers became so powerful because of the way they could swing their words.

The dreamers are the writers who dream of a people’s nation. A country where the people are free. Yet the different armies in Germany feel otherwise, including young Adolf Hitler.

Typically, I read two or three books at a time, switching every chapter or two. But Dreamers has no chapters! This totally threw me off. It’s the second book I’ve read this year without chapters. Instead, there’s a space between paragraphs, sometimes three dashes. I am not a fan of this type of writing as I cherish my chapter breaks!

This book takes readers through the city streets when revolution is declared in 1918. It seems chaotic in Germany, particularly in Munich. The many mentioned are quickly described with political views and enemies indicated as well.

There’s so much death and useless murdering in this time. It’s a horrific thought that everything was so unstable that you could be shot dead because you look slightly like the description of someone being sought after. The book also mentioned a young woman who was brutally abused by many men, it breaks my heart that such brutality exists still today.

A digital complimentary copy of Dreamers by Volker Weidermann through Pushkin Press via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I give this book 3 out of 5 tiaras because the formatting threw me off and I found myself lost and confused about what was going on. It’s a view of history that I’ve never encountered before. This book is one that should be read without distractions because there’s so many people involved that I felt I should have outlined it’s characters to keep track of all the people.

The author takes the popular history approach with the focus on people and narrative. The content is the short-lived and not well known socialist revolution in Bavaria in 1918. The main actors are the dreamer -Kurt Eisner-, his companions, and several intellectuals, artists, and reactionaries. Through a mix of journal entries, newspaper clippings, and excerpts from speeches the reader gains insight into how these people seem to function. The reader also gets a taste of the many utopian ideas of these ‘dreamers’ to improve mankind and society.
This enlivens the sheer factual history accounts as it includes feelings and thoughts.
Hence, this book brings details of the revolutionary events and general climate in Bavaria.
It is fast-paced and lucidly written, showing the different strands of thoughts while the revolutionary and its counter-forces create momentum.
A very good and interesting read for anyone interested in Weimar Germany.

I received an electronic copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is an interesting book of German pop history in English translation, looking at a fairly brief revolutionary interlude in Munich's history in 1918/1919. It's easy to forget, especially from an American perspective, how many changes in power and short-lived revolutions occurred in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and this one is perhaps especially eclipsed by subsequent history. The book provides an easy-to-read account, and in addition to discussing the roles of the writers and other intellectuals who were directly involved, touches on the responses of various prominent figures of the German literary world.

The book's very conversational style makes it a rather quick read, though the blending of past and present tense makes for a somewhat odd reading experience (in my opinion, anyway). I don't know whether this is the result of the translation, the source material, or both. The book's content seems fairly clearly intended for a non-specialist German audience, which presents a little bit of a question on who exactly the intended audience is for the translation--a niche subject for a general pop history-reading audience (though there seems to be above-average interest in interwar Germany at the moment), but treated in a form clearly not intended for a more academic one.

4/5 Stars

Dreamers is a good book with a really interesting story. However, the primary issue I found was that you really needed to know a lot of history going on otherwise it was hard to follow along with the story. The pros - it's an incredibly well-written account of a little-known bit of history and reads less like a history book and more like a novel. I would definitely suggest this as an addition to anyone studying WWI or early 1900's Bavaria!



Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

The pen is not only mightier than the sword, it hits with a BANG! And the words of the people can change a nation. A most impressive and informative book.

A world of Possibilities.

Germany in the immediate aftermath of WWI was a country in flux. Inspired by the still-fresh Russian revolution and the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy, all manner of dreamers, schemers and revolutionaries – from the drily pragmatic to the wild-eyed and utopian – hoped to transform society into their own versions of the earthly paradise.
In Bavaria the intellectuals made the first move in November 1918, deposing the Wittelsbach dynasty and establishing the People's State of Bavaria under the charismatic theatre critic and theorist Kurt Eisner. This experiment lasted barely three months, Eisner being assassinated by a monarchist army officer in February 1919. After this the even shorter-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic squabbled on before being crushed by the combined forces of the army and the right-wing freikorps.
Weidermann does a good job of detailing the inevitable in-fighting and jockeying for position and influence that follow any revolution, making it clear that – as is often the case – while cosmopolitan cities like Munich might adapt to new social paradigms, a deeply conservative rural hinterland (Very conservative in Catholic Bavaria) can often be the fatal stumbling-block to revolution.
Perhaps most interesting, and almost lost in the overall clamour of revolutionary Munich, is the mention of the role a certain army corporal may or may not have played in the events – and where the allegiances of this young man might have lain at the start of his political career. Four years later, this same corporal, by then the head of a small, ultra-revolutionary movement of his own, failed in his own attempt to seize power in Munich. We know the rest.

Thanks to Steerforth Press and NetGalley for this ARC

I unfortunately didn't manage to finish this book. I couldn't get into it and found the narrative difficult to follow. I may likely pick it up at another time when my brain feels ready for it.

I didn’t really get on with this one. I found the narrative quite hard to follow at times, and I felt that I needed to know a lot about the subject before even embarking on the book. It’s a detailed account of the build up to and the events of the short-lived Bavarian Republic of 1918-1919, a day-by-day chronicle of the turbulent time and the people involved. It’s an impressionistic account rather than a straight historical narrative, and it just didn’t sit easily with me. Useful reading for anyone particularly interested in the period but quite hard-going for the rest of us.

Post World War I Bavaria was in upheaval and the governments that followed the ousting the of the Wittelsbach family were unsuccessful and violent. The author introduces many people, but starts with Kurt Eisner and Enhard Auer, then Ernst Toller and the communist leader Max Levien. Eisner wants to use art to educate and elevate the masses. Many first officials were artists and poets and the author brings in some not connected to the government like Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann for their contemporary comments .He gives snippets about Adolf Hitler, Hanns Johst, and finance leader Silvio Gesell. The style is very readable even though I had to start taking quick notes about people because there were many that were unfamiliar. It was very helpful to learn what state Germany was in and why various groups in later years did not trust each other. Weidermann includes a helpful bibliography.

Dreamers is a fantastic slice of little-known history. Weidermann is both a gifted journalist and a literary writer. He is skilled at researching a specific moment and pulling in all kinds of interesting facts. At the same time, he writes in such an engaging style, not the dry, reportage style one often finds in journalistic writing.

Dreamers really pulls you in with the details. For instance, I knew Rainer Maria Rilke was a quiet, mind-in-the-stars poet revered throughout Germany, but I didn’t know he was obsessed with Russia. If you read Dreamers, you get to know him even better than the small bit I’ve included here.

Weidermann skillfully balances humor (I loved the scene when revolution is in the air and all some Bavarians can think of is beer and sausage) with the excitement and terrorizing feeling of revolution. Weidermann is also a gifted storyteller, as he uses so many details to make the historical figures fully- fleshed, memorable characters and keeps the story moving at a brisk pace.

He presents the “protagonist” Kurt Eisner as fully human. Weidermann gets into the nuances to show why a pale-faced, sweaty intellectual is charismatic enough to be beloved and skilled enough to be a great writer, but not visually arresting enough to be considered a great public speaker (again, subtle difference between orator and public speaker). I highly recommend this book.

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.

A refreshingly brisk and lively study of a largely forgotten moment in twentieth century history. The book moves at breakneck speed to recount 10 days of political idealism, chaos, and dissolution. Extremely energetic and informative.