August Bebel: Social Democracy and the Founding of the Labour Movement 9781788315937, 9781788314459

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Fu¨r meinen Vater Werner Schmidt in dankbarer Erinnerung

List of Plates

Plate 1 Deutschordenshof in Wetzlar, Bebel’s school (Sta¨dtische Sammlungen Wetzlar). Plate 2 Bebel’s journeyman’s piece and signet ring (Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin). Plate 3 One of the earliest photos of Bebel (AdsD, Friedrich-EbertStiftung, Bonn, FA 026047). Plate 4 August Bebel’s family, with his wife Julie and his daughter Frieda (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, FA 026066). Plate 5 House search during the years of the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–90) (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, FB 002461). Plate 6 Louise Kautsky (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, 6/FOTA063989). Plate 7 Wilhelm Liebknecht (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stftung, Bonn, FA 020580). Plate 8 Jean Jaure`s (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stftung, Bonn, FA 007050). Plate 9 Bebel’s bestseller Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and ¨ rich). Socialism) (Rotpunktverlag Zu Plate 10 Remembrance plate of the Gotha unification party conference in 1875 (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, FB 002571).

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Plate 11 August Bebel with his familiy, friends and party comrades in a Zurich beer garden (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, 6/CARD000166). Plate 12 Social Democratic Party school in Berlin, 1908 (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, FA 037472). Plate 13 August Bebel as pioneer of free suffrage in Prussia (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, FA 006995). Plate 14 Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, around 1900 (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, FA 005504). Plate 15 Paul Singer, August Bebel and Wilhelm Pfannkuch in a hackney coach (Wikimedia Commons). Plate 16 August Bebel at the Reichstag (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, FA 108638). ¨ snacht at Lake Zurich (Rotpunktverlag, Plate 17 Bebel’s villa in Ku ¨ rich). Zu Plate 18 August Bebel in his last years (AdsD, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, FA 004050). Plate 19 August Bebel’s funeral on 17 August 1913 (AdsD, FriedrichEbert-Stiftung, Bonn, FB 002583).

List of Abbreviations

ADAV

Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein/General German Workers’ Association

AdsD DtVP GDR IWMA KPD

Archiv der sozialen Demokratie Deutsche Volkspartei/German People’s Party German Democratic Republic International Working Men’s Association Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/Communist

SAP SDAP

Party of Germany Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei/Socialist Workers’ Party Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands/ Social Democratic Workers’ Party

SED SFIO SPD SVP VDAV/ Vereinstag/ Verband

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands/Socialist Unity Party of Germany Section franc
aise de l’Internationale ouvrie`re/French Section of the Workers’ International Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands/Social Democratic Party of Germany Sa¨chsische Volkspartei/Saxon People’s Party Vereinstag deutscher Arbeitervereine/Congress of German Workers’ Associations Verband deutscher Arbeitervereine/Union of German Workers’ Association

Preface and Acknowledgements

August Bebel was one of the towering figures of late nineteenth-century European socialism and a leading politician of Imperial Germany from its founding in 1871 right up to its last peacetime year. Detailing his political activism and his struggle for the emancipation of the German working class illuminates an often-neglected aspect of politics during this time. The biography situates August Bebel – and with him the German Social Democratic Party – at the interface of class history and the expanding framework of collective citizenship and civil society. Thus, the book challenges existing notions of Imperial Germany as a society of ‘deferential subjects’, and demonstrates the power of democracy during this period. In addition, it can be read as a lively panorama of society and politics in late nineteenth-century Germany. The political work of Bebel and the labour movement combined the fight for social justice with a commitment to civil society, that is, the self-activation of citizens for progressive aims. Bebel’s vision of a ‘great collapse’ or breakdown has parallels to today’s discussions of the crisis of capitalism. However, his answers and solutions to the problems of capitalism remain time-dependent and have to be seen in the context of his belief in progress and in building a socialist society. Analyzing Bebel within the framework of civil societal engagement and class relations offers new insight into the life of a central figure in the politics of Imperial Germany. The book offers a fresh interpretation of Bebel’s personal life, political activism and German social democracy at the turn of the century.

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A lot of people made it possible for my biography of August Bebel, which was first published in 2013 in German, to reach an Englishspeaking audience. I would like to thank Sarah Wendle from Rotpunktverlag in Zurich and Joanna Godfrey and Sophie Campbell from I.B.Tauris for their cooperation in bringing the book on its way. Christine Brocks translated the book carefully, with great skill and in-depth-knowledge of Imperial Germany. Benjamin Ziemann supported me in writing the book proposal. The translation and the publication received decisive financial support from the International Research Center ‘Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History’ (Internationales Geisteswissenschaftliches Kolleg ‘Arbeit und Lebenslauf in globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive’, re:work) at Humboldt University Berlin. Thanks to Felicitas Hentschke and Andreas Eckert for this subsidy. The Institute for the History and Future of Work ¨ r die Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit, IGZA) financially (Institut fu supported the publication as well. Anja Kruke and Petra Giertz from the Archive of Social Democracy at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung) helped me with the copyrights for most of the pictures for the English version. Colleagues of the re:work-team discussed possible book titles ¨ rgen Kocka, Julia Tischler, Georg and cover pictures with me. Ju Weinmann, Amira Schmidt and Petra Struve-Schmidt read parts of the German manuscript and gave additional advice. Aloys Winterling shared his experiences of the ‘biography’ genre. Again, I want to express my gratitude to Petra, Amira, Celina and Leon for providing the possibility for activities beyond writing books.

Introduction

‘Bed sheets, whites, clothing, furniture and household items’ were on the inventory list when a mother’s household in Wetzlar was dissolved in 1853. She had passed away at the age of 49. Relatives took care of her child, an orphan boy. When he died 60 years later, he left his widowed daughter and only grandchild about 300,000 marks in private assets – 200-fold the annual salary of a high-earning skilled worker at the time. However, this financial success is not a ‘from dishwasher to millionaire’ story but the career of a zoon politikon, a ‘political animal’: the orphan boy was August Bebel, the leading figure in social democracy and the socialist labour movement in Imperial Germany. His testamentary disposition from 30 April 1913 was not about the financial assets listed in the will, but about the manuscript of his memoirs Aus meinem Leben (My Life). He had already published two volumes of autobiography. The third and last one was to be released unedited and as a fragment, as if he were not able to finish it. This volume appeared on the book market in early 1914. Being only a fragment, it covered no more than the period until the 1880s.1 The fact that he portrayed only this small part of his life was to some extent due to his increasing health problems during his last years. But beyond that it also reflects his effort to write not only his memoirs but a ‘true’ history of social democracy. ‘Whenever possible I have used letters, notes, articles etc. in order to verify my account and the opinions and thoughts I am referring to.’ In so doing, Bebel

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August Bebel

followed the programme of ‘scientification’ to which the party had dedicated itself early on – believing that rationality, science and facts help explain and change the world.2 At the same time, this approach allows a first characterization of August Bebel. The workers’ leader was not interested in a quick and nicely told anecdote. Instead, he presented himself as an accurate, disciplined, well-organized and extremely well-prepared memoir writer. However, it would be nothing more than kitchen-sink psychology to trace this trait back to his family background as the son of a Prussian non-commissioned officer and the stepson of a workhouse warden. More generally, it is an example of how a social movement in Imperial Germany was striving for political participation, emancipation and recognition. August Bebel’s life is inextricably linked to the rise of social democracy and the labour movement. When the previously banned workers’ associations were re-established in the 1860s, Bebel was one of the first to join and quickly moved up within these organizations. He underwent imprisonment for his political beliefs and travelled throughout the German single states as a tireless election campaigner. He contributed to party programmes and bridged the growing divide between different camps within the Social Democratic Party in late Imperial Germany. Thus, a biography of August Bebel is also inevitably an introduction to the history of the German labour movement during the nineteenth century.3 One day in February 1890, the factory worker Moritz Bromme learned that Bebel was to give a speech in the Saxon town of Meerane that night. The end of the 1878 Anti-Socialist Laws that had banned all social democratic organizations was in the offing; these had been Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s major – albeit unsuccessful – tool to prevent the rise of social democracy in Germany. Bromme left work, went to the slippers factory where his father worked, met up with him and some of his colleagues and ‘shortly after 4 p.m. we were marching off towards Meerane [. . .]. We wanted to hear Bebel.’ Bebel electrified the workers. He rather enjoyed the personality cult that had grown around him and that motivated him. And yet, the old man is more than an effect-seeking and confident speaker; it’s not oratory that makes him stand out: he is riding a

Introduction

3

wave of trust. August Bebel is more than just a member of the Reichstag and party leader with a dictatorial attitude, no, he is in fact the people’s chosen one, president of an invisible German republic, the Anti-emperor of the masses,

wrote the well-known socialist, pacifist journalist and later Nobel peace laureate Carl von Ossietzky in 1927 on Bebel’s performances in late Imperial Germany in the Weltbu¨hne, a weekly magazine and forum for leftists, liberals and intellectuals. However, it were not only Bebel’s skills as a public speaker that were pivotal at these meetings. Early German social democracy before the Anti-Socialist Laws practised and lived direct democratic rules and continued this tradition successfully after 1890 by founding a network of associations and clubs from the bottom up. This also shows the labour movement’s orientation towards building a civil society.4 The rise of August Bebel and the labour movement is an example not only of the fight for social justice and the strange expectation of capitalism’s collapse, but of the emergence of a future socialist society and the workers’ political integration into state and society of Imperial Germany. Equally important is that the social movement of workers, artisans and intellectuals was based on a commitment to civic values, particularly during the foundation stage. They no longer wanted to be patronized from ‘above’ but sought participation, claiming their right as citizens. ‘Doctors and professors as leaders are usually good for nothing’, Bebel wrote in a letter in 1868 in which he discussed the leadership of workers’ associations.5 Just seven years earlier, in February 1861, when he joined the Gewerbliche Bildungsverein (Industrial Educational Association) in Leipzig – founded in 1861, later reorganized and called Arbeiterbildungsverein or Workers’ Educational Association – Bebel had seen things rather differently. His change of mind was a result of what Gustav Mayer, historian of the labour movement and Bebel’s contemporary, had called the ‘separation of proletarian from bourgeois democracy’. This ‘separation’ between political liberalism and social democracy also impeded the cooperation between both political camps in Imperial Germany’s political system. When in the run-off ballot for the 1887 Reichstag elections the SPD, contrary to

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expectations, was not supported by the left-liberal Freisinnige Partei (‘Freethinking’ or Radical Party), Bebel wrote to his wife that because of this attitude the election campaign had turned into ‘pure class struggle’ and destroyed ‘every illusion for the future. This is necessary even though it might hurt some people.’ Hence, for a long time historians considered that Bebel too refused to cooperate with other parties in the political system. ‘Not one man, not one penny for this system’, he said in a debate on the military budget in 1887. Yet this was his opinion as party leader. Particularly after the turn of the century, the social democrats were looking for allies at constituency level and targeted new voters by demanding affordable food in their election campaigns.6 Despite the lack of political allies in general, German social democracy went from one election victory to another, in particular after the fall of the Anti-Socialist Laws. The ‘sweet poison of electoral success’ substituted for the concept of an active political revolution the ‘symbolic revolution of gained constituencies’. These electoral victories were linked to an effective professionalization of politics. August Bebel’s life exemplifies this development. His way into politics, his decision to live for politics and his transformation from a successful artisan entrepreneur in the 1880s into a professional politician shape and structure this biography.7 Although Bebel did not precisely fit into Max Weber’s typology of a professional politician who either lived ‘for’ or ‘from’ politics, he came very close. He was passionately committed to the ‘cause’ of socialism and the labour movement and let nothing distract him from his course, even though the bourgeois world would not accept ‘what he has to offer’. His political beliefs were based on his interpretation of Imperial Germany as a class society, and he knew that he had a continuously growing party and movement behind him. Bebel stood for the whole range of political work: networking, giving speeches, organizing conferences, investing party funds in stocks with a good return, preparing and conducting election campaigns, outlining political goals and ideas. His main work Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism) would become something like a workers’ bible. Already before Bebel’s death the book was published in 52 editions, contributing substantially to his wealth and financial independence.

Introduction

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The politician Bebel was at the same time a father and husband. The letters from prison were written by the husband who assured his wife Julie of his love and was aware of what he put her through. His political rise and success were partly owing to her support. Politics and private life were intertwined in many ways. He observed his only daughter’s education and development with great and continuous interest, even sent her presents from jail and received letters from her on a regular basis. When a court case against him in Elberfeld dragged on over the Christmas holidays in 1890, he complained bitterly in a letter to Friedrich Engels: ‘This is the eighth time during our marriage of 23 years that Christmas is ruined.’8 And yet, he could not imagine quitting politics. There would have been other options, for instance to emigrate to the United States. But that country scared him more than it seemed to welcome him as a new home. During the period of the Anti-Socialist Laws he could have gone into temporary exile in Switzerland, yet he did not take this opportunity. Instead he stayed and persevered for his goals, confident that the political and economic system would not survive and the better society for which he fought would follow. It was only in his later years and after paying visits to his daughter and son-in-law in Zurich that the Swiss city became, at least to a certain degree, a retreat for him. It is often speculated how Bebel would have reacted to the outbreak of World War I and the social democratic parliamentary group in the Reichstag approving the war credits, had he still been alive. One line of interpretation suggests that Bebel, who was highly regarded within the Socialist International, would have prevented the breakdown of international workers’ solidarity and never agreed to a compromise with the Imperial government.9 According to this view, his speech against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-German war of 1870/1 indicates that Bebel would have opposed the ‘national hatred’ (‘Nationalita¨tenhaß’), as he called excessive nationalism. Contrary to this, other scholars have suggested that Bebel, the politician, felt increasingly obliged to Imperial Germany and would have called for unconditional defence of the fatherland. The fact that Bebel was prepared to welcome the prospect of a war against tsarist Russia is evidence for these scholars and their interpretation.10

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Counterfactual historiography – imagining what might have been under different circumstances – can be a useful tool to fathom the scope of historical agents when seen as a puzzle game. And yet, Bebel died a year before the fatal decisions in summer 1914; he was no longer able to interfere. His biography has to take this simple yet fundamental fact into account, all the more so since recent research has identified the multiplicity of factors that impacted on the ‘great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century’. Among them, the decision of the German Reichstag was an important but nevertheless circumstantial contribution to the outbreak of the war. It is the fundamental task of a biographer to draw the life trajectory of its protagonist as it happened and draft intersections where this course of life could have changed in alternative directions. However, it is incompatible with such a purpose to refer to remarks tied to specific situations and jump to conclusions based on imaginary decisions, which lie beyond the death of the person in question. The decision not to employ the tool of counterfactual historiography in this biography reflects a certain methodological approach. A second methodological problem of biographical research should also be mentioned here. Social democrats who wrote their memoirs or autobiographies always emphasized in their introductory comments that their lives had a representative meaning in a pars pro toto sense: the individual achievement was understood as part of the masses. Wilhelm Bock, who similarly to Bebel made his way up from journeyman to vice president of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha diet (1903 – 7) thanks to the labour movement, stated: ‘My commitment, the willingness to make sacrifices and the unabated eagerness to advocate, support and defend socialism corresponded with the devotion of the masses of class-conscious workers; among them I was only a single person.’ The individual was and is bound into structures constituting a frame of reference that shapes individual actions, attitudes and developments. This was all the more true for the socialist labour movement and the Social Democratic Party of Imperial Germany. Both characterized by the ‘principle of collective leadership’ and a decision-making process involving adversarial discussions. Within the party August Bebel was recognized and

Introduction

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accepted as the leading figure; nevertheless, the SPD was always headed by two chairmen.11 Only from this perspective, which highlights that leading figures were perceived as part of the social democratic movement, can one comprehend why August Bebel’s ambivalent and contradictory personality was widely accepted within the Social Democratic Party. The shrewd capitalist investor and workers’ leader, the internationalist who was committed to the well-being of the nation, the advocate of a ‘male feminism’ (Anne Lopes/Gary Roth), the politician who was keen on practical political reform but averse to ideological revisionism, the social critic who looked forward to the collapse of the bourgeois capitalist system but still lived in a middle-class neighbourhood, the man torn between private life and political career – these ambivalences paralleled the social situation of the labour movement and working class in Imperial Germany between integration and exclusion. This made Bebel and his personality comprehensible for those who were part of this social milieu. He epitomized norms and was a role model for the labour movement, yet he was far from being a plain and one-dimensional representative figure of German social democracy.12 It is precisely the diversity and complexity of his personality that makes his life intriguing. The ambivalences of his character were also a result of his ambition to climb the social ladder and to gain education, of his eagerness to neither make mistakes nor show any weakness in order to avoid providing his enemies with a target. Bebel and the workers of the socialist labour movement strove for social respect and political participation but did not want to be part of the bourgeois capitalist society that created inequality and injustice.

CHAPTER 1

On the Edge of the Lower Class: Poor and Yet Privileged

Life could have been over before it had even begun. In the 1840s, 200 out of 1,000 infants in German cities died during their first year of life. In some poor working-class neighbourhoods, only 60 per cent of children survived their first birthday. Johann and Wilhelmine Bebel (ne´e Simon) also lost their baby daughter shortly after birth. That August Bebel, born on 22 February 1840 in Deutz, today an inner-city part of Cologne, survived infancy was no matter of course at that time. Deutz, located on the right-hand side of the Rhine opposite Cologne, was one of the growing industrial small-towns with a particularly high infant mortality rate. Between 1840 and 1857, the population of Deutz doubled from 2,800 to 5,600. When Deutz was incorporated into the city of Cologne in 1888, the population had reached 17,600.1 Since his father was a non-commissioned officer of the Prussian Army, August Bebel was not born in one of the working-class neighbourhoods but in the fortifications of Deutz. Johann Bebel, together with his twin brother Ferdinand, had joined the military in 1828 in Poznan. They came from a family of coopers based in the Prussian commercial border town of Ostrowo (Ostro´w Wielkopolski), but making barrels and buckets was not a profitable enough craft to feed the family, so the sons decided to enter military service. The Bebel twins were not an exceptional case; almost every fourth soldier of the Prussian Army in the pre-‘March’ era, the time

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preceding the 1848 revolution, was a volunteer. When revolutionary unrest occurred throughout Europe in 1830, riots shook the Polish territories occupied by Russia. The insurgents demanded Polish independence and dethroned the Russian Tsar as king of Poland. At this stage ‘Prussia thought it appropriate to withdraw its regiments from the province of Poznan’. Some army units were redeployed at the western border of Prussia. That is how Johann Bebel got to Mayence in the province Rhenish Hesse, today the capital of Rhineland-Palatinate in the southwest of Germany. Here he met his wife-to-be, Wilhelmine Simon. When his unit was relocated to Poznan, Johann Bebel decided to stay in the Rhine region ‘in consideration of his bride’. He could join an infantry regiment based in Cologne, which made the decision even easier, all the more so since his brother too chose not to return to Poznan.2 Johann and Wilhelmine were 22 and 26 years of age respectively when they met in 1830 in Mayence. They did not get married for another eight years. We do not know for sure why the couple waited that long after Johann’s move to the new regiment in Cologne. They may have wanted to wait for a promotion, which transpired when Johann became a non-commissioned officer. Wilhelmine presumably hoped to save some of her wages as a maid for the couple’s future household. Even though she came from ‘a long-established, petty bourgeois and not at all poverty-stricken family’ in Wetzlar, Hesse, she could not expect her parents to provide for her.3 As one of seven children of a Wetzlar baker and farmer, Wilhelmine could not hope for a substantial inheritance. Around 1800, the Simons had been among the most highly taxed families in the Hesse town, but they soon faced economic decline.4 As a girl she could not learn a trade and work in her father’s business. Thus she became a domestic maid, as did many girls at that time, and moved to Frankfurt. Regional migration was quite common during the period before the revolution of 1848. People followed clear migration strategies and did not move to random places out of sheer love of adventure. Common migratory routes developed. Migrants received information and tip-offs from friends and relatives, and moved in stages from one town to the next in order to explore their options. That way it was easier to deal with the change of residence. This was

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also true for Wilhelmine Simon, when in the 1820s she moved from Wetzlar (population 5,000) to the major city of Frankfurt, in 1825 around ten times larger than her birth city. In so doing she followed ‘the lead of many daughters of other Wetzlar families’. Domestic servants were usually firmly embedded in the household of their employer and had to be ready for service at all times, often receiving only non-cash benefits such as board and lodging instead of a salary. Accordingly it was not uncommon for them to change jobs. Wilhelmine made the 40-km journey from Frankfurt to Mayence, where she eventually met Johann Bebel.5 The newly married couple remained mobile – though involuntarily so. Notwithstanding the fact that Johann Bebel did not have to go to war, the military life of ordinary soldiers and non-commissioned officers was anything but healthy and the pay only covered the bare necessities. August Bebel and his brothers, Carl Julius born in April 1841 and Carl Friedrich born in October 1842, grew up in a family characterized by ‘an economy of makeshift and meagreness’. Compared with others who were hit by rampant poverty, the Bebel family was relatively well-off, living in proper accommodation in the barracks and getting a small but regular income. However, Johann and Wilhelmine’s everyday life was very different to the bourgeois lifestyle that developed around 1800, with the husband as sole breadwinner providing for the whole family and the wife taking care of the household. August Bebel’s mother had to make some extra money; in his autobiography, written 60 years later, August recalls a childhood memory: My mother obtained permission for a kind of canteen, that is to say, she was allowed to sell small everyday life commodities to the soldiers of the casemates. This took place in the only parlour we had. I still see her in my mind’s eye today: serving soldiers steaming potatoes on earthenware plates in the evening, in the light of the rapeseed oil lamp, a portion for six Prussian pfennig.

The sutler women, who had followed the armies in the olden days, had turned into stationary sellers. Thus was the ‘partnership between soldier and wife’ kept alive during the nineteenth century.6 It is hard to say if Bebel drew a realistic picture in his memoirs. But it is fair to assume that his parents’ professional and financial

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situation remained tight and even aggravated. Just before Johann Bebel’s exemption from military service, he was offered a post as border guard in Herzogenrath, a town 70 km west of Cologne, but he fell severely ill during his three-month probation period in spring 1843, so he could not take up the post. Back with the casemates in Deutz, Johann was admitted to military hospital. ‘After thirteen months of illness, the father died, 35 years of age, and left the mother without the entitlement to a pension. We had to leave the casemates shortly after father’s death.’7 The young family faced the plunge into a new form of structural poverty for which in the 1840s the neologism ‘pauperism’ was coined. The Brockhaus encyclopedia from 1846 stated: Pauperism is a newly invented term defining a new highly significant and disastrous development also described as mass poverty [‘Massenarmuth’ or ‘Armenthum’] in Germany. Pauperism is different from forms of natural poverty as the exceptional consequence of physical, mental or moral illnesses or random misfortune which might hit individuals evermore and different also from the dire need of some who still have a secure basic livelihood. Pauperism is defined as the poverty of numerous members of the lower classes who, although they work their hardest, can barely survive and cannot rely on even the smallest income. They get into this situation by birth and will stay in it for life without any hope of improvement [. . .] And yet, they reproduce with torrential speed.8

Yet in contrast to the hordes of lower-class people, who were struck by poverty and lost their footing, the widow could rely on a family network. Johann Bebel’s twin brother, Ferdinand, took the family in and as early as October 1844 Ferdinand and Wilhelmine got married. Like Johann, Ferdinand got a pension as a disabled ex-serviceman and he took up a position as guard in the prison and poorhouse of Brauweiler, a small town close to Cologne, at the time of the wedding. Again, the family lived within the walls of the institution the father worked for – now the walls of a prison instead of barracks and fortifications surrounded the children. Whereas August’s recollection of playing in the military compound was rather a happy one, including the soldiers who ‘spoilt and sometimes teased’ him, the prison and house of correction frightened him. On his way to the front door of the family flat, barely five years old,

On the Edge of the Lower Class

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August witnessed ‘more than once’ how inmates were physically abused, although the actual purpose ‘of every house of correction’ should have been ‘to reform the detainees so that they were able to return to civil society later on without being a threat to the same’.9 August and his brothers also experienced violence at home. Bebel portrayed his stepfather as a man of contrasts, on the one hand being a ‘warm-hearted man’, who ‘eagerly attended to our well-being’, yet on the other hand subjecting his children to ‘severe physical punishment’ when he was ‘exceedingly agitated’. Nine months after the death of the youngest brother, Carl Friedrich, the stepfather died on 19 October 1846. August felt ‘relieved from a heavy pressure’. But again, Wilhelmine and her two sons were left with nothing to live on, since the mother ‘was not entitled to benefits’. Again it was the family that helped them out of their difficulties. For that purpose, they had to return to Wilhelmine’s hometown Wetzlar, where her parents lived. There was also the fact that persons in need of help could only get municipal poor relief in their home parishes. The weather was miserable. It was cold and wet. All our household effects were put outside at the bank of the Rhine under the open sky to be shipped to Koblenz and from there to be transported by carriage up the Lahn Valley to Wetzlar. When we entered the cabin of the ship on our journey to Koblenz at 10 p.m., it was crowded with people. The tobacco smoke was unbearable. Since nobody made room for us, we two boys lay down on the floor close to the door and slept as only dead tired children can sleep.

As depressing as this journey might have been for the Bebel family, it shows that they still had some financial reserves. Not only could they keep their household, they were also able to transport furniture and goods to their new home and pay for their ship ticket.10 About 15 years after Wilhelmine had left Wetzlar, she returned to the starting point of her migration. Her mother, three sisters and a brother still lived there. It is fair to assume that Wilhelmine did not consider her return a failure. Her husbands’ deaths had brought her into this predicament and being a domestic servant had always ruled out any real chance of upward mobility. Although Wilhelmine’s relatives in Wetzlar were not rich, they were not penniless either. After her mother’s death Wilhelmine inherited a few lots of land.

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Some of them she had to sell to provide for her family. However, the proceeds of this sale were not sufficient, so the family had to draw on strategies very common among the lower classes; everybody had to contribute to the family income. Wilhelmine sewed gloves for the military for piecework pay, August worked ‘on a bowling alley of a beer garden setting up skittles’ and in autumn he and his brother picked potatoes. When even this income could not make ends meet and, making matters worse, Wilhelmine fell ill, she registered both sons at the military orphanage in Potsdam, since the registration alone ensured a monthly benefit payment. This orphanage was an institution for the education, training and disciplining of soldiers’ children. After schooling, nine years of military service was compulsory. Apparently, the orphanage’s reputation among soldiers was not all that high; Wilhelmine’s first husband had once made her promise never to register the children there. Yet the financial situation of the family in Wetzlar was so precarious that Wilhelmine initially disregarded her husband’s wish. Only when the younger son, Carl Julius, was called up to enter the orphanage in 1853 – August had already been rejected on the grounds of physical weakness – did Wilhelmine withdraw the admission application.11 From January 1851 she received municipal poor relief. August Bebel did not mention getting these benefits in his memoirs since they marked the social decline of the family into the stratum of those who could not make a living from their own work. The workers’ leader omitted this episode when looking back on his successful life.12 Wilhelmine was on poor relief until 2 June 1853, when she died only 49 years old. Again, it was the family who took care of the orphans August and Carl Julius. The brother-in-law, for whom Wilhelmine had once sewn military gloves, was appointed guardian of the boys, who ¨ ckus. She was the then lived with their widowed aunt Johannette Go entrepreneurial owner of a watermill and employed a miller and a maid. Although the two boys lived in their aunt’s household and still owned some small lots inherited from their mother, they received benefits from the city orphans trust. This allowed them 20 Silbergroschen a month and covered the costs of clothing until they finished their apprenticeships.13

On the Edge of the Lower Class

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Lower-class childhood in nineteenth-century Germany always involved work. August Bebel experienced and suffered every aspect of this. However, he did not fall victim to the criminal exploitation of child labour in the course of Germany’s just beginning industrialization, when standardization and automatization of working processes allowed the substitution of adult workers with cheap child labour. Bebel’s work in his aunt’s mill was embedded in an everyday routine. He had to take responsibility and contribute to the turnover of the mill. There is nothing to idealize about this child labour, yet it was the common and unquestioned everyday life of the lower classes. August still had some time to go ice-skating or to roam through Wetzlar and the surrounding area. He was fortunate that his foster aunt, like his parents before, did not prevent him going to school. We do not know exactly who or what ensured August a good school education. His aunt may have seen schooling as a key to social mobility and future opportunities, as was commonly the case for the upper strata of the lower classes (quite possibly so given the urban, petty bourgeois background of the Wetzlar relatives). It also may have been the enforcement of compulsory schooling and the improvement of elementary education that helped Bebel to have a start at school. Or it may have been mere luck and coincidence. In any case, August’s stepfather sent him to school when he was only four-and-a-half years old. In Wetzlar he attended the charity school for the poor (Armenschule). Since it was merged with the secondary school for the middle class, standards were rather high for a provincial school. In his autobiography Bebel described himself as an able but cheeky student. Thanks to his good marks he was taught extra lessons by his maths teacher, where he learned logarithms.14 A functioning family network in spite of high regional mobility, a regular albeit meagre income from poor relief and, first and foremost, the ability to mobilize all possible ways of earning money in times of economic crisis, using connections and networks, spared the Bebel family from the abyss of pauperism. They certainly came very close. If they had tumbled down, they would never have recovered. Thus, thanks to school education and a secured, albeit very basic, livelihood, there was a silver lining in the form of a very small scope to determine their own lives.

CHAPTER 2

Artisan and Entrepreneur: A Success Story

August Bebel learned from an early age that his life and career planning was limited. After he had finished school around Easter 1854, his guardian asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ The boy, who would have loved to continue school, suggested: ‘study mining engineering’. This idea was not at all far-fetched. Since the 1840s, the urban middle class of Wetzlar had become involved in the mining of iron ore. But the next question Bebel’s guardian asked, ‘Do you have money to go to university?’, immediately made it plain that this career hope was futile. Although the political ideal of a ‘classless civic society’ had been vivid among the German middle classes since the early nineteenth century, and was probably still romanticized by many a liberal citizen of Wetzlar when Bebel left school, it ran into almost insurmountable class barriers and harsh forms of exclusion. In particular at grammar schools and universities, the places of higher education, the sons of the educated middle class – even though many had liberal leanings – kept themselves to themselves.1 This caused a long-term educational gap between different leading figures of the labour movement. Wilhelm Liebknecht, for instance, who grew up in a family of civil servants and pastors, learned about early socialist thinkers such as the Frenchman Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon when he was 20; Friedrich Engels, son of a wealthy entrepreneur, discovered Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy at the same age to escape the religious fetters of pietism of his hometown Barmen in the

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Wupper valley; Karl Marx, whose father was a solicitor, joined the ‘Young Hegelians’, a group of intellectuals, during his studies at the University of Berlin when he was 20. At that time, he started to develop his critical concept based on Hegel’s terminology, according to which the present was ‘not to understand as determined but from its internal contradictions’. When August Bebel was 20, he worked as a wandering journeyman and had read nothing beyond adventure novels and chronicles of Prussian history.2 Wetzlar did not offer many opportunities for career advancement. After the Imperial Chamber Court was dissolved in 1806 – it had been located in Wetzlar since 1689 and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a trainee there in the 1770s – the city increasingly lost its significance. In 1836, a civil servant of the administrative district of Koblenz wrote to his superior that the city’s wealth was ‘in constant decline whereas the number of people without means and of those suffering from severe poverty is continuously growing’. The financial misery continued into the 1850s, when the population figure fell due to migration. Wetzlar was one of those regions ‘whose economic development fell far behind other early industrial core areas due to insufficient resources, adverse traffic conditions and the lack of adaptability’.3 It was still characterized by an economic structure mainly consisting of crafts and small-scale businesses. In this environment, Bebel found a trainee position initiated by the Wetzlar orphans trust. He would have preferred to become a joiner, but there were no apprenticeships in Wetzlar. He refused to work for a plumber, who had a bad reputation as a drunk. Instead, he was accepted by the turner master Carl Ellenberger, whose wife used to be friends with Bebel’s mother. Ellenberger was an able small craftsman esteemed in the local community. The world of craft businesses was undergoing a period of radical change during the 1850s. On the one hand, established craftsmen, such as butchers and bakers, still secured a decent livelihood and continued to represent traditional values, norms and institutions. For tailors, shoemakers and cabinetmakers on the other hand, who were manufacturers engaged in mass production, the ratio between masters and journeymen got out of balance; too many journeymen had been trained for a limited number of positions as masters.

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For many, the traditional career path from journeyman to master was blocked or ended in the precarious position of self-employed master without employees. The turning craft was increasingly forced into a niche existence. A livelihood could still be secured by concentrating on an upscale market, but this was a risky game and could also lead to a dead end. Meanwhile, Bebel was lucky to have got into any craft apprenticeship. As uncertain as his prospects may have been, they were certainly better than those of unskilled or day labourers.4 The turner’s craft used different materials such as wood, ivory and horn. In his autobiography Bebel does not say much about the practical activities his work involved. He thought of Ellenberger, who had specialized in pipe manufacturing, as a turner ‘artist’. All day long, Bebel worked at the turning lathe tooling different materials with a moving iron. He lived a ‘typical’ apprentice life: living in Ellenberger’s house, he was under the supervision of his master, who was also responsible for Bebel’s education. He was obliged to help the master’s wife with household chores and to repair, clean and sell pipes in the adjoining shop. He worked from 5 a.m. ‘to 7 p.m. without a break’ – an unbelievably long workday, but not as intense as in a modern factory. He was under the comprehensive control of his master, who also decided on his leisure time. Going to church on a Sunday was expected; outings with other journeymen were forbidden. When Ellenberger found out that Bebel only pretended to go to church, he cancelled the free Sunday mornings.5 According to his autobiography, Bebel discovered books as a form of retreat and escape from everyday life. Nearly all social democrats mention these reading adventures in their memoirs. One of Bebel’s Wetzlar friends confirms that Bebel read a large part of the public library holdings.6 Bebel had grown up in a family where there were books in abundance. He and his mother had ‘rescued some history books’ from his father’s and stepfather’s estate. When he was still in school he read Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, first translated into German in 1852, and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. As an apprentice he plunged into the world of Friedrich Wilhelm Hackla¨nder, who was a widely read German novelist and had authored books such as Europa¨isches Sclavenleben (Slave Life in Europe), dealing with the social question and the economic dependence of

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August Bebel

women in particular. Bebel enjoyed the spellbinding historical novels of Walter Scott (Ivanhoe) just as much as did Friedrich Engels, who borrowed knights’ tales from the public library when he was 15.7 The young apprentice Bebel also read period books by Luise ¨ hlbach, such as Kaiser Joseph der Zweite und sein Hof. Historischer Mu Roman (Emperor Joseph II and his Court. A Historical Novel), and the works of Ferdinand Stolle, who later co-founded and wrote for the Gartenlaube, a bourgeois mass paper and forerunner of the modern illustrated magazine in Germany. In general, Bebel’s reading comprised the bestsellers of his time without an underlying strategy or plan.8 There were some novels with socio-critical reminiscences but also books with traditional, conservative and bourgeois content. This was no ideological training material for a future revolutionary. Bebel was a young man in pursuit of a meaning and purposeful occupation. Isolated by his master from friends and colleagues of his own age, and being ‘an incredibly weak boy’, he sought alternatives to the rough and masculine world of the craftsman. In writing about his youth in his autobiography, Bebel constructed a time period when all his talents and skills were still dormant and waiting for a political and intellectual awakening. Accordingly, his journeyman’s piece was no massive candle stick or holder, no stately pipe, as might have been expected with Ellenberger as his master, but a rather delicate, precisely crafted and dainty ivory jigsaw (see plate 2). To his surprise, Bebel got the highest marks for it. This piece was evidence of a certain craft skill, which he later brought to perfection in his professional career as politician. He excelled in fitting different details and single items together and turning them into a coherent whole. Given this little jewel, it seems to be an understatement when he claimed in his autobiography that ‘despite every effort’ he was ‘never better than average’ as a turner.9 Immediately after Bebel had completed his apprenticeship, he could show what he was made of. Before being free to embark on his journeyman wandering years, he first had to dissolve his master’s workshop in the Kra¨merstraße in Wetzlar’s city centre. Carl Ellenberger had just died and his widow did not want to continue the business. The 17-year-old journeyman took care of the last commissions before selling off the machines, tools and materials.

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‘From May to August I got up at sunrise and worked until 9 p.m. or later’ in acknowledgement of his debt of gratitude to his master’s widow. Apart from craft skills, he learned in Ellenberger’s workshop how to manage a business, write an invoice and deal with customers. Later in his life, as a master craftsman in Leipzig, as an entrepreneur and travelling salesman, he could tap into these experiences. When Bebel eventually did start his journeyman wandering years in February 1858, he was in a privileged position compared to many others. Not only had he enjoyed an all-round training and received extra travelling money from Ellenberger’s widow, he also obtained the entire equipment for his wandering years from the Wetzlar orphans trust: scarf, shirts, socks, pants, boots and rucksack including ‘1 Taler travelling money, 712 Silbergroschen to buy a wandering booklet’.10 In the 1850s, the wandering years were no longer compulsory for journeymen. In fact, the Prussian Government made efforts to curtail the tradition; it was not forgotten that wandering journeymen had played a significant role during the pre-March era and the revolution of 1848/9 by spreading socialist ideas. The origins of the early labour movement in the pre-revolutionary period lay abroad; in the 1830s, travelling journeymen made contact with exiled democrats and republicans in Paris, London and Switzerland. They founded secret organizations such as the Bund der Gerechten (League of the Just) and spread their experiences after returning to the German Confederation. Not much of this was left in the 1850s. In the Cologne Communist Trial in 1852, seven exmembers of the Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten) were sentenced to long prison terms. In 1854/5, nearly all workers’ associations were banned in the German states; Prussia also prohibited wandering journeymen from travelling to Switzerland. The political Reaction prevailed. The German governments suppressed freedom of the press and of speech as well as human and citizenship rights, which many wandering journeymen had fought for in the revolution of 1848/9.11 Bebel was not at all unhappy about this development; after all, he had been on the side of the conservatives and traditionalists when he was growing up.

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August Bebel

Thus, when Bebel started his journeyman travels in 1858, he was wandering on ‘depoliticized’ paths – as regards both his own opinions and the state of society in general. And yet, as a professional and social institution, the journeymen wandering years remained of key importance. First of all, this specific form of migration masked under- and unemployment. The journeymen found accommodation in the hostels of the craft guilds and received a very small contribution to their travelling expenses in order to get to the next stop of paid work. If need be, they even went begging, which was called ‘Fechten’ (literally: fencing). When they found employment in a workshop, they could learn new techniques and products; in that case their travels contributed to their professional advancement and could even be important for obtaining a master position later. These travels were also an initiation. For the first time, the young men were on their own, separated and freed from the families of and the restrictive relation with their masters. When they had had enough, they simply moved along. ‘As soon as it was spring, I could no longer stand it in the workshop’, Bebel wrote about ending the first work position that he had found during his travels in Speyer in the Bavarian Palatinate. ‘They treated me well, there was plenty of food, but I had to sleep in the workshop where I had a bed in the corner.’ And since, on top of that, the salary was meagre, he moved along when the first warm days of spring arrived. Journeymen saw the world they were travelling also with a tourist gaze and were seeking adventures and exciting places. Bebel, for instance, went to the theatre in Regensburg and visited the nearby Walhalla memorial, a hall of fame commissioned by the Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig in 1807 in remembrance of famous German politicians, artists, princes and other celebrities. In ‘blissful weather’ he enjoyed the beauty of ¨ llental (Hell’s Valley) in the Black Forest. In 1859, he travelled the Ho to Salzburg and was on the verge of enlisting in the Austrian Army in the Austrian – Italian War for control of northern Italy, ‘out of thirst for adventure’.12 For some journeymen these travels could turn into an ambivalent self-experience. They were left to their own devices and had to face ¨ rzburg periods of isolation and loneliness. ‘On my way between Wu and Aschaffenburg’, Bebel remembered, ‘I wandered through a

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marvellous beech forest in the Spessart [a range of low wooded mountains on the north bank of the Main] encountering not a soul. The only thing I could hear were my own steps [. . .] I sighed with relief when I left the seemingly endless forest behind me.’ On the other hand, travelling opened up opportunities to meet other craftsmen and establish contacts. In Freiburg, Bebel learned about the existence of a Catholic association of journeymen. Since he had ‘no appreciation of organizations for the sheer purpose of amusement’, he joined this association although he was Protestant: ‘By so doing I could satisfy my need to be together with young, ambitious people of my own age.’13 Between 1858 and March 1860, Bebel travelled through the south German states and through Austria, briefly entered Swiss territory in Schaffhausen but followed in general the travel ban on Switzerland. When he returned to Wetzlar in spring 1860, now 20 years of age, his brother had been dead since May the year before. August was the last survivor of his family. He had lost his father aged four, his first brother and his stepfather when he was six, his mother at 13, his master at 17 and at the age of 20 his last brother. Death and loss had shaped his childhood and youth. It might have been some consolation and confirmed his trust in the world that he was not the only one, that there were other orphans in Wetzlar who received relief money from the orphans’ trust, that he found support among his relatives and in his master’s household. And yet, life was not radiating lightness; hardship and severity shaped Bebel’s early years. He does not reveal in his autobiography how sick at heart and griefstricken he really was. Since he had detached himself from the Protestant Church at an early age, religion or faith offered him no consolation. In hindsight he kept an ironic distance from the religious zeal he encountered in many master craftsman households during his apprenticeship with Carl Ellenberger and his travelling in the southern German states. The meaning of life, the belief in himself and in the progress of life – regardless of setbacks and losses he experienced – had to originate from elsewhere. Wetzlar no longer had anything to offer him when he returned from his journeyman travels to live there again with his aunt. There being no work there, he found a job in the neighbouring town of

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August Bebel

Butzbach. In the pre-March era, preceding the 1848 revolution, Friedrich Ludwig Weidig had worked there as a teacher before he and ¨ chner wrote the revolutionary pamphlet Der Hessische Georg Bu Landbote with the inflammatory slogan ‘Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!’ (‘Friede den Hu¨tten! Krieg den Pala¨sten!’). Bebel did not stay long in the Hessian small town. When ‘the season became more and more lovely and one day three old school friends suddenly entered the workshop with large rucksacks on their backs and told me that they were on their way to Leipzig’, he joined them. However, he did not ‘drop everything’, but finished his work, tidied up and followed them three days later. ‘Before they had reached Thuringia’, he had caught up with them. Although Bebel often harped on his physical weakness and was – to his disappointment – exempted from military service in the early 1860s, and in 1862 finally rejected as unfit, he ‘excelled in hiking in those days’. Thus we have to imagine him as tough and persevering rather than strong and muscular. According to the medical examination for military service, he was ‘5 feet 4 inches 2 strich [1 strich ¼ 1/10 inch]’ in Prussian units, which is around 1.68 m.14 Bebel had never been in Leipzig during his journeyman travelling years between 1858 and 1860. Even now, nothing in particular attracted him to the Saxon capital. ‘Very often chance determines a person’s destiny’, was Bebel’s retrospective comment on his consequential decision to go to Leipzig. Leipzig would shape his future life on three counts. It was the place where he became an entrepreneur, where he met his wife and where he started his political career. Many biographies – whether intentionally or not – seem to evoke a certain consistency in the protagonist’s life.15 Yet Bebel’s period of travelling in particular highlights the multiplicity of different possibilities. It seems surprising that he caught up with his friends on their way to Leipzig, and found them, without modern means of communication, somewhere between Hesse and Thuringia. And yet, they might just as well have found attractive jobs in Eisenach, Gotha, Erfurt or Weimar, cities north of the Thuringian Forest that they passed on their hiking tour. In that case Bebel’s life would have taken a different course. But it was Leipzig that became the centre of his life.

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Around 80,000 people lived in Saxony’s second-biggest city at the time Bebel arrived. The population grew rapidly during the following years and reached 106,000 a decade later. As a trade fair city, Leipzig was a centre of commerce, printing and publishing and was dominated by bourgeois liberalism and cosmopolitanism. During the 1860s, the booming city, like other German towns, was affected by rapid demographic growth, which caused extreme social differences. A wealthy bourgeois upper class, a well-off middle class, a bourgeois stratum of master craftsmen and small salaried employees, as well as a working class of waged labourers, who passed on their status as workers to the next generation – as Hartmut Zwahr has stressed pointedly – they each lived in their own milieu. And finally there were the lower classes of unskilled day workers who tried to secure their livelihood on a daily basis.16 Bebel’s professional training, his qualification and straight career path paid off. He found work in a thriving small turner business based in Leipzig. For the first time, he had work colleagues. Together they fought for, and won, better food, a later start to their working day and transition to a piecework rate. But first and foremost Bebel learned about new products, which he later manufactured himself as an entrepreneur. The Leipzig workshop of the turner master Hermann Hahn specialized in processing horn. Bebel used the professional knowledge he gained here for his own business idea: he planned to make money from manufacturing door and window knobs out of buffalo horn. Although there was freedom of trade in Leipzig, it only applied to Saxon citizens – and obtaining citizenship was expensive. Again Bebel could rely on his family in Wetzlar; he had inherited some money and was able to sell a garden and three small fields, which his mother and brother had passed on to him. But his available cash was only enough to buy some tools and to rent a horse stable as a workshop and did not cover the cost of citizenship. In 1864, Bebel could only pursue his path into self-employment by registering his business in the name of a friend of his, a Saxon painter and decorator master, before he finally became a citizen of Saxony in 1866.17 Specialization proved to be a survival strategy for craftsmen. Still, Bebel had to conquer the same problems during the first years as entrepreneurs of our time. ‘I was forced to sell my products on

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August Bebel

long-term credit terms, but had to pay daily or weekly for the apprentice and the aid, for expenses and my own livelihood. Where to get the money from? Thus I sold my goods to a salesman who paid me not much more than cost price.’ However, the situation of Bebel’s workshop appears to have stabilized in the late 1860s. The construction boom in the growing cities contributed to Bebel’s modest prosperity. His doorknobs found buyers even in Switzerland. This transregional success was in two ways linked to Bebel’s political engagement. This is shown in a letter from Bebel’s friend and party comrade Wilhelm Liebknecht to Johann Philipp Becker, the liaison representative for the German sections of the International Working Men’s Association in Geneva, of 3 August 1867: Bebel is a horn turner craftsman and his specialities are door and window knobs including the respective metal fittings, rosettes, key pendants, buffalo horn night locks, extremely tasteful, a bit more expensive than brass. They are not available in the whole of Switzerland and South Germany. There is only an agency in Zurich. Do you know anyone who could take care of the matter? There is money in it. You can have a sample card and samples with a price list if required. I would like you all the more to take care of this matter because Bebel has lost nearly all his customers due to his support for us.

On the one hand, Bebel’s political left-leanings cost him customers in Leipzig, on the other hand he could rely on the growing network of the labour movement to gain him new business contacts.18 The business became a success, allowing Bebel to employ a second journeyman in 1868. In the following years, it mirrored the ups and downs of the economy in general. After a drop in sales due to the war of 1870/1 followed the boom of the Gru¨nderjahre, a period of intense industrialization in Germany, and Bebel was inundated with work. ¨ nigstein from 1872 When he was detained in the fortress of Ko onwards, his wife managed the business in consultation with him – August and Julie had got married in 1866. ‘Please do pay the supplier in Cologne and tell him that I have ordered enough for now.’ He also valued her expert view: ‘How is the Naumburg horn?’ As a precaution he signed the turner business over to her in June 1872. At that time his staff already consisted of ‘one workshop manager, six journeymen and two apprentices’.19

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With the ‘Panic of 1873’ (Gru¨nderkrach) a financial crisis began that triggered years of economic depression in Europe and the USA. Bebel responded by expanding his business. Apart from economic stagnation, he had to face increasing competition that produced in larger numbers at a lower price. Bebel, who was by now already well established and highly involved in the party, found a party member, the salesman Ferdinand Ißleib from the Thuringian town of Berka, who was willing to invest in Bebel’s business. Among social democratic grassroots members, there were rumours that Bebel would become ‘a big industrialist’ with a ‘wealthy business partner’ and would ‘more and more withdraw from party activities’. Indeed, in autumn 1876, the new company moved into ‘a small factory with a steam engine’, as Bebel explained. ‘Here we also started to manufacture bronze products which soon gained us a good reputation.’ In 1881, the company Ißleib & Bebel received a silver medal for its doorknobs at the industrial exhibition in Halle. It flourished due to a clever connection of party and business. Bebel even recruited Friedrich Engels as intermediary for his business interests in England and asked him to look for shops in London that would ‘trade with horn, ivory, walrus teeth, timber from abroad etc.’ as cheap suppliers. Bebel was both political agitator and representative of his business at the same time. In the following years, he was less and less involved in operative management and decided to accept a pay-off from his business partner as of 1 January 1885. He received 22,000 marks (a turner in Leipzig earned about 1,000 marks annually). According to Bebel’s estimate, the pay-off was still only ‘a third of what I need due to interests’.20 However, the foundation had been laid for Bebel’s steadily accumulating wealth, which further increased thanks to the massive success of his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Women under Socialism). His social rise from the edge of the lower classes to a journeyman, eager to learn, to a determined businessman did not lead him to have any reactionary or conservative political leanings. He was one of those ambitious craftsmen who wanted to secure their professional status as entrepreneurs. Thus Bebel’s first political home was the liberal association movement which had a stronghold in Leipzig in the early 1860s.

