Assassins and Conspirators: Anarchism, Socialism, and Political Culture in Imperial Germany 9781501751264

Citation preview

Assassins & Conspirators

Assassins

& Conspirators Anarchism, Socialism, and

Political

Culture in Imperial Germany

Elun T. Gabriel

NIU Press DeKalb, IL

© 2014 by Northern Illinois University Press Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115 Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper. All Rights Reserved Design by Yuni Dorr Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabriel, Elun T. Assassins and conspirators : anarchism, socialism, and political culture in imperial Germany / Elun T. Gabriel. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87580-481-1 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-60909-153-8 (­ e-book) 1. Germany—Politics and government—1871–1918. 2. Political culture—Germany­ —19th century. 3. Political culture—Germany—20th century. 4. Anarchism. 5. Socialism. I. Title. JN3388.G33 2014 320.943’09034—dc23 2013041736

For my father and mother, who encouraged in me a love of reading, writing, and learning, and for Donna, to whom I owe so much

Contents

A c k no w l e dg m e n ts

Introduction

ix

3

1 Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire: 1871–1878 22 2 Debating the Socialist Law: 1878

43

3 The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy: 1878–1885 70 4 “The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”: 1886–1890

115

5 Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”: 1890–1902 135 6 Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy: 1890–1914 167 7 The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War: 1903–1914 190 Conclusion: German Political Culture, Democracy, and Terrorism Notes 22 5 B i bl i o g r a ph y I nde x 28 9

273

212

Acknowledgments

I first discovered anarchism as a political theory in a high school philosophy class with Tom Murray. As an undergraduate at Haverford College, I deepened my exploration of the topic working with two fine historians, Jane Caplan and Sharon Ullman. From the moment of my arrival for graduate study at the University of California at Davis, Bill Hagen was a source of constant intellectual stimulation in the realms of social theory and German history (and would have been with jazz piano, if I had proved receptive). Thanks to his penetrating critiques of my dissertation over the entire course of its development, the foundation for this book is much sturdier than it would otherwise have been. Along with theoretical and practical guidance, Bill was also a source of pithy advice (the bon mot to which I have tried most diligently to adhere is “never quote anything boring”). The other members of my dissertation committee, Cathy Kudlick and Ted Margadant, offered astute comments about structure, style, and argument (Cathy’s advice to “prune your prose!” continues to ring in my ears), as well as valuable comparative observations from their vantage point as historians of France. I am grateful as well for the insights and support of many other faculty, fellow graduate students, and support staff at UC Davis. On the long road from dissertation to book, I received feedback and advice from many quarters, which has improved the quality of the final work—the customary disclaimer that the remaining failings are mine alone certainly applies here. My companion in anarchism-related research, Richard Bach Jensen, has been the source of several invaluable leads on sources, as well as stimulating conversation and support. Rick has shown a rare generosity of spirit in reading my essays, sharing his own, and allowing me to draw on his near-encyclopedic knowledge of the history of anarchist crime and its policing. I also appreciate the many scholars who have provided constructive criticism on various aspects of this project over the years, including Celia Applegate, Roger Chickering, and Nancy Reagin at a Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar in German History in Berlin; Martin Geyer, Thomas Lindenberger, and Eric Weitz at a Transatlantic Summer Institute in German History sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; the graduate student attendees at these workshops, many of whom are now distinguished historians; Michael Hughes, Vernon Lidtke, William Smaldone, and George S. Williamson, who commented on and discussed with me conference papers related to the book; and James Retallack, who

x

Ac kno wl ed g ments

offered perceptive criticism and very helpful leads on archival sources. I have been fortunate to receive wise counsel (as well as friendship) on many occasions from Andy Rotter, as well as my colleagues in the St. Lawrence University History Department, including Judith DeGroat, Evelyn Jennings, and Liz Regosin. Leah Farrar, one of the most talented and hard-working students I have ever encountered, was an excellent research assistant. I appreciate the support for this project shown by Amy Farranto, my editor at NIU Press, who has guided me through the process of review and revision for longer than either of us expected at the beginning. The team at NIU Press, under managing editor Susan Bean, has made turning a manuscript into a book as smooth as it could be, and copyeditor Marlyn Miller’s good judgment and amazing attention to detail have been invaluable. I have benefited from universally helpful library and archive staff throughout the research and writing of this book. This work would have been much harder without the interlibrary loan staff of UC Davis’s Peter J. Shields Library and St. Lawrence University’s Owen D. Young Library. Archivists and librarians at many institutions patiently helped me navigate their collections: the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin; the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, the Brandenburgisches Landes­ hauptarchiv in Potsdam; the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; the Landesarchiv Berlin; the Archiv und Bibliothek der Sozialdemokratie at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn; the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich; the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig; and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Just as valuable has been the financial support that kept my research going. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the St. Lawrence University Academic Dean’s Office for a Faculty Research Fellowship Award and three Scholarly Development Awards, as well as the SLU History Department’s Vilas Research Fund, which made several research trips possible. I received funding at earlier stages of this project from the Davis Humanities Institute Predoctoral Fellowship; the UC Davis Office of Graduate Studies, Social Sciences & Humanities Division; UC Davis Graduate Studies Association; and the UC Davis History Department. Some material from chapters 2, 4, and 5 has appeared, in substantially altered form, in Elun Gabriel, “The Left Liberal Critique of Anarchism in Imperial Germany,” German Studies Review 33, no. 2 (May 2010): 331–50. Throughout the long process of writing this book, my family (including my in-laws), friends, and university colleagues have made life immeasurably easier and more pleasant, and I thank them all. My father, Mark Gabriel, has assiduously read almost everything I have written, taking far more interest in my work than could reasonably be expected from someone outside the university environment. My mother, Marianne Mejia, and her husband, Freddie, have offered an inspiring example of joie de vivre, reminding me of the value of life’s many non-academic aspects while also showing encouragement for my scholarship. Though my daughter, Josephine, has often acted more as an impediment than a facilitator of the book’s timely conclusion, I am grateful for the great joy she brings into my life, as well as the sense of proportion she provides about what is truly important.

A c kno wl ed g ments

xi

I owe far more to my wife, Donna Alvah, than could possibly be conveyed in these few lines. I am privileged to be married to a woman who is not only intelligent and fun but also a superb historian. Our almost daily discussions of all aspects of history and the historian’s craft—from interpreting sources to writing compelling narrative to formatting notes—have made me a better historian, and my book’s development has certainly benefited from watching her go through the process ahead of me. Her emotional support and unwavering faith in me were critical to keeping me going over the long slog of writing and revising. For everything she is to me, I thank her.

Assassins & Conspirators

Introduction

When the German Empire (or Kaiserreich) was proclaimed on January 18, 1871, in Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors following the victorious end of the Franco-Prussian War, socialists played only a very small role in German politics. An organized workers’ movement had existed in the German lands for more than a decade, but its origins lay more in the liberal than in the socialist tradition. The fledgling socialist movement in the united German state had deeply alienated itself from the empire’s supporters, including liberal nationalists and the chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (who had orchestrated the wars culminating in German unification) by publicly denouncing the Franco-Prussian War as an illegitimate power grab. Widespread German socialist support for the revolutionary government of the Paris Commune, which lasted from March to May 1871, when it was bloodily suppressed by the French military, established in public consciousness an image of German socialists as wild radicals bent on violent destruction. The actions of a small but vocal faction of militant atheists further contributed to the socialist movement’s marginality. Forty-one years later, in the last elections of the German Empire in 1912, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) garnered nearly 35 percent of the vote and won the largest share of seats in the Reichstag. When German Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated his throne in November 1918, in the last week of the First World War, the new government, soon to become the Weimar Republic, was headed by Social Democrats. How do we account for the extraordinary rise of the German Social Democrats over the nearly five decades of the empire? This is a complex question with multiple answers, but one key dimension of socialism’s political trajectory from outcast minority to mass popular movement was connected to the growth over the course of the German Empire of a political culture that valued open public debate and challenged the nation’s semiauthoritarian constitutional structure. From the mid-1870s until after the turn of the century, one area of ongoing public debate among government officials, politicians, journalists, scholars, and others concerned the extent of Social Democracy’s compatibility with German social and political institutions. In this book I explore one crucial aspect of this public discussion, the question of Social Democracy’s relationship to the threat of revolutionary violence and terrorism. In defending themselves in public debate, Social Democrats both deepened their own commitment to democratic and parliamentary values and refashioned their public image into that of a mass party appealing to a broad swath of the nation’s electorate. A

4

ASS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

crucial aspect of how the Social Democrats altered public perceptions of their movement was by contrasting themselves to anarchists, which is the dynamic at the heart of this book. Socialists distanced themselves from their previous image as marginal, violent revolutionaries by proclaiming their faith in achieving revolutionary ends through peaceful reform and democratic procedure, in contrast to the anarchist belief in clandestine conspiracy and violent revolution. In rejecting anarchist behavior (especially the endorsement of terrorism) and alleged anarchist personal characteristics (such as excitability and cowardice), Social Democrats emphasized their own commitment to gradual change through parliamentary participation and defined the hallmarks of socialist character as discipline, calm, and openness. The reorientation of Social Democracy’s public face coincided with party leaders’ efforts to shift self-perception among the rank and file. Of those who opposed this repudiation of revolutionism, many abandoned the party or were forced out, and some of these embraced anarchism. Anti-anarchist rhetoric became so deeply embedded in Social Democratic thinking that in tactical debates rival Socialist1 factions frequently sought to delegitimize their opponents’ views by characterizing them as anarchistic. The most important phase in the refashioning of Social Democratic identity occurred during the 12 years the party was formally outlawed. In October 1878, five months after two assassination attempts against Kaiser Wilhelm I (one by a young man recently expelled from the Social Democratic ranks, the other by a man with not even a tenuous connection to socialism), the Reichstag passed a law banning all publishing, meetings, and organizations that promoted socialist goals. Passed on a temporary basis for two and a half years, the “Law against the Communally Dangerous Endeavors of Social Democracy” (Gesetz gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie), universally referred to as simply the Socialist Law, was renewed four times before expiring in 1890. Under the law’s terms, Social Democrats remained able to stand for elections, making the party’s Reichstag delegation the movement’s chief public face. After all Social Democratic newspapers and magazines in the empire were shuttered, party leaders founded Der Sozialdemokrat (The Social Democrat), an organ-in-exile published in Switzerland and smuggled into Germany, which became the party’s semiofficial mouthpiece, replacing the former multiplicity of Socialist voices in Germany. While doing enormous short-term harm to the vibrancy of Socialist workers’ culture, the Socialist Law actually enhanced party leaders’ ability to convey a focused vision of the movement, both to ordinary Social Democrats and to the German public at large, in the end facilitating the party’s public transformation. The Socialists’ disciplined reaction to the catastrophe of the Socialist Law, as well as their energetic endorsement of engagement in the democratic process and in open debate, helped encourage Socialism’s democratically inclined opponents to vigorously challenge the law’s legitimacy and demand equal treatment for all political factions. Throughout this era, the questions of anarchist terrorism’s origins and its relationship to Social Democracy played a central role in the debate over Socialism’s place in German life.

Introduction

5

The discussion of socialism’s alleged connection to political violence raised fundamental questions about the proper treatment of political, religious, and ethnic minorities and the permissibility of violating the principles of free expression and equality under the law in times of perceived national danger. While Socialists embraced a new identity rooted in democratic politics and the achievement of social change through legal means, representatives of other groups who had encountered state hostility—left liberals, political Catholics, and ethnic minorities (especially Poles and Alsatians, who were usually Catholics as well)—expressed both practical and principled adherence to the same values of fairness, legal equality, and open public debate. Though uniformly opposed to socialism, members of these groups, having been deemed reichsfeindlich (hostile to the empire) by Bismarck and his coterie, had ample reason to be wary of unchecked police power, while also sharing an ideological commitment to persuading opponents through intellectual means. Regular public contestations over Social Democracy’s role in the empire encouraged both Socialists and other opponents of Bismarck to articulate and elaborate a rhetorical defense of the rule of law and a free public sphere. It is thus unsurprising that, despite their many differences, left liberals and the political Catholic Zentrum (or Center Party) joined with the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic’s first governing coalition, as the constitutional republic articulated common political principles (though not necessarily republicanism itself) that these groups had shared for decades. That the commitment to legal equality and openness had become deeply ingrained in German political culture was evidenced in public debates in the decade following the Socialist Law’s expiration, the period of greatest anarchist violence in European history. As some anarchists in the 1890s pursued a vision of “propaganda of the deed” that translated into terrorist attacks on heads of state, government officials, and sometimes simply public gatherings, Italy, France, and the United States, among other nations, enacted illiberal anti-anarchist measures. While the German government tried to pass various repressive measures in the 1890s, the parties in the Reichstag that had condemned the Socialist Law steadfastly rebuffed these attempts. Clearly the advocates of free public debate and legal equality faced many obstacles, including conservatives and right-wing liberals in the political sphere, a potent nationalistimperialist movement backed by wealthy industrialists and enjoying a significant level of popular support, and stubbornly authoritarian imperial (and in some cases state) government bureaucracies. But the increasing tensions over the course of the imperial era between the forces pushing for a free and fair public sphere and the forces of authoritarian rule suggest that the former, despite having less formal power, succeeded in nurturing a political culture strong enough to contend with and complicate the plans of the latter.

No individual had a greater hand in shaping the institutional structure of the new German Empire than Bismarck, the “iron chancellor.” Bismarck tried to establish a system that would maximize the power of the new emperor, Wilhelm I, and by extension

6

ASS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Bismarck himself, while Prussianizing the empire to the degree possible in a federal state. Bismarck believed that the establishment of a Reichstag elected by universal suffrage (first established in 1867 for the North German Confederation) would benefit his goal of government hegemony, as he judged popular sentiment to be essentially monarchist and conservative. In any case, the Reichstag’s legislative powers were partly vitiated by the concentration of power in the independent executive and its bureaucracies, which were unaccountable to the parliament, and by the fact that many individual German states had much less egalitarian voting systems, the most famous being Prussia’s three-class franchise, which both lacked the secret ballot and divided voters into unequally sized voting classes based on income, guaranteeing the wealthy the greatest political weight. But the image some scholars have offered of Bismarck as sorcerer’s apprentice is apt: by establishing the German Empire squarely on the foundation of universal male suffrage, he unleashed forces he could not control.2 Though lionized by his supporters as the great helmsman masterfully steering the empire’s course, Bismarck struggled from the beginning with political opponents who used the Reichstag and the comparatively free public sphere to challenge the empire’s illiberal institutions. The subtitle of Thomas Nipperdey’s volume of German History, 1866–1918 devoted to politics in the Kaiserreich—Power-State Confronting Democracy (Machtstaat vor der Demokratie)­— effectively captures the tension between the structure of the German state and the ascendant practices within the nation’s political culture.3 Historians remain divided on the extent to which the forces of change succeeded in “democratizing” or “parliamentarizing” the empire, in a phrase coined by Manfred Rauh.4 Many historians, like many observers at the time, have labeled Imperial Germany a “sham parliamentary” or “semiauthoritarian” state, in which meaningful reform was permanently blocked by the power of the emperor’s (or chancellor’s) minions. This position has been forcefully advanced by one of the most influential historians of the Kaiserreich, Hans-Ulrich Wehler. While acknowledging the spread of many hallmarks of “civil society” over the course of the imperial era (growing legal equality, a political “mass market,” increasing equality of social opportunity), he concludes that civil society “did not win primacy in the system of authority, which remained deformed in an authoritarian fashion to the advantage of the traditional aristocratic elite.” Ultimately, in Wehler’s view, structural limitations thwarted an authentic transformation of politics: “The political structural decisions of 1867–71 continued to be defended by the old power cartel. The parliamentarization of both Imperial and state politics remained until 1918 a chimera.”5 In a critique of this view, David Blackbourn noted that “the formal constitutional arrangements of 1871 did indeed remain unchanged until the war; but the political context of the system changed considerably,” due to factors such as “the creeping legitimacy of the rule of law, and the emergence of a vigorous popular politics.”6 Since the 1970s, a growing body of scholarship focused on the empire’s political culture has shown how such changes in values profoundly altered the empire’s political landscape. Political cul-

Introduction

7

ture, usefully described by Lynn Hunt as “the values, expectations, and implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions,” could not alter the dualistic nature of the imperial system, in which the chancellor and imperial bureaucracy remained accountable only to the kaiser.7 However, the Reichstag’s growing stature, the increasing importance placed on elections, and greater expectations that the system be governed by the rule of law forced greater public accountability even on institutions formally free of parliamentary oversight. As Wolfgang Mommsen expressed it, Bismarck found that he “could not stem an imperceptible process of constitutional change that assigned the Reichstag, and hence the parties, mounting importance within a complex pluralistic system of division of powers and that had begun to undermine the dominant position of the old aristocratic elites.”8 A national civil society with a broad conception of the range of legitimate political behaviors gradually took hold. As part of this process, the Reichstag gained stature, partly as the result of a level of legitimacy conferred by the electoral process. Electoral culture has become the subject of some of the most illuminating recent scholarship on Imperial German political culture. In Democracy in the Undemocratic State, Brett Fairbairn has argued that, “by its very existence, the Reichstag suffrage became a symbol for democratically inclined parties and people.”9 As a democratic (though weak) institution, the Reichstag became the gravitational center of those groups struggling against Bismarckian authoritarianism. In the early 1870s, Bismarck’s attempt to crush the Catholic Church’s influence in southern Germany, the Kulturkampf (struggle for culture) ended in failure. While he managed to pass legislation driving the Jesuit order out of Germany and placing greater authority over Church matters in the state’s hands, Bismarck produced a backlash by fostering political Catholicism. The Catholic political party, the Zentrum, which grew into the largest party in the Reichstag by 1881 (and remained so, with the exception of one election, until 1912), was frequently at odds with Bismarck throughout his tenure as chancellor. Largely abandoning the Kulturkampf in the late 1870s, Bismarck turned his attention to German socialism. Again, though he pushed through a temporary ban on Social Democracy, he failed to check the movement’s electoral progress for long and faced a largely unmanageable Reichstag for most of the era that the Socialist Law was in force.10 In addition to political Catholicism and Social Democracy, ethnic and regional parties directly opposed to the government survived long into the imperial era—Guelphs (loyalists of the Hanoverian monarchy dispossessed during the wars of German unification), Poles, and Alsatians most prominently. As the Catholic, Socialist, and national minority subcultures increased their involvement in the political sphere, they enhanced the Reichstag’s legitimacy and inaugurated an era of energetic political contestation that put a premium on public debate and the universal application of the law. Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s brilliant Practicing Democracy acknowledges that “Imperial Germany—like prewar England, America, and France—did not enjoy full democracy,” but argues that the practice of democratic elections nevertheless contributed over time to the creation of a “nationalized, participatory, public culture” as the

8

ASS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

logic of fair electoral competition legitimated opponents of the regime.11 Electoral challenges (resolved by the Reichstag) showed a growing concern with procedural regularity over the course of the empire’s history; implicit in demands for uniform electoral practices, Anderson argues, “was an acknowledgment that all groups who were elected by these procedures had a legitimate place in the Reichstag.” The defenders of this principle “found themselves committed, rhetorically, to key aspects of democracy: equality, tolerance of dissent, an open society.”12 Even while partisanship was at its height (for example, during the early years of the Kulturkampf and under the Socialist Law), the Reichstag granted to deputies from reviled and persecuted minorities a reprieve from ongoing trials in which they were defendants: “It is revealing of the strong parliamentary culture that asserted itself from the very first days of the empire that the deputies did not hesitate to pass the necessary suspensions, even on behalf of their bitterest political enemies.”13 By the same token, the body’s internal rules guaranteeing all representatives the chance to speak (and to do so for as long as they wished) and requiring both speakers and listeners to show a level of personal respect for their political opponents placed all representatives on an equal footing. Furthermore, the legal protection of parliamentary speech preserved an arena in which open and unrestrained public debate thrived even during episodes of the fiercest repression outside the Reichstag chamber. In addition, electoral campaigns themselves helped instill and spread democratic norms. Fairbairn argues that by the turn of the twentieth century, widespread voter concern for “fairness issues” had begun to blunt the effectiveness of government attempts to focus elections on “national” issues. Indictments of agrarian protectionist tariffs, ballooning military expenditures, and violations of civil liberties were woven together into an effective theme for left-of-center (and to a lesser extent, Zentrum) election campaigns in 1898 and 1903. These campaign concerns, as Fairbairn puts it, “were increasingly bound together into a polarized system of issues, pitting either fairness against privilege and reaction or, in the vocabulary of the other side, responsibility and loyalty against subversion.”14 On the state level, one such “fairness” issue, that of suffrage reform, provided the ground upon which the Social Democrats and the Zentrum built a successful coalition that enacted democratic revisions to the election laws in the southern German states of Baden, Bavaria, and Württemberg.15 More surprisingly, the state of Saxony, which had in 1896 actually implemented a new electoral system modeled on the Prussian one to block the rise of Social Democracy in its Landtag, in 1909 reversed course under pressure from Socialists, liberals, and even some conservatives who saw the illiberal franchise as harmful.16 While scholars have frequently dated the rise of such fairness concerns to the 1890s, the emergence of a democratically inclined set of political values could be seen even in the 1880s.17 The coalition of Reichstag factions that rejected the Socialist Law as “exceptional legislation”—that is, a measure placing a designated group outside the general law applicable to everyone else—did so on the grounds of its violation of legal fairness.

Introduction

9

From early in the empire’s history, a substantial portion of the populace demonstrated a commitment to the ideal of equality under the law. A concern with fairness is also evidenced by campaign debate conventions that helped reinforce the notion of equality in electoral competition. Anderson describes how the “popular conception of the ‘public’ as implicitly controversial” led to the institution of the “discussion-speaker” (Diskussionsredner), a representative of a rival party invited to speak at a political gathering. Discussion-speakers were allowed half an hour or more to express their political position, and often these appearances of rival political representatives at a meeting became the occasion for genuine debate.18 Such opportunities for public debate, as well as election-time legal protections for campaign speech, extended even to Social Democrats during the Socialist Law era. Anderson’s and Fairbairn’s studies point to robust popular support for free political competition. None of this is to deny the very real effects of political influence by employers, parish priests, mayors, and other local leaders (especially powerful so long as the notion of the secret ballot remained more theoretical than actual), which kept power in the hands of local and regional notables for the empire’s first decades. This commitment to procedural fairness and open contestation was not confined to electoral culture, as can be seen in Benjamin Carter Hett’s Death in the Tiergarten, which shows that German legal culture experienced a parallel development toward greater expectations of fair trials and respect for defense attorneys, even without formal changes to the legal system, which invested state prosecutors with enormous power.19 Martin Kohlrausch’s analysis of the increasing importance of the mass media, which eventually came to undermine the legitimacy of the kaiser himself, also speaks to the growing importance of the public sphere in the German Empire.20 My study shares with these works an interest in the construction of norms for acceptable behavior. While the political parties of Imperial Germany often explicitly represented distinct segments of the population (workers, Catholics, or Poles, for instance), they also sought to locate the interests of these constituencies within a political narrative meant to include the entire national community. Even the parties of ethnic and religious minorities, though explicitly non-universalist, expressed their political demands in terms they expected would be accepted as legitimate according to the nation’s political-cultural values. The Polish party demanded greater Polish cultural and political autonomy, but it articulated this demand with the aid of the liberal vocabulary of citizen rights and self-determination. Social Democrats demanded the transformation of class relations in a way that benefited workers, but they did so in the name of rational production and social harmony, principles shared beyond the socialist milieu. Although Social Democrats, political Catholics, and left liberals heatedly opposed central aspects of each other’s ideologies, they could speak a common language of how their disagreements should be contested. This common political culture did not often translate into a coalition in policy terms, because the parties were divided on core principles, but it did facilitate Social Democracy’s normalization in

10

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

the political system, as well as the push for a more liberal democratic society. The development of this political culture could be seen in the ongoing discussion of the perceived menace of anarchist violence from the 1880s into the early twentieth century.

For many years, Guenther Roth’s thesis of “negative integration” influenced how scholars understood the Social Democrats’ place in the empire. Roth claimed that the Social Democratic movement played a paradoxical role, isolated from the dominant culture, but ultimately stabilizing the system by channeling working-class discontent and alienation into a political party that posed no imminent threat to the imperial system.21 However, the weight of recent scholarship has challenged this perspective in a number of ways. Social Democrats did indeed create what Vernon Lidtke called an “alternative culture” of their own (as did Catholics), but this culture shared many of the central aspects of wider German culture.22 While social and political competition between rival parties and subcultures remained fierce, models of Imperial German politics that emphasize segmentation into distinct social milieus while ignoring areas of broad consensus obscure a key element of the experience of politics in the Kaiserreich.23 Studies of regional and municipal electoral politics have shown the flexibility and pragmatism of electoral politics at the local level, suggesting that the Socialist milieu’s alleged isolation has in the past been significantly overstated. Describing anti-socialism in Saxony, James Retallack has observed that “rhetorical flourishes about the ‘red specter’ all too often evaporate under the impact of momentary crisis, cynical calculation, and personal ambition.”24 Other scholars have described electoral alliances for run-off elections (necessary if no candidate captured 50% of the vote, a common occurrence in this era) of almost every imaginable configuration.25 Likewise, the close scrutiny of specific subcultural milieus has found them to be more politically and socially diverse than models stressing fragmentation would indicate. For instance, Thomas Adam has revealed the Leipzig Social Democratic subculture to have been “a socially heterogeneous milieu, in which not only workers, but also white-collar employees, officials, and even small entrepreneurs were integrated.”26 Jonathan Sperber’s statistical analysis of national elections, which shows that a substantial portion of the Social Democratic vote came from middle-class voters, especially after 1890, suggests that this situation obtained widely.27 Without minimizing the fact that repressive government policies marked the experience of German Social Democrats in important ways, there is widespread evidence that the Socialist movement was more positively than negatively integrated into Imperial German society, at least by the 1890s. In this book, I add to the recent scholarship that points toward a meaningful democratization of the German Empire’s political culture (note that this is not the same as a democratization of the empire’s institutional structures) and the positive integration of Social Democracy into it. While much of the scholarship emphasizes 1890 as a decisive turning point—the end of the Socialist Law, the dismissal of Bismarck as chancellor by

Introduction

11

the new emperor Wilhelm II, and the subsequent electoral breakthrough of Social Democrats in that year’s Reichstag elections (the party doubled its vote and for the first time attracted the largest share of the popular vote)—I show that the Socialist Law period laid the groundwork for what occurred after, as revealed by the tenor and content of the debates about Socialism that occurred at this time. In this period of darkest repression, Social Democrats turned their attention to a staunch defense of key liberal democratic principles, including universal equality under the law and the pursuit of social change through political reform, and of the Reichstag franchise’s value, while some of socialism’s fiercest ideological opponents reiterated their allegiance to these same values and denounced the government’s repressive anti-socialist tactics. From the first debate on an anti-socialist bill in May 1878 through the 1890s debates on the Revolution Bill (1895) and the Penitentiary Bill (1899), both of which were attacks on the Socialists, a grouping of Social Democrats, left liberals, political Catholics, and minority-based parties stood against measures they deemed “exceptional laws.” On the other side were ranged the two conservative parties and the National Liberals (though some National Liberals voted against anti-socialist laws, and some left liberal and Zentrum deputies at different points voted for them). This is the same set of opposing party formations Fairbairn describes in the 1898 and 1903 elections. Though the Zentrum remained throughout the imperial era a crucial swing party, voting with the government on some matters, the majority of the party remained solidly within the camp devoted to legal equality and democratic debate (though a small conservative faction within the party consistently voted for the Socialist Law). All of these parties viewed Social Democracy from distinct ideological perspectives but over the decades articulated a common set of arguments: no party or social group should be subject to exceptional laws, therefore Social Democrats deserved the right to compete with other parties in a free public sphere; Social Democrats could best be challenged through open debate and fair elections; Social Democrats had proved their responsible citizenship through their measured response to the Socialist Law, including their vehement rejection of anarchism; by providing a responsible and reformist outlet for working-class agitation, Social Democracy acted as a bulwark against anarchism and violent agitation in general; the government’s persecution of Social Democracy, including police repression under the Socialist Law and the employment of agents provocateurs meant to foment anarchist plots, threatened national stability and respect for the law. It is of course hard to know whether the utterances of Reichstag deputies represented the beliefs of their constituents. In some cases, voting for a party represented an affirmation of one’s group identity. Throughout the imperial period, most Catholics voted for the Zentrum, but almost no non-Catholics did, while the Polish and Alsatian parties drew virtually all of their support from their ethno-religious groups. Likewise, many workers supported Social Democracy as the workers’ party. And even when voting might have been influenced by the parties’ policy positions, it is not possible to know how large a role any given party’s stance on anarchist violence, socialism, legal fairness,

12

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

or democracy played in people’s votes, versus trade policy, imperialism, or other concerns; however, as Fairbairn has emphasized, positions on a wide variety of issues could be conceptualized as matters of fairness. And certainly the kinds of materials the parties published suggest that politicians at least thought concerns about equality and open debate mattered to their constituents. In any case, positions in favor of these values offered no discernible impediment to voters supporting a party, and given the large amount of attention devoted to these questions in public discourse during the 1880s and 1890s, it is likely that public sentiment was not strikingly out of step with the expressions of Reichstag deputies. One of the contributions my book makes to the study of Social Democracy in Imperial Germany is that it looks at the movement in relation to the rest of the nation. Some of the finest books on German Socialism have looked at it largely in subcultural isolation, focusing on internal party dynamics while neglecting how such developments were shaped by the movement’s relations with non-Socialists.28 There is great value in these works, but they can reinforce the idea of Social Democracy’s “negative integration” into the empire, even when this is not their goal. Relatedly, though a vast scholarly literature on German Social Democracy exists, comparatively few works have engaged with the kinds of approaches to political culture previously discussed. Most of the literature on Socialism in Germany has been in the areas of social or intellectual history (often concerned with party theoreticians). My book draws from this rich historiography, while looking at Social Democracy’s place in the empire broadly.

Marx’s antagonistic relationships with particular anarchists are well-known, as is general Social Democratic hostility to anarchism. I argue in this book that discussions about anarchism and its relationship to Social Democracy were crucial to Social Democratic refashioning and the reorientation of non-socialist attitudes toward the movement; opposition to anarchism provided German Social Democrats an important means by which to distance themselves from the stigma still attached to socialism in the 1870s. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, emphasizing the contrast between these movements was central to Socialist, left-liberal, and Zentrum attacks on the Socialist Law and exceptional legislation more generally. Tracing public debates about anarchism also offers a unique vantage point on the construction of political legitimacy in the German Empire. Members of all other political camps considered anarchist violence fundamentally illegitimate, and so anti-anarchist rhetoric helped demarcate the parameters of legitimate politics. The role of anarchism, in particular anarchist terrorism, in shaping European politics has not received a great deal of scholarly attention, perhaps because of the small size of most European anarchist movements and their failure to produce lasting political institutions. From 1892 to 1901 in Europe and America terrorist attacks undertaken in the name of “propaganda of the deed”—a tactic interpreted by many anarchists to encompass politically moti-

Introduction

13

vated murder or assassination—claimed the lives of an empress, a king, a prime minister, two presidents, as well as several dozen lesser government officials, policemen, businessmen, theatergoers, and even a few workers. These high-profile anarchist killings represented only a fraction of the attentats (attempts to commit acts of violence, often political assassinations) publicly associated with anarchists (though not necessarily committed by them).29 In the German lands of central Europe—Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—dozens of terrorist deeds ascribed to anarchists occurred even before the peak of anarchist violence. In October 1881, 15 anarchists went on trial in Leipzig for conspiracy and the dissemination of revolutionary literature. In 1882, an Austrian shoe manufacturer was murdered with chloroform. In the summer and fall of 1883, a series of explosions rocked beer halls in the city of Elberfeld, though they failed to kill anyone. In September of the same year, the anarchist August Reinsdorf orchestrated a failed attempt to blow up much of Germany’s aristocratic and political elite at the dedication of the nationalist Niederwald Monument. When a wet fuse foiled their plan, the wouldbe assassins detonated their explosives at the reception hall in town (long after the assembled dignitaries had gone). In October, an explosion damaged the Frankfurt police headquarters and a Strasbourg pharmacist was murdered, and the following month a banker and his friend were beaten to death in Stuttgart. In Vienna, the winter of 1883– 1884 saw the shooting of the city’s police commissioner, the bludgeoning murder of a moneychanger and his two young sons, and the slaying of a police agent. The following January, after the Niederwald conspirators had been sentenced to death, the young anarchist Julius Lieske was apprehended for the lethal stabbing of Frankfurt police chief Carl Rumpf. During the same month, a series of letters threatened the bombing of the Swiss federal assembly and the assassination of Berlin police president Guido von Madai and members of the Hamburg political police. In 1887, Germany witnessed the trial of John Neve, an operative who had organized the smuggling of anarchist publications, as well as dynamite, into Germany.30 Such a list only hints at the climate of apprehension regarding anarchist terrorism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Though Frankfurt Police Chief Rumpf ’s murder in 1885 marked the end of German anarchist terrorism, continued anarchist attacks abroad (especially in France in the 1890s, but also in Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and the United States) kept the subject alive in the German public consciousness. So did terrorist attacks perpetrated by individuals and groups without any anarchist affiliation. Such incidents, including the two attempts on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm I in spring 1878, the assassination of Russian tsar Alexander II in 1881, and the murder of Britain’s Lord Frederick Cavendish in Dublin in 1882, increased public attention to anarchism by virtue of the similarity of the tactics employed to those advocated by anarchists. Even failed assassination attempts, such as the Niederwald plot, reminded the public of the specter of anarchist terrorism. Sensational public trials kept anarchist-related incidents in the newspapers as well. Johann Most, a German Social Democrat–turned anarchist propagandist, interjected into all of these public discussions statements of lavish praise

14

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

for anarchist murders, glorifications of executed anarchists as martyrs, and calls for retribution against the propertied classes. Thus the era of propaganda of the deed, despite claiming few victims, instilled in the European and American public a strong awareness of anarchist terrorism as a phenomenon. Though Germany had one of the smallest and least influential anarchist movements in Europe, public debate about anarchist violence and fear of its spread nonetheless occurred frequently. Every debate over the Socialist Law’s renewal featured discussion of anarchism’s relationship to Social Democracy. So too did press accounts of anarchist plots and trials within and beyond the German Empire. Public discourse about anarchism addressed the relationship of the government, its allies, and its opponents to the Kaiserreich’s political culture, including Bismarck’s categorization of groups as either “enemies of the empire” (Reichsfeinde) or “friends of the empire” (Reichsfreunde), the importance of the idea of the “legally based state” (Rechtsstaat), and the relationship of anarchism to parliamentary democracy. The debate over anarchism was only one of many public contestations over appropriate government policy, but it went right to the heart of the question of what constituted legitimate political behavior. The origins of the anarchist threat, and the correct method of confronting it, called for explanation. The vast majority of contemporary writings on anarchism evinced little interest in the movement’s political philosophy; many critics in fact denied that it had any. Instead, the idea of anarchism as a symptom of social illness engaged commentators, who explained its appearance as evidence of some social pathology, whether derived from capitalism, individualism, atheism, or reactionism. Disputes over the character and extent of anarchist transgressions show not only what aspects of the political culture were contested but also what was uncontested. Key proofs of an ideology’s political legitimacy included the ability to express the will of the people, to promote peaceful social and economic development, and to engage in politics in a fair and open fashion. Across the political spectrum, the values of honor, discipline, and openness held sway as hallmarks of political legitimacy, while cowardice, impulsiveness, and conspiratorialism marked their bearers as illegitimate interlopers into the field of politics. Despite the universal acceptance of these standards for legitimate political participation, the ascription of such labels to particular political acts remained contested. Was the left liberals’ rejection of anti-socialist legislation a heroic stand against authoritarianism or an effete rejection of bold action? Was the Socialist denunciation of anarchism a cowardly ploy to conceal the true intimacy of the two movements or the expression of a disciplined scientific worldview that eschewed impulsive violence? Even though no common ground existed on such questions, the shared agreement on character-related values provided a common vocabulary for political debate.

The most open forum for political debate in the Kaiserreich was the Reichstag, and the transcripts of its debates are one of the most important sources for this study. Once a focus of great scholarly attention, the Reichstag began to receive less attention as histori-

Introduction

15

ans turned from political history focused on elite decision-makers to social, intellectual, and cultural history. Yet Reichstag debates are an illuminating source for understanding Imperial German political culture.31 Unlike today’s parliamentary speeches, Reichstag debates were closely and broadly followed in the German Empire. Official transcripts appeared not only in the major daily newspapers but in even the smallest of provincial ones. Newspaper circulation expanded rapidly during this era, and further expanding readership was the widespread availability of newspapers in cafés and pubs. Especially important for the working classes was the widespread practice of newspapers being read aloud in pubs, workshops, and factories, extending their reach to include the poor and the illiterate. Thus almost every German citizen had regular access to the content of Reichstag debates, even in places where newspaper selection was limited. This widespread dissemination of Reichstag debates proved especially important to the Socialists, for during the period of the Socialist Law, the members of the Reichstag caucus could express Socialist ideas when most socialist newspapers, meetings, and other activities were banned or tightly controlled.32 This was important for reaching the party faithful, many of whom were unable or unwilling to take an illegal subscription to Der Sozialdemokrat, but perhaps equally important, it meant that non-Socialists heard what Social Democrats had to say on a regular basis. That Social Democratic Reichstag deputies were in fact “speaking out the window,” as it was called, rather than just addressing their colleagues can be seen in the practice, pioneered by the Socialists but also utilized by others, of reprinting Reichstag debates in book form. Immediately after the Socialist Law’s passage in October 1878, a socialist publisher in Hamburg issued the entire debate proceedings as a book, a pattern repeated after each of the law’s renewals. Even after the law’s expiration, the publication of Reichstag debates (and cheaper pamphlets featuring key Social Democrats’ speeches) flourished as an important means for the leadership to reach the party’s rank and file, highlighting important issues and effective articulations of party beliefs.33 Beyond the Reichstag, public debate flourished in newspapers, journals, magazines, and pamphlets. Here I focus primarily, though not exclusively, on several prominent newspapers and journals with national influence, from a variety of political perspectives. My newspaper sources include the staunchly conservative Neue Preußische Zeitung (New Prussian Newspaper, popularly known as the Kreuz-Zeitung for the Iron Cross emblazoned on its masthead), the state-funded and semi-official Provinzial-Correspondenz (Provincial Correspondence) and its successor the Neueste Mittheilungen (Latest Information), the National Liberal National-Zeitung (National Newspaper), the Zentrum’s Germania, and the Socialists’ Der Sozialdemokrat and Vorwärts (Forward). A number of journals, most prominently the influential right-liberal Preußische Jahrbücher (Prussian Yearbooks) and the left-liberal Die Zeit (The Times), supplement the newspaper sources. These periodicals are especially valuable not only for what they tell us about different ideological perspectives on socialism and anti-socialist legislation but also for the lively culture of debate they reveal. It was common practice for newspapers in the German

16

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Empire to reprint at times lengthy excerpts from other newspapers’ articles, sometimes endorsing their competitors’ sentiments and other times rebutting them. This practice of cross-quoting meant that newspapers were regularly engaged in direct conversation with each other. Readers of one newspaper were likely to have a good sense of what the major newspapers of other political camps were saying on any given subject. As a result, even readers who chose to remain within the ideological confines of a particular political milieu were brought into a larger, national discussion in which a common terminology and subject matter for disagreement were shared. Articles from influential newspapers were often reprinted in full by smaller papers of the same political sympathies, further broadening the audience for these national conversations. In addition to the periodical literature, insights into both elite opinion and popular dissemination of ideas about socialism and anarchism can be found in the ubiquitous pamphlet literature of the era. As with Reichstag speeches, especially important public speeches or articles in journals were reproduced as pamphlets for widespread public dissemination. The audiences for these pamphlets, which had to be either purchased or borrowed by the individual or read in a public place, tended to be more specifically defined and more partisan, giving a clear idea of how political and intellectual leaders tried to frame issues for their own constituents. These pamphlets provide one of the most important ways to access some of the content of an important venue for political discussion, the public meeting. Such meetings took many forms: regular party gatherings (especially common among Socialists), election rallies, or discussions of pending legislation or topics of general public concern. This is the hardest area to treat adequately, given the ephemeral nature of speech. However, newspaper accounts of public events, pamphlets reproducing speeches, party election calls, and election-related broadsheets all give some sense of what occurred in this realm. To further develop a sense of the activities of Social Democrats and anarchists, as well as public responses to them, I use a range of reports from local police and other officials throughout the Reich charged with monitoring them. The information in these reports ranges from lists of illegal anarchist newspapers circulating in an area to information on the activities of specific individuals and groups, to detailed accounts of public meetings, covering both the content of speeches delivered and public reactions to them. In addition, the Berlin political police presidents distilled much information from these local and regional reports into periodic assessments of the state of the Social Democratic and anarchist movements. Collectively, these reports help provide a picture of how experiences on the ground in numerous communities related to the debates in the Reichstag, newspapers, journals, and pamphlets.34 Since my central concern is public discourse, I pay only limited attention to the private documents of government officials, political parties, or individuals. Most Germans had no way of knowing what cynical calculations or tactical ruses might have lain behind particular speeches and published documents. Often at least as important as why something was said was that it was said, and responded to, contributing to public

Introduction

17

debate. However, I have used correspondence, memoirs, and the voluminous scholarship on the various political parties and key political leaders to help understand how particular information and political considerations went into shaping some public actions and statements. The book’s first chapter briefly surveys the history of conservative German antirevolutionary rhetoric from the end of the eighteenth century to the early years of the German Empire, illustrating how conservatives regarded the many revolutionary movements in Europe since the French Revolution as promoters of anarchy that undermined the foundations of social order, in particular the hierarchies of family, state, and religion. I then address the heterogeneity of German (and European) socialism in the 1860s and 1870s, which included associations devoted to organizing worker cooperatives, circles planning revolutionary uprisings, and other groups pursuing various specific agendas such as founding utopian colonies or nationalizing land ownership. In this environment, the conservative conflation of diverse revolutionaries was plausible, and indeed many socialist followers did not clearly understand the differing ideological positions of the groups to which they belonged. A noticeable shift occurred in the first half-decade of the German Empire, as the nation’s two socialist political parties merged in 1875 and the new party’s parliamentary, publishing, and intellectual leaders sought to articulate a clear set of common principles. The focus of the chapter’s final section is on the increase in elite attention to Social Democracy as its electoral fortunes rose during the 1870s. The movement came under increased scrutiny from academics and politicians, who sought to explain the movement’s success and suggest how it might be countered. The broad range of reactions to socialism extended from the academic Kathedersozialisten (socialists of the lectern) sympathetic to the goal of bettering workers’ lives through organization, some of whom advocated working with Socialists, to the right-wing liberals and conservatives who believed that socialism must be forcibly suppressed. The vast majority of elite opinion-makers viewed the movement as being led by a dangerous minority of demagogues more intent on fanning the flames of discontent than aiding German workers. In the second chapter, I outline the pivotal public debate that occurred from May to October 1878, sparked by two unsuccessful assassination attempts against Kaiser Wilhelm I, which the government sought to blame on the Social Democrats. After the first attack in May, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck proposed legislation that would ban socialist activity. In the brief Reichstag debate on the bill, conservatives claimed that socialism posed an existential threat not only to the state but to the social order as a whole. In these circumstances, the government required free rein to crush the danger, not least by eliminating the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly for socialists. The bill’s opponents, which included left and right liberals, the Zentrum, and representatives of the Polish and Alsatian ethnic minorities, argued strongly against such exceptional legislation and insisted that Social Democracy could only be defeated through intellectual and spiritual struggle in a free and open public sphere.

18

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Less than two weeks after this bill was defeated, by a wide margin, a second attacker seriously injured the kaiser, leading Bismarck to call for new elections and introduce a more severe anti-socialist law when the new Reichstag convened in the fall. The public debate in newspapers and journals over the summer and the lengthy September–October debate over the so-called Socialist Law reprised and expanded many of the arguments proffered in the May debate but also saw the entrance of the Social Democrats into the discussion (they had abstained from participation in the May debate, considering the whole proceeding illegitimate). The Social Democrats at this point began in earnest the process of redefining their public image from that of a movement committed to the current society’s violent overthrow to one supporting a peaceful revolutionary change in productive relations through the channels of parliamentary power, in explicit contrast to those who believed in the necessity of violent revolution. The Reichstag approved the Socialist Law in October 1878 when the right-liberal National Liberal Party, cowed by electoral defeat and riven by internal strife, abandoned its earlier principled opposition and joined the two conservative parties in voting for it. This draconian law’s enactment ushered in an era that profoundly influenced the development of both German Social Democracy and the German Empire’s political culture. When the Socialist Law passed in October 1878, it was set to expire in two and a half years, a concession the government had made to gain National Liberal support. This ensured a debate over the law’s renewal, and in fact the law was debated and renewed four times before finally expiring in 1890. In chapter 3, I trace political debates about socialism, and in particular its relationship to anarchism, during the Socialist Law’s first seven years. First, I address the Social Democrats’ initial responses to the law: the formal dissolution of the party’s institutions in an attempt to spare the movement a wave of massive persecution, the creation of an official newspaper-in-exile (Der Sozialdemokrat) published in Switzerland and smuggled into Germany, the decision to fully embrace parliamentary participation (which the Socialist Law did not ban), and the secret party congress in 1880 that expelled two influential radical Social Democrats who soon declared themselves anarchists. The second part of the chapter covers the important place of anti-anarchist rhetoric in the party’s process of public redefinition in the first several years of the Socialist Law era. In Der Sozialdemokrat, in electoral campaign literature, and in the Reichstag debates on the Socialist Law’s implementation and renewal as well as an anti-dynamite law passed in 1884, Social Democrats positioned themselves as open, responsible, and disciplined reformers and as the staunchest defenders of liberal principles in the nation; the contrast to anarchists as secretive, reckless, and violent anchored this discourse of Social Democratic respectability and responsibility. In addition to Social Democrats’ self-presentation, the chapter also looks at how the other political factions in Germany responded to the Socialist Law and the Social Democrats’ behavior under it. The parties opposed to the Socialist Law in 1878 continued to denounce it as an “exceptional law” but also increasingly defended the Socialists as responsible political actors, praising their measured response to persecution and endorsing the anarchist/socialist

Introduction

19

opposition that Socialists touted. Meanwhile, conservatives continued to cite incendiary, decade-old speeches from Social Democrats, as well as the words and deeds of the expelled anarchists, to insist that a revolutionary peril that justified the Socialist Law remained. By 1884, the Socialist Law’s future had grown precarious, and its renewal only passed because many left liberals feared that Bismarck would use the occasion of its failure to dissolve the Reichstag and launch a campaign against them. Regular public discussion of Socialism and the party’s resulting political prominence over these years had greatly reduced public fear of the movement. In this chapter I also consider public reactions to Germany’s only anarchist terrorist incidents: the unsuccessful attempt to blow up the royal family and other dignitaries at the dedication of a national monument in 1883, the explosion of a bomb that damaged the Frankfurt police station in 1884, and the murder of the Frankfurt police chief in January 1885. These attacks, and the trials of their perpetrators, provided the government a seemingly ideal opportunity to portray Germany as beset by an imminent revolutionary threat, but the response by the public and politicians from the center and left showed this tactic’s almost complete failure. Social Democratic opposition to anarchism was well understood by this point and the events produced no wave of fear or public support for the government’s anti-socialist measures. I conclude the book’s discussion of the Socialist Law era in chapter 4, showing how the rhetoric and votes of left liberals, political Catholics, ethnic minorities, and finally even right-wing liberals increasingly endorsed the Social Democrats’ arguments about the Socialist Law’s negative effects on public order, including the claim that “the Socialist Law is the father of anarchism.” Along with the Social Democrats, liberals and political Catholics argued that anarchism arose as a response to the authoritarian and arbitrary actions of the government and police, which alienated workers from the rest of society and drove some of them to violent expressions of despair. Though inveterate opponents of Socialism, these groups suggested that Social Democrats adhered to proper standards of political behavior and therefore must be battled in the political and cultural arena and should not be subject to unjust and brutal methods of repression. Only a fair legal and political system that included Social Democracy, they argued, could protect society from the scourge of anarchist violence. From 1884 on, the Socialist share of the national vote in Reichstag elections continued to expand, nearly unabated, as the party embraced its role as a democratic and law-abiding party championing social reform. Though the Reichstag renewed the Socialist Law in 1886 and 1888, a majority of Germans in national elections cast ballots for parties opposed to the law, while National Liberal representatives expressed increasing misgivings about it. It was clear that the law was steadily losing political support, and after a final debate in November 1889 and January 1890, the law lapsed. Chapter 5 continues the theme of the previous chapter, showing how the government’s repeated efforts to pass new restrictions on socialism in the 1890s were dashed by the same array of political groups that defended the rule of law and the right of open

20

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

democratic debate. Even during the most severe wave of anarchist violence the world had experienced, the Reichstag refused to pass anti-radical legislation, unlike the liberal democracies of Italy, France, and the United States. The political commitments articulated in the 1880s debates about Socialism and anarchism had entrenched an aversion to anti-liberal policies in a wide enough sector of German society that such laws seemed intolerable. Despite the fact that German democracy was in many ways curtailed by the German constitution, which placed most essential power in the hands of the emperor’s inner circle, and by franchises in individual states that advantaged wealthy elites, German political culture grew increasingly democratic, pitting the authoritarian regime against an ever-increasing share of the population. The chapter ends with an analysis of left-liberal scholars’ and journalists’ increasing interest in anarchism as a political philosophy, which they saw as a cry of protest against socialistic principles that had penetrated into the thinking of representatives of almost the entire political spectrum. In the book’s sixth chapter, I turn to the issue of anarchism’s influence on internal Social Democratic development after the Socialist Law’s expiration. While Social Democrats relied less on anti-anarchist rhetoric in their self-representation in public debates after the turn of the century, as anarchism faded from public concern, the contrast to anarchism continued to play an important role in the party’s self-understanding. The focus of the first part of the chapter is the strife within the party after its return to legality in 1890, which precipitated a clash between reformist and revolutionist factions, each charging the other with thinking akin to that of anarchists. At a time when the party lacked both tactical and ideological agreement on many issues, suggesting that a particular perspective bore the taint of anarchism served as a means to discredit it. In the 1890s the party leadership attacked Socialists who believed that culture and art could effect social change more thoroughly than parliamentarism and trade unions as bourgeois dilettantes equivalent to anarchists. Revisionists who concluded that socialist goals could be achieved through compromise with middle-class reformers were accused of utopian naiveté. That some Social Democrats advocated working together with nonviolent, cultural anarchists who shared many of their goals only confirmed the logic of such charges. In the second part of the chapter, I look at internal Socialist debates a decade later. After the turn of the twentieth century, and especially after the 1905 Russian Revolution, a vocal faction within the German Social Democratic Party led by Rosa Luxemburg began advocating the “mass strike” (a work stoppage by most or all sectors of the workforce) as a tactic both to achieve specific political objectives and to develop the class consciousness of German workers. The issue of anarchism’s relationship to Social Democracy proved particularly charged during the mass strike debate, as anarchosyndicalists sought to make inroads into the German trade union movement by promoting the “general strike” (a universal strike meant to precipitate the capitalist system’s total collapse), which Marxist socialists had for decades ridiculed as a utopian fantasy. On the one side, the mass strike’s advocates sought to frame this tactic as totally di-

Introduction

21

vorced from the anarchist one, while associating moderate reformists with anarchism. On the other side, opponents judged the mass strike to be too strongly reminiscent of the “utopian” anarchist general strike. The use of anti-anarchist rhetoric in these internal conflicts within Social Democracy, casting one’s opponents as quasi-anarchists, helped increase internal party tensions, which set the stage for the splitting of the movement that occurred after the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The final chapter follows German political debate during the last decade before the outbreak of war in 1914. German police and government officials showed markedly decreased concern with the danger of anarchism and expressed no worries about the possibility of revolution from the Social Democrats. The increase in the Social Democratic electorate and in ties between Socialists and members of the other parties inclined toward legal fairness and equality presaged new challenges to government illiberalism. Fears of Social Democracy’s revolutionary goals remained alive but increasingly marginalized in groups such as the nationalist Imperial League against Social Democracy, founded in 1904. Right-wing nationalists worried about the widespread acceptance of Socialists as legitimate actors on the national stage and sought to stoke public fears of the corrosive revolutionism and anti-nationalism that they argued imperiled German society, but failed in this objective. The Social Democrats’ electoral triumph in the 1912 Reichstag election—winning over a third of the votes cast and doubling their Reichstag representation (which now exceeded that of the two conservative parties and the National Liberals combined)—signaled an imminent clash between the forces advocating full parliamentary democracy and the defenders of the empire’s semi-authoritarian institutions, which was only averted by the coming of the Great War. In the conclusion I trace how anti-anarchist tropes outlived fears of anarchism itself, as anti-socialist and Social Democratic critics used them to stigmatize the antiwar Socialist minority and its eventual successor, the German Communist Party, founded in January 1919. The rhetorical strategies developed in the fight over anarchism thus had an enduring influence on how other kinds of political radicalism were interpreted in the twentieth century. I also place the transition to the Weimar Republic in the context of the political-cultural traditions of the imperial era, examining both how it fulfilled the aspirations of the Kaiserreich’s majority factions for a political order that fully respected legal equality and vigorous public debate, and how it faced a new set of challenges stemming from the experience of the war and postwar turbulence. Finally, I reflect on the German case’s utility for evaluating how we talk about terrorist threats, radicalism, and the bounds of legitimate political expression in the twenty-first century, suggesting that we can learn something from how vilified political minorities created a political culture of free and open debate in a time of fear and confusion.

C h a p t e r

o n e

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire 1 8 7 1 – 1 8 7 8

In the first years of the German Empire, the socialist movement remained small, heterogeneous, and of relatively minor concern to the empire’s government and major political factions. The conflicts at the heart of political debate were the Kulturkampf, the Bismarck-led and liberal-supported attack on the power of the Catholic Church in the new nation, and the chancellor’s campaign against conservative “particularists,” who rejected what they saw as usurpation by the new emperor of the royal and national prerogatives of the lately sovereign German states. German socialists were most widely known for their hostility to the German wars of unification and their avowed support for the Paris Commune of 1871. On account of the former, opponents branded the socialists vaterlandslose Gesellen (companions without a fatherland), unwilling to embrace the achievement of German nationhood or its hero, Chancellor Bismarck. Socialist support for Paris’s brief revolutionary government filled most Germans with horror, as “for most Europeans, the Commune appeared as an outrageous episode of terror, destruction, and disorder.” Several socialist leaders faced punishment for their hostility to the Franco-Prussian War, tried and imprisoned for allegedly plotting high treason. These political stances, along with the vehement atheistic pronouncements of some movement leaders, left socialists an alienated minority in German society.1 But because their numbers were relatively few, their opponents at first paid them little heed. Conservatives viewed German socialists in the early 1870s through the same lens with which they had regarded revolutionaries since 1789. The French Revolution

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

23

stimulated the birth of modern conservatism across Europe. Defenders of the old order rejected not merely the political revolution but the Enlightenment philosophical premises that justified it. Against the revolutionaries’ rationalistic and egalitarian social principles, conservatives championed long-standing political, social, and cultural hierarchies, rooted, they believed, in the dictates of nature and divine will, as the bulwarks of social order. They eschewed Enlightenment attempts to redefine social relations based on “mechanistic” or “artificial,” rather than organic, principles.2 By opposing traditional sources of authority, conservatives claimed, revolutionaries threatened all social order, sowing the seeds of anarchy. Conservatives disregarded differences among supporters of Enlightenment ideas, seeing them all as undermining the legitimate bases of social order. For instance, aristocratic opponents of a new Prussian legal code in 1791 claimed that because it was inspired by the “fashionable so-called theoretical philosophy” that lay behind the French Revolution, it would surely lead to “the abominable anarchy which is now devastating France.”3 At the heart of conservative theory lay a faith in the ordering principles of the patriarchal family, reflected in the structure of class and political relations, as well as in established religion. According to this worldview, mutual obligations rather than instrumental, rational calculation properly bound members of society to each other. Late eighteenth-century German conservative Adam Müller argued that “all theories of the state . . . must begin with the theory of the family,” in which the prince “is to his people as the Hausvater [paterfamilias] is to his family.”4 An anonymous German pamphlet of 1794 proclaimed that the ideal prince “has the desire to be the father rather than the master of his people.” As long as “the prince and his councillors find their greatest satisfaction in the happiness of the people . . . then the example of France, where Revolution has led to the general disintegration of orderly society, can only strengthen the attachment of subjects to their ruler and constitution.”5 Of course, familial metaphors for government and social hierarchy had existed for centuries. Non-conservatives even deployed them, generally favoring the metaphor of “brotherhood” over the conservatives’ use of patriarchal analogies.6 Conservatives decried revolution’s imperiling of both the state-as-family and the family itself, systems they saw as interconnected.7 In addition to the patriarchal family and state, religion formed the other central pillar of social stability in the conservative outlook. Conservatives saw revolutionary movements that promoted secularism or, worse, encouraged atheism as inherently damaging to the social fabric. Conservative attacks on “anarchic” movements tended to underscore the charge that they either deliberately encouraged atheism or at least undermined religious authority. German conservative publicist Johann August Starck bluntly stated, “no state can exist without revealed religion.” Edmund Burke, the Irishman whose name has become synonymous with eighteenth-century conservatism and whose writings were influential among German conservatives, likewise linked state and religion, arguing that “religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort.”8 Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II, complaining of the alleged laxity of his censor’s office in

24

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

the 1790s, decried the fact that “writings are published which attack the foundation of all religion and make the most important religious verities suspect, contemptible, and ridiculous. . . . Such writings shake the foundations of practical religion, without which no civil peace and order can exist.”9 For conservatives, those who threatened religion put the entire social edifice at risk. The conflation of heterogeneous ideological tendencies could be seen in reactions to the European revolutions of 1848–1849. In the German lands, as elsewhere, socialists, radical democrats, and moderate liberal nationalists all became involved in an inchoate revolutionary movement. Conservative opponents generally dismissed the distinctions among these groups. In his memoirs, Bismarck derided individual revolutionaries he encountered in March 1848 in Berlin as “murderers” and “louts,” while ridiculing their “revolutionary shenanigans [Schwindel]” and lumping all the revolutionaries together as “the forces that can be summed up with the word ‘barricade,’ under which can be understood all the preparatory momentum, agitation, and threats along with the streetfighting.”10 Though particularly repulsed by the actions of the urban masses, Bismarck placed the members of the Frankfurt National Assembly in the same category. So too did another future German chancellor, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who, observing the pre-parliament at Frankfurt, lamented that the “revolutionary minority that is plunging us consciously or unconsciously into this abyss” did not represent the will of the people. “The German Nation will wake up indeed when the destroying waves of anarchy roll over its head. Then it will marvel that a small but active handful of Republicans and Communists have succeeded in ruining Germany.”11 Many radical democrats embraced explicitly Jacobin terminology, which seemed to justify their opponents’ lumping of all revolutionaries together.12 Liberal nationalists who hoped to win a constitutional monarchy roundly rejected any connection with more radical elements, expressing horror at the mass uprisings of March and April 1848. Alexander Freiherr von Soiron, soon to participate in the Frankfurt National Assembly, urged at the end of April the use of “a firm hand to keep down anarchy and rebellion” and warned that “anarchy will rob us of our rights and it will rob us of our freedoms and our civilized behavior too.”13 Soiron was right to be concerned, as both future German chancellors recommended a forcible halt to the events underway. In Hohenlohe’s case, this meant the convening of a Chamber of Princes to govern the meeting of a true popular parliament: “It is only thus . . . and not by looking on in silent terror that the Governments can save themselves, that Germany can become free and united, that anarchy can be averted.”14 Bismarck, for his part, concluded in his memoir that the application of force against the “spirit of the barricade,” which he had urged at the time, would have instantly returned the German lands to order. Even those sympathetic to the liberal nationalists’ goals feared a slide into the violence of the Terror of 1793. For instance, the young Heinrich von Treitschke, later one of the most prominent nationalist historians and political figures of the Kaiserreich, described his horror at the masses “indulging in orgies of ‘Dantonian terrorism’” and feared what it

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

25

portended if not checked.15 Frankfurt Parliament member K. W. Loewe worried about the unrest the revolution had stirred up among the peasants: “It has aroused the most frightful passions in the heart of man, and it has bred a barbarism which may carry all the achievement of civilization to the grave.”16 Opposition to socialism in the 1860s and 1870s followed the same lines, eliding differences among factions, conflating them all as a revolutionary threat to the social order. As Hans-Ulrich Wehler put it, men like Bismarck saw all “social revolutionaries as heirs of the revolutions of 1789 and 1830, and later also of 1848/49. Communists and socialists, anarchists and ‘Social-Democrats’ were thus thrown together into a single pot.”17 If conservatives and liberals showed no inclination to distinguish carefully among revolutionaries, socialists themselves (not just in Germany) lacked a precise nomenclature to differentiate among the positions of various factions. Marx had not yet solidified his ideological hold on the majority of German or other European socialists. The romantic state socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, who founded the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV) in 1862, had for many years a greater influence in Germany than any other socialist leader, despite his untimely death in a duel in 1864. Though Marx and Engels scorned their flamboyant national rival, their German followers (the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, or SDAP, also known as Eisenachers after the city in which the party was founded) merged with the Lassalleans in 1875 to create a united Social Democratic party without a well-defined set of beliefs. And Lassalle was hardly the only socialist competitor Marx and his followers faced. The International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) collapsed in 1872, after eight turbulent years increasingly dominated by the relentless rivalry between Marx and Russian thinker and revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin. Though Marx came out of the struggle the victor, Bakunin continued to command a large socialist following. Only in 1876, shortly after Bakunin’s death, did an international socialist congress in Switzerland lead to a definitive rupture between Marx’s followers and loyalists of Bakunin’s “anti-authoritarian” socialism. It was not until this point that the latter begin to self-identify as anarchists with a specific ideological meaning, distinct from other socialists. Further confusing matters, Marxists, Bakuninists, and many other socialists championed the Paris Commune of March–May 1871, a revolutionary government of enormous diversity feared and reviled by observers across the rest of the political spectrum. In this atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that many who were just becoming aware of the socialist movement, whether as adherents or opponents, had little sense of what each faction stood for. In Germany, the merger of the Lassallean ADAV and the SDAP in May 1875 created a single party, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD), but cleavages between the Lassalleans, inclined toward reform by working with the government, and the Eisenachers, committed to political revolution, remained pronounced. Even within each faction, leading personalities clashed over theory and tactics. After the merger, anti-socialist observers remained distrustful of the revolutionary rhetoric of the new party’s leaders,

26

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

especially the former Eisenachers who came to dominate the united party—August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Though Marx heatedly criticized the new party’s Gotha Program of 1875 as too reformist and Lassallean, most non-socialists still looked upon the Social Democratic movement as a revolutionary threat to social stability.18 As Vernon Lidtke eloquently noted, “When both Lassalleans and Eisenachers embraced the communards as their brothers in the international struggle of the working class, the image of the socialists in Germany acquired new colors and contours, dotted with suggestions of screaming mobs, rising barricades, and burning buildings.” The party included many self-described revolutionaries who had opposed the wars of German unification as imperialistic, as well as atheists like Johann Most, who tried without success to organize a mass exodus from the churches. According to Lidtke, “the socialists’ militant atheism attracted more attention and created more resentment than either their economic or political theories.”19 Socialists routinely denounced Prussian aggression (conceived to include the process of national unification itself) and swore loyalty to the International rather than the new German nation. They would not celebrate the German national holiday of Sedan Day (commemorating the defeat of Napoleon III’s forces that decided the Franco-Prussian War), nor would they stand for the emperor’s regular address to the opening of the Reichstag session. Social Democrats not only acquiesced in their political isolation but even derived much of their identity from their staunchly oppositional stance. In a well-known and frequently reprinted 1869 speech, “On the Political Position of Social Democracy, Particularly with Regard to the Reichstag,” Wilhelm Liebknecht prophesied violent confrontation between socialism and the ruling class, and expressed disgust with parliamentarism. While promoting democracy as a necessary component of true socialism (“Socialism without democracy is pseudo-Socialism, just as democracy without Socialism is pseudo-democracy”), Liebknecht nonetheless railed against participation in the parliament of the North German Confederation.20 Though his party had agreed on its necessity, Liebknecht pointedly commented: “My personal opinion was that the representatives elected by us should enter the Reichstag, deliver their protest, and depart again immediately afterwards.” To engage further in the business of parliament presented a danger, for “those who converse with the enemy parley—and those who parley come to terms.” Liebknecht positioned Social Democracy as a party of pure opposition, decrying “the ruinous effect of parliamentary rhetoric, of talking for the sake of talking.” Seeing little hope for society’s gradual transformation into socialism, Liebknecht remarked that “socialism is no longer a question of theory, but simply a question of power, which, like any other question of power, cannot be decided in parliament, but only in the streets, on the battlefield.”21 The socialist leader seemed to hold as low an opinion of parliamentary speeches as did Bismarck when he ridiculed the Frankfurt National Assembly in his famous 1862 address to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies’ budget commission: “Not by fine speeches and majority votes are the great issues of the day decided—that was the mistake in the years of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

27

blood!”22 Conservatives would repeatedly quote this speech of Liebknecht’s in succeeding decades when they wished to challenge the Socialists’ claims that they supported peaceful social change. Yet such rhetoric usually had little connection to Social Democrats’ political behavior. Fiery language made up an important part of the Socialist stock-in-trade in the late 1860s and 1870s, attracting to the party’s banner angry and alienated workers who felt a deep sense of social injustice.23 But even the most incendiary speakers often evinced a willingness to engage in practical politics that tended toward reform. In the 1877–1878 Reichstag session, the Social Democrats in fact proposed more bills than any other party, most of them concerned with promoting free and fair elections and establishing protections for working-class organization.24 In many ways, conservative and Social Democratic rhetoric fit neatly together, as both depicted socialism as a radical revolutionary force at war with the state and dominant social order. Johann Most, the atheist, specialized in blood-curdling rhetoric, which he parlayed into skyrocketing circulation numbers for the Social Democratic newspapers he edited during the 1870s. An amorphous revolutionism suited Most, who evinced little interest in theory but displayed preternatural skill at communicating with ordinary workers. Party theoretician Eduard Bernstein recalled in his memoirs that Most had in the 1870s “enjoyed an incredible popularity among the masses” due to “an uncommon literary gift,” even if he had been an “undisciplined genius.”25 With Most at the helm after 1876, the Berliner Freie Presse (Berlin Free Press) saw its subscription rate increase from 2,000 to 18,000 in a single year, as Most unleashed a vituperative hailstorm against the enemies of socialism.26 Despite the fact that their party’s program was not nearly as radical as the rhetoric of men like Liebknecht and Most suggested, Socialists were by and large unconcerned with crafting a public image that would be less alarming to most Germans. The doubling of the Socialist Reichstag vote from 1871 to 1874 (from 3.2 to 6.8%), resulting in a much larger jump in the party’s parliamentary representation (from 2 to 9 seats in the 397-member body), combined with the merger of the two socialist parties the next year, brought the movement far more serious scrutiny from the government and the other political parties than had any of the previous proclamations of the formerly tiny minority. However, even with their success in the 1874 election, Social Democrats earned fewer votes than any of the major parties (the two liberal, two conservative, and political Catholic parties) and gained fewer seats in the Reichstag than either the Polish or Alsatian national minority party. Nonetheless, the party’s advances had caught the attention of the social and political elite. If most Germans had only a hazy notion in the early 1870s of what the German socialist movement represented, this began to change in the middle years of the decade. A handful of scholars and politicians began writing extensively about socialism, with the goal of educating the public and influencing elite opinion. From a variety of perspectives, all of them more or less hostile to the socialist parties (if not, in a few cases, to broad socialist goals), they sought to explain the movement’s rise and what could be done to halt it.

28

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

One of the earliest and most persistent of the socialists’ enemies was nationalist, pro-Bismarck, anti-Semitic historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who regarded the movement through the conservative anti-revolutionary prism previously discussed. Though a Reichstag deputy of the National Liberal Party, Treitschke came from the party’s extreme right wing and had very little of the liberal in him.27 Treitschke railed against German Social Democrats as the heirs of the French revolutionary tradition. In an 1874 article series that ran in the Preußische Jahrbücher (the influential journal Treitschke edited) and was later published as the pamphlet Socialism and Its Supporters, Treitschke described socialists as “sworn enemies of every noble civilization,” who supported the “abnegation of all that elevates humans above the beasts.”28 Socialists excited discontent, according to Treitschke, by rejecting the fundamental truth that there existed a natural aristocracy and that the multitudes must inevitably toil away if statesmen, artists, and the educated were to thrive. Promising all workers a right to an equal share of society’s fruits while undermining the masses’ comfort in religion would inevitably encourage crime and violence as the poor sought to improve their material situation without respect for law or propriety. Socialist agitation thus threatened to rob Germany of “all power of resistance against barbarism.”29 The portrayal of revolutionaries as purely destructive had strong precedents. For instance, Burke, whose anti-revolutionary views held great currency in nineteenth-century Germany, had attacked the French revolutionaries of 1789 in this fashion: “Something they must destroy, or they seem to themselves to exist for no purpose.” In language perhaps even more resonant after the invention of dynamite in 1866, Burke charged that the revolutionaries “have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament.”30 The idea that Social Democrats represented the complete negation of civilization would appear again and again in German conservative rhetoric. A nationalist concern with the defense of German culture also suffused Treitschke’s assault on the socialists. He complained that “modern socialism has transplanted from its French homeland to our soil” a desire for the “sudden shaking of all the old order.” Behind the German Social Democrats lay the specters of the French Revolution of 1789 and the recent bête noir of conservatives across the continent, the Paris Commune. Part and parcel of this criticism was the suggestion that the Social Democrats were not truly German but shared a common outlook with “Russian Nihilists” and “French Communards.”31 Writing the next year, another conservative anti-socialist, Richard Schuster, railed against the Socialists’ celebration of the Commune: “the 18th of March, the anniversary of the uprising of the Paris Commune, is for the German Social Democrats a holiday which they oppose to the second of September [Sedan Day], the German people’s national holiday.”32 In fact, the Socialists had encouraged this connection with frequent and extravagant praise for the Commune. Famously, Bebel, the party’s most prominent leader from the late 1870s until his death in 1913, told the Reichstag in May 1871: “Be assured that the entire European proletariat and all who still hold in their breast the love of freedom and independence, look toward Paris. . . . The struggle in Paris

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

29

is only a minor outpost skirmish, the great issue in Europe still lies before us, and before many decades have passed, the battle cry of the Paris proletariat . . . will become the battle cry of the entire European proletariat.” In the same speech, Bebel claimed (with good justification) that Prussia had provoked the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and had had no justification for annexing Alsace-Lorraine at the end of the Franco-Prussian War.33 Lest readers conclude that Social Democrats were merely internationalists and anti-nationalists (surely bad enough), Treitschke insisted that the German socialists were particularly dangerous, delivering the most radical speeches at international socialist congresses, while at home “the meetings of the German socialists exceed all others in the brutality of their tone.”34 Conservatives like Treitschke argued that to counter socialist incitements of class discontent and national disloyalty, the pillars of authority must be strengthened and dangerous ideas forcibly suppressed. Treitschke was somewhat atypical in downplaying the importance of established churches, which both Catholic and Protestant conservatives looked to as bulwarks of social order. In the heat of the Kulturkampf, of which Treitschke was an ardent supporter (wary of Catholic internationalism little less than socialist internationalism), a more full-throated endorsement of organized religion may have been unthinkable. Instead, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of respect for the monarch, the nation, and the educated, propertied classes in combating socialism, while prescribing harsh police measures to stifle Social Democratic agitation. Treitschke would continue to be a leading proponent of the conservative view of socialism as part of a broad international revolutionary threat to the social and cultural order whose suppression counted for far more than liberal notions of individual freedom. At almost the same time, the first and most prominent liberal treatment of socialism appeared: Albert Schäffle’s influential Quintessence of Socialism, published in 1874 and reissued many times over the following decades. “Since the second election to the German Reichstag, the ‘red specter’ has found its way into every alehouse,” noted Schäffle’s introduction; nevertheless, “the kernel and the aim of socialist propaganda is still almost unknown.” This kernel, according to Schäffle, was purely economic: socialism sought to replace private capital with collective capital.35 The bulk of the book consisted of explaining socialist (Marxist in particular) economic theory. Schäffle vociferously denied any necessary connection between this and the many bugaboos of anti-socialist rhetoric, such as atheism or the endorsement of “free love.” On the former point, he acknowledged that “the church, indeed all religion, is fanatically hated by many socialists. . . . But this tendency is not a necessary consequence of the economic socialist principle.” This did not, however, mean that there was nothing to fear from the socialist movement. “The ‘downfall [Untergang] of the highest and most ideal possessions of civilization’ would quite certainly be associated with the wild democratic-communist realization of socialism,” he noted, but again, this danger did not arise from the theory itself.36 In the end, Schäffle rejected socialist economics as flawed, but his articulation of a clear distinction between socialist theory and violent revolutionism offered a stark contrast

30

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

to the perspective of thinkers like Treitschke. German Social Democrats themselves considered Schäffle’s book unbiased enough that they offered it to their followers to provide a basic understanding of socialist principles. Schäffle’s total lack of concern with Marx’s political (as opposed to economic) thought meant that the socialist agenda he described could be accomplished as easily through the existing state as through revolution.37 This critical but benign view of socialist goals was reiterated by a group of liberal political economists associated with the Verein für Socialpolitik (Union for Social Policy) who came to be known by the term for them offered by their detractors, Kathedersozialisten. These “socialists of the lectern,” dismissing the conservative picture of socialism as a threat to an immutable natural or God-given social hierarchy, claimed that Germany urgently needed social reform to improve the lot of the working classes and regarded some of socialism’s aims as compatible with their own ambition of reconciling the state, capitalism, and the working classes. Though broadly supportive of class reconciliation and pro-worker reforms, the Kathedersozialisten divided on the appropriate stance toward the German Social Democrats. Some, such as Adolph Wagner, expressed optimism that liberals could work with the Socialists on positive social reform efforts.38 Others, most prominently Adolf Held, secretary of the Union for Social Policy, saw value in socialism as an idea but expressed profound antipathy to the Social Democrats as a political force. Like Schäffle, Held expressed sympathy for the goal of ending workers’ exploitation and better integrating them into the body politic. However, he also had a good deal to say, none of it complimentary, about the German socialist political movement. Held, like many liberals, felt that German workers had legitimate complaints against a “class state” (a state governed by and to the advantage of the upper classes) that neglected them, but he viewed Social Democratic leaders as dangerous demagogues sowing the seeds of violent revolution, making them fundamentally irreconcilable to legal and state authority. In his 1877 book Socialism, Social Democracy, and Social Policy, Held insisted that although Social Democratic voters and followers had no interest at all in revolution, “the most important leaders have adopted the position of trying to light a ready-for-action revolutionary fire” in them.39 Of Socialist leaders, he complained, “their entire agitation is directed at arousing passionate hatred against all existing order.” Of particular concern to Held was their attack on religion: while Social Democrats claimed that “religion is a private matter,” they in fact “preach the most extreme atheism and battle all religion as a tool of subjugation [Knechtschaft].” He also denounced their cosmopolitanism and anti-nationalism.40 Held’s concern was not the economic content of socialism but the political stance of the Social Democrats. Socialist principles had existed as long as humanity and had genuine value, he claimed, but “the essence of Social Democracy is the union of an extreme variant of socialism with the tendency to political revolution.” These two aspects could be sundered, he believed, by enacting social reform measures that would improve the lives of workers: “We must be willing to join with the worker in his endeavors. But we must struggle implacably against the fatherland-[less] and law-less tendency of an agitating [wühlenden] party.”41

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

31

Franz Mehring, the political correspondent for various liberal newspapers, offered a very similar perspective in a lengthy history of German Social Democracy published in July 1877 and revised and expanded twice by the end of 1878. Like Held, Mehring expressed compassion for the plight of German workers and endorsed social reform measures that would improve their lot. From this perspective, he praised Lassalle’s ADAV and its reformist thrust, as well as Lassalle’s emphasis on achieving universal suffrage and equal voting rights. But when he turned to the Eisenachers, especially Liebknecht, Mehring was lacerating. He ridiculed Liebknecht as an “apostle of revolution” with a deep urge to stir “hate, envy, and ire in human hearts,” whose “main weapon” was “a radicalism as full of rhetoric as it was empty of substance.”42 Like anti-socialists would repeatedly do in later years, Mehring quoted from Liebknecht’s 1869 speech decrying Reichstag participation. He maligned the SDAP, dominated by the revolutionary “Marx-Liebknecht tendency,” which had, in the guise of creating a Volkspartei (people’s party), “smuggled communist wares onto German soil.”43 Like Held, Mehring insisted that Socialists were disingenuous when they claimed religion to be a private matter: they were totally atheistic (Mehring held up Most as the most visible example) but feared revealing this to a religiously devout public. He also suggested they were dishonest about their beliefs concerning marriage; since people were generally satisfied with the institution, Socialists would not admit that they favored “free love,” instead merely criticizing an ill-defined “bourgeois” marriage.44 Though disdaining Social Democratic leaders, Mehring admitted that the movement had achieved significant success and that the social and political situation urgently required politicians to focus on the needs of workers. The recent advance of the Social Democrats in the 1877 Reichstag elections (in which they received 9.1% of the vote and 12 seats) showed, according to Mehring, the “imperviousness and strength of the web that Social Democratic agitation has spun around the German Empire’s limbs, of the breadth and depth to which a violent revolution-minded party has eaten into the mass of the people.” Yet a “clear and accurate picture of the threatening danger” should not be measured by the surface success of leaders with “uncommonly developed suppleness of tongue.” For it was not in the leaders, whether an “enraged fanatic like Liebknecht or an ignorant poltroon like Most,” but in the workers that lay “the great and deep riddle of the epoch.”45 Adequately addressing their concerns would separate them from the dangerous demagogues of the Socialist party. Mehring represented a key bloc of liberal antisocialist opinion and the successful transformation of Social Democracy’s place in the German Empire can be seen in his political development. From vehement anti-socialist in 1878 to Social Democratic convert by 1891 to party leader, theoretician, and historian in the next decade, Mehring followed the same trajectory as many liberals hostile to the party in 1878.46 Even more distrustful of the Social Democrats than Mehring, the left-leaning National Liberal Reichstag deputy Ludwig Bamberger considered socialist theory as pernicious as socialist politics. Bamberger, who had made his political name as a radical democratic

32

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

revolutionary in 1848, began to write about the dangers of socialism in the early 1870s. His lengthiest and most widely read work on the growth of Social Democracy was Germany and Socialism, published in March 1878. While excoriating the “leaders who dominate the class struggle, from Marx to Bakunin, from the vitriolic dialect of the poison pen to the petroleum-drenched torch, which the ‘Flambez’ of the communard government put into practice,”47 Bamberger’s greatest fear remained the creeping acceptance of socialist principles among educated Germans. He expressed particular hostility to “socialistic” state intervention in the economy to address the “social question,” which was both at the heart of Lassalle’s socialism and also advocated by the Kathedersozialisten.48 Bamberger’s chief concern was the defense of the modern, laissez-faire capitalism that he believed made social improvement possible. Even “the most moderate socialism that pines for the once-again beloved solidarity of the Middle Ages” represented a danger, for the triumph of its backward-looking ideal would mean “the dissolution of all the norms of state, law, and commerce that in the course of history have brought us out of barbarism. Beyond the ‘Internationalists,’ only a step further is the school of those that call themselves ‘anarchists.’”49 In the end, he opined, “a common bond encompasses all shades of socialism from the wild Russian Bakunin to the mildest of German professors.”50 Revealing of this common bond was the German socialist celebration of the Paris Commune. As Bamberger warned his Reichstag colleagues in 1875, “I believe that if the gentlemen . . . could murder us and through it introduce their regime they would do it. I am not so idealistic that I believe . . . that if an unfortunate constellation would come in Berlin as in Paris the hands of the peaceful citizens would suffice to protect us.”51 The threat of barbarism and anarchy was compounded, in Bamberger’s eyes, by the “reactionary” parties’ expressions of “goodwill toward Social Democracy,” that is, their endorsement of intercessions in the economy to improve the lives of workers.52 For Bamberger, this state socialist inclination could only advance the socialistic principle, to the nation’s detriment. In an 1884 essay, Bamberger again warned of the “invasion of socialist ideas” across the political spectrum. Fellow liberal thinker and Reichstag deputy from 1881 Theodor Barth pronounced the menace of “state socialism” greater than “all other dangers that threaten freedom.”53 Liberal opinion of German Social Democracy ranged all over the map, from those who believed the Socialists could become allies in a process of social reform that would reconcile capital and labor to those who regarded the Socialists much as conservatives did, as a grave peril to the social order. However, even vehemently anti-socialist liberals insisted that the correct way to combat socialist errors involved popular education, public disputation, and persuasion of workers, rather than the mailed fist recommended by conservatives. Despite his deep hostility to socialism, Bamberger, a true liberal at the core, insisted that it must be combated in the realm of ideas, not through political repression. If the folly of the socialists’ economic arguments were revealed, the ideology would be exposed as wrong-headed and counterproductive. Bamberger stood against a series of measures Bismarck sought to enact in the early 1870s to limit Social Demo-

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

33

cratic agitation, including a proposed provision of the 1874 Press Law making it a crime to suggest that disobedience of the law was acceptable and an 1875 bill that proposed criminalizing attacks on “the institutions of marriage, family, or property.” Bamberger rejected the latter measure on the grounds that Social Democrats had not engaged in any violent acts, insisting “only where the realm of action begins and the empire of thought ceases, does the legislator have the right to enter with the sword.”54 Along with this principled stand, Bamberger also claimed that police repression had shown itself wholly ineffective at quelling revolutionary sentiments, as could be seen throughout much of the nineteenth century. Less than two months after the publication of Bamberger’s Germany and Socialism, liberals’ support for free expression and intellectual debate would be put to a severe test. Though a yawning ideological gulf separated liberals and political Catholics, made wider by the Kulturkampf, they shared much common ground in their view of how to address the socialist problem. Catholics, deeply distrustful of the new empire ruled by the Protestant Prussian Hohenzollern monarchy, and even more of the imperial chancellor, rejected attempts to stymie socialism through legal or police repression, since such measures had been wielded against them. In the words of his biographer Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Ludwig Windthorst, the Zentrum’s parliamentary leader and outstanding personality until his death in 1891, “knew little about Socialist ideas, but he was not frightened by visions of bomb throwing and heads rolling, and he ridiculed the trigger-happy hysteria with which the deputies of other parties had reacted to the recent increase in Socialist votes.”55 During the 1870s Zentrum representatives often provided needed signatures to get a Social Democratic motion before the Reichstag (as did members of the left-liberal Progressive Party, and even occasionally National Liberals). Like the Kathedersozialisten and some other liberals, Zentrum leaders advocated social legislation both to improve workers’ lives and to undercut enthusiasm for Social Democracy. Political Catholics also argued that a return of spirituality and Church influence to German social life, which had been hampered by Bismarck’s anti-Catholic campaign, would weaken the socialist movement. The parties of the national minorities (also Catholic for the most part), from Alsatians and Lorrainians to Poles, likewise viewed proposed antisocialist measures through the prism of their own experience with the imperial state. As a result, all of these reichsfeindlich parties strongly advocated equality before the law, opposing exceptional laws and other contraventions of basic liberal norms of public debate and discussion. Though their diagnosis of the socialist threat differed from that of liberals (for example, many political Catholics wished to organize the economy on the basis of Christian values), their prescription was quite similar: free and open debate on the ground of the general law. When the Reichstag convened in 1877, it appeared that Social Democrats might be able to establish themselves as active participants in national politics. They introduced a number of bills, on issues as diverse as workplace safety and labor hours regulation, reapportionment of electoral districts, and repeal of laws requiring police approval for

34

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

public assemblies.56 The Social Democratic workers’ protection bill, introduced by Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, up for debate thanks to the signatures of two Zentrum representatives, earned the Catholic party’s enthusiastic support, despite its competition with a similar bill proposed by a Zentrum deputy. Windthorst told the Reichstag that “scarcely anything during the present session has caused me so much joy as the motion of the Social Democrats, because now the gentlemen are finally saying: we come with definite suggestions, discuss them and grant what is correct and expedient from them.”57 Many Social Democrats remained wary of parliamentary activity, while many of their opponents remained suspicious about the party’s true intentions; nevertheless, by the spring of 1878, as the Reichstag session was winding down, the prospect of the Socialists’ normalization within the political system appeared within reach and desired by at least a substantial number of Socialists and non-Socialists. This possible outcome was called into question when, on the afternoon of May 11, 1878, as the kaiser rode in his carriage along Berlin’s central boulevard, Unter den Linden, journeyman plumber Max Hödel fired several shots at him from amid the crowd lining the street. Though the would-be assassin missed his target completely, the attack produced immediate political consequences. Hödel had only the previous month been ejected from the SAPD, for which he had once sold newspaper subscriptions. After his expulsion for embezzlement (a fact announced on May 9 in the party’s chief organ, Vorwärts), Hödel had worked briefly for the National Liberals and also apparently for the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party founded by Court Preacher Adolf Stöcker.58 Bismarck, ever attuned to the political opportunities afforded by unexpected events, immediately sought to blame the attack on the Social Democrats. When no evidence suggesting a Socialist plot could be found, the conservative press charged Social Democrats with indirectly stirring up sentiments hostile to established authorities. Three days after the attack, the semi-official Provinzial-Correspondenz, from which many Prussian provincial papers drew their national news articles, attributed the attack to the “moral effects” of “the teachings and stimulations [Aufreizungen] of a party working for the revolution [Umwälzung] of state and society.” A news item immediately following this editorial reported that Hödel, despite carrying around Socialist brochures, membership cards, and pictures of Bebel and Liebknecht, did not consider himself a Socialist at all but, rather, “a Nihilist or anarchist, an enemy of all the institutions of state and society.” According to his interrogation, before attending Social Democratic meetings in Germany, he had toured Italy, France, Switzerland, and Spain “as an agitator of the anarchist party.”59 For the Kreuz-Zeitung, this was synonymous with being a socialist, for “the anarchists are well known to be a socialist sect, whose founder is the Russian Bakunin.”60 In a May 15 lead article titled “The Warning Finger of God,” the paper castigated Socialists for denying responsibility for Hödel’s act: “It is certain that the criminal is a Social Democrat, or moreover a Nihilist; he describes himself as an anarchist from the Bakuninist school, and thus an atheist too.” Even if he had been expelled from the Socialist party before his act, “he had soaked in the dangerous teachings’ poison,” which had “encouraged

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

35

estrangement from God and anarchic endeavors.”61 Defending his own Christian Social Workers’ Party against any connection with Hödel, Stöcker noted that the attacker had declared himself “an anarchist, in other words a radical socialist”; no one could legitimately associate such an “insane act” with a party like his, which had been founded on “the spirit of peaceful community and deepest love of the king.”62 Clearly such qualities did not apply to the Socialists. In a similar vein, the liberal Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily) pronounced that “an enormous responsibility for the criminal deed must fall” on the Social Democrats, since “the program of this party has always preached in more or less explicit terms the overthrow of all established state institutions,” opening the way for “a plan for murder to sprout in the head of a passionate and immature party follower.”63 In vain the Social Democrats pointed to Hödel’s self-identification as an anarchist and his expulsion from the Socialist party before the attack. Few Germans had a clear idea of the differences between Social Democrats, anarchists, and Nihilists, and in any case, these differences could only seem immaterial to those who regarded all revolutionary parties as threats to society. Hoping to make the most of the situation, the government hurriedly prepared antisocialist legislation for the Reichstag. The bill’s official rationale (Begründung) warned of the “ever-greater dimensions” of Social Democracy’s “noxious, confusion-inducing influence on the masses,” carried out “systematically” by “skilled agitators.” Socialist agitation, the government charged, sought to “undermine traditional moral and religious views, love of fatherland, piety and respect for the law, in short all of those foundations upon which the state and society’s security rest. Social Democracy threatens the public welfare.” To combat such a danger required “stronger, faster, and more invasive means” than allowed by current laws. Though loath to restrict “the right of free expression of opinion,” the government deemed it “in the public interest” to protect society from “the misuse of these freedoms which the supporters of Social Democracy continuously engage in.” The proposed legislation authorized the Bundesrat (the council of representatives of the individual German states’ governments) to ban organizations and publications supporting “the goals of Social Democracy,” while granting police the power to forbid public gatherings or the dissemination of printed materials with the same end. Violators would face prison terms. The law was to run for three years.64 The bill’s rationale was couched in the anti-revolutionary terms conservatives had used over the past several decades, accusing socialism of threatening to corrode the traditional civilizational order. The proposed bill was heatedly debated in the press. Conservatives vociferously demanded its passage. A front-page Kreuz-Zeitung article on May 21 reiterated the claims made over the previous week and a half that Social Democrats “preach apostasy from God, the subversion of loyalty to king and all divine and human authority, and are focused on the overthrow [Umsturz] of governmental and social order.”65 Organs of the left liberals, including the Vossische Zeitung (Voss Newspaper, so-called after the name of an early owner-editor; officially the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und

36

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

gelehrten Sachen [Royally Privileged Berlin Newspaper of Governmental and Scholarly Matters]) and the Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt Newspaper), however, opposed the law on three grounds. First, the government had offered no evidence of a direct connection between Hödel’s act and Social Democracy. Second, repression could not stop assassination attempts and in fact only inflamed the hostility of the target group. Finally, they claimed, the government was not truly concerned about preventing further violence but cynically trying to use this heinous attack to strike out at all of the opposition parties. In more temperate language, political Catholics also claimed that an exceptional law would serve no purpose.66 Left-liberal and Zentrum opposition came as no surprise to Bismarck and his allies. Their real aim was to put pressure on National Liberals like Ludwig Bamberger, who had expressed deep concern about the Social Democratic danger but refused to endorse tougher government action to crush it. The Kreuz-Zeitung took liberals to task for crying “Reaction!” against a measure that “is restricted merely to combating Social Democracy.” It mockingly questioned whether the National Liberal National-Zeitung truly believed that “editorials in the liberal papers and zealous election activity will deter the leaders of Social Democracy from the pursuit of their goals.” Ridiculing liberals for the softness of their approach toward an enemy willing to use violence to destroy society, the paper declared, “We hold it for certain that, given the gravity of the situation in the struggle against the powers of revolution, the government’s authority must be strengthened—with or without the support of the National Liberals.”67 The Provinzial-Correspondenz pointed out that liberals had acknowledged the socialist threat’s gravity, asserting a “moral connection of the attentat with Social Democracy and the pernicious influence of Social Democratic agitation.” As evidence, the article quoted several liberal papers’ condemnations of Socialism, ranging from the Berliner Tageblatt’s claim that a party with a goal of “the destruction of all existing relations” did not have the right to the same treatment as other parties to the description of socialism in the Berliner Autographirte Correspondenz (Berlin Transcript Correspondence) as a “nihilism” that “threatens our national life, which it would erode like an acrid poison injected from without.” In the semi-official paper’s view, liberals who could describe socialism in such dire terms and then turn their back on anti-socialist legislation were placing principle above national self-preservation.68 This kind of attack on liberalism was exactly what Bismarck had hoped to engender by putting forth the bill. He did not expect its passage but planned to use the issue as a tool to hammer those voting against the measure as insufficiently patriotic.69 The Reichstag debate on the bill on May 23–24 covered a range of issues, from the Social Democrats’ connection to Hödel’s act to the scope of the socialist threat, to the appropriate means to combat it, to the vagueness of the law’s wording.70 Though the proposed measure’s rationale made no mention of the assassination attempt, its opponents insisted that the two could not be disentangled. National Liberal leader Rudolf von Bennigsen pointed out that the bill had been drafted immediately after the attack, in the closing days of the Reichstag session, and thus could have no other explanation than

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

37

as a direct response to the attentat.71 The Social Democrats refused even to discuss it, on the grounds that the bill rested entirely on this spurious connection. When the first speech of the debate had concluded, Liebknecht proceeded to the rostrum. After disparaging as transparently unjust this attempt to use “the deed of a crazy person” to pursue “a long-prepared reactionary coup [Reaktionsstreiches]” against a party “that condemns murder in every form and understands economic and political development to be independent of the will of a single person,” he read a statement on behalf of the entire Social Democratic Reichstag caucus explaining that they would not take part in the debate.72 The bill’s liberal and Catholic opponents concurred with the Social Democrats about conservative attempts to pin responsibility for Hödel’s attack on the Socialist movement. Progressive leader Eugen Richter called Hödel merely a pathetic, confused individual seeking to commit an act that would bring him glory and also noted that the Social Democrats had ejected him from their party weeks before the attack.73 Windthorst claimed that Hödel’s act appeared to have been the product of insanity rather than ideology. In a rhetorical tactic that would become a staple of anti–Socialist Law arguments, the Zentrum leader brought up the 1844 assassination attempt against Prussian King Friedrich-Wilhelm IV by a disgruntled former civil servant, asking if that crime could reasonably be imputed to the middle-class social milieu from which the attacker had come.74 Even conservatives did not seek to ascribe to the Social Democrats direct responsibility for Hödel’s attack, conceding that no evidence for such a claim existed. Instead, they faulted the party’s teachings for clouding the minds of workers in ways that encouraged, in Interior Minister Botho zu Eulenburg’s words, “sad and horrifying phenomena” like the attempt on the kaiser’s life, as well as other unspecified “nefarious” deeds. Socialism’s assault on monarchy and patriotism, he suggested, had contributed to an attack directed “not merely against the life of the venerable ruler, but against the honor of this Volk [people] and land.”75 Conceding that Hödel was not part of a conspiracy, Robert Lucius Baron von Ballhausen, deputy of the Deutsche Reichspartei (German Empire Party, also known as the Free Conservative Party, a nationalist pro-Bismarck conservative party founded in 1866), nonetheless regarded the would-be assassin as “a representative of the barbarization [Verwilderung], of the depravity” fostered by Social Democratic speeches and meetings.76 Otto von Helldorff of the German Conservatives (the traditional conservative party, cautious about Bismarck and opposed to the Kulturkampf) saw only a “psychological connection” between Socialists and the attentat but argued that their failure to condemn Hödel’s act directly and rally behind the kaiser was precisely the kind of attitude that would pave the way for further violence. “The elimination of the press and the meetings” of the Social Democrats, he told the Reichstag, would result in “the elimination of terrorism” by stopping the penetration of unhealthy sentiments into those parts of the populace “not yet infected.”77 Pinning the attack on the toxic atmosphere Social Democrats allegedly produced allowed conservatives to establish a connection without exposing a plot or even any explicit Socialist incitement to violence.

