Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 1107132037, 9781107132030

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Red Secularism

Red Secularism is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern Germany, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and early feminists. Todd H. Weir shows how generations of secularist intellectuals staked out leading positions in the Social Democratic Party, but often lost them due to their penchant for dissent. Moving between local and national developments, this book examines the crucial role of red secularism in the political struggles over religion that rocked Germany and fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. todd h. weir is Associate Professor of History of Christianity and Modern Culture in the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society of the University of Groningen. His previous monograph Secularism and Religion in NineteenthCentury Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge, 2014) won the Jacques Barzun Prize for Cultural History. He is also the co-editor of books on monism, apologetics and religious heritage.

Red Secularism Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 Todd H. Weir University of Groningen

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05-06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107132030 DOI: 10.1017/9781316443736 © Todd H. Weir 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weir, Todd H., author. Title: Red secularism : socialism and secularist culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 / Todd H. Weir. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2024. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023020480 (print) | LCCN 2023020481 (ebook) | ISBN 9781107132030 (hardback) | ISBN 9781107583436 (paperback) | ISBN 9781316443736 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Secularism–Germany–History. | Socialism–Germany–History. | Working class–Germany–History. Classification: LCC BL2765.G3 W47 2024 (print) | LCC BL2765.G3 (ebook) | DDC 335.00943–dc23/eng20230819 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020480 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020481 ISBN 978-1-107-13203-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Preface Abbreviations

page vi viii ix xii

1

Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

1

2

Secularist Culture in an Industrializing City: Berlin around 1890

29

3

Prometheans: Secularist Intellectuals on the Socialist Stage

63

4

The Sociology and Psychology of Secularist Intellectuals: Dancing Near the Abyss

89

5

Workers and Worldview

114

6

The Politics of Secularism 1905–1914

153

7

Secularists in War and Revolution 1914–1922

196

8

Monism in the Weimar Workers’ Culture Movement

239

9

Culture War at the End of the Weimar Republic

285

Epilogue

323

Appendixes 1 Membership of Secularist Organizations in 1914 2 Membership of Secularist Organizations in 1930 3 Short Biographies of Socialist Secularists 4 Lectures at the Arbeiterbildungsverein Nord 1889–1891 Archives Used Index

336 337 338 339 353 355 357

v

Figures

1.1 Poster celebrating the founders of German Social Democracy: “The liberators of the proletariat 1863–1913.” Rossmaessler, Fritzsche, Dammer and Vahlteich were members of Free Religious Congregations. 2.1 Postcard of the prewar Jugendweihe, with Bruno Wille officiating and Adolph Hoffmann superimposed. 2.2 Frontispiece: Wilhelm Bölsche, The Man of the Future. 2.3 Left: Bruno Wille, Right: Wilhelm Bölsche. 2.4 Socialist lecturers in secularist popular science associations around 1890. Theodor Metzner, Ottilie Baader, Waldeck Manasse, Emma Ihrer. 3.1 Images of Prometheus. Top: masthead of Der Freidenker; Bottom: German Monist League. 3.2 Postcard of Bruno Wille in his jail in Friedrichshagen, with supporters, including Wilhelm Bölsche, gathered outside. 3.3 Postcard of Giordano Bruno celebration in 1900. Caption: “Burning is easier than disproving!” 4.1 Left: Johannes Guttzeit. Right: Agnes Wabnitz. 5.1 Left: Paul Löbe, 1890s; Right: Walter Ulbricht, ca. 1914. 5.2 Ex libris for worker readers: Gustav Hennig, “Buch-Eigener-Zeichen,” Der Bibliothekar, 1/4, Supplement (August 1909) 6.1 “Mass Exit from the State Church.” Gendarme: What are you doing there? The masons: We are simply making the exit a little wider! 6.2 “The New Kulturkampf” postcard published by the Centre Party. 7.1 Free Religious leaders of the USPD. Left to right: Adolph Hoffmann, Ewald Vogtherr, Fritz Kunert, Ernst Däumig. vi

page 9 37 42 56

60 64

85 87 98 126

138

177 183

214

List of Figures

7.2 “Look to the Right and to the Left, you see a half Independent fall!” Moscow cleaves the USPD, with a message in favor of joining the Comintern carried by Däumig and one against carried by Dittmann. 8.1 Seated figures, left to right: Magnus Hirschfeld, Maria Krische, Paul Krische, Motzen Lake. 8.2 Body Culture School Adolf Koch, Kulturwille, 1926, 86. 8.3 Kurt Löwenstein at a Kinderrepublik, 1932. 9.1 Church-leaving special issue of Der Atheist, April 1925. “People awaken, Free Humanity.” 9.2 “We will not leave you, if you bless us!” under the headline article “Concordat = Fascism.” 10.1 “Loving Congregation!”

vii

236 268 273 283 292 299 326

Tables

3.1 Members of the Free Religious Congregation elected to the Berlin City Council 1868–1914 page 79 5.1 Development of the scientific “wandering courses” in Germany 121 5.2 Educational institutions reported by the union cartels 121 6.1 Formal church exits in Berlin 161 7.1 Membership in the Community of Proletarian Freethinkers (GpF), September 1, 1921; Election results for Reichstag elections, June 6, 1920 225 9.1 The confessional identification of Reichstag deputies 1918–1933 307

viii

Preface

As a graduate student in Berlin in the 1990s, I lived in the Prenzlauer Berg district in a run-down apartment building inhabited largely by students, many recently arrived from the West, and elderly East Germans. One day, while taking out old newspapers, I looked into the recycling bin and my eye was caught by an assortment of selected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, bound in red and blue imitation leather and with gold-tinted paper edges – the sort of books customarily given to party members in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at official ceremonies. I imagined that a former state functionary had recently died and, in the process of cleaning out the apartment, his or her relatives had simply seen these as unread and worthless relics of a bygone age and thrown them out. I pulled out a few of these classics, as well as an imposing eight-volume set of the Communist Party’s official history of the German working-class movement, but I later never read them. I found a sole book that predated the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949. It was a bound volume of a year’s worth of Proletarische Heimstunden (Proletarian Home Hours), a journal published by the Community of Proletarian Freethinkers in the mid-1920s. I had never heard of Proletarian Freethinkers, and I could not place them in my understanding of socialist history. Curious, I began to skim through the journal. Meant to edify and entertain workers, each issue featured short works by expressionist poets and working-class novelists, essays by Bolshevik cultural theorists associated with the Proletkult movement, and articles discussing Nietzsche, Einstein and Freud. Peppered throughout were older poems by the likes of the “romantic anarchist” John Mackay or the American trascendentalist Walt Whitman, popular scientific treatises, and rough expressionist woodcuts showing naked figures dancing in nature or the universe as a living unity. As one would expect from a Freethought journal, there were many articles criticizing religion. At that time, I was writing a master’s dissertation on the forced collectivization of East German agriculture in the early 1950s and was getting tired of reading the rigid language of Marxism-Leninism in which state actors had ix

x

Preface

been compelled to write. The chance discovery of Proletarische Heimstunden revealed to me a new facet of the history of socialism, namely its relationship to religion. Looking back, I now see that the disposal of that private library a few years after reunification corresponded with a turning point in the history and the historiography of German socialism. The collapse of state socialism had abruptly shattered the Marxist verities – whether believed or enforced – that had sustained the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. It eliminated the contextual field which had drawn scholars on both sides of the wall to write and debate the history of socialism and the German working class, which between the 1960s and 1990s formed one of the preeminent fields of German social history. Within ten years of the disappearance of the GDR in 1990, this history had come to appear overstudied, if not irrelevant. If interest in the history of the German working class and the socialist parties was riding the down-escalator of scholarly attention in the mid-1990s, religion was riding up. These cross-currents were related. Following the end of the Cold War, scholars began to look beyond ideologies and to religious commitments to understand political behavior. The “return of religion” in the form of domestic “culture wars” and new international conflicts opened up a terrain for scholarly thinking about religion and politics. We are now far enough into this historiographical paradigm that it may be time for a further turn, a turn back to the social and cultural history of German socialism, but one that views it from the perspective of religion and secularism. In the course of writing this book, I have accumulated many debts that I am happy to acknowledge here. Around a decade ago, I entered into a fruitful exchange with Benjamin Ziemann, who has doggedly challenged me and defended the best in the social historical tradition that comes under some criticism in this book. Moritz Föllmer provided insightful commentary on two chapters, and I have benefited over the years from the collaboration of my fellow travellers in the history of Central European secularism: Tracie Matysik, Heléna Tóth, and Horst Groschopp. I thank Victoria Smolkin and Igor Polianski for conversations about Soviet secularism, and Anton Jansson for his careful reading of the draft. I developed some of the key interpretations of this study in collaborative workshops held at Queen’s University Belfast on “the Interwar Kulturkampf” in 2015 and at the British Academy on “apologetics and politics” in 2017. I am grateful to my co-conveners Hugh McLeod and Benjamin Ziemann and to the participants for that opportunity. I benefited greatly from the detailed feedback from the anonymous reader at Cambridge University Press and from the guidance of my editor Liz Friend-Smith, who has made preparing this book a pleasant journey. Most of the research for this book was undertaken while I was working at Queen’s University Belfast, made possible by grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme

Preface

xi

Trust. I wrote the first draft chapters while a fellow at the Historisches Kolleg Munich in 2012 and largely completed the book in spring 2022, while I was a senior fellow at the University of Leipzig research center “Multiple Secularities.” I am grateful to the co-directors Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Christoph Kleine, as well as to the other Leipzig fellows for their critical questions and support. The introduction received helpful feedback from the scholars participating in the “Historicizing Secular Studies” project in 2021 organized by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Michelle C. Sanchez and Justin Reynolds. At the University of Groningen, I have enjoyed discussing chapters of this book with colleagues, in particular Kim Knibbe, Clemens Six and my doctoral students. Portions of Chapters 7 and 9 have been previously published in Central European History and Past & Present respectively. I am thankful for the support of my partner Anna Salzano and my children, Sasha and Martin, and to my other great supporters, my parents and brother, Kristina, Tom and Brian Weir. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

Abbreviations

ADAV AdsD ADW AES ASV Barch BayHStA BBAW DDP DFB DGEK DMB DNVP EHH EZA FRC GDR GpF GStA GVV HVD IISG ISK KPD LAB LABB MSPD RAG SAPMO SDAP SED xii

Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein Archiv der sozialen Demokratie Archiv des diakonischen Werkes, Berlin Secretary of State, Vatican Vatican Secret Archive Bundesarchiv, Berlin Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften Deutsche Demokratische Partei Deutscher Freidenkerbund Deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur Deutscher Monistenbund Deutschnationale Volkspartei Ernst-Haeckel-Haus Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Free Religious Congregation German Democratic Republic Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker Geheimes Staatsarchiv Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung von Volksbildung Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands International Institute of Social History Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands Landesarchiv Berlin Landeskirchliches Archiv Berlin Brandenburg Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft freigeistiger Verbände Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands

List of Abbreviations

SPD StaM USPD VDAV VFF VfFF ZpF

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Staatsarchiv Munich Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung Verband für Freidenkertum und Feuerbestattung Zentralverband proletarischer Freidenker

xiii

1

Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and lasting well into the Cold War, socialism represented the most powerful and sustained force of political and social dissent in Europe. Prior to the First World War, this dissent operated largely outside of the dominant order. Socialist political parties were excluded from participation in government and the industrial actions undertaken by labor unions were often met with violence and state repression. After the war, the socialist movement split into rival Social Democratic and Communist parties. The former entered government in many countries, while the latter contributed substantially to the political polarization that fed the emergence of authoritarian regimes across much of Europe. Germany was early in the formation of an autonomous socialist movement. Following its founding in 1875, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, which took the name Social Democratic Party or SPD in 1890, became the pacesetter for sister parties across Europe for the next forty years. Religion played a crucial role in the politics of the European left and this was certainly true of the socialist movement as well. Despite the presence of Christian socialists, the overwhelming image of socialism at the time was of a movement dedicated to driving religion from the realm of the state and public life. This took a moderate form in the steadfast support of separation of church and state: the declaration that “religion is a private matter” remained a central plank of the SPD platform. A more radical stance appeared in anticlericalism. From his seat in the Reichstag, Germany’s leading socialist August Bebel outraged his fellow parliamentarians by declaring in 1874: “Christianity and socialism go together like fire and water.”1 Over the next eighty-five years, until the revamping of the SPD program at its congress in Bad Godesberg in 1959, the German socialist movement was a site of repeated anticlerical agitation. Many Germans came to view the socialist movement as antiChristian, if not antireligious and atheistic.

1

Quoted in: Vernon L. Lidtke, “August Bebel and German Social Democracy’s Relation to the Christian Churches,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1966): 251.

1

2

Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

This book offers a novel interpretation of the religious politics of German socialism. Before outlining this interpretation, I would like to briefly consider the two most prevalent explanations of the socialist criticism of religion. The first was developed by nineteenth-century socialists themselves, who held that, because the Christian churches were closely allied to monarchy and defended hierarchy as the natural order of society, they formed part of the apparatus of class oppression. Christian theology served as an intellectual fetter. In Karl Marx’s influential formulation, religion was “the opium of the people” and “the sigh of the oppressed creature,” i.e. a palliative response to human suffering, which diverted energy from the struggle against the ultimate source of oppression – capitalist exploitation.2 Anticlericalism thus appeared as the logical corollary in the religious realm of the struggle against state authorities and class opponents in the political realm. Recent literature on “secularism” offers a contrary reading of Bebel’s statement. Because “secularism” forms my own chief term of analysis, it is important to address this literature head on and clarify the different definitions being used. Within the growing field of inquiry known sometimes as “secular studies,” secularism refers to the ideologies, policies and constitutional arrangements whereby modern states and elites have sought to manage religion.3 Whereas earlier secularization theory proposed that the reduction of the realm of the religious was a largely automatic macro-processes of modernity, newer studies see in secularism a political operation, in which the distinction between the secular and religious is mobilized to make a number of political interventions possible. This operation has practical dimensions, such the separation of church and state, as well as discursive ones. Joan Wallach Scott has demonstrated, for example, how the secular–religious binary was used to reinforce gender and racial binaries, in order to discursively construct the ideal of the modern European who was white, male, educated and secular.4 Use of this binary is by no means exclusive to antireligious forces, and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has spoken of a “Protestant secularism” that contrasted a supposedly rational Protestantism with dogmatic and fanatical Catholicism.5 Due to such variation, some scholars have come to identify multiple secularisms.6 Yet, given the linkages between various uses of the 2 3

4 5 6

Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Marx: Early Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003); Michael Warner, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2018), 13–15. Elizabeth S. Hurd, “The Political Authority of Secularism in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations, 10/2 (2004): 247. Marian Burchardt, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Matthias Middell (eds.), Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015); Linell

Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

3

secular–religious distinction at the societal level, most scholars in the field of secular studies still generally speak of secularism in the singular, as a hegemonic ideology “characterized by its universalist pretensions and its claim of superiority over non-secular alternatives.”7 Viewed from this perspective, the anticlericalism propagated in socialist circles appears in a new light. Rather than being a defensive stance against the alliance of throne and altar, which is how socialist secularists generally portrayed it, anticlericalism appears as a call on socialist workers to identify with the emerging dominant, secular order. To a certain extent one can reconcile these viewpoints, by recalling the fact that socialists saw themselves as the legitimate heirs to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Democratic movement of 1848. Most likely, Bebel’s declaration in 1874 was meant to rub his liberal colleagues’ noses in the radical consequences of scientific discovery that many professed to believe in private, but no longer wished to be associated with in public. Yet, this interpretation leaves secularism as a hegemonic discourse of modernity that shaped and thus united a wide array of social formations, from Protestantism to liberalism to socialism. It does not satisfactorily account for the socialist attitudes towards religion and atheism documented in this book. Nor does it sit with the historical use of the English term “secularism” as it emerged in the nineteenth century. Leading voices in secular studies, such as Talal Asad and Joan Wallach Scott, claim that rather than imposing an ahistorical, normative definition of secularism on past events, they have grounded their analyses in a genealogical account of the conceptual use of secularism.8 Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, their conceptual histories of secularism hide as much as they reveal about what was meant by the term, when it was coined in 1851 by George Holyoake to recast the English Freethought movement that he led.9 Holyoake had been attracted to the use being made of the term “secular” by liberals at the time, for example, in their calls for secular national schools. The resultant association of “secular” with Freethought caused some liberals, such as the prominent reformer Richard Cobden, to recoil from the term “secular” and from Holyoake’s subsequent addition of “ism” to it.10 Yet, as historian Laura

7

8 9 10

Elizabeth Cady and Elizabeth Hurd (eds.), Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Elizabeth Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2008), 235; Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton University Press, 2014), 144–67. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 16; Scott, Sex and Secularism, 4–6. Todd Weir, “Germany and the New Global History of Secularism: Questioning the Postcolonial Genealogy,” Germanic Review, 90/1 (2015): 6–20. In 1850 Richard Cobden successfully convinced the founders of the National Secular School Association to drop “secular” from their name and thereby avoid “opening up a chink in their armour which they would some day have rivet up with more difficulty and discussion.” S. E.

4

Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

Schwartz has noted, the principal aim of Holyoake’s neologism was to insist that Freethought represented a “positive agenda and alternative value system” and not merely criticism of religion.11 Holyoake variously defined secularism as “this-worldism,” “cosmism,” “a new form of thought and action” and “the policy of life to those who do not accept Theology.”12 Secularism, in other words, identified a system of knowledge and ethics that could compete with other actors in the religious field. Thus, at its inception, secularism appeared against the backdrop of liberal calls for separation, but with the express purpose of naming the radical dissenting culture of more plebeian freethinkers. When Asad and Scott anachronistically applied the term “secularism” to liberal elites, many of whom, in fact, eschewed the term at that time, they occluded the actual definition proposed by freethinkers. To differentiate between the two, I refer to the former as “political” and the latter as “worldview” secularism. Political secularism names the legal and discursive use of the secular–religious binary to further political ends. Worldview secularism denotes the advocacy of cultural transformation based on replacement of dualistic religions by immanent systems of meaning. Whereas political secularism has been depicted as a largely top-down affair of modern states and powerful social forces, worldview secularism was usually championed by more marginal social segments and aligned to political dissent. In this study, when I use the term secularism, I am speaking of worldview secularism. By applying the term “worldview” to Holyoake’s movement, I am myself engaging in anachronism, given that reception of the German term Weltanschauung was only just beginning in the English-speaking world in the 1850s. In Germany, however, Weltanschauung was already the core term around which nascent formations of German secularism were organizing. In 1850, the Free Religious preacher Eduard Baltzer began to publish a pamphlet series Old and New World-View.13 His first pamphlet on “The Relationship of the Free Congregations to the Old Religions, especially to Christianity” clearly invoked the secular–religious binary; however, it did so to plant the flag of the new worldview in the religious field. The propagation of worldview remained the main task of later secularist associations, but always in connection with

11 12 13

Maltby, Manchester and the Movement for National Elementary Education 1800–1870 (Manchester University Press, 1918), 78–79. Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2012), 8. W. Stewart Ross, “We Want Science, and More than Science,” Open Court, 276 (1892): 3479; George Holyoake, The Principles of Secularism (London: Austin, 1870), 27. Eduard Baltzer, Das Verhältnis der freien Gemeinde zu den alten Religionen, besonders zu dem Christenthume, vol. I, Alte und neue Welt-Anschauung: Vorträge, gehalten in der freien Gemeinde zu Nordhausen (Nordhausen: Förstemann, 1850).

The Culture of Secularism

5

ritual practice, social engagement and life reform. This made German secularism a discrete social and cultural formation. This brings us to the main argument of the book. Although the many anticlerical statements found in the historical record, such as Bebel’s in 1874, suggest a straightforward relationship between socialism and religion, in fact, a range of motivations were at work. Some socialists claimed the mantle of Enlightenment from liberalism and thereby supported liberal calls for separation and secularization, while others gave vent to criticism of the role the churches played in the social oppression of the working class. Yet, as the closer inspection undertaken in this book reveals, the socialists most dedicated to what was then called “the religious question” had a further motivation: they were active adherents of worldview secularism. They constituted a clearly defined secularist-socialist subculture, sustained by organizations and intellectuals, who preached a positive faith in a humanistic, materialistic worldview that existed alongside and intermingled with Marxist convictions. I call this subculture “red secularism” to distinguish it both from socialist party culture and from the freethinking culture of German liberals. The Culture of Secularism Before looking more closely at red secularism, I will introduce the broader culture of worldview secularism as it formed in nineteenth-century Germany. This culture first found institutional form in the Free Religious movement that emerged among Protestant and Catholic rationalist dissenters during the period of social ferment leading up to the revolution of 1848. The Free Religious Congregations maintained the basic structures of churches, but by the 1860s many had abandoned Christianity in favor of a belief in the monistic unity of spirit and matter in a purely immanent reality. Secularism gained in associational diversity with the founding of Freethought associations in the 1880s and the formation of a German Monist League in 1906 under the leadership of biologist Ernst Haeckel. What united all of these organizations was the effort to eradicate church influence in public life while at the same time promoting secularist alternatives to the component parts of nineteenth-century church life, that is, community formation, ethical instruction of the youth, and a totalizing system of faith. In my previous book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession, I argued that the apparent paradox of a secularist religion was not so paradoxical when viewed from the standpoint of what was still a “Christian state.” The term “confession” (in German Konfession) provides the key to understanding how worldview secularism related to its religious environment. The German states adopted the ecclesiastical term Konfession in the early nineteenth century and used it to

6

Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

refer to the recognized Catholic and Protestant churches. This abstract category allowed the states to create distance between themselves and these churches, while at the same time codifying the unequal treatment of religions.14 Full rights were extended only to the state-sanctioned churches, while followers of secularism and minority religions were excluded from some rights. Although not technically Konfessionen, Judaism and worldview secularism functioned as a “third” and “fourth confession,” because of their strong presence in the confessional field. Even though the membership of all secularist organizations probably ranged between 40,000 and 50,000 in the late nineteenth century, their competitors and the state treated them as a significant competitor. In this way, worldview secularism decisively shaped the confessional field.15 Attention to the dynamics of the confessional field remains critical in this present study. Secularism mapped onto socialism, because both occupied structurally analogous positions within the semi-liberal, semi-authoritarian political and social order of nineteenth-century Germany, in which the stateimposed confessional order played a central role. However, in this study I use “culture” as the chief analytical term, because it provides a neutral concept that places secularism and socialism on an equal footing. Culture can be applied to political and religious spheres alike, thus overcoming categories of comparison that would place socialism and secularism into different orders. In addition, culture is appropriate to our endeavor because the German term Kultur was utilized by the historical actors to define the territory in which politics and religion overlapped, from the Kulturkampf of the 1870s to the struggle during the Weimar Republic between the advocates of “Kultursozialismus” and the “Kulturreaktion.” Culture has a long pedigree in the social sciences, and like secularism, it has enjoyed so many uses that the definition utilized in this book requires clarification. I was inspired by the essay “Two Cultures” penned by the British writer C. P. Snow in 1956 to describe the deep division within the British republic of letters between more Christian and pessimistic humanists, on the one side, and more secular and optimistic scientific elites, on the other. Snow was well aware 14

15

With reference to my study, Reinhard Schulze suggested at the 2018 Leipzig conference of the Multiple Secularities project that until the 1950s–1960s Europe was shaped by a “confessional secularity.” See the later formulation in Reinhard Schulze, “Islam and the Global History of Secularity,” in Dynamics of Islam in the Modern World: Essays in Honor of Jamal Malik, ed. Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 17–37. I derive the notion of the confessional field from Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” Comparative Social Research, 13 (1991): 1–44. For an account that questions the application of confessionality to secularism, see Rebekka Habermas, “Secularism in the Long Nineteenth Century between the Global and the Local,” in Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire: Transnational Approaches, ed. Rebekka Habermas (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 115–42. For figures on the membership in secularist organizations in Germany, see Appendices 2 and 3 below.

The Culture of Secularism

7

that dividing contemporary intellectuals into two camps was an oversimplification. He acknowledged that “culture” was purposefully vague, “something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map.”16 My use of the concept of culture is similarly heuristic. Like Snow, I utilize it to pull two social formations out of the background of modern society. I am not claiming that the “two cultures” of secularism and socialism are the only ones relevant to understanding the relationship of religion and left-wing politics in Germany of this period; one could also examine other “cultures” such as esotericism or anarchism. However, like Snow did for his case, I want to insist that we should concentrate on precisely these two cultures, because they are the most important movements of dissent in their respective fields in the period under investigation. I will add one further specification to my definition of the term culture. It differs from that of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who viewed culture as comprising “webs of significance” akin to language, which are utilized by a human community to make meaning.17 Instead, I approach the cultures of socialism and secularism as self-organizing and self-referential social systems, comprising individuals, associations and practices. According to German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, the essence of a social system is that it is iterative and autopoietic, which means that it produces and reproduces itself through the continual circulation of members, information and activities, all of which are recognized by the system as component parts.18 In the case of socialism, such parts are the party and labor organizations, electoral campaigns, as well as the ideas discussed in meetings and in the press. Socialist culture incorporated also associations, songs and rituals, in what American historian Vernon Lidtke called the “alternative culture” in his eponymous book of 1985.19 The notion that secularism might be also grasped as a culture in its own right, which I develop in this book, was prompted by the work of cultural studies scholar Horst Groschopp, whose Dissidenten (1997) first showed that secularism was a philosophically and politically coherent project reproduced in an extensive network of intellectuals and associations in imperial Germany.20 Thus, like the socialist movement, secularism, too, was not merely a discourse, but comprised self-organizing networks and associations that engaged in a high degree

16 17 18 19 20

Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30 (at 5). Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. and Dirk Baecker (Stanford University Press, 1995), 32–41. Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Horst Groschopp, Dissidenten: Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1997).

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of self-reflection. In each case, I argue that these systems extended beyond the card-carrying members of socialist parties or Freethought associations. Secularism operated within a wide network of popular science institutes, radical women’s organizations, and cultural reform movements advocating causes as diverse as homosexual rights, vegetarianism and abstinence.21 This book explores two dimensions of the relationship of the cultures of secularism and socialism. First, it seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of red secularism as a self-organizing subculture that was formed at the intersection of the larger cultures of socialism and secularism. Second, the book asks about the relationship between red secularism and the socialist parties, which was not solely one of mutual support. The relationship contained much tension and conflict, and secularists formed a recurring source of inner-party dissent. In the following sections, I give an overview of these two dimensions of red secularism and sketch out the main questions and findings contained in the following chapters. I then ask how these findings require us to rethink core assumptions contained in the historical literature. Through an exploration of the tensions generated by red secularism, this book casts a new light on the histories of socialism, secularism and German politics more broadly. What was Red Secularism? The book begins by charting the development of a specifically socialist subculture within the wider culture of secularism. As modern socialism began to take shape in Germany in the 1860s, its boundaries to this secularist culture were fluid. Discussion groups led by secularist intellectuals, whether in the Free Religious Congregations or in worker education societies, formed a seedbed for the first organizational efforts of German Social Democracy. Of the ten men depicted on a commemorative postcard celebrating the early leaders of German Social Democracy, four were organized secularists (see Figure 1.1). And as the young turner August Bebel rose to become the leading figure in German Social Democracy in Saxony in the 1860s, he had to face successive leadership challenges from well-known present or future leaders of Free Religion or Freethought.22 Bebel was himself an avid reader of secularist popular science and anticlerical religious criticism.

21 22

Diethart Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke (eds.), Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen: 1880–1933 (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1998). These challengers included Free Religious leaders Emil Roßmäßler and Robert Krebs, as well as future Freethinker Max Hirsch. Todd H. Weir, Secularism and Religion in NineteenthCentury Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 158.

What was Red Secularism?

Figure 1.1 Poster celebrating the founders of German Social Democracy: “The liberators of the proletariat 1863–1913.” Rossmaessler, Fritzsche, Dammer and Vahlteich were members of Free Religious Congregations. (Courtesy: AdsD/FES 6/FOTB004002)

9

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Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

Scholars have often interpreted Freethought and popular science as key vectors for liberal influence over the lower-middle and working classes.23 From the 1880s onward, however, a discrete socialist-secularist movement emerged. In 1887 socialists took control of Germany’s largest single secularist organization, the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, and in 1908, socialists broke away from the liberal-dominated German Freethought League and formed the Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers. The separation between the socialist and what was often called the “bourgeois” [bürgerlich] wings of secularism was an international process that continued until 1924, when most socialists quit the International Association of Freethinkers and set up a rival International of Proletarian Freethought. Even as Proletarian Freethinkers came to embrace Marxism, they continued to uphold a distinctly secularist worldview and imaginary. In fact, early on, most socialists did not use the term Weltanschauung to refer to Marxism, because the term was occupied. In a brochure entitled Religion, Church and Socialism of 1875, the Free Religious preacher Andreas Reichenbach argued that socialism would fail if it remained just a theory of economics: “Just like every thinking man, socialism requires a worldview. Thus, one can say that socialism is compatible with the essence of religion, and can cultivate it, naturally in a completely different form.” This worldview, he continued, could only be “taught to us by the results of strictly scientific . . . research.” It was “namely the worldview of the general theory of evolution.”24 Many terms have been used in the historical literature to describe this scientific worldview, whether positivism, materialism or Darwinism. However, the most accurate term is naturalistic monism, because it captures the shared faith of nearly all secularists in the unity and totality of existence in an entirely immanent reality, which was accessible through scientific knowledge of the physical world. As we will investigate, the relationship of historical materialism and naturalistic monism was complicated. One of the chief findings of this book is that naturalistic monism retained an abiding influence in socialist circles, even as communists in the late 1920s moved towards a rigid dogmatization of Marxism-Leninism. As our penultimate chapter investigates, one cannot

23

24

Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Die monistische Bewegung: Sozialingenieure und Kulturprediger’, in Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 246–59; Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998). Andreas Reichenbach, Religion, Kirchenthum und Sozialismus (Solingen: GenossenschaftsBuchdruckerei, n.d.), 16. Given the infrequent application of “Weltanschauung” to socialism prior to 1890, Christina Morina’s elevation of worldview as her key concept for analyzing Marxism must be seen as a potentially anachronistic imposition of a contemporary definition onto historical actors. Christina Morina, The Invention of Marxism: How an Idea Changed Everything (Oxford University Press, 2023), xx, 231.

What was Red Secularism?

11

understand the vibrant avant-garde socialist culture movement of the Weimar Republic without taking into account the central role of monism within it. This study differentiates between “pure” and “extended” secularist organizations. The former includes the associations of Free Religion, Freethought and monism, who made worldview and religious politics their principal concern, while the latter refers to the many popular education institutions that integrated monism into their curricula. Membership in the pure secularist organizations is used to keep track of committed secularists within the socialist parties and thereby better reveal the self-organization of the secularist-socialist culture. Following these persons, I have been able to chart the diffusion of secularist-monist worldview into the socialist milieu, divulging, for example, that key institutions of socialist education, such as the Berlin Workers’ School founded in 1891, were initiated and staffed by red secularists. How many socialist secularists were there? If we examine the members of the organizations of pure secularism, the numbers varied widely over the period under consideration. Just prior to the First World War, the principal umbrella organization of the socialist freethinkers claimed a national membership of 4,900–6,400 (as compared to ca. 5,000 in the rival “bourgeois” German Freethought League). A significant percentage of the roughly 18,000 Free Religious (ca. 40,000 if family members are included) were affiliated with the socialist movement, including most likely a majority of the roughly 1,800 member strong Berlin congregation. Free Religious Congregations in the northern cities of Hamburg and Königsberg, in the Saxon cities of Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden, and in centers of Bavarian Protestantism such as Nuremberg and Fürth, had close ties to the socialist movement.25 Although overall numbers were small, secularists were overrepresented in the prewar party leadership. When a congregation formed in the growing industrial center of Ludwigshafen in 1891, almost the entire local SPD leadership became members.26 At a time when only a minute fraction of Germany’s population had left the churches (less than 1 percent by 1914), some 60 percent of socialist candidates for the national parliament had become “confessionless” by 1912.27 The category of “confessionless” had been created by German authorities to 25

26

27

Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich: 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn: Dietz, 1992), 765; Theo Schneid, “‘Für das Leben, nicht für das Jenseits wollen wir wirken’: Die proletarische Freidenkerbewegung in Duisburg und Umgebung,” in Trotz alledem!: Arbeiteralltag und Arbeiterkultur zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik in Duisburg, ed. Manfred Pojana and Martina Will (Essen: Klartext, 1992), 62. Peter Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse: Geschichte und Kultur einer religiös-weltanschaulichen Dissidentengruppe dargestellt am Beispiel der Pfalz (Mainz: Gesellschaft für Volkskunde in Rheinland-Pfalz, 1991), 210–11. Jürgen Schmidt, “The Secularization of the Workforce in Germany in the Nineteenth Century,” in Secularization and the Working Class: The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lukas Fasora (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 43.

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Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

accommodate secularists; however, one cannot say what percentage of the confessionless socialists were actually organized secularists, aside from those who stated their affiliation with Free Religion. Yet, in the very last election to the Prussian Landtag in May 1932, nearly 10 percent of the elected Social Democrats (9 of 94) were self-acknowledged members of Free Religious Congregations.28 When we look to “extended” secularism in our investigation of worker education and autobiographies, it becomes clear that red secularists were able to exert considerable influence in the party culture, especially through the institutions of worker education. The Berlin Workers’ School, one such institution among many, reached some 15,552 workers with its heavily secularist educational curriculum between 1906 and 1914. The dimensions and nature of red secularism changed dramatically after the war, when the membership of socialist Proletarian Freethought associations skyrocketed to nearly 610,000 by 1930, with 120,00 in the rival communist associations. By comparison, at that time party membership of the SPD was 1,021,000 and of the KPD 135,808.29 However, here too, membership numbers do not necessarily equate with influence. Many socialists and communists were passive freethinkers, drawn to these associations by attractive cremation insurance policies. Thus, throughout the period covered in this volume red secularism remained a significant and influential presence within the wider socialist culture, but decidedly a minority one. The secularist movement provided a crucial door through which middleclass intellectuals entered the party. They played the part of heretics on the stage of the public sphere. This enabled some to establish reputations as “freefloating” intellectuals who belonged to the cultural avant-garde, while others used notoriety gained at public trials for blasphemy to launch political careers in the socialist movement. Yet, intellectuals also connected secularism with inner-party dissent. Chapters 3 and 4 trace how one generation of secularist intellectuals participated in a party schism of 1890 and later went on to play leading roles in anarchism, revisionism and radicalism.

28

29

Whereas a total of 27 socialist and communist delegates in the Landtag designated themselves as “Free Religious” over the course of the Weimar Republic, 247 chose “dissident,” 32 “confessionless” and 26 “religionless.” The only other party to use non-Christian or nonJewish nomenclature was the National Socialist Party, which had one delegate who called himself “confessionless” and 31 who preferred “gottgläubig.” Barbara von Hindenburg, Biographisches Handbuch der Abgeordneten des Preussischen Landtags: Verfassunggebende Preussische Landesversammlung und Preußischer Landtag 1919–1933 (Frankfurt am Main; New York: Peter Lang, 2017). For figures on Freethought associations, see appendices. For SPD and KPD memberships: Wilhelm Leo Guttsman, The German Social Democratic Party, 1875–1933 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 153; Die Kommunistische Internationale vor dem VII. Weltkongreß: Materialien (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1967), 141.

What was Red Secularism?

13

Chapter 5 turns from intellectuals to their audiences. Here I compare the relative importance of Marxism and scientific materialism in the political consciousness of working-class socialists. By examining workers’ autobiographies, we find a deep penetration of secularist worldview in the identities of many socialist activists, who often converted to socialism upon encountering scientific materialism. We delve into the special appeal of secularism to women socialists and use this to enter into a hotly contested topic in the history of the early feminist movement, namely the relationship of secularism to the politics of gender.30 Red secularists certainly shared the opinion of many liberals, who correlated natural science with masculine autonomy and organized religion with feminine subordination to clerical authorities. Yet, female secularists understood natural scientific worldview to be empowering. It provided them with an explanation for existing gender differentiation and offered a means for the future transformation of women and men through social and biological reform. For this reason, it is not surprising that secularists were particularly prominent among the female leaders of Social Democracy. In order to provide a thick description of the culture and politics of red secularism, I restricted my archival research to a few cities and regions. The first four chapters of the book focus on Berlin, which was far and away the country’s most important secularist city, and in which prior to 1914 nearly half of all church-exits registered nationally took place.31 From Chapter 5 onwards, I include other regions and other cities, in particular Leipzig and Munich, but also Dresden and Nuremberg. These examples enable comparisons that highlight the fact that secularism, like socialism, had to contend with diverse political and legal contexts, shaped in different ways by the sharp confessional conflicts of the first decade following German unification in 1870/71. The picture that emerges is of a regionally dispersed secularist culture that mapped onto the early points of concentration of the socialist movement in urban areas, in which Protestantism predominated but where church attendance was low. The research design entailed some further choices to limit complexity. When investigating socialism, I focused on the organizational layers and theoretical debates within the leading socialist parties – the SPD, the USPD and the KPD – and treat only in passing the important presence of secularists in the historically more marginal movements of anarchists and syndicalists and the communist opposition. Similarly, I focused on the three most important movements of “pure” secularism, namely Free Religion, Freethought and monism. I have chosen fairly conventional start and end dates for this study. The termination of the “Socialist Laws” in 1890 saw a major transformation of the SPD and coincided roughly with the emergence of recognizably socialist

30

See Chapter 5 for discussion of this debate.

31

Schmidt, “Secularization,” 44.

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Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

secularist organizations. The appointment of Hitler’s cabinet in January 1933 brought an abrupt end to socialism and red secularism, as both movements were essentially shut down in that year. The “Gretchen Question” of Social Democracy Revealing the contours and dynamics of the socialist secularist subculture is the first principal aim of this book. The second is to explore the relationship of this subculture to the socialist parties and to determine how it influenced the political events of this tumultuous period of German history. The picture that emerges is of a querulous relationship, shaped by the tension between what I described above as worldview and political secularism. Red secularists promoted anticlericalism, life reform and naturalistic worldview, while the party leadership maintained a strategic interest in limiting party involvement to advocacy of the separation of the fields of religion and politics. Party debates formed around, but never resolved the tension between these two positions, leaving this the structuring paradox of the socialist relationship to religion. In the following, I lay out how this paradox appeared in the debates between party leadership and the organizations of secularism prior to 1933. This short overview is furthermore intended to provide readers unfamiliar with the history of German socialism with a frame on which to hang the information of the subsequent chapters. For the leaders of the Social Democratic Party, the relationship of socialism to religion constituted what Germans refer to as a “Gretchen question.” A Gretchenfrage cuts to the core of an issue, but places the respondent in an uncomfortable quandary, in which an honest answer bears significant costs. It comes from Goethe’s drama, in which Faust is intent on seducing the pious girl Gretchen, who asks him: Nun sag, wie hast du’s mit der Religion? Du bist ein herzlich guter Mann, allein ich glaub, du hältst nicht viel davon. Well, tell me, you must, about your religion – how do you feel? You’re such a good man, kind and intelligent, yet I suspect you are indifferent.32

Faust responds by first insisting that each person should be allowed to form his or her own religious opinion, but when pressed further by Gretchen, he switches tack and affirms the experience of spiritual wonder in nature that could encompass both his pantheism and her Christianity. While the first answer confirms his dissenting views on religion, his second answer is evasive. It is particularly apt to speak of the Gretchen question of German Social 32

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 122.

The “Gretchen Question” of Social Democracy

15

Democracy, because, like Faust, the party maintained the official position that everyone should enjoy freedom of conviction. Yet, many socialist leaders were self-described atheists, who identified with the scientific knowledge and heroic stance of Goethe’s Faust. The party thus faced a conundrum; its leaders worried that identifying openly with their own disbelief would alienate those potential socialist voters and union members who, like Gretchen, still clung to their religious faith. Until the fundamental rewriting of the party program of the SPD at the Bad Godesberg Congress in 1959, socialism’s relationship to religion was a constant source of friction within the party, because strategic considerations repeatedly clashed with intellectual passions. The matter was further complicated by the fact that it was not merely Christian opponents who called the party out. More often than not, it was secularists within the party who posed the Gretchen question at congresses and in the socialist press, when they demanded that the party come clean. They wanted German Social Democracy to publicly identify with monistic worldview and to suppress the churches as buttresses of the imperial state and capitalism. In truth, the Gretchen question of German socialism was really a double question: What was the party’s relationship to religious actors and institutions, on the one hand, and to the culture of secularism, on the other? The ambivalence of the party policy on religion was written into its first program of 1875. Instead of committing the party to scientific materialism and anticlericalism, the founding congress in Gotha, under the guidance of Wilhelm Liebknecht, adopted the “Declaration that religion is a private matter.”33 This was a dilatory compromise, which permitted various interpretations. Its explicit call to privatize religion by separating church and state in the public domain was relatively unproblematic. But declaring religion a private matter also meant that party members were expected to privatize their own religious or atheist beliefs. This stipulation was clearly understood at the time as a rebuke to party secularists, who argued that their atheism was an intrinsic part of socialist culture. Rather than ending debate over religion and secularism, however, the Gotha Program only placed it in a new framework. Some secularists opposed the relegation of religion to a private matter and continued to push their agenda during the tumultuous period of the late 1870s, when liberal support of the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf began to falter, in part out of fear of the rising socialists. The Stuttgart freethinker Albert Dulk declared in the party’s flagship newspaper Vorwärts in May 1878 that “religion” was “the main bastion of antisocialism, of reaction, the breeding ground of all social evil. Thus, whoever 33

Discussion in: Sebastian Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage 1863–1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).

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views this struggle as peripheral and warns against it, has no conception of the true battleground of socialism. This struggle is even more necessary and decisive than the political [struggle].”34 When Berlin socialist Johann Most called on workers to leave the state churches in spring 1878, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck seized on the opportunity to tar the SPD with atheism and help mobilize parliamentary support for the passage of a series of repressive measures that became known as the “Socialist Laws” and that prevented Social Democrats from operating publicly between 1878 and 1890. Under this repression, many members of the underground party, including August Bebel, changed their tune on the religious question. They came to see secularists as unreliable partners whose anticlerical politics threatened party survival. The expiration of the Socialist Laws in 1890 triggered an upswing in secularist agitation within the party and renewed challenges to the neutrality plank. When a freethinker proposed that the party adopt an antireligious position at the Halle Congress in October 1890, Wilhelm Liebknecht used the opportunity to demand religious neutrality, denigrating the secularists with the jibe: “I do not love the priests at all, and the anti-priests just as little as the real ones.”35 The secularists did not relent, and at the 1902 Congress, the Free Religious preacher Georg Welker demanded that the party enter a Kulturkampf in the field of religion. To support his position, he quoted some of Bebel’s spicier anticlerical speeches of the 1870s. Bebel reacted allergically and provided a clear explication of his current thinking on the matter: Each one may believe what he pleases. If he is a Social Democrat, he may be a Catholic, a Protestant, a Materialist, or an Atheist – that is no one’s business in the party. It is only when, as a Social Democrat, he wishes to make propaganda in the party in favor of his religious convictions that we energetically protest, for then he interferes with the principle that religion is a private matter. (Applause.)36

Here Bebel stipulated that secularist worldviews were effectively the same as religious beliefs. Only a party that excluded the worldview convictions of its members from party politics, could legitimately demand an end to “the confusion of the public and religious powers,” which characterized the confessional state, and pass laws ensuring “that the state should be secular, and that religious communities should be private societies.” Shifting his line of argument, Bebel then made clear that this position was not merely a principled one, but reflected the tactical interests of a party that was expanding its electoral 34 35 36

Quoted in Lidtke, ‘August Bebel’, 251. Quoted in: Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion, 336–37. Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands: Abgehalten zu München vom 14. bis 20. September 1902 (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1902), 244.

The “Gretchen Question” of Social Democracy

17

base from strongholds in the largely secularized, urban Protestant milieus of North, East and Central Germany, into the Catholic industrial areas in the West and South. We must take care not to shock the religious idea of any member. On the contrary, it is our opinion, and we cannot hold it too strongly, that in religious questions we must observe absolute neutrality and nothing but neutrality. (Applause.) . . . I can assure him [Welker] that if he is to be a candidate in a district where there are many Catholics, his methods would not ensure his success. (Applause.) What Welker held to be a defect in our party is really a great advantage. . . . In practical questions our point of view is quite clear. It is visible that Social Democracy will help all the oppressed, and that is the best propaganda! (Loud applause.)37

At the annual meeting of the German Freethought League in September 1903 Welker was attacked by socialist firebrand Adolph Hoffmann – not for seeking a Kulturkampf against the churches, but rather for insensitivity to party politics. He recommended pushing “agitation for the cause of Freethought from the bottom up, not from the top down, as Welker [proposed].”38 Anticlericalism, in other words, should be pursued without directly confronting the official party policy of religious neutrality. As the party was clarifying its policy of religious neutrality in the first decade of the twentieth century, new secularist associations formed that claimed to be explicitly Marxist. In 1905, a Nuremberg freethinker founded a socialist paper Der Atheist, which soon became the mouthpiece for Proletarian Freethought. In its first issue, Arnold Dodel-Port, a Swiss botanist and former chairman of the German Freethought League, interpreted the policy of “religion as a private matter” in a fashion typical of secularists. He defended the right of each worker to determine his or her own worldview but assumed that the free action of the mind would ultimately support scientific facts, and thus necessarily lead the workers to the monist worldview. Thus he admonished them: “Do not listen to anyone who tells you: believe this or believe that and you will be blessed! Rather figure out your own affairs: ask nature and ask the universe, ask the laws of evolution and extract from them the maxims of a rational way of life! And you will be happy!”39 When the Proletarian Freethinkers formed a national umbrella organization in 1909, they pushed the party to accept anticlericalism as a necessary part of socialism. “Because historical materialism does away with all religious ideologies,” they argued, “it is unthinkable that a leading party comrade could hold a church function, because it is impossible that he might believe 37 38 39

Protokoll SPD Parteitag 1902, 245. “Protokoll der 20. Hauptversammlung des deutschen Freidenkerbundes zu Görlitz am 20. und 21. September 1903,” Der Freidenker (1903): 157–59. Arnold Dodel, ‘Religion-Privatsache!’, Der Atheist, 1 (n.d.): 1–4.

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[in God, T. W.].” Taking aim the party leadership’s position, the manifesto found it “absolutely reprehensible that short-sighted party comrades combat our purely social-democratic movement, because they do not understand that we are not dealing here with bourgeois efforts or futile games.”40 The various positions taken on the SPD’s “Gretchen question” fed directly into the key theoretical debates of the prewar decade, which pitted the party mainstream first against the revisionists around Eduard Bernstein and then against the radicals around Karl Liebknecht. As we explore in Chapter 6, the ranks of the revisionists and radicals swelled with secularists, who saw in these dissenting movements room for both natural-scientific worldview and anticlericalism. In 1912, radical and revisionist secularists joined with “bourgeois” counterparts in a campaign for church-leaving, centered initially in the secularist stronghold of Berlin. The high point came in six open-air rallies attended by many thousands in Berlin in October 1913, one of which featured the future co-founder of the Communist Party Karl Liebknecht taking the stage with the chairman of the Monist League Wilhelm Ostwald to demand a “mass exodus” from the church. Because the church-leaving campaign involved key members of the socialist faction in the Prussian parliament, the national leadership felt compelled to respond. In the central committee meeting in October 1913, Johannes Meerfeld, editor of a Social Democratic newspaper in the heavily Catholic city of Cologne, claimed that the church-leaving campaign was damaging the party’s claim to religious neutrality and that the Catholic Centre Party was “very content with this . . . sport of the Berlin comrades. We should strongly recommend to the comrades that they leave their finger from this agitation.” Meerfeld was opposed by party co-chair Hugo Haase, who reminded the committee that the declaration that religion is a private matter “is valid in two directions. First it makes demands of the state, second, however, it allows individual party members personal freedom regarding their stance or opposition towards the church. Outside the [party] organizations, we cannot prohibit any comrade from concerning himself with religious or church matters.” Following an inconclusive debate, the second party co-chair and future chancellor Friedrich Ebert proposed a resolution declaring that the agitation to leave the state churches was a private matter of the Freethought organizations and completely separate from the Social Democratic Party.41 This exchange demonstrates that the past solutions to the Gretchen question were open to renegotiation even at the highest echelon of the party. 40 41

Der Atheist, 4 (1909): 254. Dieter Dowe (ed.), “Protokoll der Partei-Ausschuß-Sitzung vom 19. und 20. Dezember 1913,” in Protokolle der Sitzungen des Parteiausschusses der SPD 1912 bis 1921 (Berlin: Dietz, 1980), 17–18.

The “Gretchen Question” of Social Democracy

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A compromise resolution was reached, but as Chapter 7 makes clear, the positions remained unreconciled and reasserted themselves when the leadership fell out over the war in 1916 and the party split in two in 1917. Haase became the chair of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD), which gathered antiwar radicals, including the bulk of the party secularists. Ebert remained chairman of the rump or “Majority” SPD (MSPD), which drew moderates, including many with Christian affiliations. During the revolution that followed Germany’s defeat in November 1918, religious policy became a bone of contention between USPD and MSPD, which for two short months came together to jointly rule Germany. Adolph Hoffmann became the USPD co-minister of culture in Prussia and unilaterally declared full separation of church and state, which meant severing church ties to the schools and ceasing state collection of church taxes. Following an uproar from the churches and their affiliated parties, Hoffmann’s co-minister from the MSDP rescinded this decree and postponed decisions on church–state matters until after the convention of a freely elected national assembly. Following the collapse of the power-sharing arrangement and the violent suppression of revolutionaries by the MSPD government, another Berlin Free Religious leader, Ernst Däumig, became USPD co-chair and led the left wing of the party into a union with the much smaller Communist Party (KPD) in December 1920. Meanwhile, now shorn of its most radical and anticlerical members, the MSPD issued a new program at its Congress in Görlitz in 1921 that moved it decidedly away from any tacit support of secularism. Religious policy returned to its paradoxical stance again after the bulk of the rump USPD rejoined the SPD in 1922. With the collapse of the USPD, the KPD became the chief gathering point of revolutionary socialism in Germany. It had a different answer to the Gretchen question. Whereas the SPD central committee repeatedly issued warnings to the half-million-strong associations of Proletarian Freethought not to speak in the name of the SPD, the Communist Party made no bones about its support of atheism. However, its interest in secularism was largely limited to the political use it could make of anticlericalism as a “weapon of class struggle.” As rigid affirmation of “Leninism” became a key marker of communist political culture, cadres assigned to the Freethought movement openly mocked the efforts of socialist secularists to import life reform and monism into the movements of “cultural socialism,” which is the subject of Chapter 8. The last chapter charts political events in the late Weimar Republic, when Germany became a key front in a transnational Kulturkampf. The Soviet Union had made the violent suppression of the clergy a key part of the drive for collectivization it launched in 1928. By 1930 its efforts to liquidate organized religion in Russia attracted international attention and led to a propaganda war with the Vatican, in which each side fought via their proxies in

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Germany.42 The Comintern pushed the KPD to imitate the rude anticlericalism of the Soviet “Godless” campaigns. Anticlericalism proved an attractive means of battering its rival, the SPD, for its quietism on the religious front. This new Kulturkampf was also welcomed by the antidemocratic right. Under the banner of “positive Christianity” the National Socialists sought to rally Christian voters to an alliance of all nationalist and Christian forces against an imaginary front of atheists and Jews. Upon taking power in 1933, the NSDAP did not keep all of its promises to the churches, but it did smash secularism and socialism, driving both underground in a series of repressive measures between February and June 1933. To round off our historical sketch, we conclude that there was a continual reproduction of secularism’s ambivalent relationship to the socialist parties. The leadership of the SPD could never shake the party’s connection to secularist culture, but secularism never achieved its stated aim of becoming the “third column” of the workers’ movement alongside party and unions. This resulted from the strategic ambivalence contained in the party line of 1875 that “religion is a private matter,” which remained in force until 1933 and beyond. The KPD, by contrast, repudiated the notion of religious neutrality and made atheism and anticlericalism mandatory aspects of communist political culture. Yet, despite the soft spot that many individual communists had for elements of secularist culture, by the mid-1920s the KPD refused to allow monist worldview to encroach on its increasingly rigid party doctrine. Discounting small anarcho-syndicalist groupings, the only party that provided secularists a relatively comfortable home in the period under consideration was the USPD between 1917 and 1922. Yet, even there, secularists were not able to win the party for open struggle against the religious establishment. On balance then, the leadership of the socialist parties continued to hold firm to the respective strategies of political secularism, while the organizational matrix supporting worldview secularism persisted in the wider radical working-class milieu throughout the period up to 1933. Historiographical Implications This investigation into the relationship of the cultures of socialism and secularism has two principal findings. First, between 1890 and 1933, there was a continual reproduction of a recognizable subculture of red secularism, centered on projects of social renewal through mass education in naturalistic monist worldview, experimentation in life reform communities, and anticlerical action 42

Todd Weir, “A European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and AntiBolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922 to 1933,” Journal of Religious History, 39/2 (2015): 280–306.

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against the state churches. Second, red secularism decisively influenced political events, but often as a disruptive, dissenting force within the socialist parties. Taken together, these findings challenge existing scholarly interpretations of the history of socialism and religion, and they have important implications for the contemporary debates about the role of political secularism in modern history. Let us briefly explore these larger historiographical questions, while leaving treatment of the specialist literature to the respective chapters. This book stands in continual dialogue with the comprehensive studies of working-class culture and politics written by West German social historians during the late Cold War and in its immediate aftermath. Given their general lack of attention to secularism, one could conclude that it was of little historical significance. However, scholars such as Margaret Anderson have pointed out that this generation of historians gave scant attention to religious questions as a whole, a result of the wide acceptance of secularization theory.43 I agree, but will go further. The secularization thesis did not merely create a blind spot for secularism and religion, it contributed to an underlying narrative used by scholars to tell the history of socialism as a movement that matured over the course of its development from a utopian origin to a pragmatic endpoint. Revealing how this narrative has informed and continues to inform the historical literature is important, if we are to create space for a new interpretation of religion and secularism in modern German history. One of the insights of secular studies has been that the secularization thesis is not merely a scientific theory that is either true or false. Rather, its invocation has served and serves as an ideological tool to advance certain political interests. This insight can be applied to two debates of the late 1950s, in which liberals and Social Democrats mobilized the emerging secularization thesis in their anticommunist apologetics.44 When transatlantic liberal intellectuals, such as sociologists Raymond Aron and Daniel Bell, claimed that the Cold War would naturally resolve in an “end of ideology,” they were both making a predictive claim about the course of history and advocating for the superiority of political pragmatism over stringent ideologies. Bell used orthodox religion as the point of reference to describe total ideologies, as “an allinclusive system of comprehensive reality . . . a set of beliefs, infused with passion [that] seeks to transform the whole of a way of life . . . a secular 43

44

Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Historical Journal, 38/3 (1995): 647–70. An exception among the larger social historical studies of Wilhelmine workers is Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 747–80. On apologetics, see Todd H. Weir, “The Apologetics of Modern Culture Wars: The Case of Weimar Germany,” in Defending the Faith, ed. Todd H. Weir and Hugh McLeod (Oxford University Press, 2021).

22

Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

religion.”45 Opposition to exclusive worldviews was also crucial to the transformation of German Social Democracy, which at the Bad Godesberg Congress of 1959 bade farewell to obligatory Marxism and revolution. With this event, the SPD ceased to define itself as a party solely of the working class, thereby opening the way for it to become a broad people’s party, a move generally seen as a precondition to the election of the first postwar Social Democratic chancellor, Willy Brandt, in 1969. The Godesberg Program, which remained in effect until 1989, also took a stand against antireligious agitation and embraced Christianity as a faith fully compatible with socialist ideals. “Socialism,” it declared, does not take a position on “ultimate truths” because it “is no substitute for religion.”46 This clear rejection of worldview and anticlericalism meant that Godesberg marked an end to the Gretchen question of Social Democracy. The “end of ideology” debate and the Godesberg Program provided the apologetic backdrop for that generation of West German historians, who turned the history of the workers’ movement from a marginal area of scholarly inquiry to the centerpiece of the new social history. Many described the long arc of socialist history as a series of developments leading up to the sea change represented by Godesberg. They revisited key party debates, and discovered a learning process amongst a reformist core, whereby practical experience and intellectual maturation led to the repudiation of Marxism, radicalism and utopianism. To give force and self-evidence to this interpretation, some relied directly on the secularization thesis, such as Karl Dietrich Bracher, who wrote in his 1984 book The Age of Ideologies: The relationship of democratic socialism to the intellectual currents of the age has been determined by this process of transformation which started about the turn of the century. Absolute, pseudo-religious ideas about a future socialist order as the ultimate goal and fulfillment of mankind’s progress have been replaced by specific, realizable and political-practice-related programmes. This ‘secularization’ of socialism represented a limitation of the chiliastically coloured claim to exclusiveness of the socialist picture of the world vis-à-vis other intellectual and political currents of the day. In conformity with this we now have programmatic statements such as ‘socialism will always remain a task’ or that its ideas are not a ‘substitute religion’ (Berlin Programme of Action, 1954).47

Although Bracher was not a Social Democrat, many of the scholars we will encounter in this study, such as Helga Grebing, Jürgen Kocka, Heinrich 45 46 47

Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, rev. edn (New York: Free Press, 1965), 399–400. Basic Programme of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Bonn: Social Democratic Party of Germany, 1959), 5–22. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), 76–77.

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23

August Winkler and Susanne Miller, were either affiliated with or were members of the SPD. They mobilized motifs of secularization to differentiate between the political positions taken during the Weimar Republic, lauding the reformism and revisionism of the SPD as a sober realism that pointed to Bad Godesberg, while dismissing the radical left as a flight into an increasingly untenable fantasy. In one of the most ambitious works on Weimar socialism, which was published in three volumes in the early 1980s, historian Heinrich August Winkler described the ideology of the left as a “popular Marxism in the form of a pseudoreligious philosophy of salvation.”48 In a number of studies of “cultural socialism,” which, as we will see in Chapter 8, was closely interwoven with secularism, historian Dieter Langewiesche argued that the “utopia of the socialist society of the future [in which] the ‘New Man’ would create the ‘New Society’” held little attraction for the educational institutions of the SPD and the unions, which remained characterized by “connection to reality and pragmatism.”49 Giving an ironic inversion of Marx’s definition of religion, he concluded that Kultursozialismus had little impact on political reality: “At best it could offer consolation, . . . a cultural compensation distant from daily life.”50 This use of irony and anticlerical tropes to create a negative foil against which a normal path to socialist political maturity could be constructed was not new. The story of sloughing off of religiously motivated utopian elements and becoming “scientific” had long been a part of party discourse. In 1886 Wilhelm Liebknecht wrote that “Our party gradually puts away childish things and emerges from its years of indiscretion [Flegeljahren]. Perhaps expressed more accurately: German Social Democracy developed from a sect into a party.” Five years later, leading party theorist Karl Kautsky called the earlier utopian socialism of Charles Fourier and Henri du Saint-Simon a “childhood disease” of the socialist movement.51 Thus, we may conclude that secularization has provided a lasting apologetic narrative within the history of socialism, one which began with inner-party debates and continued under the 48

49 50

51

Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1918 bis 1924, vol. I (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1984), 34. Winkler restated his normative interpretation of the history of the SPD centered on Godesberg, in “Görlitz, Godesberg und die Gegenwart: Vor hundert Jahren versuchte die SPD erstmals, sich von einer Arbeiter- in eine Volkspartei zu verwandeln,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sept. 13, 2021. Dieter Langewiesche, “Erwachsenenbildung,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: Band V 1918–1945, ed. Heinz-Elmar Tenorth (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 348. Dieter Langewiesche, “Die Arbeitswelt in den Zukunftsentwürfen des Weimarer Kultursozialismus,” in Studien zur Arbeiterkultur, ed. Albrecht Lehmann (Münster: Coppenrath, 1984), 51–52. See further discussions of Langewiesche’s work in Chapter 8. Vernon L. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany 1878–1890 (Princeton University Press, 1966), 237; “Kinderkrankheit” in Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm: In seinen grundsätzlichen Teil erläutert, ed. Suzanne Miller (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1974), point 11.

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Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

conditions of the Cold War in which a major role was played by SPD-affiliated historians, whose own partisan positions shone through in their interpretations. In each of the chapters of this book, I will ask how this normative historical interpretation, which I shall call the “Godesberg line,” has informed the mainstream scholarly treatments of each of the dimensions of red secularism. The point is not to dismiss such arguments, but rather to demonstrate how they may have inhibited a full consideration of the dynamics present in the historical record. Whereas most social historians of socialism showed a general disinterest in religion and secularism, an exception was formed by a small group of West German scholars. Here too, one can speak of an apologetic angle, given that several had clear affiliations to Christianity and more specifically to the Protestant Church. One of the effects of the normalization of Christianity in the wake of the Godesberg Program was that it allowed intellectuals with religious commitments to more easily join the SPD. In the 1960s, theologian Helmut Gollwitzer tried to stimulate a theoretical discussion over the relationship of Marxism and Christianity, and another theologian, Heiner Grote, published a document collection revealing the ambivalent relationship of the early SPD to religion and to secularism.52 The most substantive works yet on the relationship of secularism to socialism are the dissertations by Marburg church historian Jochen-Christoph Kaiser on Proletarian Freethought in the Weimar Republic (published 1981) and by Christian educator Sebastian Prüfer on the “religious question” in the early socialist party (published 2002).53 Kaiser demonstrated that the high point of German anticlericalism arrived during the late Weimar Republic. Despite the impressive membership numbers registered by Freethought associations at that time, he concluded that the party secularists failed to attain their chief objective, which was to reverse party neutrality towards religion, leaving them an interesting side road in the history of socialism that was ultimately not taken. Prüfer challenged earlier assumptions about party secularization and argued that there were several options in play regarding the Gretchen question as late as 1890, including efforts by secularists to treat socialism as religion, i.e. to fuse it with monist worldview. This option failed and the party settled on socialism instead of religion. The studies of Prüfer and Kaiser revealed, for the first time, the recrudescence of secularism within the socialist parties between 1863 and 1933. Yet, ultimately, they both measured the secularists against their stated ambition to become the 52

53

Helmut Gollwitzer, Die marxistische Religionskritik und der christliche Glaube (Munich: Siebenstern-Taschenbuch Verlag, 1965), 14–19. Theologian and SPD official Rüdiger Reitz wrote Christen und Sozialdemokratie: Konsequenzen aus einem Erbe (Stuttgart: Radius, 1983). Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion.

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25

“third pillar” of the socialist world, and concluded that they failed. This conclusion indirectly affirmed the prevailing Godesberg line, which assumed that the party’s ability to continually reinforce the policy of “religion is a private matter” was evidence of a process of maturation. A different analytical line, one rooted in Marxist historical narratives, appears in the studies of socialism undertaken by East German scholars. The East German regime had an ambivalent relationship to red secularism. After the war, it had suppressed efforts to re-establish secularist organizations, even those in the tradition of the Proletarian Freethinkers. However, following the debacle of the uprising of June 17, 1953 that nearly toppled it, the regime mined aspects of secularist tradition, such as the youth confirmation ceremony known as the Jugendweihe, in its effort to exert soft power through cultural initiatives. Yet there was no substantive engagement with secularism in the histories of the German working class commissioned by the communist state. Instead, research initiatives – the most important undertaken in Jena by a team directed by Dieter Fricke – interpreted secularism as an expression of “petty bourgeois democracy,” giving it a dual legacy. Depending on the political circumstance, secularism was either selectively assimilated as a progressive heritage of liberal culture, or compartmentalized as a misguided radicalism linked to a dying class, the petty bourgeoisie. In this latter guise, red secularism could be cast as a flight from reality. Only towards the end of the GDR did scholars begin to study the legacy of secularism within socialism.54 Another version of secularization appears in the diverse interpretive tradition that has viewed socialism, like other political ideologies, as a substitution for religion. During the interwar period, when sharp culture wars rocked Central Europe, Christian thinkers, such as the Catholics Carl Schmitt, Waldemar Gurian and Erich Voegelin, developed the theory of “political religion,” which saw behind the new totalitarian ideologies heretical quasireligions bent on the destruction of Christianity. This theory enjoyed a comeback after the end of the Cold War, often promoted by historians standing within the Christian conservative tradition.55 In the mid-twentieth century, a number of secular historians and philosophers, many with a Jewish background, such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith and Daniel Bell, also theorized that modern political ideologies were essentially secularized forms of 54

55

Dieter Fricke, “Deutscher Monistenbund,” in Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte: Die bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Parteien und Verbände in Deutschland (1789–1945), vol. III (Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1984), 190–96; Horst Groschopp, Zwischen Bierabend und Bildungsverein: Zur Kulturarbeit in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung vor 1914 (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1985); Michael Rudloff, Weltanschauungsorganisationen innerhalb der Arbeiterbewegung der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991). Hans Maier and Michael Schäfer, Totalitarismus und politische Religionen: Konzepte des Diktaturenvergleiches (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997).

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Introducing Socialism and Secularism as Two Cultures

religion.56 In 1940, Walter Benjamin conjured up an allegory that can serve here to capture the appeal and limitation of the theory of political religion. He likened Marxism to a chess-playing automaton that won all games, but which was secretly controlled by a dwarf hidden beneath a table. If the automaton was historical materialism, the dwarf, Benjamin concluded, was theology.57 The appeal of this allegory is its simple solution to the enigma of totalitarianism, suggesting that the secret of its alluring power and its irrationality lay in the hidden force of religion. The limitation of this approach is that it leads scholars into a historically unverifiable game of continually looking for theological secrets under the table, rather than examining the evidence on the surface of the historical record. There, in full view, historians can find direct connections between religion and socialism, one example being the socialist-secularist culture. Other scholars interested in the relationship of socialism and religion have placed them in an implicit comparison. Marxist heretics Ernst Bloch and Leszek Kołakowski received wide attention in the 1960s for their theories that socialism and religion sprang from the same anthropological/existential condition, namely human wrestling with the future. According to Bloch, both atheist socialism and Christianity were sustained by the “principle of hope” contained in the “not yet,” while Kołakowski reduced left-wing politics to the simple act of negating existing reality. In 1989 historian Lucian Hölscher compared the future visions of nineteenth-century German socialists and Protestants to arrive at an empirical method for laying out some of the common structures of socialism and secularism.58 By examining transnational connections, in particular to the religious politics of the Soviet Union, this book places the German case in a global context. Since the end of the Cold War, a number of investigations have been undertaken into the relationship of religion and communism. Historian Martin Malia claimed that the secret to Bolshevik extremism lay in its philosophical heritage; via Hegel and Marx, it was a secularized form of Christianity. Yuri Slezkine’s survey of the culture of the early Bolsheviks centered on the contentious claim that Bolshevism was a millenarian sect, comparable to the English Radical Reformation, Mormonism, or the Taiping Rebellion. Noteworthy in Malia and Slezkine’s studies, and typical of the theory of

56 57 58

Sjoerd Griffioen, Contesting Modernity in the German Secularization Debate: Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt in Polemical Contexts (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 107–46. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), Thesis I. Ernst Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); Leszek Kolakowski, “The Concept of the Left,” in The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 144–58; Lucian Hölscher, Weltgericht oder Revolution: Protestantische und sozialistische Zukunftsvorstellungen im deutschen Kaiserreich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989).

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27

political religion they implicitly subscribe to, is the lack of engagement with the actual interactions of the Soviet state with religion or secularism.59 Other historians of the Soviet Union have delved into the actions of the Soviet equivalent of the Freethinkers, the League of the Godless, which was launched in 1925 and had a fluctuating membership of up to several million before being disbanded in 1941. Daniel Peris has portrayed the organization as a bureaucratic creation, which could be dialed up or down according to the needs of the Bolshevik party. Given the abrupt reversals of Soviet religious policy in the twentieth century, anthropologist Catherine Wanner has argued that antireligion was merely one tool in the Soviet repertoire, and that communist religious policy should best be viewed as a “process of intensifying and relaxing religious expression” driven by the interests of state power to suppress or harness the resources of traditional religion to further its constructions of the sacred state.60 This finding establishes a bridge between Soviet policies and the above-mentioned literature on political secularism as an aspect of statecraft. Thomas Schmidt-Lux, Victoria Smolkin and Heléna Tóth have explored the cultural and religious dimensions of the push of all states in the Soviet Bloc in the late 1950s and early 1960s to fulfill the promise of “scientific atheism.”61 Despite their attentiveness to the presence of the culture of worldview secularism, these studies, because they focus solely on periods in which communist parties had a monopoly of political power, have interpreted worldview secularism as a tool of the political secularism of communist states. Our findings about Germany indicate that historians should also re-examine the formative, if heterodox, role of worldview secularism in early Bolshevism. After all, Vladimir Lenin devoted part of his most substantial philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) to the refutation of monistic theories propagated by some of his colleagues.62 The transnational ties between German 59

60

61

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Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2017). Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); William Husband, ‘Godless Communists’: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Catherine Wanner, State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012), 8. Thomas Schmidt-Lux, “Das helle Licht der Wissenschaft: Die Urania, der organisierte Szientismus und die ostdeutsche Säkularisierung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 34/1 (2008): 41–72. Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton University Press, 2018); Heléna Tóth, “‘Zwischen Gott und dem freien Gewissen ist für eine Staatsreligion kein Platz’: Die Namensweihe und politische Religion in der DDR,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45/1 (2019): 37–69. Igor J. Polianski, “Between Hegel and Haeckel: Monistic Worldview, Marxist Philosophy and Biomedicine in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, ed. Todd H. Weir (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 197–222.

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secularism and global communism also extend beyond Europe; this at least is suggested by Mao Tse Tung’s casual remark to a journalist that Germany had produced four great philosophical leaders, “Hegel, Marx, Engels and Haeckel,” the last one being the chief theoretician of European secularism.63 The collapse of socialism and communism as political forces and the “return of religion” in the twenty-first century created the conditions for growing scholarly attention to worldview secularism in European history.64 However, new studies have not led to a direct challenge to the disenchantment narrative underpinning socialist history, nor have they challenged the teleological assumptions baked into some of the existing genealogies of political secularism. For example, historian Anton Jansson recently examined a debate between Sweden’s leading Freethinker and Hjalmar Branting, the leader of the country’s socialist party, concluding that social democracy was a force for secularization in modernity precisely because it rejected worldview secularism around 1890.65 Rather than framing my study around assumed macrohistorical processes, I look to the stability of those structures that reproduced the conditions of possibility of socialist secularism. Socialist leaders could not ultimately answer the Gretchen question of religion between 1890 and 1933 because of the internal and external relations of competition in which they found themselves. The strong stance taken by all conservatives, including the National Socialists, against red secularism at the end of the Weimar Republic spoke to the power exerted by the force field of religion and secularism at that time. This indicates that the decline of worldview secularism and utopian thinking witnessed in the 1950s was less the result of a gradual learning process within the socialist movement, than it was the result of the massive transformations of politics and religion that began in 1933. In the Epilogue, I briefly explore the postwar history of socialist secularism and offer some hypotheses about its failure to reassert itself as a powerful presence after the collapse of the National Socialist regime.

63 64

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Klaus Mehnert, Twilight of the Young: The Radical Movements of the 1960s and Their Legacy (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1977), 292. Katharina Neef, Die Entstehung der Soziologie aus der Sozialreform eine Fachgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012). See also Carolin Kosuch (ed.), Freethinkers in Europe: National and Transnational Secularities, 1789–1920s (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). Anton Jansson, “Friends and Foes: Two Secularisms in late Nineteenth-Century Sweden,” in Freethinkers in Europe, ed. Kosuch, 155–78.

2

Secularist Culture in an Industrializing City Berlin around 1890

What comprised Germany’s secularist culture and when did a recognizably socialist subculture emerge within it? To answer the first of these questions, this chapter reconstructs the culture of secularism by following the diversity of its organizations and institutions that had emerged by 1890 and exploring how they peddled their secularist worldview to audiences from various social milieus. It identifies the core principles of this worldview and examines how they were embodied in different ritual practices and taught in institutions. The picture that emerges is of a broad network of organizations, which despite their internal diversification were united by common aspirations and the circulation of shared texts and intellectuals. In its second half, the chapter examines the effects of the political polarization of the 1880s, which was largely triggered by the growing power of the Social Democratic movement. Up until the mid-1880s, nearly all secularist organizations had been controlled by middle-class notables, most of whom held leadership positions in the parties of the “bourgeois” left. These ranged from the centrist National Liberal Party to the left-liberal Progressive Party, to the numerically marginal, but in the secularist scene very influential, radical Democratic parties. All of these parties, which I will refer to collectively as “liberal,” felt called out by the rising power of the Social Democratic Party, which challenged their control of those cultural and educational institutions developed, in part, to bring urban craftsmen and workers into their ambit. The resulting liberal–socialist antagonism split the secularist culture. The chapter examines which secularist organizations remained with liberal leadership and which fell to the socialists, and shows, for the first time in a comprehensive way, the formation of new secularist organizations with a clear socialist stamp. This was the birth of red secularism. In order to grasp the circulation of secularist ideas and map out the different types of organizations in social space, the chapter focuses on a single city in a narrow time frame: Berlin of the late 1880s and early 1890s. This enables us to delve into the affected milieus and focus on micro-level interactions that demonstrate the effects of the polarization of the scene. It also allows us to 29

30

Secularist Culture in an Industrializing City

open the aperture wide and place secularism in the dynamic markets of the new German capital, in which it had to compete. Berlin was one of the fastest growing metropolises in the world. In 1890, the city authorities registered nearly 200,000 arrivals and 163,000 departures, meaning that around one fifth of Berlin’s population of 1,551,866 was on the move over a twelve-month period.1 The majority of the migrants moved into the city’s growing working-class neighborhoods, laboring in the small handicrafts workshops or tailoring factories in the city center, or taking positions in the burgeoning metalworking, machine, chemical and electrical industries on the outskirts of the city. Although there were innumerable variations to the story, the process of urbanization took people from the towns of the Prussian hinterland, where social relations were generally shaped by deference and tradition, and transformed them into individuals who had to make sense of their new modern environment. This meant they became not only free economic agents, but free religious and political agents as well. New arrivals could select political opinions, including socialist ones, from a wide assortment of newspapers. The fact that left-liberal and socialist editors were regularly thrown in jail for violating press restrictions on politics, blasphemy and lèse-majesté was part of the game; it constrained but did not ultimately prevent the expression of radical opinions. Parliamentary elections offered an increasingly free market of political affiliation. Already prior to German unification in 1871, universal male suffrage had been established for the Reichstag, which meant that all parties tried to appeal for the votes of newly arrived workers, craftsmen and petty entrepreneurs. Whereas conservative-confessional parties often predominated in their towns and villages of origin, in the growing working-class districts of Berlin, several parties vied for their loyalty. In the 1860s, the Progressive Party (Fortschrittspartei) had been able to draw most working-class voters to its cause, but the steady growth of the socialist movement delivered an upset in 1877, when socialists took two of six Berlin Reichstag seats from the liberals in by-elections. Similarly worried about the appeal of socialism, the Christian Social Party tried to offer a more populist, antisemitic and nationalist version of conservatism, but with only modest success. By 1890, the party enjoying the greatest success with Berlin’s working class was the Social Democratic Party. Because elections to city government were determined by the “threeclass suffrage” that tied voting rights to income and property, liberals, backed by the middle classes and wealthy elites, still controlled city hall. Migration created new conditions for religious cultures. The vast majority of new Berliners were nominally Protestant; however, the church had an 1

Markus Reitzig, “Berlin-Wedding in der Zeit der Hochindustrialisierung (1885–1914): Eine gegenwartsbezogene Stadtteilanalyse,” PhD thesis, Berlin, Humboldt Universität, 2005, 406.

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31

enormous difficulty integrating them into the parishes, and by 1890 attendance in poorer neighborhoods was among the lowest in Germany. Social historians have described the “dechurching” and even “dechristianization” of German cities, particularly Protestant urban centers undergoing industrialization and commercialization, like Nuremberg and Berlin. There, the vast majority of Protestants continued to go to church for baptism, marriage and burial, but their participation in church life was otherwise largely passive, as indicated by their participation in the central ritual of most Christian churches, communion. Whereas 42.2 percent of all German Protestants and 68.5 percent of all Bavarian Protestants took communion at least once a year in 1890, only 21.1 percent of the Protestant inhabitants of Nuremberg did. Similarly, although 30.1 percent of all members of the Brandenburg church took communion in 1890, in Berlin the number was 14.6 percent.2 In working-class districts the rates were lower still. Disaffected working-class Protestants created a potential market for activists in the field of religion and competition between Christians and secularists for their attention was fierce. Yet, gathering the disaffected was not easy, as revealed by reports from two activists of incidents in their efforts to convert workers to their cause in the 1890s. By coincidence, both encounters took place in the Humboldt Grove, a city park in the working-class neighborhood of Wedding, in north Berlin. The first is from a “city missionary” from the Inner Mission of the Protestant Church, an association of conservative evangelicals who had since 1848 made it their mission to reconvert the working class and inoculate them against the allures of secularism, liberalism and socialism. City missionaries waited at the train station to intercept new arrivals and went door to door to enquire about church attendance in the newly built tenements, earning them the moniker “black police.” Yet, these missionaries had to contend with resistance, as one reported: On a park bench in the Humboldt Grove sits an old woman. . . . but the old woman is ‘enlightened’ [aufgeklärt]. Years ago, she had stood in the Christian faith, . . . however, since she moved to her children in the metropolis, she thinks quite differently: ‘how the poor people out in the villages have to be humble and bow down when they are dependent on others! Here in Berlin, I have learned to open my mouth; here I have only to make a demand and the city is ‘obliged’ to take care of me. Thus, you see that Christianity just keeps people in ignorance.’3

2

3

Lucian Hölscher (ed.), Datenatlas zur religiösen Geographie im protestantischen Deutschland: Von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), vol. ii: 419–20, iii: 135–36, 194–95, iv: 696. Bettina Hitzer, Im Netz der Liebe: Die protestantische Kirche und ihre Zuwanderer in der Metropole Berlin (1849–1914) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 253 (quotation 273).