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Bebel’s professional career mirrors a striving for acknowledgement from and participation in a society from which he had been excluded due to his family background as the son of poor parents. He overcame his social status as someone from the lower strata of the working classes thanks to his parents, other relatives and the Wetzlar city orphans trust. They made it possible for him to enjoy a basic education and proper professional training. Bebel took the opportunity and followed the only path that was open to craftsmen and people from the lower classes. It is fair to assume that he was well aware of the small window of ‘capabilities’ – to use a term coined by the economist and social philosopher Amartya Sen – that the Wetzlar municipal social welfare service opened for him; in his will he left the Wetzlar poor and orphans trust a donation of 6,000 marks.21 Bebel’s social advancement during his second and third decades of life was down to certain individual traits such as his love of learning, his appetite for education and a considerable amount of self-discipline. When he was still a school student and felt that his messing around jeopardized a good report, he decided to become ‘a good boy’. As already mentioned, he did not want to be the apprentice of a drunk without discipline. As a one-off he once gambled and lost a quarter of his weekly salary, then ‘vowed [to himself] to never gamble again’. In Regensburg in Bavaria there was no one among his colleagues who had ‘high intellectual needs. Who drank the most was the most celebrated one’ – and Bebel wanted no part of that. Instead he found stimulations such as reading matter and study in the Catholic journeymen associations. This selfcharacterization was not a retrospective styling and construction of a life with no breaks. Instead it mirrors the social reality of craftsmen and artisans in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. The years between revolution and the foundation of the German Reich were a period of a ‘society on the move’ (‘Gesellschaft im Aufbruch’, Wolfram Siemann) and August Bebel was one of those members of the lower classes at the edge of society who knew how to make use of the chances that were given at that time.22

CHAPTER 3

The Path into Politics: ‘Who is That Man with Such an Appearance?’

Liberalism was the pre-school of socialism. This is true not only for Karl Marx during the 1840s but also for August Bebel at the beginning of the 1860s. Both men’s political leanings had their roots in liberal ideas and concepts; Marx came from a democratic republican, Bebel from an economic liberalism. In both decades liberalism enjoyed a revival after periods of repression and inhibition. In 1842, when the two-year-old August Bebel was playing in the barracks of Deutz, the young Karl Marx wrote his first articles for the Cologne-based Rheinische Zeitung, before becoming its chief editor later that year. In these newspaper pieces he argued in favour of the freedom of the press, discussed the fate of the lower classes threatened by pauperism and criticized narrow-minded pressuregroup politics driven by estatist interests. At that time, the 25-yearold chief editor firmly denounced those ‘theatre critics’ and authors of other ‘uplifting articles for smuggling communist and socialist dogmas into their writings’. However, despite all precautions and prudence, the Rheinische Zeitung was banned as of 1 April 1843.1 In 1858/9, a period began in Prussia that historians call the ‘New Era’ and that contemporaries experienced as such. Police surveillance and persecution of associations started to loosen. Political liberalism in Prussia revived when Wilhelm I, who was said to be more liberal than his brother Friedrich Wilhelm IV, ascended the Prussian throne. In the Prussian House of Representatives the

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liberal factions demanded guarantees of free elections, the re-establishment of municipal and provincial self-government as well as a law on ministerial responsibility. Although by no means heralding a fundamental system change, it was certainly a sign of more political freedom when the new Prussian king took an oath on the constitution and appointed a new cabinet with ‘liberalconservative leanings’ on 5 November 1858.2 To be sure, it was mainly the desire for a united German fatherland that flared up in the celebrations on the centenary of Friedrich Schiller’s birth on 10 November 1859. But because the festival, the parades and the public events that took place in several hundred German cities had to be forced through against the authorities, they also signalled the political perseverance and determination of the urban bourgeoisie.3 This liberal era paved the way for the foundation of new associations and bourgeois-liberal interest groups. In summer 1859, liberals and democrats gathered in the newly founded Deutscher Nationalverein (German National Association) that aimed at forging a Prussian-led German state excluding Austria. The number of gymnastics and singing associations increased and a couple of organizations fostered contact across classes between artisans, craft masters and parts of the bourgeoisie. The political ideal of the ‘classless society of citizens’ flourished.4 Finally, even the economicliberal concept of freedom of trade, which had neither been accomplished after the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century nor during the revolution of 1848/9, became once again the subject of public debate.5 These developments by no means only applied to Prussia but also to other states of the German Confederation. Even though political liberalization did not go far in Saxony, the discourse on freedom of trade quickly came to fruition. The industrial law of 15 October 1861 allowed everyone, from day worker to craft journeyman, to start their own business. In the late 1850s, the Polytechnische Gesellschaft (Polytechnical Society) in Leipzig, founded in 1825, was increasingly committed ‘to remedy the lack of moral and intellectual education among trade and craft trainees that becomes more and more apparent’. The driving force behind these efforts was Emil Adolf Roßma¨ßler. As early as 1848, he had been a member of the far

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political Left of the Frankfurt Paulskirche, the German national assembly and the first freely elected parliament which sat in the Paulskirche, a church in Frankfurt. In 1850, Roßma¨ßler, a professor of zoology, was forced into retirement on the grounds of his political opinions; afterwards he became a successful writer. This naturalist was the core of a group of democratic liberals from the educated classes and the economic bourgeoisie, who wanted to establish an association for workers and artisans.6 Since the municipal authorities in Leipzig interpreted the Saxon association laws very restrictively, the new club – which aimed at remedying the lack of education among workers and artisans – was supposed to operate under the umbrella of the Polytechnical Society (Polytechnische Gesellschaft), founded and administered by bourgeois representatives. Advertisements in several Leipzig newspapers invited the interested public to come to the foundation meeting of an ‘Industrial Educational Association’ (Gewerblicher Bildungsverein) on 19 February 1861 in the Vienna Hall.7 This association was perfect for August Bebel. After only ten months of living in Leipzig, he found here what he had been looking for during his journeyman travels: the opportunity to study and to improve his education and professional training, to get in touch with other people without being caught in the stupor of alcohol and pubs, just drifting along during his leisure time, which he disliked. In his memoirs, Bebel stated that his ‘drinking performance has always been poor’, but that, after nights out in the pub with a party of friends, he ‘more than once [. . .] went home with his head held high even when the sun was already shining brightly’. Franz Mehring, long-time editor of the social democratic newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung and party historian, however, set the record straight, when he wrote in his autobiography of Bebel’s steadiness: ‘Although Bebel was unable to hold his liquor, he still appreciated a good wine; but he always went home in the concealing shadows of the night.’ We do not know how long Bebel stayed at the event in the Vienna Hall on that 19 February. But he was so impressed by the meeting that he later described it in great detail in his memoirs and in several commemorative magazines. ‘The people in the overcrowded hall immediately started heated debates.’ A number of the participants urged non-compliance with

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the decrees of the authorities and the establishment of an independent association instead. Also, they argued, it could not be the task of a workers’ and artisans’ association to ‘fill in the gaps of state elementary education. The objective had to be to introduce workers into politics and the public sphere.’8 Yet these were not Bebel’s demands or ideas. For the 21-year-old turner, the Industrial Educational Association was a potential stepping-stone for his own personal and professional advancement. Nevertheless, the foundation meeting of the Bildungsverein was a political initiation for Bebel. Among the group of oppositionists was not only the educated bourgeois Roßma¨ßler but also workers such as Carl Julius Vahlteich, a 21-year-old shoemaker and the tobacco worker Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, 15 years his senior, who had taken part in the revolutionary events of 1848/9. Bebel was intrigued: ‘Although I did not agree with these speakers, I had great respect that workers had the guts to attack the ‘learned men’ [of the Polytechnical Society]. I wished I were able to speak like them.’ Bebel had already shown political engagement in the ‘small’ political public sphere of everyday life. In Regensburg, where he spent several months in 1858/9, he held his first public office within the local guild: he was responsible for offering the arriving turners a drink from the welcome cup. During his stay in Salzburg, he was so excited about the war between Austria and Italy in 1859, that he ‘did not leave the Cafe´ Tomaselli before he had read all the newspapers’. It was also in Austria that he for the first time got involved in political debates, because Prussia refused to support Austria in this military conflict. ‘The good Prussian I was at that time, I tried to defend Prussian politics, but that did not work out well. More than once I had to leave the pub in order to avoid a beating.’9 And yet, the meeting of the Leipzig Bildungsverein was something new. Bebel had found the site of his future political life. To (co-) spearhead an organization, to take the floor, to voice his opinion and to assert it, to be in the public limelight: that was the 21-year-old’s dream and vision of the future, when he listened to the debate among the members of the Leipzig Industrial Educational Association on the balcony of the Vienna Hall. However, everything could have turned out differently and focusing on this evening in February 1861 may be

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nothing more than a retrojection. But Bebel’s rapid rise within the Bildungsverein indicates that this was indeed his political starting point. That he had settled down professionally in Leipzig, that he no longer had to travel and that he met his wife two years later gave him the stability that facilitated his political career. At the same time, Bebel was part of the increasingly politicized nineteenth-century society and its newly established platforms for exchanging political ideas, such as associations, newspapers and magazines. It was based on an artisans’ political-public culture that was passed on by craftsmen, organized in journeyman associations from generation to generation. We have to bear in mind that Bebel’s path into politics – beyond internal struggles for power and influence, debates over programmatic choices and the decision for either a Greater German solution, including Austria or a Lesser German national state without it – is also a ‘history from below’. Offering as they did a combination of sociability, entertainment, pleasure and education, the associations proved to be an attractive choice for young men who had only limited privacy while living in their masters’ households and, in line with tradition though to a declining extent, were unmarried as long as they were journeymen. They lived a life of restricted masculinity. In the associations, however, they were respected and recognized. These members – and even more so the activists – of the early labour movement did not come from a completely impoverished background. The majority were young men who had completed vocational education (mostly artisans) but whose professional prospects and possibilities were uncertain due to economic changes. They no longer strove to return to the traditional, secure world of the guilds but either sought for an opportunity to set up their own businesses, supported by the liberal bourgeoisie or pursued something new, something radical, which they hoped to find in an independent workers’ party. Politically Bebel remained affiliated with liberalism. The Bildungsverein offered foreign language classes and general educational talks on scientific issues, such as chemistry and health as well as on political economy and ‘business management’ (‘Gewerbliche Gescha¨ftskunde’), which Bebel used for his own professional

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advancement. He took courses on shorthand and bookkeeping, probably already anticipating his professional future as an entrepreneur. Gradually, the association became his home where he spent his evenings ‘if there was no workers’ or committee meeting’. There he got to know the ‘members’ wishes and needs better than the chairmen’. As early as 1862, Bebel was elected as an executive member of the association heading the departments of library and leisure – this might be a self-ironic reference considering that Bebel as a travelling journeyman had tried to avoid get-togethers for the mere purpose of entertainment, gambling and card games. ‘My desire to talk in public has been met in the association after a short time. A friend later told me that, when I talked for the first time to support and justify a motion, the people at his table looked at each other in surprise and asked: “Who is that man with such an appearance?”’ Bebel had arrived.10 In 1862, it was still Julius Vahlteich who gave the official opening speech at the first anniversary ceremony of the Bildungsverein. However, just a year later it was Bebel’s turn. He succeeded Vahlteich, the very man who had impressed him so much at the foundation meeting, as main speaker. In that speech, Bebel talked about the ‘objectives of the association’ and distanced himself from the rival labour movement that was striving for independence from liberalism. Its demands ‘on general freedom of trade and movement throughout the whole of Germany as well as on establishing and spreading industrial cooperatives’ were, according to Bebel, ‘by all means laudable’. But he declined the ‘claims to extensive political rights’ as ‘inexpedient’: ‘These rights come with certain responsibilities and duties, and the workers are not yet capable of fully meeting those.’ The question of whether or not the national liberal Leipziger Tageblatt reported Bebel’s speech correctly has to remain open. The line of argument sounded suspiciously submissive, given Bebel’s increasingly confident appearance as a self-employed artisan. And yet, more than once Bebel mentioned in his retrospective texts that in the early 1860s he was ‘still caught up in the dominating bourgeois ideas with which we had been brought up’. It is fair to assume, at any rate, that the Tageblatt had correctly summarized the underlying liberal concept in Bebel’s speech: self-help for workers through cooperatives,

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the importance of education and of economic and political independence for artisans and labourers and the demand to remove ‘some inexplicable and unjustified hardships of the association laws’, but denying the need for an autonomous workers’ organization. Bebel was part of the group of artisans and workers the aspiring liberal bourgeoisie wanted to win over for themselves by propagating an ‘integrative ideology of education’ (integrative Bildungsideologie).11 Bebel entered the political stage at a time when workers’ associations and workers’ educational associations increasingly began to see movement. Not only the timing but also the place where Bebel started his political commitment proved to be lucky. Leipzig became a field for experimentation in workers’ policies in the early 1860s. Here, labourers tested their chances beyond the opportunities provided by liberal educational organizations. Here, they made their first steps towards an independent labour party; here, the active workers around Julius Vahlteich and Friedrich W. Fritzsche organized in a ‘Central Committee’, prepared a workers’ congress. Leipzig was probably not the only ‘cradle of the German labour movement’,12 but – to adapt the same metaphor – its strongest offspring grew up there. Bebel was neither among the pioneers nor one of the founding fathers of the political labour movement. Until the mid-1860s, he remained in the protected zone of the liberal association movement; but, and this was crucial, he already grappled with opposing views and thus broadened his horizons. In organizational history terms, the German labour movement started with a split. Schisms became a characteristic feature in its long history. The oppositionists Bebel had admired at the foundation meeting of the Leipzig Gewerblicher Bildungsverein had joined the association in the hope of undermining it, but failed. The general assembly of the Bildungsverein in April 1862 ended in a decisive confrontation. Again, the oppositionists demanded the conversion into a political association: ‘After fierce and hours-long battles of words, in which I participated, the opposition lost against a majority of three-quarters of the votes cast’, Bebel recalled.13 Vahlteich, Fritzsche and others left the Bildungsverein and founded an independent association named Vorwa¨rts (literally: forward).

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The local disputes in the Leipzig associations gained importance because they impacted at national level: in several German cities similar conflicts and disputes occurred. It was fundamentally called into question whether or not working class and bourgeoisie shared common ground in the fight for political and civil rights. In an article in the Mitteldeutsche Volks-Zeitung ‘penned by an artisan’ in July 1862 – presumably by Julius Vahlteich – the predetermined breaking point was already defined. The author urged the liberal bourgeois Progress Party (Fortschrittspartei) – founded in 1861 and aiming at political reform yet without a clear commitment to universal suffrage – that it was ‘high time to address the social question, since it might still be time for a calm and peaceful solution’. However, the writer of the article believed that cooperatives as self-help were the wrong means to that end. The workers lacked ‘first and foremost money, money and again money’ to join forces and form cooperatives in order to prevail against (industrial) competitors. Labour power was ‘supposed to be an invaluable asset’ but ‘in reality it is the opposite since labour is not appreciated and labour capital earns very poor interest’.14 Although these and similar remarks did not define the workers’ association Vorwa¨rts explicitly as a socialist organization, they indicated a political move to the left. In addition, the association firmly considered itself as political and strove for networks above the local level and for political mobilization. Debates about the future direction of the workers’ (educational) associations should no longer be held in the still small associations – the Gewerbliche Bildungsverein had around 300 to 400 members between 1861 and 1863, the Vorwa¨rts association 111 members in its foundation year 186215 – but at workers’ meetings and a national workers’ congress that was to be convened. According to the invitation to the first workers’ meeting on 2 October 1862 in Leipzig, signed among others by August Bebel, the workers ‘should contribute to the movements of the time with courage and persistent strength’.16 However, this movement was not yet the place for Bebel’s political development. Although on 2 October he was appointed to the Central Committee that was to prepare a national workers’ congress, he left the committee together with other representatives of the Gewerbliche Bildungsverein as early

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as the end of the month, allegedly for time reasons, but in fact due to the mainly political character of the committee. Representatives of the Vorwa¨rts association dominated the committee and took over preparations for the workers’ congress. However, this assembly never came into being. For a start, the group around Vahlteich, Fritzsche and Otto Dammer, a science graduate and journalist, gained the upper hand in the Central Committee. They had a clearly outlined concept of the working classes, defining them as wage-dependent labourers. The liberal construct of common interests of employers and employees was thwarted and no longer found a majority in the Central Committee at the turn of 1862. The last liberal representatives left the committee. Secondly, the members of the Leipzig committee had to acknowledge that the idea of a workers’ congress was in fact a highly controversial matter among local workers’ associations. At the beginning of 1863, there were only vague expressions of sympathy, but hardly any firm commitment in favour of a workers’ congress in Leipzig.17 As a result, the Leipzig committee made contact with a colourful political personality of the ‘new Era’: Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle had made his mark as a political speaker already in the revolution of 1848 when he called for armed resistance and refusal to pay taxes. He had become publicly known as a lawyer defending Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt in a spectacular and years-long divorce process. As a member of the Berlin ‘Philosophical Society’ (Philosophische Gesellschaft) he socialized with the elite of Berlin high society from 1857. At the same time, he kept in close contact with Karl Marx in London. This relationship has caused a neverending misunderstanding marred by Marx’s envy of Lassalle’s success on the one hand and shaped by Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ anti-Semitic resentments towards Lassalle on the other.18 The Leipzig committee knew Lassalle for his speeches in April 1862 in front of the workers of the mechanical engineering factory Borsig in Berlin and at the Berlin tradesmen’s association (Handwerkerverein), which he later published as the ‘The Working Man’s Programme’ (Arbeiter-Programm). In this speech, Lassalle messianically showed the way to the future when he called out to the workers: ‘You are the rock upon which the church of the present is to be built!’

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In the longer term, this messianism would come to be highly influential within the labour movement. Yet initially, and under the difficult circumstances in early 1863, it was more important that Lassalle outlined a political and social path for the workers. Whilst ‘the moral idea’ of the bourgeoisie ‘leads to this, that the stronger, the cleverer, and the richer fleece the weaker and pick their pockets’, the ‘working class’ has realized that ‘the unhindered and free activity of individual powers exercised by the individual is not enough’ to create ‘a morally ordered community’. In fact, something had to be added to this, ‘namely solidarity of interests, community and reciprocity in development’. Although Lassalle employed the terminology of ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘workers’, he did so in a broader sense: he did not understand ‘workers’ in the narrow sense as part of an economic class but as a comprehensive term referring to citizenship, civic rights and society. ‘We are all working men in so far as we have even the will to make ourselves useful in any way to the community.’19 When on 4 December 1862 the Leipzig workers’ committee contacted Lassalle, his ‘personal discontent [. . .] had aggravated into a real crisis in late 1862’. The committee’s offer opened up new opportunities, even made him ‘happy’, ‘not so much because of the everyday bits and pieces of the task but because of the myriad of trials and the experience of mastering the masses’. The fact, however, that Lassalle accepted the Leipzig committee’s request to draft a workers’ programme initially caused a split within the workers’ movement: there were, on the one hand, supporters of Lassalle’s state socialist concept of cooperatives and on the other those who advocated an economic-liberal understanding of cooperatives.20 Lassalle adopted a political approach in his reply to the committee (Open Letter to the National Labour Association in Germany, Offenes Antwort-Schreiben). He claimed that ‘the working man’ could ‘hope for the fulfilment of his aspirations as a citizen’ only ‘through political action’. Therefore, the ‘working class must constitute itself as an independent political party based on universal equal suffrage: a sentiment to be inscribed on its banners, and forming the central principle of its action’. In order to resolve the social problems and hardships of the working class Lassalle drew on the idea of cooperatives – albeit with a significant shift in emphasis:

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cooperatives, he stated, would be successful and competitive only with the help of the State. No kind of self-help, be it as cooperatives or as trade unions, would be enough to free the working class from social misery and economic hardship. Lassalle was profoundly convinced that it was a ‘merciless economical rule under which the present system fixes the rate of wages’ so ‘that the average wages always remain reduced to that rate which in a people [i]s barely necessary for existance and propagation; a matter governed by the customary manner of living of each people[sic]’. According to this law, the working class would never be able to secure more than a meagre subsistence. Lassalle’s words echoed what many workers believed. Only by convincing the ‘89 to 96 per cent of the population, which constitutes the proportion of the poorer classes in society’, that universal suffrage was the solution to their social misery and therefore a ‘question of stomach and brains’, would it be possible to create a ‘power’ that nothing and no one ‘can long withstand’. The achievement of universal suffrage would enable social class differences to be eradicated with the help of the State. Instead of class struggle and revolution as foreseen in Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, instead of the dissolution of the State in a communist future, Lassalle advocated the peaceful albeit radical transformation and the expansion of the State.21 Ten thousand copies of Lassalle’s letter were published, of which ‘about 1,500 pamphlets were sold’ by the end of March. Initially it, by no means, triggered a mass movement. ‘The result of all these efforts was more than meagre’, Julius Vahlteich wrote 40 years later in his memoirs. At the committee meeting in Leipzig the Open Letter only secured a narrow majority of six against four votes, and on 23 May 1863 at the Leipzig foundation, meeting to establish a labour party, only 14 delegates from 11 cities attended. Although Lassalle had intended his Open Letter to be ‘an icebreaker’, the ice was not broken. The General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV), founded on 23 May 1863, was another organization that considered itself a party and it attracted the attention of the public due to Ferdinand Lassalle, its prominent leading figure – but its future potential was not yet foreseeable. In his memoirs Bebel recalled that the library of the Gewerbliche

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Bildungsverein acquired ‘about two dozen copies’ of the Open Letter. However, Bebel was sure that concrete liberal ideas were more convincing: ‘Freedom of movement and establishment, freedom of assembly and association, absence of passport controls and the possibility to travel freely; all these demands were easier to grasp and of greater concern for the working man of that time than cooperatives (Produktivassoziationen) founded with the help of the state, which he [the working man] could not really fathom.’22 Nevertheless, the foundation of the ADAV as a centralized labour party prompted the liberal workers’ association movement, which focused on education as its central plank, to react. Even though the formation of the labour movement was about the concerns, hardships and interests of the working class, issues of power, political influence and rule played an equally important role. An independent labour party operating at a regional or even national level represented a serious threat to political liberalism of losing its hard-won supporters from the ranks of workers and artisans. In several German cities, liberal-leaning workers’ associations discussed forming their own umbrella organization and ‘invited to a first Congress of German Workers’ Associations’ (Vereinstag deutscher Arbeitervereine, VDAV, henceforth Vereinstag) on 7 June 1863 in Frankfurt.23 Bebel’s political rise in the following years was thanks to the beginnings of this organization, although it all started with a personal defeat for him. In late May 1863, the liberal representatives of the Leipzig Central Committee, who – as described above – had left the committee before, organized an open workers’ meeting at which they presented their own programme and elected a delegate for the planned Vereinstag meeting in Frankfurt. Maybe Bebel did not yet have the skill to present himself in the best possible light at public meetings; or maybe he was not well known enough outside his organizational home, the Gewerbliche Bildungsverein. Be that as it may, he lost the vote against the carpenter Franz Bitter. He was still able to attend the constitutive meeting of the Vereinstag in June 1863, since he was appointed as delegate by the Gewerbliche Bildungsverein. One of Bebel’s contributions at the Vereinstag reflects his election defeat at the workers’ meeting: ‘I decidedly oppose free workers’ meetings having the right to elect and send representatives

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to the Vereinstag [. . .] Such meetings have no organization, they go along with the momentary impression a skilled speaker can create, the participants of these meetings lack the information and preparation that are provided in the associations.’ Bitter, Bebel’s successful competitor at the Leipzig meeting, had a different opinion on the matter: My Leipzig colleague [Bebel] thinks poorly of the workers’ meetings and accuses them of lack of judgment and accountability. However, I protest against this allegation. The participants in the Leipzig workers’ meeting in fact knew very well what they were deciding. The associations, on the other hand, represent only a part of the workers and they never know how long the political Reaction will allow the associations to remain in existence.24

It would miss the point to label Bebel as an early ‘organization fetishist’ based on this dispute. In the early years of the labour movement, everything was still in a state of flux. Different political ideas clashed, different organizational forms emerged, different movement concepts were discussed. Bebel was by no means the only one who opposed the workers’ meetings. At such meetings, the participants could easily become radicalized, raise extreme demands and be highly disappointed when their expectations were not met. An association, on the other hand, presented stability and structure and its members could discuss and weigh different opinions at their meetings. The fact that the associations were open to skilled workers and artisans, but excluded those from the unskilled lower classes without prospects, was considered rather an advantage than a disadvantage by the activists of the associations. However, associations operating at a local level had their limits. It was equally important to learn from each other and to exchange experiences about various projects such as saving clubs and other cooperative institutions and organizations. In addition, the ADAV had shown how to establish a central organization. But because ‘opinions differed’ at the Frankfurt Vereinstag meeting on 7 and 8 June 1863 as to ‘what this organization should look like’, the participants only agreed on a very loose alliance of the liberal associations and on an annual assembly of delegates at different

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places. Thus, the umbrella organization of the Vereinstag, the Congress of German Workers’ Association, came into being.25 Following the Frankfurt meeting in June 1863, the Leipzig Gewerbliche Bildungsverein advocated holding the next Vereinstag meeting in the Saxon trade fair city. After some internal quarrels and opposition, the Leipzig group prevailed and Bebel made his mark by organizing the second Vereinstag meeting that took place in late October 1864. Bebel started networking and made contacts far beyond Leipzig. Together with another member of the Leipzig Gewerbliche Bildungsverein, he was elected deputy chairman of the executive board of the Vereinstag at the Leipzig meeting in 1864. When participating members of the rival ADAV wanted to take the floor and ‘turmoil started on the balcony’, Bebel intervened and terminated the meeting on the first day: he and his Leipzig co-organizers had not intended ‘to exclude the public’ because ‘we thought that the workers here were educated and decent enough to not interfere and disrupt the meeting; I deeply regret that I was wrong. Closing time 3pm’, the meeting minutes read.26 Politically, the Vereinstag made little progress at the 1864 meeting. The official number of delegates was inflated to paint a more powerful picture, even though the Vereinstag was greater in number than the ADAV. In his greeting speech, Leipzig Mayor Carl Wilhelm Koch congratulated the organizers of the Vereinstag meeting stating that they ‘have excluded any false doctrine from the agenda’ – that is to say, the ideas of Lassalle and his supporters in the ADAV. Also, the foremost figure in the Vereinstag, the Frankfurtbased banker and publisher Leopold Sonnemann, conjured again the fundamental philosophy of the organization, namely that ‘there was no natural dichotomy between employer and employee’. At that time – and his intervention against the ADAV members at the conference proves this point – Bebel fully supported those views. He did not yet believe in a fundamental economic antagonism between workers and entrepreneurs. Instead, he still thought along the lines of entrepreneurism and a strong position for crafts and trades and that hard work and good performance would guarantee everyone’s professional advancement. It was downright inevitable that such a faithful supporter of the liberal idea from an artisan-class

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background should be elected to the executive board of the Vereinstag, the so called ‘standing committee’ – if only to demonstrate the openness of the liberal labour movement towards its workers and craftsmen.27 Having reached the leadership level of this large political organization in 1860s Germany, Bebel gradually diverged from his political roots during the next three years. Several aspects came into play. Firstly, he experienced the inconsistencies and phrasemongering of liberal workers’ policy firsthand in 1865. At the first Vereinstag meeting in Frankfurt in 1863, the industrialist Ferdinand ¨ sselsheim, who reported on the meeting, patronStuttmann from Ru izingly explained the importance of saving clubs: ‘The working man has got to save up; he has to keep a part of his wages and collect these monies. This is the only way he can escape misery and hunger that sometimes knock at his door. The saving clubs are supposed to teach the working man a system that enables him to put together his savings and invest them profitably.’28 When, two years later, Bebel tried to acquire Saxon nationality and Leipzig citizenship, which was required to establish a business and get married, he was obliged to submit an asset declaration to the Leipzig authorities. Apart from his Wetzlar inheritance he had saved ‘about 240 Taler’ from his wages. That was a lot of money, worth around two annual wages; but it was only enough to set up a small business enterprise with precarious and uncertain prospects.29 Presuming that Bebel had some empathy for the hardships and difficulties of his fellow members of the Vereinstag – and he claimed in his autobiographical texts that he was very familiar with them and their situation – then he must have been aware that saving was not an option for journeymen and workers on lower wages, and therefore not the solution to the social question. Secondly, being a member of the executive board of the Vereinstag opened doors to new contacts. Bebel met, for instance, the philosopher, pedagogue and journalist Friedrich Albert Lange from Duisburg who wanted to mediate between Lassalle’s ADAV and the Vereinstag. Lange, who ‘had always been on the left fringe and had pushed towards the left’ on the executive board of the Vereinstag, published his paper On the Workers’ Question in 1865. Apart from suggesting aid projects he informed his readers that the workers

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‘do not hate and show ill will towards’ the ‘privileged’ – that is to say the capitalists – of the current economic system, but that they ‘are aware of the social struggle that the present conditions demand’.30 Through Lange, Bebel learned a new language and a new terminology. Lange’s book on the workers’ question also gave him the opportunity to familiarize himself with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Thomas Robert Malthus’ gloomy population projections, Alexis de Tocqueville’s analyses of State and society and the writings of the early French Socialists. From there it was but a small step for Bebel to read in 1865 the Inaugural Address by Karl Marx on the foundation of an International Workers Association, the first work by this author that Bebel had come across, and which he ‘enjoyed thoroughly’. In its very first sentence, Marx emphasized the ‘great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished [. . .] and yet this period is unrivalled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce’.31 Thirdly, in 1865, Bebel had to learn the hard way that the brave liberal world of common interests between employers and employees would never be anything other than the ideal of a classless society of citizens. Reality was different. In 1865, Bebel tried to mediate in the strike of Leipzig book printers on behalf of the executive board of the Vereinstag. Yet the employers rebuffed his compromise proposal. ‘I clearly noticed from the comments of these gentlemen [employers] that they were utterly embittered about the workers’ bargaining committee and just did not want any agreement.’ The book printers on the other hand dismissed Bebel’s proposal to go along the lines of the labour agreement concluded in Frankfurt’s printing industry. They argued that Leipzig ‘as the main city of book publishing’ had to be careful to achieve ‘the highest possible wage agreement’. The economic conflicts between employers and employees were congruent with the divide between capital and labour. As mediator between the two poles, Bebel experienced this deep gulf firsthand and could not overcome it. Also, he considered it highly unfair that the State and its institutions took sides with the employers: ‘the police take harsh measures against the striking workers which I can by no means approve’, Bebel wrote to Leopold Sonnemann on 16 May 1865.32 By then, the young master craftsman had developed a

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strong sense of justice and an equally strong distrust of the authoritarian State. Fourthly, Bebel became politically more and more flexible – as a result of and in interdependence with his aforementioned experiences as mediator. Having in 1864, in his speech on the foundation anniversary of the Leipzig Gewerbliche Bildungsverein, still claimed that the working class was not yet ready for universal, equal suffrage, he fundamentally changed his position on this crucial issue. Already in September 1865, at the third meeting of the Vereinstag in Stuttgart, Bebel supported a resolution that it was ‘every German worker’s duty to stand up and fight for universal, equal and direct suffrage’. According to Bebel, the Vereinstag meeting in Stuttgart was characterized ‘by a substantial lurch to the left’. Therefore it was only logical that Bebel signed a resolution adopted by the Vereinstag and the ADAV at a Leipzig public meeting in May 1866 stating: ‘The national and democratic interests of the German people can only be safeguarded by a constituent parliament elected by universal, equal and direct suffrage supported by a Volkswehr [armed forces based on conscription]’.33 The introduction of this suffrage finally paved the way for Bebel’s political career less than a year later. Meeting Wilhelm Liebknecht was, fifthly, the main reason that Bebel steered to the left and turned from (left) liberalism to become a socialist. Liebknecht represented the revolutionary tradition of the socialist labour movement. As a 22-year-old he took part in the 1848/9 revolution in Baden; he went into exile after the insurrection was quelled and joined the Communist League in London. During the liberal era, he was granted amnesty and returned to Germany. As early as 1863, Liebknecht joined Lassalle’s ADAV and contributed to its newspaper Social-Demokrat. However, after controversies with Lassalle and his successors over the significance of trade unions and the role of the State in regard to the labour movement and due to his anti-Prussian stand, Liebknecht was excluded from the ADAV. His anti-Prussian views also brought him into conflict with state authorities, resulting in his expulsion from the country in 1865. Liebknecht moved to Leipzig in Saxony and joined the Workers’ Educational Society (Arbeiterbildungsverein), which was the product of a merger between the Gewerbliche Bildungsverein and

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the association Vorwa¨rts half a year earlier. Its second chairman was August Bebel. Although Liebknecht was 14 years Bebel’s senior, it must have been friendship at first sight. In November 1866, when Liebknecht’s wife Ernestine wrote to her incarcerated husband that Bebel had initiated donations to support Liebknecht’s family, he answered: ‘What you are telling me about Bebel doesn’t surprise me; I knew he is a noble fellow. Please thank him on my behalf a thousand times.’34 The friendship between Bebel and Liebknecht was based on many different aspects. Even though Liebknecht was not one of the theorists of the labour movement, he was, thanks to his academic education, a constant source of knowledge for the eager-to-learn turner craftsman Bebel. The liberal publicist and politician Hellmut von Gerlach described this teacher – student relationship in an anecdote: ‘One day Bebel asked Liebknecht what Hegel’s philosophy of the state was all about.’ In ‘his usual casual manner and with some sketchy remarks’, Liebknecht informed Bebel about the general outline of Hegel’s philosophy. Some days later the Lassalleans had a meeting. Bebel and Liebknecht attended. One of the Lassalleans wrongly referred to Hegel. Bebel took the floor, confuted the man and discussed Hegel’s philosophy in so much detail and so aptly that Liebknecht said to his neighbour: ‘One might think Bebel has swallowed up the whole Hegel in a few days’. Needless to say that Bebel, on the contrary, had read nothing by Hegel. He had only thoroughly thought about Liebknecht’s brief hints when working at the turner’s lathe.35

Both found common ground in their aversion to Bismarck’s Prussia and its expansionism aimed at forging a unified Germany without Austria. In their opposition to Lassalle, they met halfway. Liebknecht had previously been a member of Lassalle’s ADAV and had fathomed its strengths and weaknesses. Bebel came from the opposite side. As an opponent of Lassalle’s ideas and ‘in constant struggle with the Lassalleans’, Bebel had read Lassalle’s writings ‘in order to know what they want’. In so doing, he had gained new insights. Thus, in his memoirs he decisively rejected Hellmut von Gerlach’s description according to which he had turned into a ‘Marxist’ only due to Liebknecht’s influence. However, Gerlach had never meant to be

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simplistic in his interpretation of Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s friendship. Rather, he claimed that Liebknecht had appeared in Bebel’s life ‘at the exact psychological moment’ when ‘the German workers’ split from their former liberal allies’36 – and in the course of this process Bebel was not just following Liebknecht but was acting independently. All in all, Bebel’s turn to the left, to radical democratic and finally socialist concepts, has to be seen against the backdrop of changes within the political culture and the general political climate in Germany. The hopes of the ‘New Era’ were quickly shattered. For instance, in Prussia the liberals were not able to prevail in the constitutional conflict on military reform and the military budget – despite their electoral success, their optimistic spirit and personal sacrifices. From 1862 onwards, the liberal majority in the Prussian House of Representatives had consistently refused to approve the military budget due to a conflict over the expansion of military service and the enlargement of the army. But the new Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, knew how to use the stalemate situation to his advantage. He claimed that the Prussian constitution did not allow the possibility of dissension between the king and the House of Representatives and concluded that therefore governmental power lay with the king alone. As chief of administration appointed by the king, he believed he had the right to govern against parliament if need be. And that is what he did: until 1866 he governed without a budget constitutionally approved by parliament.37 Bismarck brought the battlefields of the 1860s – in the wars against Denmark in 1864 and against Austria in 1866 – into play to resolve the constitutional conflict. ‘He used his nationally tinted foreign politics as an instrument of domestic disciplining.’38 One of the most prominent aims within liberalism was national unity. Due to his ruthless ‘Realpolitik’ (practical politics), liberals saw Bismarck as a politician who was able to realize Germany’s unification – under Prussian leadership and without Austria. Thus, most Prussian liberals followed and supported him after the Prussian victory over ¨ niggra¨tz. They believed that a strong Austria at the battle of Ko Germany was possible only under Prussian supremacy. The Habsburg

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monarchy, being a multinational state, all the more due to its ties with the Kingdom of Hungary, was a model they thought was too unstable. Either this Prussian Germany, the Lesser German solution, or no Germany at all – that is how these (national) liberals saw the situation. Liberals of the South German states, however, took a different view. Not only had Saxony, Baden, Bavaria and Wurttemberg as members of the German Confederation fought side by side with Austria against Prussia in 1866; South German liberals were more and more opposed to Prussian hegemony. Throughout the whole of South Germany, they gathered with democrats in the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, DtVP); in Saxony the Saxon People’s Party (Sa¨chsische Volkspartei, SVP) emerged, founded by, among others, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel.39 The former Prussian subject Bebel, who had taken a decisively pro-Prussian stance as a travelling journeyman less than ten years previously, had turned into an opponent of the Bismarck state. The Saxon People’s Party, which was far more socialist than the German People’s Party in the other South German states, provided the outlet and stepping-stone for Bebel’s way into politics. However, political work involved (and involves) more than discussing ideas, concepts and programmes, fighting positional factional struggles within a political system in upheaval. It required – apart from personal character traits – money, time availability. Throughout his life, Bebel kept struggling with

just and also and this

problem which occurred as early as the very beginning of his political career. In November 1862, he resigned from his involvement with the Leipzig Central Committee preparing the workers’ congress, not least because his ‘multiple activities of different kinds turned into a money issue’. He had to balance how to secure his livelihood, as someone used to working 12 hours a day, and pursue his political work at the same time.40 This dilemma kept troubling him even after he became economically independent. In June 1865 – he was already second chairman of the Leipzig Workers’ Educational Society and a member of the executive board of the Vereinstag – he wrote to his fellow Vereinstag board member Leopold Sonnemann:

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I have to reject the allegations you made in your letter of 20th this month about my alleged half-heartedness. You would not have said something like that if you had known my situation. I don’t have the freedom to dispose myself as I may see fit. Even though I have my own business, I am forced to secure my livelihood through hard work every day. In addition to that, I am burdened with a large part of the administration work on behalf of the association [Vereinstag] which costs many an hour, not to speak of the evenings I have to spend on all kinds of activities of the association. I will, nonetheless, do the utmost to meet all demands and requests.41

In September 1867, Bebel sent a letter to a member of the Frankfurt branch of the German People’s Party, presumably Leopold Sonnemann again, expressing his ‘warmest gratitude’ for the five guilders he had received for this party work. Even though ‘it is my principle that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ I gladly accept the support because I know that it comes from a good German heart and I do not have to feel ashamed about it [. . .] Democracy has never suffered from an abundance of money and its representatives are not demanding at all.’42 Only when Bebel’s business became more and more successful as described in the previous chapter did this situation change. Would Bebel have been able to resign from his political work at the very beginning of his lengthy career in view of these initial financial difficulties? It is safe to assume that more socialist politicians did in fact give up and withdrew from politics than not. Fear of persecution was in the air. Johann Salm from Erfurt, for example, wrote in 1870: ‘You expect us to do more? But I have to tell you that I am surrounded and watched and will be out of bread at the very first opportunity. And I have a family with three little children.’43 At that time, Bebel too had a family he had to consider. However, his political career had quickly gone beyond the local level. During this early stage his business was doing neither well nor badly and would have been enough to make ends meet. But his craftsman turner work alone no longer satisfied him. Meanwhile he had built a substantial political network, held senior positions and was even nominated as candidate of the Saxon People’s Party for the Reichstag elections. Given these successes he neither wanted to nor could withdraw from politics by 1865/6.

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Not only had he invested a lot of time, effort and work in his political career, he was also emotionally caught by politics. Bebel could get very agitated about the ‘loud-mouths of the National Association and the Progress Party’ who day after day, hour after hour, spread frankincense and sing choruses of praise for treasonous goings-on. I sometimes felt so disgusted I could spit in their faces, with all due respect. I hope that once the day will come that we can repay them for their sins towards the people and towards Germany and then those will get their well-deserved retribution who are letting down freedom and fatherland in an unconscious and dishonourable manner,

Bebel wrote in a letter in 1867.44 This was not only the eagerness of a young politician who felt betrayed by liberalism, his former political home. Bebel was caught by his passion for politics paired with the hope of changing and improving Germany by political means. Bebel started his life for politics – detached from liberalism.

CHAPTER 4

A Life for Politics: ‘Taking the Bull by the Horns’

Bismarck turned everything upside down. For years, the Prussian prime minister and his administration quarrelled with the liberals during the constitutional conflict and over the military budget. Although after the military victories of 1864 and 1866 large numbers of liberals defected to Bismarck’s camp with flying colours, the prime minister never forgot that the liberal elites had mocked the ‘servile country squire’. By establishing the North German Confederation and restructuring North Germany in constitutional terms, Bismarck did in fact compromise with the National Liberals – for instance regarding the budgetary law. However, when he decided to introduce universal and equal suffrage for men, his intention was to strike at liberal politics and liberal notabilities. Bismarck anticipated that the rural electorate would vote predominantly conservative. The liberals were supported primarily by the urban bourgeoisie, so their majority was jeopardized by the new suffrage, which strengthened Bismarck’s position.1 Initially, Bismarck’s strategy, by and large, worked. In the constituent assembly of the North German Confederation the conservative parties were strong. But the accelerated political mobilization and participation had further consequences – even those Bismarck had not intended. Backroom policy-making, in the fashion of the notabilities who decided over candidates and political programmes, drew to a close. Politicians had to face a political mass

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market. And yet, in many rural and even in some urban constituencies, traditional patterns initially prevailed. Gustav Freytag, who in his novels portrayed the rise of the bourgeoisie and the honourable bourgeois society, recalled his nomination and election in February 1867: When the elections to the constituent Reichstag of the North German Confederation were announced, I was asked by political friends to stand. The post as a member of the Reichstag was outside of where I felt at home and where my ambitions made me drive for success. Nevertheless, I had to meet and honour the trust placed in me. [. . .] Thus I told my political friends that I considered myself suitable, gave my election speech and went to Berlin as a member of the Reichstag. It goes without saying that I became a member of the National Liberal Party.2

This quote illustrates a strong tendency towards self-stylization of a writer who became a politician more or less by accident and only for a few years. However, the ponderousness of the oppositional political camp was juxtaposed with the labour movement’s election campaign strategy based on action and citizen participation. Since voting rights were no longer restricted by census but open to all men of 25 years and above who were not in military service or got pauper relief, then the political parties had to approach the people and initiate a dialogue. It was pivotal to inform them about their rights, to show an interest in their concerns and to make them aware of their interests. Political education and grassroots work were required. The new voting rights had suddenly increased the number of ‘customers’ on the new political mass market and thus allowed for a completely new ‘supply’. When workers, artisans and ‘ordinary people’ were able to vote, it would be possible to recruit candidates from their ranks and send them to the Reichstag in Berlin. August Bebel benefited from this new situation when he strove for a life for politics or rather gradually grew into it. He had found a political position to the left of liberalism and was ambitious to make something out of his life. He had learned organizational skills from his time at the Leipzig workers’ associations, he had been networking among associations and their members throughout Saxony and approached an electorate he was dedicated to, and who would enable

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his political career. Unlike Gustav Freytag, Bebel could not be complacent and rely on one speech and one meeting of local dignitaries to win a mandate of the constituent Reichstag. ‘Over the two months before the Reichstag convened I was terribly busy with the election campaign in Saxony, since I was about the only one in charge of organizing and managing the canvass’, Bebel wrote in May 1867 to his party friend Peter Staudinger in Nuremberg. The ‘canvass of the last months had the advantage that the masses were more excited than they had been since the year 1848 and that we have succeeded in gaining a foothold in places where we had none before. Obviously, this will be very helpful for setting up new associations.’3 The new political style involved activists in more than just voter mobilization and exhausting and time-consuming trips. Also, new media were put into play in the election campaign. Bebel’s friend and party comrade Wilhelm Liebknecht urged the local workers’ associations to improve their ‘poor organization’ in the constituencies and to establish a central committee in case of a final ballot: ‘And then, don’t be mingy about posters and advertisements; we need systematic action!’4 The result of the constituent North German Reichstag elections in February 1867 generated an irony of history. Lassalle’s ADAV, which had run an election campaign focusing on general suffrage as a political principle, did not send a single candidate. However, August Bebel, formerly rather sceptical about general suffrage, and the Saxon People’s Party gained parliamentary representation right away. This would change in the elections to the first ordinary Reichstag in August 1867, when the ADAV also sent representatives to the Reichstag. However, electoral feedback among workers remained disappointingly low in general, despite new forms of action. Only about 50,000 people voted for the candidates of the Saxon People’s Party and Lassalle’s Workers’ Party ADAV. Many factors contributed to this situation. The success of the Saxon People’s Party fed on antiPrussian resentments, regional political identity and on election campaigns in a few selected constituencies whose social structure made them fertile territory. The party’s strongholds were in those regions of Saxony where the cottage textile industry ‘fought a terrible life-and-death struggle against machine work’ (Franz Mehring).5

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When judging the weak election performance of the workers’ parties, we have to bear in mind how young this new movement was and how unfamiliar the whole situation stood with politicians directly approaching potential voters and urging them to act on their own authority. Labour movement activists had a hard time mobilizing the people not only at election rallies, which offered entertainment and a welcome change from daily routines, but also on election day. They had to provide them with ballot papers and appease their fears of intimidation by the authorities. Despite economic and social structural change, neither the mobilization of workers and artisans nor the political future of the workers’ parties and their representatives could be taken for granted. A friend of Bebel from an association in Chemnitz wrote in May 1868 that ‘most parts of’ the workers had been ‘too lax and too sleepy’ and had shown ‘a lack of sense of unity in every respect’: ‘you will understand that, under these circumstances, we can develop and gain a foothold only very slowly!’6 In the following years, a course for this development would be set for both the socialist labour movement and for Bebel as one of its activists. The road to success proved to be a bumpy one, constantly presenting new and tough challenges. In the end, the movement progressed and did not reach a dead end. However, this development was not foreseeable. 1867 – 1872: BEBEL DEVELOPS HIS TALENTS When Bebel was elected a member of the North German Reichstag in 1867, this was without doubt a decisive step for him personally but not necessarily a decision for a life in politics. A good example here was Gustav Freytag who disappointedly noted in his memoirs: ‘Of all vanity on earth, the parliamentarian one is the ugliest, by all means the most harmful one. After observing myself in an unsuccessful attempt on the hustings I concluded that I was not yet material for a speaker in parliament and needed more practice.’7 Quite the contrary is true of Bebel, who had not only political experience from a vast number of meetings but was also a sufficiently persevering and tough negotiator to survive in this world of politics. A life for politics did not mean that it was possible to live from politics. Until 1906, members of

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the Reichstag did not receive any allowances. Sometimes, as was the case with Bebel, their political engagement even harmed their businesses. Bebel wanted power and influence; he strove for changes in State and society. Moreover, a ‘life for politics’ could produce inner stability; for August Bebel, the ambitious young entrepreneur, who was by no means financially secure, politics was something to hold on to. Max Weber aptly described this way of life: ‘He [the politician] nourishes his inward equilibrium and self-esteem with the consciousness of giving meaning to his life by serving a “cause”.’8 Bebel apologized to Peter Staudinger for his delayed response and asked him not to assume that his ‘zeal for our cause has cooled down’; on the contrary, his work for his own ‘cause’ had prevented him from writing letters. Also, to a member of the People’s Party in Frankfurt upon Main, Bebel wrote: ‘For a man like myself with a small business the sacrifices are not insubstantial, but I make them because I hope that my party friends and my voters respectively will do everything to make these sacrifices easier.’9 Bebel never had a penchant for shallow pathos, emotionalism or heroic speeches. Although mentioning his willingness to make sacrifices for the movement was emotional, it referred to a sense of masculinity based on honour, duty and responsibility without portraying himself as a martyr. It revealed a politically engaged personality in a movement that was still at an early stage and that had just started to separate from its former liberal ally. Despite winning the first Reichstag mandates, neither grassroots members nor leadership could be sure that this movement had a stable future. Thus, leading figures of the early labour movement such as Bebel had to mobilize members (and, in so doing, to overcome their own uncertainty and insecurity). When more and more members left the workers’ association of Breslau, Bebel wrote to a member of the local executive board in February 1868: ‘He should not lose his heart! A small number of self-confident, firm men is better than a big number’ of unreliable people. The many reports sent to Bebel from all over the country illustrated the difficulties the Vereinstag faced on the ¨ nigsberg, wrote: ground. Eduard Sack, an association member from Ko ‘You have already overcome the indifference, the lax apathy [in the Leipzig association]. This we have still to achieve. We certainly have

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the right spirit for this task; it is, however, doubtful if we also have the necessary insights [. . .] And yet one thing is undisputable: we have honestly and sincerely dedicated ourselves to the cause we serve.’10 Under these circumstances – and even more so as first representative of the socialist labour movement on the political stage of the Reichstag – Bebel was a source of hope and optimism even for the small local associations, when he gave account of his work in the Reichstag. This optimism referred to the continued existence and the safeguarding of the associations as well as to the future lives of his voters in those Saxon regions with a cottage weaving industry. Friedrich Naumann, a liberal politician engaged in social politics, recollected in a biographical note the election campaign in the Saxon constituency Glauchau-Meerane, where his father was defeated by Bebel. The workers’ politician gave the ‘squeezed people’ of this area ‘a light of great hope’. They ‘felt his mighty and forcible optimism. This was not party agitation as usual. Bebel fuelled a vivid fire. He triggered opposition, but first of all he generated new power.’11 Grassroots members saw in Bebel not only a glimmer of hope but also acknowledged his achievements. Two seasoned master weavers from the small town of Hainichen in Saxony, who were more than 20 years his senior, wrote to the 27-year-old Bebel: ‘It would do our workers no harm if they were shaken out of their sleep by somebody like you, dear Mr Bebel. We are convinced that our cause would resonate with many workers.’12 Soon, Bebel earned a reputation as an influential speaker for the masses, who could carry his audience and who not only had the better arguments in a discussion but could slaughter his opponents in a debate as in a duel. This made him a popular and sought-after speaker. ‘Like a downpour on drought soil, your social democratic apostle’s words benevolently streamed from the stage [. . .] down onto the Philistines’ burnt heads,’ wrote an inspired party member in 1870, after one of Bebel’s South Germanywide agitation tours for the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which had emerged from the Vereinstag deutscher Arbeitervereine the year before.13 Tributes like these also encouraged the leading figures of the movement. They drew strength from the backing of grassroots members and recognized that their commitment was necessary.