38

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

This interpretation cast Hödel’s attempt on the kaiser’s life as the manifestation of a widespread and diffuse danger that posed an imminent, existential threat to the existing order of society. Eduard Georg von Bethusy-Huc of the Reichspartei warned that Social Democrats advocated “the negation of each and every foundation of our moral, our social, and our state order.” Against “church, monarchy, the laws of this land, marriage, and property,” Social Democrats expressed “stark, naked, ruthless negation.” Likening Socialist agitation to “poisonous spores” threatening the social organism, Bethusy-Huc warned of the potential of a revolutionary outbreak like the Paris Commune, which could threaten the new empire’s very survival.78 Field Marshal and Chief of the General Staff of the Army Helmuth von Moltke, hero of the wars of German unification, also invoked the specter of the Commune and the possibility of imminent revolution. While the German workers had not displayed the kind of radicalism the Parisians had shown seven years prior, he worried that “on the path of revolution the better elements are very soon overtaken by the worse.” According to the elderly general, “behind the honorable revolutionary” lay the raging mobs of 1848, the “professeurs de barricades and the pétroleuses [a term for incendiaries who started fires with gasoline] of the Commune of 1871.”79 Against this threat of a revolution that might bring the nation to ruin, the most extreme response was justified. This view fit with the government’s rationale for the bill as a national security measure. President of the Imperial Chancellery Karl Hofmann explained that the Hödel attack had finally forced the government to weigh “whether it was compatible any longer with its responsibility for the peace and security of the fatherland to sit back and do nothing to counteract a danger that it has been aware of for years.” While endorsing churches, schooling, the press, and associations as critical venues for fighting socialism, he insisted that “all means for battling Social Democracy that are purely spiritual [geistigem] and moral” would be ineffective so long as socialism remained under the protection of the empire’s current press, association, and assembly laws. Given that more aggressive measures against Social Democracy were needed, Hofmann argued that a “special law” targeting Social Democrats would be the best course, because it would isolate them without impinging on the freedom of the rest of society.80 Bethusy-Huc also preferred an exceptional law targeting only the dangerous minority to “a restriction of our constitutional rights” through changing the general legal code, a course of action for which he would only vote “with a heavy heart.”81 In the same vein, Moltke recommended a “sensible, temporary restriction of the freedom” Social Democrats had “misused.”82 Helldorff proclaimed the “strengthening of natural authority” and religion against the “lacerating nihilism and materialism of the age” as vital to fighting the Socialist menace, but he cautioned that such a project would take a great deal of time and energy. “To make moral remedies effective, we must implement these repressive measures” right away, he declared. If the evil of Social Democracy were not halted soon, “then, gentlemen, I fear a crisis, a crisis that will not be resolved without blood and tears.”83 Lucius suggested that Social Democracy be treated like a disease. Rather than “letting it first

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

39

break out and then curing it,” the state should use “prophylactic measures to prevent its outbreak” in the first place.84 Conservatives backed harsh short-term repressive measures to avert disaster and provide the time needed to mount a more thoroughgoing repudiation of socialist ideas. These fulminations did not meet with a receptive audience in the Reichstag chamber. Opposition to the bill came from all of the non-conservative parties, which dominated the debate. Though speakers from the National Liberals, Zentrum, and Progressives all agreed that Social Democracy represented a danger, they regarded it as rather less than a threat to the nation’s survival. The key clash between the conservatives and the rest of the Reichstag was over the appropriate means to combat the danger all agreed existed: the government and conservatives argued that force was indispensible to fighting socialism, while their opponents advocated cultural and spiritual means for doing so; the government wanted an “exceptional law” that would silence Socialists specifically, while liberals and political Catholics strongly favored using only those means provided for in the general legal code. The adamant rejection of exceptional laws stemmed both from principle and from distrust of the government that would wield the new powers. The Zentrum opposed Social Democratic materialism and hostility to organized religion. Left liberals blasted Social Democrats (as well as conservatives and Catholics) as opponents of individual liberty. National Liberals attacked Social Democrats for their lack of patriotism. Nevertheless, all were united in a belief that socialism needed to be confronted through the open contestation of ideas rather than through repressive measures. A lengthy speech by Zentrum representative Joseph Edmund Jörg, a Bavarian conservative who retired from the Reichstag the next year, laid out the party’s philosophical motives for opposing the anti-socialist legislation. Jörg painted Social Democracy as the inevitable byproduct of recent social and economic transformations (especially the “spirit of materialism”) that had produced a “spiritual confusion” or “spiritual miasma” in the populace. Socialism was only the inevitable “shadow” of “this modern cultural life” and could be found “everywhere that Christian civilized nations have fallen away from positive belief.” The implicit, and occasionally explicit, thrust of this critique was that the Kulturkampf had eroded the authority of religion in German society, leading to this decline. He proposed to “cure this spirit” through religious revival in schools and society at large. Regarding the problem of socialism as essentially spiritual-cultural, he rejected the government’s proposed law as ineffectual, pointing to the French Second Empire’s failure to prevent its own downfall and the Commune despite the harsh measures it had employed against its opponents.85 The left-liberal Progressives unsurprisingly offered a radically different explanation for Social Democracy’s growth but concurred that it must be challenged in the intellectual realm. In the lengthiest speech of the two-day debate, Progressive leader Eugen Richter argued that his party had long seen Social Democracy’s danger and been its most reviled opponent ever since Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, founder of the German worker cooperative and self-help movement in the 1850s and Progressive

40

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Reichstag deputy, had opposed Lassalle’s state socialist ideas. The Progressive Party, Richter claimed, represented Social Democracy’s antithesis, demanding the enlargement rather than the restriction of “the individual’s personal responsibility,” and therefore opposing all economic intervention by the state. In this regard, Richter noted, to general laughter and shouts of approval, Bismarck’s push for a government tobacco monopoly put the chancellor in the same philosophical camp as the Social Democrats. Because they supported “personal, political, and economic freedom,” Progressives opposed both the government plan and the Socialists. Richter’s argument here echoed what Bamberger had written in his pamphlet Germany and Socialism. Referencing Jörg’s statement about the Socialists being a shadow of modern life, Richter called them instead “the shadow of the foundering police state,” which had taught people to depend on the state for their happiness.86 Despite their dramatically different interpretations of the source of Social Democracy’s rise, the Zentrum and Progressive deputies agreed that repressive measures would be counterproductive. Richter noted that the Social Democrats had effectively marginalized themselves by refusing to denounce Hödel’s attack simply as the act of an insane person, instead implicating the injustices of the current social order for it. By targeting them with an unjust exceptional law, the government brought the Socialists back into the foreground of the national consciousness, but in a more sympathetic light. At the same time, he worried that, if the law were to pass, it would drive Socialism into secret, and thus inevitably more dangerous, activity. “The Social Democratic movement has developed so far in the greatest openness,” leaving the party’s whole agitation in plain view, he commented. The proposed law “would drag the movement out of the public sphere,” out of the light of public observation and the safety valve provided by having to contend with opponents there. Richter predicted that the law would increase Social Democratic agitation in the workplace, where it would spread unobserved and do the most damage by exacerbating worker-employer relations.87 Similarly, Jörg had warned that the danger of using “violent means is that they make the evil worse” by “turning open agitation to the secret mole work [Maulwurfsarbeit] of formal conspiracy.”88 Both men concluded that only open public contestation could effectively confront the threat. Liberals and political Catholics also united in their opposition to exceptional legislation, both as a matter of principle and out of concern over how the government might wield such power. Bennigsen took issue with the proposed ban’s breadth, covering all publications and meetings advocating “the goals of Social Democracy.” As he pointed out, Social Democrats had many goals, and some, such as workplace safety protections and “the improvement of the working populace’s economic situation,” were not bad. Logically, it made no sense to pass a measure that conflated a wide array of agitational goals and means, confronting “violent rebellion [Auflehnung], dangerous riots, humane endeavors, and scientific investigations with the same ban.” An exceptional law would only truly be warranted in a situation in which there was street fighting or other violent and immediate danger to the state; otherwise, citizens’ freedoms and social order could

Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire

41

be defended “on the ground of equal rights for all.” Speaking for his party, he emphatically declared, “We wish to fight this danger on the ground of general law.”89 Windthorst added to this his party’s fear of handing the government such unfettered power, warning of the potential danger to other parties if the Bundesrat and police were allowed to curtail public discussion without judicial oversight. Recalling the 1872 Jesuit Law that banned the Jesuits from Germany, Windthorst announced that his party, “which fought against the exceptional laws decreed against us . . . will fight against these exceptional laws.”90 Although the main speakers for the National Liberals—Bennigsen and Eduard Lasker—strongly opposed the regime’s proposed law, deep divisions existed within the caucus. Only through strenuous pleas for party unity did Bennigsen prevail on the rightleaning National Liberals not to break ranks publicly.91 The first glimpse of these internal tensions came when National Liberal representative Rudolf Gneist and former party member Georg Beseler expressed their willingness to vote for the law with amendments to limit its scope and duration. The amendments gained no traction, as conservatives saw them as watering down the bill’s goal while they failed to satisfy Zentrum and left-liberal concerns about legal equality. In a lopsided vote of 251 to 57, the bill was voted down. Voting for the bill were most members of the two conservative parties and a handful of right-wing National Liberals (including Treitschke and Gneist) who had agreed to keep their opposition to the leadership quiet during debate but insisted on voting their convictions. What does the public debate, both inside and outside the Reichstag, tell us about the status of Social Democracy in May 1878? On the one hand, non-Socialists almost unanimously agreed that the movement represented some sort of danger, though they disagreed on the character, seriousness, and urgency of the threat. On the other hand, most of their antagonists were willing to oppose the Social Democrats’ forcible exclusion from public debate through means they considered illegitimate because they violated the principles of legal equality and open debate. Further normalization of the movement’s status in the empire could only be expected if the Socialists made a concerted effort, as they had begun to do in the 1877–1878 Reichstag session, to recast their movement as an active participant in political affairs rather than a purely oppositional force. Relatedly, if the Social Democrats could disentangle their movement from associations with violent revolutionaries and would-be assassins, they would undercut the most prevalent and powerful attack conservatives could launch at them. While it is impossible to know if the Social Democrats’ refusal to participate in the Reichstag debate was a shrewd political move, enhancing the impression that they were innocent victims and encouraging their non-conservative opponents to stand up for their rights, there was certainly a price to foregoing the opportunity to define themselves to the public as well as to their Reichstag colleagues. They would not take this approach again. That there was no public backlash against the Reichstag’s repudiation of Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation suggests that a sizable body of public opinion supported the principles of universal equality under the law and free contestation of ideas. Given the

42

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

previous several years of the bitter Kulturkampf, which many liberals supported, as well as Bismarck’s many quasi-legal machinations during the wars of German unification, were these principles consistently and deeply held? Some of the events that would soon follow seem to point to the conclusion that they were not. Yet, it is striking that in this Reichstag debate on socialism, and in those that followed over the next two decades, a growing segment of the political class, apparently reflecting public opinion, adopted a rhetorical defense of these values that became ever more deeply entrenched. Even in the first debate on anti-socialist legislation, some conservative proponents of the Kulturkampf began to suggest that the war against Catholicism should be halted (though it would be years before Bismarck would accede to this), if only to concentrate national hostility on socialism. The beginning of a retreat from the Kulturkampf at least implicitly suggested that a politically organized minority subculture could be tolerated without imperiling the nation. And over time, as went the Kulturkampf, so went the war on socialism. While government and conservative language decrying their foes as “enemies of the empire” did not cease, and the nationalism card would sometimes win electoral victories when the government played it effectively, the rejection of the anti-socialist bill in May 1878 reveals that the potential for the flowering of a political culture committed to the values of free speech and legal equality in the Kaiserreich was very real.

C h a p t e r

t w o

Debating the Socialist Law 1 8 7 8

Nine days after the Reichstag decisively voted down Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation and concluded its session, the majority coalition that had defended equality under the law faced a severe challenge on which it would temporarily founder as the paperedover divisions among National Liberals came back into stark relief and the conservative warnings of imminent revolution gained credibility. On June 2, a second would-be assassin, Dr. Karl Nobiling, fired on the imperial carriage, which the defiant Kaiser Wilhelm had continued to ride along the same route on Unter den Linden as he had been accustomed to do before the attack of May 11. Nobiling fired a shotgun from his lodging house into the street below, gravely wounding the emperor. As an angry group of bystanders stormed the building, Nobiling shot himself in the head, inflicting an injury that put him in a coma and led to his death three months later. August Bebel recalled in his autobiography feeling reassured when he heard this second would-be regicide’s name and it was completely unfamiliar to him. The following morning, wrote Bebel, he pored over the first news reports of the attack, which made no mention of the attacker having any Socialist affiliation, and “breathed a sigh of relief, entering the editorial office [of the party paper Vorwärts] with the words, ‘No, they can’t pin this on us.’” No one else in the office had heard of the attacker either.1 Minutes later, the official Wolff telegraph service issued a news bulletin claiming that Nobiling had confessed to being a Social Democrat (though no evidence that he regained consciousness after shooting himself ever appeared). It soon came out that Nobiling had attended Social Democratic meetings, but only to harangue the speakers and expound his own views. He had also attended National Liberal meetings and at various times had subscribed to Socialist, National Liberal, Catholic, and conservative newspapers.2

44

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

While the kaiser’s life hung in the balance, Bismarck plunged into action, asserting that this second attack on the monarch proved the government’s charge that Social Democracy posed a serious threat to the nation’s security. The absence of any evidence tying Socialists to Nobiling’s act did not dissuade the conservative press from trying to stoke anti-socialist fears in the German public. Bismarck convinced the Bundesrat to dismiss the already-out-of-session Reichstag on June 11 and call for new elections to take place at the end of July.3 In preparation for the new Reichstag’s fall session, the chancellor promised to draft a new anti-socialist law that would be harsher than the one rejected a few weeks earlier. In the meantime, he directed the government to use the police and judiciary’s full might to hobble the Socialist movement. Recalling the campaign of repression that followed, party theoretician Eduard Bern­ stein wrote, half a century later, “Whoever did not live through those days can only with great difficulty imagine the storm that broke over the Social Democrats. Remembering it and its immediate results affects me strongly even today.” Government mouthpieces branded Social Democracy the “party of assassins and conspirators” and sought to excite popular fury against them. “The most impudent lies against Social Democrats, concocted by unscrupulous reporters, were willingly peddled by the same newspapers that touted their own liberalism. No surprise then that among the bourgeois public a true fear of the socialist specter took hold.”4 Bebel accused Bismarck of having used his so-called “reptile fund [Reptilienfond]” (originally an anti-Guelph slush fund created through the expropriation of money from the dispossessed Hanoverian monarch in 1866) to buy anti-socialist coverage from the press, which helped “to whip up among the populace a fanatical hatred of Social Democracy.”5 According to Ignaz Auer, a leading Social Democrat and later Reichstag deputy, the conservative and National Liberal papers obscured the clear evidence of Nobiling’s insanity, while offering up an “unbelievable” number of “lies, contortions, and smears” against the Socialists. Even the Progressives put prominently in their election call the cry, “Out of the Reichstag with the Social Democrats!”6 Supported by this furor in the press, police authorities began a massive anti-Socialist assault. Across the empire, police raided the dwellings of known Social Democrats looking for any evidence connecting them to Nobiling or, failing that, any pretext to arrest them for encouraging attacks. Socialist publishers were prosecuted for allegedly inciting violence. Police everywhere shut down Social Democratic meetings or ensnared Socialists in false charges of lèse majesté (for instance, by entering a working-class pub and calling for a cheer to the emperor, then arresting all who did not instantly leap to their feet and remove their hats). At the same time, “thousands upon thousands of workers known to be Social Democrats were thrown into the streets” by their employers, recounted Bebel.7 The brutality of the government’s anti-Socialist actions throughout the election season notwithstanding, Social Democracy remained only a secondary target for the imperial chancellor, as is suggested by a famous though likely apocryphal story of Bismarck’s reaction to the Nobiling attentat (in James Sheehan’s rendition): “‘Now I’ve got them,’ he is supposed to have said. ‘The Social Democrats?’ he was asked.

Debating the Socialist Law

45

‘No, the National Liberals!’”8 Whether true or not, this story expressed the common wisdom of the day about Bismarck’s motives in all that followed. However keenly Social Democrats felt the lash of police and judicial terror, the conservative papers reserved some of their most caustic execrations for the Progressives and even more the National Liberals, whom they held publicly responsible for scuttling the first anti-socialist law. Intent on bringing the National Liberals to heel while simultaneously driving a wedge between left and right liberals, Bismarck and his supporters paid little attention to the Zentrum, which had opposed the May bill every bit as vigorously as the liberals. Even before Bismarck’s intervention, Nobiling’s bolt from the blue had completely sundered National Liberal unity, as the right-wing faction of the party that had only grumbled quietly during the May Reichstag debate now publicly rallied behind the chancellor while the rest of the anti-exceptional legislation coalition braced for the coming onslaught. Eight days after Nobiling’s attempt on the kaiser’s life, while the emperor still lay gravely wounded, Heinrich von Treitschke penned an essay titled Socialism and Assassination, which appeared first in the Preußische Jahrbücher and then as a standalone pamphlet. Condemning his own party’s rejection of the anti-socialist measure, Treitschke wrote that immediately upon hearing of Hödel’s attack, he himself had “believed that the hour had arrived for an open struggle against anarchy and would rather have accepted a manifoldly flawed law than prepared the way for a triumph of Social Democracy.”9 Indeed, he and two colleagues had defected to the pro-government side in May, though they agreed not to make any public statement. Now he vented his full fury, building upon the conservative case recently made against the Socialists as well as the ideas he had put forth in his 1874 Socialism and Its Supporters, embellishing these with new themes that would find an echo in the September–October debate on the new anti-socialist bill. For Treitschke, the campaign against Social Democracy made up but one part of a wider struggle against the forces of “anarchy” and cultural “barbarization [Verwilderung],” terms that recurred throughout the pamphlet. As he had in 1874, he insisted that Social Democracy grew out of the “anarchic movements” that had arisen in France repeatedly from 1789 through 1871 and had now begun in Germany to proclaim “the gospel of sensual voracity, of hatred and of envy, the derision of all that is holy.” This “many-year-long incitement of bestial passions” would, if not halted, soon culminate in fighting in the streets.10 The old historian insisted on both the irreconcilability of socialism with German civilization and the imminent danger of violent revolution the movement posed. Treitschke’s explanation for the Socialists’ success in Germany up to this point rested on two assertions: first, that Social Democratic leaders (“cowardly demagogues, who fear open struggle”) had beguiled decent but “immature lads” (unreifen Burschen) hungry for companionship, a million of whom had now been “estranged from the life of the nation”; second, that liberals had repeatedly rebuffed the government’s

46

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

demands for vigorous anti-socialist measures. Treitschke praised Bismarck for proposing exactly the kinds of measures needed to combat socialism head-on, understanding that “the current laws no longer suffice to protect the stability of society and culture against the great conspiracy of Social Democracy.”11 Though castigating all the non-conservative parties for failing to enact the needed law, he reserved his harshest judgment for the liberals, who had not rejected the law for selfish or nefarious reasons but based upon ill-conceived principles. He found it preposterous that some had likened the legislation to the Habsburg monarchy’s restrictive Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, “as if the violent struggle of foreign Austrian rulers against the threatening idea of German unity had anything in common with the security measures that a noble national government wishes to utilize against the enemies of all culture and morality.”12 Treitschke flatly rejected the liberal “political catechism” that held exceptional legislation to be unjust. Treitschke believed liberals had been wrong not only on principle but also on the question of effectiveness. He maintained that a decisive use of force “against the enemies of society” would have had a salutary effect on the revolutionaries. “The weakness of state power, and the cowardice of the propertied classes,” on the other hand, only emboldened “anarchic movements,” as the French example had repeatedly shown. If socialists faced strong government action, “the majority of their leaders would certainly, as soon as they felt the seriousness of state power, remain true to their heroic character and seek a safe hiding place” among their expatriate fellows in London.13 Instead, the anti-socialist measure’s defeat had sent precisely the wrong signal: “the nation, and particularly the anarchists, remained under the impression that the parties of order had not opposed the storming waves of social revolution with a firm decision or unanimous will.”14 But it was not too late to set matters aright, Treitschke assured his readers. Though vigorous repression would at first almost certainly result in “new raging outbreaks of red terrorism,” it would ultimately destroy “the wide net of organized conspiracy.” But this would only happen “if thoughtful liberals grant the crown what is indispensable for the reinforcement of social order.”15 If they refused, the nation risked either socialist revolution or the imposition of a reactionary conservative government that would undo liberalism’s positive achievements. For Treitschke, Germany’s honor was at stake as well. Strong anti-socialist action would cleanse the nation of the “ineradicable shame” that had issued from the “swamp of Social Democracy.” He chided the opposition parties for worrying about their individual fortunes, which “mean little next to the great question: shall our people support their crown when it picks up the glove that terrorism has flung in its face?” Germany, having lost the respect of other nations, would not regain it “through speeches, telegrams, and indignation meetings,” he opined. “Only when the nation through action proves that the crown’s dignity and its culture’s blessings are more precious than party squabbling—only then will the world know that what shames and dishonors us today was a foreign drop in Germany’s blood.”16 Treitschke stigmatized discussion

Debating the Socialist Law

47

and debate as anemic, much as Bismarck had done16 years earlier, and demanded the infusion of “blood and iron” into the struggle against anarchistic socialism. This pamphlet, as well as subsequent Preußische Jahrbücher articles, set the tone for the summer election campaign, as conservatives demanded that liberals be punished at the ballot box for their failure to protect the nation, while the National Liberal papers attacked Social Democracy and loudly proclaimed their newfound enthusiasm for Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation. Along with the National Liberals, the Progressives and the two smaller left-liberal parties faced the brunt of pro-government hostility. The Zentrum and the national minority parties largely remained apart from the fray, secure in their confessional or ethnic enclaves. The Social Democrats also found themselves shielded to a degree from the worst of the government’s electoral (if not rhetorical) wrath in their urban working-class redoubts. In the days after Nobiling’s attack, conservative newspapers railed against Social Democracy. But before long they followed the government in turning their energy to the National Liberals who, they charged, had exposed the nation to this second murderous assault on the kaiser. In its June 5 issue, the first after Nobiling’s attack, the weekly Provinzial-Correspondenz trained its ire squarely on the Socialists, blasting the movement as two-faced, showing a “Gorgon head” of violent revolutionism one moment, the face of a “mild goddess of peace” the next. While the party claimed to reject murder of every kind, it lavished praise on the Paris Commune, extolled the deeds of the bloody-minded French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, and charged the ruling classes with causing the masses’ misery. “What else can arise from such a doctrine,” the paper asked, “than the act of reckless destruction” that the nation had just witnessed?17 The editors of the Kreuz-Zeitung liked this article enough to run it in its entirety two days later, while also publishing a slew of additional anti-socialist articles, such as one that approvingly cited the right-liberal National-Zeitung’s characterization of Social Democrats as “revolutionaries in dressing gowns and slippers,” too cowardly to engage in violence themselves but happily “strewing the pernicious seeds that bear such bloody fruit.”18 By mid-June, however, the Provinzial-Correspondenz had little room to spare for attacking Social Democrats, so full of anti-liberal declamations had it become. A June 19 article on “The Responsibility for the Reichstag’s Dissolution” derided the National Liberals’ official election call, which promised to support whatever measures were necessary in “defense of the foundations of social order and state security” and against “attacks directed at the overthrow [Umsturz] of the existing legal order [Rechtsordnung] and the destruction of civil peace.” The article reminded readers of the party’s opposition to the May bill and heartily endorsed Treitschke’s Socialism and Assassination, concluding with a lengthy excerpt from it.19 In the following week’s issue there appeared another long article castigating the National Liberals, this time for their past alliance with the Progressives, who continued to demand that any anti-socialist measures be effected through revisions to the legal code rather than an exceptional law. The paper quoted Treitschke again, from an anti-Progressive speech he had recently delivered.20

48

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

The anti-liberal invective continued apace right up to the election at the end of July. In its final pre-election issue, the paper ran an article that again lambasted National Liberals for their past electoral alliances with the Progressive Party, an “indirect promoter” of Social Democracy.21 The Kreuz-Zeitung followed the same trajectory. On June 7, it chided the National Liberals for “playing with fire” by too long coddling the Social Democrats, but it also called on all parties to unite, “relying on the rock of divine truth in the struggle against revolution, which sooner or later threatens to topple the foundations of human society!”22 But by June 20, the paper declared that the resistance of “liberal [freiheitlichen] doctrines” to any attempt at “pulling back on the reins of humanity’s evil passions” had fostered the very “barbarization [Verwilderung] and confusion” among the masses that National Liberals now condemned.23 An article published two weeks later blamed liberals’ “turning away from the living God, through their apotheosis of the human spirit and embrace of natural human desires, through their mechanistic majority principle, through their loosening of all bonds of discipline and order, through their undermining of authority and piety, through their economic policies” for paving the way for Social Democracy and the terrible deeds liberals now looked on with horror. The article urged voters to hold liberals accountable for their “great share of the guilt for our current wretched circumstances.” Similar articles followed.24 The paper’s election-eve issue pithily summed up its critique: “Socialism is the logical development of liberalism. . . . He who would battle socialism must begin with liberalism.”25 To liberal papers’ universal complaints that the government seemed more focused on attacking them than Social Democracy, the Provinzial-Correspondenz responded that the government’s only electoral goal was to gain enough Reichstag votes “to pass measures through which the Social Democratic ‘school of crime’ will soon be closed.” If this majority came at liberals’ expense, they had only themselves to blame. The government had never been interested in “discussions and disputes about the nature and the merits of ‘exceptional laws’” but had simply wished to be allowed to do what had to be done to protect the nation.26 When the voters had their say on July 31, they delivered a mixed verdict. The two conservative parties gained a combined 38 seats, increasing their mandate by 50 percent, while the liberal parties lost 42 seats, roughly a quarter of their strength. Clearly the conservative campaign against the liberals had to some extent hit its mark. To everyone’s surprise (possibly even their own), the Social Democrats lost only three of their 12 seats and retained almost 90 percent of their 1877 share of the popular vote. The Zentrum and minoritynationality parties won almost exactly the same number of seats as they had in 1877, with the Zentrum in fact gaining one. Bismarck’s electoral campaign had delivered a significant blow to the liberals, and a lesser one to the Socialists, but the chancellor had failed to secure the strongly pro-government majority he had sought. It remained unclear what the election results would yield in terms of political outcomes in the parliament. When the newly-elected Reichstag convened to debate the “Law against the Communally Dangerous Endeavors of Social Democracy” (or Socialist Law, as it immedi-

Debating the Socialist Law

49

ately became known), the political ground had shifted at least somewhat to the right since the May debate. Buoyed less by conservative electoral gains than the cowed National Liberals’ political about-face, Bismarck presented the Reichstag with the much harsher anti-socialist bill he had promised. Article 1 of the proposed law read, “Societies directed toward the undermining of the existing political or social order through socialdemocratic, socialistic, or communist endeavors are to be prohibited.”27 Not only would the law ban all meetings and socialist publications, it would also permit the police to declare a “minor state of siege” in any locality deemed to be threatened by the socialist menace, under which they could expel Social Democrats from their places of residence at will. All appeals of the law’s provisions would be heard by government authorities rather than the judiciary. Whether the liberal, minority, and Catholic parties would hold the line against an even tougher law than the one they had rejected in May remained an open question. Despite the liberals’ electoral drubbing, the conservative parties lacked the votes to push through the new measure alone. Without the entire National Liberal caucus or a significant number of Zentrum, Progressive, or minority-party votes, Bismarck’s plans would yet be stymied. In many ways, the September–October Socialist Law debate resembled the previous spring’s, though it spanned 11 days of debate instead of two. The conservative line of attack remained largely unchanged: Social Democracy represented a revolutionary threat to the existence not only of the German Empire but also of German social and cultural institutions more generally, a situation that called for extraordinary judicial and police repression. Left liberals, the Zentrum, and the minority parties again criticized the proposed law as a violation of basic liberal principles that would be ineffective in weakening socialism in the long run. The most consequential differences in the debate involved the Social Democrats and the National Liberals. Unlike in May, the Social Democrats opted to partake in the debate, framing the issues from their vantage point and initiating the long-term process of recrafting their party’s public image as responsible, peaceful, and democratic. Equally important for the course of the fall debate and the evolution of German political culture was Bismarck’s success at demoralizing and splintering the National Liberals. Rudolf von Bennigsen had only barely held his caucus together against the first anti-socialist law, which would be impossible now. As seen most dramatically in Treitschke’s June pamphlet but evident in public statements throughout the summer, right-leaning National Liberals, and even centrist party members in a panic after the party’s crushing electoral defeat, cast aside all restraint in enthusiastically endorsing the new, more draconian Socialist Law. Even many who had vigorously opposed the May measure, including Ludwig Bamberger and Bennigsen himself, came out in favor of it. The Socialist Law’s official rationale retained the spirit of the May bill’s language, cautioning that the “pernicious [verderblichen] agitation of Social Democracy” threatened the entire social order. The rationale’s text explicitly linked the German Social Democrats to the now-defunct International Workingmen’s Association, quoting its

50

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

1864 founding document, to cast them as part of a vast, international revolutionary conspiracy. Not only were the Socialists’ “glorification of well-known revolutionaries, and even the deeds of the Paris Commune . . . likely to stimulate revolutionary desires [Gelüste] and passions and make the masses inclined toward violent acts,” but under socialism’s growing influence, “the moral and religious convictions that hold society together are being shaken apart, reverence and piety derided, the masses’ concept of authority confounded, respect for the law destroyed.” Social Democracy had in fact “declared open war against state and society, and proclaimed the destruction of these as its ultimate goal; it has itself in so doing abandoned the ground of equal rights for all.”28 This framing justified extreme measures, including the abandonment of the principle of legal equality. The debate speakers from the two conservative parties echoed these themes, with the danger of socialist atheism looming large in conservatives’ minds. German Conservative Party deputy Hans Hugo von Kleist-Retzow judged the Socialists’ “enmity against the belief in a living God and in judgment after death” to be the direct cause of their “enmity against all authority, first and foremost against the highest authorities of all, against the bearers of the entire national life, the emperor, the empress, and the princes.” He affirmed a statement once uttered by Bebel that “a fellowship between socialism and Christianity is impossible” while also taking a swipe at the Kulturkampf for trying to drive religion out of the public sphere.29 Bismarck for his part warned that the Socialist “gospel of negation” threatened “belief in God, belief in our monarchy, attachment to our fatherland, belief in familial relationships, belief in property.”30 Adolf Baron von Marschall rebuked some liberals for recommending changing the word “undermining” (Untergrabung) in the law’s text to the word “overthrow” (Umsturz), to clearly designate only the promotion of violent uprisings as illegal. Marschall argued that though Social Democrats did not publicly advocate “open violence against the state,” they planned “to put holes in the ground on which the foundations of the state are built,” knowing that in a matter of time “the building will collapse.” What better term than “undermining” could describe a situation in which “religion, morality, Christianity, all human and divine authority are exposed to immoderate attacks and abuse?”31 It was in this context that Prussian Interior Minister Botho zu Eulenburg blamed the Socialists for Hödel’s and Nobiling’s attacks. While acknowledging that they “were not directly instigated by Social Democracy,” he insisted, “Social Democracy’s teachings, and the ways that these were passionately disseminated” had excited the men’s “degenerate minds [verwilderten Gemüthern].”32 The would-be assassins had, in the words of Kleist-Retzow, “drunk from Social Democracy’s dizzying cup [Taumelbecher], and intoxicated by it, proceeded to their crimes.”33 In conservatives’ eyes, Socialists had created a toxic cultural environment that nurtured murderous and revolutionary ideas. As in May, conservatives explicitly tied the domestic threat to international revolutionary forces, portraying socialism as an outside, foreign threat, just as Treitschke’s June anti-socialist pamphlet had intimated. Chancellor Bismarck, making a rare appear-

Debating the Socialist Law

51

ance before the Reichstag to defend himself against Bebel’s exposure of his previously secret talks with the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle in the 1860s, adroitly turned the embarrassing revelation against the Social Democrats, arguing that as both a patriot and a monarchist, Lassalle differed totally from the current crop of Socialists. Eulenburg too compared the internationalist Social Democrats of 1878 unfavorably to Lassalle, whom he described as a true German honestly concerned about the German workers’ needs.34 Bismarck claimed that what had turned him against the Social Democrats was either Bebel’s or Liebknecht’s—he professed not to remember which—endorsement of the Paris Commune as a model for government. Bismarck saw the Commune, the “Nihilist knife, and the Nobiling-ish shotgun” as all of a piece with Social Democracy, which was merely the result of the migration of long-standing “international agitation” to Germany.35 In this light, Socialism’s suppression represented less an infringement on German liberty than the defense of the nation against foreign subversion. Given this perilous state of affairs, conservatives argued, the government had both the right and the duty to wield the extraordinary powers it demanded. While readily acknowledging that the long-term struggle against socialism needed to be waged in the cultural sphere, they insisted that this could only occur, as Helldorff put it, “if the degenerating agitation is removed beforehand”—the “entire, precisely defined purpose of this law.” He rejected the charge that the proposed law was an exceptional law, claiming that it would not penalize Social Democrats as citizens but would simply “prevent them from undermining the foundations of the state and starting among us a war against state and society.”36 Kleist-Retzow declared that facing “a preparation for high treason, the state must without regard for anything else have the power to confront it.”37 The government and its supporters repeatedly made recourse to metaphors of war to justify the legislation, and a key provision of the law explicitly drew on this logic: with only the Bundesrat’s approval, a “minor state of siege” could be declared for up to a year in localities “that are undermined by Social Democracy so that public security is threatened,” granting police the power to summarily expel Social Democrats from the area and also to impose “some general limitations aimed not directly against Social Democrats, covering the exercise of the right to assembly, the dissemination of printed material, and the freedom of owning or bearing weapons, or trading in the same.”38 Such language suggested that the Social Democrats’ “open war against state and society” might at any moment involve armed struggle in the streets. The government and its conservative allies never expected to win over the entire Reichstag to the Socialist Law. Just as their attacks during the summer election campaign were directed at the liberals, especially the National Liberals, so too were their Reichstag speeches. Speaking directly to this audience, Reichspartei representative Wilhelm von Kardorff announced, “At one time it was the task of the liberal parties to protect the freedom of the individual from the abuses of the bureaucratic police state; but it seems to me that this time is past, and I believe that now the liberal party should find its task in protecting the state from the abuses of the freedom of the individual.”39 Some National

52

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Liberals, like Treitschke and Rudolf Gneist, had long since embraced this position. Of the party’s representatives who took part in the debate, only Gneist, who had supported the May legislation too, spoke enthusiastically in favor of the new Socialist Law. The imminent threat of socialist revolution was central to his reasoning: “when the highest legislative authority in the empire declares that the state and society are in extreme danger, that the imperial government must take emergency measures . . . in that case the interest of the state is supreme.”40 This argument for exceptional measures would be laid out with greater theoretical rigor four decades later in Carl Schmitt’s influential theorization of the “state of emergency” or “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand).41 Other National Liberals, including party leader Bennigsen and prominent members of the party’s left wing Ludwig Bamberger and Eduard Lasker, found themselves in a painful position. All had voted against the milder anti-socialist law in the spring but feared the relentless attacks of their detractors to the party’s right and from the right wing of the party itself. Smarting from the electoral beating they had taken at the end of July and concerned about maintaining party unity, none was eager to stand openly against the law. In the Reichstag debate, National Liberals spoke far less often than either conservatives or the bill’s opponents. When the party leaders did speak, they tried to present their complete turnaround from their position of May as something other than pure hypocrisy. Referring to the law repeatedly as a “special law” [Spezialgesetz] instead of an “exceptional law,” Bennigsen defended his support for it by claiming, improbably, that it differed totally from the legislation his party had opposed in the spring, because it did not target socialist endeavors “as such” for punishment but only those acts “directed at the overthrow [Umsturz] of existing political and civic relations.” He insisted, implausibly, that Social Democratic activities not of a revolutionary character would be unaffected by this “special law.” At the same time, he seemed to accept Kardorff ’s call to focus more on the state’s protection than individual rights, justifying his support for the law by describing the incalculable damage that would result from the “catastrophe” of a successful socialist revolution: “Destroyed at the same time with law, morality, and traditional culture would be the greatest part of centuries of accumulated national capital.” In essence, Germany must burn down the Rechtsstaat to save it.42 Ludwig Bamberger also relied on the specter of violent revolution to justify his newfound support for the law, explaining that the second attack, as well as an apparent rise in incidents of lèse majesté, had opened his eyes to the inability of moderate Social Democrats to control the “anarchic masses” whose passions they stirred up. In a time of crisis the masses would be swept along toward violence, whether leaders like Bebel wished it or not. He also tried to defend his position on liberal grounds, noting that even Britain and France had not hesitated to use extraordinary measures in times of crisis, such as during the Chartist demonstrations of the 1840s and the Paris Commune. In a peculiar intellectual contortion, Bamberger declared that “the ban on Social Democratic endeavors is not an exceptional law against specific persons, but rather an objective exceptional law,” which defined the law on one particular topic (not unlike

Debating the Socialist Law

53

Bismarck’s proposed state tobacco monopoly). Perhaps seeking to cover himself with a liberal fig leaf, Bamberger applauded the law’s use of the term “socialistic,” which others had criticized for being too broad, because the true danger to society was socialistic thinking in all its forms, including conservative state socialism.43 Of course, it was utterly fanciful to imagine that the government might ever use the law to challenge Bismarck’s state socialist measures. Eduard Lasker, the only other National Liberal to speak at length, strongly condemned the bill’s exceptional-law character before offering his grudging support. He castigated the government for choosing to put forth an exceptional law when it could just as easily have asked for changes to the empire’s press, assembly, and association laws that would have accomplished its purported goal, namely, preventing the dissemination of incitements to revolutionary violence, without violating the principles of the Rechtsstaat. However, Lasker continued, as a practical politician he understood that no such bill would be forthcoming. If the Socialist Law bill failed, the government would instead wage a vicious campaign against the Reichstag, perhaps dissolving the body again. Given a choice between these two evils, Lasker gave the bill his reluctant backing. But he put the government on notice that the law, “which should serve for the establishment of peace,” must not be wielded as a tool “of war and hatred,” a sentiment that received cries of “Very good!” and “Bravo!” from the Reichstag chamber’s left.44 Lasker expressed the feelings of many of his party’s left wing; the months after the law’s passage confirmed their worst fears and they refused to support its renewal in 1880. The law’s opponents challenged the view of the Socialist Law as an emergency response to a socialist war on society, portraying it instead as an inappropriate and dangerous abrogation of legal normality—an exceptional law. This argument came most naturally, in a philosophical sense, to the left liberals of the Progressive Party and the German People’s Party. The most prominent Progressives to speak were Albert Hänel, a constitutional law professor in Kiel, and Richter, the party’s parliamentary leader. Hänel, who spoke four times during the 12 days of debate, laid out the essential liberal criticisms of the proposed law: it violated the basic principle of the Rechtsstaat, legal equality for all; it made no distinction between actions and ideas, and thereby criminalized the free expression of beliefs; and it could set the stage for attacks on any group the government distrusted (he enumerated the particularists, republicans, ultramontanes, and Progressives as potential targets, all of whom could be regarded as seeking to “undermine” current social relations, depending on how one interpreted that term). Hänel took particular exception to the fact that the bill conflated scientific inquiry and discussions of ideas with riots and uprisings, decrying the notion that government authorities should be given a free hand to “render a verdict about whether specific teachings are immoral or undermining of the state, whether they are legally condemnable [verwerf­lich].” Directing his remarks at his fellow liberals, Hänel claimed that approving the Socialist Law meant repudiating their fundamental principles: “When you deny this core of religious and political freedom of belief—freedom of press, association, and

54

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

assembly—then I say that you set yourselves in total opposition to all that we until now have associated with the idea of the liberal party for more than a hundred years.”45 This did not mean that Progressives wished Social Democrats to run riot; on the contrary, they “would be prepared, now as before, to take steps against punishable [strafwürdig] riots on the basis of the general law” and even to amend the legal code to fill in any gaps in the current law’s ability to do this.46 Leopold Sonnemann, representative of the small left-liberal German People’s Party and editor of the influential Frankfurter Zeitung, also rose to defend the liberal tradition. He called the Socialist Law an exceptional law “in the worst sense of the word, a law that annihilates a series of arduously achieved freedoms and rights and breaks apart and riddles with holes our best laws.” He also considered the proposed law counterproductive, warning, “there is no greater encouragement to class hatred than what lies in this law.” Public engagement with the Social Democrats, by contrast, had the potential both to moderate their speech and to debunk their ideas. Sonnemann credited the empire’s press laws with bringing about the improved tone shown by the working-class movement’s periodicals in recent years, citing examples of this moderation in the party’s “scientific” paper Die Zukunft (The Future). He also insisted that the government already possessed ample weapons to prevent unrest in Germany, including, he observed ironically, these same press laws, whose stringency could hardly be in doubt, given the many journalists currently imprisoned under their terms.47 If Hänel and Sonnemann offered a philosophical defense of liberalism and repudiation of exceptional laws, Richter’s speeches focused mostly on the political, condemning Bismarck for falsely accusing Progressives of acting as allies of Socialism during the election campaign, when it was Bismarck himself who had not only once flirted with Ferdinand Lassalle but also continued to support a quasi-socialist tobacco monopoly and other anti–free trade measures.48 Richter charged Bismarck with cynical and dishonest politicking from the moment of Nobiling’s attack through the July election: he complained that the chancellor had accused the liberal parties of unpatriotic and even treasonous behavior and peddled the preposterous claim that the Progressives possessed a secret fund to support socialist attentats and other outrages. This anti-Progressive campaign had cost his party numerous seats, while allowing the Socialists to retain most of their faction’s strength.49 Richter mocked Bismarck’s assertion that the Progressive Party was a negative party, noting that the chancellor’s definition of “negative” and “positive” seemed to depend entirely on what he wanted at any given moment. The chancellor’s attempts to divide the nation, Richter argued, obscured the basic truth that “we are all of the mind that the chief danger of socialist agitation lies in the excitement of class hatred.”50 The only question was how best to prevent this. Here Richter echoed his fellow left liberals, proposing that direct engagement with Social Democrats in public debate offered the most effective means of weakening socialism. Excluding Socialists from the public sphere would simply drive their agitation underground, where

Debating the Socialist Law

55

it would proceed in secret, among a greatly embittered working class. “I fear the Social Democrats more under this law than without this law,” averred the Progressive leader.51 Just like the conservatives, left liberals directly addressed the National Liberals, many of whom were obviously conflicted about the law. Throughout his speech, Richter cited with approval comments Bennigsen and Bamberger had made during the May debate, while Sonnemann bluntly called the party’s leaders hypocrites for their totally unjustifiable about-face. In addition to reading out to the Reichstag what they had said in May, he also quoted a speech Bamberger had delivered at a revolutionary gathering in 1849 in which the then-radical had championed driving monarchs from their thrones. Sonnemann was greeted with raucous laughter when he read a passage from the introduction to the event’s commemorative program (Festschrift) that ended with the exhortation: “Fight for the Social Democratic republic!”52 Whether or not such mockery was likely to change any votes, by recalling Bamberger’s radical past Sonnemann implied that Social Democrats too might become more pragmatic and moderate over the decades. The other opponents of the May law—the political Catholics, national minorities (most of whom were also Catholic and closely allied with the Zentrum), and particularists, such as Bismarck’s great enemies the Guelphs—stood firmly against the revised version. The Zentrum’s parliamentary leaders denounced the law in much the same terms as they had previously, like left liberals rejecting the principle and efficacy of exceptional laws and insisting that the socialist danger must be fought in the public arena, through intellectual (and especially spiritual) means. Even more than left liberals, they emphasized that the vagueness of the law’s language could permit its abuse by police and its application against non-Socialists. On the debate’s first day, Zentrum co-founder Peter Reichensperger delivered a lengthy speech in which he described socialism as part of an evil as old as human history, which must be fought in “private and public life, in the church and in the school, from the university to the smallest village school.” If unchallenged, this moral danger would grow in a generation to a form “compared to which the Paris Commune will look like an idyll.” Even so, he would only endorse the use of laws to prevent revolutionary acts, not to silence radical speech. Not only would an exceptional law violate Socialists’ rights as “citizens of the state” and potentially be misused to restrict “the right of liberty of the whole nation,” it would fail to stop political violence just as Russia’s brutal policing methods had failed against the “similar endeavors of Nihilism.”53 Ludwig Windthorst complained that the law as written would likely “completely prevent public discussion of social questions,” which was vital to undercutting socialism’s appeal. Along with confronting Social Democrats in open debate, added Windthorst, the government should cease its attempts to muzzle the Catholic Church, one of the strongest bulwarks against socialism’s spread.54 Zentrum politicians and their allies also advanced, in Alsatian representative Jean Dollfus’s words, “the improvement of the material and moral relations of the population” as an indispensible aspect of combating socialism.55

56

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

These opponents also expressed wariness at the vagueness of the law’s description of its target. Reichensperger, like Hänel and others, objected to the term “undermining” as too broad and nebulous. After all, he told his colleagues, every reform movement seeks an “undermining of the established political and social order.”56 Fellow Zentrum deputy Christoph Moufang raised this issue as well, defending his right, “as a friend of the fatherland and as a friend of the German people,” to work to reform the existing social order.57 Windthorst too rejected the word “undermining,” while criticizing the substitution some had proposed—“overthrow” (Umsturz)—as no clearer. Did this term encompass only violent revolution, or might it also apply to the “slow” revolution of reform movements as well? He also took issue with the whole notion of banning organizations and publications promoting “socialistic” ends. Like Richter, Windthorst brought up Bismarck’s support for a state tobacco monopoly.58 Sonnemann had jested two days earlier that, according to a definition of socialism recently published in a pro-government newspaper, Reichspartei representative Kardorff could conceivably be labeled a socialist.59 A point of great concern to Catholics, Progressives, and other “enemies of the empire” was what the government might do with any new powers the Reichstag granted it. Windthorst foresaw the law setting the stage for ever-expanding police powers, such as violating the privacy of the post, which could be employed against whomever Bismarck deemed a “negative” force.60 Guelph representative Ludwig Brüel was considerably more specific, ticking off for his colleagues the many groups who had in the last seven years come in for persecution as Reichsfeinde: the Danes, the Poles, the Alsatians and Lorrainians, the Guelphs, the particularists, the Catholics, “and now comes the war against the entire Fourth Estate.”61 Brüel saw the Socialist Law as but one part of an ongoing campaign of government repression eroding the rights of all German citizens. Zentrum and minority representatives also worried about the corrosive long-term effects of exceptional legislation. Georg Baron von und zu Franckenstein read a statement on behalf of the entire Zentrum caucus condemning Socialist agitation, “insofar as it is directed at destroying fear of God, Christianity, and church, or insofar as it threatens society or property in a legally punishable way,” but adamantly opposing exceptional laws. Franckenstein declared that he and his colleagues would have supported a Rechtsgesetz (a “legal law” or “proper law,” as opposed to an exceptional law) altering the imperial legal code to impose harsher punishments for riots or other violent outbursts if the government had offered that instead.62 Moufang too insisted that socialism must be fought with “laws rooted in justice” (Justizgesetze) rather than “police laws.”63 Polish priest and Reichstag representative Ludwik von Jazdzewski also worried about giving the government broad powers without judicial oversight: “We Poles have experienced enough to know what it means when such instruments of repression are placed in the hands of the political police.”64 The party’s parliamentary leader, Leon von Czarlinski, commented that the Poles’ “colossal experience” with unchecked police power had taught them that eventually “justice and freedom are so far suppressed that constitutionalism becomes a fiction and the constitution no more than a tiny scrap of paper.”65 Speaking on behalf

Debating the Socialist Law

57

of his fellow Alsace-Lorrainians canon Landelin Winterer drew an explicit parallel between the Socialist Law and the exceptional law in force in his home region (despite the total absence of any “danger to public security,” its stated purpose), whose abuse had embittered the populace and risked sparking the kinds of violent protests it was allegedly designed to prevent. This law’s “great calamity for our land” disinclined him and his fellows to hand over more power to police authorities.66 The most stinging indictment of the proposed law came from the Guelph Brüel, who decried it as a “wartime law” (Kriegsgesetz) that would inevitably erode “fundamental rights” that should be “treasured and respected”—“freedom of the press, of association, of movement, of trade.” Worse still was that the bill left the enforcement and judgment of the law’s provisions not to the legal system but to the government itself. The correct response to the socialist threat would be to put “repressive measures, insofar as they are necessary, in proper laws [Rechtsgesetze], simultaneously making at least a start on positive measures for the remedy of just complaints.”67 In these speeches, Catholics and minorities no less than left liberals championed the ideal of the Rechtsstaat. Catholic opposition to exceptional laws was hardly new. In their anti–Socialist Law speeches Zentrum and minority Catholic politicians repeatedly invoked the Kulturkampf, and in particular the Jesuit Law of 1872, which had banned the order from the empire and given police the power to expel individual Jesuits from their areas of residence (if German citizens) or from the empire entirely (if foreigners). The law had been justified as a defensive measure against alleged Jesuit threats to public order. Bismarck had cast aside the concerns of this law’s opponents in a manner totally consistent with his usual attitude: “We are acting in self-defense and cannot restrain ourselves with liberal phrases about citizens’ rights.” The debate over the Jesuit Law involved many of the same participants as the Socialist Law, and a similar bloc of conservatives and National Liberals came out in favor. The Zentrum, minorities, and August Bebel, the lone Social Democrat in the Reichstag at the time, voted against the measure. However, half the Progressive caucus also voted for it, sacrificing their commitment to individual liberty to the long-standing liberal goal of reducing potential Church influence on the state. The Jesuit Law’s liberal opponents included Sonnemann and National Liberals Bamberger and Lasker, both of whom would join a left-liberal secession from the party in 1880.68 If many liberals had failed to remain true to their principles in 1872, some now at least seemed much more alert to the danger Catholics saw in an exceptional law—the possible descent from constitutionalism and the rule of law to arbitrary police rule. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the debates over extending the Socialist Law and over repealing the Jesuit Law reinforced the commitment of all reichsfeindlich parties to the preservation of equal rights. The Social Democrats, reversing their prior opposition to partaking in a debate whose starting premise they considered illegitimate, now chose to articulate a clear perspective not only on the proposed law but also on Social Democracy’s place on the

58

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

political landscape. Lengthy speeches by August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Wilhelm Bracke set out the party’s key propositions. Bracke, a Lassallean in the 1860s who broke away to become a cofounder of the Eisenacher faction in 1869, was a prominent party leader commanding a huge following in his native Brunswick. He served only two years in the Reichstag, from 1877 to 1879, when he gave up his mandate for health reasons shortly before his untimely death in 1880 at the age of 37. These three Social Democrats put forth many of the same arguments as the law’s other opponents, while also beginning the process of public self-definition they would continue for the next decade.69 The Socialists denounced the law as an exceptional law akin to those targeting other minorities and warned that it would push Germany in the direction of becoming a repressive police state. Bracke compared the plight of Socialists directly to that of Catholics, calling the government’s proposal part of a “red Kulturkampf,” which he predicted would fail as clearly as the “black Kulturkampf” had. “Not for fear of the effects on our party” alone did Socialists speak against the law, he announced, but because “we believe ourselves honor-bound to defend the general liberty of citizens.”70 Calling the law “an exceptional law in the worst sense of the word—an exceptional law through which a million German citizens of the empire are outlawed, politically ostracized,” Liebknecht warned that it would open the door to a dangerous level of police despotism: “The law gives the police such extensive, absolute authority that, if they made full use of the law’s latitude, all public political life in Germany would come to a halt.”71 Like others, Bebel criticized the term “undermining” as lacking a precise definition, and he cautioned that anyone in the chamber could be labeled a “Social Democrat,” since all probably agreed in part with at least one statement in the party’s Gotha Program.72 These points that Socialists raised reinforced what the law’s other opponents were saying. At the same time, the Social Democrats spent much of their energy constructing a specific narrative about their movement’s character that rejected not only the law’s premises but also their opponents’ assertions about the party’s nature. All three speakers repudiated the charge that their movement had anything to do with the spring attacks on the kaiser, either directly or indirectly. Bebel described the writer of the official press report asserting that Hödel had acted out of socialist convictions as “an assassin against a large, honorable party” and bitterly denounced conservatives who had throughout the electoral campaign decried Socialists as “the party of the kaiser murderers” and whipped up “the most rabid and furious hate” against them.73 As Socialists had done many times since May, Liebknecht reminded his colleagues that Hödel had been expelled from the SAPD and at the time of his attentat worked for the Christian Social Party. Nobiling, a National Liberal according to Liebknecht, had never had any connection to Socialism whatsoever.74 Social Democrats had insisted for months that the attacks had lacked any political content (though later Socialist accounts accepted Hödel’s self-identification as an anarchist or else described him as a “semi-anarchist”), pronouncing both men insane.75

Debating the Socialist Law

59

Explaining to the public that they had nothing to do with political violence was indispensible to the party’s reshaping of its image. The Reichstag speakers reminded their colleagues that political assassinations had existed for thousands of years and they could no more be held responsible for the 1878 attacks than German liberals could be for assassination attempts in previous eras. Bracke brought up the anti-monarchical tone of liberal newspapers during the 1848–1849 revolution as an example. “Perhaps Dr. Nobiling came across a copy of the Mainzer Zeitung [Mainz Newspaper] from 1849,” he quipped, “in which an attempted assassination against the kaiser, then Prince of Prussia . . . was glorified in an extravagant manner.”76 Closely associated with this paper, Bracke commented to the chamber’s great amusement, was “a certain Bamberger.” Bracke, like Sonnemann, placed Social Democrats within the same political tradition as current German liberals by drawing attention to the National Liberal’s history as an 1848er.77 Socialists reinforced this idea in their portrayals of the party as devoted to peaceful reform rather than violent revolution. Bebel pointed to the complete absence of violent uprisings in Germany over the previous decade and a half of the socialist movement’s expansion as evidence that the party did not promote “violent revolution” (gewaltsamen Umsturz). Revolution as Socialists understood the term did not inevitably imply society’s overthrow but encompassed reform efforts as well.78 Bracke elaborated on this point, stating that revolution referred only to fundamental change, not the means by which it might be achieved. Critics failed to grasp that the “transformation” (Umwandlung) in historical, economic, and political relations Social Democrats sought need not be brought about in a “bloody and violent fashion” and could in fact best be achieved “on the grounds of legislation in a manner entirely peaceful and for the most part even respectful of the interests of the ruling classes.” By teaching workers to put their faith “in legislation, in the development of matters with the aid of elections, in free speech, and in the enlightenment of society” and explaining that it was impossible “to change institutions through political murder,” Socialists actually decreased the risk of violent outbreaks. Bracke also addressed two pieces of evidence opponents had brought up to suggest Social Democrats endorsed violence: the Communist Manifesto’s exhortation to revolution and sympathetic Socialist coverage of Russian Nihilism. When Interior Minister Eulenburg had cited Marx and Engels’s manifesto, he ignored its historical context; in 1848, workers lacking the franchise and other rights could not work for change through the regular political process, whereas in Germany 30 years later they could. For the same reason, Social Democrats considered Nihilist tactics completely inappropriate for Germany but understood that violence represented the only path to effect change under the brutally oppressive tsarist system.79 The intertwined claims that oppressive conditions bred political violence and political freedom nurtured peaceful reformism would form the cornerstone of Social Democratic challenges to the Socialist Law over the next 12 years. Social Democrats offered as proof of their essentially peaceful nature their reaction to the firestorm that Bismarck had unleashed against them since May. The character traits they had shown in this time of greatest adversity—responsibility and discipline—

60

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

revealed their true nature and thus their worthiness for political participation. Despite unjust persecution, Bebel averred, Social Democrats had shown singular self-restraint: “Never, I am sure, has a party found itself in such a difficult and dangerous situation as ours, and never, I am sure, has a party shown like ours its determination to remain calm and peaceful, that it is unwilling in the face of whatever type of provocation to be seduced into thoughtless actions.”80 Liebknecht hit the same note, proclaiming, “Despite the dreadful uproar of the last months, despite the multiple provocations against our party, the public peace has not been disturbed for a single moment.” He promised that Socialists would not “in any way be provoked into acts that could be labeled as insurrection, as high treason, as incitement to revolution [Umsturz], etc. Through our agitation the Social Democratic party is so well-disciplined and organized, so well-trained and so thoroughly educated in the laws of the development and movement of state and society that none of our party members would for even a moment think that the attainment of our goals could be brought about more quickly through any kind of putsch or violent blow.”81 Liebknecht had come a long way since his 1869 promise of battle in the streets, now insisting that only Socialism could prevent such an outcome. Bebel described the vast infrastructure the Socialist movement had built over the previous decade, from newspapers and magazines to lending libraries and education programs, as promoting disciplined and peaceful change. By vitiating party institutions and embittering workers, the Socialist Law threatened to bring about precisely what its backers sought to prevent—“a violent revolution [Umsturz].”82 If Social Democrats had emerged from the tests of the previous months deeply committed to the values of legal equality, open debate, and individual liberty, and displaying a calm and disciplined demeanor, the National Liberals, in Liebknecht’s view, had revealed their moral bankruptcy: “out of fear of the red specter the German bourgeoisie, insofar as it is represented by the National Liberals, is willing to place the people’s rights and liberty on the sacrificial altar.” He regarded it as “an almost tragic fate” that “National Liberalism along with German parliamentarism are to be buried by their chief advocates and that the undertaker’s work is being performed by Herr Lasker and Herr Bennigsen, the two classic supporters of the parliamentary principle in Germany.”83 Liebknecht passed over the left liberals’ staunch defense of liberal principles, casting Social Democracy as liberalism’s only legitimate heir now that the National Liberals had so abjectly tossed aside their long-held values.

To recast socialism in the public eye as a peaceful reform movement, Social Democrats had to separate themselves from some of their own past pronouncements as well as from the many European socialist proponents of violent revolution. The former they sought to do by bracketing the Communist Manifesto, Liebknecht’s 1869 speech, Bebel’s endorsement of the Paris Commune in 1871, and other inflammatory statements as historical artifacts, no longer germane to current social and political circumstances. The

Debating the Socialist Law

61

latter they tried to do by explicating the fissure within the European socialist movement between Social Democrats and various revolutionaries, increasingly exemplified by the anarchists. Even in 1878, the term “anarchist” was still mostly used in a non-ideological sense, to refer to any promoter of “anarchy,” or more rarely, to describe the most radical elements of the socialist camp, more revolutionary than the Social Democrats but essentially of a piece with them. In both contexts, they were often lumped in with Russian Nihilists or Paris Communards. But that fall, Socialists began to use the word more deliberately to characterize an ideology not only distinct from, but opposed to, socialism. This rhetorical strategy reflected a real ideological division that had intensified since the International’s collapse in 1871–1872. Since that time, Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin and his Swiss, Italian, and Spanish adherents had begun to articulate a decentralized, “anti-authoritarian” vision of society and to theorize that they could spark widespread revolution through small exemplary uprisings. In September 1872, upon their expulsion from the International, now totally dominated by Marx, Bakunin and his supporters founded the Anti-Authoritarian International, which existed for the next five years as a loose federation of like-minded socialist groups, while the Marxist faction ceased to hold congresses at all. A rapid deterioration of his health kept Bakunin from playing an active role in the new organization (he died in 1876), but it embraced his revolutionary, anti-parliamentarian, and of course anti-authoritarian views. In 1874, the Italian delegates to the Anti-Authoritarian International’s Brussels Congress persuaded the meeting to endorse the insurrectionist tactic that came to be known as “propaganda of the deed.” Its goal lay not in toppling the ruling social or political order but in igniting the masses’ innate but dormant revolutionary instincts in preparation for a future grand revolutionary uprising. The Anti-Authoritarian International rejected not only parliamentary involvement but also all trade union activity not devoted to the revolutionary abolition of private property. The anti-authoritarians eventually began to adopt the term “anarchist” for themselves, signaling their increasing distance from other socialists. However, terminological and ideological boundaries remained rather fluid. The German anti-authoritarians in Switzerland who founded their own short-lived party in 1877 called it the “German-Speaking Anarchic-Communistic [anarchisch-kommunistischen] Party.”84 Other common terms included “anarchist socialist,” “revolutionary socialist,” and “communist anarchist.” A decisive break between the anarchists and the more-or-less Marxist socialists occurred in late 1877. Members of both groups had for half a decade held out hope that they could reconstitute a unified International; to this end, they convened a Universal Socialist Congress in Ghent, Switzerland, in September 1877. The members of the Anti-Authoritarian International met before the Ghent Congress, reaffirming their anti-parliamentary, anti–moderate trade union, pro-revolutionary positions. When the Ghent Congress convened, it immediately became clear that no common ground between the socialists and the anti-authoritarians/anarchists could be found. Rather than unifying the factions, it finalized the break. So ended the dream

62

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

of a reunified European socialist movement. Over the next few years, acrimony between the two factions became increasingly heated and public. Non-socialist observers showed a clear awareness of this rupture between anarchists and socialists, whether or not they ascribed much significance to it. Adolf Held, the Kathedersozialist sympathetic to workers’ demands but unremittingly hostile to the German Social Democratic leaders, lamented the public’s ignorance of the split as only a scholar could: “So unknown is our Social Democracy that the least educated among us cannot tell it apart from the wild doings [wüsten Treiben] of the Bakuninists or pure anarchists, although Marx fought tenaciously against this foolish tendency and the German Social Democrats themselves at the most recent Ghent Congress grappled sharply with these opponents. Others throw the Social Democrats without further thought into a single pot with the Paris Commune or even with the Gallic Furies [Megären] and their petroleum.” But these conflations were wrong, Held noted. “Thinking Social Democrats” had never had anything to do with “Bakunin’s senseless war against all authority” and had finally expelled the Bakuninists from the International. The Commune Held described as “neither Bakuninist, nor Jacobin, nor Social Democratic” but, rather, a “witches’ Sabbath” of nonsensical revolutionism. Despite such careful parsing, Held in the end still assailed the German Social Democrats as lawless, atheistic, unpatriotic revolutionaries who sought to whip up “passionate hatred against all existing orders.”85 Franz Mehring, the liberal journalist and later Socialist convert, also delved into the mutual hostility between Marx and the anarchists and described the Ghent Congress as having prevented “Bakunin’s ‘revolutionary anarchism’” from becoming intertwined with the “democratic socialism of the Germans.” Bakunin he called a “half or totally crazy visionary” who preached “‘anarchy,’ the total elimination of all classes, all authorities, all states, every patriotism, every nationality, every inequality of society up to and including the differences between man and woman.” Socialists did not share the “depravity of this desolate nihilism,” nor did they condone conspiratorial plotting, attentats, and “all means of brutal violence,” putting their faith instead in “intellectual [geistigen] struggle with intellectual weapons.”86 As Held had done, Mehring qualified this comment, noting that Marx and Engels had no objection to violence itself but only to a “foolish, because untimely, use of violence.” Marxists hoped to take political power within the existing system, biding their time until the “revolutionary spirit” filled the masses to initiate the current society’s violent destruction. In the end, declared Mehring, Social Democrats and anarchists remained united in the belief that “violence must and will be the decisive and last lever of the social revolution.”87 He clearly understood that socialists and anarchists advocated very different tactics, but he saw their ultimate goals as identical. Mehring brought the same understanding to bear on the German events of 1878. He rejected attempts to pin the blame for the two attacks on Social Democracy: not only were both men insane and their deeds strongly condemned by the Socialists, but Hödel could not figure out if he was a follower of Bakunin or Marx or Stöcker. Mehring

Debating the Socialist Law

63

speculated, “Perhaps an anarchist catchword had fallen into his ears, because in the last months of his vagabond life he was known to meet with an agitator of this sect; before the court he boasted of his anarchism, and ‘propaganda is made by deed’ is a favorite expression of the Bakuninists.” Though regarding Socialists as wholly innocent of Hödel’s and Nobiling’s crimes, he nevertheless condemned the hostility that Social Democrats showed toward the rest of German society and feared the damage done to the workers’ struggle by the “communist demagoguery” of “Liebknecht and comrades,” whose “every third word is a curse and every tenth word is an undignified lie.” The “brutal, crude revolutionary antics [Revolutionsspielerei]” that defined Social Democratic agitation only impeded the workers’ peaceful attempts to improve their lives.88 Conservatives struck a similar tone, acknowledging but minimizing the significance of the differences between socialists and anarchists. The author of a July article in the Provinzial-Correspondenz reporting that Hödel had received a death sentence detailed the attempted assassin’s association with anarchist Emil Werner (the agitator Mehring alluded to) and described anarchism as the belief that political and social relations could only be changed through violence. The author cited Hödel’s declaration that he was an anarchist but also other statements he had made in which he proclaimed himself a Social Democrat and once referred to him as an “anarchist-socialist.” Such terminological looseness reveals how little meaningful distinction the author saw between the revolutionary factions.89 If some of the confusion of terms in Hödel’s case could be traced to the would-be assassin’s own muddled thinking, the pattern recurred in other contexts. During the Reichstag’s Socialist Law debate, conservatives repeatedly elided the distinction between socialism and anarchism. Botho zu Eulenburg contended that for Social Democracy “the peaceful development is merely a stage leading to the final goal, which cannot be reached by any other means than the route of violence!” As evidence of the Social Democrats’ destructive proclivities, Eulenburg cited a proclamation of the Jura Federation’s July conference in Freiburg, which had “expressly declared that Hödel’s and Nobiling’s deeds were revolutionary acts which had their full sympathy.” Anticipating the Social Democratic deputies’ response to this charge (namely, that the Jura Federation, founded by Bakunin and his admirers and one of the main groups behind the AntiAuthoritarian International, was an anarchist organization), Eulenburg acknowledged that “it is very well known to me . . . that the faction of Marx is different from the faction of the so-called anarchists.” But it could not be denied, he continued, that these movements were related, and it was an established principle that among revolutionary movements “the more extreme tendency gradually gains the upper hand” over the moderate direction. The right wing of the Reichstag affirmed this comment with a cry of “Very true!”90 Secret reports produced by the Berlin political police for government officials’ use reveal that this interpretation was more than simply a rhetorical posture for discrediting Social Democracy in public (though it served that purpose as well).91 They show an entrenched belief in the equivalence of Social Democrats and anarchists, despite

64

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

evidence to the contrary. In the fall of 1878, the Berlin Police Presidium under the leadership of Guido von Madai began issuing these reports on the state of “Social Democratic and social revolutionary movements” to approximately 150 top officials. When these semiannual (later annual) reports—redacted by the police president from the reports of political police spies, local police, and government officials and information gleaned from published socialist newspapers and pamphlets—were first issued, they expressed the conviction that the “so-called moderates” and the “revolutionaries” (later “anarchists”) differed regarding methods but shared a common ideology.92 Like the liberals Held and Mehring, political police leaders recognized socialist-anarchist antagonism but regarded the two movements as merely representing different points along a revolutionary continuum. Social Democrats confronted this understanding head-on, using the two factions’ increasingly well-known enmity to argue that they represented opposite philosophies. Addressing the fact that an appendix to the Socialist Law’s official rationale included a copy of the Ghent Manifesto, a document produced by the Universal Socialist Congress of 1877, Bebel explained that this manifesto did not, as the government asserted, prove Social Democrats to be violent revolutionaries but in fact specifically criticized “that faction of the socialists who are called anarchists and who work exclusively for violent revolution. That faction, which is represented by Mikhail Bakunin, declares: there is no means other than violent revolution.” Social Democrats, Bebel averred, not only had nothing in common with the anarchists but worked actively to expose them: “Whoever in Germany knows anything of what the anarchists desire, and especially Bakunin’s stated goals, does not have the Geheimräthe [privy councillors] of the Bundesrat and the Imperial Chancellery to thank for it, but rather the spiritual and scientific head of the International and of socialism, our comrade Karl Marx, who has made their secret plans public.”93 Bebel went on to quote passages from the Ghent Manifesto declaring that workers should advance their cause by electing parliamentary representatives in nations where they had the vote, and elsewhere by agitating for suffrage. Bebel positioned Social Democracy as the antithesis of anarchism, presenting secrecy and violence as the exclusive province of anarchists, opposed by socialists’ commitment to openness and parliamentarism. In so doing, he offered a radically different interpretation of the two movements’ relationship from the one the government, its supporters, and many liberal critics espoused. Bracke picked up this theme, challenging Interior Minister Eulenburg’s assertion that Socialists could be blamed for anarchist violence on the theory that “the more extreme tendency always wins out.” Social Democrats had actually reduced the risk of anarchist violence, Bracke maintained, by “winning over a large portion of those workers who had supported the anarchist point of view to our more reformist orientation.” Turning on its head the conservative understanding of the Paris Commune, Bracke suggested that if Social Democracy had been allowed to thrive in France, it would have thwarted the violent anarchistic tendencies that came to the fore in 1871, saving the nation from bloody

Debating the Socialist Law

65

civil war. Social Democracy—“regarding and regarded by that movement as its fiercest enemy”—totally rejected anarchism, expressing “such hostile, such stark antagonism to the mania, to the tactics, to the anarchists’ ways and means, that the antagonism could not be starker.”94 Bebel’s and Bracke’s speeches offered the basic outline of a discourse Social Democrats would elaborate during the 1880s: Social Democracy promoted peaceful revolution through disciplined agitation and parliamentary activity, weakening the threat of uncontrolled anarchist violence. The role of anti-anarchist rhetoric in Socialist selfdefinition grew more prominent and more refined over time. For instance, Bebel’s description of anarchism as “a faction of the socialists” soon disappeared.95 The charges that conservative repression produced anarchism and that police agents provocateurs nourished it also came to play a pivotal role in Social Democratic denunciations of the Socialist Law.96 If opposition to anarchism played only a modest role in Social Democratic selfpresentation in the fall of 1878, this was in large part due to the recentness of the ­socialist-anarchist break. However, this entire line of reasoning also depended on unified German Social Democratic support for peaceful reform and opposition to revolutionary violence. No such Socialist unity existed in the autumn of 1878, as all were reminded by the vitriolic blast let loose by Wilhelm Hasselmann during the Socialist Law debate. In one of the lengthiest speeches of the entire debate, Hasselmann addressed point by point Bismarck’s allegations against the Socialists. He challenged Bismarck’s claim that Social Democrats were a party of negation by pointing to a string of positive legislative proposals they had put forth, from curtailing Sunday work to limiting children’s and women’s labor, to improving factory workers’ conditions. Accepting Bismarck’s assertion that socialism eroded the people’s veneration of monarchy, he suggested that the chancellor had led the way in this regard when Prussia annexed Hanover in 1866, dispossessing its monarch of most of his kingdom. Hasselmann responded to the accusation that Socialists lacked patriotism in opposing the Franco-Prussian War by declaring that it was more patriotic to love peace than to engineer the deaths of thousands of peaceful workers and “gather bloody laurels on the battlefield.” He defended the Communards as victims of the French military’s aggression and argued that the Commune’s demise in blood and fire had occurred only because the army refused to treat with its opponents.97 Responding to the assertion that socialists wished to destroy the family, Hasselmann replied that capitalism was already doing it. Social Democrats, he claimed, merely aspired to a world in which every worker would be able to lead a decent life: “The worker should not be sacrificed to the instrument of labor, he should not be acquired by capitalists as a kind of commodity, but should be master over the instrument of labor.”98 Though certainly the most impassioned defense of Socialist beliefs delivered during the debate, little in these claims was shocking. But Hasselmann at times took his intransigent tone much further, offering inflammatory statements that put Liebknecht’s onetime derision of parliamentarism and Bebel’s

66

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

defense of the Commune to shame. The radical socialist embraced with enthusiasm conservatives’ metaphor of a war between socialism and the dominant society. Regarding the government’s bill, he announced, “Now the glove is flung down before us and we are picking it up; the battle is joined. . . . Until now, gentlemen, you in Germany have experienced nothing but an entirely peaceful, quiet agitation. Yet you would not have that. . . . If those on the side of the government wish that it come to acts of violence . . . then may the blood flow from that head who bears the responsibility for it being shed.” Hasselmann welcomed that the bill’s authors had at last “let fall completely the mask of the Rechtsstaat” that had disguised the German police state.99 Hasselmann’s entire speech was peppered with such comments, but he ramped up this exultant bellicosity at the end. The government and ruling classes, who saw in socialism’s peaceful development “an undermining of the existing society,” turned “socialism into revolutionary socialism” by persecuting the movement, he avowed. If the classes in power pushed Socialists into war, he was ready. “When the people are brought to despair, I will know where I must stand, whether on the side of the people or on the side of the government; I will stand in the middle of the ranks of the people, and if necessary I will spill my blood on the field of honor! All of my friends, all socialists, who already stand in the breach, will make this sacrifice with me if necessary.” In the midst of Hasselmann’s rhapsody about manning the barricades, the Reichstag’s president interrupted him, cautioning that he had “crossed the line of parliamentary discussion in this statement that approached a direct provocation to insurrection.” This intrusion only inflamed the irate Socialist, who snapped back that it was he who had been provoked—by Bismarck, who had called socialists a bandit gang sharpening their daggers for those in power and had proclaimed that living “under the tyranny of a society of bandits, all existence would lose its value.” Hasselmann continued to quote the chancellor, whose promise to “lay down his life on the battlefield of honor if necessary” indeed sounded no more threatening than the Socialist deputy’s profession of readiness for self-sacrifice. As to the charge of dagger-sharpening, he continued, “We are not sharpening a dagger for Prince Bismarck, we scorn the dagger wielded from behind; when we fight, we fight chest to chest.” As he began to throw back Bismarck’s phrase about the insupportability of living under “the tyranny of a society of bandits,” the chamber erupted, drowning out the speaker, while the president rang his bell (the equivalent of a gavel) to silence the house. After being again called to order by the president, to cries of “Bravo!” from the deputies, Hasselmann concluded his speech with a warning that Bismarck “should think again on March 18, 1848,” the date that year’s revolutions swept into Berlin.100 Though Hasselmann may have been justified in drawing attention to the fact that remarks deemed an incitement to riot when uttered by Socialists were regarded as perfectly acceptable by the imperial chancellor, his speech proved anything but helpful to the portrayal of Social Democracy his colleagues were trying to draw. By embracing the metaphor of war, his speech exactly conformed to the view of socialism’s relationship to the dominant society expressed by the Socialist Law’s backers. Indeed, speaking

Debating the Socialist Law

67

shortly after Hasselmann, Bennigsen referenced the Socialist deputy’s tirade as a perfect example of the kind of dangerous, revolutionary speech that justified the law.101 The party leadership recoiled at Hasselmann’s fulminations, but he and the party’s other extreme radical, Johann Most, represented large constituencies within the German proletariat, who were not always satisfied with the other Reichstag deputies’ more measured speeches. But to make headway in redefining Social Democracy for the German public, men like Bebel, Liebknecht, and Bracke would need to control the party’s message more effectively, by silencing or purging those who clamored for violent confrontation with the ruling classes. Ironically, the Socialist Law provided the means for doing just that. A year after its passage, Social Democratic publishing had been reduced almost entirely to two papers published abroad, the soon to be official party paper Der Sozialdemokrat and Johann Most’s radical Freiheit (Liberty). By the fall of 1880, Most and Hasselmann had not only been expelled from the Social Democratic party but were living abroad (both ended up in the United States by the early 1880s). Their German followers had soon either joined the two men in abandoning socialism for anarchism or resigned themselves to leading lives of quiet desperation. Under these changed circumstances, the Social Democrats had a much easier time promoting the vision of the party articulated by the moderate leaders.

Debate on the Socialist Law concluded on October 19, immediately followed by the vote: 221 in favor, 149 opposed. The law passed with support coming almost entirely from the two conservative parties and the National Liberals. A handful of Progressives and independent liberals (from the so-called Löwe-Berger Gruppe) also backed the law. The entire Zentrum caucus, the minority nationality deputies, and most of the Progressives joined the Social Democrats in opposing it. Only the bill’s softening in advance of its third reading allowed Bennigsen to secure the support of the National Liberal Party’s left wing, without which it might not have passed. Thus, while the final vote saw almost 60 percent of votes cast in favor, including a slimmer 55 percent majority of the Reichs­ tag’s full complement of 397 seats, these numbers masked the shallowness of much of that backing. Only the extraordinary happenstance of back-to-back assassination attempts against the kaiser had enabled the Socialist Law’s passage, as revealed by the very different votes in May and October. Regardless of the Socialist Law coalition’s fragility, the measure came into force two days later, initiating 12 years of official persecution for the Social Democrats. Though the Socialists sought to cushion the law’s blow by voluntarily disbanding the party’s formal apparatus and closing many of their associations and publications, they faced a reign of police terror anyhow. Hundreds of Socialist newspapers, clubs, and other institutions were forcibly closed down, while thousands of Social Democrats lost their jobs, went to prison, or faced expulsion from their places of residence under the law’s “minor state of siege” provision, exactly as opponents of the measure had feared.

68

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Despite their status as an outlawed movement, Social Democrats could take some comfort in aspects of German political culture that the battles of the previous half-year had brought clearly to light. For one, opposition to exceptional legislation ran deep in diverse subcultures across the empire. In addition, the debate on the anti-socialist measures both reinforced a sense of shared political values and helped advance a common vocabulary among groups as diverse as Polish Catholics, left liberals, and Social Democrats. Furthermore, distrust of the imperial chancellor and of the political police (especially Prussia’s) by all those who had at one time or another been branded reichsfeindlich provided Socialists a reservoir of sympathy as they faced egregious treatment at the government’s hands. These groups, despite their strong antipathy to Social Democracy, greeted every announcement of alleged Socialist plotting with suspicion and the presumption of official chicanery. Yet, to overturn the Socialist Law would require either expanded mandates for the parties opposed to the law or the conversion of hesitant National Liberals to their camp. The more Socialists could show their moderation and commitment to widely accepted norms of public behavior, while exposing the government’s actions as dishonest and dishonorable, the more difficult it would be for liberals to continue to support the law. Much rested on making Social Democracy a familiar, non-threatening component of the German social and political landscape, a task that grew easier over time, as Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s most fiery speeches faded into the past, along with the terrifying image of the Paris Commune. In 1878, conservatives had no trouble plucking an array of recent quotations from a variety of socialist sources, some by German Social Democrats themselves, exhorting revolution, even violent revolution. But eventually Eulenburg’s successor Robert von Puttkamer would encounter derision from the Reichstag when he drew from his “sack of citations” the same quotations from socialist pronouncements of the 1860s and early 1870s he had used time and again. Socialist revolutionism was gradually replaced in the popular consciousness with the image of the movement’s calm and discipline, contrasting sharply with the heavy-handed police methods utilized against it. Without the emotional charge generated by the tumult and uncertainty associated with the nation’s foundation, the Kulturkampf’s early years, and the attentats of 1878, a convincing picture of society’s imminent destruction at the hands of Social Democrats proved harder to paint. The Socialist Law came up for renewal five times (in 1880, 1884, 1886, 1888, and 1889–1890), each time provoking heated public debate about the place of Social Democracy in German society. In newspapers throughout the empire, in pamphlets, and in widely circulated Reichstag speeches, the competing political factions argued over the nature of Socialism, the appropriate bounds of democratic discourse, and the limits of the rule of law. For 12 years, the German Social Democrats labored under extremely difficult constraints. And yet, improbable as it seemed to many in 1878, the Socialist Law resulted not in the demise of German Social Democracy but in its triumphant emergence from this era as the party attracting the greatest share of the national vote in the

Debating the Socialist Law

69

1890 Reichstag elections. To achieve this outcome, Socialists had to persuade millions of non-Socialist workers, as well as a substantial portion of the middle classes, that they were not dangerous revolutionaries bent on society’s destruction but merely advocates of a just social order determined to promote their goals through legal means. By championing parliamentary democracy and peaceful social change, while discrediting their political opponents as pursuing illegitimate tactics, Social Democrats succeeded in refashioning their public image. The Social Democratic rejection of anarchism as Socialism’s opposite played a key role in this transformation. In 1878, the German public had little understanding of the difference between the two philosophies, and indeed many emergent anarchists, such as Johann Most and Wilhelm Hasselmann, had been prominent in the Socialist milieu and did not self-identify as anarchists until the early 1880s. In the Socialist Law’s first years, Social Democrats focused mainly on deflecting the charge that they supported anarchist violence by distancing themselves from assassins such as Hödel and Nobiling and revolutionary provocateurs like Most. However, Socialists increasingly used public concern over anarchism to challenge conservatives’ claims about Socialism’s essential nature. More and more systematically, Social Democrats invoked anarchism as a foil, honing the image of Socialism as fundamentally peaceful, parliamentary, and honorable by characterizing anarchism as violent, anti-democratic, and dishonorable. Social Democrats challenged the government’s claim that their propaganda had given rise to anarchist violence, instead blaming the government’s brutal anti-Socialist campaign and its repudiation of the principle of legal fairness. Social Democratic anti-anarchist rhetoric reversed conservatives’ logic by associating them with the anarchists’ methods and character (secrecy, belief in achieving goals through violence, scorn for democracy), while presenting Socialism as the antithesis of the anarchist/conservative mentality. Social Democrats went out of their way to invoke the anarchist threat, the better to assert their own political legitimacy. Each anarchist attentat, each incitement to violence from Johann Most’s pen, each government accusation casting the two movements as identical set the stage for Social Democrats to articulate their values and goals to the public. The Social Democrats would continue to build up the socialist/anarchist contrast, which played an ever-greater role in the movement’s self-definition and public rhetoric, over the years of the Socialist Law. Though the law’s actual defeat took a dozen years, the Socialists’ anti-anarchist rhetoric proved effective in changing public perceptions of the movement much earlier, forming the basis of the party’s dramatic expansion in the 1890s. At the same time, the regime’s opponents continued to solidify their commitment to a political culture that rejected exceptional laws in favor of open, fair, legal political contestation.

C h a p t e r

t h r e e

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy 1 8 7 8 – 1 8 8 5

In 1879, Franz Mehring began a series of articles on the history of Socialism for the family magazine Die Gartenlaube (The Arbor), the most popular magazine in the German Empire. Mehring, an advocate of social reform measures to aid the working classes, had turned hostile to the socialists as their rift with liberal workers’ organizations had widened in the 1860s and 1870s. The criticisms in this series of articles echoed those he had voiced in the pre–Socialist Law era. Centrally, he felt that the Social Democrats acted in ways that did not serve the workers’ cause. “Never have they attempted to take part in the Reichstag’s business with zeal and seriousness,” he complained. When they bothered to show up, Social Democratic Reichstag deputies offered only “the repetition of the same threatening speech, sometimes in a halfway decent form, other times so strongly biting that a scent of petroleum wafted through the entire house.” Mehring’s allusion to the Paris Commune’s fabled pétroleuses linked the Social Democrats to the popular conception of violent revolutionary excess that conservatives so often invoked.1 He denounced the Socialist movement for inflaming the working classes with “hate, envy, ire, dissatisfaction, rage, and all of the wild and unrestrained passions of the human breast” and ultimately attempting to “bury all that is connected to the honor of the German name, to tear from the worker’s heart every trace of human awe.” As part of the Socialists’ defamation campaigns against their opponents, anyone who spoke against the party “would immediately find his private honor and position malevolently and slanderously attacked.” The liberal jour-

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

71

nalist concluded sadly that this “formal system of terrorism” was all that the Social Democrats had built from the toil and sacrifice of the German working classes.2 Mehring’s pro-worker, anti-socialist attitude typified a large swath of liberal opinion in Germany. Until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, liberal and socialist workers’ organizations shared strong ties. The fissures that finally separated the two camps grew out of tensions over who would lead the movement, educated middle-class thinkers or workers themselves, as well as conflicting assessments of German unification under Prussia and of the Paris Commune.3 Mehring’s hostility toward the Social Democrats, though at times couched in similar terms, had little in common with conservative anti-socialism, which was rooted in a broad hostility to democracy and social change. Despite his thoroughgoing criticism of the Social Democrats for their allegedly dishonorable and irresponsible behavior, Mehring, along with left liberals like Albert Hänel and the Kathedersozialisten, did not object to the socialist goal of advancing workers’ rights but only the means Social Democrats employed. A scant 12 years after condemning Social Democracy for setting itself “against modern culture, the rich heir of a rich millennium, in favor of a gloomy and uncertain future,”4 Franz Mehring joined the newly christened German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and quickly rose to a position of prominence. Among his many writings as a Social Democrat, Mehring produced a new, laudatory history of the movement, soon acknowledged as the official party version.5 Though not every liberal evolved into a Social Democrat, Mehring’s story illustrates a trend evident over the years of the Socialist Law: the growing acceptance of Social Democrats as legitimate actors in the public sphere. To convince a man like Mehring to support the party, the Social Democrats needed both to illustrate the positive and productive elements of their political program and to disavow the revolutionary rhetoric, the “scent of petroleum,” that had been prominent among party leaders such as Most and Hasselmann, but Bebel and Liebknecht as well, in the 1860s and 1870s. A key element of this success involved transforming the public image of Social Democracy from that of a violent sect bent on the destruction of modern culture into that of a political party devoted to responsible social change. Socialist anti-anarchist rhetoric contributed a crucial element to this transformation by displacing many popular anti-socialist tropes onto anarchists and positioning Social Democracy as anarchism’s opposite. Over the course of the Socialist Law, the Social Democrats convinced not only Franz Mehring but also a significant sector of German middle-class society that they no longer represented a threat of violent revolution, much less an existential danger to German culture and society. The era of the Socialist Law has long been understood as a pivotal period in the development of German Social Democracy, though the exact nature of its influence on the party has been a matter of contention. According to some historians, the law’s imposition forced the Socialists into a path of social and cultural isolation that radicalized the party in an abnormal way, setting the stage for the eventual appearance of the intransigently revolutionary German Communist Party in the twentieth century.6 Others have

72

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

persuasively argued that the law encouraged in Social Democrats a commitment to parliamentarism by making this the only legal method of propagandizing, thus moderating the Socialist movement.7 The Socialist Law narrowed the purview of Social Democratic activity dramatically, encouraging greater attention to the Reichstag, trade unions, and ostensibly apolitical worker associations, all of which proved invaluable in sustaining the movement during its long period of legal repression. Although the law severely narrowed the public venues open to Socialists, the party showed remarkable flexibility in its response to the conditions imposed on it. In less than two years, Social Democrats had established a central press organ outside Germany, developed an effective distribution system to smuggle thousands of copies of it across the empire, and held the first of their party congresses in exile. The Socialist Law’s passage obviously had wideranging negative consequences for Socialism, and these have been given, appropriately, much scholarly attention.8 But along with systematic persecution came constant public attention and debate about Social Democracy’s nature and its relationship to the national community. In this context, Social Democrats quickly learned that they could use the deeds of anarchists to their benefit. Initially, Socialists deflected the government charge that they supported anarchist violence primarily by distancing themselves from attentats and their perpetrators.9 However, the defensive posture of Socialist anti-anarchism rapidly gave way to an active stance, in which Social Democrats used public concern over anarchism to challenge conservatives’ claims about Socialism’s nature. Social Democrats rhetorically recast their identity, honing the image of Socialism as fundamentally peaceful, parliamentary, and honorable, by depicting anarchists as their opposite. At the same time, Social Democrats attributed the rise of anarchism to vicious police repression and the goading of government spies, which had driven a handful of Socialists into irrational anarchist terrorism.

When the Socialist Law came into force on October 21, 1878, the government and police wasted no time in utilizing it to deliver what they hoped would be a death blow to the Social Democrats. Steeling themselves for this, the party’s leaders pursued a strategy of open compliance while also trying to preserve an infrastructure that would allow the movement to survive despite its outlawed status: the party executive dissolved itself and urged other party organizations to do likewise, hoping that acquiescence to the law would both soften the police repression they knew would come and demonstrate to the German public their orderly and disciplined nature.10 Many Socialist newspapers, clubs, and other bearers of Socialist culture closed their doors to forestall police action. Even so, a reign of terror descended on Social Democrats, with police harassment, arrests on trumped-up charges of lèse majesté, and widespread application of the law’s “minor state of siege” provision to drive prominent Social Democrats from their home cities. Non-political Social Democratic newspapers and journals were shut down and business

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

73

owners were encouraged to fire Socialist employees.11 In this atmosphere, some Socialists chose voluntary exile in Switzerland, England, or the United States. The strategy of legal compliance was not universally embraced. Along with many rank-and-file Socialists, radical leaders Most and Hasselmann derided it as capitulation and cowardice. Quickly the two men became the de facto spokesmen of a dissident faction of “revolutionary socialists” or “social revolutionaries,” terms meant to distinguish them from those socialists they saw as having betrayed the movement’s revolutionary core. Though initially more tactical than ideological, the cleavage between the two factions widened into an unbridgeable chasm that eventually saw many of the “revolutionary socialists” identify as anarchists. Hasselmann’s Reichstag speech from October 1878, in which he refused to sign on to the moderate and reformist vision of Socialism peddled by his colleagues but instead relished the coming war between the working class and the current society’s rulers, had made him a hero to those discontented with the party leadership’s direction. He was soon joined by Most, the popular journalist, speaker, and atheist agitator who had served in the Reichstag from 1874 until July 1878, when he lost his seat amid the antisocialist fervor of that summer’s election.12 Throughout the election campaign and Socialist Law debate, Most was serving a prison sentence. Upon his release in December, he found himself shunned by party members pursuing the moderate course mandated by the leadership. After failing to find work editing one of the few remaining Socialist newspapers, Most relocated to London, where he made the acquaintance of Marx and Engels and began publishing Freiheit in January 1879. Originally conceived as a party paper but soon identified with the apostate revolutionary faction, Freiheit excoriated the leadership for its non-confrontational path. Most saw his agitation as carrying on the Social Democratic spirit of the pre–Socialist Law era rather than repudiating Socialist ideas, but it infuriated the leaders who remained in Germany, who considered Most’s rhetoric, like Hasselmann’s, to be counterproductive.13 Bernstein, an old friend of Most’s, wrote to him asking him to moderate the paper’s tone, while August Geib, a bookseller and former Social Democratic Reichstag deputy, fretted in a letter to Liebknecht about the detrimental effects of Freiheit on the situation in Germany.14 But all to no avail. In March 1879, when the government pointed to both the content and the illegal distribution in Germany of Freiheit and fellow Social-Democratic exile Karl Hirsch’s short-lived Swiss paper Die Laterne (The Lantern) to justify the “minor state of siege” in Berlin, Liebknecht publicly distanced the party in Germany from Freiheit while also blaming government repression for spawning the radical papers. Before the Reichstag he insisted Socialists in Germany could not be held responsible for foreign-based papers, while also arguing, “If the peaceful development in Germany had been allowed, had the Socialist Law not destroyed the route of organic reform among the people, the more the party had been obliged to practical action, to practical agitation, correspondingly more moderate would be the language of the socialist organs than in fact has been the case.” Regarding Most, Liebknecht commented, “When men like Most are systematically

74

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

hunted, so that they spend years in prison, one cannot wonder when the language of such men becomes exasperated or overwrought.”15 While not explicitly disavowing the foreign papers, Liebknecht emphasized the reformist goals of the party in Germany and its determination to adhere to the letter of the law, as unjust as he considered it. For conservatives, possible links between German Social Democrats and revolutionaries abroad were a constant fear. In spring 1879, three Russian Nihilists living in Germany were tried for belonging to a secret organization. Writing to Prussian Justice Minister Adolf Leonhardt, the state prosecutor in the case expressed alarm that the Nihilist movement was setting up cells in German cities such as Berlin and Königsberg, for the purpose of disseminating violent propaganda and incendiary publications throughout the country. The suspects, he warned, had close ties to local Social Democratic leaders.16 An April 1879 article in the Provinzial-Correspondenz commenting on the case highlighted this alleged collusion and described an 1876 essay in a secret newspaper that had urged German Social Democrats toward “open warfare” and “in conclusion proclaimed solidarity with the social-revolutionaries of all lands.” The conservative paper also noted that “the newspaper of the famous Social Democrat Most” encouraged “combat against the law through secret agitation and violent revolution.”17 In a circular requesting information on the Socialist movement sent to regional police in January 1879, Berlin police president Madai expressed a particular desire for information on “the relationship of Social Democracy to the international socialist movement.”18 Over the summer and fall of 1879, the conflict between Most and the Socialist leaders in Germany worsened.19 To counteract Most’s influence on German workers (Hirsch’s paper had folded in June), the German leaders in late September began a rival Social Democratic newspaper, Der Sozialdemokrat, which was published in Switzerland and smuggled into Germany in a complex operation that ensured the paper’s regular circulation throughout the Reich.20 In August 1880, the Social Democrats designated it the official party paper. In addition to its readers among the working classes and Socialist intellectuals, the paper’s ideas also reached a broad German audience, as non-Socialist politicians and newspaper editors reported on the paper’s contents, increasingly accepting it as German Social Democracy’s official voice. A war of words between Freiheit and Der Sozialdemokrat continued until the latter ended its run in 1890 with the expiration of the Socialist Law, though the years 1879 and 1880 saw the most vituperative exchanges. While suffused with a personal animosity that would mark Socialist appraisals of Most for decades, a theoretical clash over the value of parliamentarism was central to the debate between the factions; Most completely rejected the value of the vote under the conditions imposed by the Socialist Law, instead advocating terrorism and violent revolution, while Der Sozialdemokrat strenuously defended the value of democracy and legal reformism.21 Critics of Social Democracy remained unpersuaded by Socialist leaders’ assertions of moderation, continuing to view Most and Hasselmann as the authentic representatives of socialist belief. In Madai’s summer 1879 secret report on Social Democratic

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

75

activity, he cautioned his audience not to dismiss the continuing threat of socialist violence. Social Democrats only “behaved outwardly entirely calmly” after the Socialist Law’s imposition, he reported, to “deceive the police officials entrusted with the movement’s surveillance by lulling their vigilance to sleep, while awakening among the people the belief that socialism was not in fact as dangerous as it had been portrayed, and that further application of exceptional measures against their followers was unneeded.” The government should, however, make no mistake about the movement’s capacity to turn to violence at any moment. “The use of these means is not so remote,” Madai suggested, “as the outward appearance of things in Germany would lead one to suppose. Especially not to be underestimated is the influence that Most through Freiheit . . . exercises in urging German Social Democracy toward anarchist and Nihilist principles.”22 It was entirely true that Most’s radicalism continued to hold currency with many German workers, especially in radical enclaves such as Berlin and its environs. Regional police reports and prosecutorial records for Socialist Law cases reveal that thousands of copies of each issue of Freiheit were smuggled into Germany beginning soon after the paper started its run. So seriously did Madai’s office take the threat that certain articles were hand-copied and disseminated to regional police offices.23 Supporters of what the political police called the “Most-ish party tendency” continued widespread agitation in Germany at least through 1881, frequently running afoul of the police, perhaps creating the erroneous impression that this faction was dominant among Social Democrats.24 Freiheit continued to circulate in Germany throughout the 1880s (though in smaller numbers by the decade’s end), read mostly by anarchists and followed carefully by police.25 In December 1879, Madai still regarded Social Democratic moderation as deceptive, reminding his audience that Hasselmann had thought that “it would be much better to let the mask fall . . . and to proceed immediately with the violent revolution.”26 Believing Hasselmann to represent the true face of Social Democracy, Madai saw moderate pronouncements as no more than a tactic Socialists in Germany employed to evade prosecution. This attitude was also found outside of official circles. For example, an 1879 pamphlet on “Class warfare” that inaugurated an anti-socialist publishing series on “Social Questions and Answers” targeting German workers highlighted Hasselmann’s October 1878 Reichstag speech invoking the 1848 revolution to prove Social Democratic claims of moderate reformism were lies.27 When Bismarck notified the Reichstag in February 1880 that the minor state of siege for Berlin and its environs would continue (a step required by the Socialist Law), he charged that Freiheit and Der Sozialdemokrat both proclaimed “completely openly that their unalterable goal was the violent overthrow of the existing state and social order.”28 For Germany’s government officials and backers, with regular access to both Der Sozialdemokrat and Freiheit, to downplay the differences between the two camps might invite charges of disingenuousness. Obviously Madai had a considerable stake in keeping government officials alarmed by Social Democracy—in the first two years of the Socialist Law, the budget of the Berlin political police increased more than tenfold.29

76

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Bismarck too had an obvious interest in stoking public fears of socialism. However, this blurring of distinctions between the two German socialist factions was not necessarily a deliberate concoction of the political police or the chancellor. Given the weight of a century of conservative philosophy buttressing this perspective, it seems likely that their failure to see differences between the groups was, at least early on, genuine. Madai’s reference in an 1881 letter to regional police presidiums describing perhaps the most famous anarchist leader in the world at the time as “the well-known Russian Nihilist Peter Kropotkin” was indicative of this attitude.30 Clearly the technical distinctions among revolutionaries meant little to him. Socialist leaders in Germany themselves often failed to frame the party’s growing split as theoretical instead of merely personal. In response to Bismarck’s 1880 notification of the minor state of siege’s extension, Bebel criticized the government for fearmongering but did not take issue with the chancellor’s lumping together of Freiheit and Der Sozialdemokrat, despite the two papers’ ongoing bitter feud. In the same speech, he related an amusing anecdote about Hasselmann turning on and surprising a flustered secret police agent who promptly apologized for tailing him.31 While the point of the story was that Social Democrats did not fear police surveillance, it implicitly affirmed Hasselmann’s good standing within the party. In the cases of both Most and Hasselmann, Bebel failed at this juncture to make hay out of what he must have still regarded, in line with Madai and Bismarck, as an intra-party dispute. In this environment, it was unsurprising that the spring 1880 debate over extending the Socialist Law played out much like the debate in the fall of 1878 had. The official justification for the Socialist Law’s renewal for a requested term of five years included the illegal distribution in Germany of Freiheit and Der Sozialdemokrat, papers that differed over tactics but not “matters of principle.” Whereas Freiheit endorsed “in wild language the violent overthrow of all existing state authority, church, and society” and recommended the murder of “tyrants,” Der Sozialdemokrat saw it as wiser “to defuse ‘the fear of the red specter’ through moderation” while “in every way nourishing and increasing the dissatisfaction” of the working classes in preparation for an eventual violent confrontation. In the end, “both organs of German Social Democracy” aimed at social revolution.32 This view conformed with what Berlin’s police president was reporting. In June 1880, Madai fretted that the public “has already become accustomed to the notion that the socialists are not at all as dangerous as they have been described.” However, in reality, the “moderate—or better said—cautious party” diverged from the “revolutionary” wing only in its comprehension that contravening the Socialist Law would remind the public that socialism was a dangerous philosophy.33 Conservatives and National Liberals lined up behind the renewal. Conservative deputy Hugo von Kleist-Retzow quoted Bebel’s 1871 praise for the Paris Commune, cited allegedly inflammatory statements from both Freiheit and Der Sozialdemokrat, “the two papers of German Social Democracy,” and compared the Social Democrats to the Communards and Russian Nihilists. He urged his colleagues to provide the government

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

77

with the “essential tools of war” needed in the struggle against its “bitterest enemies.” Reichspartei representative Karl Friedrich Melbeck warned the Reichstag not to be deceived by the external atmosphere of calm, because “below the surface the criminal poison continues to act” among the workers. Melbeck too likened the Social Democrats to the Communards and Nihilists.34 National Liberal speaker Heinrich Marquardsen announced that his party would continue to support the law, as the danger of socialism remained undiminished.35 The Social Democrats pursued a mostly defensive strategy. In a lengthy speech, Julius Vahlteich sought to distance the party from the acts of the Russian Nihilists, who were engaged in an ongoing campaign of attempted assassination against Tsar Alexander II (which would succeed in March 1881), and from Most. Vahlteich declared, “we have nothing at all in common with the Nihilists,” and dismissed Most as “our former colleague,” whose utterances from London had nothing to do with the Socialists in Germany.36 The party’s speakers also began to sketch out an argument against the government’s behavior that would be developed more fully in future years. Vahlteich accused the government of abusing the law, especially by shutting down peaceful Social Democratic election gatherings, and claimed that police spies had engaged in a variety of ignoble shenanigans, such as distributing a pamphlet version of Freiheit to build a case for Most’s influence over the German Socialist movement, since they lacked genuine grounds for repressing Socialism.37 Liebknecht emphasized the Socialist movement’s responsibility, noting that the profusion of Social Democratic organizations and associations before the Socialist Law showed that the movement was “an organizing party” not, as conservatives charged, “a party of destruction, a party of overthrow [Umsturz].” The true party of destruction was Bismarck’s government, which had torn down all the cultural and institutional structures that the Social Democrats had built up over many years.38 Speaking for the Progressives, Hänel reiterated the arguments he and other left liberals had made previously, warning that by blocking the Socialists from the route of open agitation, the government would inevitably push them into secret associations, promoting conspiratorial and extremist tendencies. Encouraging the Social Democrats’ responsible parliamentary behavior, by contrast, would help restrain extremists within the movement.39 Like Vahlteich, he pointed to the growth of the Nihilist movement in Russia to illustrate the dangerous consequences of the government’s brutal approach. Socialism had to be combated primarily in the intellectual realm, he argued, but “when it can and must be fought through laws, it must be fought on the basis of the general law.”40 Fellow Progressive deputy Siegmund Günther echoed this sentiment, promising that he would support the use of all appropriate legal measures against socialism, but that his party would vote against “the extension of a law through which, we are convinced, our nation’s moral consciousness must suffer a lasting, deep injury.”41 Joining the Progressives was Eduard Lasker, who had only with great reluctance voted for the law a year and a half earlier and had in March 1880 left the National Liberal Party

78

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

altogether. Lasker justified his vote against the law’s renewal by pointing both to the government’s abuses of its provisions and to the fact that it had been passed as a temporary emergency measure only.42 The only significant change of position came from the conservative wing of the Zentrum led by Count Georg von Hertling, who claimed that the Zentrum’s opposition to the law in 1878 had been based on the concern that it might be used inappropriately against non-socialists, a fear he was pleased had not been realized. Because he remained wary of how the government might use the law, he recommended that some of its paragraphs be moderated and expressed his willingness to vote for such an ameliorated version.43 In the end, the commission adopted only one change to the law’s substance, explicitly protecting Reichstag members from its provisions while the body was in session, and also recommended that the five-year extension the government requested be cut down to three and a half years.44 Satisfied, Hertling and 13 other Zentrum deputies (about 15% of their Reichstag delegation) broke with their party’s majority to support the extension. Though the law’s renewal was never in doubt, Wilhelm Hasselmann’s speech during the final day of debate, on May 4, 1880, confirmed for the law’s supporters their view of Social Democracy’s danger, completely undermining the other Socialist speakers’ depiction of their movement. As in 1878, Hasselmann delivered a speech that would be quoted by conservatives for decades as proof of Socialism’s true character. Proclaiming himself a “revolutionary socialist,” he denounced suffrage as meaningless under the conditions of the Socialist Law, which had effectively “annulled universal voting rights,” and warned his fellow Socialists of the fruitlessness of their commitment to elections. German workers, he avowed, would soon “sober up from their illusions, and say: salvation lies in our strength and in our courage alone.” He offered the acts of the “anarchists in Russia” and the French Communards as models for Germany. “I regret that from time to time before this rostrum some Socialists have made the Russian anarchists out to be a party alien to us. For my part, I accept this fellowship.” Hasselmann’s last words to the Reichstag called for revolutionary action: “The idea has penetrated deep in the people’s consciousness that the time for parliamentary chatter is over and the time for action is beginning.”45 With these words, he left the Reichstag building, never to return. Hasselmann soon emigrated to the United States, where he no longer felt compelled to moderate his tone. In “An Open Letter to the German Proletariat,” published in Freiheit, Hasselmann called for revolution and denigrated suffrage as a muzzle on the workers, whom he asked rhetorically, “Is such a dog’s life, such a slow starvation and decay not a fate a thousand times worse than the ball that strikes the freedom fighter on the barricade? Every person of courage must be imbued with burning rage to put an end to this tyranny. Death is better than the life of a slave.”46 Only minutes after Hasselmann’s speech, the Reichstag voted. So little drama was there over the outcome that the final vote of 191 to 94 in favor of the extension represented only slightly over 70 percent of the chamber’s deputies. Little in the public

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

79

understanding of Social Democracy had changed from October 1878 to May 1880 and the cursory nature of the parliamentary debate reflected that fact. So too did the lack of interest shown by the major party newspapers, which all assumed the law’s extension.