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The church’s alliance with social hierarchy and state authority that had been an asset in rural society often became a liability in the city. The availability of anti-authoritarian discourses and relative freedom of choice meant that many migrants, including this “old woman,” could thumb their noses at demands made by the clergy. Yet, as ripe as many workers may have appeared for secularist critiques of religion, their inclusion in a recognizable culture of secularism was not a foregone conclusion, as attested by an anecdote from the pen of the writer Wilhelm Bölsche, who at the time was busy lecturing to working-class Berliners about the implications of natural-scientific discovery. In an article in the avant-garde literary journal Freie Bühne in 1890, the then twenty-nine-year-old Bölsche recounted how, on one May morning, he found himself in the Humboldt Grove, marveling at the “splendor of the green paradise around me.” The park’s careful arrangement of scientifically labeled plants reminded him of its namesake Alexander von Humboldt, the great Berlin naturalist whose Cosmos of 1845 had provided the template for all subsequent popular-scientific accounts of the monist worldview. “With my walking stick I had just scratched in the sand the Greek letters ‘cosmos,’” when the lunch whistle blew and crowds of workers streamed noisily into the park. “Now the strange marks stared up helplessly from the ground. There was a huge journey in the contrast. And I felt we had made despairingly little progress in shortening it.”4 Although his reverie was disturbed by ignorant factory workers, it was precisely these workers that Bölsche saw as a great potential audience for a secularist culture. A few years later he told Germany’s most famous secularist scientist, the “German Darwin” Ernst Haeckel, that the working class represented “a huge mass of heads with the highest desire for knowledge and who offer the monist worldview an interior tabula rasa regarding the church.”5 Secularism as a culture was shaped by the interactions of intellectuals, like Bölsche, who saw themselves as prophets or teachers of the new worldview, and their followers, very often urban middle- and lower-class individuals drawn to anticlericalism and monism. One form of this interaction was via popular publications, which was Bölsche’s preferred mode of engagement. As a member of Berlin’s naturalist literary scene, he propagated secularist ideas in journals and later became one of the bestselling popular-science authors in Germany. However, we gain a fuller picture of secularist culture if we look to the interactions that took place in organizations and institutions, where material practices and intellectual dogmas circulated, and where eruptive events and 4 5

Cited in Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Letter of March 30, 1899, in Rosemarie Nöthlich (ed.), Ernst Haeckel – Wilhelm Bölsche Briefwechsel 1887–1919 (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2002), 96–101.

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power struggles occurred. The aim of this chapter is not to recreate a total picture of all organizations that peddled secularist ideas, which would lead us, for example, into Bohemian literary circles or the Freie Volksbühne, a theater production company co-founded by Bölsche to produce the dramas of naturalist playwrights. Instead, I will focus on the two types that most systematically propagated monism. At the core of the secularist culture were those organizations that understood themselves to be concerned entirely with questions of scientific worldview and religion. These can be considered the “pure” secularist organizations. Then came the realm of popular science, which comprised organizations that incorporated secularist worldview within their adult educational programs that reached many thousands of Berliners annually. The Organizations of “Pure” Secularism There were essentially four variations of “pure” secularism in Wilhelmine Germany: Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture and Monism. Uniting all of these was a core dedication to religious and confessional issues. To varying degrees, they understood themselves to be the next phase in the religious development of humanity, and, with the partial exception of Ethical Culture, they engaged in anticlerical agitation in the name of a new, scientific worldview. Each served a different clientele and had a different function, but they were interlinked through their members and all can be traced back in various ways to origins in rationalist dissent congregations that emerged within the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities in the years 1845 to 1848. After a decade of severe repression following the failed revolution of 1848, the dissenters consolidated in the League of Free Religious Congregations in 1859. In Berlin in 1890, the Free Religious Congregation (FRC) was the sole secularist organization of any size. There had been a Freethought Association “Lessing” founded in 1881, as part of the emerging international network of freethinkers launched in 1880 in Brussels. However, in 1886 it fell foul of the authorities and was declared a political organization, which meant that, among other restrictions, women could not attend meetings. Rather than carry on under such restrictions, “Lessing” disbanded. Berlin’s Free Religious Congregation had begun as the Christian-Catholic Congregation, which had been called into life in 1845 by local Catholics, but which soon attracted many Protestant and a significant number of Jewish adherents. Its first leader was a renegade Catholic priest from Breslau, Robert Brauner, who came to embrace a pantheistic monism before his exile from Berlin in 1852 and early death in 1854. His later successor, G. S. Schaefer, a schoolteacher who served as the congregation’s chief preacher between 1870 and 1887, went a step further and openly embraced atheism and

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materialist monism. He even dispensed with the title “preacher” and called himself the congregation’s “speaker.”6 Historical actors and later historians have been confused by the word “religion” in the name of the Free Religious movement and have often mistakenly concluded that it was more Christian than Freethought, which they have assumed to be more atheistic. This was not true of many of the larger Free Religious Congregations, particularly those with left-wing memberships, as was the case in Berlin. In fact, the Freethought Association “Lessing” was politically more conservative than the FRC. When “Lessing” disbanded in 1886, it was effectively absorbed by the Free Religious Congregation. Its chairman soon became the chairman of the FRC. The FRC became the main Freethought association for Berlin for the next two decades and remained the single largest corporate member of the German Freethought League. This was paralleled on the national level by the decision in 1901 of the umbrella organizations of Freethought and Free Religion to unite their leaderships in the person of Gustav Tschirn, the preacher of the large Breslau congregation. Where Free Religion was more “religious” than Freethought was in its retention of church structures and functions. The central event of the FRC was the Sunday morning meeting, which was clearly modeled on a Christian service. On any given Sunday in 1890, some 100 to 300 persons found their way into the congregation’s hall in Rosenthaler Street in the central district of Spandauer Vorstadt to listen to the day’s lecture on topics ranging from cultural history to ethics or natural science. Not just this “sermon” but other ritual elements of Christian worship were used as platforms to proclaim the falsity of Christianity and the truth of immanent worldview and its implications for social relations. This began with the opening hymns. Sung to the melody of a familiar church tune, the lyrics often directly juxtaposed the darkness of the old teachings and the light of the new. For example, the Sunday meeting of April 13, 1890 began with 250 attendees singing the following: Do we not see, flowering on this earth Splendor and great joy? The voice of Nature commands: Humanity should enjoy! Dark superstition falls, The fog disperses and is gone. We want already on this earth What was promised us in the Beyond.

6

Weir, Fourth Confession, 99–102.

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35

To us, all people are the same, Who strive for the same as we. Now, long live the future kingdom The kingdom of liberty!

Thankfully for the historian, this meeting, like most others in this period, was attended by a police officer in uniform, who took notes and was ready to interrupt the proceedings if the speaker strayed into political territory, or insulted the church or the Kaiser.7 On that day the speaker was Heinrich Peus, a twenty-eight-year-old university student of working-class background, who lectured on “the influence of economic conditions on the independence of conviction.”8 Although he was soon to become editor of a socialist newspaper in nearby Dessau, Peus’s philosophy was more Rousseauian than Marxist. Humans had a natural drive and capacity to know the world and themselves, he began, but they were everywhere hindered by authority and dogma: “Coercion [Gewalt] is the non-recognition of the nature of man; justice is, by contrast, the recognition of human nature.”9 Although science was “never finished and required continual extension and correction,” it nonetheless provided a secure foundation for their worldview: Let us thank happy fate that we were born in an age in which one recognizes the total lawfulness of all events in nature, in which . . . fear of arbitrarily operating, supernatural powers has disappeared, and in which one has ceased to beg for happiness . . . from a place that has no ear to hear, [and] instead wins it through joyfully creative, never doubting labor.10

In Peus’s account, the “social question” appeared as a factor in the struggle between authority and self-knowledge. “The obstacle, which stands in the way of independent thought is political and social dependence, which in turn are based on economic dependence. If man was just a spirit, he would have no material needs” hence there would be no struggle between “power and freedom.” The solution was thus not necessarily social ownership of means of production, but rather economic independence.11 Despite its opposition to Christianity, the Free Religious Congregation provided its adherents with services they would have been familiar with from their prior religious socialization. Not only did the Sunday meetings loosely follow the liturgical structure of a Protestant service, the congregation also 7 8 9 11

LAB A Pr. Br. 030, no. 15050, p. 347. The lecture was printed as Heinrich Peus, Unabhängigkeit der Überzeugung: Vortrag, gehalten in der Freireligiösen Gemeinde zu Berlin am 13. April 1890 (Berlin: Rubenow, 1890). 10 Ibid., 17. Ibid., 12. In a subsequent talk, Peus described the ultimate aim of socialism as the collective transition from an exterior morality, which he called “dressage,” to an inner morality. Heinrich Peus, Sitte und Sittlichkeit oder nicht Autorität, sondern Freiheit: Vortrag gehalten in der freireligiösen Gemeinde zu Berlin am 15. März 1891 (Berlin: self-published, 1891).

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maintained a number of social institutions, including a choir, a women’s association and discussion evenings. The Free Religious also performed rites de passage derived from Christian rituals. The one that raised the most commentary from the conservative press was the Jugendweihe (youth consecration), which had evolved out of Protestant and Catholic confirmation ceremonies. Like its Protestant analogue, the Free Religious Jugendweihe was timed to mark the end of primary education and the entrance of working-class children into the world of apprenticeships or work. Press and police reports on the Jugendweihe of 1891 provide a glimpse at this central event in the calendar of the congregation. The congregation rented an auspicious locale, the Concert House, where a crowd of 2,500 attended the confirmation of 17 boys and 22 girls. Following songs by the congregation and the choir, Bruno Wille gave the keynote address on “Education to Freedom.” A close friend of Wilhelm Bölsche and key figure in the naturalist literary avant-garde that established a colony in suburban Friedrichshagen, Wille found employment as a popular speaker and Sunday school teacher at the FRC. In his speech, Wille contrasted the ethical instruction he had given the children with that doled out by the churches. Whereas he did not force children to accept any teaching that contradicted reason, the church violated the laws of human development by requiring that confirmands take a vow to uphold a static confession. Instead of the “ballast” of the “old dogmas of the ancient Hebrews,” he offered the children natural science and cultural history. He taught ethics through example and urged the parents in the audience to give up demands for blind obedience from their children, because this produced only dependence and alienation. Instead, if they acted as “advising comrades” through “love paired with reason,” they could “lead the children to freedom.”12 Following this speech, a girl and a boy recited a poem of Wille’s and promised in the name of their co-confirmands to be true members of the congregation. Each child then received a “book,” which was a bound collection of secularist brochures with a fitting dedication. (See Figure 2.1.) The Jugendweihe was readily accepted among Berlin socialists and grew in popularity following the ascension of socialists to the congregation’s leadership in the late 1880s. In April 1908 a reporter from Germany’s most important socialist paper Vorwärts described his alarm when he bumped into a fellow socialist with “a confirmation present and a top hat.” He was relieved to discover that they were on their way to the FRC Jugendweihe (and not to Christian confirmation). The reporter used this encounter to create the 12

Manfred Isemeyer and Klaus Sühl, Feste der Arbeiterbewegung: 100 Jahre Jugendweihe (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1989); Michael Rudloff, “Die Entstehung des Jugendweihegedankens am Beispiel Leipzigs,” in Mitteldeutsches Jahrbuch für Kultur und Geschichte (Weimar: Böhlau, 1999), 97–121.

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Figure 2.1 Postcard of the prewar Jugendweihe, with Bruno Wille officiating and Adolph Hoffmann superimposed. (A. Hoffmanns Verlag, n.d., Bundesarchiv)

following juxtaposition: Whereas most working-class youths would arrive at socialism through the downward path of exploitation and the extinction of their dreams, the Jugendweihe represented an upward path of idealism that led the youth to “dedicate” their lives to “the struggle for the redemption and liberation of the proletariat.”13 The popularity of the Jugendweihe as a socialist ritual grew during the Weimar Republic until it was banned by the National Socialists in 1933. After the war, the GDR resurrected and transformed the Jugendweihe, now divorced from its earlier associations with Free Religion, and made it the chief ceremony of the communist state. To this day, Jugendweihe remains the most popular cultural heritage of the GDR, with many thousands of children participating annually.14 In 1847 the Prussian government had withdrawn from the congregation the right to perform marriages or baptism. However, it retained the right to burial. Its cemetery in the Pappel Allee had been on the outskirts of Berlin when it was donated to the congregation in 1846, but by 1890, the working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg had grown up around it. This refuge in the city 13

Vorwärts, April 1, 1908.

14

See Epilogue for discussion.

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was the congregation’s most prized asset and a thorn in the side of the state churches and the authorities. It was the site of repeated acts of dissent, from the posting of an atheist slogan on the cemetery gates to the public burial of prominent socialists. In August 1894, for example, some 2,000 persons attended the burial of a well-known SPD member. The police declared it a political “outdoor meeting” and levied a 50 mark fine against Ewald Vogtherr, a leading congregation member and socialist city councilor, for holding a graveside eulogy.15 In 1909, the congregation erected a large meeting hall next to the cemetery, with the monistic motto on the wall: “The world governs itself according to eternal laws.” The FRC also built a columbarium, and in 1891 1,000 people attended a ceremony at which the ashes of a woman cremated in Germany’s first crematorium in Gotha were deposited.16 Cremation was an area where liberal, bourgeois activists pioneered what later became largely associated with working-class secularism. The cause had initially been championed in Berlin by the association “Urn,” whose membership included professionals and several future members of the German Ethical Culture Society.17 When Urn failed to gain permission for a crematorium in Berlin in 1891, the FRC stepped in and its chairman Otto Friedrici repeatedly petitioned the City Council.18 In 1898, Urn was allowed build a demonstration cremation oven and it invited leading public officials to witness the burning there of a pig carcass; however, it was not until 1908 that permission was finally granted to the association to construct a crematorium in Berlin.19 The prominence of secularism in the modern cremation movement is not surprising.20 Given that Christian parties opposed cremation as a violation of religious tradition, the anticlerical implications were a great enticement to secularists.21 For the working-class members of the FRC, the cost factor was key. Burial was an expensive affair and cremation promised to be much cheaper. In 1905 a cremation cooperative was established by working-class freethinkers in Berlin, which eventually became interwar Germany’s largest Freethought association. By 1890, the FRC had 1,747 dues-paying members, mostly members of what is called “the old middle classes” (Alte Mittelstand), i.e. merchants, master craftsmen and their apprentices, some of whom had formerly been

15 16 17 19 20 21

Vorwärts, Sept. 5, 1894; Neue Preußische Zeitung (Kreuzzeitung), Nov. 16, 1894. Simone Ameskamp, “On Fire: Cremation in Germany, 1870s–1934,” PhD, Washington, DC, Georgetown University (2006), 49. 18 LAB A Pr. Br. 030, nos. 15133 and 15142. Berliner Tageblatt, July 10, 1891. Bernd Siegmund, “Berlin erhält sein erstes Krematorium,” Berlinische Monatshefte, 1997, 76. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead (Princeton University Press, 2015), 530–31. In 1908, FRC leader and city councilor Waldeck Manasse turned a council discussion on cremation into an attack on the church. LAB, Rep. 00-02-01 Stadtverordnetenversammlung, no. 1467, Leichenverbrennung, 1877–1918, no pagination.

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39

Catholics or Jews, but most of whom came from a Protestant background. Like many urban civic associations, it had been controlled by a small group of notables, educated professionals or wealthy businessmen. In the case of the FRC, these men leaned towards the Democratic Party in the 1870s. However, in the 1880s, an increasing socialist presence emerged in the association, and, as we shall see, was able to overturn the leadership in 1886. The turn of the FRC in a more plebeian and radical direction had played a part in the demise of “Lessing” and it also soured relations with the upper-class elites, who founded the German Society for Ethical Culture in Berlin in 1892. In part as a reaction to the perceived threat of radical secularism, these elites explicitly proposed “ethics” against “monist worldview” as a scientific and harmonizing means of uniting Germans in a secular culture. Those intellectuals committed to the project of scientific worldview responded a decade later by forming explicitly monist associations, starting with the Giordano Bruno League in 1900 and culminating in the German Monist League in 1906.22 Like the Society for Ethical Culture, these monist organizations largely excluded workingclass members. Secularism and Popular Science The newsletters of the FRC from the late 1880s contain notices informing members that they could obtain special rates for courses at the Humboldt Academy, Germany’s leading adult education institution. And for discounted tickets to the Urania planetarium, the Aquarium, the Passage-Panopticon with its “flood panorama,” or to Castan’s Panopticon with its famous collection of wax figures, they were directed to three members, who also happened to be the congregation’s most prominent socialists.23 In an era before moving pictures, these venues offered popular forms of visual entertainment, yet they also represented the city’s foremost institutions of popular-scientific education. The fact that they advertised in the FRC brochure was not a coincidence. It underlines the fact that popular science was, alongside Free Religion, the chief vector for the transmission of monist worldview into the Berlin population, in particular to the many intellectually ambitious adults with limited formal education, then flocking to the SPD. According to Bölsche, the Free Religious Congregations themselves had essentially transitioned into

22 23

For discussion, see Weir, Fourth Confession, 208–52. The three men were Ewald Vogtherr, Fritz Kunert and Theodor Metzner. Neues freireligiöses Sonntags-Blatt (NFRSB), 4/12 (March 23, 1889), 95; 4/19 (May 12, 1889), 151. Peter Letkemann, “Das Berliner Panoptikum: Namen, Häuser, und Schicksale,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, 69/11 (1973): 319–26.

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popular-scientific institutions, where they served as “new and promising bridges over the gap between research and the people.”24 Thanks to historian Andreas Daum, we now understand the centrality of popular science to the history of German secularism and politics. He named proximity to liberalism, a penchant for worldview and distance from university research as the “birth defects” of popular science as it arose in the mid nineteenth century.25 Yet, it is worth asking whether the intimate connection of worldview secularism was not so much a “defect” of popular science, as much more a quintessential motivation for engagement with it. In his classic study of popular science from 1935, the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck concluded that worldview is “[t]he pinnacle, the goal of popular knowledge.” He explained worldview as a by-product of the essential processes of science popularization – simplification, valuation and visualization – and claimed that it was key to the integral role played by popular science in the entire system of modern knowledge production. In generalizing academic knowledge into worldview and making it accessible to the public, popular science also fed back into the scientific community and shaped research agendas.26 In the following section, we want to take Fleck’s lead and explore how simplification, valuation and visualization were intimately connected to the articulation of the naturalistic, monistic worldview that formed the core of secularist culture. We begin with classic works of popular-scientific literature before turning to the educational institutions in Berlin in the 1880s. The literary contribution to the emergence of the monist worldview can be summed up in three books each published a decade apart. In his epochmaking book Cosmos of 1845, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt stated that his aim was to provide readers a “general natural painting descending from the farthest nebulae and rotating double stars of the universe to the telluric phenomena of the geography of organisms (plants, animals and human races).”27 Following Humboldt, popular scientists sought to capture all of nature in a single totalizing “physical description of the world,” for which Humboldt used the term “worldview.” Physician Ludwig Büchner

24

25

26 27

Wilhelm Bölsche, “Zur Geschichte der volkstümlichen Naturforschung,” in Kaleidoskop: Skizzen und Aufsätze aus Natur und Menschenleben, ed. Ludwig Büchner (Gießen: Emil Roth, 1901), xxix. Andreas Daum, ‘Naturwissenschaften und Öffentlichkeit in der deutschen Gesellschaft: Zu den Anfängen einer Populärwissenschaft nach der Revolution von 1848’, Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 87. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung, 172. Ludwik Fleck, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1935), 121. Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1845), xii–xiii.

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took a further step in simplification and added valuation in 1856 with his Force and Matter. Written during the “materialism controversy” which scandalized the German public, Büchner’s title indicates the radical reduction of all phenomena to a single principle, namely matter in motion. Valuation came through his stark and radical opposition between this scientific principle and forms of “idealism” whether in philosophy, elite culture or, most importantly, Christianity. In 1866 Ernst Haeckel published his General Morphology, which introduced the term “monism” in its popular-scientific form. Like Humboldt, he sought a total depiction of the universe, and like Büchner he sought to reduce it to a single principle; in Haeckel’s case, totality and unity were provided by the theory of evolution promulgated by Darwin. He predicted that the “monistic worldview” of “the higher developed future . . . will amalgamate natural science and philosophy into a great unity of a single, all-encompassing science.”28 Although his scientific explanations were mechanistic, Haeckel’s use of the term “monism” enabled him to claim the mantle of a long heretical, philosophical tradition in Western thought with roots going back to ancient philosophy, which posited an essential unity behind various dualisms. Baruch Spinoza proposed a single substance comprising thought and matter, which was echoed in Goethe’s bon mot “Material never without spirit, spirit never without matter” that Haeckel never tired of repeating. Haeckel’s twist was to ground the philosophical hypothesis of monistic unity in mechanistic scientific explanations. The result was a naturalistic monism. In 1899 Haeckel summarized all his innovations in worldview with his manifesto Die Welträtsel (The World Riddle), which according to political philosopher Hermann Lübbe was by far the most important popular-scientific book published in modern Germany.29 Celebrated as “anti-pope” at the 1904 meeting of the International Congress of Freethinkers in Rome, Haeckel was the key intellectual figure in the history of popular monism. From the publication of his General Morphology until 1933, there were no more significant developments in secularist worldview. Certainly some variations in monism emerged, such as psychophysical parallelism, energetics and theosophically influenced nature mysticism; however, they either remained marginal or could be integrated into the framework provided by Haeckel. His form of naturalistic monism grounded in popular science was, as we shall see in Chapter 5, something to which people, including thousands of workers,

28 29

Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), 108. Hermann Lübbe, “Die Religion und das Ende der wissenschaftlichen Weltanschauung,” in Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen: XIX. Deutscher Kongress für Philosophie, Bonn, 23.–27. September 2002 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2015), 216.

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Figure 2.2 Frontispiece: Wilhelm Bölsche, The Man of the Future (Stuttgart: Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde, 1915)

could and did “convert.” It formed the basis of utopian cultural imaginings, such as that captured in the frontispiece The Man of the Future published by Wilhelm Bölsche during the First World War in Kosmos, Germany’s most widely read popular science book series (see Figure 2.2). It showed a naked man in a sailboat, heading towards the horizon. This symbolized the monist promise of the unity of knowledge, nature and self in the self-conscious human body. The glowing future was on the horizon of this world, not in the beyond. To investigate the relationship of monism and popular science in Berlin around 1890, we turn now to three institutions, identified by Daum as national leaders in the field of popular science. Taking each in turn, I want to examine how they communicated worldview through scientific education, and how they were linked through personnel to “pure” secularist organizations, in particular, the local Free Religious Congregation. The Society for the Promotion of Popular Education One of the simplest forms of transmitting secularist ideas was the “itinerant speaker” (Wanderredner). In 1871, a group of liberals in the Rhineland had founded the Society for the Promotion of Popular Education (Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung von Volksbildung, or GVV) as a clearinghouse for such wandering speakers, who, for a fee, would lecture to member organizations. It later expanded its offerings to include mobile “people’s museums” and in 1906 “popular-scientific wandering libraries.” The GVV grew steadily from an initial membership of 158 participating organizations and 1,299 individual members in 1871 to 772 organizations and 4,339 individual members in 1878.30 30

Citation and statistics on 1878, Volkszeitung, May 27, 1879. Daum’s figure of 8,408 subscribing organizations in 1913 appears too high. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung, 171–72.

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Soon after its foundation, the GVV came under the control of those members of the left-liberal Progressive Party most invested in worker education. Although the stated aim of the GVV to “raise the morality and education of the people” was not explicitly secularist, several of these men, including Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, Franz Duncker, Max Hirsch and Rudolf Gneist, were public supporters or members of “pure” secularist organizations.31 There were many Free Religionists and Freethinkers among the freelance intellectuals who advertised their wares in the GVV catalog. These travelling salesmen for Weltanschauung were driven to take to the road by a sense of missionary calling and a lack of a salaried position and they included Ludwig Büchner, who had lost his university position following his public role in the materialism controversy. Itinerant preaching had been a marked feature of Free Religion from the outset and at least four preachers worked via the GVV in 1889, including Titus Voelkel. Voelkel’s career exemplifies the precarious nature of secularist livelihood. Police surveillance shows that after being expelled from the Magdeburg congregation for his radical posturing in 1888, he sought refuge at the Berlin FRC, where he became a regular speaker and received a commission to write a catechism. However, to make ends meet, he traveled the country, lecturing at twenty-three different Free Religious Congregations in June and July 1889. The lecture titles he offered in the GVV catalog for the winter of 1889–90 illustrate the close connection between Free Religion, life reform, utopian community formation and radical democracy: “poisons of the soul (alcohol and nicotine), the forest, Shelley a pantheist poet, people’s baths, people’s homes (Volksheime), people’s cafes and club houses for the people.”32 Among the twenty-six Berliners lecturing for the GVV at that time were four other regular speakers at the FRC. For a fee of 25–50 marks, subscribing organizations could engage Carl Pinn to lecture on the topics: “nationality, public opinion, suicide, hypnotism, women, Minnesang or the history of the press,” while Ewald Vogtherr’s offerings included “cultural history, popular philosophy, Ulrich von Hutten, the natural law of rise and decline [Werden und Vergehen], Faust, and the life goals of humanity.” This openness to Free Religion was not surprising given that the GVV’s chairman at the time, Dr. Paul Wislicenus, was the son of a Free Religious preacher and gave at least one speech in the Berlin FRC.33

31 32

33

Weir, Fourth Confession, 146, 227. Adreßbuch der Deutschen Rednerschaft: Winterhalbjahr 1889–90 (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung, 1889). On Voelkel, see LAB A Pr. Br. 030, no. 13959, and NFRSB, 4/26 (June 29, 1889). Adreßbuch. Two other Berlin FRC speakers were Bruno Wille and Bruno Spatzier.

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The Humboldt Academy: Purveyor of Scientific Worldview The institutionalization of popular science in Berlin took a large step forward with the opening of the Humboldt Academy in 1879. Named after Alexander von Humboldt, the Academy was the first adult continuing education institution of note in Berlin and sparked the Volkshochschule (adult educational colleges) movement, which to this day supports branches in most cities and large towns across Germany. It was the initiative of Max Hirsch, who guided it through the first quarter century of its existence. In addition to founding and leading the liberal labor union movement – the Hirsch-Duncker’schen Workers Associations – Hirsch was an early member of the Freethought Association “Lessing” and the German Society for Ethical Culture. Although Hirsch did not speak at the Free Religious Congregation, several of his docents did.34 Unlike the GVV, the Humboldt Academy offered its docents a professional position and stable income. With a salary of 300–400 marks per quarter for the most popular courses, Hirsch was able to attract a well-qualified staff, nearly all of whom were university educated.35 Yet, analogous to the Humboldt Academy’s own physical location in halls rented from a grammar school next to the Friedrich Wilhelm University, most of these docents occupied culturally and economically precarious positions in the shadow of the professors. The Academy attracted young teachers, who held the coveted title “Dr. phil.” and were trying to make a living as “writers” (Schriftsteller). Among the 156 docents at the Humboldt Academy in 1896 were 48 Schriftsteller and 27 university-trained schoolteachers and directors. There were also 22 Privatdozenten, those untenured and underpaid university lecturers who, for reasons of overcrowding, lack of talent, or confessional or political discrimination, did not get “called” to vacant university chairs. The sociologist Georg Simmel, who taught courses at the Humboldt Academy in 1888, was a Jewish victim of such discrimination.36 The prominence of Jewish Berliners like Hirsch among its directors and docents and its association with liberalism and secularism made the Humboldt Academy the target of antisemitic ridicule.37 34 35 36 37

The “Lessing” Freethought Association, the Free Religious Congregation and the German Society for Ethical Culture were corporate members of the Humboldt Academy. Letter from Max Hirsch to F. v. Luschan, Dec. 18, 1887, Handschriftensammlung, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Luschan papers. Max Hirsch, Humboldt-Akademie und Wissenschaftlicher Centralverein 1878–1885 (Berlin: Hugo Steinitz Verlag, 1886), 30–33. Berlin antisemite Eugen Dühring wrote “that although one cannot refer to this so-called Humboldt Academy as a school for Jews, one can call it a school by Jews, i.e. a Jewish school for the instruction of the general public.” Eugen Dühring, Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sittenund Culturfrage: Mit einer weltgeschichtlichen Antwort (Karlsruhe: H. Reuther, 1881), 147–48.

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Hirsch had been one of Germany’s leading advocates of workers’ education in the 1860s and 1870s, but by the end of the century, he had shifted the target of his popular education efforts. The Humboldt Academy aimed to reach a new segment of the middle classes, who according to Hirsch were “largely of modern origin” and commanded “leading places in the sprawling economic system and administration.”38 By 1902, the Humboldt Academy had an enrollment of 11,854 pupils, mostly comprised of white-collar workers and unemployed women, who attended classes in eight locations around the city.39 Measured by the total number of listener hours, it was the most important popular-scientific institution in Berlin between 1879 and 1933. In 1901, Hirsch still affirmed the same basic understanding of the relationship of science, worldview, personal ethics and class harmonization with which he entered into secularist circles in the 1860s. He described a dangerous age, in which only a freethinking, autonomous middle class armed with a solid scientific worldview could navigate through the Scylla and Charybdis posed by the rival authoritarian orders of confessional conservatism and base socialism: First our time forms the great epoch, where independence of thought and action . . . can be accessed by all social classes and both sexes. This in no way means a negation of religious faith and the social order; however, both [of these] should no longer base themselves on external foreign authority, but rather on the personal conviction gained through independent investigation. For this one requires science and its noble goal: a historically constituted and logically consistent worldview and ethical system [Weltund Lebensanschauung]. The deepest contradiction and greatest danger of our age, not just for the exterior integrity of states but for the highest moral and spiritual goods, lies in the disappearance of faith in authority and church-sanctioned morality, unless the common possession of science steps into their place.40

Given the centrality of worldview to Hirsch’s project, it is not surprising that nine of the thirty evening courses offered in the autumn of 1891 fell within the general scope of worldview training.41 These included courses in evolutionary

38 39

40 41

Max Hirsch, Wissenschaftlicher Zentralverein und Humboldt-Akademie: Skizze ihrer Thätigkeit und Entwicklung 1878–1896 (Berlin: Hugo Steinitz, 1896), 8. Statistics from the first quarter of 1896 show that workers and handworkers represented less than 5 percent of the total (51); while teachers (239), commercial employees (154 Kaufleute, Gehilfen, bank employees) and civil servants (82) represented the most numerous occupational groups. Hirsch, Wissenschaftlicher Zentralverein, 30–35; Max Hirsch, Aus der HumboldtAkademie: Dem Generalsekretär Herrn Dr. Max Hirsch zu seinem 70. Geburtstag von der Dozentenschaft gewidmet (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1902), viii. Max Hirsch, Volkshochschulen: Ihre Ziele, Organisation, Entwicklung, Propaganda (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1901), 8. The courses were listed under the rubrics: natural science (5), hygiene (1), ethics and philosophy (3), psychology (4), art and history (9) and languages and literature (8). Lehrprogramm der Humboldt-Akademie zu Berlin, vol. vi Quartal (Berlin, 1891).

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natural history, psychology and hygiene. All three of these aspects were bundled in the course offerings of Dr. Maximilian Klein. His course on “The History of World Wisdom” surveyed the literature on psycho-physical parallelism, while “Paths to Human Knowledge” was a course in what might be called applied monism, in which Klein offered three ways of studying a person’s spirit through their body. Students would learn to read a person’s “physiognomy” in gestures, facial expressions and hands (chirology); they would interpret handwriting through “graphology”; and they would interpret an individual’s words and deeds through the identification of “class (Stand) peculiarities” and the “influence of ethnicity [Volksschlag], sex, age, health, diet.”42 Klein arrived at the Academy in 1891 from Danzig and was its longest serving docent and repeatedly elected to its governing body. He survived the racial and political purge in 1933, and in 1941 he was still teaching courses in applied monism.43 More Volkshochschulen with secularist participation appeared in Berlin after 1900. In January 1902 the Free Academy (Freie Hochschule) opened its door. Among its founders and first directors were Bruno Wille, Wilhelm Bölsche and Wilhelm Schwaner, a pioneer of völkisch thought whose journal Der Volkserzieher became the Freie Hochschule’s official organ. Whereas Hirsch’s organization kept a strict left-liberal profile, the Freie Hochschule’s docents were a hodgepodge of socialists (Heinrich Lux), former followers of Friedrich Naumann’s National Social movement (Adolf Damaschke, Max Maurenbrecher), Monists (Wolfgang Kirchbach, Magnus Hirschfeld, Walther Vielhaber) and völkisch thinkers (alongside Schwaner, also Heinrich Driesmann, Rudolf Steiner). After the First World War, the number of Volkshochschulen rose strongly and they became key battlegrounds between right and left monists.44 Urania: The Aesthetics of Worldview We have not yet dealt substantively with the “visualization” of worldview, which Fleck considered a key part of popularization. Since the early days of modern popular science, its leading practitioners had given great attention to the importance of aesthetics. Alexander von Humboldt likened his work to that 42 43 44

Lehrprogramm der Humboldt-Akademie zu Berlin, vol. iv Quartal (Berlin, 1893), 188; vol. ii Quartal (Berlin, 1892), 6; vol. iv Quartal (Berlin, 1892), 6; vol. ii Quartal (Berlin, 1894), 5. Humboldt-Hochschule (Berlin, 1941). See also LAB B Rep. 042, no. 26111. Justus Ulbricht, “Völkische Erwachsenenbildung: Intentionen, Programme und Institutionen zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Weimarer Republik,” in Handbuch zur völkischen Bewegung 1871–1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht (Munich: Saur, 1996), 252–76; Ludwig Lewin, ‘Zur Geschichte der Lessing-Hochschule: Berlin 1914–1933’, Berliner Arbeitsblätter für die Deutsche Volkshochschule, 11 (1960): 1–48.

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of an artist, calling his Cosmos a “painting of nature.” Unlike the academic scientist who presented nature in component parts, a science popularizer had to use aesthetic means to enable the reader to apprehend it as a totality, a cosmos. Aesthetic considerations were paramount in the operations of the Urania planetarium, which opened its doors to the public in 1889. Spearheaded by Court Astronomer Wilhelm Foerster and financed on a subscription basis by some of Berlin’s wealthiest bankers and industrialists, Urania occupied a representative building adorned with busts of famous scientists.45 Inside, visitors could participate in demonstration experiments in the professional observatory or laboratories, or they could attend performances in the “scientific theater.” Politically and institutionally, the Urania was at a far remove from the Free Religious Congregation, and its founder, Wilhelm Foerster, soon went on to co-found the elitist German Society for Ethical Culture. Among Urania’s tenmember “scientific personnel” there was no room for the dilettantes of the FRC. The Urania nonetheless offered good worldview fare, albeit in a new form. Unlike the props used by most science popularizers, such as diagrams, fossils and bones, the “scientific theater” of the Urania was equipped with state-of-the-art stage technology, featuring multicolor electric lamps and a slide projector of 6,000 candle strength. This made possible a heightened experience of nature as an unfolding drama, narrated in the semi-darkness by a professional speaker. According to Director M. Wilhelm Meyer, the aim was to provide “a miniature picture of Nature” simple enough to be immediately grasped by a large crowd: With the human eye the mind is also to be enthralled – to a degree unconsciously – by the richly colorful artistic renditions of beautiful and grand scenes of nature. One should enter our theater with the same expectations with which one enters any other theater, where we are presented with a drama that stimulates serious, deeper reflection. Here as there, one cannot demand too much mental work from the audience. Thoughts and developments must be easy to follow without prior knowledge, and – in the same measure as it engages human reason – the senses, aesthetic perceptions, the heart, in other words, the whole person must also be engaged.46

Meyer saw in the unconscious, aesthetic apprehension of the totality more than a means for drawing the audience into an active, deeper engagement with natural science. The aesthetic and emotional identification of the audience with the Gesamtkunstwerk was precisely the worldview aim of the show. Meyer insisted that the relationship of reason (Verstand) to its object should not be 45

46

Harro Hess, Aus der Geschichte der Berliner Gesellschaft Urania 1888–1927 (Berlin: Archenhold-Sternwarte, 1979), 21; Wilhelm Foerster, Lebenserinnerungen und Lebenshoffnungen (1832 bis 1910) (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1911), 200. M. Wilhelm Meyer, “Die Urania nach der Fertigstellung,” Himmel und Erde, 2 (1889): 276–79.

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“cold.” One of Urania’s “nature dramas” was entitled “The History of the Primeval World” and closed “[w]ith the soft tones of a distantly emanating music.” This off-stage music was “meant to signify how all the beauty and the poetry of immense creation . . . prepared over millions of years of struggle, first achieved their purpose when the sensate human soul was born, which for the first time proved receptive to such indefinable and yet infinitely inspiring impressions of poetry, music and the secret of rhythm and symmetry.”47 Here Meyer made the aesthetic-scientific apprehension by his audience of the totality of the world and its history into the telos of the development of life on earth, i.e. the point at which nature achieved self-consciousness by gazing into the mirror provided by natural science and worldview theater. Writing a decade later, Bölsche underlined the empowering potential of this type of popular science, which had been made possible by the fusion of the cosmic view of Humboldt with the developmental narrative provided by Darwinian evolutionary theory: Now on the basis of the idea of evolution arose the demand to give the listener a true share in the creation of the world, to place him at a vantage point, where by the power of imagination the whole world stands at his feet. He should enjoy the thrill of creativity, when, there in space, as in unthinkable eons past, the world material again gathers into a nebula, when the nebula divides into a milky way of millions of stars, where one such sun bore planets and on the cooled surface of one such planet – the earth – life formed, blossomed into the carboniferous forest, and swam by as the ichthyosaurus, until finally it gathered to the human brain and – between the ice-age glaciers and the mammoths – culture began, which ultimately ascended to Galileo and Newton, to Michelangelo and Goethe.48

Meyer defended his “scientific theater” against the criticism voiced by “real” scientists that it spread “semi-education” [Halbbildung]. It was obvious, he stated, “how much one must stay on the superficial level, if one is to recall the entire history of the earth, building it up from the bottom to the top, in a timeframe of an hour and a half.” It might appear incorrect to “pedantic critics” that he added some false detail “in order to create a clearer picture,” but clarity, Meyer argued, was the chief concern. Uneducated listeners had to be caught with seamless narrative and total visual simulacra. Once captured, they could, “according to Darwinian principles, more easily work upwards from these embryonic stages of past knowledge that are suited to their mental needs.”49 Here Haeckel’s famous phylogenetic principle is adopted as an analogy for the educational process. Just as the history of the entire development of the species (phylogeny) repeated in the gestational stages of the individual embryo (ontogeny), Meyer argued that the semi-educated audience member 47 49

48 Ibid., 280. Bölsche, “Zur Geschichte der Lessing-Hochschule,” 18–19. Meyer, “Urania,” 281. For a discussion of Halbbildung, see Weir, Fourth Confession, 117–19.

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recapitulates the history of science in his or her movement from lower to higher knowledge. Furthermore, the nature drama repeats in the space of one and a half hours all of these linked genealogical accounts, producing not a second-rate copy of true knowledge, but a total representation of knowledge as worldview.50 The person who has not experienced this, Meyer concluded, “is missing part of what makes us human.” The Division of Secularism To summarize our initial survey of the secularist culture of Berlin, we have found an extensive overlap between leading German institutions of popular science education and the “pure” secularist organizations of the country’s capital city, expressed through the circulation of intellectuals and monist ideas. Having established this unity of the secularist culture, we turn now to the effects upon it of the political struggles of the late 1880s. According to Andreas Daum, German popular science emerged in the post-1848 period closely tied to left-wing politics and Free Religion, but over the following decades became increasingly professionalized, depoliticized, commercialized and institutionalized. Daum acknowledged the emergence of an explicitly “socialist” or “proletarian” popular science, but he chalked it up to the pluralization of the field.51 However, this development also needs to be understood as a result of the polarization of the field. In other words, the processes of professionalization, depoliticization and commercialization better describe the trajectory of its leading liberal voices, rather than the direction of popular science per se. The “bourgeois” institutions, such as the GVV, the Humboldt Academy and the Urania, did not monopolize the endeavor. The second half of this chapter examines the bifurcation of the secularist popular science scene into liberal and socialist wings. It does so in two steps, showing first how the tensions within the German left affected bourgeois popular science institutions and split the Free Religious Congregation. Then, it explores the institutions that emerged to the left of Free Religion and dispensed secularist Weltanschauung to meetings of trade unions, guilds, reading clubs and educational societies of the socialist milieu. In this way, the chapter demonstrates the emergence of a specifically socialist brand of secularism in the years around 1890.

50

51

A question that lies outside the scope of this book is whether there exists a relationship between naturalistic monism available at the popular science venues visited by Walter Benjamin during his Berlin youth and his later monistic fusion of nature and human society into a self-conscious and organic collective or “physis” by means of modern media. Benjamin introduced this concept in his 1928 essay “To the Planetarium.” Daum, “Naturwissenschaften und Öffentlichkeit.”

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Since the 1860s, popular science and naturalistic worldview had been hotly contested commodities in the growing struggle between urban liberal elites and Social Democratic upstarts. Left liberals had founded popular-scientific institutions as a means of building a new society based in science, secularism and liberal values. They agreed with Max Hirsch that introduction of universal male suffrage had made “the question of freedom into a question of the education of the masses.”52 But education was also understood as a means to keep socialism at bay. Already in 1870, one of the founders of the GVV had expressed his fear that agitation on the “social question” could lead the “the dead masses” of uneducated Germans to become “tools in the hands of every conscienceless upstart.”53 The explicit aim of the GVV was to “coordinate and professionalize” the spectrum of “non-socialist and non-confessional” educational associations.54 Although decentralized, the GVV did periodically purge its ranks. In August 1891 the Central GVV explicitly asked its subscribers to strike eleven names from their list, including those of three FRC radicals: Bruno Wille, Ewald Vogtherr and Titus Voelkel.55 One likely explanation of this exclusion was the public prominence of these men in recent radical socialist agitation, which will concern us in Chapter 3. The same combination of idealism and tight political control was found at the Humboldt Academy. Max Hirsch was very proud of the democratic “selfadministration” (Selbstverwaltung) of the docents but set clear political limits. One of his lecturers, the freigeistig Protestant theologian Theodor Kappstein, remembered: “Hirsch was – and that was not always good – the whole Humboldt Academy; political liberalism constrained him, social democracy was not permitted to penetrate the faculty; he jealously held watch towards right and left at the gates of the Humboldt House, with which he stood and fell.”56 The Urania too bore the marks of the social divisions within the field of popular science. Founder Wilhelm Foerster recalled that he and his professorial colleagues felt they were not being heard amid the growing clamor of science popularizers in the 1880s. Urania, with all its technological attractions, was meant to give them the soapbox they needed to rise above the crowd and restore the leadership position that scientists like Alexander von Humboldt had enjoyed forty years earlier.57

52 53 54 55 56 57

Hirsch, Volkshochschulen, 9. Viktor Böhmert, Die Entstehung der Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung (Berlin: Verlag der Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung, 1907). Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung, 172. Adreßbuch der Deutschen Rednerschaft (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung, 1891). “Persönliche Erinnerungen,” in Humboldt-Blätter: Festnummer zum 50 jährigen Bestehen (Berlin: Humboldt-Hochschule, 1928), 8–13 (citation at 9). Foerster, Lebenserinnerungen, 201.

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If the only effect of the widening gulf between socialism and liberalism was to encourage the professionalization of the major popular-scientific institutions of the city, then one might conclude that secularism simply followed the rightward drift of the main purveyors of worldview in the city. Yet, the efforts by liberals to monopolize the whole of the city’s secularist culture failed and instead split Berlin secularism. Whereas the GVV, Humboldt Academy and Urania stayed firmly in liberal hands, the Free Religious Congregation was cleaved in two, with the majority shifting into the socialist camp. This new “socialist” congregation formed the nucleus of a culture of “red” secularism in the city and led to the formation of new and explicitly socialist popular science institutions. Developments in the Free Religious Congregation As elsewhere in Germany, Free Religion played a crucial role in the formation of Social Democracy in Berlin in the early 1860s. Several of the earliest supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle and his ADAV were members of the Berlin congregation, such as shoemaker Theodor Metzner or cigar roller Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche. They had supported the formation of an autonomous socialist workers’ party in 1864, becoming leading functionaries in the ADAV, which challenged the much larger Workers’ Association (Arbeiterverein), which was under the control of the ruling left-liberal establishment of Berlin, the Progressive Party.58 This early formation of socialist parties put the squeeze on Germany’s brand of radical republicanism, known since the revolution of 1848 as the Democratic movement (Demokratie). This was also the political current most closely identified with secularism. Despite the ongoing erosion of their political clout, a clique of Democrats maintained control of the board of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation from 1869 to 1886. During this time, chairman Ludwig May and speaker G. S. Schaefer managed to bridge the gap between the congregation’s left-liberal allies and its increasingly socialist membership. This role became difficult to play after 1878, when the Socialist Laws placed the congregation under intense police scrutiny and put pressure on the leadership to suppress its socialist members or risk closure. At the same time, however, socialism was gaining traction within the congregation. Secret police reports noted that Schaefer made repeated overtures to socialist members and even called himself a socialist. In 1880 he traveled to London, to try to enlist the aid of former Reichstag deputy for the SPD, Johann Most, who had been expelled from the party for not reining in his anticlericalism and radicalism in the face of the Socialist Laws.

58

Weir, Fourth Confession, 160–64.

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Schaefer unsuccessfully tried to convince Most to join him in launching a new Democratic party. Most was soon to move to New York, to become America’s most infamous anarchist and author of the antireligious tract The God Pestilence. Back in Berlin, Schaefer continued to agitate for socialists to join the Democratic Party, which he claimed was best suited to take up the battle against the party that wants to solve the social problem from the perspective of the “old belief,” a reference most likely to Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker’s new Christian Social movement.59 Yet, despite clusters of support in Leipzig, Erfurt and Berlin, efforts to re-establish a Democratic People’s Party in Northern Germany failed to generate steam.60 In 1885 Schaefer abandoned his efforts to bring socialists under Democratic leadership and started to publicly oppose the SPD and its economic determinism, which he called “socialism of the belly [Magensozialismus].” At the national congress of the Union of the Free Religious Congregations in 1885 Schaefer urged his colleagues to address the “social question,” and argued that “the worker can be won for us by a social-political reform movement according to Stöcker’s methods.” This call, apparently for a secularist populism based loosely on Christian Socialism, earned an angry response from the Social Democratic Reichstag deputy from Halberstadt August Heine, who shouted that the worker “will refuse!” Heine stated that his party was interested in Free Religion and that socialists “can get along quite well in the Union [of Free Religious Congregations]. But we don’t need to fear the efforts of Mr. Schaefer to pull our party comrades over to his side. Our party has shown that repeatedly in elections.”61 In December 1885 Schaefer told a meeting of workers in Dresden that the only reason that “he was not a Social Democrat was that the party was not radical enough in the religious question.”62 Schaefer’s change in tactics coincided with the emergence of a specifically socialist strain of secularism.63 In 1882 the socialist Albert Dulk had founded a Freethought Congregation in Stuttgart, which was led after his death in 1884 by fellow socialist Jakob Stern. In May 1886, Stern urged the members of the national Freethought congress to move from liberal to social, or from 59 60 61

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LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15046, p. 102. Thomas Höhle, Franz Mehring: Sein Weg zum Marxismus 1869–1891 (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1958), 173. Vossische Zeitung, June 16, 1885. Heine’s opinion was not shared by many in his party. He was ridiculed by other SPD members and in 1878 the Vorwärts rejected an article he wrote urging fellow party members to join the FRC. See Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion, 250. LAB A Pr. Br. 030, no. 12978, p. 97, Report to Berlin Police-President v. Richthofen, Dec. 9, 1885. Schaefer’s speaking tour of Leipzig and Dresden had been organized by a former Berlin congregation member Ideler, who had been earlier “expelled” by police from Berlin under the Socialist Laws. Ideler was known to police as an unreliable socialist and an antisemite. Jakob Stern and Heiner Jestrabek, Vom Rabbiner zum Atheisten: Ausgewählte religionskritische Schriften (Aschaffenburg: IBDK-Verlag, 1997).

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“half” to “full” Freethought. At issue was not the secularist worldview: Stern, a former rabbi, remained one of Germany’s leading propagandists for the monist philosophy of Spinoza.64 Rather it was the role of freedom in the movement. Just as liberals held that full economic and political freedom would lead to progress, bourgeois freethinkers erroneously believed that “if religious dogmas were eliminated, the golden age of humanity would dawn.” This sort of freedom just led to a “struggle for existence” in which the powerful would prevail and dominate the weak. Thus, whereas “half” freethinkers remained limited to “Humanitätsduselei” (foggy-headed humanitarianism), “full” freethinkers recognized that free thinking and humanity are first possible in “healthy social conditions,” and that “only socialism can provide the foundation on earth for a true culture,” comprised of “external material and internal ethical culture.”65 Schaefer’s outspoken antisocialism of 1885 marked the end of the truce between the Democratic leadership and the socialist members of the FRC. At the annual election on January 25, 1886, a group declared that it was unhappy with “the dictatorial leadership of the previous board of directors” and presented its own slate of candidates. Most of these candidates were duly elected and the old board and its chairman were dismissed. Yet, the old board refused to step down and instead invalidated the election results because of the supposed participation of non-members. When a new election on February 2 produced the same result, the duly elected “socialist” majority relinquished some seats in the interest of compromise, including the chairmanship to apothecary Otto Friederici. Friederici had been a member of the town council for the left liberal party and was also the chairman of the Freethought Association “Lessing.”66 After failed attempts to enlist police support to regain control of the congregation, former chairman Ludwig May simply refused to relinquish the congregation’s assets of 39,000 marks. In an attempt to broker a compromise, the Democratic newspaper editor and soon-to-be socialist Georg Ledebour, who had recently joined the FRC, proposed placing 30,000 marks into a pension fund for Schaefer. This proposal was opposed by the socialist leader Theodor Metzner and soundly defeated by a congregation vote, a clear sign that relations between Schaefer and the congregation had soured.67 In a speech to the congregation on the “social question” in June 1886, Schaefer directly 64 65 66 67

Tracie Matysik, When Spinoza Met Marx: Experiments in Nonhumanist Activity (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Jakob Stern, Halbes und ganzes Freidenkerthum: Zeit- und Streitschrift (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1890), 15–18. Weir, Fourth Confession, 240. When the proposed pension fund was put up for a vote by the general assembly in September 1886, it was trounced 246 to 91. The socialists present criticized Schaefer as an opportunist, who “showed himself to the people as a radical man in the year 1872, but this circumstance has no meaning, given that at that time it was no trick to shoot your mouth off.” But now that “a bitter time” has arrived, Schaefer is complacent. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15048, p. 27.

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insulted socialists in a manner heard more often from the city’s left-liberal establishment: “A good socialist can be as stupid and lazy as he wants, the state will have to help him.”68 While lashing out at Social Democracy, Schaefer also made increasingly inflammatory anticlerical statements in public, drawing the wrath of the police. In February 1887, he used a guest appearance at the “Lessing” Freethought Association to compare socialist economic utopianism with Christian faith in the beyond. This “political” speech led directly to that organization’s demise. The FRC finally dismissed Schaefer in April 1887, whereupon he took the helm of the Humanist Congregation (originally called the “Free Congregation”) that had been formed earlier in the year by fellow Democrats. Seeking to prevent a repeat of their recent ouster from the FRC, the founders gave the new association statutes that made it essentially impossible for the members of the congregation to overrule the board. This precaution proved unnecessary, as the Humanist Congregation never grew much beyond the 174 members it had in 1891.69 The left-liberal Volks-Zeitung chalked up the “coup” inside the Berlin FRC to “a Social Democratic coterie” that wanted to get hold of the congregation’s substantial assets.70 This jibed with the long-standing argument of the Berlin police that socialists were using Free Religion as a substitute for politics under the Socialist Laws. Yet, the demographic explanation of the socialist takeover is more likely correct, namely that the SPD electoral base was rapidly expanding into the social milieu that supported the FRC. This account is supported by the growth spurt that set in once the FRC shifted to a prosocialist leadership. Membership rose from 1,077 dues-paying members in 1887 to 1,747 in 1890, 2,488 in 1894 and 4,311 in 1899. Generally only heads of households paid dues and were officially included in these statistics, which means that when family members were included, the number of “souls” in the congregation was estimated to be about three times as large.71 While some Democrats and left liberals could not stomach this transition and left the congregation, including Georg Ledebour (who joined the SPD four years later), many of the aspiring younger leaders in the congregation recognized an opportunity and became socialists precisely at this time. For several newly minted socialists the congregation was the springboard that launched them into local politics, and soon several were elected to the City Council. The transition of leadership also led to a reorganization of Sunday services. Rather than hiring a replacement for Schaefer, the congregation shifted to a system of rotating speakers. When one of the former Democratic notables of 68

69 70 71

LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15047, p. 391, report of June 14, 1886. Schaefer made similar statements in a speech to the School Reform Association in April 1884 to a crowd of 300 at the Victoria Brewery. Ibid., p. 410. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15048 pp. 410–12, 416. Berliner Tageblatt, Jan. 28, 1886; Volks-Zeitung, Jan. 31, 1886. See the figures in Weir, Fourth Confession, 280.

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the FRC published a letter in the national Freethought journal Menschenthum in January 1888 describing Schaefer’s dismissal as a blow to the educational aims of Free Religion, the new board countered these charges in a flyer: The past year has led us to the conviction that the honored author of the letter is in error, when he believes that there is no substitute for the rich knowledge of Mr. Schaefer. On the contrary, it seems to us that a man, who admits that he does not have the time to read Darwin in the original, cannot master the material as well as [the new lecturers, T. W.], who were not compelled to return to the school bank in [their] fortieth year, but rather can enlarge and extend their knowledge according to their own judgement.72

Indeed, most of the new speakers had some university education under their belts, such as the young Heinrich Peus, whom we introduced earlier. The new system of rotating speakers lowered costs and probably increased the quality and entertainment value of popular-scientific instruction in the Sunday lectures, which was an important factor in the strong growth of the congregation. With the change of leadership in 1886–87, the Free Religious Congregation moved from an institution that bridged the socialist–liberal divide to one that was more firmly identified with the rising socialist culture, although it remained nominally nonpartisan. Over the coming decades, participation in the FRC was the clearest marker of membership in the secularist-socialist culture of Berlin. However, it was not alone in constituting “red” secularism. The years 1887 to 1891 saw the establishment of a number of worker education institutions in Berlin that were explicitly aligned with socialism. To a degree not hitherto understood by historians, these institutions were more directly a product of the Free Religious Congregation than of the SPD. Socialist Workers’ Education Associations The best-known popular-scientific institution in the socialist milieu of Berlin was the Workers’ Education School (Arbeiterbildungsschule) founded in 1891. The historical literature has generally portrayed it as a brainchild of Wilhelm Liebknecht and hence the SPD.73 Liebknecht gave the keynote address at the founding meeting on January 12, 1891 and had outlined a plan for the Workers’ Education School in a letter written to Ewald Vogtherr from London two weeks earlier: Dear Comrade! After the practical education, which the Socialist Laws have given us, comes now the time for theoretical education. The workers must learn. And we thus consider it necessary that we create educational institutions . . . wherever it is possible.74

72 73 74

Printed handbill, found in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15049, p. 202. Josef Olbrich, Geschichte der Erwachsenenbildung in Deutschland (Leske: Springer-Verlag, 2001), 111–15; Lidtke, Alternative Culture, 162. Liebknecht to Vogtherr, London, Dec. 30, 1890, IISG, Wilhelm Liebknecht papers.

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Figure 2.3 Left: Bruno Wille, Right: Wilhelm Bölsche. (Sources: IISG, Getty Images)

Liebknecht urged Vogtherr to found a “workers’ education institution” or “workers’ university” in Berlin that would provide classes and train workers in public speaking and serve as an example for the rest of Germany. Liebknecht’s choice of Vogtherr was not arbitrary. Vogtherr already ran the largest popular science association within the socialist milieu, the Workers’ Education Society North (Arbeiterbildungsverein Nord). Thus, in essence, Liebknecht’s letter was a party commission to expand and institutionalize the existing activities of this group, which originated in the ambit of the Free Religious Congregation. The Workers’ Education Society North Iad formed in January 1889 as a cooperative venture between socialist craftsmen and the new generation of speakers of the FRC, led by the tireless Bruno Wille (see Figure 2.3).75 In his inaugural lecture given to a crowd of 200 in a pub in the Schönhauser Allee, Wille declared the secularist and socialist intentions of the association: “Through his education the worker will come to recognize his secularist [freigeistig] religion and materialistic history of nature and art, and the workers’ movement – which is a universal one – will achieve victory over 75

By the end of the first year the Arbeiterbildungsverein Nord had 220 members, who, like the board, were exclusively workers. The woodworking trades dominated the board elected in July 1889: 4 furniture-makers, 2 carpenters, 1 furniture polisher, 1 painter, 1 tailor and 1 laborer. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 14970, p. 1.

Socialist Workers’ Education Associations

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darkness.”76 The Society occasionally drew large crowds of 100 to 500, when leading Social Democratic city councilors and MPs spoke on topics ranging from colonial policy to legal issues to Thomas Malthus. However, on most weeks a smaller audience gathered, usually in Lehmann’s Salon, a pub in working-class Prenzlauer Berg, to listen to secularist takes on culture, history or popular science delivered by the same young intellectuals who were lecturing at the FRC. Thus, for example, they heard Bölsche lecture on “Art and People,” Peus on “The Utopia of Thomas More,” and Wille on “Darwinism and Socialism” (see the list of talks in the Appendix). At the end of each talk, a plate was passed to collect fees for the speakers or for labor union causes, a practice that was often “inhibited” by the observing police officers. The Workers’ Education Society North also provided working-class secularist Theodor Metzner the opportunity to lecture publicly. This central figure of both the FRC and Berlin SPD didn’t have the educational credentials to lecture at the FRC, but he gave several talks at Nord, including one on January 5, 1891 to some fifty to sixty people on “The Religion of the Future.” Religion, he explained, was not dogmatic belief (Konfession), but rather one’s relation to nature. Just as Newton had earlier disproven the Christian geocentric understanding of the universe, Darwin and Marx revealed the “untenability of biblical creation and faith in life after death.” The result was an imperative to follow the “religion of science” and create happiness in the here-and-now (Diesseits). As the “pioneers of the new worldview” it was the obligation of the Social Democrats to take sides in the religious question. The observing police officer took some pleasure in emphasizing the errors of the uneducated participants in the ensuing discussion. Metzner had pronounced Newton as “Neffthong” and the pub owner had spoken of the “light miles” required to reach the star Sirius.77 On April 28, 1891, the Society voted to dissolve itself and join the Workers’ Education School. This decision does not point to the end of this secularist project of working-class education, but rather its continuation in a larger form.78 In describing the guiding ethos of the Workers’ Education School, historian Dieter Fricke characterized it as a center of revisionism. However, the revisionist teachers around 1900, who included Conrad Schmidt, Bruno Borchardt, Paul Kampffmeyer and Max Schippel, all had personal or organizational connections to the secularist scene, as did 76

77 78

Wille claimed that the proletarian craved education and, after a ten-to-twelve-hour workday, “picks up a book to further educate himself spiritually, while the bourgeois runs to the pub to play cards.” Police report of Feb. 15, 1889, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 14970, p. 16. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 14970, p. 327. A police report of April 13, 1891 noted “that Vogtherr is the leading personality of both [FRC and the Arbeiterbildungsschule], that furthermore Zubeil and Gumpert, influential persons in the Arbeiterbildungsschule, are also frequent visitors to the meetings of the Free Religious Congregation.” LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15051, FRC 1891–1895, pp. 72, 379.

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Protestant minister turned Free Religious preacher Max Maurenbrecher and theosophist Rudolf Steiner. FRC members Wilhelm Bölsche, Georg Ledebour, Carl Pinn, Emma Ihrer and Agnes Wabnitz were all early lecturers there. Even the leading figures of Urania, Wilhelm Foerster and Friedrich Archenhold, gave occasional lectures.79 The Workers’ Education School had a strong start – 1,000 of the 6,000 persons present at the founding meeting signed up as pupils – and by 1892 it had opened up four branches around the city. But instruction was often interrupted due to the need to switch venues (mostly taverns and meeting halls) and attendance dropped in the following years. Following an 1897 reorganization that eliminated elementary courses in favor of a core of history, law, national economy, natural science and debating, attendance rose to 634 in 1898/99 and reached 2,647 in 1909/10.80 In addition to its courses, the Workers’ Education School hosted large evening celebrations on the occasion of important political anniversaries, such as the barricade battles of March 1848. As in the Jugendweihe, these galas were imbued with secularist messages. The poems printed in the program flyers highlighted the struggle of the free spirit against the forces of oppression and generally appealed to the idealism of working-class men and women with intellectual aspirations. The Ethical Society The Workers’ Education Society North was not the only organization to spring from the “socialist” Free Religious Congregation. In 1888, an organization calling itself the Ethical Society split off from the congregation. This organization is not to be confused with the similarly named, but better known and more genteel German Society for Ethical Culture that was founded across town in 1892. Ethics was a popular term at that time in secularist circles because it conveyed the promise of a scientific system of morality based on reason rather than authority. The formation of the Ethical Society was triggered by the expulsion of the FRC’s youth teacher, Dr. Franz Huber, who was apparently as divisive as he was charismatic, because soon after its breakaway he caused the Ethical Society to split over his leadership. The larger half took the name Society for the Promotion of People’s Education in 1890 – again not to be confused with the older liberal association of the same name – while the 79

80

Dieter Fricke, Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1869 bis 1917, vol. i (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1987), 678. See also the description by Lidtke, Alternative Culture, 163–64. On Bölsche and Ledebour’s participation, see Christel Reckenfelder-Bäumer, “Wissen ist Macht – Macht ist Wissen,” in Berlin um 1900: Ausstellung der Berlinische Galerie in Verbindung mit der Akademie der Künste zu den Berliner Festwochen 1984 (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1984), 405–16. Fricke, Handbuch zur Geschichte, vol. i, 678.

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slightly smaller group retained the name Ethical Society, until it decided to call itself “More Light” in 1896. Each organization had a fluctuating core of between 30 and 100 registered members, and each offered a weekly or biweekly series of popular lectures, often followed by a social dance. Despite the acrimonious polemics between the Free Religious Congregation and these two Ethical Societies, they all drew from the same coterie of speakers. Like the Workers’ Education Society North, they provided the more proletarian members of the FRC, such as Metzner, Ottilie Baader, Agnes Wabnitz and Adolph Hoffmann, a stage on which they could shine as intellectuals in their own right (see Figure 2.4). The leadership of the ethical societies was decidedly more proletarian and politically radical than that of the FRC. Precisely why they remained separate, even after Dr. Huber was expelled in 1890, could not be discerned from the police records. However, they had slightly different profiles. The Society for the Promotion of People’s Education had a high percentage of women in its leadership, which was unusual for Berlin in those years. Four women were elected to the board in 1889 and at least two women chaired meetings of the Society the following year. What made the group still calling itself the Ethical Society noteworthy was its significant working-class Jewish membership.81 One appeal of ethics was that it was felt by many Jews to be consistent with Judaism, such as Waldeck Manasse, who in his 1893 discourse at the Ethical Society on “Ethics and Freethought” identified the Talmud and the Buddha as positive proof of a natural striving of humanity towards reason and ethics that had been blocked by authoritarian religion. More importantly, perhaps, ethics offered secularist Jews an interreligious and postreligious stance that did not involve a denial of their Jewish confessional identity.82 A more complete picture of the secularist culture of working-class Berlin around 1890 would require the investigation of the numerous craft associations of the city, where the socialist members of the FRC often lectured. Because such an investigation falls outside the scope of this chapter, one example provided by police observation files will have to suffice. Bruno Wille first came to police attention not for his activities in Free Religion, but for a lecture given in June 1888 at the Association of Cabinetmakers on “What is good? The natural foundations of morality in atheistic and socialist understanding.” He delivered the same speech the following month to the Association for the Protection of the Interests of the Shoemakers and the Trade Association of 81 82

Police reported 5 Jews and 1 Protestant among the 11 members of the board elected in July 1891. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15188, p. 507. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15189, p. 373. On the supraconfessional dimension of the discourse of ethics, see Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth Century Germany,” Central European History, 46/4 (2013): 815–49.

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Figure 2.4 Socialist lecturers in secularist popular science associations around 1890. Theodor Metzner, Ottilie Baader, Waldeck Manasse, Emma Ihrer. (Courtesy: IISG, AdsD 6/FOTA004068, 6/FOTA019001)

Conclusion

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Gas, Water and Heating Pipelayers, and in October to the Typesetters’ Association. Police dissolved this and several of Wille’s subsequent talks to trade associations for transgressing limits on political and religious speech.83 Conclusion This chapter has established three aspects of the secularist culture in Berlin around 1890. First, it comprised a wide network of associations with interconnected leaderships and speakers, who propagated monist worldview and agitated for the social and political transformation of society in its name. At the core of this culture were “pure” secularist organizations, which clearly sustained an ambition to replace traditional religion. Around these were popular science institutions, which attracted a much wider following, but one whose exposure to secularist ideas was more irregular. Of the 200,000 visitors to the Urania in 1901/02, a minority may have encountered the monistic dramas in the scientific theater. Similarly, most courses taken by the 11,000 students enrolled in the Humboldt Academy did not have clear monistic content. Nonetheless, the personnel and leadership of these organizations were structurally connected to pure secularist organizations and monism was a key content. Second, this broad secularist culture had become deeply divided by 1890 into liberal and socialist or “bourgeois” and “proletarian” camps. The emergence of socialism as a political culture acted very strongly upon the secularist culture, which liberal and democratic elites had dominated since its inception. Although they retained control of the largest popular science venues, they lost control of the FRC. Despite the emergence of a red secularism with clear political contours, however, people and ideas continued to circulate across the entire organizational landscape of secularism. Thus, when one of Germany’s most famous atheists, writer Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi, came to Berlin for a week in January 1892, the chairman of the FRC Otto Friederici arranged public lectures for her nearly every night of the week, which took her from socialist to liberal institutions. She opened her Berlin tour on Sunday with a speech at the socialist Ethical Society on “The human in the animal and the animal in the human.” The next three days she spoke in rented halls to mixed audiences on “Christianity in word and deed,” “Old and new superstition” and “Nature, duty, and the rights of women.” Thursday found her lecturing in the Handworkers’ Association, a bastion of left-liberal power, and on Sunday she spoke to the Free Religious Congregation on “Death and Fear of Death.” Thus, despite bitter political divisions, the secularist culture remained united in its common engagement with religion, worldview and science.

83

LAB A Pr. Br. 030, Rep. 14121, pp. 1–11.

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Third, this chapter has shown for the first time the existence of a clearly socialist secularist culture in Berlin, centered in the FRC, but with more radical offshoots, such as the Ethical Societies and Workers’ Education Association North.84 This secularist-socialist culture was of concern to the police, which invested great energy in its surveillance. A final glimpse of this culture is provided by a covert police report from late December 1890 on the Christmas party of the Society for the Propagation of Popular Education in a pub in the Schönhauser Allee, which was around the corner from the FRC cemetery. Following some Free Religious songs at this family event, children, women and men wearing red ribbons and carnations stood up and declaimed a poem, which, according to the police report, contained a “misrepresentation of the clergy and the military.” Toasts were raised to Lassalle, Bebel and Liebknecht, and celebrants were encouraged to leave the church and join Free Religion. Each speech closed with a cheer for international Social Democracy. One woman urged others to join the women’s movement. At midnight the Christmas tree was plundered, and the “small cheap presents” brought along by the families were distributed. Dancing began at one and lasted till six in the morning. Although the celebrants had posted a sentry at the door to give advanced warning of the appearance of any police patrols, there was already an undercover officer inside. His report was later used by his superiors to declare the Society a political association and prevent women and children from attending future events.85 The report reveals how the mingling of secularism and socialism gave meaning to people’s lives, enabling them to explain and confront authority and allowing them to make sense of nature and history. This mingling of secularism and socialism marked out the subculture that will concern us for the rest of this book.

84 85

By 1901, these latter groups had transformed or closed, but the FRC had grown to 11,000 “souls” and the Workers’ Education School had an enrollment of 1,028 students. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15187, p. 353, Dec. 25, 1890; p. 360, Jan. 26, 1891.

3

Prometheans Secularist Intellectuals on the Socialist Stage

The Prometheus myth offered several points of identification for red secularists. As a young man active in socialist-secularist cultural circles in Leipzig, Walter Ulbricht, the later leader of the German Democratic Republic, gave an impassioned recitation to his socialist youth group of Goethe’s “Prometheus” on the eve of the First World War.1 In this poem, the titan challenges the Olympian gods and their need for continual worship and bloody sacrifice. Prometheus celebrates instead his own autonomy and rootedness in nature, and fashions new humans from clay in his own likeness, who will scorn Zeus. Another moment in the myth that appeared more frequently in the iconography of socialism and secularism alike, was when Prometheus brings fire stolen from the gods to earthbound mortals. Numerous posters showed him striding, naked but for a red cloth and torch in hand, bringing the light of knowledge to the working class and standing on the symbols of the church, whether a smashed cross, Moses’ tablets or the Bible. The message was clear: salvation can take place in this world through social revolution and personal enlightenment. Secularists often depicted a third scene of the myth, in which Prometheus is a sacrificial figure, chained to a rock in the Caucasus by angry Zeus, where each day his liver is torn out by an eagle. The cover of Der Freidenker, the national newspaper of German freethinkers that Bruno Wille edited from 1893 to 1921, shows naked Prometheus angrily swinging his broken chain not at an eagle (a symbol for Zeus), but at a black vulture. The reason for preferring the vulture is made clear by a poster for the Monist League from 1914, which shows a black-clad priest fleeing the light of the Promethean fire (see Figure 3.1). Socialists and secularists understood the myth as an allegory for the revolutionary intellectual, who, like Prometheus, had stolen scientific truth from university elites and the upper class and brought its light to the masses. Wilhelm Bölsche later referred to his generation of science popularizers as

1

Johannes R. Becher, Walter Ulbricht: Ein deutscher Arbeitersohn (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1958), 21.

63

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Secularist Intellectuals on the Socialist Stage

Figure 3.1 Images of Prometheus. Top: masthead of Der Freidenker; Bottom: German Monist League (Ernst Haeckel Haus).

the Promethides, the children of Prometheus.2 Refusing compromises with the dark powers of authority and dogmatic religion, they imagined that they, like Prometheus, had risked their own well-being for the cause of enlightenment. Yet, like Goethe’s Faust, the figure of Prometheus is an ambivalent one. He is a lonely figure, alienated from the gods and mortals alike. Reflecting on the 2

Wilhelm Bölsche, Was muß der neue deutsche Mensch von Naturwissenschaft und Religion fordern? (Berlin: Buchholz & Weißwange, 1934), 11.

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position of intellectuals in communist East Germany, playwright Heiner Müller created a new version of Prometheus to describe the often pitiful role that intellectuals had played in the history of state socialism. Müller’s Prometheus was a weak character in a position of double dissent, scorned by the old elites as a failed thinker, but unable to connect with the working class in whose name he undertook his class betrayal. Ultimately, he was shunned by both. The chains had grown into his flesh, a condition that could not be rectified even after his liberation by Herakles, who in Müller’s telling served as a metaphor for the victorious working-class state.3 In this chapter and the next, I engage with the ambiguous and sometimes weak positions of those self-styled sons and daughters of Prometheus who operated in the intersection of socialist and secularist cultures. I do this via a group of intellectuals, who first made their appearance as speakers and leading figures in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation in the period between 1887 and 1891. Most entered socialist politics at roughly the same time. They are well suited to a group biography because many went on to become national leaders of the German secularist organizations and some also played important roles in the history of Social Democracy and early German communism. They left behind a voluminous paper trail in party newspapers, memoirs and police files, and some have been the subject of significant scholarly study. As such, they provide a thick node for historical reflection on the relationship of religion and the radical intelligentsia. Socialist intellectuals provided crucial material for early sociological theories of intellectuals. In fact, these theories originated, in part, out of the debates within the SPD sparked by the role of party intellectuals in heretical deviations. This chapter opens by re-examining a locus classicus in the literature, the rebellion against the party leadership in 1890, which came to be known as the revolt of the Jungen, “the young ones.” By exploring the hitherto largely overlooked fact that key figures in this revolt were organized secularists, who engaged simultaneously in political and anticlerical actions, we open a window onto the secularist imprint on socialist dissent, a recurring theme of this book. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to the contradictory role played by the secularist intellectual as party “heretic.” While some of the Free Religious speakers active around 1890 exited the party following the Jungen episode, others became city councilors and even members of the Reichstag and the Prussian Diet. Their popularity with voters rested on their ability to cast themselves as Promethean heroes on the stage of socialist politics, in which secularism rather than Marxism often provided the dramatic narrative. Thus, although heretical actions caused friction with the party hierarchy, they were

3

Heiner Müller, Stücke (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1975), 343–44.

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also a successful strategy for intellectuals seeking to claim charismatic leadership in the socialist milieu. Theorizing the Socialist Intellectual Around 1890 leading theorists within the SPD began to wrestle with an apparent contradiction in the Marxist theory of economic determinism. How could workers develop an accurate class consciousness, when they were dispossessed of the scientific knowledge necessary for this task?4 Karl Kautsky, the party intellectual most associated with the dissemination of Marxist thought at this time, theorized that the proletariat could not create socialism “out of itself, it must be brought to it by thinkers, who, with all the tools of bourgeois science, place themselves on a proletarian standpoint and develop a new, proletarian social orientation.”5 Class consciousness emerged, in other words, in the dialectical interaction of the knowledge possessed by bourgeois intellectuals and the experience and revolutionary drive of the working class. To succeed, this interaction required intellectuals to betray their class of origin and integrate themselves into the proletariat as “workers of the head” (Kopfarbeiter), which is how Kautsky identified himself upon his entrée into the socialist movement in 1875.6 Yet, experience showed that intellectuals had a propensity to betray the party, as well. The revolt of the Jungen was not the first nor last schismatic movement within the party whose leadership was identified as “half-grown students and overly clever Doctores,” as Marx had quipped in 1875.7 For Kautsky, the unreliability of intellectuals stemmed from their predicament as a class segment that was subject to downward mobility in the overall process of class polarization. Here, he referred to a much-discussed phenomenon of the 1890s, the production of more university graduates than the market could absorb. Unable to enter the traditional professions, this socalled “academic proletariat” was opportunistically drawn to the socialist milieu as a source of income and influence, yet it maintained an ambivalent relationship to the working class. This socialist theory of the intellectual as class alien fed into the emerging theory of intellectuals within the new discipline of sociology. A bridge figure

4 5 6 7

Stanley Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-Class Mentality in Germany: 1887–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Kautsky quotation in: Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Das Mandat des Intellektuellen: Karl Kautsky und die Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Siedler, 1986), 259. Karl Kautsky, “Die soziale Frage vom Standpunkt eines Kopfarbeiters aus betrachtet,” Volksstaat, Sept–Oct. 1875. Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, October 19, 1877. Quoted in Ernst Theodor Mohl, “Ein Kapitel zur Frühgeschichte des Revisionismus,” in Die Zukunft: Socialistische Revue (Glashütten im Taunus: Auvermann, 1971), v.

