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

By Elun Gabriel

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781609091538

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© 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

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

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Anarchy, Socialism, and the Enemies of Order in the German Empire: 1871–1878

2 Debating the Socialist Law: 1878

3 The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy: 1878–1885

4 The Socialist Law Is the Father of Anarchism: 1886–1890

5 Socialism and the Public Sphere in the Era of Anarchist Propaganda of the Deed: 1890–1902

6 Anarchist Utopianism and the Internal Development of German Social Democracy: 1890–1914

7 The Challenges of Liberal Political Culture in the Decade before the Great War: 1903–1914

Conclusion: German Political Culture, Democracy, and Terrorism

Notes to Introduction

Notes to Chapter 1

Notes to Chapter 2

Notes to Chapter 3

Notes to Chapter 4

Notes to Chapter 5

Notes to Chapter 6

Notes to Chapter 7

Notes to Chapter Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

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 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 Landes­hauptarchiv 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.

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.

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 semi-authoritarian 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 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 semi-official 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.

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 nationalist-imperialist 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 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 semi-authoritarian 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 culture, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 motivated 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 would-be 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 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