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It enabled them to go on, to take risks and to make sacrifices. The early labour movement gained stability, quality and quantity only through the interplay and cooperation between party (or rather: Verein) grassroots and the leadership and other skills of figures such as August Bebel. However, this commitment involved a risk that they would overestimate their own personal strength and ‘burn out’. The shoemaker Julius Vahlteich, founding member of the ADAV and the same age as Bebel, wrote to his party friend Bebel in May 1869: Dear friend! A few months ago you sent me a letter that was as encouraging as the one from yesterday; you thought my response was ‘pitiful’ [. . .] It is not through laziness that I have abandoned the ‘will to force through’, but the hard-won insight that some matters just cannot be forced through with the means at our disposal. I agree that we have to work for our principles but without wearing ourselves out. So let me be frank: from this perspective, I fear that you are ruining yourself in more than one respect. I’d prefer I were wrong, for your sake. But as far as I can judge, I can’t see you going on with your tasks as an agitator or any other public activities in the long run. The point is: I have to give up either my professional activities or travelling and agitating. I can hardly get away from here on business, let alone for other ends.14

Bebel lived this balancing act. Repeatedly, he complained about the workload. When, due to his growing popularity, he got more invitations to meetings and dinner parties in Berlin, he wrote to his wife: ‘I am sick of this life here and miss you and being at home.’ He made efforts to better synchronize family and politics – the next chapter will take a closer look at that topic. But it was out of the question for him to give up politics for the sake of his family, his ‘home’ or his business – even though risks and sacrifices increased. For the first time in December 1869, Bebel was in prison for three weeks; one year later he was arrested again together with Wilhelm Liebknecht and others. Friedrich Engels wrote to Liebknecht’s wife Natalie: ‘This is the Prussian revenge for the moral defeats inflicted on the Prussian emperorship by Liebknecht and Bebel even before its coming into being. We were all very happy about the brave appearances of both in the Reichstag, under those circumstances, when it was not a small thing to reveal our political opinion openly and defiantly.’15 More and more, the increasing success of the workers’ parties drew the attention of the state authorities.

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They started interfering with the lives of the social democratic leaders and the organization of the labour movement and bullied people. We will come back to this later. But how did the movement that made the state authorities so suspicious develop? What part did Bebel play in this process in the period between his election and the foundation of Imperial Germany? He carried out a dual role as organizer and agitator of the socialist labour movement and the workers’ party. He and his fellow politicians drew on existing organizational models. Since the midnineteenth century, the system of clubs and associations was in its prime throughout Europe. The association system as a structural principle of society had been established as early as the end of the eighteenth century. During the first half of the nineteenth century it was cultivated by the bourgeoisie and dynamically spread from the 1850s. Eventually, it diffused to sub-bourgeois strata. Women as well as clerics set up clubs. A broad range of organized interests fanned out: singing, gymnastics, trade, welfare and the nation – every cause seemed suitable to be organized under the umbrella of an association or a club.16 In this sense, the labour movement with its associations and the emerging political parties bore the imprint of bourgeois organizational structures. ‘Organization, organization! is the motto of the present-day. It is necessary to set up workers’ and people’s associations everywhere and contact reliable men’, Wilhelm Liebknecht wrote in a letter to an association friend from Saxony immediately after the election victory of the Saxon People’s Party and its candidate Bebel.17 In this context, Bebel acted as an organizer. From the perspective of 150 years later, we have to be aware that an association or a club was one of the very few leisure opportunities one had, a chance to socialize with others and to escape from often cramped and crowded living conditions with hardly any privacy. Unlike pubs or inns, associations offered the chance to pursue and practise shared interests. A public sphere emerged that combined political commitment and sociability. By sharing the nineteenth-century euphoria and obsession with organizations, Bebel was a child of his time. But he was ahead of most of his contemporaries in putting his political plans into practice. And yet, once again, he could not have

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created something unless it was already emerging at a local level. Bebel connected, made contacts, gave advice and provided assistance in the process of setting up organizations. In short, he held the threads of the Vereinstag and the Saxon People’s Party together. This is shown by Bebel’s still existing letter diary from 1867/8. As dry as this source material might seem, it is an important document for Bebel’s biography and the initial stage of his life for politics. It is a bureaucratic tool, mostly free from the self-stylization that can be found in letters and even more so in autobiographical writings. In the letter diary, Bebel summarized incoming and outgoing mail, receipted postage costs, managed incoming membership fees and so forth. The workload was enormous, the work itself sometimes tedious, and involved high organizational skills. Bebel arranged an exchange of newsletters with the trade unions that also emerged during the 1860s. By sending brochures and recommendations for books, newspapers and magazines he supported new local party branches. He also was his own secretary – ‘please arrange the meeting [in Hainichen] on 9 February at 5 p.m. Since I will be in Lunzenau the day before at another meeting, I would like to know the way and means of transport to get there’; and he inquired if the Bavarian railway company would be willing to give out reduced tickets for the planned Vereinstag meeting in Nuremberg in 1868. Sometimes Bebel felt flattered and appreciated when he received letters addressed to the ‘President of the German workers, August Bebel, Leipzig’.18 This form of address also mirrored the workers’ pride in finding a worthy representative of their interests and ideas. And indeed, Bebel as a convinced agitator was able to speak in front of the masses and convert his political convictions into new organizational structures. This led him initially from Stuttgart and Gera via Nuremberg to Eisenach. These cities represent organizational milestones on the way from the Vereinstag to a social democratic party. Bebel substantially contributed to this development, since his role within the Vereinstag became more and more important. The Vereinstag meeting in Stuttgart in 1865 had not yet accepted his proposal to tighten and to professionalize the organization. Its leadership was still a lumbering body. In 1866, no Vereinstag meeting took place due to the

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Prussian– Austrian War. In the wake of the military conflict, which finally thwarted the Vereinstag’s ‘Greater German’ visions of a German nation, including German-speaking Austria, the entire movement came to a standstill. Thus, for the next Vereinstag meeting in Gera in 1867 it was ‘much more important’ to address the ‘issue of the organization and to examine it thoroughly than to put forward questions that we have already discussed a number of times’, as Bebel wrote in the run-up to the meeting. By modelling the organization of the Vereinstag along the lines of the bourgeois German National Association and Lassalle’s ADAV, Bebel was convinced that the association laws prohibiting political associations from having connections with ‘other associations of the same kind’ could be circumvented. In so doing, direct membership was possible without being a member of a local branch.19 However, Bebel did not yet find a majority in Gera for this proposed organizational makeover of the Vereinstag. A central association would have required a homogeneous political programme: this was not feasible due to the heterogeneity of the local associations. At least Bebel’s suggestions to implement expense allowances for the leadership and to elect the president directly at a Vereinstag meeting were accepted. The organization was renamed the Union of German Workers’ Associations (Verband deutscher Arbeitervereine, hereafter Verband). On Sunday 6 October 1867, at 8 p.m., the delegates met for a ‘banquet’, organized by the Gera Workers’ Association, ‘presenting the mixed choir of the association (quite a nice institution) singing several songs in a rather skilful manner’.20 On the following morning, Bebel stood for election as president, with Max Hirsch running against him. It was a crucial ballot before the final precedent-setting elections in Nuremberg the year after. On one side, there was Bebel, the young member of the Reichstag who had been partly enjoying, partly struggling with, Marx’s texts for the previous two years. He wanted ‘closer ties with French and English workers’ through the International Working Men’s Association (Internationale Arbeiterassoziation, IWMA – or the ‘First International’) with Marx as one of its leaders. Bebel had joined the association in 1866. On the other side, there was Bebel’s opponent, Max Hirsch, eight years Bebel’s senior and a member of the

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liberal Progress Party. Hirsch had a PhD in national economics and maintained that education and self-help were the only options for workers and artisans to avoid poverty and hardship. The meeting in the Thuringian city of Gera was in a way a ‘home game’ for Bebel. His proposal to hold the Verband meeting in close proximity to the town where he lived and worked had been successful. Almost half of the 36 delegates came from the neighbouring state of Saxony. The fact that he won no more than 19 out of 33 votes shows how contested his political positions in the Verband were.21 The following year saw the final clarification. In his capacity as president of the Verband, Bebel had new possibilities and brought about a restructuring of the organization. It was still work in progress, and not everything went quite as expected. At Bebel’s suggestion, the newsletter of the association, the Deutsche Arbeiterhalle, started to appear on a regular fortnightly basis, but the newspaper created a deficit that accounted for half of the expenses of the Union of German Workers’ Associations. Grassroots members of local organizations acted only half-heartedly in implementing the idea to get an overview of the associations by generating statistics. Except in South and Central Germany and some Prussian regions, associations proved ‘completely indifferent’, as Bebel stated. With hindsight Bebel described these efforts more favourably. One had to ‘shake the associations out of their current complacency’, he remembered: ‘That was possible only by giving them tasks and demanding that they fulfil them [. . .] Success was not long in coming. Gradually the associations came to life.’22 Bebel’s motto was to encourage and challenge, and soon a revival was in fact noticeable. In early January 1868, the Demokratische Wochenblatt was launched as a new publishing flagship initiated by Bebel and Liebknecht. In 1868, about twice as many delegates came to the meeting in Nuremberg as had come to Gera the year before; they represented roughly 13,500 members. Clearly, the grassroots had been woken up; they wanted to get involved and to participate in the decision-making process – after all, the president was to be directly elected at the meeting. Thus, Bebel did not entirely glorify the events, and his contribution, in his memoirs. The Nuremberg meeting of the Verband was groundbreaking because the organization that Bebel presided over now adopted the

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‘turn to the left’ that he himself had already made in 1865/6. At first sight, this change of course appeared to be his own personal achievement as an adept politician. It seemed that Bebel, thanks to his charisma and organizational skills, was able to convey his ideals and objectives to the entire political movement, which then adopted them as their own. And yet, this development did not initially emanate from him. In the run-up to the Verband meeting in Nuremberg, Bebel weighed different programmatic directions. Initially, liberal Frankfurt banker and publisher Leopold Sonnemann was entrusted with party manifesto matters and asked to draw up a draft aligning political and social demands. Had Sonnemann indeed taken up the task, the lurch to the left would probably never have happened. The idea of associating the Verband with the socialist International Working Men’s Association (Internationale Arbeiterassoziation) came from Dresden. The local Workers’ Educational Association had held a meeting on 27 June 1868 and formulated a motion to the Nuremberg meeting ‘to join the programme and the organization of the International Working Men’s Association’. This decision was not a mere organizational bagatelle. It implied a definite break with the liberal members of the Verband, and the Dresden Workers’ Educational Association was fully aware of this, as shown by the remark, ‘the Vorschuß- u[nd] Creditvereine [cooperative advance and loan associations] might be a useful palliative tool for self-employed businesses. For the dependent labourer they are rather circumstantial.’23 Thus, the Dresden-based Vereinstag members drew a clear line between wage labourers and non-wage labourers. Society was seen more and more from the perspective of divergent social classes. A week later, Bebel in his capacity as president informed the members of the Verband of the motion issued by the Dresden association in the Deutsche Arbeiterhalle, the organ of the Verband, and notified them that it would be discussed at the next meeting.24 From this point on, the writing was on the wall: a break of the Verband was bound to occur. Bebel and his allies, among them ¨ rfer and the Julius Vahlteich, the shoemaker Johann Peter Eichelsdo journalist and writer Robert Schweichel, won the majority of the delegates by 69 votes to 46 and declared the Verband to be

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‘in accordance with the programme of the International Working Men’s Association’. This included: ‘Political freedom is the necessary precondition for the economic liberation of the working classes. Thus, the social question is inseparable from the political question; the solution of the former depends on the solution of the latter and is possible only in the democratic state.’25 The defeated delegates left the conference under protest. Bebel by no means acted single-handedly in transforming the Verband of German Workers’ Associations from a body ‘currently working without principles and direction’ into a socialist organization ‘with firm principles and a determined direction’. He had explored the situation and sought alternatives. When he realized that there were voices ‘from below’ demanding what Bebel himself believed in, he used this situation and enforced this development. Six weeks before the Nuremberg Verband meeting, he wrote optimistically to the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association: a majority in favour of affiliating with the IWMA ‘is already secured; success is without doubt’.26 This was certainly a boastful, optimistic remark and meant to impress the leaders of the IWMA in London, Marx and Engels. However, it was not just the president speaking here but the agitator who had been travelling through South Germany for three weeks in February and March 1868 and who gave an account of his activities in the Reichstag to his constituency in August that year. Thus, he knew exactly what the grassroots would accept as programmatic principles – and what they desired. The liberal phase of the German labour movement came to an end with the Nuremberg Verband meeting, and a new course was in the offing. Bebel ‘assured’ a Verband member from Weimar that the next meeting in Eisenach would address ‘the political question as well’ – ‘and this in the most radical way possible’.27 This radicalism divided the Verband/Vereinstag of German Workers’ Associations. It was dissolved in Eisenach on 10 August 1869. It was replaced by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SDAP), founded in Eisenach in 1869. This was a merger of the left, ‘radical’ wing of the Verband/Vereinstag of German Workers’ Associations, members of the Saxon People’s Party as well as former members of the General

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German Workers’ Association ADAV, founded by Lassalle. The latter had left the party when it suffered a leadership crisis under the eccentric and dictatorial rule of Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, a moderately successful writer who led the ADAV between 1867 and 1871. Bebel did not take up a direct leadership position in the new labour party SDAP. This was a clever move, since former ADAV members still had reservations about their previous enemies from Leipzig, Bebel and Liebknecht. The rapprochement between some of the Lassalleans and the left wing of the Verband, which was hard-won during the months prior to the Eisenach party foundation, should not be jeopardized at the very last minute. Wilhelm Bracke, who had founded a local branch of the ADAV in Braunschweig and who now joined the SDAP, stated that he would vote to base the executive board of the party in Leipzig, the so called ‘Vorort’. In doing so, the organization could ‘duly acknowledge Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s efforts and achievements for the party. However, with some people the prejudice against the two aforementioned gentlemen is still deeply rooted.’ After Bebel’s firm intervention against announcing Vienna as ‘Vorort’, Braunschweig was chosen. Thus, with the SDAP, a second autonomous workers’ party politically independent of the bourgeoisie had emerged and would compete with the ADAV. Divergent views on the future German national state (the ADAV favoured the ‘Lesser German solution’ without Austria, whilst the SDAP still advocated a ‘Greater German solution’), different understandings of democracy (also applying to the internal organization of the party, since the ADAV was under the central and dictatorial rule of the party chairman) and personal rivalry were the main reasons why both workers’ parties went their separate ways until 1875.28 Despite his restraint, Bebel was by no means neutralized in the new party. Not only had he drafted the organizational statute prior to the party’s foundation, whose key aspects were approved at the meeting in Eisenach. He also gave the keynote lecture at the Eisenach conference and made repeated interventions. In all his efforts he neither lost sight of the movement’s grassroots-democratic principles nor the need for efficient leadership at the Eisenach convention. Bebel successfully proposed that ‘every motion has to be supported by at least a sixth of the attendees before it will be discussed’, in order to

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keep the fundamental debate under control. In addition, Bebel’s influence in the organization was strengthened by the delegates’ decision to base the new party newspaper Volksstaat (People’s State) in Leipzig. However, he also had to accept a significant defeat. In the discussion of what to call the new party he favoured as open a name as possible: ‘I request to call it: Party, instead of Workers’ Party. Our party mainly consists of workers, but also of many others who are not workers.’ This view did not find a majority, especially among the former ADAV members who had a clearer understanding of the term ‘worker’. Bebel’s suggestion to call the party ‘democratic-socialist’ instead of ‘social-democratic’ was also met with refusal. He did not fight for or insist on his ideas. Instead he realized that he could not gain a majority in these matters and put cooperation and compromise with the former Lassalleans before his own wishes.29 Gustav Mayer has coined the expression the ‘separation of bourgeois democracy from proletarian democracy’ for the phase of the labour movement between Gera and Eisenach when it became clear that Bebel would follow the path into politics. From Bebel’s and his supporters’ point of view, this was an emancipatory process accompanied by growing self-confidence. In the letter to Moritz ¨ ller in Pforzheim in 1868, already quoted in the introduction, Mu ¨ ller’s opinion that ‘the doctors and professors’ were Bebel shared Mu no longer good for leading the workers’ associations. The distance from the educated bourgeois dignitaries, who had paved the way for the Vereinstag/Verband, could not have been greater, either at grassroots or at leadership level. Besides, it is at least arguable that liberalism had to a certain extent used the workers: as voters they were supposed to secure political influence, but were never meant to be equal partners. After all, liberals and workers no longer shared common political goals in 1868/9. This affected even the local level. After the foundation of the party in Eisenach, the Leipzig city council stopped its annual allowances to the local workers’ educational association, which was still headed by Bebel. The council justified its decision by pointing out that an organization ‘whose final goal is to fight the current political situation [. . .] with the utmost efforts’ could no longer expect to be supported.30 Moreover, the liberal and the social democratic camp got in each other’s way as to which

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organization was relevant for resolving the social question. On the one hand there were the Gewerkvereine (trade associations) founded by Max Hirsch – the same Max Hirsch who was defeated by Bebel in the elections in Gera and who still focused on self-help methods and advocated balancing the interests of workers and employers. On the other hand, Gewerksgenossenschaften (literally cooperative associations, but in practice acting as early trade unions) emerged which were mainly signed up to the programme of the IWMA and therefore thought and acted to a much greater extent on the concept of class struggle. The separation of bourgeois from proletarian democracy was a process of mutual alienation. The liberal bourgeois concept of democracy (still) focused on the (politically independent citizen. However, this did not cater workers’ associations given the social reality membership of worker-artisans, whose existence

and economically) for the needs of the of their grassroots was threatened and

who were forced into wage labour on a permanent basis. Social democrats increasingly felt politically and socially excluded. The break-up was mainly caused by the social democratic leadership and supported at grassroots level. The German Workers’ Federation (Deutsche Arbeiterbund), founded by the liberals after Eisenach, never achieved more than a splinter existence. It is doubtful whether Bebel wanted to design the process in 1868/9 to be open-ended and unbiased when he asked Leopold Sonnemann to give the talk on the programmatic course in Eisenach. However, at the following meeting in Stuttgart in 1870, he opposed ‘some of Liebknecht’s remarks on the People’s Party’, which was still active in the South of Germany and had numerous supporters there. ‘A merger with the [democratic middleclass oriented German People’s Party] against the common enemy [Prussia] would strengthen both parties’, Bebel argued. The majority assumed that ‘the most progressive members’ of the middle-class democrats would change over to social democracy anyway and ‘the rest will turn to the Right’.31 During the frenzy of the German unification in 1870/1 this would prove to be an accurate prognosis of the behaviour of the liberal middle classes and the bourgeoisie; social democrats, who were persecuted and increasingly disparaged as ‘scoundrels without a fatherland’, felt isolated and excluded.

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At the Eisenach conference and with the foundation of the SDAP, another facet of Bebel the politician came to the fore: apart from being an excellent organizer and agitator, he proved himself a theorizer and programmaticist. This is often overlooked since Bebel preferred to summarize the thoughts of others and did not design a general theoretic concept. However, this aspect is also part of his personality as a politician. It is indeed of central importance since Bebel’s programmatic and theoretic publications contributed to popularizing socialism among the working class and strengthened this concept at grassroots level. Bebel became increasingly productive as a publicist. From 1863 to 1866, the bibliography of his printed speeches and writings lists only 26 items. For 1868, this number amounts to 67 contributions and speeches, in 1869 to 76. Bebel’s Eisenach speech on the programme and organization of the new party was designed to produce an inner-party understanding among the delegates. But it was also necessary to make these ideas known to a broader public and to deepen awareness of the objectives of the new party at grassroots level. Bebel had a chance to do so at the turn of 1869. In the autumn of 1869 when Bebel travelled through the South of Germany to promote and agitate for the new party, some newspapers ‘crusaded against my socialist tendencies’. Bebel responded to his opponents in the Volksstaat and published this article as a pamphlet titled Unsere Ziele (Our Goals) in 1870. As early as summer 1872, ‘increasing demand [. . .] made it necessary to print a third edition of the pamphlet’.32 Many aspects of this pamphlet were groundbreaking for Bebel’s future ideas, concepts and works. Firstly, there was his prediction of the decline of small businesses as already made by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto. Bebel declared that ‘small independent businesses’ could no longer hope to survive against the ‘spreading of modern industry’, which had to ‘meet the demands of the global market’. This reflected Bebel’s fears for his own livelihood (while at the same time he refuted this theoretical premise with his own professional success story). The scenario of economic decline confirmed the political decision to split with the liberals. Individual self-help was no longer an option given the superiority of big capital. But Bebel did not follow Marx in his bipolar concept of society

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consisting of capitalists and proletarians. At Eisenach Bebel still opposed the term ‘the workers’ in general; in Our Goals he did not want to understand the ‘working class’ as ‘wage labourers in the narrowest sense’. Instead, many ‘diverse classes’ such as writers, primary school teachers, ordinary civil servants, small artisan masters and farmers were ‘threatened by the modern development without mercy’. Thus, not class rule of the working class was the goal but ‘equality and emancipation of all’.33 Secondly, the State played an important role in this respect. Bebel characterized the future people’s State as a big association, that is to say as a cooperative. State benefits equalled people’s aid in this concept and thus served as self-help. Here, Bebel mainly followed Lassalle. But the State could also nationalize entire leading sectors such as ‘railways and transportation, the mining industry and collieries’ – the state socialist option. To some extent, Bebel left in abeyance how the ‘people’s State’ was to be realized. Justice for the oppressed people was ‘by no means’ to be gained by ‘sprinkling rose water’; moreover, history has taught ‘at all times’ that ‘usually new ideas could only be forcibly enforced by the representatives against the representatives of the past’. Violence was an option but not mandatory. On the other hand, Bebel emphasized that the ‘course of this development’ depended on ‘the intensity and strength’ ‘with which the movement inspires the involved circles’ as well as ‘on the resistance of the opponents of the movement’. Also, there was always the possibility ‘to oust private entrepreneurs by state legislation in a democratic state’.34 The German historian Thomas Welskopp believes that here the so-called ‘revolutionary attentism’ – an expression coined by Dieter Groh for the attitude of speaking about the revolution, but making laws instead – was already at work, which shaped German social democracy around and after 1900.35 Thirdly, in Our Goals Bebel reflected on the dilemma between freedom and equality under socialism and prioritized: ‘What use is mere political freedom to him [the worker] if he is starving?’ In March 1869, the Demokratisches Wochenblatt still stated that the labour movement’s primary objective was ‘the abolition of political barriers and the achievement of political freedom’ to resolve the social question. The participants in the Vereinstag meeting in Nuremberg

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had argued in a similar fashion.36 Bebel went one step further in his Our Goals: Social democracy considers political freedom as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. Social democracy sees the achievement of economic equality, that is the establishment of a state and society based on full freedom and equality, as an end. Freedom ends where it violates the sphere of someone else, that is when it violates equality.

However, Bebel did not question individual civil rights in general, as a letter of 1895 – leaping far ahead – shows: the objective of socialism was to ‘create a new economic foundation to enable individual freedom. Only socialism is able to make the freedom of individual development accessible to all people – and thus to foster the differentiation of individuals – because it will abolish exploitation and repression.’37 Fourthly, Our Goals touched a topic which Bebel became famous for during the next decades: the ‘position of the female workers’. In the current society, ‘female workers are cheaper than male workers, that is the crux of the matter’. In the ‘socialist state the woman is no longer the man’s competitor’, she ‘will be the man’s companion in the noblest sense and be not underneath but equal with him’. Lastly, the utopian elements that later helped make Bebel’s book Die Frau und der Sozialismus a bestseller are already touched on in Our Goals. In the future socialist society, the progress of the division of labour and of the employment of machines would be for the good of all: ‘everyone benefits from the advantages of improved production, everyone enjoys the profit of increased production. More enjoyment, less work.’ That was much more prosaic than the utopia Karl Marx had been dreaming about in his German Ideology. According to him, the communist ‘society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic’. Bebel’s vision, on the other hand, was rather down to earth. He described something worth fighting for that was compatible with the experiences of artisans: ‘but everyone has to work, we won’t allow idle fellows and

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malingerers. The latter will have the same role in the socialist state as thieves in the current one; general ignominy is their fate.’38 Bebel wrote the draft of Our Goals during his first imprisonment in Leipzig. For a pamphlet that was written behind bars it was moderate in tone and rather analytical. Instead of a fierce and inflammatory tract that called for revolution, the reader was faced with a detailed analysis of the ‘transformation of capitalist production into a cooperative’ economic order.39 Bebel was in prison because a Saxon court had convicted him of the ‘spreading of subversive doctrines’. Increasingly, the State became the chief opponent of the labour movement. The reason for this was the fact that the experience of persecution penetrated the everyday lives of social democrats, not theoretic-Marxist premises. The growing strength of a force negating the current political system and the increasingly radical stance of both wings of the labour movement – of the Lassallean ADAV on the one hand and the Eisenach SDAP on the other – prompted first the Prussian state, then Imperial Germany to launch counteractions. This basic conflict accelerated during the unification process in 1870/1. One of the causes of the Franco-German War of 1870/1 was the dynastic dispute over the Spanish succession. France and Prussia, in the person of Bismarck, used and instrumentalized this conflict in order to secure their respective power and interest spheres on the continent. Bismarck held the better cards in this dangerous diplomatic game. When the war began in July 1870, the world saw France under Emperor Napoleon III as an overreacting aggressor. The South German states were bound by treaties to support Prussia or rather the North German Confederation. Thus, German unification (without Austria) was realized militarily and by a policy of strategic alliances. On both sides of the Rhine there were heated public and press debates. Workers’ associations were no exception in this respect. Many of their members and representatives advocated unconditional commitment to Germany in view of the French aggression.40 In line with their slogan ‘freedom through unity’ and due to the allegedly defensive nature of the war, the Lassalleans in the ADAV supported war credits in the North German Reichstag on 21 July 1870. The situation was more complex in Bebel’s Eisenach SDAP. For many of its members it was out of the question to let their

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fatherland down, given the French aggression. On the other hand, quite a few, in particular Wilhelm Liebknecht, deeply hated Prussia. Liebknecht wanted to oppose the war credits. Bebel succeeded in convincing him to refrain from this course of action and to find a compromise. According to Bebel, the SDAP could not approve the war credits because ‘this would be a sign of trust for the Prussian government’. But neither could it refuse them ‘because this could be interpreted as approval of the malicious and criminal policy’ of Napoleon III. As a consequence, the social democrats abstained from the vote, which caused different reactions. At a mass event in his Saxon constituency in late July, Bebel received broad support. The party executive, on the other hand, criticized Bebel: the decision to abstain in the vote would alienate workers from the party due to their strong national feelings.41 Bismarck and the Prussian state leadership continued the war against France after the victorious battle of Sedan. This helped to eliminate the central source of conflict over the position of the two workers’ parties ADAV and SDAP on the national question as well as within the Eisenach SDAP. In France, imperial rule collapsed in the wake of the defeat and the Third Republic was proclaimed. Instead of initiating peace talks, Prussia waged a war of aggression to secure its rule over Alsace and Lorraine. When again war credits had to be approved by the North German Reichstag in November 1870, Bebel’s big moment finally came. Helmut Hirsch, who published the first detailed biography of Bebel in 1968, stated that ‘every young German’ in the Federal Republic should know Bebel’s speech delivered in front of the members of the North German Reichstag on 26 November 1870. Hirsch’s remarks were not only due to the political situation of the late 1960s and the policy of Franco-German rapprochement but are still valid today – and even more so given the increasing involvement of the Federal Republic in global conflicts. Building upon the right of nations to self-determination, Bebel argued that the citizens of Alsace and Lorraine had ‘undoubtedly [. . .] not the least desire to join this German state under the Hohenzollern dynasty’. If Germany ‘tramples this right to self-determination today’, the same annexation policy ‘may one day be used against us’. Also, the annexation would ‘do much to contribute to prolonging

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hostilities between two of the noblest nations’. Anyway, if Germany ‘were to apply’ the ‘thoroughly reactionary principle of nationality’ in ‘its pure form in Europe, there would be no end in sight to war [. . .] The highest and most fundamental idea in the political life of a state must be the internal satisfaction of peoples through their institutions, their right to self-determination.’ Finally, Bebel accused the members of the North German Reichstag of asking the German people to make financial sacrifices in the name of ‘patriotism’ but ‘first bide their time to see whether their pockets will be lined with the right percentages’. The assembly hall boiled over. ‘General disapproval, hissing, shouts: Shame on you! Out! Get him out of here!’, read the minutes of the Reichstag session. The Speaker of the Reichstag stated: ‘Does the speaker have no sensibility at all [. . .] for the fact that he has the nerve to abuse our people in their very representative body?! (General round of Bravo. Great noise. Shouting: Get him out of here!)’.42 This was one of the greatest moments of Bebel’s parliamentary career. In his introductory remarks, he had pointed out that he was ‘as good a German’ and ‘as much a patriot as’ the previous speaker. After his speech, he faced a united front. However, he courageously maintained his opposition. He anticipated future structural problems in Franco-German relations, demanded the upholding of standards according to international law and outlined a vision of a peaceful Europe transcending national hatreds. Bebel’s ‘No’ to the war credits – in retrospect – radiated an aura similar to that of Federal Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s remark ‘I am not convinced’ in regard to the beginning of the Iraq war, at the 39th Security Conference in Munich in 2003. Decades later, Bebel’s public appearances in Alsace ¨ lhausen (Mulhouse) on were more than triumphant, for instance in Mu 6 January 1892. Even The Times reminded its readers of this exceptional moment in Bebel’s life in an article published the day after Bebel’s death: ‘It is gratefully remembered in France that in 1871 Herr Bebel, together with his friend Herr Liebknecht, protested against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine.’43 The years between 1867 and 1872 were the foundation of Bebel’s future political life. Although his priorities regarding his roles as organizer, agitator, popular public speaker, theorist and member of

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the Reichstag kept changing during the following decades, he maintained all these functions that he had acquired during the foundation period of social democracy. It was the very combination of all these functions that made Bebel a leading political figure. There were other exceptionally gifted agitators who could hold a candle to Bebel such as Johann Most – later he saw the political future in anarchism. However, Most lacked the consistency and discipline necessary for an organizer. Marx and Engels remained the chief theorists and guiding stars of the socialist labour movement. However, none of them were any good as party strategists and organizers, not to mention the fact that Marx’s academic and theoretical work needed to be translated into a generally intelligible language. Ferdinand Lassalle had his seat on the Mount Olympus of socialism, but he died in 1864 and could no longer be considered – even had he shown any interest in the building of an organization. Soon, more and more socialists joined Bebel as members of the Reichstag. But some, such as Wilhelm Blos, were never more than backbenchers; others like Eduard Bernstein represented ‘only’ certain wings of the party. No one else had as long an experience in parliament as Bebel did. And – to anticipate future events – there were politicians such as Friedrich Ebert who had made his career based on his organizational skills in the course of the increasing bureaucratization of social democracy, yet his talent was rather onesided.44 Finally, Bebel also withstood State persecution, and could even utilize it for himself and the movement. He stayed in Germany, whereas many others – mostly from medium leadership ranks – went into exile, mostly in the USA. 1872 – 1884/9: THE DANGEROUS MEMBER OF THE REICHSTAG ‘We are two against two hundred and eighty something,’ Bebel described the balance of power in the Reichstag in his memorable speech of 26 November 1870. However, the situation was not quite as one-sided as Bebel implied, since not only Bebel and Liebknecht but also the Lassalleans opposed the second tranche of war credits. In the following five years, while Bebel was mostly in prison, the two labour parties increasingly converged and finally merged in 1875.

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After 1870/1, many grassroots members of both ADAV and SDAP were ideologically less stubborn than their leaders. Unity and (political) sociability played an important role at grassroots level. Members of both organizations were equally affected by exclusion and State persecution. The settlement of the national question by the state government had removed a huge obstacle for the Eisenach party and the Lassalleans. Both parties started to search for compromises and realized that a united organization had a better chance of surviving in an increasingly aggressive state. Together with Wilhelm Liebknecht and Adolf Hepner, a bookseller and publisher, Bebel experienced State persecution firsthand in the Leipzig high treason trial in March 1872. The three men were accused of having supported Marxist teachings such as class struggle through their writings and organizations. The Public Prosecutor even drew on the Communist Manifesto, which had largely fallen into obscurity and which, from now on, legally circulated in the press as incriminating evidence. Bebel and Liebknecht were sentenced to two years in Festungshaft (imprisonment in a fortress under ‘honourable custody’); Hepner was acquitted. The trial and the verdicts show the inconsistency of the political system in Imperial Germany. On the one hand there was the arbitrary and construed accusation; on the other hand a verdict that was rather moderate given the indictment of high treason. It is possible that State and judiciary still underestimated the movement. Anyway, the verdict of Festungshaft could not destroy social democracy. It was an honourable punishment, it did not rescind individual civil and voting rights and included privileges for the prisoners. Bebel used the time to read and study political and programmatic writings and at grassroots level the verdict generated a wave of solidarity. At a by-election in Bebel’s Saxon constituency he got 10,000 votes – more than 3,000 more than at the previous elections.45 The permissive imprisonment conditions even allowed Bebel to stay actively involved in politics and to influence both the party organization and the emerging efforts to unite and merge the two parties. In the fortress, he met with the accountant of the Volksstaat to discuss the financial situation of the newspaper. He wrote one article after another, all of which were smuggled out of prison and

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printed anonymously in the Volksstaat. Despite being behind bars, Bebel’s assessment of the situation regarding the party merger was far more accurate than that of Friedrich Engels in London, who was extremely well connected but had a critical view on the influence of Lassalleanism in the process of merger between the two labour parties. Bebel wrote to him: ‘The cult around Lassalle has to be exterminated, I quite agree with that. Also, Lassalle’s wrong opinions have to be fought, but only with caution. [. . .] You mustn’t forget – and it cannot be argued away – that Lassalle’s writings are the foundation of socialist thought of the masses due to their popular language.’46 Here, Bebel drew on his own experiences. When Bebel was released in May 1874 after two years’ imprisonment, he was not forgotten but a celebrated hero. ¨ nigstein, where he was At Whitsun 1874, he visited the area of Ko imprisoned during the last weeks of his sentence, and was told that his cell ‘had become a tourist site within the fortress in the meanwhile’. After being released, Bebel continued his political work. He travelled through his constituency, before he was taken into custody again on 1 July 1874 for insulting the monarchy. The director of the Saxon state prison in Zwickau tightened the prison conditions. Bebel was allowed to read and to write, but he was cut off from the political development of his labour movement. He wrote to Engels regarding the unification of both workers’ parties that he had ‘no knowledge at all and therefore no judgment; I only know what the newspapers report’.47 On 1 April 1875, the prison gates finally opened for Bebel and the Zwickau party members greeted him, gave standing ‘ovations’ and presented ‘some fine china coffee cups bearing a dedication’. Bebel was less pleased with the state of the merger negotiations between ADAV and SDAP, which he thought were too much dominated by Lassalle’s theories. At the unification party conference in Gotha in May 1875, where the Socialist Workers’ Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei, SAP) was founded, he played only a relatively minor role compared to his previous activities at Vereinstag meetings and other events. Neither had he the chair, nor did he give one of the keynote speeches, and some of his motions were rejected. Even his proposal to explicitly include women’s suffrage in the party

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manifesto failed. The party conference decided on the neutral term ‘nationals’ for those who were to have voting rights; women were not explicitly mentioned. On the other hand, the party’s new organizational constitution largely resembled the draft Bebel had developed for the SDAP in Eisenach in 1869. In addition, several of Bebel’s key political ideas – including the right of workers to associate in trade unions and the unrestricted freedom of opinion – were incorporated into the new manifesto. All in all, Gotha became an amalgamation of Lassalle and Marx. Reading the minutes of the unification party conference, Bebel seems to have been only one among the many; Wilhelm Liebknecht, Julius Vahlteich, Wilhelm Hasenclever and Wilhelm Hasselmann dominated the floor. He did not even have his draft manifesto which was written in the Zwickau prison to publicly circulate. He reined himself in and committed himself to the party’s cause – which in this case meant having to compromise and realize the unity of social democracy that was much desired by grassroots members.48 Bebel’s temporary withdrawal from internal party debates – though by no means was he sidelined by others – was due to the fact that he still lived for instead of from politics. He wrote to Wilhelm Liebknecht: ‘My business will keep me well and truly busy during the first six months after being released from prison. I have to keep up with my competitors who are threatening to outstrip my business.’ In return, Liebknecht informed the party members: ‘for the time being [Bebel] is rather occupied with his business so that he has only little time for politics’.49 However, this was anything but a withdrawal from politics. In the following years, Bebel became an important figure in the SAP, responsible for the broad impact and the public image of the party and movement. The Reichstag played an increasingly crucial role for Bebel the political speaker. In particular, during the period of persecution under the Anti-Socialist Laws the Reichstag was one of few options for social democrats to legally express their views within the Reich. This aspect again illuminates the ambivalence of the political structure of Imperial Germany. When the government became aware of the fact that the Reichstag served as a propaganda platform for the social democrats, it issued a draft bill in 1879 that would ban

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‘subversive’ speeches from being published in the official stenographic records. Whilst the majority of Reichstag members had been willing to agree to the Anti-Socialist laws and to prolong them for more than a decade, they rejected this bill that would censor the Reichstag. The historian Margaret Lavinia Anderson has emphasized – and in some cases perhaps overemphasized – several democratic-constitutional traditions and practices of the political system in Germany during the 1870s and 1880s. Imperial Germany did not implement a totalitarian machinery of destruction against social democracy; thus Bebel was able to develop himself in the Reichstag in various ways.50 For one thing, Bebel used the Reichstag as a platform to propagate socialist ideology and its objectives. His speech of 18 April 1877 on reform of the Trade Regulation Act is an example of this. From a Marxist perspective, Bebel vividly described the decline of small businesses whereby ‘only the larger and more competitive businesses’ would ‘keep themselves above water in this struggle for survival’. However, Marx was not Bebel’s only point of reference. He was also influenced by Charles Darwin and his evolutionist worldview, which provided an additional scientific foundation for Bebel’s rhetoric. This was meant to bring home the veracity and accuracy of his political convictions to supporters, opponents and potentially interested persons. Similar to the strategy of his brochure Our Goals, Bebel hinted at the political possibility of reform instead of revolution for achieving socialist objectives. Social democratic reform proposals could in fact not ‘completely balance clashing interests’ or even ‘create a greater stability’ of the existing society. But they were able to contain the ‘struggle that exists in reality within certain limits’. ‘This might make the other side realize that only by complying with our demands will there be a satisfactory future.’ In his speech, Bebel added some traditional social democratic demands addressing the SAP clientele. In order to make ‘cultural achievements and progress’ accessible to ‘all members of the society in a just and equitable way’, the ‘means of production in the broadest sense of the word – that is including land – have to be transformed into common property’. These socializing ideas caused a stir on the parliamentary benches of liberals and conservatives. Bebel knew

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exactly how to push the buttons of his political opponents – and the spectre of expropriation was ideal in this respect.51 And yet, provocation was never Bebel’s primary objective. He always wanted to underpin his view with arguments and facts. Bebel was a ‘Vernunftredner’ – a speaker based on reasoning – and applied strict standards. In October 1879, he wrote to Engels: ‘we disgraced ourselves in the Reichstag not in the voting but by our poor speeches’. In the debate on the customs issue Julius Vahlteich had been ‘indisposed to such an extent’ that ‘we were glad he did not make a blunder. That was very unfortunate and I was not impressed.’ In the same debate, the social democrat Max Kayser made his ‘unlucky debut’ in the Reichstag that ‘irritated us more than anybody else and many accusations were voiced’. Bebel also criticized some Reichstag members for their political attitude in overly succumbing to the ‘system’, which reflects a rather patronizing and pedantic character trait in Bebel and a way of thinking rather oriented towards order. However, these remarks reveal first and foremost Bebel’s background as an artisan who had educated himself, who put his trust in the strength of arguments, who cared about the respectability of the labour movement and was aware that a fundamentally divergent view had to be defended by being optimally prepared.52 Bebel was always very well prepared when he delivered his speeches in the Reichstag, all the more so when it was about issues vital for his party. He showed his mastery when the Reichstag discussed the prolongation of the Anti-Socialist Laws on 31 March 1881. Political opponents of the SAP claimed that social democratic newspapers had welcomed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March 1881, thus revealing the enmity of the SAP towards the system. Bebel stood up to these allegations by quoting conservative newspaper articles that were, in essence, similarly worded. To a heckler he responded instantaneously: ‘gentlemen, it is not my fault that you don’t like it, but there it is in black and white, and when something is in black and white one can happily take it home’. At the same time, he added some anecdotes about the embarrassingly unprofessional persecution of himself by the police, which caused ‘great laughter’ – apparently not only among the social democratic Reichstag members – and led to this part of his speech being

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interrupted six times. His remarks illustrated the ‘absurdity and disgracefulness of such a course of action by the authorities’ and mirrored Bebel’s confidence that he was on the right side. ‘Oh no, your weapons will shatter into pieces like glass against granite’, he shouted towards his political opponents. ‘We have already proven for a number of laws that the current development in Germany based on the capitalist mode of production – which cannot be stopped by a minister of the interior, by a Prince of Bismarck – that this capitalist mode of production plays into our hands, more and more with each passing day.’53 Bebel’s mastery of parliamentary speeches as an agitation tool was the outcome of long experience. Besides, he had addressed himself to an ever-broader range of topics and interests – he had spent the four and a half years in prison almost exclusively studying. In 1876, based on some reference books of this time, he interpreted the Peasants’ Wars on the threshold of the modern age from the perspective of the developing class struggles. From the peasants’ revolts ‘there was still to learn the often misunderstood truth that the social conditions of the different classes necessarily cause these struggles and movements’. From the mid-1870s, Bebel also focused on the relationship between Christianity and socialism. In 1874, a 24-page brochure under the title Christentum und Sozialismus (Christianity and Socialism) was printed, stating that the two were like ‘fire and water’. In 1876, he published the German translation of the book Etudes sur les doctrines sociales de christianisme (English translation: A Study of the Social Doctrines of Christianity) by the French authors Yves Guyot and Sigismond Lacroix, who provided a ‘rationalist critique of religion and the Bible’. Finally, in 1884, Bebel’s book Die mohammedanisch-arabische Kulturperiode (The Mohammedan– Arabic Cultural Epoch) appeared, in which he tried to prove ‘the superiority of a pro-cultural, pro-scientific and pro-educational Islam over Christianity’.54 After his programmatic outline in Our Goals, Bebel presented another fundamental political work in the form of his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman under Socialism, literally Woman and Socialism) in 1879. Here, he put forward a socialist position for himself and the supporters of the workers’ party allowing him to

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argue against his opponents, to counteract political setbacks and to open up the perspective of a future society. The fact that Bebel advocated women’s emancipation within the male world of the labour movement was down to personal experiences and contacts. Already his former liberal role model Emil Roßma¨ßler in Leipzig had addressed the role of women in society. In March 1865, the same year that Bebel became second chair of the Workers’ Educational Association, Louise Otto-Peters founded a women’s educational association in Leipzig; Bebel had been there. In 1872, Bebel signed over his Leipzig turners workshop to his wife. She took over and managed the business not just nominally but in practice while he was in prison. The idea of women’s emancipation was rooted in his lifeworld experiences. Besides, Bebel believed, as he told his biographer Hellmut von Gerlach, that this topic had been largely ignored in Germany compared to French socialist literature.55 The historian Thomas Welskopp has pointed out that, according to Bebel’s main work, women’s full emancipation and equality could only be achieved in the future socialist society.56 In the current capitalist society it was in fact necessary to free the woman from her role as a mere housewife. However, her main task within the field of political education was – in Bebel’s view – to stand by her husband’s side as an understanding sympathizer and companion for his political work. Instead of a clog, the husband will gain a supporter in a compatible wife; whenever prevented by other duties from personal participation, she will spur her husband to fulfil his own. She will find it legitimate that a fraction of his earnings be spent on a newspaper, for agitational purposes, because the paper serves to educate and entertain her also, and because she realizes the necessity of the sacrifice, a sacrifice that helps to conquer that which she, her husband and her children lack, an existence worthy of human beings.57

Casting a critical eye on this passage, it is fair to say that Bebel was in fact not so much concerned about women’s emancipation per se, but about women allowing men to pursue their political work without interruptions. This was the cause of frequent complaints among workers’ functionaries. The wife of Julius Bruhns, social democratic journalist and member of the Reichstag, was unsympathetic towards

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the political commitment of her husband and was suspicious when he left home for party meetings on many evenings. His marriage ‘gradually became hell’ for him. Wilhelm Blos, also a member of the Reichstag for the SAP and state president of Wurttemberg after World War I, described the obstacles of his marriage and the ‘failure’ of his wife: ‘This marriage completely failed to meet my expectations and became very unhappy. But it lasted twelve years and substantially interfered with my literary productivity during my best years.’ From the men’s perspective, the wives kept their husbands away from the public sphere. It is no surprise that Bebel, despite his radical demands for emancipation, preached a meek and forbearing wife who was to be politically educated by the husband at home.58 Also, the emancipated Bebels, with Julie being involved in August’s work and policy making, could get highly excited about Wilhelm Liebknecht’s oldest daughter Gertrud and her failed life plans. In this context, they appeared to be very traditional bourgeois role models. When in spring 1887 Gertrud travelled to the USA without having clear prospects, Julie Bebel wrote to her husband: ‘Mr L[iebknecht] said that if she does not find a position he would have to get her back home. Thank you very much, all that money. I still hope that she will find a man, that would be the best solution for her.’ August replied: If you have the opportunity then advise L[iebknecht] to send for her, I pity the poor thing. After the first position did not work out, she will probably not take a second one. And even despite her attractiveness she will hardly find a man in Am[erica] because the Americans are practical through and through. She needs a man who has enough money to let her play the grande dame, and those are not in abundance indeed.59

Bebel’s book would probably not have become a bestseller just on the strength of the idea of women’s emancipation. Still, around the turn of the century many male workers considered women as competitors and wage-squeezers, who lacked the ability to organize themselves and the ‘right understanding’ of political life: since a woman ‘has to be guided by the man, she cannot be equal to him’, a worker in a Hamburg pub argued.60 Die Frau und der Sozialismus was attractive to a broad audience because of its expectations for the future and its utopian surplus,

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by describing the future socialist society. ‘All our present educational eccentricities caused either by poverty and destitution or by wealth and social status’ could be avoided by applying an ‘educational method that is systematic and supported by plentiful material and intellectual means’. In later editions of Die Frau und der Sozialismus, Bebel saw the Zeppelin as a main means of transport in the future and believed that ‘central institutions for food preparation’ would supersede ‘home cooking’. ‘Architects and representatives of the arts and crafts movement often deplore the lack of monumental public buildings’; in the future, these would meet all artistic and technical expectations. ‘It is fair to assume that then art will develop and thrive to a greater extent than in ancient Greece during its heyday.’61 For working-class readers these ideas must have appeared alien, unreal and incompatible with their everyday life experiences. However, Bebel had the ability to present this future society by underpinning his concept with scientific facts and great persuasiveness – as he also did in his Reichstag speeches – convinced that this long-term goal would in fact come true, that it had to come true as a historical necessity. In so doing, Bebel’s utopian optimism corresponded with the SAP supporters’ and grassroots members’ enthusiastic belief in progress and change.62 Thus despite their strangeness, Bebel’s utopian ideas were compatible with the living situation of the workers. A bestseller within this milieu was born. Political opponents beyond the socialist milieu considered the book as a revolutionary and subversive botch. In Prussia, the conservative, semi-governmental newspaper Neueste Mittheilungen commented on the new edition of the book in 1883 as follows: We will not elaborate on the fantasies about the future state for now and only point to the fact that Bebel’s book is irrefutable proof for the continuous revolutionary ideas at least among the leadership [of social democracy]. Instead of engaging in a debate on practical legislative questions about improving the situation of the workers, Mr Bebel overindulges in mad fantasies on the so-called ‘ideals’; instead of realizing that the imperfection of the world is deeply rooted in human nature, Bebel continuously stirs up discontent over this situation as if the wicked ‘ruling’ class was to be blamed for it. Bebel and his comrades are not willing to accept smaller reforms, that ‘cuts no ice’ for them; heaven on Earth will come true only when the current system is eliminated!