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in this transition was Robert Michels, a former apostle of socialism turned ironic observer, who described intellectuals, in all their contradictions, not as an external element, but as an intrinsic structural component of the modern socialist party.8 Utilizing the work of Michels, and enriching it with Max Weber’s typology of religious leaders, late twentieth-century historians Thomas Welskopp and Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey argued that intellectuals occupied not one but multiple roles in the party, as “priests” defending the orthodoxy or as charismatic “prophets” at its margins.9 Moving beyond the context of socialism, Alfred Weber and Karl Mannheim famously named intellectuals a new sociological type, whose education gave them a universal perspective semi-independent of their class position. Sociologists have since correlated the emergence of these “free-floating” intellectuals to the structural transformations of the public sphere in late nineteenth-century European metropoles.10 According to historian Gangolf Hübinger, it was specifically the “double caesura of 1887 and 1890” marked by the end of the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf and the fall of the Socialist Laws, that first made “German society fully competitive in the intellectual mass market.” This was the public debut of a generation of “unpolitical” intellectuals, who embraced life and cultural reform projects as alternatives to traditional political liberalism. The first modern artistic avant-gardes were also emerging at this time, in which the repudiation of the taste of the milieu of origin was announced in manifestoes.11 A typical early example is the manifesto read out to the literary club “Through” (Durch) in 1887, in which Wilhelm Bölsche connected the aesthetic project of literary naturalism to Darwinism, anticlerical secularism and social reform.12 Both early sociological theories of intellectuals and the Marxist polemics are functionalist: they explain the habitus, attitudes, and political behavior of the radical intelligentsia out of their location in a field of social or class relations. 8 9

10 11

12

Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie: Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens, vol. ii (Stuttgart: Körner, 1925). Despite their use of religious analogies to describe party intellectuals, neither historian pursued connections between these roles and the religious field. Thomas Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 2000); Gilcher-Holtey, Mandat des Intellektuellen; Andrew G. Bonnell, Robert Michels, Socialism, and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022), 186–205. See also, Morina, Invention of Marxism. See Gangolf Hübinger and Thomas Hertfelder (eds.), Kritik und Mandat: Intellektuelle in der deutschen Politik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000). Hübinger and Hertfelder (eds.), Kritik und Mandat; Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Antipolitics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 118; Wilhelm Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie (Leipzig: C. Reissner, 1887).

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While not losing sight of the relevance of class dynamics, I propose another explanation of the propensity of socialist intellectuals to inner-party dissent, which has been essentially overlooked in the existing literature. Many intellectuals had dual loyalties, not just to the liberal public sphere and the socialist movement, but also to the two cultures of socialism and secularism. In other words, many specific hallmarks of the new generation of self-styled Prometheans, and hence the party heresies they are associated with, were in large measure manifestations of secularist culture and its interactions with socialism. The Revolt of the Young Ones The Socialist Laws were not renewed in 1890 because they had failed to hinder the SPD’s growing numbers of members and Reichstag deputies. Yet, a decade of repression had altered party culture. Electioneering had become an ersatz for forbidden street politicking and had strengthened the power of the elected deputies within the party. Looking forward to the pending end of the repressive laws, this parliamentary faction opted to continue their strategy of focusing on elections and of widening the party base to include also rural and religious voters. They were opposed by younger party members who wanted to use growing party strength to launch strikes and other radical actions. After the parliamentary faction thwarted grassroots efforts to organize work stoppages for the first international May Day and to launch a beer boycott in the summer of 1890, an opposition emerged and used its editorial control of leading socialist papers to voice its concerns.13 In July 1890, one of these papers, the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, published an article by Bruno Wille, the group’s ringleader, entitled “The First of October” (the day after the Socialist Laws were due to expire). In it, Wille claimed that the party had become subject to deformation and “corruption” under those Socialist Laws. It had become too hierarchical and “authorities” had emerged who demanded “subordination.”14 Personally affronted by these charges, party co-chairman August Bebel took his case to the rank-and-file at mass rallies in Magdeburg, Dresden and Berlin, the centers of the opposition, where he successfully got resolutions passed that repudiated the Jungen and called for a purge of oppositional newspaper

13

14

The May Day strikes planned by German radicals were in accordance with the international campaign for the eight-hour day agreed upon at the Socialist International in Paris the previous year. In a direct confrontation between Bebel and Wilhelm Werner at a mass meeting on July 5, Bebel criticized the “strike fever” and “frivolous strikes.” Dirk Müller, Idealismus und Revolution: Zur Opposition der Jungen gegen den Sozialdemokratischen Parteivorstand 1890 bis 1894 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1975), 51–52. Cited ibid., 51–52.

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editors. In front of a rowdy audience of 4,000 in Berlin, one of the largest socialist meetings ever reported, Bebel mustered his skills as an orator to demolish Wille, whose attempts to justify his actions were met by ongoing jeering from the floor. Party toleration ended a year later,15 after the leading voices of the Jungen renewed their struggle with an attack on the chief of Bavarian Social Democracy, Georg von Vollmar, who had recently called on socialists to reject revolution in favor of a reformist path. The leaders were expelled from the party at the October 1891 Party Congress in Erfurt. They responded by founding the Association of Independent Socialists, for which Wille, Paul Ernst and Paul Kampffmeyer co-authored a manifesto and served in the executive committee. This “party” never grew beyond 450 members and split in 1894, when Gustav Landauer, who edited their journal Der Sozialist, pushed it in an anarchist direction.16 Wille preferred the “individual anarchism” of John Mackay, a German-Scottish poet and fellow habitué of the Friedrichshagen community. But within the space of a few years, Wille had left partisan politics behind in favor of cultural reform activism. The Jungen sought to portray their struggle as one between the proletarian salt of the earth and an elite party leadership. They accused the Reichstag faction of “distancing itself more and more from purely proletarian ground” and slowly “descending into the camp of the petty bourgeoisie.”17 However, the counternarrative provided by party grandees stuck: Engels had branded this a “revolt of the literati and students,” who falsely believed that their academic education entitled them to an “officer’s rank with right to employment in the party.”18 Franz Mehring wrote this interpretation into his history of the SPD, concluding that the working-class members of the Jungen had been honest but confused, which had allowed them to be misled by the “young literati,” who eventually “returned to the bourgeois world.”19 Mehring also took aim at the artistic ambitions of the Jungen, particularly those of Wille, who used his leading positions in the Free People’s Theater (Freie Volksbühne) to promote

15

16 17

18 19

As evidence of this toleration, Vorwärts (Jan. 18, 1891) warmly recommended Wille’s publications and in May 1891 Wille was appointed to the supervisory “teachers’ commission” of the Berlin Workers’ Education School together with Georg Ledebour, Heinrich Braun, Dr. Arons and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Ibid., 84. Ulrich Linse, Organisierte Anarchismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 52. From the Independents’ declaration of Nov. 15, 1891. Reprinted in Peter Friedemann, Materialien zum politischen Richtungsstreit in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1890–1917 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1978), 148–53. Quoted in Müller, Idealismus, 124. Franz Mehring, Geschichte der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie, vol. iv (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1909), 334.

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plays written by fellow members of the literary avant-garde. Applying Kautsky’s view of class instability, Mehring read such works as products of the “mental world of a declining class.” The later trajectory of this coterie of naturalist writers into neo-romanticism was proof for Mehring that, unable to “endure capitalist reality,” naturalism had no choice but the “flight into a dreamland, which gave it a feeling of illusionary freedom.”20 The Jungen and the Friedrichshagener attracted scholarly interest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when their rebellion against the SPD of the 1890s resonated with New Left opposition to the party’s post-Godesberg course. Most of these studies confirmed the class-based analyses made by Engels, Kautsky and Mehring, and described the combination of ultraradicalism, moralism and aesthetic posturing as functional expressions of idealistic yet alienated, ambitious yet threatened middle-class intellectuals. A study of Bruno Wille, for example, concluded in an orthodox Marxist vein that “Wille’s crisis of consciousness reflects the situation of the politically, economically and intellectually powerless petty bourgeois in an environment determined by the interests of capital.”21 With such functionalist explanations backed up by the opinions offered by partisan observers in the day, historians have largely overlooked the role of religion and secularism in the “revolt of the Jungen.” One exception was historian Vernon Lidtke, who placed this episode in the context of party efforts to enlarge its voting base in Catholic regions of Germany.22 To this end, Bebel and Liebknecht believed the SPD should distance itself from secularist sectarianism, and, at the same Halle Party Congress in October 1890 that condemned the Jungen, Wilhelm Liebknecht delivered his repudiation of the anticlerical agitation of Freethinker Phillip August Rüdt. Yet, as this chapter revisits the events of 1890 to 1892, it will become clear that the political radicalism of the Jungen and the anticlerical agitation of the period were intimately connected, and that atheism was central to the ethical-moral critique of the party made by the dissenters.23

20

21

22

“Etwas über Naturalismus,” in Die Volksbühne, 1/2 (1892/93). Later quotation from 1908 in: Katharina Günther, Literarische Gruppenbildung im Berliner Naturalismus (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1972), 142. Kurt Sollmann, “Zur Ideologie intellektueller Opposition im beginnenden Imperialismus am Beispiel Bruno Willes,” in Positionen der literarischen Intelligenz zwischen bürgerlicher Reaktion und Imperialismus, ed. Klaus Scherpe and Gert Mattenklott (Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1973), 208–9. East German historian Gustav Seeber argued that Bebel had The correct “Revolutionary Parliamentary Tactic” And That The Jungen Represented “Left Sectarian Forces” Comprised Of “Young Academics Or Writers.” Gustav Seeber, Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die Entwicklung ihrer revolutionären Parlamentstaktik von 1867 bis 1893 (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1966), 47. 23 Lidtke, Outlawed Party. Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion, 317–18.

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Secularism, Anticlericalism and the Jungen The files of the Berlin police reveal that anticlerical activism among Social Democrats had restarted in 1887 after an eight-year lull caused by the Socialist Laws. The leading agitators were, with few exceptions, socialist members of the Free Religious Congregation (Heinrich Peus, Ewald Vogtherr) or Jungen (Carl Wildberger, Paul Ernst) or both (Bruno Wille, Conrad Schmidt). Their efforts were initially directed at party officials, whom they called upon to formally register their exit from the state churches (Kirchenaustritt), but by 1888 this expanded into a wider public campaign in which blank petition forms for church-leaving were often circulated. In March 1889 the conservative Protestant Neue Preußische Zeitung (Kreuzzeitung) noted that police were dissolving an increasing number of Free Religious and atheistic meetings. In one, Vogtherr closed his speech to metalworkers on “Ulrich von Hutten, a freethinker of the Middle Ages” by urging those present to leave the churches. In a meeting of lithographers, former theology student Paul Ernst called religion the lynchpin of the authoritarian state: “only religion deadens a person spiritually to the point that he finally renounces his own rights,” hence “only the elimination of religion can prepare . . . the elimination of today’s rulers.”24 In June 1890, the crowd at a public rally passed a resolution favoring church-leaving and calling on socialists to support the Free Religious congregations, which led to a debate in the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung between Bruno Wille and Dr. Franz Lütgenau, a socialist grammar school teacher and later Reichstag deputy, who wrote on behalf of the party. Wille followed this with a speech on “man as a member of the mass” (Der Mensch als Massenglied) delivered on August 9, 1890 in the Free Religious Congregation and a week later in the Ethical Society, in which he argued that when organized in masses, individuals fell prey to the dehumanizing machinations of authoritarian leaders whether in the military, party, state or school.25 “If the leader of a mass is bad, so too the closed mass [turns bad]. We contribute to the autonomy of the masses, when we attempt to remove our children from mass membership,” which was an allusion to church control of moral education. At the same time, Wille argued that the mass could not be trusted to make wise choices, so that democracy was no solution and anyway led to an “authority of the majority.” He referred to the followers of the SPD as “herd animals,” a designation that Bebel effectively turned against him in their 24

25

Neue Preußische Zeitung (Kreuzzeitung), March 7, 1889. In December 1888 Paul Ernst cited recent SPD conversions to the Christian-Social movement as the justification for the wave of anticlerical agitation. Wille and Fritz Kunert also spoke repeatedly on church-leaving in winter 1889, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15799, pp. 74, 78. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15050, p. 414, police report of Aug. 10, 1890; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15188, p. 250, report of Aug. 17, 1890.

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public confrontation on August 25. Two weeks later Carl Wildberger declared in a meeting in Berlin that “the plank: ‘Religion is a private matter’ must be struck from the program. It must be clearly stated that ‘every comrade has to exit the state church.’” And just days before the expiration of the Socialist Laws on October 1, Vogtherr and Peus addressed a crowd of 2,000 gathered to promote church-leaving.26 Such agitation had some effect: police noticed a significant increase in the number of church-leavers starting in August.27 After they were forced out of their positions as editors of socialist papers, leading Jungen left Dresden and Magdeburg and concentrated their journalistic efforts in Berlin. Paul Ernst, like fellow naturalist writer Wille, found a mouthpiece in the journal Freie Bühne, edited by Bölsche, while two former editors of the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, Bruno Sommer and Hermann Teistler, founded the new journal Lichtstrahlen (Light Rays) in September 1890. Lichtstrahlen connected political radicalism and secularist agitation and bore the subtitle “Popular Science and Atheist Worldview.” Members of the Jungen and speakers of the FRC were among its chief contributors.28 The editors underlined the centrality of radical religious criticism to Lichtstrahlen by opening the first issue with a polemic by Sommer against “The Bourgeois ‘Freethinkers’” and a religious-historical investigation of “The Origin of the Idea of God” by Teistler.29 Lichtstrahlen repeatedly attacked the SPD party plank of “religion as a private matter,” and in the April 1892 issue, the Independent Socialist Wilhelm Spohr interpreted Liebknecht’s recent repudiation of his earlier anticlericalism as a sign of the inner corruption of the party. Liebknecht had once said that “every committed socialist must necessarily also be an atheist.” Of course, that was ‘back then,’ when one still allowed oneself to attack parliamentarism with the sharpest weapons. Today, admittedly, we are dealing with hauling in the masses as a quantity at the cost of quality; the idea of socialism as worldview is abandoned, and the Social Democratic Party is thus degraded to a purely political one, which essentially cannot rise above the diplomatic dealing of the other parties. Whoever sees things in this light and does not protest, acts as a deserter to the cause of freedom.30

26 27

28

29 30

Germania, Sept. 12, 1890 and Sept. 27, 1890. Police noted that 462 Berliners had left the churches between August 20, 1890 and January 26, 1891, against 182 for the prior seven months. Many of those leaving used forms provided by the socialist voters’ associations or the FRC. By 1897 the FRC’s forms are the most frequently mentioned. Frequent contributors included Paul Ernst, Wilhelm Spohr, Carl Pinn, Wilhelm Bölsche, Bruno Wille, Phillip August Rüdt. Lichtstrahlen’s publisher also printed the defense of the Jungen by the Dutch socialist-anarchist F. Domela Nieuwenhuis, Die verschiedenen Strömungen in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, trans. Albert Auerbach (Berlin: O. Harnisch, 1892). Lichtstrahlen, 1/1 (September 1, 1890). Wilhelm Spohr, ‘Ist Religion Privatsache?’, Lichtstrahlen, April 3, 1892, 630.

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By 1892 this chief journalistic enterprise of the Jungen was publishing regular announcements for the Berlin Free Religious and the rival Humanist Congregations. Having established the intimate connection between socialistanarchistic opposition and secularism, we need to now offer a plausible explanation for it. The Intellectual Content of the Jungen Divergent assessments exist as to the theoretical inspiration of the Jungen. Some party observers at the time, like Eduard Bernstein, identified the movement with anarchism,31 while later scholars, such as Hans Manfred Bock and Vernon Lidtke, placed it within the context of deepening Marx reception promulgated by Kautsky; they found that the Jungen Conrad Schmidt, Paul Ernst and Paul Kampffmeyer were among the best readers of Marx in the party at the time. Peter Wienand saw in the movement an eclectic mix of radical Marxists and “ethical socialists” like Wille.32 Interpretations have been strongly colored by the various intellectual and political paths taken by the members of this group after their marginalization from the SPD. Wille, Ernst and Landauer drifted between anarchism, neo-idealism and cultural criticism; while others, such as Hans Müller, came to support German colonialism. Franz Mehring read these trajectories as proof of the charlatanism of the Jungen, discounting them as “bourgeois-anarchist counselors of confusion [Konfusionsräte].”33 Some latter-day historians have had more positive assessments. Stanley Pierson saw in the Jungen a prefiguration of all the major theoretical stances on the relationship of workers, intellectuals and class consciousness that would dominate party debates for the next twenty years: revisionism, radicalism and orthodox Marxism. Manfred Bock placed the Jungen in a series of recurrent party oppositions, from Johann Most’s radical opposition in 1880, to the debates over council communism during the German revolution of 1918 to 1922, to the extra-parliamentary opposition to the SPD during the late 1960s.34

31 32

33

34

Letter of Oct. 10, 1891, in Eduard Bernsteins Briefwechsel mit Karl Kautsky (1891–1895) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag, 2011), 6. Peter Wienand, “Revoluzzer und Revisionisten (Die ‘Jungen’),” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 17/2 (1976): 219–20; Lidtke, Outlawed Party, 282–99. Bock considered the intellectual content of the Jungen an “amalgam of Marxist categories and ethical impulses.” Hans Manfred Bock, “Die ‘Literaten- und Studenten-Revolte’ der Jungen in der SPD um 1890,” Das Argument: Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften, 13/63 (1971): 39. Quoted in Herbert Scherer, Bürgerlich-oppositionelle Literaten und sozialdemokratische Arbeiterbewegung nach 1890: Die ‘Friedrichshagener’ und ihr Einfluß auf die sozialdemokratische Kulturpolitik (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlerische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1974), 189. Bock, “Jungen.”

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Thus far, religious considerations have been missing from the accounts of the intellectual inspirations and fractious behavior of the socialist intellectuals in 1880, 1890 or 1919. Yet, the political visions raised by dissenting intellectuals in opposition to the party leadership ran parallel to the visions for new forms of spiritual community that secularists were putting forward in the realm of religion and culture. The Jungen defined socialism as an ethical community of individuals united in worldview and engaged in a struggle with the authoritarian state through democratic action and, above all, through moral development and education. They extended this anti-authoritarian struggle to the SPD itself, which they claimed had violated the essence of socialism through parliamentary cooperation, bureaucratization and hierarchization. The critique was a moral one, which focused on the degradation of the members of the socialist community. When Wille accused the SPD of having become a hierarchical party that relegated action to the voting booth and turned the workers into “herd animals” and “chain links in the mass” in August 1890, it was essentially the same critique he made of the state church for inculcating obedience rather than spiritual freedom in children in his keynote at the Jugendweihe nine months later. Wille’s alternative program of the “individualization of the worker” was summed up by Hans Müller in 1892: “we do not want to educate the workers to be will-less admirers and tireless applauders of our speakers, but to [be] men, who are clear about all their steps and frankly criticize themselves and others. What makes our movement into a powerful cultural movement? . . . the masses that think and act for themselves.”35 The ethical project of raising the worker to autonomy was connected to the repeated claim made by the Jungen that they were defending socialism “as a worldview” from the party leadership’s efforts to water down the revolutionary doctrine to make it appeal to middle-class voters. Although Paul Ernst was accused by Engels of applying Marx’s thought in a dogmatic fashion to everything, Marxism was increasingly not the core doctrine of the worldview of the Jungen. As Kampffmeyer later recalled, for them socialism was intimately connected to “modern currents in art and science” and thus “more than merely a direction in party politics.”36 The connection between sectarianism and claims to moral purity came out clearly in the founding declaration of the Association of Independent Socialists in November 1891, which stated that the SPD represented a large but indistinct mass of workers. It failed to rescue the workers from the pernicious effects of “barracks-like” life in tenements and factories, which were spiritual

35 36

Quoted in: Müller, Idealismus, 56. See the excerpted article, “Klassenkampf/Volksbühne: Erinnerungen von Paul Kampffmeyer,” no date (1930) or publication noted, in ADW, CA, AC-S, 333.

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degeneration and an inability “to react critically to new impressions.”37 By contrast, the Independents considered themselves a small group united in strength of conviction and consciousness, who offered the workers a path to independent thought. Although it affirmed “class struggle,” the declaration gave primacy to the propagation of worldview, which was best advanced through total freedom of intellectual competition. Mixing the language of political liberalism and Darwinian selection, Teistler argued in October 1891 that the worldview “more fit for existence at the time will be victorious.” Thus, we lead the struggle against the church and clergy with the certainty that atheism will ultimately fully destroy the rotten edifice of religion. . . . Progress is born in struggle. Thus, we want to know nothing of a freedom of thought that removes the struggle of opinions, even if this were possible. What we demand most forcefully is that the state and authorities do not get involved in the conflict of opinions.38

The primacy of worldview helps explain the apparently paradoxical combination of communitarian democracy and intellectual elitism. As bearers of worldview, intellectuals took precedence over the masses of workers. In October 1890 Wille stated in a literary journal that “one hundred spiritually independent individuals are incomparably more valuable for the progress of humanity than one hundred times one hundred well-disciplined, blindly faithful, party-philistine Social Democrats.”39 The implication was that intellectuals should rule. In 1892, the predominantly Social Democratic members of the Freie Volksbühne voted to oust Wille from his post as chairman, in part because he refused to allow them any input into the artistic direction. Wille quickly founded a rival organization, the Neue Freie Volksbühne with an undemocratic structure that essentially gave the founding board the ability to reappoint itself.40 One of the new board members was the socialist-anarchist Gustav Landauer, who later stated that “there exists no communism in spiritual and literary matters.”41 Key figures of the Jungen took their concern with worldview, science, ethics and art into the revisionist movement. Following the demise of Lichtstrahlen in 1894, many of its writers joined the new journal for socialist intellectuals: Der Sozialistische Akademiker, founded in 1895 and which in turn became the Sozialistische Monatshefte in 1897. The Monatshefte became the chief journal 37 38 39

40 41

Rudolf Rocker, quoted in Wienand, “Revoluzzer und Revisionisten.” Hermann Teistler, “‘Freidenkerei und Realismus’: Eine litterarisch-kritische Studie,” Lichtstrahlen, 2/1 (October 1, 1891): 14. Quoted in: Hyun-Back Chung, Die Kunst dem Volke oder dem Proletariat? Die Geschichte der Freien Volksbühnenbewegung in Berlin 1890–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989), 156. Siegfried Nestriepke, Geschichte der Volksbühne Berlin: 1890 bis 1914 (Berlin: VolksbühnenVerlag, 1930). Linse, Organisierte Anarchismus, 74.

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of the revisionists in the decades prior to the First World War. Among the members of the cohort of Free Religious Congregation speakers, Heinrich Peus and Conrad Schmidt became leading figures in the revisionist wing of the party after 1900. Another area of dissent, in which the secularist political imaginary appeared, was the struggle between “localists” and “centralists” for control of the national labor unions. Whereas the localists wanted to save strike decisions for the local organizations of the unions, the centralists favored control and coordination by central instances. The leader of the localists was the former Freethinker Gustav Kessler, and Free Religionist Theodor Metzner was a key supporter. After Kessler’s death in 1903, conflict between localists and the SPD leadership led to schism of the labor unions. In 1905, one of the leading localists, Raphael Friedeberg, rejected what he called the “socialdemocratic worldview.” He decried the central tenet of historical materialism that “not the consciousness of men determines their being, but rather their social being determines their consciousness” as a disempowering view and “symptom of rot on the body of the proletariat.” Instead, he called for a philosophy of “historical psychism” that targeted the psychological pillars of class domination: the church, the legal system and patriotism. The localist union members were forced out of the SPD in 1908 and drifted towards anarcho-syndicalism.42 Heretics on the Socialist Stage Our reopening of the archives on the Jungen has shown that the position of its leaders at the juncture of socialist and secularist cultures was crucial to explaining this party schism. Yet, the friction experienced at this location did not lead all secularist intellectuals to marginal positions in the socialist culture. In fact, heretical acts often proved to be a successful strategy for rapid ascent within the party. The confessional order of Wilhelmine Germany, which protected the representative power of the churches through blasphemy laws, created the ingredients for a drama on the stage of public opinion. It was easy for the secularist intellectual to step into the role of Prometheus, by claiming in a public meeting that scientific truth required the negation of Christianity and church privilege. The result could be a thrilling drama, particularly if the police intervened. Although not per se socialist, these dramas were particularly attractive for left-leaning workers, who recognized that secularist agitators struggled against the same authorities – church, state, monarchy, social elites – that were arrayed against the SPD. Heretics on this stage did not have to 42

Müller, Idealismus, 173, 180–81. Dirk Müller, Gewerkschaftliche Versammlungsdemokratie und Arbeiterdelegierte vor 1918: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Lokalismus, des Syndikalismus und der entstehenden Rätebewegung (Berlin: Colloquium-Verlag, 1985).

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justify their leadership by turning their intellectual work into a form of exploited labor – though some did follow Kautsky and refer to themselves as “Kopfarbeiter.” They could take the stage in their own names, as Promethides, to gain a following and even elected positions. Using the theater as a metaphor, this section examines how secularists staged themselves as a specific type of socialist intellectual. The various roles, scripts, performances of the intellectuals and the audience reactions to them will be analyzed through a group biography of fifteen secularist intellectuals in the Berlin in the early 1890s, all of whom were active at the Free Religious Congregation or one of its satellite organizations and were identified by party membership or police record as having sought to gain positions of influence within socialist circles. The cohort comprises speakers in the Free Religious Congregation and members of the SPD: Ida Altmann, Ewald Vogtherr, Conrad Schmidt, Waldeck Manasse, Heinrich Peus and Fritz Kunert; speakers who worked closely with socialist organizations without becoming members: Titus Voelkel, Bruno Wille, Wilhelm Bölsche and Carl Pinn; and SPD members who spoke at the smaller secularist societies, and appear as discussants in the FRC meetings: Adolph Hoffmann, Agnes Wabnitz, Ottilie Baader, Theodor Metzner and Georg Ledebour. One can begin to sort these individuals by their professional and educational differences. Only a minority could be identified as working-class. These were autodidacts with primary school education, who rose through the congregation to attain positions of intellectual leadership in the FRC, including the shoemaker Theodor Metzner, the gilder Adolph Hoffmann, and the seamstresses Agnes Wabnitz and Ottilie Baader. Yet, notably, these figures did not have the educational capital to lecture in the FRC itself. Lack of formal education relegated them to the status of discussants. As shown in the previous chapter, their speaking appearances took place in second-tier secularist organizations, such as the Ethical Society or the Workers’ Education Association North. Most of the new Free Religious speakers that entered the ambit of social democracy in the years 1887–1891 came from modest middle- and lowermiddle-class backgrounds. Among them were former salesmen and white-collar workers with secondary school degrees (Realschule or Realgymnasium), such as Ewald Vogtherr, Georg Ledebour and Waldeck Manasse, as well as the trained teachers Fritz Kunert and Ida Altmann. A significant number had begun but not completed university studies, such as Heinrich Peus, Carl Pinn and Wilhelm Bölsche. A few had achieved the coveted doctorate, usually in the humanities, such as Bruno Wille, Conrad Schmidt and Titus Voelkel. The majority were in their mid-to-late twenties when they debuted as speakers at the FRC (Ledebour and Voelkel were somewhat older), and for many of them this step coincided with social and familial ruptures. They broke with their religious confession of origin, shifted political affiliations from liberalism or republicanism to socialism, and reoriented their professional horizons. About the time of their first speaking

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engagement, most began to write articles, dramas and books, or become editors or publishers, and they listed their profession henceforth as “Schriftsteller.” Several joined Bohemian literary circles with avant-garde aspirations and some entered into experimental community formation in Friedrichshagen on the outskirts of Berlin. Several of these men and women attracted police attention as speakers in the various workers’ and trades associations, which formed the building blocks of German social democracy in the late nineteenth century. These meetings provided the clearest model workers had of the socialist utopia, which led historian Thomas Welskopp to call them “mini-republics.”43 Electing the meeting chairman and the debating on and voting upon resolutions were rituals of democracy that allowed for consensus formation and the affirmation or the criticism of the leadership. Spice was added to the spectacle by the presence of the observing police officer with whom the speakers played a cat and mouse game of provocation. When the speakers veered too far into politics, or engaged in blasphemy or lèse-majesté, or if a brawl occurred, the police officer would dissolve the meeting. Even this could be a satisfying outcome for the participants. The informative lecture by a guest speaker was a key ingredient in workers’ meetings around 1890 and the new crop of Free Religious lecturers was well placed to assume this task. Their struggle against the confessional Christian state gave them a topic popular among the workers, and support from the FRC and its 4,000 “souls” meant they already had a following in the socialist milieu. It was easy to shift from sermonizing on popular science, morality and religious history to making claims on political leadership. Once they committed themselves in public to the party, some Free Religious speakers rose quickly. Success in workers’ meetings opened the path to other socialist stages, such as the party press. They were made newspaper editors (Ledebour, Kunert, Peus, Schmidt) and allowed to form new cultural and educational institutions under the umbrella of the party (Wille, Vogtherr). Some entered the management of the unions, such as Ida Altmann, while other became candidates for political office. Fritz Kunert was elected to the Berlin City Council in 1888 and soon followed by Ewald Vogtherr and Theodor Metzner. They were joined at the turn of the century by Adolph Hoffmann and Waldeck Manasse (see Table 3.1). Kunert, Hoffmann, Vogtherr and Ledebour also won Reichstag seats and in 1908 Hoffmann become one of the first seven socialists elected to the Prussian Landtag. If quick assent to leadership positions was common among secularist intellectuals, so too was the tendency to confront the top party brass. These traits were often linked. Locally renowned as a “social democratic fighting

43

Welskopp, Banner der Brüderlichkeit, 222, 580.

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Table 3.1 Members of the Free Religious Congregation elected to the Berlin City Council 1868–191444 Name

Profession

Party affiliation

Year of first election

Ludwig May Paul Langerhans Roesler Otto Friederici Franz Tutzauer Fritz Kunert Ewald Vogtherr Theodor Metzner Adolph Hoffmann Waldeck Manasse

Garden nursery owner Physician Manufacturer Apothecary Carpenter Schoolteacher Salesman Shoemaker Bookseller and writer Salesman and bookseller

Progressive Progressive Progressive (?) Progressive SPD SPD SPD SPD SPD SPD

1868 1875 1875 1877 1883 1888 1890 1892 1900 1906

cock,” Fritz Kunert’s anticlerical and antinationalist speeches helped get him elected to City Council, but also got him into hot water with his party.45 Shortly after taking office, Kunert gave a scandalous speech opposing construction of a church in the interest of the “anticlerical” inhabitants of the Lausitzer Platz, who would have their “light and air” cut off and suffer from the noise pollution of church bells that “produce a nerve-wracking din [greater than] nearly any machine.”46 Party officials were displeased and the Berliner Volksblatt, the official party organ and predecessor of Vorwärts (re-founded 1891), called a public meeting in August 1889 to discuss Kunert’s behavior and his position at the FRC. In the heated discussion, shoemaker Max Baginski, a local radical and soon-to-be member of the Jungen, accused Kunert of having “no clue” about “historical materialism,” otherwise he would have known, “that the capitalist economy has long ago doomed the efforts of the Free Religionists, who aim at world improvement through moral means.” Baginski earned cheers and jeers for denouncing Free Religious efforts to “ride on the coattails of Social Democracy.”47 Resolutions for and against Kunert were tabled at the meeting, but it never came to a vote. When the Volksblatt editor demanded the dissociation of the SPD from the FRC, Kunert shoved him, triggering a tumult that led police to 44

45 47

Hans-Jürgen Mende (ed.), Berliner Stadtverordnete von 1809 bis 2001: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Edition Luisenstadt, 2001); Paul Hirsch, 25 Jahre sozialdemokratischer Arbeit in der Gemeinde: Die Tätigkeit der Sozialdemokratie in der Berliner Stadtverordnetenversammlung (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1908), 546–47. Roesler and a second city councillor Jordan later turned against the congregation and its politics, according to Ewald Vogtherr, Moderne Ketzergerichte: Ein Schul- und Ideen-Kampf der freireligiösen Gemeinde zu Berlin (Berlin: self-published, 1891), 104. 46 Berliner Börsen-Courier, Jan. 22, 1889. Vogtherr, Moderne Ketzergerichte, 8. Berliner Volksblatt, Aug. 24, 1889.

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close the meeting. Despite this inconclusive outcome, the paper still published the anti-Kunert resolution in its entirety, indicating that it represented the position of the paper and hence the party leadership:48 The assembly resolves . . . that, thanks to his entire way of thought and orientation, Councilor Kunert does not stand on the foundation of purposeful Social Democracy, and . . . that his views are not clear enough to allow him to represent Social Democracy in public and thus [the assembly] recommends to comrades in all locales to refrain from [offering him] a candidacy, until the Berlin comrades are convinced that Mr. Kunert is not just using Social Democracy as a tool for his own ambition.49

This publication amounted to a party sanction. Several days later, Kunert announced that he was resigning from the City Council and moving to Breslau to accept the editorship of a party paper there.50 The Charisma of the Prophet One of Berlin’s leading naturalist writers, Arno Holz, applied his intimate knowledge of the milieu to send up the Jungen in the 1896 play Die Sozialaristokraten. The term “social aristocrats” had been brought into circulation by Alexander Tille, an intellectual with connections to Wille and the Friedrichshagener, who proposed in 1893 that all political parties were essentially bankrupt and that only a radical libertarianism in the field of culture paired with a merciless application of Darwinian survival of the fittest in the social sphere would allow spiritually higher-standing individuals to advance the general welfare of the country.51 The chief social aristocrats satirized in Holz’s drama were Bruno Wille, recognizable in Dr. Bruno Gehrke, and the poet John Mackay, who appears as the stuttering snob Frederick Bellermann. The typesetter Wilhelm Werner appears under his own name and Holz openly referenced Werner’s failed joint venture with Wille of 1891, the secularist youth journal Die Jugend. Wille’s elitism is ridiculed throughout the piece. For example, when Werner oversteps his bounds and tries to philosophize, Gehrke responds sharply, “you will leave that to us spiritual proletarians, won’t you?”52

48

49 50

51 52

In a meeting held the following week, the Volksblatt group again failed to muster a strong showing and the resolution favoring Kunert was passed. Berliner Börsen-Courier, Aug. 29, 1889. Berliner Volksblatt, Aug. 24, 1889. The liberal Staatsbürger-Zeitung (Sept. 23, 1889) reported that it was rumored that as one of only four socialist City Councillors, Kunert’s presence had become “uncomfortable” for Paul Singer, who led the socialist faction in the City Council and was the most important man in the local party apparatus. Alexander Tille, Volksdienst: Von einem Socialaristokraten (Berlin: Wiener’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1893), 12–13. Arno Holz, Sozialaristokraten (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1924).

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This damning portrait of Wille had been preceded by the expulsion of his allies from the party, a ban on advertising his publications in Vorwärts, and the collapse of his Independent Socialist movement. Thus, it might be surmised that Wille was persona non grata in the socialist movement.53 Yet, this was not the case. The FRC leadership reprimanded him in January 1892 for “engaging in politics” but kept him on as youth instructor.54 The socialist press continued to report frequently on Wille’s activities and he continued to be engaged as a popular public speaker in workers’ associations, despite the following warning from the party leadership that appeared in Vorwärts on August 30, 1894: It is our opinion that if one engages a speaker for a meeting, then one should not only consider if he is a good lecturer, but above all whether one is dealing with a man who has at all times operated in an open and honest fashion. We leave it up to party comrades to decide if they are willing to pay an entrance fee of 10 pfennig to listen to Herr Dr. Bruno Wille speak about the “ennoblement of humanity.”

Even Vorwärts was not consistent and a year later reported sympathetically on Wille’s anticlerical actions, and in 1896 it again began running ads for his publications.55 Wille’s unusual ability to cross political lines was linked to his public persona, something observed by Alfred Kerr, one of Wilhelmine Germany’s most acclaimed raconteurs, in 1895: “In Berlin, where everything is slandered and dragged through the amply abundant dirt, the figure of this idealist enjoys a simply astonishing respect among the most varied parties. One cannot get too close to him, he is nearly – as today’s feuilleton style compels us to say – taboo, i.e., untouchable.”56 Kerr’s description evokes the combination of moral integrity, personal autonomy and distance that comprises the charisma of the free-floating intellectual. Wille quite consciously cultivated each of these elements. He defended the claim to moral purity throughout his conflict with Social Democracy. Against charges that he only turned to socialism after failing to land a job at a grammar school, Wille insisted that he consciously rejected a “Brotstudium” (degree path leading to a stable job as teacher or pastor) at the university and became a writer despite all its financial risks. When ridiculed by the audience in his confrontation with Bebel in August 1890, Wille responded with moral indignation: 53 54 55

56

On the ban by Vorwärts, see “Eine historische Ausgrabung,” Die Einigkeit, November 21, 1908. “Freie Gemeinde,” Der Sozialist, Jan. 27, 1892. Wille’s police file has clippings from Vorwärts articles mentioning Wille on Aug. 30, 1894, Oct. 23, 1895, Nov. 13, 1895, Nov. 16, 1895, Nov. 26, 1895, Nov. 27, 1895; March 26, 1896. Vorwärts also published an advertisement for Wille’s magazine Die Freie Jugend on Dec. 29, 1896. Breslauer Zeitung, Dec. 15, 1895. Reprinted in: Alfred Kerr, Wo liegt Berlin? Briefe aus der Reichshauptstadt 1895-1900 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1997), 105–6.

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The saddest part of the conflict is the filth that gets hurled. I once believed that such a thing didn’t happen in our party; you are hurling it at me without pause; my faith in the morality of the party has taken a blow. . . . But there is still a place where one doesn’t get touched by this filth. The refuge to which each person can retreat is the inner core of the soul [Gemüth]. That is where I will go if you continue to abuse me.57

By attacking the leadership as corrupt and the socialist masses as “herd animals,” Wille underscored his independence as an intellectual. This echoed the way the rising cultural avant-gardes of his day cultivated their own autonomy through the anti-authoritarian gesture of épater les bourgeois. The appeal of antagonizing the masses as a means of proving the autonomy of the avant-garde intellectual was captured in John Mackay’s poem “In the Society” published by Titus Voelkel in a Free Religious journal in 1891: In the Society All hushed. One alone spoke forth. Hard and cutting fell his clear word In the silence. All listened spellbound To the rare, never before heard sound. And he finished. Only silence on the floor, Deeply embittered: that was open war Against them all! Yet not one spoke. Nothing the surrounding silence broke. But with a light step he left the hall, And took along the hatred of them all.58 In der Gesellschaft Alle schwiegen. Einer nur sprach fort. Scharf und schneidend fiel sein klares Wort In die Stille. Alle lauschten bang Auf den seltenen, nie gehörten Klang. Und er endete. Doch alles schwieg, Tieferbittert: das war offener Krieg Ihnen allen! – keiner aber sprach. Nichts die Stille ringsher unterbrach. Jener aber ging mit leichtem Schritt, Und er nahm den Haß von allen mit.

Despite the social aristocratic sentiment expressed here, John Mackay remained one of the most popular poets of the socialist culture associations well into the twentieth century. A further element constituting Wille’s charisma was his lack of an official position. In 1892 he declared that refusing a socialist candidacy for parliament “was one of my few acts that I consider clever.” As a party man, he might have 57 58

Cited in: Müller, Idealismus, 63–64. Titus Völkel (ed.), Gedichte aus dem Neuen Freireligiösen Sonntags-Blatt, vol. ii (n.d.), 15.

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become an “enslaving slave of the infallible dogma.”59 The rejection of office in favor of charisma was an essential part of the sociological construction of the modern intellectual as an ideal type. Rather than appearing as a “priest” of socialist orthodoxy like Kautsky, Wille portrayed himself as a “prophet” of worldview and ethics. Attesting to his success, Kerr wrote that “a bit of the inherited radiance of the church minister still sits on this officer of the most unchurchly congregation.”60 Blasphemy as Public Theater: Bruno Wille and Adolph Hoffmann If the “prophet” represented one role available to secularist intellectuals, the “heretic” was another. The stage for this drama was set by government and clerical agents of the confessional German state, who defended the state churches from the symbolic violence contained in acts of blasphemy. By giving public voice to their atheism, Free Religionists brought out the inherent contradiction between public order and the freedom of conscience that was prized in the Prussian tradition of “Protestant freedom.” Once found guilty in court, a blasphemer could become a martyr to freedom. Many of the socialist speakers of the Berlin FRC spent time in jail for blasphemy; however, the true masters of its use for self-promotion at this time were Bruno Wille and Adolph Hoffmann. Hoffmann was an entirely self-educated, working-class intellectual, who built his public persona, small publishing house, and his political career around his atheism.61 He became nationally known as “Ten Commandments Hoffmann” following the bestselling success of his pamphlet The Ten Commandments and the Propertied Class, in which he satirized the hypocritical morality of the ruling classes.62 Hoffmann took evident pleasure in waging public war against the monarchic bureaucracy over the injustices of the confessional order, and made sure that each of his battles received sufficient media attention. He officially left the Protestant Church in 1887 and for ten years thereafter challenged the state’s right to force his dissident children to attend mandatory religious instruction at school. He brought this struggle to the public by publishing the resulting court rulings and bureaucratic correspondence along with humorous commentary in Chamber Court versus Chamber Court. After he was silenced in the Prussian parliament in 1908 for repeated anticlerical remarks during a debate on the church budget, Hoffmann 59 60 61

62

From a discussion of “Philosophie des reinen Mittels” in Berliner Tageblatt, Jan. 30, 1892. Breslauer Zeitung, Dec. 15, 1895. Reprinted in: Kerr, Briefe aus der Reichshauptstadt, 105–06. In the newspaper clipping archive maintained by the Prussian state on politically dangerous persons, a full two thirds of the articles in Hoffmann’s file (22 of 32) are related to his anticlerical activities. See GStA PK, I HA, Rep. 77 CB P. no. 381. Adolph Hoffmann, Die zehn Gebote und die besitzende Klasse (Berlin: A. Hoffmann, n.d.). With the 1922 edition, 190,000 copies of this brochure had been printed.

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reprinted the parliamentary protocols in a brochure, Los von der Kirche! (Away from the Church!) calling for a mass desertion from the state churches.63 Hoffmann partnered up with Wille to respond creatively to the Prussian state’s closure of Free Religious Sunday school classes between 1893 and 1894. These classes, which had been offered since 1859, had become the object of increasing state repression following revelations by the Reichsbote in 1888 that Fritz Kunert had been giving “religious instruction” to dissident children in rooms provided by the city administration. Rather than outright sanction, the state applied bureaucratic means to achieve its goals. The Royal School Collegium first requested and then summarily rejected the pedagogical credentials of Wille and Ida Altmann, the other teacher.64 Having calculated the costs, Wille and the congregation decided to disobey the injunction and continue his instruction. In December 1893, the Collegium imposed a fine of 100 marks or ten days in jail for each violation and turned the matter over to the police, who sent an undercover policeman to gather evidence from pupils in a “discrete” manner. Wille was finally arrested in November 1894 after he had accumulated fines of 2,000 marks or 200 days in jail. Having anticipated this move, Wille signed over all his property to his wife to prevent its confiscation, and then reported to the police. The FRC was also prepared, and within four days of Wille’s arrest had printed his protest letter from prison with a claimed run of 500,000 copies.65 This jeremiad against absolutism and arbitrary justice closed by interpreting his act as a sacrifice for the nation: “I did it for you, compatriots, because I feel the duty to defend my and your rights against a bureaucracy that threatens our constitution, and to demonstrate to you, as a prisoner, what sad circumstances we have.”66 The protest letter called for signatures of support and included an advertisement for a book about his experiences that Wille had yet to write but for which he had already selected a title: Siberia in Prussia. Hoffmann reproduced and sold postcard photographs that frame Wille in the window of his improvised jail in the back room of the Friedrichshagen police station. One such image shows Wille’s friends standing outside his “jail,” some with drinks in hand, toasting perhaps his clever manipulation of the Prussian police state (see Figure 3.2). Having served only thirty-five days of his sentence, Wille was released pending 63

64

65 66

Adolph Hoffmann, Kammergericht contra Kammergericht: Durch Rechts-Irrthum des höchsten preußischen Gerichtshofes zur streitbaren Handlung verleitet und dann von demselben Gericht dafür bestraft (Berlin: A. Hoffmann, 1900); Adolph Hoffmann, Los von der Kirche! (Berlin: A. Hoffmann, 1908). When Ida Altmann, who had in fact been trained and worked as a teacher, applied to replace Wille, the Collegium required of her a license to run a private school, which the Collegium then refused to issue. As late as 1916, other members of the FRC were also forbidden from giving ethics instruction. LAB A Br. Pr. 030, 14121, pp. 35–40, 45. Die Post, Nov. 15, 1895. A copy of the flyer from Nov. 14, 1895 is found in LAB A Br. Pr. 030 C, 14121, p. 47.

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Figure 3.2 Postcard of Bruno Wille in his jail in Friedrichshagen, with supporters, including Wilhelm Bölsche, gathered outside. (Courtesy: Getty Images)

appeal. The FRC quickly organized a public rally at which Wille spoke to the question, “Is there Freedom of Religion and Conscience in Prussia?”67 The opportunity for a second martyrdom arrived two years later. Wille had been on his way home from the Vienna congress of the German Freethought League, when he stopped on July 2, 1897 in Graz to give a speech entitled “The Religion of Joy” to the local Association of the Confessionless. He was arrested on charges of blasphemy.68 From his Austrian prison cell, Wille began to mobilize his connections back in Berlin to help create a public scandal that would speed his release from prison. He penned a letter to his fellow Friedrichshagener, Julius Hart, with a list of various newspapers and publicists to contact.69 After his release from prison in February 1898, Wille capitalized on his momentary notoriety and, on a slow homeward journey, gave ten speeches in Southern Germany, including four in Munich alone. In March, Wille made his triumphal return to Berlin and managed to draw a crowd of 1,500 to the

67

68

During this meeting Hoffmann and Wille admitted that they did not expect any response from state authorities to the petitions they had gathered. Wille said that the point was merely to get people to sign. Vorwärts, Jan. 9, 1896. 69 LAB A Br. Pr. 030, 14121, p. 57. DStLB, Hart papers, no. 11702, n.d.

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Friedrichshain Brewery to hear his “forbidden” talk, “The Religion of Joy,” copies of which had already been printed by Hoffmann and were available for sale at the event.70 A trace of the impression that Wille made in Austria is found in a letter to the satirical journal Die Fackel from a Miss Nobody (“Frl. Niemand”), who wrote that she was not one of those sentimental girls who wish “to die a martyr, if possible with Bruno Wille.”71 Hoffmann and Wille shared a love of theater and both wrote, directed and produced plays. They were also masters at self-staging, beginning with their own appearance. In a feuilleton on the opening of the Experimental Stage (Versuchsbühne) in Berlin in 1896, Alfred Kerr reported to readers in Breslau on this latest theatrical venture of that “sanctified club-lion and salon-tiger” Bruno Wille. Kerr predicted that, irrespective of artistic quality, Wille’s personality would make it a success. “A playwright can fail,” he wrote, but someone like Wille “needs merely to show a pronounced physiognomy and it is more useful to him than two moderately good book successes.”72 Hoffmann and Wille each cultivated his own “physiognomy” – Hoffmann with his shock of white hair, Henri Quatre goatee, and jokes in Berlin dialect, Wille with his preacher’s allures and his slouch hat.73 Both understood the rules of the dissident market and were skilled at casting themselves as victims of authority. Whereas Wille liked to appear in tragic roles, Hoffmann preferred comedy, and he was not above playing the clown. For example, to demonstrate the absurdity of the state refusal to excuse his dissident children from Christian moral instruction, Hoffmann attempted to enroll them in Jewish religious lessons. To say that secularist intellectuals “staged” their public personas is not merely metaphor. They gave themselves leading roles in the plays that they wrote, directed or produced. For the second production of the Freie Volksbühne, Wille chose Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise, which revolves around the sympathy and revulsion felt by a radical university graduate as he descends into the poverty of rural society. In 1901, Vorwärts published a drama entitled Maifeier (May Day) centered on the heroic actions of a young socialist newspaper editor modeled closely on the playwright Ernst Däumig, himself a recent convert to socialism, who later went from editing a socialist newspaper in Halle to playing a leading role in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation.74 70 71 72

73 74

LAB A Br. Pr. 030, 14121, p. 88. Volkszeitung, Aug. 2, 1897. Bruno Wille, Die Religion der Freude (Berlin: A. Hoffmann, 1898). This letter was likely a product of the wit of editor Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, 4, May 1899, 26. Breslauer Zeitung, Nov. 29, 1896. Reprinted in: Alfred Kerr and Günther Rühle, Warum fließt der Rhein nicht durch Berlin? Briefe eines europäischen Flaneurs 1895–1900 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999), 86. Dieter Fricke, “Der Zehn-Gebote-Hoffmann,” Werden: Jahrbuch für die deutschen Gewerkschaften, 1997, 90–106. Ernst Däumig, Maifeier: Soziales Drama in drei Aufzügen (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1901). For analysis, see Todd H. Weir, “Between Colonial Violence and Socialist Worldview: The Conversions of Ernst Däumig,” German History, 28/2 (2010): 143–66.

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Drama also figured prominently in the event in 1900 that launched Germany’s first self-consciously monist organization, which was named the Giordano Bruno League for Unified Worldview in honor of the Italian monk, whose monistic theories led to his execution by the Vatican in 1600. The Giordano Bruno League was the brainchild of Wille and Bölsche, and included Rudolf Steiner and several secularist personalities. At a large public celebration marking the three hundredth anniversary of Bruno’s auto-da-fé, they organized a series of tableaux vivants (lebendige Bilder), in which mute actors staged the persecution of famous religious leaders. In addition to Bruno on the funeral pyre, the series featured Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, Johann Huss and Martin Luther. The final tableau showed the triumph of humanity as an apotheosis, in which the goddesses of Freedom, Justice, Human Love, Peace and Reason lift up Humanity, and the powers of darkness (clergy and state officials) are driven from the stage. Tableaux vivants worked well with the technological constraints of late nineteenth-century photography, which required motionlessness. This series was photographed and published by Adolph Hoffmann as postcards and as a book containing fitting rhymes to these “martyrs of truth” (see Figure 3.3). Portions of the book were reproduced

Figure 3.3 Postcard of Giordano Bruno celebration in 1900. Caption: “Burning is easier than disproving!” (A. Hoffman’s Verlag, author’s collection)

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in Der Atheist in 1905 with the recommendation that workers’ associations restage the living pictures to recitations of this poetry.75 Conclusion Such staging indicates that the association of socialist intellectuals with heretics and sectarian prophets went quite deep. Socialist secularists cultivated their images as heretics because it provided them with a unique claim to leadership that was often validated by their working-class audiences, who took pleasure in their acts of blasphemy and the ensuing threat of martyrdom. Yet, as we will see in this following chapter, secularist intellectuals were not always as autonomous as they depicted themselves to be in their dramas.

75

‘Empor zum Licht!’, Der Atheist, 1/5 (February 5, 1905).

4

The Sociology and Psychology of Secularist Intellectuals Dancing Near the Abyss

Friedrich Nietzsche delivered a prototype for the modern avant-garde intellectual in the figure of Zarathustra, that modern Prometheus who came down from the mountain only to be disgusted by the inability of the educated establishment and the masses to catch his sacred fire. Nietzsche’s attack on the authorities and call for the “revaluation of all values” led to his early popularity among the elitist secularists associated with the Friedrichshagen literary circle, such that Holz satirized it in Die Sozialaristokraten, by having a plebeian publicist exclaim in Berlin dialect: “The whole world is talking about the superman [Ibermenschn]!” and then turn to his listener, a greenhorn poet, and ask “Nitschkn ham Se doch jelesn?” (You’ve read Nietzsche, haven’t you?).1 Atheism was central to Nietzsche’s definition of the truly autonomous intellectual, who, in the absence of God, leads his own life as an act of artistic creation. This “free spirit” (Freigeist) possessed “such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses.”2 Dancing near the abyss is an apt metaphor for the self-image of the person who confronts the frightening metaphysical challenge of a godless universe and welcomes the social risks that come with placing radical truths above convention. However, in this chapter I want to challenge and invert Nietzsche’s idealism. Rather than reading the abyss as the possible outcome and thus limit of brave criticism, I propose that we think of the abyss as a metaphor for the social and psychological threats and insecurities that often led intellectuals to religious criticism in the first place. In this reading, the dance of the secularist intellectual with the authorities, which was played out in the many anticlerical dramas documented in the socialist press, was not merely a clever staging of an ambitious intellectual seeking an audience. Rather it was a reckoning with past insecurities, rooted not just in a class but also in other sociological and psychological situations. 1 2

Holz, Sozialaristokraten, 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 347.

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Just as it reads Nietzsche against the grain, this chapter also questions the narratives provided by socialist secularists of their own lives. Challenging the idealism contained in accounts of religious conversion has been an important step in the critical study of religious biography. Conversion narratives generally pivot around the sudden recognition of the truth, but conversion always involves the prior wrestling with a number of social and personal frictions. In the case of German secularists, the acceptance of the new worldview is generally described as an emotionally intense experience of sudden enlightenment; however, their biographies reveal that atheism often appeared at the end of a chain of conflicts with different authorities.3 The path to atheism reveals a more complex relationship to authority than is self-evident in the discourse of secularism as radical freedom. This chapter explores the connection between conflict with authority and the propensity of secularists for heresy and erratic behavior. Instead of searching for explanation of erratic behavior in class decline, as Marxist critics did, this chapter analyzes patterns found in family life, religious upbringing and education. We begin with the cohort of Free Religious speakers of 1890 introduced in the last chapter and end with three case studies that allow us to explore the psychological and sociological forces behind the anti-authoritarianism, anticlericalism and atheism in modern biographies. Family and Confession Amongst the fifteen speakers at the Berlin Free Religious Congregation in our cohort of socialist secularists, only Ewald Vogtherr and Conrad Schmidt, whose fathers belonged to the first generation of Free Religious preachers, were raised as dissidents.4 For all others, the public identification with secularism implied a symbolic break with their confessions of origins. Breaking with one’s confession generally came with familial friction, because, as the early sociologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl made clear, in nineteenth-century Germany an individual’s confession was often more about group identity than belief: If someone asks me, why are you Protestant? I can only answer: because my father was a Protestant. . . . My religious faith, supposedly the most individual thing I possess, has really been injected into me by the authority of the family. . . . Your average man thus holds the rejection of the faith of the fathers . . . to be particularly disreputable, because among other things, he sees in it the greatest renunciation of the family.5

3 4 5

This is explored in Weir, “Däumig.” Schmidt was the grandson of the founder of the Königsberg Free Congregation, Julius Rupp. Vogtherr’s father Eugen was another in the first generation of Free Religious preachers. Quoted in: Sylvia Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens: Frauen im Deutschkatholizismus und in den freien Gemeinden 1841–1852 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 151.

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Secularist biographies reveal that confessional ruptures not only produced, but more often were preceded by problems of authority in the family. In his autobiography, Konrad Beisswanger, who rose to become one the founding figures of the Proletarian Freethought movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, described how the chance gift of an encyclopedia (Konversationslexikon) led him to question the deeply pious Lutheran faith of his lower-middle-class family. After he disputed his father’s opinion on the origin of the cosmos, his father called him the “mangy sheep of the family.” Beatings by the pastor further prepared his path into dissent, which occurred when, as a teenage printer’s apprentice in Nuremberg, a chance encounter with the journal And There Was Light (Es werde Licht) at the typesetting table alerted him to the existence of the local Free Religious Congregation.6 Although atheism might appear to be the archetypal rebellion against the father, it is not the authoritarian father that emerges from the biographies of secularists, but more often the opposite – the lack of a father. Adolph Hoffmann was an illegitimate child, as were several other of the prominent socialist secularists of proletarian origin, such as Bruno Sommer, Johann Most, and Max Sievers, Weimar Germany’s most important Freethinker.7 Others, with middle-class upbringings, including Agnes Wabnitz, Wille, as well as later FRC speakers Paul and Maria Krische, all experienced the early death of the father. Paternal death often precipitated a religious crisis, such as occurred in the biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a member of the Friedrichshagen circle and contributor to secularist literary journal Die Freie Bühne.8 In the patriarchal system of nineteenth-century Germany, minors without fathers generally received male guardians (Vormünde) and in many secularist biographies, the first steps into anti-authoritarian behavior, including the rejection of traditional religion, involved conflicts with these replacement authorities. In his memoirs, the orphan Adolph Hoffmann related his first encounter with the Berlin Free Religious Congregation as a fourteen-yearold apprentice in 1873 as an act of his resistance to his “strict” Catholic master. One day, rather than attending Protestant services, as his master required, Hoffmann found his way into a meeting in Rosenthaler Street, where he heard G. S. Schaefer speaking. When he whispered to his neighbor that the

6 7 8

Konrad Beißwanger, 50 Jahre Freidenkertum: Der Aufstieg einer Kulturbewegung (Nuremberg: Kulturverlag Nürnberg, 1930), 5. See the short biographies in Appendix 3. Shortly after the death of her father, 18-year-old Andreas-Salomé refused to take communion and fled Russia with a Dutch Protestant minister. This was the first of several intimate intellectual/romantic involvements with older men, some of whom were prominent Freigeister, such as Georg Ledebour and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose fathers had also died young. Biddy Martin, Woman and Modernity: The (Life)Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 34.

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“preacher” spoke better than the “minister,” the other replied, “well, you should hear Frit[z]sche, Hasselmann or Most.” Hoffmann asked, “Are those ministers?” “Idiot,” was the answer, “those are Social Democrats.”9 Wille’s proxy father was his older brother, who pressured him to pursue a course of studies that would lead to a financially secure profession as Protestant minister or grammar school teacher rather than follow his intellectual interests. This produced, in Wille’s words, a “contradiction in my soul.” With the approaching end of his studies, “‘family ties’ proved more and more to be an instrument of coercion, and family sensibility, piety, and obedience [proved] to be forms of servitude. And I broke this chain to preserve my individuality and save myself from self-destruction.”10 The weak identification with the father due to absence or early death suggests a psychological factor in the volatility of the secularist type, which found expression in the unwillingness or inability to conform to authority, even to that of counter-authorities, such as the SPD. Such a correlation was expressed by one of the most famous atheists of the twentieth century, JeanPaul Sartre, who celebrated his father’s early death as the key to his own freedom, but also identified it with his spiritual restlessness and aggression towards authority.11 An explanation of the correlation between a weak paternal bond and the “anti-authoritarian type” was offered by Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School, as part of the research into the psychological vulnerability of some Germans to fascism. Employing a Freudian model of social-psychological development, Adorno posited the “Genuine Liberal” as the healthy ideal type, who overcomes his Oedipal struggle by internal identification with the authority of the father. As deviations from this ideal, both the authoritarian and the anti-authoritarian personality types fail to internalize the paternal superego. The former seeks external identification with authority and is aggressive towards weakness, while the latter rejects authority and seeks to destroy it.12

9

10 11 12

Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, Wilhelm Hasselmann and Johann Most were all secularist Social Democrats; the latter two later became anarchists. See Adolph Hoffmann, Adolph ‘Hoffmann’s Erzählungen’: Gesammelte ernste und heitere Erinnerungen aus sozialisten-gesetzlicher Zeit (Berlin: self-published, 1928), 8–10; Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx (New York: Collier, 1962), 24; Fricke, “ZehnGebote-Hoffmann.” Bruno Wille, “Philosophie des reinen Mittels,” Freie Bühne für den Entwicklungskampf der Zeit, 3 (1892): 24. Jean-Paul Sartre, Die Wörter: Autobiographische Schriften (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1965), 12. Adorno’s group identified conversion away from Christianity as an anti-authoritarian trait. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950), 771. See also William Kreml, The Anti-Authoritarian Personality (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977).

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This psychological model, while helpful, can only go so far in identifying the forces at work in the formation of FRC speakers. Atheism is not merely the “faith of the fatherless” as one atheist psychologist turned devout Catholic put it.13 One cannot separate the early death of a father from the knock-on effects it had on the child’s relationship to his or her social environment, such as rapid economic and social decline, relocation, and the imposition of secondary authorities. Because nineteenth-century Germany was both an authoritarian and a largely Christian society, the various forms of worldly authority were linked to the authority of God. Atheism may be the purest symbolic expression of anti-authoritarianism, but it could be reached from any of a number of conflicts. There was, in other words, no single cause of the internally contradictory or “divided self” that William James identified as the type most likely to tend towards a religious “second birth” in conversion.14 Profession and Education A second pattern of conflict with authority occurred within the professional and educational hierarchies in which secularist intellectuals found themselves prior to conversion. By and large, secularist intellectuals came neither from the bottom nor the top of these hierarchies, but from the middle. According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the leaders of sects tend to emerge from “socialstructurally indeterminate mediating positions” in the churches, where they are granted a measure of leadership power, but frustrated by their domination within the hierarchy.15 The first generation of Free Religious leaders were indeed drawn from low-ranking clergy and students of theology. The generation of Berlin FRC speakers from 1890 featured no clergymen, although at least two were former students of theology.16 However, several were schoolteachers. Kunert taught in a public primary school (Volksschule), Altmann in a girls’ school, and Voelkel in a grammar school (Gymnasium). Pinn had trained to enter the teaching profession. Teachers were one of the primary interfaces between the state and the population. Under extremely difficult working conditions (class sizes of seventy or more pupils were common) many primary school teachers were torn between imparting humanistic education and the

13

14 15 16

Paul Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism (Dallas, TX: Spence, 1999). This methodologically problematic comparison of theists (with fathers) and atheists (without them) concludes that atheism is a psychological compensation for weak spirits. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 185–210. Bourdieu, “Genesis,” 27. Former students of theology among the Berlin secularists included Peus, Wille, Rudolf Penzig (leader of the Humanist Congregation and DGEK).

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social disciplining expected by the state.17 Leading Berlin liberal and historian Heinrich Treitschke bemoaned the difficulty of finding primary school teachers, “who do not feel unhappy in this mediating position between the educated and the uneducated.”18 Analogous to the intermediary position of schoolteachers, many secularist intellectuals held insecure positions in relation to university education. As Engels had noted, there were a significant number of university drop-outs (Durchfallskandidaten) among the Jungen, and the same was true of the FRC speakers.19 Wilhelm Bölsche, Waldeck Manasse, Carl Pinn and Heinrich Peus did not complete their studies. For the latter three, failure at the university was linked to social vulnerability. University study lifted them high above their class origin, but without the financial support and educated role models that successful graduates like Bruno Wille or Conrad Schmidt enjoyed, they faltered. Having left one milieu yet having failed to arrive in the next, they occupied a doubly marginal position. Heinrich Peus offers a particularly telling example of someone whose education had opened up a social world that he could not ultimately assimilate into. The eldest son of a downwardly mobile Catholic master carpenter, Peus worked eight-hour days as a bag gluer (Tütenkleber) at the age of eleven but managed to complete the Gymnasium in 1883 with the financial help of a classmate’s family. A sign of Peus’s identification with his adopted milieu and his ascent through education was his conversion to Protestantism and initial decision to study theology at the University of Berlin. He later switched to philosophy, philology, history and national economy with the rather unrealistic goal of becoming a “university professor.” Around 1890 he began to give talks in the FRC and Social Democratic workers’ associations and soon thereafter abandoned his studies. Throughout the rest of his life, Peus was marked by his abandoned attempt to enter the liberal educated class. As the leading socialist politician in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, Peus cultivated close ties to left liberals and democrats, supported compromise with the monarchy during the First World War and became the most prominent German Social Democrat to join the “bourgeois” Monist League.20 17

18 19

20

On Volksschule teachers as “transitional personalities” between modernization and tradition, see Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, Modernisierung und Disziplinierung: Sozialgeschichte des preußischen Volksschulwesens 1794–1872 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 342–43. Hans Müller, Preußische Volksschulzustände: Ein Wort an das Volk und seine Lehrer (Berlin: Verlag der Berliner Arbeiterbibliothek, 1890), 40–41. In a letter to F. A. Sorge, October 26, 1891, Engels called the Jungen “hidden anarchists . . . along with donkeys, uppity students and candidates for failure, wannabes of all types.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, n.d.), vol. 38, 183. Torsten Kupfer, Der Weg zum Bündnis: Entschieden Liberale und Sozialdemokraten in Dessau und Anhalt im Kaiserreich (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 65.

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Intellectual insecurity pervades the self-description that Waldeck Manasse sent to the editor of the Lexicon of German Poets and Writers, in the hopes of being included in this “who’s who” of German literature. Manasse described his commercial training as a deviation from his true calling to be a writer and intellectual. The fourth of eight children born to Jewish shop owners in a small village outside of Lübben in the Niederlausitz, he “revealed, already in school, a lively interest in literature, and when he left school, he only became a salesman against his will, always in the quiet hope that his desire for university studies would be fulfilled. He apprenticed and worked for nine years in one of the great lace houses of Berlin, dedicating each free hour to his intellectual development.” Following his first speeches in the FRC, Manasse began to study philosophy and the history of literature at the Berlin University in 1888 but gave up after six semesters. Despite having shifted careers from textiles to books (he had, in the meantime, became a book printer and seller), Manasse regretted not having the time for more literary activity.21 There were only a handful of university professors in leading positions in anticlerical secularist organizations. However, nearly all were retired, such as Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald, or had been forced from office, such as Ludwig Büchner. Being a dissident or a Jew hampered professional advancement in the university system, but being a public atheist or a socialist were usually grounds for disqualification from office, as the Berlin Privatdozent in chemistry Leo Arons found out in 1898, when the Kaiser caused a special law to be passed to prevent socialists, like him, from teaching at Prussian universities.22 Many of the speakers in secularist organizations who bore the title “Prof.” were, in fact, Gymnasium teachers, who found there an alternative educational sphere in which they were dominant. For example, Prof. Theodor Hartwig, the main leader of the International of Proletarian Freethinkers in the late 1920s, was a Gymnasium teacher in Moravia. Most secularist intellectuals expressed an ambiguous relationship to the world of academic learning. Much like religious dissenters, who support religion but criticize the church, secularists supported the spirit and ideal of the university, but claimed that the institution failed to serve these ends. The Volkshochschule that they championed to remedy this problem also provided them with university-like posts that compensated their feeling of being displaced in the educational hierarchy.

21

22

Letter from Waldeck Manasse to Brummer, Feb. 4, 1895. Brümmer papers, Briefe II, Handschriftensammlung, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Manasse entry in Franz Brümmer, Lexikon der deutschen Dichter und Prosaisten vom Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun., 1913), 355. The law became known as the Lex Arons.

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Atheism and the Lunatic Fringe The essential tasks of the intellectual may be likened to those of a physician, who first takes the anamnesis of the patient and then diagnoses the ailment and proposes a treatment. Like Marxism, atheism provided intellectuals with a totalizing analytical framework which they could use to recognize social ailments of modern society, and then try to convince working-class sufferers via speech and writing that their diagnosis and treatment were correct. Atheism and monist worldview could also help intellectuals order and resolve their own personal crises. Yet, sometimes, rather than leading to a cure, atheism led to what might be termed a metastasis of crisis. The anticlerical acts that contributed to one secularist’s success, could lead to another’s downfall. Whereas Bruno Wille proved capable of modulating his battles with the churches and the state, other secularists did not have the same self-control, savvy or luck. For them, blasphemy could be self-defeating. Following Fritz Kunert’s crude anticlerical outbursts in the City Council in 1888, the FRC terminated his paid position as ethics teacher and the SPD forced him to depart Berlin. Kunert’s uncontrolled anticlericalism was still in evidence in 1901, when as a Reichstag delegate he was called to order for interjecting the crude epithet “Meineidspfaffe” (perjury parson) during a speech by the antisemitic Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker.23 And, just like Johann Most in 1880, the FRC speaker Titus Voelkel fled the country in 1895 rather than begin a jail sentence for blasphemy.24 For some secularists, “dancing near the abyss” meant courting continual confrontation with the authorities that they criticized. The prohibitions that the state imposed to defend the sacred authority of God, Church and Kaiser worked as an incitement to violate them. Anti-authoritarianism coincided with irrational behavior and, in some cases, even insanity. Mental instability is not often a subject of social or cultural history; however, in the case of secularism this is not a trivial side story. Over the centuries, sympathetic and unsympathetic observers alike have continually identified secularists with eccentricity, confusion and mental volatility. When Fritz Mauthner, a popular feuilletonist for the Berliner Tageblatt and later author of a three-volume history of atheism, went to Brussels to cover the first International Congress of Freethinkers in 1880, he reported back:

23 24

Anon., Adolf Stöcker und die Angriffe seiner Gegner im Lichte der Wahrheit: Von einem Nichtpolitiker (Berlin: Martin Warneck, 1901), 8. Voelkel evidently first felt it was safe to travel back to Germany in 1910 after he had become an American citizen and was supposedly an employee of Columbia University. LAB A Pr. Br. 030, 13959, p. 62.

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I have never seen so many imposing male visages assembled in one place. Elders and novices, preachers of fraternal love and the commune, all of them, all seemed to bear the common stamp of an excited fanaticism, which shone from their beautiful eyes. Yet as soon as these beautiful men began to speak, I was given to hear much undigested and indigestible stuff.25

The American president Theodore Roosevelt remarked somewhat later that all reform movements were comprised of both “wise and high-minded people” and a “lunatic fringe” of “foolish fanatics.”26 In the following, I want to take seriously what Roosevelt and Mauthner suggested, namely that a structural relationship exists between radical dissent and mental instability. Rather than treating the lunatic fringe as an epiphenomenon, marginal to the social history of secularism, I propose that precisely eccentrics can open a door to understanding important elements of secularist moralism, anticlericalism and the position of radical intellectuals in an authoritarian society. Johannes Guttzeit The way secularist moral reform projects could lead to the heightening rather than resolution of personal antagonisms with authority and society is revealed in the activities of Johannes Guttzeit (1853–1935), a former army officer who became a Free Religious preacher in Berlin and Stettin in the mid-1880s. Although Guttzeit’s participation in the Berlin FRC could not be correlated to participation in socialist circles and thus precludes him from belonging to our cohort, his case is worth examining because of its connection to life reform, an important constituent aspect of secularism. The first reform cause Guttzeit supported after leaving military service in 1879 was vegetarianism, a movement that had been closely tied to Free Religion since the 1840s.27 Subsequently, Guttzeit became an advocate of nudism, pacificism and language reform, which he promoted through brochures and his own journals (The Brother and The New Man), printed in a highly idiosyncratic orthography. Although arrested several times for blasphemy, Guttzeit’s greatest public notoriety came when the court found him guilty of public nuisance (Grober Unfug) in 1890 for wearing “reform clothing,” which consisted of sandals, a wool headband and a tunic of rough cloth, reminiscent of biblical prophets and what was considered “Germanic” dress (see Figure 4.1).28 25 26 27 28

Fritz Mauthner, “Der Freidenkerkongreß,” Berliner Tageblatt, Sept. 9, 1880. Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (Newburyport, MA: Open Road, 2017), 134. On vegetarianism and Free Religion, see Weir, Fourth Confession, 88. Wolfgang Krabbe, Gesellschaftsveränderung durch Lebensreform: Strukturmerkmale einer sozialreformerischen Bewegung im Deutschland der Industrialisierungsperiode (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), 93–94; LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15046, p. 231.

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Figure 4.1 Left: Johannes Guttzeit. Right: Agnes Wabnitz. (Source: Wolfgang Sterneck, AdsD 6/FOTA045425)

By the 1890s Guttzeit had become a fabled creature in Berlin secularist circles, whose eccentric appearance was apparently matched by eccentric thinking. In Die Freie Bühne, Bruno Wille praised Guttzeit’s extreme rigor in practicing what he preached. Guttzeit addressed everyone as “brother” or “sister” and with the informal “du” and “wanted nothing less than to eliminate domination and violation in every form: political, military, economic, domestic and dietary.” Yet Wille faulted the “nature preacher” for his intellectual confusion. Guttzeit inspired depictions of charismatic apostles and “holy fools” in the literary work of Gerhart Hauptmann.29 In a lengthy portrait of Guttzeit, the conservative cultural critic Otto von Leixner attempted to describe a pathology of reform movements. He noted how Guttzeit veered from vegetarianism – the “guiding principle of his entire way of life” – to a moral condemnation of the existing social order: 29

Bruno Wille, “Der Naturprediger Guttzeit,” Freie Bühne, 2 (1891): 376–81; Warren R. Maurer, Understanding Gerhart Hauptmann (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 141.

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Almost always in standing, . . . he painted, in a preacher’s tone, a picture of the world that must result from a universal vegetable diet and simplicity, and thundered against the luxury and egotism of the pleasure-seekers, against the privileges of the nobility, the officers, the professors, against the churches and clergy, against the Old Testament, against the ideal of the Fatherland, Puttkamer’s orthographic reforms, against top hats and tails, corsets and high heels.30

According to Leixner, Guttzeit’s life path illustrated how noble moral aims became perverted once they latched on to the urban market for new forms of spirituality, whether Free Religion or life reform. Once linked to grand visions, this morality fueled a downward spiral that ended in the personality of the eccentric, itinerant preacher: The life portrait [reveals to us] the restless spirit; it shows us how utopian thoughts work seductively and destructively and what confusion they cause in the mind. There, if reason does not order them, such thoughts combine with initially noble sentiments, and, if thought out to final consequences, can only have the destruction of all existing relations as their end goal. Thus, it is possible that one can propose ‘full humanity’ and yet still arrive at conclusions that are compatible with those of mad, criminal anarchism.31

It is, Leixner wrote, “psychologically undeniable that as soon as negative principles fix themselves in the brain of a restless person – whether male or female is the same – some mad logic compels them to further negative conclusions.”32 In his psychosocial model, moral degeneration is the end result of criticism of the pillars of society, such as church, state, the monarchy and the class order. Negative criticism itself is a pathology, a madness that had befallen modern society. Leixner’s explanation of the relationship of anti-authoritarianism and reform provides a useful starting point for investigating the psychology of secularism; however, it was colored by Leixner’s own commitment to the authoritarian culture under attack. Leixner’s solution was a two-pronged government response: suppression and accommodation: “Only a strong state is today capable of treading the path of reform and following it to the end. Because it will by necessity have to hold down destructive forces and wrestle passions to the ground.”33 Two decades later, another participant observer offered a similar explanation of the relationship of moralism to political irrationality. In his famous speech “Politics as Vocation” of 1919, Max Weber observed that the final years of the war and ongoing revolution had produced many cases where “the adherent of an ethic of ultimate ends [Gesinnungsethiker] suddenly turns into a 30 31

Otto von Leixner, Soziale Briefe aus Berlin: 1888 bis 1891 (Berlin: Pfeilstücker, 1891), 280–81. 32 33 Ibid., 287. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 390.

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chiliastic prophet. Those, for example, who have just preached ‘love against violence’ now call for the use of force for the last violent deed, which would then lead to a state of affairs in which all violence is annihilated.”34 For Weber, inflexible moral schemes clouded the ability of the Gesinnungsethiker to make pragmatic political decisions. By contrast, for historian Reinhart Koselleck the propensity of moralists to undergo sudden transformation to revolutionaries was baked into the historical formation of intellectuals under the conditions of authoritarianism. Because they could not oppose the monarchy politically, the French philosophes constructed their critique of the ancien régime as a disinterested one. They purported to judge the present from the perspective of an imagined utopian system of future harmony but left their own ambitions aside. In other words, they hid their political ambitions and antimonarchist emotions behind abstract morals.35 In light of the theories of Leixner, Weber and Koselleck, I arrive at the following observation of the moral politics of life reform in a semiauthoritarian society, such as that of Germany around 1890. Life reformers staged themselves as completely “natural” persons, who listened to their “inner truth,” i.e. the voice of nature within them, and sought to organize their entire life practice around the dictates of a purely peaceful worldview. Health was conceived of as a state of harmony between the conscience and the environment. The intense moralism of life reform was expressed through its rigorous division of actions, substances and spaces according to the binary pairs of healthy/unhealthy and true/false. Common to most life reformers was the belief that current society was impure, unhealthy and untrue, but that, through their example, life reformers could reverse this situation. They saw themselves as a small group of the select, whose social isolation was, in fact, a preparation for universality; as Independent Socialist Gustav Landauer put it in the title of a programmatic speech at the utopian artists’ collective “New Community” in Berlin in 1900, the path lay “through separation to community.”36 The practical consequences were, however, almost the opposite. The imperative to live according to the ideal of universal harmony entailed practices that created continual dissonance with the social environment. This dynamic can be observed in the German vegetarian movement, which, since the mid nineteenth

34

35 36

Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 122. For discussion, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890–1920 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974). Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). Gustav Landauer, “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft,” in Das Reich der Erfüllung: Flugschriften zur Begründung einer neuen Weltanschauung, ed. Heinrich Hart and Julius Hart (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1901), 45–68.

