On October 12, 1923, Grigory Zinoviev, president of the Communist International wrote the following in Pravda:
"The German events are developing with the inexorability of fate. The path which it took the Russian Revolution twelve years to cover, from 1906 to 1917, will have taken the German Revolution five years, from 1918 to 1923. ... The proletarian revolution is knocking at Germany's door; you would have to be blind not to see it. ... Very soon, everyone will see that this autumn of 1923 is a turning point, not just for the history of Germany, but for the history of the whole world."
In fact, far from being on the point of triumph, the German Revolution was on the verge of irredeemable disaster, which would soon inflict terrible consequences on Germany and the world.
In this magisterial work, first published in 1971 and still unsurpassed, Pierre Broué meticulously reconstitutes the six decisive years during which—between "ultra-leftism" and "opportunism," "sectarianism" and "revisionism," "activism" and "passivity"—the German revolutionaries attempted to begin a new chapter in the history of the working class.
"Germany from 1917 to 1923 was the scene of the greatest working class revolutionary upsurge ever in an advanced capitalist country. With the old order disintegrating under the hammer blows of military defeat and economic collapse, parties and groupuscules, trade unions and factory committees, battled employers, the government, and paramilitaries to inaugurate a new proletarian order. In his monumental classic, Pierre Broué follows the revolutionary process from the standpoint of the revolutionaries and their multiple organizations, strewn across Europe and Russia, as they struggled to impose conceptual order on the unprecedented cataclysms unfolding before them, to frame strategies and tactics, and to win over the mass movements, in intense competition with their communist, socialist, and anarchist rivals. Broué enables us to feel that we are actually living through these epoch-making events, not just by virtue of his brilliant narrative, but, even more so, through his ongoing analysis and critique of the revolutionaries' intra-party debates, sectarian maneuvers, and all too often catastrophic decisions. As an introduction to revolutionary theory and practice, for then and for now, this book is in a class by itself." – Robert Brenner, Professor and Director, UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History
Yup, it is written by a Trot. And it is bloody expensive. But it remains a remarkable study, huge (nearly 1000 pages), and the only attempt to come to grips with the German Revolution. So you should read it.