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Yet these conservative commentators overlooked an aspect that was highly important for social democracy; not only did Bebel consider socialism a long-term goal for the far future, he also never proclaimed the political revolution. It remained virulent as a spectre and rhetorically available, but in reality it was superseded by election campaigns and election victories.63 Die Frau und der Sozialismus had to be printed and published in Switzerland: after two unsuccessful attempted assassinations of Emperor Wilhelm I, the Anti-Socialist Laws were issued on 19 October 1878 with the backing of conservative and liberal Reichstag members. Socialist associations and brochures were banned, association funds were confiscated and meetings and gatherings were broken up. According to Bebel, ‘521 persons were sentenced to roughly 812 years of prison’ during May and June 1879 alone, although these figures are undocumented. An atmosphere of ‘insults and denunciations’ set in. ‘This is an evil seed that has been sown and it will bear bad fruit,’ Bebel wrote to the Bavarian social democrat Georg von Vollmar. One of the most perfidious measures under the AntiSocialist Laws was the expulsion of social democratic activists.64 Three hundred social democrats had to leave Berlin; they lost their jobs, had difficulties in finding new positions and were separated from their families. ‘I am in great despair. Today, again seven of the recently nine expelled people – all of them fathers of a family – arrived here. I have no idea where to get the funds to help them’, Bebel wrote to Engels a year after the adoption of the law. Two years later, the same fate befell him and Liebknecht: they had to leave Leipzig in 1881.65 However, the fate of the expelled activists showed the strong and historically rooted structures of the social democratic milieu. Illegal money collections were organized, which were also at the heart of and crucial to the survival of the party as an organization. In the proassociation atmosphere of Imperial Germany, it made sense to found clubs and associations as camouflage. At local level, numerous social and leisure clubs came into being. Although they were put under police surveillance and hardly allowed for political discussions, they strengthened cohesion and were an additional organizational structure. At the same time, the party adopted conspiratorial

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strategies to create contacts between individual associations and to provide them with brochures and agitation material. The majority of copies of Die Frau und der Sozialismus – by 1890 20,000 had been printed – were smuggled out of Switzerland to Germany. The same was true of the newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat, printed in Zurich from 1879 and from 1888 in London. Soon after the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890, the successful establishment of illegal distribution channels for the newspaper and social democratic flyers – the so-called ‘Red Field Post’ – was embellished and transformed into a heroic tale of social democracy. However, it was first and foremost the opportunity to run for election to the Reichstag and to appear at campaign rallies and similar events – even under the Anti-Socialist Laws – that ensured the survival of social democracy in Germany. Social democratic members of the Reichstag were allowed to summon and hold meetings to discuss issues such as social legislation. In Erfurt, the SAP could even hire the representative Kaisersaal (Emperor’s Hall), which was highly important for the history of German social democracy. Thus, the Reichstag member for Gotha, Wilhelm Bock, was able to speak in front of an audience of 2,000 about health and safety in the workplace. Under the prevailing conditions of persecution, the Reichstag parliamentary group acted as party executive.66 Bebel was constantly on the move – both for his own business and for the party. He suffered a bitter defeat in the 1881 Reichstag elections, when he lost his constituency to the Dresden mayor. Afterwards, he ran in a by-election in Mayence: I have arrived safely here, held one meeting on Saturday, three on Sunday and will hold some more, one each today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow [. . .]. The best one was yesterday morning in the beautiful academy hall with an audience of 3,000–4,000 people and many hundreds had to go home again because there wasn’t enough room [. . .]. I was in excellent form and my speech was a great success. The applause wouldn’t stop,

he wrote to his wife. A successful election campaign speech was special even for the experienced politician Bebel. But again, he was defeated in Mayence, though only narrowly. For the first time since 1867 he did not have a Reichstag mandate. ‘I am, by the way, less

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upset and cross than you think, and neither should you. At least the Reichstag no longer prevents me from taking care of the company, I am a free man now.’ It remains open if this was mere pretence towards his wife. This much is true: he never lost his enthusiasm for politics.67 Although Bebel remained in the background at the unification party congress in Gotha in 1875 and was increasingly occupied in taking care of his business, he still had influence in the party between 1875 and 1878. Under the Anti-Socialist Laws Bebel became a central port of call for the SAP. As early as 1879, he stated: ‘It is unbelievable that there is no one in the party whom the comrades can approach with their problems for advice and assistance.’ In the end, it was Bebel who organized support for expelled party members; he also managed the assets of the banned party – and increased them. He took over from the terminally ill party treasurer, August Geib from Hamburg, and received the ‘last 1,000 marks’ left in the party coffers. ‘This was the foundation of my coming tasks as treasurer under the AntiSocialist Laws.’ He watched every penny: since shipping of the newspaper Sozialdemokrat from Zurich to Germany cost ‘double postage in a letter, particularly if a circular is added’, he advised that other publications be printed separately and sent to him by cheaper postage, ‘whereupon I will take care to distribute them’.68 At the same time, Bebel took on the role of a ‘caretaker’, the one who looked after and cared for others. For instance, two party members asked Bebel and Liebknecht about a comrade who had been expelled from Leipzig and was planning to open a cigar store in Mayence: ‘Mr Kirchner can only succeed with his business plans if the party supports him with eight to nine hundred marks. We understand that Mr Bebel knows him personally and is the best person to decide whether he is worth it.’ In general, a strict approach was taken to decide who would receive money from the party and who would not. The Reichspost (Reich postal service) refused to pay a postman’s widow the widow’s pension because her husband had not been employed long enough. Tapping into its propaganda effect, the SAP took up this case, presented it in the Reichstag and collected 300 marks for the widow. However, Bebel took issue with the widow’s plan to open her own shoe store:

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The guardian is against the shoe shop, and rightly so, I believe, since she will be neglecting her children and since she has no talents or skills, she might go to rack and ruin [. . .] I am minded to let her become a seamstress if she has any talent in this direction, to buy her a sewing machine etc. so that she can work from home. I’m sure if she works hard she will get a lot of work from the villages around and for reasonable money.

The motto was to support and to challenge.69 All in all, social democracy could not have wished for a better treasurer. When the first (illegal) party congress during the time of the Anti-Socialist Laws took place at the castle of Wyden near Zurich in summer 1880, the party coffers were filled with 37,000 marks.70 Bebel was not only involved in inner-party struggles, but also had a say in the strategic course of the SAP. Members around Johann Most, who called for a rebellion in 1879/80, were put in their place. In line with this, Bebel informed the editorial board of the Sozialdemokrat already during its foundation period: ‘We have to prevent two things: firstly the emergence of quarrels and divides caused by personal attacks; secondly, the worsening of our situation towards the Swiss authorities and regarding the persecution in Germany by heavyhanded provocations.’71 Those members of the Reichstag who, in Bebel’s view, had brought themselves too closely into line with the government under the conditions of persecution were made to toe the party line again. In the 1884 Reichstag election, the SAP won 550,000 votes, 200,000 more than in the previous election, and doubled their number of seats in the Reichstag to 24. But success also brought problems. Wilhelm Hasenclever had run both in Breslau and in Berlin and won in both constituencies. He wanted to accept the Berlin seat, but then rumours began that there had been agreements between him and the government parties in the second ballot. Heated arguments erupted within the parliamentary group. Infuriated, Hasenclever wrote to Wilhelm Liebknecht on 11 November 1884: ‘I would like to mention that Bebel has told me in a letter that he will do his utmost to shed light on the “infamous game” that has been going on in Berlin. Once again, Bebel aggrandized himself and acts like a party dictator. I will bring forward a motion in the

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parliamentary group that he will be elected as one. Then he will be entitled to act like that.’ Just like a ‘party dictator’, Bebel wrote to Ignatz Auer, a party colleague in the Reichstag parliamentary group: ‘It is my habit to take the bull by the horns and try to throw it to the ground by using the momentum of the assault. Everyone has their own way of fighting, and I consider mine to be excellent.’ Bebel prevailed over Hasenclever.72 As soon as the Hasenclever issue was resolved, Bebel saw new dangers in the form of deviationist behaviour. In his view, the AntiSocialist Laws had turned ‘our people’ into ‘cowards; policy based on opportunism instead of on principles is gaining currency. I have no idea how long it will last and how far it goes. If the majority does not realize that this is the wrong way to go and sees reason, a major crash is inevitable.’ At the turn of the year 1884/5, the political debate revolved around the Dampfersubvention, a subsidy bill for colonial postal steamships. The government cleverly advocated State subsidies for privately run postal steamship lines by pointing out that this would foster the shipbuilding industry and create jobs. A two-thirds majority of the SAP Reichstag parliamentary group regarded the issue of the Dampfersubvention as a decision on the merits regarding an infrastructure project instead of a principled political question, and was willing to approve the government bill. Bebel took a completely different view and asked the editorial board of the Sozialdemokrat in Zurich for backing in this matter. They let him publish his opinion. In so doing, Bebel could gain the support of the party grassroots. Against the will of the parliamentary group majority, the Sozialdemokrat printed numerous letters and petitions supporting Bebel’s view. Given the grassroots opposition, the parliamentary group backpedalled and moved several amendments. ‘Since the German shipyard industry is presently stagnating’, Hasenclever stated in the Reichstag on 12 March 1885, ships should be built ‘in German shipyards’ and ‘with German material alone’: only in this way ‘can the intention be conveyed that the workers will benefit from the steamboat subsidy bill’. This motion did not find a majority in the Reichstag, so the SAP parliamentary group could revise its position and vote against the bill without losing face. After this defeat, the parliamentary group tried to bring the Sozialdemokrat under control.

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Bebel was foaming with rage. ‘This is pure dictatorship of the parliamentary group,’ he wrote to Liebknecht – and prevailed again. The editorial board in Zurich remained the mouthpiece of different groups and camps within the party.73 It was ironic. In a way, Bebel won one battle after another, but not the war. ‘In war, it is the one who not only hits the hardest but who also perseveres and persecutes the defeated enemy. Don’t get sentimental’, he wrote to Julius Motteler, who organized the smuggling of the party newspaper from Zurich into Germany. At that time in late 1885, Bebel could not foresee that he would have to win battle after battle during the next 25 years. It was a tiring and exhausting political life. This confrontational course within the parliamentary group was one reason for Bebel’s anti-parliamentary remarks. As early as 1883, he wrote to Liebknecht: ‘More often than ever the thought crosses my mind to abandon the concept of parliamentarianism, it is the best school to get sluggish.’ ‘I am downright disgusted by the whole game of parliament’, he wrote to Motteler in 1886. After his victory in the debate on the Dampfersubvention, he relied on the grassroots of the party instead. ‘One thing has been established during recent months, the party is independent and does not want to be guided by leaders, regardless of who they are. The party certainly does not want a split, but it is also sure that nor do the vast majority want political compromises in parliament [Parlamenteln und Kompromisseln] and they demand that its representatives be most decisive.’74 However, it was not only the controversies with the parliamentary group that fostered Bebel’s anti-parliamentarianism but also his ambivalent relationship with parliament in general, which created frustration and resignation in him. On the one hand, Bebel refused any kind of cooperation; on the other hand, the social democrats moved amendments to improve social legislation – for instance the lowering of the retirement age to 65 – without any realistic chance of realizing these plans. Bebel’s and the party’s attitude of blocking themselves, as well as their political opponents’ refusal to cooperate, ultimately led him to even greater disappointment, since neither did the party take a step in the other direction by developing a revolutionary concept. Bebel became more and more certain – or

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rather he became increasingly obsessed with the idea – that the ‘big crash’ (Kladderadatsch) of the existing system was imminent. He came back from his business and agitational travels with the gloomiest crisis scenarios. In 1881, he foresaw ‘the almost complete stagnation of all businesses, starvation wages for the workers, mass bankruptcies in the class of entrepreneurs, artisans in complete despair’. He believed that ‘any event whatsoever’ could ‘trigger the general big crash’. Bebel cheered up the low-spirited Engels in London: ‘Every night I go to bed thinking that soon the bell will toll for bourgeois society.’ Was that autosuggestion? There was no chance whatsoever of a revolutionary system change. Bebel knew the party grassroots; in 1881, even the police administration of Erfurt described the designated social democrat and master tailor Paul Reißhaus as ‘an industrious and decent worker’. A flyer of the Social Democratic Association Erfurt from February 1890 read: ‘His skill, honesty, punctuality and relentless diligence have enabled Mr Reißhaus to buy a house, which has become necessary to maintain his business.’ Would such men spark a revolution? The situation of the SAP in the Reichstag under the Anti-Socialist Laws was contradictory in the same way. On the one hand, a revolution was not in sight, the members of the parliamentary group quarrelled with each other and had no real influence on legislation, even though they occasionally participated in the political system. On the other hand, social democrats faced social exclusion and State persecution. It is no surprise that Bebel was disgusted by parliamentarianism during the 1880s and remained ambivalent about it throughout his entire life.75 However, his political opponents did not regard him as an ambivalent politician but construed him as a dangerous enemy. ‘Bebel is one of the most outstanding leaders of the whole movement we fight’, Reich Chancellor von Bismarck said in the Reichstag in 1886. When Minister of the Interior Robert Viktor von Puttkammer stated at the same place that ‘Bebel is known as the most competent, the most eloquent but also the most dangerous of all social democrats and agitators,’ he was heckled by a member of the SAP parliamentary group: ‘And the most admired one.’ Puttkammer continued: ‘I fear his eloquence and his impact on the masses [. . .] Gentlemen, I am paying Mr Bebel a compliment about his talents; the more important

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the opponent, the more cautious one has to be.’76 Bebel’s life for politics commanded more than respect from his opponents. In a continuous process of self-reflection, confrontation and learning, he found his own political standpoint which enabled him to keep the party going and to survive or rather endure periods of doubts and persecution. From 1889, his life for politics finally turned into a life from politics. The financial success of his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus and the sale of his business shares gradually enabled him to become a professional politician.

CHAPTER 5

Family, Friends and Everyday Life: The Private Side to Bebel

The weekend was just around the corner. Johanna Caroline Julie Otto, known as Julie, had finished her working week. She worked in a finery store that produced laces, embroideries and ribbons as decorations for dresses and hats. On Saturday night, 21 February 1863, she accompanied her brother to the second foundation anniversary celebration of the Leipzig Gewerbliche Bildungsverein. Women were welcome at festive occasions like this since these events offered the opportunity to socialize. The anniversary of the educational association was by no means a meagre back alley party in a smoky and stuffy pub, but a social event. The local dignitaries turned up at the festivity that took place in one of the largest venues of the trade fair city, the Central Hall (Centralhalle). The event programme included a concert, ceremonial addresses, a banquet and a ball. It was in this setting that the 23-year-old August Bebel delivered his political maiden speech, which not only resonated with the public but also with Julie Otto, a young woman yet to reach 20. Bebel did not mention in his memoirs who noticed whom first, or who approached whom. With a touch of irony and a great deal of male arrogance he wrote: ‘It is my educated guess that it was rather the speaker who was to her liking than the content of his speech which she at that time probably did not much care for.’1 In his memoirs, Bebel introduced Julie as a politically indifferent woman only interested in amusements. This particular night in February was

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the starting point of a partnership that would last almost 50 years, which oscillated between a traditional and an emancipated relationship. It was more than three years after this first encounter before they married on 9 April 1866 in the Leipzig Thomaskirche. They could only take this step after the already mentioned initial entrepreneurial problems were resolved and Bebel had gained Leipzig citizenship: it was not an emerging pregnancy that forced them to tie the knot. Their first and only daughter Friederike (Frieda) was born three years later, on 16 February 1869. It was common in the organized labour movement to integrate family planning into life design. Families of five or more births remained the exception – Wilhelm Liebknecht, for instance, had five sons from his second marriage. It has to remain open why there was only a single child from August’s and Julie’s marriage. Neither August’s nor Julie’s letters – and even less so Bebel’s quasi-official memoirs – allow conclusions to be drawn. This was a taboo subject in nineteenth-century society. The letters between August and Julie rarely reveal more than hints of intimacy. ‘But I have dreamt so much of you and so vividly that I woke up and that I could not go back to sleep again’, Julie wrote to her husband in prison. ‘I think it’s best that you’ll come to Halle on Wednesday night and stay over, then we can talk about everything [. . .] Friedchen [the daughter] could stay with the aunt that night’, Bebel advised Julie from one of his numerous trips on behalf of his business and the party to have the night alone with his wife.2 We should not mistaken the economic situation of the marriage partners. During the 1860s, Bebel’s livelihood was still precarious. Julie came from a modest background and was a half-orphan since 1857. Her father had been an unskilled labourer. Yet, she did not belong to the impoverished lower class of Leipzig. When August and Julie met, her mother, who had been a maid and a cook in a professor’s household, was still alive. Despite the uncertain economic situation, theirs was by no means a proletarian marriage, even though Friedrich Engels portrayed Julie as ‘a true and proper German proletarian woman’. Not least the occasion and location of their first encounter indicate that both used the cultural opportunities available to ‘ordinary people’ with values of diligence, honesty,

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aspirations and education. In social terms, it was a petty bourgeois marriage, with Julie, the young labourer, marrying the aspiring selfemployed artisan August. After her first encounter and during the three years before their marriage, when Bebel embarked on his path into politics, she was aware that, in addition to his business, he had political ambitions. Although the focus of Bebel’s activities until 1866 was Leipzig and Saxony, Julie was affected by August’s political commitment and his attendance at numerous association gatherings and board meetings. She would have had three years to separate from the aspiring politician. Instead, the allegedly politically indifferent Julie became part of her husband’s political rise. In 1869, Bebel wrote to her from Berlin about encountering a political opponent and in the same year he complained about the new role of agitator he had to become familiar with. ‘Despite all affection and friendship that people bestow upon oneself, agitation is not a pleasant task.’3 On the one hand, Bebel’s decision in favour of politics contributed to the marriage eluding contemporary norms and understandings of family. On the other, it reproduced these norms and understandings in numerous facets. Bebel could achieve what other workers (male or female) only dreamt of. The marriage manifested the role model of the male sole breadwinner. Julie gave up her job and, when her daughter was born, fulfilled her role as mother and housewife. On a business trip, Bebel wrote to his ‘dear wife’: I have got quite a large commission here today and have to send samples to the store. I want to use the opportunity and send back my dirty clothes and would like to ask you to send me the following: 2 shirts and 2 pairs of cuffs with 4 collars, a few handkerchiefs, 1 pants and 1 woollen vest and 1 pair of socks, in short only what I’ll send back home, nothing more.

Bebel travelled a lot on business or for the party, and spent some time in prison. So the responsibility for bringing up their daughter fell mainly on Julie: ‘since I’m rarely around and unfortunately can hardly influence her, it is your task to wisely guide her and to draw her attention to mistakes and bad habits.’ Frieda attended the bourgeois girls’ high school4 in Leipzig, and Bebel pointed out that ‘she mustn’t forget that our circumstances are by no means like her

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school friends’ circumstances and that we cannot and will not compete in this respect’.5 The traditional role model of a wife responsible for the household and familial socialization, however, was affected by Bebel’s political commitment and his persecution by the State. When Julie took over her husband’s business to protect it from government encroachment in 1872, she did not do so in name only, but took an active part in the business. During the boom years of the Gru¨nderzeit in the early 1870s, she negotiated prices with suppliers and wages with employees. Proudly, Bebel wrote to a party friend that ‘the business, which is now managed by my wife, leaves nothing to be desired’. At the same time he pitied his wife – albeit with a hint of irony: ‘I’m sorry that you have to rush about a little sometimes. But it obviously doesn’t do you any harm. The last time you were here you looked very well.’ Julie even led the business through the tough times of the Gru¨nderkrach in 1873, when August was still in custody. When the business expanded and Bebel found his new partner Ferdinand Ißleib, Julie did not withdraw. ‘I’m sorry that you have so much work with the business. But I advise you not to do more than you can combine with the household, Mr I[ßleib] has to understand.’6 The couple thoroughly discussed and communicated all businessrelated issues, but the economic and political demands burdened their family life. In a letter to Natalie Liebknecht, Wilhelm’s wife, Julie gave vent to her emotions: ‘We readily admit that our husbands are upright and good and that they love their families. But all this rushing around and the heavy workload and the continuous fight for their political views alienate them from us and destroy their right sense of family.’ August Bebel easily became irritated with his wife when things did not go his way. ‘You have to be more precise here,’ he criticized an inaccurate price calculation. In November 1872, he reacted very impatiently: ‘As I can see from your letter I received today, it has been sent off, that is has been put in the box, on the 19th, but it has been collected only on the 20th as can be seen from the envelope. Hence, there is no doubt that you post the letters too late.’ Clearly, imprisonment had an effect on Bebel, who otherwise used to calm and comfort his wife. When Julie lent money against August’s wishes in 1886/7, he almost imperiously wrote: ‘In any case

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I demand to be asked first.’ Yet she remained unimpressed by his paternalistic attitude. When he vehemently opposed the idea of taking Paul Singer – who had been expelled from Berlin – into their flat in Dresden in early 1887, Julie agreed with him in every respect, yet still did what she wanted in the end. ‘I am very sorry to have gone against your will unintentionally [. . .] I thought that you would trust me in so far that I would never do anything I could not justify.’ Her husband was indeed capable of self-reflection and self-analysis: ‘Admittedly I gave free rein to my impatience in my last letter. It happens when one feels disappointed. Then prison takes effect and one has to try to avoid that.’7 Politically speaking also, Bebel had the utmost confidence in his wife. Julie, who used to be – allegedly – politically indifferent, took over several political tasks and functions on her husband’s behalf. When Bebel was elected a member of the Saxon diet for the first time in 1881, he assigned a bundle of tasks to Julie so that he could take his seat. She served as organizer and secretary of the labour party; Bebel and Engels portrayed her as an ‘accountant without salary’. For instance, she advised Agnes Auer, wife of the Reichstag member Ignatz, how she could get in contact with her husband, who was imprisoned in Zwickau, and how she could smuggle the illegal newspaper Sozialdemokrat into prison. In addition, Julie took over several voluntary tasks for the movement, such as organizing solidarity events for persecuted social democrats. By now, she had become a wise and self-confident observer of Wilhelmine society and the workers’ party. ‘Reaction is in full bloom right now, one might think one lives in the Middle Ages,’ she wrote about State persecution, and argued self-confidently against a publication project of Bruno Geiser, Wilhelm Liebknecht’s son-in-law. ‘It will be very difficult to get money in the current situation [. . .] At any rate it would be a folly to mention demands like this, the people would not understand it.’ Politics also shaped the everyday life of the Bebel family. August told the delegates to the Dresden party conference in 1903 that he ‘often’ received critical and invidious articles, which he read in the morning when I sit down with my wife drinking coffee. I say to her, well, Julie, there is another angry inflammatory article, that is great, that is really fun. Then my wife gets nosy – we men are also nosy – she

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wants to read the article and then she gets angry (stormy amusement). Then I tell her: ‘Don’t be a fool! I have a giggle over that.’ I really enjoy that because then I know for sure that I am right (loud applause). But when someone praises me then I scratch my head and ask myself: am I on the right track? (Very true). That is my point of view.8

This was obviously an anecdote crafted for the party members to emphasize the fundamental opposition between social democracy and the ruling system by humouring it. But it also shows how much Julie was involved in August’s political work. She accompanied him to party and international conferences, she was in personal contact and corresponded with the wives and daughters of politician colleagues of her husband; she communicated vividly with Friedrich Engels. However, she never sought the public limelight and left the great stage of politics to her husband. In the past, I used to be dissatisfied that I could not do anything to educate myself. However, I was happy knowing that I could create a cosy home for my husband, which was so important for his intellectual development and his work. But because I had to take over his party tasks as far as I could when he was away from home, I got familiar with the spirit of the movement and today I am completely committed. Thus I have to be content with what I have learned from that.

These remarks show a traditional division of gender roles: men acted in the public sphere according to male values of struggle, fight and heroism; Julie got involved behind the scenes. When August Bebel’s party friend Wilhelm Bock was elected to the Reichstag, he in retrospect wrote about his wife in view of his election victories: ‘She regarded them as a substitute for all the misery and the hardship we had endured.’ The Bebel couple considered August’s political rise in a similar way. ‘The admiration for our husbands also affects and rubs off on us.’ August’s success was also Julie’s success and thanks to her work in the background.9 With August’s political success, the horizons of the Bebel family broadened. During the early years, Bebel wrote in his letters about his trips to London or Copenhagen. But already in 1884 the family accompanied him to Lake Geneva, visiting Johann Philipp Becker, an 1848 revolutionary and member of the First International. The daughter ‘loved the trip so much that she would have returned to

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Lake Geneva as soon as she had got back home’. The fact that the 15-year-old daughter of a Leipzig artisan spent her holiday at Lake Geneva demonstrates the social rise of the Bebel family. They became a bourgeois household. ‘Has my life insurance been paid in November?’, Bebel asked his wife in 1882. Their housing situation constantly improved too. Both the Dresden flat in the suburb of ¨ neberg, where Bebel lived Plauen and the several flats in Berlin-Scho after his move to Berlin in 1890, were spacious and roomy. In 1897, ¨ snacht at Lake Zurich. This building Bebel commissioned a villa in Ku was rented out except for the attic, but his detractors in the press milked the story, landing him with a reputation as a worker millionaire. Annoyed, he sold the villa to his son-in-law in 1905. ‘I’ll be happy when I’m no longer “owner of a villa”. Once and never again.’ Julie watched Richard Wagner’s Tannha¨user in the Dresden Hoftheater and August took the opportunity to visit the British Museum and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show the second time he visited Engels in London. In 1890, Gerhart Hauptmann visited them in Berlin, and in 1906, Bebel invited Maxim Gorki. However, Bebel also enjoyed folk art such as the guest performance of the Schlierseer Bauerntheater (Bavarian folk theatre, founded in 1892, with local farmers and artisans as actors) – ‘real famers and farmers’ wives’ – in the Wallner Theatre in Berlin.10 An excerpt from a letter written by Julie contradicts the image of conspicuous wealth and a correspondingly bourgeois lifestyle. ¨ snacht describing the Julie wrote to Agnes Auer from the villa in Ku summer weeks spent in Switzerland: First we had a lot of visitors, a sister-in-law from Leipzig stayed for five weeks and we had to make plans and do something nice all the time, and I had to cook for 6 to 7 people every day in the heat and what’s more under difficult circumstances in the kitchen and without an aid. We have a very young girl from France who teaches our little one [Bebel’s grandson Werner] French but doesn’t have a clue about cooking and wants to learn.

All aspects of a bourgeois lifestyle were there: a house at the lake, a garden with vines caringly planted by August (‘If one is unlucky enough to belong to the group of vine agrarians one watches the weather with different eyes than the lucky non-vine owners’), trips

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during the summer, a maid to teach the grandson a foreign language. But on the other hand, the owner of the villa had to cook for the whole family on her own. A cook, a second servant, was out of the question. The Bebel family enjoyed their wealth and their social rise, but they knew where they came from. In so doing, they distinguished themselves from the social strata both above and below them. When the Bebel family temporarily moved into a flat in Zurich ¨ snacht – a flat ‘in a very before they bought the house in Ku unfavourable location, very noisy, both the house and the street’ – August Bebel wrote, ‘the house is truly like a barracks. Above us, there is a whole family living in nearly every room and some of them really are some sort of people. Here, one can observe and study the proletariat at its worst.’ For the vast majority of party members and voters who observed Bebel’s political path, he never lost his credibility. His rise embodied the rise of the movement from a small group of persecuted persons to an influential organization which neither Wilhelmine society nor the political system could get around. Bebel’s political career mirrored social, political and economic progress.11 Politics and personal life intersected: Bebel’s political and private success alike were regarded as a result of the movement. We do not know how Julie and August were with each other in everyday life. Their letters reveal that each was able to encourage and console the other. ‘Don’t rush too much when you are travelling. Don’t strain yourself, otherwise you’ll get sick. It is my only wish that you’ll stay healthy, then everything else will be bearable’, Julie wrote in summer 1886, after August had been sentenced to nine months in prison. Under the circumstances of persecution and arrest, August in turn, wrote in March 1882: It is my life philosophy to look at those who are even worse than me when I’m not well. If I did it the other way round, the gloomy hours would never come to an end. However, this situation has to end one way or the other. We both should and will try our utmost to make it as short and as bearable as possible. I feel so sorry for you and the little one, but I won’t make you feel better when I keep saying that without being able to change anything. So please don’t let it get ahead of you and think of the future. The sun will shine for us again.

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Bebel’s optimism also got him through private problems. At the same time, the couple teased and had fun with each other. Just like a ‘chivalrous knight’, Bebel wrote to his wife in 1880, he took out Mrs Grillenberger and ‘a Jewish, pretty widow’. On the menu was ‘marinated braised beef with dumplings, Munich style. If I had one woman with me, it might have been dangerous, but two women – that would have been too much of a good thing.’ Julie, on the other hand, flirted in her letters to Friedrich Engels and Bebel ironically warned her: ‘Don’t write such sweet letters, otherwise I’ll get jealous and then I’m not a person to be trifled with.’ Half-serious, half-joking, Julie told about her visit to a photographer. She did not feel that the photo was a good likeness of her and wanted to try it again ‘later, but it won’t get more beautiful. It is what it is, when one gets older and the serious side of life is written all over one’s face, although I still feel very young und undaunted within.’12 It remains open to question whether or not a 52-year-old August Bebel started a midlife-crisis-driven affair with Louise Kautsky, the ex-wife of Karl and 20 years Bebel’s junior. During his lifetime, the daughter of Karl Marx, Eleanor, spread rumours of an alleged affair and intimated that he was the most likely father of Louise Kautsky’s daughter. It sounded still rather platonic when Bebel wrote to Engels in a letter: ‘In Vienna, I fell even more in love with her [Louise] than I was before, if it were up to me I would not let her go.’ More suggestive is Bebel’s remark to Engels after a public appearance of Louise that he ‘would have liked to fling my arms around her neck and kiss her in front of all the people. However, I did exactly that later. This is again entre nous.’ The fact that Bebel two years later wished Louise all the best for her wedding to the physician Ludwig Freyberger and called her ‘my dear child’ makes it, on the other hand, rather unlikely that there had been an affair. Even Karl Kautsky, divorced from Louise at the time of the potential ‘affair August’, wrote doubtfully in a letter to Eduard Bernstein in 1898 that ‘this is probably nothing else than a myth’. Since the correspondence between August and Louise is said to be lost, this mystery cannot be solved. Julie maintained a friendly, motherly relationship with Louise.13 The main reference point in the married life of the Bebel couple was their only child Frieda. At first glance, this does not seem true on

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August’s part. He was the father who was never there. He was absent for about half of Frieda’s childhood, not just because of prison sentences and his expulsion from Leipzig but more because of his professional and political commitments. However, he tried to make up for this lack of closeness in many ways. He wrote very sympathetic letters to the little girl. The three-year-old joined her mother when she visited August at the Festung Hubertusburg. ‘It would be good if Frieda brings her big ball so that she can play in the hallway.’ He advised his wife in his letters how to treat the ailing child, in particular: ‘Go and see the doctor on Saturday and take a carriage if the weather is bad. Let me know as soon as possible about her condition, I won’t feel reassured unless I know.’ From his travels, he brought gifts back home for the 12-year-old girl: from Offenbach a bag ‘very posh out of calf leather instead of sheep leather’. As a teenager, Frieda accompanied her parents on several trips. When she was 18, she declared that ‘none of the men’ she had met until then ‘were like our dad’, as an amused Julie wrote to August in 1887, when he was serving his prison sentence.14 The father was not only caring and affectionate, but keen to promote his daughter’s education. She should be enabled to do what he, as an orphan from Wetzlar who attended elementary school, had not been able to many years before. Frieda was a student at the ¨ here To ¨ chterschule in Leipzig, the highest type of school for girls Ho in Imperial Germany. Much emphasis and control was placed on education in the Bebel household. Frieda was advised by her father not to read Scherr’s history of literature because it was ‘a one-sided, biased and superficial book. He is a man of the cult of heroes and praises some to the skies and condemns others wholesale. The history of literature by Kurz, on the other hand, is the best there is.’ It was planned that Frieda should study medicine in Zurich. But these intentions foundered. By 1888 –90, when Frieda was about 20, she developed her first episode of severe mental illness. After giving birth to her only child, Werner, on 22 February 1894, she suffered from – possibly post-natal – depression. The parents came from Berlin and looked for a permanent place to live in Zurich.15 The way August reacted during the weeks before his grandchild was born demonstrates his plight of being torn between the political

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and the private spheres. He wrote to his friend Victor Adler, one of the co-founders of social democracy in Austria: ‘In spring I will become a grandfather. Terrible word, a reminder that one is getting a bit long in the tooth.’ Initially, he had planned to attend the party conference of the Austrian social democrats in Vienna, but ‘this has become doubtful’ due to the birth of his grandchild. ‘Now I would like to travel to Zurich instead of to Vienna over Easter where my wife has already been for almost three weeks.’ With Viennese nonchalance, the friend answered: ‘I can’t image you in your new, exalted position as grandfather; actually you have to object, you are too young’. Then he came to the crucial point: ‘But that you don’t want to come to the party conference, you see, that is not acceptable!’ Bebel gave in, changed his priorities, travelled to Vienna and not only gave the keynote speech but stayed for the entire conference. And yet, Bebel was not a bad father. As in politics, he had a ‘caretaker’ mentality and was someone who looked after and cared for others in his private life as well. He would pitch in with his organizational skills to help, he wanted to open up all possible educational opportunities for his daughter, he supported and cared for his grandson, Werner, who became his ward after his son-in-law Ferdinand Simon died in 1912. ‘His death really got to me as well, but it is what it is. There is no point in lamenting when there are other tasks to deal with. Right now, we have to take care that Werner does well in his Matura [school leaving exams] in autumn.’ Frieda’s mental health remained unstable even after 1894, and Julie and August kept visiting her in Zurich for support. They tried to distract her and took her travelling with them. When August was already a widower, his also widowed daughter attempted suicide in Zurich. Immediately, Bebel came to Switzerland to take care of his daughter and grandson. When Bebel suffered a heart attack in Berlin in June 1913, Frieda travelled to Berlin to care for him and organize his last stay at a health spa. Despite all ambivalences and challenges, Bebel, both in his political and his private life, found a great deal of support and comfort in this family life, with its mutual affection and attachment on the one hand, though with strains and probably mental overload given the daughter’s illness on the other.16

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However, Bebel’s family life was not confined to the privacy and intimacy of the nuclear family. In this, the Bebel family was distinctly different from the petty bourgeois and bourgeois model family, which was increasingly characterized by retreat to the private sphere. Nor did the Bebel family indulge in a ‘socialist salon culture’ in contrast to a bourgeois type. They ran an open house where Julie’s relatives and August’s party comrades were – most of the time – welcome. From the intertwining of ‘organizational work, associational sociability and lifeworld’, of family and party, a ‘total milieu’ emerged. Even Bebel’s son-in-law, Ferdinand Simon, can be regarded as part of this social democratic milieu, although he came from a family of artists and had a career as a medical scientist in Zurich. Because he had been involved in a secret society trial against social democrats in Wroclaw, he had ‘given up German citizenship’ and emigrated to Switzerland. Simon’s political commitment in his early years thus demonstrated his closeness to social democracy and probably made him an all the more acceptable son-in-law for Bebel. At the same time, the interconnection between private and political sphere entailed risks for personal relationships. Political differences could destroy friendships. The best example of this is the falling-out between Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. From the middle to the end of the 1890s, they wrote up to one hundred letters to each other every year, in which they shared everyday life stories and political ideas. When they finally ended up on different sides of the revisionism debate (Revisionsmusstreit), the correspondence ended abruptly.17 Much the same is true of Bebel’s friendships. Between him and Wilhelm Liebknecht, his political partner and friend of many years, heated arguments occurred time and again, particularly from the mid-1880s onwards. In the conflict over the election of Wilhelm Hasenclever, as described in the previous chapter, Liebknecht took a rather deliberative view and defended Hasenclever. Bebel vented his anger in a letter of 15 November 1885 concerning Liebknecht’s ‘peaceful tone’ towards Hasenclever and his ‘reproachful’ letter to Bebel himself. ‘Well, well, well. I – and with me others – have often admired your ability to quickly change your view on the most important and fundamental issues.’ Bebel meticulously proved to

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Liebknecht what the latter had said when and how this was contradictory to other remarks – it was no less than a demolition of Liebknecht’s ideas and his personality. But that was not enough for Bebel. And now, a word on my pedantry. When I have been pedantic, and I readily admit that I easily become harsh and disagreeable, it has always only been about the issue in question, never about the person. I have never given the person involved a bad feeling after the dispute was over. I don’t make the mistake of being resentful, particularly not in party matters. On which note I would like to say that during the last 2 years you, in contrast to that, often struck a tone against me when others were present that was deeply hurtful. In nine out of ten cases, when I make a suggestion towards you or present a specific idea, you snap at me in a most insulting, hostile manner. Even my family has noticed that often enough and we have talked about it several times. I have no idea where this irritability, verging on hostility, comes from, but as a result it caused the alienation between two old comrades in arms, which should not happen and which could even damage the party, because it renders calm discussions and frequent cooperation impossible. Best wishes from one home to another.

Bebel’s emotional and agitated outburst was followed by many controversies on different issues during the following years. A few months later, Bebel wrote to Engels of his concern at Liebknecht’s readiness to compromise within the parliamentary group and that ‘L[iebknecht] and I almost ended our friendship, due to this.’18 Even though political trust between the pair had suffered, at a personal level their friendship lasted and remained strong both on the large and small scale. Only two days after Bebel’s angry letter, he wrote to Liebknecht: ‘Dear friend. Received your letter. Of course you are welcome. If I can’t find anyone to pick you up [in Dresden] I will ¨ cke (August[us]bru ¨ cke) [Augustus meet you half way at the Schloßbru Bridge].’ In particular, he took care of the education of Liebknecht’s sons, convinced the sceptical Natalie Liebknecht in 1890 that moving to Berlin would entail substantial financial advantages and kept an eye on the Liebknecht children, in particular on Karl. Albeit delayed, he sent his ‘best wishes’ and ‘congratulations’ to Karl on ‘successfully passing’ the law exam. ‘Not every mother is lucky enough to have sons who turned out that well. You can be very proud.’19

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In addition, Bebel corresponded with Victor Adler, a friend with whom he shared not only political ideas but also personal and private experiences. Particularly in the later letters, illnesses, uncertainties, weaknesses and loneliness were mentioned. Torn between Zurich and Berlin, between being with his daughter and his grandson and the political world, Bebel described his situation in Berlin during his last year of his life to Adler: ‘I sit there at my table all on my own, in the morning, at midday and in the evening.’ At Bebel’s funeral, Adler ‘was so moved that he could hardly speak’. The Bebels also had a happy and relaxed friendship with Adolf Geck, a journalist and editor in Offenburg, and his wife Marie. ‘We will empty the three bottles of the fine Klingenberger you sent us and drink a toast to you and your family.’20 Finally, there was the friendship of the two Londoners Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Both belonged to another generation and both had different intellectual and social backgrounds to that of Bebel. Under these circumstances, a relationship came into being that was initially based only on politics and political ideas. Yet by the early 1870s, Bebel no longer addressed Marx or Engels as ‘esteemed Sir’, but as ‘dear friend’. However, until Bebel visited London for the first time in 1880, he formally addressed them in his letters with the German ‘Sie’ and used the more informal ‘Du’ only afterwards in their correspondence. Bebel had made an impression in London on this first visit. Marx’s daughter Eleanor wrote in February 1881 to Nathalie Liebknecht: ‘We were thrilled by him. I often say that the English should see our German socialist leaders – they are real men we can be proud of.’21 In terms of theory, the influence Marx and Engels had on Bebel was unmistakable. In an earlier letter, Bebel had introduced himself and his followers as ‘ardent members of the International’. In the 1870s, Marx’s ideas had turned Bebel’s political thoughts in a new direction. At the beginning of the 1870s, the philosopher Eugen ¨ hring caused a sensation among academics and leading social Du democrats. In contrast to Marx, who explained exploitation in ¨ hring considered it ‘as analogous to robbery’. complex categories, Du According to him, social and economic inequalities were shaped by ‘relationships based on violence’. He saw a solution in

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‘economic communes’ as a model of the future society. Bebel wrote a ¨ hring and put him on an equal footing with positive review about Du ¨ hring’s concept, or rather the slogans that Marx’s writings. Du circulated about it, put the current situation of the class society in a nutshell and met the need of social democracy to formulate a ‘consistent image of the future’. When the Londoners who were ¨ hring retaliated and Friedrich Engels severely criticized by Du published his Anti-Du¨hring in the social democratic Vorwa¨rts in ¨ hring. It is difficult to 1877/8, Bebel changed his mind about Du reconstruct this change of mind in detail. However, the first edition ¨ hring’s of his volume Die Frau und der Sozialismus criticized Du rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution and repudiated his assumption that the ‘desired socialist state’ would be ‘a state based on coercion in the most dreadful fashion’; in Bebel’s view the opposite was true. There were some additional synergy effects between Engels and Bebel. It was not least Engels’ work on the Origin of Family that made Bebel completely rearrange the account of primeval society in Die Frau und der Sozialismus from the new 1891 edition onwards.22 Against this backdrop it is, at first glance, surprising that Bebel declared to the party conference in Magdeburg in 1910: I have never sworn by both Marx and Engels my whole life. When my letters to Marx and to Engels might be published some day, they will prove that I disagreed with these otherwise most outstanding men in very severe and very important matters, but that we always settled our differences in a friendly way. [. . .] I admire Marx just as little as I admire Engels and Lassalle. I don’t believe in the other gods, and neither do I believe in ours (amusement).

Several aspects of these remarks can be highlighted. There was for one thing Bebel’s aversion to ‘hero cult’ and the ‘belief in gods’, which he himself was exposed to at that time.23 Moreover, he opposed the delegate Wilhelm Kolb who defended his reform politics by referring to Marx. Kolb and his parliamentary group in the diet of Baden – a true fall from grace in the eyes of German social democracy at the national level – had approved the budget, defying the party whip. And Bebel was in fact right in his assessment of his relationship to Marx and Engels. Even though he had hardly ever questioned or

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challenged their theories, he had never – or if so only reluctantly – let them interfere in everyday politics and had always insisted on his view. ‘Your opinion about the newspaper that is to be newly founded is wrong,’ he told Engels straightforwardly in a letter about a new exile publication based in Zurich.24 Despite tactical quarrels and disputes based on daily politics, a deep and intense friendship developed between Bebel and Engels. As we have seen, Bebel told his friend about kissing Louise Kautsky, adding the remark ‘entre nous’. After Marx’s death, Bebel gently asked Engels if he wanted to move back ‘to the continent’. Such a ‘change in your entire existence will not be an easy undertaking considering your age’. ‘But a fighter like you would feel very comfortable on the continent, I think.’ Engels had already characterized Bebel as a ‘capital fellow’. ‘Not only does everything go smoothly, since I do the “official correspondence” with Bebel, but we also get results.’25 Finally, there were the political enmities Bebel cultivated in addition to his friendships. He called Georg von Vollmar, a social democrat from Bavaria and once highly regarded by Bebel, ‘always a coward’; Karl Grillenberger an unreasonable ‘bull’; and ‘dear Rosa [Luxemburg]’, ‘the poisonous bitch’, Bebel told Victor Adler, ‘will cause a lot of damage, and even more so because she is sharp as a tack, whilst she has no sense of responsibility at all and her only motive is a downright perverted dogmatism’. Yet these remarks belong to the world of politics and to Bebel’s successful years as a professional politician.26 Bebel lost his father, stepfather, mother, siblings and master when he was still a child or a youngster. In his declining years, he became more and more lonely. Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht were both considerably older than him and died in 1895 and 1900 respectively. The death of Ignatz Auer and his oldest friend Julius Motteler in 1907, who were both from his generation, hit Bebel hard. In 1910, his wife Julie died. ‘It was terrible. We are still stunned and cannot comprehend what has happened’, he wrote to Louise KautskyFreyberger and her husband. To his friend Victor Adler he described his wife’s last hours in detail and admitted to him in January 1911: ‘I had never dreamt of facing a situation like that. We had both taken it for granted, without discussing it, that I would be the first to go.’

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The party friend Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, was only sent an obituary notice and tutted at him: ‘Being rational in such a moment is really typical of him.’ But here she was mistaken. It was not Bebel being rational who wrote to her but Bebel distinguishing between friendship and party friendship. When, two months after Julie’s death on 31 January 1911, his friend and co-chairman of the Social Democratic Party Paul Singer died, and almost a year later his son-in-law Ferdinand Simon aged not even 50, Bebel was left with his mentally severely ill daughter Frieda, his grandson Werner – and his political work. ‘It would be the most radical thing to quit politics and move to the children. But I couldn’t stand that. I feel too young to do so and if I did so it would be completely over soon.’27

CHAPTER 6

Politics as a Vocation: ‘One is No More than a Hackney’

At the end of the year 1888, it was certain: Bebel was no longer a master craftsman, an associate or a travelling salesman of a prosperous medium-sized company, but a professional politician. At first glance, this watershed seems to be less important than the turning points in the history of the party and the movement. These were characterized by the foundation of new organizations, by programmatic debates and decisive and influential party conferences, by persecution, election victories and defeats. Events in the internal world of organizations such as those are crucial for a politician, and their significance will be pointed out in the next two chapters. However, they do not only affect the individual August Bebel but also the collective of social democratic agents. Bebel did not dominate the unification party conference in Gotha in 1875, he did not draft the Erfurt programme in 1891 on his own and he was not the only one fighting the ‘revisionists’. The last chapter has revealed the caesuras of his private life: starting a family, friendships, a potential love affair, illness, death and grief. His workload played a crucial role, when in 1888 Bebel decided to become a professional politician. In April, Bebel wrote about his occupation as a travelling salesman: ‘I have never left for work as reluctant as now. I will take my last trip this year and look for another job, I no longer like the commis-voyageur [salesman] game.’ One month later, his daughter Frieda suffered a nervous breakdown

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and was brought to a sanatorium close to Offenburg for treatment, where Hope Bridges Adams-Walther, the first woman to take a medical degree (Staatsexamen, state examination) in Germany, took care of her. It might be the case that the caring, but often absent, father partly made his decision hoping to better reconcile work and family life. However, it was, first and foremost, a decision for politics. Bebel wrote to Engels that he no longer wanted to play the travelling salesman, because it prevented him acting ‘precisely in those moments when it is most necessary that I interfere [in party matters]’. – Historians and biographers should not feel intimidated by neuroscience claiming that it is not free will that determines the actions of human beings but biochemical processes and neurotransmitters. Individuals’ scope for action is in fact enabled by a mixture of autonomous volition and given rational or emotional context factors and does not at all rely (only) on ‘genetic and early childhood imprinting’.1 Although Bebel made his living from politics from 1889, it was important to him not to do so from paid party functions. In 1908, he advised Karl Liebknecht, Wilhelm’s ambitious son and ten years later one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD): ‘If you ever hold a leading party office, you have to be financially independent from the party.’ Bebel himself had achieved his freedom and independence from the party in three steps. When he won a seat in the Saxon diet in 1881, he already lived from politics to a certain extent since he received a salary of 12 marks per session day for his political work. That was about four times the average daily wage in Dresden. However, Bebel could not become a rich man on this salary because the diet was in session only for a limited number of days. Bebel used his parliamentary salary to cover the costs caused by his expulsion from Leipzig in 1881. While the Bebel family stayed in Leipzig, Bebel – together with Liebknecht – rented a flat just beyond the Leipzig city border in Borsdorf. ‘I have now calculated how much the expulsion would cost us if I hadn’t the diet as a financial help.’ He estimated his travelling costs and concluded: ‘One thing is clear, if I did not have the seat in the diet we could not bear this situation financially.’ But since this funding was anything but secure, Bebel advised his wife

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‘to tell Mr I[ßleib] once in a while’ about these calculations, ‘otherwise he thinks that my situation is rather comfortable.’2 In 1884, Bebel complained to Engels: ‘I am the best example that a leading role in politics is impossible to reconcile with a normal business on a long-term basis.’ But again, Bebel decided to bow out of his former business, the turner’s workshop, and only work as a travelling salesman for the company instead of opting for a paid party function. He believed that this job would be easier to reconcile with his political travels and would let him ‘keep up practical life’ as well. As mentioned in Chapter 2, his business partner Ißleib paid Bebel off. Withdrawing from his job as a travelling salesman in late 1888 was financially facilitated by the success of his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus – roughly 20,000 copies were sold during the time of the Anti-Socialist Laws alone – and his well-paid work as a publicist. He did not depend on a party salary. Still, Bebel’s financial success sparked envy and criticism among other party members. In the mid-1890s, the newspaper Die Neue Zeit, the social democratic ‘flagship’ for debates on culture and theory, was caught up in a financial crisis. Ignatz Auer, a good friend of Bebel, wrote to Eduard Bernstein that the newspaper paid costs ‘that actually do not belong on its balance sheet. If I am not mistaken, it pays a salary to August [Bebel].’ It was said that he received fees in the amount of 3,600 marks annually – twice or three times the annual salary of a skilled worker – for his freelance work for Die Neue Zeit. With this in mind, it is fair to say that Bebel deceived himself; even though he did not get a salary from the party and even donated generous amounts of money to the SPD, his financial success was owed to the success of social democratic politics and the party. It was in fact the Social Democratic Party milieu in general that enabled him to live from politics.3 The working class and supporters of the social democratic movement considered Bebel an admirable and exemplary role model rather than a cause for criticism. In 1871, the writer Robert Schweichel, who had strong affiliations with the labour movement, had speculated that Bebel would ‘join the men of letters’ if he had to give up his business due to political persecution. In that case, Schweichel assumed, Bebel would lose ‘a part of his prestige regarding the workers due to his withdrawal from the artisan class’.

