Hitler returns to Munich and in the prevailing mood of post-defeat resentment begins to take an interest in extremist politics

Adolf Hitler joins the tiny German Workers' party, the members of which share his own virulent anti-semitism

Walter Gropius becomes director of the newly formed Bauhaus in Weimar

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany

The Spartacus League transforms itself into the Communist party of Germany

A vast crowd, assembling in Berlin, calls for a revolution and begins to seize public buildings

After ten days of street fighting in Berlin, Spartacus leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg are captured and shot

The delegates to the peace conference in Paris, mainly concerned with the terms to be imposed on Germany, hold their first session

The German assembly meets in Weimar and elects Ebert as president of the new republic

The peace treaty with Germany, ending the world war, is signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles

The Versailles Treaty declares that Germany must pay reparations for wartime damages, with the precise amount to be decided by May 1921

The peace-makers in Paris assign the Sudetenland, with its 3.5 million German-speaking inhabitants, to the new republic of Czechoslovakia

The Versailles Treaty provides a corridor of land to give Poland access to Danzig and the Baltic, thereby dividing two parts of Germany

A right-wing military putsch seizes power for a few days in Berlin

A plebiscite in Schleswig establishes the border between Denmark and Germany

A Communist uprising in the Ruhr is suppressed with difficulty by the German army

The German Workers' Party, with Adolf Hitler as one of its leading members, changes its name to the Nazi party

The commission considering the level of Germany's war reparations to the Allies decides on $33 billion

Paul Klee becomes a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar

Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the Nazi party, which now has about 3000 members

Wassily Kandinsky takes up a teaching post at the Bauhaus in Weimar

Germany is the first nation to re-establish full diplomatic relations with Russia

Thomas Mann publishes a fragment of his Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

The German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler is appointed to the Berlin Philharmonic, and spends most of the rest of his life with the orchestra

France, with Belgian support, occupies Germany's industrial heartland in the Ruhr