oa Een voorschot op toekomstige dapperheid

A down payment on future prowess. The memory of a revolution that failed

In November 1918 revolutionary soldiers, sailors, and socialist workers took to the streets of German cities such as Düsseldorf, Halle, Leipzig, Braunschweig, and Berlin. For a moment it seemed as though the revolutionary fervour would spill over the border into the Netherlands. Three thousand Dutch revolutionaries, accompanied by four hundred revolutionary soldiers and sailors, took to the streets of Amsterdam on the evening of Wednesday 13 November 1918. Contrary to reports earlier that day, the soldiers in the military barracks in the Sarphatistraat did not support the revolutionary cause and instead opened fire on the revolutionaries. The subsequent death of four revolutionaries became both the culmination and the premature end of a week of revolutionary unrest in the Netherlands. This paper sets out to reconstruct what happened and who was involved in the events that took place in the Sarphatistraat. More importantly, it will ask how these events were viewed in the light of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and how Dutch socialists and communists gave a different meaning to the disconcerting memory of a revolution that failed before it had properly started.