German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism

Donna Harsch

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807857335, 9780807820988
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861929
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism explores the failure of Germany’s largest political party to stave off the Nazi threat to the Weimar republic. In 1928 members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) were elected to the chancellorship and thousands of state and municipal offices. But despite the party’s apparent strengths, in 1933 Social Democracy succumbed to Nazi power without a fight. Previous scholarship has blamed this reversal of fortune on bureaucratic paralysis, but in this revisionist evaluation, Donna Harsch argues that the party’s internal dynamics immobilized the SPD. Harsch looks closely at Social Democratic ideology, structure, and political culture, examining how each impinged upon the party’s response to economic disaster, parliamentary crisis, and the Nazis. She considers political and organizational interplay within the SPD as well as interaction between the party, the Socialist trade unions, and the republican defense league. Conceding that lethargy and conservatism hampered the SPD, Harsch focuses on strikingly inventive ideas put forward by various Social Democrats to address the republic’s crisis. She shows how the unresolved competition among these proposals blocked innovations that might have thwarted Nazism.

Originally published in 1993.

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Chapter One
Social Democracy in 1928

Judging from its portrayal in popular novels, the SPD played a very different role on the Weimar stage than it did on the Imperial stage. Der Untertan, Heinrich Mann’s satire of Wilhelmine Germany, characterizes the Social Democratic machinist Napoleon Fischer as a devious and double-dealing, but dangerous and effective, spokesman of the oppressed. In contrast, Hans Fallada’s late Weimar novel, Bauern, Bonzen, und Bomben, depicts a party of lead feet, bound by the special interests of organized labor although represented by a clever man with a broader perspective than his constituents. A bureaucrat, not a rabble-rouser, Bürgermeister Gareis is enmeshed in his town’s political relationships, unable to exploit them from without. Mann’s Fischer is an outsider; Fallada’s Gareis, an insider. Did this fictional transformation correspond to reality? In fact, scholars dispute the degree of cultural isolation of prewar Social Democracy, variously seeing its realm as a “negatively integrated” subculture,¹ an “alternative” culture,² or a culture at once integrative and emancipatory.³ It has been argued, for example, that nationalism infected Social Democratic workers more than contemporaries recognized.⁴ Nonetheless, virtually all studies concur that, politically and socially, prewar Social Democrats were shunned outsiders. In comparison, Weimar Social Democrats seemed significantly more integrated. Most dramatic was the transformation in the relationship of the SPD and ADGB to the state. Identification with the republic was not just ideological, but practical: at the provincial, state, and, especially, communal levels, Social Democrats participated in government.⁵ Like Bürgermeister Gareis, they no longer stood outside the system.

Economically, the position of Social Democrats was not transformed. Workers’ wages remained low, their housing inadequate.⁶ In an ongoing controversy over the relative gains of labor to capital in the 1920s, some scholars argue that these were substantial, while others insist that even in Weimar’s “golden years” workers barely recouped the drastic losses of 1914–24. They agree, though, that the Free Trade Unions did win significant wage gains for the majority of workers from 1924 to 1928 and that the gap between the wages of skilled and unskilled workers decreased to some extent.⁷ Indirect evidence, such as advertisements for auto repair shops, appliance stores, savings banks, and restaurants in SPD pamphlets and newspapers, suggests that workers took some modest part in Germany’s (underdeveloped) consumer economy.⁸ In 1927, a national unemployment insurance bill increased the security of workers in Weimar’s high-unemployment economy. Notable too was state intervention in the bargaining process through binding arbitration, a change perceived by both employers and unions as more in the interest of labor than of capital. About 100,000 delegates sat on factory councils (mandated by law in 1920) where they deliberated shop floor issues.⁹ Off the shop floor, Social Democratic workers took advantage of the low-income apartments, schools, swimming pools, libraries, and adult education halls built by municipalities.¹⁰ More difficult to quantify but not insignificant, the gulf between the cultural lives of the urban worker and the urban bourgeois shrank as city dwellers from diverse backgrounds participated in the new mass culture of fashion, hits, heartthrobs, and slang via radio and film.¹¹