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century, had claimed that abstaining from meat led to an improvement of health, to a better relationship between the psyche and the organism, to more peaceful behavior, to less environmental damage and to a more egalitarian economic system and world order.37 Yet, vegetarianism, like all forms of dietary morality, erected boundaries between social groups. To take another example from a reform movement with close ties to secularism, the artificial language movement of Esperanto represented the attempt to create de novo an entirely self-sufficient order that purported to be pure, simple, lacking in contradiction, international and completely rational. Yet, Esperanto, like its smaller rival Ido, only served as an arcane language used for ritual purposes within small utopian associations.38 Ultimately, as Guttzeit’s arrest for wearing his reform clothing shows, by violating the cultural norms of semiauthoritarian Wilhelmine society, many reform practices essentially wooed conflict with the authorities. If the rigid moralism of utopian life reform offers one explanation for the proximity of secularism to the “lunatic fringe,” anti-authoritarian and anticlerical aggression offers another. To examine the role of such aggression in the failed staging of intellectual careers, we turn to two case studies from our cohort of socialist secularists. “Dr.” Carl Pinn In a society governed by divine-right monarchy and confessional privilege, atheism allowed intellectuals to give perhaps the purest symbolic expression to their anti-authoritarianism. However, conversion to atheism did not necessarily mean an escape from authority. Many sought support from an alternative authority to the Wilhelmine state, the largest of which was provided by the socialist party. The SPD had the resources and clientele to fulfill the ambitions of would-be intellectuals and provide them with alternative careers. Most of our cohort successfully realigned their relationship to authority and loyally served the party, even if their secularism and anti-authoritarian critique led them into occasionally heretical positions. Only a few later broke free of the party, most notably Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche, who dedicated their intellectual labor to other abstract ideals before turning to German nationalism during the First World War. For Carl Pinn, by contrast, problems with alternative authorities went to the heart of his failure to stage himself successfully as a 37 38

Krabbe, Gesellschaftsveränderung durch Lebensreform. After the invention of Volapük (1879) and Esperanto (1887), Ido emerged as a third artificial language in 1907 calling itself “Reform-Esperanto.” Two of its greatest proponents were the Monists Wilhelm Ostwald and Heinrich Peus. The latter also invented his own system of stenography. Heinrich Peus, Wenn ich Diktator wäre: Se me esus diktatoro (Dessau: Peus, 1932), 15–22.

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socialist intellectual. Police files and his own publications allow us to examine the structural elements, both social and psychological, that contributed to his incomplete conversion. University education figured as the key to Pinn’s attempted ascent from lower-middle-class origins. Born in 1861 to a poor Jewish merchant (Kaufmann) in Bromberg, a town in Posen near the Russian border, Pinn had trained to become a grammar school teacher at universities in Berlin and Greifswald. Police took notice of him in August 1890 for giving popular social science lectures in the socialist milieu. He spoke on “suicide and the social conditions in Germany” to a meeting of Berlin tailors, and at a gathering of furniture makers the following day he lectured on “nationality and humanity.” Pinn drew on the impressions of working-class life gathered in Łodź and Brussels and, according to the observing officer, “attempted . . . to prove that nationalities do not exist.”39 The extensive covert police surveillance of Pinn (he was trailed for thirty-eight days in 1891, seventeen days in 1892 and twelve days in 1893) reveals a man who appeared to fit the mold of a typical socialist secularist. By 1891 he had become a protégé of Ewald Vogtherr and was seen at Social Democratic events with prominent leaders such as Wilhelm Liebknecht and the former Freethinker Gustav Kessler. He worked in the Workers’ Education School, wrote for Vorwärts, and was a member of the Freie Volksbühne. Pinn had a repertoire of socially critical speeches that he recited at workers’ associations, reading clubs and the socialist Ethical Society.40 In 1892 he held talks at the Berlin Free Religious Congregation on “Mohammedan Worldview,” “Huss and Savonarola” and “The Worldview of the Ancient Greeks.” In 1893, Pinn published an article in Lichtstrahlen on the International Freethought Congress in Madrid.41 Yet, Pinn’s conversion to socialism and secularism was not as complete as his public speeches would suggest. He did not give up on his former professional ambitions. Correspondence between authorities in Metz and the Berlin police indicates that Pinn was unsuccessfully seeking a position as a schoolteacher in early 1891 in the new German province of Alsace-Lorraine, which would have precluded any further participation in socialist agitation. In 1893, the police discovered that Pinn had been fraudulently using the title “Dr.” to promote himself in socialist circles. He had indeed written a dissertation, which had been accepted at the University of Greifswald, but he had not had enough money to pay the examination costs of the Rigorosum and had been disenrolled in February 1888.42 Alongside his false title, Pinn used two false 39 41 42

40 LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 12304, p. 1. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15189, unpag. Dr. Carpinn (pseud. for Carl Pinn), “Bourgeoisie und Freidenkertum,” Lichtstrahlen, 4/1 (Oct. 1, 1893): 49. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 12304, pp. 20, 39.

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names. He published his socialist freethinking tractates under the pseudonym “Dr. Carpin,” but chose the less readily identifiable name “Dr. Eduard Feuchtwanger” in 1895 for a brochure entitled Socialist Conviction and Social Misery in German Universities, in which he attacked leading Berlin Social Democrats.43 This pseudonym did not protect Pinn and when his authorship was found out in 1897, Pinn was banned from the SPD and its organizations, thereby losing what was most likely one of his main sources of livelihood. What makes Pinn worthy of closer investigation is not this act of rebellion against the SPD. After all, Bruno Wille and the other Jungen had already taken this step. Rather, what requires explanation is Pinn’s failure to complete this break. As Dr. Carpin, he identified himself with the authority of socialism and attacked the bourgeoisie, the universities and the monarchic state. As Dr. Feuchtwanger, he reversed his points of identification and critique. In his libelous, antisocialist brochure, Pinn narrativized his own biography as a cautionary tale in which the fate of a poor student got caught up with a crisis of the German university system. Pinn began by painting an idealized portrait of the university as a “true republic of scholars,” i.e. a democratic community characterized by scientific freedom and reward for personal excellence. In reality, however, this utopia had been polluted by “Mammonism” and the care of science had fallen to men “whose undeniable achievement had been to be ‘careful in the choice of their parents.’” He called on the state to “liberate science from all this dross.”44 In the course of diagnosing the university’s ailment, Pinn explained his own failure. Poverty sacrifices the “poor students, who are eager for knowledge,” to the “struggle for existence,” so that they “almost entirely” lose sight of the university ideal and become “ripe and receptive for the teachings of Social Democracy.” Pinn made it clear that he knew these “most sorrowful conditions only too well.”45 By casting socialism as a form of physical temptation, Pinn distanced himself from the claim he had made in 1892 that only the proletarian movement could offer real Bildung.46 By declaring his loyalty to the university, Pinn now signaled his return to his original and pure “scientific” ideals, belonging to his “innermost self.”47 Pinn then turned his attention to the Social Democratic Party, where he found the same moral pollution. The market created within Social Democracy had led greedy academics to don the guise of socialist idealism to gain access to lucrative positions.48 Pinn went name by name through the “academic 43 44 46 47

Eduard Feuchtwanger, Sozialistische Gesinnung und soziales Elend auf deutschen Hochschulen (Leipzig: Oskar Gottwald, 1895). 45 Ibid., 33. Ibid., 20. Carl Pinn, Das Bildungsmonopol der heutigen Gesellschaft (Berlin: Verlag der ‘Lichtstrahlen’ (O. Harnisch), 1892). 48 Feuchtwanger, Sozialistische Gesinnung, 19. Ibid., 30.

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general staff of Social Democracy” and unmasked their hypocrisy. He accused socialist physicians of seeking to gain access to the union insurance funds, and lawyers of speculating on how to achieve useful notoriety through high-profile political trials.49 Furthermore he found in the many “Drs.” who “live off the Party,” persons who could not be full socialists because they were tainted by their religious, political, racial or class pasts. In this regard he named former democrats and left liberals (George Ledebour, Franz Mehring, Paul Ernst and Paul Kampffmeyer), former theology students (Curt Baake, Heinrich Peus and Richard Calwer), and converted Jews (Georg Gradnauer and Bruno Schoenlank). Schoenlank’s facial scars (Schmisse) from fraternity duels were, for Pinn, the physiognomic proof of the “Halbheit” (mixedness) of this civil servant’s son. Others, and here he again named Jews, were maligned because of their wealth, such as “Dr. Leo Arons, who just like the millionaire [Paul] Singer . . . can afford the luxury of a social democratic conscience.”50 Pinn’s morality tale aids in the reconstruction of his biography. Having failed to achieve the original goal of entering the ranks of the educated middle class or Bildungsbürgertum for reasons of poverty, political radicalism and personal weakness, Pinn embraced freethought and socialism around 1890. These movements offered anticlericalism and Marxism as powerful theories to explain his failure to achieve economic and educational success and they gave him an alternative authority and a replacement career goal. By 1895, Pinn had probably realized that he was not going to have a career that corresponded to his ideal trajectory as a socialist intellectual. He had failed to attract notice as a writer (though he had submitted pieces to the noted literary publicist Heinrich Hart), had not been elected to office (according to police records he had been an unsuccessful Reichstag candidate for the Silesian district of Liegnitz) and had not been entrusted with an editorial post in a socialist paper.51 In short, even in this realm of opposition, where he thought he would redeem his poverty and find a secure place of leadership, successful university graduates and particularly the Jews among them, seemed to rub his nose in his failure to complete his studies. He entered a second crisis. Rather than ascribe this failure to his lack of personal skills, he merely shifted the terms of his criticism from the bourgeois establishment to the SPD itself. Pinn’s solution to this crisis was to again reverse the polarity of his relationship to authority and seek an alliance with the SPD’s enemy: the Wilhelmine state. Like Leixner, he mobilized antisemitic tropes against leading socialists and advocated strong state intervention in the university and economy. A year after his banishment from the SPD in 1897, Pinn wrote 49 51

50 Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. Police report on Pinn, May 8, 1898, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 12304, p. 39. Handwritten manuscripts found in Hart papers, nos. 3651–52, DStLB.

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to the Berlin Police President, offering to pen a slanderous brochure against the party “if there are means available in the discretionary fund for the purpose.” Based on his insider knowledge of the “leaders and party chiefs . . . the piece would achieve a great success [in light of the upcoming Reichstag elections].” After the Ministry of the Interior had rejected this offer, Pinn made a similar overture to the Minister of Culture,52 which he signed as “Dr. Carpin.” Pinn’s duplicitous behavior shows a pattern of being unable to make an inner identification with the circles he wished to enter, whether bourgeois society, the socialist party or the authoritarian state. Even his commitment to secularism appears to have been conditional: among the three Jewish members of our sample of fifteen Berlin intellectuals around 1890, and despite the highly anticlerical nature of his public speeches, Pinn was the only one not to officially leave the Jewish faith.53 His behavior furthermore indicates that he was becoming a crank and an example of the erratic potential of the secularist type.54 The Berlin police closed their file on Pinn in 1904 with the following report: Pinn is now a run-down person, who tries to earn a living by giving language classes for children (mostly in Jewish families) and by working for several bourgeois papers, like the Berliner Tageblatt, Vossische Zeitung etc. . . . Pinn has sunken low morally; he hangs around Savigny Square in the evenings and harasses respectable and dubious females.55

The report concludes by noting that Pinn spent his days reading [bourgeois] newspapers in cafes, while in the privacy of his home he read the revisionist Sozialistische Monatshefte. Thus, even in his reading behavior, Pinn continued to live according to his unresolved and conflicting fantasies of being at the same time a respectable Bildungsbürger and a socialist intellectual.56

52 53

54

55

56

LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 12304, pp. 42, 44, 45. Pinn focused much of his writing on Jewish subjects and wrote for Jewish journals, including an article on “Jewish Docents at the Berlin University” in Ost und West in 1910 (vol. 10, no 10). Pinn was congratulated in 1936 upon his 75th birthday and thanked for his many humorous contributions to the Jewish newspaper of Posen, Blätter des Verbandes jüdischer Heimatvereine, 10/4 (1936). Adorno’s description of the crank as an authoritarian type applies to Pinn: “They have built up a spurious inner world, often driven into isolation,” and rely on prejudice to construct their pseudoreality and order the hostile outside world. Adorno further notes that “a significant social trait is semi-erudition [presumably Adorno is here translating from the German ‘Halbbildung,’ T. W.], a magical belief in science which makes them the ideal followers of racial theory.” Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality, 765. For a moralist, Pinn led an apparently immoral life. He was accused of plagiarizing stories from Posen and adapting them to locations in East Berlin. A police report from May 8, 1898 concluded: “Pinn does not enjoy a good reputation. He is described as a careless, sloppy person, who often drifts about in night cafes with immoral females and thus always has money troubles. He is inattentive to his person and his body is always dirty.” LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 12304, p. 39. Police report, October 11, 1904. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 12304, p. 52.

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Pinn’s case reveals how social vulnerability affected the careers of secularist intellectuals in the socialist party. Thomas Welskopp differentiates between three essential types of party intellectual: the autodidact brought up from the ranks of skilled labor, the bourgeois radical and the bohemian. Welskopp noted that the first two more readily formed durable bonds with the party, while the bohemians tended towards oppositions.57 Indeed, the successful “bourgeois” intellectuals like Kautsky and Singer had the intellectual and financial autonomy of their liberal backgrounds that allowed them to become stable intellectuals of the working class. Working-class autodidacts in our sample – Hoffmann, Metzner and Wabnitz, whom we turn to next – remained true to the SPD. By contrast, Carl Pinn, whose life experience was close to the proletariat, but who tried to rise via university education to the ranks of the middle class, ultimately failed to identify with socialism. This helps explains the ironic fact that both Kaiser Wilhelm II and SPD leaders spoke of the “academic proletariat” as a threat to their authority, whether of the monarchic state or its socialist opposition.58 Pinn alternatively rejected and was rejected by both. Agnes Wabnitz Agnes Wabnitz (1841–1894) built her reputation as a secularist leader by instigating a drawn-out feud with the government through anticlerical provocation, a technique mastered by Bruno Wille and Adolph Hoffmann. Unlike these two, however, Wabnitz was not able to manage her anti-authoritarian aggression, and her conflict with the state escalated to an actual martyrdom. Rather than return to jail to complete a ten-month sentence for blasphemy and lèse-majesté, Wabnitz committed suicide in August 1894. Her case is fascinating, because she and the state struggled not just over control of her person and her actions, but over her very biography and psychology. Each offered different readings of her anticlerical violence and her self-destructiveness. Agnes Wabnitz was born in 1841 within the Protestant minority of the confessionally and ethnically mixed town of Gleiwitz in the southeasternmost tip of the German Reich near Kattowitz.59 Her comfortable childhood in the 57 58

59

Ulrich von Alemann et al. (eds.), Intellektuelle und Sozialdemokratie (Opladen: Leske Budrich, 2000), 54–55. The Kaiser declared in 1890 that the “Abiturientenproletariat” comprised “of so-called hunger candidates, namely journalists, [who are] in many cases degenerated grammar school students, are a danger for us.” Quoted in Scherer, Literaten, 33. The first mention of a religious experience in Wabnitz’s biography relates to the confessional mix of Gleiwitz. As a young girl, she had been saved from drowning by a Jew. To celebrate this event her parents erected a cross on the canal bank and many Roman Catholics came to the dedication ceremony: “Myself Protestant, the kind rescuer Mosaic, and for both of us the Roman Catholics offered up praise to the unknown God! That has become a symbol for me. My soul later ruminated on all three confessions until it finally found peace in the views of our Free

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liberal atmosphere of her family’s large guesthouse ended abruptly at the age of fifteen, when her father died and the family was plunged into poverty. Removed from school, both she and her brother had to assume working-class professions (seamstress and mechanic, respectively). She remained unmarried all her life. After several years of employment as a nanny on estates in Russian Poland, Wabnitz took up residence with her brother in northern Berlin and resumed work as a seamstress. During the 1880s she was active in the SPD and by 1885 had become a leading women’s labor organizer and advocate of women’s suffrage.60 A police raid of Wabnitz’s residence in 1888 discovered three publications that the reporting officer found suspicious: Heinrich Heine’s Wintermärchen, the “Antizyllabus” (a popular satire of Catholic teachings) and the “Program of the SPD,”61 works that speak to the combination of the idealism, anticlericalism and socialism that marked her career as a public agitator. According to available records, Wabnitz’s secularist agitation predated her work in unions. When she and her brother joined the Free Religious Congregation in Berlin in September 1879 neither was “noted” by the police as a Social Democrat.62 Her first recorded public acts of political opposition were more secularist-democratic than socialistic, beginning with a pacifist speech given on “Sedan Day” 1880 and a commentary on The Conventional Lies of our Civilization, a bestselling attack on organized religion by Austrian freethinker Max Nordau. According to her biographer, with a third speech, on the “Ideas of King and God,” Wabnitz discovered the combination of themes that “unleashed . . . the first storm of excitement from her audience” but also proved to be the cause of her later downfall.63 Although she appears in police records as a discussant in the meetings of the Free Religious Congregation, as an autodidact she was probably not

60

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Religious Congregation.” Wabnitz repeatedly made philosemitic comments during her public speaking and, according to Glogau, attracted a significant Jewish following. Bertha Glogau, Agnes Wabnitz: Eine Frauenstimme aus der Bourgeoisie (Berlin: A. Hoffmann, 1894), 12, 34. Police files note that Wabnitz spoke at various meetings in 1885, where she demanded equal rights and suffrage for women, as well as the eight-hour work day. In that year she also planned a “workers’ quarters” (Arbeiterstube) with the division of income and received her first jail sentence for insulting someone. In 1886 she began to organize women’s labor associations and formed support associations for sick women in 1888. LAB A Br. Pr. 030, 14127, p. 1. The freethinker and democrat Friedrich Hermann Krasser wrote the poem “Anti-Syllabus” in 1870 on the occasion of the papal infallibility decree and in reference to the earlier “syllabus errorum.” It was hugely popular among socialist workers and the SPD sold 60,500 copies in 1872–76. Under the “Socialist Laws” it was put on the police index of forbidden works. See Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion, 79–81. Mention of the police search in LAB A Br. Pr. 030, 14127, p. 1. Throughout the police files on the FRC, police officials regularly placed a red crayon checkmark or the phrase “notiert” next to the names of socialists. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15042, unpag. Glogau, Wabnitz, 23.

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considered educated enough to give Sunday lectures there. She saw herself as one who gathered learning from venerated experts and distributed it lower down in the radiating hierarchy of popular science. She related her own experiences as a pupil at the Humboldt Academy to supporters of the Berlin Workers’ Education School in 1894, as an example of what popular science education should provide for workers. Through the Humboldt Academy she had acquired enough knowledge to give talks at the Ethical Society, the Workers’ Education School and numerous workers’ associations on subjects such as “the activity of the brain and the five senses” and “the woman in historical and scientific development.”64 Wabnitz’s message of moral transformation through education and the eradication of economic, clerical and political domination attracted the Berlin writer Bertha Glogau, a bourgeois feminist who followed Wabnitz for several months and gathered information for a biography that Adolph Hoffmann published soon after Wabnitz’s death. Although intent on making out of Wabnitz a prophet and martyr of female emancipation,65 Glogau’s biography nonetheless provides a rich document for an analysis of the interaction of Wabnitz’s moralism and anticlericalism. Its essential facts are corroborated by extensive police observation reports and newspaper articles. According to Glogau, Wabnitz identified the death of the father (and her subsequent impoverishment) as the key event that drove her to political activism and consciousness: As a child, Agnes had prayed to the “dear God” of the Protestants, and with the strange repetition of always the same thing: give me understanding! “Indeed, I experienced the answer to this prayer,” she told me. “Soon after the death of my father we lost house and fortune, and the understanding that I had always desired was suddenly there.”66

This statement points to a symbolic exchange through which Wabnitz endowed the suffering caused by the loss of her father with meaning. In exchange for her sacrificed childhood, Wabnitz gained “understanding” (Verstand), which was a power of empathy with all those who also suffered. Without this experience of suffering, Wabnitz claims she would have remained “foolish” and continued to seek understanding from the wrong source, from God. From this derived her special claim to leadership: neither the “foolish” bourgeoisie nor those who had been born into suffering had her special power

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From November 1893 to January 1894 police observed Wabnitz for a total of 18 days. On 11 of these days, she gave popular-scientific or social critical talks to organizations in the socialist milieu. The police report of January 24, 1894 concludes that she appeared to earn her living from the money gathered at these meetings. LAB A Br. Pr. 030, 14127, p. 92. Glogau claimed Wabnitz was the herald of an age of female redeemers. Glogau, Wabnitz, 4, 39. Ibid., 12.

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of empathy.67 Also buried in this quotation is the notion that Christianity needed to be sacrificed to reveal a natural religion of humanity. This could well have been taken from the religious philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, whom she purportedly read “every night” as her one “spiritual master.”68 Wabnitz responded to her structurally weak position as a single woman in a patriarchal society with a highly rigid sense of moral order. She demanded to be treated with utmost respect. While in Poland she criticized one employer for mistreating his servants, and twice stood up to defend the honor of Germany. She quit one post when the Polish estate owner named his dog “Bismarck,” and when another employer said at a party that “Everything that is German belongs to the swine,” she threw a spoon in his face.69 The identification of her own honor with that of the German nation was called into question when she moved to the capital of the recently unified country. In two separate incidents, she felt that the Berlin police impugned her moral reputation, once by suggesting that she had illegitimate children and once by failing to press charges against a student who had insulted her.70 Secularism and socialism provided the narratives through which she could explain her disappointment in a state authority that did not uphold the moral order. Corresponding to her moral rigorism, Wabnitz maintained an austere appearance. An 1885 police report characterized Wabnitz “in her entire demeanor as a prototype of a female existence broken down under privation and overwork.” Against the scorn heaped on Wabnitz by the “bourgeois press” for an unfeminine appearance, Glogau considered her asceticism an essential aspect of what made her attractive to workers (see Figure 4.1).71 Wabnitz achieved some local notoriety for her work championing the rights of waitresses. She was concerned with their sexual exploitation, which she considered the greatest form of moral pollution. Her public advocacy of strict morality often led Wabnitz into aggressively anticlerical and even scatological statements. Spurred on by audiences, on more than one occasion she dispensed with theoretically grounded socialist and secularist argument and simply equated the authorities with signs of pollution – filth, excrement and sexual impurity. In the audience discussion following a lecture given by Carl Pinn on “Conventional Lies” in January 1892, Wabnitz compared the “church with a pub or even with a toilet,” because they have “the same origin.”72 Although her biographer attributed these “small mistakes, which she committed innocently,” to the difficulty facing a single female autodidact voicing her viewpoint in a public space dominated by educated men, Wabnitz’s logical

67 68

Unlike her mother, who had risen from poverty and humbly accepted her return to it, Wabnitz stated that her experience of early wealth made her “arrogant.” Ibid., 12. 69 70 71 72 Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 18–20. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 27.

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slippages point to a systematic aggression towards authorities.73 At a speech given at a meeting of waitresses in January 1892 on “the moral standpoint of the bourgeois society,” she attacked the police and the churches for failing to prevent the sexual exploitation of waitresses. In her argumentation these authorities became polluted with the vice that they failed to prevent. It throws a peculiar light on the [public] treatment of morality, when the police quietly watch as music gaily rings out of a ladies’ bar [Damenkneipe] in the Landsberger Street during church services, or when in the same street a fourteen-year-old boy carries around a placard with the words, ‘8 wenches, fiery Poles serve the guests, etc.’ Morality is the highest deity. The Christian church rejects illegitimate children, but itself preaches that Christ was born outside marriage. . . . In the pub in Wörth Street 2, the waitresses serve in clothing composed very nearly of a single straw. There were portraits of the Kaiser and Kaiserin in this pub, and no one intervened. With that these portraits have no other value than to hang in such pubs. Thus, one should stick patriotism and religion where they belong.74

These statements were protocolled by an observing Berlin police officer and used to successfully prosecute Wabnitz on charges of lèsemajesté and blasphemy, for which she received a ten-month prison sentence in July 1892. Just as the violation of her moral reputation had prompted Wabnitz’s initial turn to political opposition, state repression inspired her to further acts of aggression and auto-aggression. She ignored court summons, and refused to stand at her arraignment “because I don’t believe in the validity of the oath.”75 Upon imprisonment in July 1892, Wabnitz went on hunger strike, because, as she told her lawyer, the Social Democratic city councilor Arthur Stadthagen, “she was convinced that the existence of prisons was itself an injustice.”76 With her hunger strike, Wabnitz demonstrated that she intended to use the prison itself as a stage for her struggle with the state. The hunger strike was historically a particularly female form of resistance and was later adopted by suffragettes in the UK and USA. It corresponded to the ascetic selfrenunciation that was part of her public persona and could be traced back to

73

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Police and others repeatedly stated that Wabnitz’s speeches were difficult to understand. In an article in the conservative Protestant Reichsbote (no. 189, August 15, 1894), Prof. Nathusius reported his frustration at having listened for two and a half hours to a confusing presentation by Wabnitz. While he appreciated her opposition to prostitution, schnapps and the disorder of housewives, he was alarmed by the way she mixed biblical exegesis with anatomy, spoke about sex in an ugly way, and attacked the church. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 14127, pp. 58, 75. Berliner Tageblatt, March 17 and April 12, 1892, as quoted in Klaus Kühnel, Freiheit du siegst: Leben und Sterben der Agnes Wabnitz (Berlin: Trafo, 2008), 121, 126. Vorwärts, July 20, 92. Following an earlier arrest for failure to appear in court, Wabnitz stated “for me the laws of the state are not laws.” Berliner Tageblatt, April 14, 1892.

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monastic practices for the “spiritualization” of the body.77 However, in Wabnitz’s case, turning her body into a weapon of struggle also knotted more closely together anti-authoritarian aggression and auto-aggression. For, although the hunger strike highlights the moral superiority of the prisoner who places her cause above her own life, it also forces the state to further pollute her moral sphere by entering her body. Wabnitz was taken to the Charité hospital and force-fed through a tube. The medical staff collaborated with the police by offering a counternarrative to Wabnitz’s own self-staging as an intellectual and activist. A professor of neurology co-authored a report that targeted each of her fields of agitation and described them as symptoms of a mental illness. Regarding her science popularization, the report noted that although she told them of her “respect for science” and preference for books on physics, chemistry and economics, Wabnitz admitted to not understanding all the content of lectures she had attended: “In any case she does not have a grasp of the essence of these disciplines.” The doctors recorded that she stated her disbelief in the “Mosaic God” but then called Jesus the son of Yahweh. Likewise, she first spoke of machines as “the source of all unhappiness, but a moment later as a wonderful invention of the human spirit that one must be proud of.” The report concluded that “Wabnitz suffers from a pathologically exaggerated opinion of herself that – supported by a faulty understanding of textbooks and lectures – has led to the formation of pronounced delusions (intervention against injustice in the entire world.)”78 This diagnosis of insanity allowed police to transfer her to a mental asylum, and the state attorney began proceedings to legally incapacitate her (Entmündigung) on grounds of insanity, which would have made the “unmarried Wabnitz” a ward of the state and enabled the state, as her guardian, to lock her away permanently to prevent her political agitation. Wabnitz’s lawyer urged her to end her hunger strike to demonstrate her sanity. Yet, instead of backing down, Wabnitz committed a further act of autoaggression and attempted suicide on November 24, 1892 by swallowing a large number of pins and sewing needles. She underwent an emergency operation and was granted a temporary release from custody on December 12, 1892. After a new medical report stated that she was sane, Wabnitz’s appeal was reopened; however, the original conviction was upheld, which meant that she

77

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The historical literature finds that this particularly female form of resistance had been pioneered by Russian anarchists in the 1880s; however, Wabnitz’s biography claims she had already practiced hunger strike in Poland, i.e. in the 1870s. Glogau, Wabnitz, 16–17. On fasting and “holy anorexia”: Christina von Braun, Versuch über den Schwindel: Religion, Schrift, Bild, Geschlecht (Zurich: Pendo, 2001), 395–97, 413. Report of August 25, 1892, reprinted in Kühnel, Wabnitz, 175–77.

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had to complete her ten-month sentence.79 This court decision set the stage for the last act of her life. Although police expected that the SPD was collecting money to send Wabnitz into exile abroad, Wabnitz herself made statements to the press indicating that she intended to die in jail.80 On the day she was to report to prison (August 28, 1894) she took poison on the tomb of the “unknown man” in Berlin Friedrichsfelde, where the barricade fighters of 1848 were buried. According to the report in the Freisinnige Zeitung, police found her with red flowers in her hair and on her dress and the note “I die for my brothers.” Another suicide note left with a friend read, “I am in the cemetery of the March dead, in our freedom acre [Freiheitsacker],” which contained a final linguistic trace of her inversion of the church order, as “Freiheitsacker” is a twist on the traditional term for cemetery, “Gottesacker” (God’s acre).81 The struggle to control Wabnitz’s narrative continued after her death. The police prohibited a public procession and allowed only official delegations of limited numbers to lay wreaths at her graveside. Yet, even at three delegates per factory and organization allowed, some 2,500 persons attended the ceremony officiated by Ewald Vogtherr in the cemetery of the Free Religious Congregation. One of Germany’s top socialist leaders, Ignaz Auer, laid a wreath “of enormous proportions” in the name of his party, while the editor of Der Sozialist, Gustav Landauer, laid a wreath with a black band and the inscription: “To the selfless fighter for freedom! From several Berlin anarchists.” The socialist press reported that with 630 to 700 wreaths, Wabnitz had received more wreaths than Wilhelm I upon his death six year earlier. Vorwärts estimated that 40,000–45,000 people waited outside the gates of the cemetery to be allowed entry after the ceremony.82 Conclusion Wabnitz’s story is a fitting conclusion to this investigation of the secularist intellectual. It serves as a counterpoint to the story of Bruno Wille, told in the previous chapter. Both Wille and Wabnitz launched themselves as moral heroes in dramatic encounters with the confessional state. Wille was able to 79 80

81 82

Letter from Stadthagen and newspaper report on attempted suicide, reprinted in Kühnel, Wabnitz, 179–82, 187. The Berliner Zeitung (August 8, 1894) reported that Wabnitz threatened to commit suicide through hunger in jail and said it could be determined after her death whether she had done anything wrong. On police speculations about an impending escape into exile, see the observation report from January 24, 1894, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 14127, p. 92. Freisinnige Zeitung, August 30, 1894; Glogau, Wabnitz, 38. Märkische Volksstimme, September 15, 1894, and Vorwärts, September 2 and 4, 1894. Berliner Neuesten Nachrichten estimated the crowd of mourners at 60,000 to 80,000 persons. Landauer quotation in Kühnel, Wabnitz, 245, 284–89.

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outsmart the police and play them for fools, selling his story all along the way. Whereas Wille’s self-staging was lampooned as frivolous by some, Wabnitz’s encounter with the police was deadly serious. The limelight of the public stage enticed her to blasphemy and other expressions of anti-authoritarian aggression that proved self-destructive. Yet, with each step along her path, including her own suicide, she struggled with the police for control of her self-staging. She carefully cultivated her image as fighter, moralist and female martyr. In the summer of 1894, shortly before her death, she directed a series of allegorical tableaux vivants at the socialist Ethical Society. For herself she chose to play the part of “a poor, ragged woman, broken down under the burden she is shouldering,” which corresponded to the role she was playing in public.83 A day after her burial, police found a handwritten placard on her grave that read “At your grave the separately marching proletariat was united again.”84 Wabnitz was able to appeal to the supporters of the anarchistic Independent Socialists as well as to the SPD party hierarchy. Like the Independents who had emerged from the Jungen, she pushed for revolutionary confrontation with the establishment with tactics implicitly at odds with the party line. Yet, unlike Wille and Pinn, she did not apply her anti-authoritarian aggression against the party itself. She insisted on party unity and hence told a meeting of the Independents in 1893 that if Social Democracy remained their only target of attack “she could only describe them as conservative anarchists.”85 Whereas Wille ultimately chose to become a free-floating writer and organizational impresario, whose charismatic appeal to workers rested in challenging the state in the name of higher morality and Freethought, Wabnitz managed to stage herself as a martyr for both secularism and socialism.

83 84 85

LAB A Br. Pr. 030, 14127, p. 1; Glogau, Wabnitz, 32. Gustav Landauer wrote a eulogy in Der Sozialist, 5/4 (September 7, 1895). Police report on the meeting of the Association of Independent Socialists, July 10, 1893, LAB A Pr. Br. 030, 15457, p. 354.

5

Workers and Worldview

What do workers think and believe? For much of the twentieth century, Marxists asked this question together with a second one: What should workers think and believe? The discrepancy between the answers tossed up additional questions. Looking towards the future, they asked: how can we bring workers to think what they should think? Looking back, they asked: Did lack of consciousness of themselves as a class result in defeats? How Marxists answered the last question depended to a large extent on their political camp. Politicians and intellectuals close to the Communist Party read the party line backwards and chastened past workers and political activists for any deviations from the theoretical path laid down by Lenin and his successors. For Western Marxists confronting the continual failure of socialist revolution, the essential strength of capitalism lay in its ability to lead the workers into false consciousness.1 Coming out of the New Left of the 1960s, historians such as E. P. Thompson and Jacques Rancière criticized fellow Marxist scholars who discounted aspects of worker culture that did not conform to normative understandings of class consciousness.2 Their call for the empirical study of working-class intellectual production coincided with the emergence of new cultural and social histories. In his 1967 study of ideological disputes within pre-1914 German Social Democracy, historian Hans-Joseph Steinberg arrived at a simple method of measuring the discrepancy between party theory, on the one hand, and the mental world of members of the working class, on the other. He examined the borrowing habits of the users of the many workers’ libraries that had been set up by unions and local social-democratic party branches throughout the industrial centers of Germany. Although the libraries kept a 1

2

This legacy can be traced in the work of Frankfurt School scholars from the 1920s to the 1960s: Max Horkheimer, “The Impotence of the German Working Class (1927),” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes and Martin Jay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 316–17; Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society (London: Sphere, 1968). Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).

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good stock of socialist theory, workers tended to avoid this genre. Instead, when they read nonfiction, they most often checked out works of natural science.3 Steinberg concluded that even the most active socialists were confounded by Marxist party literature. Instead “socialist workers won the certainty that they stood in harmony with progressive forces and ideas from materialistic educational tracts.” The claim that popular natural science, rather than Marxism, empowered workers to take self-guided roles as political actors in prewar Germany has generated significant debate among historians.4 As we wade into this debate, we want to add a new question, which is to ask after the role not just of natural science, but of natural science in its secularist embedding. After all, Steinberg found that the preferred science authors read by socialist workers were those who packaged popular science within a sharply anticlerical, monist-materialist worldview, such as Arthur Dodel-Port, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Ludwig Büchner. This chapter explores how workers experienced the relationship of historical and natural-scientific materialism. It begins by surveying party debates prior to the First World War on the relationship between these two materialisms, both on the level of theory formation and on the practical level of worker education. Then, it turns to the place of natural science and secularism in the lives of socialist workers. Worker autobiographies offer a valuable source for understanding the role of secularism in narratives of socialist becoming. Moving from the anecdotal to the general, the chapter then examines the place of secularism in the broad campaign of worker education launched by the SPD in 1906. Using Leipzig as a case study, it evaluates the secularist commitments of leading functionaries of the new educational institutions and asks what impact their teaching had on younger socialists, such as the aspiring working-class functionary who played an exceptional role in the future Communist Party, Walter Ulbricht. The final section addresses women workers as a subset of the socialist movement, for whom natural science

3

4

After novels, the first choice of Berlin metalworkers and woodworkers and Leipzig union members around 1910 was natural science. Statistics for other libraries varied. Comparative statistics for Dresden reveal that natural science was the only category of book that workers were more likely to check out than middle- and upper-class library patrons in the 1880s and 1890s. The one work of socialist literature that workers favored was August Bebel’s futuristic utopia Woman and Socialism of 1879. Dieter Langewiesche and Klaus Schönhoven, “Arbeiterbibliotheken und Arbeiterlektüre im Wilhelminischen Deutschland,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 16 (1976): 168, 170, 176, 183, 200–02. Hans-Joseph Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie: Zur Ideologie der Partei vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hannover: Literatur und Zeitgeschichte, 1967), 140–42. A study that argues instead that there was a steady trickling down of Marxist knowledge to workers: Andrew G. Bonnell, Red Banners, Books and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 128–50.

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played an empowering role, but only in conjunction with monistic worldview and secularist politics. Two Materialisms: Natural-scientific and Historical The conceit that socialism was not merely a political program but a science of society emerged, according to labor historian Shlomo Na’aman, out of the struggles that Marx and Engels waged with rival socialists. They deployed the phrase “scientific socialism” to align their theory with the allure of science and set it against the “utopian” socialism of the early nineteenth century.5 They also deployed it on occasion against the natural-scientific materialism promoted in the 1850s by the likes of Karl Vogt, Ludwig Büchner and Jacob Moleschott. Engels denigrated this variety of materialism as “vulgar” because it supposed that all aspects of social life and nature could be simply ascertained from empirical observation, a correspondence theory of truth shared by most nineteenth-century positivists. For Marx and Engels, these materialists lacked a dialectical understanding of social relations in which knowledge was itself a product and reflection of class struggle.6 Marx and Engels were less concerned than their early twentieth-century followers about how “scientific socialism” was to be imparted to the working class. However, two elements of their thought did shape educational debates in the German SPD. The first lies in the relationship of knowledge to revolutionary practice. Marx had famously criticized Ludwig Feuerbach for supposing that truth was a sufficient trigger to human liberation. For Marx, accurate social theory would be produced out of the revolutionary struggle. Wilhelm Liebknecht made much the same point in a speech to the Leipzig educational association in 1872, when he told workers not to be satisfied with the slogan offered by liberals that “knowledge is power.” Although knowledge of the world was an essential part of the revolutionary struggle, only the struggle itself could break the bourgeoisie’s monopoly over education. Thus while “knowledge is power,” it must also be combined with the understanding that “power is knowledge,” for “without power no knowledge!”7

5

6

7

Shlomo Na’aman, Gibt es einen ‘Wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus’? Marx, Engels und das Verhältnis zwischen sozialistischen Intellektuellen und den Lernprozessen der Arbeiterbewegung (Hannover: SOAK, 1979). Frederick Gregory, “Scientific versus Dialectical Materialism: A Clash of Ideologies in Nineteenth-Century German Radicalism,” Isis, 68/2 (1 June 1977): 206–23. On the correspondence theory of truth, see Frederick Gregory, “Proto-monism in German Philosophy, Theology, and Science, 1800–1845,” in monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, ed. Todd H. Weir (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 45–69. Liebknecht quoted in Sabine Hake, The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany 1863–1933 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 160.

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The true relationship between education and action in producing class consciousness was debated by party leaders in the decade before the First World War. For Rosa Luxemburg, the lesson of the 1905 Russian Revolution was that participation in revolutionary action had produced a strong worker consciousness and knowledge of social mechanisms. It revealed that the “enlightened German worker,” hitherto seen as the most advanced in Europe, had a “class consciousness implanted by the social democrats” that was “theoretical and latent.” She thus encouraged support of the mass strike, as a political action that would push the workers into spontaneous generation of active revolutionary knowledge. “Six months of a revolutionary period will complete the work of training these as yet unorganized masses, which ten years of public demonstrations and distributing leaflets would be unable to do.”8 Heinrich Ströbel, another left-wing party intellectual, proposed to solve the problem of worker passivity in a different way. Class position only made workers “receptive for socialist worldview,” but did not guarantee that they would move from “shadowy political instinct to modern class consciousness.” This required the training of critical thought though education and propaganda.9 The second legacy that Marx left the socialist movement was a corpus of theoretical writings that was so difficult to penetrate that it remained largely an elite knowledge. Natural-scientific materialism was, by contrast, quite simple to grasp and when it was combined with monism it could deliver a powerful worldview of immense appeal. Oscar A. H. Schmitz, a member of the Bohemian scene in Munich’s Schwabing district, compared Marx with Wilhelm Ostwald, the chairman of the Monist League, in 1914: “Whereas Marx’s chain of logic is so convoluted that it has probably not been unraveled by even one of the millions of workers who supposedly subscribe to his teaching,” monism possesses “a remarkable clarity and simplicity.” “The effect on the masses is the same: Marx is too dark to be easily verified, Ostwald is too light, so that the readers forget all the difficulties that he cleverly conjures away.”10 The elitism and arrogance with which Schmitz looks down at Ostwald’s monism as the “worldview of the semi-educated,” is the typical liberal strategy for discounting workers’ claim to possess Bildung.11

8

9 10 11

Quoted in Jukka Gronow, On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky’s Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 174. From an article in Die Neue Zeit, 1910/11, quoted in Frank Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland: Ein historischer Überblick (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1976), 273. Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Die Weltanschauung der Halbgebildeten (Munich: G. Müller, 1914). A writer in the revisionist Sozialistische Monatshefte concluded that only very few workers had the educational background necessary to penetrate the main works of socialist theory. Josef Kliche, “Arbeiterlektüre,” Sozialistische Monatshefte, 15/5 (1911): 315–19.

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Although Schmitz saw these two worldviews as fundamentally different, socialist leaders rarely did. Franz Petrich, a metalworker turned union organizer and politician, argued that the value of working-class knowledge was not to be determined by bourgeois experts, but rather by a practical litmus test: did it empower workers by giving them a firm intellectual footing? “If knowledge is to be power, then it is always a specific, fundamental knowledge. For the proletarian class fighter, the most important is knowledge of the processes of development of human society.”12 Thus, paradoxically, if Marxist theory discouraged workers, it would fail this test. Party educators recommended to worker librarians that they steer workers away from difficult works such as Marx’s Das Kapital and in its place offer them simple summaries written by party intellectuals Karl Kautsky, Herman Gorter and Julian Borchardt.13 In his review of Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital, the socialist-secularist teacher Otto Jenssen faulted her and another leading theorist Rudolf Hilferding for borrowing too much from Marx, which made their works impenetrable to nearly all workers. He cited leading Austrian socialist Otto Bauer, who stated that Whoever has seen our workers trying after nine or ten hours of physical work to acquire something of the immense wealth of our intellectual culture, has seen how they struggle with the fatigue that wants to close their eyes, how they wrestle with the dreadful limitations of their poor educational backgrounds, . . . how they endeavor to grasp the laws of society without ever having heard of the laws of nature, ever having learned about the laws of mechanics, . . . [that person] will not venture to hope to ever be able to make our culture the property of these exploited human beings.14

For most socialist educators, evolutionary biology was not a threat to historical materialism, but a stepping stone on the path to socialist theory. An example of this can be taken from Eduard David’s 1907 step-by-step guide for transforming inspired working-class socialists into public agitators. The author, a revisionist Reichstag deputy, recommended that after studying German grammar, workers should read the classics of materialist-monist popular science as a first step in their education.15 Natural science imparted to workers certainty of the 12

13

14

15

After an apprenticeship as a galvanizer, Petrich (1889–1945) joined the SPD and the metalworkers’ union in 1910. He studied at the Humboldt Academy in Berlin. Franz Petrich, “Bürgerliche Volks- oder sozialistische Arbeiterbibliotheken?” Der Bibliothekar, 3/5 (March 1913): 564–65. In Der Bibliothekar in 1909, Julian Borchardt argued that librarians should not give workers Das Kapital at first, but his own brochures as a means of approaching Marxism. “Einführung in den wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus,” Der Bibliothekar, 1/5 (1909): 37. Otto Jenssen, “Review of Rosa Luxemburg: Akkumulation Des Kapitals,” Der Bibliothekar, 4/20 (April 1913). Translation taken from Otto Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, trans. Joseph O’Donnell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 87. Eduard David was also a member of the Deutscher Mutterschutzbund led by monist Helene Stöcker. Steinberg, Sozialismus, 140–41.

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truth of scientific socialism and evolutionary theory bolstered their belief in the unfolding of history, in which “a progression, a forward path in the direction of higher order is not to be missed . . . despite all the deficiencies, errors and defeats.”16 The idea of a sharp distinction between the two materialisms is furthermore anachronistic because leading Marxist theorists assimilated elements of natural-scientific positivism. In 1870s, Engels took up the pen to fight the pernicious influence of Eugen Dühring, a Berlin private docent, who was captivating many young socialists with his depiction of a great war between radical materialist science and clerically infested dogmatism in the academy. Engels’s response, “Herr Dühring’s Revolution in Science,” which became known as Anti-Dühring, put historical materialism into a simple formulation and became one of the most widely read and influential texts of socialist theory.17 But rather than reject natural science, Engels sought to integrate it into the dialectical method. By proposing a historical understanding of nature, Engels opened the door to seeing also social history as part of a natural process. Such fusions of natural and social science appeared on both sides of the revisionism controversy of the turn of the century, which was sparked when Eduard Bernstein and others argued that socialism could emerge through a peaceful development towards a higher order of social organization akin to biological evolution. In his defense of party orthodoxy, Kautsky did not object to the connection drawn between biology and sociology, but to what he saw as the revisionists’ false understanding of Darwin. Both social and biological evolution, he argued, took place through revolutions.18 In his popular interpretation of Marx, the Dutch socialist Herman Gorter named achieving a worldview one of the loftiest aims of socialism, for which workers should use a combination of historical and scientific materialism.19 In the same vein, Käte Duncker, an activist in the Leipzig workers’ education movement, claimed in 1901 that many sciences “flow into the sea of socialist worldview” including – alongside economics, social policy and the history of socialism – the natural-scientific theory of evolution.20 In short, the opposition

16 17

18 19 20

Eduard David, Referenten-Führer: Anleitung für sozialistische Redner (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1919), 24. In his introduction from 1924, Hermann Duncker called Engels’s Anti-Dühring, “unsurpassed in its pithy and nonetheless clear presentation of scientific communism.” Friedrich Engels, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (Berlin: Internationaler ArbeiterVerlag, 1930), 3. On the struggle with Dühring, see Weir, Fourth Confession, 165–66. Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1916), 12–20. Herman Gorter, Der historische Materialismus (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1910), 13, 17. Käte Duncker, “Bildungsbestrebungen und Sozialdemokratie,” Der Freie Bund: Organ für genossenschaftliche Arbeit auf dem Gebiet der freien Volksbildung, 3/4 (April 1901).

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of natural-scientific and dialectical materialism was more of a problem for later historians than for the socialists engaged in worker education prior to the First World War. The SPD took practical steps to support education in both forms of materialism, when it set a new course on worker education in 1906. At the Mannheim party congress in September, two former schoolteachers, Heinrich Schulz and Clara Zetkin, argued that given the party’s tremendous growth, it could no longer rely on political activity to deliver theoretical instruction and required instead a systematic and professional approach to worker education. Indeed, the first years of the twentieth century had seen tremendous growth of the socialist movement. Party membership expanded significantly; in Leipzig it doubled from 811 party members in 1900 to 1,680 in 1904. There was rapid growth in the Ruhr mining region. In Bochum 3 percent of eligible voters were SPD party members in 1900, but by 1907 the figure was 11 percent. Union membership also grew in these years, rising from 5.7 to 29.4 percent of Ruhr miners between 1900 and 1905.21 Following the Mannheim congress of 1906, the party executive formed a Central Education Committee, which oversaw the professionalization of workers’ libraries, the promotion of youth literature, and the creation of local educational committees. In 1907 the Committee launched a national program of “scientific wandering courses” to extend popular education to workers on the model of the liberal GVV (see Table 5.1). The most prominent “wandering speakers” were Otto Rühle, a Saxon schoolteacher who called the SPD a “movement for culture,” whose mission was to break the monopoly over science and make it the common property of the entire society,22 and Hermann Duncker, who, like Rühle, later played a leading role in the formation of the Spartacus League and the Communist Party. Statistics gathered by the Central Education Committee show that natural science formed the most popular subject matter of these “wandering courses.” Of the nearly 30,000 participants in the 1913/14 season, 9,344 attended courses in natural science.23 Historians Dieter Langewiesche and Klaus Schönhoven argued that the work of the Education Committee was rather ineffective, citing poor

21 22 23

Stephen H. F. Hickey, Workers in Imperial Germany: The Miners of the Ruhr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 253. Quoted in Frank Heidenreich, Arbeiterkulturbewegung und Sozialdemokratie in Sachsen vor 1933 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1995), 54. Another report found that 41,834 listeners attended 174 courses in natural science, while the next most popular category, “The Erfurt Programm” had 20,625 attendees for 116 courses. Although the institution pushed “National Economy” with 143 courses, it had relatively fewer listeners (17,010). Günter Scharfenberg, Die politische Bildungsarbeit der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Fachbereich Politische Wissenschaft der FU, 1984), 125, 131.

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Table 5.1 Development of the scientific “wandering courses” in Germany24 Year

Courses

Lectures

Participants

of which women

1907/08 08/09 09/10 10/11 11/12 12/13 Totals

44 57 128 122 128 206 685

323 419 682 733 654 941 3,751

5,493 8,969 24,360 21.529 19,844 29,836 110,031

200 666 1,775 2,759 2,247 4,754 12,401

Table 5.2 Educational institutions reported by the union cartels25

Common libraries Reading rooms Education committees Youth committees

1905

1910

1912

252 39 n.a. n.a.

496 71 292 293

581 98 429 415

attendance and criticism of the leadership.26 Nonetheless, similar levels of reported growth were found in the educational efforts being undertaken by unions’ educational organizations (see Table 5.2). It is worthwhile to contrast the impact of the “wandering speakers” with another, much better-known educational initiative of 1906, namely the Party School (Parteischule) in Berlin. The Party School was staffed by well-known party intellectuals, such as Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Heinrich Schulz, who taught history, law and Marxism but no natural science. Unlike the “wandering speakers” or the nearby Workers’ Education School, which reached 110,031 and 15,552 workers respectively between 1906 and 1914, the Party School graduated only 141 students in the same time period. The Party School trained a small elite of future party functionaries in the complexities of Marxist historical materialism, while the former trained a broad swath of rankand-file socialists in readily accessible natural-scientific materialism.27 24 25 26 27

Ibid., 127. Zehnter internationaler Bericht über die Gewerkschaftsbewegung 1912 (Berlin, 1913). Langewiesche and Schönhoven, “Arbeiterbibliotheken und Arbeiterlektüre,” 144. A rosier picture is painted by Olbrich, Erwachsenenbildung, 120–22. Heidenreich, Arbeiterkulturbewegung, 85. Figures on Arbeiterbildungsschule from Olbrich, Erwachsenenbildung, 113.

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Worker Education: How Secularist Was It? Having established the central role natural science played in worker education in the socialist culture, the next question is, to what extent was its provision embedded in a secularist framework? Having already examined the Berlin Workers’ Education School, which emerged out of initiatives of Free Religionists in 1890, let us turn to the new party initiatives. Certainly, the leading figures of the Wanderkurse of 1906/07 revealed secularist motivations. In an essay written in 1900, Hermann Duncker had declared socialist worldview to be a religion, then gushed in monistic vein about his own “declaration of faith” to “the infinity of being, to the chain of ever higher forms of existence,” which had begun when life first arose from “individual centers of unique tension in the enormous realm of inorganic material” and went on to peak in the form of the animal.28 Otto Rühle was a frequent speaker at Freethinkers’ associations and he, like Hermann and Käte Duncker, participated in numerous secularist organizations. All three became teachers at the Berlin Freethinkers’ Volkshochschule during the Weimar Republic.29 The presence of secularism was found in the popular natural-scientific literature recommended by SPD educators, which framed mechanistic explanations, particularly of Darwinist evolution, within a monistic worldview. Even Franz Mehring, the party intellectual most deeply opposed to the effort of secularist writers to bring their naturalist literature into the party, found strong words of praise for Ernst Haeckel’s monist writing as a “weapon in the class struggle,” an appreciation later echoed by Vladimir Lenin.30 Socialist educators generally only faulted publications that were too strongly anticlerical. Leaders of the workers’ library movement repeatedly complained in their journal Der Bibliothekar about the Pfaffenspiegel, a chronique scandaleuse of the Catholic Church written in 1845 that still regularly topped the list of “history” books checked out from many workers’ libraries in the early twentieth century. One contributor urged librarians to remove this scientifically bankrupt and misleading work from the shelves and noted that Anton Pannekoek’s brochure Religion and Socialism was one hundred times better. However, he or she concluded that, unfortunately, “in nearly every discussion with intelligent young comrades one perceives the impact of the study of this shoddy book.”31 When the Free Religious preacher and revisionist socialist Max Maurenbrecher published Biblical Stories in 1909, a scathing review in Der

28 29 30 31

SAPMO, Hermann Duncker papers, NY 4445, no. 20, p. 65; no. 21, p. 45. Der Atheist, 20/7 (July 1924): 89–90. Vladimir I. Lenin, “Materialismus und Empiriokritizismus,” in Werke, vol. xiv (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1974), 353. H. Farwig, “Heraus damit!,” Der Bibliothekar, 9 (Sept. 1912).

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Bibliothekar concluded that such secularist religious criticism led away from class struggle.32 The reviewer (A.P.), was likely Anton Pannekoek, the party’s leading voice on religious matters at the time and highly critical of secularist propaganda. Yet, this position was challenged a little over a year later by another writer in the same journal who argued that The worker feels instinctively that natural-scientific and religious enlightenment, which are so closely interrelated, contribute to his political emancipation, and thus all such warning speeches are pointless; books and lectures on this subject remain well loved by the worker. They give him the certainty in his struggle for a better position in life that he is not fighting a supernatural divine authority or power or providential fate, but merely human egotism, and that, at present, religion is purely a means to his subjugation.33

The letter writer concluded that, whereas a narrow segment of urban workers may have freed themselves from religion and arrived at stable worldview (Weltbild), “the masses still need great help here.”34 This dispute between a representative of the party line and someone who claimed to speak for or from worker experience, returns us to the question with which we began: what did workers think or believe? This is not an easy question to answer. We know from library reports that they read widely in the secularist literature. To explore what this literature actually meant to selfeducated socialist workers, we turn now to their autobiographies. Secularist Conversions in Worker Autobiographies Worker autobiography became a popular book genre in the first third of the twentieth century. These were not the works of ordinary workers, but rather of ambitious men and women, who wanted their lives to serve as didactic tales of self-improvement. Nonetheless, they offer a window on the subjective experience of workers with secularist literature and culture. The autobiographies very often followed an overarching narrative built around the transition from exploited worker to class-conscious fighter, and they pivoted around a moment of conversion, described as an emotional confrontation of the “old” and “new” worldview. Yet, the precipitating event of this conversion was generally not a confrontation with capitalism, but rather the break with Christianity.35 Agricultural laborer turned socialist Franz Lüth summarized his life as the 32

33 35

Review by A.P. (Anton Pannekoek?), Maurenbrecher, Biblischen Geschichte (Vorwärts), Der Bibliothekar, 1/8 (Nov. 1, 1909). Pannekoek contributed an article to this journal under his name in 1910. 34 “Neuere religionsgeschichtliche Literatur,” Der Bibliothekar, 3/1 (Jan. 1911): 228. Ibid. Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 39, 164; Wolfgang Emmerich, Proletarische Lebensläufe: Autobiographische

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transformation of a “superstitious boy who sought the status of a Herr Pastor” into a “thinking, ambitious man, a true priest, a fighter for the suffering subservient working people.”36 Some socialists even gave their autobiographies titles to underpin this transition. Max Hoelz, the communist dissident leader of several militant uprisings in the early 1920s, chose the title From White Cross to Red Flag, which referred to his prewar participation in a chastity order affiliated with the YMCA called the White Cross.37 Worker autobiographies frequently narrated conversion experiences around naturalistic monism rather than Marxism, and they often described secularist popular science as the source of their sudden illumination. In From Worshipper to Fighter, former clay miner and later journalist and SPD politician, Nikolaus Osterroth, related the sudden “shattering” of his Catholic faith upon reading Arnold Dodel-Port’s monist tract Moses oder Darwin? “An oppressive weight was lifted from my breast, the scales fell from my eyes, and I became a different person. Yes, Feuerbach turned out to be right: I changed from a candidate for the Beyond to a student of this world, from a supplicant to a capable worker.”38 Yet, we know from studies of Christian conversion that conversions themselves follow certain patterns contained in religious texts.39 Osterroth’s reference to St. Paul’s Damascus experience indicates that the language of Christian conversion was part of the cultural background of German workers and prepared them for the notion that socialism was a faith. Secularist worldview authors scripted for workers the narrative of conversion they were to experience, and similar to the revivalist tent preacher who called the sinner to repent, they often placed before the worker the stark choice of either/or, which is clearly communicated in Dodel-Port’s title Moses oder Darwin? Alwin Gerisch, a member of the SPD executive committee between 1890 and 1917, recalled the “greatest intellectual experience of his youth” as

36 37

38

39

Dokumente zur Entstehung der Zweiten Kultur in Deutschland, vol. ii (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975), 222–26. Kelly concludes that “For many workers, the conversion to Social Democracy had been preceded by the destruction of their traditional religious beliefs.” Alfred Kelly (ed.), The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 43. Maynes, Taking the Hard Road, 164. Hoelz interpreted his affiliation with the White Cross as a response to moral confusion about his sexual desires. During his six-month probation in the White Cross, Hoelz had to “confess” to his minister “nearly daily his sexual actions and thoughts.” Max Hoelz, Vom ‘Weißen Kreuz’ zur roten Fahne: Jugend-, Kampf- und Zuchthauserlebnisse (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg, 1984), 45. Nikolaus Osterroth, Vom Beter zum Kämpfer (Vorwärts Verlag, 1920), published in: Kelly (ed.), German Worker, 160–87. See also Georg Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie und Geschichte der frühen Arbeiterlebenserinnerungen (Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag, 1976). On worldview conversions in German Social Democracy, see Weir, “Däumig.” On the religious socialization of German workers, see Hölscher, Weltgericht oder Revolution.

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a two-part conversion that took place in the second year of his apprenticeship as a machinist. It began with his study of physics, which drew his thinking away “from the narrow circle of technical knowledge to the most distant celestial bodies, from whence it returned with conclusions that were not compatible with the worldview that had been hammered into us at school.” He concluded that if the universe was “ruled by eternal, iron laws, which allowed no exception and which had already been investigated by the human spirit,” then the anthropomorphic conception of the personal God was “a fantasy product of peoples and persons, who stood on the level of childish knowledge and thought.”40 The flaming light of this revelation then streamed into his understanding of the social world, making him ripe for a second revelation, which occurred following a chance encounter with Wilhelm Liebknecht’s Leipziger Volksstaat. “Never in my life had something caught hold of my deepest being like reading this newspaper. What were the hundreds of sermons, to which I had been forced to listen, compared to these articles, which illuminated the spirit with sunlit clarity! I felt as though the many chambers of my brain had suddenly sprung open, my spiritual horizon became immeasurably greater.” He described this as a truly religious experience that made him a new man: “now the new worldview that I had conquered for myself was given its extension and completion.”41 Shortly after this experience, Gerisch launched his career as a socialist journalist by publishing a newspaper article that criticized the religious instruction provided by his village pastor. Waiter Franz Bergg recalled the impact that joining the Hamburg Education Society and hearing lectures on natural science and history had upon his development: “My mental horizon expanded. My brain was as absorptive as a dry sponge. I wallowed in intellectual pleasure.” Here, as in so many worker autobiographies, the brain functions as a materialist metaphor for the self, a site of monist unity of matter and spirit, where consciousness interacted with worldview, and where accumulation led to transformation. Bergg subsequently began to enjoy theater (tragedy, not comedy, he emphasized) and art museums, and engaged in learned discussions: “All of that gave my life an inner turn and led me slowly to a solid worldview.”42 Autobiographies underline the point made by the reader of Der Bibliothekar, that secularist enlightenment and anticlerical animus were central factors in the socialization of many working-class members of the SPD. Natural-scientific materialism offered workers a alternative knowledge to lay 40 41 42

Karl Alwin Gerisch, Erzgebirgisches Volk: Erinnerungen (Hammerbrücke: H. Unger, 2008), 144. Ibid., 145, 146. Franz Bergg, Ein Proletarierleben (Frankfurt am Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, 1913).

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Figure 5.1 Left: Paul Löbe, 1890s; Right: Walter Ulbricht, ca. 1914. (Source: Paul Löbe, Erinnerungen eines Reichstagspräsidenten, Berlin: Arani, 1949, 12, Bundesarchiv)

claim to the status of being educated (Bildung) and anticlericalism offered them means of defending this knowledge against elites, such as schoolteachers or pastors, who were identified with the churches. The writers of autobiographies were not typical of all workers, but they were typical of the successful functionaries who had transitioned from manual labor to party work. Strong secularist conversion narratives featured in the self-understanding of many twentieth-century socialist leaders, who continued the pattern set by the founders of the party, such as the turner August Bebel, who had devoured the works of Ernst Haeckel and French religious critics while imprisoned in the 1870s.43 The claim to education achieved through the study of natural science and history was so important to self-taught socialists, particularly to the secularists

43

Lidtke, “August Bebel.”

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among them, that many disregarded the dialectical message that Liebknecht attempted to deliver in 1872 and agreed with liberal secularists that foundational knowledge was liberatory in its own right. A photo from the 1890s of a young typesetter (Figure 5.1) named Paul Löbe proudly displaying a sign announcing “Knowledge is Power!” Löbe went on to a career as a newspaper editor, elected official and ultimately the President of the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. Löbe was also a long-time member of the Breslau Free Religious Congregation. Worker Autodidacts and Middle-Class Intellectuals In his own autobiography, Paul Löbe detailed his lifelong pursuit of learning but regretted that, despite his accomplishments, he never entirely escaped the insecurity produced by lack of “systematic education.”44 This admission, made in a book addressed to the educated public, speaks to the fact that worker education always took place in a dialogue, whether real or imaginary, between the autodidact and those who possessed, or were understood to possess, true Bildung. This dialogue might also be thought of as a force field of attraction and repulsion between intellectuals and workers. The very genre of worker autobiography emerged from within this force field, as ambitious workers were often spurred to write by middle-class intellectuals with a pastoral interest in the working class. In addition to the secularist left liberals, who had dominated worker education until the 1870s, there was a notable participation by Protestant ministers. Pastor Paul Göhre created a sensation when his undercover exposé of factory life – Three Months in a Workshop – was published in 1891. Göhre was close to Friedrich Naumann, whose National Social movement emerged in the 1890s as a mixture of the elite social reform known as “socialism of the lectern” (Katherdersozialismus) and Adolf Stoecker’s Christian Social movement. Naumann published his Workers’ Library in 1896, which tried to show workers that progress could be made without revolution or godlessness if they followed the example of “Jesus as a man of the people.”45 Another National Social, Protestant pastor August Pfannkuche, undertook a survey of the “religious-ethical thought world of the industrial worker” in 1898. His only detailed response came from a factory mechanic and chairman of a

44

45

In the 1890s Löbe led a private study group of Breslau apprentices, who studied, among other things, Adolph Hoffmann’s anticlerical tract Die Zehn Gebote und die besitzende Klasse, and hosted an invited Protestant pastor for a debate with Löbe. Paul Löbe, Der Weg war lang: Erinnerungen, vol. iv (Berlin: Arani-Verlag, 1990), 17, 19. Friedrich Naumann, Göttinger Arbeiterbibliothek (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1896). Max Weber contributed an essay to this volume.

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Freethought association in Karlsruhe, who over the course of two years engaged in a cordial theological dispute by letter.46 After joining the SPD, Göhre launched a book series of worker autobiographies in 1903. Naumann, now Göhre’s political rival, followed suit.47 Although he had become a socialist, Göhre chose to publish his worker autobiographies with the “bourgeois” press of Eugen Diederichs, the Jenabased publisher of many secularist writers with a mystical bent, including Heinrich Hart, Bruno Wille, Max Maurenbrecher and Wilhelm Bölsche. Several other publishers of worker autobiographies had, like Diederichs, a strong liberal-secularist profile, such as the Berlin publisher Eberhard Frowein and the Neuer Frankfurter Verlag. The chief SPD publishing house, Dietz, printed autobiographies of leading functionaries like Bebel but only began to publish the life stories of more ordinary socialists in large number after the First World War.48 The first wave of worker autobiographies was thus undertaken by a set of Protestant and secularist liberals as part of a pastoral-political project to reform not just the workers, but the socialist movement itself. To achieve the aim of the “deproletarianization of socialism” (Diederichs) through the cultural elevation of the workers, these liberal reformers sought and often received support from revisionist socialists, who shared their hypertrophic expectations in the capacity of Kultur and Bildung to solve the “social question” via evolutionary rather than revolutionary means. It is in this interplay of revisionist and liberal cultural activism that one of the most interesting and controversial investigations of the intellectual and religious life of German workers was undertaken by Adolf Levenstein, a Berlin factory foreman and amateur sociologist. Between 1907 and 1911 Levenstein used SPD channels to distribute 8,000 questionnaires to workers across Germany, of which over 5,000 were returned – despite the opposition to his study by the leading socialist theoretical journal Neue Zeit. Levenstein reported his quantitative and qualitative results on the “psychophysical impact” of industrial work in several books published between 1909 and 1914.49 The 46

47 48 49

The Freethinker’s letters aimed at showing the sublime and irrefutable truth of natural-scientific monism. Behind this, the Freethinker expressed his identification, albeit ex negativo, with Pfannkuche as an educated intellectual and spiritual leader. He wrote that he “always” kept a portrait photograph sent by the minister on his desk and asked Pfannkuche if they would ever meet. Walter Kluge, August Pfannkuche: Sein Leben und Wirken (Mehlbergen: self-published, 1982), 164–65. Franz Louis Fischer, Arbeiterschicksale (Berlin-Schöneberg: Buchverlag der ‘Hilfe’, 1906). Wolfgang Emmerich, Proletarische Lebensläufe, vol. i (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1974), 26–27. On Levenstein’s study, see Kelly, Descent of Darwin, 9; and Dennis Sweeney, “Cultural Practice and Utopian Desire in German Social Democracy: Reading Adolf Levenstein’s Arbeiterfrage (1912),” Social History, 28/2 (2003): 174–201. Works include Adolf

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scientific deficiencies of his methods – initially pointed out by Max Weber – make his statistical results unreliable. Particularly egregious, Levenstein did not divorce his data-gathering from his pedagogical ambitions among the workers. The extensive correspondence with his “worker philosophers” reveals that Levenstein tried to stimulate an interest in his own monism and hopes for social regeneration through Kultur by sending or recommending books by secularist authors, such as Bölsche, Haeckel, the monist Protestant minister Albert Kalthoff, as well as the naturalist writer Gerhart Hauptmann. His questionnaire was full of leading questions that produced dubious statistics. For example, given the wording of question 24 – “Do you believe in God or have you left the church?” – it is perhaps not surprising that few of the 810 respondents dared to affirm a belief in God. Of the 436 who answered this question, 369 did not believe and 103 had left church.50 Question 25 – “Do you often walk in the woods? What do you think, when you lie on the forest floor, deep solitude all around?” – prompted workers to consider a sacred understanding of nature. Yet, precisely what made Levenstein’s investigation unscientific is what makes his work of even greater interest to our study, because it recorded the dialogue between a liberal secularist and workingclass autodidacts at the high point of the fascination with Kultur. By taking up the materials sent by his two most prolific correspondents in 1908 and published the following year, we can examine how they attempted to bridge the social and educational gulf separating them from the “intellectual” Levenstein and his cultural monism. We encounter a first type of worker autodidact in the autobiography of Richard Richter, a forty-six-year-old weaver with little formal education (Dorfschule) living in Forst (pop. ca. 32,000 in 1919), a town in the Lausitz region dominated by its textile industry. Richter owned Haeckel’s World Riddle and The History of Creation, but credited Dodel-Port’s Moses oder Darwin? with having “filled in the gaps” in his knowledge, a turn of phrase that fits the epistemological assumption of many autodidacts that the universe could be represented as a totality through empirical study.51 Richter was an SPD functionary, who embraced the centrality of productive work for his identity – he rejected Levenstein’s suggestion that he was a “slave to the machine.” He accepted his position low down in the hierarchy of revolutionary scientific knowledge and exhibited deference towards the producers of this knowledge. Richter wrote, “gladly I would have written this or

50

Levenstein, Aus der Tiefe: Arbeiterbriefe (Berlin: Morgen Verlag, 1909); Adolf Levenstein, Arbeiter-Philosophen und Dichter, vol. i (Berlin: Frowein, 1909); Adolf Levenstein, Proletariers Jugendjahre (Berlin: Frowein, 1909); Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der sozialpsychologischen Seite des modernen Großbetriebes und der psychophysischen Einwirkungen auf die Arbeiter (Munich: Reihardt, 1912). 51 Hickey, Workers, 72. Levenstein, Arbeiterbriefe, 84.

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that representative of science and expressed my thanks, but I did not quite trust myself; my esteem for them is too great for me to risk irritating them with a simpleminded letter.”52 Nonetheless Richter was clearly pleased at Levenstein’s offer to enter into intellectual dialogue and to publish his thoughts on monist philosophy. Responding to questions about the relationship of work and intellectual activity, Richter recounted how his mind wandered while weaving to ponder astronomy or geology – “how the earth writes its own history” – and to follow the biological journey of life backwards from human evolution to its origins in inorganic matter. Richter had developed his own materialist ethics based on a balance between an instinctual egotism and cosmic awareness. “Religion” is “not identical with the ‘faith’ of pious church goers. Religion is a very fine sense of the accord between man and world. It is the great yearning of those who seek contact with the entire macrooperation of all-nature [das ganz Großwirkende der Allnatur], and [entry] into the higher harmonies above.”53 In a short exposé on psychology entitled “On the Essence and Life of the Soul,” Richter fused elements drawn from a careful reading of popular science with his own practical experiences as a weaver. Consciousness is the “workshop of my soul” in which reflections of the external world enter through the senses and are projected on the “blank crystal” walls of the mind. These images excite associative memories from the “subconscious” that are in turn projected in from other openings, leading to a collage of images on the mind’s wall. Richter is aware that this visual metaphor is not real science and hence apologizes to his educated reader for having to resort to such a “crude” “picture” for what must be a mental process of “unparalleled refinement.” He concludes his reflection with a description of the inability of the self to control the cinema of the soul, where “thought images” flit by “in colorful succession . . . like coy mermaids.” They evade his mastery – “a little ‘I’ stands alongside, like one who cannot grasp the delicate threads with his rough hands.” This image of the “little ego” as a weaver, whose hands are too rough to pluck the threads of mental association, is an apt metaphor for the psychological theories of the subconscious in circulation in 1908. However, it is also a self-deprecating acknowledgement of his own inability as a self-educated weaver to produce true scientific knowledge.54 Richter is an example of the type of working-class socialist who was empowered by naturalistic materialism and found in it a replacement for religion. The rare chance to engage in dialogue with a “scientist” (Levenstein) excited his intellectual production, but it was accompanied by the acknowledgement of his own limitations. A second type of “worker

52

Ibid., 87, 89.

53

Ibid., 91.

54

Levenstein, Arbeiter-Philosophen, vol. i, 93–94.

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philosopher” is found in the figure of Max Lotz, a miner from Gladbach, who was the most intellectually precocious and prolific of Levenstein’s respondents. Although Lotz is completely atypical, his autobiography can nonetheless be beneficially studied to gain insights into the sociology of secularist knowledge. His poem “Cry from the Depths,” which Levenstein used to title one of his books, describes the “frozen spirit” who struggled against the “clerical comedy of ghosts [kleriseischen Gespensterkömodie]” to climb the “Godladder of self-realization [Gottesleiter des Sichausdenkens].” This image fits the narrative of his own past, present and future, which Lotz presented in the seventy-six pages of letters written in the summer of 1908 and published by Levenstein.55 Lotz had been raised as an illegitimate child in a “clerically completely infected little town,” whose father, a Jewish variété singer, had abandoned him after “the Jesuits” persuaded his Catholic mother to have him baptized. Forced into factory work as a youth, the “sultry atmosphere of the factory excited his sexual nerves,” leading to the “diabolical toxin of masturbation” and “moral” deprivation.56 Lotz credited Social Democracy with having shown him “the audacious, impudent manner in which the clericalgovernmental stooges train servility into the people.” This opened the way to his discovery of scientific materialism and his moral regeneration: “As soon . . . as this leaden hood of dogmatic faith was removed and critical insight into the geological past of our planet was attained, reason reached in mercilessly. With all fibers of my being, I penetrated the tissue of the universal symmetry.” He then “freed” his wife, so that she too saw “with open eyes behind the no longer mythic curtain of death” and agreed to educate their children according to materialist principles.57 Lotz narrated his socialist and materialist-monist awakening as a resolution to the religious, intellectual and personal crises of his youth. Yet, this stability was not lasting. Intellectual accomplishment led to further dissatisfaction and to an identity crisis, spurred on, in part, as Lotz writes, by Levenstein’s offer to publish his writing. In his quest for Bildung Lotz experienced a double alienation: from his immediate social environment and from his ultimate goal, which was acceptance into the community of avant-garde intellectuals. His identification with his intellect and not his physical labor made him experience mining as a physical and moral degradation. It was “a horror to daily strap my spirit to the raw trolley of the miner.” He looked down on his fellows because “they do not feel how ignominious their human existence is. And me? Precisely because I feel it, the conscious misery strangles me.”58 “From the depths” of his present condition, Lotz expressed the direction of his ambitions: “I don’t want to be a nobody, absolutely not. I want to rise high up, very high 55 58

Levenstein, Arbeiterbriefe. Ibid., 24, 79.

56

Ibid., 5–81; citations 5–6, 8–17.

57

Ibid., 19, 21.

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up; yes, I want to be the highest in the pantheon of the human spirit.” Unable to serve as party functionary due to lack of oratorical skill, his “weapon is the quill working in solitude. Until now it has remained slumbering in the closet. Will it ever take wing?”59 The leitmotif of Lotz’s philosophical statements, poetry and autobiographical letters was the desire of the material – understood both as physical matter and as the physical laborer – to transcend its boundaries and rise into the realm of ideas, only to be thrown back again. Levenstein’s status as intellectual and the neo-idealist monist humanism he espoused represented the goals to which Lotz aspired but which were denied him. He repeatedly arrived at the conclusion that he must remain a materialist because he was dominated by the material world, while his nemesis Levenstein would have the ultimate victory because, “you can look down into the mechanisms of humanity from a higher point of observation than I can attain.” Materialism was a stepping-stone that he could not leave. Using stilted scientific terminology meant to demonstrate his ability to serve as Levenstein’s proxy, Lotz arrives at the paradoxical conclusion that his status as a modern “helot” excluded him from the circle of the learned: “And because I think, therefore I am conscious of just how deplorable my humanity has revealed itself to be.”60 Lotz had internalized the negative judgment of the uneducated working class that was the starting assumption of the missionary efforts of liberal secularists. He identified the worker with scientific materialism, which he held ultimately to be a lower form of Bildung. The higher form of secularist humanism embodied in the Nietzschean Übermensch was a dream for Lotz and one that was denied him.61 His own analysis confirmed that materialism could fill in the holes of a worker’s knowledge, but it could not produce acceptance into the community of the educated, which in 1908 demanded mastery of more elitist forms of philosophy. Given this barrier, it is not surprising that Lotz broke off contact with Levenstein after several months of intense correspondence.62 The autobiographies of Wilhelmine workers have been the subject of significant debate. Working in a Marxist frame, Wolfgang Emmerich and Georg Bollenbeck placed the genre within the competition of two cultures, a dominant bourgeois one, and a “second culture” that was proletarian-socialist.63 According to Bollenbeck, the autobiographies that appeared in 59

60 61 62

Lotz even suggests that his membership in the SPD was instrumental: “In order to force my way, in order to pave the way for my upward flight, I became a Social Democrat.” Cited in Kelly (ed.), German Worker, 345; Levenstein, Arbeiterbriefe, 22. Levenstein, Arbeiterbriefe, 63. Levenstein found that politically radical workers rejected Nietzsche. Adolf Levenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche im Urteil der Arbeiterklasse (Leipzig: Meiner, 1914). 63 Levenstein, Arbeiterbriefe, 92. Emmerich, Lebensläufe vol. i; Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie.

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non-socialist publishing houses presented the inner frustrations and suffering of the individual workers as objects of pity that could be incorporated into a völkisch conception of the national community to be led by reformers.64 Generalizing Franz Mehring’s condemnation of one of the memoirs published by Göhre, Bollenbeck concludes that these were books “for the bourgeoisie.” Instead Bollenbeck valorized those autobiographies that resisted such instrumentalization and turned their life stories into didactic lessons for raising class consciousness.65 There exists ample evidence to support Bollenbeck’s viewpoint. In his preface to one worker autobiography, Friedrich Naumann stated that “our Fischer” “belongs to the voices, who form an ever stronger chorus in all parts of the people: the worker is our brother, our compatriot [Volksgenosse], and his fate is our fate!” The middle-class readers would, Naumann hoped, ask themselves afterwards, “what more can I do for the education and improvement of the masses?”66 Levenstein’s analysis of worker psychology revealed a similarly elitist and ultimately pessimistic attitude towards workers. He placed the respondents to his questionnaires, who were nearly all members of the SPD or the unions, in four categories: 64.1 percent belonged to the “mass stratum with pronounced collective qualities,” whom he describes as “the spiritually dead, . . . a category of people, who react apathetically to all aspects of life, and whom one could just as well stick in a cage and feed regularly”; 20.1 percent were “miseducated” (Verbildete), who wrote in an imitative style full of misspellings; 9.9 percent were “contemplatives” who read Kant and Nietzsche and were politically passive and pessimistic; while only 5.9 percent belonged to the category “intellectuals,” which meant they were “creative, autonomous characters” and essentially optimist.”67 The worker autobiographies published in the decade before the First World War need no longer be read as evidence of correct or incorrect class consciousness. Rather, they offer a window onto the sociology of knowledge, as reflected in the varying responses of workers to two types of secularist thought that were competing for adherents. The first was a reductive, monistic materialism based on a correspondence theory of truth, such as popularized by figures like Ernst Haeckel. The second was an idealistic monism that wove together naturalistic pantheism with Nietzschean self-fashioning and was favored by avant-garde intellectuals. Presented with these options, workers generally chose monistic materialism. They did so, in part, for political reasons. As we have seen, the party strongly supported Darwinian evolution

64 66 67

65 Fischer, Arbeiterschicksale, unpag. Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie, 253. Fischer, Arbeiterschicksale. Levenstein, Arbeiterfrage, 11. In a more recent exploration of Levenstein’s texts, Dennis Sweeny tries to open up room for worker consciousness that goes beyond the choices of embourgeoisement and class consciousness: Sweeney, “Cultural Practice.”