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Schweichel’s observation of the early labour movement was right. Bebel’s prestige and profile relied first and foremost on the fact that he was one of them, one of the workers and artisans who had fought to get into the Reichstag and who represented their interests against the existing political and social system. But Bebel’s halo as an artisan-politician had already been established in the early 1870s and a career change into paid politics would not have damaged his reputation. By 1890, his role as a politician and party leader had long been accepted. His artisan background was by no means only a reminiscence of bygone days; he ‘felt’, as the sociologist Robert Michels pointed out, a belonging to the working class. Bebel differed substantially from other party members and voters by reason of his financial and material success, as well as the social and cultural capital he gained as a result of his political rise. But it was precisely this success that manifested progress – in which the supporters and members of social democracy believed. The heated debates at party conferences in the 1890s on the size of party salaries did not affect him personally, although he argued in favour of good pay for party functionaries.4 Occasionally, workers criticized Bebel’s wealth, as shown in Hamburg pub conversations that were secretly monitored by the police: ‘Bebel has grubbed enough pennies from workers to go into retirement.’ These remarks partly reflected adverse press reports on Bebel’s wealth. However, they were the exception. Also, it is debatable whether the police informers accurately reported what the workers said or whether they wrote what they thought their superiors wanted to hear.5 It is certain that Bebel, who had worked his way up from an employed artisan in precarious circumstances to a successful entrepreneur, also managed to prosper from an often unprofitable career in politics, within only two decades. Less than two years after Bebel’s decision to pursue a career in politics, the context and framework conditions of his career changed considerably. In January 1890, the Anti-Socialist Laws ceased to command a majority in the Reichstag. This change of course was by no means a carte blanche for social democracy; in the mid-1890s, the Reichstag debated the so-called Anti-Revolution Bill (Umsturzvorlage), and the Prussian House of Representatives

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(Preußisches Abgeordnetenhaus) discussed a ‘Little Anti-Socialist Law’. These bills aimed to limit the scope of action of social democracy, or rather ban its associations due to its alleged ‘revolutionary character’. Yet both bills failed immediately and outside pressure from the State eased. From then on, membership figures rose constantly: in 1890, local associations of organized social democracy had roughly 100,000 members, in 1903 the figure reached 250,000. The newly gained freedom was also reflected in the Reichstag elections in 1893 and 1898 when the number of voters increased from 1.79 million to 2.11 million. In 1903, more than three million men, that is 31.7 per cent of the electorate, voted for the social democrats. The election victories enabled more and more representatives to enter the Reichstag, the diets and increasingly the municipal parliaments. The free trade unions, closely affiliated with social democracy, also benefited from this newly gained freedom; they exceeded the party in membership figures and confidently expressed their own objectives. The number of trade union members rose from 300,000 (1890) to 950,000 in 1903. Against the backdrop of these dynamics, Bebel’s decision for a career in politics came just in time to ensure his participation in policy- and decision-making processes. In 1892, he – together with Paul Singer – was elected chairman of the party, which from 1890 was called Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; Social Democratic Party of Germany). The euphoria of grassroots members could be felt at close quarters at large public gatherings and motivated and excited Bebel. Politics was an experience here, a mass experience with emotions of cohesion and dedication forging ahead. On 20 January 1890, four days before the failure to prolong the AntiSocialist Laws, Bebel spoke at a meeting in Hamburg. ‘According to a general estimate, 40,000 to 50,000 people were on their feet, 10,000 to 12,000 of them in the halls.’ ‘I have never seen anything like it’, Bebel wrote to his wife. ‘When I entered the rostrum, there was a storm of applause so that the walls started to shake. The same happened when I left the rostrum after a speech of 1 12 hours – I was in good shape and despite the huge room my voice carried.’ After Bebel was nominated as Reichstag candidate for the Hamburg constituency at that meeting,

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the chairman shouted hip hip hurray for me, the enthusiasm could not be curbed. Thousands of hats waved, a thunder of voices, what a spectacle, it was exceptional. But the best was that when after the meeting was finished the people left the room and passed the rostrum, they started waving their hats and shouting hip hip hurray time and again, so that I finally got a sore neck from all the nodding.6

Looking back and comparing this with Gustav Freitag’s nomination for Reichstag candidate in 1867 illustrates the fundamental change of political culture in Imperial Germany. In the 1890s, politics was staged, presented in the political mass market and thus turned into an event-driven experience. The number of participants may have been overestimated in Bebel’s description, but he accurately portrayed the collective experience, the harmony and loyalty between himself and the grassroots members and the mutual influence of audience and actor. Bebel needed support at grassroots level and relied on their backing to meet the challenges of internal party conflicts over the political direction of the party, and to ensure his position within the organization behind the scenes. Bebel enjoyed the wave of euphoria and progress in the party. In February 1892, Julie Bebel was happy for Friedrich Engels that he had ‘jumped into the new year in such good spirits’. ‘If my husband follows you’, she continued, I will be very happy for him, but even more so for the party. In his younger years, he lacked this cheerfulness and dedicated himself to the seriousness of the situation. Thus, I am all the more pleased that he can enjoy a few of the so-called pleasures of life now that his success continues in such a favourable way. And this is in fact necessary to keep one’s balance and to keep heart and spirit alive.7

The party’s success was Bebel’s elixir of life. However, the political work did not come naturally to Bebel and remained hard and arduous. No sooner had he decided in favour of professional politics than he wrote to Friedrich Engels regarding the next session of the Reichstag: ‘All this business ruins one’s summer. But that’s how it is, one just has to do it.’ These remarks reveal the sense of duty and honour typical for a labour party. This was by no means only true for Bebel. Rosa Luxemburg lamented in 1905: ‘One has to go to work, go to work! Dear Lord, how much work awaits me!’

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In the correspondence of social democrats, functionaries shared their woes on the appeal and burden of political work. Politics was a ‘serious matter’. Even today, its serious character is the subject of discussions in the form of televised debates. Nineteenth-century social democratic politicians went to work with discipline and a special work ethos. For instance, a journalist of the newspaper Volksstaat was fired because he ‘lacked both knowledge and the willingness to work’. Such an attitude was not compatible with the social democratic concept of work. In November 1890, Bebel wrote to his friend Victor Adler: ‘You can see how occupied I am with Reichstag work. Meetings of 6 to 7 hours almost every day, of 3 hours on Saturdays, apart from that the work as party treasurer, correspondence etc., it drives me crazy. The main thing is that I work every minute, day and night, on the new edition of the Frau, which gives me enormous troubles.’8 The amount of time required and the intensive work process was due to the multi-functionality of the labour leaders and – against the backdrop of being politically excluded – to their desire to shine with their skills and achievements. Another reason for labour leaders to work as hard as they could was that they felt obliged towards the majority of party members who performed hard, physical work. This comes out in the correspondence with party friends. Compared to former times, the party ‘has turned into a bourgeois party in financial terms’, Bebel stated. Thus hard work was necessary in his view to counter the whiff of wealth being accumulated at the expense of the grassroots members. For example, at the party conference in Frankfurt upon Main in 1894, the trade union leader Carl Legien pointed out that many workers ‘have an annual income of only 800 to 900 marks’. Legien then critically continued: ‘Is it just and fair that some comrades receive exorbitant salaries out of the workers’ pennies for the membership fee that are heavy burdens for them?’ The functionaries’ intellectual political work, encouraged by the grassroots supporters, was their contribution and sacrifice in the fight for the party’s cause. ‘One is no more than a hackney. The more often people see one’s name in the newspapers, the more the amount of letters from everywhere increases. Everyone believes that one is their saviour and thus the workload grows to such an extent that I often

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think: to hell with being a celebrity!’, Bebel wrote in February 1894 to Louise Kautsky-Freyberger. Self-stylization was certainly part of the political trade, even among party friends.9 However, the political work not only gained him celebrity status – and, as Bebel’s description of his triumphant Hamburg success in 1890 illustrates, he was rather susceptible to being celebrated – but also the satisfaction of advocating the cause of the labour movement and its interests. In practical everyday life, the result of this work was political success in the form of one election victory after another, with ever-rising votes and an increasing number of people joining the party. The reward for all the hard work was the socialist State of the future with its achievements. It is questionable whether Bebel, who always had to cope with a demanding workload, himself followed the advice he gave to the overworked Julius Motteler in the mid-1880s: It is a necessity of life for you to take a 112 to 2 hour walk in fresh air every day. I make sure that I do so, may the work be ever so urgent. Such a walk is in fact no waste of time even for the job. Because strolling along makes one calm and at ease so that one can think and reflect and does things better and differently than in the rush of the grindstone.

And yet, Bebel wrote to his friends Mr and Mrs Geck from Offenburg, in 1902, that he ‘can join you for the planned hiking tour through the Black Forest not before August. My work has to be done first.’10 The workload of the party chairman also increased because the decline in pressure from outside fostered internal centrifugal forces. Internal party struggles were not entirely new, as, for instance, the debates on the Dampfersubvention in 1884/5 showed. However, these were conflicts within the parliamentary group in the Reichstag. Increasing numbers of grassroots members entailed an ever-growing plurality of political opinions within the entire social democratic milieu. Three trends emerged that can be distinguished in an idealtypical way. They signified systems arisen from a communicative process that shaped the party in constantly recurring debates. The so-called party centre around Bebel and Kautsky was the gravitational core. They represented the Marxist approach of the party, which aimed at overcoming the existing society, and were willing to cooperate with the State to a certain extent. However, they opposed fundamental

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compromises such as approving the budget, which could have been seen as giving their consent to a bourgeois government. This position offered quite a lot of scope for negotiations. It enabled self-initiative and involvement in parliamentary legislation, for instance in social legislation. However, it excluded complete integration into the parliamentary system of Imperial Germany, in view of the structural and constitutional limitations of the Reichstag such as the lack of ministerial accountability11 and frequent attempts to exclude the social democratic parliamentary group. For the party centre, Marx’s teachings were sacrosanct. It was precisely this focus on Marxism, as reflected in the Erfurt programme adopted in 1891, that caused party infighting. Right-wing social democrats, the so-called revisionists, took the view that Marxism could not be sacrosanct given real social developments. The predicted collapse of society was not looming and capitalism continued its victorious conquest of the world. Socialist society was still the main objective, but the underlying doctrine was to be revised and adapted. Left-wing social democrats, on the other hand, questioned whether parliamentarianism and limited participation as political tools made any sense at all and whether more radical, maybe even revolutionary, strategies were required to achieve a socialist society.12 These three positions are ideal-typical constructs based on real historical controversies and conflicts about theoretical and programmatic issues, to systematize inner-party developments in retrospect. Yet they also symbolically renewed and manifested themselves time and again in social actions and in discourses. They were no a priori facts but linguistic and symbolic constructs. For that reason, the three camps often overlapped and were influenced by other factors in real life. It is noticeable that different generational experiences influenced the debates. When a new editorial journalist was to be appointed, Victor Adler portrayed the potential candidate Otto Pohl in a letter to Bebel in 1899 as ‘a capital young fellow’, but who also had ‘tendencies towards [revisionist] Bernsteinism [. . .] like all young people. The devil knows, their revolutionary and anti-authoritarian attitude turns rather against Marx and us old ones than against the state and everything around it these days.’ In the same year, the 28-year-old Rosa Luxemburg, a representative of the left wing,

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contacted the 59-year-old Bebel and made suggestions on how to counteract revisionism. But Bebel had reservations and preferred a different strategy. Luxemburg could not understand Bebel’s reasons. ‘Everything he said was: “Leave old grandpa in peace, for God’s sake.” [. . .] But don’t worry, I will get the grandpa out of his corner’, she wrote to her friend Leo Jogiches. Also, the different social democratic positions often changed in the course of time, particularly in terms of individual representatives. In the 1880s, Bebel had a high opinion of Georg von Vollmar, a social democrat from Bavaria, who came from an aristocratic family of civil servants. He worked as a journalist and became chief editor of the exile newspaper Social-Demokrat in Zurich in 1880 with Bebel’s help. But when Vollmar sympathized with reform ideas after 1890, Bebel accused him of diluting the character of the labour party. According to Rosa Luxemburg, Bebel called Vollmar ‘a rogue’ in 1899.13 Under these circumstances, Bebel considered pulling the party together a crucial part of his political work. In this context, his Marxist positions, his certainty of the collapse of bourgeois society were the guidelines of his actions, accompanied by his ability to balance inner-party conflicts. Four fundamental debates that occurred between 1890 and 1903 illustrate the controversies about different theoretical and programmatic positions within the party and Bebel’s role in this context. Initially, the programme adopted in Erfurt in 1891 set the party on a Marxist footing. The Marxist preamble visualized the consequences of the ‘economic development of bourgeois society’: ‘harsher and harsher will the antagonism between exploiters and exploitees become, bitterer and bitterer the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat that divides modern society into two enemy camps’. The Marxist prophecies were followed by practical demands for education, the emancipation of women, the democratization of the society, social and political reforms and occupational safety. The first part of the programme was drafted by Karl Kautsky, the second part about practical politics was written by Eduard Bernstein. Authors, party leadership and parliamentary group had intensively discussed the different drafts. According to Bebel’s estimate, the one that was circulating during the summer was ‘about the sixth’. By the autumn, two more drafts had

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been exchanged between Kautsky, Engels and Bebel. After a detailed presentation by Wilhelm Liebknecht, the programme was adopted unanimously and without discussion. Even if the analysis of society had been inspired by Marxism, the Social Democratic Party of Germany did not define itself as a mere class party. It was opposed ‘not only to exploitation and oppression of wage labourers but to any kind of exploitation and oppression in the present society, be it directed against a class, a party, a gender or a race’.14 Whereas at the party conference in Erfurt the programme was adopted without a debate, in the days leading up to it a battle of words had been waged on the future strategy of the party and on how to deal with the inner-party opposition of the ‘young’. When a motion for closure of the debate was carried on the second day of the negotiations, Bebel defied this attempt: ‘Not for anything in the world should we give the opposition even a semblance of justification for the allegation that we have cut them short. The final motion is rejected.’ Bebel’s intervention in the debate on the ‘young’, who thought parliamentary work not revolutionary enough, was motivated by his desire to maintain democratic procedures and a deep mistrust at the same time. Beforehand, Bebel had written to Adler: ‘We have to cope with our “young” in E[rfurt], one way or another.’ At the party conference, Bebel exaggerated the standpoint of the ‘young’ and, in doing so, presented it as a minority position. According to him, the inner-party opposition of the ‘young’ maintained that the party had ‘become lazy and a bunch of simpletons’, had lost the ‘objective to abolish the capitalist mode of production’. They would suggest, Bebel continued, that there were ‘buckets full of complaints’ against the party leadership from grassroots members, but at the party conference the ‘speakers today could present not even a small basket of them’. Bebel was well aware that he was in the majority. All violent revolutionists would, in Bebel’s words, ‘be shot like sparrows’ ‘in the era of the repeating rifle’. The minutes simply reported ‘approval’ at this point. However, the fundamental dilemma remained. This was also seen and used by conservative, government-leaning opponents; the conservative Neueste Mittheilungen reported in 1893 from the Reichstag, where Bebel had triggered a debate on the future State, as follows: ‘Member

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of the Reichstag Richter aptly said: “when the ‘young’ say that nothing comes of the palaver in parliament then you [Wilhelm Liebknecht] try to calm them down by saying to them in meetings – just as Bebel did in 1891 – ‘the catastrophe is nigh, the big crash will be there earlier than anyone imagines’. But when you are asked to present your plans and put them to the test by scientific or parliamentary critique, where you don’t have to show considerations for the ‘young’, then you hide away”’. Both Bebel and the party performed a balancing act between parliamentary work and nebulous future expectations as well as revolutionary optimism.15 When it came to the third conflict, Bebel could not rely on the support of the party. In this respect, he made an error of judgement. In the wake of the successful elections in 1890 and 1893, it was discussed how to win new sections of the electorate. Bebel advocated an agrarian programme to support smallholder peasants. This stood in stark contrast to the Marxist foundations of the Erfurt programme, according to which farmers were part of the ‘sinking middle classes’. Several party member meetings prior to the conference in Wroclaw in 1895 had already revealed that the agrarian programme could not win a majority. At the party conference itself, Bebel, who himself was a member of the committee on agrarian policy, did not respond to the allegations as masterfully as usual. To defend himself, he referred several times to his long-standing commitment for the party. ‘There are comrades in the committee who have earned their spurs for their commitment to the party’ when some of the critics were still students and far away from Marxism. But even pointing out that Engels also wanted ‘to support the small peasant as much as possible’ proved to be of no avail among the party delegates, almost three-quarters of whom voted against the agrarian programme. The German historian Detlef Lehnert has concluded from this result, that social democracy increased its focus on the milieu of the industrial and skilled workers. Bebel frankly admitted his defeat: ‘We “agrarians” were beaten,’ he wrote to Victor Adler. ‘After so many victories a defeat is a real treat.’ But that was only pretence. In the same paragraph, Bebel complained about the ‘doctrinairism a` la Kautsky’ that ‘has thoroughly ruined our chances in the countryside for years’ and thrown back the movement among rural voters ‘by at least 10 years’. This defeat must have hit Bebel hard.16

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Finally, there was the revisionism debate. Revisionism is ‘one of the most intriguing aspects of socialist theory formation’. As the one ‘true’ Marxism does not exist and every interpretation of Marxism is inevitably revisionist, as the historian Helga Grebing has shown, the term itself is multifunctional. However, within the history of the Social Democratic Party, it is closely linked to one particular individual, Eduard Bernstein. Born in 1850, the son of an engine driver, Bernstein attended a Gymnasium (grammar school) until he was 16. He then completed an apprenticeship as a bank clerk. In the 1870s, he worked for the party, then went into exile during the Anti-Socialist Laws, initially to Zurich and in 1880 to London. In 1881, Bebel wrote to Engels that Bernstein would be ‘the better choice as editorial journalist of the Sozialdemokrat than Kautsky, who has recently shown some strange attitudes, which are probably mostly due to his knowledge and view on Austria.’ In the 1890s, when Bernstein developed his new ideas, Bebel’s view on him changed fundamentally. ‘I firmly believe the man is sick’, he wrote to Victor Adler.17 What was the reason for Bebel’s bitterness? During his London exile, Bernstein had no contact with the Social Democratic Party milieu and grassroots members. He increasingly realized the weaknesses of the Marxist analysis of society. Bebel’s big crash – the so-called ‘Kladderadatsch’ – failed to happen and the predicted collapse of the middle classes did not come true. Instead, socialism had to be realized ‘gradually’ and ‘piece by piece’, in Bernstein’s view. ‘What is commonly called the final objective of socialism’ ‘is nothing to me, the movement is everything’. In ‘England nowadays’, Bernstein added in his book The Preconditions of Socialism (Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus), ‘no responsible socialist dreams of an imminent victory for socialism through a great catastrophe’. Instead, British social democrats resorted to participating and cooperating in the municipalities and ‘other organs of selfgovernment’. ‘And the final goal? Well, that just remains a final goal.’18 As a matter of fact, Bebel could not have agreed more with Bernstein’s commitment to the movement. But it was impossible for him to abandon the Marxist utopian concept. ‘We have to put an end to these half measures’, Bebel wrote to Victor Adler in October 1898. But revisionist and reform efforts within the party held their ground.

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Thus, at the Dresden party conference in 1903, Bebel settled the score with these inner-party currents. ‘The foundation of all these new “revisionist” tendencies’ was Bernstein’s works. But Bebel wanted to hit all of them in a sweeping blow: Georg von Vollmar, Ignatz Auer, Bernstein and all the other revisionists. If there were voices in favour of approving the Reich budget, argued Bebel at the party conference, then the stakes were clear to him: ‘my goodness, if we are at that point then the old social democracy is gone, then we make a mockery of ourselves in front of our enemies’. He would not ‘blur the antithesis between proletariat and bourgeois society’, for he adhered to the principle ‘I will remain the deadly foe of this bourgeois society and this state system to undermine their preconditions of existence and to abolish them if I can.’ The delegates responded with ‘stormy applause’. This time, in contrast to the vote on the agrarian programme, Bebel was backed by the delegates. In a roll call vote, only 11 delegates were against the final resolution that strongly condemned ‘the revisionist efforts’ which tried to change the ‘victorious party tactics based on class struggle’.19 However, Bernstein was still supported by members of the parliamentary group and Georg von Vollmar, the main target of Bebel’s speech in Dresden, was already pursuing reform-oriented politics in southern Germany. By 1900, political participation in local self-governing bodies, as experienced by Bernstein years before in England, had become common practice in Germany. Social democrats were involved in the work of local public health insurance schemes, trade courts and occasionally employment offices. On the ground, social democrats already practised revisionism and reformism. For this reason and because there were many revisionists in the parliamentary group in 1903, Bebel ultimately refrained from pressing for Bernstein’s exclusion from the party. A party split was at least on the horizon. It is possible that Bebel also took to heart the advice of his friend Victor Adler. He had written to him prior to the Dresden party conference: ‘You will blow the fellows away, I have no doubt about it [. . .] But then what? You don’t give the beaten guys the possibility to retreat and that is what I am opposed to.’20 Cutting off the enemy’s line of retreat was a method Bebel employed to an even greater extent in his political work and in

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struggles with opponents from outside the Social Democratic Party. The Marxist concept of society that suggested an irreconcilable antagonism between the classes had shaped his speeches against revisionism in his party and they had even more effect against opponents from beyond the party. Also, the social and political development in Imperial Germany under Emperor Wilhelm II gave ample cause for conflict and critical debate. During the decade after the Anti-Socialist Laws, this particularly applied to social legislation. Reich Chancellor Bismarck had laid its foundation in the 1880s by implementing health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884) and pension and disability insurance (1889). Social legislation was in fact a response to obvious undesirable social developments, such as the growing inequalities and injustice of the capitalist society. But first and foremost it was one of the twin pillars – together with persecution based on the Anti-Socialist Laws – of Bismarck’s strategy to prevent the rise of social democracy. Already the SPD’s predecessor party the SAP had branded Bismarck’s social legislation as an ideological weapon of the State. Now Bebel put the pension and disability insurance under the microscope. In 1889, he published an article in the Neue Zeit that was seminal for the social democratic position and pointed at several weaknesses. Pensions were legally payable only from the age of 70. Bebel concluded that this legislation was de facto ineffective since ‘in many industries, a 70-year-old worker is a white raven’.21 In the early 1890s, a new social political course was in the offing which social democracy had to address, since social legislation was one of the main interests of the party’s very own clientele. Industrial safety regulations and a reform of industrial legislation were added to the existing social laws. Bebel was a member of the Reichstag committee for industrial safety and complained about the ‘draining of energy’ this work entailed and that it ‘damped one’s spirit’. Engels cheered Bebel up by telling him that ‘the efforts were not in vain’. There ‘is no better propaganda’. Government measures included first successes such as Sunday work prohibition, strengthening of trade supervision and improved health protection in relevant industries. Apart from these victories the zeal for reform came quickly to an end. Bebel must have felt vindicated in his initial assessment of 1890.

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In March 1890, he had written to Engels in view of the new political framework conditions after Bismarck’s resignation: ‘They will do a bit of workers’ protection; but apart from that the system [. . .] will demand much more than before in terms of military and related policies.’22 One of these ‘related’ areas was undoubtedly foreign affairs. Wilhelmine foreign politics was shaped by colonial politics, the quest ¨low), ‘naval for a ‘place in the sun’ (Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bu politics’ (or Flottenpolitik) and escalating international tensions. Already under Wilhelm I and against Reich Chancellor Bismarck’s will, Germany had become a colonial power. During the 1890s, Germany developed a special version of imperialism under the slogan of ‘world politics’. Colonies in Africa and the Pacific Ocean never assumed economic significance under this politics and rather symbolized than represented the German claim to power. Criticism of German colonial politics from the ranks of social democrats was endless. In economic terms, the colonies were a big loss-making business. In the Reichstag, Bebel argued that he would be more than willing to ‘give away’ the East African colony for nothing and that would be ‘a present beneficial to Germany’. Only the Catholic Centre Party could be happy about the colonies, because it would offer the possibility to pursue ‘missionary politics under the flag of German colonial politics.’ The idea of trying to translate ‘the way of handling public affairs in Germany to East Africa and our colonies’ could only result in ‘failure’. According to Bebel, German administration officials and militaries went to the colonies without knowledge of or feeling for the local population. Corporal punishment, which was common in the colonies, violated Africans not only physically but also injured their pride. Bebel’s most successful public foray on the colonial question was undoubtedly his Reichstag speech on 16 February 1894, when he described in detail physical abuse in East Africa with the hippopotamus-hide whip and announced that he would bring one of ‘those specimens and put it on the table of the House’. That would make the members of the Reichstag visualize the flogged person, ‘who wears little or no clothing’, and how ‘probably after the first, surely after some strokes, the blood splatters’. The combination of

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sex, violence and scandalizing colonial politics in Bebel’s speech was rather effective. Bebel, who usually focused on facts in his speeches, revealed a different behaviour here. He knew how to stir his audience, how to cause a scandal. However, a coherent social democratic colonial policy never came into being. In the name of humanity, the social democrats condemned in fact the violence committed in the colonies. At the same time, they reproduced common colonial concepts of the bourgeois society such as the idea of conveying culture to the ‘savages’. The problem remained virulent.23 Bebel kept engaging in social politics. His investigation Lage der Arbeiter in den Ba¨ckereien (On the Situation of Bakery Workers), which he published in 1890, was groundbreaking and is still seminal for social historical analysis today. In the introduction, Bebel wrote that governmental inquiries and reports of trade control inspectors were often unsatisfactory, because they usually said ‘almost nothing’ about wage level, working times, conditions of accommodation and living. Bebel’s inquiry provided agitation material on the issues of workers’ exploitation and social inequality as well as the insight that bakery workers ‘were in a situation almost unfit for human beings’. The bakery workers’ trade union had distributed 5,000 questionnaires in late autumn 1889. 745 came back and 663 were used for the report. By revealing social grievances in this industry, social democracy stressed its core competence in social politics.24 Furthermore, this competence was required in another field. During the years after Bebel’s decision in favour of professional politics, a wave of strikes swept Europe. One of these wage conflicts was the miners’ strike in 1889/90 that – together with the Hamburg dockworkers’ strike in 1896/7 – gained symbolic power in particular. In both industrial disputes, trade unions and social democracy were caught by surprise and hardly involved in the run-up to and during the early stages of the events. The SPD was in a quandary. Solidarity was beyond debate, but from the party’s point of view an uncoordinated course of action was by no means in line with party strategy. In a letter to Adler in 1892, Bebel had already called attention to this problem in the context of the printers’ strike: the strike ‘causes a lot of trouble’ for the party. ‘If these gentlemen had had it their way and we had fulfilled their

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demands, we wouldn’t have a penny left [. . .] We should discount or rather honour some thousand – or more precisely some ten thousand – marks for the decision to join the “modern labour movement”.’ With this diagnosis, Bebel expressed his fear that the Social Democratic Party would be bankrupt if it financially supported every strike with the vague prospect that the striking workers would join the party organization. During the dockers’ strike, both the party and Bebel kept a low profile on the surface to not give any more ammunition to propaganda allegations that this was a strike instigated by the ‘Reds’. However, Bebel wrote ambiguously that the ‘Hamburg workers pinched 30,000 marks from the party’. ‘Pinched’: solidarity was very well, but Bebel was not convinced that this payment was really necessary. Here, he was in line with the rest of the party leadership. Immediately after the end of the failed dockers’ strike, the party newspaper Vorwa¨rts published some articles insisting that it was ‘high time’ to ‘ensure that these events do not repeat themselves’. First and foremost, strike decisions should not be made by ‘randomly summoned people and mass meetings’.25 Bebel’s two main objectives of political work – strengthening grassroots democratic and citizen engagement among the working class and establishing a stable organization that would defy the attacks of bourgeois society – clashed; Bebel and the party gave priority to a stable organization. And yet, in a speech in front of students in 1897 – the same year that the dockers’ strike failed – Bebel emphatically stressed the primacy of engagement, in words that are still relevant today. On his question, ‘What is politics?’ he replied: Politics is influence exercised on the character and formation of institutions and measures, which in their totality affect the polity (Reich, state, municipality) down to the very last individual, and are of determining influence on the entire social and economic life of the nation and the individual. And this means that it is the duty of every man, from the moment that he becomes capable of forming an independent judgment, to take an interest in public affairs; for the reason that the entire social existence and development of the individual are dependent to a greater degree on such institutions and conditions as are peculiar to the society in which he lives than upon his own knowledge, experience and ability.

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This was the plea for the active citizen and civil society, the call ‘Get involved!’, one hundred years before Ste´phane Hessel’s famous plea to get involved rather than to be indignant.26 The zoon politikon August Bebel followed exactly this path and became a professional politician. He experienced the difficulties of realizing this claim in the daily arduousness of the political lowlands.

CHAPTER 7

Politics until Death: Battles of Words and War Prophecy

What a duel. ‘Going up to the rostrum, he is greeted with rapturous applause. After the applause has died away’, the French Socialist leader Jean Jaure`s takes the floor. ‘He has half an hour’s speaking time to attack Bebel, which is extended by fifteen minutes during the course of his speech. Bebel too is greeted with vibrant and prolonged applause and hand clapping which he begs to stop with a gesture.’ That is the setting on Friday 19 August 1904 in the magnificent Amsterdam Concertgebouw. The organizers of the International Socialist Congress knew how to stage the infighting between different party wings.1 Once again – or rather still – it was about revisionism, but this time, at the Amsterdam conference, from the European perspective. The debate was based on the Dresden resolution of 1903 against the ‘dangerous efforts of revisionism’. The very fact that a resolution was put to the vote at this international conference, repeating phrases and entire paragraphs from the German resolution verbatim, shows that German social democracy played a dominant role among European labour parties. Apparently, some German social democrats felt guilty for surging ahead even after these events. In a lengthy editorial article in Neue Zeit, Karl Kautsky thanked the French Socialists ‘for their exemplary calmness and restraint which they exhibited when discussing conflicting strategies, although it was all about their own matters’. And yet, Jean Jaure`s had by no means been

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as restrained as Kautsky suggested in retrospect to his German readers. In fact, Jaure`s had touched a sore point of German social democratic strategy and tactics and revealed it in front of the Socialist International public. He explained that there were several progressive currents outside of socialism, which had to be made use of ‘in the fight against reaction’. This aspect was completely ignored by the Dresden resolution: ‘in this respect it has a sectarian character’. However, this was only the defence of everyday politics oriented towards reform. What followed was Jaure`s’ fundamental attack on Bebel’s lifetime’s work: ‘you are a big party, you are the future of Germany, one of the most noble and glorious parties of civilized and thinking human kind’. After this praise Jaure`s dealt a low blow. ‘Oh yes, a day after those elections in June [1903], which got you three million votes, it became clear to everybody that you have an applaudable power of propaganda, of advertisement, of alignment. However, neither the traditions of your proletariat nor the mechanism of your constitution allow you to use this apparently colossal power of 3 million votes and to turn it into political action.’ The mighty German social democracy was unmasked as a weak illusionary giant which was not even able to guarantee hosting the future international Socialist congress in the German ‘capital’ due to the obstructions of the powerful German authoritarian State.2 Bebel maliciously summarized Jaure`s’ remarks at the beginning of his own speech. He claimed that Jaure`s had given the ‘completely wrong impression’ that German social democracy had initiated the debate. He also accused Jaure`s of having described the Dresden resolution ‘as if everyone who had voted in favour of it must be a complete idiot’ and the resolution itself of representing ‘the greatest possible intellectual terrorism’. Bebel also slipped in a few sarcastic insinuations in his speech. The ironic exclamation ‘What merits Jaure`s claims for himself due to his involvement with the bourgeois radicals!’ caused ‘amusement’ among the delegates. The conference minutes registered a similar emotional response seven times, occasionally even ‘great amusement’. Jaure`s did not apply sarcasm in his speech. Bebel knew how to sway the delegates’ emotions regarding a further issue: he reported that the French Chamber of Representatives was supposed to discuss the punishment of a

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high-ranking police officer who had ordered a violent police operation against workers. But the representatives of Jaure`s’ parliamentary group had voted to remove this issue from the agenda. ‘Vigorous boos’ echoed through the Amsterdam concert hall. If something like this happened in Germany, Bebel pointed out, ‘the workers’ representative would be stripped of his mandate the next day’. With this contribution, Bebel fired up the mood of the delegates and ‘brought down the house’.3 To some extent, Bebel showed a conciliatory attitude in substance towards Jaure`s: ‘If we truly want to achieve progress in Germany, we have to rely on the bourgeois parties as the circumstances require, but we reject a permanent alliance with these elements.’ However, Bebel foundered on Jaure`s’ main criticism without even noticing. Bebel posed the rhetorical question: What did he [Jaure`s] actually expect of us after the three million victory? Should we have mobilized the three million and marched to the royal palace to dethrone the emperor? (amusement) [. . .] In Germany, three million are not enough. But let’s see and wait until we will have seven or eight million [. . .] we are still a minority, but a minority which is feared by its enemies.

Bebel did not want to see the structural problem that Jaure`s had mentioned. The party gained one victory after the other, but it did not change anything overall. Election campaigns, election victories, fights and debates with political opponent were substitutes for the revolution. They were the activating element and the energy source of the party; these electoral achievements exhilarated the members. Their limited influence in the Reichstag, which would have remained meagre even with eight million voters, was ignored. In addition, there were the formative experiences of persecution and exclusion under the Anti-Socialist Laws in particular and in Imperial Germany in general. When Bebel at the 1903 Dresden party conference swore to remain a deadly enemy of bourgeois society for the rest of his life, this was not a spontaneous outburst but biographically deeply rooted. In his closing remarks at the congress in Amsterdam, Bebel called on the different socialist camps in France to unite: the ‘joint fight against the common enemy will banish bitterness and hostilities from your hearts’. These remarks

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reflected the experiences of German social democrats, which would become the basis of European socialists and their political strategy. In Germany, severe pressure from the outside caused the homogenization of the socialist movement on the inside. It was not only an anecdote from Bebel’s personal life but also the foundation of social democratic experiences, when in 1910 Chancellor of Imperial Germany Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg became the first ‘representative of the government who had ever addressed me outside of parliamentary negotiations’ and inquired into his health after his roughly 40 years as a member of the Reichstag. Jaure`s, on the other hand, could not comprehend the outsider position of Bebel and most parts of German social democracy in his fundamental criticism. Thus, it must have been alien to him when the German socialists insisted on distancing themselves from participating in government. Bebel emerged victorious from the battle of words that, according to the conference president Henri van Kol, ‘was the first of its kind worldwide’. The Dresden resolution was adopted by 25 votes in favour to five against and became the basis of European social democratic party tactics.4 However irreconcilable, determined and firm Bebel’s position was, he always respected democratic rules. He was greatly irritated when Vorwa¨rts, in an article in 1905 on the second congress of the meanwhile united French socialists – the Section francaise de l’Internationale ouvrie`re (SFIO) – only reported on the left wing and ‘praised it to the skies, but did not mention Jaure`s’ speech regarding Germany with one word’. He wrote to Kautsky that this was ‘a scandal. Hatred and passion must not go this far.’ These remarks also referred to internal quarrels and political conflicts on the editorial board of Vorwa¨rts, thus showing Bebel as an advocate of a plurality of opinions who wanted to enforce his position without silencing oppositional views. At the same time, he was the one among the German delegates who – after the Amsterdam conference – was realistic enough to prefer diversity to unity and not to make a clean sweep and throw Jaure`s out of the International. Kautsky, on the other hand, had ‘come to the conclusion that an agreement in France is only possible against Jaure`s and without Jaure`s’. It was necessary to ‘undermine Jaure`s’ reputation among the proletariat’.

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When Victor Adler told Bebel about Kautsky’s position on this matter, Bebel responded: ‘It is simply impossible to exclude Jaure`s from the party. Kautsky cannot do that in France, just as he cannot exclude Vollmar in Germany.’ In addition, ‘Jaure`s is an honest man who will always have a great number of followers as long as he stays in politics.’5 Bebel would be proved right in trusting Jaure`s based on his standards for party politicians. Jaure`s was committed to Franco-German cooperation and vehemently opposed the looming war. On 31 July 1914, he was murdered by a French nationalist in Paris. The Amsterdam congress also discussed European colonial policies. It recognizes the right of the inhabitants of civilized countries to settle in lands where the population is at a lower stage of development. However, it condemns most strongly the existing capitalist system of colonial rule and calls upon the socialists of all countries to overthrow it. The system results in the oppression of the people of Africa, Asia etc. by the civilized nations of Europe which can be observed every day.

Bebel left it to others to advocate inconsistent socialist colonial policies on the European political stage. However, at home in Germany he still pursued this topic and made his mark in doing so. After his ‘hippopotamus-hide whip’ appearance in the Reichstag in 1894 and his earlier criticism of the brutal action of the German troops in China in 1900, he took the floor once again in January 1905. The reason was the Herero uprising in German South West Africa the year before. Meticulously, Bebel elaborated the causes of the uprising. Within a few years of colonization, the ‘livestock of the natives has been reduced by more than a half’. Also, they had been taken advantage of by Germans buying their land. The attitude of the merchants was, in Bebel’s eyes, ‘a particularly evil chapter’. They had been ‘systematically seen to exploit the natives by whipping up their desire for all sorts of gewgaw and European pleasures in order to make them pay most dearly for the satisfaction of these desires’. The colonies had increasingly fallen under the influence of ‘big capitalist corporations’, which generated artificial enthusiasm for colonial policy in Germany.6

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Finally, the ‘ill-treatment of the African people’ was ‘immensely grave and severe’. ‘Given that the natives [are] completely without rights and protection – and it is more than fair to assume that – it is no surprise that hatred and outrage have reached this level among those people.’ In view of these circumstances, Bebel granted the Herero the unreserved right to resist: ‘Gentlemen, every people and every tribe that feel their human rights have been extremely suppressed have the right of insurrection, the right of rebellion (Hear, hear! from the social democrats).’ It was ‘only a natural consequence of our colonial policy’ that the ‘insurgents committed some of the worst atrocities’ during this insurrection. Because ‘this war – and this is undeniable – has been waged with great ruthlessness on our part too; some outlets of the German press have declared that the natives had to be annihilated, not only those bearing arms but also women and children, the entire race had to be destroyed root and branch.’ ‘That is a barbaric warfare.’ The speakers following Bebel accused him of having lost sight of the German side, of the soldiers’ bravery. Dr Otto Arendt from the conservative German Reich Party (Deutsche Reichspartei) said: ‘Unbiased historical research will once reveal the brave achievements of this campaign.’7 However, much later historical research did in fact prove Bebel entirely correct. In the two uprisings of the Herero and the Nama between 1904 and 1908, 80,000 people died; the campaign clearly bore the hallmarks of a genocide. The third foreign policy topic Bebel addressed and influenced was military, war and peace policies. But here, his political commitment does not give a coherent picture. Bebel’s political reactions were rather inconsistent and different camps emerged within the party depending on varying foreign political constellations. With particular regard to foreign politics, the political isolation of social democracy proved to have a major impact. Social democrats had very little information and no sources in government to give them an idea about foreign political events and situations. When a journalist wrote an article about the navies of Germany, France and Great Britain, Bebel advised him to compare the fleets ‘not just regarding the number of ships but also in terms of their combat power’. He believed that ‘the Navy League [Flottenverein] tells fibs in its flyers lessening the German strength in order to stimulate

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armament’. Added to this was a widespread enthusiasm for the navy in Germany since the 1890s that also attracted parts of the working class. Fuelled by the emperor and pressure groups, this obsession was fed by the belief in technology and progress, pride in German quality craftsmanship and imperialistic hopes. German foreign policy became increasingly confrontational. In terms of colonial policy the Reich felt like a ‘latecomer’ and did not want to be left even further behind but to participate and have its say. From the turn of the century, Bebel cautioned against this sort of policy and the expansion of the navy. The two so-called Moroccan crises, in 1905/6 and 1911, clearly showed the risks involved. According to Bebel, the ‘splendid policy towards Morocco’, based on the German belief that the Reich’s economic interests in Morocco were threatened by an alliance between Great Britain and France, made naval war against those countries more and more likely.8 Morocco remained an international issue. During the second Moroccan crisis, France occupied parts of Morocco, allegedly to avoid internal fighting in the North African country. The German Reich claimed that its trading stations were under threat and sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir. However, Bebel did not consider this politics of intimidation a war risk: ‘I don’t think there will be war, because I’m entirely sure that France will not go to war for the sake of England.’ Thus, Bebel was unwilling to take action at the level of the international socialists, to convene congresses and organize demonstrations. Already three years before, in August 1908, Bebel angrily stated: ‘It is ridiculous to get upset over every chauvinist stuck-up twit and initiate demonstrations.’ Nevertheless, peace demonstrations did take place in early autumn 1908 and Bebel increasingly clashed with the far left wing of the party in his remarks on foreign policy. When he praised the Franco-German agreement – which waived Germany’s claims in Morocco in exchange for some small territories in Central Africa – as a peace-keeping measure by the government, Rosa Luxemburg condemned this assessment as ‘scandalous’. At a meeting in Plauen in Saxon Vogtland, she ‘strongly denounced Bebel in her speech, and the audience enthusiastically agreed with her’.9

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These controversies were shaped by inconsistencies in Bebel’s personal stand on war and peace, but were also examples of conflicting positions within the Social Democratic Party at large. Bebel considered disarmament – which he had dismissed as a utopian idea in a letter to Engels in 1893 – the only effective means to resolve the ever increasing international conflicts. In his Hamburg constituency, he outlined a concrete concept of disarmament at a large meeting of party members in March 1911. According to these considerations, the European powers had to accept the division of territories in both Europe and the colonies as the status quo, implement arbitral courts and increasingly cut back military spending every year: reaching the level of 1910 in 1912, the level of 1909 in 1913, etc. ‘The most important thing is to reduce armament expenses; otherwise rapprochement is impossible.’10 And yet Bebel was anything but a pacifist. For one thing, he clearly distinguished between aggressive and defensive wars. For another, he as an ‘old chap’ was prepared to ‘shoulder the rifle and go to war against Russia’, in his eyes a backward country ruled by a despotic tsar. ‘You might laugh about me but I was completely serious’, Bebel confirmed this remark at the Essen party conference in 1907. In the same speech, he substantiated his arguably most famous remarks on the defence of the fatherland. On 7 March 1904, Bebel had elaborated his thoughts about the relationship between military and social democracy in the German society. In this context, he said with a hint to the government: Gentlemen, in future you cannot fight a victorious war without us (Hear hear! from the social democrats.) If you win [a war], you will win with us, not against us [. . .] I say further: we have the greatest interest if we are forced into a war – I assume that German policy is itself too cautious to provide any grounds for causing a war – but if the war should be a war of aggression [against Germany], a war in which the existence of Germany was at stake, then, I give you my word, every last man of us, even the oldest, is ready to shoulder arms and defend our German soil, not for your but for our sake, and if necessary in spite of you (Hear, hear! from the social democrats).11

Bebel’s different political positions – on the one hand mortal enemy of bourgeois society, on the other protector of the fatherland, disarmament and armament advocate at the same time – illustrate,

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that a biography should never paint the portrait of an unambiguous identity. Depending on their perspective, different observers perceived Bebel as a different person. Among party members, the view prevailed that Bebel’s willingness to defend the fatherland was not a carte blanche to the present bourgeois society. On the other hand, his remarks reflected the increasing integration of social democracy and of millions of workers who were not members of the party and who could identify themselves with the successful, brash German State. A caricaturist of the bourgeois press drew a fitting picture of the complex situation of Bebel, social democracy and the working class as a whole: two workers see August Bebel wearing suit and hat and a rifle over his shoulder marching towards them. One of them says: ‘Well, August, you really want to shoulder a rifle and defend the fatherland?’ Bebel answers: ‘Shush! It’s not loaded!’12 This policy of deterrence soon failed. This was because deterrence increasingly blended into unbridled armament, threats, provocations, nationalist outbursts – between and within the European countries – creating an explosive mixture. In an almost prophetic way, Bebel pointed to this development a few times during the last three years of his life. On 9 November 1911, he said in the Reichstag: The great order to march will be given in Europe, sending to the battlefields 16 to 18 million men, the flower of European male youth from all different nations, equipped with the best tools for murder and turned against each other as enemies. But in my view, after the great order to march will come the great crash [Kladderadatsch ] (Laughter.) – Yes, you have already laughed about that, but it will come, it is only postponed (Great amusement.) It will come not caused by us but by you yourselves (Very true! from the social democrats.)