Some historians contend that political integration, greater prosperity for at least some workers, and mass culture corroded the walls around the socialist fortress and that the decay of proletarian culture sapped the vitality of the SPD.¹² Others note that, in fact, only after 1918 did Social Democracy reach its peak of organizational differentiation and penetrate all aspects of its members’ lives; however, they add, expansion spread the movement too thinly, while participation in government breached the boundary between the SPD and the bourgeois world, so that inner atrophy set in.¹³ Historians also point out that as the gap between Social Democracy and bourgeois society narrowed, the breach between it and other proletarian cultures widened, in part because the skilled workers who formed its nucleus benefited more than unskilled workers from housing and other social programs.¹⁴ In addition, mass culture exerted a stronger pull on less-skilled, younger, and female workers who had not cut their teeth on the male-centered, craftworker associationism of prewar Social Democracy.¹⁵ Above all, Social Democracy no longer encompassed the socialist working-class world but faced competition from German Communism.

A second group of scholars claims that despite these developments the integration of Social Democratic into bourgeois culture did not occur. In the warmer climate of the republic, they say, Social Democracy’s separate culture blossomed, not withered.¹⁶ Adalheid von Saldern has suggested that diverse external influences, in fact, produced paradoxical results: Social Democratic culture both did and did not erode. No longer in sharp opposition to the state, it grew less political yet remained committed to its autonomy and forms of solidarity.¹⁷ Saldern’s point that isolation and integration were not mutually exclusive is well taken. Weimar Social Democrats demonstrated marked ambivalence in their attitudes toward the larger polity. The beloved slogans and songs of ritual occasions expressed related, but divided, loyalties. In celebration of the reunification of the majority SPD and Independent Socialists in 1922, for example, an SPD assembly in Munich shouted a triple “Long live the republic!” and then sang the Workers’ Marseillaise. Socialist festivals commemorated the working class and the republic.¹⁸ The intensity of Social Democrats’ affection for the republic waxed and waned inversely to that of the middle class. In rocky periods, they professed, at once defiant and bitter, “[The republic’s] only protector is the organized working class.”¹⁹ Ambivalence toward the larger society even permeated the Reichsbanner, the only SPD fraternal organization that, on paper at least, embraced bourgeois republican groups. At the founding meeting of the Munich Reichsbanner in 1924, its chairman beseeched a skeptical (Social Democratic) crowd to accept the Reichsbanner as a “compound of associations (Vereinszusammensetzung).” Social Democrats distrusted not only bourgeois who might join their associations but workers who strayed beyond the pale. Reichsbanner activists continually entreated less dedicated members to forsake “bourgeois sport leagues,” although these were proletarian in composition.²⁰

The dilemma of integration versus isolation produced tensions inside Social Democracy’s cultural organizations, within the SPD, and between the SPD and its fraternal associations. Stripped of the appeals to principle that adorned them, most major political fights in the SPD boiled down to disagreements over whether to retain or to tear down the walls between Social Democracy and the rest of German society. When the SPD entered the national cabinet in 1928 for the first time in five years, this old conflict flared anew, fed by discomfiture over participation in a coalition with bourgeois parties. This issue also plagued the SPD’s effort to stave off the Nazi threat—should it counter the assault on democracy and republic by going after the same social groups the NSDAP attracted or by securing a proletarian fortress? To understand the complex evolution of this quandary after 1928, an overview of the composition and ideology of Social Democracy in 1928 is necessary.