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as a corollary to the development of society towards socialism. However, there was also a sociological dimension to choosing materialism. When analyzing taste, Pierre Bourdieu argued that workers generally made the “choice of the necessary” and positively claimed as theirs, what was anyway allotted to them by the social field.68 Levenstein’s respondents illustrated this choice, when they refused elements of his proposed course of study for them. Thus, a miner from Gladbeck, Hugo Teuchert, returned to Levenstein an introductory book on philosophy with the comment that he found it noble that the author sought to elevate his readers through Kantian idealism, “but – I am sorry to have to say – on the rough field of the toiling workers, he will reap a meager crop.” Instead Teuchert affirmed the utility of the popular science of Büchner and Dodel-Port (whom he credits with having destroyed his belief in a personal god), along with the classic authors Goethe and Schiller and SPD party journals.69 The autobiographies of Richter and Lotz offered further evidence of the manner in which two working-class men engaged in self-reflection to wrestle with the promise and peril of these two forms of secularist knowledge. Whereas Richter rejected Levenstein’s argument that manual labor was incompatible with attaining higher knowledge, Lotz affirmed it. Lotz found the encounter with Levenstein initially liberating, as it offered a path for his desire to transcend his lot and become an intellectual. He resisted the “choice of the necessary” and sought to demonstrate his capacity for aesthetic expression and Nietzschean heroism, but without the cultural capital needed for the leap to become an avant-garde or socialist writer, he withdrew from the encounter. Precisely in his anguish and grandiosity, Lotz reveals most about the sociology of secularism. Like Carl Pinn, examined in the last chapter, he fell between two stools. He too came from a poor background and arrived at socialism and secularism with great hope, which turned into deep resentment once he failed to fulfill the dream of becoming an intellectual leader. Workers’ Culture in Leipzig Thus far in this chapter, we have established that the period between 1906 and 1914 saw a tremendous expansion of socialist culture, particularly in the field of worker education. The numerous autobiographies published in this period provided anecdotal evidence that the encounter with secularist forms of knowledge and struggles with religion played an important role in the formation of socialist worker identity. I want to now bring these two together to examine the 68 69

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 372–79. Levenstein, Arbeiterbriefe, 92.

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role of secularism in the teachers and students of the institutions of worker education, using the Saxon city of Leipzig as a case study. Leipzig played a key role in the history of German socialism from the 1860s, when Bebel and Liebknecht were based there. As a largely Protestant city with a high level of de-churching, it was also a hub of German secularism with a firm Free Religious (Deutschkatholisch) presence.70 Leipzig was a stronghold of socialist life reform and youth movements, which found their epicenter in the Leipzig People’s House (Volkshaus), a cultural and educational venue, the construction of which in 1906 was a massive demonstration of socialist power and worker culture.71 The secularist contribution to socialist culture is revealed by the biographies of its key functionaries, beginning with locally powerful Friedrich Bosse. He was the leading figure of the Arbeiterverein (Workers Association), which was dedicated to the educational and cultural life of the city’s workers and with 2,000 members in 1892 exceeded the total membership of the local SPD.72 Bosse made worldview a central theme of his educational and literary work. He wrote numerous agitational dramas, which were performed by the Arbeiterverein, including The Workers Organizations Indeed Have a Future (1888) in which a socialist son confronts his Christian father and explains that he has left the church, because “it would be disastrous for our whole culture, if articles of faith that cannot be reconciled with the discoveries of science were to be authoritative for our entire social life.”73 In 1901 the association’s educational newsletter, which was edited by Bosse, addressed the city’s workingclass youth, telling them that they were missing the “mental weaponry” to become active socialists: “You are a Social Democrat. Fine, now work so that socialism doesn’t just remain an affair of the emotions and the heart for you, but becomes scientific knowledge, a worldview.” They were encouraged to begin with a course in economics leading up to the “powerful theoretical edifice of Marxism” and then study natural science. “Does not the study of evolution (Darwinism!) provide the best weapons against clerical-dogmatic nonsense . . .?” In addition to this mental foundation, the newsletter promoted gymnastics and artistic associations, as well as the association’s library and meeting rooms, which, it added, fortunately did not require listeners to drink alcohol as many of the pubs that hosted socialist meetings did.74 70 71 72 73 74

Weir, Fourth Confession, 51. Franz Walter, Vom Milieu zum Parteienstaat: Lebenswelten, Leitfiguren und Politik im historischen Wandel (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2010), 52–56. Hans-Joachim Schäfers, Zur sozialistischen Arbeiterbildung in Leipzig 1890 bis 1914 (Leipzig: Museum für Geschichte der Leipziger Arbeiterbewegung, 1961), 35–36. Quoted in: Ursula Münchow, Arbeiterbewegung und Literatur 1860–1914 (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1981), 122. See her portrait of Bosse, 115–33. “An die jungen Arbeiter!,” Der freie Bund, Leipzig, August 1901.

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Under Bosse’s aegis, prominent freethinkers lectured at the Arbeiterverein, such as Berlin FRC speaker Titus Voelkel. Hermann and Käte Duncker became Bosse’s close collaborators in integrating secularist content into socialist education. Religious criticism proved to be the most dangerous topic for the association, bringing the threat of a police ban. “In the interest of its own existence,” he warned in the association’s newspaper in March 1895, “the Arbeiterverein will have to avoid discussion of religious questions for the time being, despite the great need of enlightenment on this subject.” In the years 1905 and 1906, however, there was a resurgence of popular-scientific and antireligious lectures.75 The tremendous growth of the SPD led to numerous efforts to professionalize and streamline the party organizations. Increased income allowed the party and the unions to vastly expand the number of paid party positions, also in the field of culture. In Leipzig, the largely voluntary Arbeiterverein was supplanted by the Workers’ Education Institute, which was placed in the hands of Gustav Hennig,76 whose biography was typical of that of many socialist autodidacts. Following primary school, he apprenticed as a machine worker and moved to Leipzig in 1888, where he joined the SPD, the Arbeiterbildungsverein, and the Freethought Association Humboldt. He credited the latter with having given him a clear philosophical foundation based on Spinoza’s pantheism and the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. Soon these gave way to “socialist ideas.” In 1898 he was elected to chair the People’s Association of the neighborhood Plagewitz-Lindenau and began his ambitious educational activities, including public lectures, of which he reportedly gave 3,000 over his career. In 1902 he was able to switch professions and become a bookseller for the socialist Leipziger Volkszeitung. The upsurge in party interest in education in 1906 found him well positioned to take a leading role. As secretary of the Workers’ Education Institute, Hennig organized concerts, lectures, courses and celebrations for Leipzig workers. He warmly approved of its efforts to lead workers away from alcohol and towards a “life in harmony with reason” and complete “cultural advancement.”77 Hennig was also the central figure in the workers’ library movement. He had founded the Central Workers’ Library in Leipzig in 1893 with a budget of 357 marks. By 1913 his budget had expanded to 22,000 marks annually for 59 branch libraries in the Leipzig area that held ca. 60,000 books. In the same period, the number of members had risen from 572 to 16,015 and number of checked out books from 1,922 to 197,862.78 In 1909 Hennig launched a 75 77 78

76 Schäfers, Arbeiterbildung in Leipzig, 40, 106–15. Ibid., 143. Felicitas Marwinski, Sozialdemokratie und Volksbildung: Leben und Wirken Gustav Hennigs als Bibliothekar (Munich: Saur, 1994), 14–15. Der Bibliothekar, 5/9 (1913): 641.

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national journal Der Bibliothekar through which he sought to train workerlibrarians across Germany. He wanted them not only to learn professional techniques, but also to act as educational guides who would steer workers away from popular “trash literature” (Schundliteratur) and towards more edifying works. His humanistic ideal was the well-rounded man of culture, who developed in equal measure his scientific, moral, philosophical and aesthetic faculties. This was reflected in recommendations for starting a personal library on a limited budget. He recommended that workers select works from natural science in its monistic interpretation, history, socialist theory and philosophy, as well as naturalist novels and older classics. Hennig thus exemplified a socialist version of the cult of Kultur just prior to the First World War, as a combination of life reform and the study of the classics, Marxism and monist philosophy.79 In one issue of his librarians’ journal, Hennig circulated designs for ex libris to be used in worker libraries (Figure 5.2). These depict the idealized relationship of workers and knowledge that he propagated. Two show learning as a nocturnal activity, which takes place when factory gates are closed. Knowledge acquisition appears superior to labor, as the light of science sheds enlightenment while the worker’s tools remain in the dark. A third image shows an elderly man in a laborer’s shirt, a working-class Socrates or Darwin, sitting in a library. Assembled around him are instruments of knowledge acquisition, and on the wall behind a Latin phrase popular among librarians: “He who knows where the knowledge is, is closest to having it.” Below the card catalog the injunction in Esperanto “organize!” Secularism and Socialist Youth: Walter Ulbricht in Leipzig The efforts of the SPD and the Free Unions in the field of education were flanked by a new attention to young workers. In 1905, the party endorsed new youth organizations and gave generous funding to their newspapers. In an early historical account written in 1956, the SED functionary Fritz Globig drew on his own personal experiences in the Leipzig Young Workers (Arbeiterjugend) to illustrate the centrality of religious conflict to the socialist youth movement. Born in 1892, Globig’s mother was pious and brought the children to church, while the father stayed home and imparted to the children natural-scientific knowledge of “the worlds of plants and animals.” The son’s

79

When the SPD split in 1917, Hennig joined the USPD and between 1919 and 1923 he led the Heimvolkshochschule Tinz near Thuringian Gera, which was an important state-sponsored center for worker education, at which fellow secularist Otto Jenssen also played a major role (see Chapter 8). After the war, Jenssen and Hennig joined the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED).

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Figure 5.2 Ex libris for worker readers: Gustav Hennig, “Buch-EigenerZeichen,” Der Bibliothekar, 1/4, Supplement (August 1909)

anger towards authorities first stirred when a primary school teacher teased him for his poverty, and when he observed the tremendous wealth of the local pastor. After his younger brother was beaten in public, “war was declared between me and the pastor.”80 Conflicts with the church also marked the first steps taken towards the formation of the Arbeiterjugend. With 435,000 members in their youth associations, the Protestant and Catholic churches had dominated the youth movement of the day and felt deeply threatened by the entry of the SPD

80

Fritz Globig, Aber verbunden sind wir mächtig: Aus Arbeiterjugendbewegung (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1958), 17–18.

der

Geschichte

der

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into this field. When socialists called a meeting to organize young workers in Berlin in November 1904, they were opposed by Rev. Reinhard Mumm, a prominent Protestant conservative, who had arrived with supporters of the YMCA. According to Globig, socialists formed a majority of 800 persons present and ejected Mumm and his 200 supporters from the hall.81 Because the state prohibited the participation of women and minors in political associations, the new youth movement was compelled to focus on culture and education. This meant that culture, which was the preferred zone of operation of the secularist movement, became the first point of entry into the socialist movement for an entire generation of young workers born around 1890, such as Willi Münzenberg, the later press czar of the communist movement, and Walter Ulbricht, the first leader of the GDR.82 The fact that Ulbricht’s formative educational experiences took place within the institutions founded and run by secularists such as Hennig provides an interesting case for further exploration, both for its typicality and for the fact that it reveals an important biographical facet of the most influential leader of German communism in the twentieth century. Whereas Hennig and Globig had found their own way to socialism and secularism, Ulbricht had in some sense been born into both cultures. After his parents had left the Protestant Church in 1897, Ulbricht was released from the obligatory religious instruction in school. In its place he and the three other children of Social Democratic parents – known as “the reds” – received lessons in astronomy, archaeology, natural science and technology from a “Free Religious” instructor. Unlike Prussian Berlin, where the children of dissidents were forced into Christian religious instruction, Saxony had not revoked the right granted to Deutschkatholisch congregations in 1848 to give religious instruction to dissident children in schools.83 The importance of Ulbricht’s confessional affiliation with dissidence is revealed by the surprising answer he gave to questions about his subjective religious beliefs in a questionnaire filled out during his later exile in the Soviet Union. To the question “If you do not believe, since which age?” he answered “4 years,” which was his age when his parents left the church.84 In 1907 Ulbricht underwent the Jugendweihe and in 1908 joined the newly formed Arbeiterjugend Educational Association Old Leipzig, where one of the chief lecturers was, alongside Gustav Hennig, Alfred Herre, a left-wing socialist who went on to edit the Freethought journal Der Atheist after the war. Herre regularly offered Leipzig youth a series of lectures in which monist cosmology flowed into evolutionary biology and ended with the stages of class 81 82 83 84

Ibid., 30. Willi Münzenberg, Die dritte Front: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern, 1972). Paul Drews, “Die freien religiösen Gemeinden der Gegenwart,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 11 (1901): 484–527. Mario Franck, Walter Ulbricht: Eine deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Siedler, 2001), 80.

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development.85 The Educational Association enforced a strict moralism. One former member later commented: “We were against exploitation, alcohol, smoking, card playing, soccer and trash literature.” Such literature was periodically collected and burnt at festive events. It was at one such evening that Ulbricht is remembered to have recited Goethe’s “Prometheus” with great pathos.86 With their enthusiasm for hiking, singing and guitar playing, Leipzig’s socialist youth shared much in common with their bourgeois counterparts in the Wandervögel movement, except that they tied red handkerchiefs to their walking sticks.87 Integrating older traditions of humanist Bildung and the contemporary currents of life reform, Ulbricht pursued a path of self-ennoblement that combined physical, intellectual, moral and aesthetic activities. He joined gymnastics association “Eiche”(Oak Tree), which trained in the Leipzig Volkshaus. Typical of the socialist concept of gymnastics, the members of Eiche did not pursue competitive sports, but rather worked towards the health and harmony of individual and collective bodies, which they displayed at celebrations of other workers’ associations in the form of “marble groups” comprised of athletes assuming the poses of classical statues under colored lights.88 Ulbricht’s successful internalization of the project of Bildung in its secularist and socialist combination is revealed by his solo actions undertaken during international travels in 1911 and 1912 as a journeyman furniture maker. According to the official biography written by GDR poet laureate Johannes Becher in 1958, Ulbricht approached each stop on his trip as an opportunity for “scientific” study, beginning with a visit to a hygiene exhibition in Dresden. In galleries in Munich, Zurich and Amsterdam he examined paintings to learn the “laws of beauty.” In Lucerne he worked through three volumes of The Geology of Switzerland and collected rocks “not for their beautiful shape or color, but according to scientific criteria.”89 Ulbricht was not the only aspiring socialist intellectual to view his travels as a journeyman as an educational Grand Tour. During travels around Western Germany and Switzerland in 1895, the young Berlin wallpaper hanger and Free Religionist Adolf Harndt kept a diary of his 85

86 87 88

Herre’s 1911/12 lecture series offered young socialists 25 evenings of illumination on “the social development of humanity” with the following structure: 1. Views of the origin of the world, 2. The cosmos, 3. The earth, 4. Life on earth, 5. Evolution of man from the animal world, 6. The cultural development of man, 7. The social development of man, 8. Origin and development of religion, 9. Ancient society, 10. Feudal society, 11. Bourgeois society. Schäfers, Arbeiterbildung in Leipzig, 172–73. Fellow KPD leader Ernst Thälmann attended a Jugendweihe in 1900 in Hamburg. Becher, Walter Ulbricht, 21. Carola Stern, Ulbricht: Eine politische Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1963), 21–22. 89 Ibid., 23. Ibid., 26, 27; Becher, Walter Ulbricht, 30, 32.

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cultural exploits that was written in chatty and cosmopolitan style and peppered with French and English phrases, as though addressed to an imagined educated reader.90 In 1912 Ulbricht joined the SPD, and signed up for courses at partyaffiliated workers’ education institutions. Following tips for autodidactical study found in Der Bibliothekar, he kept notes in stenographic shorthand on the many history and popular science books that he checked out of the library, and in 1913 he became one of Hennig’s 163 volunteer librarians. A functionary in the socialist youth association, Ulbricht led a summer solstice event in 1914 and explained to participants “how we want to celebrate and shape these celebrations as materialists.”91 A photograph from 1914 (see Figure 5.1) shows the twenty-year-old Ulbricht in suit and tie, a self-confident, if somewhat prudish, aspiring socialist leader. The socialist youth movement in Leipzig was the subject of substantial attention in the GDR, partially due to its role in the genesis of East Germany’s first leader. Yet, historians and former associates of Ulbricht were keen to dissociate the future communist from what was retrospectively viewed as the false path of cultural reform. In 1961 Hans-Joachim Schäfers argued that the steady growth of worker education in Leipzig since 1906 had been accompanied by a hollowing out of its revolutionary content. After the radical Hermann Duncker had left the Leipzig scene, historical materialism gave way to reformism and revisionism. For Schäfers, secularist natural-scientific education belonged to this trend, and Hennig’s “exaggerated effusions over nature . . . objectively led a great portion of the Leipzig socialist youth away from the political struggle.”92 Fritz Globig, himself a member of the Arbeiterjugend Educational Association between 1908 and 1911, recalled Hennig as “a romantic pedant [Bildungsphilister] who copied the petty bourgeois educational methods and lectured a hundred times on the ‘value and pleasure of the small and smallest [objects] in nature.’”93 Other GDR politicians, who had known Ulbricht in Leipzig, came to the aid of biographers and remembered Ulbricht as a strict opponent of revisionism.94 Bruno Apitz, the author of Naked Among Wolves (Nackt unter Wolfen), a famous novel based on his time in a National Socialist concentration camp, later recalled how Ulbricht pressed into his hand a copy of Marx’s “Wage Labor and Capital” and thereby saved him from being trapped in the “soup of reformism” which was spreading in the youth organization Old Leipzig in 1914. Despite such bona fides for Ulbricht’s revolutionary attitude, the picture provided by the historical record is more complicated. Evidence indicates that 90 92 94

91 Harndt’s “Reiseeindrücke,” May 1895, Harndt papers. Franck, Walter Ulbricht, 41, 44. 93 Schäfers, Arbeiterbildung in Leipzig, 185. Globig, Arbeiterjugendbewegung, 87. Heinz Voßke, Walter Ulbricht: Biographischer Abriß (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1983), 34.

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Ulbricht was indeed aware of the potential tension between class struggle and religious criticism. A school essay he penned on “The Driving Forces of the German Reformation” shows that he was a proficient master of historical materialist analysis. He criticized “bourgeois historians” whose “idealistic view of history sketches not the elemental driving forces, the contradictory economic interests, but only the religious shell through which these are expressed.”95 Yet I found no evidence that Ulbricht sided with revolutionary Marxism against the mixture of life reform, humanist education, monist natural science. His own active participation in and propagation of the secularistsocialist culture suggests he saw no contradiction between the two materialisms. Even his support of the “Liebknecht group” and its revolutionary opposition to the war did not mean that he had abandoned his philosophical elitism. Faced with the insidious effects of Prussian militarism while stationed in the Balkans during the war, he wrote to his parents that he had sought refuge by reading Homer.96 In the final months of the war, shortly before he would become a revolutionary, Ulbricht published an article in Der Bibliothekar that has been overlooked by his biographers, perhaps because of its innocuous-sounding title: “Reading Habits of the Balkan Troops.” Yet, this document is remarkable because Ulbricht expresses in it the prerogative of morally and intellectually superior men to determine what is best for workers, an attitude shared by liberal elites who saw themselves as Germany’s Kulturträger, as well as by the later communist movement. In his article, Ulbricht assembled arguments about the effects of good and bad literature on workers that he had learned from Hennig and Herre and applied them to the soldiers stationed in the Balkans. Despite lack of access to books, poor lighting, excessive heat and above all the “damaging effect of fevers on the activity of the brain” (Ulbricht had contracted malaria), soldiers still looked for “spiritual sustenance” in literature. Unfortunately, they often favored “inferior spiritual products” and “trash literature,” leaving the classics to gather dust. Echoing Hennig’s injunction that librarians must lead workers to the right literature, Ulbricht dismissed as capitalistic the argument that workers should be allowed to read what they want: “Good businesspeople and poor popular educators will hold up the – oh, so overused – argument that the strong demand for the above-mentioned books requires compromise with the taste of the buyers or borrowers. But we cannot speak of taste, given that most readers are characterized by a lack of judgment in literary questions.” Trash literature is a reflection of the “living conditions of the soldiers, which make difficult or impossible their mental concentration.” Good literature must be made to replace inferior, thereby “eliminating these

95

Document reprinted ibid., 34.

96

Franck, Walter Ulbricht, 45, 51.

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maldevelopments.” Ulbricht then gave an example of the transformative impact of good literature. Living ten to a room in Macedonia, the soldiers in his company usually played cards or read cheap novels. But when one of them began to bring in quality books from the soldier’s center, and read aloud from Ludwig Thoma, Mark Twain or Wilhelm Raabe, “cards and love stories were soon forgotten.” Yet, Ulbricht lamented, “how little propaganda is made for good literature and how much more seldom is there discussion about this.”97 In short, the picture Ulbricht presented was of a universal thirst for consciousness and education that was blocked by objective, material conditions imposed by the inequalities of class society. The result was that, left to their own devices, the soldiers (like the Leipzig workers) fell victim to the dream world of consumer capitalism. Levenstein could have subscribed to this view of the population as a pre-enlightened, preconscious mass, whose “taste” was not to be trusted, as it had been built around the market for mass-advertised second-rate literature. The two routes to alleviate this plight were either education or coercion, i.e. exposure to real culture or the disruption of the access to bad literature. This sort of moralism does not translate into a particular political position. Ulbricht ended up in the left wing of the USPD that rejected democracy and came to embrace communism, while Paul Löbe remained a moderate, who supported the war effort and later became a mainstay of Weimar democracy. Nonetheless, Ulbricht’s case indicates that the cultural elitism fostered in Leipzig’s prewar workers’ culture movement could be compatible with later embrace of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. a dictatorship of those with the proper consciousness and literary taste. Women and Secularism My examination of the influence of red secularism in the life stories of workers has thus far largely focused on male adults and youths. The last section of this chapter turns to women as a subset of workers, whose relationship to secularism deserves special attention. Historians have long been aware of the strong presence of religious dissenters in the early women’s movement. Whereas evangelicals were prominent in the United States, in Germany the women’s associations of the nascent Free Religious Congregations of the 1840s acted as a gathering point for several future feminists.98 Yet, historians have not given equal attention to the contribution of Free Religion and secularism more generally to the socialist women’s movement. Among the four women named 97 98

Walter Ulbricht, “Die Lektüre der Balkantruppen,” Der Bibliothekar, 10/9–10 (Sept. 1918), 1154–55. Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens; Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton University Press, 1996).

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by historian Richard Evans as the important leaders of this movement in the 1890s – Ottilie Baader, Emma Ihrer, Lily Braun and Clara Zetkin – only Zetkin was not a member in a secularist organization.99 In fact, the other three came to socialism via secularist activism, as did the union organizers Ida Altmann and Agnes Wabnitz, whom we encountered in previous chapters. Many of the radical “bourgeois” feminists who cooperated with their socialist counterparts were also prominent secularists, such as the Freethinker Hedwig HenrichWilhelmi and the sex reformers and Monist League members Helene Stöcker and Grete Meisel-Hess.100 In order to open up the relationship of secularism and socialist feminism, I will examine events in Berlin, where the first efforts to organize workingclass women were marked by intense competition between socialists, Christians and liberals. In the first history of the Berlin women’s worker movement, published in 1889, Adeline Berger noted the signal effect of a speech given in 1869 by Louise Peters, a former revolutionary and Deutschkatholik, who led the liberal women’s movement on the national level. In response, Lina Morgenstern, a Jewish Progressive and future member of the Freethought Association “Lessing,” helped organize a Berlin organization. Amidst the rising tensions between the left-liberal, democratic and socialist parties in the mid-1870s, a socialist women’s group broke off in 1877, but was soon banned by the police.101 A second effort to organize came with the founding of the Association to Protect the Interests of Female Workers (Verein zur Wahrung der Interessen der Arbeiterinnen) in 1885. It was spearheaded by the aristocratic anti-prostitution activist Gertrude GuillaumeSchack, but three women active in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation took leading roles – Emma Ihrer, Agnes Wabnitz and Hedwig HenrichWilhelmi. Unhappy with “the genteel element of their leadership,” some of the working-class women broke away and formed the Berlin Working Women’s Association of the North (Arbeiterinnen-Verein im Norden), which was the first women’s organization to declare its allegiance to the socialist movement. Two of the four members of the “agitation committee” were members of the Free Religious Congregation (Wabnitz and Hedwig Gubela) and several Free Religious speakers were invited to lecture.102 99 100

101

102

Richard Evans, Sozialdemokratie und Frauenemanzipation im deutschen Kaiserreich, trans. W. G. Seebold (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1979), 128–46. Other women who wrote for freigeistig publications or were members in freigeistig organizations include Henriette Fürth, Anna Siemsen, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Maria Krische, Maria Asmus, Maria Holgers and socialist leader Hedwig Gubela. The freigeistig basis of early socialist feminism is not addressed in Jean Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy 1885–1917 (Princeton University Press, 1979), 56–58. Adeline Berger, Die zwanzigjährige Arbeiterinnen-Bewegung Berlins und ihr Ergebnis: Beleuchtet von einer Arbeiterin (Berlin: self-published, 1889), 27.

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The leading Berlin socialist Paul Singer, whose coat factory employed many female workers, competed with the Christian Social leader Adolf Stoecker in patronizing one of the earliest women’s labor unions, the Association of Coat Seamstresses in Berlin. Stoecker later told a court that he offered Emma Ihrer 1,000 marks to keep the women’s movement out of the hands of socialists.103 Given this competition, it is not surprising that secularist themes were a mainstay of speeches given in the women’s organizations of Berlin at this time, and that many meetings were dissolved by police when male participants engaged in antireligious arguments. In 1886, the police banned all three working women’s associations; however, two years later Ihrer and Baader began to organize new female unions.104 Despite the prominence of a few female members, most secularist organizations were male-dominated, and gender formed a key lens through which they viewed the power of orthodox religion. The preacher of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation G. S. Schaefer warned in 1884 that “uneducated people, and also women demand, like all weaker spirits, a massive, concrete religion, while stronger spirits and namely men of science honor the free worldview.”105 He urged men to exercise their patriarchal prerogative in the name of progress. Because of women’s tendency to hang on to “religious insanity,” “it is the duty of every man to energetically oppose his wife and allow his children to be taught only in a fashion that he holds correct.” In theses on moral education that Schaefer had printed in 1885, he claimed that the goal of sexual equality required temporary male domination in order for men to educate women: “The women’s question is at present a question, i.e., a task, for men.”106 The Free Religious socialist Adolph Hoffmann gave a Marxist twist to this argument in his 1892 brochure “A Warning Call! To the Women and Girls of All Classes,” in which he stated that women’s reactionary attitudes resulted from their absence from the capitalist productive process. “The man can no longer be kept away from public life . . . It is necessity – the struggle for existence in the corrupt society of today – that has forced the men, and a small part of women and girls, to seek refuge in the camp of the fighting proletariat 103 104 105

106

Heinz Niggemann, Emanzipation zwischen Sozialismus und Feminismus: Die sozialdemokratische Frauenbewegung im Kaiserreich (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1981), 57. Berger, Arbeiterinnen-Bewegung, 38, 41; Niggemann, Emanzipation, 57. Schaefer supported the work of the FRC’s Women’s Association, which was directed by his wife and the wives of the leading men of the congregation. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15046, p. 344. In 1925 Bruno Sommer restated the need of Freethinkers to specially target women in their educational endeavors in order to liberate them from clerical domination. See Bruno Sommer, “Schafft Freidenker-Bibliotheken!,” Kulturschau: Bibliographischer Anzeiger für die linksgerichtete Literatur, 1/1 (1925): 18–20. LAB A Pr. Br. 030, 12978, p. 78. G. S. Schaefer, Thesen über die falsche Gefühlsbildung, insbesondere der Mädchen, durch Haus und Schule (Berlin, 1885).

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and to take part in the liberation struggle.” Isolated in the private sphere of the family, most wives failed to understand that the money and time that their husbands devoted to political and intellectual activities reflected, in fact, a noble commitment to human liberation. Two developments would alleviate the ensuing marital crises: women’s education and the entry of more women into the workforce, where they would be drawn into the “holy struggle.”107 Hoffmann was not alone in arguing that the success of socialism and the liberation of women were linked to the destruction of Christian society. At the end of his speech on “The splendid misery of the woman question” in September 1890, the freshly minted socialist city councilor Ewald Vogtherr had the audience pass two resolutions: first, that leaving the state churches was a good means of agitation in the “woman question” and, second, that all men present should “concede an equal status to their wives.”108 The way these male secularists framed their call for female education appears to confirm arguments made by historians Dagmar Herzog and Joan Scott, who have questioned the widespread belief that secularism has had an emancipatory effect on women. Herzog argued that in the period prior to the 1848 revolution, liberal men supported women’s liberation (in conjunction with full rights for Jews and religious dissidents) in the name of humanism, but that male domination was reinscribed in the educative role that liberal men believed they should play in women’s transition to future equality.109 Scott has gone further and argued that secularism, as it emerged within nineteenthcentury liberal and radical republican circles, was a cornerstone of an ideology of male, bourgeois domination in European modernity.110 Revealing how gendered forms of domination operated inside the crucible of emancipation movements, these studies have corrected overly sunny portrayals of the relationship of secularism and feminism. However, we still need to explain the overlap. As historian Laura Schwartz observed of England in the same period: “Secularists active in the women’s movement were motivated as much by their Freethinking beliefs as they were by a commitment to women’s rights, or rather that these two intellectual currents were intertwined.”111 Three factors help explain the similar entwinement found in Germany. First, secularists, and especially Free Religionists, targeted women as one of their key sites of contention with the churches. Like the Protestant Inner Mission, the Free Religious sought to organize women, care for their well-being, and supervise

107 108 110 111

Adolph Hoffmann, Ein Warnungsruf! An die Frauen und Mädchen aller Stände (Berlin: A. Hoffmann, 1895), 9. 109 LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15799, p. 87. Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, 140–66. Scott, Sex and Secularism; Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 100. Schwartz, Infidel Feminism, 171.

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and guide their moral improvement. The Berlin Free Religious Congregation even built its own home for unwed mothers, a rival to Protestant and Catholic establishments, which often sought to hide these women away.112 Second, monist materialism offered women, who belonged to the ranks of the “semi-educated,” an alternative form of Bildung. Like ambitious male workers, middle-class women and girls did not have access to the institutions of neo-humanist education. With few exceptions, Gymnasien and universities remained male preserves until the twentieth century.113 The Prussian state first allowed regular admission of women in the Berlin University in 1908. Excluded from the dominant forms of educational capital provided by such institutions, many women seeking status improvement were attracted to popular science as an easily assimilable form of knowledge. At the Humboldt Academy female enrollment rose from around 40 percent in the early years to nearly 60 percent in 1896.114 One student there was the Free Religious union organizer Agnes Wabnitz, who felt that attendance at the Humboldt Academy had helped her gain the educational authorization to speak and teach publicly.115 Under the umbrella of the Humboldt Academy three Berlin women, the teachers Minna Cauer and Helene Lange and the physician Dr. Franziska Tiburtius, developed a separate program in 1889 of “science courses (Real-Kurse) for women.” Lange, like Cauer one of Germany’s best-known early feminists, became the director of this program that provided “a sounder educational foundation for young girls.”116 Education formed a central plank of all early women’s associations in Berlin, as expressed in the 1888 charter of the left-liberal women’s association Frauenwohl (Women’s Welfare): “motivate, enlighten, fill gaps.”117 This reads like an appeal to the “semi-educated.” The proposal for a socialist women’s movement in the late 1880s likewise anchored education in the first statute: “The Woman is morally equal to the Man: her intellectual capacities, which have been alternately undervalued and

112 113

114

115 116

117

See reference to “Ledigenheim,” Harndt papers, unpag. The first private women’s Gymnasium was opened in Karlsruhe in 1893. Lina Morgenstern, Frauenarbeit in Deutschland, vol. i (Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Hausfrauen-Zeitung, 1893), 25. Hirsch, Volkshochschulen, 8; Konrad Hirsch, “Die Humboldt-Hochschule, Freie Volkshochschule Groß-Berlin und die Volkhochschulfrage: Eine Studie über die Beziehungen zwischen Volkshochschule und Volkswirtschaft,” PhD, Giessen (1927), 11, 33. Glogau, Wabnitz, 6. Lehrprogramm der Humboldt-Akademie zu Berlin, IV Quartal (Berlin, 1889), 4–5; HumboldtAkademie, 1891, VI Quartal: 2. Among one of four women to study medicine in Zurich in 1871, Tiburtius became possibly the first female physician in Prussia, when she moved to Berlin in 1876. Morgenstern, Frauenarbeit, 21. Another of Europe’s earliest universityeducated female physicians was the Dutch freethinker and feminist, Aletta Jacobs. Minna Cauer, 25 Jahre Verein Frauenwohl Groß-Berlin (Berlin: W&S Loewenthal, 1913), 25.

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insufficiently developed, are to be fully educated, and she is thus to be allowed to enter those occupations, for which she proves herself capable.”118 Third, naturalistic monism offered a theoretical framework for understanding women’s place in society and for modeling an alternative future. Of the women mentioned above, Altmann, Wabnitz, Henrich-Wilhelmi and Stöcker regularly lectured on natural science and, in particular, on biology.119 The penchant of early feminists for biology may appear surprising, given that thirdwave feminists of the 1980s and 1990s were sharply critical of the role of sociobiology in naturalizing male domination by appearing to fix gender identity to sexual difference.120 Historians of science have generally attributed female attendance at popular-scientific events to an “ornamental” function, which served to produce bourgeois “sociability” (desired by the active male members).121 In other words, they have seen women’s participation as an exception that proves the rule of their exclusion from popular science. What goes missing from these accounts are the specific motivations of women active in the field. One must take seriously the message written to Ernst Haeckel on the back of a photograph of a woman from Portland, Oregon, stating that she was “one of the 1000’s of young Women, whose minds are being emancipated by Haeckel’s works.”122 118

119

120

121

122

For the text of this program, authored by Ms. Pötting and rumored to have been edited by August Bebel, see ibid., 35. A further indication of the importance of the secularist scene for the socialist women’s movement is given by the list of working women’s organizations published by Free Religionist Emma Ihrer in 1893. Among the 56 organizations in Germany, 19 were centered in Berlin. Ten of these were industry-specific quasi-unions; of the remaining nine, four had freigeistig origins or leadership, including the ArbeiterBildungsschule (200 women among 2,000 members), the Freie Volksbühne (women made up half of the 3,359 members), the Neue Freie Volksbühne and the Ethische Gesellschaft (64 female members of 270 total). Also listed was a Frauen und Mädchen-Bildungsverein für Berlin und Umgegend (112 members), where FRC member Agnes Wabnitz taught. Emma Ihrer, Die Organisationen der Arbeiterinnen Deutschlands, ihre Entstehung und Entwickelung (Berlin: self-published, 1893). Representative titles of popular-science lectures include “The circulation of matter is the soul of the world,” given by Henrich-Wilhelmi in October 1885; “Women in historical and scientific evolution” and “The activity of the brain and the five senses” given by Wabnitz in November 1894; and “The emergence of plants and people” given by Altmann in 1895. In Leipzig Käte Duncker lectured in 1899 on “Social state-building in the animal world.” LAB A Pr. Br. 030, 14133; no. 14127, p. 92; no. 8742, p. 24; Schäfers, Arbeiterbildung in Leipzig, 59. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 156–204; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung, 125. Similar findings in Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2001), 125–30; Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow: Mediziner, Anthropologe, Politiker (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 125. Heinrich Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel: Denkmal eines großen Lebens (Jena: Fommann, 1934), 91. Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, one of the chief promoters of the Giordano Bruno League in Berlin, wrote to Haeckel on March 11, 1903, that “Miss Isadora Duncan . . . is an enthusiastic adherent

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Let us dive more deeply into this appeal of Haeckel’s monistic biology, which allowed adherents to ground female identity in a natural order outside of the moral-clerical discourse. Helene Stöcker, who was one of Germany’s most influential sex reformers, wrote of Haeckel in 1914, “we walk in his path, when we seek to liberate motherhood from the chains that clerical narrow-mindedness has laid on it, and when we seek to make the scientific knowledge of our sexual lives into a discipline of science, namely sexology, which is being today developed equally by natural and cultural science.”123 Similar to the proposal put forward by fellow sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld that homosexuality represented a “third sex” between male and female, Stöcker argued that the monistic union of male and female was both the origin and goal of sexual activity, and that in the liminal space between lay “the highest goal of human development, the ‘androgyne’ as meant by the Romantics – the unity of masculinity and femininity in higher humanity.”124 Haeckel’s evolutionary theory also provided a historical framework for explaining the constitutional inferiority of women that was accepted even by leading Wilhelmine feminists. Haeckel supported the neo-Lamarckian claim that characteristics acquired in the life of an organism could be passed to the offspring. In this way, a species might alter its biology by “learning” how to adapt to new things in its environment. Alternatively, negative traits might be bred into species by external conditioning, allowing apparently congenital gender differences to be explained as the long-term effects of male domination. “Men are responsible for the foolishness and weaknesses of the woman, because they hinder her mental development,” HenrichWilhelmi told a large Berlin audience in March 1891. “This is the case with all peoples, the savage just as much as the highly civilized. Only the form of contempt of the woman changes with the development of culture.”125 The same environmental theories that explained female inferiority also offered a means for its amelioration. In a 1907 brochure The Pious and the Free Woman, Gustav Tschirn, then President of both the Union of Free Religious Congregations and the German Freethought Association, conceded

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of monism,” who knows “Darwin’s works very well and is an admirer especially of your activities in Germany and in the international cultural world.” EHH, Haeckel papers. Quoted in: Susanne Omran, Frauenbewegung und ‘Judenfrage’: Diskurse um Rasse und Geschlecht nach 1900 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000), 388. Quoted ibid., 38. An article that points to but does not fully explain the significance of natural science to Wilhelmine feminists: Edward Ross Dickinson, “Reflections on Feminism and monism in the Kaiserreich 1900–1913,” Central European History, 34/2 (2001): 191–230. Vorwärts, March 5, 1891.

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that women were one of the main hindrances to a rapid development of free thinking, but he argued that this was not due to their true or eternal “nature.” He compared female weakness to the negative characteristics widely attributed to Jews. Each was the product of environmental factors: in the case of the Jews the key factor was professional discrimination, which forced Jews into commercial and banking professions. “Is it a surprise,” he concluded, “that business savvy developed into a singular talent among them and in the course of centuries this propensity has been bred more than inherited from generation to generation!” Women suffered from an oppressive Christian education that taught them obedience as a virtue.126 To reverse this, secularists believed an environment of democracy, universal education, secularist religion and some form of socialism would breed a “New Woman” alongside the “New Man.” For many secularist women, from the Dutch freethinker Aletta Jacobs to Helene Stöcker, eugenic measures and female emancipation went hand in hand.127 The notion that women’s liberation depended on the mutual restructuring of the marriage relationship was emphasized by Hedwig Henrich-Wilhelmi in 1891: “The true emancipation of the woman takes place in closest connection to the man, in the same pursuit with him of joint life goals, in the struggle for equal obligations and equal rights. The free woman . . . can only love a free man.”128 After the turn of the century, marriage was taken up in freigeistig circles as one of the key utopian “communities” of the discourse of Gemeinschaften. Mutual sexual fulfillment, eugenically sound reproduction, friendship and intellectual exchange all became elements of the new ideal of the “marriage community” (Ehe-Gemeinschaft). Yet, according to Adeline Berger in 1889, working-class women had little stomach for the “free love” advocated by Henrich-Wilhelmi or the disquisitions on “breeding marriage” versus “comradely marriage” (Paarungs-Ehe and Genossenschafts-Ehe) by socialist intellectual Curt Baake, who tried to win his listeners for the collective raising of children.129

126 127

128

Gustav Tschirn, Christentum, Demokratie und Sozialismus, Vortrag gehalten am 5.10.1921 zur Bundestagung in Hannover (Leipzig: Deutschen Freidenkerbund, 1921), 20–21. The German League for Mothers’ Protection had been founded in 1905 by Helene Stöcker with significant participation of sociobiologists like Alfred Ploetz. Stöcker gave the organization’s journal a name that suggested the utopian potential of eugenics 1908: Die Neue Generation. Grete Meisel-Hess argued in 1909 that they would replace the individualistic women’s movement with “conscious social measures” aimed at “the highest racial well being.” Ursula Ferdinand, Das Malthusische Erbe: Entwicklungsstränge der Bevölkerungstheorie im 19. Jahrhundert und deren Einfluss auf die radikale Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Münster: LIT, 1999), 208. See also Stöcker’s article, “Monismus und Mutterschutz,” Neue Generation, 8 (1912): 546–49. 129 Vorwärts, March 5, 1891. Berger, Arbeiterinnen-Bewegung, 37.

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Conclusion This chapter examined the relationship of the two types of materialism – historical and natural-scientific – on offer in the socialist culture of Wilhelmine Germany. Despite occasional tensions, there was a wide consensus that both had a role to play in the socialist movement. For many workers, “socialist worldview” was a mixture of second-hand Marx and first-hand Haeckel. Walter Ulbricht recalled in a speech in 1960 that a half century earlier, “in the Arbeiterjugend we read Marx’s book Critique of Political Economy in the course on economics and Haeckel’s book in the course on natural science. Rarely has a book had more lasting impact than Haeckel’s World Riddle.”130 Reading such popular-scientific texts gave many workers the intellectual self-confidence and anticlerical rhetoric needed to undertake their first act of opposition to authority, which was often directed at the local priest or pastor. Our investigation of the biographies of male and female workers challenges past assumptions about the political valence of the core intellectual content of the secularist worldview, namely the evolutionary, materialistic monism tirelessly promoted by Ernst Haeckel. This worldview has often been deemed reactionary. Historian of science Daniel Gasman set the tone in the 1970s with his strong thesis that Haeckel’s thought laid the foundation for National Socialist racial ideology.131 To be sure, Haeckel’s work was utilized by many völkisch thinkers, and several former Monists, such as his secretary Heinrich Schmidt, called National Socialism the fulfillment of his biological thought and natural religion after 1933.132 Haeckel had helped coin the concept of “life value” (Lebenswert) and used it to justify the inadvertent genocide of “low” value Native Americans as collateral damage in the course of European expansion. The National Socialists had merely to modify this theory to justify racist extermination in Europe.133 Yet despite Haeckel’s own support of imperialism and his claim that the evolutionary principle of “survival of the fittest” was antisocialist and indeed aristocratic, his own political views did not determine his intellectual legacy. When Haeckel died in 1919, he was eulogized in the socialist Vorwärts as the “German Encyclopedist”: “What Diderot, d’Alembert, Voltaire once accomplished for the French, that should also be said to Haeckel’s honor: he was a pathbreaker for the intellectual German 130 131 132 133

Quoted in Peter Klemm, Ernst Haeckel: Der Ketzer von Jena (Berlin: Urania-Verlag, 1966), 244. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald, 1971), xxii. Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel, v. Ernst Haeckel, Die Lebenswunder: Gemeinverständliche Studien über biologische Philosophie (Volks-Ausgabe) (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1906), 157–64.

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revolution.”134 One can conclude that monist-materialist worldview was not per se emancipatory or reactionary. Its valence depended on how it was articulated within social struggles. Whereas some liberals used Haeckel’s ideas to justify imperialism, many leading socialists saw in them a weapon in class struggle, and the early women’s movement and the homosexual rights movement found emancipatory potential in the natural-scientific foundation they provided for a new politics of gender removed from Christian norms.

134

Cited in Franz Meffert, Ernst Häckel der Darwinist und Freidenker: Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik des modernen Freidenkertums (Munich: Volksverein-Verlag, 1920), 245.

6

The Politics of Secularism 1905–1914

The first five chapters of this book have sketched out the sociological, intellectual and institutional dimensions of secularism as a dissenting culture and examined how secularist knowledge correlated to confidence among workingclass autodidacts, whether men, women or youth. This chapter takes up the political implications of secularism in the period of national parliamentary upheaval, which began in 1906 and deepened into a systemic crisis after the Reichstag elections of 1912 returned the largest ever number of socialist deputies. Since the “Fischer controversy” of the early 1960s, historians have been debating the relationship between this crisis and the decision of the monarchic state and military to go to war in August 1914. According to Thomas Nipperdey, the fluid, unstable situation in parliament left all sides feeling immobilized, making “the alternative of war or revolution” into a construction that served the “either-or polarization by ultras.” Similarly, Hans-Ulrich Wehler concluded that imperial adventurism represented a “flight forward” for a monarchy facing intractable problems presented by democratic politics.1 Helmut Walser Smith has drawn attention to the religious dimension of this period, which he likened to the Kulturkampf of the 1870s due to the heightened confessional antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants.2 Yet, to date, the influence of secularism on this political crisis has remained unexplored, despite an upsurge of anticlerical demonstrations, utopian manifestoes and the founding of a host of new secularist organizations. To make sense of the complex interplay of secularist agitation and partisan politics we need to draw rough distinctions between five political groups, who were strongly represented amongst Germany’s secularist movement. To begin with there was the fundamental divide between the “bourgeois” (or liberal) and the “proletarian” (or socialist) camps. Yet important divisions existed within

1

2

Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol. i: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich: Beck, 1992), 755–56. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985). Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics 1870–1914 (Princeton University Press, 1994).

153

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each of these camps. On the socialist side, there were radicals, pushing towards revolution, and revisionists, arguing for evolution. On the bourgeois side, amongst those for whom I often use the shorthand “liberal,” there were left liberals, who backed the Progressive parties, and democrats, who stood in the tradition of radical republicans. Finally, rounding off the bourgeois-liberal camp were the antipolitical advocates of a rule by cultural elites. This chapter locates these groups on the national level at the outset of the period, and then turns to two German states, Prussia and Bavaria, to explore interactions in different regional confessional and political contexts. National Politics 1905–1908 In 1905 socialist radicals in Germany looked with great hope at the revolutionary events unfolding in Russia. The collapse of that revolution at the end of the year fed into long-standing frustrations at home. Despite the tremendous growth of their party and the full coffers of the trade unions, many German socialists felt that they had reached the limit of parliamentary action. Their inability to challenge the Prussian election law, which minimized worker voting power and ensured a continuation of “bourgeois” rule, placed in question the longterm socialist strategy of “revolutionary waiting,” which assumed that continual party growth would eventually deliver socialist transformation, either through the ballot box or through a political crisis, which August Bebel called the “big Kladderadatsch [hullabaloo].” Radicals increasingly favored the idea that rather than waiting, the party should provoke confrontation with the system, for example by calling for a general or mass strike to oppose the Prussian electoral law. Many reformists and revisionists, who were strongest in the labor unions, rejected the mass strike as illegal, costly and a threat to the existence of the labor movement. They continued to place their hopes for a transformation of Germany’s political system on the ongoing growth of labor union membership and on the increasing share of socialist seats in the Reichstag.3 The radicals enjoyed significant support from the party rank-and-file in Berlin, where between 1906 and 1912 political street violence reached a prewar peak.4 Unable to gain control of the party, radicals looked for

3

4

Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1973); Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955). In 1908, Rosa Luxemburg and Ottilie Baader led a group of 100 women to the memorial ceremony for the martyrs of the 1848 revolution – the “Märzgefallenen” – that developed into a spontaneous demonstration for universal suffrage. Thomas Lindenberger, Straßenpolitik: Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1995), 19–20, 310.

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alternative sites of action, and anticlericalism fit into this strategy.5 It appealed to working-class revolutionaries, but also to many left liberals. Karl Liebknecht believed the SPD could tap middle-class opposition to the Bülow government in the 1908 Landtag elections with a campaign based on electoral reform, antimilitarism and what Liebknecht called “ethical arguments.”6 Seven socialists were elected to the Landtag, a first in the history of that institution. Of these, six were from Berlin districts and three were radicals: Liebknecht, Heinrich Ströbel and Adolph Hoffmann. The other minority movement in the SPD that concerns us in this chapter is revisionism. The central bone of contention between the revisionists and the “orthodox” Marxists was the latter’s assumption that the “iron law” of wages and the concentration of capital necessarily led to social polarization and eventually to social revolution. Citing evidence of the economic health of the middle classes, revisionists proposed an “evolutionary” theory, which held pure socialism to be an ethical ideal, which would guide the party, as it negotiated with other democratically inclined political parties. According to Eduard Bernstein’s dictum “the movement means everything to me, . . . the final goal nothing,” they sought reform within capitalism.7 Monist and Free Religionist Heinrich Peus, a powerful figure in the SPD in Dessau, gave a good summary of the revisionist credo: Let us promote practical socialism! Let us transform the world in which we live today in the spirit of socialism! Today, I insist, not tomorrow! The hope for a future event is misguided. The day of the ‘liberating Kladderadatsch’ will never come. In that Bebel and with him many others were prisoners of his misleading conceptual system.8

Revisionism had a strong secularist signature but was weak among party officials. Two of the minority of only eleven delegates to vote against the condemnation of Bernstein and his revisionist theory at the Dresden Party Congress of 1903 were Free Religionists, Peus and Paul Löbe. Both men cultivated ties to democratic-liberal circles.9 5 6 7

8

9

Opinion of Paul Göhre, quoted in: Deutsche Tageszeitung, Jan. 17, 1906. Cited in Dieter Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten: Die nichtproletarischen demokratischen Kräfte in der deutschen Geschichte 1830 bis 1945 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1981), 140. “Erklärung Eduard Bernsteins vom 29. September 1898 an den Parteitag der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands in Stuttgart zur Begründung seiner revisionistischen Anschauungen,” in Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. iv: 1898–1914 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1967), 19. Heinrich Peus, Zwangsparen und genossenschaftliche Gartenstadt, vol. ii, Lose Blätter: Singla folii: Zweisprachige Bibliothek in deutscher Sprache und in Weltsprache (Leipzig: Unesma, 1915), 2. Löbe participated in the Breslau chapter of the DGEK and in the Gesellschaft für sozialer Reform led by Werner Sombart and took part in the Breslauer Dichterkreis, which was an offshoot of the Friedrichshagener circle. Löbe recalls being taunted as a “loyal servant” (treuer Knecht) for his revisionism by Adolph Hoffmann at the 1903 Congress. Löbe, Erinnerungen, 54, 56, 62–64.

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The Politics of Secularism 1905–1914

If the Russian Revolution acted as a goad to radical socialists, another world-historical event of 1905, the French law separating church and state, was a provocation to German liberals, who worried that they were falling behind France in the struggle against the Vatican. Confessional tensions in Germany had been rising since the late 1890s. Some German Protestants avidly supported the “Los von Rom” (Away from Rome) movement, founded in 1898 to convert Austrian Catholics to Protestantism. The Vatican enflamed Protestant passions with harsh condemnations of the Lutheran “heresy” and dogged attacks on liberal theological currents, culminating in the “anti-modernist oath” for all Catholic priests.10 Liberals were alarmed when the German state proffered the Catholic Center Party a deal in 1903, whereby the key elements of the anti-Catholic legislation of the 1870s, in particular the “Jesuit Laws,” would be repealed in exchange for parliamentary backing of naval building and colonization.11 Raising the specter of resurgent ultramontanism, Friedrich Naumann published an influential tract Democracy and Monarchy, in which he argued that only a social liberalism tied to a strong monarchist state could prevent “Roman domination.” Although his National Social Association failed to attract support in the 1903 Reichstag election, Naumann’s strategy inspired many.12 The Center Party reacted in a divided fashion to the liberal onslaught. Julius Bachem, editor of the influential Kölnische Volkszeitung, called on Catholics to “come out of the tower,” i.e. abandon their confessional isolation and incorporate conservative Protestants into the Center Party. In this spirit, the clergy, politicians and lay leaders attending the national Catholic conference (Katholikentag) in Essen in 1906 called for ecumenical cooperation in “an alliance of all confessions faithful to God and Jesus Christ against the forces of atheism and revolution.” This tactic was opposed by younger party leaders, who criticized nationalism and did not shy away from defending confessional prerogatives. In December 1906, Center Party deputies objected to the government’s colonial policy, in particular the recent military suppressions of revolts in South West Africa. In response, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow dissolved parliament and called a snap election in which he appealed to nationalists to form an alliance to “struggle against ultramontanes, Guelfs [Hanoverian separatists, T. W.], socialists and Poles.”13 In the so-called Hottentot elections of January 1907, the “Bülow-Bloc” of Conservatives and

10

11 12

Smith, German Nationalism, 118–40; Kurt Nowak, Geschichte des Christentums in Deutschland: Religion, Politik und Gesellschaft vom Ende der Aufklärung bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 1995), 157–58. Roísin Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 106. 13 Smith, German Nationalism, 125–26. Quotations ibid., 138–41.

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National Liberals whipped up nationalist emotions and delivered a defeat to the SPD, which lost half of its seats. The atmosphere of Kulturkampf and the parliamentary realignment contributed to a burst of activity among “bourgeois” secularists, who sought to fill their sails with the new energy of German liberalism. Already in 1904, a secularist journal had argued that the “union of liberals” could only succeed if it challenged the confessional system.14 New organizations were founded, including the League for Mothers’ Protection in 1904–05, the German Monist League in 1906, and in 1907 the German League for Secular Schools and Moral Instruction, which pioneered ethics as an alternative to religious instruction in schools.15 Naumann’s call for a “gathering” of liberals in the political realm was echoed in the secularist scene. In 1906, the Frankfurt industrialist, Buddhist and freethinker Arthur Pfungst called for a “union of free spirits,” and the Congress of Freethinkers in Stettin issued a similar declaration. In 1907 the formation of a first umbrella organization for all secularist organizations was announced and in 1909 formally constituted as the Weimar Cartel.16 Following calls for a “centralization” of freigeistig organizations in Berlin to counteract the “fragmentation of spiritual life,” a “Cultural Cartel of Greater Berlin” was launched in 1910.17 Local cartels also formed in Munich and Frankfurt am Main. Prior to 1909, the leading secularist organizations foregrounded their antiCatholicism and sought to build common ground with liberal Protestants. The Monist League focused some of its initial public attacks at Catholicism; one of the largest events held by the newly founded Berlin chapter of the DMB was a series of public debates with the Jesuit biologist Erich Wasmann in 1907.18 Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald participated in the Anti-Ultramontane National Association (Antiultramontane Reichsverband) of the former Jesuit Count Paul von Hoensbroech.19 The heated confessional climate enhanced the 14 15 16

17

18

19

“Liberale von heute,” Das Freie Wort, 21 (February 1904). Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890– 1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 97. The driving spirit behind the Weimarer Kartell was Max Henning, the editor of Das Freie Wort. Max Henning, Jahrbuch des Weimarer Kartells 1912: Ein Handbuch der freigeistigen Bewegung Deutschlands (Frankfurt am Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, 1912). Frank SimonRitz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1997); Groschopp, Dissidenten, 13–51. See the undated circular (ca. 1908) of the “preparatory central committee for the centralization of reform associations,” signed by land reformer Adolf Damaschke and DGEK chair Rudolf Penzig, in DStLB, Hart papers, no. 2866. Ludwig Plate, Ultramontane Weltanschauung und moderne Lebenskunde: Orthodoxie und Monismus: Die Anschauungen des Jesuitenpaters Erich Wasmann und die gegen ihn in Berlin gehaltenen Reden (Jena: Fischer, 1907). See letters to Ostwald from the Antiultramontane Reichsverband, BBAW, Ostwald papers, no. 4020, Nov. 7, 1910 and no. 4021, Jan. 1, 1911. On Hoensbroech, see Smith, German

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appeal of secularism among German liberals, such as Max Weber’s brother Alfred, a young professor of sociology in Prague, who issued a welcoming statement for the organizing committee for the 1907 International Congress of Freethought. Weber dismissed conservative worries that Freethought was being used by socialists and teetotaling anarchists – whom he called the “biggest consumers of lemonade on earth” – to prepare a future without “masters or gods.” The real enemy were the state “masters” who were forcing “gods” on the people through clerical control of schools and thereby retarding cultural development.20 The hope for liberation through culture and education was the core tenet of a liberal approach to national renewal that Thomas Mann later famously described as “unpolitical” and which others have since called “antipolitical,” because it denied the efficacy of parliamentary democracy.21 Unpolitical liberals were not so naïve as to think that the power of their “personalities” alone would lead to national rebirth. In good Kantian fashion, they envisaged a period of national tutelage, in which the “educators” would have to rely on political authority. Ludwig Büchner, who was both Germany’s most famous Freethinker and a leading Democrat, referred in the 1890s to the negative effects of universal suffrage as “the Democratic Disease,” which afflicted society when “those uneducated . . . voters, who are dependent on the church, Social Democratic leadership or personal influences, are given the same rights as the educated.” Büchner advocated instead a “reform of universal voting rights in favor of a greater participation of those portions of the nation that are intelligent and independent in their opinions or civic positions.”22 Similarly, some secularists supported electoral reform with more votes for the “bearers of culture” (Kulturträger).23 In October 1906, leading Munich monist Johannes Unold held a lecture, in which he opposed democracy as the rule of the majority over the cultural elite. Because the majority of Prussian citizens would vote for “clerical” (Center) or “class” rule (SPD), Unold proposed instead a corporatist model in which one voted according to profession.24

20 21 22 23 24

Nationalism, 129–32; Armin Müller-Dreier, Konfession in Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur des Kaiserreichs: Der Evangelische Bund 1886–1914 (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1998), 266. Alfred Weber, “Zum Freidenkerkongress (1907),” in Alfred-Weber-Gesamtausgabe (Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 1999), 64–65. Repp, Antipolitics. “Die demokratische Krankheit,” Ludwig Büchner, Kaleidoskop: Skizzen und Aufsätze aus Natur und Menschenleben (Gießen: Emil Roth, 1901), 83–89, citations at 87, 89. See Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 10–15. Dr. J. Unold, Monismus und Klerikalismus, ed. Dr. Heinrich Schmidt (Brackwede: W. Breitenbach, 1907).

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Although borders in the liberal-bourgeois camp were fluid, the antidemocratic stance of antipolitical intellectuals can be distinguished from the direction taken by some of Naumann’s followers, who came to embrace the radical republican tradition of the 1848 revolution. They formed the Democratic Union (Demokratische Vereinigung) and split off from the Progressive Party (Freisinn) in April 1908 over its participation in the Bülow government.25 Rudolf Breitscheid had earlier issued a call for a “bloc of leftists,” by which he meant a “cooperation with Social Democracy in all questions related to defense against conservative-clerical attacks.” However, he also wanted a Social Democracy free of “unfruitful” Marxism that would look to liberalism as its “mentor” (Lehrmeister). His collaborator Hellmuth von Gerlach, also a former Christian Social, demanded from the SPD a “radical program, interpreted revisionistically and applied practically.”26 Debates over democracy also contributed to divisions within secularist organizations. Some organizations defected from the national Freethought League (DFB) because of the unwillingness of “bourgeois” members to abandon an electoral modus that provided extra votes for wealthier members and functionaries and thus bore resemblance to the “three-class” voting system. At the 1904 annual meeting, “bourgeois” Berliners Rudolf Penzig, Otto Lehmann-Rüßbult and Bruno Wille all voted to defend this system and rejected the reform proposal put forward by the board of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation that would have redistributed votes to reflect the relative size of each congregation and thus given the enormous “socialist” Berlin Free Religious Congregation a dominant position. When the proposal was rejected, the Berlin Free Religious Congregation withdrew from active participation in the DFB (it had exited the national organization of Free Religion for similar reasons the year before).27 Following renewed debate over vote distribution at the 1908 DFB Congress in Frankfurt, a number of socialist chapters formed a separate umbrella organization to represent “the proletarian element within the Freethought movement.” The Zentralverband deutscher Freidenkervereine (ZdF) was formed and shifted into an opposition movement to the DFB.28 The division between “bourgeois” and “proletarian” Freethought would not be overcome until 1930. Proletarian freethinkers were strongest in regions where cooperation between liberals and socialists was weak, such as Munich, the Rhineland and Hamburg. They pilloried the 25 27 28

26 Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 133. Citations ibid., 136–37, 142. “Protokoll der 21. Hauptversammlung des deutschen Freidenkerbundes zu Eberfeld am 9.10.1904,” Der Freidenker (1904): 157–58. Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 93–114. Hamburg (550) and Munich (850) had the biggest chapters of the Zentralverband (4,900 members nationally in 1912). Berlin had only 4 members, because the Berlin FRC did not join the smaller ZpF. This division structured the rivalry in the 1920s between the FRC-offshoot, the VFF, and the GpF, which emerged out of the ZpF.

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idealism of the bourgeois “Sport-Freidenker,” who “want to replace the sermon of the priest with the lecture of the professor, transform church ceremonies into secular ‘hours of edification’ in which one gets intoxicated on the platitudinous chatter of vulgar monism, this vogue of bourgeois enlightenment.”29 For socialist freethinkers, true monism had to include the overcoming of the dualism of class, i.e. it meant the incorporation of Marxian social theory and class struggle. The Church-leaving Movement in Berlin and Prussia until 1908 Having examined partisan politics and the secularist scene on the national level between 1905 and 1909, we now turn to investigations of how the two interacted in political action. We start in Berlin with the socialist campaign for church-leaving, and then move to socialist, anarchist and liberal secularist agitation in Munich. As discussed in the introduction, secularists continually tested the SPD declaration that “religion is a private matter” by insisting on the right to undertake anticlerical agitation to defend the (private) freedom of conscience of their own associations. The most politically potent weapon at their disposal was official exit from the churches (Kirchenaustritt). Unlike blasphemy, which was a fleeting symbolic act, registering one’s exit was considered a body blow to the state churches and not just because it potentially deprived them of statecollected taxes. The size of the church flock was measured by membership rather than attendance. The right to leave the church and become “confessionless” was first formalized in Prussia in 1847 to allow rationalist dissidents to leave the state churches without forming new ones. Its political potential was realized during the late 1870s, and it played a significant role during the Weimar Republic and again during the National Socialist “Church Struggle.” However, the first time it was used in a sustained fashion as a form of mass political protest was in Berlin between 1905 and 1914. Police statistics (see Table 6.1) reveal two waves of church-leaving in this period, one cresting in 1908, the second in 1913. In each wave, the churchleavers were largely working-class, but in the first wave the percentage of SPD members among church-leavers was much higher. The peak of church-leaving came in 1913 and the beginning of 1914 and corresponded to a joint campaign of socialists and liberals.30 Overall, the net reduction of church membership

29

30

Der Zentral-Verband Deutscher Freidenker: Seine Entstehung und seine Aufgaben (Nuremberg: Hauptvorstand des Zentralverbands Deutscher Freidenker in Dresden, 1910), 3, 7–8. Police in 1912 attributed 4,215, i.e. over 60 percent, of church exits to agitation by the leftliberal Komitee Konfessionslos.

Table 6.1 Formal church exits in Berlina Year

Total exits

Male

Female

Registered as Social Democrats

Protestant

Catholic

Jewish

Worker / craftsmen

Higher classes (“bessere Stände”)

1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1912 1913 1914 1915

245 232 262 271 291 376 413 1060 4408 5868 11063 9769 4375 7719 12572 6438 672

170 170 172 185 223 268 292 872 3601 3718 6506 5881 2532 4711 7811 3980 291

74 62 90 86 68 108 106 153 612 1855 4001 3568 1618 2864 4597 2340 369

50 (20%) 42 (16%) 49 (19%) 82 (30%) 100 (34%) 124 (33%) 115 (28%) 471 (44%) 1989 (45%) 2655 (45%) 4225 (38%) 2467 (25%) 1454 (33%) 1359 (18%) 1454 (12%) 1349 (21%) 189 (28%)

174 156 202 188 233 298 324 890 2745 4660 9484 8102 3388 6467 11048 5667 459

25 34 23 35 35 40 59 118 594 1170 1493 1542 920 1165 1476 748 175

46 42 37 48 23 38 30 52 69 38 86 125 67 87 48 21 38

185 (76%) 198 (85%) 202 (77%) 216 (80%) 235 (81%) 298 (79%) 344 (83%) 997 (94%) 4313 (98%) 5538 (94%) 10551 (95%)

60 34 60 55 56 78 69 63 95 330 512

3889 (89%)

486

a

LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15799, 15800, 15801.

161

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The Politics of Secularism 1905–1914

was moderate. With 2 million residents in Berlin, only 0.5 percent of the population left the churches in 1913. Yet, church exits completely outstripped conversions between religions. In 1907, for example, there were 5,868 exits from the churches, but only 162 conversions to Protestantism, 46 to Catholicism and 15 to Judaism.31 When compared to church-leaving for the rest of Prussia and, indeed, the entire Reich, the fact that annually between 10 and 25 percent of all German church exits prior to 1914 took place in Berlin, makes that city an anomaly.32 Only in the final twelve months before the war, did church-leaving pick up elsewhere. This raises the questions: why Berlin, and what constellation of forces led to these two waves? The best starting point for answering these questions is the investigation of church-leaving by Jochen-Christoph Kaiser for the period 1905 to 1914. Kaiser sought to poke holes in the inflated sense that secularists had of their own impact on what appeared to be anticlerical acts by German workers. Whereas secularist organizers told workers that they were leaving the churches for political-ideological motives, Kaiser emphasized the material interests of the workers. To explain the uptick around 1905, he pointed to changes in the financing of the state churches introduced by the Prussian government beginning in 1905, which reduced fees charged for specific church services (Stolgebühren) and raised church taxes based on income. The effect of this new revenue structure was to increase the financial burden on the religiously indifferent members of the churches, who did not use its services.33 Resentment towards church taxes grew further in 1907, when the government adopted new instruments that improved its ability to gather the taxes, and again in 1908, when clergy salaries were increased.34 Changes in church taxes are an important but not sufficient cause to explain church exit. Other local factors must be considered, beginning with the relationship of the Prussian state to dissidents in Berlin. Berlin had the greatest concentration of dissidents in Germany, yet they were subject to more intense discrimination than in some other German states. Whereas Saxony and Bavaria allowed Free Religious instruction to dissident schoolchildren, most of Prussia required confessionless children to attend Christian religious instruction 31 32 33

34

LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15799, 15800, 15801. Statistics in Hölscher (ed.), Datenatlas, vol. ii, 475, vol. iv, 703–04. Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, “Sozialdemokratie und ‘praktische’ Religionskritik: Das Beispiel der Kirchenaustrittsbewegung 1878–1914,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 22 (1982): 280–82. See also Katharina Neef, “Politicizing a (Non)Religious Act: The Secularist Church Exit Propaganda of the Komitee Konfessionslos (1908–1914),” in Freethinkers in Europe: National and Transnational Secularities, 1789 1920s, ed. Carolin Kosuch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 297–330. In an article “From the Stomach of the Church,” Vorwärts (Aug. 16, 1908) reported that church taxes were set to increase to 20 percent of the income tax and encouraged readers to get an early start on their exit application, so as not to pay “tribute” for another year.

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against the will of their parents. Agitation for church-leaving had begun in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation (FRC) after its religious instruction was prohibited by the Royal Provincial School Collegium in 1894, an injunction that was not lifted until the last days of the First World War. This meant that a continual casus belli was present for secularist agitation in Berlin. At the height of the church-leaving campaign in November 1913, the President of the Monist League Wilhelm Ostwald insisted that his anticlerical actions were motivated purely by the practical question of finding the “the shortest path to removing the intolerable compunction to confessional instruction of dissident children,” which proved the “intimately immoral idea of a state church, i.e., the combination of religion and state administration.”35 Police files reveal that the church-leaving movement in Berlin between 1890 and 1910 was led by the most prominent socialists in the Free Religious Congregation, who often sought to link the defense of the dissidents to wider political goals, and thereby overcome the party injunction on anticlerical activity. This was particularly obvious when they sought to establish church-leaving as the norm for party officials. At an 1894 meeting on “state religion and Social Democracy,” the Free Religious organizers invited prominent socialists who had not left the church to appear at their next meeting to explain their position. In response, Vorwärts urged socialists to reject this intolerance as an “inquisition” (Ketzergericht).36 On another occasion, the editors commented sarcastically on “the well-known propensity of certain Free Religionists to demand freedom of conscience for themselves, but not to grant others this freedom.”37 Church-leaving meetings of the 1890s became places where rank and file members and party officials debated the party line. Some spoke in favor of the “Marxist” perspective that worker belief in religion was withering of its own accord and that anticlerical agitation only hindered socialist appeals to Christian and especially Catholic workers.38 Yet, as the left-liberal Vossische Zeitung reported in March 1897, the “fierce confrontations” at mass rallies for

35 36 37 38

“Die Austrittsbewegung und der politische Liberalismus,” Vossische Zeitung, Nov. 26, 1913. In the subsequent meeting, Henrich-Wilhelmi, Hoffmann and Wille all attacked the Vorwärts article. Vorwärts, Feb. 20, 1894; Feb. 22, 1894. Vorwärts, Jan. 7, 1893. At a September 1890 Austritt meeting, a furniture maker argued that “the belief in God will fall away on its own for convinced Social Democrats.” Germania, Sept. 12, 1890. At a meeting on “Die Religion der Zukunft” in the same month, the retired Protestant preacher Kendziora, who often spoke in socialist circles, said that his former church was not worth fighting because it was dying of its own accord. He criticized the FRC as a meaningless development and cited Marx and Kant in support of his argument that religions would be replaced by “religious feeling.” He was opposed by some of the audience, who shouted “tear down the churches!” Berliner Volksblatt, Sept. 20, 1890.

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The Politics of Secularism 1905–1914

church-leaving often ended in victory for the secularists. At the end of the debate of one such meeting, the audience sided with the demand of Waldeck Manasse that socialist officials should “also show their true colors regarding the religious question” and passed an anticlerical resolution by an overwhelming majority.39 Manasse and Hoffmann complained thatVorwärts and the party were “lukewarm” (lau) towards Freethought,40 and this is correct, insofar as reporting on the campaign for dissident rights was generally ambivalent. For example, in a lead article promoting the passage of a “dissidents’ law” in the Prussian Landtag in July 1897, Vorwärts described dissidents as those people “who have turned their backs on the state recognized and sponsored faith communities, because they cannot reconcile ‘salvific truths’ with their healthy reason.” Having thus implicitly identified dissidence with common sense, the article then distanced the party from enforcing this norm, calling it “[a] bald maneuver . . . when our opponents try to identify dissidence and social democracy. . . . Our party leaves religious questions entirely to the independent decision of each individual member.”41 The most important person in the Berlin church-leaving campaign was Adolph Hoffmann. He is a prime example of a secularist activist who sought to work within the party rather than directly challenging the party plank. Hoffmann cast church-leaving as the mere exercise of the individual’s right to private freedom of conscience. On January 6, 1896, Hoffmann co-founded the socialist-dominated Free Religious Commission for Exit from the State Church that printed and distributed forms for church-leaving and organized rallies on an ongoing basis.42 The Commission explicitly called on Berliners to use church-leaving to lodge their protest against the obligatory confessional instruction of dissident children against the will of their parents. Without the pioneering efforts of the Berlin FRC in this field, it is unlikely that it would have come to the more spectacular church-leaving events of 1905 to 1914. As police noted in 1906, most of the requests for church-leaving were filled out on forms printed by the FRC.43

39 40 41 42

43

Vossische Zeitung, 2nd edn, March 30, 1897. “Protokoll der 19. Hauptversammlung des Deutschen Freidenker-Bundes am 19. und 20. Mai 1902 zu Berlin,” Der Freidenker (1902): 87–88. “Gewissensfreiheit für Dissidenten,” Vorwärts, July 3, 1897. Members of the commission were Adolph Hoffmann, coachman Engler, furrier Menzel, polisher Juensch, and the innkeeper Lindemann. On Jan. 15, 1896 the Commission held a rally attended by roughly 1,000 people at which 96 persons declared their Austritt as a demonstration against the prohibition on Free Religious instruction. Vossische Zeitung, zweite Beilage, Jan. 16, 1896; zweite Beilage, Feb. 4, 1896. From a police report forwarded to the Protestant Church, April 3, 1906, LABB 14/2575 Part II, unpag.

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Two political factors contributed to the sudden jump in church-leaving in 1905.44 First was the pending passage of a new school law for Prussia, which, when it was finally approved by the Landtag in summer 1906, strengthened church control over religious instruction and codified confessional segregation. The second was agitation against the three-class electoral system that effectively disenfranchised the Prussian working classes. Paul Göhre, who as a former Protestant minister played a singular role in SPD religious politics, proposed that the party respond to both of these challenges through churchleaving: The onslaught which the Prussian and German proletariat has launched against the three-class voting system will likely be held in narrow bounds. Petitions no longer help; leaflets and mass demonstrations likewise produce no miracles; peaceful demonstrations are to be choked in blood; we cannot and may not consider a political mass strike: in this situation, given the pending school law, a mass church-leaving movement of great proportions may, in fact, be a revolutionary tool of struggle.45

Historian Marjorie Lamberti found that the SPD as a whole was cool to Göhre’s proposal,46 but the press at the time noted that the public linked both the Russian Revolution and agitation for electoral reform to the ongoing Free Religious church-leaving campaign.47 In April 1906 socialist freethinkers dominated protest demonstrations against the school law in the Rhenish towns of Duisburg and Ruhrort and passed resolutions demanding reform of the Prussian franchise and separation of church and state.48 In the same month the agitation committee led by Hoffmann placed a large ad in Vorwärts offering free copies of a May Day handbill (with a claimed run of 1 million copies) calling for “Mass exodus out of the church” as a “Protest against the School-Clericalisation-Law [Schulverpfaffungs-Gesetz].”49 The popularity of Hoffmann’s anticlericalism likely helps explain his election to the Prussian parliament in 1908 despite the unfair franchise. He would clearly have been a poor choice if there had been any possibility of cooperative work with other parties, such as had existed in Bavaria prior to 1905. However, as Fritz Kunert had explained upon his own election to 44

45 46

47 48 49

According to the Vossische Zeitung, Feb. 23, 1908, the main causes of the wave of churchleaving were the political position of the Prussian government and the “sharper tax practice” of the Protestant Church. Deutsche Tageszeitung, Jan. 17, 1906. Leo Arons, another revisionist, also called for church-leaving. Marjorie Lamberti, State, Society and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 195–98. Vossische Zeitung, Jan. 20, 1906. Theo Schneid, “Arbeiterbewegung zwischen Integration und Ausgrenzung: Die proletarische Freidenkerbewegung in Rheinland-Westfalen,” PhD, University of Duisburg (1991), 52–53. Vorwärts, April 15, 1906. In 1905 the DFV and BFRC reportedly printed 300,000 flyers promoting church exit. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15799, p. 185.

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another body with a restrictive franchise, the Berlin City Council, the chief purpose of their taking elected seats was “to exercise criticism . . . and thus achieve propaganda.”50 The socialist deputies elected to the Prussian Landtag in 1908 assumed a similar tactic and quickly became known as the “angry seven” or the “bad conscience of this parliament.”51 None of the seven took greater pleasure in the role of firebrand than Hoffmann, who used his bully pulpit to criticize the state churches and advertise the church-leaving movement. During debate on the salaries of church ministers in October 1908, Hoffmann was called to order three times for inappropriate criticism of church and state officials. Barred from speaking further in the halls of parliament, he went to the streets. He promptly organized a public rally in a large rented hall, where in front of a crowd of several thousand he passed from a criticism of the “violation of [his] freedom of speech” to an attack on the church oversight of public schooling: “As long as the school is ruled by the church, our children will be raised in clericalism [Muckerei] and slavish obedience to heavenly and worldly authorities.” Following his call for the liberation of the schools, some 1,500 persons marched from the Tiergarten through the city center singing the “Workers’ Marseillaise,” cheering international Social Democracy and yelling “Away from the church!” (Los von der Kirche). A scuffle broke out when police stopped them at the edge of the Prenzlauer Berg district, which was finally ended when police reinforcements arrived on horseback.52 The slogan “Away from the church!” became the battle cry of the intensified church-leaving campaign in 1908. Even if Hoffmann did not invent it, the slogan certainly fit his ironic style, as it manipulated the name of the antiCatholic “Away from Rome” movement popular among the Protestant, nationalist and liberal circles that backed the Bülow government. Although many liberals may have been sympathetic to Hoffmann, there is little evidence that the liberal secularist organizations contributed in any meaningful way to the first wave of the Berlin church-leaving campaign of 1905 to 1909, which had modest success in terms of numbers of completed exits. Police and church officials were regularly able to disqualify applications for church-leaving after they had been submitted. Many applicants failed to appear at the church parish or police station for a mandatory meeting to conclude the procedure.53 Despite 50 51 52

53

“Bericht über die Kommunalwähler-Versammlung des 24. Kommunalwahlbezirks,” July 2, 1888, LAB A Br. Pr. 030, 11092, p. 53. From an article on a church-leaving demonstration at which Hoffmann spoke to 1,000 Breslau residents, including many “bourgeois.” Volkswacht, Breslau, April 16, 1909. Vorwärts, Oct. 31, 1908; Vossische Zeitung, Nov. 2, 1908; Vorwärts, Nov. 3, 1908. Some 2,000 attended a meeting two weeks later at which Hoffmann spoke, “Away from the church and its pastors that don’t pay church taxes!” See “Kirche gib acht!” Vossische Zeitung, Nov. 15, 1908. Between Jan. 1 and May 15, 1906, in one parish of Berlin, 794 Protestants registered but only 527 completed their church exits. “Ephoralbericht über die kirchlichen und sittlichen Zustände der Synode Berlin III, Berlin 1906,” LABB 14/2575.