The next five years would see a transformation in Socialists’ self-presentation and the understanding of the movement shown by many of its opponents. A formal break with Most and Hasselmann in the summer of 1880 helped initiate a long campaign by Social Democrats to distinguish themselves from anarchists and to associate the latter with all of the negative traits many Germans held about Socialists. Party leaders’ hostility to the two radicals initially stemmed from concern about their personal actions and statements rather than their ideological orientation per se. It was the men’s lack of discipline, a value that lay at the heart of the Social Democratic self-conception as well as the image the party sought to promote to the broader German public, that so enraged their comrades.47 Throughout the first half of 1880, Socialist leaders blasted Most for what Der Sozialdemokrat called his “conceited delusions of grandeur,” which led him to abandon “the duty of discipline.” Most had no right, the paper asserted, “to ignore at will the program, discipline, and every duty of party as well as the demands of intelligence and respectability” by writing incendiary columns for Freiheit from the safety of his London exile.48 In an open letter, party leaders complained that instead of acting like “a party man, aware of his responsibilities,” Most had shown himself to be “a weak, reckless person.” They promised, by contrast, to “proceed constantly on the path that duty and party interests mark out.”49 Less than two weeks after Hasselmann’s final outburst in the Reichstag, Der Sozialdemokrat began publishing articles attacking him, too. The first, titled “A Resignation from the Party,” presented Hasselmann’s speech as only the last in a long series of acts that undermined the party. Though elected as a Social Democrat, Hasselmann had finally “forfeited this honorable title [Ehrennamens]” and “formally surrendered his membership in the party.”50 A month later the party’s Reichstag delegation signed another article, “To Our Party Comrades!” which fleshed out the party’s criticisms of Hasselmann and called his last words to the Reichstag “a defection from our party and especially from us. We accept this defection with pleasure,” as it distanced from the party a man who from the beginning had belonged to it “unwillingly and only in public, while continually and systematically plotting and conspiring against it.”51 In addition, the Reichstag caucus charged Hasselmann with intellectual confusion. If he truly believed in “attentats with revolver and dynamite, burning torches and so on,” using the weapons of Russian revolutionaries and Communards, then “he is a laughable gasbag [Schwätzer] . . . whoever believes this nonsense belongs in a nuthouse.”52 While Social Democrats had expressed sympathy for Nihilists, they never endorsed the movement’s tactics, which grew out of the undemocratic, repressive climate fostered by the tsarist system. “The anarchists,” who made up only a small part of the Russian

80

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

opposition and “are known to German socialists under the name Bakuninists,” also represented a philosophy completely at odds with socialism. “It is a serious insult to the Social Democratic workers of Germany that Herr Hasselmann believes he can sell them such a chaotic and contradictory jumble of catchphrases [Phrasenmangel].”53 Social Democrats denigrated both men as cowards. In a public lecture, Ignaz Auer recalled Most as being so terrified at the prospect of arrest under the Socialist Law that he immediately fled to Britain, taking an absurdly circuitous route to avoid the police he imagined to be in hot pursuit. No sooner had he arrived in London than he “found again the courage of grand words.” While his comrades who remained in Germany “toiled under unending difficulties to tie the [movement’s] torn threads together, Most labored in the most zealous fashion to sow discord in our ranks.”54 The party leaders charged Hasselmann with lacking the gumption to follow through with his threats, either “to assassinate with dagger and revolver in the manner of the Russian Nihilists” or to fight in the streets in the manner of French revolutionaries: “For the one, as well as for the other, he is lacking the most important thing—courage.” Proclaiming their opposition to both men, they announced, “We stand just as distant from the follies and inconsistencies of Most as from the demagogic intrigues and agitations of Herr Hasselmann.”55 In August 1880, the Social Democrats held the first of three secret congresses (whose proceedings were summarized, for party members and the German public at large, in Der Sozialdemokrat) under the Socialist Law, at the castle of Wyden in Switzerland. At this congress, the delegates formally expelled both Most and Hasselmann from the party. Though the Wyden delegates mentioned Hasselmann’s “anarchist utterances” in passing, the indictments against the men focused on their personal irresponsibility as much as on their ideological deviations. The resolution expelling Hasselmann condemned his “intrigues and unscrupulous conduct” and branded him a “notorious slanderer.”56 Wilhelm Hasenclever asserted that Hasselmann had spoken “directly against the party’s principles” when he declared his solidarity with the “Russian anarchists.”57 The case against Most was more directly focused on his support for attentatism, including Hödel’s and Nobiling’s attacks against the kaiser. Summarizing the charges, Georg von Vollmar argued that Freiheit’s rebellious editor “could no longer be considered a socialist at all. He is at best a Blanquist, and that in the worst sense of the word, one who has no other purpose than to pursue aimless and thoughtless revolution-making [kopf­ lose Revolutionsmacherei].” The resolution against Most denounced his attacks on the party, which “contradict all the laws of honor,” and concluded with the words, “The congress renounces all solidarity with Johann Most and regards him as expelled” from the party. The delegates to the secret conclave also declared their “full sympathy” with “all movements that strive for the liberation of the people from social and political oppression,” including the Russian Nihilists. However, they explicitly declared the tactics of “the so-called anarchists and the Nihilists” to be completely inappropriate for Germany, with Bebel observing, “There can be no doubt for any thinking socialist in Germany that Russian Nihilism is worlds apart from German Socialism.”58

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

81

Police President Madai read the expulsions at the Wyden Congress as nothing more than the result of a factional war, as inconsequential as the internecine battles among the French revolutionaries. His December 1880 report observed, accurately, that Most had been expelled for his “attempted undermining of party discipline” rather than for ideological heterodoxy (though this had been a subject of condemnation by some speakers). He did note the rancorous division between supporters of Most’s Freiheit and backers of Der Sozialdemokrat, but he characterized it as merely a tactical dispute, emphasizing that the Social Democrats at the congress had proclaimed their support of their “brother parties in other countries,” as he put it. Madai noted that they had also stricken the word “legal” from the phrase in the party program that they would work toward their ends with “all legal means” (reasoning that this was impossible under the conditions of the Socialist Law), which the police president took as an admission that the Socialists planned to pursue the subversion of German society through illegal means. His takeaway from the congress was that Socialists had proclaimed that “Revolution-making and games are foolish, but a serious preparation for the coming world-shaking revolution certainly necessary.”59 The question of whether or not the split between the “social revolutionaries” and Social Democratic party leaders in Germany marked a genuine ideological division arose again when the Russian group The People’s Will (collectively lumped with other Russian revolutionaries as Nihilists) assassinated Tsar Alexander II on March 13, 1881. In the Freiheit issue of March 19, Most expressed his jubilation in an article titled “Finally [Endlich]!” Declaring his pleasure that the group had at last succeeded after multiple previous attempts to slay the Russian sovereign, he hoped that this deed would inspire a wave of attentats against rulers across Europe.60 The relatively tolerant British authorities regarded the article as so inflammatory that they immediately arrested Most, who ended up serving a prison term of 15 months for incitement to murder and slander against the tsar, after which he emigrated to the United States, where he resumed publishing Freiheit from New York. Writing about the tsar’s assassination in Der Sozialdemokrat, Bernstein adopted a rather more restrained tone, criticizing the tactic the Russian revolutionaries had employed but also confessing to a “feeling of inner satisfaction” at the result, which he described as the Russian people’s “verdict” on the regime’s repressive character.61 A lead article for the Kreuz-Zeitung adduced these “outbursts of jubilation” proof of the essential similarity of all revolutionaries, calling sympathy for the tsar’s murderers a sign of the “moral depravity” of society’s “anarchic elements.” Ultimately, the author proclaimed, “the murder was the common crime of all underminers of the state and society, who share in the blame.”62 Though initiated before the tsar’s assassination, the Bundesrat’s notification to the Reichstag of the extension and expansion of the “minor state of siege” from Berlin to the cities of Hamburg and Altona sparked a two-day debate at the end of March about whether Socialism truly threatened public order in these cities, a debate in which the party’s relationship to Most played a central role. In a lengthy speech, Auer took exception to the

82

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

rationale for the minor state of siege’s imposition, namely, that the Socialist movement in Germany “threatens to take on a more and more revolutionary character,” which the government supported with a citation from Freiheit in which Most praised one of the Russian conspirators to the tsar’s assassination. To this charge, Auer responded, “That Most did that is probably right. I don’t read ‘Freiheit,’ not because I’m afraid to, but because I do not agree with the position of that paper.” He declared, “We accept no responsibility for the actions of Most and his friends,” which he labeled “idiocies” and “insane high jinks.” To emphasize his point, he read out the Wyden Congress resolution expelling Most from the party.63 If Socialists truly represented a danger to public security, Auer reasoned, local opinion would be supportive of the minor state of siege. That this was not in fact the case he illustrated by reading excerpts from articles in three non-socialist Hamburg papers. One worried that the minor state of siege would generate a sympathy vote for Social Democrats in elections, another stated that there was “entirely no need” for the measure and alleged that no one in the city could be found who believed it warranted. The last stated, “It is correct that the Social Democratic element, in Hamburg as in all the great industrial cities of Germany, is substantial . . . on the other hand, everyone also knows that in Hamburg for years there have been no disturbances of public order that would present the occasion for the imposition of an exceptional rule.”64 Not only was the minor state of siege unwarranted, Auer argued, it caused serious social harm. He described how the government had repeatedly abused this provision to persecute law-abiding citizens, hounding Socialists who had engaged in no prohibited activities out of one locality after another, including one man expelled from Hamburg while on his sickbed. He warned his colleagues on the left that they too could easily wind up as targets of the law. He ended on a note of defiance, promising, “No power in the world is capable of eliminating this idea, and the more we are persecuted, the more we are hunted, the more we are ill-used, the more our fanaticism grows.”65 His speech earned a “Bravo!” from the left side of the Reichstag chamber. Robert von Puttkamer, the Prussian culture minister and German Conservative Reichstag deputy who would three months later succeed Eulenburg as interior minister, immediately sought to rebut Auer’s claim that his party was not associated with Most and Freiheit, likening the two Socialist “denominations” to the factions of Robespierre and Marat during the French Revolution. The moderates (like Robespierre) eschewed the tactics of attentats and murder (favored by Marat and the Most-Hasselmann faction), which were “not very pretty when regarded from a moral perspective,” but still adhered to the belief that the established society “must perish in flame.” He went on to make the dubious assertion that “the party of Most according to our sense is much more influential and more powerful within German Social Democracy than the BebelLiebknecht party.” Therefore, he concluded, “The attempts of Herr Auer to exclude this Herr Most from the party are futile, he is an integral part of their party.”66 As further evidence, he pointed to the Wyden Congress’s resolution striking the word “legal” from the

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

83

party programs and the resolution of (in Puttkamer’s inaccurate rendering) “solidarity with all revolutionary and anarchist parties throughout the rest of Europe’s countries.”67 Having established to his own satisfaction the unity of the two groups, Puttkamer exhibited as evidence of Socialism’s revolutionary danger a string of quotations from Most’s Freiheit, including his “Finally!” article, and a speech delivered by Hasselmann in New York praising the tsar’s assassination. Citing a recent article in Der Sozialdemokrat that had invoked Marx’s phrase that violence (Gewalt) was the midwife of all old societies giving birth to new ones, Puttkamer concluded, “Today we all know that the socialistic people’s state can only be reached through a violent revolution [gewaltsamen Umsturz].”68 An article in the Kreuz-Zeitung pilloried Auer for first claiming that Nihilist tactics were not appropriate for Germany but “in the next instant declaring that one could not be surprised if ‘under certain circumstances’ Nihilism took root among us.” The author praised Puttkamer’s repudiation of the Social Democrats’ claims not to be a “revolution party [Umsturzpartei]” and his insistence that the rejection of the party’s “extreme” elements by the “moderates” meant nothing.69 In a speech filled with humor, Bebel fought back against the conservatives’ claims. He noted that Most’s adherents had done poorly in recent elections and claimed that only a few hundred copies of Freiheit reached Germany each week. Regarding Puttkamer quoting Hasselmann’s New York speech, he protested: “We cannot be held responsible for every outburst from a bad character or eccentric scatterbrain.” On the Wyden delegates’ striking of the word “legal” from their program, he told Puttkamer that this act only acknowledged the fact that “You have on the basis of the Socialist Law declared all our civil rights forfeit.” Secrecy, however, ran contrary to Socialists’ nature.70 Bebel evoked repeated laughter from the Reichstag as he described the constant and excessive surveillance he faced wherever he went, though he was doing nothing suspicious. Responding to Puttkamer’s quotes from Der Sozialdemokrat describing Alexander II as a tyrant and referring to the Nihilists’ “verdict” against him, Bebel quoted three nonSocialist papers (all from Bavaria) using much harsher language to condemn the murdered tsar than what was in the Socialist paper.71 The lone left-liberal speaker to engage in this debate pushed back against the conservative reading of the relationship between the Social Democrats in Germany and Most and Hasselmann. Volkspartei representative Friedrich Payer suggested to the Reichstag that the outbursts of the “Most and Hasselmann enterprise [Firma]” must be regarded as “the products of a perhaps half-crazy man” and challenged Puttkamer’s claim that this element had a greater influence on ordinary Social Democrats than the moderates did. Payer argued vociferously against the imposition of the minor state of siege, which would not help stop the already illegal distribution of forbidden newspapers and pamphlets but would only hurt the moderates. He insisted that the provision could only legitimately be imposed where Social Democrats presented “a danger that threatened public security,” yet “the entire public opinion in Hamburg, insofar as it has been expressed in the press, has declared there to be no danger to public security.” The

84

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

government’s casual attitude to its use represented a danger to any “friend of true citizen freedom.” Payer’s speech received a “Bravo!” from the Social Democratic deputies.72 Though no one from the Zentrum spoke in the Reichstag, the party’s national newspaper, Germania, weighed in on the relationships between moderate Social Democrats, social revolutionaries, and Nihilists. The paper, along with conservatives, argued that the tsar’s assassins and the German Social Democrats shared an atheistic renunciation of divine law that led to the justification of revolution, describing this as the outcome of liberal principles extending back to the French Revolution.73 Nevertheless, the Catholic paper blamed the Socialist Law for making Social Democracy more dangerous than it had been before 1878. A week and a half before the tsar’s assassination, an article on the minor state of siege’s extension complained that the banning of Socialist periodicals in Germany had led to the dissemination of foreign papers whose radicalism far surpassed the old Social Democratic ones and cautioned, “The suppression of public speech in the press and meetings has led to a secret propaganda that holds the greatest danger for society.”74 In an article three days later, the paper noted that the smuggling and distribution of fiery calls for revolution “was all prophesied during the debate on the Socialist Law by its opponents.” Exactly as predicted, “through the exceptional law the Social Democratic party has been pushed more and more away from the ground of reform and into the revolutionary channel.” The article also compared the alienation of Socialist youth under the law to the effects of the Kulturkampf on Catholics.75 Three weeks later, the paper noted with approval that the British government had been able to arrest and convict Most for his “Finally!” article based on the general law rather than an exceptional law.76 A similar debate in the Reichstag erupted in November 1881, after the body received another report from the Bundesrat on the regime’s one-year extension of the minor state of siege for Berlin, Altona, Harburg, Hamburg, and Leipzig. The rationale for this extension included familiar charges against the Socialists, including holding secret meetings and distributing illegal literature. According to the report, despite the “formal split of the so-called moderate (parliamentary) and the extreme revolutionary party,” the factions differed from each other only negligibly “with respect to the means by which they seek to achieve their aimed-for general overthrow [Umsturz] of the existing state of things.” Concerns over the secret distribution of Social Democratic literature included “especially Most-ish pamphlets” but also “the party organs ‘die Freiheit’ and ‘der Sozialdemokrat.’” In Leipzig “the followers of the non-German, namely Russian, revolution party [Umsturzpartei] enter into the secret councils of Social Democratic agitators” with the result that among German socialists “thoughts of violent revolution have become naturalized to a high degree.”77 The government also warned of the influence on the party of the “wellknown agitator Hasselmann” and claimed that at the October 1881 international socialist congress in Chur, Switzerland, a representative of “the so-called moderate party” (Wilhelm Liebknecht was the party’s delegate) expressed “the fullest sympathy for the Russian revolutionary socialists” and called revolution a legitimate means of struggle, which “proves the close relationship of the Most-ish and Bebel-Liebknecht-ish tendencies.”78

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

85

The four-and-a-half-hour Reichstag debate was dominated by Social Democratic speakers, notably Wilhelm Hasenclever, who alone spoke for two hours. Hasenclever’s speech, later published as a pamphlet, focused primarily on the unfairness and cruelty of the minor state of siege. He began by comparing the German response to Hödel’s and Nobiling’s attacks to recent attentats in Italy and the United States. The would-be killer of Italian king Umberto I, Giovanni Passanante, who had many similarities to Hödel, was placed in an insane asylum. Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield in June 1881 in an act stemming from frustrated ambition (just like Nobiling, according to Hasenclever) was hanged for his crime, but no one else was persecuted for it. “In those lands only the true criminal has to suffer,” declared the Socialist speaker, “while in Germany innocent people are persecuted through the minor state of siege for the deeds of others.” Much of the rest of the speech was taken up with a litany of examples of unjust arrests and expulsions under the provision.79 Hasenclever explicitly distanced the party from Most and Hasselmann, ridiculing Hasselmann as a coward and blasting Freiheit, whose main goal was “to outdo us and discredit our positions among the people,” for serving chiefly the interests of the German police. Hasenclever jibed, “If the ‘Freiheit’ had not been founded by such a scatterbrain [Wirrkopf], it would probably have been founded by an agent of the regime.”80 Karl Frohme argued that the influence on German Socialists of the radicals abroad was trivial, admitting that “several muddled people have been moved by the encouragement of Most-ish agents to make common cause with the so-called ‘extreme party,’” but castigating the police for trying to inflate this into a major conspiracy.81 Left liberals Hänel and Lasker continued to focus on the essential injustice of the exceptional law. Hänel insisted that the question of whether this particular imposition of the minor state of siege was justified was ultimately beside the point, as the fundamental issue was the appropriateness of having an exceptional law at all. Lasker complained about the regime’s harassment of Socialist electioneering, which he argued should be free and open. In both cases, the left liberals emphasized the importance of an open public sphere and blamed the Socialist Law for driving Social Democrats into secretive agitation.82 Puttkamer repeatedly rose to respond to the hail of criticism. The core of his position was the claim that the Socialist Law had prevented violent revolution. By clearing out the kindling Socialists had been stacking, the government’s measure had prevented the risk of a wildfire that might sweep across the nation with a little wind. The Socialist Law was never intended, he explained, to put an end to Social Democracy by itself. Rather, “We wanted to build a dam against the further spreading of these dangerous ideas”; were the law not in place, Germany might now be contending with “rivers of blood.”83 It is difficult to assess definitively the public reaction to the rhetoric of the different political camps in this era, and the October 1881 Reichstag elections offered, once again, little clarity. The Social Democratic vote dropped 40 percent from its October 1878 level, a fact that Puttkamer pointed to in December as a measure of the law’s efficacy. Hasenclever

86

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

professed to see in the same statistic a miraculous achievement for the party, given the constant harassment of Social Democrats as they campaigned, with their electoral gatherings shut down, their literature confiscated, and their voters intimidated. Despite their decreased share of the vote, the Socialists increased their Reichstag mandate from 9 to 12, benefiting from several runoff-election wins, which came as the result of district-level electoral alliances, a common practice among all the political parties (though it was routinely denied by national political leaders).84 Though the Social Democrats achieved a mixed outcome in the 1881 elections, left liberals had their best result of the entire imperial era, earning about a quarter of the popular vote among their three different parties. The Secessionists, members of the National Liberals’ left wing who had broken from the party in 1880, doubled their ranks, while the Progressives also expanded their numbers. The two conservative parties lost 38 seats, giving up all their gains from 1878. The election campaign ranged over a number of issues, from Bismarck’s push for state socialist legislation to tariff policy, and concerns with freedom of expression and rule of law were only one factor among many in the results. Whatever voters’ specific motives, about half of German voters chose a candidate who opposed the Socialist Law. Thus, though the Socialists saw their share of the vote erode in the midst of the highly repressive environment of the 1881 elections, this did not appear to have to do with any appreciable public fear of Socialist revolution. Whether Germans enthusiastically embraced Hänel’s and Lasker’s principled defense of the rule of law or not, it does not appear that Puttkamer’s heated rhetoric about prairie fires and rivers of blood connected with many voters.

By the end of 1881, the political debate about Social Democracy consistently revolved around three related axes: the “moderate” faction’s relationship to the “extremists” or “social revolutionaries” abroad, as well as to other revolutionary groups; the place of political violence versus parliamentary practice in the Socialist conception of revolution; and the role of the Socialist Law and “exceptional legislation” more broadly in either fueling or hindering the threat of violent revolution. Over the next few years, the Social Democratic campaign against anarchism would address all three issues. Crucially, labeling their opponents “anarchists” supported the Socialists’ contention that their competitors represented a distinct ideology rather than a disenchanted faction of their own movement, as the focus on Most and Hasselmann might suggest, or a point along an ideological continuum, like the language of “moderates” and “extremists” might. As an integral part of their anti-anarchist rhetoric, Social Democrats promoted their own conception of revolution as a project of peaceful reform rooted in disciplined thoughtout action and political debate within a democratic system, which differed totally from the anarchists’ view of revolution as unrestrained and violent destruction. Socialists argued that they labored to achieve their goals through open and legal means, while anarchists clung to conspiratorial secrecy; therefore, by blocking open Socialist agitation,

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

87

the Socialist Law injured the former while benefitting the latter. Social Democrats added to this last charge the accusation that the government deliberately incited anarchists through police agents provocateurs, to gin up excuses to persecute Social Democracy. The break with Most and Hasselmann in the summer of 1880 marked the beginning of what would become an explicit ideological debate with anarchism, as the Social Democrats distanced themselves from the “social revolutionaries.” Though in August 1880 Most did not yet regard himself as an anarchist, he had begun socializing with anarchist refugees in London and had recently published in Freiheit the first in a series of articles by the German anarchist August Reinsdorf.85 His detractors, including Friedrich Engels, were already suggesting that he might go over to anarchism. At the same time as Most and Hasselmann began moving toward an unsophisticated anarchist ideology, Social Democratic thinkers more and more embraced Marx and Engels’s thought. In a letter to August Bebel many years later, Bernstein claimed that in the 1870s, “I was eclectic, indeed like most of us, a radical democrat with socialistic tendencies,” who only became a “Marxist” while living in exile in Lugano, Switzerland, after the Socialist Law’s imposition.86 As a rudimentary Marxism spread through the party, attacks on the two Socialist renegades began to develop a more coherent theoretical dimension rooted in a critique of anarchist ideology. By the 1860s and 1870s, Marx had launched lengthy and heated attacks on the early anarchist thinkers Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin, which laid some of the groundwork for German Social Democrats’ later anti-anarchist rhetoric. For instance, Marx’s essay “Saint Max,” a savage critique of Max Stirner’s The Individual and His Own that comprised three-quarters of The German Ideology (1846), ridiculed Stirner’s idea of a “union of egoists” in which untrammeled individuality would reign as deluded utopianism that failed to understand the necessity of disciplined organization to the revolutionary project.87 Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a direct rebuke to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty, clarified his belief in a philosophy of action, against the French thinker’s allegedly sterile philosophizing. In a conspectus of Mikhail Bakunin’s 1873 Statehood and Anarchy, Marx rejected Bakunin’s defense of social organization from the bottom up, while also sprinkling the text liberally with invectives such as “Nonsense!” and “Schoolboy drivel!”88 This particular attack on Bakunin did not appear in print for half a century, but the attitude found within it was reflected in his public rhetoric and communications with his followers. Social Democrats’ ideas about anarchists were partly shaped by Marx’s sometimes abstruse critiques of these thinkers but even more so by an easily digestible narrative that reduced the struggle between Marx and his socialist competitors to simple binary oppositions exemplified by the scientific/utopian distinction. The two most widely read works of socialist theory in late nineteenth-century Germany, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto and Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, developed this contrast. In the early nineteenth century, wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen painted “fantastic pictures of

88

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

future society,” which represented “the first instinctive yearnings of [the proletariat] for a general reconstruction of society.” As such, they were necessarily “of a purely Utopian character,” with the crucial consequence that “the significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development.” Whereas the early utopians were revolutionary, “their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects.”89 Thirty years after the Communist Manifesto, Engels’s ponderous tome, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (popularly known as Anti-Dühring), developed the Marxist attack on the cults of personality by which Marx and Engels felt besieged.90 As originally published in 1878, Anti-Dühring, like Marx’s long and theoretically complex attacks on his socialist opponents, could appeal only to a tiny audience of erudite thinkers. However, at French socialist Paul Lafargue’s request, Engels two years later published three chapters from it as a long pamphlet, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. This pamphlet, which summarized the Marxist view of socialist development in language that could be widely comprehended, was translated into many languages and quickly became one of the most popular socialist theoretical works.91 Essentially an exegesis on the section of the Communist Manifesto previously cited, it laid out the Marxist critique of non-Marxist socialism in plain and forceful language. According to Engels, the early nineteenth-century utopian thinkers were limited in their criticisms of European society by the historical era in which they lived: “The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain.” This utopian mode of thought, Engels noted, still guided many socialists, for whom “socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world of its own power.” Only with Marxism had socialism overcome this subjective, ahistorical utopianism to become a science.92 Engels’s formulation posited two clear varieties of socialism—utopian socialism and Marxism—and positioned them on a developmental line (both temporal and intellectual) from the former to the latter. Only at the end of the 1870s did Marxist socialists elevate anarchism to its status as chief ideological antagonist, as the movement developed a mass following in many parts of Europe. When they did so, they were guided in their understanding both by Marx’s attacks on the anarchists and Engels’s explication of the development from utopian to scientific socialism. The first book directly attacking anarchism by name from a Social Democratic perspective came out in 1877 in the immediate aftermath of the Ghent Congress, authored by the Swiss socialist Hermann Greulich, a longtime associate of Marx and Engels in the International. Greulich’s The State from the Social Democratic Point of View: A Dispute with the “Anarchists” proved popular, and the German Social Democrats advertised it in Der Sozialdemokrat’s list of socialist titles for sale throughout the newspaper’s decade-long run.93 Greulich’s account, following the same narrative logic as Engels’s near-contemporaneous work, described socialism’s evolution from utopia to science, placing anarchists in the utopian past rather than the advancing socialist

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

89

future. In particular, Greulich derided the anarchist fetishizing of complete individual freedom. “The ‘absolute autonomy of individuals and groups’ is a utopia par excellence,” he wrote, since complex industrial society required a high level of organization. He ridiculed the anarchist dream of “unlimited individual autonomy” as “the stupid invention of some selfish fools, who understand nothing of the nature of human society.” Greulich warned that Social Democrats could not sit idly by “when confusion is implanted in the workers’ movement, where clarity and definiteness are before everything necessary.”94 Though German Social Democrats would focus more energy on anarchists’ endorsement of violence, Greulich’s book laid out two important elements of socialist antianarchism: the evaluation of anarchists as fanatical and utopian, and the insistence that socialism and anarchism stood diametrically opposed. In the fall of 1880, Bernstein, living in exile in London and in close contact with Marx and Engels, began to elaborate this theoretical anti-anarchist critique for a German Socialist audience in the pages of Der Sozialdemokrat. Bernstein took the anarchists to task for their devotion to an “absolute freedom” that “knows no duty whatsoever and is therefore the opponent of the principle of solidarity,” an attack that built on the party’s critique of Most. Since only class solidarity could deliver the workers from their exploitation, socialism (even the most reformist) was revolutionary, while anarchism (even the most radical) was reactionary.95 In an article published a week later, Bernstein returned to the self-defeating nature of the anarchists’ anti-authoritarian individualism. Only by sacrificing some autonomy, Bernstein asserted, could workers forge a social structure capable of acting for the common good. Democratic majority rule, despised by anarchists, provided the only means of avoiding the endless struggle of competing groups.96 In an 1883 article, Bernstein ridiculed a recent anarchist manifesto that imagined a society built upon voluntary worker collectives: “the whole teaching of a state or society as an organism based on free contract,” Bernstein declared, “is a utopia of the previous century.” Lost in a petit-bourgeois fantasy, anarchists had succumbed to the “illusion of an unlimited absolute freedom,” making them “the social revolution’s worst enemies.” In an article several months later, he declared that “anarchy means inequality and consequently unfreedom, because an absence of rules does not abolish the rule of the strongest—communism means equality, and because equality is indispensable to freedom, only in communism is the highest degree of freedom possible.”97 In a similar vein, an 1881 article by Socialist pedagogue Robert Seidel disparaged the anarchist adherence to an idea of “absolute individual freedom [that] does not exist and has never existed except on the imagined deserted island of Robinson [Crusoe], Simplicissimus, and other Romantic heroes.”98 In its 1881 election call, the Socialist leadership rejected economic individualism, claiming one of the chief problems of the current system of “private-capitalist production is its anarchistic-chaotic disorderliness,” which could be fixed only through social reform measures that would bring the economy to a higher order.99 Under Bernstein’s editorship from the beginning of 1881, Der Sozialdemokrat continued to publish anti-anarchist articles regularly.

90

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

While the earliest anti-anarchist works focused mostly on a theoretical critique of anarchists as confused utopians, German Social Democrats soon developed a specific litany of charges against anarchism that went to the heart of Socialists’ self-understanding: anarchists lacked discipline, patience, courage, self-restraint, and foresight, leading them to fetishize violent revolution while rejecting worker education and organization activities as well as the ballot box. Already by the late 1870s, a commitment to democratic politics and, to a lesser extent, active parliamentary participation had become central to Social Democratic activity; however, only after the Socialist Law’s imposition did the party build these up as the heart of its political practice. A newfound reverence for democracy underwrote the notion of disciplined and peaceful revolutionism that the party trumpeted to its followers and enemies alike. In the famous and oft-cited 1869 speech in which he had proclaimed that the question of power would ultimately be decided in the streets, Wilhelm Liebknecht had offered only a highly qualified endorsement of democracy. “Many people . . . believe that universal suffrage is a magic wand,” Liebknecht had scoffed. “They labor under the delusion that though living in a police and military state they can pull themselves out of the quagmire of social misery by means of universal suffrage.”100 Twelve years later, he and the rest of the party’s Reichstag delegation distributed an election campaign call with a paean to the power of elections: “Let no one say: ‘My vote doesn’t matter!’ Every vote matters. The vote of the poorest and lowest holds the same weight in the ballot box as that of the richest and highest.”101 In a front-page article in Der Sozialdemokrat titled “Why We Vote!” published shortly before the election, Bernstein went so far as to pronounce those who did not vote and encouraged others not to the proletariat’s worst enemies.102 In his December 1881 speech, Hasenclever cited this article in his explanation of the great value Socialists attached to democracy. Given the constant harassment Social Democrats endured during the election campaign, every vote for a Socialist candidate counted as a heroic act, he declared.103 Though harassment, intimidation, and the breaking up of electoral events may have hurt the Social Democrats’ electoral results, their determined attempts to engage in the process helped convey Socialists’ commitment to democracy and public debate. By appearing at election rallies, by putting up “candidates for the count” (who could not win their districts, but who added votes to the party’s total, demonstrating the movement’s might), and by proposing legislation (even though Socialist measures had no chance of passage), Social Democrats conveyed a message of responsibility and reformism to the German public.104 This Social Democratic rhetoric routinely employed anarchism as a foil. In 1878 Bracke had derided those who “remain cradled in the delusion that in the rejection of all political life, in complete anarchy they will find a cure for the workers.”105 In contrast, Social Democrats called on their followers to engage in the nation’s political life within all those institutions in which they could play a role. Majority democracy within a socialist system, declared a Sozialdemokrat article, would “most significantly extend the sensible, moral individual freedom of all. . . . Only through socialism can we approach, insofar

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

91

as it is possible, the ideal of absolute freedom demanded by the anarchists.”106 Another article in the paper reported happily that workers had recently turned a deaf ear to “the anarchist cry, ‘Down with universal voting rights!,’” understanding the folly of this tactic. “The vote is one of the worker’s good rights,” affirmed the article’s author, “and to renounce it out of supposed revolutionism . . . is to rob the proletariat’s emancipation struggle of one of its most effective tools.”107 Embracing democracy was directly connected to the Socialist project of redefining the concept of revolution in a way that divorced it from violence. In advance of the 1881 election, party leaders argued, “in contrast to social revolution in the sense of the violent overthrow of today’s social order through an explosion from below, we understand by social reform the redress of social abuses and injustices through peaceful means— through the legitimate legislative route.”108 At election time three years later, they reaffirmed this sentiment: “We have never denied the revolutionary character of our party and never will. Rather, just because we are revolutionaries—which means desiring the thorough eradication of existing abuses, the radical transformation of today’s relations of production—we are in principle opponents of putsches and other violent acts, which in a civilized land like Germany make no sense.”109 In his Reichstag speech on the minor state of siege in December 1881, Hasenclever connected this point to the anarchists. Whereas their opponents understood revolution to consist of the “immediate overthrow [Umsturz] of what exists with powder and dynamite,” Social Democrats understood the word to mean “societal transformation [gesellschaftliche Umwälzung], which is also possible through legal means.” But eschewing violence did not make Social Democrats less revolutionary than the anarchists. “I do not want to say that we are not as radical as the Mosts and Hasselmanns,” he declared. “No, we are more radical, because our legal agitation . . . is more effective than eternal screeching about revolution [Revolutionsgeschrei].”110 An 1883 article published in the Arbeiter-Wochenchronik (Workers’ Weekly Chronicle) and reprinted in Der Sozialdemokrat characterized the Social Democratic program as a “clear, logical” call for the reorganization of society, which was “radical and comprehensive, and likewise practical and moderate in its demands,” refuting the allegation that Socialists encouraged “general violent revolution.”111 Rejecting democracy and social reform, anarchists touted violent revolution as the only legitimate political tactic, stated the Socialists. In a Sozialdemokrat article in November 1880, philosopher Josef Dietzgen criticized “Mostians, Hasselmen, Anarchists, and Nihilists” for making “revolution into a fetish” and believing in “storms and rumblings [Poltern]” for their own sake. They failed to understand that the goal of revolution was “not the battle, but the peace, not the destruction, but rather the construction.”112 An 1883 article in the paper titled “Brutality and Revolution” berated anarchists for seeing revolution and violence as inseparable: “The logic of the anarchist social revolutionary—that one must before all else be brutal to be a revolutionary, that one can instigate a revolution through brutality—is narrow-minded and preposterous,” showing a total “disregard for

92

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

the laws of humanity.”113 Declaring, “we have nothing in common with so-called anarchism,” the party’s 1881 election call expressed disgust at the worship of violence. Marx’s declaration that violence was the midwife at a new social order’s birth (a favorite quote of conservatives) referred, the party leadership stressed, only to a situation in which the old rulers blocked the way of progress: “all of the bloody revolutions that world history recounts to us were the naturally inevitable consequence of forcible interventions in the development process” by those in power. Whether revolution would proceed peacefully in Germany or not, the Social Democrats insisted, “does not depend on us, but on the government and ruling classes.”114 Ending the Socialist Law and allowing the unimpeded exercise of the franchise would promote such a peaceful development and undercut the anarchist menace. An 1884 Sozialdemokrat article on the political situation in Austria stated, “only universal voting rights could put an end to the Austrian workers’ inclination toward terrorism and anarchism.”115 The Social Democrats’ indictment of anarchist tactics went hand in hand with their criticisms of anarchist character. Socialists crafted a self-image that stressed the party’s open and honest nature and conveyed their adherence to values shared by other Germans, such as honor, courage, discipline, and responsibility. The honor defended by Socialists differed from the exclusivist notion of “caste honor” (Standesehre) promulgated by the aristocratic class, yet it valorized essentially the same personal attributes: bravery, self-control, and adherence to a strict code of behavior.116 But in place of reckless physical courage, Social Democrats stressed the importance of holding fast to one’s political convictions and adhering to party discipline. In the public sphere, Socialists saw equal treatment under the law and a fair political system as matters of honor.117 As Ann Goldberg has recently argued, Germany’s honor culture in the Kaiserreich became associated with the values of “modern citizenship and equal rights, together with practices associated with mass, participatory politics.”118 Social Democrats claimed that their honorable behavior entitled them to political participation and respect, whereas anarchists’ moral deficiencies and lack of honor disqualified them from the same. Denigrations of anarchist character appeared frequently in Socialist books and pamphlets, and nearly every issue of Der Sozialdemokrat contained at least one short news item insulting the anarchist character. Stories depicting anarchists as crumbling under duress, succumbing to reckless expressions of anger, abandoning personal honor, or seeking attention instead of respect sought to discredit anarchism in the eyes of rankand-file Socialists and project Social Democracy’s respectability. Greulich, for instance, promised to be objective in his book, unlike his anarchist opponents, who “could not do without personal insults.”119 He repeatedly disparaged anarchist rhetoric’s personal tone: “We do not consider it necessary to sharpen the battle over principles through continual personal insults as our opponents do, and we hold it as unnecessary because our fundamental and specialized weapons are sufficiently hard and sharp.” What compelled Social Democrats to criticize anarchism was “neither hate nor ill will” but, rather, the “duty of honesty to call things by their right names.”120 When anarchists attacked the

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

93

German Social Democratic leaders for being too cowardly to back violent revolution, Socialists turned these criticisms on their heads, claiming that the anarchist cult of violence showed political immaturity and irrationality, while true courage was manifested in discipline and patience. The author of a November 1880 Sozialdemokrat article on “Revolution or Reform?” suggested that, “while every fiber twitches in indignation and one is conscious of the power of his fist,” the true Social Democrat practiced “voluntarily imposed restraint . . . that is not only more dignified to a sensibly thinking person but also requires a hundred times more moral courage than a furious attack.”121 In their 1881 election proclamation, the Socialist leaders said that it “would have been unmanly, undignified” to remain passive under the Socialist Law, but anarchist calls for violence showed reckless impatience; Social Democrats instead displayed the difficult virtues of judgment and self-control.122 Social Democrats described the anarchist devotion to violence as a childish attempt to feel powerful. “A child who puts on a tall hat in order to make us believe he is a man acts no more foolishly than these people!” wrote the author of a Sozialdemokrat article attacking anarchists for mistaking indiscriminate brutality for revolutionism, while another blasted anarchist “putschism” (Putschmacherei) as an activity of “political children.” Social Democrats, by contrast, understood that “the time of putsches, of conspiracies and illusions lies, fortunately, behind us.”123 In a phrase foreshadowing Lenin’s evaluation of the anarchists, Wilhelm Liebknecht referred to anarchism as a “childhood illness” (Jugendkrankheit) while another author remarked, “we have long since put the youthful illness of illusions behind us.” In place of rash outbursts, wrote Liebknecht, Socialists demonstrated “courage, courage, and once again courage,” always keeping in mind “the necessity of wise actions and calm considerations.”124 Connected to this immaturity was the anarchists’ focus on the immediate gratification promised by dramatic acts of violence. An 1882 Sozialdemokrat article described “anarchist-nihilist revolution-orgies,” while another characterized Most as a “weak, thoughtless person who yields to every whim and gives free rein to every passion.” Karl Kautsky declared that anarchism lured only the confused and the reckless. “Not a single aware and honest Social Democrat has ever gone over to anarchism,” he asserted. “Those that do so are unclear minds or adventurers.”125 Another Social Democrat described anarchism as a drug satisfying a craving to feel powerful: “Anarchism is an intoxicant which gives in the moment it is consumed a feeling of colossal strength, but which dissolves into a hangover.”126 Socialist theory, another article declared, offered “no intoxication, but also no resulting hangover, rather clarity about what we can, and accordingly should, do. . . . It is unromantic, sober, and so must repulse sensationalism-craving spirits, but it gives us a quality that fills our adversaries with desperation: perseverance and endurance.”127 This critique of anarchists’ obsession with violence was developed in detail in Wilhelm Liebknecht’s widely distributed pamphlet, written at the behest of Hamburg Social Democrats in 1886, Anarchism, Social Democracy, and Revolutionary Tactics. At the heart of Liebknecht’s argument was an explication of the meaning of the term “revolution.”

94

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Even in his 1869 Reichstag speech, Liebknecht had noted, “the word ‘revolution’ expresses two different things. Sometimes it means simply the overthrow of a government which can be the result of a brief street battle. That is the narrower sense of the word. In the wider sense it comprises the entire development of a new social structure, which has to create for itself an adequate political form.”128 In the 1886 pamphlet, Liebknecht associated anarchism with the former conception of revolution, Social Democracy with the latter. Socialists rejected the synonym for Revolution that conservatives favored—Umsturz—which connoted revolution in the sense of toppling a regime, preferring the term Umwälzung, which suggested a gentler transformation (etymologically, “rolling over” or “rotation” rather than “overthrowing”). “What does ‘revolution’ [Revolution] mean?” Liebknecht asked, responding: “‘Rotation [Umwälzung],’ according to the exact origin and meaning of the German word. The turning of an axle, rotation. In the socio-political realm revolution means the displacement of a state, governmental, social and economic system by another, higher, more developed one.”129 He argued that anarchists made the mistake of equating revolution and violence. “Who says that armed, violent attacks, stabbings, beatings, gunpowder or dynamite are part of revolution?” asked Liebknecht. “Therein lies a fundamental error. Confusing the essential with the accidental, the ‘anarchists’ (using the name for the whole category of ‘revolutionary’ word-fetishists) have made an entirely inessential element of revolution into an essential one, indeed they have made it into the true nature and actual core of revolution.” In fact, violence need play no part in a revolution, he claimed, and offered the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill in Britain as an example of a totally peaceful revolution. As Social Democrats did at other times, he associated their revolutionism with that of earlier European liberals and democrats.130 The anarchist belief that a revolution “could be made by party commandos” followed inevitably from their thoughtless infatuation with violence, according to the author of an 1883 Sozialdemokrat article who disparaged the idea that revolution could be achieved by will alone: “Only weak logicians, only metaphysical thinkers . . . only people for whom in the history of the world there are nothing but villains and heroes, who see bloodshed as the revolution’s inevitable substance, only revolution’s theologians could come to such a conclusion.”131 Social Democrats, by contrast, understood the virtue of patient toil. A letter to the paper from a German workers’ education society quoted approvingly Karl Grillenberger’s statement that “the founding of the smallest workers’ association, even if it be only in possession of a sick fund, is a greater ‘deed’ than all the revolutionary screams and the dynamite throwing of the social revolutionaries.”132 Anarchists, thought Social Democrats, were really more interested in getting attention than engaging in serious action. When an anarchist paper objected to the Social Democrats calling them harmless, Der Sozialdemokrat taunted that this description “does not suit the heroes of publicity [Reklamehelden].”133 Socialist accounts of anarchist endeavors frequently employed as a stock phrase “the clamor of the anarchists” or referred to their “capriciousness [Willkür].”134 The preface to the published minutes of

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

95

the Social Democrats’ second secret congress under the Socialist Law, in Copenhagen in spring 1883, described the core of Social Democratic tactics as “not loudly-uttered catchphrases but rather well-evidenced arguments, not empty threats but rather word and deed in unison, not conspiratorial games, but only as much determined discretion as necessary.”135 Der Sozialdemokrat ridiculed London anarchists wishing to hold a meeting open to the public as merely a cry for attention. “The ‘delegates,’” reported the paper, “held their meetings open to the public. But no person, no reporter, no dog, no cat came. After this vain wait for an audience . . . they then made the heroic decision to declare their proceedings secret.” The article mocked the anarchists for their openness as well as their secrecy. In the end, it was “the same old story of all ‘anarchist’ congresses,” commented the paper. “Everyone wants to be an officer, and no one a soldier.”136 Not only did Social Democrats distance themselves from violence by depicting it as the province of undisciplined and immature anarchists, they also suggested that it was their conservative opponents, not themselves, who shared a worldview with the anarchists. In the section of the 1881 election call rejecting anarchist violence, the party leaders commented, “the concept of revolution is not synonymous with the concept of violence, or else the men of violence in the past—Genghis Kahn, Tamerlane and such men of ‘blood-and-iron politics’—would have been revolutionaries par excellence.”137 Liebknecht used nearly identical language in a Reichstag speech three years later, substituting for “men of violence” the phrase “slaughterers of men.”138 An article in Der Sozialdemokrat declared, “If killing were of itself useful and revolutionary, then we would have to give the palm for revolutionary service to the Tamerlanes, the Napoleons, the Bismarcks, and such organizers of mass murder.” Social Democrats took no part in this kind of savagery, they claimed, because of their civilized nature: “It is impossible for a party of culture, the party of culture—for that is Social Democracy—to do homage to the cult of murder.”139 By wedding Bismarck’s “blood-and-iron politics” to the violence of Genghis Kahn and Tamerlane, the Socialists likened the chancellor, along with the anarchists, to the “Asiatic hordes” who represented the antithesis of culture and civilization.140 Liebknecht moved beyond the merely allusive when in an essay a few years later he described Bismarck as a “true ‘anarchist’” and “really a perfect ‘anarchist’ man of violence” who “believed in the omnipotence of sheer force.”141 This overvaluation of violence led conservatives and anarchists to misunderstand the nature of authentic (i.e., socialist) revolution. Grillenberger suggested that this commonality between conservatives and anarchists could be seen in the German anti-Semitic movement: “conservatives have their own Most and their own anarchists; the entire Stöcker-ish movement is nothing other than a faithful copy of Most’s approach, and the Neustettin events [the 1881 burning of a synagogue and the anti-Semitic fervor in its aftermath] belong in the same category as Most-ish attentats; they are the ‘propaganda of the deed’ of the conservative anarchists.”142 If the critique of anarchist immaturity and lack of restraint, exemplified by the cult of violence, highlighted the Social Democrats’ peaceful and disciplined nature, anarchist

96

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

conspiratorialism provided a contrast to the idea that Socialists were naturally open and honest. In an 1882 Reichstag speech, the Bavarian Socialist leader Georg von Vollmar contended that “the Most-ish tendency, the so-called ‘social revolutionaries’ . . . the tendency of Freiheit” remained committed to “the old Jacobin tenet” that a revolution could be made by a secret conspiracy. This “old, pre-socialist tenet,” Vollmar explained, was “not socialist, but Blanquist.”143 This distinction was crucial to the Social Democrats’ contention that the Socialist Law had fueled German anarchism’s growth, both by causing some to lose faith in open and legal activity and by encouraging police to incite anarchist acts that would justify the anti-socialist measures. Though Socialists always condemned anarchism as foolhardy and ineffectual, they also sought to place the ultimate blame for anarchism on the government’s illiberal and anti-democratic activities under the Socialist Law.144 When their opponents seized upon the secret party meetings, the smuggling of Der Sozialdemokrat into the country, and other illegal activities to paint Social Democracy as inherently conspiratorial and dishonorable, they retorted that Socialism was by nature open and honest. The Socialist Law, responsible for “the poisoning of our public life,” had forced them to act at times in secret.145 The preface to the minutes of the Social Democrats’ Copenhagen Congress explained that the delegates had met “not to concoct conspiracies, not to plan putsches; any decent person could have listened to what our comrades debated. . . . We have no secrets from decent people, our endeavors need not be hidden from the light of day.”146 Hasenclever, lamenting that the party had been forced to hold the congress not only in secret but “outside of our fatherland,” declared, “We would rejoice if we could deliver Police President von Madai this kind of a report: our congress is taking place in Berlin, we request that you come and keep an eye on us. This would be much more convenient, and would make the current antagonism to the police unnecessary. Revoke the exceptional law and you may watch us day in and day out, wherever we are, and no secret meetings will be organized, everything will be done openly.”147 In February 1884, Der Sozialdemokrat argued that because Socialism was “supported by open propaganda and not conspiratorial games, Social Democracy has been much worse affected by the exceptional law than anarchism.”148 Socialists pinned the rise of anarchism on the law’s brutality, which had broken the weak and led them to despair. Johann Most provided a prime example. In his 1886 pamphlet Liebknecht wrote, “Herr Most, whose infirm body and even less robust spirit were not able to withstand the test of the anti-socialist laws, has become a victim of them.” Without the law, “his thought might well have matured,” but instead, “this unfortunate creature, his mind overtaxed by his impotent fury,” could only “bandy about the most insane threats and attempt to disguise his impotence with blood-curdling battle cries.”149 Addressing Bismarck in March 1880, Bebel complained that the fruits of the Socialist Law had been “nothing other than hatred, nothing other than embitterment, an embitterment that must finally lead to the belief and the conviction that nothing more remains than violent overthrow of the existing situation.”150 Making the same point, Der

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

97

Sozialdemokrat wrote in 1882, “It is truly no wonder that this shameful system causes many to lose patience. . . . if we must now struggle against the anarchists” as well as the government, “we must at least confess that we grasp how one could become, in this land of corruption and infamy, an anarchist.”151 Socialists claimed that the government’s exclusion of Social Democracy from legitimate activities exacerbated the situation by undermining the party’s ability to check extremists. “The madnesses [Tollheiten] of a Most are the work of the Socialist Law,” the Reichstag Fraktion (caucus) wrote in their 1881 election call, because it had prevented Social Democrats from effectively muzzling his dangerous radicalism: “Without the Socialist Law Most would have vanished from the scene or disappeared within the framework of Social Democratic party organization, which tolerates no deviation from the party program. And without the Socialist Law no worker would have been infected by a Most’s imbecilities.”152 Karl Kautsky made the same point in the essay “How to Breed Anarchists,” in which he argued that the measures directed against “the ‘moderate’ Socialists have had only one result: to strengthen the anarchists.”153 Socialists also pointed to the government’s dishonest and dishonorable practices, from sanctioning police brutality to employing spies and agents provocateurs, in inciting terrorism. They claimed, usually with solid evidence, that police spies were often responsible for distributing Freiheit in Germany, and Auer even charged that financial support for the paper came from Bismarck’s anti-Guelph “reptile fund.”154 Discussing the October 1881 high treason trial of a handful of anarchists, Frohme noted first that only a handful of members of the “so-called ‘extreme’ party’’ had been uncovered by the police, and a third of them had been acquitted during the trial. “That, gentlemen, is the spread of the ‘extreme party’ in Germany.” Accusing the police of encouraging anarchists, he called the Leipzig trial “one part an affair of stupidity, ignorance, fanaticism, and the other part an affair of the police.”155 Such accusations would become increasingly central to Socialist criticisms of the law as the decade progressed.

That the Social Democrats had succeeded to some degree in distancing themselves from the anarchists in this era can be seen in the lack of public attention given to the most significant anarchist plots to occur on German soil during the Kaiserreich, most attributed to August Reinsdorf and his followers. On September 4, 1883, a bomb exploded in the beer garden of a restaurant in Elberfeld, three weeks before the Reinsdorf circle’s spectacular failed bid to blow up with dynamite the kaiser and much of the rest of the German political elite as they gathered for the dedication of the Niederwald Monument on September 28. When the dynamite failed to explode due to a wet fuse, the conspirators detonated it that evening at a reception hall in nearby Rüdesheim. A month later, on October 29, an explosion severely damaged the Frankfurt police headquarters. None of these attacks killed or even seriously injured anyone, although at nearly the same time (October and November) the Slavonian anarchist Michael Kumics murdered a

98

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Strasbourg pharmacist and a Stuttgart banker. Finally, in February 1885, three weeks before Reinsdorf ’s execution for the Niederwald plot, Frankfurt police chief Carl Rumpf, the central figure responsible for the 1881 trial of a group of anarchists as well as for infiltrating Reinsdorf ’s group with spies and agents provocateurs and eventually arresting the conspirators, was murdered, a crime for which the anarchist Julius Lieske was convicted and executed.156 Though the release of information on Reinsdorf ’s plot appeared timed to aid in the Socialist Law’s renewal (coming as it did in April 1884, three months after the anarchist’s arrest), the whole affair received little attention from the national press or the Reichstag deputies during the debate. Only with the trial in December 1884 did Reinsdorf ’s conspiracy receive some notice. Der Sozialdemokrat simply ridiculed the anarchist plotters as it had Most and Hasselmann so many times before. Reinsdorf fell ill as the time to execute the Niederwald attentat approached, sending two bumbling henchmen in his stead, who botched the job. Unlike the Nihilists, each of whom was ready to sacrifice his life unhesitatingly in the service of the movement’s goals, the German anarchists showed “no trace of an energetic, clear will,” the Social Democratic paper opined.157 The Neueste Mittheilungen was primarily concerned with rebutting the claim that the Socialist Law had given rise to anarchism, a position that could only come from “utter ignorance,” given the existence before the law of Hödel and Nobiling, Reinsdorf, Most and Hasselmann, and Bakunin even earlier. “This revolution-danger has not increased, but rather decreased” as a result of the “extraordinary measures of 1878.” Nothing in the article suggested any connection between the Niederwald plot and Social Democracy.158 The German family magazine Nord und Süd (North and South) published an article in spring 1885 that detailed the Niederwald plot, trial, and the leaders’ executions, all with barely a word on the events’ political aspects. On Reinsdorf ’s motivations, the article’s author commented, “Hatred against all inspired him, but most actively against the German Social Democrats,—as is known, there is no fiercer hatred than that between Possibilists and anarchists, between opportunists and principle-men.”159 Aside from this comment, which conformed to the Socialists’ perspective on the opposition between anarchism and Social Democracy, the matter was treated as criminal rather than political. Even an article published in Treitschke’s Preußische Jahrbücher immediately after the verdict was delivered made no reference to Socialism (or even anarchism), instead reflecting on what the plot revealed about human nature, morality, and the power of dynamite to garner criminals public attention.160 A lengthier article in the next issue of the Preußische Jahrbücher, “The Crime at Niederwald,” did take up the issue of the crime’s political motivations. The article’s author O. M. noted that Franz Rupsch, one of the two conspirators who actually planted the dynamite, had an early education in German socialism but focused on Most’s Freiheit as the means by which he was primed “for any socialist mischief [Schandthat].” O. M. highlighted the role of Reinsdorf ’s personality in his political attitude, by reporting that “in his sinister countenance one could see German nihilism fully.” The anarchist conspirator

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

99

had “a hard, cold, ruthless mind, a sharp tongue, complete mastery over the rich inventory of socialist phraseology,” and a single passion: “the bitter, wrathful hatred against the existing social order.” A man of such character was inevitably drawn to anarchism, revolting against “the struggle confined to the ballot box,” with the prospect of “once in every three years depositing a voting ballot with ‘Bebel’ or ‘Liebknecht’ written on it.” Reinsdorf disdained the two Socialist leaders as “nothing better than Social Democratic bourgeois, parliamentary professional politicians.” Against this, the anarchist cultivated the desire “to demonstrate against the ruling forces of this hated culture at every opportunity with reckless terrorism,” using “the dynamite bomb, death and destruction in its train and thereafter chaos!” Up to this point, the author at times equated anarchism and socialism and at times reinforced Social Democratic messages about the opposition between the movements. In the end, O. M. returned to boilerplate conservative charges that “the parliamentary socialism of Bebel, Liebknecht and consorts and the anarchic socialism of Bakunin, Most, Reinsdorf and consorts are both grown from the same muck, differentiating themselves theoretically not at all, and practically through some differences of temperament, tactics, and the rivalry of their demagogic leaders.” Once the German worker had subscribed to Social Democracy, “it is ever so simple for him to be caught up in the gospel of anarchism.” As to the “most effective means in the fight against Social Democratic anarchism,” O. M. had little to say except to urge “all elements of the Volk” to partake in “the protection of human culture against a wild assailing barbarism.”161 Striking in this article is that its depiction of Reinsdorf in terms of both personal qualities and program exactly fit within the logic of Socialist anti-anarchism, even while its overall perspective conformed to a traditional conservative view conflating the two movements.

Though the national press had by 1884 largely accepted the Social Democrats’ interpretation of anarchism and its relationship to Socialism, some anti-Socialists, like O. M., remained convinced that the clear differences between the two movements obscured a deeper connection between the two. Police President Madai clung to this perspective until the end of his tenure in October 1885. In June 1881, he noted that “while Der Sozialdemokrat, the official party organ, in one number condemns Most’s revolutionary tirades in the sharpest fashion and seeks to make sport of them, in the next number it publishes articles that are in perfect harmony with Most.” Restating his earlier assessments, he commented, “the only considerable difference” between the “so-called moderate” faction and the “revolutionary” faction was that “the one believes that the natural development of things will and must lead to revolution, while the other is anxious to accelerate its beginning through its own activity.”162 Six months later, he once again insisted that the moderates and the followers of Most were “merely factions of one and the same party, which only embrace different positions over the tactics to follow,” a truth that the “so-called moderates” were “anxious to conceal.” A year later, the police president

100

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

declared it an act of “great hypocrisy” when Liebknecht “dared to make himself and his entire party out to be peaceable” while the party’s official organ promoted, in Madai’s words, “total revolution” and “the most brutal violence.”163 In March 1884, he opined that while the outward relationship between Socialists and anarchists was undoubtedly tense (Most had just declared dynamite to be the appropriate tool to deal with the German Social Democratic leaders), “inwardly the so-called moderates in fact sympathize with the anarchists, because both parties hold to the same revolutionary standpoint and are only of a different mind concerning tactics.”164 Madai remained deeply concerned that the Social Democrats’ mask of respectability would successfully obscure the Socialists’ secret plans for revolution among the public. In his final report in July 1885, he insisted, “Outwardly they combat each other with the greatest bitterness. But while the anarchists also nurture an inner hatred and contempt for the Social Democrats, such a feeling is far from the case among the latter and this must be so, because their goals are thoroughly bound up with those of the anarchists, whose deeds likewise bring their realization closer. The moral indignation that Social Democracy puts on for show each time its close kinship to the anarchists is even implicitly touched upon has no justification whatsoever.”165 The perspective found in Madai’s secret reports was reflected in published works such as Georg Zacher’s popular 1884 account of German socialism, The Red International. Zacher, a junior civil servant (Regierungs-Assessor) working in the Berlin political police offices, clearly based his work in large part on Madai’s reports.166 His book, which went through three editions within the year, followed by translations into French and English, articulated all of the arguments conservatives had used since 1878 to conflate Social Democrats with assassins and anarchists. On Hödel and Nobiling, Zacher found the Socialists guilty of “moral complicity,” judging their attacks to have been “only the natural consequences of an unprincipled agitation” by the party.167 He acknowledged that the Wyden Congress saw the “splitting of the radical Most-Hasselmannish tendency and the so-called moderate Bebel-Liebknechtish tendency,” as “the radicals transformed themselves into complete anarchists” who “considered the existing conditions so rotten that they wished to bring about the revolution immediately through the use of all violent means.” But in the same breath, he declared that “so-called moderates” also judged the current society to be irredeemable but did not believe “that it could be swept away from today to tomorrow, and so they chose in place of immediate ‘overthrow’ [Umsturzes] the slower, but surer ‘undermining’ [Untergrabung] of the existing system.” Comparing passages from Social Democratic and anarchist papers, he claimed to find them for all intents and purposes identical, as both supported the “the current system’s overthrow, which could only be realized through the path of violence.” Therefore, Zacher concluded, Socialists and anarchists should be regarded as “two factions of one and the same party, whose color is red.”168 He also defended the Socialist Law’s efficacy, arguing that it had sown discord in Socialist ranks, encouraging some to emigrate and others to consider supporting the government’s reform measures, and also crediting to the law “the challenges faced by the anarchists and their powerlessness” in Germany.169

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

101

The Red International clearly struck a chord with some sectors of German society in 1884 and was widely cited by anti-Socialists. A positive commentary in the Preußische Jahrbücher called it “an interesting report on the international connection of the revolutionary parties” and endorsed its fundamental claim that while the aims of Nihilists, Fenians, Social Democrats, and anarchists differed, “all of these parties are united that the only means to reach their goal is revolution.”170 A November 1884 article in the same periodical, penned by state prosecutor E. Peterson, called the struggle against socialism “nothing other than resistance and self-defense against a revolutionary assault.” Adopting Zacher’s term “the red international,” the state prosecutor insisted that Socialists and anarchists shared the same principles, even if the former rejected the “absolute negation of the current circumstances” that the latter championed. At the same time, Peterson offered a somewhat contradictory message, suggesting that the Social Democrats, like the Progressives, might successfully be absorbed into the political mainstream and adopt practical stances, though this would not happen overnight. Since “within the German socialist party a bitter struggle is being carried on between the anarchists of the Most-ish tendency and the followers of Bebel and Liebknecht,” it was an especially good time to seek to support the “success of the moderate socialists, before they once again draw nearer to the anarchist tendency.”171 Peterson, not unlike O. M., clearly experienced some cognitive dissonance between his picture of a unitary red menace and his awareness of both the Socialist-anarchist enmity and the Social Democrats’ commitment to electoral politics and social reform. In fact, even the tenor of Guido von Madai’s secret police reports changed subtly toward the end of his tenure. Though he never gave up his position that outward differences between Social Democrats and anarchists mattered little, he more and more accepted that the two saw themselves as distinct and opposed. In his final report, Madai still considered the struggle between Socialists and anarchists as “only a question of tactics . . . which has been present from the beginning in Social Democracy.”172 However, repeated declarations that Social Democrats and social revolutionaries/anarchists differed in no meaningful way sat side by side with material that showed an increasing official awareness of the distinctions. In 1883, the political police began keeping separate files on the two movements, while Madai himself dropped the terminology of “so-called moderates” and “extremists” in favor of “Social Democrats” and “social revolutionaries” (and then “anarchists”), acknowledging a clearer ideological distinction. In January 1883, Madai reported on the “Most-ish tendency,” or “social revolutionaries,” only after concluding his discussion of Social Democratic activities, and this section focused mostly on the content and dissemination of Freiheit. In noting the paper’s continued violent tone, he discussed its praise for two Viennese anarchists’ robbery and murder of a shoe factory owner and the French anarchist actions at Montceau-les-Mines (the inspiration for Émile Zola’s novel Germinal).173 Key to the distinction Madai hesitatingly began to accept was the Social Democrats’ openness and peacefulness. The police president described the Socialists’ 1883

102

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Copenhagen Congress at length, observing that while they had hotly debated the efficacy of parliamentarism, no one proposed violence as an appropriate alternative tactic. Since his last report, he commented, “the party has very energetically partaken in public life, bearing witness to its growing confidence.”174 On the other hand, little was known about Most’s followers because these, “following Most’s example, incline ever more toward anarchist principles and accordingly avoid every association and joint operation.” In March 1884, he made the distinction more explicit. “Just as the actual Social Democracy has undeniably made progress in Germany,” Madai reported, “so it appears that the following of the social revolutionaries, or ‘anarchists’ as they are more correctly referred to now, has also grown.” While Madai discussed the Socialists’ electoral activities, publications, and the doings of Reichstag delegates, he noted that anarchist agitation, which took place “in deepest secret,” could only be followed through Freiheit.175 The tensions within Madai’s reports between what the political police observed and how he interpreted that data reveal both the strengths and the limitations of Social Democratic public rhetoric. Even die-hard anti-socialists were forced to concede that Social Democrats were not anarchists and did not endorse political assassination or immediate violent revolution but rather advocated open political agitation and reformism. However, this did not lead conservatives rooted in a philosophical anti-revolutionism to welcome or trust Social Democrats’ political participation, always believing that the party’s public face concealed a more sinister and threatening nature.

If Social Democrats were never going to win over their political police or archconservative critics, what of those political factions committed to parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, the opponents of the Socialist Law since 1878? A clear indication of the progress Social Democrats had made in redefining themselves, and the importance of anti-anarchist rhetoric in that redefinition, came in 1884. During the second debate on the Socialist Law’s renewal, opponents of the Bismarckian order, from left liberals to backers of the Zentrum to the deputies of the ethnic minority parties, adopted the Socialist framing of anarchists’ relationship to Social Democracy and the influence of the Socialist Law on the German political climate. If the first renewal of the Socialist Law had been a foregone conclusion, this was not the case in 1884. Both the Social Democrats and the left-liberal parties had significantly increased their Reichstag mandates in the 1881 elections, to the point that the three leftliberal parties formed the largest bloc in the chamber; the number of Socialist and leftliberal delegates exceeded that of the two conservative parties and the National Liberals combined. The Zentrum and minority parties, both hostile to exceptional legislation, had also gained seats in 1881. The possibility of the Socialist Law’s end was real, a fact attested to by the length of the debate and the energy shown by all participants in it. The government’s justification of the bill was notable on two scores, first in that it made only the most tenuous connection between Social Democrats and anarchist at-

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

103

tentats, second in that it presumed the Socialist Law’s eventual end. It argued that the Socialist Law had successfully eliminated public threats to law and order, creating apparent peace, while also warning that surface calm could not be taken as a sign that the movement had died down or been extinguished. In fact, the government insisted, there was no doubt that the Socialist movement continued to be strong, as evidenced by the “recent exposure of criminal attacks on life and property in Germany as well as other civilized lands, which with high probability can be traced to the initiative of the revolution parties [Umsturzparteien].” This oblique reference likely referred to Reinsdorf ’s Niederwald plot and the 1883 attacks in Vienna by Austrian anarchists Hermann Stellmacher and Anton Kammerer, first a robbery-murder that took three lives and then the shootings of two police detectives responsible for anti-socialist surveillance. This general reference to unspecified “revolution parties” was the closest the text came to implicating Social Democrats in these acts. While insisting that the law must be renewed, the government also anticipated the law’s eventual end. In requesting only a two-year extension (unlike the request for five years in 1880), the government claimed that the law would remain necessary only until the regime’s social legislation, such as the recently passed Sickness Insurance Bill of 1883 and the under-consideration Accident Insurance Bill (approved by the Reichstag in July 1884), began to have a positive effect on the sentiments of German workers. The government also pointed out that the fears of the law’s opponents that it would be used against “those who do not belong to the revolution parties” had proved groundless.176 The regime had noticeably moderated its tone since 1878 and even 1880. All parties involved in the debate understood that it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the Reichstag would approve the extension. While the conservative papers remained largely silent, the National-Zeitung came out in favor of the law’s extension but adopted a noticeably more circumspect position than it had taken previously, conceding that a permanent solution to the problem of political violence resting on the basis of the general law must eventually be found.177 The Frankfurter Zeitung saw a potentially decisive step toward overturning the Socialist Law in the unification in early March 1884 of most of the left liberals into the Deutsch-Freisinnige Partei (German Radical Party), provided that the bulk of the Zentrum remained opposed.178 From mid-March to early June, the Catholic flagship paper Germania, representing the Zentrum’s left wing, published over 20 front-page articles denouncing the Socialist Law and emphasizing the need to put whatever anti-socialist measures might be required back on the basis of the general law. The day before the debate began, the paper ran an article titled “Law Based on Justice [Rechtsgesetz] and Police Exceptional Law,” which noted that in spring 1878, the overwhelming majority of the Reichstag believed both that Social Democracy presented a great danger and that any legislative “strengthening of the means of defense” against it must occur “on the foundation of the general law.” Even those members who had backed a “police exceptional law” over a Rechtsgesetz had stated at the time that it was only an expedient until an appropriate revision of the

104

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

legal code could be developed. But this “interim” period had now extended to five and half years.179 The next day the paper led with an article that condemned Socialists’ “insulting, hate-inspiring, and subversive attacks on religion, marriage and family, [and] property,” while insisting that it made no sense for such attacks to be punishable when they came from the mouths of Social Democrats but not from other citizens, while harmless utterances by Social Democrats were punished simply because they came from Social Democrats. After a panegyric to equal rights under the law and a description of how the law had alienated workers from society and respect for authority, just as the Kulturkampf had done with Catholics, the article summed up its main point: “the mere extension of the Socialist Law does not lead to the good. The law has . . . neither destroyed Social Democracy nor could it impede its recent upswing.” These arguments would be repeated over the succeeding weeks.180 If the building of a Socialist/left-liberal/Catholic majority against the law seemed entirely possible, even probable, in March 1884, Bismarck held a potential trump card. The new Deutsch-Freisinnige Party united a by-no-means-coherent bloc of left liberals who faced the challenge of trying to establish a sense of common identity before the upcoming October 1884 Reichstag elections. Forcing a party-loyalty vote against the Socialist Law so soon after the union might tear apart the new party, which was directly in Bismarck’s sights as the primary target in the upcoming elections.181 Bismarck made no secret of the fact that the kaiser supported the law’s extension, and should it be rejected, he would dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections immediately, seeking to duplicate the outcome he had achieved in fall 1878. That the stakes of the Reichstag debate were high can be seen in the length of the debate (six full days, two in March and four in May) and the prominent role in it of party leaders from all sides of the political spectrum, including the chancellor, who delivered three lengthy speeches. On March 20, even before the Reichstag took up the Socialist Law’s extension, Social Democrats Hasenclever and Grillenberger spoke for well over an hour in response to the government’s latest report on the minor state of siege, making the contrast between anarchism and Social Democracy the central element of their critique of the government. The report, as in earlier years, cited the secret distribution of Freiheit and Most’s anti-religious pamphlet The God-Pestilence along with Der Sozialdemokrat as evidence of the ongoing socialist revolutionary threat, asserted that “the followers of the Social Democratic doctrine have become gradually more and more accustomed to the idea of violent revolution,” and claimed that the party’s secret organization had grown considerably. The government in addition accused Der Sozialdemokrat of trivializing the dynamite explosion (whose authors remained unknown, but whom the government presumed to be Reinsdorf ’s anarchist followers) that had occurred at the Frankfurt police headquarters building in October 1883.182 Hasenclever complained that, despite the Socialists’ open and reformist agitation, the government had once again “offered the same old reproach that no difference exists between the ‘dynamitards’ and us socialists. That is totally false. I myself have in a

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

105

court of law sharply distinguished between the anarchists and us. . . . Anarchism, like Nihilism—the word says it all—wishes to dissolve state and society . . . we on the other hand want exactly the opposite, we want to fortify the state, bringing it to a higher moral standard, so that it exists not only as the night watchman for property, as it does today, but as an aid to the entire people.” Describing recent speeches in which Grillenberger had attacked “not only their deeds, but also their ideas,” he asked his colleagues, “What more can we do? We can’t hang the anarchist gentlemen! In any case, we fight them at least as sharply as the regime.” Hasenclever ridiculed the government report’s use of Most’s paper and pamphlet to justify the minor state of siege: “On page 8 of the memorandum Johann Most, so often disavowed by us, is once more called to help. . . . Most, who is considered a confused idiot [Wirrkopf] by the Social Democratic Party.” He concluded his speech with the proclamation, “You cannot destroy our ideas, you cannot drive us into the arms of anarchism; we are too level-headed, we have other ideas and we are too wise for that.”183 Grillenberger’s speech likewise underscored the deep hostility between anarchism and Social Democracy, ever since he himself had, he quipped, “so to say, thrown the first bomb into that group,” incurring “the insane rage” of “the anarchist clique.”184 The Socialist speakers also accused the government of sowing the seeds of German anarchism, by blocking the route of peaceful reform, to which Social Democrats remained committed, and by encouraging anarchist agitators. Rebutting the charge that Social Democrats created the soil in which anarchists throve, Hasenclever asserted, “the actual promoter of the anarchists is this evil law whose deliberation is at hand. The anarchist agitation, especially that perpetrated by German anarchists abroad, did not exist when the Socialist Law did not exist. . . . this law has produced the appalling agitation that is taking place abroad.” According to Grillenberger, in all of southwest and west Germany August Reinsdorf was said to be “an entirely degenerate subject” who was “nothing more than a tool called on to create a number of victims and at the same time supply material for the extension of the Socialist Law.”185 Later the same day, speaking on the question of the Socialist Law’s renewal, Bebel also took up the issue of anarchism. “If there are anarchists in Germany . . . these anarchists have only become possible through the Socialist Law,” he declared. “The fathers of the Socialist Law are at the same time the fathers of the anarchist nonsense [Anarchisterei] in Germany.” Bebel explained that many German anarchists had begun as “men faithful to their principles,” but the Socialist Law had turned them “fanatical to the point of insanity,” robbing them of a controlled, positive outlet for their energy. Anarchism, which “is for us what Nihilism is in Russia,” expressed the “hopelessness to the point of desperation of certain elements in the world of the workers” under the Socialist Law.186 Moderate Socialist Moritz Rittinghausen too argued that “since the enactment of the Socialist Law the theory of anarchy,” once confined mostly to France, “has also found a place among us. The more you push Social Democracy out of the foreground, naturally the more you bring forth the anarchists.”187

106

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Like his colleagues, Bebel accused government agents of deliberately fueling anarchism. If anarchism “has not hitherto become more powerful,” Bebel told the Reichstag, “it is because we have held it back, while one could not say the same of certain police organs,” which had encouraged “anarchist hotheads” so as to manufacture justifications for continued anti-socialist measures. “If anarchism has found a base in Germany,” Bebel concluded, “it has occurred exclusively through police agitation.”188 Liebknecht devoted nearly half of his speech the following day to the “Frankfurt dynamite affair” (the explosion at the Frankfurt police station), repeating his colleagues’ suspicions that since Reinsdorf had roamed freely for months after the police became aware of his activities he might in fact be “an agent of the police and in their pay.” He charged that the Socialist Law had turned “our police into a giant espionage establishment,” in which agents provocateurs provided both money and incitement for attentats.189 The other half of Liebknecht’s speech elaborated on party representatives’ many explanations of their conception of revolution as peaceful, in contrast to the anarchist and conservative understanding of revolution as inevitably violent. Liebknecht explained to the Reichstag, “If the word ‘revolution’ [Revolution] in our mouths had ever meant or should ever mean ‘violent overthrow’ [gewaltsamer Umsturz], and if you could prove that we strove for or fomented ‘violent overthrow,’ then you would be justified in your Socialist Law, your exceptional law. . . . Our party has, however, defended itself against this meaning of the word revolution.” In fact, “according to the very foundation of the socialist worldview, which sees history as an organic developmental process, we cannot will a violent overthrow [gewaltsamer Umsturz] in your sense; our conception of the laws of development and history teach us that we are not in a position to make a revolution.” Social Democrats, he claimed, therefore provided the strongest defense against anarchism. “The anarchists . . . have no foundation in Germany—why? Because in Germany the crazy plans of those people run aground on this tightly closed [festgeschlossenen] organization of Social Democracy.” Liebknecht ended his speech with a plea to all those who “hold dear to their heart the honor, freedom, and security of the German fatherland” to vote against the bill.190 The chief left-liberal speakers during this debate were once again Hänel, now a member of the new Deutsch-Freisinnige Partei, and Sonnemann of the German People’s Party. Hänel complained that the government sought to justify the Socialist Law as a remedy for a whole series of “acts of violence, crimes, attentats, dynamite explosions” that had nothing to do with it but, rather, with the system of “preventive justice” enshrined in the Socialist Law. He asked, “Do we not see that the predisposition to such crimes breaks out especially in those political systems that inscribe on their banners the repression of legitimate activities? What do the attentats under Napoleonic rule or the attentats of the Nihilists teach us? Gentlemen, they teach me that such laws more than the rule of the general law nourish the predisposition to criminal acts.”191 Sonnemann accused the government of cynically trying to use the fear of anarchism to push through the law’s extension, blasting Puttkamer for having spoken “not one word on any con-

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

107

nection of the Socialists to the anarchists and the dynamite affair” in Frankfurt, because he knew that none existed.192 Sonnemann went further, describing how a police agent named Horsch had provided dynamite and chemicals to workers whom he then tried to incite to an attentat and suggesting, like Liebknecht, that Reinsdorf too might have been in the pay of the police. Though unconnected to the Socialists, “the anarchist machinations do stand in a certain relationship to the Socialist Law,” he stated, for by violating the principle of equality under the law, the government directly encouraged anarchist violence: “When people are placed outside the law, chased from their homes and families, they are driven to desperation . . . is it then any wonder when a few of them begin to have such criminal ideas? The Social Democrats can say with good reason, when one considers these people: look, this is what your Socialist Law has brought!”193 Adding to this message was a speech delivered by August Schenk von Stauffenberg, a Secessionist member of the Freisinnige, who acknowledged that “the elements out of which the anarchist party is now made up undoubtedly existed before now” but claimed that the creation of “a specific, unified party with criminal goals” in its current form was “the fruit of the long duration of the Socialist Law.”194 All of these left liberals explicitly endorsed the Social Democrats’ claims about the relationships among Socialism, anarchism, and the Socialist Law. Ludwig Windthorst articulated a similar perspective, maintaining that while no one but a Social Democrat would find any value in Bebel’s most recent book (Woman in the Past, Present, and Future), he was appalled at the idea of banning such a harmless work of theory, even though its content revolted him. Only if there existed “a connection between Social Democracy in general and the revolution parties abroad, a connection with the people who have brought about such violent explosions” might exceptional measures be warranted. But “as long as the gentlemen stand on the basis of discussion and the basis of reform,” the Socialist Law lacked all justification.195 As to the “anarchist machinations,” the ordinary criminal laws, along with the dynamite law the government had proposed, would address “this society of skulkers in the shadows,” he concluded.196 Windthorst’s speech was both quoted and praised by Germania in a series of articles in the weeks after the March debate, which decried the banning of Socialist publications and gatherings without any regard to whether their content posed any danger and rejected the conflation of Social Democracy with other radical groups, commenting “justice as well as intelligence require police and judicial practice to show regard for this and not to confuse and mix them up with each other.” Nevertheless, the government continued to speak of “initiatives of the revolution parties” and refer to German Socialists as “dynamite heroes,” “revolutionaries who shrink from nothing, etc.”197 Germania also praised the German populace’s public demands that “their freedoms be outlined clearly and legally, the rights of the government, parliament, and people fixed by law and ensured as much as possible in their execution.” The true danger lay not in socialism as such, according to the Catholic paper, but in the modern means of terrorism: “What is required is not the Socialist

108

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Law, but a law preventing the ownership and use of dynamite.”198 The Dynamite Law, already submitted to the Reichstag for consideration immediately after the Socialist Law renewal, met with the paper’s approval. Along with the Social Democrats and left liberals, Germania rejected the government’s claim that “the exceptional law has brought us in Germany calm and security compared to other lands.” The Socialist Law had not only failed to prevent a string of anarchist crimes in recent years but had actually taken the authorities’ attention away from this real danger, while fueling the discontentment that nourished anarchism: “The hundreds of thousands of German Social Democrats are not anarchists, but it is our firm opinion that the longer the Socialist Law lasts, the more anarchists will appear from within them.” Given the Socialist Law’s role in creating the anarchist menace, the paper declared, “anarchist deeds are not a motive for, but rather against, the Socialist Law!”199 The paper in a later article chastised all the “participants in the fraud” that “Germany had the Socialist Law to thank for its security, for example from dynamite attacks.”200 An article condemning “semi-official blarney [Officiöse Flunkereien]” ridiculed the law’s backers for perpetrating a “double fraud”: “the fraud that refuses to differentiate between anarchism and Social Democracy and the fraud that pretends that Germany’s salvation from anarchist acts of violence lies in the Socialist Law.”201 This position was also adopted by the ethnic-minority parties. Ludwik von Jazdzew­ ski, speaking on behalf of the Polish faction, proclaimed, “we are as hostile to these endeavors of Social Democracy as any party in the chamber,” but blamed the Socialist Law for radicalizing Socialist agitators and driving them underground.202 Unaffiliated (though later Guelph) deputy Heinrich Langwerth von Simmern opposed the Socialist Law as an exceptional law and explicitly likened it to the anti-Catholic laws of the early 1870s.203 Landelin Winterer, representative of the regional Alsace-Lorraine Party, joked that if exceptional laws were an effective protection from Socialism, no one would be better protected than the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, who endured not merely a minor state of siege but a continual major state of siege! He berated the Socialists for their celebration of the anniversary of the Paris Commune’s declaration but denied they could be held accountable for anarchist acts. Echoing an argument propounded by many left liberals, but in defense of Catholic rights, he suggested that the real social danger came from the belief in the “omnipotence of the state,” from which it was not far to “socialist collectivism”; for, he reasoned, “if the state can do everything in the realms of church and school, why should it not be able to do everything in the economic realm? Gentlemen, if the state of Bismarck can do the one, the state of Bebel can do the other.” Thus his party was compelled to vote against the law’s renewal.204 Against the many and varied opponents of the law’s renewal, who dominated the debate in terms of time at the podium (nearly two-thirds of the proceedings transcript) as well as public discussion outside the chamber, government speakers and their backers largely reiterated the claims they had made since 1878 about the alleged fraternity of various ill-defined “revolution parties,” exemplified by the claim that no difference

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

109

existed between the anarchists and Social Democrats. They attributed Germany’s current political calm to the Socialist Law, promising they would support its end as soon as Bismarck’s social reform program had taken root. The most strenuous defense of the law came from Interior Minister Puttkamer, who continued to milk Most and Hasselmann’s past as Socialist leaders for all it was worth. He pointedly recalled that Bebel had only five years earlier spoken of “my friend Most,” though “the friendship seems to have cooled somewhat,” he added wryly. Despite the Social Democrats’ public attacks on anarchists, when “these men’s relationship to the anarchists and to the entire international tissue of revolutionary parties is held up to the light, . . . the international solidarity of the parliamentary Social Democrats with those who go further is not so entirely absent.”205 He claimed that Bebel, though guarded in his language, still embraced “violent revolution, which Most, in a somewhat more brutal and cynical expression, called ‘the general massacre.’”206 In another speech he characterized the difference between anarchism and Socialism as one only of degree: while “anarchism wants to attack society and the state immediately with the bestiality of a wild animal, seizing it by the throat and tearing it apart,” Social Democracy wished more cautiously to “first undermine it and then come to revolution [Umsturz].”207 Other conservatives followed much the same line. Reichspartei representative Kardorff brought up Bebel’s 1871 speech praising the Paris Commune (to which the Socialist leader shouted back “Ancient history!”) and noted that Most, “once a leader of the Socialists,” continued to spread “incendiary pamphlets [Brandschriften] in the German fatherland.”208 German Conservative Wilhelm von Minnigerode repeatedly invoked an 1874 speech from Hasselmann as characteristic of Social Democracy. He considered the anarchists’ “dynamite attentats” to be “child’s play . . . compared to the systematic tearing down of religion, monarchy, property, marriage” by the Socialists before 1878, which represented “thousands and hundreds of thousands of small dynamite cartridges.”209 The evidence conservatives presented was more and more outdated, as fresh examples of Social Democratic rhetoric endorsing violence simply could not be found. Conservatives also defended the Socialist Law as responsible for the relative peace in Germany. Replying to the Socialists’ insistence that “anarchism is firstly a product of the exceptional law,” Puttkamer asked, “What became of Herr Most and Herr Hasselmann, who once adorned this rostrum, after the exceptional law? They disappeared.” Clearly the Socialist Law had done its work, the interior minister asserted, by curbing the “revolutionary excrescences” that had blighted the nation in 1878, restoring “calm and peace” to the land.210 In May, he returned to this theme: “Thank God,” he said, “that under the rule of this law we live largely free of anarchism [Anarchistenthum], while in all other states, where such preventive measures do not exist, this form of criminality has already found itself in full bloom.”211 German Conservative Helmuth von MaltzahnGültz rejected the idea “that the German law against the outrages of Social Democracy is to blame when the once staunch comrades of our Social Democratic colleagues

110

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

proceed to murderous and bloody deeds abroad.”212 In one of his irregular speeches to the Reichstag, Bismarck urged the law’s renewal, protesting Windthorst’s desire “to wait until there is fire, most likely from dynamite or petroleum, before intervening.”213 Throughout the debate, the government’s National Liberal allies were rather more measured in their support of the law’s extension. Marquardsen, in a short speech delivered on behalf of the entire National Liberal Party (effectively the right-wing rump of the formerly large party) in March, expressed his belief that an exceptional law must, in a constitutional state, be limited to a certain term, noting that his party had convinced the government to pare down its bill to a two-year extension. Though not satisfied with all parts of the bill, his party would vote for it, for it had at least hindered, if not eliminated, Social Democratic agitation.214 In May he offered a somewhat more energetic defense of the law, insisting that as long as Social Democracy remained “saturated with communist ideas,” which represent “the grave of civilization and the overthrow of the general state order,” then it was “our obligation to confront these exceptional circumstances with exceptional measures.” He challenged the claim of his former colleague Stauffenberg that the Socialist Law had contributed to “anarchist movements, dynamite attentats, etc.,” pointing out that anarchist movements had also appeared elsewhere in Europe where there was no Socialist Law.215 Aside from these two speeches, the National Liberals remained nearly silent, unwilling to defend the law on ideological grounds and only partially satisfied with its practical effects. Capturing the tenor of much National Liberal sentiment, historian Theodor Mommsen wrote to a constituent in March to explain his position: “in my opinion the time was due to sensibly narrow the exceptional law, not to eliminate it entirely all of a sudden,” but the regime “refused any modification and put before the Reichstag the simple question of whether the current exceptional situation [Ausnahmezustand] would be extended for two years or would suddenly come to an end. In this situation, my assessment was that the former evil was the lesser.”216 The lone vocal exception to National Liberal ambivalence was the bellicose speech of Treitschke, in which the nationalist historian condemned the anti-religious, immoral, and antimonarchical tone of Social Democracy, invoking Most and Freiheit three times during his short speech. He too challenged Stauffenberg’s claim that “the anarchists had first been called forth by this law, which in fact states it exactly backwards. Anarchists have always been within Social Democracy; you will vividly recall the speeches that Herr Most once delivered in this spot.” Still holding Social Democrats responsible for the 1878 attacks, he gave credit to the Socialist Law that “we have not experienced a new Social Democratic bloody deed on German soil.”217 The conservative press underscored all of these points, asserting that the Socialist Law had produced positive effects on the Social Democrats’ behaviors, fostering a tenuous social calm that could easily be reversed were the law to lapse. The Kreuz-Zeitung approvingly cited the “‘more moderate’ tone” of the Social Democrats’ speeches, contrasting these to the “fiery speeches that Hasselmann once delivered in the Reichstag, to the sure applause of Social Democratic voters.” Their “loss of taste for such oratori-

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

111

cal outbursts” the paper attributed to the Socialist Law, which had “created a peaceful basis for legislation to solve the social problems.”218 However, “if those endeavors against which the law is directed have experienced a decrease due to its effect on the populace, that is not proof that it can be dispensed with, rather it proves just the opposite, that it is proper to retain it, because one may expect a further beneficial result from it.”219 The Provinzial-Correspondenz commented that Socialist representatives had “made the attempt to cast their party as the opponent of anarchism and all violent revolutionary endeavors,” but “the protests beloved of Social Democratic leaders against any connection between their and the anarchists’ endeavors” were belied by the “numerous criminal outbursts of the extreme Social Democratic parties” in other lands, which did not plague Germany only thanks to the government’s “protective measures.”220 Another article cited Zacher’s The Red International as providing “indisputable proof ” of the efficacy of “repressive measures against the socialist revolution party [Umsturzpartei].”221 The stakes of the Reichstag vote had been cast in dramatic terms by both sides. Opponents warned of the growing threat of anarchist violence, the alienation of moderate and parliamentary Social Democrats from German society, and the German populace’s loss of confidence in the government and police if an arbitrary and unjust exceptional law were perpetually renewed. On the other side, the government and its backers warned of imminent violence and possible revolution if the bulwark of the Socialist Law were removed. The bill’s fate remained in doubt in the week before the Reichstag’s final vote.222 Most acutely aware of the political stakes of the vote were the members of the new Frei­ sinnige Party. Stauffenberg wrote to his fellow Secessionist Bamberger, “the fate of the Socialist Law—on this depends the whole future of the liberal party; I obviously proceed from the assumption that we can no longer agree to the old law; we must be clear therefore about all the dangers and consequences.” Bamberger saw things somewhat differently, placing party needs ahead of principle. He suggested to Stauffenberg that “it would not be at all harmful if we provided a dozen apostates” to vote for the law’s renewal to ensure its passage and save the new party from Bismarck’s inevitable attacks if the law’s extension were voted down. Bamberger was confident that Richter, head of the Progressives before the left-liberal union, would also be willing to “furnish several contingents in order to get around a dissolution.” As Bamberger noted in his diary as the law was being debated, the situation was politically peculiar: “Queer combination of the Socialist Law renewal; Bismarck proposes it with pathos and for all the world would like to see it rejected in order to be able to dissolve [the Reichstag]. We reject it with pathos and would like to see it accepted in order not to be dissolved.”223 This situation was obvious to the public as well. The satirical conservative paper Kladderadatsch (Crash) featured a few cartoons on the subject in March and April. In one titled “The Table Is Set,” the Sword of Damocles labeled “dissolution” hangs by a thread over the Socialist Law bill.224 In another, “For the Committee Debating the Socialist Law,” Bismarck presents two eggs, drawn from the baskets “Either” and “Or” to Windthorst and the leaders of the Freisinnige, one labeled “Socialist Law” and the other “Dissolution.”225 In the end, the

112

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

leaders of the Freisinnige met and decided, based on ruthless political calculation, that they would ensure the Socialist Law’s passage, on the one hand by ordering deputies who opposed the law to skip the vote and on the other by finding the requisite votes in favor from among their own members.226 Twenty-six Freisinnige members voted for the law, while 13 were absent for the vote. The Zentrum, more authentically divided over the law, pursued a similar strategy to ensure passage. When the vote came, 39 Zentrum deputies cast ballots in favor of the law’s extension and 18 others remained absent.227 As a consequence of these political tactics, the final tally on the Socialist Law’s renewal was 189 in favor to 157 opposed, with 51 members not voting. If cynical party politics had saved the law for another two years, the precariousness of their position was clear to the government’s supporters. Immediately after the vote, the Provinzial-Correspondenz hardly seemed reassured, devoting a lead article to the anniversary of Hödel’s and Nobiling’s attentats, which it blamed on the fact that “a revolutionary party was permitted through the most immoderate defamations and insults against the moral and legal order to infuse in their followers the outrageous delusion that every criminal was an avenger against a polity responsible for the sufferings of the oppressed.” Given this, it could only be regarded as astonishing that a large number of “representatives of the German nation had voted for the freedom of such agitation, based on the irresponsible statement . . . that the Socialist Law had proven totally powerless against the Social Democratic danger, that the struggle against Social Democracy must thus revert to being waged merely through free discussion.”228 Conservatives took little comfort in their legislative victory, as the tide of public sentiment had clearly turned against them. The day after the Socialist Law’s renewal, the Reichstag took up the so-called Dynamite Law, which would punish the possession or distribution of explosives with a prison term of one to five years. The government justified the law as a tool to counter the “generally threatening danger” of explosives, and “anarchist criminality” in particular, such as the “recurring incitements to dynamite attentats in nearly every issue of the anarchist revolution-papers [Umsturzblätter].” Though the official justification sometimes used catchall phrases, referring at one point to “the international tendency toward criminal activity of the revolution parties,” there was no mention of Social Democracy specifically.229 The law was uncontroversial, backed as a reasonable security measure by even the left liberals and the left wing of the Zentrum. That the law received any discussion in the Reichstag was due entirely to the Social Democrat Hasenclever. Reminding the public that police agents had often incited anarchist activities, the Socialist deputy expressed the fear that a police spy might plant a dynamite packet at the home of a Social Democrat while he was out and then send in another police agent to “discover” it and arrest the Socialist. “There is also the possibility, gentlemen,” he continued “that among the anarchists there are persons who might sneak a dynamite packet into a so-called moderate Social Democrat’s possession. Because the police are oftentimes closely connected to the anarchists, this connection . . . could be used in the most shameful manner with such a law.” Whether or not Hasenclever genuinely feared planted dynamite,

The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy

113

he clearly wanted to take the opportunity of this discussion to push the line that the government promoted anarchist attacks and colluded with anarchists against Socialists. Walking a fine line, he also declared that the Social Democrats would not vote against the law, as they were loath to stand in the way of the government’s “fight against the socalled anarchist ‘propaganda of the deed,’” while also wishing to disprove Puttkamer’s assertion that Socialists were half-anarchists, rather than the “determined and principled opponents of anarchist endeavors” that they in fact were.230 Windthorst, never one to hold his tongue, also contributed to the brief discussion, noting that, while he opposed the Socialist Law, he believed there was “vigorous support from all sides” for “extraordinary legal measures against the anarchists.”231 Picking up on Hasenclever’s concern, the Zentrum leader asked for government confirmation that the scenario of planted dynamite landing an innocent man in prison could not come to pass. According to his understanding, the victim of such a ruse could not be said to be “in possession” of explosives in the sense intended by the law. Despite the reassurance of the Reich justice minister on this score, on the bill’s final reading the following day, Freisinnige representative and lawyer Carl August Munckel proposed inserting the word “knowingly” into the phrase “whoever is in possession of,” an amendment that the Reichstag adopted before approving the law overwhelmingly by voice vote.232 This undramatic episode suggests a few things. First, the Social Democrats regarded any opportunity to discuss anarchism as beneficial to their campaign of normalizing their own movement in the eyes of the public. Second, the Reichstag majority opposed to exceptional laws was indeed, as its members routinely claimed, not at all opposed to tough legal measures against threats to public security, when the government targeted a specific threat with a specific change to the criminal code. At the same time, the body’s support for Munckel’s amendment, which implicitly supported the plausibility of Hasenclever’s imagined scenario about ignoble police shenanigans, suggested a continued distrust of the government among those who had once been targeted by it. During the fall 1884 election campaign, the Social Democrats offered a lengthy position paper spelling out socialism’s economic philosophy and underscoring its reformist character. On political matters, the Socialists stressed their support for “equal rights for all.” In keeping with this, they attested, “on principle we are opponents of all exceptional laws” and “of every constriction of liberty,” and had always voted against all exceptional laws, even those directed against their enemies, pointedly contrasting themselves with the significant number of Freisinnige representatives who had voted for the Socialist Law. The Socialist leaders also reminded voters that “no speaker dared” during the Reichstag debate to attribute to them the attacks of 1878 (though Treitschke had in fact done so) or those perpetrated by anarchists.233 As in 1881, the election results offered conflicting trends. The dramatic loser was the newly established Deutsch-Freisinnige Partei. Despite its leaders’ engineering of the Socialist Law’s renewal to protect themselves from Bismarck’s campaign against them, the electoral debacle they feared came to pass anyhow, as the party lost 15 percent of

114

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

the vote share garnered by its constituent parties in 1881 and a third of its Reichstag caucus. Both conservative parties also lost votes, but the Reichspartei held steady in representatives and the German Conservatives actually expanded their mandate by over 50 percent. The other parties saw little change in their vote share or seats, with the exception of the Social Democrats, who captured 50 percent more votes than in 1881 and doubled the size of their Reichstag Fraktion. Following two elections in which its vote share declined, the SAPD began a period of nearly unbroken expansion of its voter pool. As Jonathan Sperber has demonstrated, most of this increase came from previous non-voters choosing Social Democrats, perhaps as the party’s emphasis on the value of elections persuaded workers to channel their energies into the democratic process, or as new voters came of age unburdened by deeply engrained anti-socialism. Increasing vote switching between the Social Democrats and other parties from election to election, though not always in the Social Democrats’ favor, also suggests the growing normalization of Social Democracy within the political landscape.234

The period from 1878 to 1885 was crucial for the Social Democrats, who were forced under enormous duress to reorganize their party to survive the strictures of the Socialist Law. Yet in articulating to its followers how they should behave and explaining to the German public why it should not be persecuted into extinction, the party took the opportunity to redefine itself. The Social Democratic critique of anarchism allowed the party to embody in a distinct and concrete image all that it was not, an image against which Socialist political values of democracy, peace, discipline, and openness could be brought into relief. These years also proved important for non-Socialists. The Socialist Law renewals, the periodic impositions and extensions of the minor state of siege, election campaigns, and acts of anarchist violence all demanded that competing political factions explain both their understanding of Socialism and its relationship to anarchism and also their view of what a fair political and judicial system should look like. By the middle of the 1880s, a loose political consensus against exceptional laws and for a liberal democratic order had formed on the center and left of the political spectrum. Over the next half-decade, it would prove increasingly difficult for the government and its allies, especially the National Liberals, to justify the further persecution of Social Democrats. And this would only grow harder as the Social Democrats launched a concerted effort to expose the corrupt practices of the political police, especially their alleged use of agents provocateurs to incite anarchist attentats.

