Proclamation of the republic in Germany

The proclamation of the republic in Germany took place in Berlin twice on 9 November 1918, the first at the Reichstag building by Philipp Scheidemann of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD) and the second a few hours later by Karl Liebknecht, the leader of the Marxist Spartacus League, at the Berlin Palace.

In the German Revolution of 1918–1919, during which Social Democrats and Spartacists were among the groups that fought to determine the country's future form of government, it was the MSPD and the ideas of the bourgeois-democratic parties that prevailed over the Spartacists and their more radical idea of a soviet-style republic. The German Empire was transformed from a monarchy into a parliamentary-democratic republic with a liberal constitution. Scheidemann's speech marked the point at which the Empire could be said to have ended and the Weimar Republic, the first republic to include the entire German nation-state,^[1] to have been born.