Almost a year later, Bebel wrote to Victor Adler: ‘It is already quite a while ago that – after closely observing the European situation – I came to the conclusion that the next year might bring us the European war, mainly caused by our stupid England policy which has created a constellation of powers that no one would have imagined possible a few years ago.’ There was ‘too much explosive material’ – ‘last year Morocco, this year the Balkans’ – ‘one is driven forward against one’s will’.13

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Bebel’s idea of disarmament did in fact provide some leverage. The desire for disarmament as well as rapprochement between Germany, France and Great Britain, in order to eliminate the ‘threat to world peace’, was incorporated into the manifesto of the large Basel peace conference of the Socialist International in November 1912. But this fundamentally different policy could not be put into practice. Forty years of half-hearted social reforms and a reform gridlock regarding the political system, a heated climate among the mass public within and outside of Germany, an irrational mixture of readiness for and rejection of war; all this did not leave room for manoeuvre based on an alternative policy as suggested by the Socialist International. The workers at grassroots level were torn. The metaphor Bebel had used in the Reichstag – ‘the barracks are all red’ – was in fact true: many social democrats were soldiers and many soldiers were social democrats. But these men were trained to defend the German Reich. They were largely cut off from any information about the German government’s involvement in the policy of escalation in June/July 1914 and, in addition to that, the social democratic press took the same line as their bourgeois counterparts and raised the spectre of the ‘hordes of Cossacks’ who would ‘trample down’ Imperial Germany. The workers shouldered their rifles, as Bebel had said.14 All over Europe, the Socialist International admired – and at the same time feared – the organizational power of German social democracy, because this dominance fundamentally shaped the structures of the International and – as happened in Amsterdam – set the programmatic agenda. But even before August 1914, trouble was brewing in the organization. Furthermore, the social democrats in both Central European states, Germany and Austria-Hungary, were excluded from any participation in government. What Bebel predicted in his letter to Victor Adler in 1912 would happen, did happen, during the July crisis in 1914; after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, Europe was heading towards war: the European nations were ‘driven forward against their will’. Despite being the strongest opposition party in the Reichstag, the social democrats were not able to initiate an alternative political strategy opposed to governmental politics. Also, the divide

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between the two camps within the party increasingly worsened: the right wing was looking for permanent political allies, the left wing prepared for fundamental opposition. For all these reasons, the ‘great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century’ took its course. Bebel had seen it coming.15 In terms of inner-party politics, two topics dominated Bebel’s last ten years as a professional politician. Firstly, there was the issue of the relationship with the trade unions; secondly, there was the question of budget approval by the social democrats in the diets of the southern German states. At the latest since the end of the AntiSocialist Laws, Bebel’s relationship with the trade unions had been rather tense. As early as 1893, he wrote to Friedrich Engels that all the trade union leaders met in Frankfurt to ‘cook up a compromise thin as workhouse gruel’. He was looking forward to the next party conference: ‘these gentlemen will certainly get a good roasting’. Particularly in the boom years from 1895 onwards, the trade union movement started to grow rapidly and the socialist trade unions no longer needed to consider themselves as mere adjunct organizations of the party. By 1900, the powerful free trade unions did not want to put up with any party interference, least of all by the far left wing of the SPD, whose representative Rosa Luxemburg dismissed the fight for higher wages as a desperate ‘Sisyphean task’.16 This outlines the conflict between trade unions and party regarding the question of mass strikes that kept social democrats in general – and Bebel in particular – on their toes around 1905/6. The former opponents in the revisionism debate, Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein, represented one side of the quarrel, senior trade union leaders the other. In a nutshell, the conflict centred on whether to use mass strikes to enforce universal and equal suffrage, which was in effect in only a few single state diets. Bernstein floated this idea as early as 1902 and Luxemburg took it up. Political strikes had proved successful in Belgium and Sweden and were employed as an instrument of power during the Russian revolution in 1905. However, the strike was the trade unions’ very own tool to enforce their demands regarding industrial relations. They felt their autonomy and competence threatened by this debate. In addition, they feared for their existence, in case mass strikes should happen and

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be quelled by the State. Thus, they denounced ‘propagating the political mass strike’ at the fifth trade union congress in May 1905 as ‘reprehensible’.17 In the run-up to the party conference of 1905 in Jena, Bebel tried to pour oil on troubled waters. On 15 August, he wrote to the trade unionist Robert Schmidt: ‘I agree with you that party and trade unions have no reason at all to feud, that we, the party, have every reason to wish the trade unions the best development and to do the utmost to contribute to achieving this; however, this should be the same vice versa.’ And yet, that balance was far from being the case. In its resolution, the party enforced its position that ‘the broadest possible usage of mass strikes’ was ‘one of the most successful instruments of the political fight’ to achieve suffrage or rather to prevent the deterioration of suffrage. Only 14 out of roughly 300 delegates voted against the resolution. The Jena delegates were intoxicated by the idea of mass mobilization that was reminiscent of the Russian revolution of 1905 and showed particular fighting spirit. In his closing remarks in the debate on mass strikes Bebel pointed out: ‘I have never heard the words “blood” and “revolution” as often as in this debate (Amusement.) By listening to all this I automatically looked at the tips of my boots in case they were already wading in blood (Great amusement.)’18 Despite having no prospect of winning the debate on mass strikes within the party, the trade unions still insisted on their point of view. The Jena resolution had been written by ‘literates’, who ‘in the majority had no idea at all about the practical workers’ movement’, claimed critics. The trade unions had their own ideas about how to improve the situation of the working class in bourgeois society and were no longer willing to bow to the party. Bebel intervened in the non-public negotiations between party and trade unions in February 1906. Here he took the view that mass strikes were in general an important political tool, but could not be used in the current situation to fight for a better diet suffrage in Prussia. Soon different interpretations of Bebel’s remarks circulated and the situation remained obscure and tense. The debate on mass strikes had to be reopened. This took place at the Mannheim party conference in 1906, where the power of the trade unions became apparent. Bebel was fully

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aware of that fact; ‘We as a party are not able to exercise power over the trade unions.’ The resolution issued in Mannheim was a victory for the trade unions. The party leadership was still allowed to use mass strikes as a political tool; however, it had to ‘get in touch and confer with the general commission of the trade unions’ first. When mass events demanded the reform of Prussian suffrage in 1910, the party leadership made no attempt to call mass strikes but organized street demonstrations. During spring 1910, a nonparliamentary public emerged, which exceeded party expectations by far. Hundreds of thousands of people participated in these events which took place in numerous Prussian cities. Rosa Luxemburg’s plan to use these initiatives by partly non-organized persons to the benefit of social democracy was dismissed at the Magdeburg party conference of 1910.19 The party in general – and Bebel in particular – wanted to veer neither to the political left nor to the right. Thus, Luxemburg on the left and the representatives from Baden around Ludwig Frank – a lawyer and one of the greatest political talents in the party before World War I – on the right were kept on a short leash. A motion issued by Luxemburg, stating that suffrage could only be achieved by ‘a large, united mass action of the working people’, was watered down under pressure from the trade unions to maintain the balance within the party. Adopting Luxemburg’s resolution would be ‘an unfriendly act towards the trade unions’, the delegate Richard Wagner from Braunschweig declared. In the last years of his life, Bebel finally opposed mass strikes: ‘Instead of showing our strength, our weakness will be revealed and we will be disgraced’, he wrote in July 1913 to Karl Kautsky. The Magdeburg party conference of 1910 became once again Bebel’s stage to fend off reformism and the right wing’s endeavour to forge substantial alliances with bourgeois parties. There was something ritualistic about Bebel’s efforts to do so, which were, at the same time, a display of ‘practical power actions’. The infighting between the two wings of the party expressed ‘political realities’ by means of language. In the Baden diet, the social democratic parliamentary group had repeatedly approved the budget. In the run-up to the party conference of 1910, Bebel justified his Baden party comrades by

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pointing out the ‘less significantly sharp class antagonism, the greater leisureliness [Gemu¨tlichkeit ] and human togetherness’ in the South German state. In Magdeburg, Bebel strongly criticized Ludwig Frank personally (‘oh, you undoubting Thomas!’) and politically (‘with your state political wisdom, with your diplomacy [. . .] which was as unwise as it could ever be’), but it was out of the question for him to throw Frank out of the party. Bebel increasingly considered himself a party veteran keeping the diverging wings together. ‘I have to be on the spot, otherwise the spirits will clash horns on every possible occasion and bad things could happen. Fortunately I am well [. . .], can attend all meetings of the executive board and the parliamentary group and from 3 in the afternoon also the Reichstag sessions’, he wrote in February 1911.20 Bebel’s remarks, his key position in the Reichstag and party conference debates create the impression that he was still the centre of social democracy. This was in fact true in terms of him being a guiding and central figure. ‘As a last resort they always come back to senile old Bebel’, he wrote with a mixture of self-irony and arrogance when he was asked to give a speech at the congress of the Socialist International in Copenhagen. His workload was still enormous. ‘I am terribly stuck with work, have to write for our election book and have to finish the second volume of my memoirs. However, on Saturday I will leave town, I finally need rest and quiet.’ He also gave some thought to the composition of the executive board; he talked to his friends about it, made proposals and endorsed Friedrich Ebert. Bebel remained the ‘caretaker’ of the party, both on the large and small scale. Out of the inheritance that he obtained in 1905 he donated 45,000 marks for locked-out electrical industrial workers. It was presumably also Bebel, who made an anonymous 40,000-mark donation to party coffers in January 1906. Besides, he had given ‘1,200 marks during the last years and today again a hundred’ to ‘very remote relatives of Julie, fifth or sixth grade’, as he wrote on 11 November 1912 in a letter to Louise Kautsky, Karl’s second wife. This financial generosity did not change Bebel’s view about Julie’s relative according to his sense of honour and work ethic: this man was ‘a bookbinder, but a wimp who doesn’t know how to help himself’.21

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In autumn 1906, the issue of mass strikes as a political tool re-emerged as a topic to be discussed at the next party conference. Victor Adler from Vienna urged Bebel not to reopen this debate. Bebel could ‘not agree: you [in Austria] might be in a position to do so. Here in Germany with dozens of literates, who need a subject for their articles and controversies, this is impossible.’22 When considering these remarks, we have to take into account Bebel’s penchant for irony and sarcasm. However, the question arises of whether these debates were just media fodder, dispensed from the ivory tower of a party leadership that was out of touch with party grassroots. The rapidly grown social democratic media landscape with its numerous journalists and editors certainly required material to fill their newspapers. But these debates at party conferences and international congresses also reached grassroots level and were discussed by ordinary members. They were by no means just some ideas of a political caste that had lost touch with ordinary people. Grassroots members were also interested in these questions. They gave them direction and encouraged them to find their own political position. Unfortunately, a readership analysis is not possible in retrospect, so it has to remain open whether the numerous regional and local newspapers were bought by the social democratic milieu because or although they were filled with comments on Reichstag or party conference debates and discussed political, ideological, theoretical and cultural issues in detail on their front pages. The fact remains that the newspapers sold. A regional paper such as the Erfurt Tribu¨ne had a print run of roughly 14,000 copies shortly before World War I, when Erfurt’s population was 110,000. In addition to that, there was the local grassroots work of journalists, editors, delegates and members of the Reichstag in numerous associations and meetings. However, we should not forget that hard ideological controversies were of secondary importance at the grassroots level. The fact that one of the protagonists of the party visited a city and gave a speech was reason enough for a mass turnout. When the revisionist Eduard Bernstein came to Erfurt and talked for two hours about the ‘historical and economic necessity of socialism’, his speech ended ‘in storming applause’ – despite the fact that the Erfurt member of the Reichstag,

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Paul Reißhaus, and the Erfurt party delegate Otto Michaelis were on Bebel’s side. On the ground at grassroots level, controversies were smoothed and reduced to a common denominator that would find a consensus. This is illustrated by the false picture drawn by the Erfurt Tribu¨ne’s report on the Dresden party conference in 1903, which – even ‘despite some unpleasant occurrences’ – ‘will not be able to impede the advance of the proletariat’: the proletariat ‘marches with again freshly washed trousers, but they will dry on the march. Only a few have voted against the resolution which is showing us the way on this march, even these ones will stay in marching columns and not stray on side paths that only lead into a swamp.’ And yet, party members were not to be unduly pushed either. At an Erfurt party meeting in October 1903, a speaker talking about the last party conference overran. He was ‘heckled to finish which made him come to an end. This is very regrettable since his remarks were extremely calm, plain and informative. Thus the attitude of a few gives the impression that the Erfurt comrades did not want objective discussions and that personal disputes were more to their liking.’23 Bebel was the central reference point of all these activities on the ground. Reporting on the unspectacular party conference of 1902, the social democratic Tribu¨ne stated that ‘Bebel’s speech on the next Reichstag elections’ had been ‘the highlight of the party conference’. He epitomized the principles of party tactics and party strategy. Referring to the Dresden revisionism debate it said: ‘Bebel’s attitude is understandable. He considers himself the father of the party and has expressed his anger about some tricks his children have played on him.’ Bebel remained the core of the movement. He received ‘797 cables and more than 2,000 cards and letters’ for his 70th birthday and he intended to ‘get to know the content of those’.24 However, his political work increasingly showed signs of wear and tear from 1905 onwards. Personal misfortunes, the deaths of friends and relatives left their mark. Bebel no longer felt the need to interfere and intervene everywhere. He and his party comrades realized that he was no longer in the loop of everything. With regard to filling positions in a team to fight the Catholic Centre Party, Rosa Luxemburg wrote that ‘comrade Bebel’ was ‘of course informed about anything’. No one from the party headquarters told Bebel that

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his friend Victor Adler had been asking for 10,000 marks for Austrian social democracy. ‘Not a word. I have written to the office immediately and given them a piece of my mind,’ he told Adler in June 1911. Only two months later, he complained again: ‘But what can you do if you are far away from headquarters and you get to know everything much too late and you have to fear that all your replies and orders are outdated and overtaken by events.’25 Furthermore, Bebel was occupied with planning his posthumous reputation. He did not want to leave it to chance what future generations of workers and politicians would think of him. He started gathering material for his memoirs. In a letter to Julius Motteler, he complained about how Wilhelm Liebknecht left his papers: ‘Everything is in a complete mess, although he could have instructed his five sons to get his stuff in order.’ He found the time for this authorial work of preserving his memories for the future, but he neither could, nor wanted to, keep his hands off politics. As early as 1908, his son-in-law Ferdinand urged Bebel to give up politics, after he had suffered a breakdown at the Nuremberg party conference. ‘I cannot bring myself to do that, yet’, he wrote to Karl Liebknecht. Politics was his life and his anchor after the personal losses he had suffered. Without politics ‘it would be over soon’, he wrote to Victor Adler on 29 December 1912. ‘We all have our crosses to bear. I have pictured my remaining years differently.’26 Thus, Bebel’s image among party comrades was ambivalent. Victor Adler wrote to him that the Copenhagen socialist congress ‘lacked sparkle – you weren’t there – and the Germans are still accustomed to expect initiatives from you and, regarding different things, from Paul [Singer]’. Hermann Molkenbuhr from the party executive, on the other hand, noted after Bebel’s breakdown: ‘It was rather embarrassing in Nuremberg. Bebel physically weak. The last remains of his life light are dying away. His physical weakness might have been an additional reason for him to find the right tone for reconciliation.’ But 1908 was not the end. At the party conferences in Mannheim in 1910 and in Jena in 1911, he gave the keynote talks. And he remained active on his central stage, the Reichstag, even in his very last stage of life. Still on 20 June 1913, at 73 years of age and seven weeks before his death, he took part in a Reichstag vote.27

CHAPTER 8

‘Anti-Emperor of the Masses’: Worshipping a Hero?

‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’, stated Albert Camus in his philosophical treatise on The Myth of Sisyphus. Was Bebel such a Sisyphus? In view of his conflicts with other party members, the ancient Greek hero enters the mind, who kept on rolling a huge boulder uphill where he could not hold it. The stone rolls back, the work starts again. How many times had Bebel warned against the dangers of revisionism and reformism within social democracy, at how many party conferences, how many parliamentary group meetings, in how many newspaper and magazine articles? How many metaphors, how many arguments had he employed in order to push the colossus revisionism down the cliffs? And yet, it reappeared again and again in ever-new variations and had to be fought. Some in his party were willing to subsidize the emperor’s battleships, others to back the budgets of certain single German states, and still others even wanted to realign the Marxist ideological foundation of the party. Bebel prevailed, time and again, only to face the same problem again soon enough. The ancient Sisyphus is a symbol of the futility and uselessness of certain types of human work. The daily task is aimless and without hope of change. Yet this was not August Bebel, the leader of social democracy in Imperial Germany. Otherwise he would never have become the shining light of SPD members and voters. Albert Camus’ ‘happy Sisyphus’, on the other hand, draws sense and meaning from

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his tedious task and gains recognition. His work is his life. This was precisely Bebel’s role. His unwavering and continual effort demanded respect from observers and politicians of all parties. Neither did he just abandon the ‘boulder’ revisionism, nor did he shatter it and dispose of the pieces. He stood fast to the democratic principle of open debate. ‘A happy man has passed away. Few can claim so many victories in their lives’, Hermann Molkenbuhr wrote in his diary on 17 August 1913, four days after Bebel’s death.1 And yet, political success is relative. Under the conditions of the political system of Imperial Germany Bebel was not able – and not willing – to lead his party to participate in government and political decision-making processes. However, he neither advocated fundamental opposition, nor did he refuse to cooperate in some areas, which he publicly admitted. He knew that the existence of the labour movement and the Social Democratic Party had pushed the government to initiate social reform legislation, which resulted in improved living conditions and the political participation of workers. He still criticized these changes as insufficient; he and his party made many efforts to find alternatives which, however, proved not to be feasible. In this respect Bebel reached the limits of political isolation – also those set by himself. The stubborn belief in the collapse of bourgeois society and the fixation on the idea of the socialist society – a goal which was nicely pictured but belonging to a distant future – thwarted the fertile beginnings of a creative political will. Yet it was also the political exclusion of the Social Democratic Party and its lack of strong and stable allies that prevented the political realignment of the party strategy towards a more creative political approach. The idea of a united parliamentary block ‘from Bebel to Bassermann’ – Ernst Bassermann, a lawyer, was chairman and from 1898 leader of the National Liberal parliamentary group of the Reichstag – including the Social Democratic Party, the Left Liberals and the National Liberals was impossible at Reich level due to the attitude of many National Liberals. Quite a few of the latter were also members of the Imperial Association against Social Democracy (Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie).2 Blaming Bebel for focusing on mundane details of everyday politics on the one hand, whilst still pursuing utopian ideals on the other, fails to appreciate

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the political situation of the Reich and its largest territory state, Prussia. In a still hostile environment which, however, offered the opportunity to shape politics, policies and the polity (albeit on a small scale), pursuing political reforms, and strengthening the party organization while keeping the utopian vision alive, was a doublesided strategy that was due to the concrete circumstances in State and society. And, even more so, for most social democrats it was precisely these utopian future expectations of the socialist society that epitomized the fundamental system change from which everyone would benefit. Yet, since this change was not to be realized by revolutionary politics, Bebel and the party were content with election victories. The fact that both mobilization and voter potential within the labour movement might have reached its limit was not yet identified as a problem. Until his death, Bebel led the world’s largest labour party, which had grown from 400,000 members in 1906 to 1.1 million in 1914. For most of the male workers the party was not only their political guide, but also the centre and home of their social and individual lives. Bebel had contributed to bringing this about and there was nobody who contested his achievement – who was even able to do so. He epitomized the pursuit of community, unity and Marxist conviction. Yet still, he was only able to hold together the divergent political wings of his party. This was not a Sisyphean, but a Herculean task. The quarrel between the rival camps was caused by fundamental conflicts and structural conditions, which even Bebel could not eliminate. Consequently, they had a long-term effect on the party. However, contemporaries and party comrades made Bebel an iconic figure of unity. According to Karl Kautsky, the eminent Marxist theoretician and ‘Pope of Marxism’, ‘all comrades, regardless of their political affiliation’, considered Bebel ‘the best and most competent representative of their interests. Nobody saw him as a spokesman of merely one faction but of the party as a whole, despite his trenchant appearance.’ And even Bernstein had to admit that Bebel ‘never wanted to be anything else than a part of this great organism’ – although his memorial article was predominantly dedicated to Bebel’s work from before 1890 and dealt only briefly with the decades after the Anti-Socialist Laws and the revisionism

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debate! The adversarial press, however, interpreted Bebel’s ability to hold the party together differently. They saw a ‘stern disciplinarian, almost arbitrary in the repression of dissent’.3 As early as 1893 a worker from Hamburg had claimed: ‘My emperor is Bebel’, when he was sitting together with colleagues in a pub discussing the role of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. The anarchist newspaper Der arme Teufel supported this view: at a big workers’ meeting, masses of people crowded towards Bebel. A policeman who was stuck in the middle shouted: ‘“Well, this is even crazier than when the emperor comes!” One of the workers shouts back: “This is our emperor!” His words travel through the crowd and arouse more cheering everywhere.’ The ‘anti-emperor of the masses’ (as Carl von Ossietzky called him) died on 13 August 1913 from a weak heart in the Swiss health spa of Churwalden/Passugg and was buried like a European emperor on 17 August 1913. According to the Vossische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper with a large circulation, ‘around 60,000 people’ paid him their last respects during the two days before his burial ceremony and ‘500 funeral wreaths’ were carried at the procession. ‘The funeral procession in front of the crematory lasted more than an hour.’ And the social democratic newspaper Vorwa¨rts reported about the ‘order of the procession’: ‘1. wind band “Konkordia”. 2. wreaths and flowers. 3. funeral carriage. 4. flower carriage. 5. carriage for the family. 6. accompanying carriage. 7. delegations: a) SPD faction of the Reichstag, b) French representatives, c) English representatives, d) Austrian and other countries’ representatives, e) German representatives, f) Swiss representatives. 8. wind band “Eintracht” [“Harmony”]. 9. political associations from Zurich and the surrounding area. 10. trade union organizations’. Seventeen memorial ceremonies took place on 17 August in Berlin alone, with many more in other social democratic strongholds. A film was even produced for the Wochenschau, a weekly cinema newsreel series. Today the 60-m-long filmstrip is held in the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive), Department of Film Archives. Since Bebel was buried in Switzerland, the attending crowd was not quite as impressive as at Wilhelm Liebknecht’s funeral 13 years earlier, when about 150,000 people joined the funeral procession from the centre of Berlin (Berlin-Mitte) to the cemetery in

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Friedrichsfelde in the Berlin borough of Lichtenberg, around 8 km from Mitte.4 As one of the few opportunities for a political gathering under the Anti-Socialist Laws, burial ceremonies were part of the political festive culture of the labour movement from the 1870s onwards and showed a form of resistance. In the decades after 1890, they became a symbol of the claim to power and the growing strength of the workers’ movement; they represented order, discipline and the high organizational level of social democracy. Funerals opened up a sensual– emotional perspective of political agency. The followers of the deceased political leaders gathered to pay their last respects. Bebel’s funeral in Zurich also reflected his private life; the Swiss trading metropolis had become his second home and retreat from the political world. The Bebel family had decided on Zurich as his final resting place. Julie Bebel had been buried at the Zurich cemetery Sihlfeld in 1910. Bebel, who was ‘a strong supporter of cremation’, was laid to rest next to his wife.5 The funeral ceremony in Switzerland: a last symbol of feeling excluded, a victory of the family father over the politician, or a pragmatic decision to have his grave close to daughter and grandchild? Burial ceremony and procession epitomized the cohesion of the Socialist International and – consciously or unconsciously – the tense relationship of party and trade union movement; after all, union representatives were placed at the back of the procession. The funeral corte`ge demonstrated cultural equality with the bourgeois State. Many top hats gleamed in the Zurich August sun, worn by representatives of the social democratic parliamentary group who followed Bebel’s coffin. The entire funeral ceremony had an almost transcendental meaning. Bebel, a ‘magnificent person’, an ‘example of immeasurable dedication and unwavering loyalty’, was the ‘flesh of the flesh of the proletariat’. As ‘if one’s own heart’s blood would curdle, as if the very best of us had slid down into the realm of the dead’, stated Victor Adler in his ‘mournful lament for the dead’. The German poet Ernst Klaar wrote a poem on Bebel for the social democratic satirical magazine Der Wahre Jacob: ‘Poverty knows, what it has lost with you: / A new saviour has been born for us! / A saviour – yes! / Kindled by a sublime fervour, / Boldly you have proclaimed a

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new salvation to us / The salvation of equality and justice, / Born out of the injustice of our time.’6 The bringer of salvation was dead, but his message and his dedication would survive as a pillar of the social democratic movement. ‘The sower is fallen. But his seeds will still ripen. He was fortunate enough to see them flourish and blossom and grow. Yet it was not granted him to reap the harvest.’ Bebel, who had ‘fought and suffered for the working masses’, would be unforgotten: ‘No, Bebel, you will live forever for us.’ The satirical magazine Jugend answered this heroic pathos with humour: a caricature showed a scrubby, white-bearded God with a distraught face saying: ‘Now that Bebel has come up here, all the heavenly choirs are on strike!’7 Apparently, Bebel was a jack-of-all-trades who could even convince the heavenly hosts of exploitation and persuade them to strike. What was so special about him? Charisma has become an allpurpose notion used extremely carelessly. Even some political beguilers have seemingly effortlessly gained the accolade of being charismatic. Max Weber defined charisma solely as attribution and recognition by the followers instead of resting on personal skills or character traits. Yet in contrast, charismatic power should rather be understood as interdependence between attribution and individual qualities. A charismatic personality is developed only through the reciprocal linkage between both aspects and created by staging through different media. From behind one’s desk and all alone, no one will emerge a charismatic leader. Bebel’s obituaries were full of all kinds of charismatic attributions such as dedication, devotion, trust, love, dignity, community spirit, courage, determination, the willingness to fight and to make sacrifices. Hermann Greulich, bookbinder, later journalist and co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland, described Bebel as a ‘born fighter’, who had lived a ‘rich life full of work and fight’. For all who were ‘sloppy or weak-minded’ at work he was a ‘severe judge’. Due to his ‘selfdevelopment’ he had ‘iron energy’.8 Bebel was also predestined to be ascribed charismatic attributes, because he climbed the social ladder from humble beginnings with ‘very basic and poor education’. Often we see precisely those people as charismatic who are from a marginalized background and still turn out to be successful. In the 1860s, the founders of the workers’

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organizations appeared to be ‘a handful of fools’, and yet they achieved the ‘miracle’ of setting up a mass organization. This extraordinary charisma was contextual, insofar it was primarily visible and comprehensible from the perspective of the followers. The journalist Maximilian Harden for instance, who reported on the Social Democratic Party conference in 1903, found himself disenchanted with the charismatic Bebel from the opposing political angle: ‘We think that everything he [Bebel] said in Dresden on domestic and foreign politics is unbelievably boring and silly; we are surprised [. . .] that he imagines the administration of public funds of Imperial Germany as a general store.’ However, that would not bother the party members in the slightest; they came from a completely different point of view. Moreover, the remarks in Bebel’s obituaries on his unifying achievements within the party already indicate a fear of future frictions. Even though this is with hindsight and from the perspective of the splitting of the labour movement in 1917 – 18, the remarks on Bebel as party unifier seem to be a plea to the different wings of the party organizations not to jeopardize the party’s unity. And while the New York Times in its obituary of 14 August 1913 praised Bebel for being ‘able to keep the ranks of the party united at nearly all times’, only three days later the same newspaper speculated whether the revisionists of the party would soon gain more influence.9 Characterizing Bebel as a charismatic leader was also based on the fact that it was ‘natural for German workingmen to take pride in Bebel as one of themselves, the ideal workingman, who, though he had risen to power and fame, ever remained one of themselves, faithful to the class that had unbounded faith in him, faithful to his beginnings, to his very end’, as the US journalist Herman Simpson wrote. Algernon Lee, the American socialist politician and educator, stated similarly in a letter to the New York Times: ‘The thing that characterized his whole career, more deeply perhaps than any other feature, was that he never sought to rise out of his class, but always to rise in and with it.’ Bebel’s followers saw him as authentic. It was not his villa at Lake Zurich, nor his bourgeois manners nor his impeccable clothing, but his commitment to the working class and its cause that was decisive for the perception of Bebel. This also involved him being

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a role model. It was not least thanks to the efforts of the German social democratic workers that Bebel could rise from a journeyman turner to the ‘master turner of Imperial Germany’. His ascent was based on their political local work and commitment. According to the German historian Dieter Langewiesche, this filled them with pride and gave Bebel credibility with the social democratic workers. Thanks to these ‘moral merits’, stated Kautsky, ‘Bebel earned this unbounded love that made everyone look up to him like to a father so that we feel his loss as deeply as we feel the loss of a father.’ The image of the ‘father’ is juxtaposed with the image of the workers’ emperor. The ‘Emperor Bebel’ was the leader of the working class whose ‘magical impact on the masses’ and claims to power challenged State and society, as the London Times reported. The ‘father Bebel’, not least as one of the last founders of social democracy, had the authority within the party to pull it together, at least on a formal level.10 Thus, the biography of August Bebel, born 22 February 1840 in Deutz, died 13 August 1913 in Passugg/Switzerland, is the coherent life of a person who, like everyone else, can be seen as a many-faceted personality with divergent identities. Those were not the result of existential fractures but coexisted naturally: Bebel, the atheist, worshipped by his followers as a saviour; Bebel, the critic of the State and society of Imperial Germany and its ‘mortal enemy’, yet willing to defend it with military means; Bebel, who preached the collapse of the system – the ‘Kladderadatsch’ or big crash which was also the title of a left-wing satirical magazine – and still praised economic, technological and social progress. And this was another reason for his charisma; the contradictions in Bebel’s life were the very same as those of his followers, being proud of this country that had risen thanks to their efforts, but that had nevertheless excluded them as ‘knaves without fatherland’. Finally, the attribution of charisma requires media in order to convey and spread the charismatic image. We have already mentioned that many of Bebel’s verbal battles in the context of the political infighting of German and international social democracy were staged. Theodor Heuss, first post-war president of the German Federal Republic and back in 1910 observer of the Social Democratic

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Party conference in Magdeburg, wrote to his wife: ‘Today party conference. Quite dull, so far. Tomorrow Bebel and [Ludwig] Frank going head to head – read the evening papers tomorrow.’ Journalists too treasured Bebel. The cult around his person had been built up early on. Portrait photographs were highly sought-after; in many working-class flats his picture hung right next to the one of the emperor, mirroring the divergent orientations of Bebel’s followers. The Sunday supplement of the social democratic Dutch newspaper Het Volk published a photo with the caption ‘In de arbeiderswoning’ (‘In the working-class flat’) that depicted a mother lifting up her little daughter to garland Bebel’s portrait with black ribbon. With Bebel’s death someone died who had been present in many working-class households and who was deeply missed, even at a personal level. Lotte Lemke, during the Weimar Republic chief executive of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, a social democratic welfare organization, recalled how as a little girl she came home ‘into the kitchen of the small workers’ flat. There my mother was standing at the stove crying. When I asked her what had happened she said under tears “August Bebel is dead.”11 Was Bebel also the emperor of the female workers? Even though we have to take into consideration that all obituaries idealized Bebel in general, it is striking that female authors emphasized his ‘unusual attractiveness towards women’. Julie Romm, writer for the Neue Zeit, a theoretical journal of the Social Democratic Party, recalled how her liberal bourgeois mother met Bebel in Hamburg during the Reichstag election in 1883. ‘Like all other women, he took her heart by storm. She was enamoured by his modest character, his calm and confident appearance, his amiable humour.’ Even more important than Bebel’s communication and people skills at a personal level was his commitment to women’s liberation with his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism). ‘His book was educational and provocative’, the Austrian socialist Adelheid Popp wrote on Bebel’s impact on the ‘Austrian workingwomen’s movement’. And Louise Kautsky penned in the social democratic Vorwa¨rts: ‘Especially we women have reason to warmly commemorate him today.’12 And yet, Bebel advocated a ‘male feminism’. While recognizing the social need for female emancipation in general, he had

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internalized gender differences in his private life: ‘it is a strange thing with women. If their favourites and passions are not considered or ignored somehow, if their vanities are even wounded, even the cleverest woman goes beside herself and becomes absurdly hostile. Love and hatred are close together, a controlling and balancing common sense does not exist’, Bebel wrote in a letter in 1910. Despite all his intentions to liberate women in the future socialist society, Bebel was a child of his times. Yet, female party members were in the grip of these gender stereotypes, too. Louise Zietz, member of the party’s executive board and later of the Weimar national assembly, reproduced similar stereotypes in her obituary on Bebel: ‘what we instinctively sensed, what was waving in our heads, dark and chaotically, is expressed here [in Die Frau und der Sozialismus ] in all clarity’. On the one hand the feeling woman, on the other the intellectual man. And still, female authors emphasized Bebel’s role model function in their obituaries. ‘The workingwomen movement is still learning from the most outstanding pioneer of the women’s movement. We often demanded: “If only all men would talk like him!”’ However, this was not what most men did. Hermann Molkenbuhr did not even mention women’s emancipation and gender equality in his memorial speech on Bebel at the party conference in Jena on 14 September 1913.13 After this speech, the president of the sitting, Friedrich Ebert, said: ‘We proceed in constituting the party conference, namely the bureau.’ The workers’ emperor was dead, the party turned to everyday organizational politics. There should never be another workers’ emperor. He had only been possible under the conditions of Imperial Germany with all its contradictions. According to the conservative newspaper Neue Preußische Zeitung (also known as the Kreuzzeitung), Bebel died as an unhappy Sisyphus: his death ‘will probably have no political consequences’. Yet it is also true, as the New York Times on 17 August 1913 titled in capital letters: ‘NO ONE BIG ENOUGH FOR BEBEL’S PLACE’; here we can see the happy Sisyphus.14

Epilogue

Two places, one life. Two places of the present reflect August Bebel’s path of life in the long nineteenth century. Two squares, one in Cologne-Deutz and one in Berlin, are named after him. At the beginning of the Weimar Republic, some city councillors of Bebel’s birth city Cologne-Deutz wanted to juxtapose the monarchic culture of remembrance with an iconic democratic figure. A ‘worthy square or a good street’ should be named after August Bebel in 1920. The result was disillusioning and, at the same time, illustrated the ambivalence of political culture between tradition and modernity, persistence and change, in the first German republic. The city council selected a square that was still at the planning stage and completed only seven years later. It still does not belong to the touristic highlights of the cathedral city. Situated on the right bank of the Rhine on the outskirts of the city, it is surrounded by rented flats and hosts a playground. The peripheral location, the sobriety and plainness of the Bebel Square symbolize Bebel’s start in life and his lower-class background.1 Quite the contrary is true for the Bebelplatz in Berlin, the city where Bebel had lived and worked in the Reichstag from 1890. At the meeting of the Berlin Magistrate on 16 February 1946, Karl Maron, deputy mayor of Berlin and member of the Communist Party of Germany, proposed to rename two squares in Berlin ‘on the occasion of the upcoming birthdays of Franz Mehring and August Bebel, two men who rendered outstanding services to the labour movement’.

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The members of the Magistrate unanimously accepted Maron’s proposal to rename the Franz-Joseph-Platz, located at a central place in Berlin-Mitte – in everyday language often referred to as Opernplatz (Opera Square) – after Bebel. Although there was only very scant evidence of the beauty and elegance of the square in the midst of the ruins of Berlin, the decision of 31 July 1947 in favour of this meaningful place was a clear signal. It indicated that it was considered necessary to epitomize the break from the past, from tradition, the monarchy, militarism and anti-democratic thinking. Bebel and the labour movement were supposed to be the centre of society. Moreover, choosing Bebel (and Franz Mehring) was a symbolic act on the way to the planned merger between the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED, Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) that was established in April 1946 in East Berlin. Bebel got his square in the (then previous) capital in the Soviet occupation zone, surrounded by the state opera house to the east, the Old Library to the west, with a view to the street Unter den Linden and the main building of the Humboldt University in the north. It came true what Robert Michels had once predicted in 1913 when Bebel died: only ‘if the Prussian state could be destroyed [. . .] would August Bebel get a memorial next to the “old Fritz” [Friedrich II of Prussia, Friedrich the Great] on Unter den Linden’. After the political turning point in 1989, no one suggested renaming Bebel Square. Thus, the equestrian statue of the ‘old Fritz’ is less than 50 m away from the Bebelplatz.2 What, in retrospect and from a perspective of a culture of remembrance, appears to be a successful and coherent life of an individual was in fact less consistent and more ambivalent than the history of the two squares symbolizes. The pluralism and different interpretations of Bebel as a person in the public sphere became apparent during the East – West conflict. At the SED unification party conference in April 1946, a portrait of Bebel was displayed right between the pictures of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx – which was both a reminiscence of the tradition of the labour movement and a concealment of the true balance of power. The pressure of the communists and the Soviet occupation forces to merge the two

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parties was offset with an iconographic sign of rapprochement. Portrayals of Stalin and Lenin would have been a message too threatening for the social democrats in view of the involuntary unification. In 1950, however, at the third party conference of the SED, Bebel had already become obsolete. Now, it was a picture of the ‘big four’, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, surrounded by a corona. Otherwise, Bebel was commemorated at many anniversaries and numerous events. Thanks to several streets being named after him in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Bebel kept a place in the people’s minds, more so than in the Federal Republic. However, he never sank into oblivion in either of the German states. Repeatedly, stamps with Bebel’s portrait were released in the GDR. In 1965, the postal service of the GDR printed a 20-pfennig stamp on the occasion of Bebel’s 125th anniversary, picturing a surprisingly tired-looking Bebel with a print run of 10 million copies. In 1988, the Federal Post Office followed suit and commemorated Bebel with an 80-pfennig stamp on the 75th anniversary of his death. The stamp showed Bebel behind his desk in a statesmanlike pose, concerned with his posthumous reputation. In the same year, Helmut Hirsch published the third edition of his Bebel biography at the paperback publishing house Rowohlt-Taschenbuchverlag, which had overall sales of 24,000. About eight years after William Harvey Maehl’s extensive political biography of August Bebel in the English language, two further substantial biographies in German appeared around this commemoration date in 1988 which – although diametrically opposed in ideological terms – came to similar conclusions. Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt, formerly married to the social democratic politician and Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, described Bebel as an orthodox Marxist who was incapable of reform policy. The GDR collective of authors around Ursula Herrmann and Volker Emmrich – as well as other GDR publications – highlighted Bebel’s unwavering commitment to socialism that had become ‘social reality’ in the East German state.3 One side interpreted his sense of principles as a failure, the other as outstanding achievement. Among social democrats in the Federal Republic, Willy Brandt in 1963 emphasized Bebel’s efforts by persuasion and propaganda to win the people for

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socialism. Bebel and the social democratic movement were celebrated as advocates of ‘freedom of opinion, assembly and political democracy’. By highlighting these ideals of the Federal Republic, Brandt not only distanced Bebel from GDR socialism but also from Marx. This was not surprising given the fundamental change in the orientation of the SPD at the party conference in Bad Godesberg in 1959: the first part of the party programme on the core values of socialism no longer referred to the Marxist tradition of the party. In 1988, on the 75th anniversary of Bebel’s death, Brandt emphasized Bebel’s fight ‘for peace’, which a few years later was taken up again by Johannes Rau – minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia and deputy party leader at that time – who pointed out that Bebel had opposed ‘any kind of chauvinism’. Also, he had ‘contributed more than most others’ so that ‘broad sections of the population could experience democracy’ in Germany.4 Apart from this ideological trench warfare during the East – West conflict, over the sovereignty of interpretation of Bebel’s core political values, the ‘counter-emperor’ remained a towering figure in the public’s mind due to his commitment to human rights, disarmament, justice and education. In Wetzlar and Leipzig, both cities where Bebel spent many years of his life, schools are named after him, which is an apt choice. In Wetzlar, a comprehensive school located within a traditional working-class neighbourhood bears his name. It was founded in 1972 during the phase of educational reform policy in the Federal Republic when comprehensive schools were established to eliminate the barriers between different previous school types.5 In 1992, a Leipzig primary school was named after Bebel. The August Bebel Prize of the August Bebel Foundation, ¨ nter Grass, has recently initiated by Nobel laureate in literature Gu raised broad public awareness of the ‘counter-emperor’. However, Bebel remains an ambivalent and therefore a historically intriguing figure. Many of his ideas and convictions are only understandable considering the historical context. From today’s perspective, Bebel’s unquestioned belief in progress seems strange in a period that is clearly shaped by the double-edged effects of progress. But for him, for social democracy and for many of his contemporaries this belief was a driving force. There was already an

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ongoing discourse on the negative consequences of progress in Bebel’s last years of life (and not just among nostalgic conservatives), but it had no relevance for Bebel in particular and German social democracy in general. Some utopian elements, which Bebel elaborated in his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus, contained both the idea of emancipatory liberation and – in practical and organizational terms – the path to the patronizing State at the same time. On the one hand, Bebel’s inclination to permanently discuss the orientation of the party presents him as a self-referential party functionary who had lost touch with the worries and hardships of his followers. On the other hand, this commitment to his principles – which seems rather unworldly from today’s perspective, given the current state of the political world – was the glue that held the party together. In a certain way, Bebel as a socialist was valueconservative (wertkonservativ) and progressive at the same time. In addition to this ambivalence, we have seen him as someone who took care of many people individually and who was concerned about social justice and political participation. Furthermore, it should be noted that his firm commitment to principles, which increasingly hardened and even turned into dogmatism during the 1890s, was also a response to State repression. Despite the heroization of the persecution under the Anti-SocialistLaws, a loss of trust towards the State remained. Bebel changed and stayed true to himself at the same time: as a member of the liberal workers’ association movement during the 1860s, he favoured selfhelp over support by the State; later as a socialist he denounced the existing State and hoped for a harmonizing ‘future State’. Even liberal observers had to admit that Bebel ‘was never an unwavering and extreme radical’, despite his commitment to his principles. The Frankfurter Zeitung even spotted ‘a certain sereneness’, a ‘mellowness of age’ in his last years of life. According to the liberal newspaper, his criticism of Ludwig Frank and the Baden reformists within the party in 1910 had been ‘gracious’ and ‘inoffensive to the social democrats from Baden’. In the Reichstag, he voted in favour of several bills in 1912 and ‘repeatedly compromised between a radical basic view and practical necessities of politics while holding a public office’.6

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Bebel could easily be incorporated into the phalanx of critics of capitalism who are still discussed today, but his suggestions are ambivalent. His criticism of the ‘principle of “cheap and bad” that is true for the most part of the bourgeois production’ is an apt description of the aberrations of today’s mass consumption. But Bebel’s conclusions also evoke uniform grey images of the economy of scarcity: the ‘socialist economy’ ‘will put an end to fashion follies and fooleries which only favour waste and often tastelessness’.7 In the historical context Bebel’s ideas were given special meaning against the backdrop of the exploitation of physically hard-working people under disastrous conditions – which today rather takes place in other parts of the world. The ‘slaughters of capitalism’, as Bebel put it, are no longer happening in German collieries and British factories but in South African goldmines and Asian textile mills. Today, it is sulphur workers in Indonesia and Pakistani labourers dismantling discarded crude oil vessels with cutting blowpipes, who suffer health-damaging exploitation. Thus Bebel’s political message has to be globalized in line with the already globalized working conditions. Nevertheless, social grievances continue to exist even in the Western world. Inequalities between rich and poor are increasing. ‘The concentration of wealth’, as Bebel put it in Die Frau und der Sozialismus, is still valid. Before this situation can be remedied, it is necessary to ‘raise public awareness for the people involved’, an August Bebel Prize laureate, the sociologist Oskar Negt, wrote about ¨nter Wallraff.8 his fellow laureate, the investigative journalist Gu In the last third of the nineteenth century, Bebel and his party initiated a structural change by mobilizing the masses, and Bebel as a gifted speaker again and again raised ‘awareness for the people involved’ in the Reichstag. And yet, he never became a staunch advocate of parliamentarianism or a passionate proponent of representative democracy. It was his strong belief that democracy and justice could only come true under socialism. Since Bebel envisaged the socialist society as extremely harmonic, elections and efforts to find social alternatives would become obsolete in the long run.9 Bebel demanded and supported attitudes that we would refer to today as engagement with and for civil society. In retrospect, this

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seems to have been even easier in the nineteenth century than today. It was the time of association blissfulness. The association – and as an organization at local level the Social Democratic Party had similar traits to an association – offered sociability and community. Beer and politics shaped a markedly male political culture in the associations. Civil engagement also promised a welcome escape from everyday life, and offered grassroots members change and stimulation. The perspective of an individualized consumer society a hundred years later should not make us forget this historical context. However, this nineteenth-century association community based on participation clearly had an exclusive character. Apart from some half-hearted attempts, social democrats never seriously tried to include workers with a different social profile such as agricultural workers, let alone small farmers, into their organization. The original workers’ movement that incorporated numerous artisan journeymen and artisan masters – one of whom was Bebel – in its foundation stage, turned into a party of (skilled) factory workers around and after 1900. Women were also excluded. Bebel’s commitment to the emancipation of women was met with fierce opposition within his own organization. Unskilled workers were underrepresented in the party. Otherwise, social democracy was a party of labour. Involuntary unemployment was strongly criticized and was an important aspect of the political agitation to mobilize the workers or to win new followers. But any other form of unemployment, such as idleness and loafing, was unacceptable. A high work ethic was taken for granted. In the 1880s, Bebel wholeheartedly turned to politics. Politics became his profession. But was Bebel a politician? This question, which might seem absurd at first glance, originates in a conservative understanding of politics, implying that politics always and exclusively has to follow the feasible. The publicist Hellmut von Gerlach, who was part of the liberal national social movement, stressed in his Bebel biography of 1909: The leader of the largest German party has never been a politician in the proper sense of the word. Like the statesman, the politician has to develop long-term plans [. . .] Only the final goal was fixed in Bebel’s political thinking, the socialist future state. He never lost sight of this goal. But he never racked his brain about how to reach this goal.

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His political strategy was to take one step at a time. [. . .] Bebel always pursued politics either for the very distant future or the very next moment. He did not care much about what lay between these two poles.

The obituary in the conservative Neue Preußische Zeitung repeated this point of view. Party work had been a ‘matter of the heart’ for Bebel: ‘he was an honest visionary. If the politician is mainly characterized by sound and sober judgment, then Bebel was nothing less than a politician.’ This argument as a general characterization – distorting Bebel’s actual political work – has kept coming up until today. He ‘was no strategist, did not draw any lines, did not show options between everyday life and political utopia’. This is, allegedly, the ‘unfortunate legacy of August Bebel’.10 Contrary to this understanding of politics, Max Weber formulated a much more differentiated concept. In his view, ‘three qualities are chiefly decisive for the politician: passion, responsibility and a sense of proportion. Passion in the sense of concentration on the object of concern [Sachlichkeit ]: passionate devotion to a “cause” [Sache ].’ ‘Responsibility toward this same cause’ had to become the ‘decisive guiding star of his action’. Finally, a ‘sense of proportion’, ‘the ability, with inward calmness and composure, to allow the realities to work on one’, is needed. The obituary in the conservative London Times described Bebel in a similar way: Bebel ‘was something more than a politician. He was the leader for nearly two generations of perhaps the most striking movement of our times. There have been chiefs more brilliant amongst the German Socialists, but none has done such service to the cause.’11 Precisely because Bebel did not have an unambiguous personality and because he passionately fought for the cause of socialism, but did not ‘allow the realities to work on’ him ‘with inward calmness and composure’ given the looming crash (Kladderadatsch), he was accepted as a political personality within the social democratic milieu. Bebel managed the balancing act between visionary longterm goals and pragmatic reform policy; at the same time, he successfully integrated grassroots members into politics. It was this mixture that created Bebel’s halo as emperor and father of the workers, within and beyond the party. And when Bebel was pushing

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his physical limits in doing so, he was still sure ‘that it will not destroy him if the world, as he sees it, is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer it and that he is capable of saying, in the face of all this, “nevertheless”’, ‘only such a one has the “vocation” for politics’, as Max Weber stated.12 As we have seen, Bebel’s entire working life was shaped by the concepts of sacrifice, fight and commitment to the cause of his party and its ideas. It is a good thing when politically committed people no longer fall prey to the male-connoted mania of sacrifice. But Bebel considered his life as a life for politics – a life for politics till death, which even his worst enemies appreciatively admitted. The day before his death, Bebel asked the party executive for travel information concerning the next party conference. Thus it is fair to say, as the Neue Preußische Zeitung wrote, ‘that he belonged to the party until his last breath’.13 And The Times, while admitting that it had with Bebel’s ‘theory [. . .] small sympathy’ and declaring that ‘his views [. . .] were narrow and doctrinaire’, summarized Bebel’s life with words of highest appreciation: ‘A notable figure has passed away – Herr Bebel is no more. Lassalle, Marx, Liebknecht, Bebel – these names sum up the history of German Socialism; and it is a question whether the last has not exercised the deepest and most enduring influence.’ He probably was ‘[l]ess gifted outwardly than the other three’, but ‘Bebel was a greater party leader than any of these; a consummate Parliamentarian and organizer; a courageous fighter and an adroit tactician; a great general in Parliamentary warfare. His has been a life of strenuous, unflagging labour, clear concentration on distinct objects, a long propaganda directed with unfailing skill.’14

Chronology

1804 Birth of Wilhelmine Simon in Wetzlar, mother of August Bebel. 1808 Birth of Johann Gottlob Bebel (or 1809), father of August Bebel. 1820s Wilhelmine Simon moves to Frankfurt upon Main and to Mayence and works as housemaid. 1828 Johann Bebel and his brother Ferdinand, both trained coopers, voluntarily join the Prussian Army in the Prussian province Posen (Poznan´). 1830 Redeployment of both Bebels’ military units to Mayence. 1838 Marriage of Johann Bebel and Wilhelmine Bebel, ne´e Simon. 1840 22 February: birth of August Bebel in Deutz near Cologne. 1844 31 January: death of Bebel’s father. 14 October: Bebel’s mother marries her first husband’s brother. 1846 19 October: death of Bebel’s stepfather; the family moves back to Wetzlar. 1853 2 June: death of Bebel’s mother. 1854 May: Bebel starts his apprenticeship as a wood-turner in Wetzlar. 1858 February: Bebel begins his journeyman’s travel. 1860 Spring: Bebel returns to Wetzlar and works as a turner in Butzbach. May: Bebel moves to Leipzig.

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1861 19 February: Bebel joins the Industrial Educational Association (Gewerblicher Bildungsverein) in Leipzig. 1862 Autumn: a split-off of the Industrial Educational Association, the association Vorwa¨rts (literally: ‘Forward’ or ‘Ahead’), asks Ferdinand Lassalle to write workers a programme. 1863 6 February: public speech of Bebel at the second anniversary celebration of the Industrial Educational Association; on that occasion, Bebel meets his future wife Julie, ne´e Otto. 23 May: foundation of the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV) in Leipzig; F. Lassalle becomes president. 7/8 June: Bebel attends the foundation ceremony of the Congress of German Workers’ Associations (Vereinstag – from 1867 on Verband – Deutscher Arbeitervereine, VDAV) in Frankfurt upon Main. 1864 24 January: Bebel starts his own business, a turner workshop, in Leipzig. 23/24 October: second meeting of the VDAV in Leipzig prepared by Bebel. 1865 Spring: foundation of a Workers’ Educational Association (Arbeiterbildungsverein) in Leipzig; Bebel becomes chairman; he meets and gets acquainted with Wilhelm Liebknecht. December: foundation of the trade union of cigar workers, the General German Cigar Workers Society, in Leipzig. 1866 9 April: marriage of August Bebel and Julie Otto. June/July: Prussia and its North German allies go to war against Austria and its South German allies. 19 August: foundation of the Saxon People’s Party (Sa¨chsische Volkspartei). Summer: Bebel joins the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), the First International. 1867 25 February: Bebel elected to the Constituent Reichstag of the North German Confederation. 6/7 October: at the fourth meeting of the VDAV in Gera, the delegates elect Bebel president.

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1868 5– 7 September: fifth meeting of the VDAV in Nuremberg: liberal-leaning members leave the Congress of German Workers’ Associations. Bebel re-elected president. 1869 16 January: birth of Bebel’s daughter Frieda. 7– 10 August: foundation congress of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) in Eisenach. VDAV is dissolved. December: Bebel’s first imprisonment. 1870 July 1870 – February 1871: Franco-German War. 26 November: Bebel speaks in the Reichstag against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. 1871 18 January: coronation of Wilhelm I as German emperor; foundation of the German Empire. 3 March: Bebel elected to the Reichstag; apart from the years between 1881 and 1883, he was a member of the Reichstag until his death. 1872 11 – 23 March: high treason trial in Leipzig against Bebel, W. Liebknecht und Adolf Hepner. 8 July – 14 May 1874: Bebel imprisoned; extensive reading and writing of journalistic texts during the arrest. 1874 1 July: Bebel sentenced for high treason and lese-majesty. 1875 1 April 1875: released from Festungshaft (imprisonment in a fortress). 22227 May: unification party conference of the SDAP and the ADAV: foundation of the Socialist Workers’ Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei, SAP). New party programme adopted. 1876 All year through: election campaign trips. Business and party affairs keep dominating Bebel’s life. An early highlight is a public meeting with around 5,000 participants in Leipzig (17 February). 30 March: SAP is banned in Prussia. Autumn: Ferdinand Ißleib becomes joint partner in Bebel’s turner business. 1877 23 November: Bebel sentenced to six months in jail; he works on the manuscript of Die Frau und der Sozialismus. 1878 21 October: Anti-Socialist Laws passed. 1879 February: Die Frau und der Sozialismus published.

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1880 December: Bebel visits Marx and Engels in London. 1881 June: Bebel and Liebknecht expelled from Leipzig. 12 July: Bebel becomes member of the Saxon diet (until 1890). October/November: Bebel loses his Reichstag mandate in the elections. 1883 March/April: illegal SAP party conference in Copenhagen; on his way back to Germany, Bebel is briefly arrested. 29 June: Bebel wins back his Reichstag mandate in a byelection in Hamburg. 1884 September: Bebel moves to Dresden-Plauen with his family. 1885 December 1884 – May: internal party quarrels about the subsidy of steamships, tensions between Bebel and Liebknecht. 1886 November: Bebel writes his book on Charles Fourier during a nine-month imprisonment. 1887 October/November: Bebel visits Engels in London. 1888 December: Bebel sells his business shares to his associate F. Ißleib. From this moment on, Bebel works exclusively as a politician. 1889 May/June: strike of the miners in the Ruhr valley, Silesia and in the Saar region. July: Bebel participates in the founding congress of the Second International in Paris. November/December: trial at the district court of Elberfeld against the SAP with more than 400 witnesses. The party, represented by Bebel, emerges successful. 1890 30 September: end of the Anti-Socialist Laws. September: Bebel and his wife move to Berlin. October: at the party conference in Halle/Saale the SAP renames itself Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), name it retains today. 1891 2 February: marriage of Bebel’s daughter Frieda to Ferdinand Simon. From this time on, August and Julie Bebel regularly visit Zurich.