C h a p t e r

F O U R

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism” 1 8 8 6 – 1 8 9 0

The public debate over the Socialist Law’s renewal in 1884 showed the easing of Social Democracy’s political marginalization. The anarchist plots in Germany from 1883 to 1885 failed to generate political enthusiasm for further anti-socialist measures or antianarchist laws other than the modest and targeted Dynamite Law, and from this point on, discussions of Socialism no longer hinged on its relationship to anarchism or to violent revolutionism more generally. Though some conservatives would continue to warn of a Socialist revolutionary peril all the way up until Kaiser Wilhelm II’s famous declaration of August 1, 1914, “I no longer recognize any parties or any confessions; today we are all German brothers,”1 this position had few adherents outside of increasingly narrow (though politically powerful) circles. During the last five years that the Socialist Law was in effect, public debate on the law focused much less on the nature of Socialism and its relationship to anarchism than on the role of illiberal state policies and police repression in producing anarchist violence. The frequent Social Democratic rallying cry, “The Socialist Law is the father of anarchism,” was taken up by a range of Bismarck’s opponents. Though the year 1890 saw the end of the Socialist Law and the Social Democratic breakthrough election in which the party for the first time garnered the largest percentage of the Reichstag vote, the groundwork for these achievements had been laid over the entire course of the Socialist Law, not only, as many scholars have emphasized, in terms of Social Democrats’ organizational and electoral acumen but also in terms of the movement’s framing of its political principles and of the government’s role in fomenting anarchist violence.

116

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

Despite the battering of the left liberals and the strengthening of the conservative bloc by 31 members (even with declines in votes for both parties), the political climate after the 1884 election did not seem propitious for further vigorous anti-socialist action. By the time the law came up for renewal two years later, many National Liberals openly exhibited a heightened discomfort with the prospect of endlessly renewing the law. Rudolf Gneist, once a staunch proponent, had come out against it, and the National Liberals’ new leader, Johannes von Miquel, opposed it as well.2 Though the party’s furthest left members had long since defected to the Deutsch-Freisinnige, even for many right-wing liberals justifying the law became more difficult as the Socialists uncovered repeated flagrant abuses and manipulation in its implementation. During the last three debates on the Socialist Law, in 1886, 1888, and the brief debate of 1889–1890, the rhetorical ground had shifted noticeably from the previous debates, with the anti–Socialist Law forces even harsher in their critiques of the law, and in particular of government attempts to use anarchist activities to justify anti-Socialist persecution. Making its case for the Socialist Law’s renewal in 1886, the government emphasized in particular the alleged rise of anarchist activity in the nation. A November 1885 government report to the Reichstag on the status of anti-socialist measures pointed to Rumpf ’s murder, the wide distribution of Freiheit in Germany (the government estimated that 4,500 copies of the paper entered Germany and Austria every month), and the attempts of anarchists to make incursions into the Berlin workers’ milieu as justifications for the law’s continuation.3 In presenting its argument this way, the government conceded that anarchism and Social Democracy differed and that the Socialists’ political efforts were focused on gradual, legal reform rather than violence. The proposal for a five-year extension also addressed directly the two main non-Socialist charges against it: first, that it had hindered neither the “increase in the number of Social Democratic Reichstag deputies” nor “the perpetration of anarchist attentats” such as Rumpf ’s murder; second, that exceptional laws infringed on freedom and undermined public faith in the state. In response, the government claimed that thanks to the law “the intensity and revolutionary energy of at least a portion of the Social Democratic movement had diminished,” while the Socialist deputies had begun to work for “a legislative solution to the socio-political problems of the present.” However, the law’s expiration would “open the doors again for the extraordinary power of the agitation of the revolution parties.”4 These two claims became the central points advanced by conservatives. The theme of Interior Minister Puttkamer’s first speech during the debate was that the Socialist Law had moderated Social Democracy. Where Hasselmann had once concluded a Reichstag speech with his wish “to die on the barricades,” and Bebel had defended the murder of princes, the character of German Socialism had completely changed, the interior minister was happy to say. “I congratulate them,” he stated, “on the inner transformation that has proceeded.”5 Six weeks later, he rebutted Windthorst’s charge that the Socialist Law acted as “anarchism’s foster father” with the assertion that before the law’s implementation, “the entire Social Democratic Party, including its par-

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

117

liamentary wing, was as a matter of fact composed of anarchists, or at least was filled with them.” After almost eight years under the Socialist Law, the Social Democrats “have certainly changed a great deal in their external attitude, and they have, if I may say, shed [ausgemausert] anarchism from their ranks.”6 But the question remained, according to the interior minister, whether or not the parliamentary leaders could continue to transform “the disposition of the masses to eliminate the violent-revolution-minded” elements in the party, turning Social Democracy into a “radical reform party, which we could call the extreme left wing of the German People’s Party” (a comment precipitating laughter from the right side of the chamber). Puttkamer feared that the Socialist Law’s lapse would allow the party’s radical agitators to return to “the insurrectionary speeches” of the past, destroying “every possibility of a peaceful development within the party.”7 More than a decade later, the Conservative Handbook, published jointly by the two conservative parties, promulgated the same view, countering the claim that “the Socialist Law had first produced anarchism” with the statement that in fact “the isolation of these most radical elements out of the general party mush [Parteibrei] and its condensation into small groups gave the authorities the chance to combat the especially generally dangerous outgrowths in a sustained way.”8 Other conservative speakers during the 1886 debate made the same point. German Conservative Albrecht von Schlieckmann acknowledged that the Socialist Law had not been able to check anarchist violence fully, but he argued that it nonetheless stood as a bulwark against a full-scale descent into revolutionary barbarity. Addressing the Reichs­ tag’s Socialist faction directly, he argued that the Socialist Law protected them too: “You maintain that you are not anarchists, that you never touched the principles of anarchism; you reject with indignation the anarchists’ principles, as well as their deeds and their actions. But you know, gentlemen, that if there were no Socialist Law . . . it would not be so easy to do this.” For if Social Democrats were allowed to organize publicly, “soon the men behind you [Hintermänner] would come forward and say: now there has been enough talk, now we want to see deeds! And then the anarchists would perhaps for the first time overtake you.”9 Reichspartei representative Ernst Leuschner reiterated this perspective, accepting that, “as they say, the Social Democrats in this house do not endorse this agitation” but cautioning that if “order were disturbed at all through the excitement of the people, and violence replaced it, then the so-called moderate leaders would very quickly be pushed to the side. Radicalism would take hold of the organization, and those who advocate radicalism are the anarchists.” In this situation, Leuschner warned the Socialists, “anarchy would throw you completely overboard.” Germans therefore needed the law “to protect us from anarchy’s endeavors.”10 Though most conservative speakers in the Reichstag hesitated to claim that Social Democracy and anarchism were equivalent, Christian Social Party leader Adolf Stöcker did not, telling his Reichstag colleagues, “when the Social Democrats go on as if anarchism were far different from their idea of perfection [Ideenhimmel], they count on either the ignorance or the forgetfulness of the political world.” A cry of “Very true!”

118

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

from some right-wing deputies greeted this remark, indicating at least some support for this position remained. As evidence Stöcker cited an unnamed Socialist songbook whose songs glorified the French Revolution, the assassination of Alexander II, and the revolutionism of Wilhelm Tell. “All this is anarchism,” he proclaimed, which “follows from their principles.” A Social Democrat who “defends the Commune . . . is an anarchist, and he lacks only the time and occasion to pursue practical anarchism.”11 Stöcker’s pronouncements, which would have been in the conservative mainstream several years earlier, now marked him as the most extreme voice on the right. As in 1884, the National Liberals contributed little to the debate. Marquardsen delivered two short speeches supporting the law’s renewal, on the grounds that it had impeded the Social Democrats to some degree and that it had not in the previous two years been used overly harshly. In a short speech, Fritz Kalle, the only other National Liberal to address the body, maintained that Social Democrats wished to destroy marriage, adducing in support of this claim quotes from Most and Hasselmann, a misquote of the Communist Manifesto, and Bebel’s endorsement of equal rights for women. Georg von Hertling, leader of the Zentrum’s conservative faction, attacked Socialists for allegedly spreading atheism, which “all of us who stand fast on the ground of Christianity, who regard Christianity as the basis of our entire national identity [Volksthum]” must combat, for “the atheism of the masses is no mere theoretical conviction; instead, the atheism of the masses is an immediate force of destruction.”12 Hertling offered no explanation of how the law furthered this goal, which anti–Socialist Law Zentrum representatives like Windthorst would hardly have opposed. Even before debate on the Socialist Law itself had commenced, the Social Democrats came out firing. Hasenclever objected to the Reichstag president’s intention to combine discussion of recent government measures against Social Democracy and the Socialist Law extension itself, prevailing on this point after a brief debate. Having won the right to address the government’s anti-socialist activities first, Socialist deputies Louis Viereck, Karl Frohme, and Paul Singer spent the next three hours recounting in detail the harshness and dishonesty with which the minor state of siege and other police measures continued to be employed, with only a few brief challenges from Puttkamer.13 This litany of abuses was capped by Singer’s dramatic exposure of a recently discovered police agent provocateur. Since the Socialist Law’s first years, Social Democrats had accused the political police of artificially inflating anarchism’s influence in Germany. Numerous Sozialdemokrat articles pointed to the systematic support the police gave anarchism in order to create a climate in which they could act more easily against Social Democrats.14 In March 1880, the Socialists charged that a police spy had been found distributing a pamphlet version of an article from Freiheit to bolster the government’s case that Most’s brand of revolutionism held sway over the Socialist movement.15 To justify prolonging the minor state of siege in Berlin in 1881, claimed Der Sozialdemokrat, the police had used as evidence the two-year-old seizure of an anarchist printing press. The article claimed

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

119

that, at the time of the Wyden Congress, only 25 copies of Freiheit entered Berlin each week, and seven months later not more than five, “of which the majority are police subscriptions!”16 The next year Grillenberger challenged the government assertion that the “Most-ish faction” was on the rise in Hamburg (justifying the minor state of siege there), arguing that of the couple hundred German subscriptions to the “London-based anarchist Most-ish Freiheit,” most were going to the police. He offered a string of examples of police spies encouraging disturbances of the peace and facilitating Freiheit’s distribution. As many Socialist speeches from this point on would do, Grillenberger’s speech referenced a comment Puttkamer had once made that he preferred the anarchists to the Social Democrats (because they admitted their true aims rather than hiding behind a peaceful front, according to the interior minister). This “fancy [Liebhaberei] of the minister for the Most-ish faction” suggested to Grillenberger that the government, far from trying to eliminate anarchism, actually nurtured it to facilitate the continuation of anti-Socialist measures.17 Most important for subsequent discussions of the Socialist Law was the party’s amassing of mountains of solid evidence that spies under the command of the Berlin Police Presidium, which reported to Interior Minister Puttkamer, had acted as agents provocateurs. The extent of the police spies’ involvement in writing articles for anarchist papers, buying dynamite, and financing attentats remained in some dispute, but government representatives could not disprove the involvement itself.18 In October 1878 the interior minister and police president were already receiving reports from their first well-placed spy, Rudolf August Wolf. In addition to reporting on Social Democratic gatherings in Hamburg, Wolf sought to persuade the movement’s followers to pursue the “Most-ish” path of violent revolution. Wolf and a fellow spy, A. Wichmann, began publishing articles in Freiheit denouncing the Social Democratic leadership’s cowardice and calling for violence in Germany. The two spies also vigorously protested the expulsion of Most and Hasselmann from the party.19 When Most went to prison in Britain for his most inflammatory articles, a police spy actually took over Freiheit’s editorship in his absence. When the Socialist leadership exposed Wolf as a spy, they used the incident to try to discredit the government.20 The story of another police spy, Elias Schmidt, first came to light in 1882, and thereafter appeared repeatedly in Social Democratic Reichstag speeches and newspaper articles. Schmidt arrived in Zurich (the center of German Socialist activity while the party was outlawed) claiming to be a Social Democrat and spreading around money to gain party members’ trust. Telling the story to the Reichstag in December 1882, Vollmar observed that “what the police want before all else is not at all reports of our habitual­ activities; no, there must be some conspiracy, dynamite, and such things at hand.” Knowing this, Schmidt set about trying to concoct a conspiracy for the police by establishing an “attentat fund,” manufacturing poisoned arrows, and then sending reports to his superiors about all the conspiracies being fomented in Switzerland.21 Schmidt was soon exposed, just as the government was attempting to use his “evidence” against the Socialists.

120

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

The Wolf and Schmidt affairs offered the Social Democrats a starting point from which to build up a public case against the government. Socialists also asserted that Frankfurt police chief Rumpf not only had prior knowledge of the Niederwald attentat but had even supported it financially through the police spy Carl Rudolf Palm.22 Most important for subsequent discussions was Singer’s exposure, immediately before the 1886 Socialist Law renewal debate began, of Ferdinand Ihring, a former soldier turned Berlin political police agent. Under the name Mahlow he had entered into working-class organizations, where he displayed such provocative and radical behavior that he was immediately suspected of being a spy. But without proof, the Social Democrats took no immediate action against him. He continued to urge Socialists to acts of violence, such as destroying telegraph lines and train stations, and bragging of his association with anarchist leaders in Switzerland. He asked workers if they knew where to find dynamite, telling his fellows he wanted to plan an attentat against the kaiser. Finally, in late January 1886, Ihring-Mahlow tipped his hand to an unemployed woodworker named Berndt, hoping to convert him to the ranks of police spies. Berndt instead reported the entire series of events to Singer.23 Though Puttkamer denied the claim, he offered no proof to challenge Singer’s statement, and the affair became a public embarrassment for the government. Social Democratic leaders took to shouting “Ihring-Mahlow” during the Reichstag speeches of those who defended the Socialist Law as a necessary response to anarchist violence. References to police spies served as a shorthand way of questioning their opponents’ claims. Der Sozialdemokrat and other publications also routinely referenced the affair and described incidents they judged to show police corruption as “Ihring-Mahlowiades.” Social Democrats portrayed the use of these methods not simply as unjustified, but as dishonorable. In his anti-anarchist pamphlet for the Hamburg workers, Liebknecht addressed Puttkamer directly: “We—the fighting, conquering Social Democrats—we will see to it that you, Herr von Puttkamer, along with your Mahlow-Ihrings and all your other cronies, with all your Junker trickery and police chicanery, meet with the ruin you deserve.”24 In a 1911 work devoted entirely to police spying, Socialist Eugen Ernst wrote, “The ignominious use of spies has shown a corruption that threatens to poison Germany’s entire political life. Only Social Democracy’s iron discipline has prevented the agents provocateurs from gaining a proper foothold.”25 During the Socialist Law debate itself, other Socialist speakers picked up on the topic Singer had introduced. Bebel declared, “If anything has established anarchism in Germany, it is the Socialist Law; and if anything has contributed in lending anarchism support, it is the manner in which the police organs of Germany have proceeded against us.” Therefore, “the moral murderers of Police Chief Rumpf are the fathers of the Socialist Law.” But it was not merely morally that they were to blame, for “the Prussian police stand not just in connection to the anarchists, but rather have directly supported them as agents provocateurs.” He proceeded to lay out several examples of police spies encouraging attacks and even starting attentat funds.26 Viereck too claimed, “it is always police agents themselves who make the suggestion to carry out attentats!”27 Liebknecht

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

121

explained the police reliance on agents provocateurs (“And there are many MahlowIhrings!” he noted) as an act of desperation because, “where Socialist opinions rule among workers, we see no riots; they always occur in un-socialist areas.”28 This idea appeared in an anonymous Social Democratic pamphlet from 1886, Why We Are Pursued! On the Natural History of the Socialist Law, Dedicated to Puttkamer and the Puttkamerlings, which asked, “And have the Social Democrats organized any riots, plotted revolt, ignited rebellion, erected barricades? . . . German Social Democracy has done nothing but hinder the aim of violent revolution.” The author also discussed Ihring-Mahlow and other agents provocateurs.29 In this vein, Singer warned in a June 1886 discussion of government anti-socialist measures that the government aided the anarchist cause by breaking up Socialist families through the Socialist Law’s harsh implementation, which encouraged the desperate to turn to anarchism. Thus the Socialist Law had had “no other success than the breeding of anarchists, the provocation of attentats, putsches, or other such revolutionary occurrences.”30 Singer cautioned the Reichstag: “those elements, which in their totally desperate condition have the tendency to call for the use of force, are drawn into the foreground” through “the closure of the safety valve of the public sphere [Offentlichkeit], by which you hinder us from publicly advocating our principles.”31 Singer held up anarchist violence in other countries as an illustration. In the Habsburg Empire, where only a weak Social Democratic movement existed, “anarchism is the protest of despair against the Austrian regime’s politics.” That Germany remained largely free of the anarchist blight, the nation should “thank the Social Democratic education,” he argued, which prevented workers from succumbing to the anarchist temptation.32 “The peaceful development of our state and social situation,” declared the Social Democratic Central Election Committee before the 1887 elections, was imperiled by the “exceptional law, which obstructs the working class from the legal route of reform, destroys among the people the sense of justice, and flings in their face the phrase: justice is the basis of the state. The banning of Social Democracy means the breeding of anarchy and anarchism.” If the government truly wished to do away with the threat of anarchist violence, it need only foster a climate of legal equality and conduct elections free of intimidation and fraud, for “if the expression of universal suffrage were respected as an expression of the people’s will, then there would be no hindrance to the social question’s peaceful solution, and social revolution’s terrifying specter would be banished through social reform.”33 The Freisinnige faction offered a nearly identical interpretation of the situation. This time the much smaller caucus was totally united against the measure. Hänel, still the party’s main spokesperson on the Socialist Law, cautioned that, while it might appear that the bourgeoisie’s “desire for peace and security has been fulfilled by the Socialist Law,” this was in fact “a false sense of peace,” bought at the price of justice, the only basis for truly lasting security. He warned that “you cannot ever curb Social Democracy or anarchist endeavors or secure their lasting elimination except by means of intellectual [geistigen] liberty, confronting them with truth.” He contested the assertion of the

122

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

law’s supporters that it reduced class hatred, replying, “without a doubt the Socialist Law has not blunted class hatred, but sharpened it.”34 This view was shared even outside the left-liberal circles. In his 1885 pamphlet, Social Democracy: Its Truths and Its Errors, Christian Radenhausen, a religious and philosophical thinker involved in the empire’s anti-Semitic milieu, warned that the law had injured “the sense of legality in outsider circles,” as people feared the wide application of “exceptional laws for excluded parts of the population.”35 Among the Zentrum majority and the minority nationality parties, the same view held sway. Windthorst emphasized his and his colleagues’ readiness “to support whatever measures the royal or imperial governments consider necessary to confront anarchism,” including further changes to the legal code, but forcing Social Democracy into secrecy made it “stronger, more intensive, more powerful,” and also “more criminal. I believe that if in Germany we unfortunately also must lament the anarchists, the emergence of these anarchists must in no small part be ascribed to the circumstances that exist under this law.”36 Windthorst continued to call for open debate with the Socialists: “if we accustom the people to debating with us, within the rules, within the laws, then we are in a position to demonstrate to them the errors, the objectionable parts” of their ideology and work toward the social question’s peaceful solution.37 The Polish deputy Stephan Cegielski averred, in the best tradition of political liberalism, that “Citizens of an empire, of a state, must have equal rights, because they bear equal duties,” a principle that held just as true for German Social Democrats as for the empire’s Poles. “We have been, are, and will continue to be against all exceptional laws,” commented Cegielski, “and thus today, despite our aversion to providing support for Social Democracy’s activities, we will vote on principle against the law’s extension.”38 Because it was clear that the proponents of the Socialist Law’s renewal commanded a narrow Reichstag majority, Windthorst proposed a raft of modifications to the law that would lessen its harshness, particularly by weakening police powers under the minor state of siege. The Zentrum and Freisinnige were prepared to move forward with this version of the bill if they could get Socialist backing, but the Social Democrats split on the issue and rather than show this division to the public, agreed as a bloc to reject any compromise.39 Though the Reichstag committee tasked with reviewing the law voted against its renewal, the full Reichstag voted in favor, with Hertling’s Zentrum minority, most National Liberals, and the two conservative parties once again supporting the law. A month after the law’s renewal, on May 4, a bomb was hurled into a crowd of policemen ordering the dispersal of a workers’ rally for the eight-hour day in Chicago’s Haymarket district. The bomb and the chaotic melee that followed left seven police officers dead. Though the bomber was never identified, eight anarchists were tried for inspiring the murders. None of the men was directly implicated in the Haymarket violence, and some were not even present at the rally. Nevertheless, in October 1886 seven of the eight anarchists were sentenced to death, and four were ultimately hanged on November 11, 1887 (two had their sentences commuted, while the last committed suicide in his cell

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

123

on the eve of the execution date). The Haymarket trial and execution attracted worldwide attention, and its victims became widely known as the “Chicago martyrs,” even among non-anarchists.40 The Haymarket Affair had added resonance in Germany, as five of the eight defendants were German immigrants and a sixth was the American-born son of a German immigrant. Debate in the United States put the relationship of anarchists to the broader socialist and working-class rights movement in the spotlight. For all of these reasons, the Haymarket Affair was followed closely in Germany. Two weeks after the event, when everyone still assumed anarchists were in fact responsible for the bombing, Der Sozialdemokrat denounced the perpetrators for their dangerous immaturity: “The bomb-throwing remains a totally unjustifiable act of senselessness. In a struggle where the interests of hundreds of thousands are at stake, one does not play with fire like children, but rather has the duty—and especially the intellectual leaders—to weigh carefully the consequences of his deed in advance.”41 The paper condemned Johann Most for his ceaseless calls for violence, observing that “Constant fantasizing about murder and conflagration characterizes the moral weakling; the energetic, determined man does not intoxicate himself in wild dreams, but instead resolves and acts.”42 This repudiation of anarchist violence was echoed at the Social Democrats’ third secret congress under the Socialist Law, which took place in St. Gallen, Switzerland in October 1887, a month before the Haymarket anarchists’ execution. The Social Democratic declaration that enshrined anti-anarchism in official party doctrine, in contrast to the personal language of the resolutions expelling Most and Hasselmann from the party at Wyden in 1880, addressed anarchist tactics directly: “individual use of violence does not lead to the goal and, insofar as it injures the sense of justice in the masses, it is positively detrimental to the liberation struggle of the working class and therefore worthless.”43 In discussion of the resolution, Liebknecht described the practitioners of propaganda of the deed as “fanatical” men who believed “their personal acts through the use of violence can bring about the longed-for revolution.” However, “violence cannot make a revolution,” for “we speed up the victory of our cause not through putsches and attentats, but rather through means that increase our power. . . . We must morally win over the masses of the people.” In contrast to anarchist violence, “our solution is: agitate, organize, study.”44 Interior Minister Puttkamer nevertheless insisted that the St. Gallen Congress had once again revealed that “ultimately the route of violence, not the route of peace, is the one by which Social Democracy’s final goals can be reached.” Emphasizing that Liebknecht’s critique of anarchist putschism at the congress had been on practical grounds (namely, that it would lead to greater repression), Puttkamer claimed that Social Democrats simply intended to “bide their time until the masses are prepared to make a revolution.”45 This seemed to the interior minister no improvement at all. German Conservative deputy Carl Kurtz interpreted the Socialist repudiation of anarchists for being “not revolutionary enough” as proof that Socialists welcomed violent revolution.46 This reading of the St. Gallen denunciation of anarchism could also be found in a Prussian

124

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

Foreign Office report in October 1887, which claimed that the party program “no longer rejects the path of violent revolution.” A report from the Berlin police president two months later warned that the tenor of the “revolutionary press” indicated that many Social Democrats were undergoing a “gradual conversion to anarchism.”47 In response to such charges, Bebel read to the Reichstag at length from the resolution that condemned anarchist tactics, especially violence.48 Conservatives’ thinking had by the mid-1880s certainly developed from the earlier stance that Social Democracy and anarchism were for all intents and purposes indistinguishable but continued to posit a fundamental similarity between them. As discussed in the previous chapter, even Madai in his final reports as Berlin police president in 1885 had begun to take a more moderate line on the relationship between Social Democracy and anarchism, accepting that both radical and moderate Socialists opposed anarchism, though he remained convinced that they ultimately shared a common goal. I. V. Friedheim, Madai’s successor as Berlin police president, largely followed his predecessor, expressing great skepticism about the Socialists’ professions of moderation. In July 1886, he wrote that, as the debate over the Socialist Law’s renewal had approached, Social Democrats had moderated the tone of their pronouncements, cloaking their support for violent revolution under a public persona of peaceful reformism. Moderates, he wrote, “hope, or at least claim to hope,” that a social revolution could be accomplished “gradually, in a peaceful fashion through the moral imprint of the working masses on legislation,” but the radicals “know very well that the party program can be fulfilled completely only through violent revolution” and merely awaited sufficient strength to initiate it. “As long as the Socialist Law’s extension remained in doubt,” they were careful to avoid misdeeds, he observed, “but when their hope began to disappear in every direction . . . their speakers in countless public gatherings gradually revealed again their true face” and openly declared that the current social order’s “violent overthrow” was “sooner or later inevitable.” Though he saw moderate Socialists as just as dangerous as radical ones, he made a clear distinction between the two Social Democratic factions and anarchists, like Madai reserving several paragraphs for a discussion of the latter after his report on the activities of the former. On the relationship of the two movements, he observed that “the anarchists living in Germany . . . live in the bitterest enmity with the Social Democrats, so much so that as soon as they are recognized as such, they are denounced by them in Der Sozialdemokrat.”49 However, in a circular to authorities in the German states in December 1886, the Berlin Police Presidium requested information on the activities of both “social-revolutionary” tendencies, including the dissemination of Der Sozialdemokrat and the anarchist papers Freiheit and Der Rebell (The Rebel). The officials who replied also made little distinction between the threats posed by the two movements, though they understood the enmity between them. A police reporter from Magdeburg even noted that the Social Democratic movement in his district had split, as one faction was ostracized for openly expressing sympathy for anarchism.50

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

125

Three works on Socialism and anarchism published in 1887, two of them by police officials, presented these views to the German public. The perspective articulated in the Berlin political police secret reports found its way into the public sphere through an anonymous book (based on a series of newspaper articles for the conservative Hamburger Korrespondent [Hamburg Correspondent]), oft cited by later writers on German anarchism, titled Socialism and Anarchism in Europe and America during the Years 1883 to 1886, which promised that it was based on “official sources.” And indeed it was, at times copying whole passages word for word from Madai’s secret reports. Most of the section on Germany was devoted to the recent activities of the Social Democrats, from the party’s Copenhagen Congress of 1883 to its electoral campaigns, to the smuggling of Der Sozialdemokrat into the country. Anonymous author D. H. explicitly noted the divisions between Socialists and anarchists, commenting that the latter “avoid all association and mutual operation with the non-anarchist socialists” and in fact routinely vilified Social Democratic electioneering. “The relationship between the Social Democrats and the anarchists or Mostians remains outwardly constantly harsh,” he commented, with Der Sozialdemokrat expressing revulsion at the murders committed by Stellmacher, Kammerer, and other anarchists, while Freiheit venerated Stellmacher as “a hero and a man of honor.” Nevertheless, D. H. continued, “the fundamental positions of Social Democracy and the social revolutionaries are entirely the same,” and there was no question that the former would “support their mole-work with the use of violence, as soon as they felt themselves strong enough.”51 Copying a passage directly from Madai’s July 1885 report, D. H. wrote, “While the anarchists also nurture an inner hatred and contempt for the Social Democrats, such a feeling is far from the case among the latter and this must be so, because their goals are thoroughly bound up with those of the anarchists, whose deeds likewise bring their realization closer.” Even so, the book went so far as to credit the fact that “it has not yet come to the most serious outrages” in Germany not only to “the alertness and watchfulness of the authorities” but also to the sway of “the Socialist party leaders themselves” and “the discipline to which their followers have been accustomed,” at least partly endorsing the Social Democrats’ public self-presentation.52 In the same year, Rudolf Emil Martin, a London correspondent for the governmentfriendly Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne Newspaper), published an anonymous book on Anarchism and Its Followers, in which he emphasized the “immense difference between anarchists and Social Democrats,” quoting at length from Most’s fulminations against the Social Democrats, although he also commented, “In their goals anarchists and Social Democrats are in accord, only differentiating themselves in the choice of means.” And even here, the differences were often subtle: “The anarchists are murderers in principle,” but even the Socialists had deemed Alexander II’s assassination not a “murder” but an “execution.” Martin made the somewhat surprising claim that “already in the present time Social Democrats are going over to anarchism in droves.” Though “not directly strengthening the ranks of the anarchists, they become more anarchistic,” refusing to participate in elections and expressing “dissatisfaction with the Socialist deputies.”53

126

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

A pamphlet penned by a Magdeburg police inspector in 1887, The Secret Organization of the Social Democratic Party (which proved popular enough to run through three editions that year), likewise saw only a thin line separating the two opposed movements. The author, W. Krieter, warned that “so long as the supporters of the current social order are of the belief that its violent overthrow has never been sought by Social Democracy,” the government’s efforts to thwart it would fail. But in reality, the vast majority of Socialists rejected the “moderate” parliamentary leaders and adhered to the “revolutionary standpoint,” and even Der Sozialdemokrat derided and insulted “all that to national-thinking Germans is holy” no less than Most’s Freiheit.54 Despite the “bitter struggle” between anarchists and Social Democrats, both sought “the complete overthrow of the current social order.” Only on the matter of tactics did the two differ. While “the anarchists strive through conspiracies and attentats, especially through the use of dynamite, to terrorize the ruling classes and through such murderous deeds call the mass of the people to revolt,” Social Democrats believed in waiting until everything was prepared before striking and condemned anarchists such as Reinsdorf and Lieske “only due to the ‘uselessness’ of these attentats.” Like Martin, he cautioned that recently “the majority of Socialists have made a notable swing to anarchism,” turning against the leaders’ support for parliamentarism.55 Anti-socialists took the Social Democrats’ denunciation of the Chicago Haymarket trial as “class justice” and the anarchists’ execution as “judicial murder” as signs of the party’s secret support for anarchism.56 Martin commented that in the majority of public groups organized on behalf of the Chicago anarchists, Social Democratic clubs had taken leadership positions. They had also participated in gatherings where anarchists spoke, praising “the achievement of the unforgettable Reinsdorf ” and championing propaganda of the deed.57 Krieter claimed that Liebknecht had declared “his solidarity with the anarchists” during a recent tour of America and took Der Sozialdemokrat’s decision to print the entire courtroom speech of Haymarket defendant August Spiess as further evidence of this sentiment.58 When conservatives in the Reichstag pointed to the Social Democrats’ telegram to Governor Oglesby of Illinois requesting clemency for the men after their guilty verdict as a sign of the two movements’ close relationship, Singer replied that in the telegram the Socialists “expressed ourselves to be determined opponents of anarchist activities, of anarchism,” also pointing out that they were hardly the only supporters of a pardon petition. They joined hundreds of thousands of others who regarded the trial as unjust, including many members of the British parliament, none of whom, Singer noted drily, were socialists, much less sympathizers with anarchism.59 Singer not only refuted the charge that Social Democrats shared an ideology with anarchists but also placed the movement in a camp that included all who championed a just legal system and opposed police and judicial brutality. Bebel followed the same line, noting also that the Social Democrats’ telegram to the Illinois governor (signed by Bebel, Liebknecht, Singer, and Grillenberger) earned a withering rebuke from Johann Most, who derided the Socialists’ use of the phrase “in the name of humanity” rather

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

127

than “from the standpoint of justice.”60 As they did with increasing frequency, the Social Democrats sought to utilize the acts and statements of anarchists to underscore their own commitment to the prevailing values of Germany’s center and left.

At the end of 1886 Bismarck had demanded that the Reichstag pass a seven-year military budget, the so-called Septennat, seeking in this way to weaken the Reichstag’s budget-making power. When the left liberals and Zentrum united in opposition and it failed in January 1887, Bismarck dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections for the following month, hoping to secure a victory of pro-government parties by campaigning on their strongest terrain, national security and imperial power; to this end the political right whipped up fears of a possible military confrontation with revanchist France. The two conservative parties and the National Liberals formed an electoral alliance, in which they agreed not to challenge one another but to back the strongest candidate from among the three parties in each district. In this atmosphere, the conservative–National Liberal alliance, known as the Kartell (Cartel), won a significant victory, capturing 220 of 397 Reichstag seats, increasing its share by 40 percent, and giving it a solid majority. The most impressive gains were made by the National Liberals, who returned to their status as largest Fraktion in the Reichstag, capturing a huge share of previously leftliberal voters, who proved enthusiastic supporters of German militarism and imperialism. The Freisinnige caucus shrank to less than half its former size, and the party actually lost votes in an election that saw turnout increase dramatically.61 Most of their wins in run-off elections were only made possible by Social Democratic support. The German People’s Party failed to win a single seat. Though the Social Democrats managed to expand their vote share modestly, they lost over half their Reichstag delegation.62 If ever there were a propitious time for Bismarck to strengthen the Socialist Law, this seemed to be it. The version of the law the government put forward in 1888 proposed exile from the Reich and loss of citizenship for those found in violation of its major provisions, along with increased fines for distributing banned socialist literature. Again Bismarck demanded a five-year extension. The government’s justification for this strengthened version of the law included the usual assertion that the Socialists were closely tied to the “revolution parties in other lands,” who provided the Germans money, and that “among the party leadership the revolutionary tendencies had advanced into the foreground.” The government claimed that, along with 10,000 German subscriptions to Der Sozialdemokrat, several thousand copies of Freiheit and the two Germanlanguage London anarchist papers Der Rebell and Autonomie (Autonomy) entered the country regularly.63 Despite what appeared on the surface to be a radical political shift in 1887, the Reichstag debate over the Socialist Law in January–February 1888 played out much like the previous one. The Social Democrats, fewer in number but no less confident in their rhetoric, took control of the debate immediately, as Singer in the first speech of

128

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

the debate hammered the issue of police support for anarchist attentats through agents provocateurs, false claims of Socialist-anarchist equivalence, and the excessive harshness with which the provisions of the Socialist Law had been enforced over the previous two years. He ridiculed the law’s official justification for propounding the false claim that “the Social Democrats are the allies of the anarchists, the Social Democrats support anarchist crimes.” The government and its supporters must acknowledge, he insisted, that “this anarchism, gentlemen, so far as one can speak of anarchism in Germany, the Socialist Law produced. The Socialist Law, not Social Democracy, is the father of anarchism.” More than once Singer repeated this phrase, blaming both the embitterment and alienation of the population through the Socialist Law’s brutality and also the activities of police spies such as Ihring-Mahlow. “Wherever the talk of anarchism exists,” he expounded, “one can be absolutely sure that it is the police officials . . . who encourage these activities.” There followed a long inventory of the many cases of agent provocateurism Social Democrats had uncovered over the years.64 Describing a particular meeting at which anarchists plotted an attentat, he said to his colleagues, “Gentlemen, please imagine this picture for a moment: the Berlin police’s paid agent chairs a conference where these anarchist crimes are discussed and agreed upon.”65 Bebel elaborated on these charges at length a few days later and again on the last day of debate, when he made the (likely overblown) claim that in 1882, when Most was in prison in Britain for his “Finally!” article, two-thirds of the anarchist movement was made up of police.66 To support their charges, the Social Democrats published their correspondence with a police commandant in Zurich, which provided evidence on the activities of two German police spies in Switzerland.67 Though the interior minister immediately rose to challenge Singer’s charges, his response was vague, for the most part merely defending the need of the government to employ spies to monitor revolutionaries and rebutting the claim that any had been engaged as agents provocateurs. As he had two years earlier, Puttkamer attributed to the Socialist Law the “relatively quiet” tone of the 38 Social Democratic papers legally published in Germany, also arguing that the very presence of so many Socialist newspapers (never mind that it represented a tiny fraction of the number that had existed in 1878) and a substantial Reichstag delegation proved that the law was not brutal but simply effective at moderating Social Democratic behavior.68 Regarding the claim that “the Socialist Law is the father of anarchism,” he acerbically remarked, “we have heard this so often that in fact in my eyes it has become an entirely used-up platitude that it is barely necessary to refute.” Nevertheless, Puttkamer did try to do so, relying on the standard conservative interpretation of revolution: when a party cuts itself off from “the moral order of the world, when it declares in its program the legitimacy of endeavors that aim at the destruction of the world order that for thousands of years has been our hallowed tradition,” then it could only be a matter of time before the extremists commanded the movement. Accordingly, he depicted the “growth of the radical trend and also of anarchism” as “the result of Social Democracy’s sins.”

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

129

Even in invoking this familiar conservative theme, he acknowledged “a considerable difference” between the radical Social Democrats and the anarchists, both of which he distinguished from the moderate Socialists. In place of the once inevitable references to the parliamentarians as “so-called moderates,” he spoke simply of “moderates” or “parliamentarians.” And in fact, he admitted that “it would be going too far to make German Social Democracy directly responsible for the deeds of anarchism.” However, the “moral responsibility” for anarchist outbreaks rested with Socialists as their “intellectual fathers.”69 In a speech the next month, he reminded the chamber that when Most and Hasselmann had delivered “speeches dripping with blood” in the Reichstag, they had been Social Democratic leaders. “It is thus a complete error,” he declared, to blame “our German Socialist Law for the cultivation and dissemination of anarchism.”70 Despite Puttkamer’s harsh denunciation of Socialism, the content and language of his speech revealed a partial rhetorical retreat from the early part of the decade. The short entry on “Anarchy” in the 1888 edition of the Meyers Encyclopedia suggests that the clear distinction between anarchism and Social Democracy had become ingrained in public thinking by this time. The encyclopedia briefly described “anarchy” and “anarchism,” which it related both to the Russian Nihilists and various self-described anarchist movements, and then observed, “German Social Democracy, which wishes to regulate the entirety of civil life through the state and through its coercive power, stresses the opposition between anarchists and Socialists with great sharpness and rejects the association with the anarchists (Most and comrades) most emphatically.” The entry also explained that anarchist dynamite attentats, especially Reinsdorf ’s, had resulted in the passage of the Dynamite Law.71 In the entry for “Social Democracy,” the encyclopedia called the 1878 attentats the results of Socialist agitation but went on to describe the development after this point of “a radical anarchist party under the leadership of Most and Hasselmann” and the “definitive split between the anarchists and the so-called ‘moderate,’ but still radical Bebel-Liebknecht party” at Wyden. The “Socialism” entry explained, “a more radical tendency emerged in the anarchists . . . who wish for immediate overthrow [Umsturz] of all that exists with all possible means, among which they advocate the elimination of opponents through murder.”72 Though not pro-Socialist by any stretch of the imagination, this reference work for the general public reflected the key Social Democratic messages about the party’s relationship to anarchism as well as its pursuit of its goals via parliamentary means. Zentrum co-founder and member of the party’s right wing Peter Reichensperger, who had voted for the Socialist Law in 1884 and 1886 (after previously opposing it) and also urged his party to back Bismarck’s Septennat bill, delivered a speech more typical of the views of the party’s left. Proclaiming that “the evil of Social Democracy can only be combated if we take the road of common law and inner healing,” rather than through “mechanical repression,” he warned of the danger of injustice and repressive policing producing anarchism, as evidenced by the Russian example. Owing to “the most farreaching police violence,” the tsarist empire had seen little Social Democratic activity,

130

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

because “after the police have taken charge of the matter with the most unbridled and reckless use of force, we see naked anarchism.” Russia routinely served as the archetype of authoritarian government against which liberals measured the state of German institutions. Now this logic had found its way into the thinking of a fairly conservative deputy, taking as prominent a place in Reichensperger’s rhetoric as pleas for spiritual renewal in the combat of socialism, the stock-in-trade of Zentrum discourse. Concluding that Christian feeling, support for the state, and the cooperative solidarity of “all good elements of the Volk” could not be achieved “with exceptional laws and the sharpening of these,” he decided, “I can only recommend that the bill be rejected.”73 Throughout the debate, conservatives emphasized the danger of anarchism, especially the specter of anarchists overwhelming Social Democratic leaders, while the parties opposed to the law condemned excessive police repression and spying. German Conservative representative Helldorff suggested that anarchism had been a major issue at the St. Gallen Congress because the Social Democrats had seen a “truly great spread of this anarchist orientation” within their movement. Already Germany was subject to “anarchist putsches, dynamite, and other things” hatched from abroad, but if we “tolerate this army of revolution organizing within Germany under our eyes,” there would come a “convulsion that will cost an amount of blood and misery next to which everything that can be wreaked by anarchist putsches and dynamite is a triviality.”74 Reichspartei speaker Kardorff embraced police spying, calling it “a sad necessity that we have been compelled to by the turn the socialist movement has taken toward anarchism.”75 The law’s non-socialist opponents picked up on the Socialist attack on police abuses and reiterated their long-standing objections to exceptional legislation. Bamberger attacked the use of agents provocateurs and blasted government surveillance as ineffectual. Since even the harshest measures had proved incapable of preventing the Niederwald conspiracy and Rumpf ’s murder, he declared that he and his comrades “would rather accept these dangers than forfeit our rights and our freedom.”76 Freisinnige representative Albert Träger also decried the use of agents provocateurs. Beginning with the comment “Anarchism, in Germany at least, first made its appearance after the Socialist Law was passed,” he detailed three different types of anarchists: the spiritually and morally ill (like Hödel); common criminals who simply adopted the mantle of politics to justify their actions; and, most troubling, a third part “composed of agents provocateurs, of artificial anarchists who endeavor to raise up real anarchists.”77 It was bad enough that the government tried to blame Social Democrats for the first two categories, but the fact that it actively encouraged anarchist violence totally undermined its credibility. Against all these charges, Puttkamer protested in frustration, “We operate absolutely no agents provocateurs” and flatly declared, “That is the last word that I have to say in relation to it.”78 The minority parties too opposed the law. Polish representative Jozef Koscielski declared, “We will vote against the Socialist Law as well as against the sharpening of the same, first on the grounds that we are, we must declare, on principle against every excep-

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

131

tional law,” also because they did not trust the government in its implementation based on what they had seen so far.79 Windthorst delivered a few boilerplate anti–Socialist Law speeches hitting the same themes.

Despite the Cartel’s large majority in the Reichstag, the body rejected both Bismarck’s proposal to sharpen the Socialist Law and his demand for a five-year extension, instead renewing the original version for two years. Many members made it clear that they were supporting the law in its current form for the last time while awaiting new safeguards against political extremism that could be worked out within the boundaries of universally applicable law. The press of the Zentrum and National Liberals strongly favored such a step.80 Legal scholars writing on the topic in the window between the 1888 extension and the next debate in November 1889 were mostly divided between those who believed the Socialist Law should be allowed simply to expire and those who endorsed strengthening the general legal code in preparation for the law’s inevitable end. In his Socialist Law and Administration of Justice, which went through four editions in 1889, left-liberal Offenburg lawyer Oskar Muser offered “an urgent call to the opponents and the friends of the Socialist Law for a return to the basis of the general law and the combating of all attempts at the extension of the exceptional law in its current or another form.”81 Muser quoted Hänel’s Reichstag speeches approvingly, endorsing freedom of association and the press and criticizing the legal injustices perpetrated against Social Democrats. On the other side was Ludwig Fuld, whose Cancellation of the Socialist Law and the Alteration of the Legal Code argued that before the law expired new legal measures should be put in place, since a decade of long-simmering hatred built up among Socialists was at risk of exploding if the pressure were suddenly released. Once positive measures had had time to work, it would be possible to completely normalize Social Democracy.82 In Social Democracy and Its Combating: Studies in the Reform of the Socialist Law, Brunswick judge and National Liberal Reichstag member Wilhelm Kulemann compiled all of the competing arguments together, seeking to facilitate an informed public discussion about the various options for proceeding against Social Democracy without violating the sense of legal fairness produced by an exceptional law.83 What is clear in all of this literature is that none of these scholars expected the Socialist Law to survive past 1890. The only question was what would follow. Even the secret reports of the Berlin police presidents showed increasingly measured assessments. Bernhard Baron von Richthofen, whose first report came in 1887, over time developed a nuanced understanding of the internal divisions that beset Social Democracy and the problems faced by the government in repressing Socialism. Richthofen perceived that government anti-socialist measures could, as their opponents claimed, push Socialists into radicalism. The moderate socialists had put tremendous energy into the electoral campaign of February 1887, anticipating a significant increase in their Reichstag representation. Their failure, Richthofen observed, encouraged radical Social

132

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

Democrats to turn away from parliamentarism and possibly toward violent revolutionism (though he did not connect this risk to anarchism, which he covered separately). Richthofen’s next report mocked the anarchists and explicitly noted the Social Democrats’ efforts against them. Describing an 1889 anarchist congress in Paris, he commented that it “proceeded in an entirely formless, truly anarchist fashion” from one topic to another and concluded “without passing any resolutions, because this would impose control on the individual comrade’s personal freedom.” Explaining the marked decrease in the number of anarchists active in Germany, he wrote, “the followers of this party are now observed and combated nearly as sharply by the Social Democrats as by the authorities.”84 Thus by the end of the Socialist Law era, the German political police in their private communications neither regarded anarchists and Socialists as secretly in cahoots nor seemed unduly alarmed by the activities of the Social Democrats. Official skepticism about the Socialist Law’s benefits could be found among other officials as well. In his 1925 memoirs, Hans Hermann von Berlepsch, the district governor in Düsseldorf from 1884 to 1889 and later Prussian minister of trade and industry, recalled that “anyone with an opportunity to observe the effects of the Socialist Law firsthand . . . discovered that forcible means failed completely, that they might address external symptoms but could never eradicate underlying convictions. Ultimately the only thing achieved was a hundredfold increase in the bitterness found in working-class circles.”85 Given even some government officials’ ambivalence, it was with little surprise that the Socialist Law was not renewed in January 1890. To begin with, it was clear that elite opinion had turned against the law, and the National Liberals who had voted for it in 1888 in solidarity with their Cartel partners were no longer willing to do so again. Second, Robert von Puttkamer had resigned as interior minister under pressure from the new, liberal-minded Kaiser Friedrich III, who believed in limiting the constitutional powers of the monarch and chancellor. Puttkamer’s replacement, Ludwig Herrfurth, heeded public opinion as well as the new monarch’s wishes by softening the law’s implementation, reversing the course Puttkamer had set over the previous two years.86 Friedrich III ruled for only 99 days before being overcome by cancer of the larynx in June 1888, but his son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, though closer in politics to his grandfather than his father, expressed sympathy for more thorough social reforms on behalf of workers and at the beginning of his reign seemed open to fostering a better relationship with the Socialists. Bismarck now found himself on the outs with both the National Liberals and the young kaiser, who insisted on a milder version of the Socialist Law, whereas the chancellor had argued for a stronger and permanent one. With even the right wing of the Zentrum opposed, this left only the two conservative parties in Bismarck’s corner in November 1889, when the extension was introduced. The official justification trumpeted the law’s success in protecting the nation from the Socialists’ “incitement to acts of violence” and moderating their behavior over time. Though not yet time to do away with the law, the government proposed to moderate many of its provisions and place it

“The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism”

133

more on the ground of general law, in particular by adding judicial review to the authority it granted the police, while asking for the law to be made permanent.87 The three-day discussion of the law’s first reading gave a clear idea of the parties’ reception of this new approach. The moderated law pleased the National Liberals, whose speakers endorsed it, challenging the term “exceptional law” that the law’s opponents continued to bring up against it. Reichensperger too praised the government for moderating some of the law’s provisions, though he did not trust the idea of an open-ended law and ultimately came out against the proposal because it remained an exceptional law.88 Almost no one (with the exception of a single Reichspartei speaker) sought to paint Socialism as a revolutionary threat, with the law’s proponents defending it as beneficially moderating Socialists and promoting social reform, its opponents charging that it sowed discontent among the working classes. The Social Democrats trotted out their usual arguments— Liebknecht and Bebel both rehearsed the law’s entire history, beginning with the attacks of 1878 being falsely attributed to Socialists, the opposition of Social Democracy to anarchism (“Anarchists believe in the omnipotence of violence, we do not; violence is an anarchist fetish,” proclaimed Liebknecht), the law’s production of a previously nonexistent anarchist threat, the history of police spies such as Ihring-Mahlow—but these in some ways seemed beside the point. No one else on either side invoked the threat of anarchist attacks, the dissemination of Freiheit, Most’s connection to the Socialists, or any of the justifications for the law from earlier years. The Social Democrats had for all intents and purposes won this battle already.89 A Reichstag committee tasked with revising the bill opted to eliminate the “minor state of siege” provision altogether, so when the Reichstag next discussed the bill in January, it was even milder than before. This version pleased the National Liberals and had the kaiser’s support but lost most of the conservatives. When the Reichstag voted to accept the committee’s proposed modifications to the bill, its fate was sealed. On January 25, 1890, the bill received almost exclusively National Liberal support, going down to defeat with 98 votes in favor and 169 against, with a third of the Reichstag having already decided to leave town in the midst of the election season. The Socialist Law had come to an end not with a bang but a whimper.

A month later, the election of a new Reichstag produced the greatest transformation in the empire’s electoral history, as the Social Democrats garnered 19.7 percent of the vote, nearly double what they had achieved in 1887, giving them the largest share of the vote of any party in the body, though they only won 35 seats. Perhaps even more significantly, the Socialists finally made significant inroads into the German middle classes, which would continue for the rest of the imperial era (and beyond).90 At the same time, the Freisinnige increased its vote share and more than doubled its caucus’s size, while the German People’s Party took 10 seats after having lost every seat it held three years earlier. The big losers were the National Liberals and the Reichspartei, which lost both

134

A SS A SSINS & CONSPIRATORS

votes and representatives. The former Kartell now commanded only 135 instead of 220 seats, scarcely more than the left liberals and Socialists combined. A month later, Bismarck resigned his post as chancellor, and the German Empire embarked on what came to be called the “new course” under Kaiser Wilhelm II and Chancellor Leo von Caprivi. Though the year 1890 did not end government persecution of Socialists, it did signal a move toward a growing public and political consensus in favor of liberal values of free expression and legal and procedural fairness. While these values would constantly run up against illiberal government institutions, the kaiser’s frequent hostility, and the enmity of other powerful forces in German life (such as major industrialists like the Krupp family), they continued to spread through the empire’s political culture, as could be seen in public reaction to anarchist terrorism during the 1890s, when propaganda of the deed reached its peak in Europe.

C h a p t e r

F I V E

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed” 1 8 9 0 – 1 9 0 2

The climactic events of 1890 marked a new era in the history of Social Democracy in the Kaiserreich. Having distanced themselves from anarchism and articulated a public identity as disciplined, peaceful, and parliamentary and no longer facing the restrictions of the Socialist Law, Socialists now found it possible to pursue a variety of practical political measures, as they had tentatively done in the latter half of the 1880s. And the government initially appeared willing to find some common ground with the Social Democrats, even if its goal remained improving the lives of workers enough so that they would not support Socialism. But the mood of Wilhelm II and Chancellor Caprivi, who had replaced Bismarck in March 1890, soon soured, as the Socialists seemed little inclined in their hour of triumph to strike an overly conciliatory tone. Many conservatives inside and outside the government hoped that an intense wave of European anarchist violence from 1892 to 1894, which culminated in the murder of French President Marie François Sadi Carnot in June of that year, would provide an opening to pass new restrictions on the Social Democrats. However, these plans were dashed by the same coalition of political groups that had opposed the Socialist Law, supported by a public that showed an increased aversion to anti-liberal restrictions being placed on domestic minorities. After Austrian Empress Elisabeth’s assassination in September 1898, the Hamburger Nachrichten (Hamburg News), for many years the mouthpiece of Chancellor Bismarck, reported on a conversation the former chancellor (who had died the previous month) had had with its staff in 1894, in which he declared, “In protecting humanity against

136

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

criminal threats every energetic measure is just as appropriate as against any other infectious disease or plague. Against the modern murder sect, human society is in a situation of self-defense. He who kills in self-defense cannot ask himself whether his act is an act of justice. It is his necessity and his right to defend himself. Is not state-organized society in the same position toward the anarchists as the peaceful man who is compelled by attacks to act in self-defense in whatever way he can?”1 However, many Germans by now questioned the value of repressive measures, even against anarchists, and the government never even offered a bill. But when it pursued a measure targeting the alleged violence of striking workers against strike-breakers, which was intended to provide the legal justification for renewed persecution of Socialists, it made explicit references to the anarchist danger in order to justify the law. The bill failed, as political and public opinion remained unconvinced that Social Democrats posed a violent threat. Two further anarchist assassinations of prominent heads of state, Italian king Umberto I of Italy in 1900 and U.S. president William McKinley in 1901, prompted renewed discussion of how to address the anarchist menace, but only the most stalwart conservatives expected sweeping new legislation against anarchists, never mind Socialists. In this era, German anarchists or quasi-anarchists such as Gustav Landauer for the most part spent their time developing a cultural vision of a new social order, not promoting political violence, making them more objects of curiosity than fear. Throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century, left-liberal scholars and journalists devoted significant attention to the exploration of anarchist philosophy’s intellectual significance. Harking back to the pre–Socialist Law writings of men like Schäffle and Bamberger, they argued that anarchism had arisen as a reaction to the “socialist principle” pervading German life, as an inchoate cry of stifled individualism. Like Social Democrats, these thinkers regarded anarchism as the opposite of Socialism, but unlike the Socialists, they praised its advocacy of freedom from state oppression.

At the beginning of the 1890s, Social Democrats began to grapple with their new place in the German Empire. With the Socialist Law gone and nearly a million and a half votes won in the 1890 election, it seemed possible to many moderate Social Democrats that they could begin to forge political alliances, in particular with the left liberals, and fully normalize their place in German politics. On June 1, 1891, Georg von Vollmar delivered the first of two controversial speeches known as the “Eldorado speeches” (after the Munich pub where they were delivered). With these speeches, the party moderate launched an early salvo in the struggle over the direction of German Social Democracy in the post–Socialist Law era. Vollmar spoke out passionately in favor of a policy emphasizing reform over revolution, parliamentary cooperation over intransigent opposition.2 To the reformist camp, the Eldorado speeches heralded the promise of society’s peaceful transformation into socialism. By the decade’s end, party stalwart and editor of Der Sozialdemokrat during the Socialist Law period Eduard Bernstein had likewise declared

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

137

himself in favor of reformist tactics as part of what he termed “evolutionary socialism.” Bernstein argued that Marx’s belief in the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse required revisions in light of the current German situation, in which it seemed possible that society could peacefully evolve into socialism. While many party radicals feared this reformist impulse, they too sought a new place on the political landscape, appearing increasingly willing to engage in cooperation and compromise with other political parties. In 1890 the Social Democrats changed the party’s name from the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD) to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), signaling their openness to being a Volkspartei (representing all the German people) rather than just a working-class party. At the Erfurt Congress of 1891, the party adopted a new program, penned by influential party thinker Karl Kautsky, which replaced the Gotha Program of 1875. The theoretical half of the Erfurt Program expressed a revolutionary radicalism in terms taken directly from Marx, yet the party’s practical agenda, expressed in the document’s second half, reflected a commitment to economic and political change within the Reich’s established framework.3 Thus, the program boldly stated that the present social system “will finally lead to such unbearable conditions for the mass of the population that they will have no choice but to go down into degradation or to overthrow the system of private property,” but Kautsky also commented, “When . . . we declare that those social reforms which stop short of the overthrow of the present system of property are unable to abolish the contradictions which the present economic development has produced, we by no means imply that all struggles on the part of the exploited against their present sufferings are useless within the framework of the existing social order.” Kautsky called parliamentary activity “the most powerful lever that can be utilized to raise the proletariat out of its economic, social and moral degradation.”4 By yoking together radical Marxist language and practical political activity, the leaders of the party produced an ideology of “revolutionary ‘attentism,’” that is, attentive waiting for revolution. According to this logic, since capitalism’s collapse would occur inevitably through the system’s internal contradictions, Socialists needed merely to bide their time and prepare to take over after capitalist society’s demise.5 What this meant in practical terms was a heavy focus on electoral politics, reform measures, and trade union activity. It was not only Socialists who considered the question of what exactly the changes of 1890–1891 would mean for Social Democracy’s role in German life. From left liberals to arch-conservatives, speculation was rife about both what the future would hold and how best to engage or oppose the movement. Many liberals had even in the previous decade embraced the possibility of working with Social Democrats on reform projects and bringing them more fully into the political mainstream through vigorous public disputation of ideas, hoping to moderate the party and also undercut the Social Democrats’ appeal to workers by ameliorating their situation. In the early 1890s, a spate of books, pamphlets, and speeches laid out competing cases for how to understand Socialism. In 1890 Theodor Barth, Freisinnige Reichstag deputy and editor of the prominent weekly Die Nation (The Nation), reissued his 1878 book The Socialist Future State, rechristened The

138

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Social Democratic World of Thought. Noting that the original had come out at a less than propitious time, when “discussion of socialist theory receded behind the police action inaugurated by the Socialist Law,” and that over the next 12 years Socialists had spent their energies almost exclusively on struggling against this measure, Barth deemed it an ideal time to return to this theoretical debate. In his book, Barth discussed a range of issues, from Marx’s economic ideas to Socialist beliefs about law, religion, marriage, and foreign relations. Barth’s central objection to the Social Democratic worldview was its infringement on individual rights: “So far as the socialist state is actually achievable, it can only be established at the cost of individual liberty.” He found reassurance in this fact, for “as long as there is a trace of self-awareness and power in a people, it will never sacrifice complete liberty to equality fanaticism.” To combat socialism, he urged society’s leaders to furnish the masses with “the weapon of education.”6 Another prominent representative of this attitude was liberal Protestant pastor Friedrich Naumann, who joined the Christian Social Party in 1890, hoping to challenge Social Democracy through a religiously based movement committed to social reform for the working classes. After clashing with that party’s leaders, he founded a Christian liberal party that was eventually absorbed by the Freisinnige, and he also began publishing Die Hilfe (Help), an influential weekly magazine of social reform targeted at the middle classes as an alternative to Socialism. Like Barth, Naumann was explicit about his disagreements with Social Democrats but hoped to work with them when possible and contend with their ideas honestly. Georg Gothein, a left liberal elected to the Reichs­tag in 1903, also emphasized the importance of contending with Social Democracy in the political sphere. His 1904 speech, “Liberalism and Social Democracy,” published as a pamphlet by Naumann’s Die Hilfe, acknowledged the “unbridgeable contrast” between Social Democracy and liberalism, but he urged liberals to wage “an honest, political struggle” against socialism, based on the foundation of absolute equality for all citizens. “We advocate as much as the Social Democrats for an independent, impartial administration of justice,” he declared. Criticizing Prussian officialdom’s persecution of Socialists, he held up as a model southern Germany: “where this terrorism against Social Democracy is unknown, where even the Zentrum does not shy away from making a coalition with the Social Democrats, Social Democracy has adopted a milder stance than with us here in Prussia.”7 Confirming this view of the south, a Saxon envoy to Bavaria reported in 1898 that he was “amazed when he learned in discussions with ‘leading personalities’ in the south that the SPD was seen not as a threat, but as just another political party.” But even in Saxony, where anti-socialist sentiment flourished and a distinctly illiberal association law prevailed, political police monitored but rarely interfered with Socialist associational life.8 Carl Grünberg, a liberal social reformer who would later embrace Marxism and become the founding director of the Institute for Social Research, even in 1897 pleaded for Social Democracy’s political normalization. In his dictionary of Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Grünberg defined socialism broadly, with entries covering ancient and

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

139

medieval socialist ideas, utopian writers such as Thomas More and Tomasso Campa­ nella, and even Christian Socialism. His discussion of German Social Democracy’s history focused on theoretical and organizational developments, highlighting the party’s moderation after 1890. “German Social Democracy will and must in its inner structure experience a conversion and gradually go from being a social revolutionary to a radical social reform party,” he suggested, calling this a “natural developmental process when undisturbed by exceptional laws.” The entry on “Anarchism” focused mostly on the theoretical ideas of Proudhon and Stirner, with only a brief mention of Bakunin, Most, and “propaganda of the deed,” noting that anarchists had produced nothing but “fantasies, criminals and, last but not least, agents provocateurs.”9 The 14th edition (1894–1896) of Brockhaus’s venerable popular ConversationsLexikon (Encyclopedia) focused in its “Social Democracy” entry mostly on the period since 1890 and in particular on the party’s political goals, namely, “the elimination of class rule and classes themselves, [and] equal rights and equal duties for all without regard to gender or ancestry,” which included the struggle against “every kind of exploitation and oppression, whether against a class, a party, a gender, or a race.” The entry went on to list a series of Socialism’s practical goals, such as equal voting rights, direct legislation by proposition, the elimination of laws limiting rights of free expression and assembly, and a host of other liberal demands.10 Regarding anarchism, Brockhaus noted that, in Germany, Most was “expelled from the Social Democratic party due to his all-too-radical revolutionary endeavors” and that his “agitation in Germany achieved little practical success within the workers’ world,” due to, “before everything, the determination with which the German Social Democratic party opposed the anarchist endeavors.” Whereas both “oppose[d] the exploitation of the workers” and condemned “ownership of land and capital,” they pursued these goals in totally different ways. While “the anarchists not only approve of attentats but often consider them virtually the most important means of agitation, Social Democracy awaits its salvation principally in the development of economic circumstances.”11 In short, it would be hard to imagine a kinder non-socialist rendition of the party’s goals and relationship to anarchism. That this attitude was widespread found confirmation in an 1893 political police assessment of Social Democracy’s progress since the end of the Socialist Law, which fretted that “gradually in ever-wider circles the opinion has gained ground that the danger of Social Democracy for the current state and social order has been overestimated” and that the party would soon “take part with the others in parliamentary work,” pursuing its goals through a “peaceful, orderly competition.” This view had even penetrated the bourgeois parties, who had accustomed themselves to the agitation of the Socialists. The report, while acknowledging the openly reformist bent of men like Vollmar and “the now and again patriotic ring in the speeches of some leaders,” argued that this attitude was mistaken, yet in so doing revealed how prevalent it was.12 Emblematic of the changed place of Social Democracy on the political landscape was a debate that occurred in the Reichstag over several days in January and February 1893,

140

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

known as the Zukunftsstaat (future state) debate. Prompted by a call from a Zentrum representative to explain what they wanted, the Social Democratic Reichstag deputies took it upon themselves over the course of several days’ debate to explain Socialist theory in great detail. While their political opponents on all sides challenged the Socialists’ views during the course of the debate, it provided an example of open and clear disputation of ideas, not prompted by any particular piece of legislation and with no other goal than the debate of differing philosophies. Friedrich Engels wrote to Bebel to praise the victory represented by having the Reichstag spend five days focusing on “the reorganization of society according to our ideas.” The Social Democrats, who covered the event widely in their press, were delighted with the results and published the transcript in a huge edition (more than 1.5 million copies) for distribution to their followers in anticipation of the 1893 elections.13 Of course, not all was sweetness and light for the Social Democrats in the 1890s. Many looked at the Socialist triumph with enormous trepidation and continued to warn that socialism meant the destruction of German life. These fears, most vehemently articulated by Catholic conservatives, were almost always linked to socialist atheism. The People’s Society for Catholic Germany published its own edition of the Zukunftsstaat debate, supplementing the anti-socialist speeches delivered in the Reichstag with additional commentary, concluding that the more the “wild fanaticism of the collectivist and socialist fundamental ideas of Marxist theory” took hold, seeking “to fill the masses of workers with hatred, with despairing pessimism and so to make them ripe for a violent revolution,” the more the “representatives of positive Christianity, of the current social order and an emphatic social reform” must make clear the irreconcilability of the goals of Social Democracy and Christianity.14 In The Social Democrat Comes! A Warning Cry to Our Rural People, which went through 13 editions in 1890, the anonymous author, allegedly “an old village priest,” responded to the recent incursions into villages of outsiders who came “to proclaim a new gospel, the gospel of Social Democracy,” which preached the equality of farmers, servants, and day laborers, rich and poor, who should all share goods in common and work in community. Social Democratic converts did not attend church on Sunday, he complained, instead spending this time in pubs insulting faith and religion. The Catholic priest blamed this situation, like Zentrum and German Conservative Reichstag deputies often did, on the Kulturkampf, which had allowed “young people in every way to become brutalized and run wild, because the state itself declaimed against the Christian church and with it the Christian religion,” and whose end result had been to leave Germany with more Social Democrats than any other land in Europe. The pernicious effects of Socialism also included the specter of gender equality, a world in which “the woman will go into the alehouse and public gatherings and speak in public life like a man.” Ultimately, “a family, a Christian marriage—these foundations for the building of society and the state—do not exist in the Social Democratic future state.”15 In an unexpected turn, the old village priest blamed the Jews, “the beloved child[ren] of the Socialists,” for financing Social Democracy, which in return

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

141

avoided attacking Jews, despite the fact that they owned most of the nation’s capital. Against the Socialist danger the author prescribed religion as the crucial bulwark, but he also demanded from those in power more constraints on freedom: he criticized “our liberal state” for promulgating among the young the principle of unchecked freedom and cautioned masters not to tolerate Socialist or irreligious ideas among their workers.16 Five years later, Swiss-born Jesuit Victor Cathrein (using the pseudonym Nikolaus Siegfried) published Through Atheism to Anarchism, an investigation of contemporary university life told through the fictional story of studious nineteen-year-old Alfred B., who leaves his Christian parents and hometown for university study in Berlin. Young Alfred, initially shocked at his professors’ atheism, which the book links to their faith in modern natural science, is finally seduced away from Christianity by them. Soon after, he falls under the spell of the speeches of “Liebknecht, Auer, Singer, Fischer, and other spokesmen of the Social Democratic Party. He became ever more convinced at the truth of the phrase: without God no authority,” which becomes the tale’s leitmotif.17 Having become a Social Democratic convert, he visits Bebel and Liebknecht to interrogate them about how there could be law, discipline, and economic organization without authority. Unsatisfied by the “pretty phrases” of the “two patriarchs of German Social Democracy,” Alfred “inclined ever more toward the anarchist movement,” for, comments the author, “Without God no authority, and so anarchism with its denial of every authority is the irrefutable consequence of atheism.” The German anarchists in the story eagerly celebrate the bloody attentats in France of the years 1892 to 1894, and at anarchist gatherings Alfred attends, he hears lectures “on how to manufacture explosives and explosive bombs,” as well as “how to wield a dagger so it reaches the victim in a sure and deadly way.”18 In the book’s final section, Alfred is redeemed by a kindly rector who returns him to Christianity, and the story concludes with the author’s plea for expanded Catholic education, so that “for our children, unlike so many of our contemporaries, the university will not become the grave of their faith.”19 Five years later, the book was republished with additional material and the author’s real name.20 The sentiments of these Catholic anti-Socialist books echoed the Reichstag speeches of Georg von Hertling, who had cautioned in his 1886 defense of the Socialist Law, “the atheism of the masses is no mere theoretical conviction; instead, the atheism of the masses is an immediate force of destruction.”21 It is worth noting that the hostility to Social Democracy that these Catholic conservatives expressed did not originate in the belief that Socialists wished to topple the current society through violent revolution, but from a much older and more enduring conservative belief, which associated atheism with the subversion of monarchy, patriarchy, and private property. Dr. August Hohenthal’s 1891 primer, Social Democracy in the Vest Pocket, addressed to “the German Volk,” laid out this charge, pronouncing socialism a threat “not only for throne and altar, or for the existing form of government, or for rank and property, or for house and farmstead [Haus und Hof] and personal freedom and family life, but for humanity in general, for the entire culture . . . in a word, for everything that separates humans

142

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

from animals.” Hohenthal bemoaned that socialists “wish to abolish all married and family life, all household and homely hearth, the tender, sweet bonds of love between parents and children, and to turn the world into a single giant dovecote.”22 However Social Democracy might try to pass itself off as “some sort of improver of the world,” it was in truth “the destroyer of every divine and human order.” Seeing socialist atheism at the heart of its menace for German society, he offered a simple prescription: “Just become earnest Christians again, not merely in word, in a purely exterior way, but in deed and truth . . . then Social Democracy will, like a terrible dream, gradually disappear on its own.”23 Dr. Max Oberbreyer used similar language in his 1891 “handbook for everyone,” The New Program of Social Democracy. Oberbreyer judged Socialism to be “a danger for throne and altar, rank and property, house and farm, for personal freedom and family life” and declared that “the Christian religion alone can help against Social Democracy,” conquering “the unbelieving world-spirit and materialism, from which stems that idea that foments social war.”24 Issued the same year, district court president Leopold Kunowski’s book Will Social Democracy Triumph? warned of the inevitable radicalization socialism must lead to. According to Kunowski, all reform movements, including Social Democracy, counted among their followers members of the “wildly excited [wild aufgeregter] masses” who would inevitably outdistance their leaders’ positions to preach “a total revolution of state, church, and social order . . . especially the division of wealth, the abolition of the bonds of matrimony, and even community of women.” As evidence, he pointed to the anarchists, the “most extreme” party of the time, “who condemn every state and moral order.”25 Like the anonymous village priest, Kunowski expressed alarm at the “elimination of class differences and authority, as well as the state.” Bakunin took the desire for “the abolition of every inequality among people” so far “that he recommended even the same type of haircut—short-cut hair, clothing, and hats for both genders.” To thwart the slide into anarchy, he urged the nationally minded German parties to unite “in determined struggle against the revolutionary parties.”26 A handful of conservatives went further, continuing to hold to the line so many had taken in the 1880s, that Social Democracy and anarchism were for all intents and purposes identical. In 1893, historian and Bismarck biographer Hans Blum argued that although “the anarchists wanted immediate revolution and in particular the murder of princes and ‘tyrants,’” no genuine difference existed between them and the “so-called ‘tame’ Social Democracy.” Ultimately, “both types of revolution party [Umsturzpartei] hoped for and still hope for today ‘the social revolution,’ the entire existing state and social order’s violent extermination.”27 Constantin Rößler, in an 1894 book on Social Democracy, asserted, “The relationship of anarchism to Social Democracy and to other types of revolutionary socialism is evident. It can only appear laughable when Social Democrats object that they have an entirely different goal. The immediate and serious goal of both is destruction.”28 In September 1893, the right-wing National Liberal Hamburger Nachrichten had likewise declared that Social Democracy, by spreading the idea

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

143

that “the current state and social order is a horrible crime against the general rights of humanity,” bore the blame for anarchism, insisting that “anarchism will not be overcome until its rotation crop [Vorfrucht], Social Democracy, is eliminated from the world.”29 The pseudonymous Lynkeus went further, arguing in On the Edge of the Abyss: Against Social Democracy and Anarchism that anyone who looked at Socialist party papers could not doubt that “Socialism is not only the ‘rotation crop’ [Vorfrucht] of anarchism, but the ‘nursery school [Vorschule] of anarchism.’”30

Though such strenuous attacks on the cultural peril posed by Social Democracy make clear that conservative fears about the revolutionary change Socialists advocated remained deeply engrained in some quarters, they were no longer able to sway political events as they had in the 1870s and into the 1880s, notwithstanding the full flowering of anarchist propaganda of the deed in the early 1890s. In 1891 and 1892, a French anarchist who went by the name of Ravachol planted three dynamite bombs around Paris in retaliation for government brutality against workers demanding the eight-hour day. Though none of these bombs killed anyone, Ravachol was tried for three other murders he may or may not have been connected to and was guillotined. Outraged by Ravachol’s execution, August Vaillant hurled a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies in December 1893, killing no one. Three months later, a week after Vaillant’s execution, Émile Henry threw a bomb into the Café Terminus in Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one person and injuring a number of others. Over the next few months, four more bombs exploded across Paris. The period from March to June 1894 also saw several attacks by Italian anarchists in Italy, including an attempt on Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, as well as the most high-profile anarchist attentat to this point, the assassination of French president Carnot by the young Italian Sante Caserio. In the United States, Alexander Berkman tried to kill Carnegie Steel official Henry Clay Frick in July 1892 in retaliation for the company’s lethal brutality against striking workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In the midst of this wave of anarchist violence, France passed a series of anti-anarchist measures (known pejoratively to their opponents as the “villainous laws”) that restricted freedom of speech and imposed severe penalties for inciting violence, while Italy enacted a harsh temporary law similar to the German Socialist Law, which “forbade associations and meetings, both public and private, that aimed at subverting the social order through violent, overt acts.” Spain and Switzerland also passed anti-anarchist measures resembling Italy’s.31 In their comments on these anarchist attacks, Socialists drew on the perspectives they had honed in the previous decade to condemn and distance themselves from anarchists. A string of articles in Vorwärts from 1892 on, with titles such as “Attentats and Their Consequences” and “Anarchist Nonsense,” portrayed anarchists as both irrational and harmful to the workers’ cause. “Such a silly fool, lost in his fantastical imaginings, does not even see that he is only a puppet, whose strings are pulled by a cleverer one in

144

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

the terrorist wings,” wrote the paper in January 1894. “He does not see that the fear and terror he causes only serve to deaden all the senses of the philistine crowd, that it shouts approval of every massacre that clears the road for reaction.”32 While public attention was focused on anarchist propaganda of the deed, German conservatives called for concerted international anti-anarchist measures and also hoped to impose a new version of the Socialist Law in Germany. Starting in late 1893, the government began keeping files on foreign anti-anarchist measures, which by late 1894 included detailed information on the laws passed or discussed in Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States (and would grow to include Portugal and Brazil in later years).33 The debates over the enactment of these laws were followed closely in the German press, with conservatives and some National Liberals showing approval, Social Democrats and left liberals criticizing them.34 The Hamburger Korrespondent (Hamburg Correspondent), in one of a series of articles on anarchism in December 1893, considered German state officials obliged to pursue “the imposition of exceptional measures” against anarchists, given “the impossibility of an effective surveillance of their actions on the basis of the general law,” while the KreuzZeitung demanded a concerted international legal and police effort to combat anarchist “beasts of prey,” a sentiment shared by other conservative papers, especially after Carnot’s assassination.35 Arthur Deval, who hoped his 1894 pamphlet Anarchism and the Solution to the Social Question would be discussed by the Reichstag, urged a more thorough moral education in the schools, but he also called for a raft of new legal measures to combat “the demonic force of anarchism,” including restrictions on the press and theater, the banning of anarchist associations, and rewards for information on anarchist groups, seizure of anarchist property, deportation, and greater use of the death penalty.36 Notably, neither the conservative papers nor even Deval’s colorful tirade against anarchism sought to connect these attacks to Social Democracy. Those who did, such as industrialist and Reichspartei representative Carl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg, represented the most extreme elements of the government, press, and Reichstag. Stumm remained as convinced as ever that Social Democracy could be held responsible for anarchism, but when in a January 1894 Reichstag speech he delivered the once-reliable conservative applause line, “Social Democracy and anarchism are exactly the same; they differentiate themselves only in regard to tactics,” it elicited only laughter from the left side of the Reichstag and silence from the right.37 Though Chancellor Caprivi had initially hoped to placate the working classes through constructive engagement and believed Reichstag participation offered an important safety valve for Socialist energies, he judged the Socialists ultimately responsible for anarchism, telling them in an 1893 Reichstag speech, “you called forth the anarchists, and now they are uncomfortable [unbequem] for you . . . you have thrived so well now that you no longer wish to have anything to do with the anarchists. The majority of the nation does not believe you . . . and holds you responsible for everything that happens due to your entirely destructive actions.”38

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

145

Stumm and others began pushing the kaiser and chancellor to pursue changes to the German legal code (thereby avoiding, supporters hoped, the appellation of “exceptional legislation”) that would allow for harsher penalties against radical publications and agitation. In a letter to Caprivi penned two weeks after Carnot’s assassination, Stumm insisted that since the Socialist Law’s expiration had not fulfilled the expectations of those who claimed the “disease” would disappear with the law, “all of the state-supporting parties including the Zentrum have finally reached the conclusion that it cannot go on like this and that the state must pursue measures against Social Democracy.” He insisted that “only an energetic, thorough, and purposeful action” could restore the government to its former prestige among the populace, urging the chancellor to strike while the iron was hot.39 Some in the conservative press went so far as to suggest that Caprivi’s “new course” had put the nation at risk of revolutionary violence and demanded that the government rectify the situation.40 Among the most insistent opponents of this strategy were a number of left-liberal writers, predominantly scholars of law and political economy, who weighed in on the issue of anti-anarchist measures in the 1890s through books, articles, and pamphlets, as well as public lectures. These men shared with other Wilhelmine academics the common “perception of a society with serious problems” that they could “solve through the application of their expertise.”41 Like left-liberal politicians, these writers highlighted the role of the Socialist Law in particular, and government violations of legal fairness more generally, for awakening anarchism in Germany. E. V. Zenker, a Viennese journalist, lamented in his influential 1895 study Anarchism: A Critical History of the Anarchist Theory that “a small group . . . has succeeded in making the whole world talk of them. . . . And, one may ask, on what day, by what act was anarchism offered so fortunate a chance? This occasion was the German Socialist Law.” When the misguided “policy of force crippled the legal agitation of Social Democracy through an exceptional law, a radical group arose within the socialist working classes, which . . . drew from events the lesson that now, excluded from legal agitation, all their power must be devoted to preparing for revolution.”42 Within a few years, Zenker asserted, anarchism experienced a “terrible awakening, and where it had never been before, it suddenly raised up its Gorgon head.”43 He invited readers to ponder the effects of the unjust persecution on innocent Socialists: “How many anarchists have become so merely because they had the misfortune to be suspected of anarchism and thus treated like common criminals? How many have become anarchists because they were ostracized from society due to their freely expressed views?”44 Dr. Hermann Tobias came to the same conclusion about anarchism’s origins in an 1899 essay published in the Rostocker Zeitung (Rostock Newspaper) and reprinted by the Political Economy Society in Berlin. “In the year 1878 anarchism was without significance in Germany,” he observed. “Then came the Socialist Law and with it that treatment of German Social Democracy that destroyed hundreds of lives. The leaders of the party recommended the politics of restraint. But thousands of workers went over to anarchism, and as a result never has it been so strong as in the mid-eighties. The only

146

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

outbreaks of terrorist anarchism that we have experienced in Germany . . . occurred under the period of the Socialist Law.”45 By blaming the entire strategy of police repression for fueling anarchism, these writers bestowed their scholarly imprimatur on the arguments advanced by left-liberal politicians in the previous decade. Some singled out the enthusiastic use of the death penalty as particularly unproductive, as it both confirmed for anarchists the state’s injustice and created martyrs for the cause. The pseudonymous Emanuel, whose pamphlet Anarchism and Its Cure was uncharacteristic in its religious bent but otherwise typical of liberal writings on anarchism, blasted “ignorance clothed in the robes of state authority wielding force [Gewalt] instead of knowledge in an attempt to cure murder through murder. Each execution of an errant soul achieves nothing except bestowing on the imagined martyr a halo, inspiring a hundred other fools to follow in his wake.”46 Tobias too advised that the “draconian sharpening of the criminal penalties for anarchist crime” demanded by conservatives would be counterproductive. “For the terrorist fanatics who thirst after the laurels of a martyr the death penalty holds no fear, rather desirability . . . a strengthening of judicial punishments would only increase the effectiveness of anarchist incitement to propaganda of the deed.”47 The cycle of French terrorism from Ravachol to Caserio seemed to confirm this view. Certainly, executed anarchists were routinely lauded as martyrs.48 Social reformer and peace activist Dr. Eduard Loewenthal hoped the fact that “all police measures so far have achieved no improvement,” while “each execution has generally led to a new attentat,” might move “even the most superficial of spirits finally to deeper reflection” about how to cope more effectively with anarchism.49 Even conservatives sometimes questioned the death penalty, though for different reasons. A Berliner Neueste Nachrichten (Berlin Latest Report) article from June 1894 proposed as a better deterrent to anarchist crimes long sentences of hard labor and corporal punishment, so as not to play into anarchists’ fantasies of martyrdom.50 Left-liberal writers also criticized the legal system’s unjust treatment of anarchists. Berlin lawyer Richard Biber, who served as a defense attorney in 27 anarchist trials in the 1890s, described numerous cases of open bias on the part of the political police and judges. Among other improprieties, the anarchist affiliation of criminal defendants was often made public, specifically to increase the likelihood of a conviction. Because “even in our judicial circles, and naturally even more in the wider circle of the people in general, an almost absolute ignorance rules over what anarchist ideas preach and aim at,” people were prepared to believe the worst of anarchists. Once the accused was labeled “an adherent of propaganda of the deed,” a typical juror would be “overrun with a horror that certainly does not contribute to facilitating an objective judgment.”51 When convicted, anarchists faced harsher sentences than others guilty of commensurate crimes. Anarchist journalist Albert Weidner commented on Biber’s account, “the study of anarchist trials must fill every objectively thinking jurist with serious misgivings,” since the routine denial of “the blindness of justice” had “irretrievably destroyed” the working classes’ “faith in the Rechtsstaat.”52 Weidner wrote as a partisan, but left-liberal scholars

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

147

also made the link between judicial impropriety and political radicalism. Zenker, for example, contended that as long as “whole classes of society have occasion to doubt the state’s goodwill to practice justice, then the doctrine of the state’s superfluity and evil will find proselytes.”53 Instead of police brutality and judicial vindictiveness, left liberals urged German society to take seriously the improvement of the masses’ living and working conditions, which would eliminate the breeding ground for discontent. If governments truly wished to combat anarchism, wrote Emanuel, “they could do nothing better than to clean their own stables, so that no anarchist tries to take care of this in a clumsy manner and feels called to throw a bomb.”54 Pursuing the same logic, boys’ adventure writer and later Gartenlaube editor Stanislaus von Jezewski (writing under his pseudonym C. Falkenhorst) wrote, “There is hope that through the gradual improvement of the social situation, and further progress toward a rational solution to the Social Question in keeping with the traditional basis of society, the embitterment of the masses will by and by disappear and remove the soil in which anarchism today flourishes.”55 Loewenthal promised that if the dispossessed of society were granted a decent life and the right to work, “then anarchism will vanish into thin air.”56 Using the ubiquitous metaphor of anarchism as a disease, Tobias argued that “to eradicate anarchism,” it was necessary to “remove that which nourishes the symptoms of the illness. . . . Remove the dissatisfaction of the poor, take away the misery of the lowest in society, and give the desperate back their lost belief in society’s goodwill and fairness. Anarchism thrives on social distress; social measures provide the only effective means to energetically fight it.”57 Zenker, in an 1898 article on “Anarchism and How to Combat It,” argued, “No vigilance will prevent attentats, no severity make fanatics shrink back from them, and no system of international policing hinder action-anarchism’s spread, if the miasma hidden in the social body does not disappear.”58 All of these writers shared the view that adherence to the rule of law and the promotion of social reform would provide the best defense against anarchism. Even some government supporters had their doubts about the efficacy of the legal measures proposed by the hardline conservatives. In an 1894 pamphlet titled Against Anarchism, addressed to the German government (and mailed to the chancellor’s office by the publisher, to make sure the right audience saw it), an anonymous “man of the people” traced the “root cause of the cancerous ulcer” of anarchist terrorism to a materialism that rejected belief in life after death. He thus judged laws of even “the sharpest severity” to be futile, as the Socialist Law and recent anti-anarchist measures in other nations had proved. Rather than “pouring oil on the fire,” the government needed to pursue social reforms that would ameliorate the lives of the less fortunate, while “encouraging the Social Democrats to prudence and sense and making anarchist crimes impossible.”59 Even Constantin Rößler, who regarded “the immediate and serious goal” of both Socialism and anarchism to be “destruction,” considered anarchists to pose no threat other than that of arbitrary murder: “We will recapitulate our judgment on anarchism here: it is in no way dangerous to the whole. But the whole has a duty to summon

148

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

all its circumspection and energy to protect each individual from willful destruction.” Despite his prior approval of the Socialist Law, he deemed a new exceptional law unnecessary, as “only on the ground of general law . . . can Social Democracy be fought.”60 These prescriptions, in the liberal and Catholic anti-anarchist mold, had many adherents even among conservatives. Nor was German officialdom of one mind on how to proceed. The strongest advocate for new legislation was Botho zu Eulenburg (again Prussian interior minister as he had been in 1878), who argued that the “anarchist-socialist danger” could only be curtailed through “a sharp socialist law,” but he found himself in the minority.61 Even within the Interior Ministry, a report recommending specific changes to the Reich’s press laws cautioned that these must be “directed exclusively against anarchism.” In a report to the chancellor including possible text for a new law, Justice Secretary Rudolf Nieberding took a cautious tone, recalling the Reichstag’s rejection of the last proposed iteration of the Socialist Law and observing that the proposed legislation would “probably be construed in public opinion as a law against the Social Democrats. A question is, whether the prospect of this is greater in a time in which the Social Democrats have achieved such a strong parliamentary representation.” He also expressed concerns that other political factions would fear new measures might be used “against other than anarchist and Social Democratic endeavors.” Throughout his report, Nieberding tried to anticipate how skeptical Reichstag members and the public might be convinced to accept the laws.62 A lengthy dispatch from the Bavarian state government directly questioned the need for new legislation, noting the failure of anarchists to penetrate into the Socialist milieu with their revolutionary ideas, due to the latter’s hostility to anarchism. Bavarian officials remained concerned, however, about the prospect of both German exiles and foreign anarchists coming to Germany as other states passed harsh anti-anarchist legislation, potentially increasing the domestic revolutionary threat. The governor of Mainz wrote to Caprivi to say that the time seemed inopportune to bring this issue to the Reichstag, but he expressed hope that the federal states could pursue effective action against anarchists on their own.63 Clear-sighted about the public mood, Caprivi too realized a new anti-socialist or even anti-anarchist bill would face a high hurdle in the Reichstag; he himself questioned the need for such measures due to the Social Democrats’ growing moderation. In reply to Stumm’s July 1894 letter urging new legislation, he sounded a cautious note, warning that the political atmosphere had changed over recent years. “Whether even the National Liberals and Reichspartei themselves could be won over remains questionable to me,” given their reluctance to support the deportation of Socialists, proposed as one of the measures to sharpen the Socialist Law in 1888. The chancellor believed that “an effective anarchist law must allow the possibility of rendering all anarchists harmless before they commit a crime,” but he doubted that a Reichstag majority could be found to pass one. This presented a real risk, for “once the government has made it clear through proposing a bill that the existing laws are insufficient, that much more rigorous

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

149

ones are necessary, it cannot accept a rejection of such a proposal.” Given this situation, Caprivi asked, “If an anarchist- or Social Democrat–law were rejected, if the results of new elections did not bring a better Reichstag, would we not merely promote the business of Social Democracy, increase dissatisfaction, and drive followers to it?”64 Caprivi expressed the same caution to Kaiser Wilhelm, but the emperor, believing that “a favorable wind had caught the sails of the political movements,” charged him with drafting a bill, whether a revision of the legal code or an exceptional law, to give the government the tools to combat Socialist and anarchist agitation.65 In an October article complaining of the chancellor’s lack of energy and will in pursuing this “anarchist law,” Die Post (The Post) acknowledged the possibility that it might fail but urged the government to take the gamble, adopting the slogan “first weigh, then wager [erst wägen, dann wagen].”66 Caprivi’s continued reluctance to marshal his full energy for what came to be called the Revolution Bill [Umsturzvorlage] led to the chancellor’s replacement with the elderly and pliable Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst in October 1894, shortly before the bill was debated by the Reichstag. Stumm and the kaiser had severely misjudged the political situation. When the bill was introduced to the Reichstag in December 1894, it faced criticism from all sides, both within the Reichstag and among the public.67 What proponents most wanted was a tool to check Socialism’s growth, yet the only evidence of dangerous violence they could muster came from the wave of anarchist attacks that had struck the continent (but not Germany) over the previous two years, and many openly questioned the need for legislation even against that threat. The Revolution Bill’s official justification warned that “the agents and those seduced by the most unrestrained species of state-hostile [staatsfeindlich] theory, anarchism, devote themselves to excite through their deeds an insane hatred against order and morality among broad sectors of the people.”68 Introducing the bill, Justice Minister Nieberding assured legislators that it was not directed against the Social Democrats at all; however, it had not been written in such a way as to target anarchism narrowly, either because its promoters did not really see any difference between the two movements or because they did intend to use it to go after Social Democracy. And Nieberding himself frequently cast the revolutionary threat in very general terms. All of the evidence adduced by Nieberding to show the alleged revolutionary threat came from the writings of anarchists outside of Germany. He cited three separate radical texts, two pamphlets written by Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and an article by Most from Freiheit, despite the fact that Kropotkin had never had anything to do with the German workers’ movement and Most’s influence had been on the wane for years even inside the German anarchist movement. The supporting evidence provided to the Reichstag commission considering the bill likewise featured mostly articles from Freiheit and Autonomie, plus excerpts from a handful of police reports on unruly Social Democratic meetings.69 Nieberding concluded his introduction of the bill to the Reichstag with a forceful but pedestrian restatement of conservative anti-revolutionism, professing confidence that the deputies “would not be inclined to underestimate the

150

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

dangers that through quiet surreptitious work threaten our society and that, if allowed to advance, would inevitably lead to the abandonment by the people of their belief in all of the noble ideals for which our culture has worked for a thousand years.”70 If Nieberding carefully avoided outright statements that Socialists represented part of the same danger as anarchists, Stumm-Halberg did not. He covered the standard litany of revolutionary bugaboos from previous decades to illustrate the current danger, including the Paris Commune and an inflammatory speech Liebknecht had delivered in 1874. Addressing the Social Democrats, he said “you are with the anarchists of one heart and one soul [very true! from the right; laughter from the Social Democrats] and you differentiate yourselves from the anarchists only on tactics.”71 It would have been impossible from the tenor of his speech (or even the examples he used) to distinguish it from one delivered a decade or more earlier. In response to Nieberding’s introduction of the bill, Socialist deputy Ignaz Auer delivered an incisive and humorous speech, which the stenographic report shows was greeted with frequent laughter from the chamber. The Socialist anti-anarchist perspective formed the centerpiece of Auer’s argument. In warning of revolutionary criminality, Nieberding had cited as evidence several criminal trials that had resulted in long terms of imprisonment for the defendants. Auer countered, “these sentences were passed against so-called anarchists, and, gentlemen, you must know that there are no more venomous opponents of Social Democracy than just these anarchists. My party has not the least thing to do with these prison sentences, and so this evidence that the state secretary sought to adduce for our general tendency toward criminality is totally invalidated.” Auer pointed out that in fact all of the evidence Nieberding provided came from anarchists’ writings, showing not only the government’s disingenuousness but also Socialist publications’ remarkable responsibility. Auer joked that the justice minister seemed to be relying on Puttkamer’s old “bag of citations” (Zitatensack) from the 1880s (Social Democrats had often taunted Puttkamer for collecting inflammatory speeches from Freiheit and other anarchist publications and reading them to the Reichstag to justify the Socialist Law), which contained “not one single citation extracted from our newspapers or pamphlet literature, even though our publishing is extremely active. . . . out of all of these newspapers and our rich pamphlet literature the State Secretary was unable to produce a single citation to give support to this bill whose goal is to extinguish our party.”72 During the debate over the bill, political caricatures in the Socialist satirical magazine Der wahre Jacob (The Real Jacob) showed Nieberding displaying Freiheit, as well as pages inscribed with the names of the anarchists Kropotkin and Bakunin, in a desperate attempt to justify the bill.73 Auer also called into question Nieberding’s claim, made as he read his Freiheit quotes to the Reichstag, that the government was diligently trying to hinder the anarchist paper’s distribution throughout Germany. “That may be so,” Auer remarked, “but it certainly has not been the case at all times,” and he went on to recount examples from the 1880s of police providing financial support for the paper and helping to smuggle it into