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this, the movement rattled the authorities, for, as the conservative Tägliche Rundschau warned in 1908, “it is obvious that a church with which the masses can play must lose respect.”54 Religious Politics in Bavaria 1905–1909 Upon joining the new federal German state in 1870/71, Bavaria gained a Prussian emperor, but retained its own king. Because the royal house was Catholic, represented between 1886 and 1912 by the Prince Regent Luitpold, the Catholic Church retained a privileged place in Bavarian life. Bavaria had its own papal nuncio and was governed by its own episcopal conference. The Kulturkampf of the 1870s had been fought out principally in Protestantdominated Prussia. Having been largely spared this trauma, Bavaria had a less developed network of confessional defense organizations than the Catholic regions of Prussia. Religious practices in the capitals of the two states also varied greatly. Bavaria’s capital Munich was some 80 percent Catholic and church attendance remained higher than the national average, whereas much of Berlin’s overwhelmingly Protestant population was Protestant in name only. In 1863 less than 20 percent of Berlin’s Protestants took communion (as compared to nearly 80 percent in Bavaria or 70 percent in Saxony) and the rates dropped continually thereafter.55 Importantly, the constitutional position of dissidents varied greatly in the two kingdoms. Unlike Prussia, Bavaria allowed the Free Religious Congregations to provide religious instruction to dissident schoolchildren and its courts upheld this right when challenged.56 Bavaria was the stronghold of the Reformist wing of the SPD. Again and again, Bavarian party chairman Georg von Vollmar stressed the need for religious tolerance and insisted that the SPD was “a purely economic and political party, outside of any confessional partisanship.”57 The success of Vollmar’s strategy of religious neutrality can be seen in the ability of the Munich SPD to buck the national trend, which generally held that the more Catholic the region, the weaker the socialist movement. Although the city was overwhelmingly Catholic, more than 50 percent of Munich votes routinely went to the socialists in local and national elections. Among the Bavarian party leadership itself, some 60 percent remained members of the Catholic Church, 54 55 56

57

“Der Vorwärts und die Austrittsbewegung,” Tägliche Rundschau, Nov. 26, 1908. Smith, German Nationalism, 88. The Munich court upheld the rights of an unwed mother to withdraw her children from religious instruction and entrust them to the Free Religious Congregation. Andreas Reichenbach, Die religiöse Erziehung und die freien religiösen Gemeinden vor dem kgl. Verwaltungs-Gerichtshof in München (Munich: self-published, 1889). Karl Heinrich Pohl, Die Münchener Arbeiterbewegung: Sozialdemokratische Partei, freie Gewerkschaften, Staat und Gesellschaft in München 1890–1914 (Munich: Saur, 1992), 87.

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including Vollmar and his chief lieutenant, Erhard Auer; Auer even allowed himself to be voted into the leadership of a local church council so he could oppose an expensive building project.58 When a vote was held in Munich in 1894, asking whether the assembled Social Democrats wanted to leave the church, the proposal was rejected by 500–600 votes against 8. Vollmar noted during the Munich Party Congress in 1902 that a significant portion of the local public would consider any tampering with the privileged position of the churches to be an insult. Such tacit defense of Catholic interests, alongside shared opposition to the liberal parties, was crucial to the cooperation of the SPD with the Center Party, which culminated in a local electoral alliance in 1905.59 The policy forged by Catholic socialists in a majority Catholic state was a source of irritation for socialists in traditionally Protestant regions of Bavaria with strong secularist traditions. Nuremberg, the largest city of the largely Protestant region of Middle Franconia, was a hotbed of radical secularism and home to Der Atheist, the mouthpiece of the Proletarian Freethought movement. Mannheim in the Palatinate had been a center of early rationalist dissent, and socialists dominated the Free Religious Congregation of the growing industrial center of nearby Ludwigshafen.60 Given the relatively good relations between the Center Party and the SPD in the Bavarian core, it is not surprising that opponents of the SPD made frequent use of anticlerical rhetoric. Upon moving from Mannheim to Munich in 1899, Philipp August Rüdt took the helm of the local Freethought Association. Despite having been expelled from the party in 1895, he was invited to speak and agitate among local party organizations and discussion clubs, which were resisting Vollmar’s efforts to dissolve them and integrate the members into a centrally administered party organization. Around 1903 the leadership of the Freethought Association passed to Joseph Sontheimer, who was known to police as one of Munich’s most notorious anarchists and maintained ties to writer Erich Mühsam and other figures of the radical cultural scene in the district of Schwabing. A gadfly in the socialist milieu, Sontheimer occasionally succeeded in rallying rank-and-file socialists against the party leadership. In large meetings held in 1905 regarding the mass strike and unemployment, anarchist resolutions were pushed through and Sontheimer’s speech applauded.61 58 59 60

61

Ibid. Ibid., 87–88; Markus Schmalzl, Erhard Auer, Wegbereiter der Parlamentarischen Demokratie in Bayern (Kallmünz: Laßleben, 2013), 128–29. In 1900 1.3 percent of the population of Ludwigshafen had joined the FRC and in January 1900 the Social Democratic fraction of Stadtrat was able to pass a 300 mark supplement for Free Religious education. Bahn, Deutschkatholiken und Freireligiöse, 210–11. On the close tie of the Munich anarchist scene to Freethought, see Ulrich Linse, “Die Anarchisten und die Münchner Novemberrevolution,” in Bayern im Umbruch die Revolution

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The combination of Catholic monarchy, reformist Social Democracy and flourishing cultural bohème, allowed Munich to develop into a great center of liberal secularism prior to the war, in which professors and cultural prophets attracted attention with their public stances against the Catholic Church. The sight of these elites kicking against the pricks was tremendously appealing to a generation of idealistic university students, such as Hermann Heimerich, a law student, who in December 1906 aided the private scholar Dr. Max Rieß in forming a local chapter of the secularist student association, the Young German Culture League (Jungdeutscher Kulturbund). Rieß’s philosophy combined monism with advocacy of a Fichtean cultural nationalism that drew inspiration from Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn. Echoing Langbehn’s title Rembrandt as Educator, the stated aim of this Culture League was to raise a “cohort of future ‘educators’”62 by gathering the “freethinking and spiritually and morally self-enlightening young people, distilling the quintessence of what is truly valuable . . . [and] bridging all divisions – social and religious – that currently stand in the way of inner German cultural unity.”63 Rieß argued that religious division would be overcome through the separation of church and state and the removal of clerical influence over universities and schools, while social division would be overcome through cultural enlightenment via the self-appointed “educators.” Following a speech given by Rieß to 180 listeners in Munich in May 1907, a young worker requested that the “Kulturarbeiter” should bring knowledge to the proletarian, who had been subjected to nine years of fairy tales about god and loving one’s neighbor in primary school. Rieß replied paternalistically that the representatives of science would be willing to share the results of their research, but only if workers brought understanding and interest to the table.64 In July 1907, Rieß and Heimerich formed a Cartel of the Free Associations of Munich (Kartell der freiheitlichen Vereine Münchens) which included the German Society for Ethical Culture, the Monist League, Free Religious Congregation and the Jungdeutscher Kulturbund. Similar to the secularist cartels in Frankfurt and Berlin, this one excluded socialist or anarchist secularist associations, such as the Munich Freethought Association. Plans for the Cartel to house the national Weimar Cartel were halted following Rieß’s suicide in September 1908. Replacing Rieß at the head of the Munich Cartel was Ernst Horneffer.

62 63 64

von 1918, ihre Voraussetzungen, ihr Verlauf und ihre Folgen, ed. Karl Bosl (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1969), 40. On Sontheimer, see Pohl, Arbeiterbewegung, 203. Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, Dec. 11, 1906. Allgemeine Zeitung, Dec. 14, 1906. Max Rieß (ed.), J. Gottlieb Fichte: Ein Evangelium der Freiheit (Jena: Diederichs, 1905), xi. Report on meeting of May 16, 1907, Staatsarchiv München, Pol. Dir. München 1819.

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Horneffer was a public philosopher, who upon his arrival in Munich quickly became the leading figure in the secularist scene there. In their reports, police officers acknowledged his tremendous charisma in public demonstrations and remarked that even Catholic hecklers in the audience became silent in his presence.65 Through Die Tat, a journal that he founded in 1909, Horneffer tried to push German liberals to adopt a politics of social respiritualization through Kultur: “Overall it was a dangerous mistake to separate culture from the great organizations of the people. One believed that one was keeping [culture] ‘pure’, but one weakened it. Culture cannot do without a sustaining organization.” The ultimate aim was to reintegrate culture into the state, as society’s largest organization. However, this could not be achieved through party politics, which Horneffer found had been stripped of culture and excellence. “Salvation,” Horneffer concluded, “can only come through the ‘unpolitical’ [person], who can bring a common cultural ideal into political life, who alone can bridge the tensions that have grown intolerable.”66 Such sentiments were widespread among prewar Monists, including Heinrich Peus, who concluded that the “formation of that culture bloc of the Left . . . which is so hotly desired by many . . . must remain a work of total spiritual freedom; it must absolutely not wish to be a new party, and thus any narrowly drafted positive program based on resolutions is to be rejected.”67 Horneffer’s “unpolitical” stance was not without political consequences. The liberal focus on party politics had led to a secularization that had cost it inner strength and weakened it against the confessional parties. The solution, Horneffer believed, was for liberalism to become a religious movement, whose path to inner rejuvenation would be blazed by remorseless culture war against all authorities that hemmed individual spiritual freedom. This “spirit of Rome” extended beyond the Center Party to Protestantism, because the Reformation had only shifted external forms and not overcome Catholicism. Horneffer identified an analogous crisis brewing in the socialist camp, which was also threatened by secularization. Utopian aspirations provided Social Democracy with a religious spirit, but it was in danger of sliding into the lukewarm waters of liberal politics when it came to combatting religion. Horneffer noted that the religious neutrality promoted by the party leadership was in opposition to the anticlerical energy at the base, and concluded that if the leadership succeeded in making it a purely economic “material class party,” the decline of Social 65 66

67

Police report on Horneffer, Jan. 8, 1914, Bay HA, Minn 73551. His brother August Horneffer argued that the decisive battle for the nation would be fought “in the religious territory . . . because only through the unity of thought, feeling and life” can social divisions be overcome. Ernst Horneffer, “Unsere Ziele,” Die Tat, 1/1 (April 1909): 1–4; August Horneffer, “Die deutsche Eiche,” Die Tat, 2/9 (Dec. 1910): 693. Heinrich Peus, “Ein positives Programm des Monismus,” Das Monistische Jahrhundert, 2/43 (1914): 1212.

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Democracy was unavoidable.68 In short, Horneffer proposed a völkisch version of secularism as the sole hope for renewal of socialism and for the German nation. When he failed to attract followers to a proposed “Kulturpartei,” Horneffer was not dissuaded and proposed instead a religious leadership for liberalism in the form of a “religion of neo-paganism.”69 National Politics 1909–1914 Just how sensitive royal officials were to the religious interests of the liberal members of the “Bülow Bloc” is shown by an internal communiqué from the Prussian Minister of Culture in September 1908. At issue was a sizable inheritance that had been bequeathed to a number of secularist organizations in Wiesbaden, a city in the western province of Hesse-Nassau that had been incorporated into Prussia in 1866. In a prior report the minister had recommended blocking the execution of this will on political grounds, but he was now reversing his position, arguing that the likely outcome of such an action would be “sharp attacks on the Royal government from the liberal side, both in the press and probably in the state diet,” which “would be very undesirable in the current political climate, because they could shift the position of the government in relation to the parties united in the political bloc.”70 Such concessions to the liberals were no longer necessary after July 1909, when the Conservatives backed the Center Party and voted against the Chancellor’s tax reform. Having lost the confidence of the Kaiser and unable to maintain his coalition majority, Bülow was forced to resign. The collapse of the “Bülow Bloc” led to a political polarization that stimulated the growth and radicalization of extraparliamentary pressure groups on the right and left.71 Shared opposition to the new ruling “black-blue bloc” of the Center and Conservative parties meant new alliances became possible on the left. Friedrich Naumann proposed a political alliance “from Bebel to Bassermann,” i.e. including the Socialists, Progressives, and National Liberals. Although this failed to emerge on the national stage, Socialists and Progressives made local agreements not to compete against one another in run-off elections for the Reichstag. This loosened the taboo long held by both parties against cooperation.72 68 69 70 71 72

Ernst Horneffer, Die Kirche und die politischen Parteien: Aufruf zur Gründung einer Deutschen Kulturpartei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1908), 62, 10–11. Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, vol. 80 (1911), 413. Minister of Culture to Minister of Interior, Berlin, Sept. 23, 1908, GStA, I HA, Rep 77, Abt. I, Tit. 416, no. 41. Volker R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871–1914: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics (New York: Berghahn, 1994), 287. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 156–58, 228–36. Groh, Negative Integration, 223. Cooperation with liberals had been rejected in the past by the national SPD; however, it had been practiced locally, for example, in Anhalt under Heinrich Peus’s leadership. In 1902 Peus

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If anti-Catholicism had been the glue holding together the “Bülow Bloc,” anticlericalism in the name of “cultural freedom” became a central component of any socialist-liberal rapprochement, and one that helped compensate for the incommensurability of their economic interests. This meant a shift from a principal focus on the Catholic Church to attacks on conservative Protestantism and even religion as a whole. Thus, whereas the Berlin chapter of the Monist League had targeted a Jesuit biologist at its major event in 1907, in 1910 it questioned the foundation of the Christian faith itself with a public debate of the question “Did Jesus exist?”73 From 1909, Germany’s chief revisionist, Eduard Bernstein, was courted by liberals and democrats, who saw him as their gatekeeper to the socialist movement.74 Secularist-völkisch publisher Eugen Diederichs wrote to Bernstein in 1910 that he had decided “to go along with the whole pull to the left in the political realm, and get somewhat strongly involved in political currents, in order to bring sympathy for the individual personality to bear against the state.” He requested Bernstein’s advice on foreign writers that he might publish to promote “the line of [Democrat Theodor] Barth, i.e., the future union of revisionism and the bourgeois left.” In his response, Bernstein mentioned the work of several French Radicals and Liberals, but recommended only two for publication in German, Aristide Briand’s La Séparation and Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau’s Associations et Congrégations. These texts, he felt, could be applied against the Center Party in addressing the “church question.”75 For Diederichs, the magic formula, often repeated in his correspondence after 1909, was “Fabianism.”76 He published a work by the leading English Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who fused sociology with monism and evolution. However, unlike the Webbs, Diederichs did not think in a socialist idiom. Socialism and Fabianism were really just rhetorical phrases that indicated how he sought to harness the energy and followers of the SPD to his reform program. In a revealing letter to Friedrich Naumann in December 1912, Diederichs intimated that he was abstaining from liberal party politics to foster a “German Fabian movement,” but that ultimately, he and Naumann were

73 74 75 76

led an electoral alliance of National Liberals and Socialists against the antisemitic “Bürgerblock.” Kupfer, Weg zum Bündnis, 88–110. Arthur Drews, Berliner Religionsgespräch: Hat Jesus gelebt? Reden über ‘Die Christusmythe’ (Berlin: Verlag des Deutschen Monistenbundes, 1910). Wilhelm Ostwald sent a postcard to Bernstein on March 7, 1909 following up on their evening’s discussion. BBAW, Ostwald papers, no. 209. Letters of Jan. 25 and May 16, 1910 in Eugen Diederichs, Selbstzeugnisse und Briefe von Zeitgenossen (Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederichs, 1967), 193–94. Diederich wrote Karl Korsch on Oct. 12, 1912 that he had heard that Korsch intended to create something like the “summer courses of the Fabians in Wales,” and that this would be an ideal opportunity for Die Tat.

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“marching separately but fighting together.” In a paradoxical inversion of Marxist terminology, Diederichs declared in early 1913 that the mission of his publishing house was to deliver “a new spiritual superstructure, a neoidealism, to our economic development” and that the greatest task still incomplete was the “deproletarianization of socialism.” In essence, Diederichs sought to draw socialism into his biologically and religiously grounded integral nationalism. In 1912 he wrote to the president of the Austrian Monist League Rudolf Goldscheid that he wanted to promote a “national conception of socialism, i.e., a biological conception of socialism” in which “democracy is not the antithesis of aristocracy.”77 In the same year he purchased Die Tat from Horneffer and built it over the years into an influential mouthpiece for his reform efforts. The “biological conception of socialism” was nothing other than a variation of the key term in Diederichs’s philosophy: “life.” In a letter to Julius Hart in 1900, he had defined “life” as “desire, a striving for a distant goal, a flowing,” which encompassed both the physical and the ideal. He excitedly described his realization that this category “contains everything” and hence could not be divided. In 1913, he informed the French writer Jules Romains that Die Tat “knows no other program than to serve life.”78 Given the long list of spiritual guides published by Diederichs, which ran from neo-romanticism, to naturalistic monism, to Asian religion, to dissenting Protestantism, Max Weber likened the press to a “department store of worldviews.” Diederichs was not bothered by the contradictions between the works he published. Like Nietzsche, the criteria by which he judged a philosophical worldview, a work of art, or a religious creed was whether it strengthened and gave expression to life. He wrote to dissident Protestant minister Carl Jatho in July 1911 that “I feel myself not only to be a publisher, but to a certain extent also an organizer of the extra-church religious movement.”79 One of Diederichs’s authors was Max Maurenbrecher, who was a politically erratic socialist-secularist intellectual. From the moment the Protestant clergyman joined the SPD in 1903, he presented himself as an autonomous intellectual with little respect for anything but his own convictions. His conversion to socialism was ultimately part of a strategy to convert socialism to nationalism,

77 78

79

Diederichs, Selbstzeugnisse, 42, 45, 215. DStLB, Hart papers, letter of March 5, 1900. One of Diederichs’s main authors was Wilhelm Bölsche, who justified his own Kirchenaustritt in 1906 out of fealty to his “deep life [Tiefenleben]” i.e. the “stream of nature that rushes through us and must rush through as a source of life and the heart blood of our age.” Reichsbote, Sept. 16, 1906. Gangolf Hübinger, “Eugen Diederichs’ Bemühungen um die Grundlegung einer neuen Geisteskultur,” in Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 262; Diederichs, Selbstzeugnisse, 201.

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which became apparent in Maurenbrecher’s effort to get the SPD to support the German military in an era of mounting imperialist competition.80 Once August Bebel nixed Maurenbrecher’s appointment to the new Party School in Berlin in 1906, Maurenbrecher became ever more antagonistic to the party leadership. In October 1908, the revisionist Kurt Eisner helped Maurenbrecher gain employment as the full-time “party instructor” in Nuremberg. The following year he also became the teacher of the local Free Religious Congregation.81 Maurenbrecher now mobilized his anticlerical rhetoric against the party orthodoxy, those “epigones of Marxism, who muck up the heads of the workers and make them incapable of real politics through their dogmatically grounded theories.”82 Following the collapse of Bülow’s government, Maurenbrecher began to style himself as a designated leader of a future revisionist-liberal coalition. Maurenbrecher, like Diederichs, ultimately saw socialism as an identification of the individual with the biological body of the people. After leaving the SPD in 1913, he expressed his hope to fellow Protestant minister Gottfried Traub that the monist movement could break into the socialist milieu and offer them a “truly organic socialism that avoids all narrowness of Marxism and stands in true harmony with today’s science.” He and Traub would go on to become leading intellectuals of the national-liberal völkisch right.83 The cooperation with revisionists sought by “unpolitical” cultural prophets like Horneffer and Diederichs did not bear much fruit. Democrats, by contrast, were somewhat more successful. Heinrich Peus urged the socialist voters in Anhalt to attend the meetings of both the SPD and the Democratic Alliance (Demokratische Vereinigung) in 1910,84 and Paul Löbe cultivated ties to Democrats85 and backed the Free Religious preacher in Breslau, Gustav Tschirn, in the Reichstag elections of 1912. Yet, Tschirn was defeated along with all other Democratic candidates.86 Thus, as with earlier failed efforts to establish a radical party in Germany, the Democratic Alliance mobilized a group of “brave officers” but no army (Rosa Luxemburg).87

80 81 82 84 85

86 87

Leipziger Volkszeitung, June 3, 1905. Bernhard Grau, Kurt Eisner 1867–1919: Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2001), 253. 83 Vorwärts, Oct. 13, 1908. Quoted in: Fricke, “Deutscher Monistenbund,” 193. Volksbote, Stettin, Nov. 9, 1910, June 6, 1912. Löbe debated happily with the Democrats in their meetings in Breslau and mentioned visits by Hellmuth von Gerlach and Rudolf Breitscheid, as well as the liberal Friedrich Naumann. Theodor Oliwa, Paul Löbe: Ein sozialdemokratischer Politiker und Redakteur: Die schlesischen Jahre (1875–1919) (Neustadt an der Aisch: Degener, 2003), 183. Löbe, Erinnerungen, 183. The Democratic Alliance gained influence in the public sphere through the work of its members in leading liberal newspapers and cultural journals. Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 138–39, Luxemburg citation at 142.

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The desire of democrats and left liberals to engage with the SPD heated up debate over the question of electoral reform. On April 10, 1910 leading Democrats joined with Social Democrats to give speeches at mass protests against the three-class electoral law in Prussia that drew 250,000 demonstrators in Berlin.88 Yet, the Democrats still had trouble with democracy. In the same year an organization appeared in Berlin with the programmatic name of Kultur-Parlament, which attempted to amalgamate democracy and Kultur under a left-liberal/revisionist leadership.89 What this might entail was revealed in a forum on “Equal Franchise” in the organization’s journal Diskussion. Some contributors continued to argue against “the brutal power of the head count.” One liberal argued that democracy might actually provide new opportunities for cultured elites to educate and thus elevate the working class: “The equal franchise forces [a person] of a higher cultural or social standing not to utilize his superiority egoistically for himself, but rather to apply it to the enlightenment of his national comrades [Volksgenossen] living in less ideal conditions.” Full democracy would, in other words, force liberals to descend into the masses to educate them, not in the narrow interest of a party or class, but of the social whole.90 Not surprisingly, such efforts to use “Kultur” to mediate between liberalism and Social Democracy angered some socialist secularists. In June 1910, the Hamburg chapter of the ZdF condemned the national Freethought League (DFB) for its evasive talk of harmonizing class differences and called on socialist freethinkers to leave the DFB. Later that year, Adolph Hoffmann indeed walked out of the 1910 DFB congress over its unwillingness to address electoral reform.91 Yet, he did not burn his bridges to liberal secularism. Rather, he used secularism to goad liberals into supporting Social Democracy. In a 1910 speech to Freethinkers in the left-liberal bastion Frankfurt am Main, Hoffmann appealed to their nationalism, when he warned that armed with the Separation Law of 1905 the French had prepared an “intellectual Jena” for Germany (an allusion to Napoleon’s 1806 defeat of the Prussian army): “Because only the nation, which has the most intellectually developed and capable population on its side, marches forward in the world. One can ask the question, whether the atheists and socialists are not the better patriots than the pious and the papists.”92 He also 88 89

90 91 92

Ibid., 140–41. Listed as the contributors of the “Kultur-Parlament” were leading revisionists (Eduard Bernstein, Otto Braun, Wolfgang Heine, Otto Arendt), Berlin’s bohemians (Bölsche, Wille, Julius Hart, Hermann Sudermann, F. W. Foerster, Max Halbe) and a host of liberal and democratic publicists and professors. Diskussion: Kultur-Parlament: Eine Monatsschrift für aktuelle Kulturfragen, 1/2 (1910). The author, Dr. Marwitz, was most likely the Jungliberale and lawyer Benno Marwitz. Diskussion, 1/2 (1910): 51. “Die Ziele des proletarischen Freidenkertums,” Reichsbote, Oct. 23, 1910. Volksstimme, Feb. 1, 1910.

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pushed the question of socialism at the 1912 Munich congress of the International of Freethinkers – the first to be held in Germany. Whereas most of the delegates proposed rather evasive formulations of the solidarity of Freethought with the left, Hoffmann declared that such discussion was useless: to be a freethinker implied adherence to socialism.93 The collapse of the Bülow Bloc set the stage for a radicalization of liberal secularism, but this took two directions. Berlin featured greater cooperation between Social Democrats and left liberals, while in Munich educated secularists followed Horneffer, who set the tone with his Nietzschean elitism and calls for cultural revolution. Church-Leaving in Berlin 1909–1914 The birth of the “black-blue bloc” in July 1909 created the conditions under which the church-leaving campaign could form the basis for an anticlerical coalition of left liberals, socialist radicals and revisionists.94 In contrast to 1905, the initiative for the second wave came from liberal monists. In the month of Bülow’s demission, Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, former publisher of the Giordano Bruno League and indefatigable secularist organizer, argued that such a campaign offered the best practical means to force through the separation of church and state. Two months later, the conservative Protestant Kreuzzeitung reported that the monists had joined the “systematic agitation” for church-leaving and had proposed that the money saved on church taxes be voluntarily donated to the Monist League.95 Late in 1910 Lehmann-Rußbüldt arranged a meeting between his Berlin benefactor, the former cavalry officer Kurt von Tepper-Laski, and Ernst Haeckel to discuss creating an organization. Other notables were brought on board, including the youth movement leader Prof. Ludwig Gurlitt, and the “Komitee Konfessionslos” (Committee Confessionless) was born.96 The new organization’s correspondence was published in Der Demokrat (renamed Der Weg in September 1911), the

93 94

95 96

Kreuz-Zeitung, Sept. 4, 1912. Revisionist Paul Löbe proposed using church-leaving as a means of promoting the secularization of the schools at the September 1909 Leipzig Party Congress. Horst Ermel, “Die Kirchenaustrittsbewegung im Deutschen Reich 1906 bis 1914: Studien zum Widerstand gegen die soziale und politische Kontrolle unter dem Staatskirchentum,” PhD, University of Cologne (1971), 74. Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, Sept. 16, 1909. After it was revealed that one of the early members of the Komitee Konfessionslos was a police spy, who had paid dues to the committee, Adolph Hoffmann teased the Interior Minister on Feb. 16, 1911 that this constituted a misuse of state funds to support church-leaving: “Herr Minister, what if your colleague from [the Ministry of] Culture finds out!” Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Der geistige Befreiungskrieg durch Kirchenaustritt (Berlin: Verlag des Komitees ‘Konfessionslos’, 1913), 7.

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Figure 6.1 “Mass Exit from the State Church.” Gendarme: What are you doing there? The masons: We are simply making the exit a little wider! (Source: Lustige Blätter, 1912)

journal of the Charlottenburg physician and later leader of the League of the Atheists (Bund der Atheisten) Georg Zepler. Following endorsement by the Monist League, the church-leaving movement gained support from the German Freethough League and the Weimar Cartel.97 A humorous cartoon from the time shows Germany’s leading monists, Haeckel and Ostwald, chiseling out the door of a church to ease exit (Figure 6.1). 800 persons declared their church exit at one of the first large demonstrations, which was held on October 28, 1912 in the Neue Welt concert hall in Berlin and featured Wille and Tschirn as speakers. In keeping with its origins in the monist movement, the Komitee Konfessionslos cultivated an educated, bourgeois image, and distanced itself from the socialist church-leaving movement. The lists printed of recent churchleavers always began with those with university titles and prominent positions, and the choice of Frederick the Great to adorn the postcards of the Komitee was an advertisement of its nationalist orientation. At a church-leaving

97

The 1912 budget of Komitee Konfessionslos was 5,550 marks, of which 2,450 came from the Monist League. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Der geistige Befreiungskrieg, 10; Simon-Ritz, Organisation einer Weltanschauung, 181.

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meeting co-hosted with the Monist League in December 1911, Ludwig Gurlitt revealed the insensitivity of the elitist monists to working-class audiences, when he took unclear statements made by “simple people” at the meeting as proof of the “inferiority of public primary schooling” and of the need for church-leaving in order to secularize schools.98 When Lehmann-Rußbüldt argued that the working classes and Social Democracy “stood well behind the upright and modern-thinking segment of the middle classes [Bürgertum],” this was more a reflection of the social gulf between socialist and monist efforts than an accurate portrayal of the reality of the churchleaving movement.99 In fact, it was only in late 1912, after the socialists in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation joined forces with the liberals in the Komitee Konfessionslos, that a tremendous growth in agitation took place. This convergence found symbolic expression in the headline of the New Year’s edition of Der Freidenker – “Away from Rome and away from the churches” (Los von Rom und Los von den Kirchen) which merged Hoffmann’s slogan with that of the liberal anti-Catholic movement.100 Agitation became more combative. Der Freidenker reported on “storm scenes in a church-leaving meeting” that occurred after three Protestant ministers arrived with their parishioners at a brewery-hall meeting in the district of Moabit called by the Komitee Konfessionslos. The keynote speaker, freshly minted SPD-Reichstag delegate Ewald Vogtherr, responded to the presence of these visitors by stating that he was not addressing true Christians, but those who had “broken inside with the church,” whom he urged to leave the churches to prevent the “clericalization” (Verpfaffung) of the schools. After a break during which church-leaving declarations were gathered, Rev. Henselmann was given a chance to speak and “The disquiet of the assembly increased during his remarks to a din. Partisans of the church defended their minister through yelling, stomping, and whistling with their house keys.” The mood became tumultuous after Henselmann verbally attacked Vogtherr and was barred from speaking further. At this point his supporters left singing the Lutheran hymn “A Mighty Fortress is our God” to the jeers of those who remained.101 In February 1913, the Culture Cartel of Greater Berlin held a public meeting against the “moral coercion” of dissident children at which Penzig (DGEK, 98 99 100 101

Vossische Zeitung, 2nd edn, Dec. 14, 1911. Quoted in: Kaiser, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 284. Der Freidenker, 23/1 (Jan. 1, 1913). “Sturmszenen in einer Kirchenaustrittsversammlung,” Der Freidenker, 23/1 (Jan. 1, 1913). Such conflicts between church dignitaries and secularists also took place in the press. Lehmann-Rußbüldt and Dr. Meffert, lead apologist of the Catholic Volksverein, kept up a printed exchange of opinions and insults. See “Ein neues Kulturdokument des Komitees ‘Konfessionslos’,” Kölnische Volkszeitung, April 27, 1912.

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DFB), Anschütz, Eckold (DMB) and Hoffmann (FRC) spoke.102 In May, socialist secularists dominated a meeting held to celebrate the visit of the Portuguese freethinker, Sebastião Magalhães Lima, whom Adolph Hoffmann introduced as a hero for having helped liberate his people “from the chains of a despotic church” through the recent Portuguese law of separation. Following Magalhães Lima’s speech, which was translated from the French by Vorwärts editor Ernst Däumig, Hoffmann again took the stage and “castigated the Prussian domination by Junkers and priests,” a reference to the ruling coalition of Center Party and Conservatives. According to the Vorwärts report he was greeted with stormy applause and shouts of “Away from the church! Separation of church and state!”103 In the fall of 1913, the tone of the church-leaving meetings became even more radical. At a meeting of the Komitee Konfessionslos in the Berlin Viktoriabrauerei, the socialist journalist Walter Oehme called church liberals the “most dangerous enemies” of the movement, comments deemed so hefty that Georg Zepler and other members of the Komitee had to distance themselves from him.104 On October 28, the Komitee Konfessionslos held four simultaneous mass meetings around Berlin under the slogan “Mass strike against the state church!” At each, at least one “bourgeois” and one socialist secularist spoke. Peus and Tschirn spoke to ca. 3,000 at the Friedrichshain Brewery; Wille, Vogtherr and the monist pacifist Lilli Jannasch spoke at in the Viktoriagarten in the bourgeois district of Wilmersdorf; Hoffmann spoke with the liberal Free Religious preacher Wilhelm Klautke in working-class Moabit. At the day’s largest meeting, DMB President Ostwald spoke at the Hasenheide together with Karl Liebknecht, who was the only speaker without obvious secularist affiliation. A total of 1,328 church-leaving declarations were filled out, 600 alone at the meeting held by Ostwald and Liebknecht.105 After the success of these demonstrations, the Komitee announced an even larger effort at twelve different locations around the city to take place in November on the Protestant Day of Repentance and Prayer (Buss- und Bettag) under the satirical slogan “Repent!” (Tut Buße!).106 These were banned by the police and had to be held a week later. Despite police closure of seven of the twelve meetings because of “overcrowding,” organizers reported receiving 4,209 Austritt declarations, mostly in the working-class district Wedding.107 The fact that thousands of Berliners could leave the 102 103 104 106

107

“Dissidentenkinder,” Berliner Tageblatt, Feb. 3, 1913. “Eine Kundgebung der Freidenker,” Vorwärts, May 26, 1913. 105 Berliner Volkszeitung, Oct. 16, 1913. Vossische Zeitung, Oct. 29, 1913. Reichsbote, Nov. 16, 1913. This slogan may well have stemmed from Hoffmann, who had earlier proposed it to Paul Löbe for a talk in Breslau: “As a title I would recommend ‘Repent!’ One can deal with everything under that.” Postcard of Oct. 30, 1901, DStLB, Atg. 12384. “Die falschen Apostel,” Die Post, Nov. 21, 1913; Vossische Zeitung, Nov. 21, 1913.

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Protestant Church in the Prussian capital in a single day caused widespread alarm in church and government circles.108 The Kaiserin weighed in, telling the Minister of Culture that she regretted that the state had little legal recourse to prevent church-leaving. She reportedly approved plans to raise the administrative fees for Austritt, which would countermand the financial incentive of those hoping to avoid church taxes.109 However, when rumors circulated in the Berlin press that exit fees would increase to 100 marks in 1914, it had the unintended effect of leading to a surge of Berliners wanting to leave the church before the year’s end. The press reported that the police had to hire five new employees to meet the demand for church-leaving at the civil registry.110 On November 31, three more mass meetings were held and 1,247 Kirchenaustritte declared. Karl Liebknecht and six secularist activists squared off against four Christian ministers and the theology student Paul Tillich, who later achieved international fame as a religious socialist and liberal theologian.111 The guests were shocked at the rude insults to church and monarchy expressed by the audience. When one pastor tried to speak, he was silenced with the cry, “liar, liar, priest, shut up!”112 Increasingly, meetings ended in tumults.113 The press reported on Christmas day that a new announcement of church-leaving meetings had appeared, signed also by Bernhard Menke, the Dresden-based leader of the national Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers (ZpF).114 In January the ZpF, Berlin Free Religious Congregation and Komitee Konfessionslos created a new alliance, the United Committee for ChurchLeaving (Vereinigte Komitee für Kirchenaustritt) directed by Menke, Hoffmann and Lehmann-Rußbüldt. This United Committee signified two new developments: the institutionalization of cooperation between the radical socialist and “bourgeois” secularists, as well as the expansion of the movement beyond Berlin into the Rhineland, Hamburg, Saxony and Bavaria.115 The ZpF

108 109 110 112 113

114

115

On November 25, 1913, 73 Protestant ministers met to discuss the best response to the churchleaving movement. Reichsbote, Nov. 30, 1913. Berliner Tageblatt, Nov. 15, 1913; Kreuzzeitung, Nov. 16, 1913. 111 Berliner Tageblatt, Dec. 1, 1913. Berliner Tageblatt, Dec. 1, 1913. Pastor Haecker, “Die Wildgewordenen,” Reichsbote, Nov. 27, 1913. The minister of Mt. Olive Parish in Berlin described wild scenes surrounding his confrontation with Adolph Hoffmann; J. Hölzel, “Es ist höchste Zeit!,” Reichsbote, Dec. 4, 1913. A meeting sponsored by Protestant liberals ended in a tumult after Pastor Imig insulted a church-leaver with the jingoistic comment: “You behave like a German-speaking Frenchman [Wackes]!” The conservative Reichsbote noted with evident satisfaction, “it rained punches.” Reichsbote, Dec. 12, 1913. See also Berliner Tageblatt, Dec. 10, 1913. The announcement was signed by Drews, Haeckel, Eugen Ernst, von Gerlach, Hoffmann, Höft, Hans Leuss, Bernhard Menke, Ostwald, Peus, Schücking, Tepper-Laski, Tschirn, Wille and Mayet. Berliner Neuste Nachrichten, Dec. 25, 1913. Berliner Volkszeitung, Jan. 8, 1914. The January meetings were held on “church Sunday” at sixteen locations at which 2,343 Austritt declarations were signed. Däumig also spoke. Ermel, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 130–32.

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organized its first widespread meetings at its chapters across Germany in February 1914. When the guest agitators Hoffmann, Alfred Bernstein, Peus, Lily Jannasch and Tschirn spoke, clashes often broke out with church supporters, as in Bochum and Düsseldorf in March and April 1914.116 These developments were in marked contrast to Berlin, where the last official action of the church-leaving movement appears to have been a demonstration held in January 1914 under the motto “The people are rising!” It grew increasingly quiet in the capital in the months prior to the outbreak of war. The only anticlerical event of note was the “May Festival of the Godless” organized by the Free Religious Congregation on Ascension Day without the apparent participation of the Komitee Konfessionslos.117 Between choral pieces and recitations of Goethe, the estimated 6,000 attendees in the Friedrichshain Brewery listened to the keynote speech “Why we are godless” by Adolph Hoffmann, who had recently been elected to chairman of the Congregation.118 Why did the church-leaving movement shrink back to its original base in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation in the six months before the war?119 The most likely explanation is that the local success of the church-leaving movement and its radicalization into rude anticlericalism had produced too much negative press and made further support politically costly for liberal parties and for the mainstream SPD. On December 20, 1913 the SPD party leadership distanced itself from the church-leaving movement, and in January 1914 Paul Göhre reversed his earlier support of the church-leaving movement in an opinion piece.120 According to a report from the Prussian police, “this water blast from above has noticeably cooled down the excited temperaments. Even Adolf Hoffmann has acted less provocatively since then.”121 Judging from the newspaper clippings found in the files of the Berlin police, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and the Protestant Church, the bulk of publicity generated by the church-leaving movement in 1913 was in the conservative and Protestant press. Unlike the church liberals, who were 116 117

118 119 120 121

Deutsche Tages-Zeitung, March 31, 1914; “Die konfessionelle Meute,” Vorwärts, April 7, 1914. A copy of the festival newspaper “Der Gottlose” – Offizielles Organ aller “Ketzer” (“The Godless” – Official Organ of all “Heretics”), of which 5,000 were sold, is found in the Landeskirchliches Archiv Berlin Brandenburg (LABB 14/2519). This file also contains correspondence that documents the unsuccessful efforts of the Royal Consistory to persuade the Berlin Police Presidium to ban the event. Der Freidenker, 22/12 (June 15, 1914): 117. As a sign of the shifting mood, the DGEK issued a call for tolerance from the Austritt movement late in 1913. See Kölnische Volkszeitung, Jan. 5, 1914. On the echo of Göhre’s article in the party, see Kaiser, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 289–93. Dieter Fricke and Rudolf Knaack (eds.), Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878–1913 (Berlin: BWV, 2004), vol. iii, 557.

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harmed by church-leaving because of their affinity with elements of its rhetoric, the conservative “positive” Christians were willing to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the Komitee Konfessionslos and engage in similar tactics. In December 1913, the Reichsbote argued that “in our public age” big meetings were necessary and announced approvingly that the general superintendents for Greater Berlin had called for a “general church Sunday” on January 11, 1914 to resist church-leaving. The Positive Church Association of Berlin held its own public protest meeting in the tent of the Busch Circus on January 25, 1914.122 In accordance with the logic of the modern public sphere, conservative Christian publicists sought to disqualify the church-leaving campaign by arguing that behind its universal claims lay particularistic interests.123 They sought to puncture Lehmann-Rußbüldt’s depiction of his movement as the summation of Prussia’s enlightened national and liberal traditions by applying the combination of antisemitism and red-baiting perfected by Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker in the late 1870s. The Reichsbote, Die Post, Deutsche TagesZeitung, Staatsbürgerzeitung and Kreuzzeitung all referred to the “Jewish” interests supposedly served by the movement. In November 1913, for instance, the Reichsbote reported on a public meeting on blasphemy laws at which the socialist deputy Cohn and “his race-comrade Waldeck Manasse” spoke. The article concluded that it is no surprise that with such agitation thousands of members of the church “are dragged off by Reform Jews, who should instead agitate against kosher slaughter if they want to raise their national comrades [Volksgenossen] to the level of Christian culture.” A writer for the Staatsbürgerzeitung noted that the Jewish atheist and editor Georg Zepler published articles opposing antisemitism yet favoring church-leaving in a recent issue of Der Weg and concluded that “behind this whole affair stands Jewish-national organized Judaism.”124 The other line of argument pursued by the conservative and confessional press was that the liberal Kulturkämpfer in the Komitee Konfessionslos had entered into a “brotherhood of arms with Social Democracy” in order to reach the masses. But rather than leading the socialists, they had become the junior partners in a movement that “sails . . . under a red flag.”125 A postcard printed by the Center Party showed the Monist League, the “professors” and the secularist journals all swept up in a red mob ready to set fire to the church 122 123 124 125

Reichsbote, Dec. 20, 13; Ermel, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 129. Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History, 72/1 (2000): 153–82. Reichsbote, Nov. 16, 1913; “Ein neuer Dummenfang,” Staatsbürgerzeitung, Nov. 8, 1913. “Die falschen Apostel,” Die Post, Nov. 21, 1913. A similar argument was made in the article “Der Kirchensturm,” Hamburger Nachrichten, Jan. 7, 1914. It claimed that the Komitee Konfessionslos had been leading a “shadow existence” until the SPD came and took it over.

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Figure 6.2 “The New Kulturkampf”: postcard published by the Center Party. (Source: Getty Images)

and the confessional public school (see Figure 6.2). This analysis was not completely unjustified. Police statistics show that most of those who left the churches were workers and a large portion of these was organized in the SPD.126 And most if not all elected politicians in the movement were socialists; the “bourgeois” leaders were, with the exception of the Democrats, representatives of an unpolitical, cultural liberalism. Confessionless Moral Instruction in Bavaria 1910–1914 The relatively good relations between the SPD and the Center Party in Bavaria began to sour between 1908 and 1909. Public condemnations by the Center Party backfooted the socialist party leadership and created an opening for anticlerical agitation within the socialist camp. This set the stage for the return of Philipp August Rüdt, the black sheep of the Bavarian SPD, who began to speak again in local socialist associations. Because the Freethought Association he once chaired was now dominated by the anarchist Joseph Sontheimer, Rüdt founded a new Freethought Association “Darwin” around

126

In 1911 the police registered 5,473 Austritte in Berlin, of which 5,164 were workers or craftsmen and 1,923 known Social Democrats. Kaiser, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 278.

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1909.127 Following the execution of the Spanish anarchist and social pedagogue Francesco Ferrer in October 1909, which liberals, socialists and secularists immediately blamed on the Catholic Church, the Darwin Association convened a protest demonstration, at which Rüdt demanded that the just response to the “judicial lynching” in Spain was for the peoples of Europe to topple “the domination of clericals and tyrants” and erect a “new state, a new society, which is filled with the principles of the modern age, modern science, modern humanity.”128 True to its oppositional orientation, “Darwin” joined the ZdF and repeatedly invited Adolph Hoffmann to Munich. In January 1910, Hoffmann questioned the party policy of “religion as a private matter” and handed out church-leaving forms, and in October Hoffmann treated a crowd of 3,500 in the Kindl beer hall to his brand of anticlerical humor.129 Such demonstrations were a thorn in the side of the Bavarian SPD party leadership. Although some leading Munich functionaries were members of “Darwin,” in 1910 Erhard Auer reinforced the Bavarian party line at the regional party congress in Erlangen. He argued that the Center Party was using the actions of a few Freethinkers to circulate the propaganda claim that “Social Democracy is the sharpest enemy of religion.” A resolution was passed that relegated Freethought agitation to a private affair to be strictly divided from party work. Auer was reportedly able to block a further visit by Hoffmann in 1911.130 It is a testament to the drawing power of liberal secularism in Munich that when the Kartell der freiheitlichen Vereine held its own protest over Ferrer’s execution it exceeded the 5,000 person capacity in one beer hall and had to set up a second demonstration for 2,000 in another. The chairman of the meeting struck inflammatory tones by warning that “the black powers” were going to try something in Germany like they had in Spain. As the first speaker, Horneffer called Ferrer’s anarchism “a necessary consequence of clericalism,” but then argued that Germans did not require revolution because they could marshal the weapons of philosophy and personal education against the church. The demonstration showed that even in this “old Jesuit city of Munich the free spirit lives and is becoming wild and is lashing out in order to protect its right . . . to free education. The dilemma facing Europe today is: either Rome

127 128 129

130

Rüdt held a talk in Schwabing to the Social Democratic association with 250 persons. Report of Regierungspräsidenten von Halder, April 12, 1909, BayHStA, Minn 73551. Quoted in: Linse, “Anarchisten und Novemberrevolution,” 42. Bayrischer Kurier, Jan. 5, 1910; police report of meeting on Oct. 10, 1910, BayHStA, Minn 73551. Otto Zimmermann, “Die Freidenkerbewegung,” Stimmen aus Maria Laach, 80 (1911): 402. Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des 10. Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Bayerns: Abgehalten in Erlangen am 13., 14., und 15. August 1910 (Nuremberg: Fränkische Verlagsanstalt, 1910), 84–85, 87, 102–05; Schmalzl, Erhard Auer, 131.

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or the free spirit.” The second speaker was the Progressive leader Ludwig Quidde, who argued that clericalism was sustained by the “passive membership in the churches of millions of Germans who no longer believed but didn’t have the courage to leave the churches and outwardly drag the old chains along with them.” The audience passed a resolution protesting both the church-backed killing of Ferrer and the Center Party for preventing the introduction of the “enlightened national school” under pretext of freedom of confession. It demanded the “complete freedom of the state school from clerical tutelage and the separation of church and state” and urged freethinking men and women to publicly express their convictions, an indirect call for church-leaving.131 Although police files noted the presence of socialists in the audiences of liberal and anarchist anticlerical demonstrations, the socialist Freethought Association “Darwin” showed relatively little action after 1911, most likely as a result of the SPD resolution against their agitation passed in Erlangen. With few exceptions, the significant anticlerical protests in 1909, 1910 and 1911 in Munich did not include calls for mass church-exiting.132 Why did the Bavarians not seize on this weapon that was clearly very effective in Prussia? Three factors stand out. First, Bavaria allowed Free Religious instruction for confessionless schoolchildren, second, the church tax regulations were different, and third, the regional SPD leadership throttled radical anticlericalism. When two of these factors changed, however, a Bavarian church-leaving campaign did begin to form in 1912. A dramatic shake-up of Bavarian politics occurred in November 1911, when the Center Party used its Landtag majority to withhold approval of the budget, thus forcing snap elections. Fierce attacks on the SPD by the Center Party in the run-up to the 1912 elections were given episcopal sanction. Liberals and socialists formed an electoral alliance – “the Red Bloc” – which got 47 percent of votes against the Center’s 40 percent. However, due to districting and electoral laws favorable to the Center Party, the Red Bloc received only sixty-eight seats to the Center’s eighty-seven. The cabinet resigned and Prince Regent Luitpold chose Count Georg von Hertling, a sitting member of the Center Party in the Reichstag, as the new Minister President. This appointment represented a significant break with the tradition of choosing for this post a nonpartisan representative of the higher civil service, who could ensure the autonomy of monarchic government from parliament and church.

131

132

Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Oct. 26, 1909. The Catholic Bayrische Kurier responded with a full-page broadsheet protesting the breaking of the confessional peace by the Freethinkers, Nov. 1, 1909. Exceptions being a meeting of “Darwin” in 1910 and a speech by Horneffer in the same year.

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Hertling’s appointment gave the Center Party hope for greater power than it had enjoyed previously. Born in Hessen, Hertling had experienced the Prussian Kulturkampf in the Rhineland prior to his call to a chair in philosophy in Munich. As a member of the Center Party’s right wing, who had long opposed cooperation with Social Democracy, Hertling set out his government’s priorities in a bellicose speech in the Landtag in March 1912 that took aim at socialism and liberalism. Conservative government meant two things, he announced. First, it meant the conservation of state authority: any party that rejected the monarchy did not belong in “our political life.” Second, it meant the conservation of society’s spiritual foundations that formed “the healthy core of our national life [Volkslebens].” He characterized the present moment as a culture war. “We live in an unusually agitated time,” in which “intellectual movements of the most diverse variety run alongside and against one another.” As a deeply pious Catholic philosopher, Hertling had long been doing battle with the Darwinian “hypothesis” and monism. He condemned the belief in “evolution” as a “magic formula” and rejected the idea that Christianity might evolve into an improved “religion of the future.” In religious matters, Hertling found that truths did not evolve, but were eternal and contained in the Christian teachings affirmed by the vast majority of Bavarians. Thus, the maxim of his government was “Christian religion should be protected, it should be maintained and it should form, as it always has, the foundation of the entire education system.”133 In the June session of the Bavarian Landtag, the Social Democrats responded to this declaration with two programmatic speeches of their own. In a humorous address, the ailing Vollmar decried the amount of time wasted in parliament debating the right of the state to appoint bishops or the right of the church to require the oath against modernism from priests. He would willingly grant these all to the Center Party as a gift in exchange for separation of church and state. Two weeks later, the party’s education expert, former schoolteacher Johannes Hoffmann, demanded the secularization of the schools and said that the anticlerical agitators were not to blame for the willingness of Germans to leave the churches, rather it was the priests, who entered parliament to make politics.134 Given that the Red Bloc had no hope of passing such legislation, these speeches were merely statements of principle. It was for the Center Party to choose the time and place of next battle and it did so in November 1913 with

133

134

“Christentum als Grundlage der Kultur: Programmrede des Ministerpräsidenten,” in Verhandlungen der Kammer der Abgeordneten des bayerischen Landtags, Jahre 1913/1914, vol. 8 (Munich, n.d.), 33. Ibid., vol. 8/2, 369–70, session of June 4, 1912; vol. 8/2, 807–11, session of June 21, 1912; vol. 8/3, 224.

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an interpellation to the Minister of Culture by one of the principal figures in the Bavarian Center Party, Franz von Pichler, a prelate and cathedral provost in Passau. After noting the recent church-leaving demonstrations in Berlin by Wilhelm Ostwald and leading socialists, Pichler turned to the situation in Bavaria, where the provision of Free Religious ethical instruction in the schools presented the “most dangerous” problem, also because it formed the basis for “systematic agitation” for church-leaving. Pichler asked the Minister of Culture to examine whether this did not violate those principles set out by Hertling, namely defense of the authority of the state and its spiritual foundations. “According to our convictions . . . the entire education must take place on the basis of the religion revealed by God for our Christian people, therefore on the basis of positive Christianity.”135 In his initial reply, the Minister of Culture Eugen von Knilling explained that seven Bavarian municipalities had permitted Free Religious instruction in schools starting in 1871. Four of these municipalities had provided subsidies and one, Nuremberg, had even mandated ethical instruction of dissident children. This practice had taken place outside the field of vision of the central government until 1910, when his predecessor in office had decided to investigate it and determine whether it was in keeping with a 1905 ordinance regarding the public instruction of religion. Von Knilling stated that the matter had now become politicized and indicated that past steps taken to regulate the phenomenon had only led to further public interest.136 The government scrutiny of Free Religious education had initially gone well for the secularists, and even opened up new horizons for action. With Max Maurenbrecher in Nuremberg and Ernst Horneffer in Munich, Free Religious instruction was being given by two of the most controversial secularists in Germany, who nonetheless enjoyed a certain cache among educated liberal circles that may have extended into the Bavarian civil service. Horneffer submitted a memorandum to the Ministry of Culture in 1910, and for the public he published The Confessionless Moral Instruction of the Free Religious Congregation in Munich.137 This expensively printed booklet treated ethical questions in a modest and learned fashion and withheld the anticlerical barbs he used to pepper his public speeches. Its aim was to make Free Religious instruction palatable to the authorities. Approval had been 135

136 137

Ibid., vol. 8/8, 13, session of Nov. 27, 1913. The Center Party and the Catholic press had begun to apply pressure on the Bavarian government to stop confessionless moral instruction already prior to the opening of the Landtag session; see “Bayern beim Landtagsbeginn,” Das Freie Wort, 8/14 (October 1913): 489–93. Verhandlungen der Kammer der Abgeordneten des bayerischen Landtags, Jahre 1913/1914, vol. 8, 79–84, session of Nov. 29, 1913. Ernst Horneffer, Konfessionsloser Moralunterricht der freireligiösen Gemeinde in München (Leipzig: Die Tat, 1910).

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granted in 1911, and financial support (300 marks from the city council) led Horneffer to seek to turn the exceptional case of this single congregation into a normal alternative and potential competitor to confessional religious instruction in schools across Bavaria. He promoted this idea in talks around the city and in 1913 announced plans to expand his moral instruction to three new neighborhoods in Munich.138 The notion of “confessionless” ethical instruction was being championed across Germany at this time.139 It points to the transformation of a specifically Free Religious training in preparation for the Jugendweihe into a stateapproved ethical instruction that could be provided for all children whose parents left the churches. School reformers used the right granted by various German states to dissidents to provide religious instruction as a legal lever to pry open the confessional school system. And the successes of the churchleaving movement in Berlin, where over 10,000 left the church in a single year, opened the prospect of a huge potential market for ethics instruction.140 An analogous development in another confessionalized segment of society, health care, was announced in 1913 with the launch in Munich of the Association for Confessionless Medical Care.141 One indication of Horneffer’s success in reframing the debate around confessionlessness is found in the manner in which the SPD worded a policy reversal in the Munich City Council. In December 1911, the SPD had opposed granting 300 marks of support for Free Religious school instruction because of its policy of opposing spending for “confessional purposes.” Yet in January 1912, the SPD leader released his colleagues from fractional discipline and allowed them to vote for the support if they considered it “non-confessional” moral instruction.142 Church officials in Bavaria realized that the stakes were very high in Horneffer’s initiative. One Bavarian church leader who had studied Horneffer’s writings closely and recognized the threat posed by his initiative was Bishop Michael Faulhaber, future Cardinal of Munich. From his episcopal see in Speyer, Faulhaber had registered the alarming growth of Free Religious instruction in nearby Ludwigshafen. In a speech in July 1911, he admonished the participants of a meeting of the Catholic Teachers’ Association that there 138 139 140

141 142

Police report on Horneffer, Jan. 8, 1914, BayHStA Minn 73551. Susanne Enders, Moralunterricht und Lebenskunde (Bad Heilbrunn/OBB: Julius Klinkhardt, 2002). Monist Lilli Jannasch concluded that the wave of church-leaving meant that pastoral care of the population should pass from churches to secular “popular homes.” “Statt Kirchen – Volksheime!,” Das Freie Wort 13/13 (Oct. 1913): 748–50. This “Appeal to all friends of free worldview” was signed by leading monists and doctors in Munich and published in Es werde Licht (March 1914): 166. L. F., “Aus den religionsreformerischen Kämpfen in Bayern,” Der Dissident, 5/12 (March 1912): 12–13.

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was no contradiction between faith and education and that they could not avoid taking a position in the “religious question of worldview.” In 1913 he joined a petition effort aimed at revoking the right to Free Religious instruction in the schools.143 In the midst of the rising tensions in the Landtag in 1912, a “Komitee Konfessionslos” was formed in Nuremberg. A key role was played by the former leader of the Jungdeutsche Kulturbund Hermann Heimerich, who had concluded his law studies with a dissertation on the legal status of the Free Religious Congregations in Prussia and moved to Nuremberg in 1911, where he joined the local Free Religious Congregation as well as the SPD. In the name of the Komitee Konfessionslos, he penned a flyer promoting churchleaving, of which 40,000 copies were distributed around the city by members of the Free Religious Congregation. The following year, Heimerich pilloried the “shameless slandering by the clericals” of Free Religious school instruction and threatened that if legal means did not suffice, the congregation would launch a church-leaving campaign that would show that “even in Bavaria it is possible to inflict wounds on the church.”144 Heimerich was confident of the outcome of this struggle and wrote that “at present the existence of Free Religious instruction in Bavaria does not appear threatened.”145 However, events soon proved him wrong. When debate in the Landtag heated up at the beginning of December 1913, it followed the pattern in the streets. The Social Democrats gave principled support to the rights of dissident families, but refrained from anti-Catholic or antireligious polemics. Instead, SPD vice chairman Martin Segitz attacked the Center’s social policies for being un-Christian. It was the left-liberal deputies instead who offered the fiercest resistance to the Center Party’s advance. Professor Siegmund Günther compared the threatened ban on Free Religious instruction to the Kulturkampf of the 1870s, while fellow Progressive deputy Ludwig Quidde accused Hertling of applying to the Bavarian state the policies of ultramontanism, i.e. “the use of state power for the coercive suppression of opinions that challenge the ruling views.” Both Günther and Quidde characterized the state intervention against confessionless religious instruction as a line in the sand. For Quidde there could be no mediation on this point, which 143 144 145

Speech of Dec. 11, 1913. Erzbischöfliches Archiv München, Faulhaber papers, no. 6978. See also no. 6979 on the Free Religious Congregation Ludwigshafen. Ulrich Niess, “Hermann Heimerich und die freireligiöse Bewegung,” in ‘Das Paradoxe zog mich an’: Festschrift für Eckhart Pilick (Mannheim: Brandt, 1997), 79–80. Heimerich quotation in Max Henning, Handbuch der freigeistigen Bewegung Deutschlands, Österreichs und der Schweiz (Jahrbuch des Weimarer Kartells 1914) (Frankfurt am Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, 1914), 316. Willy Albrecht, “Zwischen Reformismus und Revolution: Die bayerische SPD von den Anfängen bis zur revolutionären Umbruchphase (1918–1920),” in Freiheit für den Freistaat: Kleine Geschichte der bayerischen SPD, ed. Rainer Ostermann (Essen: Klartext, 1994), 33–34.

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marked “the true opposition between that which we consider spiritually and politically reactionary and that which we hold up as the ideal of freedom.” Günther warned Hertling to expect stiff resistance: “We will not shy away from even the harshest forms of opposition, if restrictions of the freedom of conscience take place specifically in this area.”146 In his address to the Landtag, Center Party leader Heinrich Held, who would go on to become the most influential Bavarian politician of the Weimar Republic, agreed with the liberals that “here the spirits divide. Here there is only struggle, constant struggle.” Echoing Günther’s phrase, he continued, “we do not shy away from the struggle, we take it up. The struggle is about the Christian educational ideal in the form of the confessional school.” Destroying this ideal was the aim of the freethinkers, hence their confessionless moral instruction was a danger for the state. He discounted Segitz’s restatement of the SPD maxim “religion is a private matter.” “How often have we heard this lovely phrase and how long has it been that we no longer believe it!”147 Held then engaged in an extended discussion of Horneffer’s teachings, in which he connected incendiary statements made by Horneffer in other publications to the philosophical and religious arguments of Confessionless Moral Instruction. With its combination of Darwinism, monism and Nietzscheanism, Horneffer’s program was not confessionless but religionless and antiChristian. Held argued that Horneffer’s teaching stood in no relation to the Deutschkatholiken, who had originally been granted the right to give religious instruction. They had still believed in positive Christianity, whereas Horneffer wrote that “faith in God is the greatest calamity that has befallen humanity.” Held blasted the Bavarian state for granting approval to Horneffer’s instruction, which placed Christian children in danger of having their faith called into question by fellow pupils. Minister of Culture von Knilling told the Landtag that he would investigate the matter. He recognized that two principles were valid but in conflict: freedom of conscience prohibited forcing children to attend confessional religious instruction, but the state had to uphold its commitment to forms of religious education compatible with state interests. His negative comments about Free Religious instruction and his rejection of Horneffer’s application to extend teaching in new districts of Munich portended ill for the secularists.148 However, as long as Knilling reviewed the policy, Munich secularists refrained from anticlerical agitation with the exception of anarchist Joseph Sontheimer, who played cat and mouse games with the police in the first half of 1914. In April Sontheimer eluded a ban by announcing a meeting with the harmless title 146 147

Verhandlungen der Kammer der Abgeordneten des bayerischen Landtags, Jahre 1913/1914, vol. 8, 95, session of Dec. 2, 1913. 148 Ibid., 112. Ibid., 124.

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“limiting births,” but when the police arrived to observe, they found a sign proclaiming a “birth strike.” In his speech, Sontheimer urged the 500 listeners to cease procreating to protest church mendacity and the conditions of proletarian life as well as to withhold future recruits from the military.149 On May 9, the matter of Free Religious instruction returned to the Landtag, when the Center Party again interpellated the Ministry of Culture and demanded to know why no action had been taken.150 At this point, secularists saw the writing on the wall. On the occasion of a celebration marking the centenary of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s birth on May 20, Sontheimer bemoaned the impunity with which the Center Party was now able to beat down the left and impose more restrictive laws on church-leaving. He laid principal blame on “the royal Bavarian Social Democracy,” which was now suffering the consequence of its earlier “perverse union with the ultramontanes.” The SPD had supported the Center Party’s electoral reform bill in 1905 and now, having “made the ultramontanes the strongest party, . . . is being tossed out. This is what you get, if you enter a relationship with whores and priests, [it is] as though a steer mated with a nanny goat.” Revolution was the only hope, and it was his association’s duty to “throw spiritual bombs into the masses.”151 Three days later, Horneffer addressed a boisterous crowd of 3,300 at the Kindl beer hall, where he excoriated the Bavarian government for looking to reactionary Prussia for direction. But whereas Prussia was merely defending the status quo when it refused to allow confessionless religious instruction, Bavaria was about to violate its own legal tradition and retract rights already granted. Horneffer described the fate of Free Religious instruction as the test case that would decide the fate of the liberal order, for “once the rule of law has been violated, there is no end in sight. Then comes the university, then Protestantism, because the whole is at stake. We are but the first victim!” He foresaw two possible and undesirable outcomes, a night of clerical reaction or revolution: “all revolutions have begun with a small violation of right, but once released, the currents can sweep away the surest and largest dams of rights and laws.”152 On July 17, the Minister of Culture announced his decision to ban confessionless moral instruction. Because the instruction was atheistic and its ethical system not based on the ten commandments, Knilling deemed it hostile to Christianity and a danger to the faith of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish

149 150 151 152

StAM, Pol. Dir. Munich, no. 5112, reports of March 7, April 7, May 1, 1914. Verhandlungen der Kammer der Abgeordneten des bayerischen Landtags, Jahre 1913/1914, vol. 10/275, session of May 9, 1914, 859ff., 871, 875, 881. StAM, Pol. Dir. Munich, no. 5112, reports of May 20, 1914. BayHStA Minn 73551, report of May 23, 1914.

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children: “It has now been determined that this instruction stands in clear opposition to and in incompatible competition with the religious-ethical educational principles and goals maintained by the state for our public primary schools.”153 The Social Democrats lodged a formal complaint, asking for a clarification of how the government would ensure the “freedom of conscience of the confessionless children and parents.” However, with the growing likelihood of war at the end of July, the SPD fraction shelved this interpellation.154 Conclusion This chapter has investigated the relationship of secularist agitation and the national parliamentary turmoil of the period 1905–14. The anti-Catholic spirit of the Bülow Bloc provided a positive atmosphere for secularist agitation, but party-political rivalry polarized the secularist culture. Following the collapse of the Bülow government in 1909, Social Democrats and liberals found themselves together in the camp of the opposition and secularism formed a point of potential cooperation between them. Yet, the balance of competition and cooperation varied regionally. The comparative examinations of Bavaria and Prussia revealed how the different confessional frameworks and political contexts led to diverse political outcomes. The conditions in Bavaria were particularly well suited to sustaining liberal domination of secularist agitation. The “royal Bavarian SPD” did not seek leadership in the new culture war. Its milieu overlapped with that of the Catholic Church and it had not forgotten the benefits it had enjoyed from its long accommodation with government and the Center Party, even if this had become increasingly strained after 1907. This drove secularism to the margins of Munich socialism, and largely left the field to anarchists and liberals. The contrast to Berlin is significant, where steps were taken towards a fusion of the liberal and socialist church-leaving movements in 1912. Democrats and liberals entered into this cooperation with an overinflated sense of their importance as “bearers of culture.” Ostwald told a friend in 1913 that his aim was to deliver to the socialists “the theoretical underpinnings for the new content . . . that they will desperately need for their organization after the exhaustion of their Marxism.”155 Yet, in his memoirs, Ostwald provided a more negative judgment of his encounters with radical Social Democrats: “The more intimate acquaintance did not invite a

153 154 155

Verhandlungen der Kammer der Reichsräte des bayerischen Landtags: Jahre 1913/1914, 2. Session (Munich: Königl. Hof- und Universitätsbuchdruckerei, n.d.), 369–70. Verhandlungen der Kammer der Abgeordneten des bayerischen Landtags, Jahre 1913/1914, vol. 12, session 316, p. 439; session 317, p. 442. Ostwald to Loeb, Oct. 14, 1913, BBAW, Ostwald papers, no. 1828.

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continuation and so I soon gave the thing up.”156 In the court of public opinion, the partnership appeared to serve radical socialists and not the liberals or the moderate socialists. This raises the question of whether the revolutionary Liebknecht was left the victor on the stage? Jochen-Christoph Kaiser concluded that the ultimate beneficiaries of the surge of popular church-leaving in 1913 were the radicals within the SPD, whom Paul Göhre called the “Liebknecht group.” According to Kaiser, their support of church-leaving was largely instrumental and sought to reignite the “debate over the political mass strike via a detour.”157 It is true that Liebknecht was the one speaker at the mass rallies in October 1913 to offer purely political reasons for Kirchenaustritt, and his speech received the most press, precisely because it appeared to represent a new and dangerous direction in the movement. However, several reasons speak against this political reading of the church-leaving movement. First, with the exception of Liebknecht himself, all of the regular socialist speakers at the church-leaving meetings were also secularists. Second, Göhre’s interpretation, which has been followed by some historians, was made to discredit the movement.158 Third, Liebknecht himself had an abiding interest in secularist culture, as attested to by his reading and speculative writing on worldview. We might apply in this case Liebknecht’s own claim that “Nothing is more wrongheaded than deducing the level of scientific understanding of the relationship of things from the propagandistic argumentation made by a person.”159 Both in Munich and Berlin there was a dampening down of anticlericalism in the winter of 1913/14. One cause of this was the counteroffensive of conservatives, churches and state, whose propaganda raised the political costs of being affiliated with church-leaving. If the accusation of being antinational had proven an effective cudgel for beating the SPD in the 1907 elections, being portrayed as anti-Christian might prove equally damaging. In 1910 the leadership of the Bavarian SPD restated its long-standing opposition to any association with anticlericalism and the Berlin leadership issued similar injunctions 156 157 158 159

Wilhelm Ostwald, Lebenslinien: Eine Selbstbiographie (Berlin: Klasing, 1927), 252. Kaiser, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 289–93. Manfred Gailus, Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des protestantischen Sozialmilieus in Berlin (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 36. Some anecdotal evidence of Liebknecht’s proximity to secularism: As a young lawyer, he lectured in October 1899 for the socialist-secularist educational association “More Light” on “Communism and Women’s Rights in the Developmental History of Humanity.” LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, no. 15191, p. 431. A Prussian Ministry of the Interior file shows that he had agitated against the absurdity of divine right in his speaking tour of the United States in 1910 (GStA, I HA, Rep. 77 CB P., no. 122). During his prison terms in 1906–08 Liebknecht read heavily in the secularist classics (e.g. Haeckel, Mach, Avenarius) and in 1917–18 he worked on a theory of the “laws of motion of social development.” Karl Liebknecht, Die Bewegungsgesetze der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung: Fragment, ed. Thomas Schulze (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995), 322.

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in late 1913. The articles in the conservative press also targeted liberal secularists as traitors to the national cause. When Peus floated the expectation that Ostwald might convert to the socialist cause in late 1913, it excited little attention in the socialist press, but the story was picked up by at least eleven Christian and conservative papers.160 The radicalization of secularism and the right-wing response created shearing forces within the liberal camp, particularly for liberal Protestants, that were reminiscent of the Kulturkampf of the 1870s. In both episodes, religious animus against the Catholic Church generated initial liberal optimism, but as anti-Catholicism gave way to general anticlerical and even antireligious agitation, tensions increased with liberal Protestants and produced a backlash. The proliferation of chauvinist organizations after 1912 echoed the swing by some national liberals, such as Heinrich von Treitschke, to nationalist antisemitism after 1877.161 The drift to the right also occurred in the secularist camp, where figures such as Maurenbrecher and Horneffer began to lay the groundwork for the völkisch direction they would take during the coming war.162 In his standard work on Bavarian politics under Hertling’s government, Willy Albrecht found that unlike Prussia, where the antagonisms between the “ruling aristocracy and the mass of the people” grew starker in the years immediately before the war, Bavaria had less polarization due to its liberal traditions and more equitable franchise. The exception to this was cultural politics, where Albrecht concluded that the ban on confessionless religious instruction poisoned the relations between the parties.163 The Landtag debates in Bavaria reveal an impasse that could not be bridged by compromise, but only shelved. On the eve of the banning of the Free Religious instruction, a Protestant minister from Nuremberg described the “hefty spiritual struggles lately fought out here in Bavaria” as the confrontation between “two diametrically opposed worldviews” in which there was only an “either-or.” In his view, it should be made clear to anyone who confabulated about “freedom of conscience” that the state could not tolerate the emergence of a “religionless and antireligious generation in its schools that would later be a great danger to the state itself. The right to freedom of religion and conscience in no way involves the right to authorized religionlessness and public 160 161 162

163

See press clippings in BBAW, Ostwald papers, no. 5280. Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). Ulrich Nanko, “Das Spektrum völkisch-religiöser Organisationen von der Jahrhundertwende bis ins ‘Dritte Reich’, ” in Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne: Entwürfe ‘arteigener’ Glaubenssysteme seit der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus Ulbricht (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 206. Willy Albrecht, Landtag und Regierung in Bayern am Vorabend der Revolution von 1918: Studien zur gesellschaftlichen und staatlichen Entwicklung Deutschlands von 1912–1918 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968), 71–73.

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blasphemy.”164 Thus, we can conclude that both in Prussia and Bavaria, secularist agitation rattled the foundations of Germany’s confessional system and with it the undemocratic political order. The campaigns for church-leaving and confessionless religious instruction called out the churches and their respective milieus and presented the state with an impasse that could not be breached without further exacerbating the hostile camps or calling into question its own legitimacy. The course and outcome of the secularist campaigns in Prussia and Bavaria also caused tensions within German secularism and pointed towards future divisions. Public agitation demonstrated to liberal secularists that they could excite wide sections of the urban population through anticlericalism, in particular anti-Catholicism, but the coalition with Social Democracy that made this possible led to suspicions – fostered by the nationalist and clerical press – that they had become marionettes instead of prophets. Some liberals, such as Wilhelm Ostwald, backed out of the cooperation with Social Democracy, while others, such as Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, continued. Social Democracy too was split over church-leaving. Paul Göhre sounded cautious tones, while Adolph Hoffmann pressed forward. These responses prefigured the positions taken during the war. The strongest anticlericals, Lehmann-Rußbüldt and Hoffmann, became two of Germany’s leading antiwar organizers, while Ostwald and Göhre became prowar activists in their respective milieus.

164

J. Schiller, “Über Gewissensfreiheit und Religionslosigkeit,” Fränkischer Kurier, July 11, 1914. In March 1919 Schiller proposed a “Holy Alliance” between Protestantism and Catholicism to ward off the materialist spirit of the socialist revolution. Josef Selbst, “Zeitlage und kirchliches Leben im Jahre 1918/19,” in Kirchliches Handbuch für das katholische Deutschland, vol. viii: 1918–1919 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche, 1919), 141.

7

Secularists in War and Revolution 1914–1922

The schism of German Social Democracy and the emergence of two rival socialist parties in 1917 was a world-historical event. It set the stage for the violence between former comrades that marked the postwar revolution and it contributed to the divided response of the German left to the forces of reaction at key junctures leading up the National Socialist seizure of power. Internationally, the fracturing of the once preeminent socialist party of Europe enabled greater Bolshevik influence over other socialist parties, a circumstance whose effects were felt until 1989/91. Given these weighty consequences, scholarly debates over the positions taken by German socialists during war and revolution have been highly charged. To a significant extent they have followed and been shaped by the arguments made at the time by the intellectuals and leaders of the competing parties. For revolutionary socialists, the formation of an Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) in 1917 became necessary after reformist forces had undermined the party commitment to class struggle. Those who remained in the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD) argued that radicals were trying to hold Social Democracy back from becoming a mass party capable of entering government, and that the radicals preferred instead to live as a sect which warmed itself on the myth of a coming revolution. After the Second World War, the official line of the East German historical establishment was that the decision of the MSPD Chancellor Friedrich Ebert to turn the guns of the military against revolutionaries had been a betrayal of Marxism. Many West German historians, by contrast, saw it as an unfortunate but necessary deed, committed by those who had shouldered “the burden of power” and sacrificed elements of the socialist project in order to secure parliamentary democracy.1 In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of West German historians, some with sympathies for the USPD, offered a third interpretation, when they argued that the revolution had 1

Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978); Heinrich August Winkler, Klassenkampf oder Koalitionspolitik? Grundentscheidungen sozialdemokratischer Politik: 1919–1925 (Heidelberg: Stiftung Reichspräsident-Friedrich-EbertGedenkstätte, 1992), 6.

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been “incomplete” because it failed to rigorously eliminate the vestiges of the old regime, thereby weakening Weimar democracy.2 The recent centenary brought renewed scholarly attention to the German revolution, yet most new studies have remained locked in the normative positions of the West German historiographies of the 1970s and 1980s: Was Ebert’s option for parliamentary rule and against revolution a success that led to democracy3 or a failure that paved the way for the National Socialist dictatorship?4 Some studies have sought to break out of the interpretative fetters of this binary alternative by focusing instead on the roles of gender, violence, transnational flows, or revolutionary narratives.5 Yet, the role of religion has been conspicuously absent. Does this simply reflect a lack of historical importance of socialist secularism to the course of events between 1914 and 1922? One could imagine that the religious concerns apparent in Munich and Berlin in 1913 simply gave way to the weightier political concerns produced by the national crisis of war, according to the adage of historian Jacob Burckhardt: “When two crises intersect, the stronger temporarily [momentan] carves its way through the weaker.”6 Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the declaration of war on August 4, 1914 the air suddenly went out of the campaigns of the secularists to overturn confessional discrimination in Prussia and Bavaria. In early September 1914, Ethicist Rudolf Penzig asked monist Wilhelm Ostwald to return a manuscript related to their secularist campaigns with the explanation that, even if it escaped military censorship, it was unlikely to find buyers. He intended to lay this text and thus his agitation efforts ad acta: “After all, one must also do something for one’s literary archive!”7 Yet, as this chapter will show, the secularist plans did not stay in the desk drawer for long. As Burckhardt noted, the disappearance of the weaker crisis was only momentary. The ideas and politics that had informed the heady 2 3

4

5

6 7

See the summary in Wolfgang Niess, Die Revolution von 1918/19 in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). Robert Gerwarth, November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2020); Alex Burkhardt, “Forgotten, Not Forgiven? New German-Language Works on the 1918/1919 German Revolution,” German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 40/1 (2018). See also works cited in: Ulrich Wyrwa, “1918/19 Markstein der deutschen Demokratie: Neuerscheinungen zum 100. Jahrestag der Revolution,” Neue Politische Literatur, 66/1 (March 1, 2021): 3–35. See the review of recent scholarship in Benjamin Ziemann, “The Missing Comedy and the Problem of Emplotment: New Perspectives on the German Revolution 1918/19,” in Living the German Revolution of 1918/19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses, ed. Christopher Dillon, Steven Schouten and Kim Wünschmann (Oxford University Press, 2021). Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History, trans. M. D. Hottinger-Mackie (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1943), 128. Letter from Rudolf Penzig to Wilhelm Ostwald, Sept. 9, 1914, BBAW, Ostwald papers, no. 2272.

