Assassins and Conspirators

Anarchism, Socialism, and Political Culture in Imperial Germany

Elun Gabriel

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781609091538
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Deutsche Geschichte

Over the course of the German Empire the Social Democrats went from being a vilified and persecuted minority to becoming the largest party in the Reichstag, enjoying broad-based support. But this was not always the case. In the 1870s, government mouthpieces branded Social Democracy the "party of assassins and conspirators" and sought to excite popular fury against it. Over time, Social Democrats managed to refashion their public image in large part by contrasting themselves to anarchists, who came to represent a politics that went far beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Social Democrats emphasized their overall commitment to peaceful change through parliamentary participation and a willingness to engage their political rivals. They condemned anarchist behavior—terrorism and other political violence specifically—and distanced themselves from the alleged anarchist personal characteristics of rashness, emotionalism, cowardice, and secrecy. Repeated public debate about the appropriate place of Socialism in German society, and its relationship to anarchist terrorism, helped Socialists and others, such as liberals, political Catholics, and national minorities, cement the principles of legal equality and a vigorous public sphere in German political culture.

Using a diverse array of primary sources from newspapers and political pamphlets to Reichstag speeches to police reports on anarchist and socialist activity, this book sets the history of Social Democracy within the context of public political debate about democracy, the rule of law, and the appropriate use of state power. Gabriel also places the history of German anarchism in the larger contexts of German history and the history of European socialism, where its importance has often been understated because of the movement's small size and failure to create a long-term mass movement.

CHAPTER ONE

Anarchy, Socialism, and

the Enemies of Order in

the German Empire

1871–1878

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 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 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 street-fighting.”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 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, 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 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 ...