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

151

Germany. “It is well-known that Herr von Puttkamer had a certain fondness for the anarchists and for Hans Most in particular,” the Socialist speaker proclaimed. “Likewise papers such as the Hannoversche Courier (Hanover Courier) and the Leipziger Tageblatt (Leipzig Daily) have often stated that they much preferred the anarchism of a Hans Most . . . to the Social Democratic agitation of a Bebel, Liebknecht, Singer, etc.”74 Auer took these statements as admissions of the value of anarchist outrages for conservative projects of repression. That Socialists continued to expose agents provocateurs lent plausibility to this charge. For example, an October 1900 news item in Vorwärts noted the official report of the arrest of one Wichmann in Potsdam had immediately set off alarm bells, with its references to “the murder of princes, anarchism, Hans Most, police vigilance—that is Puttkamer, of very blessed memory, all over.” Sure enough, it was the same Wichmann whom Socialists had uncovered as a police spy during the 1880s, the paper discovered.75 If by the time of the Umsturzvorlage debate fresh evidence of a Social Democratic threat was lacking, evidence of Socialist hostility to anarchism was not. Local government officials frequently remarked on Socialist denunciations of anarchists in communities across the empire. When anarchists organized meetings, whether to defend the attacks occurring abroad or to reject violence as alien to authentic anarchism, Socialists often attended with the sole purpose of disrupting the proceedings. In April 1894, in the Brandenburg town of Forst im Lausitz, Socialists sent out the word not to show up at a speech by an anarchist named Bertram but changed their minds when the meeting drew a crowd of over a hundred people, opting to come out in force to interrupt and shout repeatedly during the anarchist’s speech. According to the police director in Brunswick, the majority of attendees at Friedrich Hoos’s October 1894 talk sponsored by the anarchist reading club “Forwards” were Social Democrats, “who seemed to be there to blow up [sprengen] the meeting.” Speaking later that month on “Anarchism and Propaganda of the Deed,” Hoos challenged Socialist accusations that his party was made up of “spies, robbers, bandits, and murderers” and denigrated Social Democrats as cowards for supporting democracy. Confronting the anarchist, Socialists at the meeting “explained that a bloody revolution under the current state situation would never achieve their goals,” and so they “proceeded with the ballot in their hand on the legal path and pursued the struggle through the enlightenment of the masses.”76 These kinds of encounters provided dramatic evidence supporting the claims made by the Socialist Reichstag representatives during the Revolution Bill debate. Despite Nieberding’s and Stumm’s ominous warnings, there is little evidence that police officials themselves considered even the German anarchists to present any serious danger to the nation. In fall 1894, when the Prussian Interior Ministry requested information from the regional Regierungs-Präsidenten (district presidents) on local anarchist activity, the responses revealed both that little anarchist activity was afoot and that what did exist was confined mostly to the circulation of a handful of newspapers and pamphlets (usually Freiheit and its London-based rival Autonomie, along with the

152

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

pamphlet “To the Workers in Soldier’s Uniforms”), the meetings of small discussion clubs, and occasional public events. The report from Arnsberg described the anarchist Friedrich Krüger’s attempts to organize anarchist gatherings in several cities, all of which failed because he could not secure the rental of a meeting space. Even the zealous official from Gumbinnen who commented, “For a long time I personally have focused my special attention on anarchist activities, and the police organs have provided me diligent assistance” had turned up nothing, though he promised immediately to alert the higher authorities should any anarchist doings come to light.77 Berlin and its environs had the most impressive agglomeration of anarchists (followed by Altona on the outskirts of Hamburg), including several discussion clubs and public meetings that routinely drew a hundred or more participants and onlookers. In addition, the police estimated in 1895 that the anarchist paper Der Sozialist (The Socialist) had a circulation of 4,000, while Berlin anarchists disseminated 10,000 copies of various anarchist pamphlets.78 The police were mostly content to keep tabs on key leaders and groups thought to be radical. Occasionally, diligent authorities did pursue charges against anarchists, such as the 1892 high treason case initiated by the chief state prosecutor in Aachen against Friedrich Dobberstein and comrades, prompted by their possession of issues of Autonomie that included articles “in which violent revolution is called for.” Four men were convicted and each was sentenced to over five years in prison. Speakers at two anarchist meetings in early 1894 were tried by the authorities in Halle for inciting violence, while two anarchists in Waldenburg (Saxony) were convicted and served short sentences for distributing 3,000 copies of an anarchist brochure one of them had written that was deemed to promote violence. But such cases were the exception rather than the rule.79 Several reporting officials commented in 1894 on the tensions between the majority of Social Democrats and the so-called “independent” Socialists (dubbed the Jungen, or “young ones” by their detractors in the movement), who challenged the party leadership’s reformist orientation and in some cases flirted with anarchism. Though the Neueste Mittheilungen in September 1893 claimed that more and more “independent Socialists” were leaving the movement to pursue the anarchist program of propaganda of the deed, local police reports did not back up this assertion.80 For example, the Potsdam report described the attendees at two “debatably anarchist gatherings” that had taken place in the area in recent months as “independent” Social Democrats (who had now embraced the term “anarchists”), adherents of the free-religious movement (who believed in religion without churches or dogma), and “ordinary Social Democrats.” In no case could any of these be called “anarchistic in the international sense of the word,” commented the reporter. The Frankfurt an der Oder Regierungs-Präsident likewise noted the existence of reading and discussion clubs made up of “independent” Socialists who “seemed to incline toward anarchist tendencies,” but whom he deemed to pose no threat of violence.81 When anarchists (mostly former “independents”) held events in Teltow in September, the district’s reporting official noted, “The meetings were properly announced and offered as a rule no opportunity for a cancellation or other police interven-

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

153

tion.”82 A Berliner Tageblatt reporter who visited an anarchist club’s weekly discussion night in September 1894 described the 30 attendees as mostly well-dressed young men, a few even “dandy-ish [stutzerhaft],” looking more like “little sons of the bourgeoisie than world-overthrowing [weltumstürzende] revolutionaries.” Playfully painting the scene, he noted that discussion proceeded without a chair or parliamentary procedures, “as it understandably always does in anarchist gatherings.” Speakers addressed each other with the formal “Sie” and the appellation “Herr” until one hot-blooded speaker reminded them that this was not compatible with anarchist principles, at which point they switched to the term “comrade” and the informal “Du.” As they drank “boycott-free” beer and smoked cigarettes, they debated late into the night about how best workers should organize for the economic struggle and unanimously condemned propaganda of the deed.83 Such well-heeled German anarchists offered few provocations to justify harsh new legislation. In this atmosphere, support for the Revolution Bill in the Reichstag was so weak during its first reading (December 1894–January 1895) that the committee charged with its review, which was dominated by the Zentrum, rewrote the bill into legislation punishing blasphemy and disturbance of worship and enshrining in law respect for established religions, in effect responding to the fears expressed in the Catholic anti-socialist and anti-anarchist writings discussed earlier. In this form, the bill had only the Zentrum’s support, and in May 1895 it went down to ignominious defeat. The Reichstag received thousands of petitions against the bill, compared to only a few in support, and public meetings decrying the bill took place throughout the spring of 1895. As Robert Lougee has argued, “as an aroused press and public made abundantly clear, fear of revolution was not an overriding anxiety of the German people or one which would induce them to accept repression or manipulation.”84 Despite the anarchist violence of the era, Germans neither saw Social Democrats as responsible for it nor judged the repression of individual freedom to be the most appropriate way to combat the potential danger. The defeat of the Umsturzvorlage, as well as the government’s lack of response to the defeat, marked an important milestone for many liberals. Theodor Barth’s Die Nation saw the outcome as a victory for liberal principles, though conservatives’ threats suggested the precariousness of the situation: “Such a victory at the beginning of a campaign has its considerable moral value; it is very good that the population has learned the power it commands; and we are also of the opinion that the constitution is freely and easily defended in editorials written with ink; but it is truly difficult in actual reality.”85 The 1896 edition of Eugen Richter’s Political ABC Book (subtitled “a lexicon of current issues and controversies”) noted under the “Anarchists” entry, “the attempt has been made to justify the Revolution Bill’s necessity . . . especially for combating anarchism. But German legislation already contains a rich arsenal of criminal statutes [Strafparagraphen] and powers of every kind for the authorities to repress and punish such acts of violence, crimes, and misdemeanors.”86 In the next edition, published two years later, Richter observed that new restrictions on press and assembly had recently been proposed in the name of protecting the nation from anarchism. Even “setting aside all the experiences

154

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

in Russia” over many years, the 1897 anarchist assassination of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, prime minister of Spain (a country where harsh anti-anarchist measures were already in effect), clearly proved “that the sharpest restrictions on political rights and the most far-reaching exceptional designations against anarchism are not suitable to protect against attentats and crimes.” In his 1896 entry on the “Revolution Bill,” Richter also emphasized public discontent with attempts to abridge citizens’ rights: “Public opposition was very soon not limited simply to Freisinnige and Social Democratic circles. Authors, scholars, and artists with prominent names and from all political parties made public remonstrances against the Revolution Bill.” He claimed that even the conservative and National Liberal representatives who favored the bill quickly discovered that their constituents did not.87 No thoughtful person, Richter suggested, could accept exceptional legislation as an appropriate reaction to anarchist violence. By the late 1890s, conservatives had lost the battle to position Social Democrats as part of a serious revolutionary threat. Though some demanded a state coup (Staats­ streich) in the aftermath of the law’s failure, no moves in this direction were seriously contemplated, nor did the new chancellor dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections.88 In disgust, the Conservative Handbook concluded, “The whole course of the thing furnished the proof that the combating of Social Democracy ‘on the foundation of the general law’ only leads to uncertainty and contamination of the state-supporting parties and that the only real way to do it is the open and firm combating of Social Democratic agitation as such.”89 But this was simply not to be, despite another sensational anarchist attack a little more than three years later. In September 1898, Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni stabbed to death Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary as she walked along the shore of Lake Geneva, a deed that shocked Europe, the German-speaking world in particular, for its utter senselessness, given the victim’s complete lack of involvement in politics. When news of the killing hit the wires, Social Democrats sprang into action. Within a week, the Märkische Volks-Zeitung (People’s Paper of the March) and Vorwärts had published a string of articles denouncing the attempts of the “capitalist agitation press of the agrarian and industrial magnates” to use the attack to impose “coercive laws against all opponents of the current state and social order.”90 At the annual Social Democratic party congress in October, Liebknecht claimed that despite the fact that everyone knew the attentat was “a nonpolitical murder, the most nonpolitical of all murders,” conservatives had immediately launched into cries that “this is anarchism, and anarchism is the fruit of socialism, both issue from the same soil,” which he characterized as “dishonorable lies.”91 Vollmar declared to the Reichstag that his party “condemns categorically bloody deeds of violence, whether directed at simple and unknown people or at an empress, and without regard for whether they are perpetrated by anarchists or governments”; the best method of fighting anarchism was to teach workers to improve their social conditions through “the power of collective, organized liberation action [Befreiungsaktion].”92 Bebel followed the same reasoning in a widely circulated November 1898 speech on

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

155

“Attentats and Social Democracy,” in which he declared that while Social Democrats “can and will consider as enemies and fight with determination all persons in power who oppose us,” they would never seek to assassinate their enemies, for this only “furnishes reaction’s sails with wind.”93 Denouncing the Revolution Bill, Bebel noted “the fact that a foreign anarchist in a foreign country committed the deed sufficed to allow the hatred of the German bourgeoisie to flare up in bright flames against the small band of German anarchists, but even more so against the detested Social Democracy.” This reasoning was every bit as unjust as “when we were charged with the attempts of the idiot Hödel and of the degenerate Nobiling to shoot Kaiser Wilhelm I.”94 Social Democrats went further, depicting anarchibsm not only as the product of conservatives’ repressive tactics but also as the culmination of bourgeois society’s individualist logic. This perspective, already touched upon by Social Democrats in the 1880s and even earlier by Marx and Engels, became central to their portrayal of anarchism in the 1890s. In October 1887, the Social Democratic congress in St. Gallen had called anarchism, “insofar as it strives for the absolute autonomy of the individual, anti-socialist, nothing other than a one-sided elaboration of the fundamental ideas of bourgeois liberalism.” Explaining this resolution, Wilhelm Liebknecht commented that Proudhon’s development of the idea of “anarchy” in the 1840s represented a petit-bourgeois reaction to the threat of a rising grand bourgeoisie, while Bakunin’s focus on the “absolute freedom of the individual, the annihilation of every authority . . . the annihilation of the state, annihilation of the family, general chaos” was nothing more than “the bourgeois ideal in revolutionary lionskin.”95 Liebknecht again insisted in his October 1898 speech that “anarchism is rooted in capitalist society, which has proclaimed free competition, the economic war of all against all.”96 Bebel blamed the thinking of bourgeois liberals, of which “the anarchists are the consistent, merely extreme, branch” (to which the audience cried “Very true!”), for inspiring anarchist violence. The “doctrine of the individual’s importance—developed to its extreme consequences—explains how people who have no capacity for keen thinking, who are easily led by passionate impulses or are easily influenced by suspicious outside suggestions and whisperings, assault particular individuals occupying influential positions, because they hold such individuals responsible for society’s evils.” Because Marxist Socialists believed in the immutability of historical laws, they would never resort to such acts of terror. Though Social Democrats hated Bismarck above all other opponents, Bebel observed, nevertheless “one finds nowhere in the entire Social Democratic press and literature the thought that it would be a fortunate thing if that man were removed through violence.” On these grounds, Bebel suggested, “our capitalist enemies have the least right to be indignant over the anarchists. The belief in the supreme influence of important personages in influential positions on history’s course is of an entirely bourgeois origin.”97 A month later in the Reichstag he pointed out that most assassinations over the previous century had not been perpetrated by Socialists or anarchists, but by aristocrats or members of the bourgeoisie.98 If few others followed this particular line of reasoning, Social Democrats were not

156

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

alone in defending their movement from any association with Lucheni’s act. The Frankfurter Zeitung lashed out at the “pro-regime press [Ordnungspresse]” for demanding “an exceptional law for protection against anarchism” and portraying the murder as “a warning to act with decisiveness against Social Democracy.” Challenging such “ignorance and perfidy,” the paper recounted the Socialists’ decades-long struggle against anarchism and pointed out that the only anarchist attacks on German soil had occurred under the Socialist Law.99 Germania too accused the regime’s “agitators [Scharfmacher]” of seeking “‘energetic measures’ not only against the anarchists but also against the Social Democrats” and also noted that the anarchist attentats of the 1880s had occurred while an “exceptional law” was in place. The Catholic Kölnische Volks-Zeitung (Cologne People’s Paper) ridiculed the government’s Scharfmacher for demanding not only that all anarchist papers, meetings, and demonstrations be banned but that “all revolutionary endeavors must be fought in this way, even when they call themselves Social Democratic.” The paper warned that a new Revolution Bill would meet the fate of the last one and predictably endorsed Church agitation and social reform measures against the evil epitomized by anarchism.100 While some conservatives did demand anti-socialist measures in the wake of the attack, just as the left-liberal and Catholic papers asserted, more typical was the call of the Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne Newspaper) for new laws specifically against anarchism, arguing that “exceptional circumstances [Ausnahmezustände] demand exceptional measures, and anarchism constitutes for state and society an exceptional circumstance of the gravest sort” and pointing approvingly to the string of anti-anarchist legislation passed by other European powers over the previous several years. The paper did not even rhetorically relate this danger to Social Democracy.101 Reichstag deputy Wilhelm-Friedrich Count von Limburg-Stirum did suggest that Socialists paved the way for anarchism by claiming that the current society was bad and needed to be eliminated but admitted there was no more direct connection.102 The Berliner Tageblatt observed that the Hamburger Nachrichten’s call for new legislation “neatly avoided any direct reference to Social Democracy,” giving the impression that it was “directed only at the anarchists,” but the liberal paper doubted this was “honestly meant.”103 Whether it was or not, some conservatives clearly understood they would have to tread delicately if they hoped to push through new measures of any sort. A November article in the Schlesische Zeitung (Schleswig Newspaper) admitted as much, stating, “We have argued for the necessity of an anarchist law, not for one instant failing to recognize that the Social Democratic propaganda is overall not less dangerous than the anarchist,” but realizing that a law against both movements would have no chance of getting through the Reichstag.104 When the Prussian Interior Ministry again asked for reports on local anarchist activity from regional officials in the aftermath of the Lucheni attentat, the reports frequently noted the vigorous and organized Social Democratic opposition to the anarchists, which included not only driving them out of the party and Socialist-dominated organizations such as trade unions but also heckling them in anarchist-organized meetings. For exam-

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

157

ple, when anarchist thinker Gustav Landauer delivered a public speech on “Anarchism as a Worldview” in Görlitz in December 1897, the audience was made up chiefly of Social Democrats, who showed up expressly to denounce the anarchists in a public venue. In a small town near Merseburg, a group of Social Democrats attended an anarchistorganized meeting, which had drawn a crowd of one hundred or more mostly curious onlookers, to debate the local anarchists. According to the police observer’s report, the Socialists soundly bested the anarchists, who were “not very intelligent and not accustomed to public speaking.”105 The official who wrote from the town of Forst commented about the local anarchists, “the results of their agitation have been as unsuccessful as the personalities of their representatives are mediocre.” After describing the Social Democrats’ disruptions of three separate attempts by the anarchists to hold public gatherings, he observed that the strong hostility of the Socialists “is the main reason that the agitational activities of the local anarchists in Forst have not met with success.”106 It is clear from such reports that the Social Democratic campaign against anarchism, even before the empress’s murder, was highly visible both to the public and to the police. Conservative proposals for new anti-radical measures, whether including Socialists or not, found virtually no popular support. If the Umsturzvorlage debacle had shown the enormous difficulty of trying to capitalize on anarchist violence to pass sweeping legal restrictions on German socialist radicalism, the situation in fall 1898 reaffirmed it. Even a Prussian state proposal—the so-called “Little Socialist Law” of 1897, targeted at parties promoting “subversive [umstürzlerische], social-revolutionary endeavors”—had failed, despite the state legislature being elected by a franchise favoring the wealthy.107 A final attempt to stifle Social Democracy through legal means was not inspired directly by the anarchist assassinations of the late 1890s but by the rise in industrial strikes in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II had long ago soured on Socialism, but in 1897, inspired by a major Hamburg strike, he pronounced that “the struggle against revolution [Umsturz] with all means we take as a commandment. . . . Whatsoever party dares to assault the foundations of the state, to revolt against religion and does not spare the all-highest Lord must be overcome.” He called Social Democracy a “disease” and a “pestilence.”108 Out of this deep frustration with labor unrest and Socialist agitation more generally, the government in 1899 drafted a bill that proposed mandatory hard labor for anyone who used violence, threats, or “insults to honor and reputation” while organizing or participating in a strike. This so-called Prison Bill (Zuchthausvorlage) was met with withering denunciation from across the political spectrum, with major public figures including sociologist Max Weber, influential economist and liberal reformer Lujo Brentano, and Friedrich Naumann coming out vehemently against it, and mass demonstrations against it occurring, including one that drew 70,000 in Berlin in June and another with 20,000 participants in Hamburg and Altona.109 During the bill’s second reading, the Reichstag voted it down.110 After Gaetano Bresci slew King Umberto I of Italy the next year, some conservatives

158

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

and right-wing liberals dreamed once again of passing an anti-anarchist law (the Frankfurter Zeitung called this “as unchangeable as night following day”), but the government never took up the idea.111 However, Berlin police president Ludwig von Windheim did seek a ban on all anarchist meetings in Prussia on the grounds that they threatened public order.112 In the aftermath of Gennaro Rubini’s unsuccessful attempt on the life of King Leopold II of Belgium in November 1902, the Hamburger Nachrichten continued to complain about the Socialists’ disavowals of responsibility for anarchism: “in every case the anarchist attentat is excused, sugar-coated, or even celebrated, and in that way anarchism is encouraged by Social Democracy.” However, the paper’s insistence that a close relationship between the movements was “evident” was not widely shared except by conservative stalwarts. As a working-class Social Democrat in a city pub commented to his fellows at about the same time, “the great mass of bourgeois society . . . is at least no longer so silly as to believe that the Social Democrats threaten a violent revolution.”113 Die Post in a 1903 article called anarchists “wild beasts” that “should be exterminated root and branch” and urged deportation and harsh punitive measures against them. While the paper saw Socialism and anarchism as growing from the same roots, it conceded, “A Socialist Law we can perhaps do without, an anarchist law no more.”114 But no one in authority pursued either possibility. A proposal in the Preußische Jahrbücher by Justizrat (“judicial advisor,” an honorary title bestowed on attorneys by the Prussian state) Wilhelm Kahl to punish anarchists with the lash (Prügelstrafe) and another from Conrad von Massow to place anarchists in mild preventive custody were subjects of lively debate in the press, but neither caught on in policy circles, though the former idea was periodically floated for years, including by U.S. Secretary of the Navy Bonaparte at a 1906 speech to the Chautauqua Society in New York.115

The commitment to fairness and legal equality had become deeply engrained in German political culture by the turn of the century, and perceptions of anarchism had also changed significantly. Notable in this regard are both the local government reports sent to the Interior Ministry in fall 1898 and succeeding years and the secret reports of Berlin police president Windheim in the 1890s and early 1900s. Local officials described a fairly languid and insular German anarchist movement. Anarchist papers from abroad had largely been replaced by domestic anarchist papers, most prominently Der Sozialist and its allied humor paper, Der arme Konrad (Poor Conrad), and Neues Leben (New Life), published by a competing group of Berlin anarchists. The November 1898 report from Danzig captures the general tenor of police observations at this time: “True anarchists in this region are nonexistent. However, in the city of Danzig a group of former Social Democrats has come together, calling themselves ‘the Radicals.’ . . . The Radicals do not have an organization, they socialize with each other in their homes. . . . The Radicals have not held meetings, and they have no connection to foreign anarchists. . . . An interest in propaganda of the deed has thus far not been apparent.” In most locales, a handful of

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

159

anarchists met, read anarchist newspapers, and heard occasional speeches by prominent anarchists on speaking tours. The few agitators present among the German anarchists struggled to form a more robust movement, but with little success. For example, the report from Frankfurt an der Oder noted that in 1896 anarchist activist Paul Frauböse had founded a “free anarchist-socialist union” with 12 members in Cottbus. The majority “were friendly to anarchist theory, but in no way sympathetic to the anarchists’ violent means,” and members gradually withdrew from the group until it disbanded. Frauböse founded a new group, which fell apart soon after he moved away.116 In response to the government’s query about the presence of foreigners among German anarchists, nearly every district reported that German anarchists had no links to those in other countries, except through the reception of occasional pamphlets and newspapers.117 In a December 1898 Reichstag speech, August Bebel asserted that the German anarchists had for some time been “very harmless people” devoted to establishing trade unions and cooperatives rather than pursuing propaganda of the deed. “I ask the head of the political police in Berlin, in whose hands all the threads of policing throughout Germany are pulled together, and who is thus very well-informed about the entire movement in Germany, whether he can provide evidence of any other agitation by the current anarchist movement than what I have presented here.”118 Police President Windheim did not take up the Socialist leader’s challenge, but his own reports make it clear that he could not easily have done so. His report for the year 1898 carefully distinguished the anarchists of violent attentatism from the self-described “noble anarchists [Edelanarchisten]” prominent in Germany, who sought to build a utopian future from the principle of “individual self-determination.”119 The next year, he noted that “the idea of propaganda of the deed survives only in the glorification of their old martyrs, and this also is expressed in word and in print more timidly than before,” a remarkably clearsighted appraisal only a year after Lucheni’s attentat.120 A perfect example of this type of anarchist was John Henry Mackay (German, but born of a Scottish father), who wrote in a letter published by Rudolf Steiner’s Magazin für Literatur (Magazine for Literature) in September 1898 that “there are unbridgeable contrasts between those who are in fact anarchists and those who falsely call themselves so and are so called, and that apart from the wish for an improvement and restructuring of social conditions, they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with each other.” Mackay, who had always opposed propaganda of the deed, declared himself devoted to “the spiritual progress of the idea of equal freedom in the minds of individuals, the only thing on which all hope for the future rests.”121 The picture of German anarchists expressed by Bebel and Windheim, and exemplified by Mackay, was shared by the chief prosecutor for the state of Berlin who, after investigating whether anarchist papers could be held responsible for the murder of Empress Elisabeth, concluded there were no grounds for pursuing a case, as they had in fact deemed Lucheni’s attentat a senseless act of brutality that only harmed the anarchist cause. He also warned that a failed prosecution would only strengthen the anarchist movement.122 Over the years, Windheim’s accounts of anarchism grew longer and more detailed,

160

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

even while their tone became increasingly routine. He described the meetings, movements, publications, and feuds of the anarchist movement, with only the occasional warning concerning specific threats to public safety, usually from foreigners or German anarchists abroad.123 Despite having pushed the 1901 ban on public anarchist gatherings on the grounds that they disturbed public order, he did not seem to be thinking of the threat of assassinations, as his 1902 report noted that this understanding of propaganda of the deed had been replaced among German anarchists with the idea of the “general strike,” a unified international work stoppage, “which must after a short while bring about general social revolution and with it ‘anarchy,’ the state of absence of authority [Herrschaftslosigkeit] and the freedom of the individual.”124 He well understood that the promotion of violence was confined to the anarchist movement’s fringes. Windheim’s successor Georg von Borries criticized his predecessor’s conclusion about the nonviolent nature of contemporary anarchism in his first report (1903), but two years later he too conceded that preparing the way for the general strike was “the quintessence of all anarchist agitation at this time.”125 No longer perceiving a revolutionary threat from anarchism, the police presidents still tracked particular anarchists they feared might engage in criminal acts—particularly Italians, who had been responsible for most of the highest-profile anarchist killings of the previous decade.126 As the focus of political police concerns moved from the broad category of “revolutionary movements,” in which they included Social Democracy, to the specific category of anarchism, and finally to particular (mostly foreign) anarchists, their tactics became more focused on monitoring a small number of specific targets, sharing information within Germany and internationally, and tightening border security. By the early 1890s, Russian, German, and French officials were already engaged in serious discussions about systematic information sharing among their police services. In a letter from May 1893, Russian ambassador to Germany Pavel Shuvalov floated to head of the German foreign office Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein “the possibility of the establishment of direct relations between the Russian Department of Police and the Oberpräsident (Upper President) of the Berlin Police in affairs regarding revolutionary propaganda,” to improve surveillance of revolutionaries and “contribute to the prevention of their criminal designs, equally dangerous for the two empires.” Toward the end of the year, French authorities had contacted the Germans about monitoring French anarchists in the country. Exchanges of information among police within the Reich’s separate states and with various foreign police forces, which expanded over the next few years and especially after the French president’s killing, focused very tightly on monitoring specific criminal suspects.127 After Empress Elisabeth’s killing, international police cooperation increased exponentially, helped along by the International Anti-Anarchist Conference of Rome in November–December 1898.128 As Mathieu Deflem notes, both this conference and a subsequent one that met in St. Petersburg in March 1904 “conceived of anarchism as a strictly criminal matter, the enforcement of which was to be handled at the administrative level by police institutions.”129 While partly a strategy to accommodate the diverse

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

161

participant states, which had very different attitudes toward political crime, as Deflem suggests, this also conformed well to the increasingly bureaucratic view of the anarchist danger adopted by German authorities. In 1899, the Berlin Police Presidium began maintaining an “anarchist album” with details on the occupation and whereabouts of prominent anarchists, updated every month or so at first. Though revised less zealously as the years went by, it was kept until 1917. To help provide consistency, the Interior Ministry provided a standard form for information to be collected, including biometric data.130 Information sharing on anarchists extended throughout Europe and even to the Americas, providing the Berlin police presidents with precise details on the membership and activities of German expatriate anarchists, such as the members of an anarchist colony founded in southern Brazil in 1902.131 This approach to policing meant that German anarchists were increasingly able to meet openly, though to some degree this depended on the political climate and the whims of officials. Especially in the aftermath of spectacular anarchist assassinations, police took a harder line. An October 1898 meeting with the theme “The International Anarchist Hunt [Anarchistenhetze] and the Conspiracy against Freedom” was judged to threaten “widespread agitation of the general populace and therefore a disturbance of public peace, order, and security” and was forbidden. Friedrich Dempwolf, who had previously run afoul of the law, was also denied permission to speak on “Attentats and Anarchy” in two Brandenburg towns less than two weeks after King Umberto I’s assassination in July 1900.132 Baron Hans von Hammerstein-Loxten, who became Prussian interior minister in 1901, wrote to the Regierungs-Präsidenten in December, three months after President McKinley’s assassination, that since “the open dissemination of anarchistic principles in assemblies” always posed a threat to public order and security, “a ban of all anarchist assemblies seems necessary and justified.”133 Even in this environment, the Potsdam police president gave strict instructions to his underlings only to shut down meetings they were sure posed a threat, urging them “to act with great care, so that no mistake is made, especially in the direction of forbidding Social Democratic meetings” on the basis of the new stricter policy.134 Except during such crackdowns, most anarchist activities were simply observed by the police. In Wiesbaden in December 1897, local officials even replied to a request from the Interior Ministry to forbid an anarchist conference in the interests of public order that they could not do so, because the anarchists could not be considered to be disturbing the peace before they had even met.135 Dempwolf, having been denied permission to speak on “Attentats and Anarchy” in the towns of Adlershof and Rixdorf on the outskirts of Berlin, was allowed to hold a meeting a week later in front of an audience of 70 in nearby Neu Weissensee, having changed his title to the less attention-grabbing “Discussion of Tactical Questions in Anarchism.” The policeman taking notes at the event reported that the anarchist called the Italian king’s killing “deplorable,” asserted that “anarchy has nothing to do with violent deeds,” and declared himself the “enemy of every murder, the judicial kind as well as the mass murder of war.”136 Not everyone was pleased with this increased police tolerance. Only two months

162

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

earlier, the right-liberal Grenzboten (Border Herald) decried the fact that the police had found “no cause” to break up an anarchist meeting that passed a resolution declaring sympathy with Spanish prime minister Cánovas’s assassin, “presumably due to the exemplary behavior of the gentlemen assassins [Herren Meuchelmörder].” This article was reprinted approvingly by the Hamburger Nachrichten.137 In July 1901, the Neue Korrespondenz (New Correspondence) quoted from an article in the Berlin anarchist Neues Leben dedicated to Bresci on the anniversary of his killing of the Italian king, arguing that such fueling of “attentat-desires” should “put an end to the fairytale of the harmlessness of the German anarchists.”138 Despite such complaints from the political right, the bulk of public opinion supported the more tolerant attitude, with complaints coming from left liberals and Social Democrats when the police did shut down peaceful anarchist gatherings.139

As fears of anarchist terrorism in Germany waned, an array of left-liberal scholars began to engage with anarchism as a political philosophy. Many of the same law professors and social scientists who took the occasion of anarchist attacks to criticize exceptional laws and promote social reform went further, suggesting that anarchist philosophy had lessons for the modern world that could be gleaned through careful scientific inquiry. These academics, acutely aware of their declining influence in an age of mass politics and mass culture, sought to reestablish their importance by promoting their ability to understand and cope with modern social problems like anarchism.140 Part defense of the status of the German scholarly class and part promotion of libertarian individualism, their books and pamphlets offered to unravel the anarchist enigma for the common person, revealing the philosophy’s relevance for resisting the socialistic principle’s spread. In addition to those who read these authors’ works, many more would have encountered their ideas in public lectures as well as articles in newspapers like the Frankfurter Zeitung, which published favorable reviews of specific works and also called on these men as experts in the aftermath of anarchist attacks.141 The scholars who wrote on anarchism repeatedly charged that popular ignorance and misconceptions peddled by literary hacks had obscured anarchism’s true significance for the modern world. Zenker professed shock at the audience reaction to a public lecture he had given shortly after Vaillant threw his bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies in December 1893. “I felt almost ashamed,” he wrote, “that I had told these men, who represented the best of the middle-class political electorate, things entirely new to them regarding matters that, in light of the relevance and importance of the question, truly every citizen should be familiar with.”142 Dr. Wilhelm Eduard Biermann, adjunct lecturer at the University of Leipzig, complained of the “misunderstanding” he often encountered “in lay circles” that anarchism meant only “dynamite bombs and attentats and similar atrocities,” an irritation voiced by other scholars as well.143 Rudolf Stammler opened his book The Theory of Anarchism with these words: “The increasing

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

163

number of attempted murders and criminal attentats perpetrated by anarchists in recent times has given the impression in many circles that the anarchists are a half-crazy band of fanatics. It is totally forgotten—perhaps never even known—that there is a theory of anarchism. . . . In its pure form it is a philosophy of social life that social science must not ignore.”144 Their concerns about public ignorance, they insisted, were not merely academic. Naum Reichesberg feared that, rather than confronting anarchism based on its “actual postulates,” those who regarded it as “merely a fanatical band of robbers and murderers” were in danger of pursuing “empty phantoms created by an overheated imagination.”145 A Dr. Steinhammer rebuked the popular press for making the “serious error” of conflating anarchism “with a few fanatics’ political actions,” sowing “complete confusion” among the public by promoting the idea of an international anarchist conspiracy, which was no more than the “fantasy of newspaper editors and their correspondents.” The spread of such false ideas held great peril. “With an uncritical fight against anarchism,” he cautioned, “we will with chilling surety advance the movement’s cause, as we must be reproached for doing in the struggle against socialism.”146 These scholars maintained that anarchism’s rise was a consequence of the embattled status of individual freedom as the “socialist principle” had come to predominate in the contemporary world (just what Bamberger had first complained of two decades earlier). Whereas conservatism, socialism, and even a state-centered version of liberalism advocated social organization rooted in increasing state authority, anarchism rejected the state’s growing might and widening purview, calling instead for a society based on individual free will and voluntary participation. Anarchism was thus a powerful voice challenging the state’s unbounded power. For Professor Andreas Voigt, “The anarchist idea of a solution to the problem of utopia is actually commendable, though it is as lacking as every other solution.”147 Though he considered anarchism “certainly one of the greatest errors in which humanity has been entangled,” Zenker asserted, “nevertheless, it too has a cultural mission, and no small one, however fearful natures might shrink from this contention. . . . Anarchism will some day help in overcoming socialism, if not through anarchy then at least through freedom.” He claimed that increasing military competition in the modern world encouraged growing state control over economic and social relations, a phenomenon that “makes itself manifest in the general endeavor to expand the sphere of power of the state at the cost of the individual, and to solve economic problems in the same way as one organizes an army. State socialism, Kathedersozialismus, the Christian Social movement prove the simultaneity of this characteristic of the era in all circles of today’s society.” Even “politicians who still call themselves liberal today often relinquish without a fight one position after another in the defense of economic freedom.” As a consequence, this “religion of the absolute, infallible, all-mighty, and ever-present State” had spread throughout society. If this socialistic principle’s advance were not halted, “the respect for personal freedoms will more and more wane, while the authoritarian, religious tendencies will wax,” leading to a world of crushing

164

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

state power: “Whether the end of the song will be the Social Democratic people’s state or the socialistic absolute monarchy is incidental.”148 Anarchism’s philosophical importance rested in its determined opposition to such a future of arbitrary authority and diminished freedom. “Before things come to this,” he prophesied, “out of the needs of the people itself a countertendency will make itself felt, which will endeavor to pull development back in the opposite direction . . . and the shock troop [Stossgruppe] of this future struggle will be anarchism, which today is already preparing and sharpening the intellectual weapons for it. That the overcoming of socialism could be effected by the introduction of anarchy we do not believe, but it will be carried out under the banner of individual freedom.” In defending the value of free association and individual rights, anarchism stood in the breach abandoned by the dominant political parties. Zenker ended these reflections with the statement that anarchism “contains at least as many usable and useful elements as socialism, and if today even governments, men of learning, and bishops proceed without fear upon the path of socialism, then a discussion of anarchist theory should not be so casually waved aside.”149 For Zenker, anarchism stood as the creeping socialist principle’s intellectual antithesis. In remarkably similar language, Tobias too lauded anarchism’s value. Though anarchism was “one of the greatest errors ever propagated,” he commented, each error has a cultural mission, and anarchism’s is not among the least significant. Our era is working feverishly to expand state authority. The socialist idea, the belief in the state’s infallible power, is gaining new adherents every day. It spreads as state socialism to the government and the ruling parties, as Kathedersozialismus to scholars and young people, as Catholic socialism and Christian socialism to the churches and their followers, and as Social Democracy to the workers. Everywhere we witness efforts to expand the sphere of state power at the individual’s expense . . . [anarchists] provide the spiritual weapons in the battle to preserve and win back the rightful freedom of the individual against state control.150

Similarly, Karl Diehl, professor of political economy at the University of Königsberg, called anarchism “a good counterweight against the philosophy of socialism. . . . In preaching unlimited liberty, anarchism defends the power of the free personality” against “socialistic ideas.”151 Standing up for individual freedom against the socialistic principle’s myriad manifestations would benefit society and deprive philosophical anarchism of its raison d’être. Though critical of the anarchist project’s extremism, liberal academics placed it within a tradition of philosophical support for individualism with strong German roots. Hermann Seuffert speculated that “anarchism’s germ lies in many people’s aversion to the historical arrangement of state power relations,” alleging, “many living today have an anarchist vein in them.”152 Both he and Biermann cited an essay by Johann Fichte in which the eighteenth-century German philosopher declared, “it is the end of all govern-

Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist “Propaganda of the Deed”

165

ment to make the government unnecessary,” and expressed his conviction that “in the development of human life there lies a point when all the state’s bonds will be unnecessary. At that point, instead of strength or cleverness, pure reason will be acknowledged as the highest judge.”153 Georg Adler, a liberal professor in Basel who would go on to embrace Social Democracy, suggested of Max Stirner that what had “secured a place for him forever in the world’s literature” were his stress on “the principle of free individuality and the right of each personality to the peculiar development of its own being” and his “protest against all endeavors of spiritual disciplining [geistiger Dressur] and uniformization [Uniformierung].” According to Adler, Stirner had been the first to imagine “the profound (if also utopian) construction of a social ideal strictly based on the idea of the individual’s autonomy.”154 In explicit contrast to the German philosophical school of thought that saw the individual as subordinate to the state, attributed to Hegel and others, these men argued that anarchism expressed a deeply held German commitment to individual freedom.155 Left liberals claimed that while anarchists took their worship of individuality to impossible lengths, their aversion to authority was symptomatic of modern society’s real illness, state power’s expansion at the individual’s expense. And indeed, Social Democrats and trade unionists, conservatives and nationalists and imperialists, rural workers, and agricultural and industrial barons did look to the state as a crucial tool in realizing their disparate goals. Left liberals were not wrong in their observations, but the vast majority of Germans shared neither their fears of the state nor their enthusiasm for laissez-­ faire economy. In 1884, National Liberal Reichstag representative Johannes Miquel (who helped lead his party into a close alliance with Bismarck and was later appointed Prussian finance minister) had already pronounced a requiem for the kind of liberalism espoused by these left-liberal writers on anarchism. “We no longer recognize,” he asserted, “that kind of liberalism which defines progress as the diminution of the state’s role, an exclusive reliance on self-help, and the rejection of all public social and economic organizations; which identifies free trade with political freedom.”156

By the early years of the twentieth century, the political culture of the German Empire had moved toward broad acceptance of the core liberal democratic values that the anti-exceptional law coalition of the 1880s and 1890s advocated, notwithstanding the powerful minority that remained steadfastly opposed. Though deep misgivings about the continuing advance of Social Democracy could be found among all non-Socialists, only a handful of conservatives and right-wing nationalists continued to advocate legal and police repression of Socialism as an effective or acceptable solution to the problem. Both Catholic and Protestant thinkers looked to a revival of religious belief as the means of salvation from the corrosive cultural effects of Social Democracy, while liberals looked to blunt Socialism’s appeal through social reforms benefiting workers and, for the many liberal nationalists, through imperialist and militarist ventures that united

166

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Germans across lines of class, confession, and region. Anarchism, once primarily invoked to stigmatize Social Democrats as dangerous revolutionaries, increasingly came to be regarded as mostly harmless in its culturally oriented German manifestation. For left liberals, it even provided a way to talk about the importance of individual freedom in an era of expanding state power. Within the Social Democratic movement, lively debate over anarchism and in particular its relationship to Socialism continued to occupy the party’s thinkers as they confronted a host of questions about the movement’s appropriate tactics and stance toward the institutions of German society.

C h a p t e r

SIX

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy 1 8 9 0 – 1 9 1 4

As far back as the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had defined their movement in opposition to utopian “others.” In the days of the First International in the 1860s, Marxism’s chief competitor became Bakuninism. And toward the end of the 1870s, this political antagonist had begun to be defined as anarchism. Anti-anarchist rhetoric was central to the German Social Democrats’ self-conception and public presentation throughout the years of the Socialist Law. So it is no surprise that opposition to anarchism remained embedded in Social Democratic theoretical debate in the years after the law’s expiration, even while public concern about anarchism in Germany began to move away from the question of its relationship to Socialism. While connected to the crafting of Social Democracy’s public persona as a disciplined, scientific mass movement, this discourse served increasingly as a tool to criticize competing ideas within the movement. From 1890 until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 (and in fact beyond), the world’s largest organized socialist movement grappled with the tactical dilemma of how best to approach the social and political institutions of the Kaiserreich, whether in democratic parliamentary politics, labor organization, or social and cultural affairs. Social Democrats coming to these debates from a variety of directions invoked the specter of anarchist “utopianism” to stigmatize opponents’ ideas and to discipline heterodox elements within the party. If theoretical anti-anarchism at times helped impose some unity on a generally fractious movement, it also served as a wedge that deepened fissures among theoretical opponents and made it harder for them to see past differences.

168

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

At the same time, the possibility of a political rapprochement with actual anarchists was made exceedingly difficult, for good or ill, by the deeply internalized hostility that had been cultivated over the preceding decades. More than in the public rhetorical battles during the Socialist Law period, anarchist ideas and anarchists themselves played a role in these debates. Yet, as in the previous public debate, most participants rejected anarchism as an errant philosophy, a symbol of flawed thinking and character. The tradition of Marxist anti-anarchism allowed party leaders to position those deemed too radical and those deemed too reformist as theoretically naive, personally immature, and ultimately bourgeois. The leadership, to promote a narrow interpretation of Marxism and a defined repertoire of Socialist action, stigmatized calls for both gradual cultural transformation and immediate revolution as betraying an anarchist taint. Those who questioned Marxist orthodoxy, whether advocates of a broad socialist coalition that would include anarchists or supporters of alliances with liberals, found themselves lumped with anarchists as utopians or “opportunists.” The supporters of intensified radicalism and preparation for revolution discovered that their tactical positions too could fall victim to the accusation of reproducing anarchist logic. Heterodox intellectuals, revisionists, and radicals thus all came under attack for allegedly anarchistic tendencies. When Socialists mobilized anti-anarchism for internecine struggles after 1890, they made use of the harsh anti-anarchist rhetoric they had developed during the 1880s, which, when used against opponents in the party, cast theoretical and tactical disagreements in stark and bitter terms, making unity increasingly difficult. It encouraged party members not to see opposing theoretical and agitational ideas as different positions within a broader movement but, instead, as dangerous and reactionary transgressions of Social Democratic ideology. The language of anti-anarchism encouraged the divisiveness that marked the united SPD’s last decade and hastened and heightened the intense hostility between those who would leave to form the Communist Party and the faction that would retain the SPD name. Carl Schorske and others have emphasized the depth of the split within the party from 1905 onward.1 Certainly the Russian Revolution exacerbated internal Social Democratic tensions, but the stigmatization of opposing Socialist points of view as anarchist, and therefore ultimately reactionary, even in the 1890s helped lay the groundwork for the escalation of the rhetorical battle after the turn of the century. The many twists and turns of German Social Democratic theoretical debates and factional struggles in the Wilhelmine era have been chronicled elsewhere.2 Here I focus on anarchism’s importance to these intellectual struggles. In the end, the very discursive tactic that helped enforce party unity under the banner of the centrist leadership also facilitated the ensuing schism.

When Most and Hasselmann turned openly hostile to party leaders in 1878, they did so because they judged their tactics to be too compliant and passive in the face of a German state that had just declared war on socialism. Most and Hasselmann saw themselves

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

169

as the carriers of the true flame of socialism, which had to remain in revolutionary opposition to the dominant society. In a different yet not totally unfamiliar way, the same debate played out after 1890, when reformists like Vollmar argued for the pursuit of practical reform measures, coalition-building with other parties, and parliamentary and labor union work. The long-simmering theoretical tension between radicals and moderates was brought into the open by the combination of the party’s tremendous electoral success in 1890 and the end of the Socialist Law, which not only made cooperation with non-Socialists more thinkable but also opened up the avenues for debate and discussion within Social Democracy. Under the Socialist Law, because the members of the Reichstag caucus became the party’s de facto leaders and Der Sozialdemokrat its official mouthpiece, disagreements could be settled within the narrow confines of the three party congresses and occasional public disputes in the party paper. After 1890, not only did the Socialists’ Reichstag membership increase significantly and party congresses occur every year, but Socialist press and associational life also revived rapidly, leading to a situation in which many and varied voices contended. In the first post–Socialist Law years, what Vernon Lidtke called the “economic and gradualist interpretation of revolution,” the seed from which Bernstein’s influential notion of “evolutionary socialism” would grow, predominated in the party. At the same time, a significant contingent in the party saw increasing parliamentarism as dangerous and rejected the hope expressed by some moderates that “the present society is growing into socialism.”3 Despite the Socialist party’s adamant rejection of anarchism tout court, the radical Social Democrats who feared that moderates overvalued parliamentarism shared a belief long held by anarchists. For example, Berlin anarchist poet and literary critic Gustav Landauer wrote of the Socialists’ 1893 Reichstag election campaign, “on this path we will never come to a free society, but only to social reforms, the strengthening of the state, the tightening of the yoke.”4 Two years later he wrote, “the anarchists are not a political party, because they do not accept the basis of the current political system and disdain to bargain and haggle with it. We anarchists wish to be preachers and our goal is to revolutionize the spirit.”5 Engaging in politics meant sacrificing the essence of socialist revolutionism. Fellow Berlin anarchist Albert Auerbach argued in his 1892 pamphlet Against Petit-Bourgeois Parliamentary Social Reform, For Revolutionary Social Democracy! that only two roads lay open to the German proletariat: “one points toward an improvement, the other toward an overthrow of the class state. Does the proletariat want to make a deal with the present society, or does it want to do away with it and put in its place the society of the free and equal?” Auerbach reveled in images of workers fighting shoulder to shoulder in battle on the “field of honor,” not using the “wooden swords” Reichstag deputies wielded in mock combat.6 When Socialists used the phrase “political battle,” one anarchist commented sarcastically in 1891, this “obviously does not mean ‘revolution’” but merely “a fight with scraps of paper.”7 Anarchists who appealed in this way to workers’ sense that the Socialist party leaders had removed themselves from the authentic goals of socialism were not so far apart from many Socialists.

170

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

A number of young radical thinkers within the party challenged the stance adopted by the leadership in 1890–1891 and opposed the Erfurt Program, which despite its theoretical radicalism they considered to be a manifesto of moderate reformism. They looked upon the doctrine of reforming capitalism while waiting attentively for its great collapse with hostility. This group, which the press dubbed the Jungen, included newspaper editors such as Max Schippel, who edited the Berliner Volks-Tribüne (Berlin People’s Tribune), and Hans Müller, coeditor of the Magdeburg Volkstimme (Voice of the People), as well as Bruno Wille, founder of the Freie Volksbühne (Free People’s Theater). Inspired by a radical reading of Marx, these dissidents denounced what they saw as the party’s petit-bourgeois turn and argued for a more thoroughgoing revolutionary outlook that would encompass social, intellectual, and cultural change, rather than merely parliamentary struggle for the improvement of the capitalist world. They regarded the strict economic determinism embraced by the leadership as a deterrent to meaningful social action: if capitalism followed fixed historical laws, then political organization, cultural education, and the promotion of class consciousness among the workers served no purpose. For those unwilling to accept a logic that they saw as fostering collective passivity, certain beliefs long held by anarchists—such as faith in instinctive revolutionary character of the masses and conviction that revolution could be initiated by awakening workers to an awareness of their subjugation—proved attractive. Many sought to fuse Marx’s economic insights with a theory of social practice that granted a greater role to personal initiative, education, and the people’s ethical development in the advancement of the socialist cause.8 Such a synthesis offered middle-class intellectuals a clear place within the movement, as the working class’s teachers, and also provided a conception of how one could act as a revolutionary in an era lacking structural economic crises, when workers’ living standards and social power continued gradually to wax. While some members of the Jungen drifted toward anarchism, most remained committed (if doctrinally heterodox) Marxists who wished to see a more wide-ranging field of party activism. The closeness of the Jungen perspective to one advocated by anarchists opened them up to attacks from the party’s established leaders who denigrated them as dilettantes and middle-class adventurers, “half-anarchists” lacking discipline and commitment. Marx had prepared the ground for such a charge; apparently blind to the irony of his own position he always regarded intellectuals with great suspicion. As children of the middle classes, they threatened to give the workers’ movement a “petit-bourgeois” cast, he feared.9 The leadership’s struggle against the Jungen revealed both the tensions that would increasingly dog the party over intellectual dissent and the willingness of party leaders to attack opponents who refused to submit to party discipline with the language of anti-anarchism. Like Most and Hasselmann in 1880, the Jungen split from the party to form what they considered an authentic revolutionary socialist movement, what they called the “Independent Socialist Party” (a name later adopted by Socialist radicals who broke from the party majority over its support for the war in 1914).

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

171

Some of the party malcontents advocated explicitly for a rapprochement with German anarchists, who had for the most part rejected violence by the 1890s. However, the history of mutual enmity made such a relationship potentially fraught with tension. In a series of leaflets to Berlin Socialists in summer 1893, some of the Jungen who had initially collaborated with the anarchist paper Der Sozialist denounced their erstwhile colleagues, explaining that while they strenuously opposed “the anti-revolutionary dictatorship of the Reichstag caucus” and “the corrupting results of parliamentarism” (they approvingly quoted from Liebknecht’s 1869 speech on this subject), they refused to countenance anarchist attacks on Socialist doctrine or endorse the anarchists’ belief in undisciplined individual freedom. At the same time, they continued to reject the SPD’s “new tactics” as “nothing more than a compromise with the masses at the cost of principle” and signed their declaration with the statement “Long live revolutionary socialism!”10 Like Most and Hasselmann before them, they considered themselves true Social Democrats, wanting neither to leave the party nor submit to its reformist leadership. Within a few years, however, all had done one or the other. But the complexities of negotiating the theoretical and practical relationship to anarchism in internal Socialist disputes did not end. Even some Social Democrats who had not been affiliated with the Jungen pushed for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between Social Democracy and anarchism than that which had reigned in previous decades. Different groups interpreted anarchism’s significance differently. For some radical Marxists, class consciousness needed to be awakened through militant revolutionary activity; for others it was through increased educational efforts. On the other side, revisionists like Eduard Bernstein moved toward an ethical and cultural interpretation of socialism that also resembled anarchism in key aspects. Social Democrats who argued for increased openness to alternative theoretical and practical ideas judged the rigidity of both Social Democrats and anarchists to be detrimental to the struggle for workers’ rights and began advocating for a pluralism that would facilitate members of the two movements working harmoniously. The heart of this effort was the Sozialistische Monatshefte (Socialist Monthly), for its first two years Sozialistische Akademiker (Socialist Academic), founded in 1895 by Josef Bloch as an alternative to the party’s official theoretical organ, Karl Kautsky’s Die Neue Zeit (The New Era). In its first dozen years, the journal published 25 substantial articles concerning anarchism (some written by prominent German anarchists such as Landauer). Many of these articles criticized anarchist theory but took it seriously, placing it within the broad socialist discursive milieu, directly counter to the attitude elaborated by party leaders under the Socialist Law. Bloch lamented in 1904 that the political exigencies of the previous two decades had prevented Socialists from coming to a proper understanding of anarchism. Since the government had launched its anti-Socialist campaign “under the pretext that it must defend itself against any kind of anarchism,” it had been impossible for Social Democrats honestly to examine the anarchists’ teachings without playing into

172

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

the government’s hands. The long-standing “theoretical confrontation between the anarchist and Social Democratic doctrine,” going back to Marx’s battle with Bakunin, had also inhibited an open engagement with anarchist ideas. An unbiased assessment, Bloch concluded, would reveal that anarchism differed from Socialism only in its choice of means (ironically, exactly what conservatives had charged since the 1880s).11 In a five-part article from 1895 addressing “The Anarchist Doctrine and Its Relationship to Communism,” Bloch called for anarchist participation in the socialist movement, since anarchist theory, both its individual and communist variants, taken to its logical conclusion must culminate in a socialist vision of society’s organization. The penultimate article in Bloch’s series arrived at an assessment that “the anarchist systems are all nothing other than communism.” Advocating the two socialist camps’ unification, Bloch urged anarchists to “abandon their sulking corner [Schmollwinkel]” and acknowledge that “they themselves, like the socialists, in spite of their appearances of uniqueness, have the same endeavor, whose goal is the abolition of exploitation in every form. The words must read: March together, strike together!”12 For Bloch, division between the two movements only weakened their common cause. In spring 1896, the Sozialistische Monatshefte published an article addressing the same subject, titled “Anarchism, a Socialist Tendency?” Acknowledging that “many people, among them well-known and famous socialists,” would regard the question as “idle or entirely laughable,” the article’s author, the French sociologist and anarchist sympathizer Augustin Hamon, sought to challenge the view of socialism and anarchism as inevitably antagonistic. He complained that for Social Democrats, “the opposition between the doctrines is an absolute one; they reserve for their one view alone the designation ‘socialist.’” As a consequence, they “excommunicate the anarchists, both communist and collectivist, and hound them out of the great socialist family.” The anarchists responded in kind, Hamon claimed, creating between the movements an artificial rift that had no basis in theory. Defining socialism as any social system that “results in the socialization of the means of production,” he argued that anarchism was indeed a socialist tendency. “The assertion that communist and collectivist anarchism are not socialist doctrines,” he concluded, “stands in opposition to the historical and logical truth, because we have proved historically and logically that socialism includes in itself anarchist communism and collectivism.” He echoed Bloch’s final statement: “the philosopher must come to the conclusion that within socialism all—whichever school they might belong to— could march together, united in their attack on the existing society.”13 Hamon urged Social Democrats to cast off the mantle of dogmatism and embrace a broad vision of socialist pluralism. Wally Zepler suggested the same thing in 1909. In a pair of articles, on “The Individual in Anarchism” and “The Individual in Socialism,” she argued that anarchists understood that even a society based on the free individual required the existence of behavioral standards enforced by the larger community. “Communist anarchism,” she claimed, “differentiates itself, where the question of social force is concerned, in no single point

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

173

from socialism, it is in essence of a piece with socialism.” Ultimately, Zepler concluded, “it remains in fact incomprehensible why communist anarchists like Kropotkin call themselves anarchists and not socialists . . . , while they reveal no fundamental difference between them.”14 Though taking a swipe at the anarchists’ pettiness, as Hamon had the socialists’, Zepler concluded that anarchism fell within the bounds of socialist theory. For many Social Democrats who turned their attention increasingly to cultural and ethical concerns, anarchists appeared more and more as fellow travelers. For instance, a 1913 Sozialistische Monatshefte article on Kropotkin by Roman Streltzow concluded, “Naturally from our socialist standpoint we cannot follow Kropotkin in his anarchism. . . . And yet we also must do homage to Kropotkin the man. For his ethical aim [Wollen] is determined by his love of humanity and is intended to liberate it from want and oppression. All differences of theoretical and practical opinion cannot make us blind to the essential equality of the motive behind his system and socialism.”15 Without embracing anarchism, Social Democrats like Streltzow emphasized essential similarities between the movements’ goals. This kind of blurring of the lines between the movements could be seen in the experience of individuals like Paul Kampffmeyer, a member of the Jungen who had become an anarchist by the mid-1890s, but returned to Social Democracy by the end of the decade.16 It also occurred in some public venues where anarchists and Socialists began to mix. An anarchist meeting in August 1900 featured a debate between an anarchist and a Social Democrat about tactics, in which, according to the policeman present, they “were almost united in principle, and differed only in tactics.” The next month the same Social Democrat spoke at an anarchist event that drew 130 listeners, this time offering a critique of the Great Powers’ colonial politics.17 These meetings occurred at the same time as other Social Democrats were attending anarchist meetings to disrupt them, suggesting that the tension in the Socialist movement about how to approach anarchism existed among the rank and file no less than among party intellectuals. The possibility of bridging the socialist-anarchist gap was made easier by most anarchists’ rejection of assassination by the late 1890s and some anarchists’ tentative sanctioning of electoral participation. Anarchist writer Albert Weidner observed in an 1898 article on “The Position of the Anarchists toward Elections” that anarchists, and in particular the German anarchists, had in recent years accepted that elections played a critical role in awakening the workers’ political consciousness by involving them in direct political agitation. While anarchists still emphasized workers’ self-organization and the development of institutions independent of the state, they had realized, according to Weidner, that renouncing electoral participation meant squandering an agitational opportunity. Anarchists had thus moved closer to Social Democracy without sacrificing their commitment to sparking a revolution in the near future. For some Socialist intellectuals, this sign portended the possible fusion of the two movements. Only recalcitrance on the part of those accustomed to the groups’ mutual hostility stood in the way.18

174

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Though they often chided the anarchists for their sectarianism, Social Democrats who advocated broad socialist unity also criticized the dogmatic anti-anarchists within the Social Democratic movement. Bloch put his vision of socialist-anarchist comradeship into practice by publishing in the Sozialistische Monatshefte not only articles favorable to anarchism but also many written by anarchists themselves, such as Weidner. Particularly appropriate to convey the message that anarchism and Social Democracy could invigorate one other was Francesco Saverio Merlino, one of the most famous Italian anarchists who was, at the time he wrote, in the midst of a gradual process of reidentifying himself as a “libertarian socialist.” He cautioned that contemporary socialism, both the Marxist and anarchist versions, had become “dogmatic, doctrinaire, and therefore necessarily subjective and utopian.” Socialism needed to “come down from the lofty but unfruitful heights of doctrine” and engage in the day-to-day struggles of “political, economic, and social life. . . . It must fight for practical reforms, which the people demand and the government refuses, not for wished-for formulations of principles and uncertain formulas of one or another socialist school or party.”19 Merlino envisioned socialist unity as an alternative to unproductive polemics and abstract theoretical battles. Two of the anarchists Weidner had identified as proponents of new tactics such as electoral participation also appeared in the journal. Adolf Marreck and Ladislaus Gumplowicz both emphasized anarchism’s recent doctrinal evolution. Marreck described the newfound anarchist commitment to elections as the result of a “years-long skepticism toward the tactic of violence inaugurated by Bakunin. . . . That we are standing up for parliamentarism is only a sign of the distance we have gone from the Bakuninist tactics.” Rhapsodizing about universal suffrage as a “creative tool” by which humans could balance the contradictions between pure intellectual ideals and practical economic needs, Marreck embraced the tactic enthusiastically. “Universal suffrage functions as one uses it,” Marreck opined. “If we anarchists now use the right to vote in a spirit of progress, it is impossible to see how we should promote domination and repression.”20 This tactical evolution set the stage for potential collaboration between Socialists and anarchists. Gumplowicz, a member of the Jungen before turning to anarchism, likewise saw present circumstances as auspicious for the two groups’ unification. In “Changes in Anarchist Tactics and Doctrine,” he assessed both propaganda of the deed and antiparliamentarism to have been failures, the former resulting only in outbreaks of individual or collective despair, the latter wasting an opportunity to spread the anarchist message. He urged his fellow anarchists, despite their fear of being tainted by a corrupt political system, to risk political engagement as a way to propagandize for their cause while continuing their extra-parliamentary “propaganda of the idea.” Gumplowicz suggested that since the founding of self-help cooperatives had taught anarchists the value of democracy in the economic sphere, they should apply the same lesson to the political sphere. He recommended an abandonment of the ideal of “absolute absence of authority” in favor of a return to Proudhon’s idea of free, autonomous federations organized

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

175

democratically. In addition to embracing democracy, Gumplowicz encouraged his fellow anarchists to abandon their long-standing hatred of Social Democrats. “As for the present political situation in Germany,” he wrote, “it seems entirely clear to me that it demands an alliance of all democratic elements against the anti-democratic desires of the Junkers and their big-capitalist reinforcements.” If the Social Democrats in turn renounced their “intolerant dogmatism,” the two socialist streams could unite to form an unstoppable socialist and democratic flood. Gumplowicz told his compatriots that they had only two options, to go “either backwards to capitalist liberalism or forward to socialist democracy.”21 Like Bloch, Gumplowicz imagined virtually no difference between Proudhonian anarchism and Social Democracy. Along with such specific calls for unity, the Sozialistische Monatshefte accepted for publication a variety of other pieces by prominent anarchists, including Landauer and anarchist historian Max Nettlau, and also featured reviews of books by and about anarchism.22 The editors of the Sozialistische Monatshefte offered a new conceptualization of Social Democracy’s relationship to anarchism, challenging the party’s sacralization of orthodox Marxism and emphasizing practical agitation’s central importance to socialism. The Sozialistische Monatshefte also urged Socialists to build coalitions with liberals where possible. In this context, the paper published a kind obituary for Leopold Sonnemann in 1909. Noting that the Frankfurter Zeitung was “one of the few greatcapitalist papers that remained friendly to social reform and the workers’ movement,” the obituary claimed that “Sonnemann was manifestly unjustly attacked. Today a just appreciation of his personality is possible, even in Social Democratic circles.”23 Socialists considerably less sympathetic to anarchism, such as Bernstein, also approached anarchism in a way that differed markedly from the Marxist anti-anarchist tradition. Though he showed greater reserve in his assessment of anarchism than Bloch and his associates, Bernstein too addressed the movement in the theoretical realm, acknowledging that some anarchist leaders deserved serious intellectual consideration. In 1891, while the party struggled to find direction in a new era, Bernstein began an article series on “The Social Doctrine of Anarchism” for Die Neue Zeit, roughly a decade after his extended theoretical exploration of anarchism in Der Sozialdemokrat. Earlier in the year, John Henry Mackay had published The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, a popular exposition of Proudhonian mutualist anarchism in the form of a didactic novel.24 According to Bernstein, the widespread literary attention to Mackay’s book had spurred him to once again take up the issue of anarchism. Avoiding the tone of many previous anti-anarchist writings, including some of his own, he argued, “nothing is more dangerous than to answer catchphrases with catchphrases,” and promised a “calm and relevant exposition and critique of anarchism’s fundamental ideas.”25 He resisted discrediting anarchism based on the actions of anarchist assassins, even while the wave of French propaganda of the deed was getting under way. Rejecting the simple equation of anarchism with terrorism, he defended the movement’s leaders from the charge that they bore responsibility for acts of violence

176

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

perpetrated in anarchism’s name. He also drew attention to what he saw as the anarchists’ intellectual progress since the 1880s, noting that Kropotkin’s anarchism hardly resembled Most’s. Bernstein began his article series intending to provide a critique of anarchist economic, social, and ethical ideas, matching the scope of concerns touched on in Mackay’s novel. However, in the end, after six installments and nearly sixty pages, he had only managed to cover anarchist economic theory. As he had a decade earlier, he depicted anarchism as a perennial utopian fantasy: “the idea of anarchy as a state of society without a trace of force, initiated by people, without rulers and without binding obligations, can be traced back to the earliest beginnings of the literature of civilized peoples.” Even if one did not consider “these communist ideal societies’ utopian character” as truly anarchist, the philosophy could still be traced back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century liberal philosophers who imagined a state of nature in which humans had total freedom, which they voluntarily surrendered to advance their own interests. Anarchists simply rejected the idea of an ur-contract at the dawn of society, insisting on the individual’s continued autonomy. Bernstein saw this perspective as rooted in bourgeois individualism.26 This charge appeared in other Social Democratic critiques of anarchism as well. For instance, a Neue Zeit article by expatriate Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek labeled anarchism “the most influential and most important for the workers’ movement of all the modern utopian systems,” which nevertheless remained “petit-bourgeois, a backward-looking longing after the ‘freedom’ of the independent small producer.”27 Bernstein’s critique of anarchist economics, like other Social Democrats’, boiled down to the impossibility of a complex society existing without state organization and the group’s ability to constrain individual arbitrariness. Bernstein blamed the lengthiness of this series of articles on economics for his ultimate failure to write anything about anarchism’s “social and ethical” aspects. Bernstein’s avoidance of these issues is intriguing, especially at a time in his life when, as Manfred Steger has observed, “the evolutionary language of ethical perfectibility and rational self-control of late-Victorian liberalism became the much-cherished standard for his own cultural and social values.”28 It is entirely possible that he found a critique of anarchist social and ethical ideas difficult to formulate, given his own developing attitudes. Though we cannot know if Bernstein ever realized he had more in common with anarchists than he wanted to admit, his extensive exploration of anarchist ideas over the years suggests that he found them at least worthy of grappling with.29

Open intellectual engagement with anarchism was not something Marxist stalwarts in the party took kindly to. In a 1901 article, Bebel defended the Neue Zeit as the “official” organ of the party, explicitly distancing it from the Sozialistische Monatshefte, which he noted stood “outside party control” as “a free platform where anyone can express an opinion.”30 Bloch responded in a letter protesting the char-

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

177

acterization of his journal as anything other than a party paper and stating that he personally as a party member adhered to Socialist party discipline, but he also did not back down from his project of uniting diverse socialist camps.31 To help define the limits of Socialist identity, the party’s centrist leadership not only exalted the Neue Zeit (edited by Karl Kautsky for many years) as the central theoretical organ in the post–Socialist Law era but also sought to promote works like Russian expatriate Georgii Plekhanov’s Anarchism and Socialism, which became one of the most wellknown Marxist anti-anarchist tracts of the 1890s. Published in France in 1894, at the height of the wave of anarchist terrorism there, within months the book appeared in German (translated by Bernstein’s wife and published by the SPD’s Vorwärts publishing house) and English (translated by Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor Marx Aveling). Plekhanov’s work, a simple and highly polemical assault on anarchism, combined theoretical critique with rhetorical disdain for the anarchist character. German Social Democratic publishers reprinted it numerous times over the years, and it served as a standard account of Social Democratic anti-anarchist sentiment in the decades around the turn of the century. Plekhanov’s book, though certainly intended in part as an intervention into public debate about anarchism, addressed itself primarily to a Social Democratic audience. Positioning anarchism as a latter-day utopianism, Plekhanov denounced it as a philosophy of middle-class dilettantes. “The utopians of our day, the anarchists, are the extractors of quintessence,” he wrote. “They have nothing to do with social science, which, in its onward march, has outdistanced them by at least half a century.” They failed to comprehend modern socialism, rooted in “economic reality, and the inherent laws of its evolution.” Plekhanov organized his narrative to trace utopian thinking’s intellectual degeneration from Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon through the great (though theoretically misguided) anarchist thinkers to the present batch of anarchist “epigones” who could not even make “the two ends of their reasoning meet.”32 He acknowledged the intellectual heft of the anarchist “fathers” Stirner and Proudhon, noting also that Proudhon “bitterly mocked those people for whom the revolution was reduced to acts of violence, the exchange of blows and bloodshed.” Sadly, “the descendants of the ‘father,’ the modern anarchists, understand by revolution exclusively this brutally childish method,” undertaken in the name of “the individual’s unlimited rights.”33 Echoing Social Democrats’ charges from the previous decade, Plekhanov portrayed anarchism as both childish and immoral. Such “decadent utopians, stricken with incurable intellectual anemia,” were, according to Plekhanov, bourgeois dandies, men “quite comme il faut, men about town who . . . wear nothing less than patent-leather shoes, and decorate their button-holes with a dahlia before they go to meetings.”34 Making a similar claim, a Neue Zeit article in February 1894 claimed it was the “mentally ill and people with perverse instincts, which a decaying society produces by the hundreds” who “in speeches and writing carry out anarchist propaganda.”35 Such attacks on anarchists as irrational and decadent echoed the anti-Most tirades of the 1880s.

178

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Socialist anti-anarchist writings also continued to depict anarchists as confused and cowardly, traits disqualifying them as potential comrades. A Neue Zeit lead article from 1895 complained that a meeting of the unemployed led by Wilhelm Liebknecht had been disturbed by Gumplowicz, who shouted out anti-state slogans, drowning out the speakers. The article repeated Liebknecht’s judgment of Gumplowicz as a man of “unsound mind . . . who did not know what he wanted.” As the police took him into custody (he was arrested for defaming the monarch in his remarks), Gumplowicz had “betrayed the bewilderment of a helpless weakling,” reported the article. At his trial, “instead of representing his position with firmness and clarity,” Gumplowicz confined himself to a “teary complaint” that the state prosecutor had insulted him. The author opined that such abuse should hardly have fazed “a revolutionary who would rather demolish capitalist society today than tomorrow.”36 Such attacks not only impugned the anarchist character but also discouraged the kind of anarchist-socialist cooperation Gumplowicz symbolized. For, unlike the anarchists denounced in Der Sozialdemokrat in the 1880s (other than Most and Hasselmann), Gumplowicz had close ties to various Socialists. Though he had not yet graced the pages of the Sozialistische Monatshefte, he had written articles for Wille’s Freie Bühne (Free Theater), which, according to the Neue Zeit, had denigrated “the party of the classconscious worker.” The article went on to criticize Wille’s paper, which allegedly embraced a mish-mash of ideological positions, including Nietzscheanism and anarchism (“the flattering tickling of all corrupt bourgeois instincts”) and engaged in “at times open, at times concealed clawing against the class-conscious proletariat.”37 Such vicious remarks were also directed at established party elders deemed to be showing anarchists too much respect. When in a favorable review of the anarchist Fritz Brupbacher’s work Marx and Bakunin, Franz Mehring acknowledged that Marxist literature had been overly harsh toward Bakunin and regretted Marx’s “attempt to destroy Bakunin’s good name” by accusing him of working for the tsarist police,38 he drew the outraged criticism of Russian émigré N. Rjasanoff (the pen name of David B. Goldendach, also known as David Riazanov). The future director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, who was at the time involved in the German Socialist movement, expressed contempt for Mehring’s description of Brupbacher’s book as “an industrious and careful study” and a “useful and meritorious work.” Rjasanoff picked apart Mehring’s review of Brupbacher in a scathing article series (“Social Democratic Flag and Anarchist Wares”) far longer than the piece it critiqued.39 He ridiculed Mehring for describing Brupbacher as a “comrade” (implying a shared socialist fellowship with the anarchists) and allowing anarchist accusations of socialist “slander, shameless dishonesty, forgery, embezzlement, unheard-of abandonments of moral sense” to be “smuggled into the party literature.” And it was not only Mehring. According to Rjasanoff, “comrade Bernstein had already in 1908 begun to make concessions to the anarchists” when he accepted some of their charges against Marx.40 Rjasanoff perceived a serious threat in Social Democrats’ letting anarchist accusations go unchecked. “‘Comrade’ Brupbacher,” he sneered, “is a

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

179

‘subaltern fanatic,’ and has no more respect for the ‘Marxist formulas’ than the sow that undermines the roots of the mighty oak, with whose acorns she fattens herself ‘with little wit and grunting with pleasure.’”41 Embracing the charge of Marxpfafferei (being a Marxist cleric), Rjasanoff warned that treating anarchists as anything other than petty and dishonest, and even acknowledging any validity in their critiques of Marx, risked letting the anarchist taint infect Social Democracy. Though much of the battle against the feared influx of anarchists into the Socialist movement took place on a purely rhetorical stage, the 1896 International Workers’ Congress in London gave the struggle concrete form. SPD leaders rejected the calls of some within the European Social Democratic movement to allow anarchist participation in the conference, claiming that bourgeois intellectuals had no relationship to the workers’ movement. At Eleanor Marx Aveling’s request, Liebknecht published in Vorwärts a brief notice on the subject, in which he claimed, “to force their way into the International Workers’ Congress is currently the idée fixe of the destructive ‘anarchist’ groups, which year-in and year-out have nothing better to do than insult Social Democracy, and then suddenly discover before every international workers’ conference that they too are socialists.” But this recent attempt to appear as “proper socialists” had fooled no one, he insisted. Of the anarchists’ plan to hold their own London conference in the event they were shut out of the socialist congress, Liebknecht wrote, “we can only approve. The anarchists have just as much right as the Bimetallists, populists, anti-Semites, and other bourgeois parties to hold as many congresses as they see fit. We wish them luck and only desire that no foreign and hostile elements disturb the international congress of socialist workers and trade unions.” For good measure, Liebknecht concluded with the comment that anarchism was “only a variety of capitalism and like it stands as the diametrical opposite of socialism.”42 The anti-anarchist faction won the day. Social Democratic thinker Alfred Kuroff defended the anarchists’ exclusion from the conference in a reply to Hamon’s Sozialistische Monatshefte article “Anarchism, a Socialist Tendency?” In “Anarchism, Not a Socialist Tendency,” Kuroff emphasized the irreconcilability of anarchist and Social Democratic principles of social and economic organization and argued that a joint congress with anarchists thus made no more sense than one with any other bourgeois party that exalted “the ideal of absolute individual liberty.” Where Socialists “want to organize productive work according to a plan, the anarchists want it to be, entirely and on principle, disorganized.” Because they were democrats, “for every socialist the highest commandment is the will of the classless Volk, while for every anarchist it is his own will.” Starting from such utterly contradictory social and economic principles, it was clear, according to Kuroff, that “socialism and anarchism have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with one another.”43 In further articles over the next two years, Kuroff elaborated on this point. “Socialism’s principle,” he proclaimed in one, “is solidarity, love of one’s neighbor, fraternity, love of truth, the individual’s absorption into the community.” In contrast, “anarchism’s principle is the love of self, the rule of personal selfishness and the lie, the individual’s

180

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

disconnection from all community,” which “removes the prerequisite for every morality entirely.”44 In the economic sphere, the anarchist “ideal of freedom (this is a utopian idea that has been superseded)” was incompatible with the socialist goal of “the socialization of the means of production.”45 In the end, those who sought closer ties between anarchism and Social Democracy could not persuade party leaders to back their position. Anti-anarchist rhetoric, woven into the dominant Socialist self-conception by the 1890s, proved an insurmountable obstacle. Orthodox Marxists within the party saw these intellectuals’ attempts to bring anarchism into the Socialist fold and to promote socialist diversity, more generally, as threats to the party’s integrity and in response shored up the theoretical wall built in earlier years against the anarchist threat.

Anti-anarchist rhetoric also played an important role in a different context, as the Social Democrats engaged in one of the most important theoretical battles in the early years of the twentieth century, the “mass strike” debate, which severely threatened party unity.46 Like the heterodox intellectuals sympathetic to working with anarchists, many Socialist radicals saw the party’s reliance on social reform and parliamentarism as problematic. The anarchist idea of the “general strike”—a total work stoppage that would force the collapse of the capitalist system and thereby usher in the revolution—attracted some radicals looking for new forms of working-class activism that would rouse workers from their reformist passivity. Raphael Friedeberg, a physician and supporter of independent trade unions, tried to introduce the general strike concept into mainstream Social Democratic practice. The 1901 congress of the Free Association of German Trade Unions, which Friedeberg helped found as a radical alternative to the SPD-allied trade unions, passed a resolution on “Parliamentarism and the General Strike,” bemoaning that the Social Democratic emphasis on electoral politics and trade union actions had produced a “totally false education of the masses,” obscuring the true goal of socialism— the “full and final liberation of the human personality.”47 These independent, localist trade unions (a small minority of the labor union movement) envisioned the general strike as a means by which workers could develop their revolutionary awareness and assert themselves as active agents of social transformation. Friedeberg finally persuaded party leaders to place the tactic on the agenda for the 1905 party congress in Jena.48 Friedeberg’s 1904 pamphlet Parliamentarism and the General Strike advocated both the use of the general strike and a socialist-anarchist alliance in the class struggle. “The general strike idea should not divert the unions from the daily struggle,” he wrote, “but we also need a further horizon, the unions must become aware of their work as the germ and the bearer of the new social order. And the unions can do much in this regard. Through strikes they school the workers, give them moral strength, impart a sense of solidarity, proletarian thinking, and experience.”49 The “direct and immediate education” provided by participation in a general strike would help liberate workers’ “free personal-

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

181

ity.” Friedeberg imagined bringing together anarchists and Social Democrats around the ideals each represented, individual and social freedom: “Only the unification of these two ideas yields as its product the fully free person after which we strive.” He urged Socialists to “fight together with those who stand alike on the ground of socialism and the class struggle.” Justifying the pursuit of the heretofore anarchist tactic, he wrote, “If the weapon of the general strike brings us to our true battlefield, the economic . . . if it deepens our psychological struggle, if it prevents the dissipation of fighting energy and power among those who have the same enemies and the same goals, then it will have fulfilled a great task in the proletarian struggle.”50 Friedeberg’s call was received positively by critics of party ossification such as sociologist Robert Michels, who “demanded that intellectuals act as moral pedagogues to instill enthusiasm for socialism in the rank and file rather than pour its proletarian ‘members as parts into a complicated machinery.’”51 If Friedeberg was willing to embrace what he termed “anarcho-socialism” after his eventual exclusion from the Social Democratic movement, other proponents of workingclass education and political trade-union action labored mightily to distance such action from the anarchist general strike. Some of these radicals began pushing the party to adopt a Social Democratic tactic that they called the “political mass strike.” The crucial difference as they saw it was that, rather than inaugurating the revolution itself, the mass strike would be used as a tool for heightening class consciousness. Rosa Luxemburg, increasingly the most influential theorist of the Social Democrats’ radical wing, shared many of Friedeberg’s criticisms of Socialist policy but remained vehemently anti-anarchist. She and other radicals who stayed within the party found themselves having to defend their tactics against the charge of anarchist leanings. To do this, Luxemburg often paired her critique of revisionist “opportunism” with a critique of anarchism, as errors of the right and left extremes, placing her own Socialist vision squarely within the Marxist tradition. To defend the mass strike as a policy, she sought to separate the concept from its potential anarchist association and to suggest that it was reformists, not radicals like herself, who actually had more in common with anarchists. In October 1898, reflecting on the just-concluded Social Democratic congress in Stuttgart, Luxemburg described two eras of internal Socialist tactical debates. The first era, from 1868 (the eve of the Eisenacher party’s founding) until 1891 (the adoption of the Erfurt Program), had focused on debates about parliamentarism, which continued as long as socialists were denied voting rights (until 1871) and the right to organize freely (from 1878 to 1890). “At that time,” she wrote, “the anarchist-leaning, antiparliamentary extreme left was justly combated.” But the party’s triumphs in 1890 “ended all doubt about the implications of the parliamentary struggle, and those elements that cleaved to the standpoint of pure negative agitation were forced swiftly to conclude their natural development into anarchism, that is, into political bankruptcy.” Having framed the first era as a struggle against the error of anarchist anti-parliamentarism, Luxemburg turned to the second era. “Immediately the struggle against the opposite tendency began,” she continued. “Previously one wing of the party had always

182

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

undervalued positive everyday political struggle, inclining toward negation.” Now, the party’s rapid expansion had led some party members “to the other extreme, the overvaluation of positive reform work, to the tendency of opportunism.” This latter error, in Luxemburg’s eyes, represented the greater danger, for “since the anarchist theories are daily turned on their head through Social Democracy’s practical successes—that is, through facts themselves—it is complete brainlessness to adhere to the anarchist phantasms today.” However, the very successes that undermined anarchism’s credibility fueled the opportunistic perspective, so that “the demands that the struggle with the opportunistic tendency places on the party’s theoretical and tactical education are incomparably higher than was the case in the struggle against anarchism.”52 In this way, she positioned her own endorsement of radicalism as totally divorced from that of the intellectual dissidents within the party promoting anarchist-socialist cooperation. Luxemburg reiterated this point in her anti-revisionist pamphlet of 1900, Social Reform or Social Revolution? The party, she warned, had to navigate carefully “between the two cliffs: between relinquishing the mass character and relinquishing the goal, between falling back into a sect and falling over into a bourgeois reform movement, between anarchism and opportunism.” Of the two, she claimed that the party had already overcome “the lesser danger, the childhood measles of anarchism,” in its struggle against the “independent movement” (that is, the Jungen). “The greater danger—the dropsy of opportunism—is currently being overcome,” she asserted optimistically. For good measure, she insisted that both the dangers of the left and right extremes “will be overcome only with the help of the weapons furnished by Marx.”53 Keenly aware of the mass strike’s potential association with anarchism, Luxemburg went to considerable lengths to paint the mass strike as a natural development of Marxist ideas. Luxemburg’s well-known 1906 essay Mass Strike, Political Party, and the Trade Unions began with two chapters explaining how the mass strike she advocated had nothing in common with the apparently similar anarchist tactic. In the opening paragraph, she cited Engels’s denunciation of the general strike in his 1873 work The Bakuninists at Work: The general strike, in the Bakuninists’ program, is the lever that will be used for introducing the social revolution. One fine morning all the workers in every industry in a country, or perhaps in every country will cease to work, and thereby compel the ruling classes either to submit in about four weeks, or to launch an attack on the workers so that the latter will have the right to defend themselves, and may use the opportunity to overthrow the old society.

Luxemburg pithily summed up Engels’s critique as follows: “either the proletariat as a whole is not yet in possession of the powerful organization and financial resources required, so that they cannot carry through the general strike; or it is already well enough organized that it does not need the general strike.” The flaw in the anarchists’ fantasy was

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

183

that they regarded the general strike as “a means of inaugurating the social revolution, rather than as a means of the working class’s daily political struggle.”54 This distinction formed the wedge that Luxemburg sought to drive between the anarchist general strike and the Social Democratic mass strike she supported. The Russian Revolution in 1905 profoundly influenced Luxemburg’s thinking. She considered the workers’ mass strikes as central to that revolution’s success and regarded them as a model relevant to Germany. “The Russian revolution has now effected a radical revision” of Engels’s decades-old critique, she claimed. “For the first time in the class struggle’s history it has achieved a grandiose realization of the idea of the mass strike and . . . has even matured the general strike and thereby opened a new epoch in the labor movement’s development.” Luxemburg carefully avoided challenging Engels, instead commenting, “It does not, of course, follow from this that either the tactic of political struggle recommended by Marx and Engels or their critique of anarchism was false. On the contrary, it is the same train of ideas, the same method, the Marx-Engels tactics that lay at the foundation of German Social Democracy’s previous practices, that now in the Russian revolution are producing new momentum and new conditions in the class struggle.”55 What separated the anarchists’ utopian vision of the general strike from the practical method of the Socialist mass strike was, for Luxemburg, the anarchists’ ahistoricism: “For the anarchist mode of thought . . . what is essential is the whole abstract, unhistorical view of the mass strike, and of all the conditions of the proletarian struggle generally. For the anarchist there exist only two items as material suppositions of his ‘revolutionary’ speculations—first imagination, and second goodwill and courage to rescue humanity from the existing capitalist vale of tears.” By contrast, the Social Democratic version of the tactic, which had as its goal the radicalization of the workers for political struggle, had developed naturally from historical circumstances. “The mass strike in Russia has been realized not as a means of bypassing the working class’s political struggle, and especially parliamentarism, to leap suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup,” she argued, “but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism.”56 This distinction between the general strike and the mass strike continued to form a crucial element of Luxemburg’s defense in intra-party battles over the tactic, allowing her to endorse Auer’s claim that “the general strike is general nonsense” while still promoting the mass strike.57 Countering “the fear of the mass strike’s ‘propagation’ that has even led to formal anathemas against those allegedly guilty of this crime,” Luxemburg used the Russian example to illustrate its total disconnection from anarchism.58 Even though the conditions in Russia “seemed as if created to be the experimental field for anarchism’s heroic deeds . . . not only did and do the anarchists in Russia not stand at the mass strike movement’s head . . . but the anarchists do not exist as a serious political tendency in the Russian revolution at all.” Instead, according to Luxemburg, there existed only “a

184

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

handful of half-grown ‘anarchists’ who promote confusion and bewilderment amongst the workers to the best of their ability.” The Russian case, “the first historical experiment on the model of the mass strike, not merely does not signify a vindication of anarchism but actually means a historical liquidation of anarchism.”59 At the 1910 Magdeburg party congress, Luxemburg again assured her audience that mass strikes did not signal a victory for anarchists—who had played no role in them but had in fact been “completely trampled by the troops of the organized proletariat” (the audience responded with a cry of “Bravo!”).60 Luxemburg explained, “The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon is . . . conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the working class’s emancipation struggle Marx and Engels first pointed out and fought for with all their might in the International in opposition to anarchism.” Unlike anarchist radicalism (“a tendency ‘revolutionary’ in the most naked pitchfork sense”), the Socialist mass strike arose from the natural development of the workers’ political struggle. Luxemburg noted the irony that, just as the mass strike had become revolutionary, the anarchists had abandoned it for trade unionism in the form of anarcho-syndicalism. “Today anarchism,” she asserted, “which is indissolubly associated with the idea of the mass strike, has itself come to be opposed to the practice of the mass strike; while the mass strike, which was combated as the opposite of the proletariat’s political activity, appears today as the most powerful weapon of the political struggle for political rights.” Whereas the anarchists’ utopian logic “sixty years ago led to the conclusion that the mass strike was the shortest, surest, and easiest means of springing into the better social future,” the same mode of thought now led to the conviction “that the trade-union struggle was the only ‘direct action of the masses’ and therefore the only true revolutionary struggle.”61 By associating trade unionism with anarchism Luxemburg took a stab at party moderates’ excessive focus on reformist labor organizing. In his 1909 book, Tactical Differences in the Workers’ Movement, Pannekoek, a fellow mass-strike proponent, like Luxemburg rejected both anarchism and revisionism as equal, though opposite, deviations from Social Democratic truth. Where anarchists gave themselves over totally to revolution, revisionists abandoned themselves to pure reform. Favorable conditions for workers produced revisionism, whose adherents figured “that on the path to a progressive improvement . . . society’s gradual transformation can be carried through.” Anarchism, on the other hand, appeared during times of crisis, which led some to believe that “with a single revolutionary action, it is possible to topple capitalism, without need of patient, carefully prepared small works.” This desire for capitalism’s sudden toppling had returned to the workers’ movement, Pannekoek warned, in the form of syndicalism and anarcho-socialism. This kind of revolutionism was rooted in an “instinctive class-feeling, which bitterly hates capitalism, but does not understand it.” Pannekoek decried anarchists’ impatience: “Anarchism, which hates this detail-work, cannot channel the revolutionary spirit, the desire for struggle, which it awakes.”62

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

185

Revisionists, in a symmetrical error, believed that they could work with the bourgeoisie’s progressive elements to achieve socialist goals, but this tactic, he declared, “extinguishes the hard-won, clear class consciousness” of the workers, making it equally damaging. Whereas anarchists failed to understand that the workers’ movement must use weapons forged by the bourgeoisie (political parties, trade unions, the proletariat’s industrial discipline), revisionists failed to understand that these weapons must be turned directly against the bourgeoisie through tactics such as the mass strike. “At first glance,” Pannekoek acknowledged, “the two tendencies that we have designated with the general names anarchism and revisionism seem totally opposed to one other. They are, however, at the same time, closely related to each other, because they stand opposed to Social Democratic tactics as one-sided distortions. They are both expressions of the same bourgeois perspective.” Failing to understand history’s dialectical nature, they tried to join “a bourgeois worldview with a proletarian attitude.” And so, he concluded, “anarchism is the petit-bourgeois ideology grown wild, revisionism the same ideology grown tame.”63 Despite Luxemburg’s and Pannekoek’s framing of the mass strike as totally divorced from anarchism, the tactic received a chilly reception from large swathes of the Socialist movement. The Second International’s 1904 congress rejected the mass strike tactic, warning Socialists not to be “taken in by the anarchists.”64 In the glow of the Russian Revolution’s apparent success, the German Social Democratic congress at Jena in September 1905 endorsed the mass strike as a potential weapon in the working-class struggle (though only under very circumscribed circumstances), but after consultation with trade union leaders, the party promptly reversed itself at the 1906 Mannheim Congress.65 At this point Friedeberg, Michels, and some of their supporters, under attack by the Socialist leadership, left the party entirely, while Luxemburg, Pannekoek, and others continued to try to win over their comrades to the tactic.66 While Luxemburg struggled to cleanse the mass strike of any taint of the anarchist general strike, the tactic’s critics within the Social Democratic movement sought to reinforce such associations. A number of pamphlets criticizing anarchism appeared soon after the publication of Luxemburg’s 1906 essay. While targeting the attempts by Germany’s tiny anarcho-syndicalist movement to make inroads into the labor movement, their sharp attacks on anarchists for their faith in spontaneous radical action by the working class helped place the taint of anarchism on the mass strike (which may in fact have been their primary intent). Wilhelm Herzberg’s 1906 pamphlet Social Democracy and Anarchism noted that since “anarchism has attempted in the form of anarcho-socialism to break into the party- and union-movement” (here he was referring to Friedeberg), the time seemed right “once again to draw the borderline between Social Democracy and anarchism.” Much of Herzberg’s analysis of anarchism relied on Social Democratic antianarchism’s familiar tropes. “If one listens to two anarchists on anarchist theory, one will hear three different opinions,” he joked, and he warned that the “almost unending flood of senseless phrases” one heard out of the mouths of anarchists could only be “a

186

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

bad sign, since what is clearly thought out can also be expressed clearly, and vice versa.” Anarchist propaganda, he remarked, “consists often enough of the most miserable lies and distortions,” revealing its nature as “the flesh of the bourgeoisie’s flesh.” 67 After disparaging the historical anarchist tactics of brigandage (from the 1870s) and propaganda of the deed (from the 1880s and 1890s) in a perfunctory manner, Herzberg turned to the issue of the general strike, insisting that the achievement and protection of basic rights—freedom of association, speech, coalition, and suffrage—better served the struggle for proletarian emancipation than this utopian revolutionary fantasy.68 Proclaiming that “the secret of [Social Democrats’] social cohesion lies in their discipline . . . the individual’s subordination to the whole,” he rejected spontaneous mass action as a threat to the workers’ “ordered, disciplined organization.”69 Without repudiating the mass strike completely, he cautioned that “if used too often it fritters away the strength of the workers,” a rebuke to those who put the value of stimulating the workers’ oppositional consciousness ahead of the conservation of labor union resources.70 In the context of the furious internal party debate over the mass strike tactic at exactly this time, it is hard not to see Herzberg’s complaint that “the anarchists muddle the proletariat with phrases encouraging self-deception about their power,” as being at least partly directed toward Socialists like Luxemburg.71 Whereas party radicals wished to heighten the workers’ sense of class antagonism through constant militant actions, Herzberg argued that the liberal state’s freedoms were too precious to risk losing. In contrast to the radicals’ belief that trade unions should instigate confrontational strikes and escalate their clashes with capitalists, Herzberg (and trade union leaders themselves) envisioned the unions’ role as defending and incrementally improving the workers’ situation. Herzberg saw a united front between anarchists and Social Democrats as a chimera, because “the anarchists’ tactics stand as an insurmountable obstacle against such a ‘united blow’ against common enemies by those marching separately.” As long as anarchists incited the proletariat to rash action, they would remain at odds with Social Democrats, who encouraged workers “to coolly calculate” and sought to foster in the masses “ordered, disciplined organization.”72 Simon Katzenstein’s 1908 pamphlet Anarchism and the Workers’ Movement utilized anti-anarchist rhetoric to challenge the radicals’ tactics in much the same way as Herzberg’s book did. Katzenstein, a revisionist affiliated with the Sozialistische Monatshefte, nonetheless made common cause with the party’s orthodox center against the radicals. Though he conceded that the mass strike could be beneficial in the service of a very specific goal, he objected to the idea of using it for the kind of educational purpose many mass-strike proponents advocated and decried as nonsense the anarchist idea of the general strike as “the kernel and primary content of the entire socialist undertaking, as the single means for capitalism’s elimination and socialism’s creation.” He also denounced anarchists for opposing “socialists’ collaboration in municipal politics and social legislation; and not least against the centralization of trade unions, tariff treaties,

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

187

and the like.” Party radicals, who regarded Socialist cooperation with bourgeois parties as draining the movement of its revolutionary content, had criticized precisely these activities. Katzenstein explained that only the “working class’s organization and schooling— through political, trade union, and cooperative work, and socialist education”—would ensure their long-term victory.73 Reversing the radical critique that bureaucratization had hobbled the authentic socialist spirit, Katzenstein offered reformist parliamentarism as socialist ideology’s essence. Lambasting the anarchist faith in “the unrestrained will of the unorganized masses, who in their unfathomable wisdom . . . move toward all that is good,” Katzenstein rejected the sentiments expressed in Luxemburg’s Mass Strike, in which she urged the party to remain in the “closest possible contact with the mood of the masses” and not to underestimate “the political maturity . . . of the unorganized proletarian mass.”74 Katzenstein insisted that only through the amelioration of workers’ conditions and their gradual education by intellectuals could Social Democrats pave the way for society’s transformation into socialism. When Katzenstein complained of “the inner struggle that anarchism brings into the workers’ movement, diminishing and slowing its work-power,” he could easily have been criticizing the radicals for blurring the lines between socialism and anarchism (in almost exactly the same way as others criticized revisionists who sought common ground with anarchists).75 In the same year, Franz Laufkötter’s article “Utopian Ideas in Modern Socialism” labeled the anarcho-socialist general strike utopian. “The catastrophe theory, which flared up in the idea of the economic mass strike, rests on the analogy of the volcanic eruption,” he remarked, yet “whoever has observed how difficult it is to carry out social revolutions, precisely because they penetrate so deeply into human life, will lose the utopian faith in social revolution’s magical power.” He charged that the “work of the present is . . .­frequently neglected in favor of future-entranced radicalism” by those who wish “to instill revolutionary enthusiasm in the mass of the people.”76 “Enthusiasm” here was a code word for the kinds of activities mass-strike proponents were involved in—in 1905, Kurt Eisner had asserted that the “kindling of enthusiasm” was “the most important educational problem facing the party,” sparking a heated intra-party debate about “enthusiasm.”77 Laufkötter warned, “A battle of decision is in store between utopianism and socialism, between children who still believe in miracles and hope for the miraculous, and calm men who wish to transform the world through serious work.” Reinforcing the link between anarcho-socialists and mass-strike supporters, he urged Socialists to be on guard against those who “hold fast to childish beliefs that they wrap in the cloak of scientism, but who in fact have not outgrown utopianism.”78 Luxemburg and Pannekoek had, of course, asserted precisely such a “scientific” Marxist basis for the mass strike. Georg Stiékloff, in a 1911 Neue Zeit article series on “Marx and Bakunin,” argued that Marx “condemned categorically the vain attempt of an impatient and frivolous minority that strives to identify its own wishes with the objective laws of historical processes,” noting that this applied not only to anarchists but to all “insurrectionists” who,

188

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

though rejecting anarchism, “were nonetheless prepared to follow anarchist methods and contort a rational, methodical preparation for revolution into blind and disoriented acts of violence.” Stiékloff described a fundamental battle between an ideology that encouraged the newly awakened masses’ “instinctive, and in their impulsiveness, stormy” tendencies, and “the representative of an experience-rich proletariat that has reached a readiness for power, that strives with consciousness, through organization and methodical action, for its true and surely imminent emancipation.”79 Without naming names, Stiékloff clearly connected those with faith in the masses’ instinctive revolutionism (mass-strike proponents among these) with anarchism.80 Karl Kautsky, at times in the radical camp, defended the party leadership’s opposition to the mass strike by associating it with anarchism.81 In the Erfurt Program, he had written that the “proletarian utopians” of the early nineteenth century had adopted a strategy of extreme radicalism due to their difficult circumstances: “Every form of the class-struggle which was not aimed at the immediate overthrow of existing order . . . seemed to the early socialist as nothing more nor less than a betrayal of humanity.” He described this “primitive socialist way of thinking” as “a children’s disease which threatens every young socialist movement which has not got beyond utopianism. . . . At present this sort of socialist thinking is called anarchy, but it is not necessarily connected with anarchism. It has its origin, not in clear understanding, but rather in mere instinctive opposition to the existing order.”82 Distilling the socialist tactical dispute into a contest between the “strategy of attrition” and the “strategy of overthrow” in a 1910 Neue Zeit article, Kautsky charged Rosa Luxemburg with ahistorical thinking, alleging that she “does not derive the necessity of the mass strike from the conditions of the given situation, but from general psychological considerations, which are valid for every mass action, wherever and whenever this may take place.” This psychological view of class struggle was a position socialists had long ascribed to utopians in general and anarchists in particular (and it was in fact at the center of Luxemburg’s own critique of the anarchist general strike). Kautsky defended the strategy of attrition as the tactic that had guided the Social Democrats successfully through the Socialist Law era, “against both the demands by Most’s supporters for applying the strategy of overthrow, and the attempts of the revisionists of that period . . . to win the sympathy of the bourgeoisie by weakening the fighting character of our movement.”83 In response, Luxemburg upbraided Kautsky for trotting out the “anarchist specter of the mass strike” as a means of criticizing her, citing a recent anarchist congress that had denounced the political mass strike as ineffectual to show that the anarchists clearly understood her position to be opposed to theirs.84 Throughout the tactical debates among Social Democratic thinkers, anarchism served as a key touchstone, a sign of illegitimacy against which different ideas could be measured. All sides wielded anti-anarchist rhetoric to stigmatize their opponents. As long as the taint of anarchism adhered to the mass strike, and to spontaneous revolutionary action more generally, it made the job of those trying to convince their com-

Anarchist “Utopianism” and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy

189

rades to pursue a more energetic revolutionary policy all the more difficult. In the end, the centrist “orthodox Marxist” faction opposed to the mass strike prevailed, backed by the party’s parliamentary leaders, the trade unions, and working-class Socialist sentiment. By framing internal party disputes in terms of the anarchist-socialist clash, Social Democrats exacerbated rather than moderated conflicts, leading Luxemburg to lament the “hatefulness and difficulties of party life . . . the constant defamation of all that is fine and noble in mankind.”85 While the party executive did encourage different factions’ members to work together on practical matters, as historian Dieter Buse has argued, the narrow definition of the limits of ideological deviance and the willingness to tar opponents with the anarchist brush prepared the ground for the unbridgeable chasm that opened under the pressures of war and revolution.86 The radical wing’s growing isolation and stigmatization culminated during the war in a split within the Social Democratic movement that would generate powerful and enduring antagonisms in the German left throughout the Weimar Republic.87 In the end the radical advocates of the mass strike (and opponents of war), who remained suspicious of trade union reformism and political coalition building with liberals, broke from the Social Democratic Party. Refusing to be labeled as anarchist, they first called themselves “Independent Social Democrats” but ultimately claimed a new Marxist identity as the German Communist Party. Though they flatly rejected anarchism in many of the same ways as their Socialist ex-comrades, they suffered the same rhetorical assaults as the anarchists had in previous decades.