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church-leaving campaigns in 1913 soon re-emerged and thrust themselves into the new dynamics created by the existential struggles over war and revolution. While liberal secularists brought their interests into multiple camps from the völkisch right to the pacifist left, the dominant direction of socialist secularists led to the USPD, where some assumed key positions. The task of this chapter is to not merely to show how they arrived in such positions, but to investigate to what extent secularism shaped antiwar and revolutionary action and provided a source of utopian political imagination that was translated into programs for a new social order. Secularists and the Outbreak of War The advent of war in 1914 did not so much paper over the bitter confessional divisions of Germany, as offer a hope for their resolution. In one of his only successful public speeches, on August 1 Kaiser Wilhelm II appealed directly to this hope: Should it now come to a battle, then there will be no more political parties. I, too, was attacked by the one or the other party. That was in peace time. I forgive you now from the depths of my heart. I no longer recognize any parties or any confessions; today we are all German brothers and only German brothers.8

This so-called fortress peace or Burgfrieden raised hopes for a new and lasting national unity, and a lessening if not an elimination of the confessional conflicts that had divided Germans since the Reformation. Many secularists gripped by the “August experience” understood the Kaiser’s words as an offer to them as well. This encouraged them to join the spiritual mobilization for war. On August 23, Munich’s Freiheitlicher Kulturbund, which only a month before had been attacking the Catholic Church and the Center Party, convened a patriotic commemoration, at which Ernst Horneffer enthused in front of a crowd of 600–700 people that “a rebirth has taken place, people have become transformed, we are witnessing the birth of the inner man. A new book of history is rushing over our heads, the powerful magic of the word ‘united’ has taken us completely captive. For the first time in two thousand years we are united.”9 Rather than eliminating secularist demands for state recognition, however, the Burgfrieden merely reframed them. While applauding the end of the Kulturkampf that had raged since roughly 1906, the antagonistic parties, and

8

9

“The Kaiser Speaks from the Balcony of the Royal Palace (August 1, 1914),” GHI Documents, vol. 5 (https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=815, last accessed June 10, 2021). Report of Aug. 24, 1914, StAM Pol. Dir. M., 4559.

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the secularists among them, almost immediately began to restate their positions and argue them through the logic of the Burgfrieden. In the first weeks of the war, the socialist lawyer Hermann Heimerich petitioned that the recently issued ban on Free Religious teaching in Bavaria be postponed until after the war with “reference to the well-known phrase of the Kaiser that he no longer recognizes parties and confessions, but only Germans.”10 The Bavarian Minister of Culture remained unmoved. In Berlin at the same time, Landtag deputy Adolph Hoffmann accused the Spandau State Munitions Plant of violating the Burgfrieden when it told a Free Religious worker that he had been refused work because it “would not tolerate confessionless workers, because people who believe in nothing are capable of anything.”11 Many church leaders did not accept the notion that the Burgfrieden gave secularists the right to articulate their creed in public, because they understood secularism as inherently antireligious. In October 1915, the Royal Consistory of the Protestant Church lodged a formal complaint with the Magistrate of Berlin, when it learned that the Berlin Free Religious Congregation had held its semi-annual Jugendweihe in the city hall. According to the conservative press reports, the socialist city councilor who officiated the ceremony, Waldeck Manasse, had called the war a “bloody misunderstanding of world history” and had pointed out that all the belligerent parties “prayed to the same God for victory.”12 Because such statements injured the religious feelings of others, the Consistory argued that use of municipal buildings by the Free Religious was not compatible “with the idea of the Burgfrieden, which animates the German people in these difficult days.” In keeping with its own liberal traditions, the Magistrate responded that it could not reject orderly requests for such legitimate spiritual celebrations, precisely in the interest of “maintaining the Burgfrieden.”13 Secularist Support for War Church historians have drawn attention to the theological contributions made by both major churches to the war effort. In their sermons, priests and pastors accepted the just war claims of the government and portrayed the war as a test

10 11 12

13

Hermann Heimerich, “Das Verbot des freireligiösen Unterrichts in Bayern,” Das Freie Wort, 14/15–16 (November 1914): 418–20. In response to Hoffmann’s complaint the Ministry of War affirmed that workers would not be asked about their confessional status upon being hired. Berliner Tageblatt, August 31, 1914. “Berliner Zuschauer: Eine deutsche Feier für die Göttin Vernunft,” Neue Preußische (Kreuz) Zeitung, Oct. 7, 1915. “Kirchliche Zeitlage,” Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die evangelischen Landeskirchen Deutschlands (1916), 168. Royal Consistory, Berlin to Magistrate, Berlin, Oct. 29, 1915 and Magistrate to Royal Consistory, Nov. 5, 1915, LABB 14/2519.

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of faith and of the willingness of believers to sacrifice.14 There has been little study of the secularist response to war. Many of the leading lights of the secularist movement, particularly the liberals among them, initially became avid proponents of war. Rather than abandon secularism, most sought to harness their movement and its ideas to the war effort. Echoing their Christian rivals, these secularist ideologues called for the sacrifice of life in the interest of a spiritual nation, which they equated with the term Kultur. monists Haeckel and Ostwald joined with a number of university theologians to sign the “Declaration to the Kulturwelt,” a document circulated worldwide to defend Germany against accusations of barbarism and declare that Germans were fighting as a “Kulturvolk” in the name of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant.15 Some prowar secularists shared with Protestants the proclivity for filling the national Kultur entirely with their own worldview, which one now called the “German religion.”16 In June 1915, Das Freie Wort, a mouthpiece of liberal secularism, sought to build bridges between secularists and Protestants by proposing that Germans could be united by a new abstract understanding of God that would remain alien to Russians, Jews and Catholics.17 The popular preacher in Frankfurt am Main, Wilhelm Klautke, portrayed Free Religion as the only truly German religion in his effort to gain state recognition of his congregation as a legal church. In a 1916 article, he set out to prove that “in its soul, German culture is Free Religious,” because only Germany had produced the succession of spiritual prophets, from Luther, Leibniz, Frederick the Great, Kant, Schiller, to Goethe, who had given the best expression to the ultimate truth of monism. Through them Free Religious culture was penetrating the German people, and now through the war the opportunity had come to spread “our Free Religious-monist-humane culture” throughout world civilization.18 Secularist war theology also entailed a new relationship to authority. In 1916 Gustav Tschirn, the joint chairman of the German Freethought League and the League of Free Religious Congregations, circulated “A Freethinker’s Confession,” which wrestled with the tension between anti-authoritarian traditions and new authoritarian desires. It began with the core credo shared by the Free Religious since the 1870s: “Free self-determination in all religious matters in accordance with advancing knowledge,” instead of the “authority 14 15 16 17 18

Günter Brakelmann, Protestantische Kriegstheologie im ersten Weltkrieg: Reinhold Seeberg als Theologe des deutschen Imperialismus (Bielefeld: Luther-Verlag, 1974). Martin Greschat, Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Christenheit: Ein globaler Überblick (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2014), 19–20, 19, 20; Nowak, Geschichte des Christentums, 199. Rudolf Penzig lectured on “German Religion” in early 1915, Ethische Kultur, 23/3 (1915). F. Köhler, “Vom deutschen Gott,” Das Freie Wort, 5–6 (June 1915): 269–71. In 1920 Prof. Dr. med. et phil. F. Köhler was lecturing on Nietzsche at the Cologne Volkshochschule. Wilhelm Klautke, “Die freireligiöse Idee als Seele Deutscher Kultur im Lichte von Luther, Schiller, Leibniz und anderen deutschen Geistesgroßen,” Es werde Licht, 47/11–12 (Nov./Dec. 1916).

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of infallible councils, popes or holy scriptures.” But it continued with the oath of a loyal subject: “I bow down in reverence [Ehrfurcht] before the eternal power that – superior to any human-like personality – is uniformly active in all worlds and also penetrates and rules [durchwaltet] me.”19 The war also brought some former Protestant ministers, Max Maurenbrecher and Gottfried Traub, away from their involvement in secularism and back into the fold,20 where they soon re-emerged as advocates of a völkisch Protestantism.21 Maurenbrecher made it clear that his return to the church did not mean that he was dropping his quest for “a freer religion in favor of renewed dogmatic ties.” He had merely recognized that religious renewal could not be achieved “outside of the traditional religious community, which is after all historically intertwined with our national life.”22 Although initially accepted by Protestant conservatives with a degree of pleasure, the theological innovations of these former renegades soon raised alarm. In March 1916, General Superintendent Wilhelm Zoellner of Münster noted the alacrity “with which the enthusiastic cosmopolitans had given up the dream of the fraternity of peoples as the not far off stage of evolution . . . and become unsurpassable in accenting Germanness [Deutschtum].” Rather than abandoning their earlier orientation on the monistic substance of all things, these cultural Protestants “nationalized” it. They, too, began to speak in a völkisch vein of “the German God.”23 The language of dread and talk of a “German God” or “German religion” paralleled the reorientation of prowar secularists to state authority. In an address to Kiel monists in 1916, Heinrich Peus, who was the sole prominent SPD politician in the otherwise liberal and “bourgeois” Monist League, approvingly spoke of loyalty towards the king (Fürst) as a civic virtue: “love for the ruler, who stands at the head of the state entity, is already a bit of love of the fatherland, it leads the most apathetic to become a good citizen.” This is a striking reversal for a man who had spent several months in jail for lèsemajesté in 1891. Peus became one of the most nationalistic Social Democrats and embraced the postwar plans of Friedrich Naumann. In 1915, he wrote several articles in Vorwärts supporting the voluntary incorporation of Belgium and other smaller states in a “Central European Empire,” and in 1916, he 19 20 21

22 23

Tschirn’s “Freidenker Bekenntnis” was signed by Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Plate, Bruno Wille and Max Henning. Reprinted in Privatweg, 3 (December 1917), 11. Gangolf Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994). One sign of this exchange was the publication of an article by a leading Protestant advocate of völkisch theology: Wilhelm Stapel, “Muß es Wucher geben?” Der Freidenker, 22 (Nov. 15, 1915). “Übertritte und Austritte,” Kirchliches Jahrbuch (1918), 447ff. Zoellner, “Ausblicke von der gegenwärtigen inneren Lage der Kirche aus,” Kirchliches Jahrbuch (1916), 1–18.

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identified imperialist competition, in which the small states would be eliminated in the interest of economies of scale and colonial expansion, as a means of achieving socialist aims.24 In the same year, Ethicist Rudolf Penzig argued that the entire country should rally behind Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg as the embodiment of the “total interests of the people,” because “the state means nothing other than organized society.” Thus, one could safely resurrect Naumann’s idea of the “social Kaisertum” and put it to use in a “social Kanzlertum.”25 Klautke, too, sought to reposition Free Religion as a safe religion firmly in the mainstream of the German nation. He argued that the designation “dissident” was too negative and no longer appropriate given the selfless idealism and high ethical content of the monist Weltanschauung. A new positive designation was needed.26 Secularists expected their demonstrations of patriotism to be rewarded by a lifting of discrimination. And with mounting sacrifices and emotional investment in war, they made their demands more fervently. Late in 1916 Peus gave a speech in the Reichstag demanding that dissidents be granted the right to become army officers.27 The Ministry of War rejected this petition with an argument that had long been used to exclude Jews and secularists from the officer corps. Affiliation with a recognized religious creed, the Ministry argued, “was of indispensable significance for the educational influence of the officer on the rank and file,” particularly regarding the military oath.28 In fact, administration of the oath was often a point at which dissidents were singled out for abuse, such as occurred at the mustering of the young monist Carl von Ossietzky, who went on to become the most famous antifascist journalist of the Weimar Republic. His wife later recounted the scene, which finds analogues in the biographies of other socialists: First the Catholics had to take the oath on the flag, then the recruits of the Protestant faith. Carl did not step forward with the one or the other. He was a Freethinker. He waited to see what the major would do with him and the other like minded. Then came the command “Freethinkers, atheists, sectarians, godless – step forward!” Carl was the only one who stepped forward. The major regarded him from head to toe with a

24

25 26 27 28

Friedrich Naumann’s book Mitteleuropa (1915) was a popular expression of liberal imperialistic war aims. On Peus’s views, see Vorwärts, Jan. 10, 1915; Freie Presse, Jan. 14, 1915; Vorwärts, July 11, 1915. Critical articles are found in “Wohin die Reise gehen soll” in Vorwärts, March 15, 1916; “Sozialmonarchist Peus,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, Sept. 30, 1916. Ethische Kultur, 24/3 (Feb. 1, 1916). Brochures from Klautke: Weihnachten im Kriegsjahr 1915, Freireligiöse Totenfeier, and his letter of Jan. 14, 1917 to the Prussian King are found in EZA 7/3451. Kreuzzeitung, Jan. 22, 1916; Heinrich Peus, Antimilitarist und Offizier (Leipzig: Unesma, 1916). “Dissidenten können nicht Offiziere werden,” Privatweg, 1916, 8.

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withering look – how could a recruit not recognize the official churches: “You godless swine, the oath also applies to you!”29

Despite continued discrimination, the secularists did not give up seeking recognition, and in May 1918, the Berlin monist Dr. Eckold tried to portray monism as a legitimate religion with a positive creed: “Under religion we understand a reverent awe of a godhead or equivalent power [Machtfaktor],” which in the case of monism was not the Christian God, but “the trinity of ‘ethics,’ morality and reason.” The avant-garde literary journal Die Aktion snidely characterized the logic of this new piety: Oh please, please, dear state, do us the favor and be so kind as to recognize us as a ‘religious society.’ We promise to always be very good. If we can’t believe in the Christian God, because Haeckel forbids that, then we want to believe in you and always obey your laws. Then you’ll be so kind and allow us to become officers, won’t you?30

Pacifism and Secularism In one of his last “monist Sunday sermons,” given in September 1914, the President of the Monist League, Wilhelm Ostwald, called for a union of European nations under the German Kaiser, and in early 1915 set off for Sweden (with Foreign Office help) to try to win support for a “Europe under German leadership” united against Russian despots.31 Although he could have likely counted on the support of prominent figures, such as Haeckel, Penzig, Horneffer and Wille, an increasing number of liberal secularists resisted the war. In December 1914 Ostwald reported to Haeckel that the war was dividing the Monist League, and he proposed keeping the organization inactive to prevent a split. Yet, in May of the following year, he announced his resignation. He publicly cited his health, but in private correspondence noted that a great “chasm” separated him and the organization. He complained to Haeckel that the numerous representatives of “international Jewry” found in the monist ranks were opposed to his patriotic acts.32

29

30 31

32

Maud von Ossietzky, Maud von Ossietzky erzählt: Ein Lebensbild (Berlin: Buchverlag Der Morgen, 1966), 47–48. For similar accounts given by Rudolf Wissell and Waldeck Manasse, see Bonnell, Red Banners, 122–23. G. Lehmann, “Der Monistenbund – eine Religionsgemeinschaft?” Die Aktion, 8/29–30 (July 27, 1918): 373–75. Ostwald’s mission to Sweden was harshly criticized in the German conservative press, because of disparaging remarks he made there about the German churches. Simon-Ritz, Organisation einer Weltanschauung, 223; Fricke, “Deutscher Monistenbund,” 194. Differences over the war caused Ostwald to break with two of his closest international monist allies, the German-American biologist Jacques Loeb and the President of the Austrian Monist League Rudolf Goldscheid. Both men were Jewish. Ostwald letters to Haeckel from Dec. 1914 and May 1915, quoted in Rosemarie Nöthlich et al., “Weltbild oder Weltanschauung? Die Gründung und Entwicklung des Deutschen Monistenbundes,” in Jahrbuch für Europäische

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The Berlin chapter of the DMB was indeed strongly pacifist and in 1915 fell under the leadership of Count Georg von Arco and Kurt von Tepper-Laski, who together with Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt formed the core of a new antiwar organization Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV) founded in November 1914.33 Tensions between pacifist and prowar camps soon divided the monist movement. In February 1916 von Arco forwarded a poem to Ernst Haeckel written by a young monist serving on the front, who depicted a struggle between those who sill honored the “goddess Philosophy” and those who called on Germans to “stay the course [durchhalten]”:34 You [Philosophy, T. W.], do not stand idly by, Reach into the murderous frenzy, So that peace may preside, Fight valiantly against deceit and lies. Failed has pious superstition, Failed have church and diplomacy, Failed have gag and thumbscrew, The real now separates from the haze. Failed have blind faith, The flock’s domestic docility, And devotion to the leaders, The reward for which was slavery!

Had this poem been read as intended by its author at the annual meeting of the DMB in Jena in February 1916, its mobilization of anti-Catholic stereotypes to characterize the obedience of the population to state and military authorities during the war would have only antagonized those monists like Haeckel, who backed the war. Late in 1916, the then eighty-three-year-old Haeckel made an effort to lead the DMB back into the nationalist camp and offered Wilhelm Bölsche the presidency as a replacement for the recently deceased Munich sociologist Franz Müller-Lyer. Bölsche declined this offer over expected opposition from the Berlin chapter, “because for these queer saints I am horribile dictu not enough of a pacifist but rather an imperialist, war celebrant or I don’t know what else!”35 Bölsche

33 34 35

Wissenschaftskultur, ed. Heiko Weber and Maurizio Di Bartolo, vol. iii (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), 60. Heiner Fangerau, “monism, Racial Hygiene, and National Socialism,” in monism, ed. Weir (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 223–47; Neef, Entstehung. By November 1915 the BNV had in its ranks many leading Democrats, revisionist socialists and monists. Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 152–61. See letter from Graf Arco, DMB Berlin to Haeckel, Feb. 26, 1916, EHH, Haeckel papers, Jena. Letter from Bölsche to Haeckel, Dec. 20, 1917 and Haeckel’s reply, Jan. 12, 1917 in: Rosemarie Nöthlich, Ernst Haeckel–Wilhelm Bölsche: Briefwechsel 1887–1919 (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2002), 271–73.

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recommended ignoring the Berlin DMB until after the war, “when in place of these political eccentricities that don’t belong to monism at all, true intellectual motivations will again prevail, even in Berlin.” Yet, this prediction proved false; it was the nationalist monists like himself and Haeckel who effectively abandoned the organizations, never to return. A similar parting of ways took place in the other corners of the secularist movement in 1916.36 With their drift towards pacifism, the secularist organizations became subject to increased military censorship. The journal of the Komitee Konfessionslos, Der Weg, was banned from publishing for the duration of the war in January 1915 and the following year the publications of the BNV were subjected to the same fate.37 In July 1916, the Ministry of War began to solicit information from regional governments on pacifist activities among monists and freethinkers.38 The conservative Christian Reichsbote announced in August 1916 that “the enemies of Christianity are on the move again” and reported statements made by the DMB that it planned to produce new flyers and that those organizations who could not agitate in public, like the Proletarian Freethinkers, would work by “word of mouth.”39 Socialist Opposition to the War A few notable socialist secularists supported the war effort, such as union organizer Ida Altmann and revisionists Heinrich Peus and Henriette Fürth, but most fell into the camp of the opposition that coalesced into the USPD in 1917. The historical literature generally cites the following milestones on the path to the formation of the USPD: opposition to war in the Reichstag, international solidarity efforts between socialist radicals, and acts of resistance to party domination of the press and organizations. If we revisit these milestones, it becomes clear that secularists active in the church-leaving movement played an oversized role. The first socialist Reichstag delegate to break party discipline over the war was the former teacher of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, Fritz Kunert, who abstained from voting on the first round of war credits on August 4, 1914. That same day Ernst Däumig, future member of 36

37 38 39

In 1916, the pacifist socialist Ewald Vogtherr, who had been the co-editor with Wille of Der Freidenker, was dropped from the masthead. In 1916 the FRC Hamburg dropped out of Penzig’s school reform efforts, embraced peace and became subject to police restrictions.. “Jahresbericht of FRC Hamburg,” Der Freidenker, 5 (March 1917): 36–38. Privatweg: für Mitteilungen an die Mitglieder des Bund der Konfessionslosen, 1 (April 1917). Munich Police Command to Royal Bavarian War Ministry, July 11, 1916. StAM, Pol. Dir. M. 5112. Reichsbote, Aug. 17, 1916. The paper predicted that “for the period after the war we have to reckon with a storm against Christianity and church, in comparison to which the animosities of the 1870s were a child’s game, and the church, especially the Protestant, would do well to prepare itself for this in good time.”

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the same Free Religious Congregation, was one of the editors of Vorwärts who issued a declaration against the war credits.40 The first two deputies to vote against the war credits were freethinker Otto Rühle and anticlerical activist Karl Liebknecht. They formed a revolutionary “International Group,” which transformed first into the Spartacist League and then the Communist Party. A second, larger group stepped into opposition on March 24, 1916, when party co-chair Hugo Haase delivered an antiwar speech in the Reichstag and eighteen delegates voted against the war credits. This group joined together in the Socialist Working Group (Sozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, SAG) and formed the nucleus for the later USPD. The SAG gained control of the Berlin SPD executive, and Adolph Hoffmann was elected its new chairman in 1916. Two of the four signers of a declaration of opposition in 1917 had secularist backgrounds: Ledebour and Vogtherr. Kunert, Hoffmann, Menke and Fricke also became active in the opposition. The SAG differed from the Spartacists in its reluctance to split the party and endanger its organization.41 Thus, when Adolph Hoffmann and Georg Ledebour attended the antiwar Zimmerwald conference in Switzerland in December 1915, they joined French comrades in denouncing the Burgfrieden policies of their respective parties, but were unwilling to banish socialists who still supported the war from the International Group, a move demanded by Bolsheviks, such as Vladimir Lenin, and Spartacists, such as Rosa Luxemburg.42 If anger at continuing confessional discrimination provided one contributing factor to the oversized role of these prominent red secularists in the formation of the USPD, a second lies in their access to the autonomous secularist organizations at a time in which the majority party suppressed oppositional agitation. The press of the Proletarian Freethinkers provided a site for the expression of alternative viewpoints not allowed in the party press. In August 1914, nationally circulated Der Atheist immediately cast a shadow over the war, lamenting that with it “our Freethought movement, the bourgeois as well as the proletarian, has been almost completely annihilated.” Yet, its position was initially ambivalent. The newspaper reprinted some prowar statements, such as Haeckel’s article “England’s Blood Guilt,” and carried an article by editor-in-chief Konrad Beisswanger justifying the summary

40

41 42

Eugen Prager, Geschichte der USPD: Entstehung und Entwicklung der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Glashuetten bei Taunus: Auvermann, 1970), 25–26. See also Groh, Negative Integration, 692. On Kunert’s abstention, see his comments in “Eine Feststellung,” Der Kampf, 2 (February 1916): 79. David Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: The History of the Independent Social Democratic Party 1917–1922 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 69. Francis L. Carsten, War Against War: British and German Radical Movements during the First World War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 39, 85–86. Angelica Balabanoff, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung 1914–1919 (Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld, 1928), 14.

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execution of a Belgian priest who reportedly directed partisan activity against the German occupiers from his church tower.43 However, such articles soon gave way to criticisms of the military. In October 1914, freethinker Arthur Wolf reported that socialists were confronting the question of “Who bore the guilt for the war?” Chauvinists, who “decades ago would have shoved all guilt for our social malaise in the shoes of the Jews, have now found a scapegoat in England.”44 Der Atheist reported in December on a debate over the German atrocities in occupied Belgium that had taken place in the Dresden chapter of the Proletarian Freethinkers between Bruno Sommer, the former editor of Lichtstrahlen, and Bernhard Menke, the national chairman of the ZpF and later Saxon party secretary of the USPD. Sommer blamed partisan attacks on the poor popular education that Belgians received from Catholic priests. Menke accused Sommer of false patriotism and concluded that Germany bore the “main guilt” for the war. Those who voted for the war credits had betrayed the people and the International and were therefore “no longer Social Democrats.”45 Red secularists could take a lead in the early formation of party opposition because their organizations were semi-immune from party and police control. According to a retrospective account, the opposition forces in Dresden that later formed the local USPD first gathered in the local chapter of the Proletarian Freethinkers, in part because it could mask its activities as cultural. Already in January 1915, the chapter hosted a secret meeting with three dozen selected members, who gathered to hear Otto Rühle describe the heated arguments over the war credits among the socialist Reichstag deputies. So tight was the connection made in Dresden that for police “the word Freethinker was somewhat equivalent with war resister and political criminal.”46 Freethinkers and other secularists were also prominent in the development of the party opposition in Berlin, Leipzig and Gelsenkirchen.47 Freethinkers were a particular “site of infection” in the party in Frankfurt am Main.48 In November 1915, the Frankfurt-based Youth Section of the Proletarian Freethinkers became the coordinating body for the antiwar opposition that had been driven out of the Young Workers (Arbeiterjugend) by central party officers. They transformed the newsletter of Youth Freethinkers into a mouthpiece for their struggle against the dictatorial practices of the party 43 44 45

46 47 48

“Der Weltkrieg,” Aug. 23, 1914; Ernst Haeckel, “Englands Blutschuld am Weltkrieg,” Sept. 20, 1914; Konrad Beißwanger, “Geistliche als Franktireurs,” Der Atheist, Oct. 4, 1914. Arthur Wolf, “Chauvinismus, eine geistige Volkskrankheit,” Der Atheist, Nov. 1, 1914. Der Atheist, Dec. 13, 1914. In a letter of November 20, 1914 to Karl Kautsky, Sommer sought but apparently did not receive theoretical support in his struggle with Menke. IISG, Kautsky papers, K DXXI, nos. 16, 17. Ernst Lorenz, 5 Jahre Dresdner USP (Dresden: Genossenschafts-Druckerei, 1922), 6. Stefan Goch, Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterbewegung im Ruhrgebiet: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel Gelsenkirchen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990), 164. Judit Pàkh, Frankfurter Arbeiterbewegung in Dokumenten 1832–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Bund, 1994), 697.

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leadership.49 The later USPD leader Robert Dißmann founded a chapter of the ZpF in Frankfurt to hide his oppositional activities.50 Freethinkers also played a prominent role in the party opposition in Bavaria, where, as the last chapter showed, the SPD had long been dominated by reformists who got along well with their Catholic counterparts. Josef Sontheimer became a key figure in the oppositional circle around the ethical socialist Kurt Eisner, who went on to become the Prime Minister of the Bavarian Socialist Republic in 1918. Both later fell victim to the counterrevolution; Eisner was assassinated in February 1919 and Sontheimer was executed by the Freikorps Oberland less than three months later. In Nuremberg, where all local party bosses stayed loyal to the party mainstream, the outsider Konrad Beisswanger, editor-in-chief of Der Atheist, began to organize the party opposition. Also in the smaller Bavarian town of Kempten, the key figure in the development of the future USPD was the chairman of the local Freethought organization.51 Given such incidents, there is little reason to question the retrospective account of a delegate at a ZpF conference in 1919, who recalled “that the proletarian Freethought organizations consistently offered energetic resistance to the war madness.”52 On a national level, the three best-known leaders of the ZpF – Menke, Beisswanger and Theodor Fricke – spent time in jail for oppositional activities.53 In a period in which the military severely constrained public speech, the partial immunity from prosecution granted to elected officials turned the national and state parliaments into key forums for debating the war effort. On the floor of the Reichstag in October 1916, Otto Rühle rejected Eduard Bernstein’s petition to release Liebknecht from prison, stating that it was only the class struggle of the working class and not parliament that would free Liebknecht. After being called to order by the president of the Reichstag, Rühle stated that he was not addressing members of the house but the millions outside.54 Hoffmann also used parliament to criticize the war, but unlike Rühle he did so within the logic of the liberal state. He demanded fulfillment of the equal rights implied in the Burgfrieden, while at the same time arguing that the war itself violated the cultural ideals for which it was supposedly being fought. In both registers, the religious question served him well. In early 1916, 49 50

51

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Mitteilungsblatt der Jugendsektion des Zentralverbandes proletarischer Freidenker (Ortsgruppe: Frankfurt a.M.), nos. 2–12, Nov. 15, 1915 to April 15, 1916. Toni Sender, The Autobiography of a German Rebel (New York: Vanguard, 1939), 68–70; Volker Depkat, Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden: Deutsche Politiker und die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 444. Bernward Anton, “Die Spaltung der bayerischen Sozialdemokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der USPD: Vorgeschichte – Verlauf – Ursachen,” PhD, Universität Augsburg (2015), 899. “Rheinisch-westfälische Freidenker-Konferenz,” Der Atheist, Nov. 2, 1919. 54 See Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 125–30. Arbeiterpolitik, Nov. 4, 1916.

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for example, Hoffmann was making a principled argument for separation of church and state in the Landtag, when he switched gears and began to pillory church involvement in the war effort by reading from In the name of God – Forward! (Im Namen Gottes – Durch!), a book being sent to soldiers on the front by a military chaplain: There it states: ‘It is not our fault, if in the bloody work of war, we also have to do the work of the executioner. (Listen to that! among the Social Democrats.) The cold iron has been placed in the hand of the soldier, he should use it without shame, he should run the bayonet between the ribs of the enemy, (Listen to that! among the Social Democrats) he should smash his rifle on their skulls . . ., that is his holy duty, that is his service to God [Gottesdienst]!’ (Raucous cries of ‘Listen! Listen!’ and ‘Boo’ among the Social Democrats.) You must certainly protest against this! . . . Is this Christian? Is this religious? (Introjection from right: ‘Yes!’ Dep. Liebknecht ‘you’re still smiling?’commotion to the right. Dep. Ströbel: ‘You would drive Christ from the Temple!’ Introjection from right: ‘Go to England!’)55

Hoffmann cited the opinion of the liberal Protestant theologian Martin Rade that war and true Christianity were mutually exclusive and concluded therefore that “this attitude of the military chaplain is . . . assuredly a consequence of the financial dependence of the church on the state.” Upon hearing this, deputies from the liberal, conservative and Center parties left the chamber calling out “Outrageous, disgusting, cowardly, scandal.” Hoffmann ended his speech by repeating the slogan that had twice gotten him called to order by the president of the Landtag before 1914: “War is a mockery of God, Christianity, and all human culture!”56 Hoffmann’s speech and the reactions of the other deputies to it show how effectively the juxtaposition of the pacifist core of the Christian message and the reality of war could puncture the moral sensibilities of the Burgfrieden. Hoffmann’s speeches were so critical that his fellow socialist deputy Konrad Haenisch stated publicly that he preferred the company of the liberal deputies.57 Following Hoffman’s criticism of a fellow socialist deputy on January 19, 1917, the five SPD deputies loyal to the party majority voted to exclude the four SAG members from their parliamentary faction, a step that the Reichstag members had taken three days earlier. The division of the SPD was formalized in April 1917 with the founding of a new party, the USPD. The larger rump party retained control of most of the party apparatus, newspapers and organizations, and became known as the Majority or MSPD. Observers saw in the split a final division between the two ways of reading the party platform regarding religion as a private matter. In an article “Atheists 55 56 57

Vorwärts, March 16, 1916. Vorwärts, March 16, 1916. Vorwärts, March 2, 1912; 1910 episode cited in Fricke, “ZehnGebote-Hoffmann.” Vorwärts, April 13, 1916.

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and Party Opposition,” Der Atheist quoted extensively from the Catholic Center Party’s flagship paper Germania: All personalities in the Social Democratic Party, who have enthusiastically contributed to Freethought propaganda, church-leaving movement, etc., now stand in the camp of the [SAG], i.e., Adolf Hoffmann, Vogtherr, Ledebour. It thus appears that the spirits of the party can divide on this issue as well: here the neutrals, here the declared atheists and opponents of religion.

Nevertheless, Germania distrusted the apparent neutrality of the Majority Socialists, given their prewar weakness against the church-leaving movement in Berlin. Vorwärts (now in the hands of the MSPD) insisted that the party was neutral on religion. Der Atheist agreed and told Freethinkers to expect no improvement from the Majority socialists, “but we hope that the oppositional direction in the party will take a different stance on this matter and not play hide-and-seek with it, as has been common practice in the party till now.”58 If the party split allowed secularists to articulate their viewpoints more clearly in the USPD, some leaders of the MSPD greeted the schism as an opportunity to purge the party of its anticlericalism and seek cooperation with Christian parties. A Catholic Church observer noted with pleasure the anti-Marxist and antisecularist comments made by Wilhelm Kolb, the leader of Badenese Social Democrats, in November 1917.59 Kolb castigated socialist radicals, those “epigones of Marx” whose intransigent and dogmatic belief in the theory of revolution had been hindering socialism’s transition “from a political sect to a political party.” It made them blind to the fact that a socialization of the economy was taking place through the very state they opposed. By ending its rejection of the state and voting for the war credits, the SPD had actually moved closer to its goal because now the “state must approach socialism, whether it wants to or not.” It also opened up to the party a new politics of culture. Without compromising on the socialist commitment to separation of church and state, Kolb stated that the party could now recognize the positive contribution of religion and break with that tradition that understood “the pseudo-Enlightenment [Aufkläricht] of Freethought as a quasi-integral part of socialist worldview.”60

58 59

60

“Atheisten und Parteiopposition,” Der Atheist, 13/6 (March 18, 1917). Domdekan in Mainz Joseph Selbst, “Zeitlage und kirchliches Leben im Kriegsjahr 1917/18,” Kirchliches Handbuch für das katholische Deutschland 1917/1918, vol. vii (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche, 1918). Wilhelm Kolb, “Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte, Nov. 1917, 241–50, 245, 247. Peus argued in the Reichstag that the war was making socialism a necessity and would eventually bring the SPD into power. Leipziger Volksstimme, 244 (Oct. 18, 1917).

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Debates over Dissident Children Amidst the rising domestic tensions that led to splits among secularists and socialists in 1916, arguments over the confessional issues shelved at the start of the war now resurfaced. In March 1916, National Liberals in the Prussian Landtag reopened debate on petitions to release dissident children from obligatory religious instruction in state schools. As the bitterest opponent of the deconfessionalization of the schools, the Center Party argued that reopening this question would disturb the Burgfrieden and should thus be postponed until after the war. Left liberal Gottfried Traub responded that the Burgfrieden created precisely the right conditions for solving this problem, and Adolph Hoffmann asked how the Center could call the dissident question a disturbance of the confessional peace and yet not say the same of the “Judenstatistik,” referring to the recent military census of Jewish participation in the war.61 He demanded a new Reich school law that would free schools “of all particularistic slag” and create a single non-denominational school. “One people, one school, that corresponds to the present time,” he concluded, tapping into arguments against the existing system of confessional schools (Bekenntnis-Schulen) made by Johannes Tews, the General Secretary of the national Teachers’ Association. Tews wanted a non-denominational “German united school” under secular control, because, as he put it, “in the trenches one does not ask about confession.”62 When the Prussian Diet resumed debate on religious instruction in November 1917, the Bolsheviks had just seized power in Russia. Traub, who had recently left the Progressive Party and joined the reactionary and völkisch Vaterlandspartei, did not abandon his call for non-confessional religious instruction in schools, but he gave it a new twist. He said that it was important to guarantee the rights of the “large movement of rightwing dissidents,” by which he presumably meant völkisch-Protestant supporters of a Germanic religion, for whom “religious instruction, as taught in the schools, is not pious enough, not orthodox enough.”63 Responding to Traub, Hoffmann argued that the schools should not be teaching Luther’s Catechism, but the peace declaration of the new Russian government. Traub retorted that Hoffmann should try to write his own catechism, a jab at Hoffmann’s lack

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Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Preußischen Hauses der Abgeordneten, session of Nov. 17, 1916, 2382. See also documents in GStA, I HA, Rep. 77, Abt. 1, Tit. 416, no 52. “Kirche und Schule,” Gerhard Kropatscheck, Dresden, Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die evangelischen Landeskirchen Deutschlands (1917), 411–53, 442. “Ein Kammergerichtsurteil. Zur Dissidentenfrage,” Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die evangelischen Landeskirchen Deutschlands (1918), 249–55.

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of formal education.64 Little did he suspect that Hoffmann would soon undertake just such a book. The Free Religious Congregation commissioned Ernst Däumig to write a Free People’s Catechism which Hoffmann published in a reported edition of 100,000. Hoffmann later recalled that he hid the bulk of these and allowed the police to confiscate a small portion which he purposely left in his printing shop.65 After being called before a military censor, Hoffmann was forced to cut two pages from the Free People’s Catechism. Despite this, possession of the booklet was considered treasonous, as revealed by an incident that Hoffmann recounted in the Landtag in July 1918. A twenty-three-year-old toolmaker had been reading Däumig’s book in a café in the suburban town of Pankow, when a soldier asked if he might have a copy. After the toolmaker agreed to provide the book, he was arrested for fifteen days and then deported to the front for distributing revolutionary tracts, “which are suited to compromise the military power of the German Reich during the current war.”66 The course of the war unsettled liberal secularists and new positions on socialism emerged. Several leading figures were drawn into organizing efforts undertaken by a circle of liberal Protestant historians – Friedrich Thimme, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch and Adolf von Harnack – who sought to prevent a return to prewar oppositional socialism and confessional strife.67 In 1917, Thimme co-founded a “Committee for the Cultivation of Domestic Peace” (Ausschuss zur Pflege des inneren Friedens), whose first conference was attended by the Center Party politician Dr. August Pieper and two Catholic priests as well as numerous secularists, including Tschirn, Peus, Penzig and Zepler. Peus drafted a declaration calling for the equality of all political parties, churches, religious and “worldview directions” willing to seek common ground through a “positive, constructive” attitude rather than “merely negative criticism.” This was too much for Pieper, who made it clear that Catholic participation was contingent on striking the passage on the equality of all “worldview directions” and including more prominent Protestants rather than “Free Religious personalities.”68 Although this effort had few practical 64 65 66 67

68

Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Nov. 16, 1917. Hoffmann, ‘Hoffmann’s Erzählungen’, 90–91. Mitteilungsblatt des Verbandes der sozialdemokratischen Wahlvereine Berlins und Umgegend, erste Beilage, 15 (July 19, 1918). Thimme was committed to reconciling Social Democracy with the Prussian state and in 1915 spearheaded the publication of a collected volume Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland together with leading socialist reformists and revisionists. He later wrote to the editor of Reichsbote on July 10, 1924: “Since I became politically active, my ultimate and highest goal has been to win Social Democracy for the monarchy.” Annelise Thimme, Friedrich Thimme: 1868–1936: Ein politischer Historiker, Publizist und Schriftsteller in seinen Briefen (Boppard am Main: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1994), 125–26, 186, 229. Gustav Tschirn, “Die Organisationsbestrebungen zur Pflege des inneren Friedens,” Der Freidenker, 25/23–24 (Dec. 1, 1917): 178–79. See letters from Thimme to Harnack, Oct. 10, 1915 and Dec. 16, 1917, in: Thimme, Briefe, 143–45, 166–68.

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consequences, it represented an inter-confessional counterpart to the Interfactional Committee formed of left liberals, Catholics and moderate Social Democrats in the Reichstag in 1917 and which later constituted the foundation of the “Weimar coalition” of democratic parties.69 Another effort to unite a broad spectrum of liberals was undertaken by the freigeistig publisher Eugen Diederichs, who gathered important intellectual figures at Burg Lauenstein in 1917. The meeting came to an impasse between the positions of the (former) Free Religious preacher Max Maurenbrecher, who proposed a “State Party of the Intellectuals” (Staatspartei der Geistigen) and Max Weber, who supported the introduction of universal suffrage. According to Gangolf Hübinger, this failed meeting symbolized the end of the intellectual Burgfrieden. German intellectuals earlier united in support for an international “war of culture” now found themselves on different sides of a domestic culture war.70 This division also ran through the secularist movement. Those who left organized secularism often became outright reactionaries. Alongside Maurenbrecher, this included Ernst Haeckel, who joined the ultranational Vaterlandspartei and reportedly became a member of the Thule Society around December 1918, an organization that included some of the founding figures of National Socialism, such as Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder and Rudolf Hess.71 The ongoing collaboration between the USPD and Democratic pacifists organized in the BNV deepened in the final days of the war, and the BNV moved closer to support of socialism. In an illegal meeting on October 14, 1918 Tepper-Laski declared to forty-seven members of the BNV that they had to attack militarism, capitalism and monarchism. On November 8, 1918 there was a meeting of the BNV in Magnus Hirschfeld’s house, at which it was decided to put the organization onto a “socialist foundation,” although few of the participants actually joined a socialist party.72 Secularists in the Revolution The second half of this chapter analyzes the role of red secularism in the events of the revolution itself. At the start of the revolution, between November 1918 and January 1919, several secularist leaders were catapulted into positions of governing power (Figure 7.1). One reason for this was their strategic position in the revolutionary events that led up to the unexpected collapse of the

69 70 71 72

Heinrich August Winkler, Deutsche Geschichte vom Ende des Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2000), 349–50. Hübinger, “Eugen Diederichs’ Bemühungen,” 267. Gasman, Scientific Origins, 30. On Maurenbrecher, Vorwärts, Feb. 9, 1918. Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 193.

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Figure 7.1 Free Religious leaders of the USPD. Left to right: Adolph Hoffmann, Ewald Vogtherr, Fritz Kunert, Ernst Däumig. (Courtesy of Bundesarchiv, FES, AdsD 6/FOTA030692, 6/FOTA034288, 6/ FOTA036604)

government on November 9. In January 1918, 183,000 workers went on strike at 299 Berlin factories, in what was the most serious challenge to government authority during the war. The strike was led by a group called the Revolutionary Stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute), who had formed as an opposition to the official trade unions and their support of the war effort. The Revolutionary Stewards held both the USPD and the Spartacists at arm’s length, the former for being too cautious, the latter for being too reckless. According to historian Ralf Hoffrogge, Ernst Däumig was the only outsider

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and intellectual allowed into their leadership. When the metal turner Richard Müller was arrested and sent to the front following the January strike of 1918, Däumig became the group’s de facto leader.73 When police disbanded the strike leadership, a secret council formed under Vogtherr, Hoffmann, Kunert and Josef Herzfeld and met in the Reichstag to avoid arrest.74 When the authority of the elected parliaments and the monarchy suddenly collapsed in early November, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils asserted themselves as the new basis of popular legitimacy and the Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of Greater Berlin (Vollzugsrat des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrates Groß-Berlin) became the most important council in the nation. With Richard Müller as its chairman, and Däumig and Ledebour as members of the Executive Council, the Revolutionary Stewards and the USPD had a strong hand and were able to forge a power-sharing agreement with the MSPD on November 10, whereby the Majority and the Independent Socialist Parties agreed to co-lead all the ministries in the state of Prussia.75 As a consequence, Adolph Hoffmann was appointed to co-lead the Ministry of Education for Prussia, Däumig and Ledebour soon joined the Executive Council, and Vogtherr was appointed a liaison to the navy. However, although political power was to be shared, the monopoly of violence was not. In December 1918, Ebert secured a secret agreement with the military to suppress revolutionary excesses, which would prove crucial for the unfolding of events in January 1919. How are we to interpret the fact that three or four members of the 1918 strike committee and the informal leader of the Revolutionary Stewards were all prominent socialist secularists? What role, if any, did their secularism play in the course of the revolution? To an extent, it helps explain the structural position of these men at the arrival of the revolution in the nation’s capital. Their past secularist activism had made them locally powerful leaders, who had been held at arm’s length by the party leadership for their repeated efforts to drag the party into religious politics. Yet, if we shift our focus from how they arrived at leadership positions in the USPD to an exploration of their motivations, we can point to other concerns that made them secularist revolutionaries. On the one hand, they continued to be motivated by a desire to modify the confessional system, and, on the other, they worked from a utopian political imaginary linked to their worldview and life reform efforts. In the 73 74

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Ralf Hoffrogge, Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 57. Among USPD politicians mentioned in police reports of February 1918, were four current and former secularists Vogtherr, Kunert, Ledebour and Hoffmann, a former visitor of the FRC, Fritz Zubeil, and three politicians without secularist affiliations: Hugo Haase, Emanuel Wurm and Josef Herzfeld. See Ingo Materna and Hans-Joachim Schreckenbach (eds.), Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Berichte des Berliner Polizeipräsidenten zur Stimmung und Lage der Bevölkerung in Berlin, vol. iv (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1987), 253–59. Morgan, Socialist Left, 123.

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following I explore how the division of the party gave secularists an opportunity, unmatched since the revolution of 1848, to bring these concerns into the center of revolutionary politics. I will do this by latching onto the actions of the most prominent revolutionary secularists of this period. Following Adolph Hoffmann, I show how confessional struggles played a pivotal role in shaping religious responses to the revolution and helped shape the Weimar Constitution. Turning to Ernst Däumig, I explore the connection between his secularist political imaginary and theory of the workers’ councils, through which he hoped to lead the revolution and shape a new generation of socialists. Adolph Hoffmann as Co-Minister of Culture Given that religious matters were a prerogative of state governments and Prussia was the largest state, the Prussian Ministry of Education was the single most important office in Germany for determining the fate of the German churches. Not surprisingly, upon his appointment, Hoffmann immediately sought to dismantle all aspects of confessional discrimination and church privilege and power by revolutionary fiat. The vision for the Ministry of Culture issued on November 13, 1918 was also signed by MSPD co-minister Konrad Haenisch, but reveals Hoffmann’s initial dominance: The old fortresses of arbitrary violence have fallen. Now it is time to create new space for a new edifice, a house in which the entire people feel at home. Thus, first of all, away with all the barriers and hindrances in our public institutions that are left over from centuries of reaction; away with the remnants of the antiquated views and ideas that have allowed the spirit of narrowness and darkness, the worship of brutal power, and the celebration of militarism and bureaucracy to run wild in people’s heads.

The ministry’s first step would be to liberate the schools from every “paternalism,” “falsification of history” and “confessional influence.” The schools were to be separated from the churches and the churches “liberated from the state, but also from their state subsidies.” This announcement was followed by a flurry of decrees. On November 15, Hoffmann announced the equal rights of dissident children. Two weeks later he ended school prayer, removed religion from among the exam subjects in schools, and ordered the consistories to eliminate prayers for the King and the royal house from church services.76 These measures prompted an immediate outcry from Catholic and Protestant church leaders. On November 19, the Catholic Bishop of Cologne, von Hartmann, denied their legality; without the legitimacy of an elected legislative 76

Ludwig Richter, Kirche und Schule in den Beratungen der Weimarer Nationalversammlung (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1996), 241. Gottfried Mehnert, Evangelische Kirche und Politik 1917– 1919: Die politischen Strömungen im deutschen Protestantismus von der Julikrise 1917 bis zum Herbst 1919 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1959), 106–15.

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body, this separation was simply an “act of arbitrary violence.” According to Vice President Lahusen of the Protestant Higher Church Council (EOK), the events in Prussia would decide “whether the masses of our people want to live under the blessings of the church or sink into paganism.”77 Both churches mobilized their faithful against Hoffmann. The Protestant Church circulated a petition to retain religious instruction in schools, which received 7 million signatures by January 1919. The Catholic regions of Rhineland and Silesia threatened to withdraw from Prussia and form independent states. The Catholic Kölner Volkszeitung wove fears of Bolshevism together with antisemitism, when it wrote that through Hoffmann’s Ministerial Director Alexander Futran, a Jewish monist of Russian origins, the Ministry of Culture would soon place “Catholics and Protestants in the state of Prussia under the Russian whip.” Futran was summarily executed a little over a year later by government troops for leading a USPD defense organization, and was eulogized by the Monist League, as a hero who had turned from monist worldview to revolution because, as Futran himself had written, “A conviction only has value and effect, if it is backed by action.”78 Defeat in war, the Kaiser’s abdication, and socialist revolution were deeply traumatic events for both state churches. Because the collapse of the monarchy robbed the Protestant Church of its highest official, or summus episcopus, the Church found itself in a constitutional crisis, necessitating a reorganization on a new foundation. A number of church liberals supported the separation of church and state as a necessary step in their efforts to democratize the church. However, their willingness to cooperate with Hoffmann’s Ministry tarnished their reputation within the High Church Council.79 Hoffmann’s efforts helped conservative Protestants, such as the editor of the Kirchliches Jahrbuch Johannes Schneider, make sense not only of the revolution but of the lost war. Although he blamed the church for not doing enough to maintain the “spirit of 1914,” he concluded that “guilt for the political and moral collapse is borne first and foremost by Social Democracy.” The revolution unleashed “a flood of religious hatred, which had previously been held in check, bubbling in the dark depths.”80 This was the church version of the stab-in-the back theory, circulated by the military to pin blame for defeat on domestic enemies. For 77

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Von Hartmann quotation: Richter, Kirche, 5. “Für unsere Kirche,” Flugblätter aus der Schicksalsstunde der preußischen Landeskirche, no. 1 (n.d.), in ADW, CA 866I, p. 116. Mehnert, Evangelische Kirche, 108. Kölnische Volkszeitung article of Dec. 2, quoted in “Wirrwarr im Kultusministerium?” DeutschEvangelische Korrespondenz, 17/49 (Dec. 5, 1918); Monatsblätter of the Berlin DMB, 8/3 (April 1920). Jonathan R. C. Wright, ‘Über den Parteien’: Die politische Haltung der evangelischen Kirchenführer 1918–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977), 17–18. Johannes Schneider, “Kirchliche Zeitlage,” Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die evangelischen Landeskirchen Deutschlands (1919), 321–22.

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Catholics, too, Hoffmann’s brief stint as Culture Minister had a lasting impact, revealing for them the antireligious character of socialism. For men such as Catholic Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, the Weimar Republic bore “the mark of Cain” and would remain marred by this birth defect.81 Tremendous strains soon developed in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, not over the goal but over the means of achieving the separation of church and state. Hoffmann wanted to rule by revolutionary right (“kraft der Revolution”) while Haenisch wanted decisions to be provisional, awaiting later democratic legitimization. Hoffmann desired the elimination of the Wilhelmine bureaucrats, while Haenisch was convinced that the machinery of the state would stop if this course were pursued. Hoffmann wanted to use state power to generate support for the new regime through public propaganda that would deliver “enlightenment to the masses in the countryside via a comprehensive campaign.”82 Haenisch, still infused with the spirit of wartime nationalism, wanted to create national solidarity within the Volksgemeinschaft to stand up to the external threats to Germany’s territorial integrity.83 From late November onwards, Haenisch campaigned publicly against Hoffmann’s decrees and opposed any “shallow priest-eating, pseudo-enlightenment and iconoclasm.” This open rift between the two fed into the growing strains in the coalition government, which led the MSPD to make use of its ultimate authority. On December 12 and 13, 1918, leaders of the eight Prussian Protestant churches met with Ministry of Culture officials, who assured them that the Ministry would back away from Hoffmann’s decrees and thereby avert a Kulturkampf. In a letter of December 31, 1918, Haenisch informed Hoffmann of the steps he was undertaking to reverse earlier decrees, which were driving Catholic workers back into the Center Party fold and costing both socialist parties “hundreds of thousands of votes.” Haenisch claimed that he had only voted for these measures in November because Hoffmann had otherwise threatened to take the matter to the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils. He concluded that “going forward only one of us can carry out the leadership of the Ministry of Culture” and that in the interest of “socialism and the fatherland, I would find it desirable that you go.”84 This assertion reflected 81 82

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Michael Faulhaber, “Eröffnungsansprache von Kardinal Michael v. Faulhaber, 27. August 1922,” in Katholikentag München 1922 (Würzburg, 1923), 4. Adolph Hoffmann, “Unter den Linden 4,” in Die Revolution: Unabhängiges Jahrbuch für Politik und proletarische Kultur (Berlin: Freiheit, 1920), 185. Haenisch wrote to the press on November 26 that he opposed the immediate separation of church and state through a “hasty coup de main” but that it nonetheless “lay in the general line of our party.” Richter, Kirche, 7. Auf der Schwelle der neuen Zeit: Kundgebung der Humboldt-Hochschule (Berliner Volkshochschule) am Sonnabend, den 1. Februar 1919 (Berlin: Verlag Dr. Wedekind, 1919), 17–18. Richter, Kirche, 7. Haenisch to Hoffmann, Dec. 31, 1918, IISG, Zentralrat, B-21, pp. 8–10. Hoffmann, “Eine Rechtfertigung,” Der Atheist, Jan. 19, 1919.

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the decisive tipping of the balance between the USPD and the SPD in late December 1918. At the Reich Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils that met between December 16 and 20 in Berlin, this “highest organ of the revolution” decided that future power would rest in the democratically elected National Assembly. Without hope of continuing the revolution within the government, Hoffmann followed the other USPD ministers and resigned from the governing coalition with the MSPD. Haenisch issued the government’s new position on January 9, which was to leave open the question of the future relationship of church and state until after the democratic elections to the National Assembly, which were set for January 19. Hoffmann’s initiatives had contradictory effects. They prompted the Center Party to run its campaign for the National Assembly as an antisocialist, antisecularist defense of Catholic worldview. At the same time, the threat posed by radical secularism pushed party moderates to seek collaboration with the MSPD. Matthias Erzberger, the central figure behind Center’s ongoing cooperation with majority social democrats and liberals since 1917, made quick parliamentary elections a condition of his agreeing to enter Ebert’s government and take the unenviable position of Armistice Commissioner in November 1918. Erzberger reported to papal nuncio and future pope Eugenio Pacelli in February 1919 on the “good results” obtained by this decision, which had allowed the Center Party to stave off the obligatory separation of church and state and prevent the MSPD from introducing the “confessionless” public school: These two successes must be esteemed all the more since a further political development to the Left must be anticipated in the near future before we can expect the inevitable return to the Right. Great injury to the Church can be prevented by the Center [Party] in this present period of maximum danger. If church-state separation were once put into effect, it would be almost impossible to return to the earlier condition.85

Shared opposition to the radical secularism of the first months of the revolution opened some common ground between Catholics and Protestants. The Catholic politician and professor of economics Martin Faßbender invoked Hoffmann to argue for Protestant membership in the Center Party: “Hand on your heart: What are all the controversies between Christian religious communities since the Reformation . . . in comparison to the chasm that separates us from – Adolf Hoffmann?”86 Yet, despite such ecumenical overtures, the existential danger posed by the revolution led the churches and their political allies to respond with calls for confessional loyalty. Thus, historian Rudolf Morsey called Hoffmann, somewhat ironically, “the savior of the Center.”87 85 86 87

Klaus Epstein, Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma of German Democracy (Princeton University Press, 1959), 286, 288–89. Quotation in: Mehnert, Evangelische Kirche, 165. Rudolf Morsey, Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei: 1917–1923 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1966), 110–42.

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By the same token, Hoffmann could also be considered the “savior of the DNVP,” as historian Ludwig Richter has proposed. Fighting his decrees provided a justification for church participation in the formation of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) in late 1918, which collected the remnants of the Fatherland Party, the prewar Conservative parties and the antisemitic Christian Social Movement to form the most powerful interwar conservative party. The DNVP was a bastion of antidemocratic thought and the political home of most high-ranking Protestant clergymen and, according to some historians, it formed the first true milieu party of Protestant German conservatism. Prior to the war, many elites, in particular the clergy and nobility, identified with the Borussian imperial state and did not participate in the milieu organizations of the conservative base. Only once the abdication of Wilhelm II severed their ecclesiological and personal ties to the Prussian monarchy and the “godless” Revolution of 1918/1919 welded them together, did Protestant conservatives have an experience of persecution comparable to that which had integrated the Catholic and Socialist milieus in the 1870s and 1880s.88 Like the Center Party, the DNVP waged its campaign for the National Assembly as a confessional struggle against the anticlerical “Kulturkampf” triggered by the revolutionary government. Superintendent Otto Dibelius proposed that Protestant ministers inform parishioners how to vote and that they walk together from the church service to the polls.89 Although Haenisch had reassured the churches that he would not single-handedly implement secularization, politically minded clergymen sought to portray Hoffmann as the embodiment of the MSPD policies as well. Some historians have identified the propagandistic use of Hoffmann’s earlier actions as an electoral trick, which, as liberal-democratic politician Theodor Heuss claimed of the crude antisemitism, reflected “the dearth of ideas of the DNVP.”90 However, both antisemitism and antisecularism were not trivial matters for German conservatives; they had been linked since the late 1870s as core elements of conservative nationalist identity. Furthermore, as shown by the aforementioned letter from Erzberger to Pacelli just following the election, the churches and their political allies recognized that the outcome of the elections to the National Assembly would determine the writing of the constitution that would lay out the future position of the churches in German society.

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Richter, Kirche, 119; Frank Bösch, Das konservative Milieu: Vereinskultur und lokale Sammlungspolitik in ost- und westdeutschen Regionen (1900–1960) (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002); Helge Matthiesen, Greifswald in Vorpommern: Konservatives Milieu im Kaiserreich, in Demokratie und Diktatur 1900–1990 (Düsseldorf: Droste-Verlag, 2000). 90 Wright, Über den Parteien, 20–21. Richter, Kirche, 114.

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The USPD had emerged from the party split with few newspapers and a weak party structure, which contributed to a poor showing in the January 19 elections. It obtained only 22 delegates, as against the 165 elected for the MSPD. Together the socialist parties did not have a majority of the 423 delegates of the new National Assembly.91 The MSPD could have ruled alone with the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) with whom it shared points of agreement in education and church policy. However, because of the enormous tasks facing the new government, the SPD sought to include the Center Party, which required compromise on the issues dear to Catholics. Secularism and the Weimar Constitution With the defeat of Hoffmann and USPD, control over the restructuring of Germany’s confessional system passed into the hands of the MSPD and its allies. Already before the formation of the new government in February 1919, compromises on religious matters had made their way into the draft constitution being written by the professor of law Hugo Preuss on behalf of the Council of People’s Deputies. Because Preuss declined to give clear direction on school secularization to avoid sparking lengthy debates on worldview issues, the USPD-controlled Leipziger Volkszeitung warned of a “complete victory of the clerics.”92 Over a period of six months, the subcommittee responsible for educational and religious matters hammered out the articles of the constitution governing the confessional order, arriving at compromises that made no one entirely happy, but which reflected some of each coalition party’s program. Shortly before ratification, the DDP left the government in protest over the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and the Center Party used its increased power to extract additional concessions out of the SPD. When Carl Schmitt later characterized the Weimar Constitution as a “dilatory formal compromise” composed of contradictory contents, he named religious differences between the leading parties as a chief cause.93 Indeed, on several crucial issues, such as the confessional organization of the school system, the constitutional assembly simply pushed ultimate regulation into the future. Ulrich Stutz famously called it a “limping” separation of church and

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The confessional identification of the delegates to the National Assembly reveals striking differences. While the SPD and USPD delegations were composed of 50 percent and 68 percent declared dissidents (including Free Religious) respectively, there was only one dissident in the DDP and none in the other delegations. Mehnert, Evangelische Kirche, 180. With 110 delegates, dissidents and Free Religious were more numerous than Catholics and second only to Protestants in the National Assembly: 165 Protestants, 102 Catholics, 10 Jews, 1 Altkatholik. Only 9 did not name their confession. Deutsche Tag, March 3, 1919. Quoted in Richter, Kirche, 239. Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 85.

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state because, although it declared “there exists no state church” and guaranteed individual freedom of conscience, the churches sought and obtained a continuity of the key privileges they had enjoyed hitherto, although now justified with new legal principles. The churches were declared “corporations of public law” and continued to receive state-collected church taxes from all registered church members. Language from earlier drafts of the constitution demanding a “unified school” was removed and the rights of parents to determine the religious nature of the schools was inserted. The confessionalized school system was retained pending a future school law, which was never passed due to the polarization of the political fronts and the weakening of the left in the ensuing years.94 Although the Weimar Constitution guaranteed dissident children freedom from religious instruction, it did not guarantee them the right to an alternative instruction. This meant that while all citizens enjoyed a negative freedom from compulsion to attend confessional instruction, for most German states only the former state churches retained the positive religious freedom to provide such instruction. Yet, the secularist organizations were integrated into the confessional order in a new way. In a subcommittee meeting on April 1, 1919, the leading voice of the DDP, Friedrich Naumann, expressed sympathy for the socialist position that the churches should not be principally privileged over “associations with cultural aims or associations that are concerned with questions of worldview, even if they are monists or Freethinkers.” Simon Katzenstein of the MSPD, a leader of the workers’ abstinence movement with long-standing ties to secularist circles, promptly brought in an amendment cosponsored by a member of Naumann’s party to open the status of corporation of public law to associations that pursue “the collective cultivation of a worldview.”95 Crucially, however, worldview associations would have to petition for this status and provide evidence that they had a steady membership and stable constitution to guarantee their continuity. This meant that the de facto exclusion of secularists from access to confessional goods was maintained, but was offset by the de jure right to rectify this in the future. Here, as with the schools, the dilatory nature of the compromise worked towards the interest of the churches. When the largest secularist organizations, such as the Proletarian Freethinkers and the Monist League, later requested the status of corporations 94

95

Richter, Kirche, xi; Siegfried Weichlein, “Von der Staatskirche zur religiösen Kultur: Die Entstehung des Begriffs der ‘Körperschaft öffentlichen Rechts’ mit Blick auf die Kirchenartikel der Weimarer Reichsverfassung,” in Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche: Sprachliche Konzepte religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in Europa, ed. Lucian Hölscher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 90–116. Florian Bohusch, “Verfassungsrechtliche Grundlagen der Glaubensfreiheit: Religionsverfassungsrecht in den deutschen Verfassungsberatungen seit 1848,” PhD, University of Constance (2002), 169–70. See also, Weichlein, “Staatskirche.”

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of public law, their petitions were usually rejected.96 It may be concluded that the Weimar Constitution represented a compromise between deeply entrenched confessional positions that satisfied none, but did allow for the survival of key structures of the Wilhelmine confessional system. This translation of the confessional system into a democratic order pointed the way forward to the church–state arrangement of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, but for the duration of the Weimar Republic it provided grounds for ongoing socialist-secularist agitation. When the final version of the constitution was presented to the entire National Assembly in July 1919, Fritz Kunert rejected the compromise in the name of the USPD. He demanded “no baksheesh, no fat tips from the state in the form of subventions, salaries” for the churches, and concluded by calling for the “confiscation” of church property. Historian Ludwig Richter has argued that such USPD pronouncements on religious policy were largely propagandistic efforts to profile itself as the truly socialist party.97 However, this interpretation is not plausible given the strong secularist streak in the party. The USPD position on the new constitution coincided with that of Der Atheist, which lamented that “a tragicomedy has been played out in the Weimar National Theater, in which the German people and human progress have been the victims. . . . On questions regarding school and church the Center [Party] was victorious down the line, thanks to its red friends [in the MSPD, T. W.].” Der Atheist praised the USPD, “which stood entirely alone with its petition for a separation of church and state.”98 Multiple sources speak of a reignition of the church-leaving movement in the spring of 1919.99 According to Protestant minister and editor of the Kirchliches Jahrbuch Johannes Schneider, the agitation was not being driven by the liberal secularist organizations that had been at the center of the prewar church-leaving campaigns, nor was the MSPD involved. Rather the greatest propaganda was being made in Der Atheist, Rote Fahne (KPD) and Die Freiheit (USPD). Indeed, the highest rates of church-leaving between 1919 and 1922 occurred in the cities and regions that showed the highest electoral support for the USPD, such as in Saxony and Berlin.100 Kurt Rosenfeld of the USPD believed that the huge upsurge in church-leaving in

96 97 98 99 100

Drucksachen des Preußischen Landtages, 3. Wahlperiode, 1. Tagung 1928/30. No. 4178. Richter, Kirche, 540, 71. “Die schwarz-rot-goldene Reaktion,” Der Atheist, July 27, 1919. Freie Jugend in one Berlin district agreed to launch “a great church-leaving propaganda.” Mitteilungsblatt der Freien Jugend von Groß-Berlin, 3/2 (April 1, 1919). Schneider, “Kirchliche Zeitlage,” Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die evangelischen Landeskirchen Deutschlands 1919, 302–420, at 335. Church-leaving peaked in Saxony in 1921, in Berlin in 1920. The correlation of USPD support and church-leaving is taken from tables in Morgan, Socialist Left, 448–50; Hölscher (ed.), Datenatlas, vol. ii, 475, 626, 640.

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Berlin in September 1919, which saw over 12,000 requests filed, was sparked by popular anger at the DDP for backing away from the more liberal churchleaving law it had proposed earlier in the year. Indeed, the tides were changing, and a more restrictive regulation was passed against the votes of the SPD and USPD in November 1920. This ordinance required a period of one month for reconsideration, during which the duly informed church officials were allowed to contact the applicant.101 Religion became a key point of distinction between the rival socialist parties. The most powerful leader of the USPD in Saxony, Richard Lipinski, authored a pamphlet with the emphatic title Leave the Church (Heraus aus der Kirche) in 1919, whereas MSPD leader and long-time editor-in-chief of Vorwärts, Friedrich Stampfer, reprinted his 1905 Religion is a Private Matter (Religion ist Privatsache).102 Ample evidence exists of correlations between the USPD and the advancement of secularist aims. A Christian teachers’ organization concluded that the party’s “animosity towards religion” had motivated it to issue three resolutions to the Reichstag to secularize the schools in 1921.103 Police reported that Freethought propaganda was being distributed in USPD meetings in Bremen in late 1921.104 A statistical comparison of the regional membership of the largest Freethought association GpF and the 1920 Reichstag elections shows that regions with strong support of the USPD were also centers of German Freethought. This was especially true of the Rhineland, Halle/Merseburg, Thuringia and Leipzig/West Saxony (see Table 7.1). Connections between the secularist movement and the USPD were particularly tight in Berlin, where the Free Religious Congregation, Germany’s largest local secularist organization, counted in its leadership some of the highest-ranking leaders of the USPD. The Free Religious Congregation published its announcements in the USPD papers Freiheit, Der Sozialist and Arbeiter-Rat and jointly conducted its Jugendweihe with the party in 1920. Most of the socialist Free Religious leaders – Manasse, Vogtherr, Hoffmann, Däumig, Paul and Maria Krische, Adolf Harndt – worked in the USPD. In fall 1920 the annual report of the Berlin Congregation contained the “preliminary draft of state settlement with the church” that had recently been worked out by the Central Committee of the USPD.105 The draft called for: 101 102 103 104 105

GStA PK I HA, Rep. 169 D, Xc, no. 6, vol. 1. Morgan, Socialist Left, 464; Richard Lipinski, Heraus aus der Kirche: Ein Beitrag zum Kirchenaustritt nebst Gesetz und Verordnung vom 4. August 1919 (1919). Schule und Erziehung, 9/4 (April 1921): 27. Police captain to Reichskommissar of public order, Jan. 13, 1922, Staatsarchiv Bremen, FS 2181. “Jahresbericht 1919–20,” Die freie Gemeinde: Mitteilungsblatt der Berliner Freireligiösen Gemeinde und ihrer Ortsgruppen (1920).

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Table 7.1 Membership in the Community of Proletarian Freethinkers (GpF), September 1, 1921; Election results for Reichstag elections, June 6, 1920106 Community of Proletarian Freethinkers

Regional Associations/Headquarters Rhineland/Lennep Westfalia/Dortmund Ruhr/Duisburg Northern coast/Hamburg Hessen/Kassel Braunschweig-Hannover Middle Germany/Halle Thuringia/Jena Baden-Würt./Stuttgart Bavaria/Munich West Saxony/Leipzig East Saxony/Dresden Brandenburg/Potsdam Upper Silesia/Kattowitz Totals

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

106

107

Percentage popular vote for SPD/USPD in electoral district containing the headquarters Chapters

Members

8 46 11 21 16 10 28 16 10 12 55 91 5 6

826 4711 3824 2009 677 764 1781 897 388 474 2820 7611 426 348

10.0 / 32.8 20.8 / 19.7 13.5 / 13.8 38.4 / 15.1 27.3 / 12.3 28.0 / 19.2 8.8 / 45.2 15.4 / 30.6 15.9 / 12.8 15.9 / 11.9 9.1 / 42.1 27.4 / 21.4 20.6 / 30.2 Election not held

335

27554

National average 21.6 / 18.8

An end to all state payments to churches (Religionsgemeinschaften). State employees to be barred from employment by churches. No state supervision of religion. An end to government compilation of statistical information on the confessional identity of the inhabitants. No religious holidays except Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. No religious celebrations in public institutions, including schools. All church members required to reregister their religious affiliation upon passage of the new law.107 All buildings and mobile property of the churches to be turned over to the community (Gemeinschaft). Religious groups to apply to a public administration for building use.

Schneid, “Freidenkerbewegung in Duisburg,” 89–90; Morgan, Socialist Left, 449. N.B. Because the regional associations of the GpF and the electoral districts do not always coincide, I have taken the electoral district containing the regional headquarters of the GpF branches. Reregistration would have presumably decimated the church membership rolls and boosted the alternative Weltanschauung organizations.

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9. Instruments necessary for religious services to remain with the churches. 10. An end to religious instruction in schools and closure of the theological faculties in public universities. 11. Cemeteries to enter into the public trust.108 Had these measures been enacted, they would have brought about a radical secularization of state and society and the nationalization of key church assets. The close proximity of the Proletarian Freethought movement to the USPD, is revealed by the objection lodged by the local chapter of the Saxon town of Gersdorf, which was majority MSPD, against the clear support of the USPD given by the editors of Der Atheist.109 Although the USPD failed to develop into a significant force at the national level, it did seek to implement some of these measure at the local level. One Independent member of the Berlin Magistrate wrote that in many regions of the country, the party would have to accept its inability to affect educational policy and remain aloof as the “loyal lieutenant” of the working class. However, in regions where it could rule alone or in coalition with MSPD, it would be “heavy sin” to remain in the opposition. He gave as examples Erfurt, where the party sought to communalize the burial services, and cities, such as Hamburg and Berlin, where Independents were leading the struggle against the confessional school system.110 Ernst Däumig and the Revolutionary Council Movement In the first six months of 1919, Ebert’s government unleashed the Freikorps to suppress the insurrectionary efforts by communists and USPD radicals in the Ruhr, Leipzig, Halle and Berlin. This, and the smashing of the Bavarian Council Republic in May, deepened the hostility between MSPD and USPD. At a conference of Proletarian Freethinkers of Rhineland Westphalia in October 1919, delegates from the town of Remscheid proposed the following amendment to the organizational statutes: “Members of the Majority Social Democracy are to be excluded.” The petition was not passed, but it indicates the mood in socialist-secularist circles, as echoed in the speeches given that day. One speaker was the liberal monist turned socialist culture expert Kurt Löwenstein, who stated that November 9, 1918, had marked not the beginning of revolution, but simply a collapse of the old order. The revolution had yet to take place. Another speaker told delegates that the chief task of the moment 108 109 110

This list has been slightly condensed. It was also reprinted in “Kirche und USP,” Der Atheist, 16/13–14 (July 1920): 52. Der Atheist, 17–18/9 (Sept 1920). Max Peters, “Erziehungspflichten der sozialistischen Gemeinde,” “Kommunalisierung des Bestattungswesen,” “Schul- und Erziehungswesen,” Die Sozialistische Gemeinde, 4 (Feb. 15), 5 (March 1, 1920), 13 (July 1920).

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was the “continuation of the revolution, which has to be based on the foundation of the council system and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”111 The “council system” of the USPD was an original model of revolutionary direct democracy that gained many adherents between 1918 and 1921. Writing after the hopes for revolution had collapsed in 1921, Karl Korsch, a critical observer and later pioneer in the development of “Western Marxism,” noted an inverse relationship between the actual power of the councils and the utopian hopes associated with them as a form of political association. In November and December 1918, when the councils had been the actual bearers of sovereignty, they had been moderate and featured a mixture of political perspectives. As the Independents were ejected from the national government in January 1919, the councils fell more and more under their sway, and, despite the fact that fewer and fewer cities called up their councils, the claims made in the name of the councils increased. In 1920, Korsch concluded, the councils mostly continued as an idea.112 Indeed, critics on the right and the left identified the council model as an overly idealistic system that was distant from the messiness of parliamentary democracy or the clarity of party dictatorship. Although the council system has attracted the attention of a dedicated following among specialists over the years,113 most historians have given it short shrift as a passing interlude between the power-sharing government of November 1918 and the violent efforts to overthrow the government by the KPD.114 This interpretation occludes the fact that the USPD was the principal force of revolutionary action in Germany up until the merger of its left wing with the much smaller KPD in October 1920.115 A further reason for the neglect of the council system was that its political opponents as well as later historians considered its model of direct democracy to be unworkable and its advocates naïve if not irrational.116 One obvious explanation of this apparent irrationality, namely that it was inspired by religious motivations, has been

111 112

113

114

115 116

“Rheinisch-westfälische Freidenker-Konferenz,” Der Atheist, Nov. 2, 1919. Karl Korsch, “Wandlungen des Problems der politischen Arbeiterräte in Deutschland,” March 1921, in Karl Korsch: Politische Texte (Cologne: Europäische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1974), 22– 32. Ralf Hoffrogge, “Richard Müller, Ernst Däumig and the ‘Pure’ Council System,” and James Muldoon, “The Birth of Council Communism,” in The German Revolution and Political Theory, ed. Gaard Kets and James Muldoon (Cham: Springer, 2019), 199–214 and 339–60. Gerhard A. Ritter, “Direkte Demokratie und Rätewesen in Geschichte und Demokratie,” in Wiedertäufer der Wohlstandsgesellschaft : Eine kritische Untersuchung der ‘neuen Linken’ und ihre Dogmen, ed. Erwin Scheuch (Cologne: Markus, 1968). Ziemann, “Missing Comedy.” Dieter Engelmann, “Rätekonzeptionelle Vorstellungen während der deutschen Novemberrevolution,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, 25/6 (1983): 804. Miller, Bürde der Macht, 130, 353.

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hinted at by some historians but never explored.117 Yet, in the summer of 1919, Viktor Stern, a German-speaking Czech-Jewish schoolteacher and prewar monist, proposed that the councils embodied a religious idea, “which like a magic formula promises salvation in every direction. . . . Faith in the council system is nearly a new religion of the German proletariat. Even its most bitter enemy must today bow to this [expression of] mass will.”118 The connection between secularism and the council movement is suggested by the fact that several of its leading theorists were past or future organized secularists, including – alongside Stern – Georg Ledebour, Ernst Däumig and Max Sievers. Other contributors, such as Curt Geyer and Max Adler, were strongly influenced by monism and were culturally close to the secularist movement. According to historian Carl Schorske, the specific revolutionary imaginary that underpinned the council idea sprang from “the traditional ultrademocratism of the German left.”119 Yet, as I have explored previously, this ultrademocratism that erupted in the revolution of 1848 was closely tied to Free Religion,120and this connection survived the revolution and reappeared, for example, in the “revolt of the young ones” explored in Chapter 3. To delve more deeply into the role of the secularist imaginary in the council system, I will link these earlier movements to the actions and writings of Ernst Däumig, who was not only the leading German theorist of the council system, but as cochairman of the USPD and member of the Reichstag also its most powerful champion. Throughout the period of revolution, he also sat on the board of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation and gave regular lectures there. In 1917 and 1918, he published Journeys through Church History (Wanderungen durch die Kirchengeschichte), an ambitious history of religion from the origins of Christianity in Greek and Jewish thought up to the present, as well as the aforementioned Free People’s Catechism.121 Reading these writings on religion against the proposals for the council system that he set forth in keynote speeches to party congresses, pamphlets and in his journal Arbeiter-Rat (Workers’ Council) can open a window onto the historical relevance of this dimension of the secularist imaginary for the German Revolution. We have encountered Däumig already as an example of a socialist-secularist intellectual. His biography was marked by several abrupt transformations. He 117 118 119 120

121

On Däumig’s “millenarian” motivations and unspecified “religious” nature, David Morgan, “Ernst Däumig and the German Revolution of 1918,” CEH, 15/4 (1982): 304, 329. Quotation in Miller, Bürde der Macht, 352. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 326. Weir, Fourth Confession, 78–79; Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Politisierung des religiösen Bewußtseins: Die bürgerlichen Religionsparteien im deutschen Vormärz (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1978), 132. Ernst Däumig, Wanderungen durch die Kirchengeschichte (Berlin: A. Hoffmanns, 1925); Ernst Däumig, Freier Volkskatechismus: Ein Wegweiser zur echten Nächstenliebe und freien Menschenwürde (Berlin: A. Hoffmanns, n.d. [1918]).