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October: party conference in Erfurt; a new Marxist-leaning party programme is adopted: the Erfurt Programme. 1892 March: first General Congress of German Trade Unions in Halberstadt. 21 November: the delegates of the party conference in Berlin elect Bebel as co-chairman, together with Paul Singer. 1893 February: Bebel explains the idea of the future socialist State in the Reichstag. 1894 16 February: with great public effect, Bebel criticizes German colonial politics in the Reichstag. 22 February: birth of Bebel’s grandson Werner Simon. Spring: daughter Frieda suffers from depression. 1895 October: the programme to support rural areas (Agrarprogramm) that Bebel advocates does not get a majority at the Breslau party conference. 1896 9 February: Bebel attends a huge demonstration against the deterioration of suffrage to the Saxon diet. November– February 1897: strike of the Hamburg dockworkers. ¨ snacht at 1897 July: Bebel and his wife move into their villa in Ku Lake Zurich. 14 December: speech in front of students in Berlin. 1898 February: Bebel’s pamphlet against militarism is published: Nicht stehendes Heer, sondern Volkswehr! 1899 Spring: discussions with Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin on their opposition to revisionism. October: at the party conference in Hannover, Bebel heavily criticizes Bernstein for his revisionist positions. 1900 June: in the 210 meetings of the preceding session of the Reichstag, Bebel took the floor 136 times. 1901 5 December: the Social Democratic Party delivers a petition against food customs to the Reichstag with almost 3.5 million signatures. 1903 September: party conference in Dresden: Bebel attacks the revisionist wing of the party. 1904 7 March: in a Reichstag speech, Bebel claims that, in the case of a defensive war, he himself would shoulder arms.

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August: congress of the Second International in Amsterdam, fierce dispute between Bebel and Jean Jaure`s. 1905 30 January: Bebel speaks in the Reichstag about the uprising of the Herero in German South West Africa. September: party conference in Jena: debates about the political purpose of mass strikes. 1906 September: at the party conference in Mannheim, the conflict between party and trade unions over mass strikes as a political tool is resolved. 1907 25 January: for the first time since 1881, although the number of votes for the SPD increased in absolute numbers, it declined as a percentage. The number of mandates halves to 43. August: the congress of the Second International in Stuttgart speaks against arms race and warns of a world war. 1908 February: Julie Bebel diagnosed with breast cancer. April: August Bebel suffers from a cardiac insufficiency; several stays at a health spa. September: at the Nuremberg party conference, Bebel, entirely exhausted, speaks against the approval of the budget in the diet of the South West German Grand Duchy of Baden. 1909 September: for the first time Bebel does not give a position paper at a party conference. 1910 The first part of Bebel’s memoirs Aus meinem Leben is published. 25 February: official celebration organized by the SPD for Bebel’s 70th birthday with several thousand guests. Spring: mass rally against the Prussian three-class suffrage. September: at the Magdeburg party conference, Bebel delivers a position paper against budget approvals. 22 November: death of Julie Bebel; funeral in Zurich. 1911 The second part of Bebel’s memoirs Aus meinem Leben is published. 28 March: Bebel delivers a speech about domestic and foreign policies in his Hamburg constituency. September: Bebel gives the welcome address and the position paper on the Morocco crisis at the party conference in Jena. 1912 4 January: death of Bebel’s son-in-law Ferdinand Simon.

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12 January: in the Reichstag elections the SPD wins 34.8 per cent of the votes and becomes strongest parliamentary group. September: Bebel falls ill during the Chemnitz party conference. 1913 20 June: it is the last time Bebel participates in voting by roll call in the Reichstag. 13 August: Bebel dies in Churwalden/Passugg, Switzerland. 17 August: funeral in Zurich. 1920 In Cologne-Deutz a place is renamed as Bebelplatz. 1947 25 March: in Berlin (West), the August Bebel Institute for political education is founded. July: renaming of the Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-Platz (Opernplatz) as Bebelplatz in the city centre of Berlin (Berlin-Mitte). 1972 A comprehensive school (Gesamtschule) in Wetzlar is named after Bebel. 1991 April: foundation of the August Bebel Society in Eisenach. 1992 A primary school in Leipzig is named after Bebel. ¨ nter 2011 Establishment of the August Bebel Foundation by Gu Grass. 2013 August: festivities in Zurich and broad coverage on the centenary of Bebel’s death.

Dramatis Personae

Adler, Victor (1852 – 1918), physician. He was able to unite the different Austrian socialist groups at the party conference in Hainfeld in 1889 and established the Social Democratic Party of Austria. A close and intimate friend of Bebel. At Bebel’s funeral reception Adler stated: ‘Each of us feels a deep gap in our lives.’ Auer, Ignatz (1846 – 1907), saddler, editor. Significantly involved in the unification with the ADAV in 1875. Bebel complained in 1899 that Auer ‘marches more and more to the right’; nevertheless, they remained close friends. In 1901, Auer wrote to Bebel from a spa town: ‘I also gained several pounds of weight.’ Bebel,

Ferdinand

August

(1808/9 – 1846),

non-commissioned

officer, workhouse warden, brother of Johann Bebel; August Bebel’s stepfather. Although he beat the children, August referred to him as a ‘kind-hearted man’. Bebel, Frieda (1869 – 1948), daughter of August und Julie. Did a foundation course as a preparation to go to medical school, no exam. Married the physician Ferdinand Simon. Experienced repeated bouts of mental illness. ‘Unfortunately Frieda’s condition is very dissatisfying. We visited her yesterday, every visit gives me pain,’ Bebel wrote to Minna Kautsky in 1912. Bebel, Johann (1808/9 – 1844), non-commissioned officer, father of August Bebel. August characterized him as a ‘conscientious, accurate

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and neat soldier’ who was ‘sick and tired’ of his existence as a soldier after 12 years of service. Bebel, Julie, ne´e Otto (1843 – 1910), milliner. Married August Bebel in 1866. ‘I could not have found a wife more loving and devoted, always willing to make sacrifices’, Bebel wrote in his memoirs. Bebel, Wilhelmine, ne´e Simon (1804 – 1853), housemaid, mother of August Bebel. Bebel remembered: ‘the poor lass had seen few good days in her wedlock and widow life. But yet, she was always friendly and of good cheer.’ Becker, Johann Philipp (1809 – 1886), brush-maker and journalist. President of the German section of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in Geneva. Participant in the foundation party conference of the SDAP in Eisenach in 1869. In 1884, the Bebel family visited Becker at Lake Geneva on a holiday trip. Bernstein, Eduard (1850 – 1932), bank clerk, journalist. From the 1890s, Bernstein demanded a revision of Marxist principles within the SPD. In Bebel’s eyes, this development was ‘the most severe danger looming for the party’. In a letter to Bernstein, Bebel accused him of being ‘no longer anchored in social democracy’. Bismarck, Otto von (1815 – 1898), estate owner, prince, minister president of Prussia, chancellor of Imperial Germany. In retrospect, Bebel was impressed by ‘his [Bismarck’s] ability to hate’. Bismarck ‘is a character [. . .] composed of volcanic fire’ and ‘particularly liked to attack his enemies’. Bebel described Bismarck as a man ‘who has never done a good deed during his entire life’. Dammer, Otto (1839 – 1916), chemist. Together with F. Fritzsche and J. Vahlteich, Dammer invited Ferdinand Lassalle to compile a programme for the Leipzig workers’ association. Dammer had lost touch with the workers’ movement during the 1870s. Bebel remembered him as ‘one of the most diligent lecturers’ of the Leipzig workers and workers’ educational association.

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177

Dietz, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm (1843 – 1922), typesetter and publisher. His publishing house in Stuttgart was highly regarded as the ‘Cotta of the workers’ movement’, a comparison with one of the most renowned middle-class publishers of German classic literature. Published Bebel’s main works. Bebel stated that ‘Dietz took a great risk’ in printing the second edition of his banned book in Germany under the Anti-Socialist Laws. Ellenberger, Carl Heinrich (1805 – 1857), wood turner master, in whose workshop Bebel learned his craft. Bebel described him as an ‘artist’ of wood turning, but also as a rigorous master. Engels, Friedrich (1820– 1895), businessman, political economist, philosopher, author of the socio-critical book Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England (1845, English translation: The Condition of the Working Class, 1885). Karl Marx’s closest friend and working partner. Bebel was in contact with him from the 1870s; from 1880, Bebel and Engels used the informal ‘Du’ when they met or wrote to each other. Bebel stated: ‘when he died in 1895 at the age of 75 it was as if a part of myself had died’. Fourier, Charles (1772 –1832), salesman and social critic. A utopian socialist who advocated the idea of a harmonic, autarkic, selfsufficient society. Bebel wrote a biography of Fourier in 1888, in which he stated: ‘Fourier’s great merit is that he did not let himself be deceived by the bourgeois society, that he recognized its hollowness and ambivalences and that he unmasked it without mercy.’ Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1825 – 1905), cigar maker. Co-founder and member of the executive board of the ADAV; 1865 – 78 president of the union of German cigar workers. Emigrated to the USA in 1881. Bebel admired his courageous opposition to the middle-class notables in the Leipzig Industrial Educational Association in 1861/2. Geck, Ernst Adolf (1852 – 1942), technician and journalist. Editor of the social democratic newspaper Volksfreund in Offenburg, long-time Reichstag member in Imperial Germany and in the Weimar Republic. Close and down-to-earth friendship with Bebel: ‘But I am happy that

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you have been in the theatre and enjoyed yourself at the winetasting. It is fun with Adolf [Geck]’, Julie Bebel wrote to her husband, amused by his report of his visit to the Geck family in 1906. Hasenclever, Wilhelm (1837–1889), tanner and journalist. From 1871 president of the ADAV. Bebel recalled that Hasenclever initially tried to emulate the ostentation of his predecessor Johann B. v. Schweitzer: Hasenclever arrived ‘in Altona in a coach pulled by two grey horses and enjoyed being given an ovation by his supporters’. But Hasenclever soon recognized that ‘this role does not suit him’. Hauptmann, Gerhart (1862–1942), writer, literature Nobel laureate (1912). Their son-in-law, Ferdinand Simon, introduced Julie and August Bebel to Hauptmann. August attended a home performance of the forbidden play Die Weber. He was less impressed with Hauptmann’s further works. When ‘all court theatres’ performed Hauptmann’s romantic-mystical play Hannele Matterns Himmelfahrt, Bebel said he would regret it ‘if he [Hauptmann] developed further in this direction’. Hirsch, Max (1832 – 1905), economist and journalist. Member of the VDAV, engaged in social policy. Together with Franz Duncker and Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, co-founder of the Hirsch-Dunckersche Gewerkvereine, a liberal trade union organization. According to August Bebel, the coal miners’ strike in the Waldenburg district of Silesia in 1869 was ‘a severe blow’ to their idea of ‘harmony between the interests of capital and labour’. In 1867, Hirsch lost the presidential election to Bebel at the VDAV meeting in Gera. Ißleib, Ferdinand (1838 – 1897), businessman, joint partner and financer of Bebel’s turner workshop. When Bebel was jailed in 1887, Julie reminded her husband that ‘Mr Ißleib’s birthday is on 15 July’ so that he would send him a letter. Jaure`s, Jean (1859 – 1914), teacher, philosopher. Co-founder of the newspaper L’Humanite´ and of the French section of the Second International. In a way, Jaure`s was a reform-oriented ‘French Bebel’. Bebel described Jaure`s as the ‘real leader of our people’ in France. However, due to Jaure`s’ pragmatic politics and his leaning towards

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cooperation with the French Government, Bebel considered him a ‘rather strange saint’. Kautsky, Karl (1854–1938), writer, editor. Represented the Marxist core of the SPD in programmatic and theoretical terms; he was a close ally of Bebel and published the third part of Bebel’s memoirs after his death. Bebel recalled that in the 1880s, Kautsky and Bernstein – fierce opponents in the revisionism debate – sang a duet that ‘softened stones and broke one’s heart’ in the editorial office of the Sozialdemokrat. Kautsky-Freyberger, Louise (1860 – 1950), ne´e Strasser, F. Engels’ secretary. Bebel met Louise after her divorce from K. Kautsky and was impressed by her appearance. According to Bebel, she tended ‘to get carried away out of sheer liveliness’, but otherwise ‘she is a fine specimen of a woman’. Lange, Friedrich Albert (1828 – 1875), philosopher, publicist and professor. Member of the VDAV and the IWMA. Helped push the VDAV increasingly ‘to the left’. ‘One of the most amiable people I have met’, judged Bebel. Lassalle, Ferdinand (1825–1864), lawyer, philosopher and author. Cofounder and first president of the ADAV. Bebel, initially a firm opponent, encountered socialist ideas through Lassalle’s work. Bebel recalled from Lassalle’s first appearance he attended, that the president of the ADAV was a ‘fluent but sometimes declamatory’ speaker. Liebknecht, Natalie, ne´e Reh (1835 – 1909), Wilhelm Liebknecht’s second wife. Despite political disagreements between Bebel and W. Liebknecht, their families had a friendly relationship. In 1890, Bebel urged Natalie to move to Berlin with her family – and was successful in the end. Bebel supported Liebknecht’s sons and openly shared with Natalie his sorrows about his daughter Frieda. In 1894, Bebel wrote to Natalie that Frieda ‘insistently’ expressed ‘suicidal thoughts several times’. Liebknecht, Wilhelm (1826–1900), studied, among other subjects, philosophy. 1848-revolutionary, journalist. Leading member of

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social democracy, initially in the ADAV, then in the VDAV. Close friend of Bebel, one of Bebel’s most important political mentors, though often severely criticized by him. Bebel had the impression that Liebknecht’s political decisions were ‘completely dominated by emotions’; ‘his softness increases with age’, Bebel wrote to Kautsky in 1885. Luxemburg, Rosa (1871 –1919), economist and author. Lecturer at the SPD party school. She ‘is an intelligent woman and will stand her ground’, Bebel wrote in 1898. Later, he and Luxemburg grew apart. Marx, Jenny, ne´e von Westphalen (1814 – 1881), Karl Marx’s wife. Bebel met her in 1880 when he travelled to London the first time: ‘she had an elegant appearance, immediately won my sympathy and was skilled in entertaining her guests in the most charming, gracious manner’. Marx, Karl (1818 – 1883), philosopher, economist, journalist. Author (together with Engels) of The Communist Manifesto in 1847/8, cofounder of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in 1864. From 1880, Marx and Bebel used the informal ‘Du’ when they met or wrote to each other. Bebel was ‘very positively surprised to see how Marx – at that time notorious for being the worst misanthrope – was a dab hand at playing with his grandchildren’. Most, Johann (1846–1906), bookbinder and editor. Several agitation tours on behalf of the SDAP and the SAP in the 1870s, after 1880 anarchist, emigrated to the USA in 1882. Bebel saw Most best characterized in how he – ‘with all the passion of his temperament’ – initiated the movement for leaving the Church in 1878. Motteler, Julius (1838 – 1907), cloth-maker, merchant. From 1863 member of the VDAV. Together with Julius Bruhns he organized the illegal distribution of social democratic press material from Switzerland to Germany. When Motteler was expelled from Switzerland and moved to London, Bebel wrote that he ‘fights with his life and limb and until his last breath for the cause’ of the party; however, he found it difficult ‘to adapt to unfamiliar situations’ so that he ‘will be a complete mess before his wife arrives’.

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Otto-Peters, Louise (1819 –1895), writer and journalist. Co-founder of the General German Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein) in 1865. Bebel recalled that when she as chairwoman of the Leipzig Women’s Educational Association asked the Workers’ Educational Association for the club house ‘to establish a Sunday school for girls, we willingly gave our consent’. Richter, Eugen (1838 – 1906), lawyer, insurance salesman, journalist. Member of the (left-)liberal German Progress Party (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, Deutsch-Freisinnige Partei). Important opponent of Bebel in the Reichstag, which apparently influenced Bebel’s reminiscence of their very first meeting: Richter ‘acted as if he were looking down on us full of superior contempt’. Roßma¨ßler, Emil Adolf (1806 –1867), teacher and professor of zoology. Co-founder of the Industrial Educational Association in Leipzig, of the VDAV and the Saxon People’s Party. Roßma¨ßler ‘firmly tried to warn Bebel of Liebknecht’, because he was ‘a dangerous person, a disguised communist’. Schweichel, Robert (1821 – 1907), journalist and writer. Schweichel, ‘a happy reveller’ (F. Mehring), contributed ‘vividly’ to the agitation for the VDAV in the 1860s. Asked by Bebel to draft a programme for the Nuremberg VDAV meeting in 1868. ‘Schweichel’s conciliatory character was more helpful than Liebknecht’s daring nature in this situation, when it was necessary to win the still hesitating members.’ Schweitzer, Johann Baptist von (1833 – 1875), lawyer and writer. President of the ADAV 1867 – 71. In Bebel’s view, Schweitzer was ‘a large-scale demagogue’ who would ‘have proved to be a worthy scholar of Machiavelli had he been a leading figure of the state’. Schweitzer ‘must have been very anaemic’, Bebel assumed. When both shook hands, it felt as if ‘I had grasped the cold, clammy hand of a dead body.’ Simon, Ferdinand (1864 – 1912), physician and scientist. Husband of August Bebel’s daughter Frieda. Bebel asked social

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democrats from Solingen – a stronghold of the cutlery industry – for their advice, because he wanted to buy ‘silverware of best quality’ as a wedding present. Bebel financially supported Simon’s medical research. When Simon, who ‘as a husband, father and son-in-law was without equal’, died prematurely, the family lost ‘their essential backbone’. Simon, Werner (1894 – 1916), studied medicine. Grandson of August Bebel. After Werner’s birth Bebel wrote: ‘He is exceptionally lively but very well-behaved, one hardly noticed that a child is in the house.’ The fact that Werner successfully passed his school leaving exam (Abitur) in 1912 and was ‘ready to go to university, gives me a feeling of relief’, Bebel wrote to Kautsky. Singer, Paul (1844 – 1911), businessman. From 1869 member of the SDAP, from 1892 together with Bebel co-chairman of the SPD. When Bebel and Singer prepared a trip to London in 1892, Julie Bebel was confident that Singer would ‘protect her husband; he is faithful like gold’. Sonnemann, Leopold (1831–1909), banker and publisher. Co-founder and board member of the VDAV until 1867, (left-)liberal member of the Reichstag 1871–84. He financially supported Bebel on his way into politics. In the preface to his memoirs Bebel commemorated Sonnemann, who died a year before, as one of his fellow campaigners in the early years of the movement. During Bebel’s imprisonment in a fortress, he sent Bebel ‘twenty bottles of wine to prison’. After Bebel’s arrest Sonnemann granted him a loan of 600 Taler. Vahlteich, Carl Julius (1839 –1915), shoemaker and editor. Member of the Leipzig educational association, made contact with Lassalle in 1862/3. Co-founder of the ADAV in 1863, switched to the VDAV, in 1869 co-founder of the SDAP. Emigrated to the USA in 1881: he had ‘lost his livelihood three times, he finally wants peace and to enjoy his life’, Vahlteich explained his decision to Bebel. Vollmar, Georg von (1850 – 1922), officer and journalist. Leading figure of Bavarian social democracy, represented a reform-oriented current

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within German socialism. Around 1880, Bebel supported Vollmar: ‘If I can help you in one way or another, please let me know without being ashamed; what can be done, shall be done’, Bebel wrote in 1878, when Vollmar was arrested. After Vollmar’s revisionist turn, Bebel attacked him spitefully and personally. He mocked Vollmar for being wealthy and having lost touch with social democratic rankand-file members, because he lived ‘on the idyllic shore of the Walchensee’ in the Bavarian Alps. Wilhelm I (1797 – 1888), King of Prussia and German Emperor. In 1848, he ordered the military suppression of the revolution and, in doing so, antagonized the masses; in the last years of his life he was very popular in Germany. Bebel disliked the cult around the emperor: ‘How this poor, old W[ilhelm] is shown around everywhere to be applauded and cheered. An appalling spectacle, in any case, and also calculated.’ Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941), King of Prussia and German Emperor. Wilhelm’s politics of social reform in 1890/2 did not impress Bebel and could not stop the rise of the labour movement. On the contrary, Bebel assumed that Wilhelm’s undiplomatic, anti-socialist tone would even strengthen social democracy. Bebel’s statement in the Reichstag that ‘every speech of the emperor wins us around 100,000 additional votes’ caused ‘tumultuous amusement’ in the plenary session on 22 January 1903. Bebel predicted that the emperor ‘will bring the splendour of the Hohenzollern dynasty to an end’. Zetkin, Clara (1857 – 1933), primary school teacher. Campaigner for women’s rights within the Social Democratic Party, editor of the journal Gleichheit. Although Zetkin (together with R. Luxemburg) supported Bebel in his fight against revisionism, Bebel kept his distance from Zetkin throughout his life: ‘the good Clara is often unreasonable and makes a fuss; fortunately, her journal is published sub-rosa and gets only little attention’, Bebel wrote in 1898. Shortly before his death, Bebel feared that ‘in Jena [at the party conference] the two women [Zetkin and Luxemburg], together with their supporters, plan to attack all key institutions’ of the party.

Glossary of Associations and Parties at Local, National and International Level

Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV: General German Workers’ Association, founded on 23 May 1863, existed until 1875. First president Ferdinand Lassalle, 1863 – 4. Founded on the initiative of workers from the association Vorwa¨rts in Leipzig. In its heyday, the association had about 8,000 to 9,000 members. The president of the centralized association had dictatorial powers. This caused internal quarrels and was one reason that many members left the ADAV in 1869 to join the newly founded Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Arbeiterbildungsverein, Leipzig: Workers’ Educational Association. In the early 1860s, many educational societies were founded throughout Germany. The Leipzig association was a merger of the Gewerbliche Bildungsverein and the association Vorwa¨rts, established in 1864/5. Liberal and social democratic oriented members joined the Workers’ Educational Association; both middle- and working-class representatives participated. The association was partly funded by the municipality; however, after an obvious shift to the left in 1866/7, these subsidies stopped. Deutscher Arbeiterbund: German Workers’ Federation. The federation was established by liberals after the SDAP was founded in Eisenach. This liberal labour movement was never more than a splinter organization.

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Deutscher Nationalverein: German National Association, founded in 1859, one of the first political mass organizations in the 1860s with about 23,000 members. Inspired, among others, by the Italian unification, it fought for the German unification. Most of the members were liberal-leaning, some moderate democrats. However, the association split over Bismarck’s unification politics and domestic politics in general. The rightwing members followed Bismarck (and founded the National Liberal Party), while the left liberals founded the German Progress Party. Since, in addition, the organization’s point of arrival – Germany’s unification – was on its way, the association ceased to exist in 1867. Deutsche Reichspartei: German Reich Party, from 1871 successor of the Free Conservative Party (Freikonservative Partei), a conservative party between right-wing conservatism and the National Liberal Party. It uncritically supported Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s politics, including the Anti-Socialist Laws. Deutsche Volkspartei, DtVP: German People’s Party. Throughout South Germany, liberal and democratic-leaning people’s parties occurred. In the 1860s, these parties supported the idea of German unification including the German-speaking parts of Austria, the socalled ‘Greater German solution’ (großdeutsche Lo¨sung). The party integrated workers, master craftsmen and petty bourgeois members. People’s parties championed the federal structure of Germany and engaged in democratic reforms but were opposed to socialist ideas in economic terms. Flottenverein: Navy League. The league was founded in 1898 as a pressure and interest group and successfully influenced the people and the public opinion. It advocated the necessity of strengthening and arming the navy. Its members included heavy industry representatives; it became a mass movement with more than one million members (corporative and individuals). Freisinnige Partei: ‘Freethinking’ or Radical Party, a left-liberal party from 1884 to 1893. It demanded full civil rights, freedom of the press and parliamentary reforms under the constitutional monarchy

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(including a government that was responsible to the Reichstag). In 1893, the party split into two left-wing currents. Gewerblicher Bildungsverein, Leipzig: Leipzig Industrial Educational Association, founded in 1861 by members of the middle-class and municipal elites. This association was not only the starting point for Bebel’s political life, it was also important for the development of the labour movement in general. A splinter group of workers, dissatisfied with the patronizing, apolitical and liberal-leaning course of the association, founded the association Vorwa¨rts, which resulted in the foundation of the ADAV. In the mid-1860s, the Industrial Educational Association was reorganized and became part of the Leipzig Workers’ Educational Association. Internationale Arbeiterassoziation, IAA: International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) or the ‘First International’. It was founded in London in 1864; Karl Marx wrote the ‘provisional rules’ of the organization, describing existing society as defined by class and class struggles. Because the German association laws prohibited corporative memberships, only individuals could join the First International. The IWMA never became a mass movement in the German states, although Bebel claimed that all members of the VDAV would also be members of the IWMA. The First International could only rely on single members of the different labour movement organizations in Germany. Leipziger Zentralkomitee: Leipzig Central Committee. In 1862/3, public meetings were held in different German cities to organize a workers’ congress. The driving force came from workers in Berlin, where a central committee was established in 1862 to prepare and organize such a congress. However, due to internal quarrels and persecution in the Prussian capital, the task was transferred to a committee in Leipzig. While the Central Committee tried until March to organize a congress, it was F. Lassalle’s decision to abandon this initial aim and instead to prepare a noncommittal congress to establish a strong workers’ party: the ADAV. Nationalliberale Partei: National Liberal Party, right-wing liberal party. Founded in 1866/7, after quarrels in the German National

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Association; existed until 1918. The party supported Bismarck and was always pro-government. After 1900, it opened up to left-liberal parties. As a result, the idea of a ‘grand bloc’ arose, formed out of leftliberal parties, the National Liberals and the Social Democratic Party, the so-called alliance ‘from Bebel to Bassermann’, named after two of its main representatives August Bebel and Ernst Bassermann. Polytechnische Gesellschaft, Leipzig: Leipzig Polytechnical Society, founded in 1825. It was an association typical of those founded by the middle classes in the early 1800s, offering a place to socialize and seeking to influence politics, economics and society, spread education, citizen rights and create a ‘classless civic society’. Thanks to the initiative of the Polytechnical Society, the Industrial Educational Society was founded in 1861. Sa¨chsische Volkspartei, SVP: Saxon People’s Party. In Saxony, the People’s Party, founded by, among others, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, was established in 1866 in the context of several people’s parties emerging in South Germany. Compared to other people’s parties in the South German states, the Saxon organization was more left-leaning. It was Bebel’s stepping-stone into politics. When integrated into the SDAP in 1869, it ceased to exist. Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei [Deutschlands], SDAP: Social Democratic Workers’ Party, founded in 1869 at the party conference of Eisenach. This party was a merger of members of the ADAV, VDAV and the Saxon People’s Party. In its programme it described economy and society in Marxist terms and saw itself as a sub-organization of the IWMA, although this was not accurate and legally impossible. The party had about 11,000 members in 1870. At the 1875 unification conference in Gotha, the party became part of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD: Social Democratic Party of Germany. The SAP party conference in Halle in 1890 renamed that party as the SPD. After the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws, it developed into the largest socialist party in the world before World War I, with more than 1 million members. However, in this huge organizational cosmos, three different political currents existed. The revisionists

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favoured political reforms, cooperation with liberals and a progovernmental course (especially in southern Germany). In the centre of the party, a Marxist view prevailed, but without the objective to revolutionize the masses. Bebel belonged to this majority faction. On the left, members were dissatisfied with the majority policy of ‘muddling through’ and propagated, for example, mass strikes as a political weapon to change the political system. Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei, SAP: Socialist Workers’ Party. It was founded at the unification party conference in Gotha in May 1875, where the ADAV and SDAP merged. The Gotha programme was heavily criticized by Marx for its Lassallean orientation. However, this criticism was not published before 1891. Despite severe persecution under the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878 – 90), the party’s vote increased starting with 9.1 per cent in 1877, suffering a slight decline to 8.1 per cent in 1881 and reaching 19.7 per cent in 1890. In 1890, it was renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Vereinstag deutscher Arbeitervereine, VDAV: Congress of German Workers’ Associations. It was founded in Frankfurt upon Main in June 1863. In 1867, it was renamed as Verband deutscher Arbeitervereine (Union of German Workers’ Associations). Initially, this umbrella organization was meant to coordinate all different liberal workers’ associations in Germany, but from 1865 onwards it increasingly turned into a social democratic organization. In contrast to Lassalle’s ADAV it had a federal structure and supported a ‘Greater German solution’ in the context of the German unification. In 1867, Bebel became its president. In 1868, it had about 13,000 members. At the Nuremberg conference that year, most liberal delegates left the organization because a small majority decided to follow the principles of the Marxist IWMA. Vorwa¨rts, Leipzig: workers’ association ‘Forward’. The association was the result of a split in the Industrial Educational Association. While a majority of members supported moderate liberal aims of self-help and education, an opposition minority demanded the conversion into a political association. The minority left the Industrial Educational Association and founded the independent association Vorwa¨rts (literally: forward) which had 115 members in 1862. The new

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association gained importance because it was the key player in Leipzig in preparing a workers’ congress. The board members of the association invited Ferdinand Lassalle to draft a programme for a workers’ organization. Zweite Internationale: Second International. It was formed at the Socialist Conference in Paris in July 1889 and was the umbrella organization of socialist parties worldwide. German social democracy with its mass organizational background dominated the Second International, much to the dislike of the other partners. In spite of the insistence on its international character, national sensitivities determined its work to a great extent. Creating a blueprint for lasting peace in Europe was a central aim of different conferences after 1900. However, with the outbreak of World War I, internationalism collapsed.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Hirsch, Bebel, p. 18; Seebacher-Brandt, Bebel, pp. 372–4. 2. Bebel, Leben, p. 8 (according to the edition of 1995, also all following notes); Welskopp, Banner, pp. 596ff. 3. See also Mehring, Bebel, p. 306. 4. Bromme, Fabrikarbeiter, pp. 130f.; Ossietzky, Parteitag, p. 846; see, in general: Welskopp, Banner; and Schmidt, Zivilgesellschaft. Civil society can be understood as the space between state, economy and the private sphere (sociological-spatial definition). However, this rather static understanding has to be widened to make use of it as a concept for analyzing the working classes and especially labour movements. For this reason, civil society is also defined by including social behaviours (e.g. different ways of engaging in the public and the society, respecting oppositional positions) and following norms and rules (accepting the other; fair, but also critical arguing, for example). Despite these ideal ascriptions, civil society does not symbolize a ‘better society’. One must also take the ‘dark sides of civil society’ into account (violent conflicts, ignoring minority positions, exclusion mechanisms). See, for this approach with regard to the German labour movement: Schmidt, Early German Labour Movement, pp. 293–311; id., Bru¨der, Bu¨rger und Genossen. ¨ ller, 16 July 1868, in Fischer (ed.), Bebel, p. 267. 5. A. Bebel to M. Mu 6. Mayer, Trennung; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 7 March 1887, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 393; Seebacher-Brandt, Bebel, p. 223; Fischer/Krause, Bebel, pp. 124–6; Nonn, Verbraucherprotest, pp. 220ff., 240ff. 7. Welskopp, Banner, p. 740; Weber, Vocation, p. 162; Borchert, Professionalisierung, pp. 64ff. 8. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 2 January 1890, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 346. 9. Technically, there was no ‘Reich government’ but a so-called Reich ‘leadership’ (Reichsleitung). The Reich administration under the

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Notes to Pages 5– 15

Reich chancellor, the only responsible German minister – and even he depended on the Emperor – developed into a quasi-government. See Lermann, Imperial Governance, pp. 14ff. – For a general overview see Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany. 10. Rau, Bebel, pp. 9f.; Hirsch, Bebel, pp. 50 –3; Walter, SPD, p. 46; Herrmann et al., Bebel, pp. 591f. 11. Bock, Freiheit, p. 3; Witt, Fu¨hrung, pp. 27f. ¨ ller, Biographien, p. 9, pp. 170ff.; 12. Lopes/Roth, Men’s Feminism; Etzemu Gestrich (ed.), Biographie, pp. 13ff.

CHAPTER 1 ON THE EDGE OF THE LOWER CLASS: POOR AND YET PRIVILEGED 1. There is almost no source material from Bebel’s childhood and youth, therefore all biographical studies on Bebel mostly refer to Bebel’s autobiography Aus meinem Leben (Bebel, Leben, pp. 9–23). See also Hirsch, Bebel, pp. 7– 22; Seebacher-Brandt, Bebel, pp. 22– 33; Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 13; Flender, Kinder- und Jugendzeit, pp. 3ff. On Deutz: Reder, Gaswerke, pp. 6ff. ¨ ve, Milita¨r, 2. Hahn/Berding, Reformen, pp. 426f.; Bebel, Leben, p. 10; Pro pp. 14f. 3. Bebel, Leben, p. 10. 4. On mixing up the professions of Bebel’s paternal and maternal grandparents see Bebel, Leben, p. 689, fn. 2; also conclusive and summarizing the results Flender, Kinder- und Jugendzeit, p. 8 (fn. 2), p. 14. According to the family tree of the Simon family, Bebel’s maternal grandfather came from a family of bakers from Wetzlar; his parental grandparents came from a cooper family. On the financial situation see Hahn, Bu¨rgertum, p. 300. 5. Oltmer, Migration, pp. 15f.; Wierling, Dienstma¨dchen; Bebel, Leben, pp. 10f. ¨ ve, Milita¨r, pp. 35, 79; Hufton, The Poor; Zeitlhofer, Arbeit, pp. 31ff.; 6. Pro Bebel, Leben, p. 11. 7. Bebel, Leben, p. 13. 8. Allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyklopa¨die fu¨r die gebildeten Sta¨nde. ConversationsLexikon. 9th edition. In 15 volumes (Brockhaus), Leipzig 1846, vol. 11, p. 15. 9. Bebel, Leben, p. 14; Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Erga¨nzungsblatt no. 100, October 1834, col. 799. 10. Bebel, Leben, pp. 15f. 11. Engelen, Soldatenfrauen, pp. 502ff.; Bebel, Leben, pp. 20f. 12. On the construction of hero images and on dealing with sickness and death within the working class see Schmidt, Helden, pp. 93 –103; Schmidt, Arbeitsleute, pp. 105–27. 13. Flender, Kinder- und Jugendzeit, pp. 46ff. 14. Bebel, Leben, pp. 16, 19; Hirsch, Bebel, pp. 19f.

Notes to Pages 17 – 28 CHAPTER 2

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ARTISAN AND ENTREPRENEUR: A SUCCESS STORY

1. Bebel, Leben, p. 24; Hahn, Bu¨rgertum, p. 285. On the culture of the bourgeoisie and its impact in German cities see in general Hein (ed.), Bu¨rgerkultur, and the case study Schulz, Vormundschaft; Gall, Liberalismus, pp. 324ff. 2. Hunt, Engels, pp. 62f.; Hosfeld, Geister, p. 14; on Liebknecht, the biography ¨ der; see Pelz, Liebknecht and Dowe, published posthumously by W. Schro ¨ lder (eds), Gesellschaft; Bebel, Leben, Agitieren and Beutin/Malterer/Mu p. 26. 3. Report of 23 December 1836, quoted from Hahn, Bu¨rgertum, p. 283; ibid., pp. 432ff. 4. Lenger, Sozialgeschichte, pp. 88 –109. 5. Bebel, Leben, pp. 24f. 6. Loreck, Sozialdemokrat, pp. 159ff.; Flender, Kinder- und Jugendzeit, p. 60. 7. Hunt, Engels, p. 30. 8. Bebel, Leben, p. 26. 9. See plate 2; also in: Laufer/Ottomeyer (eds), Gru¨nderzeit, p. 392; Bebel, Leben, p. 24. 10. Flender, Kinder- und Jugendzeit, pp. 62f. 11. Herres, Kommunistenprozess, pp. 133ff.; Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, pp. 35ff. 12. Bebel, Leben, pp. 27, 32f., 29, 34. 13. Ibid., pp. 38, 28. 14. Bebel, Leben, pp. 39f.; Hirsch (ed.), Bebel-Dokumente, p. 44. 15. Bebel, Leben, p. 39; Winterling, Probleme, p. 198. ¨ der, Leipzig, pp. 11f.; Lieske, Arbeiterkultur, pp. 39 –51; Zwahr, 16. Schro Konstituierung, pp. 194ff., 323f. 17. Bebel, Leben, p. 41, 140f., fn. 64 (p. 693). 18. Bebel, Leben, pp. 141f.; Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 83; W. Liebknecht to J.P. Becker, 3 August 1867, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. I, p. 216. In a letter of 16 July 1868, Bebel thanked Becker for ‘friendly recommending my articles to a commissioner’ and sent a ‘letter with some samples’ on the same day (A. Bebel to J.P. Becker, 16 July 1868, in Bebel, Reden, p. 560.) 19. A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 26 September 1872, 1 October 1872, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, pp. 48, 51; Bebel, Leben, p. 141. 20. Julius Hecht to A. Bebel, 30 August 1875, quoted from Welskopp, Banner, p. 201; Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 177; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 8 September 1874, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 24; Hirsch, Bebel, p. 34; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 28 December 1884, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, pp. 163f.; turners’ income according to Neu, Drechslerei, p. 77. ¨ konomie, pp. 29ff.; Flender, Kinder- und Jugendjahre, pp. 83–93. 21. Sen, O 22. Bebel, Leben, pp. 19f., 27, 32.

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Notes to Pages 29 – 39

CHAPTER 3 THE PATH INTO POLITICS: ‘WHO IS THAT MAN WITH SUCH AN APPEARANCE?’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Hosfeld, Geister, pp. 28 –31. Siemann, Gesellschaft, pp. 190– 3. Noltenius, Schiller, pp. 237– 58. Nathaus, Geselligkeit, pp. 105 – 16; Gall, Liberalismus, pp. 324 – 56; Na’aman, Nationalverein, pp. 41ff. Nipperdey, Bu¨rgerwelt, pp. 215ff.; Ambrosius, Staat, pp. 69ff. Translator’s note: In the following, Bildungsbu¨rgertum is translated as educated middle class or educated bourgeoisie, distinguished from Wirtschaftsbu¨rgertum, translated as economic bourgeoisie. According to Jonathan Sperber’s summary, Bildungsbu¨rgertum is a German peculiarity. It is characterized predominantly by its ‘close ties to the state’ and its ‘ideal of Bildung’ (education). The ‘distinct role of Bildung’ includes ‘its characteristic as the secularized version of German Protestant ideals’ and ‘its origins as both a product of and reaction against the Enlightenment’. ¨ rgertum, the Wirtschaftsbu¨rgertum is based on In contrast to the Bildungsbu economic success and status. See Sperber, Bu¨rger, p. 276. ¨ der, Leipzig, p. 41; Na’aman/Harstick, Konstituierung, Quoted from Schro ¨ der, pp. 34, 39f., 45f.; Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, pp. 288f.; Schro Leipzig, pp. 64f. ¨ der, Leipzig, Bebel, Leben, p. 355; Mehring, Bebel, p. 304; quoted from Schro p. 51. Bebel, Leben, pp. 45, 32, 34; Hirsch, Bebel, p. 26. ¨ der, Leipzig, pp. 72f. Bebel, Leben, pp. 46, 59; Schro Bebel, Akademiker, p. 13; Leipziger Tageblatt, no. 55, 24 March 1863, ¨ der, Leipzig, p. 74; see also Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, quoted from Schro p. 284. Na’aman/Harstick, Konstituierung, pp. 57–9; Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, ¨ der’s book on the Leipzig labour movement p. 386; the title of Schro ¨ der, Leipzig). On further ‘roots’, see Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, (Schro pp. 339ff., 381ff. Bebel, Leben, p. 46. Mitteldeutsche Volks-Zeitung, no. 154, 6 July 1862, in Na’aman/Harstick, Konstituierung, pp. 171f. ¨ der, Leipzig, pp. 65, 67. Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, p. 377; Schro Mitteldeutsche Volks-Zeitung, no. 227, 30 September 1862, in Na’aman/ Harstick, Konstituierung, p. 340. Na’aman/Harstick, Konstituierung, p. 63, pp. 86ff. Hosfeld, Geister, pp. 133, 139. Na’aman, Lassalle, p. 428, 458; Lassalle, Working Man’s Programme, p. 57, 52 –3, 44; see also Na’aman, Lassalle, pp. 461, 463, 466. Na’aman, Lassalle, p. 411; see also Hoffrogge, Sozialismus, pp. 62ff. Lassalle, Open Letter, pp. 5, 8, 17, 45, 46.

Notes to Pages 40 – 50

195

22. Vahlteich, Lassalle, p. 23; O. Dammer to F. Lassalle, 26 March 1863, F. Lassalle to O. Dammer, 13 March 1863, in Na’aman/Harstick, Konstituierung, pp. 399, 392; Bebel, Leben, p. 60. 23. Na’aman/Harstick, Konstituierung, p. 604; Retallack, Red Saxony, pp. 36f. 24. Offermann, Arbeiterbewegung, p. 489; Bericht Frankfurt 1863, in Dowe (ed.), Berichte, pp. 34, 36. 25. Bericht Frankfurt 1863, in Dowe (ed.), Berichte, p. 30. 26. Bericht Leipzig 1864, in Dowe (ed.), Berichte, pp. 53, 58. ¨ der, Leipzig, p. 82; 27. Hoffrogge, Sozialismus, pp. 65, 67; Schro Bericht Leipzig 1864, in Dowe (ed.), Berichte, p. 52; Welskopp, Banner, p. 41. 28. Bericht Frankfurt 1863, in Dowe (ed.), Nachdrucke, pp. 23f. ¨ der, Leipzig, pp. 126f.; on wages, see Kocka, Arbeitsverha¨ltnisse, 29. Schro pp. 493ff. 30. Bebel, Leben, p. 77; Lange, Arbeiterfrage, p. 164. 31. Bebel, Leben, p. 101; Marx, Inaugural Address, p. 575. 32. A. Bebel to L. Sonnemann, 11 and 16 May 1865, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, pp. 536f., 538f. 33. Bericht Stuttgart 1865, in Dowe (ed.), Berichte, p. 92; Bebel, Leben, p. 89; Resolution einer Volksversammlung [Resolution of a people’s meeting] in Leipzig, 8 May 1866, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 13. 34. W. Liebknecht to Ernestine, 17 November 1866, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. I, p. 199; Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 52. 35. Gerlach, Bebel, p. 32. 36. Bebel, Leben, pp. 99f.; Gerlach, Bebel, pp. 21–3; Naumann, Bebel, 1910, pp. 116f. 37. Siemann, Gesellschaft, pp. 212ff.; Lenger, Industrielle Revolution, pp. 298ff. 38. Siemann, Gesellschaft, p. 216. 39. Lehnert, Sozialdemokratie, p. 54; Carsten, Bebel, pp. 38f.; Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 348. 40. Bebel, Leben, p. 59. 41. A. Bebel to L. Sonnemann, 23 June 1865, in Archiv der sozialen ¨ hzeit der Arbeiterbewegung, A 6. Demokratie (AdsD), Bonn, Bestand Fru I thank Thomas Welskopp (Bielefeld) for letting me have archival documents that he only in parts used for his book Das Banner der Bru¨derlichkeit. See Welskopp, Banner, p. 200. 42. A. Bebel to a member of the Volkspartei in Frankfurt upon Main, 11 September 1867, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 549. 43. J. Salm to A. Bebel, 24 January 1870, quoted from Schmidt, Tra¨gerschichten, p. 16. On the problem of recruiting leadership personnel in the early labour movement see Welskopp, Banner, pp. 146f. 44. A. Bebel presumably to L. Sonnemann, 11 September 1867, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 550.

196

Notes to Pages 51 – 62

CHAPTER 4 A LIFE FOR POLITICS: ‘TAKING THE BULL BY THE HORNS’ 1. Kolb, Bismarck, p. 55; Welskopp, Banner, pp. 462f.; Lenger, Industrielle Revolution, pp. 317ff. 2. Freytag, Erinnerungen, p. 224. 3. A. Bebel to P. Staudinger, 28 May 1867, in Bebel, Reden, vol. I, p. 544. 4. W. Liebknecht to Gottschald, approximately 31 August 1867, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. I, p. 218. For election campaigns, see also Retallack, Red Saxony. 5. F. Mehring, quoted from Kocka, Traditionsbindung, p. 351; Pollmann, Arbeiterwahlen, pp. 164–95. 6. Carl Ernst Schelle to A. Bebel, 29 May 1868, in Fischer, Bebel, p. 183; see also Carsten, Bebel, p. 33. 7. Freytag, Erinnerungen, p. 225. 8. Weber, Vocation, p. 162. 9. A. Bebel to P. Staudinger, 28 May 1867; A. Bebel to (presumably) L. Sonnemann, 11 September 1867, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, pp. 545, 549. Bebel made his business even smaller than it was: he used the untypical German diminutive ‘Gescha¨ftchen’, a very little business. 10. Bebel to Julius Scheil, 15 February 1868; Eduard Sack to Bebel, 2 January 1868, in Fischer, Bebel, pp. 109, 61. 11. Naumann, Bebel, p. 116. 12. F.A. Fricke/F. Engelmann to A. Bebel, 26 November 1867, in Fischer, Bebel, p. 44. 13. Th. Kerner to A. Bebel, 14 January 1870, quoted from: Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 105. 14. Julius Vahlteich to A. Bebel, 25 May 1869, AdsD, Bonn, A 5, Nr. 379 (Material Welskopp). 15. Bebel, Leben, p. 355; F. Engels to W. Liebknecht, 19 December 1870, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel mit Marx/Engels, p. 116. 16. Seminal Nipperdey, Verein, pp. 174–205; for summary and overview see Nathaus, Organisierte Geselligkeit; Hoffmann, Geselligkeit. 17. W. Liebknecht to Gottschald, 19 February 1867, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. I, p. 208 (emphasis in original). 18. See the letters in Fischer, Bebel, pp. 27f., 50, 70, 138. 19. A. Bebel to P. Staudinger, 28 May 1867, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 546. 20. Deutsche Arbeiterhalle, no. 10, 15 November 1867, in Dowe (ed.), Berichte, p. 140. 21. Fischer, Bebel, p. XLVI f.; Herrmann et al., Bebel, pp. 59ff.; SeebacherBrandt, Bebel, pp. 93ff. 22. Fischer, Bebel, p. XLVIII f.; Bebel, Leben, p. 136. 23. M. Hendel to A. Bebel, 30 June 1868, in Fischer, Bebel, pp. 232f. 24. Bebel, Leben, p. 146; Fischer, Bebel, p. LX f.; Mitteilungen an den Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine, 8 July 1868, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, pp. 33 –7.

Notes to Pages 63 – 77

197

¨ rnberg 1868, in Dowe (ed.), Berichte, p. 162f. 25. Bericht Nu 26. A. Bebel to the General Council of the IWMA, 23 July 1868, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 562. ¨ ller, 2 July 1869, in ibid., p. 565. 27. Bebel presumably to A. Mu 28. Protokoll Eisenach 1869, in Protokolle, vol. I, pp. 59 –63; Hoffrogge, Sozialismus, pp. 69f. Members of the ADAV had substantially interrupted the foundation congress of Eisenach (see Carsten, Bebel, p. 45). 29. Protokoll Eisenach 1869, in Protokolle, vol. I, pp. 28, 56, 54f. ¨ ller, 16 July 1868, in Fischer, Bebel, p. 267; Rat der Stadt 30. A. Bebel to M. Mu ¨ der, Leipzig, pp. 225f. Leipzig, 29 December 1869, quoted from Schro 31. Protokoll Stuttgart 1870, in Protokolle, vol. I, pp. 19, 16f. 32. Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, pp. 686–721; Bebel, Ziele, p. IV. 33. Bebel, Ziele, pp. 5, 15. 34. Ibid., pp. 15f., 24, 45 (emphasis in the original). 35. Welskopp, Banner, p. 658; allg. Groh, Negative Integration; Stephan, Genossen. 36. Demokratisches Wochenblatt, 6 March 1869, quoted from Welskopp, Banner, p. 593. 37. Bebel, Ziele, p. 17; A. Bebel to P. Natorp, 26 July 1895, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 5, p. 68; see for a different interpretation Seebacher-Brandt, Bebel, p. 113. 38. Bebel, Ziele, pp. 20f.; K. Marx, A Critique of the German Ideology (1845– 6), online version: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf; Bebel, Ziele, p. 26. 39. Bebel, Ziele, p. 33. 40. Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, pp. 316ff.; Siemann, Gesellschaft, pp. 298ff. 41. Der Volksstaat, no. 59, 23 July 1870, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 117; Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 116. 42. Bebel, speech on 26 November 1870, in Stenographische Berichte, 1st legislative period, 1867– 70, vol. 15, pp. 9–12. English translation: http:// germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/709_Bebel_Franco-Pruss%20 War_214.pdf. 43. ‘Herr Bebel’s Friendship for France’, The Times, 14 August 1913. The Times Digital Archive. Web, accessed 4 February 2018. 44. Witt, Fu¨hrung, pp. 27ff., who on the other hand emphasizes Ebert’s ¨ hlhausen, Ebert. versatility. See, as overview, Mu 45. Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 677. 46. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 19 May 1873, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, pp. 14f. 47. Bebel, Leben, p. 383; Herrmann et al., Bebel, pp. 165ff.; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 23 February 1875, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 595. 48. Protokoll Gotha 1875, in Protokolle, vol. II, p. 38, pp. 40, 47–9. 49. A. Bebel to W. Liebknecht, 14 September 1874; W. Liebknecht to A. Goegg, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. I, pp. 572, 639. 50. Anderson, Lehrjahre.