The unprecedented success of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1890 elections confronted the movement with a dilemma. If the party chose to participate fully in parliamentary politics, it could seriously influence much of the legislation that passed through the Reichstag. If it rejected parliamentarism, it could conceivably mobilize a vast army for revolution. The Erfurt Program uneasily united these two conflicting visions, but could not resolve the underlying tension between them. The opposition between anarchism and socialism, which remained an essential aspect of Social Democratic self-understanding even while the wider political relevance of anarchism was on the wane, helped make the combination of a revolutionary outlook with a reformist practice appear coherent. Rejecting Socialists who wished to work with a variety of other critics of German society, from middle-class liberals to anarchists, helped remind the party of its particular ideological commitments, even if its revolutionism was expressed only as “revolutionary attentism.” From the ouster of Most and Hasselmann in 1880 to the purging of the Jungen in the early 1890s and the thwarting of Luxemburg’s massstrike agitation after the turn of the century, anti-anarchism played a significant role in legitimizing (and delegitimizing) various tactics, as Socialists told and retold the story of Social Democracy’s clashes with the anarchists (whether Marx’s battles with Bakunin or the contemporary era’s struggles) as a way to explain Social Democracy’s authentic nature.

C h a p t e r

SE V EN

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War 1 9 0 3 – 1 9 1 4

Public discussion of anarchism in the last decade of the Kaiserreich was confined for the most part to the left-liberal intellectuals and Social Democratic theorists described in the last two chapters. Though German police continued to monitor the anarchist movement, they expressed ever less alarm at the anarchists’ doings. For Social Democrats, the final prewar decade saw not only a significant expansion of the party’s voter pool but also more and more cooperation between Socialists and other political factions at the local, state, and national levels. Fear of Social Democracy as a dangerous revolutionary movement was confined to a noisy fringe of hard-core nationalists who, despite their best efforts, found themselves powerless to change public perceptions on the issue. They also faced a political culture whose commitments to the rule of law, open public debate, and democratic practice had deepened and broadened in ways that challenged the German Empire’s semi-authoritarian seats of power. By 1914, the coalition of Socialists, liberals, political Catholics, and national minorities that would go on to provide the basis for the Weimar Republic’s constitutional democracy stood ready to oppose the chancellor, the military, and the kaiser when they showed their authoritarian inclinations, despite being for the most part unable to pursue a positive legislative agenda due to the irreconcilability of their goals.

Though propaganda of the deed continued in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe (for instance, anarchists killed Spain’s prime minister José Canalejas in 1912 and King

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

191

George I of Greece in 1913, while Russia experienced an escalating war of terrorism and state violence, though with Social Revolutionaries rather than anarchists), anarchists almost everywhere else had abandoned the tactic. The German police continued to monitor anarchist activity with much diligence, surveilling right up to 1914 approximately 2,000–3,000 Reich citizens who either “called themselves anarchists openly or else through repeated visits to anarchist gatherings and the regular purchase of anarchist literature” declared their membership in the movement, as well as a few dozen foreign anarchists on German soil.1 Nevertheless, they neither found nor manufactured themselves any anarchists eager to throw bombs into cafés or to murder monarchs. Rather, the police reports described anarchists earnestly engaged in theoretical discussions or social activities (such as participating in singing clubs) and, at times, partaking in spirited public debates with Social Democrats about topics such as the general strike, the mass strike, and the value of parliamentarism.2 The police and judiciary greeted this all for the most part with equanimity, occasionally prosecuting individual anarchists for their activities but showing no great alarm at the movement, as can be seen in the reports of local police officials as well as the secret reports of the Berlin police presidents Borries (1902–1908) and Traugott von Jagow (1908–1916). From 1906 to 1910, German police officials reported on anarchist conferences in Ludwigshaven (in the Rhineland), Leipzig, Delmenhorst (in Lower Saxony), and Hamburg, describing in measured tones the topics of discussion, which included the general strike, opposition to parliamentary participation, and, most troubling to authorities, anti-militarism, including discouragement of military service. Included in the reports were cuttings from local newspaper stories on the discussions, which evinced the same calm.3 In addition to the occasional large conferences, dozens of local anarchist groups across the nation met regularly to discuss and promote their ideas, but they struggled to get their voices heard (not least because of Socialists’ continued harassment). In April 1911, a local official in Leipzig commented that there were a few readers of anarchist papers in some of the surrounding towns, but “due to the strong counter-agitation of the Social Democratic Party they have not thrived and are totally without significance.” The police from Dresden reported that the reading and discussion club “Knowledge,” which had about 15 members, had held a few public gatherings in the previous year, but little else, due to a lack funds.4 A similar tone can be found in the report submitted in August 1912 by the local Landrat (county commissioner) in the Brandenburg district of Nieder-Barnim: “About anarchist activities in the district there is nothing special to report. The anarchist reading- and discussion-club founded in Oberschönweide and consisting of about 6–8 persons on February 29 of this year held a public lecture evening on the theme ‘What do the anarchists want?’” The event organizer was fined 50 marks and sentenced to 10 days in jail for failing to give notice of the gathering. Elsewhere in the district, “the anarchist group in Eden has developed no agitational activities and its membership circle is so small that the group will likely soon dissolve itself.”5 By 1914, the police and local press covered the

192

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

anarchists much as they did Social Democrats—with wariness and disapproval but an acceptance of their opponents’ right to meet and discuss their ideas. When Borries took over as police president, he was alert to the potential danger from anarchists, commenting in his report for the period from mid-1903 to mid-1904, “Although the year 1902 was free from specific anarchist atrocities,” it would be incorrect “to hope that the anarchist danger, the pursuit of the anarchist ideal through propaganda of the individual deed [Einzeltat] has at last by now been suppressed and eliminated,” due to its continuing support in the “Romance nations.” However, “among the less hotblooded Teutons, among our German anarchists, who have come to understand the inadequacy of this means of struggle,” the tactic “has no active followers any longer.” Instead, the anarchists had turned to the general strike as their key means of struggle.6 The 1904–1905 report’s section on anarchism began, “Anarchism is at present . . . almost completely communist and its ideal [is] . . . a state-, law-, religion-, and marriage-free one, on the principle of egalitarian community life without private property of freelyformed groups,” a rather benign (and accurate) assessment.7 For 1905–1906, Borries commented that “individual anarchism is politically dead,” while only Romance anarchists, especially the Spanish, advocated propaganda of the deed. A year later, the police president stated, “Terror is not preached in Germany. True propagandists of the deed among our anarchists at this time in all likelihood do not exist, although some of them unite to such an extent on the one hand brutality and on the other disorientation, that perhaps they could be driven to terrorist acts through clever influencing,” for example, by foreign anarchists. The measures pursued by police authorities had, he judged, “considerably weakened this already in no sense imposing movement.” Jagow’s first report (on 1908 activities) reiterated his predecessor’s concern, cautioning that, despite German anarchists’ rejection of terrorism, it was wrong to view anarchism “entirely as ‘harmless’ or as ‘relatively benign,’” illustrated by the example of the “mentally-ill Berlin shoemaker” who tried to blow up the Berlin criminal court building after getting hold of Johann Most’s pamphlet on making explosives, Revolutionary War Science. Even so, a year later Jagow pronounced German anarchism “at present rather moderate,” and in 1910 declared that German anarchism offered “no immediate threat,” an opinion he continued to adhere to in future reports.8 These attitudes could be found in the popular press as well. In 1907, Hellmut von Gerlach, editor of the popular Berlin weekly Der Welt am Montag (The World on Monday), published a cover story on “The German Anarchists” in Der Tag (The Day). The breezy write-up focused on an anarchist congress planned by Raphael Friedeberg; when it was banned by the police, the anarchists met in the middle of the night in the open air. The content of their discussions was utterly harmless, Gerlach reported, and they cheerfully informed the police of it afterward. Noting that German anarchists had nothing in common with the preachers of violence in the Romance lands, Gerlach urged officials to show more tolerance, since anarchist propaganda consisted chiefly of antiparliamentarism and agitation for the general strike, which, if implemented, would only

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

193

harm the workers themselves.9 The Social Democratic Leipziger Volkszeitung (Leipzig People’s Paper) commented in its report on the 1909 anarchist congress in the city, “today only an overanxious police soul can feel a sense of dread when the name anarchist is uttered.” Though characteristically critical of anarchist beliefs, the paper described the attendees’ discussions in detail, noting their attempts to chart a new, reformist course. Most commentators in this period deemed the German anarchist movement virtually nonexistent outside of Berlin.10 A reporter at a Berlin anarchist congress in May 1912 described the men he encountered as compassionate, if none too bright. “Such people,” he concluded, “cannot be dangerous to an organized state; idealists in such an unclear, blurry fashion possess no initiative of their own.” He saw police measures as necessary only to protect these “weak natures” from falling under the spell of “foreigners from the East, who come from Russia via Zurich” to preach society’s destruction.11 The police presidents’ reports also underscored the opposition between anarchism and Social Democracy. Starting with Borries’s 1904–1905 report, the discussion of anarchism appeared not merely at the end but under a discrete subsection heading. In that report, the Berlin police president noted that anarchist attempts to capture Socialist followers for their movement had once again failed because “their end goals diverge widely from each other,” exactly the opposite of what Madai had claimed two decades earlier. In the previous year, Borries had noted that despite the popularity of the “general strike idea, which has found a great appeal also in non-anarchist worker circles, in particular by the anti-parliamentary ultra-radical Socialists and by apolitical trade unions,” the anarchists’ attempts to attract followers from “the ranks of Social Democrats unsatisfied with their party and from the local trade union branches” had come to naught.12 Jagow also saw the differences between the two movements clearly, even comparing the anarchists’ total opposition to the existence of a German army unfavorably to the attitude of Social Democracy, which “cannot do without an energetic discipline in its own party and for its future state” and so was “not a principled enemy of every defense organization,” only demanding that the army be transformed into a “people’s army.”13 In terms of political agitation, the police presidents consistently reported that anarchists confined themselves chiefly to two projects, neither of which had achieved much success: first, spreading the general strike idea to the labor unions and, second, antimilitarist activism, which included distributing their pamphlets to soldiers and sailors.14 In the report for 1905–1906, Borries described the anarchists’ plans to inaugurate an eight-hour day by organizing a mass action in which all workers would simply stop working after eight hours from May 1 forward. Unfortunately for the anarchists, he noted, “so far there has not been one single case anywhere in the world from which one could conclude that even a few workers have made use of this so-loudly-propagated means of struggle.”15 The 1906–1907 report on anarchism included the kind of matter-of-fact detailed rendering of the movement’s theoretical debates that had many years before become the hallmark of the police presidents’ reports on Social Democracy. Regarding an August 1906 international anarchist congress, Borries described the anarchists’

194

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

debate about whether to participate in trade unions with the view of improving workers’ economic situation or to try to radicalize existing syndicalist unions, creating “in today’s society the living kernel of the society of tomorrow,” as well as their discussion of antimilitarism.16 In the report covering the year 1908, Jagow observed, “in the centralized trade unions, the few anarchists who are members by reason of their occupation play not the least political role.”17 At the same time, the police presidents also described a shift among anarchists to a focus on more social and cultural pursuits. Borries’s 1906–1907 report described anarchist organizations as consisting of “reading and discussion clubs, leagues of free workers, the League of the Federation of Labor, culture organizations, freethinker organizations, etc.” Jagow’s report for 1909 devoted space to projects like Gustav Landauer’s “Socialist Union,” whose goal was to establish cooperative economic ventures and rural settlements that would fulfill anarchist ideals. Recently, he reported, two anarchist groups had established collective shops offering various foodstuffs.18 When individualist anarchism, which Jagow had previously described as having lost all German adherents, reappeared on the scene in 1910, the dominant concern of its advocates was not terrorism but “the development of the individual toward the conscious free personality, which shakes off all constraints.”19 In 1911, he observed that Landauer’s collection of essays, Call to Socialism, received little notice from workers but had “found in the ideological or biased [einseitig] literary strata of the bourgeoisie many enthusiastic admirers [begeisterten Liebhaber],” a comment of which the Social Democrats would surely have approved.20 The weakness of and divisions within the German anarchist movement were also recurrent themes in the police presidents’ appraisals.21 Their worries about anarchist violence were all focused on the much more active foreign groups, which the reports covered in great detail, including even those of South America and Japan. The calm of the police incurred the displeasure of some elements in the conservative press and even the kaiser himself. In June 1905, two papers published stories titled “Capitulation to Anarchism?” arguing that the government was too soft on the movement. The Hallesche Zeitung (Halle Newspaper) conceded that, while Socialism might be fought, with difficulty, through public debate and reform measures, anarchism had to be met with aggressive policing and legislation. Meanwhile, the Hamburger Nachrichten continued to beat the drum on the connections between Social Democracy and anarchism.22 In 1906, Kaiser Wilhelm made it clear that he expected “the most precise surveillance of the terrorist movement,” but he also asked his Staatsministerium (Ministry of State) to consider “the question of the struggle against Social Democratic and revolutionary endeavors” more generally, including the possibility of strengthening the laws against anarchism “as quietly and unsensationally as possible,” so as not to arouse opposition.23 Despite these calls from the conservative press and the kaiser, neither the police nor the justice ministry even seemed to take seriously the possibility of a change in approach to anarchism, much less Socialism.

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

195

If police officials’ depictions of anarchism showed increasing calm and subtlety of understanding, their reports on the Social Democrats exhibited an even more striking sense of bureaucratic routine and theoretical comprehension. The reports became amazingly thorough, for example running to well over 30,000 words for the 1913 report (versus 8,500 for the anarchists, about a third devoted to the German movement and two-thirds to non-Germans).24 The level of detail and awareness of intra-party disagreements among the German Social Democrats, but also throughout the international socialist movements, was impressive, so much so that these reports would make a serviceable history of European socialism’s social and political (and to some extent, intellectual) history during this period. The German police knew that Social Democracy was an organized mass movement and much of the material in the reports came from, or could easily have been found in, the party’s vast newspaper, journal, book, and pamphlet literature. The police presidents expressed no concern about any secret activities or agendas but a great deal about the movement’s apparently unstoppable political advance. Otherwise, the only area of Socialist agitation about which government authorities appeared visibly nervous was the promotion by party radicals of the mass strike, especially in 1905–1906 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Justice Minister Nieberding investigated the possible grounds for prosecuting Social Democrats should they engage in a mass strike, while Prussian interior minister and future chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg closely followed Socialist debates on the mass strike, in anticipation of its revolutionary potential. After the Mannheim Congress rejected the tactic, government officials breathed easier.25 Outside of the debates in theoretical journals and party congresses, in the world of mass politics, Socialists increasingly pitched themselves as a Volkspartei, a party of the whole people, rather than a narrow working-class party, committed to improving the lives of ordinary Germans and to a free and fair political system. Longtime reformist Georg von Vollmar told a Munich crowd after the party’s 1903 Reichstag election victory, “I can only say that we Social Democrats are entirely willing and would desire nothing better than to utilize our current position to be able to contribute in a positive and reforming sense to the great national cultural tasks.”26 In answer to the question “Why has the red tide risen so powerfully?” a Social Democratic pamphlet trumpeting the party’s recent electoral success in fall 1909 state-level elections declared, “More and more . . . all dependent people, all workers, artisans, small farmers, small retailers, all low- and mid-level officials have realized that Social Democracy alone faithfully and forcefully advocates for them.” The pamphlet’s chief subject was the Socialists’ opposition “to all indirect taxes” on “foodstuffs, trade, transport, and agriculture,” though the party also proclaimed itself the only faction committed to fighting for “the universal, equal, secret, and direct franchise” (in opposition to inegalitarian state-level electoral procedures such as Prussia’s three-class voting system). Finally, proclaimed the pamphlet, despite “lies after lies” from their opponents, “people no longer let

196

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

themselves be scared by the word Social Democracy,” for “ever more the Volk learns that Social Democracy alone and exclusively advocates for the Volk.”27 That this self-presentation was successful is revealed on the most basic level by the party’s continued electoral triumphs. In the 1903 Reichstag elections, the party received 31.7 percent of the vote, and even in 1907, when the party lost vote share for the first time since 1881, it still garnered 29 percent, outdistancing its nearest competitor, the Zentrum, by almost 10 percent and earning more than double the votes of the two conservative parties combined. In 1912, the last elections before the war, the SPD captured 34.8 percent of the vote, more than making up for its losses in the previous election. Jonathan Sperber’s important analysis of the Kaiserreich’s national elections reveals other striking data. Perhaps unsurprising is that the Social Democrats throughout the course of the Wilhelmine era took votes from all of the other parties from election to election, most pronouncedly from the liberal parties. According to Sperber, “in the 1890s, the attraction of previous liberal voters was the single greatest factor in the election victories of the Social Democrats.” At the same time, after the turn of the century, the SPD experienced a net loss of voters to the liberal parties, a “setback which it never encountered with any other party or group of parties in the Wilhelmine era.”28 Social Democrats were aware that liberals represented their chief electoral competitors, as can be seen in their campaign materials. A 1903 Reichstag election flyer claimed in bold lettering, “These ‘Freisinnige’ are just as reactionary as the conservatives, National Liberals, and Zentrum,” a charge filled out over several paragraphs, while a 1906 flyer accused the Freisinnige of joining “the ranks of the ‘national’ parties”; in fact, “the parliamentary history of the Freisinn in the Reichstag consists of a continual chain of concessions to reaction,” representing (in extra-large font) “the complete capitulation of the Freisinn to the will of the Prussian Junkers.”29 Two years later a flyer for the Prussian Landtag elections blasted the “untrustworthiness of the bourgeois parties,” which had “betrayed their democratic principles in their pursuit of a place among the ruling parties.” Socialists positioned themselves as the party that “would help culture to victory over unculture,” even in the Prussian “Junker parliament.”30 The permeability of the electoral divide between liberals and Socialists shows clearly the party’s political normalization. More surprising, and confirming the Social Democrats’ self-portrayal as a Volkspartei, is Sperber’s finding that “after 1900, the middle class voted for the labor party to almost as great an extent as did the working class.” The Zentrum’s so-called “tower” provided the best bulwark against the Social Democrats, but even Catholic workers increasingly voted for the Socialists over the last three elections of the imperial era.31 Aside from the long-standing issue of Socialist atheism, the one area of policy in which the Social Democrats were most at odds with the broad sentiments of Germans in the empire’s last decade was the sphere of militarism and imperialism.32 Though enthusiasm for naval building and colonial ventures was hardly universal among nonSocialists, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow was still able to cobble together an effective electoral coalition of conservatives and mostly right liberals (the Bülow Bloc, as it was

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

197

known) for the 1907 elections. When the Reichstag refused to support additional funding for the colony of German Southwest Africa at the end of 1906 in the aftermath of the brutal suppression of that region’s Herero and Nama peoples (in what many scholars consider the first genocide of the twentieth century), Bülow dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections, often referred to as the “Hottentot election” (after the name by which the Europeans referred to the native peoples), which delivered the Social Democrats the electoral setback noted above. Though the party lost less than 10 percent of its voters, the Socialist Reichstag delegation was halved, dropping from 81 to 43, due to the Bülow Bloc’s effective district-level alliances for run-off elections. Yet, if this issue proved an electoral vulnerability for the Social Democrats, the unity of the winning coalition did not long outlast the election. The Bülow Bloc faced trouble achieving much in the Reichstag because its constituent factions did not see eye to eye on many issues. And two of its notable achievements were in fact liberal democratic victories. First, the Reichstag altered the empire’s association laws to allow women to participate in public gatherings and restricted the ability of the police to ban public meetings. Second, it moderated the notorious lèse-majesté laws that had been a key tool in police persecution of Social Democrats for decades. Like the 1887–1890 Cartel, the Bülow Bloc failed to stop the advance of liberal values in German political culture and failed to hold together beyond a single election victory. Only two years after the election, Bülow was out as chancellor. By the early years of the twentieth century, the idea of Socialist moderation had become part of the conventional wisdom of the liberal middle classes. As early as 1891, political scientist Karl Oldenberg had, in The Goals of German Social Democracy, described “peaceful revolution [Umwälzung]” and “acceptance of parliamentarism as the critical political means of gaining power” as “characteristic achievements of the new development” in the party’s thinking, though it might take skeptics years to accept this “changed state of affairs.”33 Less than a decade later E. Reyckardt’s What Must One Know about German Social Democracy? conveyed the same view of Social Democracy: “Social reform! That is the answer that resounds ever more loudly from the ranks of Social Democracy, and on the side of the bourgeoisie finds an ever louder echo.”34 Left liberals understandably looked at the Social Democrats’ increasingly moderate behavior with satisfaction and saw this as the basis for a coalition against the forces of reaction. Friedrich Naumann regretted in a 1903 lecture in Munich the failures of liberals of the past to live up to their values. During the Kulturkampf, “a part of liberalism lost its liberal tone [Kammerton] and became through the struggle illiberal [unliberal],” while in the era of the Socialist Law liberalism had sinned against “the spirit of civil liberty.” But now, he told his audience, liberals were defending their principles and had found strong allies in the Socialists. The Protestant pastor remarked with satisfaction that the strongest defense of liberal principles in the fight against the lex Heinze (a censorship law targeting “immoral” art and literature passed in 1900, but only after its harshest aspects had been curbed by the Reichstag) came from the Social Democrat Vollmar, a

198

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

comment cheered by Naumann’s Bavarian audience. Against the forces of conservative and clerical reaction, the “new movement of the growing masses of the Volk” must be “composed of today’s liberalism and Social Democracy.”35 Naumann’s vision of liberal solidarity, though limited by his scorn for the Zentrum, marked a development from liberals’ earlier resistance to working with Socialists. Naumann’s Democracy and Imperial Rule: A Handbook for Domestic Politics, which went through multiple editions from 1900 to 1905, depicted radical democracy and Socialism as near neighbors in the democratic camp opposed to monarchical authoritarianism.36 A pair of Theodor Barth speeches from 1908, printed as Liberalism and Social Democracy, likewise greeted the growing moderation of the Social Democrats positively. Barth claimed that the utopian fantasy of the “great capitalist crash [Kladderadatsch]” that would usher in a new socialist world explained “the intransigent radicalism of the Social Democratic movement in its youth,” for “whoever believes in the soon-approaching­ paradise or downfall of the world has little inclination to be concerned with worldly details.” Yet the movement had evolved over time, Barth told his audience. Happily, “the reformist or revisionist current,” which sought “to better the situation of the workers within the currently existing state and social order” had “in the course of time ever more prevailed,” not only within the labor unions and other worker organizations but also (“with a few exceptions”) among “the intellectuals of the party.” Now those who wished to keep alive “the fear of the red specter” and to paint Socialists as “a dangerous slew of unteachable revolutionaries, who are determined in a bloody revolution to kill off all that the peaceful citizen holds dear,” were forced to dig up “every rash or arrogant [renommistische] revolutionary phrase, whenever or wherever uttered by a Social Democratic speaker or publicist.” Commenting that, where once radicals vilified party members who sought to take part in the business of governing, now even “the representatives of the most marked radicalism” elected to municipal councils showed themselves “eager participants in city affairs.” The more Social Democrats committed themselves to reform, the more “a political collaboration between liberalism and Social Democracy appears possible.” Barth remarked that in many parts of southern Germany, Social Democracy was already regarded as “an equal political party,” and he greeted with approval the formation in Baden of a “pan-democratic [gesamtdemokratische]” coalition of National Liberals, left liberals, and Social Democrats.37 Barth had always championed equal rights for Socialists, but now he foresaw the possibility for an expanding alliance with Social Democrats on a range of issues. This view was shared by many other liberals. Founded in 1901 by both left liberals and National Liberals, the Society for Social Reform, which sought to initiate reforms that would lessen class antagonism, hoped to find some common ground with Social Democrats. Its chair, Baron Hans Hermann von Berlepsch, believed that the SPD could become a party “which attempts without class hatred, and without a war of extermination against the existing order, to fight on the path of reform and development for a place in the sun for workers, to which they, like every other citizen of the

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

199

state, are entitled.”38 Like Barth, Berlepsch sought common ground with Social Democracy, albeit predicated on the latter’s embrace of increasing reformism. The relationship of Catholics to both Social Democrats and left liberals was more strained. However, Socialists and Catholics in particular shared a history of persecution as Reichsfeinde. Since Bebel, the only Social Democrat in the Reichstag in 1872, had voted against an anti-Jesuit law and the Zentrum majority under Windthorst had opposed the Socialist Law, they had made common cause on the issue of equality under the law. Every time the Jesuit Law came before the Reichstag until its final repeal in 1917, the Social Democrats voted against it as an exceptional law. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the two parties also worked together on another area of common concern, electoral fairness. In Bavaria in 1905 a Zentrum-Socialist coalition gained the two-thirds majority in the state parliament it needed to enact liberal suffrage reform. In Baden and Württemberg, they achieved similar results.39

If liberals, and to a lesser extent political Catholics, had come to terms with Social Democracy as a political party and found themselves allied in their commitments to democracy and legal equality, although sharply divided on other issues, large sections of the political right had not. Even after the turn of the century, by which time little confusion over the differences between anarchism and Socialism remained, some conservatives still insisted that Social Democrats supported anarchism. Theophil Wurm, a Protestant pastor and member of the Christian Social Party, expressed outrage that “all of the terrible deeds of the Nihilists and anarchists against crowned heads and their political and military advisers are marked in red in Social Democratic calendars.” H. Bürger, in a pamphlet published in a run of eight million copies by the Central League of German Industrialists, claimed to have found in another party historical calendar “the memory honored of the anarchists’ main leader, the Russian revolutionary and preacher of murder Mikhail Bakunin,” as well as the attentats of the 1880s and 1890s memorialized.40 In a memoir penned shortly after his dismissal as chancellor in 1909, Bernhard von Bülow too claimed that the annual Vorwärts calendar failed to honor national heroes like Bismarck and military victories such as Königgrätz and Sedan, “but a series of Russian Nihilists and Italian Anarchists and their murderous enterprises are named.”41 Even if Social Democrats did not intend to celebrate the acts of violence they listed, conservatives regarded the activity as tantamount to admitting a fellowship with the anarchists. Though examples of such conflations of Socialists and anarchists could be found in the rhetoric of political conservatives, for the most part conservative anti-Socialism continued to associate the movement with the vague idea of revolutionism, exactly as it had done since the 1870s. The quixotic quest to stem the Socialist advance can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie (Imperial League against Social Democracy), founded in May 1904 under Eduard von Liebert, former general and governor of the colony of German East Africa and member of the

200

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

executives of both the Pan-German League and the Colonial Society. These nationalist pressure groups founded in the 1880s and 1890s (in addition to the above, they included the Navy League, the Society for the Eastern Marches, and the Society for Germandom Abroad) all considered anti-Socialism to be central to their projects. For instance, Victor Schweinburg commented in 1907 regarding the Navy League, founded in 1898 to agitate for increased funding of German naval expansion, “the real object was to unite all who call themselves national in order to lead them at the right moment into the struggle against the anti-national and treasonous Social Democrats.”42 Yet to pursue “exclusively the struggle against the revolution party [Umsturzpartei] in all areas,” the Imperial League against Social Democracy was established.43 The League’s founders expressed the concern that neither the government nor “the parties of order” were doing enough to combat the Socialist menace and they initially strove to unite all the anti-Socialist parties, though increasingly the group became a front for the Reichspartei, with some connections to German Conservatives and National Liberals. Unlike the other nationalist pressure groups, the League devoted significant energy to supporting the Bülow Bloc in the 1907 Reichstag elections, in which Liebert himself was elected for the Reichspartei. The Bülow Bloc’s success in that election initially seemed to augur well for the success of the anti-Socialist cause, but this victory proved chimerical. Like the other pressure groups, the League had a somewhat antagonistic relationship to the Zentrum, which on the one hand showed itself committed to anti-Socialism in its core values but on the other was known as a pragmatic party committed to working within the Reich’s established institutions and focused on protecting its particularist Catholic concerns, which the pressure groups considered anti-national. Left liberals and the left wing of the National Liberal party, though willing to join an anti-Socialist electoral alliance, were not interested in pursuing the strident anti-Socialist course the pressure groups wanted once elected. As part of its electoral engagement, though also more broadly, the Imperial League against Social Democracy contributed to public debate a profusion of pamphlets and flyers all seeking to make the case that those who believed the Social Democrats no longer to be a danger to German society were seriously mistaken. According to the League’s ten-year-anniversary celebration pamphlet, the inevitable “molting of Social Democracy into a moderate bourgeois reform party” that “bourgeois illusion-­politicians” had confidently predicted had not come to pass.44 The League’s list of objectives depicted Socialism as an imminent revolutionary threat. These goals included working “against the anti-monarchical and revolutionary endeavors of Social Democracy” and opposing “the activity of Social Democracy directed at the overthrow [Umsturz] of the existing state and social order.” The League hoped its activities­—exposing the alleged lies of the Socialists and rallying all non-Socialists to work together—would “allow the possibility of help to workers and tradespeople beset by Social Democratic terrorism.”45 In its first few years, the League produced

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

201

hundreds of propagandistic pieces, which it distributed via the political parties and at election-related gatherings, as well as through a network of local League branches. Like conservatives had done in the 1870s and 1880s, the League linked Social Democracy to a revolutionary threat extending back to the French Revolution of 1789. One pamphlet likened the Social Democrats to Jacobins, and many linked Socialism to the Paris Commune.46 The Socialists’ apparent moderation served only as a mask to cloak the party’s authentic nature, League literature claimed, highlighting a number of pronouncements made by Social Democrats over the previous few decades to expose the truth. Much attention was devoted to Wilhelm Liebknecht’s anti-parliamentarism speech from 1869 (never mind that he had died in 1900) and August Bebel’s 1871 endorsement of the Paris Commune. In the pamphlet Indiscreet Questions for Social Democracy, the question “Bloody revolution or gradual growth into the future state through peaceful reforms?” was answered with four quotations, three from Marx and Engels— the last lines of the Communist Manifesto (1847), Marx endorsing the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (1875), and Engels proclaiming the Paris Commune to have been a dictatorship of the proletariat (1891)—and only one from a German Social Democrat: Liebknecht’s proclamation that revolution would occur either through state decrees or through violence (1874).47 The League had difficulty finding recent material to support its charges. One pamphlet rightly pointed out the disjuncture between the Erfurt Program’s radical Marxist theoretical section and its moderate practical section, acknowledging, “If the demands of the second part alone made up the goals of Social Democracy and if these were pursued in a manner that was not calculated to harm the inner peace and military strength of the fatherland, Social Democracy might in fact be considered and dealt with as a reform party and on equal footing with the other political parties.” But, the author assured readers, it was the “through and through revolutionary goals” of the program’s first section that were “of determinative significance for the judgment of today’s Social Democracy.”48 Additional evidence was found in Bebel’s speeches during the Zukunftsstaat debate, the discussion of which took up a third of this 48-page pamphlet.49 Most important of all was Bebel’s genuinely provocative statement made during an attack on revisionism at the 1903 Dresden party congress: “I want to remain the mortal enemy of this bourgeois society and this state order, to undermine their conditions of existence and, if I can, to eradicate them.”50 Though the congress overwhelmingly supported Bebel in repudiating revisionism, the tone of Bebel’s polemic was certainly never matched by any party actions. But for the League, Bebel’s statement revealed The True Face of Socialism, as one pamphlet with this title put it: “The Social Democrats continue to put forth great effort to demonstrate that their candidates are most suitable to represent the German people in the Reichstag. But they cannot provide this evidence with sincere means, rather they must take refuge in lies and deception. The Social Democrats disguise their true face with a mask!”51 Another pamphlet described the SPD’s parliamentarism in the same way: “it uses this means only out of party-interest and for the deception and lulling to sleep of

202

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

bourgeois society, to not unnerve anyone, but rather to let them think themselves safe, until the time has come to lift the mask.” The author worried that the Socialist ploy would work, that “gradually more and more liberal voters will think: ‘It is good here with the Reds.’” A footnote to this passage provided the example of the National Liberal leadership in Baden, which had recently celebrated “the convergence of the National Liberal Party with Social Democracy on many points, such as on cultural questions” and repudiated the slogan, “Under all circumstances against Social Democracy.”52 League publications coupled the notion of Socialists as duplicitous with the idea that they were not sincere in their efforts on behalf of workers. According to a 1907 pamphlet produced by the Reichsverband chapter in Gotha, “Social Democracy does not serve the true interests of the worker, but only uses his help to obtain political power and with it the opportunity to carry out the implementation of its revolutionary international ultimate aims.”53 Socialism’s goal, as the League characterized it, was purely destructive. “The real aim of the entire German Social Democracy,” claimed another pamphlet, was “the conquest of political power through the working class for the purpose of altering the state and social order.” It only relied on elections because it still lacked the strength to seize power, but it would certainly “proceed to violence when it is more sure of its affairs.”54 The League’s pamphlets repeatedly warned that violent revolution and German society’s destruction lay at the heart of Social Democracy, while all its reformist goals on behalf of workers and democracy amounted to nothing more than a sham. The charges against Social Democracy were exactly those expressed by conservatives 40 years earlier, that it attacked the cornerstones of the social order: monarchy, religion, family, marriage, and private property. A magazine essay describing the League just after its creation and soon reprinted as a pamphlet stated, “Social Democracy undermines the foundations of our culture, the church, the state, property, family and thereby the national strength.”55 Another warned, “If it triumphs, it will destroy what a manythousand-­year development built on a historical foundation of culture has created.”56­ A typical election flyer distilled these points dramatically into a series of boldface, large-font declarations, with brief elaborations on each statement: “The Social Democrats want to rob you of your property,” “The Social Democrats want to eliminate marriage and family” (the accompanying text described Socialist “free love” and the taking away of children from their parents at birth to be raised institutionally), “The Social Democrats want to exterminate religion,” “The Social Democrats want to abolish the monarchy,” “The Social Democrats want to take the fatherland from us,” “The Social Democrats consort with our enemies” (a reference to Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s hostility, as members of the North German Confederation’s Reichstag, to the Franco-Prussian War), “The road to Social Democracy runs over corpses [gehts über Leichen]” (the key example was the Socialist celebration of the “reign of terror of the Commune in Paris in 1871”).57 Another flyer, which asked, “What do the Social Democrats want?” answered, again in large boldface type: “They want to take your property,” “They want to abolish marriage and family,” “They want to tear religion out of your heart,” “They want to take

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

203

from you your king,” “They want to rob you of your fatherland.”58 Making it clear that this was an existential fight, a call for all anti-Socialists to vote in a Reichstag run-off election included the line, “It is a question of to be or not to be!”59 League propaganda repeatedly asserted the incompatibility of Social Democracy with religion. The pamphlet “Christianity and Social Democracy” described the SPD party program’s statement that “religion is a private matter” as only “an empty turn of phrase,” for in fact “Social Democracy continues to preach hatred against every religion.” Moreover, the party’s beliefs ultimately undermined Christian principles. “The attempt to try to make Social Democrats religious is futile,” stated the pamphlet, because “Social Democracy conflicts with all moral teachings of Christianity.” It concluded with the pronouncement, “A Christian cannot be a Social Democrat.”60 In response to the prominent news of two pastors recently embracing Socialism, the League produced the leaflet, “Was Christ a Social Democrat?” The answer was no, because, despite his concern for the poor, Christ “preached not discontentment, covetousness, hedonism, shamelessness, mockery of all virtue and morality, like our Social Democratic tinselapostles do but, rather, in all things the complete opposite.”61 Though no doubt rooted in sincere conviction, this focus on pitting Christianity against Socialism suggests that the League thought the charge could have some resonance, especially with the rural voters who were often the implicit or explicit targets of the group’s publications. And there is certainly evidence that this remained one of the most divisive aspects of Social Democratic culture. Clay miner Nikolaus Osterroth, an eventual convert to Socialism, found the party’s hostility to Christianity around the turn of the twentieth century the biggest impediment to his becoming a Socialist: “I found sharp attacks in the Social Democratic press against clerical institutions and even an occasional word of scorn against things that were holy to me. That made me very uneasy. . . . I fought through many a bitter battle between my political and my religious convictions.”62 In fact, as per the League’s warnings, Osterroth eventually abandoned his faith, but encounters with such anti-Christian sentiments must surely have discouraged many other workers from exploring Socialism further. Emphasizing this conflict offered the League the possibility of reaching Catholic Zentrum voters, men like Osterroth who saw Socialist atheism as its most threatening aspect. Yet, despite many League pronouncements that its principles transcended confession, long-standing antipathy toward political Catholicism among right-wing nationalists undermined the possibility of making serious inroads with Catholics. Although Liebert carefully avoided anti-Catholic statements early on, others involved with the League were rather more hostile, and by the end of 1905 the political Catholic press was calling on its members to withdraw their membership. Though the organization remained formally confessionally neutral, the message of Christian unity against the atheistic Socialist menace failed to bring Catholics back to the League.63 It certainly could not have helped matters that, in the 1907 election in which the League participated so heavily, the Bülow Bloc vilified the Zentrum as well as the Social Democrats.

204

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Along with religion, several pamphlets discussed the specter of the family’s destruction, symbolized in particular by gender equality. One found the Socialist cry “Equal rights for all” especially horrifying. “Equal rights for all!—even for women” could only lead to the dissolution of the family, for the effects of “economic and social equalization” would include easy marriage and easy divorce. In the Socialist future state, couples would be bound only by bonds of attachment, eroding the family and making it difficult even to know a child’s paternity. As a result, “the child instead takes the name of the mother.” The Socialist vision of gender equality neglected the natural order, the author warned, for “The female is destined by nature to become and to be a mother. . . . The wife belongs in the house, to raise the children and look after household matters, so that the husband finds a cozy home when he is finished with his work.” Women’s labor was “inverted [verkehrt] and unnatural.”64 Added to this was the threat of children being taken from their parents and raised communally, destroying the family. Repeatedly, the League sought to turn one of the Social Democrats’ self-proclaimed virtues, discipline, against it, suggesting that this quality revealed a tyrannical bent. “One does not hear much of liberty in Social Democracy,” observed a pamphlet perhaps making an appeal to left liberals. Instead, the party promised a “reign of terror” that would be worse for workers than their alleged oppression in bourgeois society, for “the liberty of Social Democracy is the worst tyranny!”65 Discipline was no automatically positive quality, the author of another pamphlet remarked, for “robber bands are also disciplined, discipline is no substitute for true nobleness of the heart. . . . With blind agitational fury Social Democracy destroys true learning [Bildung] and civilized behavior [Gesittung].”66 Another claimed that, despite Socialists’ current support for freedom of the press, there would not be any in their future state, for “this future state would be the most absolutely coercive state [vollkommenste Zwangsstaat],” brooking no dissent.67 Related to this, League literature frequently claimed that Social Democrats only amassed their large party membership, election victories, and full coffers through “terrorism” against unwilling but cowed workers.68 Apart from such cultural fears, the dangers of Socialist anti-militarism loomed large for the Reichsverband, perhaps not surprising given the group’s intimate connections with nationalist pressure groups such as the Navy League and Colonial Society. One pamphlet described how Germany had sacrificed its blood repeatedly for the advancement of humanity, protecting Europe “in murderous battle from subjugation by the Asiatic hordes.” If anti-militaristic Social Democracy “were to succeed in attaining mastery in Germany, the German Volk would be swept up in the most difficult internal and external struggle and with greatest likelihood would be weakened in terrible fashion, never to rise from political and social misery.”69 One author, proclaiming himself “an old military man,” believed “undermining the reliability of the army” to be “the chief danger of today’s Social Democratic movement.”70 At the center of this charge were two concerns. First, Socialists had a long history of attacking what they considered German aggression: from Bismarck’s misleading editing of the Ems Dispatch, which helped pro-

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

205

voke France into war in 1870, to Germany’s involvement with other European powers in putting down the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900–1901, to German imperialist activities in Africa, including enormous brutality against colonial subjects. From the League’s perspective, the Social Democrats always seemed to take the side of Germany’s competitors and enemies. Many of the League’s publications imputed disloyalty to Social Democracy in terms nationalists had used since the Franco-Prussian War: one pamphlet spoke of “fatherland-less and hostile-to-the-state Social Democracy!” and another of the “hostile-to-the-fatherland, revolutionary party of overthrow [revolutionäre Partei des Umsturzes].”71 The other issue that drew the League’s ire was the Socialists’ call for a people’s army, a sort of popular militia, in place of a standing army. A pamphlet that brought both of these concerns together warned that since “A properly organized, well-led standing army will always be victorious over a well-led militia,” the Socialist goal of ending the standing army threatened German security. While the Socialists might hope for peaceful diplomacy, all the “energetic diplomatic notes” in the world meant nothing if “warships with cannons” did not stand behind them. Though Socialists claimed to oppose war, if they came to power they would likely precipitate war by emboldening Germany’s competitors, among whom the pamphlet numbered England, America, Russia, France, Japan, China, Brazil, and Venezuela! “Social Democracy, that so detests war, as it says, that wishes for an era of eternal peace” had, the author suggested, “through its actions helped embolden Germany’s opponents and so has aided and abetted the danger of war.” At the same time, the Socialists’ unwillingness to support German imperialism would be detrimental to German international trade if it were ever allowed to influence policy.72 In the League’s voluminous anti-Socialist material, anarchism was scarcely mentioned. A few pamphlets referenced the general strike idea, with one regarding it as the epitome of Socialist strike goals: “the worker-leaders flatter themselves that they, as soon as their organization is advanced enough, could through a general work stoppage bring to a standstill the entire economic and cultural life of the present with one blow.”73 Another illustrated the potential for Socialist radicalization with the example of Raphael Friedeberg’s attempt to introduce the general strike into Social Democracy.74 In another pamphlet, anarchism was mentioned in passing in a way suggesting its triviality in German political culture by the early twentieth century. “It will not be possible to eliminate the delusional socialist ideal from the world entirely, as is also the case with anarchism,” but a successful anti-Socialist campaign could confine it too to “fanatics and obsessed world-improvement enthusiasts, unscrupulous agitators, [and] frivolous fellows who have nothing to lose.”75 Clearly, the political salience of anarchist violence to the public framing of Social Democracy had diminished nearly to the point of nonexistence, even among the most zealous anti-socialists. Even when conservatives invoked anarchism explicitly in their anti-Socialist tirades, the point was more to portray socialism as the representative of the broad revolutionary tradition described at this book’s outset than to address any particular anarchist danger. In

206

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

a section of his best-selling 1913 manifesto, If I Were the Kaiser, titled “Struggle against Revolution [Kampf gegen den Umsturz],” head of the Pan-German League, Heinrich Claß, declared that society could tolerate a nationally minded workers’ party but not one “that drives the masses toward anarchism, that has rejected its own Volk, its own fatherland.” Claß called for the imposition of the original 1878 Socialist Law proposal (before the Reichstag had watered it down, out of misplaced concerns about exceptional legislation) and the summary expulsion of all Social Democratic leaders from the nation. “And this applies naturally to all anarchists too,” he added. The arch-nationalist defended his position in the tradition of Bismarck: “it is the absolute duty of the state to oppose ruthlessly all further sedition; it must support civil society in this way, if it doesn’t wish to commit suicide.” Claß considered it “a wonder that we have not had open revolution yet,” given the Socialists’ “poisoning of the Volk.”76 Like the Reichsverband literature did, Claß depicted Social Democracy as a clear and present danger that must be combated with all of society’s resources. The League proclaimed itself a vigorous and effective force in rolling back this menacing Socialist tide. A 1908 pamphlet warned that “the struggle against the revolution party” had not been pursued successfully over the previous decade because “on the bürgerlich [“civil” or “citizen”] side it was far too often confined to defense, instead of venturing out among the broad masses with bold, cheerful attack.” The League, unlike other non-Socialists, “does not shy away from frontal attack,” but has “gone into Social Democratic election districts and through speech and writing brought enlightenment about the true nature of Social Democracy to the broadest strata of the people.” The pamphlet averred that even the Social Democrats acknowledged the effectiveness of the League’s efforts, which “put a powerful fear into the crack troops of the red International.” By carrying on the struggle “with toughness and tenacity,” it had achieved remarkable successes.77 The Social Democrats did indeed treat the League, which they dubbed the “Reich Lies League” [Reichslügenverband] as an important foe, ridiculing it in their public pronouncements and publishing pamphlets of their own directly refuting the League’s attacks.78 In addition to the Reichsverband’s many pamphlets and election broadsheets, it also ran a “speaker school,” which each year trained 50–60 itinerant speakers to take its message across the country and challenge Socialists in election debates. It even created its own worker organizations, which in 1907 had an unimpressive membership of 22,000, and by 1914 had only risen to 36,000.79 The League’s claims for its effectiveness rested chiefly on a string of electoral successes (including anti-Socialist victories in Reichstag by-elections in Eisenach and Oldenburg and municipal elections in Lübeck and Hamburg in 1905, as well as near misses in Reichstag by-elections in Darmstadt, Hanover, and Döbeln in 1906), which culminated in the Bülow Bloc’s 1907 Reichstag election victory.80 “After the Septennat election of 1887, for twenty years the Social Democratic Party grew from election to election,” pronounced the group’s special election correspondence periodical shortly after the 1907 election, but once the League had “entered into the national struggle,” Socialism had

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

207

experienced its first defeat in two decades, proving that “the general election of 1907 is a triumph for the fundamental idea of the Imperial League against Social Democracy.” It had been active in 69 electoral districts before the general election, and an additional 13 for run-off elections, issuing 22 new pamphlets, for a total of 72 issued in less than three years. The League was capable of producing these publications in impressive numbers too, over 10 million total for the 1907 election period and a run of over 1.5 million for a single 1911 pamphlet celebrating the German Empire’s 40th anniversary.81 As part of its publicity campaign, the League made sure to send copies of its pamphlets to police officials it hoped would welcome its activities.82 Matching the vigor of its electoral engagement was the League’s membership. In a pamphlet from 1906, Liebert claimed the League had close to 90,000 members, which, if accurate, would have dwarfed all of the nationalist pressure groups except the massive Navy League, which had 275,000 members in 1905.83 A 1907 broadsheet put the League’s membership at 133,500, with 250 local chapters and a further 330 independent affiliated associations, while the group’s leadership came up with a figure of 144,000 members.84 After the election victory of 1907, membership rose significantly over the next few years, to reach 221,500 in May 1912, with 1,300 chapters and affiliated societies, compared to 320,000 members for the Navy League. Yet, as Axel Grießmer points out, the increase in membership went hand in hand with quite a lot of instability, as thousands of members and many chapters left the group.85 Despite the size of its membership and the breadth of its activities, the Imperial League against Social Democracy proved unable to duplicate the success of the 1907 Reichstag election. In 1912, the SPD not only reversed its previous losses but hit a record in both vote share and number of seats. With 110 seats out of 397, the Social Democrats surpassed the Zentrum as the Reichstag’s largest caucus. What’s more, when the Reichstag voted to elect its president, August Bebel received 175 votes. Since the new left-liberal bloc, the Progressive People’s Party, had only 42 seats, Bebel must have received the votes of at least 23 deputies from the National Liberals, the Zentrum, or the minority parties. The chamber elected Bebel’s colleague Philipp Scheidemann first vice president. The Reichsverband saw the 1912 defeat as “shameful for the bürgerlich parties,” which had failed to heed the League’s mantra that all non-Socialists must unite. Despite this defeat, the League continued full steam ahead, reporting in 1914 that it continued to offer education courses, which had been attended by hundreds of men on nearly a hundred topics, and that its publications now numbered over 200, nine of them with over a million copies printed and one with two million.86 Less than three months after this report, the Great War began, and although the League continued its work, it ceased to play any meaningful role in German politics. The enormous activity of the League seems in the end to have achieved little in changing the German public’s view of Social Democracy. Its worldview, rooted in a conservatism increasingly marginalized in the Kaiserreich’s political culture, never found purchase among the masses, despite its embracing much of the politics of mass society, from intense electioneering to

208

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

mass distribution of popular broadsheets and pamphlets. Indeed, the League’s attitude toward Socialism does not even seem to have been shared by the Reich’s political police.

The democratizing trend could be seen in more than the continued normalization of the place of Social Democrats on the political landscape, the end of the manipulation of the specter of anarchist violence, and the turn away from the idea of exceptional legislation. The famous Daily Telegraph Affair of 1907, in which the British newspaper published conversations Kaiser Wilhelm II had had with Colonel Montague StuartWortley while staying at his house in Britain, proved embarrassing due to many absurd and inflammatory statements made by the kaiser and weakened the monarch in the eyes of many Germans. Many questioned his judgment and also blamed the chancellor for failing to exert more control over him.87 As the monarch’s credibility waned in many people’s eyes, the Reichstag’s stature could only increase. One of the most important public events to reveal the transformation of German political culture in the decade before the war was the Zabern Affair of 1913. In October of that year, 20-year-old lieutenant Günter von Forstner of the 99th Prussian Infantry regiment, garrisoned in the Alsatian town of Zabern, delivered a speech on discipline to his men, urging them not to get into fights with the locals. During the course of his speech, he used the pejorative epithet Wackes for the native Alsatians and suggested that if any soldier assaulted by a Wackes killed him, he would be rewarded by the lieutenant with 10 marks.88 When this story trickled out first to the local papers and then to the national press, it caused an uproar. Clashes between German soldiers and Zabern residents led to the military imposing its own rule in the area, supplanting civil authority by dispersing crowds and detaining citizens without legal authority. Both the original incident and the military’s reaction produced outrage across the nation, fueled by the dismissive attitudes of the kaiser, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, and War Minister General Erich von Falkenhayn. From the end of November to mid-December, mass protests against military abuses, most led by Social Democratic leaders, took place in a number of cities. On December 3–4, the Reichstag discussed three interpellations (requests for a government official to explain an act, leading in some cases to a legislative vote of confidence) regarding the Zabern events, from the Progressives, Social Democrats, and Alsatians. All three demanded that the chancellor explain what was being done to protect Alsatian citizens from military despotism and to ensure such an event did not happen again. The debate united representatives from across the non-conservative political spectrum. Adolf Röser of the Progressives spoke first, blasting the events in Zabern as “unworthy of a cultured state [Kulturstaat] and the army of a cultured state” and decrying that “Law and justice are being injured and trampled underfoot through the establishment of a military despotic rule [Willkürherrschaft].” The forcible detention of citizens by the military, at times for periods of over 12 hours, “offends against justice and law.” In addition to demanding that measures be put in place to prevent the recurrence of

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

209

such acts, he warned that conservatives’ endorsement of the army’s behavior promoted “absolutism of the worst kind,” which must “in our land with a liberty-minded populace” have a damaging effect. Instead of a “politics of the firm hand, a politics of force,” Germany needed to assert “a politics of justice and of fairness.”89 The Reichstag transcript throughout Röser’s speech indicated “Vigorous applause left and among the Social Democrats” or “Very correct! left and from the Zentrum,” making clear the breadth of political support for his assertions. Following Röser was Alsatian Social Democrat Jacques Peirotes, who set the recent Zabern events in the context of the government’s earlier plans for “new exceptional laws” in Alsace-Lorraine, seeing the “acts of arbitrariness [Willkür]” and “acts of military dictatorship” as part of a pattern that threatened justice. He inveighed against the “complete flagrant violation of the law” that occurred when “military police violence [Polizeigewalt]” had usurped the authority of the civil administration in the area. Peirotes’s criticisms of the government, including his charge that the military had in this case committed “high treason,” earned repeated cheers from the Social Democrats, left, Zentrum, Poles, and Alsace-Lorrainians, that is, the overwhelming majority of the Reichstag in 1913. Peirotes also drew a direct connection between Forstner’s suggestion that it was acceptable to shoot Alsatians and the government’s attitude that strikebreakers could shoot striking workers and even to the 1525 Peasants’ War, during which troops slaughtered thousands of peasants.90 Under the force of these criticisms, Bethmann Hollweg conceded both that Alsatians needed to be respected and that it was regrettable if the military had exceeded the law, while also insisting that the army had to be respected and that claims of a conflict between civil and military authorities, whether in Alsace or elsewhere, were false. In the end, he proclaimed that both “the authority of public powers [Gewalten] and the authority of the law will be protected.”91 Much less conciliatory, Falkenhayn attacked those who insulted the military and told the Reichstag that the army’s authority, discipline, and sense of honor must be protected. Breaches of appropriate conduct could be handled by the army itself. His speech was repeatedly interrupted with jeers, hisses, and contestations of his statements.92 Far from calming the deputies, these two speeches turned some who had planned to speak on the government’s behalf away from this course. The day finished with two more blistering attacks on the government, from Zentrum deputy Constantin Fehrenbach and National Liberal Fritz van Calker. In response to Bethmann Hollweg’s equal concern for the authority of public powers as for the law, Fehrenbach described “justice and law” as the “most delicate plant,” which needed careful tending that the government had failed to provide. “The military too is subject to law and justice, and if it came to the situation that the military were placed ‘ex lex’ [outside the law] and the civilian populace were exposed to the arbitrariness [Willkür] of the military, then, gentlemen: finis Germaniae [the end of Germany]!”93 Given such provocations by the army, Calker feared for the future of Alsace-Lorraine as part of the Reich; he also reiterated others’ concerns about the danger of military authorities usurping civilian powers.94

210

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

The next day’s speeches were even more acerbic, with the chancellor doubling down on his support of the military and Alsatian, SPD, and liberal representatives excoriating the government. A Polish representative added further tales of military insults from Posen, such as soldiers refusing to shop in Polish shops and insulting Poles with terms such as “Polish swine.”95 The only deputy speaking in the military’s defense was East Prussian Reichspartei representative Carl von Gamp-Massaunen, who argued that the army was dealing with the incident properly through its own command structure and suggested that the “worst enemy of the further development of Alsace-Lorraine in a German-national sense” was not the army but the nationalist Alsace-Lorraine party that opposed the region being a part of Germany. His speech received cheers from Reichs­ partei colleagues and jeers and mockery from the center and left.96 At the end of the day, the Reichstag voted on a motion of no confidence in Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, an option that had only been added to the Reichstag’s rules in 1912. The result was a humiliation for the chancellor, as 293 deputies voted against him while only 54, all from the two conservative parties, opposed the motion. Nothing, of course, came of this vote, since the chancellor answered only to the kaiser. The higher officers charged with inappropriate conduct in the Zabern Affair were acquitted, while Forstner received only nominal punishment; however, those perceived as the worst instigators of the conflict on the ground were transferred away from Zabern. If this conclusion to the events did not suggest Germany to be a nation in which the military faced full accountability for overstepping the bounds of appropriate and even legal conduct, it did reveal a public culture, exemplified by but not limited to the Reichstag, in which people of quite different political and social positions came together to demand the rule of law, justice, and civil authority. Social Democrats, ethnic minorities, liberals, and political Catholics all shared a language of equal rights and rule of law, which only a politically powerful but isolated conservative minority rejected in favor of authoritarianism and militarism. Even Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg at least to some degree conceded the importance of the rule of law, civil-military peace, and respect for citizens’ rights. If the Zabern Affair cast into sharp relief the limits of the Reichstag’s power in a semiconstitutional state, it also dramatized the clash between the political culture developed over the previous four decades and the mentality of the bastions of the empire’s order exemplified in the military and the kaiser.97

It is impossible to know how the tensions between these two forces would have played out had war not broken out in August 1914, leading swiftly to a quasi-military dictatorship and then to a revolution that swept away the empire and replaced it with a republic. What is clear is that the political culture of the German Empire in 1913 looked notably different from that of the 1870s and 1880s or even that of the first Wilhelmine decade. The articulation of common political values that had occurred over the course of the Socialist Law era, helping to normalize Social Democracy’s place in the empire,

The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War

211

provided the foundation for a very different kind of state after November 1918. However, as can be seen in the frenetic activity and rhetoric of the Imperial League against Social Democracy and the lack of serious accountability of the military for the Zabern Affair, the old order would not go without a struggle. But the important conclusion, from the point of view of this study, is that if the structures of the imperial system remained formidable in 1914, they faced an increasingly united political culture, in which Social Democrats occupied a central role, committed to open debate, fairness, and the rule of law.

Conclusion G e r m a n C ul t u r e , a n d

P o l i t i cal D e m o c r ac y ,

T e r r o r i s m

In these pages, I have tried to show how anarchism, a movement always on the fringes of Imperial German politics and never strong numerically, nonetheless played an important role in the development of the empire’s political culture. As an exemplar of political otherness, a marker of political pathology, anarchism attracted persistent attention and helped various political factions legitimate their worldviews and justify their political prescriptions. For conservatives, anarchists exemplified the danger posed by movements challenging society’s established hierarchies. Anarchist violence validated conservatives’ conception that a war between anarchy and society existed, whose prosecution did not allow for fastidious adherence to legal or democratic standards. Conservatives defended the Socialist Law as a response to the “state of emergency” posed by the endeavors of “revolution parties.” As Chancellor Bismarck put it in his memoirs, the defense of the German nation had to come before petty concerns about law and constitutionality. “I have never doubted,” he wrote, “that, in a severe crisis, a minister must advise his monarch to stage a coup d’état . . . rather than let his fatherland succumb to anarchism and the state perish before his eyes. . . . A state which fights for its very existence does not make its decisions dependent upon the advice of law faculties.”1 Seeing the battle against revolution as an existential struggle for the German state and culture’s survival justified repressive legislation, from the Socialist Law to the Revolution Bill to the Penitentiary Bill, while also placing Social Democracy irredeemably beyond the circle of legitimate political movements. When Social Democrats, Catholics, and left liberals reframed the relationship of Social Democracy to violent revolutionism generally and anarchism specifically, they challenged the conservative interpretation of both issues, rejecting “exceptional laws” as

Conclusion

213

unjust and counterproductive and refusing the premise of Social Democratic responsibility for anarchist violence. Without abandoning their revolutionary posture, Socialists redefined their concept of revolution to place it inside the German political-cultural mainstream. They recast their public identity in explicit opposition to anarchism’s deviant pseudo-revolutionism, which, they claimed, shared with conservatives a faith in the efficacy of immoral and brutal violence. Despite their deep opposition to Socialism on religious grounds (in the case of political Catholics and mostly Catholic minorities) or the party’s view of the state’s role in social and economic life (in the case of left liberals), other parties remained committed to combating them in the intellectual realm and working with them when possible. Left-liberal scholars’ interpretations of anarchism backed Social Democratic claims about the harm of illiberal policies and the complete opposition between anarchism and Socialism, while elaborating a critique of anarchism sympathetic to the philosophy’s opposition to state power. Social Democrats also utilized the anti-anarchist rhetoric that had become central to their identity to quell internal party disagreement, stigmatizing dissenters as quasi-anarchists who threatened to undermine core Socialist principles. In all of these ways, discussions of anarchism’s origins and its relationship to Socialism contributed to the development of political values in the Kaiserreich. This study adds to a body of scholarship showing the growing normalization of Social Democracy’s place in the German Empire’s political landscape and the development of robust liberal values in this era. Even ex-chancellor Bernhard von Bülow in 1914 went so far as to describe “the safety valves of parliamentary life” as “indispensable” to the maintenance of social order and moderate Social Democratic behavior, though he still considered the Socialists fundamentally anti-national.2 While Bismarck had envisioned a situation in which he could endlessly cobble together coalitions of “friends of the empire” or, in a later version, “state-supporting parties” against shifting “enemies of the empire” (including Catholics at times, left liberals at times, and Social Democrats perennially), this discourse failed, in large part because those who faced the government’s ire found common ground on the need for fairness and legality. The ongoing emphasis by Social Democrats, political Catholics, and left liberals (and over time, right liberals as well) on the distinction between legitimate Socialism and illegitimate anarchism facilitated Social Democracy’s integration into the nation’s normal political life, encouraging Socialists and other Reichsfeinde to stand together in opposition to government and police overreach, even if they were less successful in cobbling together coalitions to achieve positive political goals. When Catholics analogized the Socialist Law to the Kulturkampf and Social Democrats saw the protection of Alsatian citizens’ rights as part of their own crusade for the rule of law, cheering the speeches of each other’s Reichstag representatives, they helped forge a political consensus that transcended their otherwise strong ideological divisions. Social Democrats’ political practices, which reinforced the significance of parliamentary democracy, disciplined reformism, and gradual change, linked them to the

214

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

dominant political culture’s values, including honor and responsibility. The history of anti-anarchist rhetoric suggests the extent of Social Democracy’s positive integration into Imperial politics, which curtailed ideological radicalism’s power. While the “alternative culture” (Vernon Lidtke’s phrase) of May Day celebration, Socialist songs, and other forms of sociability set the party’s most fervent supporters apart from other social groups, the party presented itself to the wider public in language understood and accepted as legitimate by even those Germans not part of the narrower Socialist milieu.3 This shared political language facilitated the rapid expansion of the Social Democratic vote among the German middle classes, most of whom did not partake in Socialist associational culture, and the frequent crossing of party lines between liberal and Social Democratic voters.4 The legitimation of Social Democracy contributed to a larger change in German political culture during the Kaiserreich: the establishment of parliamentary democratic and legal norms that worked against the political elite’s authoritarianism. All of the reichsfeindlich parties (whose constituents already made up a majority of the nation’s voters by the 1880s) utilized a common vocabulary of open public contestation of ideas and commitment to the rule of law, which they increasingly turned against the government’s actions, to challenge its methods and question the source of its claim to authority. When Social Democrats, liberals, political Catholics, and Poles rejected anarchist violence, brutality, arbitrariness, and secrecy, they also delivered a rebuke to the German government’s practices against its enemies. They condemned anarchism, and also the government, for contravening the principles that should govern a democratic society. Anti-anarchism also encouraged Social Democrats to launch a robust public defense of parliamentarism and peaceful reform, both moderating the movement’s political stance and undercutting conservative charges of Socialist-anarchist collusion. The conservative interpretation of anarchism and of political violence more generally, which had underwritten the Socialist Law, never managed to sway public opinion after the middle of the 1880s. Even as other nations passed anti-anarchist and anti-radical laws in the 1890s, each attempt by the German government to restrict freedom of debate and association suffered legislative defeat in the Reichstag. In 1914, Germany faced a profound conflict between the dominant political culture and the elite in control of many of the empire’s administrative institutions.

Both Social Democratic support for the war effort and the postwar transition to the Weimar Republic represented in many ways not a break with but the culmination of processes long at work in Imperial German society and, indeed, one logical outcome of the Kaiserreich’s political trajectory. The Social Democratic vote for war credits on August 4, 1914, marked the final step of the Socialist transformation into a party generally regarded as a legitimate actor on the national political stage. Even conservatives deeply distrustful of Socialism appeared to accept the party as one with a legitimate place in

Conclusion

215

national political discourse. Bernhard von Bülow’s political memoir of the Kaiserreich, published in 1914 and revised two years later, shows both the progress Socialism had made by the war’s outbreak and the war’s profound importance for Social Democracy. In the first edition of his memoir, the former chancellor decisively rejected exceptional measures against Socialism but worried about the Social Democratic problem’s intractability. Echoing the Socialists and liberals, Bülow described the importance of parliamentary participation as a public venue for the expression of Socialist ideas. Criticizing conservative proposals for harsh anti-socialist legislation, he noted, “Exceptional laws against Social Democrats would choke these outlets. They would force the Social Democratic movement to transform itself from a strong party movement into a powerful secret society. . . . If the Government decides to use forcible means, it deprives itself of all possibility of perhaps effecting more by peaceful methods.”5 Despite his distrust of Socialism, he regarded the movement as one that must be challenged in the open, condemning the option of illiberal government repression. However, Bülow still judged the Social Democrats to be enemies of the German nation. “A comparison with other countries which have succeeded, or seem gradually to be succeeding, in making the Socialist party participate in the Government of the country does not hold good in view of German conditions,” Bülow commented. “We have a different political system, and, above all, different Social Democrats. . . . Just as our past, our political development and our peculiarities differ from those of other countries, so does our Social Democratic problem. We must study our own conditions, the peculiarities of the German Social Democrats, who attack the foundations of our State, and the peculiarities of our State, which we must defend against the Social Democrats.” Bülow characterized the Socialists as unusually well organized and dogmatic, traits they derived from the German national character. However, in contrast to French and Italian socialists, he found German Social Democracy totally lacking in a “national basis. It will have nothing to do with German patriotic memories which bear a monarchical or military character. It is not . . . a precipitate of the process of national historical development, but since its existence it has been in determined opposition to our past history as a nation. It has placed itself outside our national life.”6 Despite his acceptance of liberal political methods to deal with the Socialist problem, Bülow, little less than Eduard von Liebert, saw the movement as an anti-national threat in 1914. The revised edition of Bülow’s memoir appeared in the midst of the Great War. Bülow largely rewrote the book’s chapter devoted to Social Democracy, offering a strikingly different assessment of the movement. “In August, 1914,” the revised chapter began, “the Social Democrats, who up till then had stood aside in all decisions regarding national questions, properly so called, came into line with the whole German nation. . . . They showed that their late leader, Bebel, had been in earnest when he said that if Germany were attacked he himself would shoulder his gun.” Among the various causes for celebration at the war’s onset, “without doubt the attitude of Social Democracy was one of the matters for greatest rejoicing.” Bülow deleted from this edition various passages in

216

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

which he had portrayed the Socialists as implacably anti-national. Instead he described how “the Social Democratic leaders were guided by that love of their country and their consciousness of their duty to the nation, which they well knew the working classes, who formed their political following, to harbour.”7 Though still critical of the Socialists’ past behavior, he emphasized the movement’s development into a loyal German political party. In the revised edition’s introduction, written in May 1916, Bülow speculated optimistically, “In the future mutual understanding between Social Democracy and the Government, and between Social Democracy and the other parties, will be easier of achievement and of more frequent occurrence than in the past, since the painful division of Germans into national and non-national parties has been done away with in this war.”8 Bülow’s change of heart concerning Social Democracy brought him into line with the sentiments expressed by liberals, some political Catholics, and Socialists themselves during the prewar era and signaled an important broadening of support for Social Democracy’s political normalization. Though Social Democracy’s positive integration into social and political life had been proceeding for decades, the war swept away most of the lingering vestiges of hostility to the movement except among a core of militaristic, authoritarian conservatives who, though they held most of the nation’s key levers of power until the autumn of 1918, were isolated from the thinking of the vast majority of Germans. The revolution that dethroned them put in place a political system that had deep continuities with the Kaiserreich. The Weimar coalition in the republic’s first years included the SPD (then, as in the last years of the empire, the largest faction), the Zentrum (after a brief, failed rechristening of the party as a nondenominational Christian People’s Party [CVP]), and the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP). The heir of the right-wing National Liberals, the German People’s Party (DVP, not to be confused with the imperial-era leftliberal party of the same name), and the conservatives’ German National People’s Party (DNVP) formed the redoubt of anti-Weimar forces on one side, while the revolutionary German Communist Party (KPD) occupied the role of intransigent oppositionists that the anarchists once had. Though this schematization is crude, it illustrates the point that the political world of the Weimar era was not unprecedented. Nor were the politicians who governed the new republic. Though the generation of Bebel and Liebknecht, Bamberger and Hänel and Richter, Windthorst and Hertling did not live to see the republic, many of the young politicians of the imperial era went on to lead the new republic and they brought to it the political commitments they had cultivated in the prewar decades. Comparison of the political cultures of the imperial and Weimar eras points not to a continuity of German political abnormality or long-standing antipathy to democracy (or even a lack of preparation for it) as explanations for the Weimar Republic’s chaos and downfall but to the profound disruptions caused by the First World War and the events of the next decade and a half. It was these circumstances that allowed right-wing nationalist opponents of the republic finally to channel into more popular form the antiliberal, anti-democratic energy of imperial conservatives, and only after the Depression

Conclusion

217

hit did these forces gain a mass following in the form of National Socialism. On the war’s eve, the vast majority of German voters backed political parties that favored the equal application of the law, a free and open public sphere, and the resolution of social problems through legislative means. In the war years and beyond, such conceptions were challenged, as a culture of crisis and “state of emergency,” political violence, and street radicalism eroded the political faith that might have sustained the Weimar Republic through the buffeting of economic and social turbulence. The Weimar system’s failure must be seen in its own historical context, with a full appreciation of the possibilities that existed in 1918. If the Kaiserreich contained certain of the seeds of the Weimar Republic’s destruction, it also nurtured a political culture that might have held the republic together under more fortuitous circumstances.

If the Weimar Republic in many ways fulfilled the promise of the Kaiserreich’s political culture, in certain respects it represented a radical break from earlier political traditions, most strikingly in terms of the growing legitimation of political violence. Even so, the postwar era did not provide the kind of opening for anarchism that greater tolerance for the revolutionary overthrow of the current order might suggest. Neither anarchists nor intellectual interest in anarchism disappeared, but dramatic changes kept them at the fringes of public debate, where they had been since the turn of the century and where they remained until the 1960s. During and after the war, political discourse overflowed with symbolic points of reference: trench warfare (and the resulting death and mutilation), food riots, the “stab in the back” legend, the revolutions of 1918–1919, the Treaty of Versailles, and hyperinflation, among others.9 The specter of anarchistic disorder could not hold a candle to the lived realities of Germans in this era. While the far right in fact embraced political assassination, in the 1880s and 1890s the most prominent characteristic of anarchism in public discourse, and revolutionary communists adopted a version of the mass strike verging on the anarchist general strike, neither anarchists’ anti-statism nor their critique of Social Democracy’s tyrannical discipline (shared with the Imperial League against Social Democracy) found resonance amid civil war, social strife, international opprobrium, and economic chaos. On a profound level, the war transformed popular attitudes toward the state and political violence in ways that undermined anarchism’s symbolic significance. On one hand, anti-state sentiment lost popular influence, and on the other, the endorsement of political violence became more widely accepted, and thus unremarkable. The rejection of state authority central to anarchist ideology met with great skepticism in a world that had experienced state-orchestrated mobilization for total warfare. All combatant nations, even liberal Britain, had backed increasing state power as a necessity in the World War. In a world of powerful and aggressive states, the prospect of weakening one’s own state seemed foolhardy to many. Under such circumstances, the promotion of individual freedom and autonomous organization promoted by anarchists and cheered on by

218

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

left liberals seemed impossibly antiquated to most Europeans. At the same time, the interventionist state’s advantage for carrying out political programs became more obvious than ever. Rather than challenging the state, even more groups began making demands on it.10 The war accelerated these long-term trends. Even more important, the war transformed European attitudes toward political violence. In the late nineteenth century, anarchists had guaranteed their marginal position on the political landscape by proclaiming the need for violent revolution and endorsing political assassination. After the slaughter of the First World War, the barriers to the use of violence for political ends diminished significantly. Political movements both left and right, from communists to fascists, embraced the use of violence in political struggle. Dirk Schumann’s work on political violence in the Weimar Republic has shown that tactics once seen as the province of anarchists, but advanced by communists in the postwar period—an extreme version of the mass strike, spontaneous uprisings intended to ignite revolution, and violent street protests—found much wider acceptance than they ever had in the imperial era. In the war’s final months, police noted increased interest in USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) and Spartacist pamphlets with titles like “The Hour of Decision” and “Long Live the Mass Strike,” which celebrated immediate and potentially violent political confrontation. During the radical strikes that marked the early Weimar years, workers embraced (under the imprimatur of revolutionary communism) the anarchist-pioneered general strike as “the last, terrifying weapon” of the workers.11 As the unemployed and discontented abandoned their faith in the Weimar government to solve their problems, they built on a repertoire of popular protest styles developed during the war that accepted tactics of political violence as legitimate, while challenging the effectiveness of the peaceful parliamentarism promoted by Social Democrats. For instance, a manifesto calling for the creation of a German Communist Party described “as a goal the ‘liberation . . . of humanity,’ achievable not through franchise or parliamentary reform but only through communism.”12 Had the anarchists of the 1880s still existed in any numbers in Germany, this normalization of political violence and revolutionism might have allowed them to play a greater political role, as it made commonplace and unremarkable what had once marked anarchism as deviant and despised. Schumann points to the growing ubiquity of violence as central to politics in Weimar, from the civil wars of 1919–1921 to the presence of right-wing and Communist paramilitaries on the streets, to the extolling of violence as an expression of masculine virtue within all political factions. Bernd Weisbrod has drawn attention to the heightened “acceptance of illegal political violence” in this era. “Not only was the civil society’s ‘brutalization’ in the war itself new, but so was the escalation of symbolic and provocative violence in the postwar period’s civil war clashes.”13 As Schumann argues, political violence’s gradual entrenchment as normal encouraged the escalation of violence over the course of the Weimar Republic, ultimately contributing to the destabilization that toppled it.14 The streets became a radicalized site of unruliness, amenable to the kinds of

Conclusion

219

calls for immediate revolution repeatedly issued by anarchists in earlier decades. But in the Weimar era, Nazis and Communists, not anarchists, took to the streets. The right-wing perpetrators of violence in the Weimar years acted ostensibly in the service of order, as had the German police in the 1880s and the military at Zabern. However, left-wing political violence remained strongly pathologized in public discourse. Communism in the Weimar era replaced anarchism as the representative of political illegitimacy (and criminality), against which parties defined their own legitimate politics. As Eric Weitz has claimed, “The KPD’s opponents, from social democrats and trade unionists to employers, state officials, and Nazis, defined their political identities, established their political agendas, and secured their political powers largely in opposition to German and international communism.”15 This new anti-communism borrowed heavily from the Kaiserreich’s anti-anarchist tropes. The Social Democrats, like other advocates of social stability, worried about Communists threatening the established order. Warning of the dangers of radical Communist policies, the Social Democratic Volkstimme (Voice of the People) asserted that “a rushed socialization would mean ‘chaos, . . . hunger revolts, civil war, economic anarchy.’” Like the anarchists before them, the “USPD and KPD were perceived not as representatives of political positions but as instigators of crime.”16 When the Social Democratic Volksblatt (People’s Paper) condemned the Communist promotion of revolutionary working-class violence, it echoed the party’s previous anti-anarchist statements. The newspaper, Schumann recounts, “called the counter-violence of the workers ‘explicable, but mistaken,’ and firmly held that the struggle against capitalism must be pursued with peaceful methods, because ‘militarism and brutal physical violence’ belong to a stage that history has surpassed.”17 Socialists, defenders of the Weimar state in which they had a stake as a party of peaceful constitutionalism, rejected violent uprisings in the same terms that they had decades earlier. This time, however, they were upholding these ­political-cultural values against revolutionary communism rather than anarchism. Though anarchists faded from rhetorical prominence, the same language lived on as a way to talk about social unrest, political illegitimacy, and terrorism. Karl Kautsky’s 1920 attack on the Bolshevik regime in Russia, Terrorism and Communism, provides a clear example of the anarchist stigma’s transference to Communism. Kautsky’s polemic criticized revolutionary terrorism and linked the Bolsheviks to the French Revolution’s terror, which had turned large sectors of the populace against the revolutionaries. Kautsky argued that over the course of the nineteenth century, revolutions (he pointed to the French revolutions of 1830, 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871) had become progressively more civilized, evolving from “brutality” to “humanity.” Kautsky employed the evolutionary metaphor (made explicit in the book’s subtitle, “A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution”) to cast Bolshevism as an atavistic return to revolutionary savagery, exactly as Social Democrats had once depicted anarchism. The chapter “The Communists at Work” (whose title recalled Engels’s The Bakuninists at Work) made the Communist-anarchist parallel explicit. Quoting liberally from

220

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

Engels’s pamphlet, Kautsky painted Bolshevik methods as akin to those of the Spanish anarchists criticized by Engels. He warned that the Russian Communists had fallen victim to the same mistakes as the Bakuninists, embracing brutality and implacable intransigence over the civilized democratic practices that held the potential to broaden the movement’s support.18 Trotsky’s blistering response, published the next year and also titled Terrorism and Communism, defended revolutionary violence, while lambasting Kautsky’s veneration of parliamentarism and peaceful social change and mocking his commitment to freedom of the press.19 Trotsky’s criticism of democracy and gradual change echoed the anarchist rejection of Socialism as timid and cowardly. Despite the Communist commitment to a powerful, centralized state (the opposite of the anarchist social vision), this debate strongly resembled the rhetorical conflict of Socialists and anarchists during the Kaiserreich. While the empire’s political culture pointed to the possibility of a successful transition to a stable democracy, the language of political delegitimation that drew on earlier condemnations of anarchism contributed to an anti-Communism that fueled its targets’ adoption of a stance of militant opposition. Though the swift hardening of the division between Social Democracy and Communism in the Weimar Republic had many causes, certainly the recourse to an available anti-anarchist language heightened mutual enmity on the left. At the same time, the Weimar Republic’s other political factions helped push a large and dissatisfied sector of the populace into unremitting opposition to the state, expressed in a growing Communist cult of street violence.20 The political right shared a common vocabulary of its own, denouncing the left, both the Social Democratic and Communist tendencies, in terms familiar from imperial conservatives’ anti-revolutionary rhetoric. Added to this, crucially, were widespread bitterness at the war’s outcome, the traumas of hyperinflation and Depression, and fears of revolution heightened by the experience of Russia. In this atmosphere, the language of anti-radicalism and techniques of mass politics that the Imperial League against Social Democracy employed with so little effect in the empire helped undermine the republic.

The symbolic uses of anarchism are worthy of broader investigation, in part because anti-anarchist rhetoric did not simply vanish in the early twentieth century but was employed against other types of political movements. This study has traced the role of anarchism in the German Empire’s political culture, but anti-anarchist rhetoric was widespread. Across Europe (and even outside it) anarchism served as a potent political symbol, influencing many nations’ political and cultural environments. Though certain commonalities existed in the popular portrayal of anarchism by its opponents (as apolitical, irresponsible, and pathological), debates within different national contexts also served their own specific purposes. Likewise, the tensions around political tactics that emerged in the ideological battle against anarchists—and among Socialist factions

Conclusion

221

during the mass strike debate—would reappear later in the Soviet Union, the Spanish Republic, postwar Eastern Europe, and among socialist intellectuals in the 1960s. Looking at how German Social Democrats tried to think through such issues, as well as the practical constraints on advocating positions seen to bear the taint of anarchism, can help shed light on the range of intellectual positions later socialists supported and denounced. The German case examined here argues for the value of more careful study of how political factions in other places and times both deployed the figure of the anarchist and also wrestled with anarchist political goals and means in their own debates about appropriate political conduct. Even if one is inclined to think that anarchism itself has been consigned to the dustbin of history, anti-anarchist rhetoric had a role in shaping the political history of late nineteenth-century Europe whose legacy can be traced down to the present. The anarchist theorization of violence’s role in revolutionary struggle has influenced diverse revolutionary movements, as have anarchist terrorist tactics. At the same time, anti-anarchism has influenced how societies comprehend terrorism.21 Modern political discourses on terrorism draw on tropes that originated in late-nineteenth-century political debate. This rhetoric’s reification of “terrorism” as a phenomenon, whether signifying destructive chaos or revealing state policies’ bankruptcy, has often obscured rather than illuminated the complex dynamics behind the origins of and rationales for the use of political violence.

As the German Empire’s politicians, journalists, social scientists, and experts of all stripes competed to explain anarchism’s sources and to proffer remedies for its danger, they debated core political issues: the range of legitimate speech and action, the appropriate limits of government power, and the constraints the rule of law should impose on the policing of political violence. Though this is not a book about today’s world, it is hard when writing in the context of the current “War on Terror” not to notice parallels with the Imperial German debate about terrorism, especially the issue of what sacrifices of liberal principles may be necessary to preserve the state from radical political violence. Simple interpretations of terrorism, now as in the past, often serve to mask their proponents’ ideological agendas. Imperial Germany’s example should warn us to greet with great caution pronouncements about modern terrorism’s origins and the measures proposed to end it. The logic of the “state of emergency” necessitating anti-democratic and extra-legal actions to preserve the social order against an amorphous enemy pursuing society’s destruction through dishonorable and illegitimate means has been used throughout the twentieth century to undermine democracy. Though most forthrightly used by Nazis, Fascists, and Stalinists, this construction of an anarchistic enemy has underwritten myriad declarations of martial law and coups d’état, as well as abrogations of legal norms in avowedly democratic nations like the United States (of which the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism in the recent past, as well as torture,

222

A SS A SSINS and C ONSPIR ATORS

indefinite incarceration at Guantanamo Bay, and government endorsement of drone strikes against U.S. citizens in the present represent only some examples). Fundamentally, the clash between those in favor of and those opposed to the Socialist Law and later German anti-socialist proposals came down to two questions: Did radical revolutionaries, even when they did not pick up arms en masse, present an existential threat to the nation and German society? Could they be fought using the ordinary tools provided by the common legal code? Those who supported the Socialist Law insisted that the revolutionary threat imperiled state and society, and in such a situation the government had the right and indeed the duty to act in extraordinary ways, even if these violated the principle of legal equality. The controlling metaphor governing this view was the state of war, made explicit in the Socialist Law’s “minor state of siege” provision. This approach found its legal theoretical foundation more than four decades later in the writings of Carl Schmitt, who claimed that in a “state of emergency” or “state of exception [Ausnahmezustand]” the nation’s sovereign entity had the inherent right to suspend law to ensure its own continuation. The Socialist Law represented only a hint of the theory of dictatorship Schmitt advocated and the practice he endorsed in the form of the Third Reich. But the basic conception that a legal, constitutional order might be violated in the service of power’s self-preservation was the same, and we know Bismarck at least seriously pondered the possibility of a state-sponsored coup to crush the advances of Socialism and democracy.22 In the United States today we find legal claims that the president has “inherent powers” to protect the nation that trump the laws of the land and the Constitution itself. Richard A. Posner’s Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency certainly recalls Schmitt in both title and argument, though Posner does not go so far as to advocate a legal dictatorship to combat the threat of terrorism.23 The opponents of “exceptional legislation” in the Kaiserreich, like today’s champions of the rule of law, both questioned whether the menace of terrorism or revolution actually endangered the nation’s continued survival and argued that any legitimate danger should be confronted on the basis of the general law. To fight unexpectedly serious threats, they insisted, the correct course of action was to revise the general law’s provisions as required, preserving the legal order. They also claimed that adherence to principles such as open discussion and debate in the context of legal equality provided the best defense against terrorism and revolution, since measures permitting the violation of civil liberties and suppression of public debate embittered those who might otherwise be brought around to legitimate political behavior. The same rationale is evident in the 1880s cry that “the Socialist Law is the father of anarchism” and the early twenty-first-century claim that policies of torture, “extraordinary rendition,” and the indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay aid in the recruitment of terrorists. No less than today, proponents of the rule of law found themselves accused of putting abstract ideals above patriotic duty when they denounced the Socialist Law or defended the Socialists’ right to peacefully promote their political vision.

Conclusion

223

German left liberals’ attempt to separate anarchist violence from anarchist theory suggests how we might productively proceed to unravel terrorism’s Gordian knot without recourse to the sword. Rejecting terrorism’s legitimacy reveals nothing about the moral or political status of the causes in whose name it is undertaken. The discourse of “terrorism” depends heavily on the assumption that states have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, while non-state actors’ political violence is, ipso facto, unjustifiable (revolutionaries’ justifications of violence have for the past two centuries occupied a gray area between). The twentieth century’s unprecedented level of state-sponsored violence suggests one problem with such a conceptualization. The post–Second World War legal doctrine of “crimes against humanity” and the coinage of the term “state terrorism” (not so different from what Social Democrats accused the Bismarckian state of practicing) have begun to contest the implicit dichotomy that imbues the concept of “terrorism” with coherence. The parallels between the United States or Europe today and the German Empire are hardly exact, and it is not my intention to indulge in facile comparisons. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that our current political debates about anti-terrorist strategy, the appropriate range of executive authority and parliamentary deliberation in times of crisis, and the treatment of suspected enemies of the state all have historical precedents, which we can look to as we try to understand how a liberal democracy should (and should not) respond when faced with an alarming and amorphous threat. The current era of rhetorical pyrotechnics surrounding terrorism hardly stands alone; arguments about the causes and cures for non-state political violence have come to the surface of political debate at various times in the past century. The present American “War on Terror,” like West German arguments about terrorism in the 1970s, deploys a political discourse with roots extending back to the late nineteenth century. Though the Kaiserreich’s debate about anarchism may not help us understand terrorism in all its complexity, it can help us understand the political rhetoric that has defined it and the potential dangers of that rhetoric. Whatever we think of their political agendas, those in the German Empire who chose to stand for open public debate and the rule of law in uncertain times—including Social Democrats and anti-Socialists who insisted that their disagreements should be fought out in the realm of ideas and on a level playing field—should be an inspiring example of the power of democratic commitments to contend with authoritarianism. The example of the Imperial German center and left’s commitment to these principles and their refusal to countenance exceptional legislation, defended in a much less free state than most of today’s democracies, might perhaps encourage us not to give up our core values quite as casually as many seem willing to do in an ill-defined battle against the forces of social destruction.

Notes

Abbre viations

BAB BLHA GStAPK IISG LAB VDR

Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz International Institute of Social History Landesarchiv Berlin Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags

Introduct ion

1. Throughout this book, I use the capitalized “Socialist” and “Socialism” interchangeably with “Social Democrat” and “Social Democracy” to refer to the German Social Democratic movement and party, and the lower-case “socialist” and “socialism” to refer to the adherent or ideology broadly. Many anarchists, while not Social Democrats, definitely considered themselves socialists. 2. Lothar Gall, Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutionär (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1980). See also David Blackbourn, “Bismarck: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 33–44. 3. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, vol. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992). 4. Manfred Rauh, Die Parlamentarisierung des Deutschen Reiches (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977). 5. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, Von der “Deutschen Doppelrevolution” bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1849–1914 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 772, 771. 6. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 276. Blackbourn presents the same perspective in expanded version in The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), especially 408–12, though the whole chapter on “The Old Politics and the New” (400–459) is illuminating on the advent of mass politics. 7. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 10–11.

226

NOTES TO PAGES 7–9

8. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, trans. Richard Deveson (London: Arnold, 1995), 19; originally published as Der autoritäre Nationalstaat: Verfassung, Gesellschaft und Kultur des deutschen Kaiserreiches (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1990). 9. Brett Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State: The German Reichstag Elections of 1898 and 1903 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 16. Thomas Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preussen, 1867–1914: Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994), while focused on Prussian state electoral culture, suggests that Social Democrats and Catholics attempted to employ the issues and electoral behaviors that governed national elections to break down the restrictive culture, as well as law, of Prussian elections. 10. Margaret Lavinia Anderson and Kenneth Barkin (“The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf: Some Reflections on the Historiography of Imperial Germany,” Journal of Modern History 54, no. 4 [December 1982]: 685) note that Bismarck faced “a Reichstag in which the opposition outnumbered governmental forces 272 to 125 from 1881 to 1884, and 240 to 157 from 1884 to 1887.” 11. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 21, 20, 12. 12. Ibid., 419. 13. Ibid., 287. 14. Brett Fairbairn, “Interpreting Wilhelmine Elections: National Issues, Fairness Issues, and Electoral Mobilization,” in Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 41. The same themes are covered in Democracy in the Undemocratic State, 45–51. Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 269n4, argues, by contrast, that Imperial German politics was marked by an oscillation between the importance of “national” and “economic” issues. 15. Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State, 65. He also notes the growing agitation in Saxony against the 1896 franchise law that had been modeled on the Prussian three-class system. 16. James Retallack, “‘What Is to Be Done?’ The Red Specter, Franchise Questions, and the Crisis of Conservative Hegemony in Saxony, 1896–1909,” Central European History 23, no. 4 (December 1990): 271–312. 17. An excellent discussion of the historiography of electoral culture in the Kaiserreich can be found in Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), especially 103–12, though the entire chapter on “‘Democracy in the Undemocratic State’?” (90–125) is illuminating. 18. See Anderson’s fascinating discussion of this institution in Practicing Democracy, 295– 305. 19. Benjamin Carter Hett, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

NOTES TO PAG ES 9–12

227

20. Martin Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal: Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin: Akademie, 2005). 21. Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1963). See also Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (New York: Berg, 1985), 91, for an effective restatement of this argument. See also Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1973). 22. Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 6. 23. The idea of rigid “socio-cultural milieus” comes from M. Rainer Lepsius, especially “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Die deutschen Parteien vor 1918, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1973), 56–80. Stanley Suval’s Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) follows a pattern similar to Lepsius’s. Karl Rohe’s emphasis on the existence of distinct and largely isolated political “camps” can be found in Wahlen und Wählertraditionen in Deutschland: Kulturelle Grundlagen deutscher Parteien und Parteiensysteme im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters, 1–7, offers an astute assessment of the weaknesses of various approaches to electoral culture, as does Thomas Kühne’s “Wahlrecht–Wahlverhalten–Wahlkultur: Tradition und Innovation in der historischen Wahlforschung,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 33 (1993): 481–547. 24. James Retallack, “Antisocialism and Electoral Politics in Regional Perspective: The Kingdom of Saxony,” in Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 50. This notion can also be seen in Heinrich Mann’s famous novel Der Untertan (The Subject), in which an opportunistic Socialist politician and the novel’s odious bourgeois anti-socialist protagonist collude to the benefit of each. 25. Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State, 261, lists some of the diverse electoral coalitions found at both the national and regional levels. 26. Thomas Adam, “How Proletarian Was Leipzig’s Social Democratic Milieu?” in Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933, ed. James Retallack (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 270. Adam describes the Socialist milieu, not only in Leipzig, but also in cities such as Frankfurt, Berlin, and Munich, as a “component culture” (Teilkultur) with a strongly integrative aspect to it. 27. See Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters, 63–71, on the inter-class support for Social Democratic Reichstag candidates. 28. Three outstanding works in this category are Vernon L. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878–1890 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); Stanley Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-Class Mentality in Germany, 1887–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Among works that do look at Social Democrats and their relations to the larger culture, Alex Hall’s Scandal,

228

NOTES TO PAGES 13–23

Sensation and Social Democracy: The SPD Press and Wilhelmine Germany, 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) stands out as an early and illuminating example of the benefits of looking at Social Democracy in a national context. More recently, David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), includes essays emphasizing such interactions, as do many other works that are not centrally focused on the Socialist movement. 29. Throughout the book, I use the term “attentat” (now largely obsolete in English) to encompass, as it does in German and French, assassination attempts and other acts of violence both successful and unsuccessful. No other English word captures this meaning. 30. All of these incidents are described in detail in Andrew R. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, vol. 1, The Early Movement (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), 257–310. Though Carlson’s book was titled “Volume 1,” no second volume ever appeared. 31. Hans-Peter Goldberg, Bismarck und seine Gegner: Die politische Rhetorik im kaiserlichen Reichstag (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998) provides a rare model of the cultural analysis of the Reichs­ tag in this systematic study of the rhetorical styles of Bismarck and three of his opponents— August Bebel, Eugen Richter, and Ludwig Windthorst. A scholar of rhetoric, Goldberg details how verbal style, linguistic constructions, cultural tropes, and personal mannerisms all contributed to the effects of their Reichstag speeches. Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) provides an excellent example of how historians can make the most of Reichstag speeches as a source. 32. The law eliminated 352 Socialist political associations and 1,229 publications. See Hall, Scandal, 14. 33. Because the Reichstag debates were official government documents, they could not be censored and their publishers could not be prosecuted, as they would otherwise be for disseminating socialist ideas. See Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 82–89; Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 287. 34. One of the best examples of such local police files’ use is Richard J. Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities: Pub Conversations in Hamburg,” in Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 124–91, which draws on the reports of undercover political police officers who monitored working-class pubs from 1892 until the 1910s. Evans collected over 300 of the most compelling reports and published them in Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich: Die Stimmungsberichte der Hamburger Politischen Polizei, 1892–1914, ed. Richard J. Evans (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989). Another fine example is Marven Krug, “Reports of a Cop: Civil Liberties and Associational Life in Leipzig during the Second Empire,” in Retallack, Saxony in German History.

