1919
Treaty of Versailles signed
In the Hall of Mirrors where the German Empire had been proclaimed forty-eight years earlier, German delegates signed a treaty that stripped their country of colonies, army, territory, and self-respect, and assigned them the guilt of the war. John Maynard Keynes walked out in protest. A young Austrian corporal fumed in Munich.
Amritsar massacre
General Reginald Dyer marched Gurkha troops into a walled garden in Amritsar where Indians were holding a peaceful assembly. He blocked the exits and ordered ten minutes of rifle fire. At least 379 died, perhaps a thousand. Dyer said he wished to produce a moral effect. He did. He lost India for the British.
May Fourth movement in Beijing
Chinese students marched on Tiananmen when news broke that Versailles had handed former German concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than returning them to China. The protests swelled into a nationwide rejection of traditional culture and foreign submission, reshaping Chinese intellectual life for a generation. Among the young men who were listening was a quiet librarian named Mao Zedong.
Mussolini founds the Fascist movement
In a Milan hall next to a piazza, a former socialist newspaper editor and decorated WWI veteran founded the Fasci di Combattimento, a paramilitary movement that fused nationalism, anti-Bolshevism, and a cult of violence and action. Benito Mussolini had about a hundred followers. Within four years his Blackshirts were marching on Rome, and he would rule Italy for two decades.
Weimar Republic takes form
Germany's new republic, drawn up in the placid town of Weimar because Berlin was too chaotic, adopted one of Europe's most liberal constitutions. Women voted, speech was free, welfare expanded. It also carried clauses that would one day let a chancellor rule by decree. Article 48 was a loaded gun on the mantelpiece.
Spartacist uprising crushed
In Berlin, communist revolutionaries led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht tried to seize power. Government troops and right-wing Freikorps put them down within days. Luxemburg was beaten with a rifle butt and shot; her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal. The German left, split between Social Democrats and Communists, would never recover.
March First movement in Korea
Thirty-three Korean intellectuals signed a declaration of independence and read it aloud in a Seoul restaurant. Students spread it across the peninsula and two million Koreans demonstrated in the following weeks, waving flags and chanting for liberation. Japanese troops killed perhaps seven thousand. The uprising was crushed but made independent Korea a permanent political idea that would not die.