198

Notes to Pages 78 – 86

51. Stenographische Berichte; 3rd legislative period, 1st session 1877; vol. I, pp. 568, 576, 570; Goldberg, Bismarck, pp. 104–108. 52. Goldberg, Bismarck, pp. 115–37; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 23 October 1879, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 28. 53. Stenographische Berichte. 4th legislation period, IVth session 1881; vol. I, pp. 650, 658, 661; Goldberg, Bismarck, p. 123. ¨ fer, Sozialismus, 54. Bebel, Bauernkrieg, p. IV; Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 160; Pru p. 91. ¨ der, 55. Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 219; Fischer/Krause, Bebel, p. 37; Schro Leipzig, p. 449; Gerlach, Bebel, p. 41. 56. Welskopp, Banner, pp. 731–6. 57. Bebel, Die Frau und der Sozialismus, edition of 1879. English translations: Woman under Socialism, translated by Daniel de Leon, p. 224. The expression ‘and complete emancipation’, with which the paragraph in the original ends, is missing in the English translation. See also Woman and Socialism, translated by Meta L. Stern. 58. Quoted from Schmidt, Helden, p. 100. 59. J. Bebel to A. Bebel, 14 February 1887, A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 17 February 1887, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, pp. 360, 366. 60. Evans, Kneipengespra¨che, pp. 158–65, here 10 May 1902, p. 164. 61. Bebel, Frau, pp. 144, 148 (The English translation of 1904 does not entail these passages.) 62. Langewiesche, Bebel, pp. 16f.; Miller, Bebel, pp. 57f. 63. Neueste Mittheilungen, II. vol, no. 103, 25 October 1883, p. 4; Welskopp, Banner, pp. 736– 40. 64. People who were perceived as a threat to public order by state authorities could be expelled from cities or towns under the state of siege (e.g., Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig). 65. Bebel, Leben, p. 489; Carsten, Bebel, pp. 84ff.; A. Bebel to G. v. Vollmar, 12 December 1878, 21 October 1879, Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 7, p. 24. 66. Schmidt, Spielra¨ume, p. 139; Carsten, Bebel, pp. 82ff. 67. A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 5 and 17 December 1881, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 111, 115. 68. Bebel, Leben, p. 507; Bebel to the office of the Sozialdemokrat, 18 September 1880, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 40. 69. This was also the motto of the German Social Democratic Party around ¨ der for an ‘activating state’ in social 2000 under Chancellor Gerhard Schro policy, in close cooperation with the British Labour Party under Tony Blair. 70. J. Leyendecker/J. Stock (Mayence) to W. Liebknecht and A. Bebel, 14 August 1881, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. II, p. 381; A. Bebel to W. Liebknecht, 10 September 1883, in ibid., pp. 528f.; Seebacher-Brandt, Bebel, p. 166. 71. Bebel to the editorial board of the Sozialdemokrat, 18 September 1880, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 43.

Notes to Pages 87 – 96

199

¨ tz Langkau, Einleitung zu Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. II, pp. 34f.; 72. Go W. Hasenclever to W. Liebknecht, 11 November 1884, in ibid., p. 727; A. Bebel to I. Auer, 14 November 1884, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 147. 73. Herrmann et al., Bebel, pp. 267–70; Carsten, Bebel, pp. 108–10; Seebacher¨ ter, 15 December 1884, in Brandt, Bebel, pp. 212ff.; A. Bebel to H. Schlu Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 155; Stenographische Berichte, VIth legislation period, 1st session 1884/5, 3rd vol., pp. 1777f.; A. Bebel to W. Liebknecht, 1 April 1885, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 176. 74. A. Bebel to J. Motteler, 5 December 1885, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 212; A. Bebel to W. Liebknecht, 28 December 1883, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. II, p. 810; A. Bebel to J. Motteler, quote from Carsten, Bebel, p. 111; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 19 June 1885, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, pp. 189f. 75. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 11 February 1881, in Bebel: Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 57; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 7 December 1885, in ibid., p. 218; Schmidt, Spielra¨ume, pp. 283, 147. 76. Stenographische Berichte, VIth legislation period, IInd session 1885/86, 3rd vol., pp. 1787, 1755, 1756; Carsten, Bebel, pp. 110– 19.

CHAPTER 5 FAMILY, FRIENDS AND EVERYDAY LIFE: THE PRIVATE SIDE TO BEBEL ¨ der, Leipzig, p. 72; Bebel, Leben, p. 60. 1. Schro 2. J. Bebel to A. Bebel, 1 May 1887, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 458; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 23 April 1883, in ibid., p. 166. 3. F. Engels to J. Bebel, 8 March 1892, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 522; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 7 June 1869, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 637. 4. The Ho¨here To¨chterschule was the forerunner of the Ma¨dchengymnasium, the secondary school for girls. Unlike the school for boys, the Ho¨here To¨chterschule did not offer a sixth form and thus offered no qualification to enter university. Most students came from an upper- or middle-class background. 5. A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 11 March 1882, 25 August 1880, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, pp. 123, 84, 86. 6. A. Bebel to R. Schlingmann, 31 August 1872, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 582; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 28 August 1872, 11 March 1882, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, pp. 46, 124. 7. J. Bebel to N. Liebknecht, 12 September 1887, A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 28 August 1872, 21 November 1872, 28 February 1887 (emphasis in the original), J. Bebel to A. Bebel, 21 January 1887, A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 18 April 1887, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, pp. 631, 46, 58, 384, 330, 444; see also Lopes/ Roth, Men’s Feminism, pp. 154f. 8. A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 13 July 1881, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 76; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 4 June 1892, F. Engels to A. Bebel, 20 June 1892, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, pp. 542, 547; J. Bebel to A. Auer, 21 February 1887, in Herrmann, 85. Todestag, p. 65; J. Bebel to A. Bebel, 6 August 1886, in

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

Notes to Pages 96– 104

Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 238; Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Dresden 1903, pp. 215f. J. Bebel to F. Engels, 13 February 1892, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, pp. 618f.; Bock, Dienste, p. 71; J. Bebel to N. Liebknecht, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 628. A. Bebel to J.P. Becker, 13 September 1884, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 138; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 18 December 1882, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 149; A. Bebel to J. Motteler, 20 April 1900, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 15; Hirsch, Bebel, p. 35; J. Bebel to A. Bebel, 7 August 1887, in Ehe, p. 520; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 29 October 1887, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 536; A. Bebel to G. Hauptmann, 17 December 1890, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 5, p. 8; A. Bebel to M. Gorki, 2 March 1906, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 110; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 10 October 1893, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 712. J. Bebel to A. Auer, 24 September 1900, in Herrmann, 85. Todestag, p. 70; A. Bebel to E. Bernstein, 26 August 1902, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 49; A. Bebel to W. Liebknecht, 7 August 1894, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 5, p. 51; Langewiesche, Bebel, pp. 18, 24. J. Bebel to A. Bebel, 6 August 1886; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 11 March 1882; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 25 August 1880, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, pp. 238, 122, 85; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 15 November 1891, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 476; J. Bebel to A. Bebel, 20 February 1887, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 371. Lopes/Roth, Men’s Feminism, p. 187, fn. 48; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 7 September 1892, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 581; K. Kautsky to E. Bernstein, 19 April 1898, in Schelz-Brandenburg (ed.), Bernsteins Briefwechsel 1895–1905, p. 633; Schelz-Brandenburg (ed.), Bernsteins Briefwechsel 1891–1895, p. 412; Callesen/Maderthaner (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 240. A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 8 August 1872, 21 November 1872, 16 December 1881; J. Bebel to A. Bebel, 9 March 1887, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, pp. 37, 61, 113, 398. A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 30 December 1886, in ibid., p. 293. A. Bebel to V. Adler, 17 January 1894, 11 March 1894, in Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 135, 140; V. Adler to A. Bebel, mid-March 1894, ibid., p. 141; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 12 January 1912, ibid., p. 544; Herrmann et al., Bebel, pp. 713f., 717ff. Welskopp, Banner, p. 422; Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 324; letter count in Schelz-Brandenburg, Bernsteins Briefwechsel. A. Bebel to W. Liebknecht, 15 November 1884, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. II, pp. 736f.; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 19 June 1885, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 189. A. Bebel to W. Liebknecht, 17 November 1884, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. II, p. 743; Herrmann et al., Bebel, p. 262; A. Bebel to N. Liebknecht, 17 June 1893, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 5, p. 37. A. Bebel to V. Adler, 29 December 1912, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 560; A. Bebel to M. Geck, 23 February 1897, Bebel, Reden, vol. 5, p. 91.

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21. Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, pp. 564ff., vol. 2/2, pp. 14ff.; E. Marx to N. Liebknecht, 12 February 1881, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel Marx/Engels, p. 431. 22. A. Bebel to K. Marx, 27 March 1869, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 1, p. 564; quotes ¨ hring from Grebing (ed.), Geschichte der sozialen Ideen, p. 150; by E. Du Welskopp, Banner, p. 721; Seebacher-Brandt, Bebel, pp. 185f.; Bebel, Frau, pp. 48, 149f.; Herrmann et al., Bebel, pp. 221f. 23. Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Magdeburg 1910, p. 359. As early as 1870, an inquiry was sent from Bebel’s constituency Glauchau: ‘As your portrait is much in demand I would like to ask you to send some specifying the price for it’. (H. Albert to A. Bebel, 10 April 1870, Bundesarchiv Berlin, SAPMO, NY 4022/96 (Material Welskopp).) Bebel answered immediately, sending a picture made by a Glauchau ‘photographer’ who had reproduced it (H. Albert to A. Bebel, 17 April 1870, ibid.) 24. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 20 August 1879, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 20. 25. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 17 March 1883, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, pp. 102f.; F. Engels to F.A. Sorge, 31 December 1884, in Briefe und Auszu¨ge, p. 190. 26. A. Bebel to V. Adler, 6 December 1894, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 166; V. Adler to A. Bebel, 5 August 1910, ibid., p. 510. 27. A. Bebel to L. Kautsky-Freyberger, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 208; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 8 January 1911, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 521; R. Luxemburg to K. Zetkin, 25 November 1910, in Luxemburg, Briefe, vol. 3, p. 264; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 29 December 1912, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 561.

CHAPTER 6 POLITICS AS A VOCATION: ‘ONE IS NO MORE THAN A HACKNEY’ ¨ ter, 2 April 1888, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 299; 1. A. Bebel to H. Schlu A. Bebel to F. Engels, 2 May 1888, in ibid., p. 307; Abelshauser, Wirtschaftswunder, p. 16; La¨ssig, Introduction, pp. 6f. 2. A. Bebel to K. Liebknecht, 10 November 1908, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 164; A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 3 September 1881, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 91. 3. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 28 December 1884, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, pp. 163f.; I. Auer to E. Bernstein, 16 April 1896, in Schelz-Brandenburg (ed.), Bernsteins Briefwechsel, p. 125, fn. 10; diary of Bruno Schoenlank, 20 March 1897, quoted from Fischer/Krause, Bebel, p. 216 (Schoenlank was one of Bebel’s main opponents in the revisionism debate). 4. R. Schweichel to W. Liebknecht, 17 April 1871, in Liebknecht, Briefwechsel, vol. I, p. 384; Michels, Bebel, p. 674; Carsten, Bebel, pp. 153f. 5. Walter, SPD, p. 31; surveillance report from 2 November 1894, in Evans (ed.), Kneipengespra¨che, p. 259; Evans, Einleitung, in ibid., p. 18. 6. A. Bebel to J. Bebel, 21 January 1890, in Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 574. 7. J. Bebel to F. Engels, 13 February 1892, in ibid., p. 618. 8. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 14 April 1889, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 326; R. Luxemburg to L. Jogiches, 30 September 1905, in Luxemburg, Briefe, vol. 2, p. 178; journalist of the Volksstaat quoted from Herrmann et al.,

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

Notes to Pages 115– 126

Bebel, p. 103; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 17 November 1890, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 63. Bebel, Leben, p. 156; Carl Legien, 22 October 1894, in Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Frankfurt 1894, p. 73; A. Bebel to L. Kautsky-Freyberger, 18 February 1894, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 5, pp. 46f. A. Bebel to J. Motteler, 20 September 1883, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 117; A. Bebel to M. Geck, 1 July 1902, in ibid., vol. 9, p. 48. See on the political and constitutional structure of Imperial Germany: Lerman, Imperial Governance, pp. 13 –32. Mergel, Kulturgeschichte, pp. 4f.; Kuhn, Arbeiterbewegung, pp. 118f.; Lehnert, Sozialdemokratie, pp. 93ff.; Hoffrogge, Sozialismus, pp. 146ff.; Carsten, Bebel, pp. 179f. V. Adler to A. Bebel, 6 November 1899, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 330; R. Luxemburg and L. Jogiches, 11 March 1899, 10 November 1899, in Luxemburg, Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 289, 400; see also Carsten, Bebel, p. 185. Lehnert, Sozialdemokratie, p. 91; Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Erfurt 1891, pp. 3, 5f., 358; F. Engels to F.A. Sorge, in Briefe und Auszu¨ge, pp. 370f.; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 7 July 1891, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 74; SeebacherBrandt, Bebel, pp. 245–8; Grebing (ed.), Geschichte, p. 156. A. Bebel to V. Adler, 2 October 1891, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 77; Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Erfurt 1891, pp. 140, 119, 165, 172; Neueste Mittheilungen, 6 February 1893. Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Breslau 1895, p. 112, 123; Lehnert, Sozialdemokratie, p. 92; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 20 October 1895, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 193. Grebing (ed.), Geschichte, p. 161; A. Bebel to F. Engels, 11 February 1881, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 2/2, p. 56; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 23 October 1899, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 329. Bernstein, Preconditions, p. 192. Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Dresden 1903, pp. 309, 317, 319, 313, 418, 420. V. Adler to A. Bebel, 8 September 1903, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 422. ¨ ber die Invalidita¨ts- und Altersversicherung im A. Bebel, ‘Das Gesetz u Deutschen Reich’, in Die Neue Zeit 7 (1889), p. 660. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 2 June 1890, 25 April 1891, 31 March 1890; F. Engels to A. Bebel, 1/2 May 1891, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, pp. 394, 411, 418, 385. Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 1137, pp. 1141ff.; Stenographische Berichte, IXth legislation period, IInd session 1893/94, vol. II, pp. 1310 –12, p. 1294. Bebel, Lage, pp. 7, 10, 17f. A. Bebel to V. Adler, 16 January 1892, 1 December 1896, in Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 86, 224; Vorwa¨rts, no. 45, 23 February 1897, and no. 46, ¨ ttner, Arbeitswelt, p. 177. This issue 24 February 1897, quoted from Gru

Notes to Pages 126– 139

203

surfaced again in the new context of the mass strikes during Bebel’s last life decade as a politician. 26. Bebel, Akademiker, p. 8; Hessel, Engagez-vous.

CHAPTER 7 POLITICS UNTIL DEATH: BATTLES OF WORDS AND WAR PROPHECY 1. Sozialisten-Kongreß Amsterdam, pp. 35, 39. 2. Sozialisten-Kongreß Amsterdam, pp. 36 –9; Karl Kautsky, ‘Der Kongreß zu Amsterdam’, in Die Neue Zeit, 22 (1903/4), vol. 2, p. 673. 3. Sozialisten-Kongreß Amsterdam, pp. 39f., 41. 4. Ibid., pp. 42f., 56, 57. Bebel’s remarks quoted from: Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 1048. 5. A. Bebel to K. Kautsky, 7 November 1905, in Kautsky, Briefwechsel, p. 175; K. Kautsky to V. Adler, 18 October 1904, A. Bebel to V. Adler, 25 October 1904, in Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 433, 437. 6. Sozialisten-Kongreß Amsterdam, p. 14; Stenographische Berichte, XIth legislation period, Ist session 1903/05, vol. 6, pp. 4098 –4100. 7. Stenographische Berichte, XIth legislation period, Ist session 1903/5, vol. 6, pp. 4102–5. 8. A. Bebel to F.E. Rust, 15 February 1906, Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 109. 9. A. Bebel to V. Adler, 9 August 1911, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 539; A. Bebel to H. Molkenbuhr, 20 August 1908, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 157; R. Luxemburg to K. Zetkin, 24 November 1911, 9 December 1911, in Luxemburg, Briefe, p. 139. 10. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 25 February 1893, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, pp. 666f.; Hamburger Echo, 28 March 1911, quoted from Herrmann, et al., Bebel, p. 696. 11. Sozialdemokratischer Parteitag, Essen 1907, p. 255; Stenographische Berichte, XIth legislation period, Ist session 1903/4, vol. 2, 7 March 1904, p. 1588 (emphasis in original). When tensions occurred between Germany and Great Britain in 1908 and the British Labour Party called for mass demonstrations, Bebel advised the ‘English’ social democrats in his private correspondence without much diplomatic tact: ‘Instead of whining they should learn to shoulder their rifles and to defend themselves if necessary’ (A. Bebel to H. Molkenbuhr, 20 August 1908, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 157.) ¨ ller, Biographien, pp. 153ff.; caricature reproduced in and quoted 12. Etzemu from Walter, SPD, p. 46. 13. Stenographische Berichte, XIIth legislation period, IInd session, 9 November 1911, vol. 268, p. 7730; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 6 October 1912, in Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 550f. 14. Außerordentlicher internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress zu Basel 1912, pp. 23ff.; Schmidt, Spielra¨ume, pp. 377ff. 15. Lehnert, Sozialdemokratie, pp. 108–10; Hoffrogge, Sozialismus, pp. 164ff.

204

Notes to Pages 139– 151

16. A. Bebel to F. Engels, 10 October 1893, in Blumenberg (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 711; Lehnert, Sozialdemokratie, p. 97. 17. Hoffrogge, Sozialismus, p. 155; Resolution 1905, in Schneider, Geschichte, pp. 416f (document 8); Carsten, Bebel, pp. 197ff. 18. A. Bebel to R. Schmidt, 15 August 1905, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 102; Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Jena 1905, p. 336. 19. Bremer Zeitung, August 1905, quoted from Carsten, Bebel, p. 204; Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Mannheim 1910, p. 297; Mannheim resolution 1906, in Schneider, Geschichte, p. 418 (document 8); Fischer/ Krause, Bebel, pp. 132f., 146. 20. Hoffrogge, Sozialismus, p. 159; Mergel, Kulturgeschichte, p. 5; Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Magdeburg 1910, pp. 436, 245, 258; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 16 August 1910; 5 February 1911, in Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 512, 523. 21. A. Bebel to K. Kautsky, 16 August 1910, in Kautsky, jr (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 228; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 9 June 1911, in Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 533f.; Bebel/Bebel, Ehe, p. 596 (fn. 5); A. Bebel to L. Kautsky, 11 November 1912, in Kautsky, jr. (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 323. 22. A. Bebel to V. Adler, 4 October 1906, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 472. 23. Tribu¨ne, no. 34, 10 February 1903; Tribu¨ne, no. 224, 25 September 1903, p. 1; Tribu¨ne, no. 222, 4 October 1903. ¨ ne, no. 222, 4 October 1903; 24. Tribu¨ne, no. 223, 24 September 1902, p. 1; Tribu ¨ ter, 3 March 1910, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 188. A. Bebel to F.H. Schlu 25. A. Bebel to V. Adler, 9 June 1911, 9 August 1911, in Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 533, 539. 26. A. Bebel to J. Motteler, 12 March 1900, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 10; A. Bebel to K. Liebknecht, 10 November 1908, in ibid., p. 165; A. Bebel to V. Adler, 29 December 1912, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 561. 27. V. Adler to A. Bebel, 14 September 1910, in Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 514; diary entry H. Molkenbuhr, 23 September 1908, in Braun/Eichler (eds), Arbeiterfu¨hrer, p. 98.

CHAPTER 8 A HERO?

‘ANTI-EMPEROR OF THE MASSES’: WORSHIPPING

1. Camus, Mythos, p. 160; H. Molkenbuhr, 17 August 1913, in Braun and Eichler (eds), Arbeiterfu¨hrer, p. 204. 2. Heckart, Bassermann; Schmidt, Spielra¨ume, pp. 200f. 3. K. Kautsky, Bebel, in Die Neue Zeit 31 (1912/13), p. 740; E. Bernstein, in Der Wahre Jacob, 6 September 1913 quoted from Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, pp. 58, 33; The Times, 14 August 1913, p. 7. 4. Spitzelprotokoll, 27 May 1893, in Evans (ed.), Kneipengespra¨che, p. 329; Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, p. 7; Der arme Teufel, 1902; and Vorwa¨rts, August 1913, quoted from Michels, Bebel, pp. 693, 695; Vossische Zeitung, 1913. 18 August 1913, p. 1; Hughes, Demonstrations, p. 244.

Notes to Pages 151– 158

205

5. A. Bebel to the Verband der Feuerbestattungsvereine, 9 March 1910, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 9, p. 191. 6. W.H. Vliegen, Bebel’s populariteit, Het Volk (Amsterdam), 14 August 1913, quoted from Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, p. 298; Ma¨rkische Volksstimme, 15 August 1913, quoted from Faksimile, in ibid., p. 45; E. Klaar, Auf Bebels Sarg, Der Wahre Jakob, 6 September 1913, quoted from ibid., pp. 126f (‘Die Armut weiß, was sie an dir verloren: / Ein neuer Heiland, wardst du uns geboren! / Ein Heiland – ja! Von hehrer Glut ¨ ndet, / Hast du uns ku ¨ hn das neue Heil verku ¨ ndet, / Das Heil der entzu Gleichheit und Gerechtigkeit, / Geboren aus dem Unrecht dieser Zeit.’ 7. V. Adler, Arbeiter-Zeitung (Wien), 14 August 1913, quoted from: ibid., p. 26; Jugend, 1913, p. 1037. 8. Bliesemann de Guevara/Reiber, Charisma, pp. 17ff.; H. Greulich, Volksrecht (Zurich), 14 August 1913, quoted from Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, p. 51; J. Marchlewski, in Vorwa¨rts, 15 August 1913, quoted from ibid., p. 88. 9. J. Marchlewski, in Vorwa¨rts, 15 August 1913, quoted from Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, p. 87; M. Harden, in Die Zukunft, 44, 1903, pp. 498ff., quoted from Hirsch, Bebel, p. 365; New York Times, 14 and 17 August 1913. 10. H. Simpson, in The New Review 21, 1913, pp. 801–804, quoted from Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, p. 93; A. Lee, in New York Times, 19 August 1913; Anonymous, Des Deutschen Reiches Drechslermeister, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung, 17 August 1913, quoted from Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, p. 141; Langewiesche, Bebel, p. 18; K. Kautsky, Bebel, in Die Neue Zeit, 47, 1913, p. 740; The Times, 15 August 1913, p. 5. 11. T. Heuss to E. Heuss-Knapp, 18/19 September 1910, in Heuss, Aufbruch, p. 310; Welskopp, Banner, p. 369; Het Volk, 16 August 1913, illustration in Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, p. 118; L. Lemke, in Glotz, Bedeutung, p. 103. 12. J. Romm, in New Yorker Volkszeitung, 23 and 17 August 1913, quoted in Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, pp. 288, 286; A. Popp, in Die Gleichheit, 10 September 1913, quoted in ibid., p. 275; L. Kautsky, in Vorwa¨rts, 12 August 1923, quoted in ibid., p. 227. 13. A. Bebel to K. Kautsky, 16 August 1910, in Kautsky, jr (ed.), Briefwechsel, p. 227; L. Zietz, in Die Gleichheit, 1 September 1913, quoted from Gemkow and Miller (eds), Adler, p. 304; A. Popp, in Die Gleichheit, 10 September 1913, quoted in ibid., p. 275; Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Jena 1913, pp. 203–7. 14. Sozialdemokratische Parteitage, Jena 1913, p. 207; Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 377, 14 August 1913; New York Times, 17 August 1913.

EPILOGUE 1. Bering/Großsteinbeck, Dimension, pp. 328f. 2. Hanauske (ed.), Sitzungsprotokolle, vol. II, p. 195; Michels, Bebel, p. 672.

206

Notes to Pages 159– 165

3. Maehl, Shadow Emperor; Seebacher-Brandt, Bebel; Herrmann et al., Bebel; Gemkow, Bebel, pp. 102, 104. 4. Brandt, vol. 4, pp. 290, 292; Brandt, vol. 5, pp. 453, 455; Rau, Bebel, p. 9. 5. A. Bebel to P. Natorp, 26 July 1895, in Bebel, Reden, vol. 5, p. 67; information about the school by Friedbert Wehrle, head teacher of the August-Bebel-Gesamtschule, 8 March 2013. Traditionally, there is a threetier school system Germany: the Gymnasium with the Abitur, a school leaving exam and qualification for university, the Realschule as a middle school and the Hauptschule as an elementary school, both vocationally oriented. From 1968 onwards, the first Gesamtschulen were established in Germany (first West Berlin and West Germany) along the lines of English and Swedish comprehensive schools. 6. Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 224, 14 August 1913, Erstes Morgenblatt, p. 1; ibid., Abendblatt, p. 1. 7. Bebel, Frau, Jubila¨umsausgabe, p. 385. 8. Michael Glawogger, Workingman’s Death, documentary film 2005; Bebel, Frau, Jubila¨umsausgabe, pp. 338ff.; G. Grass at the award ceremony for G. Wallraff, 22 February 2013. 9. K. Kautsky, obituary for Bebel, 22 August 1913, in Gemkow/Miller (eds), Adler, p. 56; Ritter, Bebel, pp. 16f. 10. Gerlach, Bebel, pp. 55f.; Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 377, 14 August 1913; Walter, SPD, p. 46. 11. Weber, Vocation, p. 192; ‘Herr Bebel’, The Times, 14 August 1913, The Times Digital Archive. Web, accessed 26 February 2018. 12. Weber, Vocation, p. 207. 13. Neue Preußische Zeitung, no. 377, 14 August 1913, p. 1. 14. ‘Death of August Bebel’, The Times, 14 August 1913, The Times Digital Archive. Web, accessed 26 February 2018.

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Index

Adler, Victor, 101, 104, 106, 115, 117, 119 – 22, 125, 133, 137 –8, 143, 145, 151, 175 agitation, 56, 79 – 80, 84, 89, 93, 125, 163, 180 –1 agrarian programme, 120, 122 Alsace-Lorraine, 5, 71 – 2, 169 Amsterdam, 129, 131–3, 138, 172 amusement, 23, 91, 96, 105, 130 –1, 137, 140, 183 Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, 77 antagonism, economic, 42, 118 anti-Emperor, 3, 148, 150 anti-Semitism, 37 Anti-Socialist Laws, 2 – 5, 76 – 8, 83 – 7, 89, 111, 113, 121, 123, 131, 139, 149, 151, 161, 169 –70, 177, 186, 188 – 9 appearance, public, 34, 57, 72, 99, 133, 149, 155, 179 apprenticeship, 14, 18–20, 23, 26, 168 Arendt, Otto, 134 artisans, 3, 18 – 28, 30 – 6, 40 – 1, 52, 54, 61, 66, 68 –9, 78, 89, 111 –2, 163 association system, 58

Auer, Agnes, 95, 97 Auer, Ignatz, 87, 106, 111, 122, 175 August Bebel Foundation, 160, 173 Austria, 22 – 3, 30, 32 – 3, 46 –8, 60, 64, 70, 101, 121, 138, 143, 145, 150, 156, 168, 175, 186 authenticity, 153 Baden, 45, 48, 105, 141, 161, 172 Bad Godesberg, 160 Bassermann, Ernst, 148, 188 Bavaria, 22, 28, 48, 59, 83, 97, 106, 118, 182 – 3 Bebel, Ferdinand August, 9, 12, 167, 175 Bebel, Frieda, ix, 92 – 3, 99 – 101, 107, 109, 169 – 71, 175, 179, 181 Bebel, Johann Gottlob, 9 –12, 167, 175 –6 Bebel, Julie (ne´e Otto), ix, 5, 26, 81, 91 – 102, 106– 7, 114, 142, 151, 168, 170, 172, 175– 6, 178, 182

218

August Bebel

Bebel, Wilhelmine (ne´e Simon), 9– 14, 167, 176 Bebelplatz (Bebel Square), 157 –8, 173 Becker, Johann Philipp, 26, 96, 176 Berlin, x, 18, 37, 52, 57, 83, 86, 93, 95, 97, 100–1, 103–4, 150–1, 157–8, 170–1, 173, 179, 187 Bernstein, Eduard, x, 73, 99, 102, 111, 117 – 8, 121 – 2, 139, 143, 149, 171, 176, 179 Bethmann-Hollweg Theobald von, 132 Bismarck, Otto von, 2, 46 – 8, 51, 70 – 1, 79, 89, 123– 4, 176, 186, 188 Blos, Wilhelm, 73, 81 Bock, Wilhelm, 6, 84, 96 bourgeoisie, 30 – 1, 33, 35 – 6, 38, 51 – 2, 58, 64, 66, 118, 194 Bracke, Wilhelm, 64 Brandt, Willy, 159 – 60 Braunschweig, 64, 141 breadwinner, male, 11, 93 British see Great Britain Bromme, Moritz, 2 ¨ chner, Georg, 24 Bu budget, budget approval, 105, 117, 122, 139, 141, 147, 172 budget, military, 4, 47, 51 burial see funeral Camus, Albert, 147 canvass see elections capital, social and cultural, 112 capitalism, capitalists, xiii, 3, 7, 44, 68, 70, 79 – 80, 117, 119, 123, 133, 162 caretaker, 85, 101, 142 Catholic Centre Party (Zentrumspartei), 124, 144

Catholic journeymen association, 23, 28 ‘cause’, the (of politics/socialism), 4, 55–6, 76, 115–6, 164–5, 180 celebrity, 75, 116 Central Committee (Leipzig), 35– 7, 40, 48, 187 charisma, 62, 152– 4 child labour, 15 child mortality, 9 China, 133 Christianity, 79 citizenship, xiii, 21, 25, 38, 43, 92 civil society, xiii, 3, 13, 127, 162, 191 class, xiii, 6 – 7, 17, 25, 36, 38– 40, 68, 89, 119, 142, 153– 4, 187 class society, 4, 105 class struggle, 4, 39, 66, 74, 79, 118, 122, 187 classless civic society, 17, 30, 44, 188 Cologne, 9 – 10, 12, 21, 26, 29, 157, 167, 173 colonial politics, colonies, 124– 5, 133 – 6 Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten), 21, 45 conflict, constitutional, 1862 – 1864, 47, 51 Congress of German Workers’ Associations (Vereinstag deutscher Arbeitervereine), 40– 45, 48 – 9, 55 – 6, 59 – 60, 62– 3, 65, 68, 75, 168 – 9, 178– 81, 187– 9 cooperatives, 34, 36, 38–41, 62, 68 credibility, 98, 154

Index Dammer, Otto, 37, 176 Darwin, Charles, 44, 77, 105 defence, national, 5, 136 deterrence, policy of, 137 Dietz, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm, 177 disarmament, 136, 138, 160 Dresden, 62, 84, 95, 97, 103, 110, 122, 129 – 32, 144, 153, 170, 172 ¨ hring, Eugen, 104 – 5 Du Ebert, Friedrich, 73, 142, 156 economy of makeshifts, 11 education, 5, 7, 15, 17, 19, 28, 30 – 3, 35 – 6, 40, 82, 100 – 1, 103, 118, 152, 160 education, political, 52, 80, 173 Eisenach, 24, 59, 63 – 68, 70 – 1, 76, 169, 173, 176, 185, 188 Elberfeld, 5, 170 election campaigns, 2, 4, 53, 83, 131, 169 elections, 3, 53, 109, 116, 120, 149, 162 inner party, 40, 60, 66, 178 Reichstag, 49, 52 – 4, 58, 74, 84, 86, 96, 102, 113, 130, 144, 155, 170, 173 Ellenberger, Carl Heinrich, 18 – 21, 23, 177 emancipation, xiii, 2, 68 emancipation, women’s, 80 – 1, 118, 155 – 6, 163 Emmrich, Volker, 159 engagement, political/civil, xiii, 26, 32, 55, 126, 162 – 3 Engels, Friedrich, 5, 17, 20, 27, 37, 39, 57, 63, 73, 75, 78, 83, 89, 92, 95–7, 99, 103–6, 110–1, 114, 119–21, 123–4, 136,

219

139, 158–9, 170, 177, 179–80 enmities, 78, 106 equality, 68 – 9, 80, 151– 2, 156 Erfurt, 24, 49, 84, 89, 143– 4 Erfurt programme, 109, 117– 20, 171 everyday life, 11, 15, 19, 32, 38, 70, 82, 91 – 107, 116, 163 – 4 exclusion, 7, 17, 74, 89, 131, 148, 163, 191 expulsion, 45, 83, 100, 110 family networks, 12, 15 fatherland, defence of the, 5, 136–7 father role, 5, 100 – 1, 110, 144, 151, 154, 164 Federal Republic of Germany, 71– 2, 154, 159 – 60 feminism, 7, 156 First World War see World War I Fourier, Charles, 170, 177 France, 70–2, 97, 131–5, 138, 178 Franco-German War, 5, 70–1, 169 Frank, Ludwig, 141 – 2, 155, 161 Frankfurt upon Main, 10 –1, 31, 40– 4, 49, 55, 62, 115, 139, 167– 8, 189 freedom, 40, 50, 63, 68 – 9, 76, 160, 186 Freethinking/Radical Party (Freisinnige Partei), 4, 186 – 7 Freytag, Gustav, 52 – 4 friendship, 46 – 7, 102 – 4, 106 – 7, 109, 177 Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 32, 35, 37, 176 – 7 funeral, 104, 150– 1, 172 – 3, 175 future see society, socialist

220

August Bebel

Geck, Ernst Adolf, 104, 116, 177–8 gender see also role model, 96, 119, 156 General German Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein), 181 General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein), 39 – 43, 45 – 6, 53, 57, 60, 64 – 5, 70 – 1, 74 – 5, 168– 9, 175, 178 – 182, 185 Geneva, Lake Geneva, 26, 96 – 7, 176 Gera, 59 – 61, 65 – 6, 168, 178 Gerlach, Hellmut von, 46, 80, 163 German Democratic Republic, 159 –60 German National Association (Deutscher Nationalverein), 30, 60, 186– 8 German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei), 48 – 9, 66, 186 German Reich Party (Deutsche Reichspartei), 134, 186 German Workers’ Federation (Deutscher Arbeiterbund), 66, 185 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 18 Gorki, Maxim, 97 Gotha, 6, 24, 75 – 6, 84 – 5, 109, 188 –9 ¨ nther, 160, 173 Grass, Gu grassroots, grassroots members, 27, 55 – 7, 61, 63 – 7, 74, 76, 82, 87 – 9, 113 – 16, 119, 121, 126, 138, 143 –4, 163– 4 Great Britain, 121, 134 – 5, 138, 162, 198, 203

Greater German solution, 33, 60, 64, 186, 189 Grebing, Helga, 121 Grillenberger, Barbara M., 99 Grillenberger, Karl, 106 Groh, Dieter, 68 ¨ nderzeit’, 94 ‘Gru Halle/Saale, 27, 92, 170, 188 Hamburg, 81, 85, 112 –3, 116, 125– 6, 136, 150, 155, 170 – 2 Hasenclever, Wilhelm, 76, 86 – 7, 102, 178 Hatzfeldt, Sophie von, 37 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 97, 178 health, 1, 11, 33, 84, 98, 101, 132, 150, 162 health insurance see also social politics, 122– 3 Hepner, Adolf, 74, 169 Herero, 133 – 4, 172 heroism, 96 Herrmann, Ursula, 159 Heuss, Theodor, 154 Hirsch, Helmut, 71, 159 Hirsch, Max, 60 – 1, 66, 178 Hirsch-Dunckersche Gewerkvereine, 66, 178 honour, 55, 114, 142 ideology, 35, 69, 74, 77, 123, 143, 147, 160 illegal actions, 84, 86, 95, 170, 180 illness, 12, 14, 100 – 1, 107, 109, 173, 175 Imperial Association against Social Democracy (Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie), 148 imprisonment, 2, 70, 74 – 5, 94– 5, 169– 70, 182

Index Industrial Educational Association (Gewerblicher Bildungsverein), 3, 31 – 6, 40, 42, 45, 91, 168, 177, 181, 185, 187 – 94 inequality, 7, 104, 123, 125, 162 inheritance, 10, 13 – 4, 25, 43, 142 International Working Men’s Association, 26, 60, 62 –3, 66, 96, 168, 176, 179– 80, 187 –9 intimacy, 92, 99, 102 Ißleib, Ferdinand, 27, 94, 111, 169 –70, 178 Jaure`s, Jean, 129– 33, 172, 178 Jena, 140, 145, 156, 172, 183 journeymen wandering, 18, 20 – 4, 31, 34, 48, 167 Kautsky, Karl, 99, 102, 116, 118 –21, 129 – 30, 132– 3, 141, 149, 154, 179 – 80, 182 Kautsky(-Freyberger), Louise, 99, 106, 116, 142, 155, 179 ‘Kladderadatsch’ (big crash), 89, 121, 137, 154, 164 Kolb, Wilhelm, 105 ¨ snacht, 97 – 8, 171 Ku Lange, Friedrich Albert, 43–4, 179 Langewiesche, Dieter, 154 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 37 – 9, 42, 45 – 6, 64, 68, 73, 75 – 6, 105, 165, 168, 176, 179, 182, 185, 187, 190 Lassalleans, 46, 64 – 5, 70, 73 – 5, 189 League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten), 21

221

Legien, Carl, 115 Lehnert, Detlef, 120 Leipzig, 3, 21, 24–7, 30–44, 48–9, 52, 55, 59, 64–5, 70, 74, 80, 83, 85, 91–3, 97, 100, 110, 160, 167–70, 173, 176–7, 181–2, 185, 187–90 leisure, 19, 31, 34, 58, 83, 142 Lemke, Lotte, 155 liberalism, 3, 25, 29, 33 –4, 40, 45, 47, 50, 52, 65 Liebknecht, Karl, 110, 145 Liebknecht, Natalie (ne´e Reh), 57, 94, 103, 179 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 17, 26, 45–8, 53, 57–8, 61, 64, 66, 71–4, 76, 81, 83, 85–8, 92, 95, 102–4, 106, 110, 119–20, 145, 150, 165, 168–70, 179–81, 188 life for politics, 2, 4– 5, 7, 32, 48, 50– 90, 98, 116 – 7, 145, 148, 165, 187 lifestyle, bourgeois, 11, 97 livelihood, 12, 15, 18 – 9, 25–6, 48– 9, 67, 92, 182 London, 21, 27, 37, 45, 63, 75, 84, 89, 96 – 7, 104– 5, 121, 154, 164, 170, 180, 182, 187 loyalty, 114, 151 Luxemburg, Rosa, 106 – 7, 114, 117– 8, 135, 139, 141, 144, 171, 180, 183 Maehl, William Harvey, 159 Magdeburg, 105, 141– 2, 155, 172 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 44 Mannheim, 140– 1, 145, 172 Marx, Jenny (ne´e von Westphalen), 180

222

August Bebel

Marx, Karl, 18, 29, 37, 44, 61, 63, 67, 69, 73, 76 – 7, 99, 104– 5, 117, 158 – 60, 165, 170, 180, 187, 189 Marxism, 117, 119 – 21, 49 Marxist, -s, 46, 70, 74, 77, 116, 118, 120 – 1, 123, 147, 149, 159 – 60, 171, 176, 179, 188 – 9 mass strikes, 139 – 41, 143, 172, 189 Mayence, 10 – 1, 84 – 5, 167 Mehring, Franz, 31, 53, 157 – 8, 181 messianism, 37 – 8 Michels, Robert, 112, 158 middle classes, 15, 17, 25, 66, 120 –1, 187– 8, 194 military service, 9– 12, 14, 24, 47, 52 Molkenbuhr, Hermann, 145, 148, 156 Moroccan crisis, 135, 137, 172 Most, Johann, 73, 86, 180 Motteler, Julius, 88, 106, 116, 145, 180 ¨ ller, Moritz, 65 Mu Nama, 134 Napoleon III, 70 – 1 National Liberal Party (Nationalliberale Partei), 51–2, 148, 186–7 Naumann, Friedrich, 56 naval politics, 124, 135 Navy League (Flottenverein), 134 –5, 186 ‘New Era’, 29, 37, 47 North German Confederation, 51 – 2, 70, 168

Nuremberg, 53, 59 – 63, 68, 145, 169, 172, 181, 189 organizer, 58, 67, 72–3, 95, 129, 165 orphans trust, 14, 18, 21, 23, 28 Ossietzky, Carl von, 2, 150 Otto-Peters, Louise, 80, 181 pacifism, 3, 136 ‘Panic of 1873’, 27 parliamentarism, 88, 117, 119, 162 participation, 2– 3, 7, 28, 51 – 2, 61, 80, 89, 117, 121– 2, 132, 138, 141, 148, 161, 163 Passugg, 150, 154, 173 paternalism, 95 pathos, 55, 152 pauperism, 12, 15, 29 persecution, 29, 49, 70, 73–4, 76, 78, 84, 86, 89–90, 94–5, 98, 109, 111, 123, 131, 161, 187–8 political culture, 47, 114, 157, 163 politics as profession/ professionalization, 4, 20, 59, 90, 106, 109, 115, 125, 127, 139, 163 Polytechnical Society Leipzig (Polytechnische Gesellschaft), 30 – 2, 188 poor relief, 13 – 5 Popp, Adelheid, 155 Poznan, 9– 10, 167 privacy, 33, 58, 102 private life, 5, 7, 91 – 107, 109, 151, 156 property, common, 77 Prussia, 10, 18, 21, 29–30, 32, 45– 8, 57, 61, 66, 70–1, 82, 112, 140–1, 149, 158, 168–9, 172

Index public sphere, 32, 58, 81, 96, 158 Puttkammer, Robert Viktor von, 89 rank and file see grassroots members Rau, Johannes, 160 reading adventure, 19 – 20 reformism, 122, 141, 147, 161 Regensburg, 22, 28, 32 Reißhaus, Paul, 89, 144 religion, 23, 79 reputation, 18, 27, 56, 97, 112, 132, 145, 159 revisionism, 7, 102, 109, 117–8, 121–3, 129, 139, 143–4, 147–9, 153, 171, 179, 183, 188 revolution, 4, 39, 45, 68, 70, 77, 83, 88 – 9, 117, 119– 20, 131, 140, 149, 189 revolution of 1848, 10, 21, 24, 32, 37, 45, 96, 183 Richter, Eugen, 120, 181 role model, 7, 93 – 4, 111, 154, 156 Roßma¨ßler, Emil Adolf, 30 – 2, 80, 181 rules, democratic, 3, 132 Russia, 5, 10, 136, 139 – 40 Russian Revolution 1905, 139 –40 salvation, 152 Saxon People’s Party (Sa¨chsische Volkspartei), 48 – 9, 53, 58 – 9, 63, 168, 181, 188 Saxony, 25, 30 – 1, 45, 48, 52 – 3, 56, 58, 61, 93, 95, 188 scandals, 125 Schiller, Friedrich, 30

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Schulze-Delitzsch, Hermann, 178 Schweichel, Robert, 62, 111–2, 181 Schweitzer, Johann Baptist von, 62, 178, 181 Second International, 129–30, 138, 142, 151, 170, 172, 178, 190 Seebacher-Brandt, Brigitte, 159 self-determination of nations, 71–2 self-help, 34, 36, 39, 61, 66 – 8, 189, 161 separation of bourgeois from proletarian democracy, 3, 65–6 servants, domestic, 13 Simon, Ferdinand, 101– 2, 107, 170, 172, 175, 178, 181– 2 Simon, Werner, 171, 182 Singer, Paul, 95, 107, 113, 145, 171, 182 Sisyphus, 139, 147 –9, 156 Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), 2, 6–7, 107, 111, 113, 119, 121, 123, 126, 136, 148, 153, 155, 158, 163, 170–1, 175, 183, 188–9 Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei), 56, 63, 169, 185, 188 social movement, 2– 3 social politics, 56, 123, 125 social welfare, 28 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), 158 – 9

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August Bebel

Socialist Workers’ Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei), 75, 169, 189 society, bourgeois, 52, 89, 118, 122, 125 – 6, 131, 136– 7, 140, 148, 177 society, socialist, xiii, 117, 148, 162 future of, 3, 69, 80, 82, 149, 156 solidarity, 5, 74, 95, 125– 6 Sonnemann, Leopold, 42, 44, 48 – 9, 62, 66, 182 speaker, 2–3, 37, 41, 54, 56, 72, 76, 78, 91, 162, 179 steamships, subsidy for, 87, 170 strikes see also mass strikes, 44, 125 –6, 139, 152, 170–1, 178 Stuttgart, 45, 59, 66, 172, 177 success, 1, 4– 5, 14, 17, 27 – 8, 31, 47, 49, 52, 54, 57, 61, 63 – 4, 67, 84, 86, 90, 96, 98, 111– 2, 114, 116, 124, 148, 158 suffrage, 36, 38 – 9, 45, 51, 53, 75, 139 –41, 171 – 2 theoretical concepts/ideas, 67, 72 – 3, 75, 104 – 6, 117– 8, 121, 165 Thuringia, 24, 27, 61 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 44 trade unions, 39, 45, 59, 66, 76, 113, 115, 125, 139 – 41, 150 –1, 168, 171 – 2, 178 turner artisanry, 25–8, 32, 46, 59, 80, 111, 154, 167–9, 177–8. unification, German, 47, 66, 70, 186, 189 unification party conference in Gotha, 75 –6, 85, 109, 169, 175, 188 – 9.

Union of German Workers’ Associations (Verband deutscher Arbeitervereine), 60– 5, 168, 189 utopia, utopianism, 69, 81 – 2, 121, 136, 148 – 9, 161, 164 Vahlteich, Carl Julius, 32, 34 – 7, 39, 57, 62, 76, 78, 177, 182 violence, in the family, 13 violence, in politics, 68, 104, 119, 125, 131 Vollmar, Georg von, 83, 106, 118, 122, 133, 182 –3. Vorwa¨rts (association), 35 – 7, 46, 168, 185, 187, 189 wage labour, wages, 10, 25, 37, 39, 43 – 4, 62, 66, 68, 89, 94, 110, 119, 125, 139 Wagner, Richard (composer), 97 Wagner, Richard (delegate), 141 Waldenburg, 178 Weber, Max, 4, 55, 152, 164 – 5 Weimar Republic, 155 – 7, 177 Welskopp, Thomas, 68, 80 Wetzlar, 1, 10–1, 13–15, 17–21, 23, 25, 28, 43, 100, 160, 167, 173 Wilhelm I, Prussian king and German emperor, 29, 83, 124, 169, 183 Wilhelm II, Prussian king and German emperor, 123, 150, 183 work, political, xiii, 4, 48 – 50, 56– 7, 75, 79 –81, 96, 107, 110, 114 –16, 118 – 20, 122– 3, 126, 130, 142, 144– 5, 164

Index work ethics, 142, 163 workers, female, 69, 93, 155– 6. Workers’ Educational Association (Arbeiterbildungsverein) see also Industrial Educational Association, 3, 35–6, 45, 62, 65, 80, 168, 176, 181, 185, 187 workload [overworked] 57, 59, 94, 109, 115 – 6, 142

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World War I, 5, 81, 141, 188, 190 Zetkin, Clara, 171, 183 Zietz, Louise, 156 zoon politikon, 1, 127 Zurich, 5, 26, 84 –8, 97 – 8, 100– 2, 104, 106, 118, 121, 150– 1, 153, 170– 3 Zwahr, Hartmut, 25

PLATE 1 The beginning of a social rise: Deutschordenshof in Wetzlar. Bebel went to school here between 1846 and 1854.

PLATE 2 A symbol of the ability to create unity out of diversity: August Bebel’s journeyman’s piece from 1853/4. On the left, a representation of Bebel’s success: Bebel’s signet ring.

PLATE 3 Patent leather shoes and a determined look into the camera: one of the earliest photos of Bebel, presumably from 1863.

PLATE 4 Julie Bebel, shown here with her family; on the right-hand side, daughter Frieda. The family’s wealth was not just staged for this photograph. In the early 1880s, when the photograph was taken, August was a successful entrepreneur and a member of the Saxon Diet and German Reichstag.

PLATE 5 Anything but a workers’ idyll: due to their political engagement, socialists faced house searches (as shown in this picture), arrest and expulsion from their home towns during the years of the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878 – 90).

PLATE 6 After her divorce from Karl Kautsky, Louise Kautsky was Friedrich Engels’ secretary and housekeeper. Bebel was impressed by her straightforward, natural character.

PLATE 7 Wilhelm Liebknecht, Bebel’s friend (though often criticized by him), around 1880.

PLATE 8 A dignified opponent of Bebel: Jean Jaure`s, here portrayed as a determined workers’ leader who is focused on his goal.

PLATE 9 In 1879, Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism) was published. Bebel revised his book several times; up to World War I, more than 140,000 copies were sold.

PLATE 10 A synthesis of Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle: leading delegates of the Gotha unification party conference in 1875. Bebel (fourth from the left in the inner row) is one of many others, but close to the centre of power.

PLATE 11 Apparently, party quarrels among different political currents did not affect Bebel’s private life. Clara Zetkin (third from left), left-wing Socialist, and reformist Eduard Bernstein (far right) met during the International Socialist Workers’ Congress with (from left to right) Ferdinand Simon, Frieda Simon, Friedrich Engels, Julie and August Bebel, Bernstein’s stepson Ernst Schattner and Regina Bernstein in a Zurich beer garden.

PLATE 12 Socialist education in the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin, 1908: August Bebel (fifth from left) next to Rosa Luxemburg. The future president of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, sits on the third bench of the right bench row on the left-hand side. The future president of the German Democratic Republic, Wilhelm Pieck, sits on the second bench of the left bench row on the left-hand side.

PLATE 13 August Bebel as pioneer of free suffrage in Prussia. This picture of a disciplined protest march is iconic and worlds apart from Euge`ne Delacroix’s revolutionary painting ‘Liberty Leading the People’ of 1831.

PLATE 14 Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, around 1928.

PLATE 15 Paul Singer, August Bebel and Wilhelm Pfannkuch in a hackney coach on their way to the Jena party conference, 1905.

PLATE 16 The place where August Bebel spoke about and for the workers: Bebel at the Reichstag on 7 December 1905.

¨ snacht at Lake Zurich. At first glance, PLATE 17 Bebel’s villa in Ku the Bebel family would seem to have enjoyed a lavish and generous lifestyle. But most parts of the villa were rented out.

PLATE 18 August Bebel presents himself as a statesman without holding a state office. Would he have become the first president of the Weimar Republic, had he lived longer? The photograph attempts to establish posthumous fame.

PLATE 19 August Bebel’s funeral on 17 August 1913. The funeral march to the Sihlfeld cemetery in Zurich.