1 1. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 41, 66–68; Roth, The Social Democrats, 85–101. 2. Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

NOTES TO PAGES 23–26

229

Press, 1966), 336; Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 72. 3. Quoted in Epstein, Genesis, 382. This protest, against the Allgemeines Landrecht, came from the “aristocratically dominated Stände of Minden-Ravensberg.” See also 509, 514 on conservatives’ interpretation of the French Revolution as the result of the Enlightenment. 4. Quoted in Robert M. Berdahl, The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology, 1770–1848 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 172, 173. See also Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 281– 88; Sperber, The European Revolutions, 72; Berdahl, Politics of the Prussian Nobility, 5–6. 5. Unterredung zwischen einem deutschen Reichsfürsten und einem Seiner Räthe, der kein Illuminat ist (Germany, 1794), quoted in Epstein, Genesis, 498. 6. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), for an excellent discussion of these metaphors and their use during the 1790s. 7. Marx and Engels devoted considerable energy in the Communist Manifesto responding to the persistent charge that socialism sought to destroy the family. 8. Epstein, Genesis, 516; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; repr., ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 79. 9. Quoted in Epstein, Genesis, 459–60. Epstein renders “bürgerliche Ruhe und Ordnung” as “civil society.” I have altered the quote to a more literal translation. 10. Otto von Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen (1898; repr., Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1926), 23, 25, 53. 11. Memoirs of Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, ed. Friedrich Curtius, trans. George W. Chrystal (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 1:43. This appraisal comes from a note of April 7, 1848. Hohenlohe did not live to write his own memoir, so most of the text consists of excerpts from the papers he accumulated over his career. 12. Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 289–92. 13. Quoted in Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, trans. Christiane Banerji (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 35. 14. Memoirs of Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, 1:44. 15. Andreas Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 5. 16. Quoted in Peter N. Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 163. 17. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 3:902. 18. Though not published at the time, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program (New York: International Publishers, 1938) circulated among German Social Democratic leaders, who gradually adopted more and more Marxist tenets. 19. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 39, 67–68.

230

NOTES TO PAGES 26–29

20. Liebknecht, “On the Political Position of Social Democracy, Particularly with Regard to the Reichstag,” in Wilhelm Liebknecht and German Social Democracy: A Documentary History, ed. and comp. William A. Pelz, trans. Erich Hahn (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 155, 156. This speech was reprinted numerous times. 21. Liebknecht, “On the Political Position,” 158, 159. See also Elfi Pracht, Parlamentarismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 1867–1914 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1990), 35–55, on Social Democratic skepticism of parliamentarism, and its embattled position in the Reichstag (and the earlier North German parliament) during the late 1860s and 1870s. 22. A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (1955; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 53–57, covers Bismarck’s famous speech, as well as his general contempt for political debate; see also Sperber, The European Revolutions, 251–52. 23. W. L. Guttsman, The German Social Democratic Party, 1875–1933: From Ghetto to Government (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 50, noted the generality of the early socialist appeal, which had more to do with a sense of injustice than a theoretical critique of the economic system. 24. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 55–58. 25. Eduard Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre (Berlin: Der Bücherkreis, 1928), 84, 85–86. 26. Robert W. Goodrich, “On the Road to Wyden: The Expulsion of Johann Most from the German Social Democratic Party, 1878–1880” (Master’s Thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1994), 21. From 1871 to 1873, Most edited the Chemnitzer Freie Presse (Chemnitz Free Press); from 1873 to 1874 the Süddeutsche Volksstimme (South German People’s Voice) in Mainz; from 1876 to 1878 the Berliner Freie Presse (Berlin Free Press). 27. Treitschke biographer Andreas Dorpalen suggested that Treitschke joined the National Liberals only because his friend organized support for him and because “he believed that he could make his weight felt most effectively in their ranks,” but he might as easily have joined the Reichspartei (Empire Party). See Heinrich von Treitschke, 180–81. 28. Heinrich von Treitschke, “Der Socialismus und seine Gönner,” part 1, Preußische Jahr­ bücher 34, no. 1 (1874): 68–69. 29. Treitschke, “Der Socialismus und seine Gönner,” 1:70. A more detailed account of Treitschke’s model of the proper social order as laid out in this pamphlet can be found in Langewie­sche, Liberalism in Germany, 206–8. 30. Burke, Reflections, 50, 51. 31. Treitschke, “Der Socialismus und seine Gönner,” 1:68; “Der Socialismus und seine Gönner,” part 2, Preußische Jahrbücher 34, no. 3 (1874): 283. 32. Richard Schuster, Die Social-Demokratie: Nach ihrem Wessen und ihrer Agitation quellenmässig dargestellt (Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1875). Quoted in Roth, The Social Democrats, 101. 33. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages, 1. Legislaturperiode 1. Session (hereafter VDR with legislative period and session indicated by number only), 25 May 1878, 921, 920. This speech, which was often cited by anti-socialists in later years, is also discussed in Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 41–42, and Wolfgang Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen

NOTES TO PAGES 29–34

231

um Sozialistengesetz Bismarcks, 1878–1890 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961), 16. All ellipses in quotations are mine unless otherwise noted. 34. Treitschke, “Der Socialismus und seine Gönner,” 2:283. 35. Albert Schäffle, Die Quintessenz des Sozialismus, 25th ed. (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1920), 1, 2–3. 36. Ibid., 60–61, 63, 64. 37. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 63–65. 38. On the widening gulf between middle-class and working-class reform politics since the 1840s, see Hermann Beck, “Working-Class Politics at the Crossroads of Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism,” in Barclay and Weitz, Between Reform and Revolution, 63–85. 39. Adolf Held, Sozialismus, Sozialdemokratie und Sozialpolitik (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1878), 36. 40. Ibid., 88, 87. 41. Ibid., 31, 119. 42. Franz Mehring, Die deutsche Socialdemokratie: Ihre Geschichte und ihre Lehre; Eine historisch-kritische Darstellung, 3rd rev. and expanded ed. (Bremen: Schünemann, 1879), 90, 95. 43. Ibid., 276–77, 119. 44. Ibid., 170–71, 277–80. 45. Ibid., 151, 173. 46. In fact, Mehring went on to join the radical wing of the SPD and in 1916 helped lead the Spartacus League. Weeks before his death in January 1919, he helped found the German Communist Party. 47. Ludwig Bamberger, Deutschland und der Socialismus, 2nd expanded ed. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1878), 5. The reference to “Flambez” presumably refers to the popular idea of the Communards as incendiaries. Specifically, a forged document attributed to Communard Théophile Ferré with the words “Flambez Finance!” (an order to burn down the ministry of Finance) appeared at his trial, making the phrase famous. 48. Stanley Zucker, Ludwig Bamberger: German Liberal Politician and Social Critic, 1823– 1899 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), 110–11. 49. Bamberger, Deutschland und der Socialismus, 13. 50. Quoted in Guttsman, German Social Democratic Party, 53. 51. Quoted in Zucker, Ludwig Bamberger, 116. 52. Bamberger, Deutschland und der Socialismus, 27–28. 53. Ludwig Bamberger, “Die Invasion der socialistichen Ideen,” 1–30, and Theodor Barth, “Die charakteristischen Züge des heutigen Staatssocialismus,” 44, in Gegen den Staatssocialismus: Drei Abhandlungen von Ludwig Bamberger, Theodor Barth, Max Broemel (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1884). 54. Stanley Zucker, “Ludwig Bamberger and the Crisis of German Liberalism” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1968), 215–16; Zucker, Ludwig Bamberger, 115–17. 55. Anderson, Windthorst, 207. 56. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 57–58. 57. Quoted in Anderson, Windthorst, 211.

232

NOTES TO PAGES 34–41

58. A brief description of the attack, drawn from Bebel’s memoirs, appears in Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 70. In Anarchism in Germany, 115–16, Carlson offers a much more detailed narrative, based on both newspaper accounts and police records. 59. Provinzial-Correspondenz 16, no. 20, 14 May 1878, 1. 60. Neue Preußische Zeitung 112, 14 May 1878, 2. 61. “Der warnende Finger Gottes,” Neue Preußische Zeitung 113, 15 May 1878, 1. 62. Neue Preußische Zeitung 112, 14 May 1878, 3. Ignaz Auer (Nach Zehn Jahren: Material und Glossen zur Geschichte des Sozialistengesetzes [London: German Cooperative Publishing, 1889], 46) cited this statement of Stöcker’s in conjunction with a host of other media accounts to show a pattern of falsely charging Socialists for anarchist acts. 63. Quoted in Provinzial-Correspondenz 16, no. 20, 14 May 1878, 2. 64. VDR 3.2 (1878), Anlage 274:1591–92. 65. “Maßregeln zur Abwehr socialdemokratischer Ausschreitungen,” Neue Preußische Zeitung 117, 21 May 1878, 1. 66. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 35–37. 67. “Maßregeln zur Abwehr socialdemokratischer Ausschreitungen,” 1. 68. Provinzial-Correspondenz 16, no. 21, 22 May 1878, 2–3. 69. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 72–73; Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 33–35. 70. A detailed account of the entire debate can be found in Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 37–50. 71. VDR 3.2, 23 May 1878, 1504. 72. Ibid., 1497. 73. Ibid., 1520. 74. VDR 3.2, 24 May 1878, 1529. 75. VDR 3.2, 23 May 1878, 1511, 1510. 76. VDR 3.2, 24 May 1878, 1545. 77. VDR 3.2, 23 May 1878, 1512–13. 78. Ibid., 1500, 1502. 79. VDR 3.2, 24 May 1878, 1535. 80. VDR 3.2, 23 May 1878, 1495, 1496, 1497. 81. Ibid., 1503. 82. VDR 3.2, 24 May 1878, 1535. 83. VDR 3.2, 23 May 1878, 1513–14, 1515. 84. VDR 3.2, 24 May 1878, 1544–45. 85. VDR 3.2, 23 May 1878, 1498–99. 86. Ibid., 1515–16. 87. Ibid., 1520–21. 88. Ibid., 1499. 89. Ibid., 1503–4, 1505–6, 1510. 90. VDR 3.2, 24 May 1878, 1531–32. 91. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 38–39.

NOTES TO PAGES 43–47

233

2 1. August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1911), 2:412. 2. Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre, 61–62; Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, 141– 46. Carlson (147–50) argues, based on somewhat thin evidence, that Nobiling’s attentat was part of an anarchist plot funded by the German branch of the Swiss Jura Federation. 3. Gall, Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutionär, 94–96, suggests that this move was probably not the cool, ruthless calculation it is generally assumed to have been, but an emotional gamble he hoped would shuffle the political deck in a way that would free him from his position of political isolation. 4. Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre, 62, 63. 5. Bebel, Aus meinem Leben, 2:414. 6. Auer, Nach Zehn Jahren, 54–65. 7. Ibid., 65–71; Bebel, Aus meinem Leben, 2:415. See also Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre, 62–66; Bebel, Aus meinem Leben, 2:415–17; Lidkte, The Outlawed Party, 73–77. 8. James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 183. A slightly different version appears in Gall, Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutionär, 94. See also Eugen Richter, Im alten Reichstag: Erinnerungen von Eugen Richter, Mitglied des Reichstages, vol. 2, Januar 1877 bis November 1881 (Berlin: Deutsche Press, 1914), 62–63, 65–66, 71, 79–80; Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre, 61–62. 9. Heinrich von Treitschke, Der Socialismus und der Meuchelmord (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878), 10. 10. Ibid., 4. 11. Ibid., 4–6, 3–4. 12. Ibid., 11, 10. 13. Ibid., 5, 6, 7. 14. Ibid., 11. 15. Ibid., 7, 13. 16. Ibid., 12, 13. This comment about “foreign blood” might have been an oblique charge of Jewish taint to socialism, as scarcely more than a year later Treitschke would write the article (“Unsere Aussichten” [Our Views], in Preußische Jahrbücher 44, no. 5 [1879]: 559–76) in which he penned the famous words, “The Jews are our misfortune.” An anonymous reader of this manuscript suggested this might instead have been an allusion to the taint of French radicalism, a plausible reading given the other allusions to French weakness. 17. “Das furchtbare Verbrechen eines zweiten Mordversuches gegen den Kaiser,” ProvinzialCorrespondenz 16, no. 23, 5 June 1878, 1. 18. “Die Frevelthat vom 2. Juni,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 132, 8 June 1878, 1; “Revolution in Schlafrock und Pantoffeln,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 131, 7 June 1878, 1. 19. “Die Verantwortung für die Reichstagsauflösung,” Provinzial-Correspondenz 16, no. 25, 19 June 1878, 2–3.

234

NOTES TO PAGES 47–52

20. “Das ‘Regierungsprogramm’ und die National-Liberalen,” Provinzial-Correspondenz 16, no. 26, 26 June 1878, 3–4. 21. “National-Liberale, Fortschrittspartei und Sozialdemokratie,” Provinzial-Correspondenz 16, no. 30, 24 July 1878, 3. 22. “Revolution in Schlafrock und Pantoffeln,” 1. 23. “Der nationalliberal Wahlaufruf,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 141, 20 June 1878, 1. 24. “Die Wahlen für den Reichstag,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 154, 5 July 1878, 1. See also “Rathlosigkeit des Liberalismus,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 156, 7 July 1878, 1; “Die liberalen Parteien und die Socialdemokratie,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 164, 17 July 1878, supplement, 1. 25. “Auf den Grund,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 175, 30 July 1878, 1. The election-day issue likewise placed criticism of the National Liberals front and center: “Am Wahltage,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 176, 31 July 1878, 1, while the next day’s issue led with an article on “Die Consequenzen des Liberalismus,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 177, 1 August 1878, 1. 26. “Die Regierung und die Wahlbewegung,” Provinzial-Correspondenz 16, no. 29, 17 July 1878, 2–3. 27. VDR 4.1, 1878, Anlage 4:2. 28. Ibid., 4:3, 4, 5. 29. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 71. Kleist-Retzow here castigated the Reichspartei, which had backed Bismarck’s anti-Catholic campaign. Many German Conservatives, by contrast, had opposed the Kulturkampf. 30. VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 125, 126. See also Wilhelm von Kardorff (VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 72, 84). 31. VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 113. 32. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 50. 33. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 71, 72. 34. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 70, 51. 35. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 68, 70; 9 October 1878, 127. See also Kleist-Retzow’s speech, ibid., 84–85. 36. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 37, 35. Other examples of this argument include VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 112–14 (Representative von Marschall); VDR 4.1, 11 October 1878, 187– 88 (Representative Melbeck). 37. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 70, 72–73. 38. VDR 4.1, 1878, Anlage 4:5, 6, 8. 39. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 85. 40. On Gneist’s justification of the law, see Eric Hahn, “Rudolf Gneist and the Prussian Rechtsstaat: 1862–78,” Journal of Modern History 49, no. 4 (December 1977): On Demand Supplement, D1378. 41. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). See also Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 42. VDR 4.1, 10 October 1878, 165–66, 169, 170–71.

NOTES TO PAGES 53–58

235

43. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 52–53, 54, 55–56. 44. VDR 4.1, 18 October 1878, 355, 359. 45. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 59–61, 62. 46. VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 131. 47. Ibid., 115, 116–20. 48. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 88. 49. VDR 4.1, 14 October 1878, 240. 50. Ibid., 238. 51. Ibid., 240–41. 52. VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 121–22. 53. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 33–35, 31. 54. VDR 4.1, 11 October 1878, 201–2, 205. 55. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 83. 56. Ibid., 31–32. 57. VDR 4.1, 14 October 1878, 258. 58. VDR 4.1, 11 October 1878, 204. 59. VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 120. 60. VDR 4.1, 11 October 1878, 204, 205–6. 61. VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 134–35. 62. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 112. 63. VDR 4.1, 14 October 1878, 259. 64. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 86. 65. VDR 4.1, 12 October 1878, 209, 210. 66. VDR 4.1, 10 October 1878, 163. 67. VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 134–35. 68. Róisín Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Boston: Brill, 2003), 66–70. 69. To maximize the propagandistic value of these speeches, the Social Democratic press immediately published this debate as Die Sozialdemokratie vor dem Deutschen Reichstage: Entwurf eines Gesetzes gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie nebst Motiven und Anlagen, vol. 2, Stenographischer Bericht der Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags am 16. und 17. September 1878 (Hamburg: Genossenschafts-Buchdruckerei, 1878). 70. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 83; see also VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 39 (Bebel). 71. VDR 4.1, 18 October 1878, 342, 347. 72. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 44. 73. Ibid., 38–39. 74. VDR 4.1, 18 October 1878, 342–44. 75. See “Ein Kapitel über ‘Agitation,’” Vorwärts, 5 June 1878, 1; “Das Attentat und die Pathologie der Seele,” Vorwärts, 19 June 1878, 1. Reinhard Höhn, Die vaterlandslosen Gesellen: Der Sozialismus im Licht der Geheimberichte der preußischen Polizei, 1878–1914, vol. 1, 1878–1890 (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964), xxiv, provides several other examples as well. Ignaz Auer, Nach Zehn Jahren, 22, cited news reports that Hödel had said to police that he “belonged to the Christian Social Party, but was in fact an anarchist of the purest sort [vom reinsten Wasser].” Auer

236

NOTES TO PAGES 59–65

personally believed that he was simply crazy. See also Auer to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 15 May 1878, in Wilhelm Liebknecht, Briefwechsel mit Deutschen Sozialdemokraten, vol. 1, 1862–1878, ed. and comp. Georg Eckert (Assen, Netherlands: Von Gorcum, 1973), 781–82; Eduard Bernstein, My Years of Exile: Reminiscences of a Socialist, trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1921), 19–20. 76. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 78. 77. Social Democracy’s Lassallean wing in particular had long seen itself as the successor to the democratic movement of 1848. See Toni Offermann, “The Lassallean Labor Movement in Germany: Organization, Social Structure, and Associational Life in the 1860s,” in Barclay and Weitz, Between Reform and Revolution, especially 108. 78. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 49. 79. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 78, 82, 79. 80. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 39. 81. VDR 4.1, 18 October 1878, 345, 350. 82. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 46, 49–50. 83. VDR 4.1, 18 October 1878, 344–45, 347. 84. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, 91. 85. Held, Sozialismus, Sozialdemokratie und Sozialpolitik, 33–34, 88. Presumably the “Gallic Furies” were the mythical pétroleuses. 86. Mehring, Die deutsche Socialdemokratie, 165, 135. 87. Ibid., 64–65, 166–67. 88. Ibid., 181–83, 185, 197–98. 89. “Die Verurtheilung des Hochverräthers Hödel,” Provinzial-Correspondenz 16, no. 29, 17 July 1878, 4–5. 90. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 50–51. 91. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, was rather more inclined to see this perspective as a cynical tactical ploy of Bismarck and his henchmen. But the mind-set of conservatism dating back to the late eighteenth century encouraged government leaders to dismiss distinctions between Socialists and other radicals as superficial. 92. These reports, which can be found in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, were published in the 1980s, edited by the historians Dieter Fricke and Rudolf Knaack. I cite the relevant page number for the published version, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung, 1878–1913, 3 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1983–1989). See the introduction (1:ix–xviii) for a fuller discussion of the information that was included in these reports and their intended audience. 93. VDR 4.1, 16 September 1878, 48. 94. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 79–80, 83. In his speech, Bracke noted that the Social Democratic paper Vorwärts had recently mocked an anarchist “bewaffnete Spaziergang”—the Benevento uprising of 1876, led by the Italian anarchist leaders Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafi­ ero, who took the opportunity of their trial to propagandize for the anarchist cause. The would-be revolutionaries’ plight became a southern Italian cause célèbre and all were eventually acquitted.

NOTES TO PAGES 65–71

237

The best account of this uprising can be found in Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864– 1892 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 95. However, this ambiguity about terminology survived into the early 1880s, especially in reference to Most and Hasselmann. While Social Democrats disowned the two men, they often referred to the “Most and Hasselmann party,” “Most-ish tactics,” etc., betraying an initial reticence to call the two men anarchists, while also focusing their critiques on the men’s personal qualities more than their political beliefs. See Auer’s denunciation of Most, Hasselmann, and Freiheit in VDR 4.4, 31 March 1881, 654–55. 96. Leopold Sonnemann had in fact raised this concern in the debate. See VDR 4.1, 9 October 1878, 119. 97. VDR 4.1, 10 October 1878, 148–49. 98. Ibid., 148, 151. 99. Ibid., 145. 100. Ibid., 150, 156–57. 101. Ibid., 167. See Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 104–5; and Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 77, for more on the effects of Hasselmann’s speech. A lengthy summary of the entire Socialist Law debate can be found in Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 83–111.

3 1. In his autobiography, Bebel quotes a newspaper article on his first Reichstag speech that made frequent allusion to his love of “petroleum.” See Bebel, Aus meinem Leben, 2:225–26. The image of the pétroleuse is well described and analyzed by Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 159–90. See also Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries, trans. James Atkinson and Starr Atkinson (New York: George Braziller, 1966). 2. Franz Mehring, “Zur Geschichte der Socialdemokratie,” part 8, “Die höchste Blüthe der deutschen Socialdemokratie,” Die Gartenlaube, no. 31 (1880): 504–5. 3. “The coincidence of constitutional, national, and social problems during the decade of the Reichsgründung” split the democrats and liberals from the socialists, according to Beck, “Working-Class Politics,” 82. 4. Mehring, “Zur Geschichte der Socialdemokratie,” part 7, “Der Gothaer Vereinigungs­ congreß,” Die Gartenlaube, no. 26 (1880): 423. 5. Franz Mehring, Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1897–1898). 6. For this perspective, see Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871–1914 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1992), as well as Wehler’s works. Such a perspective fits into an argument emphasizing a German Sonderweg, key to explaining the Nazis’ rise. See also Heinrich Potthoff, “Social Democracy from Its Beginnings until 1945,” in A History of German Social Democracy from 1848 to the Present, ed. Susanne Miller and Heinrich Potthoff, trans. J. A. Underwood (New York: Berg, 1986), 36–37. A more subtle shading of this position can also be

238

NOTES TO PAGES 72–74

seen in V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18–28. 7. The latter appears in Roth, The Social Democrats; Anderson, Practicing Democracy; Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, to some extent; and other works going back as far as Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1911; repr., trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999). 8. See Lidtke, The Outlawed Party; Groh, Negative Integration; Dieter Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer: Der Berliner politische Polizei im Kampf gegen die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung, 1871–1918 (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1962); Hall, Scandal, among others. 9. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 128; Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, 3; Raymond C. Sun, “Misguided Martyrdom: German Social Democratic Response to the Haymarket Incident, 1886–87,” International Labor and Working Class History 29 (Spring 1986): 64–65. 10. Vorwärts, 21 October 1878, 1; Goodrich, “On the Road to Wyden,” 41–44; Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 78–79. 11. In fact, the charge of Majestätsbeleidigung (lèse majesté) was amorphous, providing a convenient charge to arrest Socialists. See Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 74; Alex Hall, “The Kaiser, the Wilhelmine State and Lèse-Majesté,” German Life & Letters 27, no. 2 ( January 1974): 101–15; and “By Other Means: The Legal Struggle against the SPD, 1890–1900,” The Historical Journal 17, no. 2 (1974): 365–86, on the government and police utilization of lèse-majesté charges against Social Democracy. See also Auer, Nach Zehn Jahren, 66–67, on the government’s legal tools for repressing Socialism. 12. Johann Most, Memoiren: Erlebtes, Erforschtes und Erdachtes (New York: John Most, 1903), 3:30, 65, recounts the election campaigns of 1874 and 1877; see 78–79 for his account of the terrorization and threats against workers in his district during the 1878 election. See Good­ rich, “On the Road to Wyden,” 24–31, on Most’s popularity in the 1870s. 13. Goodrich, “On the Road to Wyden,” 54–55; Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre, 84–86, criticized Freiheit for being completely out of touch with the situation in Germany. 14. Bernstein’s March 15, 1879, letter to Most appears in Bebel, Aus meinem Leben (1914), 3:45–46. On Geib’s letter of concern to Liebknecht from May, see Goodrich, “On the Road to Wyden,” 55. 15. VDR 4.2, 17 March 1879, 443. 16. GStAPK (Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz) I. HA Rep. 84a, Nr. 10029 (Strafverfolgung von russichen revolutionären Studenten [Anarchisten], 1876–1879), 38–39. 17. “Russische Nihilisten und deutsche Sozialdemokraten,” Provinzial-Correspondenz, no. 18, 30 April 1879, 3. 18. BLHA (Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv) Rep. 2A I P, Nr. 796, n.p. (“Berlin, 20 January 1879”). 19. Goodrich, “On the Road to Wyden,” 57–79. 20. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 89–97, recounts the paper’s founding and the smuggling operation. A firsthand account from the head of the “Red Postal Service” is Joseph Belli, Die rote Feldpost unterm Sozialistengesetz (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1912).

NOTES TO PAGES 74–78

239

21. Goodrich, “On the Road to Wyden,” 79–99; Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 110–12. 22. “Übersicht vom 10. Juni 1879,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:19, 25. 23. BLHA Rep. 2A I P, Nr. 796 (Regierung Potsdam Präsidialregistratur Politische Bewegungen, Vereine), “Berlin, 21 July 1879”; GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a, Nr. 10033 ( Justizministerium Abteilung für Strafrecht Anarchismus, 1850–1905 [1931] Majestätsbeleidigung), 19–22. A file from the state prosecutor in Hanover against anarchists distributing Freiheit, 3–41, includes a detailed enumeration of which issues were found in what quantities, and the insults against the kaiser, Bismarck, and others found in them. See also GStAPK I. HA Rep 84a, Nr. 10038 (Untersuchung gegen vier Anarchisten . . .), 45–49 (against Wolfgang Wunderlich and August Kieter). A 16-page hand-copied collection of Freiheit articles from January to July 1879 that the political police considered particularly scandalous is in BLHA Rep. 2A I P Nr. 796 (Zusammenstellung auf das Programm die Abonnementsverhältnisse und Vertrieb der Zeitung “Freiheit”). 24. BLHA Rep. 30B (Polizei-Präsidium Potsdam), Nr. 230, 17–20, 28, 107, 126, 161, 284, 293, 305; GStAPK I. HA Rep 84a, Nr. 10036 (Untersuchung gegen Josef Breuder . . .), 32e–32f. 25. BLHA Rep 30B, Nr. 231, 128, 132; Nr. 232, 16, 129–30, 164, 245, 316–17; Nr. 233, 33, 102, 131.
26. “Übersicht vom 29. Dezember 1879,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:33. 27. Classenkampf, vol. 1 of Sociale Fragen und Antworten (Bremen: Nordwestdeutscher Volksschriften-Verlag, [1878]), 10. 28. VDR 4.3, 1880, Anlage 7:19. 29. Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 318. 30. BLHA Rep. 30B (Polizei-Präsidium Potsdam), Nr. 230, Berlin, 31 August 1881, 315. 31. VDR 4.3, 6 March 1880, 284–85. 32. VDR 4.3, 1880, Anlage 26:152. 33. “Übersicht vom 10. Juni 1880,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:48. 34. VDR 4.3, 6 March 1880, 297–99, 299–300. 35. Ibid., 307–8. 36. Ibid., 304–5. 37. Ibid., 280; see also VDR 4.4, 30 March 1881, 617. 38. VDR 4.3, 4 May 1880, 1152. 39. VDR 4.3, 6 March 1880, 294. 40. Ibid., 295–96. 41. VDR 4.3, 4 May 1880, 1163–64. 42. VDR 4.3, 6 March 1880, 306. 43. Ibid., 291–93. 44. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 124. 45. VDR 4.3, 4 May 1880, 1167–68. 46. “Ein offenes Wort an das deutsche Proletariat,” Freiheit, 31 July 1880, reproduced in

240

NOTES TO PAGES 79–83

Günter Bers, Wilhelm Hasselmann, 1844–1916: Sozialrevolutionärer Agitator und Abgeordneter des Deutschen Reichstages (Cologne: Einhorn, 1973), 160. 47. On the centrality of discipline to Social Democrats, see Lidtke, The Alternative Culture, 51–52; Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 50; Adelheid von Saldern, “Latent Reformism and Socialist Utopianism: The SPD in Göttingen, 1890 to 1920,” in Barclay and Weitz, Between Reform and Revolution, 207. 48. “In Sachen der ‘Freiheit,’” Der Sozialdemokrat, no. 7, 15 February 1880, 2. 49. Ignaz Auer et al., “An unsere Parteigenossen!” Der Sozialdemokrat, 27 June 1880, 2. 50. “Ein Austritt aus der Partei,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 16 May 1880, 2. 51. Auer et al., “An unsere Parteigenossen!” 1. 52. “Ein Austritt aus der Partei,” 2. 53. Auer et al., “An unsere Parteigenossen!” 1. 54. Ignaz Auer, Von Gotha bis Wyden: Vortrag gehalten zu Berlin am 30. Mai 1900 (Berlin: Socialistischen Monatshefte, 1901), 16. 55. Auer et al., “An unsere Parteigenossen!” 2. 56. Ursula Herrmann et al., eds., Die Kongresse der Sozialistischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands unter dem Sozialistengesetz (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1980), 31–37. The “Protokoll der Nachmittagssitzung am 22. August (1880)” was taken up largely with the question of Hasselmann’s and Most’s expulsions. 57. Herrmann et al., Die Kongresse, 41. 58. Ibid., 38, 38–43, 44–45. 59. “Übersicht vom 31. Dezember 1880,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:65–67. 60. Johann Most, “Endlich!” Freiheit, 19 March 1881. 61. Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre, 122–23; Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 127. 62. “Vor dem Abgrunde I,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 74, 27 March 1881, 1. 63. VDR 4.4, 30 March 1881, 616–17. 64. Ibid., 620, 623. 65. Ibid., 615–16, 625, 627–28, 619. 66. Ibid., 631–32. See also German Conservative Albrecht von Schlieckmann (VDR 4.4, 31 March 1881, 662). 67. VDR 4.4, 30 March 1881, 632–33. Hans Blum, Das Deutsche Reich zur Zeit Bismarcks: Politische Geschichte von 1871 bis 1890 (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1893), 507, among others, cited Puttkamer’s inaccurate quotation of the Wyden Congress declaration. 68. VDR 4.4, 30 March 1881, 632–37. The article cited was “Verschwörung oder Revolution,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 20 February 1881, 1. For similar charges, see also Carl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg (VDR 4.4, 31 March 1881, 651). 69. “Die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Social-Demokratie,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 78, 1 April 1881, 1. 70. VDR 4.4, 31 March 1881, 654–56.

NOTES TO PAGES 83–88

241

71. Ibid., 658–60. 72. Ibid., 646–49. 73. “Der Kampf gegen die Sozialdemokratie,” Germania, no. 73, 31 March 1881, 1. 74. “Die sozialdemokratische Bewegung,” Germania, no. 49, 2 March 1881, 1. 75. “Wochen-Rundschau,” Germania, no. 52, 5 March 1881, 1. 76. “Die internationale Repression des politischen Mordes,” Germania, no. 74, 1 April 1881, 1. 77. VDR 5.1, 1881–1882, Anlage 14:29–31 (“Rechenschaft über die Anordnungen gegen die Sozialdemokratie”). 78. VDR 5.1 (1881–1882), Anlage 21:82 (“Rechenschaft über die Anordnungen gegen die Sozialdemokratie”). 79. VDR 5.1, 10 December 1881, 296–97. 80. Ibid., 299. 81. Ibid., 316, 317. 82. Ibid., 313–14, 322–23. 83. Ibid., 315–16. 84. Often such alliances involved supporters of parties with some constituent overlap, such as Progressives and Social Democrats, voting for each other’s candidates, but in some cases, less intuitive outcomes occurred. For example, conservative leaders might urge their followers to throw their weight behind a Social Democrat to deny a representative of the hated Progressives a seat in the Reichstag, figuring that it would be less damaging to add one member to the small Social Democratic Fraktion. 85. Goodrich, “On the Road to Wyden,” 76n21. 86. IISG (International Institute of Social History), Eduard Bernstein Papers, A135, Eduard Bernstein to August Bebel, 20 October 1898, 2. 87. Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 141, 144. Thomas’s book is an exhaustive study of the influence on Marx’s thinking of his constant bitter clashes with anarchists. 88. Karl Marx, “After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 543, 547. This conspectus was produced in 1874–1875. 89. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 498–99. 90. Though most of the non-anarchist competitors of Marxism did not warrant their own books, Marx and Engels’s writings are strewn with swipes at socialists such as Karl Grün, Wilhelm Weitling, and Moses Hess, and the towering figure of early German socialism, Ferdinand Lassalle. 91. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 683. 92. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling (1880; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1935), 36, 44. 93. Hermann Greulich, Der Staat vom sozialdemokratischen Standpunkte aus: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit den “Anarchisten” (Zurich: Volksbuchhandlung, 1877). See, for instance, Der

242

NOTES TO PAGES 89–92

Sozialdemokrat (Probenummer [Sample number]), 28 October 1879, where the text was offered for sale for 25 pfennig. Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was also continuously available from its publication in 1880. Greulich’s book was reprinted in 1912, attesting to anarchism’s continued importance as a foil for Socialist self-definition. 94. Greulich, Der Staat, 8, 15–16, 21. 95. Leo [Eduard Bernstein], “Bemerkungen eines Sozialdemokraten über den Anarchismus,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 31 October 1880, 2. 96. Leo, “Bemerkungen eines Sozialdemokraten über den Anarchismus,” part 2, Der Sozialdemokrat, 7 November 1880, 2–3. Bernstein took over editorial duties at the paper a few months later, in January 1881. That the growing attention to anarchism was not simply a product of Bernstein’s editorial whims is clear from the simultaneous growth of anti-anarchist rhetoric in Reichstag speeches. 97. Leo, “Sozialismus und Anarchismus,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 18 January 1883, 1; Leo, “Kommunismus oder Anarchie,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 15 November 1883, 1. 98. A. B. C. [Robert Seidel], “Sozialismus, individuelle Freiheit und Gleichheit,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 1 September 1881, 1. 99. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion zur ersten Reichstagswahl unter dem Sozialistengesetz (27. Oktober 1881),” in Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Reichstag: Tätigkeitsbe­ richte und Wahlaufrufe aus den Jahren 1871 bis 1893 (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1909), 192. 100. Liebknecht, “On the Political Position,” 161. 101. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion” (1881), 217. 102. “Warum Wir Wählen!” Der Sozialdemokrat, 29 September 1881, 1. 103. VDR 5.1, 10 December 1881, 304–5, 304, 297. 104. Pracht, Parlamentarismus, 189–94; Jonathan Sperber, “The Social Democratic Electorate in Imperial Germany,” in Barclay and Weitz, Between Reform and Revolution, 168. 105. VDR 4.1, 17 September 1878, 79. 106. A. B. C., “Sozialismus, individuelle Freiheit und Gleichheit,” 1. 107. “Sozialpolitisches Rundschau: Oesterreich,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 10 August 1882, 1. See VDR 4.4, 31 March 1881, 660, for Auer’s condemnation of Most for rejecting voting. 108. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion” (1881), 200. 109. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion zur zweiten Reichstagswahl unter dem Sozialistengesetz (28. Oktober 1884),” in Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Reichstag, 247. 110. VDR 5.1, 10 December 1881, 304–5, 300. 111. “Unsere Prinzipien,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 29 March 1883, 1. 112. Josef Dietzgen, “Die Moster, Hasselmänner, Anarchisten und Nihilisten,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 21 November 1880, 1. 113. “Brutalität und Revolution,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 8 November 1883, 1. 114. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion” (1881), 210–11. 115. “Die Situation in Oesterreich,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 21 February 1884, 1. 116. See Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 33, on Social Democratic rejections of dueling, and 37–39 on the concept of Standesehre. McAleer’s examination of the duel is illuminating concerning aristocratic and grand-bourgeois conceptions of honor, but I find the leap to the claim that such no-

NOTES TO PAGES 92–95

243

tions infused the public culture of the empire more broadly implausible. See 203–8. 117. Thomas Lindenberger, Straßenpolitik: Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1995), 299–300, discusses the importance of the “sense of honor” in workers’ street politics. 118. Ann Goldberg, Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11. 119. Greulich, Der Staat, 5, 31. 120. Ibid., 17, 31. 121. “Revolution oder Reform?” part 2, Der Sozialdemokrat, 7 November 1880, 2. 122. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion” (1881), 210–13. 123. “Brutalität und Revolution,” 1; “Revolution oder Reform?” part 2, Der Sozialdemokrat, 7 November 1880, 1. 124. Selim. [Wilhelm Liebknecht], “Das rothe Gespenst,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 14 September 1882, 1. The term Lenin used to describe anarchism is usually translated as “infantile disorder” (or Kinderkrankheit in German). See Vladimir I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder: A Popular Essay in Marxian Strategy and Tactics (New York: International Publishers, 1972). 125. Selim., “Das rothe Gespenst,” 1; Auer et al., “An unsere Parteigenossen!” 2; Symmachos [Karl Kautsky], “Freiheit,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 8 September 1881, 1. 126. “Die Situation in Oesterreich,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 21 February 1884, 1. 127. “Was wir nicht thun können und was wir thun sollen,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 16 August 1883, 1. 128. Liebknecht, “On the Political Position,” 156. 129. Wilhelm Liebknecht, “Anarchism, Social Democracy, and Revolutionary Tactics,” in Pelz, Wilhelm Liebknecht, 264. Even Ferdinand Lassalle, proponent of democracy and erstwhile acquaintance of Bismarck, appeared in police files in the 1850s and 1860s as the head of an Umsturzpartei. See Beck, “Working-Class Politics,” 68. 130. Liebknecht, “Anarchism,” 266, 275. 131. “Was wir nicht thun können und was wir thun sollen,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 16 August 1883, 1. 132. “Sozialpolitische Rundschau,” report from the Sozialisten der Deutschen-ArbeiterBildungs-Vereine in Bern, Der Sozialdemokrat, 30 August 1883, 3. 133. Der Sozialdemokrat, 3 November 1881, 1. 134. For example, “Sozialpolitische Rundschau,” Oesterreich, Der Sozialdemokrat, 15 March 1883, 3. 135. Protokoll über den Kongress der deutschen Sozialdemokratie in Kopenhagen (Zurich: Schweizerische Genossenschaftsbuchdruckerei, 1883), 4. 136. “Sozialpolitische Rundschau,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 25 August 1881, 2. 137. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion” (1881), 210. 138. VDR 5.4, 21 March 1884, 190–91. 139. “Attentate und Attentate,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 16 August 1883, 2. The palm dates to pre-Christian times as a symbol of victory. 140. Many German authors who wrote on anarchism found a link between the savagery

244

NOTES TO PAGES 95–98

of anarchist tactics and the national origins of two of its chief proponents, the Russians Bakunin and Kropotkin. A different racialist interpretation of anarchism focused on its success among the “hot-blooded” southern Europeans in Italy and Spain. 141. Liebknecht, “Anarchism,” 275. 142. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 141. 143. VDR 5.2, 13 December 1882, 763–64. 144. Numerous studies on the policing of Social Democracy under the Socialist Law exist. For the Socialist perspective, see Auer, Nach Zehn Jahren, and Eugen Ernst, Polizeispitzeleien und Ausnahmegesetze, 1878–1910: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Bekämpfung der Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1911). The most detailed modern study of the political police and their tactics is Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer. 145. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion” (1881), 213, 215, 216. Auer (VDR 4.4, 30 March 1881, 618) and Hasenclever (VDR 5.1, 10 December 1881, 298, 302) both addressed this theme before the Reichstag as well. 146. Protokoll über den Kongress, 3. 147. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 136. 148. “Die Situation in Oesterreich,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 21 February 1884, 1. 149. Liebknecht, “Anarchism,” 258. 150. VDR 4.3, 6 March 1880, 280. 151. Der Sozialdemokrat, 10 August 1882, 1. 152. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion” (1881), 209–10. Some anarchists in fact agreed with this analysis. In a 1902 pamphlet lionizing the anarchist August Reinsdorf, August Reins­dorf und die Niederwald-Verschwörung (Berlin: “Neues Leben,” 1902), Max Schütte made the same argument concerning the German anarchist movement’s origins: “Under the law and in part because of it, anarchism, which until then had played scarcely any role to speak of, became a power” (3). After the attentats, he wrote, the “Social Democrats defended themselves energetically against all blame, while Reinsdorf and comrades openly championed revolution and regicide,” leading to their increased popularity (5). 153. IISG, Karl Kautsky Papers (1789–1996), Nr. 2098, 11 (“Wie man Anarchisten züchtet” [1884]). See also A115, 1–5 (“Johann Most” [1924]), for Kautsky’s reminiscences about the development of Most, whom he called a “child of the Socialist Law,” into an anarchist. 154. For Bebel’s speech, see VDR 4.3, 6 March 1880, 280; for Auer’s speech, see VDR 4.4, 30 March 1881, 617. 155. VDR 5.1, 10 December 1881, 317–18. 156. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, 288–95, 302–3. Though Lieske was convicted of Rumpf ’s murder, Carlson (ibid., 309) considers the case inconclusive. 157. “Zum Dynamit-Prozeß ‘Reinsdorf und Genossen,’” Der Sozialdemokrat, 1 January 1885, 1. 158. “Der neueste Hochverraths-Proceß und das Sozialistengesetz,” Neueste Mittheilungen 3, no. 133, 28 December 1884, 2.

NOTES TO PAGES 98–104

245

159. Karl Braun-Wiesbaden, “Das Attentat auf dem Niederwald und der Hochverrathsproceß vor dem Reichsgericht,” Nord und Süd 33 (April–June 1885): 70. 160. “Politische Correspondenz,” Preußische Jahrbücher 55, no. 1 (1885): 97–98. 161. O. M., “Das Verbrechen am Niederwald,” Preußische Jahrbücher 55, no. 2 (1885): 116, 118–21, 123. 162. “Übersicht vom 15. Juni 1881,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:89, 92, 96. 163. “Übersicht vom 12. Januar 1882,” ibid., 1:120; “Übersicht vom 30. Januar 1883,” ibid., 158–59. 164. “Übersicht vom 4. März 1884,” ibid., 1:222; even the generally circumspect Police President Windheim repeated this idea. See “Übersicht vom 15. Januar 1898,” ibid., 2:80, which contains almost identical language. 165. “Übersicht vom 6. Juli 1885,” ibid., 1:272. 166. According to Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, Georg Zacher’s later career included a stint as director of the Imperial Statistics Office. Zacher’s continued interest in social problems can be seen in his later writings: in 1900 he produced a comparative survey of workers’ insurance programs in different countries, which was translated into English and French, and in 1919 he published an article on unemployment insurance. 167. Georg Zacher, Die Rothe Internationale, 2nd ed. (Berlin: William Hertz, 1884), 12. 168. Ibid., 22–23. 169. Ibid., 47. 170. Julian Schmidt, “Politische Correspondenz: Die rothe Internationale,” Preußische Jahr­bücher 53, no. 5 (1884): 503–4. 171. E. Peterson, “Die Bekämpfung der Sozialdemokratie,” Preußische Jahrbücher 55, no. 5 (1884): 396–400, 408, 417. 172. “Übersicht vom 6. Juli 1885,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:267. For similar statements, see “Übersicht vom 14. Juni 1882,” ibid., 1:134; “Übersicht vom 1. November 1884,” ibid., 1:248. 173. “Übersicht vom 30. Januar 1883,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:166–68. 174. See Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, especially 129–54, for a thorough account of the radical/moderate split within the Social Democratic leadership of the 1880s and how the radicals distinguished themselves clearly from anarchists. 175. “Übersicht vom 30. Juli 1883,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:197; “Übersicht vom 4. März 1884,” ibid., 1:221. 176. VDR 5.4, 1884, Anlage 24:422. 177. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 138; “Die Gefahren und Nachteile des Socialist­ engesetzes,” Germania, no. 74, 29 March 1884, 1. 178. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 139. 179. “Rechtsgesetz und polizeiliches Ausnahmegesetz,” Germania, no. 66, 19 March 1884, 1. 180. “Zur weiteren Erwägung,” Germania, no. 67, 20 March 1884, 1. Other examples

246

NOTES TO PAGES 104–9

include “Zur Discussion über das Socialistengesetz,” Germania, no. 90, 19 April 1884, 1. 181. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 136–37; Zucker, “Ludwig Bamberger and the Crisis,” 276. 182. VDR 5.4, 1884, Anlage 22:414–17 (“Rechenschaft über die Anordnung gegen die Sozialdemokratie”). Most’s pamphlet was Johann Most, Die Gottes-Pest (New York: Freiheit, 1883). 183. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 136, 138, 139, 140. The 1884 debate transcript, like many others, was reprinted by the Social Democrats: Die Sozialdemokratie vor dem Deutschen Reichstage: Erste Lesung des Sozialisten-Gesetzes, nach dem amtlichen Stenogramm (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1884). 184. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 140. 185. Ibid., 138. 186. Ibid., 149–50. 187. VDR 5.4, 9 May 1884, 487. 188. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 150. This theme of an unholy alliance between anarchists and conservatives achieved its most famous literary expression in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). 189. VDR 5.4, 21 March 1884, 188–90. 190. Ibid., 190, 192. 191. Ibid., 174. 192. Ibid., 182. 193. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 182. 194. VDR 5.4, 8 May 1884, 445–46. 195. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 159–60, 166. 196. VDR 5.4, 8 May 1884, 459. 197. “Eine schwere Verantwortlichkeit in Sachen des Socialistengesetzes,” Germania, no. 76, 1 April 1884, 1. See also “Ueber die Handhabung des Socialistengesetzes,” Germania, no. 82, 8 April 1884, 1. 198. “Der Antrag Windthorst zum Socialistengesetz,” Germania, no. 93, 23 April 1884, 1. 199. “Zur Discussion über das Socialistengesetz,” Germania, no. 90, 19 April 1884, 1. 200. “Wesentliche Klärungen in Sachen des Socialistengesetzes,” Germania, no. 98, 29 April 1884, 1. 201. “Officiöse Flunkereien in Sachen des Socialistengesetzes,” Germania, no. 101, 2 May 1884, 1. 202. VDR 5.4, 21 March 1884, 187. 203. Ibid., 192–93. 204. VDR 5.4, 8 May 1884, 465–67. 205. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 154, 157. 206. Ibid., 158. 207. VDR 5.4, 9 May 1884, 476–77. 208. VDR 5.4, 21 March 1884, 178–79. 209. VDR 5.4, 9 May 1884, 449–52. 210. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 154.

NOTES TO PAGES 109–16

247

211. VDR 5.4, 9 May 1884, 476. 212. VDR 5.4, 21 March 1884, 186. 213. VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 162–64. 214. Ibid., 143–44. 215. VDR 5.4, 8 May 1884, 462–63, 460–61. 216. “Professor Mommsen über das Sozialistengesetz,” National-Zeitung, 16 April 1884, morning ed., 1. 217. VDR 5.4, 9 May 1884, 484. 218. “Reichstags-Nachrichten,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 70, 22 March 1884, 1. 219. “Zum Socialdemokraten-Gesetz,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 71, 23 March 1884, 1. 220. “Die Debatte über das Sozialistengesetz,” Provinzial-Correspondenz, no. 13, 26 March 1884, 1. 221. “Die Sozialdemokratie und das Sozialistengesetz,” Provinzial-Correspondenz, no. 15, 9 April 1884, 1. 222. “Das Sozialistengesetz,” National-Zeitung, 6 May 1884, evening ed., 1. See also Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 153–60. 223. Zucker, “Ludwig Bamberger and the Crisis,” 276–77, 279. 224. Kladderadatsch 37, no. 10, 2 March 1884, first supplement, 1. 225. Kladderadatsch 37, no. 17, 13 April 1884, 68. 226. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 153–56. 227. Zucker, “Ludwig Bamberger and the Crisis,” 283. 228. “Die Verlängerung des Sozialistengesetzes,” Provinzial-Correspondenz, no. 20, 14 May 1884, 1. 229. VDR 5.4, 1884, Anlage 84:753–54. 230. VDR 5.4, 13 May 1884, 580. 231. Ibid. 232. VDR 5.4, 15 May 1884, 630–31, 633. 233. “Aufruf der Sozialistischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands vom September 1884 zum Reichstagswahl,” in Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 3, März 1871–April 1898 (Berlin: Dietz, 1974), 214, 216. 234. Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters, 43–44.

4 1. “The Kaiser Speaks from the Balcony of the Royal Palace (August 1, 1914),” in German History in Documents and Images, vol. 5, Wilhelmine Germany and the First World War, 1890–1918, . 2. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 166. 3. VDR 6.2, 1885–1886, Anlage 17:77 (“Rechenschaft über die Anordnungen gegen die Sozialdemokratie”).

248

NOTES TO PAGES 116–20

4. VDR 6.2, 1885–1886, Anlage 143:665. 5. VDR 6.2, 19 February 1886, 1141–42. 6. VDR 6.2, 30 March 1886, 1742. See also German Conservative Otto von Helldorff (ibid., 1742–43). 7. VDR 6.2, 19 February 1886, 1142. Puttkamer’s joke had roots in reality. Bebel and Sonnemann did grow to be friends over their years as Reichstag colleagues, as can be seen from a 1901 letter in which Sonnemann praised a Vorwärts article he had recently read, apologized for not being able to visit Bebel when he was last in Berlin, and closed with greetings to Bebel’s wife. See Sonnemann to Bebel, 17 October 1901 (IISG, August Bebel Papers, Nr. 162). As early as 1869, Sonnemann also corresponded with Liebknecht (IISG, Wilhelm Liebknecht Papers [1842–] 1859–1900 [–1938], Nr. 307). 8. “Angehörigen beider konservativen Parteien,” Conservatives Handbuch, 3rd revised and expanded edition (Berlin: Hermann Walther, 1898), 421–22. 9. VDR 6.2, 19 February 1886, 1152–53. 10. VDR 6.2, 31 March 1886, 1766. 11. VDR 6.2, 30 March 1886, 1757. 12. VDR 6.2, 31 March 1886, 1771. 13. VDR 6.2, 18 February 1886, 1102–25. 14. Der Sozialdemokrat, 27 July 1882, 1. Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 156, notes that Marx and Engels described the symbiotic relationship between police and revolutionary conspirators as early as 1850. The entire section “Politische Polizei und Anarchisten” (153–64) addresses this police-conspirator dynamic. 15. VDR 4.3, 6 March 1880, 280; VDR 4.4, 30 March 1881, 617. 16. “Sozialpolitische Rundschau,” Deutschland, Der Sozialdemokrat, 13 March 1881, 2. 17. VDR 5.2, 14 December 1882, 791, 794. Puttkamer made the statement, “Most ist mir lieber als Sie [I prefer Most to you]” in an earlier Reichstag speech. See also Ernst, Polizeispitzeleien, 22. 18. See Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 23–25, 263–71; Ernst, Polizeispitzeleien, 61–93; Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 254. 19. Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 92–95. 20. See Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 95–101, for an account of Wolf ’s attempts to blackmail Madai, and his alleged suicide while in police custody. The Social Democrats pointed to Wolf ’s suspicious death to further impugn the honor of the political police. 21. VDR 5.2, 13 December 1882, 760. 22. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, 289–99. 23. Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 184–87; Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 242–43; VDR 6.2, 18 February 1886, 1112–13. 24. Liebknecht, “Anarchism,” 275. Der wahre Jacob, no. 109 (1890), 866–67, illustrated an article on the end of the Socialist Law (“Auch ein Opfer des Sozialistengesetzes”) with a satirical image of a statue commemorating the Socialist Law era sacrifices of Ihring-Mahlow, Schröder, Haupt, and other police spies.

NOTES TO PAGES 120–24

249

25. Ernst, Polizeispitzeleien, 153. Numerous studies on the policing of Social Democracy under the Socialist Law exist. Ernst and Auer, Nach Zehn Jahren, recount this from a Socialist perspective, while the most detailed modern study is Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer. 26. VDR 6.2, 18 February 1886, 1129–31. 27. VDR 6.2, 24 March 1886, 1633. 28. VDR 6.2, 2 April 1886, 1842. 29. Warum verfolgt man uns! Zur Naturgeschichte des Sozialistengesetzes. Puttkamer und den Puttkämerlingen gewidmet (Zurich, 1886), 7, 9–13. 30. VDR 6.2, 26 June 1886, 2185. For other instances of the phrase, “The Socialist Law is the father of anarchism,” see Bebel, VDR 5.4, 20 March 1884, 149; Singer, VDR 7.2, 27 January 1888, 531. 31. VDR 6.2, 26 June 1886, 2185. 32. Ibid. 33. “Aufruf der sozialdemokratischen Fraktion zur dritten Reichstagswahl unter dem Sozialistengesetz (21. Februar 1887),” in Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Reichstag, 275–76. All italics in quotations indicate original emphasis, which was represented either by bold font or expanded character spacing. 34. VDR 6.2, 31 March 1886, 1768–70. 35. C. Radenhausen, Die Sozialdemokratie: Ihre Wahrheiten und ihre Irrtümer (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1885), 100–101. 36. VDR 6.2, 30 March 1886, 1738–39. 37. Quoted in Anderson, Windthorst, 209. See the entire section, “Windthorst and Social Democracy” (ibid., 207–18) on his commitment to open and democratic practice. 38. VDR 6.2, 30 March 1886, 1745–46. 39. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 243–44. 40. The best of the many accounts of the Haymarket Affair is Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). All eight men always maintained their innocence. 41. “Aus Amerika,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 20 May 1886, 1; quoted (and translated) in Sun, “Misguided Martyrdom,” 58. 42. “Sozialpolitische Rundschau,” Der Sozialdemokrat, 20 May 1886, 3. 43. Verhandlungen des Parteitags der deutschen Sozialdemokratie in St. Gallen: Abgehalten vom 2. bis 6. Oktober 1887 (Zurich: Hottigen), 42–43. 44. Ibid., 41–42. 45. VDR 7.2, 27 January 1888, 547–48. German Conservative Otto von Helldorff echoed these accusations concerning the St. Gallen Congress the following day: VDR 7.2, 30 January 1888, 600. 46. VDR 7.2, 17 February 1888, 977. 47. GStAPK I, HA Rep. 77, Tit. 500, Nr. 47, Bd. 2 (Systematische Überwachung der revolutionären Parteien aller Staaten durch Organisation des Nachrichtenwesens [3. Feb 1885–6. Nov 1888]), 102, 110–11.

250

NOTES TO PAGES 124–28

48. VDR 7.2, 27 January 1888, 547–48. 49. “Übersicht vom 24. Juli 1886,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:291, 293–94, 299. 50. BAB (Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde) R3001/5738 (Reichsjustizministerium Antwortschreiben der Bundesregierungen auf das Cirkular vom 25. December 1886—No. 36896—betreff. das Einschreiten gegen Anarchisten oder Socialdemokraten wegen Vertreibung verbote­ner Schriften u. a., February 1887–), no. 445, no. 112; LAB (Landesarchiv Berlin) A Pr Br Rep 30 Nr. 11662 (Die politische Zustände in Magdeburg [1883–1888]), 178–81. 51. Socialismus und Anarchismus in Europa und Nordamerika während der Jahre 1883 bis 1886: Nach amtlichen Quellen (Berlin: Richard Wilhelmi, 1887), 12, 24–25. 52. Socialismus und Anarchismus, 37, 40. See “Übersicht vom 6. Juli 1885,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:272, quoted in chapter 3. 53. Rudolf Emil Martin, Der Anarchismus und seine Träger: Enthüllungen aus dem Lager der Anarchisten (Berlin: Neufeld & Mehring, 1887), 205, 183–85. 54. W. Krieter, Die geheime Organisation der sozialdemokratischen Partei. Nach authoritativen Quellen dargestellt, 3rd ed. (Magdeburg: Albert Rathke, 1887), 46–50. 55. Krieter, Die geheime Organisation, 54–55, 58–59. 56. See Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 78, 81–82, 85–86. Hall, Scandal, 72–88, discusses the Social Democrats’ criticism of “class-based justice” (Klassenjustiz). 57. Martin, Der Anarchismus und seine Träger, 186. 58. Krieter, Die geheime Organisation, 57–59. 59. VDR 7.2, 27 January 1888, 538. For the text of the Social Democrats’ petition, in which they called themselves “declared adversaries of Anarchism,” see IISG, Wilhelm Liebknecht Papers 1845–1900 (1931) [duplicate of RCChIDNI, Moscow], Fond 200, Opis’ 1, Delo 161. 60. VDR 7.2, 30 January 1888, 600. 61. Sheehan, German Liberalism, 202–3, 216–17. 62. Because electoral districts were not reapportioned to reflect population changes, urban Socialist districts continued to expand in population. At the same time, Socialists did not benefit significantly from run-off elections due to the left liberals’ weakness and the Kartell parties’ agreement not to contest districts against each other. See Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 259–60. Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:319n3, 320n8, offer an instructive comparison with the Reichspartei: with 763,128 votes, the Social Democrats significantly exceeded the Reichspartei’s total of 736,789 votes, yet the latter party ended up with 34 deputies, more than three times the number of Social Democrats elected. 63. VDR 7.2, 1887–1888, Anlage 71:388–89. 64. Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 230–37, lists a number of cases of police spies being exposed between 1886 and 1888, covered in Der Sozialdemokrat. 65. VDR 7.2, 27 January 1888, 527–28, 531, 532. See 528–38 for Singer’s catalogue of police involvement in attempts to incite Socialists to violence and cultivate anarchism. 66. VDR 7.2, 30 January 1888, 609–17; VDR 7.2, 17 February 1888, 963–68.

NOTES TO PAGES 128–33

251

67. IISG, Julius Motteler Papers (1863–1906), Nr. 1527/4 (“Wortgetreue Abschriften deren Deutschen Reichstage, gelegentlich der Berathung über die Verlängerung resp. Verschärf­ ung des Socialistengesetzes verlesenen Actenstücke, betreffend die Berliner Polizeiagenten Schröder in Zürich und Haupt in Genf ” [n.p., 1888]). 68. VDR 7.2, 27 January 1888, 544–45. 69. Ibid., 546, 548. 70. VDR 7.2, 13 February 1888, 870. 71. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, vol. 1, A–Atlantiden, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Bibliographischen Instituts, 1888), s.v. “anarchie.” 72. Ibid., vol. 15, Rüböl–Sodawasser, s.vv. “sozialdemokratie,” “sozialismus.” 73. VDR 7.2, 27 January 1888, 553–54, 556–57. 74. Ibid., 559–62, 564. 75. VDR 7.2, 30 January 1888, 619–20. 76. VDR 7.2, 28 January 1888, 572–75, 576. 77. VDR 7.2, 13 February 1888, 874. 78. VDR 7.2, 28 January 1888, 584. 79. Ibid., 590. 80. Though moves in that direction were made, nothing ever came of them. See Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 194–203. 81. Oskar Muser, Sozialistengesetz und Rechtspflege (Theorie und Praxis), 4th ed. (Karls­ ruhe: Handelsdruckerei, 1889), 5. 82. Ludwig Fuld, Die Aufhebung des Socialistengesetzes und die Aenderung des Strafgesetz­ buches (Berlin: Siemenroth und Worms, 1889). 83. Wilhelm Kulemann, Die Sozialdemokratie und deren Bekämpfung: Eine Studie zur Reform des Sozialistengesetzes (Berlin: Carl Heymanns, 1890). 84. “Übersicht vom 22. November 1889,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 1:354, 361. In Richthofen’s 1893 report, the anarchists appeared again as pathetic buffoons, who failed utterly to recruit the Jungen, a group that broke with the Social Democratic Party in 1893, to their own cause (“Übersicht vom 2. September 1893,” 2:15–16). 85. Hans Hermann Freiherr von Berlepsch, Sozialpolitische Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen (Munich: Gladbach, 1925), 21–22, cited as “Retrospective Judgment of a District Governor on the Failure of the Anti-Socialist Law (1925),” trans. Erwin Fink, in German History in Documents and Images, vol. 4, Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany, 1866–1890, . 86. Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen, 204. 87. VDR 7.5, 1889–1890, Anlage 36:74–75 (“Gesetzentwurf, betreffend Abänderung des Sozialistengesetzes”). 88. VDR 7.5, 5 November 1889, 117–23. 89. For Liebknecht’s charges, see ibid., 132, 137; and for Bebel’s discussion of anarchism, see 7 November 1889, 188–89. 90. Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters, 52–53.

252

NOTES TO PAGES 136–41

5 1. “Bismarck und der Anarchismus,” Conservative Correspondenz, no. 73 (12 September 1901), in BAB R8034/II/4962, 84. See “Bismarck über den Anarchismus,” Germania, 30 November 1898, 45–46, for excerpts from Bismarck’s discussions with Lothar Bucher, which were published in 1898 and cited in the conservative press for many years. See also “Prince Bismarck on Anarchists,” The New York Times, 23 September 1898, 10, for an English-language version of his remarks on anarchism. 2. Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 24. 3. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 4–6. 4. Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program), trans. William E. Bohn (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910), 90–91, 188. 5. Groh, Negative Integration, exhaustively describes this doctrine and analyzes its effects on the party. 6. Theodor Barth, Die sozialdemokratische Gedankenwelt (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1890), 1, 68, 70. 7. Georg Gothein, Liberalismus und Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Hilfe, 1904), 9, 15, 28. 8. Krug, “Reports of a Cop,” 280, 281–83. 9. Carl Grünberg, Sozialismus, Kommunismus, Anarchismus ( Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1897), 37, 5. 10. Brockhaus’ Konversationslexikon, vol. 15, Social–Türken, 14th ed. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1894–1897), s.v. “sozialdemokratie.” 11. Brockhaus’ Konversationslexikon, vol. 1, A–Astrabad, 14th ed., s.v. “anarchismus.” 12. BLHA Rep. 2A I P Nr. 799, n.p. (“Uebersicht über den Verlauf der sozialdemokratischen Bewegung in Deutschland seit der Aufhebung des Reichsgesetzes gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie” [2 September 1893]). 13. Kenneth R. Calkins, “The Uses of Utopianism: The Millenarian Dream in Central European Social Democracy before 1914,” Central European History 15, no. 2 ( June 1982): 134–35. The debate was published as Der sozialdemokratische “Zukunftsstaat” (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1893). 14. Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland, Bebel und sein “Zukunftsstaat” vor dem Reichstag (Cologne: J. P. Bachem, 1893), 165–66. 15. Der Sozialdemokrat kommt! Ein Warnungsruf an unser Landvolk. Von einem alten Dorfpfarrer [Heinrich Hansjakob?] (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1890), 3, 5–6, 10, 14. 16. Der Sozialdemokrat kommt! 22–23. 17. Nikolaus Siegfried, Durch Atheismus zum Anarchismus: Ein lehrreiches Bild aus dem Universitätsleben der Gegenwart (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1895), 57. 18. Ibid., 96–97, 99, 103. 19. Ibid., 151. 20. Victor Cathrein, Durch Atheismus zum Anarchismus: Ein lehrreiches Bild aus dem Universitätsleben der Gegenwart, 2nd, expanded edition (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1900). 21. VDR, 6.2, 31 March 1886, 1771.

NOTES TO PAGES 142–44

253

22. August Hohenthal, Der Socialdemokrat in der Westentasche: Ein Wort zur Aufklärung für das deutsche Volk (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1891), 5, 13. 23. Ibid., 26, 36–37. 24. Max Oberbreyer, Das neue Programm der Sozialdemokratie: Ein Taschenbuch für Jedermann (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1891), 5, 7. 25. Leopold von Kunowski, Wird die Sozialdemokratie siegen? Ein Blick in die Zukunft dieser Bewegung (Belhagen & Klasing, 1891), 67–68. The charge that socialism would produce “community of women” went back decades and was even addressed in the Communist Manifesto. 26. Kunowski, Wird die Sozialdemokratie siegen? 137, 68. 27. Blum, Das Deutsche Reich, 506. 28. Constantin Rößler, Die Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Hermann Walther, 1894), 41. 29. BAB R1501/113581/f, 24 (“Die Bekämpfung des Anarchismus,” Hamburger Nachrichten, 12 September 1893, morning ed.). See also 35, “Schutzmaßregeln,” 17 December 1893, morning ed. 30. Lynkeus [pseud. of Erwin Heinrich Bauer, or possibly Josef Popper], Am Rande des Abgrundes: Wider Socialdemokratie und Anarchismus, Ein Mahnruf an Fürsten und Völker (B. Elischer, 1894), 34. The text can be found in BAB R43/1395a (F3), 105. 31. Richard Bach Jensen, Liberty and Order: The Theory and Practice of Italian Public Security Policy, 1848 to the Crisis of the 1890s (New York: Garland, 1991), 86–88. 32. Vorwärts, 23 January 1894, quoted in Georgii Plekhanov, Anarchismus und Sozialismus (Berlin: Expedition des “Vorwärts,” 1894), 77. Some of my translations draw on George Plechanoff [Georgii Plekhanov], Anarchism and Socialism, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1894; repr., Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1920). Other examples include “Attentate und ihre Folgen” and “Denunzianten und Spitzel an der Arbeit” (11 November 1892), “Anarchistischer Wahnsinn” (9 September 1893), “Anarchistische Staatsretter” (12 September 1893), “Der Anarchistengesetz­ ler” (2 December 1893), and “Anarchie und Polizei” (19 December 1893). These and others can be found in BAB R1501/113581/f (Acta betreffend: Ausserungen der Presse über den Anarchismus, 22 Oktober 1886–2 Oktober 1909), 5–23, 37–39, 43–50. 33. BAB R43/1395a (Reichskanzlei Registratur 1900–1918 Akten betreffend Bekämpf­ ung d. Umsturzbewegungen 755/1), 72–76, 93–101; BAB R43/1395b (755/2), 76–84; BAB R1501/113581/g (Bekämpfung und der Stand des Anarchismus im Ausland [ Juni 1901–­Oktober 1904], 1–137 (despite the title, the first 60% of the file focuses on the years 1893–1895); GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 4, Bd. 1 (Innenministerium Anarchie Maßnahmen gegen die anarchistische Bewegung im Auslande [1894–1897]). This attention continued all the way up to the First World War and even beyond: BAB R1501/113581/h (Dezember 1904–Januar 1923). 34. On the range of responses in press clippings, see GStAPK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 4, Bd. 1, 79–81; BAB 1501/113581/f, 19–74. 35. BAB R1501/113581/f, 19, 25 (“Die internationale Bekämpfung des Anarchismus,” Hamburger Korrespondent, 13 December 1893; “Gegen den Anarchismus,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, 23 November 1893. See also 27–30 for additional Hamburger Korrespondent articles on

254

NOTES TO PAGES 144–47

anarchists over the following few days, as well as 65–66, 68–69, for similar calls from this and other papers in the aftermath of Carnot’s murder. The same attitude can be seen in 42, an untitled news item from the Berliner Politische Nachrichten (Berlin Political News), 22 December 1893. 36. Arthur Deval, Der Anarchismus und die Lösung der sozialen Frage im Verhältnis zur Rechts­pflege (Berlin: Cassirer & Danziger, 1894), 5, 6–13, 33, 34. 37. VDR 9.2, 22 January 1894, 792. 38. VDR 9.2, 30 November 1893, 192. See also Walter Wittwer, Vom Sozialistengesetz zur Umsturzvorlage: Zur Politik der preußisch-deutschen Regierung gegen die Arbeiterbewegung 1890 bis 1894 (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR Zentralinstitut für Geschichte, 1983), 210–11, 213, 220, 231. 39. Fritz Hellwig, Carl Ferdinand Freiherr von Stumm-Halberg, 1836–1901 (Heidelberg: Westmark, 1936), 502. 40. Articles from the Hamburger Nachrichten and Berliner Neueste Nachrichten are addressed in “Rezepte gegen den Anarchismus,” Freisinnige Zeitung, 6 July 1894, in BAB R1501/113581/f, 70. See also Lynkeus, Am Rande des Abgrundes, 47–49, for a set of proposed changes to the press, association, and election laws. 41. Woodruff D. Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 193. 42. Ernst Victor Zenker, Der Anarchismus: Kritische Geschichte der anarchistischen Theorie ( Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1895), 187. The pre–World War I political career of Zenker, an eclectic journalist, social theorist, and politician in Vienna, is recounted in John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 181–83. 43. Zenker, Der Anarchismus, 189–90. 44. Ibid., 214–15. 45. Hermann Tobias, Der Anarchismus und die anarchistische Bewegung, Volkswirtschaftliche Zeitfragen 163 (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1899), 40. 46. Emanuel, Anarchismus und seine Heilung (Leipzig: Wilhelm Friedrich, 1894), 7–8. 47. Tobias, Anarchismus, 40–41. 48. On anarchist martyrology, see Blaine McKinley, “‘A Religion of the New Time’: Anarchist Memorials to the Haymarket Martyrs, 1888–1917,” Labor History 28, no. 3 (1987): 386– 400; Elun Gabriel, “Performing Persecution: Witnessing and Martyrdom in the Anarchist Tradition,” Radical History Review 98 (Spring 2007): 34–62. 49. Eduard Loewenthal, Der Anarchismus und das Recht der Schwachen, oder: Die Drei Grundübel unserer Zeit, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Hermann Brieger, 1894), 3. 50. BAB R1501/113581/f, 65 (Berliner Neuste Nachrichten, 29 June 1894 [morning ed.]). 51. Richard Biber, quoted in Albert Weidner, Aus den Tiefen der Berliner Arbeiterbewegung, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Seemann, 1905), 82–83. 52. Weidner, Aus den Tiefen, 81–84, 87. 53. Ernst Victor Zenker, “Der Anarchismus und seine Bekämpfung,” Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 1 (1898): 715. 54. Emanuel, Anarchismus, 38, 44.

NOTES TO PAGES 147–52

255

55. C. Falkenhorst, “Die Anarchisten,” Die Gartenlaube, Halbheft 10 (1892): 309–10, 312. 56. Loewenthal, Der Anarchismus, 15. 57. Tobias, Anarchismus, 41–42. 58. Zenker, “Der Anarchismus und seine Bekämpfung,” 714. For similar claims, see also Zenker, Der Anarchismus, 208, 215; Dr. Steinhammer, Die Wahrheit über den Internationalen Anarchismus. Ein Beitrag zum kritischen Material (Berlin: Hugo Steinitz, 1894), 23–24. 59. Gegen den Anarchismus: Ein Wort an die Regierungen; Von einem Mann aus dem Volke (Berlin: Gustav Müller, 1894), 4–5, 8, 10–12; BAB R1501/113581/i (Acta betreffend Eingaben in Bezug auf die Bekämpfung des Anarchismus, 15 Januar 1894–Märs 1901), 4–5. 60. Rößler, Die Sozialdemokratie, 41, 46. 61. This statement, made in a letter to his cousin Philipp Eulenburg is quoted in Robert W. Lougee, “The Anti-Revolution Bill of 1894 in Wilhelmine Germany,” Central European History 15, no. 3 (September 1982): 227. 62. BAB R43/1395, 6–7, 10–17. 63. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 4, Bd. 1, 106–12, 113. 64. Hellwig, Stumm-Halberg, 502. See also Wittwer, Vom Sozialistengesetz zur Umsturzvorlage, 206. 65. Wittwer, Vom Sozialistengesetz zur Umsturzvorlage, 215–19, describes the contentious internal government debate; Hellwig, Stumm-Halberg, 504–5. 66. BAB R1501/113581/f, 74 (Die Post, 2 October 1894). 67. Lougee, “Anti-Revolution Bill,” 229–32. There were, however, supporters, such as T. Szafranski of Lübeck, who wrote to the government announcing an association of “fatherlandloving men” devoted to fighting “the revolutionary [umstürzlerischen] endeavors of Social Democracy and anarchism” (BAB R43/1395b, 149–54). 68. VDR 9.3, 1894–1895, Anlage 49:226. 69. BAB R3001 6179, 133–38, 140–50, 151–55. 70. VDR 9.3, 17 December 1894, 173–79. 71. VDR 9.3, 9 January 1895, 206–9, 208. 72. VDR 9.3, 8 January 1895, 187. 73. Der wahre Jacob, no. 223 (1895): 1880 (“Umsturzgesetzliches”); no. 224 (1895): 1892 (“Nußknacker-Galerie”); no. 225 (1895): 1896 (“Aus der Umsturz-Kommission”). 74. VDR 9.3, 8 January 1895, 188–90. 75. “Lokales: Ein alter Puttkämerling,” Vorwärts, no. 243, supplement (18 October 1900), in BLHA Rep 2A I Pol. 1053, 120. 76. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 30; BAB R 1501/113581/e (Reichsministerium des Innern Acta betreffend: Die gesetzlichen Maßnahmen zur Bekämpfung des Anarchismus, 20 September 1894–4 März 1918), 8, 9–10. 77. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 1, Adhib. 1, Bd. 1 (Die anarchistische Bewegung in Preußen Berichte der Regierungspräsidenten), 282–88, 189–94, 218–22. 78. BAB R3001 6179 (Materialien zur Beratung der sogen. Umsturzvorlage und die Kommissionsverhandlungen [ Januar–März 1895]), 17–21. 79. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 84a, Nr. 10042 (Untersuchungsverfahren gegen Anarchisten

256

NOTES TO PAGES 152–56

Lambert Hoever, Johannus Westrus u.a. . . .), 1–2; BAB R3001 6179, 23–27, 28–31, 33–36. For other cases (collected for the commission considering the Revolution Bill), see 70–132. 80. “Ein Anarchistennest,” Neueste Mittheilungen, 26 September 1893, 3. 81. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 1, Adhib. 1, Bd. 1, 88–89, 97–98. See also BLHA Rep. 3B I Pol. (Regierung Frankfurt [Oder] Polizeiangelegenheiten Politische Polizei Überwa­ chung der sozialdemokratischen und kommunistischen Bewegung, Anarchisten), Nr. 526, 6–10. 82. BLHA Rep. 2A I P Nr. 799, n.p. (Der Landrath der Kreises Teltow, 19 September 1894). 83. “Ein anarchistisches Klublokal,” Berliner Tageblatt, 3 September 1894, evening ed., in BAB R1501/113581/f, 73. 84. Lougee, “Anti-Revolution Bill,” 233–37, 240. 85. “Politische Wochenübersicht,” Die Nation 12, no. 33, 18 May 1895, 1. 86. Eugen Richter, Politisches ABC-Buch: Ein Lexikon parlamentarischer Zeit- und Streitfragen, 8th revised ed. (Berlin: Fortschritt, Aktiengesellschaft, 1896), 8–9. 87. Eugen Richter, Politisches ABC-Buch: Ein Lexikon parlamentarischer Zeit- und Streit­ fragen, 9th revised ed. (Berlin: Fortschritt, 1898), 8–9; Richter, Politisches ABC-Buch, 8th ed., 422–23. 88. On the perennial, if unrealistic, rumors of a Staatsstreich in the 1880s and 1890s, see Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 245–47. 89. Conservatives Handbuch, 423. 90. “Gegen den ‘Umsturz,’” Vorwärts, 16 September 1898, in BAB R8034/II/4962, 13. See also 4, 6, 12–13, for additional articles from these two Socialist papers from September 14–16. 91. Wilhelm Liebknecht, “Eröffnungsrede auf dem Sozialdemokratischen Parteitag in Stuttgart, 3. Oktober 1898,” in Maßnahmen gegen die Anarchisten im Deutschen Kaiserreich (1871–1918), ed. Dieter Johannes and Andreas W. Hohmann (Frankfurt am Main: Edition AV ’88, 1999), 9. 92. VDR 10.4, 13 December 1898, 56. 93. August Bebel, Attentate und Sozialdemokratie: Nach einer Rede von August Bebel, Gehalten am Mittwoch, den 2. November 1898 zu Berlin, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Expedition der Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1905), 8. 94. Ibid., 2, 5. 95. Verhandlungen des Parteitages, 155, 39–40. See also Wilhelm Blos, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Sozialdemokraten (München: G. Birk, 1919), 2:96–97. 96. Liebknecht, “Eröffnungsrede,” 9. 97. Bebel, Attentate und Sozialdemokratie, 6, 5, 8. 98. VDR 10.5, 15 December 1898, 101. 99. Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 255, 15 September 1898, in BAB R1501/113581/f, 81. 100. “Der Kampf gegen den Anarchismus,” Germania, 15 September 1898, and “An der Wurzel,” Kölnische Volks-Zeitung, 14 September 1898, in BAB R8034/II/4962, 5, 2. 101. “Die neuesten Strafgesetze gegen den Anarchismus,” Kölnische Zeitung, no. 906, 26 September 1898, in BAB R1501/113581/g, 164. 102. VDR 10.4, 13 December 1898, 61. 103. Berliner Tageblatt, 23 September 1898, in BAB R8034/II/4962, 24.

NOTES TO PAGES 156–59

257

104. “Die Bekämpfung des Anarchismus,” Schlesische Zeitung, 8 November 1898, in BAB R8034/II/4962, 37–38. 105. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 1, Adhib. 1, Bd. 2, 51, 58; for other examples, see 41–42, 49, 51, 56, 57–58, 69–70, 74–75, 103. 106. BLHA 3B I Pol. Nr. 526, 20–22. A rare exception is the report from the Teltow district in November 1898, which claimed Social Democrats and anarchists in the district worked “hand in hand” (BLHA 2A I Pol. Nr. 1055, 18). 107. Gerd Fesser, “Von der ‘Zuchthausvorlage’ zum Reichsvereinsgesetz: Staatsorgane, bürgerliche Parteien und Vereinsgesetzgebung im Deutschen Reich, 1899–1906,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte 28 (1983): 112–13. 108. The speech was reported on disapprovingly in “Politische Wochenübersicht,” Die Nation 14, no. 23, 6 March 1897, 342. 109. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 2:714–15. Naumann’s speech at the Berlin protest was published as Die Zuchthausvorlage (Berlin: Hilfe, 1899). Brentano’s pamphlet was Reaktion oder Reform? Gegen die Zuchthausvorlage! (Berlin: Hilfe, 1899). 110. Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 247, makes the point that this represented the third stinging defeat for kaiser-backed anti-socialist legislation in five years, including the “little Socialist Law” defeated in the Prussian House of Deputies elected by the inegalitarian three-class franchise. 111. Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 210, 1 August 1900, in BAB R8034/II/4962, 56. The usual arguments from the various ideological perspectives can be found on 55–81, 87, as well as BAB R1501/113581/f, 112–15. 112. “Eine Konferenz der Anarchisten Deutschlands,” Die Post, no. 6, 5 January 1903, in BAB R8034/II/4963, 16. 113. Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities,” 131. 114. “Anarchismus und Sozialdemokratie,” Hamburger Nachrichten, no. 276, 23 November 1902; “Ein internationales Anarchistengesetz,” Die Post, no. 601, 24 December 1903, in BAB R8034/II/4963, 14, 21. See BAB R8034/II/4963, 23–24, 30, for 1904 Post articles still fervently linking anarchism to Social Democracy. 115. For an example, see “Praktische Vorschläge für ein Anarchisten-Gesetz,” Die Post, no. 474, 12 August 1900, in BAB R1501/113581/f, 99. See 103–9 for articles from the Deutsche Tageszeitung (German Daily News), Kölnische Volks-Zeitung, Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, and Vossische Zeitung on these topics, as well as BAB R8034/II/4962, 68–69, 71; BAB R8034/II/4963, 16. For an account of Secretary Bonaparte’s speech, see “Bonaparte Suggests Whip for Anarchists,” New York Times, 13 August 1906, 1, and BAB R1501/113581/h, 28. 116. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 1, Adhib. 1, Bd. 2, 8, 42–43. 117. Ibid., 49, 50, 53, 57, 67, 83, 102. For the questions included in the Interior Ministry circular, see BLHA 3B I Pol. Nr. 526, 15. 118. VDR 10.5, 15 December 1898, 100. 119. “Übersicht für 1898,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 2:149– 50. 120. “Übersicht für 1899,” in ibid., 2:181.

258

NOTES TO PAGES 159–61

121. “Der individualistische Anarchismus: Ein Gegner der ‘Propaganda der Tat,” Magazin für Literatur 67, no. 39 (30 September 1898), and 41 (15 October 1898), in Gesammelte Auf­sätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte, 1887–1901, by Rudolf Steiner (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner, 1989), 282–83. 122. GStAPK, I. HA Rep 84a, Nr. 10046 (Prüfung von Aufsätzen in den anarchistischen Blättern ‘Sozialist,’ ‘Armer Konrad’ und ‘Neues Leben’ zu dem Attentat auf die Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich auf die Möglichkeit der Strafverfolgung), 4–9. 123. German anarchists involved in agitation, including strikes, in Switzerland were of particular interest to Police President Windheim. See BAB R1501/113581/g, 216–20, 229–33, 269–75. 124. “Übersicht für 1902,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 2:315, 316. 125. “Übersicht für 1904/05,” in ibid., 2:462. 126. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 2 (Die anarchistische Bewegung in den deutschen Bundesstaaten), 33–40, 85–86. 127. GStAPK, I. HA Rep 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 8, Bd. 1 (Maßnahmen gegen die anarchistische Bewegung [1881–1898]), 40, 51–56, 61–67, 73–96, 103–13. Bd. 2 (covering 1898–1899) is almost entirely taken up with information sharing on particular anarchists outside of their country of origin. See also Richthofen’s detailed instructions to police officials in the German states on information sharing on anarchists: BAB R1501/113581/e, 13–15. 128. This conference was followed closely in the German press from its announcement onwards, with representatives of all political positions weighing in. See, for example, BAB R8034/ II/4962, 12–13, 21, 24, 26–27, 30–32, 38, 40–43. 129. Mathieu Deflem, “‘Wild Beasts without Nationality’: The Uncertain Origins of Interpol, 1898–1910,” in Handbook of Transnational Crime and Justice, ed. Philip Reichel (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 279. See also Richard Bach Jensen, “The International Anti-Anarchist Conference of 1898 and the Origins of Interpol,” Journal of Contemporary History 16, no. 2 (1981): 323–47. 130. GStAPK, I. HA Rep 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 9, Bd. 1 (Anarchisten-Album 1899–1906), Bd. 2 (1906–1917). Some regional officials provided even longer, more detailed descriptions of anarchists in their areas of responsibility. See BLHA Rep. 3B I Pol. Nr. 526, Nr. 527. The list from Frankfurt an der Oder peters out after 1901 and ends in 1905. This approach had its detractors, especially among left liberals who argued it was ineffective. See BAB R8034/ II/4962, 9. 131. BAB R1501/113581/g, 260–65. 132. BLHA Rep. 2A I Pol. (Regierung Potsdam Polizei- und Politische Angelegenheiten Politische Polizei Anarchistische Bewegung) Nr. 1053, 20–21, 68–70; Nr. 3558, 27. 133. BLHA Rep. 2A I Pol. Nr. 3558, 44. 134. BLHA Rep. 2A I Pol. Nr. 1054, 64. 135. GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 1, Bd. 1, 213–14. In the end, the gathering was canceled at the last moment because the meeting room was refused to the anarchists.

NOTES TO PAGES 161–64

259

136. BLHA Rep. 2A I Pol. Nr. 1053, 86–88. 137. “Anarchistenschutz,” in “Maßgebliches und Unmaßgebliches,” Die Grenzboten: Zeitschrift für Politik, Literatur und Kunst 56, no. 4 (October 1897): 150; Hamburger Nachrichten, 24 October 1897, part 5, in GStAPK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 8, Bd. 1, 195–96. 138. “Die deutschen Anarchisten,” Die Neue Korrespondenz, 2 July 1901, in BAB R1501/113581/f, 113. 139. Examples of press criticism of anarchist gatherings being forbidden include BLHA Rep. 2A I Pol. Nr. 1053, 96; Nr. 1054, 88. 140. See Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 180–81, on the importance of education in liberals’ self-conception. The widespread challenges of liberal professionals are discussed in Konrad Jarausch, “The Decline of Liberal Professionalism: Reflections on the Social Erosion of German Liberalism, 1867–1933,” in In Search of a Liberal Germany: Studies in the History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present, ed. Konrad Jarausch and Larry Eugene Jones (New York: Berg, 1990): 261–86. Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 13, 82, 123–27, emphasizes how threats to their status led many scholars to express hostility toward mass society and democracy. 141. For example, Ernst Zenker’s work was discussed in the aftermath of Lucheni’s attentat, and Hermann Seuffert was cited in newspapers in September 1900 (BAB R8034/II/4962, 36–37, 63–64, 71, 75). 142. Zenker, Der Anarchismus, v. 143. Wilhelm Eduard Biermann, Anarchismus und Kommunismus: Sechs Volkshochschulvorträge (Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1906), 6–7. See also Walther Borgius, Die Ideenwelt des Anarchismus (Leipzig: Felix Dietrich, 1904), 6; Karl Diehl, Über Sozialismus, Kommunismus und Anarchismus: Zwölf Vorlesungen ( Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1906), 41. 144. Rudolf Stammler, Die Theorie des Anarchismus (Berlin: O. Häring, 1894), 1. Stammler (1856–1938) was an influential enough thinker on law and social science that he earned a booklength critique from Max Weber: see his Critique of Stammler, trans. Guy Oakes (1907; repr., New York: Free Press, 1977). 145. Naum Reichesberg, Sozialismus und Anarchismus (Bern: August Siebert, 1895), unpaginated foreword, 10–11. 146. Steinhammer, Die Wahrheit, 5–6. The government followed the public debate on anarchism, placing this and other pamphlets, along with letters and petitions, into Interior Ministry files. See GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 5 (Eingaben und Broschüren von Privatpersonen zur Bekämpfung des Anarchismus [1894–1902]). The first two-thirds of the file (1–40) includes much material from 1894, becoming spotty thereafter. 147. Andreas Voigt, Die sozialen Utopien: Fünf Vorträge (Leipzig: G. J. Göschen, 1906), 95. 148. Zenker, Der Anarchismus, 210–12. Pursuing a somewhat different logic, businessman and author Albert Bach (writing under the pseudonym A. von der Landeck), in Anarchismus und Kirche, oder Wissenschaft und Monarchie: Unabhängige Gedanken (Berlin: Hermann Walther, 1903), 1, 6–7, saw an elective affinity between anarchism and religious dogma, as both represented

260

NOTES TO PAGES 164–69

extreme opposition to society’s natural development, which was rooted in the rule of law and free trade. In this negative way, the philosophy revealed the harmful and anti-progressive effects of clericalism. 149. Zenker, Der Anarchismus, 212. 150. Tobias, Anarchismus, 37–38. 151. Diehl, Über Sozialismus, Kommunismus und Anarchismus, 65, 66. 152. To illustrate just this point, Diehl, Über Sozialismus, Kommunismus und Anarchismus, 40, told the story of a man who one moment raged against anarchism and then later in the same conversation pronounced his unwillingness to adhere to a law requiring children be vaccinated. 153. Hermann Seuffert, Anarchismus und Strafrecht (Berlin: Otto Liebmann, 1899), 10; Biermann, Anarchismus und Kommunismus, 16–17. 154. Georg Adler, Stirners Anarchistische Sozialtheorie ( Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1907), 35–36. 155. Hegel’s position on the relationship between individual freedom and the duty to obey the state is complex and a subject of ongoing scholarly debate. See Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 156. Quoted in Sheehan, German Liberalism, 189. For a more detailed treatment of leftliberal responses to anarchism, see Elun Gabriel, “The Left Liberal Critique of Anarchism in Imperial Germany,” German Studies Review 33, no. 2 (May 2010): 331–50.

6 1. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 322; Manfred B. Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13. 2. Classic works include Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, which addresses intra-party factionalism in the Socialist Law era; Schorske, German Social Democracy, which focuses on the tensions that led up to the German Communist Party’s founding; and Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). On the post-1890 influx of intellectuals into the Social Democratic movement and their influence on party development, there is Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, which includes much information pertinent to my own study. Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism, addresses the theoretical tensions within Social Democracy through an intellectual biography of the leading revisionist. On the party’s final split, see William A. Pelz, The Spartakusbund and the German Working Class Movement, 1914–1919 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988). 3. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 298. This opinion was voiced by the Berliner Volksblatt on the eve of the elections. 4. “Die sozialdemokratische Wahlagitation (II),” in Gustav Landauer im “Sozialist”: Aufsätze über Kultur, Politik und Utopie (1892–1899), ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (Hyman) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 121.

NOTES TO PAGES 169–73

261

5. Gustav Landauer, “Der Anarchismus in Deutschland,” in Auch die Vergangenheit ist Zukunft: Essays zum Anarchismus, ed. Siegbert Wolf (Frankfurt: Luchterhand, 1989), 53–54. This article was originally published in 1895 in the eclectic cultural periodical Die Zukunft (The Future). 6. Albert Auerbach, Wider die kleinbürgerlich-parlamentarische Sozialreform, für die revolutionäre Sozialdemokratie! (Berlin: Sozialist, n.d.), 22, 29–32, 5. 7. Die Irrlehren und Irrwege der Sozialdemokratie in Deutschland: Eine zeitliche Warnung an die arbeitende Klasse (London: Gruppe “Autonomie,” [c. 1891]), 27. This pamphlet is credited by Max Nettlau, Bibliographie de l’anarchie (Brussels: Bibliothèque des “Temps Nouveaux,” 1897), 160, to Josef Peukert and by the International Institute of Social History to the Italian anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino. 8. Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 12–22. See also Lidtke, The Outlawed Party, 308–9. 9. Despite his distrust of intellectuals, Marx also attacked workers who aspired to the role of intellectuals. In an October 1877 letter to Friedrich Sorge, Marx complained, “The workers themselves, when they, like Herr Most and consorts, give up work and become literati by profession, always do ‘theoretical’ harm and are always ready to fasten themselves to the scatterbrains of the so-called ‘educated’ class.” Quoted in Max Nettlau, Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionäre: Die historische Entwicklung des Anarchismus in den Jahren 1880–1886 (Berlin: ASY-Verlag, 1931), 138–39. 10. IISG, Julius Motteler Papers (1863–1906), Nr. 1769, 17–22. 11. Josef Bloch, “Rundschau: Wissenschaft: Socialwissenschaft,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 8, no. 8 (August 1904): 679. 12. Catilina [ Josef Bloch], “Die anarchistischen Lehren und ihr Verhältniss zum Kommunismus,” Der sozialistische Akademiker 1, no. 24 (December 1895), 476, 477; Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 106–7. 13. A. Hamon, “Der Anarchismus, eine Richtung des Sozialismus?” Der sozialistische Akademiker 2, no. 2 (February 1896), 107; no. 3 (March 1896), 153; no. 4 (April 1896), 242. Hamon previously published a socio-psychological essay on the anarchist character, which appeared as a chapter in the popular French anti-anarchist book of 1894, Félix Dubois’s Le Péril Anarchiste. Dubois’s work appeared in English and German in the same year. 14. Wally Zepler, “Das Individuum im Anarchismus,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 11, no. 10 (19 May 1910): 626, 627. 15. Roman Streltzow, “Pjotr Alexejewitsch Krapotkin,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 19, no. 1 (16 January 1913): 37. 16. Kampffmeyer’s ideological development was observed closely by the political police. In a January 1899 report, the reporter for the Landrat of the Ober-Barnim district of Brandenburg described in some detail Kampffmeyer’s return to the Socialist fold and his break with his former anarchist colleagues: BLHA Rep 2A I Pol. 1053, 28–29. 17. BLHA Rep 2A I Pol. 1053, 87–88, 99–104. The September meeting was shut down by the police once the anarchists began speaking and it was deemed an “anarchist” event. 18. Albert Weidner, “Die Stellung der Anarchisten zu den Wahlen,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 2, no. 6 ( June 1898): 253–57.

262

NOTES TO PAGES 174–78

19. Francesco Saverio Merlino, “Sozialismus und sozialistische Doktrin,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 1, no. 10 (October 1897): 535, 537. 20. Adolf Marreck, “Die Anarchisten und das Wahlrecht,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 2, no. 8 (August 1898): 377, 378. 21. Ladislaus Gumplowicz, “Wandlungen in der anarchistischen Taktik und Doktrin,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 2, no. 7 ( July 1898): 325–27. 22. Gustav Landauer’s contributions included articles on anarchist theory and practice that often made no mention of Social Democracy whatsoever. See, among others, “Die Anarchistenhetze in Spanien,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 1, no. 10 (October 1897): 561–63; “Börne und der Anarchismus,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 3, no. 7 ( July 1899): 353–55. 23. “Sonnemann,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 13, no. 23 (November 1909), 1508. 24. John Henry Mackay, Die Anarchisten, Kulturgemälde aus dem Ende des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Zurich: K. Henckell, 1891), trans. Benjamin R. Tucker as The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: B. R. Tucker, 1891). 25. Eduard Bernstein, “Die soziale Doktrin des Anarchismus,” Die Neue Zeit 10, no. 12 (1891–1892): 359. 26. Bernstein, “Die soziale Doktrin des Anarchismus,” Die Neue Zeit 10, no. 14 (1891– 1892): 421. 27. A. Pannekoek, “Sozialismus und Anarchismus,” Die Neue Zeit 24, no. 26 (1905–1906): 844. 28. Steger, Quest for Evolutionary Socialism, 69. See Schorske, German Social Democracy, 17–18, on the ethical dimension central to Bernstein’s revisionism. 29. In addition to those in Der Sozialdemokrat (see chapter 3) and those discussed here, Bernstein wrote other articles on anarchism and numerous reviews of works by and about anarchists, for example “Einiges über Stirner,” Die Neue Zeit 16, no. 43 (1897–1898): 526–28; review of Max Nettlau, Michael Bakunin: Eine Biographie in Die Neue Zeit 17, no. 12 (1898–1899): 375–77. 30. “Nachklänge zum Lübecker Parteitag,” Die Neue Zeit 20, no. 4 (1902): 102–4. 31. IISG, August Bebel Papers, 1866–1913, 68c ( Josef Bloch to August Bebel, 29 October 1901). 32. Plekhanov, Anarchismus und Sozialismus, 16, 72. “Quintessence” was believed by medieval philosophers to be a fifth element, the substance of heavenly bodies and purer than earth, air, fire, and water. Plekhanov thus likens anarchists to alchemists and other pseudo-scientists of the past. 33. Ibid., 81, 80. 34. Ibid., 72, 82. 35. “Bourgeois-Anarchistisches,” Die Neue Zeit 12, no. 22 (1893–1894): 674. 36. Ibid., 674. 37. Ibid., 675–76. 38. Franz Mehring, “Neue Schriften über Marx,” Die Neue Zeit 31, no. 51 (1912–1913): 990.

NOTES TO PAGES 178–81

263

39. N. Rjasanoff, “Sozialdemokratische Flagge und anarchistische Ware,” Die Neue Zeit 32, no. 5 (1913–1914), 150–61; no. 7, 226–39; no. 8, 265–72; no. 9, 320–33; no. 10, 360–76. On Rjasanoff, including his career as director of Moscow’s Marx-Engels Institute and his death in the Stalinist Great Purge, see “David B. Riazanov,” in Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, ed. Branzo Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitsch, rev. and expanded ed. (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 398. Mehring replied to Rjasanoff ’s articles with a terse rebuff, in which he mocked Rjasanoff for a critique four times as long as the original review. He also pointed out that even Karl Kautsky, the doyen of Social Democratic Marxism, had acknowledged that Marx’s behavior toward Bakunin had not always been exemplary. 40. N. Rjasanoff, “Sozialdemokratische Flagge und anarchistische Ware,” part 1, Die Neue Zeit 32, no. 5 (1913–1914): 150, 151. Rjasanoff had in fact already attacked Bernstein for this, in a 1910 article titled “Marx as Slanderer.” He berated Bernstein for “carelessly” accepting the anarchists’ accusations and challenged the assertion that Marx had behaved in any way ignobly. See N. Rjasanoff, “Marx als Verleumder,” Die Neue Zeit 29, no. 9 (1910–1911): 278–86. 41. N. Rjasanoff, “Sozialdemokratische Flagge und anarchistische Ware,” part 5, Die Neue Zeit 32, no. 10 (1913–1914): 376. Rjasanoff ’s reference was to Ivan Andreevich Krylov’s fable of a pig under an oak that gnaws at the tree’s roots searching for acorns, not comprehending that in so doing it is destroying their source. 42. “Wilhelm Liebknecht, Vorwärts, 15 July 1896,” in Briefwechsel mit Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, ed. and comp. Georg Eckert (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), 486–87. Bimetallists advocated both gold and silver currency backing. 43. Alfred Kuroff, “Der Anarchismus, keine Richtung des Sozialismus,” Der sozialistische Akademiker 2, no. 11 (November 1896): 693, 695, 697–98. 44. Alfred Kuroff, “Anarchistische und sozialistische Moral,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 1, no. 3 (March 1897): 148–49. 45. Alfred Kuroff, “Zur Kritik des Anarchismus,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 2, no. 4 (April 1898): 181. 46. See William Smaldone, “Rudolf Hilferding and the Theoretical Foundations of German Social Democracy, 1902–33,” Central European History 21, no. 3 (September 1988), 276–78; Schorske, German Social Democracy, 36–45. 47. Quoted in Angela Vogel, Der deutsche Anarcho-Syndikalismus: Genese und Theorie einer vergessenen Bewegung (Berlin: Karin Kramer, 1977), 56. 48. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 35. 49. Raphael Friedeberg, Parlamentarismus und Generalstreik, in Wozu noch in die Parlamente? (Reutlingen: Trotzdem, 1978), 63. This conception of the general strike as “myth” was a central theme of Georges Sorel’s 1906 Reflections on Violence. 50. Raphael Friedeberg, Parlamentarismus und Generalstreik (Berlin: Die Einigkeit, 1904), 3, 4. 51. Carl Levy, “Max Weber, Anarchism and Libertarian Culture: Personality Politics and Power Politics,” in Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, ed. Sam Whimster (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 95. See also Schorske, German Social Democracy, 35; Pierson, Marxist

264

NOTES TO PAGES 182–87

Intellectuals, 187–89. Michels’s teacher, Max Weber, also compared the SPD unfavorably to the anarchists, who at least showed revolutionary commitment, in contrast to Socialist leaders’ “lame rhetorical grumbling and complaining, petty reasoning.” See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, trans. Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 107–8. 52. Rosa Luxemburg, “Nachbetrachtungen zum Parteitag,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. G. Adler et al. (Berlin: Dietz, 1972), 1:1:242–44. 53. Luxemburg, “Sozialreform oder Sozialrevolution?” in Gesammelte Werke, 1:1:443–44. 54. Luxemburg, Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften, in Gesammelte Werke, 2:93–94. My translations of a few passages in this text draw on Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike: The Political Party and the Trade Unions and the Junius Pamphlet, trans. Patrick Lavin (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 55. Luxemburg, Massenstreik, 95. 56. Ibid., 97, 96. 57. See, for instance, Luxemburg’s 1910 speech, “Der politische Massenstreik und die Gewerkschaften,” in Gesammelte Werke, 2:467. 58. Luxemburg, Massenstreik, 99–100. 59. Ibid., 95–96. Luxemburg’s charge that the Russian anarchists were associated with bandit activity and the lumpenproletariat were repeated in later speeches and writings. See “Der politische Massenstreik,” 470. 60. Luxemburg, “Der politische Massenstreik,” 469. 61. Luxemburg, Massenstreik, 95–98. 62. Anton Pannekoek, Die taktische Differenzen in der Arbeiterbewegung (Hamburg: Erdmann Dubber, 1909), 41, 43. 63. Ibid., 44, 58, 61. 64. Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 189. 65. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 42–45, 49–53; Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 190–93. 66. See Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 236–39, on Pannekoek’s attempts to theorize “the source and nature of a proletarian socialist consciousness” (236). 67. Wilhelm Herzberg, Sozialdemokratie und Anarchismus (Ludwigshaven am Rhein: Gerisch, 1906), 3–4, 32. 68. Ibid., 21, 24. 69. Ibid., 32. 70. Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 187–89; Schorske, German Social Democracy, 14, 35. 71. Herzberg, Sozialdemokratie und Anarchismus, 32. 72. Ibid., 18, 32. 73. Simon Katzenstein, Der Anarchismus und die Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1908), 5. 74. Luxemburg, Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften (Hamburg: E. Dubber, 1906), quoted in Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 191, 192. See also 190–93, and Schorske, German Social Democracy, 54–58, on Luxemburg’s advocacy of the mass strike.