The SPD’s Fraternal Organizations

The largest organization within Social Democracy was the ADGB. The Free Trade Unions were administered by a formidable bureaucracy, paid and volunteer, estimated by a staff member in 1927 at 200,000 (of whom about half were factory council delegates). Union membership, almost five times greater than the SPD’s in 1928, comprised the party’s main reservoir of votes. About two-thirds of all Social Democrats belonged to the ADGB or to the AfA-Bund, while only 10 to 15 percent of Free Trade unionists were in the SPD.²¹ As representatives of 85 percent of all organized workers in Germany, the Free Trade Unions were a weighty interest group, an ally not to be taken lightly. Since the 1890s, when union membership first outpaced the SPD’s, union autonomy had grown apace. In the Mannheim Agreement of 1905, the Free Trade Unions had won parity with the SPD: on issues of joint concern the two leaderships were “to seek a mutual understanding in order to achieve unified procedure.”²² In the Nuremberg Resolution of 1919, the ADGB declared its political neutrality and rejected intervention in its internal affairs by any party, including the SPD. Union leaders tended to present themselves as the true representatives of the working class in public affairs, a role the SPD could not fulfill, they intimated, because it had to compromise with bourgeois forces.²³ Nonetheless, informal and formal ties were abundant, and power and influence in the relationship did not flow in only one direction. Union officials represented the SPD in parliamentary bodies at all levels of the republic. Of its 152-member Reichstag delegation of 1928, more than one-fourth were trade union officials.²⁴ The unions also provided financial support in electoral campaigns.²⁵ Cooperation existed at the highest levels: Otto Wels, cochairman of the SPD, and Peter Grass-mann, vice-chairman of the ADGB, attended each other’s executive committee meetings.²⁶

Trade union leaders strongly supported the Weimar republic. In 1928, Theodor Leipart, chairman of the ADGB, wrote, “The trade unions are so closely and beneficially connected to the state that in practice the question of approval or disapproval of the state no longer has meaning.”²⁷ Yet this support, crucial to the republic’s survival between 1918 and 1923, grew passive as the ADGB retreated from the political stage in the mid-1920s and tended to intervene in politics only on issues of wages and Sozialpolitik (social welfare policies).²⁸ As union political involvement declined, state intervention in labor-management disputes escalated so that the Free Trade Unions relied ever less on the independent strength of organized workers to resolve conflicts. As favorable settlements won with state help piled up, ADGB admiration for the Weimar “system” grew, but this regard rested on union officials’ high estimation of its social and welfare policies more than on deep attachment to its democratic foundations.²⁹

The second most significant fraternal organization was the Reichsbanner. In 1924, as the republic reeled out of a year of intense crisis, Social Democrats formed the republican defense league. The impulse came from rank and file defense formations that had sprung up in Saxony and Bavaria, the two states most threatened by antirepublican forces in 1923.³⁰ SPD leaders, hostile to the idea of a military-style bund and to the cooperation of the Saxon Proletarian Hundreds with the KPD, at first looked askance at these groups. In the end, the executive bowed to pressure to establish a defense league but, against leftists, insisted that it become an all-republican, rather than a proletarian, organization.³¹ Members of the Center and Democratic parties sat on the Reichsbanner’s executive committee. In practice, the Reichsbanner remained heavily Social Democratic in composition and became ever more closely identified with the SPD. Its 3 million members were not all party members, but an estimated 90 percent voted for the SPD. The Reichsbanner was larger than the SA or the German Nationalist Stahlhelm but, unlike these right-wing paramilitary groups, did not engage in serious military training until 1932.³² In its first years, with its aggressively republican and antiaristo-cratic songs and rhetoric, it acted as a propaganda machine for the republic and as a watchdog against antirepublicanism.³³

In contrast to the official posture of the Reichsbanner, most Social Democratic leisure organizations vociferously defended proletarian, socialist sociability. Ironically, at their origins in the 1890s, many Social Democratic cultural organizations were ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One Social Democracy in 1928
• Chapter Two Indian Summer
• Chapter Three Where Stands the Enemy?
• Chapter Four The Struggle Begins
• Chapter Five Living with Toleration
• Chapter Six The Debate over a Crisis Program
• Chapter Seven The Iron Front
• Chapter Eight Into the Abyss
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index