Although remembered by history as the proclaimer and prime minister of the revolutionary Bavarian Republic of 1918-1919, the socialist Kurt Eisner was first and foremost a publicist and litterateur. For roughly a quarter of a century prior to his role as deposer of and successor to the Wittelsbachs he lived by his pen as a polemicist for social democracy. In addition to the myriad reports and commentaries he filed as a regular contributor to various social democratic publications, his oeuvre includes histories; exposés; treatises on philosophy, aesthetics, and pedagogy; literary criticism; poetry; and a sizable body of ideologically motivated, didactic creative literature--all unified by the underlying purpose of educating the German worker for revolution. In the belief that art was the most effective means of instilling into the proletariat a consciousness of its historical circumstance and collective potential, Eisner devised and practiced a political aesthetic. His...