NOTES TO PAGES 187–91

265

75. Katzenstein, Der Anarchismus, 15. 76. Franz Laufkötter, “Utopistische Ideen im Modernen Sozialismus,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 12, no. 21 (22 October 1908): 1342, 1343. 77. Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 187. See also the whole section on “The Problem of ‘Enthusiasm’” (187–93). 78. Laufkötter, “Utopistische Ideen,” 1345. 79. Georg Stiékloff, “Marx und Bakunin,” part 1, Die Neue Zeit 29, no. 50 (15 September 1911): 844–45, 846. 80. Two years later, Stiékloff expanded these articles into the short book Marx und die Anarchisten (Dresden: Kaden, 1913), in which he described anarchism as a “childhood disease that the workers must survive before they work their way up to class consciousness” (68–69). 81. Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 240–41. 82. Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 196–98. 83. Karl Kautsky, “The Mass Strike,” in Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans. Patrick Goode (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 59, 57. 84. Rosa Luxemburg, “Ermattung oder Kampf?” in Gesammelte Werke, 2:360. 85. Quoted in Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals, 254. 86. For Dieter K. Buse’s positive view of how factionalism was largely overcome, see his “Party Leadership and Mechanisms of Unity: The Crisis of German Social Democracy Reconsidered, 1910–1914,” Journal of Modern History 62, no. 3 (September 1990): 500. Smaldone, “Rudolf Hilferding,” 275–76, also highlights the importance of intellectuals trying to hold the party’s extremes together. 87. By contrast, Schorske, German Social Democracy, emphasized the role of external economic and political pressures in driving the party toward its eventual schism.

7 1. “Übersicht für 1906/7,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 3:80; see also “Übersicht für 1909,” 3:234; “Übersicht für 1911,” 3:414; “Übersicht für 1912,” 3:515. 2. For examples of anarchist anti-election flyers from this era (e.g., “Wählen oder nicht wählen?” or “An die Kommunalwähler der 3. Abtheilung des 15., 26. und 27. Wahlbezirks”), see IISG, Julius Motteler Papers (1863–1906), Nr. 1769, 43–44. 3. GStAPK, I. HA Rep 77, Tit. 2512, Nr. 2, 41–43, 45–46, 47–48, 51–57, 70–74, 75–80. Andreas W. Hohmann and Dieter Johannes, Der Spitzelbericht: Die Anarchistenüberwachung im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Edition AV ’88, 1999), have collected a fascinating selection of local police reports on anarchists, mostly from 1906 and 1907. On the anarchists’ anti-military service agitation, see BLHA Rep 3B I Pol. 526, 78–79. 4. LAB A Br. Pr. Rep. 30 15766 (Polizeipräsidium Berlin Anarchistische Bewegung in der Provinz Sachsen [1910–1917]), 72, 119. See also 90, 97–99, 122, 128, 130–31.

266

NOTES TO PAGES 191–95

5. BLHA Rep 2A I Pol. (Sozialdemokratische Bewegung Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie), Nr. 3554, 340–42. 6. “Übersicht für 1903/4,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 2:375– 77. Most’s pamphlet was Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft: Ein Handbüchlein zur Anleitung betreffend Gebrauches und Herstellung von Nitro-Glycerin, Dynamit, Schiessbaumwolle, Knallquecksilber, Bomben, Brandsätzen, Giften, u.s.w., u.s.w. (New York: Internationalen Zeitungs-Vereins, 1885). 7. “Übersicht für 1904/5,” in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, 2:461. 8. “Übersicht für 1906/7,” ibid., 3:85, 87; “Übersicht für 1908,” 3:157; “Übersicht für 1909,” 3:239; “Übersicht für 1910,” 3:332. 9. “Die deutschen Anarchisten,” Der Tag, no. 194, 18 April 1907, in BAB R8034//II 4963, 79. 10. “Die anarchisten reformieren,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, no. 193, 2 June 1909, in BAB R8034//II 4964, 14–15. See 27, 44–50, 56–57, 92–94. 11. “Besuch bei einem Anarchisten,” Brandenb. Land. Zeitung [Brandenburger Landeszeitung (Brandenburg Rural Newspaper)?], no. 125, 31 May 1912, in BAB R8034//II 4964, 93–94. 12. “Übersicht für 1904/5,” 2:463, and “Übersicht für 1903/4,” 2:377, in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven. 13. “Übersicht für 1910,” 3:330. 14. On general strike agitation, see “Übersicht für 1904/5,” 2:465–67 (with particular focus on Friedeberg’s general strike pamphlet); “Übersicht für 1905/6,” 2:530; “Übersicht für 1906/7,” 3:85; “Übersicht für 1908,” 3:159; Übersicht für 1911,” 3:413. On anti-militarism, see “Übersicht für 1904/5,” 2:462–63; “Übersicht für 1905/6,” 2:530; “Übersicht für 1906/7,” 3:78, 85; “Übersicht für 1908,” 3:159; “Übersicht für 1909,” 3:239. 15. “Übersicht für 1905/6,” 2:530. 16. “Übersicht für 1906/7,” 3:78. 17. “Übersicht für 1908,” 3:159. For examples of the anarchists’ attempted incursions into the trade unions, see “An die gewerkschaftlich organiserte Arbeiterschaft Deutschlands,” “Aussperrung und Solidaritätsstreik,” IISG, Julius Motteler Papers 1863–1906, Nr. 1769, 39, 40–41. 18. “Übersicht für 1909,” 3:240–41. 19. “Übersicht für 1906/7,” 3:81; “Übersicht für 1910,” 3:329. 20. “Übersicht für 1911,” 3:415. The Landauer book referred to was his Aufruf zum Sozialismus (Berlin: Verlag des Sozialistischen Bundes, 1911). 21. “Übersicht für 1908,” 3:163; “Übersicht für 1912,” 3:516. 22. Dort.[mund?] Zeitung (Dortmund Newspaper), no. 130, 4 June 1905; Hallesche Zeitung, no. 265, 8 June 1905, in BAB R8034/II 4963, 42–43. See also 56–57, 65–66, for the Hamburger Nachrichten articles. 23. Sitzung des königlichen Staatsministeriums, 31 August 1906, in BAB R43/1395n F4, 134–35. 24. “Übersicht für 1913,” 3:535–636. 25. BAB R43/1395n (Reichskanzlei Parteien Sozialdemokratische Bestrebungen und politischer Massenstreik), 29–30, 40–43, 85–101.

NOTES TO PAG ES 195–200

267

26. Quoted in Dieter Fricke, “Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie von seiner Gründung bis zu den Reichstagswahlen von 1907,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 7, no. 2 (1959), 240. 27. “Sozialdemokratisches Flugblatt vom Herbst 1909 über den Einfluß der Sozialdemokratie in Deutschland,” in Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 4, März 1898–Juli 1914 (Berlin: Dietz, 1967), 271–73. 28. Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters, 72–73. 29. LAB A Br. Pr. Rep 30 14080 (Politische Zustände in der Provinz Westfahlen, insbesondere die sozialdemokratische und anarchistische Bewegung [1902–1909]), 9; BLHA Rep. 2A I Pol. Nr. 1041, 9–10. 30. BLHA Rep. 2A I Pol. Nr. 1041, 414–15, 24–25. 31. Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters, 72–73. 32. See BAB 43/1395n, 190–201, on government officials’ concerns about the threat posed to the military by Socialist anti-militarism. 33. Karl Oldenberg, Die Ziele der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Leipzig: Grunow, 1891), 92. 34. E. Reyckardt, Was muß man von der Deutschen Socialdemokratie wissen? Allgemeinverständlich beantwortet von E. Reyckardt (Berlin: Hugo Steinlitz, 1900), 80. 35. Friedrich Naumann, Liberalismus, Zentrum und Sozialdemokratie (Munich: Freistatt, 1903), 10, 24, 29, 31–32. 36. Freidrich Naumann, Demokratie und Kaisertum: Ein Handbuch für innere Politik, 4th revised ed. (Berlin: Hilfe, 1905). 37. Theodor Barth, Liberalismus und Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Concordia Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1908), 9–10, 13, 23, 33–34. 38. Quoted in Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, 213. 39. Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State, 65. On the Jesuit Law, see Healy, The Jesuit Specter, 205, 211. 40. Theophil Wurm, Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, ihre Grundsätze und ihre Taktik (Stuttgart: Verlag des Süddeutschen Ev. Jünglingsbundes, n.d. [aft. 1903]), 20; H. Bürger, Soziale Thatsachen und Sozialdemokratische Lehren: Ein Taschenbüchlein für denkende Menschen, new and revised ed. (Charlottenberg: Richard Münch, 1903), 3. On the provenance of Bürger’s pamphlet, see Eduard Bernstein, ed., Dokumente des Sozialismus: Hefte für Geschichte, Urkunden, und Biblio­ graphie des Sozialismus (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1903), 3:146. 41. Bernhard von Bülow, Imperial Germany, trans. Marie A. Lewenz (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1914), 223–24. 42. Quoted in Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 192–93. 43. Quoted in Fricke, “Der Reichsverband,” 244. 44. 10 Jahre Reichsverband: Festgabe der Hauptstelle des “Reichsverbandes gegen die Sozialdemokratie” in Berlin zum 9. Mai 1914 (Berlin, 1914), 15. 45. The League’s goals were included in many of its pamphlets and flyers and can also be found in 10 Jahre Reichsverband, 7.

268

NOTES TO PAGES 201–5

46. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 20: Die Sozialdemokratie im Lichte der Wahrheit (Berlin: Johannes Belling, 1905), 44–47. 47. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 46: Rudolf Lepsius, Indiskrete Fragen an die Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Reichsverbands-Verlag, [c. 1906]), 12. 48. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 6: Gedanken über Ziele, Wege und Gefahren der jetzigen deutschen sozialdemokratischen Bewegung (Berlin: Merkur, 1905), 5. 49. Die Sozialdemokratie im Lichte der Wahrheit, 17–31. 50. 10 Jahre Reichsverband, 15. 51. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 15: Das wahre Gesicht [1905], 1. 52. Gedanken über Ziele, 11, 13. 53. “Reichsverband” Ortsgruppe Gotha, Was will der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie und was hat er seit seiner Gründung geleistet? (Berlin: Die Post, 1907), 1. 54. Gedanken über Ziele, 6–7. 55. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 5: Conrad von Massow, Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, Abdruck aus der Monatschrift für Stadt und Land ( July 1904) [1904 or 1905], 1. 56. Gedanken über Ziele, 21. 57. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 10: Wählt keinen Sozialdemokraten! [1905], 1–2. 58. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 13: Was wollen die Sozialdemokraten? [1905], 1–2. 59. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 14: Auf, zur Stichwahl! [1905], 1. 60. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 9: Christentum und Sozialdemokratie [1905], 1, 2. 61. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 37: War Christus Sozialdemokrat? [c. 1906], 1–2.
62. Nikolaus Osterroth, Vom Beter zum Kämpfer (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1920). Quoted in Alfred Kelly, ed. and trans., The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 179. 63. Axel Grießmer, Massenverbände und Massenparteien im wilhelminischen Reich: Zum Wandel der Wahlkultur, 1903–1912 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2000), 80. 64. Menenius, Ziele, Wege und Ausgang der Sozialdemokratie (Berlin, [1905]), 9–10. 65. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 8: Freiheit [1905], 1, 2. See also pamphlet no. 11: Sozialdemokratische Freiheit [1905], 1–2. 66. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 19: Die Sozialdemokratie: Eine rückschrittliche Partei! (Witten: Westfälischer Kurier, [1905]), 5. 67. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, Die Sozialdemokratie in ihren Widersprüchen, Irrwegen und Gefahren für Deutschland (Berlin: Merkur, 1905), 5. 68. Gedanken über Ziele, 23; Die Sozialdemokratie in ihren Widersprüchen, 12; “Reichsverband” Ortsgruppe Gotha, Was will der Reichsverband, 1. 69. Die Sozialdemokratie in ihren Widersprüchen, 16. 70. Gedanken über Ziele, 14, 19. 71. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 12: Wie hilft der Staat dem

NOTES TO PAGES 205–10

269

Arbei­ter [1905], 2; pamphlet no. 16: Die Lehren der Socialdemokratie, 2. 72. Die Sozialdemokratie in ihren Widersprüchen, 9–12. 73. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 19: Wem nützen Streiks? (Berlin: Merkur, [c. 1905]), 2. 74. Lepsius, Indiskrete Fragen, 32–34. 75. Menenius, Ziele, Wege und Ausgang, 16. 76. Daniel Frymann [Heinrich Claß], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1913), 67, 66. 77. Die Kampfesweise des Reichsverbandes im Lichte der Sozialdemokratie und wie sie in Wahrheit ist: Eine Aufklärungsschrift an das deutsche Bürgertum (Berlin: Reichsverbandsverlag, 1908), 1–2. 78. The most popular such text was the pamphlet Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie vor Gericht (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1912). Grießmer, Massenverbände und Massenparteien, 199–226, covers the extensive League-Social Democracy print and electoral battle. 79. “Reichsverband” Ortsgruppe Gotha, Was will der Reichsverband. See also 10 Jahre Reichsverband, 19, 28. 80. 10 Jahre Reichsverband, 20–22. 81. Ibid., 25–26, 33. For a detailed discussion of the League’s involvement in the 1907 election, see Grießmer, Massenverbände und Massenparteien, 140–86. 82. BLHA Rep. 2A I Pol. Nr. 1041, 369; Nr. 1042, 75–76, 242. 83. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, pamphlet no. 32: Eduard von Liebert, Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie [c. 1905], 4. 84. “Reichsverband” Ortsgruppe Gotha, Was will der Reichsverband; Grießmer, Massenverbände und Massenparteien, 78. 85. Grießmer, Massenverbände und Massenparteien, 187–88; the Navy League membership number comes from Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 366. 86. 10 Jahre Reichsverband, 36, 40–50. 87. See Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal, 242–63, for a fascinating treatment of this media scandal. 88. David Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), 98–99. 89. VDR 13.1, 3 December 1913, 6140, 6144, 6145. 90. Ibid., 6146–48. 91. Ibid., 6157–58. 92. Ibid., 6159–60. 93. Ibid., 6162. 94. Ibid., 6168, 6170. Some of these points and a fuller rendering of the debate are covered in Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913, 121–23; and Richard William Mackey, The Zabern Affair, 1913–1914 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 45–66. 95. VDR 13.1, 4 December 1913, 6180–81. 96. Ibid., 6182, 6184. This day’s entire debate is recounted in Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913, 124–25, and Mackey, The Zabern Affair, 71–87. 97. See Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913, 180–81; Mackey, The Zabern Affair, 94–98.

270

NOTES TO PAGES 212–22

C onclusion

1. Otto von Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke, ed. Gerhard Ritter and Rudolf Stadelmann (Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1932), 15:449, 637, quoted in Roth, The Social Democrats, 78. 2. Bülow, Imperial Germany (1914), 212. 3. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture, rightly points to the ways that the Socialist subculture was simultaneously distinct from that of the dominant culture and similar to it in its structures. 4. Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters, 265–68. 5. Bülow, Imperial Germany (1914), 212–13. 6. Ibid., 217–18, 223. 7. Bernhard von Bülow, Imperial Germany, new and revised edition, trans. Marie A. Lewenz (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1917), 220, 221. 8. Ibid., xlv. 9. On the important symbolic value of food riots, see Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Martin H. Geyer, Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne, München 1914–1924 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), explores the importance of economic metaphors and the figure of the profiteer in the war years and early Weimar era. 10. For example, see Davis, Home Fires Burning, 239–41. 11. Dirk Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933: Kampf um die Straße und Furcht vor dem Bürgerkrieg (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 54. 12. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 220, 222. 13. Bernd Weisbrod, “Gewalt in der Politik. Zur politischen Kultur in Deutschland zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 43, no. 7 ( July 1992), 392. 14. Schumann, Politische Gewalt, 359. 15. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 4. 16. Schumann, Politische Gewalt, 50, 60. 17. Ibid., 62. 18. Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution, trans. W. H. Kerridge (1919; repr., Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1973), 31–42, 121–22, 158–71. 19. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1921; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961). 20. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 130–31, 200. 21. Though written a third of a century ago, Walter Laqueur’s Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977) remains a good introduction to the origins and development of ideas about terrorism from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. 22. See Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 245–47.

NOTE TO PAG E 222

271

23. Richard A. Posner, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). The phrase “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” or a similar wording goes at least as far back as Justice Robert Jackson’s dissent in the 1949 Terminiello v. Chicago Supreme Court case, in which he declared, “The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact” (337 U.S. 1 [1949]). A scathingly critical account of the modern employment of Schmittian ideas can be found in Agamben’s State of Exception.

Bibliography

Prim a ry Sources

Archives

and

Libraries

Archiv und Bibliothek der sozialen Demokratie (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn) Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich) Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv (Potsdam) Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (Berlin) Deutsche Bücherei (Leipzig) Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin) International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) Landesarchiv Berlin (Berlin) Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin) S e l e c t P e r i o d i c al s Frankfurter Zeitung Die Gartenlaube Germania Hamburger Nachrichten Kladderadatsch Königlich Privilegierte Berlinische Zeitung (Vossische Zeitung) Die Nation National-Zeitung Neue Preußische Zeitung (Kreuz-Zeitung) Neueste Mittheilungen Die Neue Zeit Nord und Süd Die Post Preußische Jahrbücher Provinzial-Correspondenz Der Sozialdemokrat Der Sozialistische Akademiker/Sozialistische Monatshefte

274

B I BL IO GR A PHY

Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags Vorwärts Der wahre Jacob Die Zeit O t h e r P r i n t e d M at e r i al Adler, Georg. Anarchismus. Jena: Handw. d. Staatsw. Jena, 1889. ———. “Die Lehren der Anarchisten.” Nord und Süd 32 (1896): 371–83. ———. Stirners Anarchistische Sozialtheorie. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1907. Adler, Max. Max Stirner und der moderne Sozialismus: Feuilletons aus der Arbeiter-Zeitung vom Oktober 1906. Vienna: Monte Verita, 1992. Angehörigen beider konservativen Parteien. Conservatives Handbuch. 3rd revised and expanded ed. Berlin: Hermann Walther, 1898. Auer, Ignaz. Nach Zehn Jahren: Material und Glossen zur Geschichte des Sozialistengesetzes. London: German Cooperative Publishing, 1889. ———. Von Gotha bis Wyden: Vortrag gehalten zu Berlin am 30. Mai 1900. Berlin: Verlag der Socialistischen Monatshefte, 1901. Auerbach, Albert. Wider die kleinbürgerlich-parlamentarische Sozialreform, für die revolutionäre Sozialdemokratie! Berlin: Sozialist, n.d. [1892]. Bamberger, Ludwig. Deutschland und der Socialismus. 2nd expanded ed. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1878. ———. “Die Invasion der socialistischen Ideen.” In Gegen den Staatssocialismus: Drei Abhandlungen von Ludwig Bamberger, Theodor Barth, Max Broemel, 1–30. Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1884. Barth, Theodor. “Die charakteristischen Züge des heutigen Staatssocialismus.” In Gegen den Staats­ socialismus: Drei Abhandlungen von Ludwig Bamberger, Theodor Barth, Max Broemel, 31–44. Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1884. ———. Liberalismus und Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Concordia Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1908. ———. Die sozialdemokratische Gedankenwelt. Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1890. Bebel, August. Attentate und Sozialdemokratie: Nach einer Rede von August Bebel, Gehalten am Mittwoch, den 2. November 1898 zu Berlin. 2nd ed. Berlin: Expedition der Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1905. ———. Aus meinem Leben. 3 vols. Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1910–1914. Belli, Joseph. Die rote Feldpost unterm Sozialistengesetz. Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1912. Berlepsch, Hans Hermann. “Retrospective Judgment of a District Governor on the Failure of the Anti-Socialist Law (1925).” Translated by Erwin Fink. In German History in Documents and Images. Vol. 4, Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany, 1866–1890, . Bernstein, Eduard, ed. Dokumente des Sozialismus: Hefte für Geschichte, Urkunden, und Bibliographie des Sozialismus. Vols. 2–3. Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1903. ———. My Years of Exile: Reminiscences of a Socialist. Translated by Bernard Miall. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1921.

B I BL IO GR APHY

275

———. Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre. Berlin: Der Bücherkreis, 1928. Biermann, Wilhelm Eduard. Anarchismus und Kommunismus: Sechs Volkshochschulvorträge. Leipzig: Deichert, 1906. ———. “Die neuere Entwicklung des Sozialismus.” Zeitschrift für Politik, no. 3 ( June 1908): 488–513. Bismarck, Otto von. Gedanken und Erinnerungen. 1898. Reprint, Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1926. ———. Die gesammelten Werke. Edited by Gerhard Ritter and Rudolf Stadelmann. 15 vols. Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1932. Blos, Wilhelm. Denkwürdigkeiten eines Sozialdemokraten. Vol. 2. Munich: G. Birk, 1919. Blum, Hans. Das Deutsche Reich zur Zeit Bismarcks: Politische Geschichte von 1871 bis 1890. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1893. Borgius, Walther. Die Ideenwelt des Anarchismus. Leipzig: Felix Dietrich, 1904. Brentano, Lujo. Reaktion oder Reform? Gegen die Zuchthausvorlage! Berlin: Hilfe, 1899. Brockhaus’ Konversationslexikon. 14th ed. 17 vols. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1894–1897. Bülow, Bernhard von. Imperial Germany. Translated by Marie A. Lewenz. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914. ———. Imperial Germany. New and revised ed. Translated by Marie A. Lewenz. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1917. Bürger, H. Soziale Thatsachen und Sozialdemokratische Lehren: Ein Taschenbüchlein für denkende Menschen. New and revised ed. Charlottenberg: Richard Münch, 1903. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Reprint edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987. Cathrein, Victor. Durch Atheismus zum Anarchismus: Ein lehrreiches Bild aus dem Universitätsleben der Gegenwart. 2nd, expanded ed. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1900. Claß, Heinrich [Daniel Frymann]. Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten. 4th ed. Leipzig: Dieterich, 1913. Classenkampf. Vol. 1 of Sociale Fragen und Antworten. Bremen: Nordwestdeutscher VolksschriftenVerlag, [1878]. Deval, Arthur. Der Anarchismus und die Lösung der sozialen Frage im Verhältnis zur Rechtspflege. Berlin: Cassirer & Danziger, 1894. Diehl, Karl. Über Sozialismus, Kommunismus und Anarchismus: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1906. Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Vol. 3, März 1871– April 1898. Berlin: Dietz, 1974. Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Vol. 4, März 1898–Juli 1914. Berlin: Dietz, 1967. Dubois, Félix. Die Anarchistische Gefahr. Authorized German ed. Translated by Max Trüdjen. Amsterdam: Aug. Dieckmann, 1894. Emanuel. Anarchismus und seine Heilung. Leipzig: Wilhelm Friedrich, 1894. Engels, Friedrich. “Die Bakunisten an der Arbeit.” In Internationales aus dem Volksstaat (1871– 75), 16–33. Berlin: Vorwärts, 1894.

276

B I BL IO GR A PHY

———. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Translated by Edward Aveling. 1880. Reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1935. Ernst, Eugen. Polizeispitzeleien und Ausnahmegesetze, 1878–1910: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Bekämpfung der Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Vorwärts, 1911. Evans, Richard J., ed. Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich: Die Stimmungsberichte der Hamburger Politischen Polizei, 1892–1914. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989. ———. Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Fricke, Dieter, and Rudolf Knaack, eds. Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung, 1878–1913. 3 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1983. Friedeberg, Raphael. Parlamentarismus und Generalstreik. Berlin: Die Einigkeit, 1904. ———. Wozu noch in die Parlamente? Reutlingen: Trotzdem, 1978. Fuld, Ludwig. Die Aufhebung des Socialistengesetzes und die Aenderung des Strafgesetzbuches. Berlin: Siemenroth und Worms, 1889. Gegen den Anarchismus: Ein Wort an die Regierungen; Von einem Mann aus dem Volke. Berlin: Gustav Müller, 1894. Gothein, Georg. Liberalismus und Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Hilfe, 1904. Greulich, Hermann. Der Staat vom sozialdemokratischen Standpunkte aus: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit den “Anarchisten.” Zurich: Volksbuchhandlung, 1877. Grünberg, Carl. Sozialismus, Kommunismus, Anarchismus. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1897. Hamon, Augustin. “The Psychology of the Anarchist.” In The Anarchist Peril, by Félix Dubois. Translated by Ralph Derechef. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894. Held, Adolf. Sozialismus, Sozialdemokratie und Sozialpolitik. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1878. Hermann, Ursula, Wilfried Heinze, and Ruth Rüdiger, eds. Die Kongresse der Sozialistischen Arbei­ terpartei Deutschlands unter dem Sozialistengesetz. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1980. Herzberg, Wilhelm. Sozialdemokratie und Anarchismus. Ludwigshaven am Rhein: Gerisch, 1906. Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Chlodwig. Memoirs of Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst. Vol. 1. Edited by Friedrich Curtius. Translated by George W. Chrystal. New York: Macmillan, 1906. Hohenthal, August. Der Socialdemokrat in der Westentasche: Ein Wort zur Aufklärung für das deutsche Volk. Mainz: Kupferberg, 1891. Hohmann, Andreas W., and Dieter Johannes. Der Spitzelbericht: Die Anarchistenüberwachung im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Frankfurt am Main: Edition AV’88, 1999. Die Irrlehren und Irrwege der Sozialdemokratie in Deutschland: Eine zeitliche Warnung an die arbei­ tende Klasse. London: Gruppe “Autonomie,” [c. 1891]. Johannes, Dieter, and Andreas W. Hohmann, eds. Maßnahmen gegen die Anarchisten im Deutschen Kaiserreich (1871–1918). Frankfurt am Main: Edition AV’88, 1999. Die Kampfesweise des Reichsverbandes im Lichte der Sozialdemokratie und wie sie in Wahrheit ist: Eine Aufklärungsschrift an das deutsche Bürgertum. Berlin: Reichsverbandsverlag, 1908.

B I BL IO GR APHY

277

Katzenstein, Simon. Der Anarchismus und die Arbeiterbewegung. Berlin: Vorwärts, 1908. Kautsky, Karl. The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program). 1891. Reprint translated by William E. Bohn. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910. ———. Selected Political Writings. Edited and translated by Patrick Goode. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. ———. Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution. 1919. Reprint translated by W. H. Kerridge. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1973. Kelly, Alfred, ed. and trans. The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Krieter, W. Die geheime Organisation der sozialdemokratischen Partei. Nach authoritativen Quellen dargestellt. 3rd ed. Magdeburg: Albert Rathke, 1887. Kulemann, Wilhelm. Die Sozialdemokratie und deren Bekämpfung: Eine Studie zur Reform des Sozialistengesetzes. Berlin: Carl Heymanns, 1890. Kunowski, Leopold von. Wird die Sozialdemokratie siegen? Ein Blick in die Zukunft dieser Bewegung. Bielefeld: Belhagen & Klasing, 1891. Landauer, Gustav. Auch die Vergangenheit ist Zukunft: Essays zum Anarchismus. Edited by Siegbert Wolf. Frankfurt: Luchterhand, 1989. ———. Aufruf zum Sozialismus. Berlin: Verlag des Sozialistischen Bundes, 1911. ———. Gustav Landauer im “Sozialist”: Aufsätze über Kultur, Politik und Utopie (1892–1899). Edited by Ruth Link-Salinger (Hyman). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. Landeck, A. von der [Albert Bach]. Anarchismus und Kirche, oder Wissenschaft und Monarchie: Unabhängige Gedanken. Berlin: Hermann Walther, 1903. Lenin, Vladimir I. “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder: A Popular Essay in Marxian Strategy and Tactics. 1920. Reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1972. Lepsius, Rudolf. Indiskrete Fragen an die Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Reichsverbands-Verlag, [c. 1906]. Liebert, Eduard von. Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, [c. 1905]. Liebknecht, Wilhelm. Briefwechsel mit deutschen Sozialdemokraten. Vol. 1, 1862–1878. Edited and compiled by Georg Eckert. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1973. ———. Briefwechsel mit Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Edited and compiled by Georg Eckert. The Hague: Mouton, 1963. Loewenthal, Eduard. Der Anarchismus und das Recht der Schwachen, oder: Die Drei Grundübel unserer Zeit. 2nd ed. Berlin: Hermann Brieger, 1894. Luxemburg, Rosa. Gesammelte Werke. 5 vols. Berlin: Dietz, 1972–1975. ———. The Mass Strike: The Political Party and the Trade Unions and the Junius Pamphlet. Translated by Patrick Lavin. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Lynkeus [prob. Erwin Heinrich Bauer, poss. Josef Popper]. Am Rande des Abgrundes: Wider Socialdemokratie und Anarchismus, Ein Mahnruf an Fürsten und Völker. Leipzig: B. Elischer, 1894. Mackay, John Henry. Die Anarchisten, Kulturgemälde aus dem Ende des XIX. Jahrhunderts. Zurich:

278

B I BL IO GR A PHY

K. Henckell, 1891. Translated by George Schumm as The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Boston: B. R. Tucker, 1891. Martin, Rudolf Emil. Der Anarchismus und seine Träger: Enthüllungen aus dem Lager der Anarchisten. Berlin: Neufeld & Mehring, 1887. Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Program. New York: International Publishers, 1938. Massow, Conrad von. Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie. Abdruck aus der Monatschrift für Stadt und Land ( July 1904) [1904 or 1905]. Mehring, Franz. Die deutsche Socialdemokratie: Ihre Geschichte und ihre Lehre; Eine historischkritische Darstellung. 3rd revised and expanded ed. Bremen: Schünemann, 1879. ———. Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Dietz, 1897–1898. Menenius. Ziele, Wege und Ausgang der Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie, [1905]. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. 4th ed. Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1888. Michels, Robert. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. 1911. Reprint translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999. Most, Johann. Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft: Ein Handbüchlein zur Anleitung betreffend Gebrau­ ches und Herstellung von Nitro-Glycerin, Dynamit, Schiessbaumwolle, Knallquecksilber, Bomben, Brandsätzen, Giften, u.s.w., u.s.w. New York: Internationalen Zeitungs-Vereins, 1885. Most, John. Die Gottes-Pest. New York: Freiheit, 1883. ———. Memoiren: Erlebtes, Erforschtes und Erdachtes. 3 vols. New York: John Most, 1903. Muser, Oskar. Sozialistengesetz und Rechtspflege (Theorie und Praxis). 4th ed. Karlsruhe: Handelsdruckerei, 1889. Naumann, Friedrich. Demokratie und Kaisertum: Ein Handbuch für innere Politik. 4th revised ed. Berlin: Hilfe, 1905. ———. Liberalismus, Zentrum und Sozialdemokratie. Munich: Freistatt, 1903. ———. Die Zuchthausvorlage. Berlin: Hilfe, 1899. Nettlau, Max. Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionäre: Die historische Entwicklung des Anarchismus in den Jahren 1880–1886. Berlin: ASY-Verlag, 1931. Oberbreyer, Max. Das neue Programm der Sozialdemokratie: Ein Taschenbuch für Jedermann. Mainz: Kupferberg, 1891. Oldenburg, Karl. Die Ziele der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. Leipzig: Grunow, 1891. Pannekoek, Anton. Die taktische Differenzen in der Arbeiterbewegung. Hamburg: Erdmann Dubber, 1909. Pelz, William A., ed. and comp. Wilhelm Liebknecht and German Social Democracy: A Documentary History. Translated by Erich Hahn. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Plechanoff, George [Georgii Plekhanov]. Anarchism and Socialism. Translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling. 1894. Reprint, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1920. Plechanow, Georg [Georgii Plekhanov]. Anarchismus und Sozialismus. Berlin: Expedition des “Vorwärts,” 1894. Protokoll über den Kongress der deutschen Sozialdemokratie in Kopenhagen. Zurich: Schweizerische Genossenschaftsbuchdruckerei, 1883.

B I BL IO GR APHY

279

Radenhausen, Christian. Die Sozialdemokratie: Ihre Wahrheiten und ihre Irrtümer. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1885. Reichesberg, Naum. Sozialismus und Anarchismus. Bern: August Siebert, 1895. Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie. 10 Jahre Reichsverband: Festgabe der Hauptstelle des “Reichsverbandes gegen die Sozialdemokratie” in Berlin zum 9. Mai 1914. Berlin, 1914. ———. Auf, zur Stichwahl! Pamphlet no. 14 [1905]. ———. Christentum und Sozialdemokratie. Pamphlet no. 9 [1905]. ———. Freiheit. Pamphlet no. 8 [1905]. ———. Gedanken über Ziele, Wege und Gefahren der jetzigen deutschen sozialdemokratischen Bewegung. Pamphlet no. 6. Berlin: Merkur, 1905. ———. Die Lehren der Socialdemokratie. Pamphlet no. 16 [1905]. ———. Die Sozialdemokratie: Eine rückschrittliche Partei! Pamphlet no. 19. Witten: Westfälischer Kurier, [1905]. ———. Die Sozialdemokratie im Lichte der Wahrheit. Pamphlet no. 20. Berlin: Johannes Belling, 1905. ———. Die Sozialdemokratie in ihren Widersprüchen, Irrwegen und Gefahren für Deutschland. Berlin: Merkur, 1905. ———. Sozialdemokratische Freiheit. Pamphlet no. 11 [1905]. ———. Wählt keinen Sozialdemokraten! Pamphlet no. 10 [1905]. ———. Das wahre Gesicht. Pamphlet no. 15 [1905]. ———. War Christus Sozialdemokrat? Pamphlet no. 37 [c. 1906]. ———. Was wollen die Sozialdemokraten? Pamphlet no. 13 [1905]. ———. Wem nützen Streiks? Pamphlet no. 31. Berlin: Merkur, [c. 1905]. ———. Wie hilft der Staat dem Arbeiter. Pamphlet no. 12 [1905]. Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie vor Gericht. Berlin: Vorwärts, 1912. “Reichsverband” Ortsgruppe Gotha. Was will der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie und was hat er seit seiner Gründung geleistet? Berlin: Die Post, 1907. Reyckardt, E. Was muß man von der Deutschen Socialdemokratie wissen? Allgemeinverständlich beantwortet von E. Reyckardt. Berlin: Hugo Steinlitz, 1900. Richter, Eugen. Im alten Reichstag: Erinnerungen von Eugen Richter, Mitglied des Reichstages. Vol. 2, Januar 1877 bis November 1881. Berlin: Verlagsanstalt Deutsche Press, 1914. ———. Die Irrlehren der Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Fortschritt, 1890. ———. Politisches ABC-Buch: Ein Lexikon parlamentarischer Zeit- und Streitfragen. 8th revised ed. Berlin: Fortschritt, Aktiengesellschaft, 1896. ———. Politisches ABC-Buch: Ein Lexikon parlamentarischer Zeit- und Streitfragen. 9th revised ed. Berlin: Fortschritt, 1898. Rößler, Constantin. Die Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Hermann Walther, 1894. Schäffle, Albert. Die Quintessenz des Sozialismus. 25th ed. Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1920. Schröder, Wilhelm, ed. Handbuch der sozialdemokratischen Parteitage von 1863 bis 1909. Munich: G. Birk, 1910. Schuster, Richard. Die Social-Demokratie: Nach ihrem Wesen und ihrer Agitation quellenmässig dargestellt. Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1875.

280

B I BL IO GR A PHY

Schütte, Max. August Reinsdorf und die Niederwald-Verschwörung. Berlin: Neues Leben, 1902. Seuffert, Hermann. Anarchismus und Strafrecht. Berlin: Otto Liebmann, 1899. Siegfried, Nikolaus [Victor Cathrein]. Durch Atheismus zum Anarchismus: Ein lehrreiches Bild aus dem Universitätsleben der Gegenwart. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1895. Socialismus und Anarchismus in Europa und Nordamerika während der Jahre 1883 bis 1886: Nach amtlichen Quellen. Berlin: Richard Wilhelmi, 1887. Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Reichstag: Tätigkeitsberichte und Wahlaufrufe aus den Jahren 1871 bis 1893. Berlin: Vorwärts, 1909. Die Sozialdemokratie vor dem Deutschen Reichstage: Entwurf eines Gesetzes gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Socialdemokratie nebst Motiven und Anlagen. Hamburg: Genossenschafts-Buchdruckerei, 1878. Die Sozialdemokratie vor dem Deutschen Reichstage: Erste Lesung des Sozialisten-Gesetzes, nach dem amtlichen Stenogramm. Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1884. Der sozialdemokratische “Zukunftsstaat.” Berlin: Vorwärts, 1893. Der Sozialdemokrat kommt! Ein Warnungsruf an unser Landvolk. Von einem alten Dorfpfarrer [Heinrich Hansjakob?]. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1890. Stammler, Rudolf. Die Theorie des Anarchismus. Berlin: O. Häring, 1894. Steiner, Rudolf. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte, 1887–1901. Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner, 1989. Steinhammer, Dr. Die Wahrheit über den Internationalen Anarchismus. Ein Beitrag zum kritischen Material. Berlin: Hugo Steinitz, 1894. Stiékloff, Georg. Marx und die Anarchisten. Dresden: Kaden, 1913. Tobias, Hermann. Der Anarchismus und die anarchistische Bewegung. Volkswirtschaftliche Zeitfragen 163. Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1899. Treitschke, Heinrich von. Der Socialismus und der Meuchelmord. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878. ———. Der Socialismus und seine Gönner: Nebst einem Sendschreiben an Gustav Schmoller. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1875. Trotsky, Leon. Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. 1921. Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961. Tucker, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Verhandlungen des Parteitages der deutschen Sozialdemokratie in St. Gallen: Abgehalten vom 2. bis 6. Oktober 1887. Zurich: Hottingen, 1888. Voigt, Andreas. Die sozialen Utopien: Fünf Vorträge. Leipzig: G. J. Göschen, 1906. Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland. Bebel und sein “Zukunftsstaat” vor dem Reichstag. Cologne: J. P. Bachem, 1893. Vollmar, Georg von. Ueber die nächsten Aufgaben der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. 2nd ed. Munich: M. Ernst, 1899. Warum verfolgt man uns! Zur Naturgeschichte des Sozialistengesetzes. Puttkamer und den Puttkämerlingen gewidmet. Zurich, 1886. Weber, Max. Critique of Stammler. Trans. Guy Oakes. 1907. Reprint, New York: Free Press, 1977. Weidner, Albert. Aus den Tiefen der Berliner Arbeiterbewegung. 2nd ed. Berlin: Seemann, 1905.

B I BL IO GR APHY

281

Wilhelm II. “The Kaiser Speaks from the Balcony of the Royal Palace (August 1, 1914).” German History in Documents and Images. Vol. 5, Wilhelmine Germany and the First World War, 1890– 1918. . Wurm, Theophil. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, ihre Grundsätze und ihre Taktik. Stuttgart: Verlag des Süddeutschen Ev. Jünglingsbundes, [aft. 1903]. Zacher, Georg. Die Rothe Internationale. 2nd ed. Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1884. Zenker, Ernst Victor. Der Anarchismus: Kritische Geschichte der anarchistischen Theorie. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1895. ———. “Der Anarchismus und seine Bekämpfung.” Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 1 (1898): 706–15. Zola, Émile. Germinal. 1885. Translated by Stanley and Eleanor Hochman. New York: New American Library, 1970.

S econda ry So u rces

Adam, Thomas. “How Proletarian Was Leipzig’s Social Democratic Milieu?” In Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933, edited by James Retallack, 255–70. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. ———. Windthorst: A Political Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, and Kenneth Barkin. “The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf: Some Reflections on the Historiography of Imperial Germany.” Journal of Modern History 54, no. 4 (December 1982): 647–86. Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Beck, Hermann. “Working-Class Politics at the Crossroads of Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism.” In Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990, edited by David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz, 63–85. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998. Beiser, Frederick C. Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Berdahl, Robert M. The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology, 1770–1848. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Berghahn, Volker R. Modern Germany: Society, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Bers, Günter. Wilhelm Hasselmann, 1844–1916: Sozialrevolutionärer Agitator und Abgeordneter des Deutschen Reichstages. Cologne: Einhorn, 1973. Blackbourn, David. “Bismarck: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” In Populists and Patricians: Essays in

282

B I BL IO GR A PHY

Modern German History, 33–44. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987. ———. Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg before 1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. ———. The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Boyer, John W. Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Buse, Dieter K. “Party Leadership and Mechanisms of Unity: The Crisis of German Social Democracy Reconsidered, 1910–1914.” Journal of Modern History 62, no. 3 (September 1990): 477–502. Calkins, Kenneth R. “The Uses of Utopianism: The Millenarian Dream in Central European Social Democracy before 1914.” Central European History 15, no. 2 ( June 1982): 124–48. Carlson, Andrew R. Anarchism in Germany. Vol. 1, The Early Movement. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972. Davis, Belinda J. Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Deflem, Mathieu. “‘Wild Beasts without Nationality’: The Uncertain Origins of Interpol, 1898– 1910.” In Handbook of Transnational Crime and Justice, edited by Philip Reichel, 275–85. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. Dorpalen, Andreas. Heinrich von Treitschke. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. Eley, Geoff. Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. Epstein, Klaus. The Genesis of German Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Evans, Richard J. “Proletarian Mentalities: Pub Conversations in Hamburg.” In Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War, 124–91. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Fairbairn, Brett. Democracy in the Undemocratic State: The German Reichstag Elections of 1898 and 1903. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. ———. “Interpreting Wilhelmine Elections: National Issues, Fairness Issues, and Electoral Mobilization.” In Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives, edited by Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack, 17–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Fesser, Gerd. “Von der ‘Zuchthausvorlage’ zum Reichsvereinsgesetz: Staatsorgane, bürgerliche Parteien und Vereinsgesetzgebung im Deutschen Reich, 1899–1906.” Jahrbuch für Geschichte 28 (1983): 107–32. Fricke, Dieter. Bismarcks Prätorianer: Der Berliner politische Polizei im Kampf gegen die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung, 1871–1918. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1962. ———. “Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie von seiner Gründung bis zu den Reichs­

B I BL IO GR APHY

283

tagswahlen von 1907.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 7, no. 2 (1959): 237–80. Gabriel, Elun. “Anarchism’s Appeal to German Workers, 1878–1914.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 5, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 33–65. ———. “The Left Liberal Critique of Anarchism in Imperial Germany.” German Studies Review 33, no. 2 (May 2010): 331–50. ———. “Performing Persecution: Witnessing and Martyrdom in the Anarchist Tradition.” Radical History Review 98 (Spring 2007): 34–62. Gall, Lothar. Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutionär. Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1980. Gay, Peter. The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. Geyer, Martin H. Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne, München 1914–1924. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Goldberg, Ann. Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Goldberg, Hans-Peter. Bismarck und seine Gegner: Die politische Rhetorik im kaiserlichen Reichstag. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998. Goodrich, Robert W. “On the Road to Wyden: The Expulsion of Johann Most from the German Social Democratic Party, 1878–1880.” Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1994. Grießmer, Axel. Massenverbände und Massenparteien im wilhelminischen Reich: Zum Wandel der Wahlkultur, 1903–1912. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2000. Groh, Dieter. Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges. Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1973. Gullickson, Gay L. Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Guttsman, W. L. The German Social Democratic Party, 1875–1933: From Ghetto to Government. London: Allen & Unwin, 1981. Hahn, Eric. “Rudolf Gneist and the Prussian Rechtsstaat: 1862–78.” Journal of Modern History 49, no. 4 (December 1977), On Demand Supplement D1361–81. Hall, Alex. “By Other Means: The Legal Struggle against the SPD, 1890–1900.” Historical Journal 17, no. 2 (1974): 365–86. ———. “The Kaiser, the Wilhelmine State and Lèse-Majesté.” German Life & Letters 27, no. 2 ( January 1974): 101–15. ———. Scandal, Sensation, and Social Democracy: The SPD Press and Wilhelmine Germany, 1890– 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Healy, Róisín. The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany. Boston: Brill, 2003. Hellwig, Fritz. Carl Ferdinand Freiherr von Stumm-Halberg, 1836–1901. Heidelberg: Westmark, 1936. Hett, Benjamin Carter. Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Höhn, Reinhard. Die vaterlandslosen Gesellen: Der Sozialismus im Licht der Geheimberichte der

284

B I BL IO GR A PHY

preußischen Polizei, 1878–1914. Vol. 1, 1878–1890. Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964. Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. ———. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Jarausch, Konrad. “The Decline of Liberal Professionalism: Reflections on the Social Erosion of German Liberalism, 1867–1933.” In In Search of a Liberal Germany: Studies in the History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present, edited by Konrad H. Jarausch and Larry Eugene Jones, 261–86. New York: Berg, 1990. Jefferies, Matthew. Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Jensen, Richard Bach. “The International Anti-Anarchist Conference of 1898 and the Origins of Interpol.” Journal of Contemporary History 16, no. 2 (1981): 323–47. ———. Liberty and Order: The Theory and Practice of Italian Public Security Policy, 1848 to the Crisis of the 1890s. New York: Garland, 1991. Kohlrausch, Martin. Der Monarch im Skandal: Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie. Berlin: Akademie, 2005. Krieger, Leonard. The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Krug, Marven. “Reports of a Cop: Civil Liberties and Associational Life in Leipzig during the Second Empire.” In Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933, edited by James Retallack, 271–86. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Kühne, Thomas. Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preussen, 1867–1914: Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994. ———. “Wahlrecht–Wahlverhalten–Wahlkultur: Tradition und Innovation in der histori­ schen Wahlforschung.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 33 (1993): 481–547. Langewiesche, Dieter. Liberalism in Germany. Translated by Christiane Banerji. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Originally published as Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). Laqueur, Walter. Terrorism. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. Lazitch, Branzo, and Milorad M. Drachkovitsch. Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern. Revised and expanded ed. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986. Lepsius, M. Rainer. “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft.” In Die deutschen Parteien vor 1918, edited by Gerhard A. Ritter, 56–80. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1973. Levy, Carl. “Max Weber, Anarchism and Libertarian Culture: Personality Politics and Power Politics.” In Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, edited by Sam Whimster, 83–109. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Lidtke, Vernon L. The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. “August Bebel and German Social Democracy’s Relation to the Christian Churches.”

B I BL IO GR APHY

285

Journal of the History of Ideas 27, no. 2. (April–June 1966): 245–64. ———. The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878–1890. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Lindenberger, Thomas. Straßenpolitik: Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin, 1900 bis 1914. Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1995. Linse, Ulrich. Organisierter Anarchismus im deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969. Lougee, Robert W. “The Anti-Revolution Bill of 1894 in Wilhelmine Germany.” Central European History 15, no. 3 (September 1982): 224–40. Mackey, Richard William. The Zabern Affair, 1913–1914. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991. McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. McKinley, Blaine. “‘A Religion of the New Time’: Anarchist Memorials to the Haymarket Martyrs, 1888–1917.” Labor History 28, no. 3 (1987): 386–400. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State. Translated by Richard Deveson. London: Arnold, 1995. Originally published as Der autoritäre Nationalstaat: Verfassung, Gesellschaft und Kultur des deutschen Kaiserreiches (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1990). ———. Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920. Translated by Michael S. Steinberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Originally published as Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 1890–1920, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974). Nettlau, Max. Bibliographie de l’anarchie. Brussels: Bibliothèque des “Temps Nouveaux,” 1897. Nipperdey, Thomas. Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918. Vol. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992. Offermann, Toni. “The Lassallean Labor Movement in Germany: Organization, Social Structure, and Associational Life in the 1860s.” In Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990, edited by David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz, 87–112. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998. Pack, Wolfgang. Das parlamentarische Ringen um das Sozialistengesetz Bismarcks, 1878–1890. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961. Patten, Alan. Hegel’s Idea of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pelz, William A. The Spartakusbund and the German Working Class Movement, 1914–1919. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988. Pernicone, Nunzio. Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pierson, Stanley. Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-Class Mentality in Germany, 1887–1912. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Posner, Richard A. Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Potthoff, Heinrich. “Social Democracy from Its Beginnings until 1945.” In A History of German

286

B I BL IO GR A PHY

Social Democracy from 1848 to the Present, edited by Susanne Miller and Heinrich Pott­ hoff, translated by J. A. Underwood, 3–147. New York: Berg, 1986. Originally published as Kleine Geschichte der SPD: Darstellung und Dokumentation, 1848–1983 (Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft, 1983). Pracht, Elfi. Parlamentarismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 1867–1914. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1990. Rauh, Manfred. Die Parlamentarisierung des Deutschen Reiches. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977. Retallack, James. “Antisocialism and Electoral Politics in Regional Perspective: The Kingdom of Saxony.” In Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives, edited by Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack, 49–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. “‘What Is to Be Done?’ The Red Specter, Franchise Questions, and the Crisis of Conservative Hegemony in Saxony, 1896–1909.” Central European History 23, no. 4 (December 1990): 271–312. Ringer, Fritz K. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890– 1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Ritter, Gerhard A., and Klaus Tenfelde. Arbeiter im deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871–1914. Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1992. Rohe, Karl. Wahlen und Wählertraditionen in Deutschland: Kulturelle Grundlagen deutscher Parteien und Parteiensysteme im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992. Roth, Guenther. The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration. Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1963. Saldern, Adelheid von. “Latent Reformism and Socialist Utopianism: The SPD in Göttingen, 1890 to 1920.” In Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990, edited by David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz, 195–222. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Schoenbaum, David. Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982. Schorske, Carl E. German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. Schumann, Dirk. Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933: Kampf um die Straße und Furcht vor dem Bürgerkrieg. Essen: Klartext, 2001. Sheehan, James J. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Smaldone, William. “Rudolf Hilferding and the Theoretical Foundations of German Social Democracy, 1902–33.” Central European History 21, no. 3 (September 1988): 267–99. Smith, Woodruff D. Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

B I BL IO GR APHY

287

Sperber, Jonathan. The European Revolutions, 1848–1851. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849. Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. ———. “The Social Democratic Electorate in Imperial Germany.” In Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990, edited by David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz, 167–91. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998. Stearns, Peter N. 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974. Steger, Manfred B. The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Stern, Fritz. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. Sun, Raymond C. “Misguided Martyrdom: German Social Democratic Response to the Haymarket Incident, 1886–87.” International Labor and Working Class History 29 (Spring 1986): 53–67. Suval, Stanley. Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Taylor, A. J. P. Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman. 1955. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Thomas, Edith. The Women Incendiaries. Translated by James Atkinson and Starr Atkinson. New York: George Braziller, 1966. Originally published as Les pétroleuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Thomas, Paul. Karl Marx and the Anarchists. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Thompson, Alistair P. Left Liberals, the State, and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Vogel, Angela. Der deutsche Anarcho-Syndikalismus: Genese und Theorie einer vergessenen Bewegung. Berlin: Karin Kramer, 1977. Wagner, Joachim. Politischer Terrorismus und Strafrecht im Deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871. Heidelberg: V. Decker, 1981. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Vol. 3, Von der “Deutschen Doppelrevolution” bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1849–1914. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995. ———. The German Empire, 1871–1918. Translated by Kim Traynor. New York: Berg, 1985. Originally published as Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973). Weisbrod, Bernd. “Gewalt in der Politik. Zur politischen Kultur in Deutschland zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen.” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 43, no. 7 ( July 1992): 391–404. Weitz, Eric D. Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

288

B I BL IO GR A PHY

Wittwer, Walter. Vom Sozialistengesetz zur Umsturzvorlage: Zur Politik der preußisch-deutschen Regierung gegen die Arbeiterbewegung 1890 bis 1894. Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR Zentralinstitut für Geschichte, 1983. Zucker, Stanley. Ludwig Bamberger: German Liberal Politician and Social Critic, 1823–1899. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975. ———. “Ludwig Bamberger and the Crisis of German Liberalism.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1968.

Index

Aachen, Germany, 152 Adam, Thomas, 10 Adler, Georg, 165 Adlershof, Germany, 161 Against Anarchism, 147 Against Petit-Bourgeois Parliamentary Social Reform, For Revolutionary Social Democracy (Auerbach), 169 Alexander II (tsar of Russia), 13; assassination, 77, 81 Alsace-Lorraine, 29; citizen rights, 213; Zabern Affair (1913), 208–12 Alsatian parties, 5, 7, 11, 27, 33, 55–57, 108, 208 Altona, Germany, 152; minor state of siege, 81, 84 Anarchism, Social Democracy, and Revolutionary Tactics (Liebknecht), 93–94 Anarchism: A Critical History of the Anarchist Theory (Zenker), 145 Anarchism and Its Cure (Emanuel), 146 Anarchism and Its Followers (Martin), 125 Anarchism and Socialism (Plekhanov), 177 Anarchism and the Solution to the Social Question (Deval), 144 Anarchism and the Workers’ Movement (Katzenstein), 186 anarchists, 34, 45, 72–113 passim, 212–23 —attitudes toward anarchists: anarchists as other, 212; anti-anarchist stance of conservatives, 17, 24, 74, 82–83, 85, 115, 124, 128–30, 194, 205–6, 212; anti-anarchist

stance of liberals, 145–47, 212–13; antianarchist stance of Social Democrats, 4, 11, 12, 18, 60–65, 61–65, 72, 77, 86–94, 86– 96, 123, 126–27, 143–44, 150–51, 154–56, 167–89 passim; anti-anarchist tropes, 21, 179–80, 213, 219, 220–21; Marxist antagonism, 12, 87–88; Social Democrats rapprochement with, 171–76, 181; symbolic use of anarchists, 219–21 —beliefs: ahistoricism of, 183; anti-militarism, 191, 193; doctrinal evolution, 173–74; elections, 173; general strike, 180–89, 192, 217, 218; individualism, 155, 165, 176–77, 217; political philosophy, 162–66; utopia, 176, 184 (see also utopianism); violence versus theory, 223 —origins, 145–46; Bakunin and, 25, 34, 61 —repression of anarchists, 65; files on antianarchist measures, 144 (see also police powers); local government reports on anarchists, 151–53, 156–61, 191, 193–94 (see also police powers); Socialist Law as father or anarchism (see Socialist Law, radicalization and) —scholarship on anarchism, 162–66, 242n140, 260n2 —terrorism, 4, 175–76, 212–23; brigandage, 186; Haymarket bombing, 122–23; plots in France, 143; plots in Germany, 97–99, 115, 120; plots in Italy, 143; propaganda of the deed, 12, 14, 61, 126, 139, 159, 186, 190–91; revolution, 93–94, 169

290

I ndex

—types (see also Jungen); anarcho-socialism, 181, 185 Anarchists: A Picture of Civilizations at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (MacKay), 175 anarcho-socialism, 181, 185 Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, 7–8, 33–34 Anti-Authoritarian International, 61 Arbeiter-Wochenchronik (Workers’ Weekly Chronicle), 91 arme Konrad, Der (Poor Conrad), 158 Arnsberg, Germany, 152 assassination, 12–13, 58–59, 143, 158; of Alexander II (tsar of Russia), 77, 81; attempts against Wilhelm I, 4, 17, 34, 43–44; of Canalejas, 190; of Cánovas del Castillo, 154; of Carl Rumpf, 98, 116, 120; of Elisabeth (Austrian empress), 135, 154–56; of George I (Greece), 191; of James Garfield, 85; of Marie François Carnot, 135; of Umberto I (Italy), 85, 136, 161; of William McKinley, 136, 161 atheism, 3, 23, 27, 30, 84, 118, 140–41, 196, 203 attentat, 228n29. See also assassination Auer, Ignaz, 44, 79, 81, 150–51, 183, 235n75 Auerbach, Albert, 169 Austria, 144 Austro-Prussian War, 29 authoritarianism, 5, 7, 12, 14, 29, 212, 213, 214, 221. See also Bismarck, Otto von Autonomie, 127, 149, 152 Baden (Germany), 8 Bakunin, Mikhail, 25, 34, 61, 87, 167, 174, 199, 263n39 Bamberger, Ludwig, 31–33, 36, 40, 49, 52, 55, 111, 130, 136 Barth, Theodor, 32, 137, 153, 198 Bavaria (Germany), 8, 96, 199 Bebel, August, 26, 28–29, 34, 43, 50, 51, 57, 58–60, 64, 76, 83, 96, 106, 118, 128, 133,

154–55, 159, 201 Belgium, 158 Bennigsen, Rudolf von, 36, 40, 41, 49, 52, 55, 67 Berkman, Alexander, 143 Berlepsch, Hans Hermann von, 132, 198–99 Berlin, Germany, 13, 152, 227n26; German workers in, 75; minor state of siege, 73, 81, 84, 118–19; police reports from, 124–25, 131–32, 158, 161, 191 (see also police powers) Berliner Autographirte Correspondenz (Berlin Transcript Correspondence), 36 Berliner Freie Presse (Berlin Free Press), 27 Berliner Neueste Nachrichten (Berlin Latest Report), 146 Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily), 35, 36, 153, 156 Berliner Volks-Tribüne (Berlin People’s Tribune), 170 Bernstein, Eduard, 27, 44, 73, 87, 89, 136, 169, 175, 242n96, 263n40 Beseler, Georg, 41 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobold von, 208, 209 Bethusy-Huc, Eduard Georg, 38 Bieberstein, Adolf Marschall von, 40, 160 Biermann, Wilhelm Eduard, 162, 163–64 Bismarck, Otto von, 3, 44, 233n3; anti-revolutionary stance, 24, 76; authoritarianism, 7, 12, 212, 213; criticism by Hasselmann, 65–67; discussions with Bucher, 252n1; exceptional legislation, 17, 33, 35–42 passim, 44, 49, 50, 104, 111, 226n10; failure to distinguish among socialist groups, 63–64, 76, 213; “iron and blood” speech, 26–27; as “iron chancellor,” 5–6; Lassalle and, 51, 54; military budget, 127; power to dissolve Reichstag, 104, 111, 127; press coverage and, 44, 135–36; relations with National Liberals, 45; religion and, 50; rhetoric of speeches, 228n31; tobacco monopoly, 40, 54 Blackbourn, David, 6

Index

Bloch, Josef, 171–76 Blum, Hans, 142 Bolsheviks, 219–20. See also Russia Borries, Georg von, 160, 191, 193, 194 Bracke, Wilhelm, 58–60, 64, 90, 236n94 Brazil, 144, 161 Brentano, Lujo, 157 Brüel, Ludwig, 56, 57 Brupbacher, Fritz, 178 Bülow, Bernhard von, 196–97, 199, 213; memoir, 215 Bülow Bloc, 196–97, 200, 203, 206–7 Bundersrat, 35, 41, 64, 81 Bürger, H., 199 Burke, Edmund, 23, 28 Buse, Dieter, 189 Cafiero, Carlo, 236n94 Calker, Fritz van, 209 Call to Socialism (Landauer), 194 Canalejas, José, 190 Cancellation of the Socialist Law and the Alteration of the Legal Code (Fuld), 131 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 154 Caprivi, Leo von, 134, 135, 144, 148–49 Carnot, Marie François Sadi, 135, 143 Caserio, Sante, 143 Catholics, 57, 140, 199, 212–13; family and, 140; in southern Germany, 7. See also Kulturkampf; Zentrum Cathrein, Victor (aka Nikolaus Siegfried), 141 Cavendish, Frederick, 13 Cegielski, Stephan, 122 Central League of German Industrialists, 199 Chartist demonstrations, 52 Chicago, Illinois, 126; Haymarket bombing, 122–23 Christian People’s Party (CVP), 216 Christian Social Workers’ Party, 34, 35, 117– 18, 138, 199 Chur Congress (1881), 84

291

civil liberties. See rule of law civil society, 6, 7 Claß, Heinrich, 206 class issues, 9, 11, 20, 70–71, 139, 146–47, 180–89, 231n38; “Class Warfare” pamphlet, 75; German workers’ movements, 3; labor strikes, 122–23, 126, 143, 157; trade union movement, 20, 72, 180, 184. See also mass strike Colonial Society, 200 communism: anti-communism, 219–20; Communist Manifesto, 87–88, 118, 167, 253n25; Marxist thought, 12, 87–88, 167, 176–77, 181–89 passim. See also Marx, Karl conservatism, 241n84; alliances, 127; antianarchist stances, 194, 212 (see also under anti-revolutionary stance in this entry); antirevolutionary stance, 17, 24, 74, 82–83, 85, 115, 124, 128–30, 143, 205–6; anti-socialist stance, 22–23, 28–29, 36–42 passim, 45–48, 50–51, 63, 76, 141, 199–202; distinctions among socialist groups, 63–64, 76, 116–18, 129, 142–43, 236n91; exceptional legislation and, 17, 24, 74, 82–83, 85, 109–11; family, 23, 141–42; linked to anarchism, 95, 151; origins of modern conservatism, 22–23, 236n91; religion, 23–24; social stability, 23; state, 23 Conservative Handbook, 117, 154 conspiracy, 75, 96, 119–20, 248n14 constitution, 6–7, 270n23. See also rule of law Conversations-Lexicon Encyclopedia (Brockhaus), 139 Copenhagen Congress (1883), 95, 96, 101–2, 125 crimes against humanity, 223 Crispi, Francesco, 143 Czarlinski, Leon von, 56 Daily Telegraph affair, 208 Danzig, Germany, 158

292

I ndex

Darmstadt, Germany, 206 Death in the Tiergarten (Hett), 9 Deflem, Mathieu, 160, 161 democracy, 90, 165, 190, 208, 214, 221, 223; Reichstag and, 7, 8. See also equality, legal Democracy in the Undemocratic State (Fairbairn), 7 Dempwolf, Friedrich, 161 Deutsche Reichspartei. See German Empire Party Deutsch-Freisinnige party, 103–4, 106, 111, 112, 113, 121, 138 Deval, Arthur, 144 Diehl, Karl, 163–64 Dietzgen, Josef, 91 discussion-speaker, 9 Dobberstein, Friedrich, 152 Döbeln, Germany, 206 Dollfus, Jean, 55 Dresden, Germany, 191 Dresden Congress (1903), 201 dueling, 242n116 Düsseldorf, Germany, 132 Dynamite Law, 112–13, 115 economic determinism, 170 Eisenach, Germany, 206 Eisenachers, 25, 31. See also Social Democrats Elberfeld, Germany, 13; restaurant bomb, 97 electoral process, 7, 10, 78, 173, 180, 196, 226n9, 241n84; election of 1878, 48; election of 1881, 85–86, 95, 102; election of 1884, 104, 113–14, 116; election of 1887, 121, 127; election of 1890, 133–34, 136; election of 1893, 169; election of 1898, 8, 11; election of 1903, 11, 196; election of 1907, 197, 200, 206; election of 1909, 194; election of 1912, 21, 207; electoral districts, 250n62; fair elections, 11; “Hottentot election,” 197; local elections of 1905-1907, 206 Elisabeth (Austrian empress), 135, 154–55

Engels, Friedrich, 25, 73, 87–88, 167, 182, 201 Enlightenment, 23 equality, legal, 5, 9, 11, 12, 42, 53, 138, 199 Erfurt Congress (1891), 137, 170, 181, 189, 201 Ernst, Eugen, 120 ethnic minority political groups, 5, 7, 27, 33, 55–57, 108–9, 122, 190. See also specific groups Eulenburg, Botho zu, 37, 50, 63, 148 exceptional legislation, 8–9, 11, 17, 35–36, 36–42, 52–53, 116, 121, 133, 144, 148, 199. See also Socialist Law Fairbairn, Brett, 7, 11, 12 fairness issue, 8, 12; discussion-speaker, 9 Falkenhayn, Erich von, 208, 209 family, 23, 65, 140, 141, 142, 204; familial metaphors, 23 Fehrenbach, Constantin, 209 Fichte, Johann, 163–64 First International. See Workingmen’s Association (First International) Flambez, 32, 231n47 Forstner, Günter von, 208 Fourier, Charles, 87 France, 143, 144, 160; French Revolution, 17, 22–23, 28; Paris Commune, 3, 22, 25, 28, 32, 47, 51, 52, 55, 71 Franckenstein, Georg Baron von und zu, 56 Franco-Prussian War, 3, 22, 65, 71 Frankfurt, Germany, 13, 227n26; police headquarters explosion, 97, 106, 120 Frankfurt National Assembly, 24, 26 Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt Newspaper), 36, 54, 156, 162, 175 Frauböse, Paul, 159 Free Conservative Party. See German Empire Party free speech, 42, 53. See also public debate Freie Bühne (Free Theater), 178 Freie Volksbühne (Free People’s Theater), 170

Index

Freiheit (Liberty), 67, 73, 96, 98, 124, 125, 149; in opposition to Der Sozialdemokrat, 74–98 passim French Revolution, 17, 22–23, 28 Frick, Henry Clay, 143 Friedeberg, Raphael, 180, 185, 192 Friedheim, I.V., 124 Friedrich III, 132 Friedrich-Wilhelm IV (king), 37 Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 34 Frohme, Karl, 85, 118 Fuld, Ludwig, 131 Gabriel, Elun (Assassins and Conspirators: Anarchism, Socialism, and Political Culture in Imperial Germany): outline of study, 17– 21; sources of study, 15–17, 260n2; terminology, 225n1, 228n29; thesis of study, 10–12 Garfield, James, 85 Geib, August, 73 gender, 140, 197, 204, 253n25. See also family General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), 25, 31 general strike. See anarchists George I (Greece), 191 Gerlach, Hellmut von, 192 German Communist Party (KPD), 21, 71, 168, 189, 216 German Conservative Party, 50 German Democratic Party (DDP), 216 German Empire, 214; anti-anarchist measures, 144–66 passim (see also Socialist Law); bureaucracies, 6; colonies, 197; constitution, 6–7, 270n23; democratizing, 6, 10, 208, 214 (see also democracy); executive branch, 6; failure to distinguish among socialist groups, 63–64, 76, 84, 98–99, 104–5, 150; historians of German Empire, 6–11, 27–33, 125–26, 140–43, 162–66, 243n140, 260n2; legal system, 9, 39, 145–47; local reports on anarchists,

293

151–53, 156–61 (see also police powers); national vs. economic issues, 226n14; parliamentarizing, 6, 26, 214 (see also Reichstag); police powers, 56, 63–64, 65, 87, 114 (see also police powers); proclamation, 3; Prussian influence on, 6; spies, 72, 114, 118–22 (see also police powers); working class in, 146–47 (see also class issues). See also Reichstag; Socialist Law German Empire Party, 37, 51, 77, 130, 133– 34, 144, 230n27 German History -- Power-State Confronting Democracy (Nipperdey), 6 German legal system, 9, 39, 145 German National People’s Party (DNVP), 216 German People’s Party (DVP), 216 German People’s Party (left-liberal party), 53, 54, 106, 117, 127 German Southwest Africa, 197 German -Speaking Anarchic-Communistic Party, 61 German unification, 7, 71; wars of unification, 22, 26 Germania, 15, 84, 107–8, 156 Germany and Socialism (Bamberger), 31–33, 40 Ghent Congress, 61, 62, 64, 88 Gneist, Rudolf, 41, 52, 116 Goals of German Social Democracy, The (Oldenberg), 197 Goldberg, Ann, 92 Görlitz, Germany, 157 Gothein, Georg, 138 Grenzboten (Border Herald), 162 Greulich, Hermann, 88–89, 92 Grillenberger, Karl, 94, 104–5 Grünberg, Carl, 138–39 Guelphs, 7, 55–57 Guiteau, Charles, 85 Gumbinnen, Germany, 152 Gumplowicz, Ladislaus, 174–75 Günther, Siegmund, 77

294

I ndex

Hallesche Zeitung (Halle Newspaper), 194 Hamburg, Germany, 13, 152, 157, 206; Hamburg Social Democrats, 93; minor state of siege, 81, 84 Hamburger Korrespondent (Hamburg Correspondent), 125, 144 Hamburger Nachrichten (Hamburg News), 135, 142–43, 156, 158, 162, 194 Hammerstein-Loxten, Hans von, 161 Hamon, Augustin, 172, 173, 179 Hänel, Albert, 53–54, 71, 77, 85, 86, 106, 121 Hanover (Germany), 7, 65, 206, 239n23 Harburg, Germany: minor state of siege, 84 Hasenclever, Wilhelm, 80, 85, 90, 91, 104–5, 112–13, 118 Hasselmann, Wilhelm, 65–67, 69, 168–69, 237n95; “Open Letter to the German Proletariat,” 78; as revolutionary socialist, 73, 74–75, 78, 79–81 (see also Freiheit [Liberty]) Haymarket bombing, 122–23, 126 Held, Adolf, 30, 62 Helldorf, Otto von, 37, 130 Henry, Émile, 143 Herero people, 197 Herrfurth, Ludwig, 132 Hertling, Georg von, 78, 118, 141 Herzberg, Wilhelm, 185–86 Hett, Benjamin Carter, 9 Hilfe, Die (Help), 138 Hirsch, Karl, 73 historians of German Empire, 6–11, 260n2; concept of “alternative culture,” 10, 214; concept of “negative integration,” 10; political culture, 9; scholarship of anarchism, 162–66, 243n140, 260n2; scholarship of socialism, 27–33, 125–26, 140–43, 260n2; segmentation of social milieus versus consensus, 10 Hödel, Max, 34–35, 36, 58, 62–63, 235n75 Hofmann, Karl, 38

Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Chlodwig zu, 24, 149 Hohenthal, August, 141–42 Hohenzollern monarchy, 33 “How to Breed Anarchists” (Kautsky), 97 Hunt, Lynn, 7 Ihring, Ferdinand (aka Ihring-Mahlow), 120 Imperial League against Social Democracy, 21, 199–207, 212 Independent Social Democrats, 189, 218 independent socialists, 152, 170–71, 173–74 individualism, 138, 155, 165, 176–77 International Workers’ Congress (1896), 179 International Workingmen’s Association (First International), 25, 61, 167 Italy, 85, 136, 143, 144, 161, 236n94 Jackson, Robert, 270n23 Jagow, Traugott von, 190 Jazdzewski, Ludwik von, 56, 108 Jena Congress (1905), 180, 185 Jesuits, 7; Jesuit Law (1872), 41, 57, 199 Jews, 140–41; anti-Semitism, 233n16 Jezewski, Stanislaus von, 147 Jörg, Joseph Edmund, 39, 40 Jungen, 152, 170–71, 173, 174, 182, 251n84. See also Independent Social Democrats; independent socialists Jura Federation, 63, 233n2 Kahl, Wilhelm, 158 Kaiserreich. See German Empire Kalle, Fritz, 118 Kammerer, Anton, 103, 125 Kampffmeyer, Paul, 173, 261n16 Kardorff, Wilhelm von, 51, 52, 130 Kartell alliance, 127, 131 Kathedersozialisten (“socialists of the lectern”), 17, 30, 32, 33, 62, 71 Katzenstein, Simon, 186–87

Index

Kautsky, Karl, 97, 137, 171, 188, 219, 220, 263n39 Kladderadatsch (Crash), 111 Kleist-Retzow, Hans Hugo von, 50, 51, 76– 77 Kohlrausch, Martin, 9 Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne Newspaper), 125, 156 Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen (Royally Privileged Berlin Newspaper of Governmental and Scholarly Matters). See Vossische Zeitung (Voss Newspaper) Koscielski, Jozef, 130 Kreuz-Zeitung (Cross Paper), 36, 47, 48, 81, 83, 110, 144 Krieter, W., 126 Kropotkin, Peter, 76, 149 Krüger, Friedrich, 152 Kulemann, Wilhelm, 131 Kulturkampf, 7, 8, 22, 29, 33, 42, 57, 68, 84, 140, 197 Kumics, Michael, 97–98 Kunowski, Leopold, 142 Kuroff, Alfred, 179–80 Kurtz, Carl, 123 labor strikes, 122–23, 126, 143, 157. See also mass strike Lafargue, Paul, 88 Landauer, Gustav, 136, 157, 169, 175, 194, 262n22 Lasker, Eduard, 41, 52, 53, 77, 85, 86 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 25, 31, 51, 245n129 Laterne, Die (The Lantern), 73 Laufkötter, Franz, 187 Leipzig, Germany, 10, 13, 191, 227n26; minor state of siege, 84 Leipziger Volkszeitung (Leipzig People’s Paper), 193 Leonhardt, Adolf, 74

295

Leopold II (Belgium), 158 lèse-majesté laws, 197, 238n11 lex Heinze, 197 Liberalism and Social Democracy (Barth), 198 liberals, 3; left liberals, 5, 212–13; left-liberal criticism of National Liberals, 55; liberal nationalists, 24; opposition to exceptional legislation, 36–42 passim, 53–55, 85, 106–7; political alliances, 136–37; views on anarchism, 145–47, 212–13; views on socialism, 29–33, 31–33, 35–36, 39, 70–71, 138, 197–98. See also Deutsch-Freisinnige party; German People’s Party (left liberal party); National Liberal Party; Progressive Party libertarian socialist, 174 Lidtke, Vernon, 10, 26, 169 Liebert, Eduard von, 199–200, 203, 215 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 26–27, 31, 34, 37, 51, 58–60, 73–74, 90, 93–94, 120–21, 123, 126, 133, 154, 178, 201 Lieske, Julius, 13, 98 Limburg-Stirum, Wilhelm-Friedrich Count von, 156 Loewe, K. W., 25 Loewenthal, Eduard, 147 Lorrainians, 33. See also Alsace-Lorraine Lougee, Robert, 153 Lübeck, Germany, 206 Lucheni, Luigi, 154–56 Lucius, Robert, 37–39 Luxemburg, Rosa, 20, 181–89 MacKay, John Henry, 159, 175 Madai, Guido von, 13, 74, 80, 98–102, 124 Magazin für Literatur (Magazine for Literature), 159 Magdeburg, Germany, 124, 126 Magdeburg Congress (1910), 184 Malatesta, Errico, 236n94 Mann, Heinrich, 227n24 Mannheim Congress (1906), 185

296

I ndex

Marat, Jean-Paul, 47, 82 Märkische Volks-Zeitung (People’s Paper of the March), 154 Marquardsen, Heinrich, 77, 110, 118 Marreck, Adolf, 174 Martin, Rudolf Emil, 125 Marx, Karl, 12, 25, 64, 73, 87–88, 167, 201, 263n39; critiques of, 179; economic determinism, 170; intellectuals and, 170, 261n9; scientific-utopian distinction, 87–88 mass media, 9, 44; anarchist press, 124, 152 (see also specific publications); newspapers, 15 (see also specific newspapers); pamphlet literature, 16 (see also specific pamphlets); reaction to anarchists, 143–45, 192 mass strike, 20–21, 180–89, 194, 217 Mass Strike, Political Party, and the Trade Unions (Luxemburg), 182 Massow, Conrad von, 158 McKinley, William, 136, 161 Mehring, Franz, 31, 62–63, 178, 263n39; articles on socialism, 70–71; as member of SPD, 71 Melbeck, Karl Friedrich, 77 Merlino, Francesco Saverio, 174 Meyers Encyclopedia, 129 Michels, Robert, 181, 185, 263n51 military: budget, 127; expenditures, 8 “minor state of siege,” 73, 81, 84, 118–19, 222 Miquel, Johannes von, 116, 165 Moltke, Helmuth von, 38 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 7, 110 Most, Johann, 13, 26, 27, 65–67, 69, 168–69, 237n95; “Finally” article, 81, 83, 84; as revolutionary socialist, 74, 77, 79–80, 87, 96 Moufang, Christoph, 55, 56 Müller, Adam, 23 Müller, Hans, 170 Munckel, August, 113 Munich, Germany, 227n26 Muser, Oskar, 131

Nama people, 197 Nation, Die (The Nation), 137, 153 National Liberal Party, 11, 18, 28, 33, 34, 39, 41, 45, 77–78, 110, 116, 118, 131, 133–34, 142–43; alliances, 127; exceptional legislation and, 36, 49, 52–53, 76; government and press criticism of, 45, 47–48, 51–52, 234n25; left-liberal criticism of, 55 National Socialism, 217 National-Zeitung (National Newspaper), 36, 47 Naumann, Friedrich, 138, 157, 198 Navy League, 200 negative integration, 10 Nettlau, Max, 175 Neu Weissensee, Germany, 161 Neue Korrespondenz (New Correspondence), 162 Neue Preußische Zeitung (New Prussian Newspaper). See Kreuz-Zeitung (Cross Paper) Neue Zeit, Die (The New Era), 171, 175, 176, 177–78, 187–88 Neues Leben (New Life), 158 Neueste Mittheilungen (Latest Information), 15, 98, 152 Neve, John, 13 Nieberding, Rudolf, 149, 150 Niederwald Monument, 13; attempted dynamiting of, 97, 98, 120 Nihilists, 34–35, 59, 74, 77, 80, 105 Nipperdey, Thomas, 6 Nobiling, Karl, 43–44, 58, 63, 233n2 Nord und Süd (North and South), 98 North German Confederation, 6 O. M., 98–99 Oldenberg, Karl, 197 Oldenburg, Germany, 206 opportunism, 168, 182 Osterroth, Nikolaus, 203 Owen, Robert, 87

Index

Palm, Carl Rudolf, 120 Pan-German League, 200, 206 Pannekoek, Anton, 176, 184–85 Paris Commune, 3, 22, 25, 28, 32, 47, 51, 52, 55, 71, 77 Parliamentarism and the General Strike (Friedeberg), 180–81 Passanante, Giovanni, 85 Payer, Friedrich, 83–84 Peirotes, Jacques, 209 Penitentiary Bill (1899), 11, 212 People’s Society for Catholic Germany, 140 People’s Will, The, 81. See also Nihilists pétroleuses, 70, 71, 237n1. See also Paris Commune Plekhanov, Georgii, 177 police powers, 56, 63–64, 65, 87, 221, 245n129; agents provocateurs, 114, 118–22, 128, 130, 151, 248n24; anarchist albums, 161; distinctions among socialist groups, 63–64, 76, 81, 98–99, 101–2, 124; funding, 75; international cooperation against anarchists, 144, 160–61, 258n127; relationship between police and conspirators, 75, 248n14; reports on anarchists, 151–53, 156–61, 191, 193–94, 239n23, 251n84; reports on Socialists, 74–75, 123–24, 131–32, 194, 228n34, 244n144; repression and, 72, 87 Polish parties, 5, 7, 9, 11, 27, 33, 55–57, 108, 122, 130–31 Political ABC Book (Richter), 153 political culture, 9, 10–12, 14, 42, 212–23, 227n23; democratic values and, 165; liberal values and, 190–211; role of anarchism in, 212–23 passim political legitimacy, 12, 14 Portugal, 144 Post, Die (The Post), 158 Potsdam, Germany, 152, 161 Practicing Democracy (Anderson), 7–8

297

Press Law (1874), 33 press laws, 148 Preußische Jahrbücher (Prussian Yearbooks), 28, 45, 47, 98 Prison Bill, 157 Progressive Party, 33, 37, 39–40, 54, 111, 208, 241n84; arguments against exceptional legislation, 53, 77 (see also liberals) propaganda of the deed, 12, 14, 61, 126, 139, 159, 186, 190–91 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 87 Provinzial-Corespondenz (Provincial Correspondence), 15, 34, 36, 47, 74, 112 Prussia, 6, 26, 29, 65, 138 public debate, 3, 5, 7, 11, 12, 41, 190, 191, 214, 217, 221, 223; about anarchists, 12, 76–114; parliamentary speech, 8; Reichstag and, 14–15, 48–49, 115–34 passim; on repression, 115–34 passim; rhetoric of speeches, 228n31; Socialist Law, 11, 43– 69, 76–114; Zukunftsstaat (future state) debate, 140. See also free speech; political culture public sphere, 5, 6, 9, 11, 17, 50, 54, 75, 217. See also public debate Puttkamer, Robert von, 68, 82–83, 85, 106, 116, 117, 120, 123, 128–29, 132, 151, 248n7 Quintessence, 262n32 Quintessence of Socialism (Schäffle), 29–30 Radenhausen, Christian, 122 Rauh, Manfred, 6 Ravachol (François Claudius Koenigstein), 143 Rebell, Der (The Rebel), 124, 127 Rechtsstaat. See equality, legal Red International, The (Zacher), 100–101 Regierungs-Präsidenten, reports on anarchists, 151–53, 152, 156–61. See also police powers Reichensperger, Peter, 55–56, 129–30, 133 Reichsfeinde (groups hostile to empire), 5, 13,

298

I ndex

33, 55, 68, 199, 213, 214 Reichsfreunde (groups friendly to the empire), 13 Reichspartei. See German Empire Party Reichstag, 3, 4, 208; constituents, 11–12, 226n10; democracy and, 7, 8 (see also democracy); political debate and, 14–15, 48–49, 76–114, 104–11, 139–40, 228n31, 228n33; power of, 6; rhetoric of speeches in, 228n31; socialists in, 27, 33–34, 72, 114, 133–34. See also exceptional legislation Reinsdorf, August, 13, 87, 97–99 religion, 23–24, 30, 50, 203 Retallack, James, 10 revolution, 50, 52, 59, 86, 123, 212–13, 219, 223; conservative anti-revolutionary rhetoric, 17, 24–25; peaceful versus violent, 91–92, 93–94, 95; revolutionary attentism, 137, 189; Social Democracy and, 3, 50, 52, 58–59, 64, 80, 86, 91–92, 93–94, 95, 106, 123, 137, 167, 212, 213 (see also Social Democracy). See also anarchists; Social Democrats; terrorism Revolution Bill (1895), 11, 149–51, 153–54, 156, 157, 212 revolutionary attentism, 137, 189 revolutionary socialists, 73, 191 Reyckardt, E., 197 Richter, Eugen, 37, 39–40, 53, 54–55, 111, 153 Richthofen, Bernhard Baron von, 131–32 Rixdorf, Germany, 161 Rjasanoff, N., 178–79, 263n39, 263n40 Röser, Adolf, 208 Rößler, Constantin, 142, 147 Roth, Guenther, 10 Rubini, Gennaro, 158 Rüdesheim, Germany, 97 rule of law, 6, 7, 8, 14, 86, 190, 212, 214, 221, 223, 270n23. See also equality, legal

Rumpf, Carl, 13, 120; assassination of, 98, 116, 120 Rupsch, Franz, 98–99 Russia, 77, 81, 160, 191; Russian Revolution (1905), 183–84 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 87 Saxony (Germany), 8, 10, 138, 152 Schäffle, Albert, 29, 136 Schippel, Max, 170 Schlesische Zeitung (Schleswig Newspaper), 156 Schmidt, Elias, 119–20 Schmitt, Carl, 52 Schorske, Carl, 168 Schulze-Delitzsch, Franz Hermann, 39 Schumann, Dirk, 218 Schuster, Richard, 28 Schweinburg, Victor, 200 Second International, 185 Secret Organization of the Social Democratic Party (Krieter, W.), 126 secularism, 23 Sedan Day, 26 Septennat, 127, 129 Shuvalov, Pavel, 160 Singer, Paul, 118, 120–21, 127–28 Social Democracy and Anarchism (Herzberg), 185 Social Democracy in the Vest Pocket (Hohenthal), 141–42 Social Democracy: Its Truths and Its Errors (Radenhausen), 122 Social Democrat Comes! A Warning Cry to Our Rural People, The, 140 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 3, 11, 71, 137, 216. See also Social Democrats Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP), 25, 31. See also Social Democrats Social Democratic workers’ protection bill, 34

Index

Social Democratic World of Thought, The (Barth), 138 Social Democrats, 3, 5, 11, 17, 22 —anti-anarchist stance, 4, 11, 12, 18, 61–65, 72, 77, 86–94, 95–96, 123, 126–27, 143–44, 150–51, 154–56; anti-conspiracy stance, 96; criticisms of government repression, 77, 82, 83–84, 85, 118–22, 130; expulsions from party, 67, 77, 79, 80, 81, 237n95; in internal development, 167–89 passim; linking conservatism to anarchism, 95–96, 118–22, 151 —attitudes toward Social Democrats by others, 215, 244n144 (see also specific parties); assassinations and media response to Social Democrats, 35–36, 44; criticism of heroes on calendars, 199; failure to distinguish from anarchists, 63–64, 76, 84, 98–99, 104–5, 116–18, 129, 142–43, 150, 199; as foreign subversives, 50–51; formal outlawing of, 4, 67–69; as party of assassins and conspirators, 44, 45, 57–58; pétroleuses, 70, 71, 237n1; as pure opposition, 26; vaterlandslose Gesellen, 22 —beliefs: alternative culture, 214; anti-militarism, 196, 204–5, 215–16; anti-imperialism, 196; atheism, 23, 27, 30, 84, 118, 140–41, 196; democracy, 4, 90; economic determinism, 170; Marxist thought, 87– 88, 167, 176–77, 181–89 passim; peaceful reform, 4, 59, 65, 72, 91–92, 136–37, 167, 169, 174, 213–14; religion, 30, 203; World War I, 215–16 —class relations, 9, 11, 20, 70–71, 139, 180– 89; mass strike, 20–21, 180–89, 194, 217; workers and, 11, 20, 70–71 —congresses, 169; Copenhagen Congress (1883), 95, 96, 101–2, 125; Dresden Congress (1903), 201; Erfurt Congress (1891), 137, 170, 181, 189, 201; international socialist Chur Congress (1881), 84;

299

International Workers’ Congress (1896), 179; Jena Congress (1905), 180, 185; Magdeburg Congress (1910), 184; Mannheim Congress (1906), 185, 195; St. Gallen Congress (1887), 123, 130, 155; Stuttgart Congress (1898), 181; Wyden Congress (1880), 80–81, 82, 100, 119 —history in German Empire: aftermath of Socialist Law, 18, 20, 67–114, 167–89 (see also specific issues); assassinations and media response to Social Democrats, 35–36, 44; origins of socialists, 22, 25 —identity formation, 4, 60–67, 77–114 passim, 181–89; heterogeneity, 17; internal debate after Socialist Law, 167–89; Marxist thought, 87–88, 155, 167, 176–77, 181– 89, 181–89 passim —internal development, 167–89 passim, 213; anti-anarchist rhetoric, 168, 178–80, 188– 89; Lassallean wing, 236n77; radical versus reformist, 168, 181–89; revisionism, 168, 181–89; splits, 168, 177, 189; utopian versus opportunist, 168, 182 —laws affecting (see also Socialist Law); criticisms of government repression, 77, 82, 83–84, 85, 118–22, 130; Dynamite Law and, 112–13; exceptional legislation, refusal to discuss, 37–42 passim; exceptional legislation, willingness to discuss, 49–69 passim, 57–60; lèse-majesté laws, 197, 238n11; protection bill, 34 —publications, 169, 170; Der Sozialdemokrat (The Social Democrat), 4, 15, 18, 67, 74– 98 passim, 95–97, 98, 118, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127, 169; in exile, 4, 72 (see also specific publications); Die Neue Zeit (The New Era), 171, 176; Sozialistische Monatshefte (Socialist Monthly), 171–76 —revolution and, 3, 50, 52, 58–59, 64, 80, 86, 91–92, 93–94, 95, 106, 123, 137, 167, 212–13; evolutionary socialism, 137, 169;

300

I ndex

peaceful reform, 4, 59, 65, 72, 91–92, 136– 37, 197; rhetoric versus behavior, 27; violence and, 5, 70–71 —strategies: criticisms of government repression, 77, 82, 83–84, 85, 118–22, 130; mass strike, 20–21, 180–89, 194, 217; normalization in political system, 9–10, 69, 70–114 passim, 167, 174, 189; parliamentarizing, 26–27, 72, 90, 136, 137, 139, 167, 169, 174, 181, 189, 197, 213–14; party of people (Volk), 195–96; political alliances, 136–37, 138, 175, 190–211 passim, 198–99, 241n84; rapprochement with anarchists, 171–76, 181; recasting socialism, 60–67, 69, 77–114 passim; relations with non-socialists versus isolation, 12; revolutionary attentism, 137, 189; rigidity versus pluralism, 171–72, 180; World War I, 215–16 Social Reform or Social Revolution? (Luxemburg), 182 social revolutionaries. See revolutionary socialists socialism: scholarship of, 27–33, 125–26, 140–43, 260n2 (see also historians of German Empire). See also German Socialists; Social Democrats Socialism, Communism, Anarchism (Grünberg), 138–39 Socialism, Social Democracy, and Social Policy (Held), 30 Socialism and Anarchism in Europe and America during the Years 1883 to 1886, 125 Socialism and Assassination (Treitschke), 45 Socialism and Its Supporters (Treitschke), 28 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Engels), 88 Socialist Law, 4, 11, 18, 43–69, 212, 222, 244n144; aftermath, 20, 67–69, 70–76; as creating political calm, 108–10, 116–17, 128; end of, 132; exceptional legislation,

8–9, 35–36, 36–42, 52–53; metaphors of war, 51, 66; predecessors, 35–42 passim; radicalization of socialists and (father of anarchism), 19, 71–72, 77, 84, 96–97, 105–7, 115–34 passim; renewals of, 68, 76–114, 116, 124, 127, 131; votes on, 67, 112, 133; wording of, 50, 56. See also exceptional legislation Socialist Law and Administration of Justice, The (Muser), 131 Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD), 25, 137 socialists. See German socialists Society for Germandom Abroad, 200 Society for the Eastern Marches, 200 Soiron, Alexander Freiherr von, 24 Sonnemann, Leopold, 54, 55, 106–7, 175, 248n7 Sozialdemokrat, Der (The Social Democrat), 4, 15, 18, 67, 95, 96–97, 98, 118, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127, 169; as rival to Freiheit, 74– 98 passim Sozialist, Der (The Socialist), 152, 158, 171 Sozialistische Monatshefte (Socialist Monthly), 171–76 Spain, 143, 144, 154, 190 Spartacists, 218 Sperber, Jonathan, 10, 114, 196 St. Gallen, Switzerland, 123 St. Gallen Congress (1887), 123, 130, 155 Stammler, Rudolf, 162–63 Starck, Johann August, 23 Stauffenburg, August Schenk von, 107, 111 Steger, Manfred, 176 Steiner, Rudolf, 159 Stellmacher, Hermann, 103, 125 Stiékloff, Georg, 187–88 Stirner, Max, 87, 165 Stöcker, Adolf, 34–35, 117–18 Strasbourg, Germany, 13, 98

Index

Streltzow, Roman, 173 Stumm-Halberg, Carl Ferdinand von, 144–45, 150 Stuttgart, Germany, 13, 98 Stuttgart Congress (1898), 181 suffrage, 78; male, 6; Reichstag suffrage, 7; universal suffrage, 6, 174 Switzerland, 143, 144 Tactical Differences in the Workers’ Movement (Pannekoek), 184 Tag, Der (The Day), 192 tariffs, 8; tobacco, 40, 54 Teltow, Germany, 152 Terror of 1793, 24 terrorism, 4, 13, 20, 97–99, 115, 120, 143, 175–76, 212–23; anarchist terrorism’s origins, 4; brigandage, 186; discourse of, 223; Haymarket bombing, 122–23; legitimation of political violence, 217–20; propaganda of the deed, 12, 14, 61, 126, 139, 159, 186, 190–91; rhetoric against, 221; Social Democracy and, 3; state terrorism, 223; “War on Terror” of today, 221–23. See also assassination; revolution Terrorism and Communism (Kautsky), 219– 20 Terrorism and Communism (Trotsky), 220 Theory of Anarchism, The (Stammler), 162–63 Through Atheism to Anarchism (Cathrein aka Siegfried), 141 tobacco monopoly, 40, 54 Tobias, Hermann, 146, 147 trade union movement, 20, 72, 180, 184; general strike, 20 Träger, Albert, 130 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 24–25, 28–29, 45– 48, 110, 230n27 Trotsky, L., 220 True Face of Socialism, The, 201

301

Umberto I (Italy), 85, 136, 161 United Kingdom, 144 United States, 144, 158. See also Haymarket bombing Universal Socialist Congress (Ghent, Switzerland), 61–62; Ghent Manifesto, 64 utopianism, 21, 87–88, 90, 167–89 passim Vahlteich, Julius, 77 Vaillant, August, 143 Verein für Socialpolitik (Union for Social Policy), 30 Vienna, Austria, 13 Viereck, Louis, 118, 120 violence. See terrorism Voigt, Andreas, 163 Volksstimme (Voice of the People), 170 Vollmar, Georg von, 80, 96, 119, 139, 154, 195, 197–98; “Eldorado speeches,” 136–37; as moderate, 169 Vorwärts (Forward), 15, 143–44, 154, 236n94, 248n7 Vossische Zeitung (Voss Newspaper), 35–36 Wagner, Adolph, 30 Waldenburg, Germany, 152 Weber, Max, 157, 263n51 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 6, 25 Weidner, Albert, 146–47, 173–74 Weimar Republic, 3, 21, 189, 190, 216–20; governing coalition, 5; violence in, 216–20 passim Weisbrod, Bernd, 218 Welt am Montag, Der (The World on Monday), 192 What Must One Know about German Social Democracy? (Reyckardt), 197 Why We Are Pursued!, 121 Wichmann, A., 119 Wiesbaden, Germany, 161

302

I ndex

Wilhelm I, 5; assassination attempts against, 4, 13, 17, 34, 43–44 Wilhelm II, 23–24, 132, 134, 135, 149; Daily Telegraph affair, 208; declaration of 1914, 115 Will Social Democracy Triumph? (Kunowski), 142 Wille, Bruno, 170, 178 Windheim, Ludwig von, 158, 159–60 Windthorst, Ludwig, 33, 34, 37, 41, 55–56, 107, 117–18, 122 Winterer, Landelin, 56, 108 Wolf, August, 119 Woman in the Past, Present, and Future (Bebel), 107 World War I, 215–16 Wortley, Montague Stuart, 208

Wurm, Theophil, 199 Württemberg (Germany), 8 Wyden Congress (1880), 80–81, 82, 100, 119 Zabern Affair (1913), 208–12 Zacher, Georg, 100–101, 245n166 Zeit, Die (The Times), 15 Zenker, E. V., 145, 147, 162–63, 163–64 Zentrum, 5, 7, 11, 33, 34, 39, 55–57, 102, 112, 129–30, 131, 145, 153, 190, 199, 203, 216; conservative wing, 78, 118; opposition to exceptional legislation, 36–42 passim, 107–8; radicalization of socialists and, 84, 122. See also Catholics Zepler, Wally, 172–73 Zukunftsstaat (future state) debate (1893), 140 Zurich, Switzerland, 119