The armed mass demonstrations that convulsed Berlin now forced the terrified Max von Baden to act over Ebert’s appointment as Chancellor (Prime Minister):
The revolution is on the verge of winning. We cannot crush it but perhaps we can strangle it…if Ebert is presented to me from the streets as the people’s leader, then we will have a republic; if it is Liebknecht, then Bolshevism. But if the abdicating Kaiser appoints Ebert as Reich Chancellor, then there is still a little hope for the monarchy. Perhaps it will be possible to divert the revolutionary energies into the legal channels of an election campaign.
A short time later Scheidemann was busy eating soup in the Reichstag restaurant when he heard loud cries from the crowd outside. He ran to the balcony and spontaneously announced that Ebert was now Chancellor. Then, as if in an afterthought, he shouted, “Long live the Great German Republic!”
As soon as Ebert had heard this news he was absolutely enraged. According to Richard Watt’s history, The Kings Depart, “His face turned livid…he banged on the table with his fist. He was furious at Scheidemann’s presumption. ‘You have no right to proclaim a republic!’” But it was too late…
The SPD leader’s first act as Chancellor was to ask von Baden to accept the Regent’s office, hoping to restore a constitutional monarchy. Ebert’s first appeal to the masses was:
Fellow Citizens! I call on you all for support in the difficult work that awaits us…Fellow Citizens! I urgently appeal to you: leave the streets! Maintain law and order!
Effective power was in the hands of the workers’, soldiers’ and sailors’ councils which had sprung up throughout the length and breadth of Germany. Delegates had been elected in mass meetings in every factory, barracks, and ship in order to see their interests represented. These councils were the same as the soviets (the Russian word for workers’ councils) that had spontaneously sprung up in Russia in 1905 and again in 1917. But the workers and soldiers, as with their Russian counterparts after February, were not conscious of their power. If they had been they could have formed the basis of a new German workers’ state. Instead they gave this power to the SPD/USPD coalition.
Events moved quickly. On 10 November a joint meeting of the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils elected a provisional executive committee, which in the absence of an elected government took effective power into its hands by appointing a government of people’s commissars. The new government was composed exclusively of members of the SPD and USPD: three majority socialists (SPD), Ebert, Scheidemann and Landsberg; and three Independent Socialists (USPD), Haase, Dittmann and Barth. Although they rested on the workers’ councils, these leaders soon came to an accommodation with the old state bureaucracy and the German High Command.