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dropped out of the Gymnasium in his native Halle to join the French Foreign Legion, where he served in Indochina. Having returned home, and after a frustrating tour in the German army, Däumig “converted” to socialism in 1900.122 He became the editor of the socialist paper in Halle, where he also contributed to worker education and penned a Jugendweihe brochure. When he moved to Berlin in 1911, he became editor for military and educational affairs at Vorwärts, taught at the Arbeiterbildungsschule and sat in the Party’s Educational Committee for Greater Berlin.123 He was an outspoken antimilitarist and radical.124 He participated in the fringes of the church-leaving movement, and during the war Däumig become a frequent speaker at the Free Religious Congregation. By war’s end he had eclipsed Bruno Wille as the congregation’s favorite Jugendweihe orator. He was elected to the board of the congregation in December 1918 and held regular lectures there throughout the next three years, when not hindered by the threat of arrest.125 At the same time, Däumig had become the leading representative of the USPD’s left wing and in March 1919 was elected party co-chairman, an office he did not accept after the moderate co-chair Hugo Haase refused to serve with him. After Haase’s untimely death as the result of an earlier assassination attempt, Däumig became party co-chair in December 1919 and was elected to the Reichstag in 1920. Already during the last year of the war, Däumig had begun to think through the organizational architecture of a new system of direct democracy based on workers’ councils. He became an expert on developments in Russia, and in October 1918 planned a series of lectures on the Russian Revolution at the

122 123

124

125

Weir, “Däumig.” A biographical study of Däumig is found in Morgan, “Däumig,” 304–06. See also Horst Naumann, “Ernst Däumig – ein freireligiöser Revolutionär,” in ‘Kein Jenseits ist, kein Aufersteh’n’: Freireligiöse in der Berliner Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: Bezirksamt Prenzlauer Berg, 1998), 190–99. Commenting on the threat of war as a result of the “Morocco Crisis” of September 1911, Däumig proposed to a socialist assembly in Berlin that if war were to break out, the party should “apply revolutionary means of struggle.” Fricke and Knaack (eds.), Dokumente, vol. iii, 367. In 1913, Däumig produced a booklet to accompany a slide show on the Balkan Wars produced for worker education. He captioned slides showing priests as “indication of the unhealthy influence of religious fanaticism on war” and “incitement of national and religious hatred through slogan of ‘crusade.’” Ernst Däumig, Der Balkankrieg (Berlin: Zentralbildungsausschuß der sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, 1913), 10. On November 16, 1919 Däumig sent a letter to Adolf Harndt, the main organizer of the FRC, canceling a planned lecture because Gustav Noske (the MSPD minister most notoriously associated with persecuting the socialist revolutionaries) “is again showing a particular interest in my person, so that I have been forced to live underground for the past two weeks.” Adolf Harndt papers. Däumig was a board member of the FRC from December 1918 until at least June 1921. LAB B Rep. 042, no. 8981, 2 and no. 57556, 37.

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Workers’ Education School.126 The workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprang up throughout Germany upon the collapse of the government and the declaration of a socialist republic in early November. The MSPD and USPD centrists, such as Haase, accepted the initial necessity of the councils to create order in the chaos that descended on Germany following defeat and governmental collapse, but wanted to subject them to party control and replace them as soon as possible with elected government bodies. The USPD left, of which Däumig was a leading voice, saw councils as revolutionary bodies through which class rule by the proletariat could be carried out. Already at a November 16 meeting of the Executive Council (Vollzugsrat), Däumig opposed the formation of a “constitutional national assembly” and demanded instead a central committee of all councils to determine the new form of “proletarian Democracy.”127 When the first Council Congress met in Berlin in December 1918 and approved plans for elections to the National Assembly, Däumig called it a “political suicide club” which had just passed a “death sentence” on its own existence. In a speech of December 27, 1918, in which Däumig delivered a pessimistic analysis of the first six weeks of the revolution, he called the formation of the councils its “sole achievement.”128 Däumig’s “pure council system” contrasted clearly with the Soviet model. In the USPD Party Congress in March 1919, Däumig stated his support of the council system, “as we now find it established in the constitution of the Russian Soviet Republic,” but made the differences clear. Whereas the Bolsheviks used their strictly disciplined, hierarchical and centralized party as a leading force within the democratic councils, in Däumig’s model the councils not only replaced parliament, but were ultimately superior to socialist parties and the state itself. In stating that the councils and not the parties should lead the revolution, Däumig acknowledged that he was making a “heretical comment” that would dismay listeners of all the rival socialist parties.129 Whereas the MSPD saw parliament and the Bolsheviks saw the party as the representative of the people or the revolution, Däumig wanted to do away with representation. For him, the councils were the people and revolution. The revolution “had created its own organs with elementary force,” and these councils were not merely “proletarian-socialist combat formations 126 127 128

129

Police report of Sept. 9, 1918, in: Materna and Schreckenbach (eds.), Dokumente, vol. iv, 286–87. Engelmann, “Rätekonzeptionelle Vorstellungen,” 800. Ernst Däumig, Der erste Akt der deutschen Revolution! Vortrag des Genossen Däumig gehalten in der Arbeiterratsversammlung der USPD Arbeiterräte am 27. Dezember 1918 (Berlin: P. Neumann, n.d.), 1; Eberhard Kolb, “1918/19: Die steckengebliebene Revolution,” in Wendepunkte deutscher Geschichte 1848–1990, ed. Carola Stern and Heinrich August Winkler (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2001), 117. Ernst Däumig, Das Rätesystem: Reden auf dem Parteitage der U.S.P.D. am 4. und 5. März 1919 (Berlin: Der Arbeiter-Rat, 1919), 3.

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[Kampfgebilde]” that would fade away once they had eliminated the “authoritarian state [Obrigkeitsstaat], even if it has a republican facade.” The councils were to replace the state as a “self-administering collective body [Gemeinwesen].”130 Using another biological metaphor, Däumig described the council system as a living organism in which the central organs are “continually controlled by cells of electoral bodies in factories and professions [that are] active at all times and distributed across the entire country.” Completing the system was a supreme council of representatives of the regional councils that was to be a “control instance” but not an executive.131 The council idea also had bearing on Däumig’s understanding of the role of political violence. He opposed Bolshevik “putschism,” by which he meant the strategy of trying to precipitate revolution through insurrection. Although he believed that violence was a necessary part of revolution and was widely rumored to have been behind the creation of armed units within the USPD, Däumig was convinced that one could not “make” revolution.132 Proletarian violence was to be reactive not proactive. Related to this, he opposed the Bolshevik embrace of terror as a tactic for maintaining the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin once claimed that the lesson to be drawn from the French Revolution was the need for more, not less terror. Däumig similarly denounced the MSPD for embracing violence to maintain its own rule. He deplored the use of paramilitary Freikorps by Gustav Noske, the “bloodhound” of the MSPD, to suppress worker insurrection, and said that unlike the Ebert government, the Democrats of 1848 would never have called in the “praetorian guards” to secure their rule.133 In May 1919, Lenin blasted this “pure council system” as being fully removed from the exigencies of class war: “Those philistine gentlemen headed by Däumig are probably dreaming of a revolution (that is, if any idea of revolution ever enters their heads) in which the masses will all rise at once, fully organized.”134 While Däumig left hard-nosed politicians scratching their

130 131 132

133 134

Ernst Däumig, “Der Rätegedanke und seine Verwirklichung,” in Die Revolution: Unabhängiges Jahrbuch für Politik und proletarische Kultur (Berlin: Freiheit, 1920), 84. Däumig, Das Rätesystem, 7. In February 1919, Däumig ridiculed the naïve hopes of “bourgeois pacifists” that a League of Nations would bring world peace. Instead “the world war must lead into a world revolution, out of which a new and better age will first be born.” As a former noncommissioned officer and expert in military matters, Däumig was rumored to have led efforts to arm and train revolutionaries in Berlin. Yet, although he was arrested at least twice by Noske, no direct participation in violence could be proven and Däumig was soon released. Karl Grünberg, Die sozialistische Volkswehr: Mit einem Vorwort von Ernst Däumig (Berlin: A. Hoffmann, 1919), 3. Ernst Däumig, Der Aufbau Deutschlands und das Rätesystem: Koreferat und Schlußwort auf dem 2. Rätekongreß in Berlin (8.–14. April 1919) (Berlin: Der Arbeiter-Rat, 1919), 10. V. I. Lenin, “The Heroes of the Berne International,” Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. xxix (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1972), 392–401.

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heads, his plans were fully in keeping with core elements of secularist political thought. The first core element of the secularist imaginary was the belief that social transformation would occur through the formation of advanced spiritual communities, such as the Free Religious Congregations. Thus, the botanist Nees von Esenbeck went to the revolutionary Prussian parliament of 1848 as a Free Religious “missionary,” and Theodor Hofferichter called the congregations a “nursery for the principles of democracy.”135 Socialist secularists supported such reform projects as garden cities, consumer and production cooperatives, and “people’s houses,” which were conceived of as islands of community that would slowly penetrate and transform the society. Georg Ledebour expressed something similar when he hoped that the revolutionary workers’ councils would develop into rural communes reminiscent of Charles Fourier’s phalansteries.136 The second element of the secularist imaginary was the centrality of overcoming the spiritual and psychological shackles of authoritarianism. At the Second Council Congress in April 1919, Däumig stated that the KPD was leading the workers rather than educating them to become self-governing, and accused the MSPD of having succumbed to the lure of ruling through what was still, in his eyes, an authoritarian state.137 Both of these methods failed to overcome the psychological weakness of the German proletariat, which resulted from its lack of education and autonomy: We are still suffering from the spirit of military subservience and passive obedience, our heritage from the past centuries. This spirit cannot be killed by more electoral struggles, by election tracts passed out among the masses every two or three years. It can only be destroyed by a sincere and powerful effort to maintain the German people in a condition of permanent political activity. This cannot be realized outside of the [council] system.138

This psychological diagnosis of political consciousness tied into his criticism of religion. In the preface to his book Church History, Däumig blamed the alliance of “state, church and school” for drilling ignorance and obedience into the population. When the time for war arrived, the military had been able to mobilize the Lutheran creed “let every soul be subject unto the higher powers” that lay dormant in every former schoolchild, so that “we, who consider ourselves spiritually free, witness with horror the uncanny power that medieval

135 136 138

Christkatholisches Ressourcen-Blatt, 1/42 (1849), 171–72; Hofferichter quoted in Graf, Die Politisierung des religiösen Bewußtseins, 271. 137 Engelmann, “Rätekonzeptionelle Vorstellungen,” 804–06. Däumig, Rätesystem, 15. Quoted in Julius Martov, The State and the Socialist Revolution (New York: International Review, 1938), 27.

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beliefs still exercise in our ‘enlightened’ age.”139 Thirty years earlier, Free Religionist Bruno Wille had similarly turned the sectarian struggle against the church hierarchy into a critique of the growing authoritarianism and bureaucratization of the SPD. He accused the party leadership of falling to the lure of electoral politics and turning the workers into “herd animals” and “members of the mass.”140 The centrality of overcoming alienation to Däumig’s thought is also reflected in his belief that the success of the revolution depended on erasing the distinction between intellectuals and workers, a third element of the secularist imaginary. According to Däumig, the Germans had to avoid the “enormous mistake” of the Bolsheviks, which had been to seek support “exclusively from the calloused fist” of the workers: “From the start we want to strive for an understanding between head and hand workers and build our council system on this dual foundation.”141 The task of intellectuals was to help workers overcome the educational and psychological barriers that stood in the way of their self-mastery. He claimed that in Berlin the council leadership had identified one hundred promising young workers, who, once educated, would replace the old socialist leaders not merely as individuals, but more importantly as a type. Whereas the old functionaries, who were either parliamentarians or union leaders, had become alienated from the masses, the new leaders would be “inside the pulsing life” of the revolution, part of its organically evolving being. In spring 1919, Däumig announced in the name of the Executive Council the founding of a “Free Higher-Learning Community [Hochschulgemeinde] for Proletarians,” named thus because it would entail the “life together of learners and teachers with all the fruits of a school founded on nonauthoritarian and joyful cooperation.” It would not provide “bookish knowledge” or vague general education, but practical and political knowledge and “training of the spirit” with the aim of helping young proletarians take an active part in the socialization of the economy, which would be achieved not through decrees, but through the struggle of the workers in the councils.142 Däumig’s views were echoed by other council theorists with secularist affinities. Kurt Eisner saw in the council a “school of democracy,” out of which “personalities arise to take up political and economic” tasks,143 while Austrian Max Adler stressed the primacy of consciousness rather than party control for maintaining the integrity of the councils. Like Däumig, he proposed that the

139 140 141 142 143

Däumig, Kirchengeschichte, 7. Police report of Aug. 10, 1890, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 15050, 414. Däumig, Aufbau Deutschlands, 13. Däumig, “Freie Hochschulegemeinde für Proletarier,” Der Arbeiter-Rat, 1/15 (1919). Engelmann, “Rätekonzeptionelle Vorstellungen,” 804–06.

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right to vote not be tied to a narrow definition of working-class membership as it was in Soviet Russia, but rather to “a confession of socialism.”144 The notion that historical progress originated in idealistic communities constantly under threat from the powers of authority describes not just Däumig’s understanding of politics, but also of religion. In Journeys through Church History, Däumig argued that religion developed along two parallel and antithetical tracks: the first in intellectual culture, the second in the institution of the church. Culture was driven forward by the progressive evolution of consciousness towards a higher humanism; however, these achievements were coopted by the church, which “in continual adaptation to the conditions of the time developed itself into an organization of domination” by state and clerical elites.145 In the dialectic of spiritual advance and dogmatic calcification, Däumig pointed to the key role played by heretics in advancing the spirit and simultaneously building the bridge to political action. Heretical movements are “decidedly revolutionary uprisings in religious garb.”146 The end of this dialectic was not the elimination of religion, but the conquering of “the fortress of the church, in order to set something more perfect in its place.”147 Thus social revolution and anticlerical struggle flowed together. Only backed by social revolution could the champions of the modern, free worldview create the more perfect “religion of humanity” described in Däumig’s Free People’s Catechism. The catechism closes with “our confession of faith,” which combines natural-scientific monism and democratic humanism: “I believe that I am and remain a link in the unending chain of humanity . . . I believe that it is my obligation to love my fellow men, to support them in need and danger and to contribute to making humanity freer and happier.”148 Däumig saw religious and political heresies as expressions of the same emancipatory spirit that was threatened by the same institutional manipulations. Thus, he compared the contemporary socialist movement to Christianity before it was coopted by the Roman state, but concluded that “in the speed of its spread, modern socialism far exceeds Christianity.”149 It is reasonable to conclude that he understood socialist revolution and the particular form of the councils as the culmination not only of the Marxist history of class struggle, but also of the history of religion and secularism. The Final Act of the Revolution By the summer of 1920, Däumig’s hopes that his council system could provide a correction to the Bolshevik model of revolution had faltered. With the 144 145 148

Max Adler, Demokratie und Rätesystem (Vienna: Ignaz Brand, 1919), 31–32. 146 147 Däumig, Kirchengeschichte, 6. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 6, 5. 149 Däumig, Freier Volkskatechismus, 4, 31. Däumig, Kirchengeschichte, 45.

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successive collapse of the council governments in Bavaria and Hungary, Russia appeared to be the sole remaining beacon of world revolution. In July 1920, Däumig traveled to Russia to attend the Second Congress of the Communist International to negotiate terms of cooperation. In front of the congress, the chairman of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev, criticized Däumig for failing to understand that communists must “lead the way for the working class, and not to wait until we are dragged forward.” The USPD was then presented with the Twenty-One Conditions for Membership in the Communist International (Comintern),150 which would have effectively required its Bolshevization. This Moscow ultimatum effectively split the party in two, as shown by the cover of the satirical magazine Ulk (Figure 7.2). At the regional congress of the Saxon USPD in September, Däumig took on Rudolf Hilferding, Arthur Crispien and others who opposed the union of USPD and KPD. He argued that the Germans would have to choose sides in a possible future war between France and Russia, which would result in a “struggle of worldviews.”151 Hilferding and Crispien reportedly identified the German supporters of the Comintern, such as Däumig, not as Leninist hardliners, but rather as “revolutionary romantics” given to “utopian, syndicalist and anarchist tendencies.”152 The differences could not be reconciled, and in December 1920 the left wing of the USPD joined the KPD. KPD leader Paul Levi and Däumig became cochairmen of the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD). This was a momentous historical event, as it lifted the KPD from being a disparate sect with only 1,700 members in the summer of 1920 to a party with 52,000 members. Yet conflicts with the Comintern led membership to drop precipitously to 26,000 by August 1921. Däumig was one of the first casualties: he and Levi resigned in February 1921 over Comintern plans to precipitate the violent and disastrous “March Action” in Germany.153 On October 1, Däumig and Hoffmann announced the formation of the Communist Working Collective (Kommunistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, KAG), a new faction dominated by secularist socialists. In addition to Däumig and Hoffmann, its executive committee included Max Sievers, the future chairman of Germany’s largest Freethought association.154 Otto Brass, the future chairman of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation, later joined the KAG. Although the KAG had hoped to serve as the basis for a new revolutionary party, just as the SAG had 150 151 152 153 154

Däumig speech on July 30, 1920. Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International (www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch07.htm). Jesko Vogel, Der sozialdemokratische Parteibezirk Leipzig in der Weimarer Republik: Sachsens demokratische Tradition (Hamburg: Kovac, 2006), 227. Max Sievers, “Der Parteitag in Halle,” Der Arbeiter-Rat, 2/43–44. Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten, Aufstand der Avantgarde: Die Märzaktionen der KPD 1921 (Frankfurt: Campus, 1986), 445–47. Morgan, “Däumig,” 323–28. Mitteilungsblatt der kommunistischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 1/4 (Oct. 19, 1921).

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Figure 7.2 “Look to the Right and to the Left, you see a half Independent fall!” Moscow cleaves the USPD, with a message in favor of joining the Comintern carried by Däumig and one against carried by Dittmann. Source: Ulk, October 1920. (Image courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg)

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done for the USPD in 1917, it proved to be a dead end. As an ironic finale, which shows the continued relevance of secularist structures in supporting inner-party dissent, one of the last meetings of the KAG, at which it was decided to rejoin the USPD, was held in the Free Religious meeting hall in Berlin in March 1922. In July, Däumig died as a result of a heart attack suffered on the floor of the Reichstag. Following the murder of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau by nationalist reactionaries in June 1922, the former KAG members rallied around the republic and rejoined the SPD in September. By this point, it had become clear to the secularist organizations that their hopes for a thoroughgoing secularization of the state were not going to be realized soon. In January 1922, the rump USPD signaled its retreat from its earlier radical anticlericalism, when it voted to reverse the practice of requiring candidates to leave the church, due to “the strong anchoring of the church in our national life.”155 Conclusion According to historian Susanne Miller, two souls had lived in the breast of prewar Social Democracy. On the one hand, the party was sustained by the utopia of total social transformation, which despite its global claims fostered sectarianism and an alienation from political reality. On the other hand, it nursed a practical reformist tendency. These souls separated during the war and their conflict drove the dynamics of the German Revolution. The first principle explained, for Miller, the repeated rejection by the USPD of opportunities for participation in power. Their “wishful thinking untethered from reality” led to ultimate powerlessness.156 By contrast, when the MSPD assumed “the burden of power” and compromised its ideals to work with its political opponents, it became a responsible, pragmatic pillar of democracy. In this telling, the failure of the USPD remains a key point used to emplot the history of Social Democracy as one of disenchantment, in which the SPD successively pruned away its utopian offshoots. This chapter has offered another explanation of some of the utopian content of the USPD and the revolution more broadly. Rather than seeing it purely as an expression of Marxism or socialist culture, this article has examined the impact of red secularism. Weeks into the war, socialist secularists were protesting that the Burgfrieden had not led to full integration of religious dissidents in the national community, and this confessional discrimination spurred their antiwar opposition in the SPD. Secularist networks and press organizations gave them a necessary measure of autonomy to build a 155 156

Report from January 21, 1922, ADW, CA, no. 764. Miller, Bürde der Macht, 130, 353.

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leadership position in the inner-party opposition and later the revolution. This allowed figures such as Ernst Däumig and Adolph Hoffmann to pick up the reins of revolutionary power and seek to take the state itself in 1918 and 1919. However, their leadership did not merely result from their strategic positions in moments of revolutionary contingency. Both men were charismatic leaders, who spoke on behalf of reform ideals and political projects that had been cultivated in the secularist movement for decades before the war. Hoffmann effectively linked his pacifism to religious criticism, whereby his secularist worldview appeared both as the negation of clerical hypocrisy and as a higher fulfillment of some of the humanistic sentiments expressed in the “Sermon on the Mount.” Hoffmann’s attempted elimination of the public power of the churches was quickly foiled. However, the episode galvanized the Christian parties and helped cement the political alliance of MSPD, Center Party and DDP, who forged the “limping” separation of church and state in the new constitution. The survival of key elements of the prewar confessional system meant that red secularism retained its political relevance, and set the stage for the “culture wars” of the Weimar Republic. Däumig’s writings and actions open another window on the relationship of secularism to revolution. Religious and political dissidence coincided in his revolutionary theory and in his political choices. The “pure” council system, which he defended for a time against Lenin, offered German socialists a novel form of revolutionary organization that expressed a communitarian imaginary that had been expounded by prior generations of radical secularists. Through the councils, he believed workers would gain moral autonomy and consciousness of the monist humanism that he saw as the telos of religious and political history. Following the collapse of the council movement and the disastrous putschism of the United Communist Party in 1921, most socialist secularists returned to the SPD and red secularism returned to what it had been before 1914, a dissenting movement largely within German Social Democracy.

8

Monism in the Weimar Workers’ Culture Movement

The hope of quickly realizing secularist aims through state power at the outset of the Weimar Republic passed with the waning of the revolutionary period. Yet, the stabilization of the republic set the stage for the growth of socialist secularism as a popular movement. In the political realm, the Proletarian Freethinkers, whose membership had topped half a million by around 1926, stepped up their anticlerical activities. This fed into conservative fears of “godlessness” and contributed to the political polarization of the late 1920s, a development that will concern us in the final chapter. Red secularism also reached a high point in the realm of culture, where, as this chapter explores, it helped shape the workers’ culture movements of Weimar Germany. As part of the blossoming of modern associational life within the pillarized social order of nineteenth-century Germany, socialists had formed their own soccer and bicycle clubs, their own choirs, theater companies and libraries. Although some offered socialist content, the cultural forms practiced by the socialist associations were roughly analogous to those found in the Christian milieus. During the Weimar Republic a marked change occurred. New demands were made in the name of Kultur and experiments were launched with the hope of ushering in the coming socialist society. This was the message of the 1924 Leipzig Workers’ Culture Week, sponsored by the SPD. It began with the performance of Ernst Toller’s “Transformation” (Wandlung), a “mass festival drama,” in which nearly 1,000 performers took part.1 Leading socialist politicians and well-known secularists addressed the crowds and a new journal was launched with the Nietzschean title Kulturwille (Will to Culture).2 Under the luminous goal of creating an experimental field for a future civilization, the various life reform movements of the Wilhelmine era, such as nudism, vegetarianism and rhythmic gymnastics, were recast. Expressionist playwrights, such as Toller, gave bold accents to novel forms of performance,

1 2

Karl Czok and Horst Thieme, Leipzig: Geschichte der Stadt in Wort und Bild (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1978), 74. Reports in Vorwärts, Aug. 5, 24; Münchner Post, Aug. 7, 13, 24.

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such as the Sprechchor (speaking choir), in which lay actors declaimed revolutionary texts and engaged in dance movement that was meant to bring to life the revolutionary community. As they formulated plans for emancipation in “the future relationship of people and work, the relationship of the body and health and the democratization of knowledge and education,” Weimar-era cultural activists also argued for a specific role of Kultur in revolutionary social transformation.3 In new journals, intellectuals forged and debated theoretical frameworks for what became known as “cultural socialism” or Kultursozialismus. In an issue of Kulturwille on “workers’ culture,” Richard Weimann, the secretary of the National Committee for Socialist Education (Reichsausschusses für sozialistische Bildungsarbeit), issued demands in the name of this new “Kultur movement.” He criticized prewar socialist education for being politically marginal and suffering from “spiritual narrowness and doctrinaire one-sidedness.” Now that it was recognized that “Socialism has always been viewed by its adherents, even if perhaps unconsciously, as worldview, as a higher ethical idea, yes, as a religion,” it was possible “to penetrate everything with new spirit, with new conviction” and to win the masses for the democratic idea and for a “new national community [Volksgemeinschaft]”4 To achieve this aim, Weimann demanded a “socialist culture and education movement” that was “no longer, as in the past, an appendage or ‘institution’ of the party or unions” but which stood “on par” with them. The same demand was made at the Leipzig Culture Week by leading SPD politician Heinrich Schulze, who wanted the cultural movement to act as the “third column” of socialism.5 The active participation of monist intellectuals, the hypertrophic claims made in the name of Kultur, the idea of a “third column” all point to a strong secularist contribution to cultural socialism, yet this has not been investigated in the historical literature. German Kultursozialismus was connected to the cultural experiments of interwar “Red Vienna” and the Soviet avant-garde, which have attracted scholarly attention because of their efforts to harness culture and art to the utopian project of creating a socialist “New Man.” According to historian Anson Rabinbach, Viennese socialists focused on culture and education as a pragmatic response to the contradictory position they occupied in interwar Austria. Given that the party had little hope of convincing the pious, conservative voters in the country’s hinterland to vote for them, the focus on culture, education and secularism became a way of solidifying the urban milieu against reactionary encirclement, while sustaining hope for a positive turn in the 3 4 5

Wolfgang Kaschuba, Lebenswelt und Kultur der unterbürgerlichen Schichten im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 43. Richard Weimann, “Die sozialistische Kulturbewegung,” Kulturwille, 7 (1924): 108–10. “Die dritte Säule: Ein Rückblick auf die Leipziger Kulturwoche,” Vorwärts, Aug. 14, 1924.

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future.6 In the case of the early Soviet Union, the grand cultural experiments of the 1920s have been linked to the unfolding dynamics of revolutionary transformation in the short decade between the end of the Civil War and the establishment of Stalinist cultural forms in the early 1930s.7 Some historians have, following the lead of Antonio Gramsci, interpreted culture as a key political arena in interwar Europe, precisely in post-revolutionary situations, when the “war of movement” gave way to a “war of position.”8 By contrast, historian Dieter Langewiesche arrived at a more pessimistic reading of Kultursozialismus as marginal to interwar socialism. He argued that its educational theories did not meaningfully challenge the “connection to reality and pragmatism” manifested by the SPD and unions.9 Kultursozialismus remained a compensation for the “loss of Utopia” experienced by socialists on the factory floor and in parliamentary democracy.10 Without discounting the role of revolutionary hope and or its disappointment as drivers of cultural innovation, I pursue another explanation in this chapter, namely that Kultursozialismus was, in part, a further expression of monism as a form of knowledge connected to social dissent. Rather than seeking to influence socialism from the outside, as they had prior before the war, with the Revolution of 1918 monist intellectuals entered the socialist milieu in order to realize their long-standing cultural visions. The relevance of this group was not lost on church observers, such as the Catholic apologist Desiderius Breitenstein, who noted in 1930 that: “First the rich influx that socialism experienced as a consequence of the political collapse of liberal freethinking circles brought revisionism to more speculative territory. Freethought, which had always sympathized with socialism, is gaining ever more influence in the socialist movement, which will certainly also impact the educational movement.”11 In this chapter, I take up Breitenstein’s thesis. Rather than paint a broad portrait of the influence of freethinkers as a whole, I propose to examine instead the actions of a discrete group of formerly liberal, monist intellectuals,

6

7

8

9 10 11

Anson Rabinbach, “Red Vienna: Symbol and Strategy,” in The Austrian Socialist Experiment: Social Democracy and Austromarxism, 1918–1934, ed. Anson Rabinbach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 189. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Nicholas N. Kozlov and Eric D. Weitz, “Reflections on the Origins of the ‘Third Period’: Bukharin, the Comintern, and the Political Economy of Weimar Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History, 24/3 (1989): 387–410. Langewiesche, “Erwachsenenbildung,” 348. Dieter Langewiesche, “Arbeiterkultur in Österreich,” in Arbeiterkultur, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Königstein: Hain Verlag, 1979), 49. Desiderius Breitenstein, Die sozialistische Erziehungsbewegung, ihre geistigen Grundlagen und ihr Verhältnis zum Marxismus (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1930), 93.

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former liberals who took key positions in the organization, practice and theory of Kultursozialismus. As we saw in our investigations of Leipzig and Berlin, monism had made significant inroads into prewar worker education. Autobiographies revealed that many workers converted to the worldview of materialistic monism, and some of the leading theorists of prewar international socialism, whether the “worker philosopher” Joseph Dietzgen or Russian Georgi Plekhanov, have been associated with monism.12 Yet, I will argue that it was in the Weimar Republic that monism made its most significant contribution to socialist culture. Accounting for this requires a revision not only of existing accounts of Kultursozialismus, but also of the history of monism. Most accounts effectively end with the eclipse of the Monist League during the First World War.13 Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, the historical impact of monism was of greater duration and lasted from the 1840s to the 1940s.14 This longer time line is suggested in an autobiographical sketch of 1957 by the Leipzig monist Robert Riemann, who wrote of his pride that the “numerically weak” Monist League of the Wilhelmine era was able to grow to serve a “million-strong” secularist movement in the Weimar Republic.15 Riemann was a Gymnasium teacher and prewar liberal, who joined the SPD in 1923. This chapter writes a history of monism within Weimar-era socialism, examining how a set of intellectuals translated, transformed and propagated their ideals in a new context. After first giving a short account of the career trajectories of these intellectuals, it investigates how they brought their monist theories of culture to bear on the intense discussions over the role of culture in Marxist theory. In the second half, the chapter selects a number of case studies to explore how monism entered into key branches of the workers’ culture movement: sex reform, body culture, ritual culture and educational reform. The Monist Generation of 1918 The monist socialists of the Weimar Republic represent the second generation of socialist intellectuals surveyed in this book, the first being the generation of speakers of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation who stepped onto the 12

13

14 15

Joseph Dietzgen, Erkenntnis und Wahrheit: Des Arbeiterphilosophen universelle Denkweise und naturmonistische Anschauung über Lebenskunst, Ökonomie, Philosophie, Religion und Sozialismus (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1908); Georgi Plekhanov, The Development of the monist View of History (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956). Hübinger, “Monistische Bewegung”; Paul Ziche (ed.), Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung, Ernst-Haeckel-Studien (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000); Nöthlich et al., “Weltbild oder Weltanschauung?” Todd H. Weir, “The Riddles of monism: An Introductory Essay,” in monism, ed. Weir, 1–44. Robert Riemann, “Mein achtzigster Geburtstag,” in Dummheit und Einsicht – Aus meinem Leben (1877–1957) (ed. Tord R. Riemann, www.hugo-riemann.de, 1961), 5.

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public stage around 1890. Following their brief flirtation with plebeian socialism, Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche placed their hopes in monism and helped found first the Giordano Bruno League in 1900 and then the German Monist League (DMB) in 1906. Aside from the quixotic figure of Heinrich Peus, there was little crossover between the “aristocrats of the spirit” in the Monist League and the prewar SPD. This changed markedly during the First World War. As we saw in the last chapter, only a minority of the DMB, including its leaders Haeckel and Ostwald, abandoned pacifism for nationalism. Key chapters, including those in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna, hewed to the pacifist cause with Berlin Monists forming the core of the Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV).16 As the revolution unfolded, these left-wing monists moved in three directions. Some remained autonomous radical liberals; a few found their way to the fledgling communist movement; but most entered the two socialist parties SPD and USPD. Representing the first option were figures such as sex reformer and leading feminist Helene Stöcker and the pacifist Otto Lehmann-Rüßbüldt. Both cooperated openly with socialists but remained affiliated with the radical Democratic movement.17 In April 1919, amidst the revolution in Berlin, Stöcker reiterated the elitist vision of Wilhelmine monism, when she wrote that only “a vanguard minority, gathered at the highest level of understanding and intent, could lead the way to a democratic future.” Six months later she asserted the primacy of cultural and psychological over economic factors in social transformation: “Changes in relations of ownership will remain superficial concerns that cannot change the true essence of the matter – people – unless we succeed in changing the very souls of people themselves.”18 Another representative of this group was Carl von Ossietzky, who went on to become one of Weimar’s leading left-wing intellectuals as the editor of the Weltbühne. He is today remembered less for his monism than for his pacifism and his biting commentary on National Socialism, which earned him a Nobel Peace Prize but led to his imprisonment in a concentration camp and ultimately cost him his life.19 In 1921, he penned the commentary on “World Peace” for the fourth plank of the draft program of the German Monist League. War was 16 17

18

19

Fricke, Deutsche Demokraten, 193. Stöcker, Lehmann-Rußbüldt and Ossietzky had all joined the short-lived Democratic Association in 1909, founded by Rudolf Breitscheid. Whereas Breitscheid abandoned Democracy and joined the SPD, Ossietzky remained true, founding a Republican Party in 1924. Quoted in Kristin McGuire, “Feminist Politics Beyond the Reichstag: Helene Stöcker and Visions of Reform,” in Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, ed. Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt and Kristin McGuire (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 147–48. Istvan Deak was dismissive of Ossietzky’s monism, suggesting that it was simply anticlericalism that attracted him to the organization. He also overlooks the monist connections of other

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“an atavism left over from an earlier animal phase of the development of our species” and he stated that monists “confess to a scientific pacifism and internationalism and propose a league of peoples that unites all nations in an equal community of culture [Kulturgemeinschaft].”20 Despite its lofty ambitions, by the mid-1920s the Monist League had shrunk to a small association.21 Among the monists who joined the communist movement was Ernst Reuter, who as a trainee teacher had taken part in the monist campaign for churchleaving in 1913 and engaged in antiwar action in the BNV. Returning from Russian exile, where he had served the Bolsheviks, he rose quickly in the new German Communist Party, becoming General Secretary in 1921, only to be purged later that year. He joined the SPD and, as an ardent anticommunist, later achieved fame as mayor of West Berlin during the Berlin Airlift.22 Viktor Stern, a German-speaking Czech Jew, who had asked “Can monism replace religion?” in the Monistische Jahrhundert in 1914, formed a long-lasting relationship to the communist movement, and went from being the leader of the Czech freethinkers in the interwar period to being an important functionary in the GDR after the war.23 The Hamburg schoolteachers Heinrich Meyer and Hans Kippenberger combined monism and communism. The son of a Leipzig Free Religious preacher, Kippenberger had moved from the USPD to the KPD in 1920, while at the same time playing a leading role in the monist youth movement “Sun.” Hermann Remmele, a member of the KPD Central Committee, wrote a biting report to Stalin about these “intellectuals and halfintellectuals, who stemmed from the bourgeois monist movement in Hamburg.” Remmele, himself a working-class graduate of the prewar Party Institute (Parteihochschule) in Berlin, looked down on the derivative education of this group: “At a time when young workers and also young intellectuals studied Marx, Engels and party literature, these intellectuals studied Nietzsche, [Ernst] Mach, Kant, Hegel. From each of these, however, only what can be read in the ‘Dictionary of Philosophy’.”24 Despite their differences, Meyer,

20 21 22 23

24

Weltbühne contributors. Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbuhne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 52. Carl von Ossietzky, “Weltfrieden,” Monistische Monatshefte, 6/2 (Feb. 1, 1921): 83–85. LAB B Rep. 042, Nr. 8985, DMB Vereinsregister. Ernst Reuter, Schriften: Reden, ed. Hans Hirschfeldt and Hans Reichhardt (Berlin: Propyläen, 1973), 188–89, 300, 346–55. Viktor Stern, “Kann der Monismus die Religion ersetzen?,” Das Monistische Jahrhundert, 50 (1914): 1401–11; Igor Polianski, “Von der ‘Lockerung der Erbanlagen’: Lysenko und der politische Genetik-Diskurs in der DDR,” in Vererbung oder Umwelt? Ungleichheit zwischen Biologie und Gesellschaft seit 1945, ed. Constantin Goschler and Till Kössler (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016), 202–27. “Remmele-Memorandum December 25, 1932,” in Deutschland, Russland, Komintern -– Dokumente (1918–1943), ed. Hermann Weber, Bernhard Bayerlein and Gleb J. Albert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 900; Hans Kippenberger and Adolf Franck, “Monistische Jugendbewegung ‘Sonne’: Referate,” Monistische Bibliothek, 23 (1921).

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Kippenberger and Remmele enjoyed successful careers in the KPD, including election to the Reichstag, but were caught up in the purges during their Moscow exile and executed in 1937 and 1939.25 By far the largest group of left-wing monists became and remained Social Democrats. The following list of monist socialists is not exhaustive, rather it names nineteen individuals of this category, who were prominent or appear elsewhere in this book. The criteria for selection are (a) membership in monist organizations or authorship of articles in monist journals between 1906 and 1930 and (b) close cooperation with or membership in one of the socialist parties during the Weimar Republic. Short biographies can be found in Appendix 3.26 Most members of this group had been active in monist circles prior to the war and were “November socialists,” who joined the USPD or SPD just before or during the outbreak of revolution in November 1918. This included the former schoolteachers Dr. Kurt Löwenstein, Fritz Gansberg, Maria Krische, Dr. Robert Riemann, Max Zelck and Prof. Theodor Hartwig, as well as three active researchers: sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, biologist Prof. Julius Schaxel and biologist Dr. Paul Kammerer. It also included two professionals: chemist Dr. Paul Krische and engineer Alexander Futran. A smaller group of monists had joined the SPD prior to the war, including the schoolteachers Dr. Max Hermann Baege and Otto Jenssen, lawyer Dr. Hermann Heimerich, and the newspaper editors Heinrich Peus and Georg Engelbert Graf. Finally, this group includes a number of writers who first appeared in monist and socialist circles during the Weimar Republic: such as physician Dr. Max Hodann and the schoolteachers Dr. Anna Siemsen and Adolf Koch. A comparison of this group with the generation of 1890 reveals strong continuities. Confessionally, all or nearly all monist socialists officially left their confessions of birth and become dissidents. As in 1890, the bulk were of Protestant background (twelve), but again with a significant number of former Jews (five).27 Continuities are also found in gender, education and profession. These self-defined intellectuals were mostly men (seventeen of nineteen), whose principal claim to leadership in the socialist movement was advanced knowledge, generally garnered from universities or teachertraining institutions. Professionally, only two socialist monists were active

25 26 27

Two former Wanderlehrer of the SPD and later communists, Hermann Duncker and Otto Rühle, interacted frequently with the socialist monists. Exceptions are Magnus Hirschfeld and Adolf Koch. Hartwig and Kammerer were not German citizens but are included here because of their extensive engagement in German debates. According to historian Heiner Fangerau, there was a growing identification of monism with Jewishness by the churches and the nationalist right. Fangerau, “monism.”

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scientists, while several more came from the “free professions” (two physicians, an engineer and a chemist). Above all, they were schoolteachers. As noted in Chapter 3, schoolteachers occupied intermediate positions within a bureaucratic hierarchy in which they were subject to domination from above (by professors, as well as by church and state officials) but used to exerting leadership within the milieus of the children they taught. War and revolution produced a structural crisis of the bureaucracy that prompted and enabled teachers to break free of their hierarchies. The chairman of the national Social Democratic Teachers’ Association, Kurt Löwenstein, compared the revolution to a storm that had left many teachers bewildered, like “lightly freighted boats” that were vulnerable to the temptation to sail into the “seemingly secure harbor of [political] reaction.” But for those teachers who already internally rejected the “intellectual and religious domination of the old regime,” the collapse of authority brought liberation. Löwenstein claimed that socialist teachers “today stand in the middle of the ranks of the workers, and the union with the working-class movement has become so intimate for them, that they have already achieved leadership positions of lasting significance.”28 Löwenstein’s allegory of teachers as boats threatened by storms and seeking protective harbors is an apt image for understanding the novel situation after 1918 for secularist intellectuals within the socialist movement. In our examination of the situation of 1890, we saw that the price “bourgeois” intellectuals paid for accepting a position in the SPD or its organizations was the abandonment of the hope of future state employment. Fritz Kunert, Carl Pinn and Bruno Wille all recognized that they would not be able to work as primary or Gymnasium teachers after taking that step. The Revolution of 1918 decisively changed this. During the Revolution some monist intellectuals were vaulted into the state administration.29 Even as the socialists lost their controlling position on the national level, the USPD and SPD maintained control over many communal and state governments, which funded schools, theaters and other cultural institutions. In Berlin, for example, where the USPD gained 38 percent and the SPD 17 percent of the votes in the city council elections in 1920, it was possible, for the first time, to imagine implementing elements of the socialist educational policy. New secular (weltliche) schools were founded that offered leadership possibilities to left-wing teachers, and the socialization of parts of health care provided careers for physicians, such as Max Hodann, who worked in sex counseling via municipal agencies. Monist intellectuals 28

29

Kurt Kerlow-Löwenstein, “Geschäftsführende Vorsitzende der Arbeitsgemeinschaft sozialdemokratischer Lehrer und Lehrerinnen Deutschlands: Über die gesellschaftliche Stellung und Funktion des Lehrers,” Kulturwille, 7 (1924): 111–12. Max Hermann Baege became an undersecretary of the Prussian Ministry of Culture.

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pushed for the “communalization” of previously church-run or private services.30 The unions, which by 1927 employed an estimated 200,000 persons, offered numerous employment opportunities to left-wing intellectuals, such as Georg Engelbert Graf, who directed the Central Educational Office of the Metalworkers’ Union.31 Secularist intellectuals also found welcoming audiences and opportunities for paid work in the many workers’ culture associations, whose membership peaked during the Weimar Republic.32 By around 1928 there were roughly 1,200,000 members of the socialist sports clubs, 320,000 participants in the workers’ choirs, 600,000 subscribers to the People’s Theaters (Volksbühnen), 100,000 members of the Friends of Nature outdoors club (Naturfreunde) and over half a million members of the various socialist Freethought associations. W. L. Guttsman estimated that membership in these clubs outstripped party membership by at least two to one.33 In short, socialism offered a bustling harbor for former monist liberals, most of whom engaged at multiple sites in the parties, unions, cultural organizations and municipal bureaucracies. A good example is provided by Löwenstein, who was probably the politically most successful member of the cohort under examination. Following a socially and emotionally unstable childhood, Löwenstein abandoned studies at a rabbinical seminary in Berlin around 1908 and began to lecture and write for secularist organizations, such as the Ethical Culture Society and Monist League. Radicalized during wartime military service, he joined the USPD in 1918, where he quickly rose to become a chief party official for educational policy. He was nominated by the socialist parties to the highest post in Berlin’s school system (Oberstadtschulrat) in 1920, but his confirmation faltered due to sharp protests from conservatives and church leaders. As the commissioner (Stadtrat) for education in the proletarian district of Neukölln, he spearheaded the campaign to create secular

30 31

32

33

Otto Jenssen, “Die Sozialisierung des Wohnungswesens,” Die sozialistische Gemeinde, 2/1 (January 1, 1920). Dieter Langewiesche, “Politik – Gesellschaft – Kultur: Zur Problematik von Arbeiterkultur und kulturellen Arbeiterorganisationen in Deutschland nach dem 1. Weltkrieg,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 22 (1982): 375. Peter Lösche and Franz Walter, “Zur Organisationskultur der sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik: Niedergang der Klassenkultur oder solidargemeinschaftlicher Höhepunkt?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 15/4 (January 1989): 511–36; Wilhelm Leo Guttsman, Workers’ Culture in Weimar Germany: Between Tradition and Commitment (New York: Berg, 1990). Wilhelm Leo Guttsman, “Arbeiterkultur in der Spannung von Systembejahung und Klassenkampf,” in Studien zur Arbeiterkultur: Beiträge der 2. Arbeitstagung der Kommission ‘Arbeiterkultur’ in der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde in Hamburg vom 8. bis 12. Mai 1983, ed. Albrecht Lehmann (Münster: Coppenrath, 1984), 17. Hartmann Wunderer, Arbeitervereine und Arbeiterparteien: Kultur- und Massenorganisationen in der Arbeiterbewegung, 1890–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1980).

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(weltliche) schools.34 His successful political career (from 1920 to 1933 he sat in the Reichstag) ran alongside his secularist activities. Both merged in his leadership of educational reform and the socialist children’s movements (Kinderfreunde). Löwenstein was a frequent contributor to party publications, such as Marxistische Tribüne and Sozialistische Jugend (edited by G. E. Graf), educational reform publications, such as Die Neue Erziehung (founded by Baege), as well secularist journals, such as Der Atheist and Monistische Monatshefte. Another wide-ranging monist was the biologist Julius Schaxel, a loyal student of Ernst Haeckel, who found his way to the socialist movement during the war. Following a socialist victory in Thuringian state elections, Schaxel was appointed to a key position in university reform in February 1923, earning him the animus of many nationalist professors. With the fall of the government a year later, he was forced from office. As his political and reform activities led to increasing alienation from the university environment, Schaxel threw himself into socialist education. He launched Urania as a socialist competitor to Kosmos, Germany’s most famous popular science journal. Between 1924 and its forced closure in 1933, Urania booklets were regularly printed in runs of 25,000 copies.35 Historian Nick Hopwood called his contributors “leading cultural producers”; in fact, they were to a great extent monists, including Paul Kammerer, Heinrich Schmidt, Max Hermann Baege, Theodor Hartwig, Georg Engelbert Graf, Max Hodann and Anna Siemsen. Like Schaxel, the socialist culture movement gave them a practical arena in which they could undertake large-scale experiments to fuse monist worldview with new forms of community, experiments that had remained largely confined to the drawing board of their imagination prior to 1918. Culture and Revolution: Neo-Kantianism Versus monism To implement their grand visions of cultural transformation within the socialist milieu, the monists required a fundamental rethinking of the place ascribed to culture and consciousness in Marxist revolutionary theory. As we saw in Chapter 5, some prewar secularists, such as Wilhelm Ostwald, had been eager for monism to replace Marxism. After the war and the failed Hungarian revolution, Karl Polanyi, once a glowing admirer of Ostwald’s monism and leading Budapest freethinker, declared that Marxism had lost any connection 34 35

See the biographical sketch in the introduction to Kurt Löwenstein, Sozialismus und Erziehung: Eine Auswahl aus den Schriften 1919–1933 (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1976). Nick Hopwood, “Producing a Socialist Popular Science in the Weimar Republic,” History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996): 121; Dieter Fricke, Julius Schaxel (1887–1943): Leben und Kampf eines marxistischen deutschen Naturwissenschaftlers und Hochschullehrers (Jena: Urania-Verlag, 1964).

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to reality. The revolutionary parties were using “dead Marx,” like the cadaver of a sultan strapped to his horse to keep up the spirits of his warriors during battle.36 Such arguments had already cropped up in the revisionism controversy in the prewar SPD. Privately, many leading socialists had come to doubt the predictive value of Marxism, but stuck with the dogmatic truths of Marx as interpreted by Karl Kautsky, because they provided a glue to keep the party together. War and revolution burst this consensus and ushered in a crisis of Kautskianism and economic determinism. Communists followed Vladimir Lenin’s lead and subjected Kautsky to a withering critique for the passivity implicit in his strategy of “revolutionary waiting.” For the Majority socialists, revisionism had been proven correct, and democracy had established the foundation for a peaceful transition to a more egalitarian society. At both extremes and in between, room was opened for new theories about how education and culture could develop the revolutionary will needed for the transition to socialism.37 Two philosophical schools were prominent in Weimar Kultursozialismus: neo-Kantianism and monism. Rather than repudiating Marx and Kautsky outright, as Polanyi had done, each of these schools sought to position itself as the inheritor to Karl Kautsky and from there to make its revisions of Kautskianism, such as occurred in two Festschriften that appeared on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1924. In a special issue of the party journal Die Gesellschaft, the party’s foremost neo-Kantian Karl Vorländer recalled that Kautsky had written that Marxism would become an “empty conceptual exercise” if it were forgotten that “the human will” was the root of economic activity and that intellectuals, in particular, could only be won to the movement through idealism and an emphasis on “the end goal” (Endziel).38 Vorländer himself espoused the view that socialist transformation had no economic necessity, but lay in an ethical choice that could be cultivated through education. In a programmatic text written to set the party’s course for the Görlitz program of 1921, Vorländer argued socialism should no longer be viewed as a historical mission of the proletariat, endowed by the unfolding of the world spirit, but was the “community of free-willing people”

36

37 38

In his function as secretary of the Central Association of Hungarian Freethinkers, Karl Polányi informed Wilhelm Ostwald on May 19, 1913 that their newspaper, Szabad Gondolat (Free Thought) “strove to extend the monist worldview and, in particular, the ethical world picture that this entails.” BBAW, Ostwald papers, no. 4119. On Polányi’s monism, see Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 46–47. Gary P. Steenson, Karl Kautsky 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978). Karl Vorländer, “Kautsky als Philosoph,” in Karl Kautsky: Dem wahrer und mehrer der Marx’schen Lehre, zum 70ten Geburtstage, ed. Rudolf Hilferding (Frankfurt am Main: Sauer & Auvermann, 1968), 24.

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(Gemeinschaft frei wollender Menschen).39 The jurist Gustav Radbruch, another leading MSPD intellectual and neo-Kantian, predicted that the cultivation of ethical idealism through socialist education would be a “coming religious wave.” “It will be,” he envisioned, “a religion of the here and now [Diesseitsreligion], not a religion that looks at the earth as an antechamber of the beyond [Jenseits].”40 Although his praise for the Diesseitsreligion was vaguely secularist, Radbruch polemicized in the same speech against the dogma of the “priests of atheism” and he would later apply the same ethical idealism to support the religious socialists and claim that socialism was, in essence, a “rethinking of the Christian ethics of love.”41 Neo-Kantianism also had radical variations that appealed to left-wing socialists. The charismatic philosopher Leonard Nelson attracted a cohort of fervent university students in Göttingen and launched the International Youth League (IJB). After the war, he proposed that the League pursue a path of “revolutionary revisionism” and led it into close association with the USPD. Organized in tightly disciplined local cells, the League required personal ethical development through life reform practices (vegetarianism and abstinence) and mandatory church exit. Increasingly Nelson’s group entered into cooperation with the Proletarian Freethinkers, and its anticlerical agitation led to the group’s expulsion from the SPD in 1925. In 1926, the group was refounded as the International Socialist Fighting League (ISK).42 The compatibility of neoKantian idealism with positivistic monism and anticlericalism was also evidenced in the work and reception of Max Adler, a leading theoretician of Austrian Social Democracy, who inspired German Kultursozialisten. Adler was a product of the unique intellectual culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna, in which the monist philosophy of Ernst Mach played a central role. By giving monism a deeper level of epistemological reflection, Mach helped Adler’s generation envisage a unity of science, in which socialist theory and naturalism could find their place.43 In his Festschrift article on “Sociology in Marxism,” Adler recast Marxism as a science with its own domain of explanation. “For us,” he wrote, “Marxism is thus identical with sociology, and is named for its foundational nineteenth-century thinker, just as one names nineteenth-century 39

40 41 42 43

Karl Vorländer, “Zu den philosophischen Grundlagen unseres Parteiprogramms,” in Das Programm der Sozialdemokratie: Vorschläge für seine Erneuerung (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1920), 10–17 (citations at 13, 15–16). Gustav Radbruch, Die weltliche Gemeinschaftsschule: Verhandlungen des ersten Sozialdemokratischen Kulturtages in Dresden (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1921), 21, 11. Quoted in: “Toleranz und Klassenkampf,” Der Freidenker, 4/1 (January 1, 1928). Sabine Lemke-Müller, Ethischer Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie: Der politische Weg Willi Eichlers vom ISK zur SPD (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1988), 34–35. Inspired by Mach, the Viennese circle of logical positivists made the unity of science one of its main concerns. See Paul Ziche, “Monist Philosophy of Science: Between Worldview and Scientific Meta-Reflection,” in monism, ed. Weir, 159–77.

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physics Newtonianism or the theory of the development of animal species Darwinism.”44 Adler also contributed to the second Festschrift dedicated to Kautsky in 1924, Living Marxism, which was edited by Otto Jenssen and whose other authors were largely socialist monists. Their articles provide a snapshot of the monist attempt to rethink culture in revolutionary theory. They set out from a common diagnosis of the failure of the German working class to take power once the moment of system crisis predicted by Marx and Kautsky had finally arrived in autumn 1918. The problem was not lack of organization or discipline, given that Germany had large, well-organized socialist parties. Rather the revolution failed because the working class lacked revolutionary will and consciousness. In her essay on the “Psychological Preconditions of Socialism,” school reformer Anna Siemsen wrote that it was “largely the immaturity of the proletariat” that was to blame for “our continuing political defeats.”45 The answer, according to Max Hodann, was the cultivation of “the proletarian ideology,” which he described not as class consciousness based in Marxism but as the “inner constitution of our class comrades.” Although eliminating class society depended on seizing political power, whether this victory could be sustained depended on the timely implementation of “logical cultural policy” to educate the masses. Jenssen, in his contribution, painted a paradoxical picture of the state of play in 1924. On the one hand, he saw the period as characterized by the “extraordinary extension of the field of battle” in which the reaction had the upper hand, yet, on the other, he believed that the period was witnessing “the construction of a socialist culture, the foundations of which we are attempting to lay today.”46 In short, these monists shared with Vorländer and Adler the conviction that consciousness was one of the most pressing political concerns of the day. From this proceeded demands for a new arm of the socialist movement dedicated to consciousness and culture. In 1920, Kurt Löwenstein argued that alongside the existing national “Economic Council” overseeing the hoped-for socialization of the economy, Germany needed a “Culture Council” (Kulturrat) that would centralize all cultural efforts.47 Four years later, after it was clear that the revolution had failed, Löwenstein argued more dialectically that the new culture was being born within the old, that “the capitalist economic chaos and bourgeois society are so far advanced in their decomposition that one can 44 45

46 47

Karl Kautsky: dem wahrer und mehrer der Marx’schen Lehre, zum 70ten Geburtstage, 9. Anna Siemsen, “Psychologische Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus,” in Der lebendige Marxismus: Festgabe zum 70. Geburtstage von Karl Kautsky, ed. Otto Jenssen (Jena: Thüringer Verlagsanstalt, 1924), 383. Max Hodann, “Erziehungsarbeit und Klassenkampf,” and Otto Jenssen, “Zur vierten Phase des Marxismus,” in Der lebendige Marxismus, ed. Jenssen, 402, 404, 6. Kurt Kerlow-Löwenstein, “Der Kulturrat,” Der Atheist, 9 (September 1920).

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recognize the great tendencies under which the evolution of the new society is taking place.”48 The role of culture and education was to give the workers the subjective abilities to fulfill their objective mission: “In this way the struggle for socialism is not just a question of social existence, but of social consciousness. Thus, the economic and political task extends to an educational task. Heads must be revolutionized, so that they can become the pioneers of the coming generation out of knowledge and conviction.” Monists believed that this revolutionizing of heads meant not just education in the correct worldview, but also education within new social forms of integrated communities. Monism as “Extended Marxism”: Paul and Maria Krische Having sketched out the space that monists created for a new understanding of consciousness within Marxist revolutionary theory, we need to examine how they filled it. For this, we draw on the work of Paul and Maria Krische, who, although they were not the most influential monists in the socialist movement, best exemplify the effort to fuse monism and Marxism on a theoretical level through their writing and on a practical level through their life reform experiments. Married in 1904, chemist Paul and schoolteacher Maria styled their relationship as a democratic community of equals. Paul edited the Monist League’s youth supplement The Sun and founded Asgard, a “cultural union for social-ethical work and spiritual progress.” This intentional community peaked in 1913 with 169 members, of whom 110 lived in Berlin. Fitting its goal of the “radical equality of man and woman,” Asgard showed a nearly even balance of the sexes. It attracted young urbanites of limited educational qualification from the professions of the “old” (handworkers, merchants) and “new” (technical assistants, shop assistants, telephone operators) middle and lower-middle classes. Fitting his commitment to secularism and eugenics, Krische maintained statistical information on both the members’ religion (107 Protestants, 46 dissidents, 9 Jews and 7 Catholics) and race (155 “Germanic,” 12 “Semites” and 2 “Slavs”).49 In an eponymous publication of 1918 he advocated “young marriage” (Jugendehe) to counteract the shrinking birth rate that was alarming eugenically minded freethinkers at war’s end. In 1917 Krische published Heimat! (Home) a book aimed at deepening the geographical rooting of the German people in a “community [Gemeinschaft] of land and person.” Despite such völkisch tones, Paul’s involvement in

48 49

Kurt Löwenstein, Das Kind als Träger der werdenden Gesellschaft (Vienna: Jungbrunnen, 1924), 5. “Asgard: Kulturbund für sozialethische Arbeit und geistigen Fortschritt,” Dritter Bericht 1913, 1914, 1915 des Verbandes Groß-Berlin (n.d.).

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eugenics and race theory was entirely typical of his generation of left-wing monist intellectuals.50 Paul became a board member of the DMB Berlin chapter in 1916, and the Krisches became active in the Free Religious Congregation. The day after the war ended, on November 12, 1918, Paul Krische transformed Asgard into the Association for Cultural Politics (Bund für Kulturpolitik), which hosted lectures by leading USPD politicians and left liberals, including Eduard Bernstein, Heinrich Ströbel and Helene Stöcker. After joining the USPD in December 1918 or January 1919, Paul and Maria Krische entered the party’s Central Education Commission and published extensively in USPD journals.51 At the same time, they ramped up their work in the burgeoning socialist Freethought movement. The Krisches used these positions to propagate their vision of how monism and life reform could be integrated into Marxism. We can enter this effort via Maria Krische’s reflection on the ethical instruction or, as she called it, “science of community” (Gemeinschaftskunde) that she had been providing to Free Religious children in Berlin, and had by 1921 expanded to include 17 Berlin schools, each with an average of 150 pupils. Against proposals made by “bourgeois” monists for a single lesson plan for all secularist organizations, Krische declared that the transformation of economic relations was the necessary precondition for the ethical project of creating “the collective person” (Gemeinschaftsmensch). Yet rather than abandon monist ideals, Krische placed them on the back of political revolution and economic socialization. In fact, her lesson plan revealed an essential continuity with her prewar monism. It was built upon an evolutionary ladder leading from natural science to anthropology, from Naturvölker to Kulturvölker, from “forms of work” to “forms of community.” All of these tendencies merged at the future endpoint of development: “the socialist age: religion without God, pure experience of community [Gemeinschaftserlebnis].”52 As we saw in Chapter 4, some prewar socialist education experts had proposed a division of responsibilities between natural-scientific and historical materialism, whereby Darwin explained biological and Marx social evolution. For monists of the Weimar Republic this division could not stand, because it 50

51 52

Paul Krische, Excelsior: Kurzer, gemeinverständlicher Abriss über eine neue Religion und Lebensphilosophie, in bescheidenen Formen geschrieben für jedermann (Leipzig: LotusVerlag, 1904). See also, Paul Krische, Von der Reinheit des Mannes: Bekenntnisse eines Vaters für seinen Sohn (Jena: Diederichs, 1910); Paul Krische, Heimat! Grundsätzliches zur Gemeinschaft von Scholle und Mensch (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1918); Paul Krische, Jugendehe! Eine Forderung für unsere Zukunft (Berlin: Otto Wigand, 1918). Between 1919 and 1922 the Krisches published articles in Freiheit, Sozialistischer Erzieher, Der Sozialist and Der Arbeiter-Rat. BArch, Konvolut Krische. Maria Krische, “Zwei Jahre Unterricht in Gemeinschaftskunde für Dissidentenkinder,” Der Atheist, 17/5 (1921).

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limited their ambitions in the realm of culture. Paul Krische began to make a case for the fusion of historical and scientific materialism in a series of articles in the USPD journal Der Sozialist that were subsequently published as a book by the Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers (ZpF) in 1921 under the title Socialism and Religion. Although he claimed to be building a theory of religion “on the ground of Marxism,” it was, in fact, a revision of Marx on the ground of monism. Touting advances “in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, mental science (psychology), life science (biology),” Krische claimed that “we today understand the essence of religion more clearly than Ludwig Feuerbach and those influenced by him (Marx, Bebel) were able to 70 years ago.”53 Against the old, or “orthodox” Marxist position, Krische argued for an “expanded” Marxism that saw “the primary and determinate [factor] not in the means of production, but rather in that which first generates the production, in the structures [Anlagen] of a person, in his drives.” In other words, the more fundamental ground of “expanded” Marxism was not economics, but biology. Importantly, this required a rethinking of the politics of religion, because religion was not epiphenomenal, but rather a historically formed response to a basic psycho-biological drive.54 In a review of new theoretical books by Russian communists in 1926, Krische attacked rising party leader Joseph Stalin and theorist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky for neglecting psychological science and subordinating questions of ethics and sex to the needs of the state. Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, he argued, had proven that the sexual drives were fundamental to human motivation. By ignoring this, Soviet experiments at social engineering were courting disaster.55 Although Krische sought to fuse Marx and Freud (the title of another of his books), his was a willfully one-sided reading of these authors, which removed the dialectical aspects of their thought. Instead, he sought to incorporate aspects of their theories into the evolutionary sociology of Franz MüllerLyer, who had been the president of the Monist League from 1915 until his accidental death in 1916. Müller-Lyer is largely forgotten today, but his work on the “phases of culture” was enormously influential among Weimar-era monists. It proposed to unite all branches of science and hence all of human existence into a single evolutionary continuum, thereby extending the reach of 53

54 55

Paul Krische, Sozialismus und Religion: Eine soziologische und psychologische Studie für Freidenker und Sozialisten (Dresden: Zentralverband der proletarischen Freidenker Deutschlands, 1921), 2. Ibid., 4. Krische, like radical freethinker Otto Rühle, preferred Alfred Adler over Freud. With Alfred Adler, secularists could argue that religion was the result of psychological repression and that the revolution had failed due to psychological affinity of the German and Austrian workers for authoritarian regimes. Horst Groschopp, “Weltwende zu einer neuen Kultur: Beiheft zum fotomechanischen Nachdruck von Otto Rühles ‘Illustrierter Kultur- und Sittengeschichte des Proletariats’” (unpublished, 1991).

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Haeckel’s evolutionary theory into the realm of consciousness and culture, and laying a path for future stages of social progress. “Like no other creature,” Müller-Lyer wrote, in his mental [geistiger] aspect, man is a soft fungible wax in the hands of the milieu . . . and above all he is a product of his stage of culture. And this mutability and malleability is the necessary precondition for his nearly limitless capacity for adaptation, which renders him suitable for nearly every perfection [Vervollkommung], but also for the most hideous forms of degeneration.56

Weimar-era monists took Müller-Lyer’s phases of culture and grafted onto them the Marxian stages of economic organization. Paul Krische replaced economic determinism with a biological determinism, rooted in psychological and sexual drives. Müller-Lyer also provided monist socialists with a blueprint for the future. The aim of the stages of culture was to reach the point where humanity, as the crown of nature, would achieve self-consciousness. Whereas Feuerbach had argued seventy-five years earlier that religion and philosophy would be the site of the emergence of “species consciousness,” Müller-Lyer had claimed that “with the rise of sociology” a new hour has struck on the great clock of the world. It announces the emergence of man out of the twilight of instinctive life into the clear daylight of consciousness, the awakening of the slumbering giant now conscious of his aim, to the purposeful struggle to labor. . . . As humanity by means of natural science has been able to have dominion over nature, so will it learn by means of the science of culture to control the strange creation of culture which it has blindly brought into being, and become lord over it for its own purpose.57

Krische took this vision and called the conscious self-organization of culture in science simply “socialism.” Following Müller-Lyer, left-wing monists of the Weimar era believed that given the mutability of human culture in response to its environment, once humans gained control over their own environment, they could render war obsolete. Like Krische, Carl von Ossietsky interpreted the wartime struggle between pacifists and nationalists in the Monist League as a reflection of the contest between Müller-Lyer’s sociology and Haeckel’s biology. Whereas the followers of Haeckel saw the war as a Darwinian “struggle for existence,” Ossietsky claimed that “precisely because we are convinced of the phase theory, war appears to us as something completely anachronistic.”58 56 57 58

Franz Carl Müller-Lyer, Der Sinn des Lebens und die Wissenschaft: Grundlinien einer Volksphilosophie (Munich: Lehmann, 1910). Franz Carl Müller-Lyer, The History of Social Development (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1920), 354–55. Ossietzky, “Weltfrieden.” Monistische Monatshefte, 6/2 (Feb. 1, 1921): 83–85.

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More importantly, the followers of Müller-Lyer generally believed that violent class struggle would also become obsolete. In an essay from 1927 on changes in worker consciousness in the transition from the age of coal to the age of electricity, Krische argued: “The more differentiated and complicated technology becomes in an age of electricity, the more positive [development] can only be achieved through continually increased forms of collective labor by qualified people . . . who no longer fully reject the apparatus of production in which they stand, but rather view it as a structure, in [which] they must themselves become active.”59 Krische’s viewpoint was not outside the party mainstream. Rudolf Hilferding suggested in his 1927 keynote speech to the Kiel Party Congress that there could be a smooth transition between highly developed capitalist modes of production and the socialist planned economy in the context of a democratic republic.60 In summation, Müller-Lyer delivered the vision for a “science of culture” that could transform unconscious society and its agonistic contradictions into a self-conscious and harmonious community made up of biologically, psychologically and intellectually self-fashioning individuals. The task of the socialist culture organizations was, according to Paul Krische, to translate these insights into practice by helping workers educate themselves in pioneer communities. Religion was central to this effort. In a speech at the National Working Group of Secularist Organizations (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft freigeistiger Verbände RAG) in 1924, he laid out his plan for a “science of community” (Gemeinschaftskunde) and described the history of religion as the history of humanity’s unconscious striving for Gemeinschaft. Having now achieved “scientific insight into the wonderful action of the universe,” humanity could begin the process of transforming society from a “loose living aside one another” to Gemeinschaft or a “society of solidarity.” The creation of this “all-encompassing formation of a new humanity” required the transformation of the individuals comprising it, but not simply by installing a new economic system, which Krische called the view of “dogmatic Marxism.” Rather the aim was the “transformation of the disposition of people’s deepest natural drives.”61 To overcome the pathological development of the drives under capitalism, which had produced egotistical individualism on the one hand and church-fostered obedience to authority on the other, socialist culture organizations would create communities joined in mutual aid. These communities would reinforce the individual’s monistic experience of “connection 59 60

61

Paul Krische, “Die Umschichtung des Proletariats im elektrischen Zeitalter,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 71(126)/6 (1927): 828. Günter Könke, Organisierter Kapitalismus, Sozialdemokratie und Staat: Eine Studie zur Ideologie der sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik (1924– 1932) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987), 60. Paul Krische, “Gemeinschaftskultur,” Der Atheist, Sept. 1924.

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with one’s fellow man and with the entire limitless world, in which he vibrates as a tiny grain.” Driven by the desire for salvation born of doubts about life, he is thrilled by the delight of participating in the complete life of all, he is seized to his innermost feeling by that glorious word of the American poet Whitman – ‘Camerado!’ As a comrade belonging to all things in existence, he sings his hymn to life, and in the intoxication of the great joy of being he lays aside all heroic postures, glory and desire for domination, finally content that he is a true comrade.62

Because the transition from unconscious class society to the conscious “society of solidarity” depended on the transition from religious myth to scientific secularism, Krische argued that Gemeinschaftskunde should lay aside the word “religion” and, in fact, fight contemporary religions: “we must destroy the feeling of dependence in us root and branch.” He had already pushed hard to insert secularism and anticlericalism into the program of the USPD. In 1921, Krische proposed that the party reject the traditional policy of that “religion is a private matter” and demand instead the “liberation of religious forces and ethical action from unscientific thinking, dependency and the illusory bourgeois ideology of the past religious confessions.”63 The USPD leadership, however, grew increasingly deaf to such calls for religious revolution, and Paul Krische was even rebuked by fellow monist Kurt Löwenstein, who rejected him for a teaching post of the Volkshochschule of Greater Berlin. Although Löwenstein himself wrote of “phases of culture,” he found that Krische hewed too closely to Müller-Lyer and had thereby left the foundation of historical materialism.64 The cold shoulder that Krische received from the party leadership likely strengthened his resolve to develop his Gemeinschaftskunde in the Proletarian Freethought movement, where he and his fellow monists were very successful. A sign of their intellectual hegemony over the freethinkers was the decision to rename Germany’s largest Freethought association from Central Office (Zentralstelle) of Proletarian Freethinkers (ZpF) to Community (Gemeinschaft) of Proletarian Freethinkers (GpF) in 1922. Krische helped draft a new organizational program and developed a close working relationship with Arthur Wolf, who had replaced Konrad Beisswanger as publisher of Der Atheist, the leading secularist newspaper in Germany. In 1922 he opened a Freethinkers’ Volkshochschule in Berlin, which during its winter semester 1924/25 offered a thirty-two-evening course of general secularist education.65 62 64 65

63 Ibid. Krische, Sozialismus und Religion, 5. Löwenstein to Maria Krische, March 13, 1921; letter to the Central Committee of the USPD regarding Krische, May 26, 1921, AdsD, Löwenstein papers. Instructors included dissident communists Otto Rühle and Hermann Duncker. Der Atheist, 20/7 (July 1924): 89–90.

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In April 1924 Krische called for the formation of a new movement of experimental “socialist life communities” (sozialistische Lebensgemeinschaften or SOL) to forge proletarian life forms and a new culture. These communes were to include not more than five to six families so that the individual would not drown “in the mass.” Members were to donate 10 percent of their income to the community. The essential content of their cultural work was life reform, including “body culture (nudism and gymnastics), practical, natural diet (vegetarianism, liberation from all intoxicants), formation of a healthy natural sex life.” Krische noted: “One will recognize the new men also on apparently external aspects (clothing and housing design),” and recommended functional wooden construction (Flachbau) for communal living quarters with small vegetable gardens “in order to satisfy the raw foods afficionados.”66 Given the silence around the SOL movement in the socialist and Freethought press after its first year, it is safe to assume that the movement drew few adherents.67 The Gemeinschaftskunde developed by the Krisches is a useful starting point for situating the projects for cultural transformation propagated by better-known monist intellectuals. All of these projects partook of the “Gemeinschaft” discourse that had been cultivated within the secularist scene since the 1880s. Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, one of the co-founders of the German Ethical Culture Society, had advanced a theory of secularization in his book Society and Community of 1887, which hinged on the transition from a premodern integrated social order (Gemeinschaft) to a modern, anonymous social order (Gesellschaft). This work is now taken as a classic of sociological theory. Usually overlooked is its claim that unchecked secularization would lead to social disintegration unless new types of ethical communities arose to supplant the waning traditional forms. The challenge, according to Tönnies, was to build a new culture of community in time to correct the inevitable turn to socialism, for once “the multitude achieved consciousness” and strode from “class consciousness to class struggle” it would “destroy society and the state, which it wants to transform.” The task was to “nurture the essence and idea of the Gemeinschaft” and secretly grow “a new culture underneath the declining one.”68 Since that time, secularists promoted life reform communities, as islands within modern society, in which the future “new culture” would be 66 67

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“Sozialistische Lebensgemeinschaften,” Kurier: Pressedienst der Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker, 1/1 (June 1924). Reporting on his commune in Remscheid, one socialist recommended that the SOL-movement not give in to the illusion that it could realize socialist community within capitalism. Instead, he proposed that communes focus on political struggle. Johannes Resch, “Sozialistische Lebensgemeinschaften,” Der Atheist, 20/7 (July 1924): 89–90. Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie (Berlin: K. Curtius, 1926), 246–47.

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prepared. Secularists imagined that these new forms of life would act as magnets and attract followers, or as they often put it, form new “organs” within the social body. Building new forms of community began with reformation of the dyad of the couple and the family. For example, when Kurt Löwenstein and Maria Kerwel, the daughter of a Prussian military civil servant he had met while lecturing at the Free Religious Congregation Hannover, signed a marriage contract based on “equal rights and obligations” in 1911, they chose the “community name” Kerlöw, which was a composite of their two family names, to be used as long as their voluntary union lasted.69 To explore how monist projects of experimental community formation entered into and influenced Weimar-era Kultursozialismus, the following section dives into four areas of activity: sexual reform, body culture, festival culture and educational reform. In each case, we focus on specific monist intellectuals who were also movement leaders. This biographical approach helps identify clear lines of influence from Wilhelmine monism to Weimar Kultursozialismus. It allows us to explore how monist theorizing was integrated into the specific discourse of each of these reform movements. Together these case studies offer a somewhat impressionistic, but nonetheless concrete point of entry into the wide and, as yet, relatively uncharted terrain of Weimar monism. They also provide new perspectives on the relationship of the workers’ culture movement to the longer history of German secularism. Monism, Socialism and Sex Reform: Magnus Hirschfeld One of the main targets of the Wilhelmine life reform movements was the human body, and many viewed its regeneration as the key to triggering a transformation of society as a whole. As a philosophy based on the integration of mind and body, monism lent itself to reformers who preached the spiritualization of the body or the incarnation of the spirit. There was a particularly strong connection between monism and sexual reformers, who viewed the sex act itself as a form of community that united two bodies and minds. In his wellknown survey of the erotic life of animals and humans, Love-Life in Nature (1898), Wilhelm Bölsche argued that through physical “love” men and women “grow physically and mentally beyond themselves” and experience spiritual community with nature, with other individuals and with “humanity as Gemeinschaft, as a higher organism.”70 The naturopathic physician Magnus Hirschfeld was a contemporary of Bölsche’s, a fellow monist who is today remembered as a pioneering 69 70

AdsD, Löwenstein papers, folder 1. Quoted in: Magnus Hirschfeld, Verstaatlichung des Gesundheitswesens (Berlin: Bund Neues Vaterland, 1919), 17, 60.

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sexologist and one of the most important activists for homosexual rights in the first half of the twentieth century. He achieved his greatest fame during the Weimar Republic, when he did most to try to bring sexual reform into the socialist culture movement. Often referred to as “Comrade Dr. Hirschfeld” in the socialist press,71 Hirschfeld declared interest in socialism in numerous ways. In 1919, he had demanded the socialization of the medical system as fulfillment of the Erfurt Program and later joined the Association of Socialist Doctors. He published in Vorwärts, and proudly announced in 1922 that he had been a subscriber for three decades. Yet his biographers have not found any proof of an actual membership in the SPD. One came to the apt conclusion that he was “an outsider in his political home, the SPD.”72 Hirschfeld’s ambivalent relationship to socialism corresponded to his social habitus as an educated professional. However, it also reflected his differences with the party over the significance of life reform, which were already clearly expressed in an article on “Natural Healing and Social Democracy” published in March 1897 by the then thirty-year-old physician: How often have we encountered at workers’ associations that, following a lecture on natural living and health methods, a Social Democrat objects that it all has no purpose as long as the economic conditions are miserable, [but that] in the state of the future all will be different. No and again no, workers should know that the source of their misery does not lie alone in the unfavorableness of the economic conditions, but also in their own weaknesses and imperfection; telling them this is the holiest obligation of every friend of the people. Not just reform of the state or society is needed, but rather also a reform of lifestyle and character. . . . Self-education is the foundation of all reform of life.”73

As an enthusiastic supporter of the new state of Weimar and its Social Democratic leadership, Hirschfeld lodged his claims on the revolution in the name of holistic health reform. His vision for a new socialist state had a strongly technocratic flair. At a public rally on February 1, 1919 entitled “On the Doorstep of the New Era” and presided over by the SPD Minister of Culture Konrad Haenisch, Hirschfeld demanded a new ministry for public health. Whereas the old regime had used police action to cut out the infections of the national body (Volkskörper), the new principles of public health, “in the

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Arnold Holitscher and Augustin Turek, “Internationales Ärztliches Bulletin,” Zentralorgan der Internationalen Vereinigung Sozialistischer Ärzte, 1/2 (February 1934); Albert Grzesinski, Im Kampf um die deutsche Republik: Erinnerungen eines Sozialdemokraten (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001). Manfred Herzer, Magnus Hirschfeld und seine Zeit (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017), 51, 340; Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 38–39. Quoted in: Manfred Herzer, Magnus Hirschfeld: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen, schwulen und sozialistischen Sexologen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992).

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spirit of socialism,” demanded that they be healed from within. He called for a cadre of physicians, natural scientists and others, “who feel themselves to be inseparably connected to the public body [Volksorganismus], as organs that are just as necessary for its maintenance as is the state,” and who lead the ministry in the “spirit of the new age, the spirit of belonging and order, i.e. not subordination as in the past.”74 Hirschfeld provided a secularist rationale for the nationalization of healthcare, stating that “it is no accident that the same socialist state that has established as a principle the separation of church and state should also strive for a closer cooperation of state and health care. Natural science has taken the place of theology, modern hygiene has replaced decrepit morality.”75 Hirschfeld failed to get his ministry of health, but the new republic did create favorable conditions for an institutionalization of his work in sexology and sex reform. In 1919 Hirschfeld purchased a building in Berlin to house his Institute for Sexual Research.76 One would be hard pressed to find a more complete summation of monism written for a popular audience than the first volume of Hirschfeld’s Sexual Science (Geschlechtskunde) of 1926. The book opens with a credo to sexuality as the linchpin of a monist understanding of the natural world: precisely in the sexual realm, nature is ruled not only by an infinite multiplicity in detail but by a very far-reaching concordance on the higher level. While this is no clear proof, it is nonetheless a remarkable indication of the unitary origin and identity of everything that lives and loves on earth. All beings are materially related to us. In all operate the same forces as in us.77

In swelling, lyrical prose, Hirschfeld described sex as the ongoing division and reunification of unitary life on multiple parallel levels. Animal desire and pairing mirrored the attraction and fusion of male and female germ cells, out of which emerged one being “that lives on with heightened energy.” Sexuality was for Hirschfeld “the spring of all life, the originary force that is continually at work in unending creation.” Sexual rhythms were woven into the patterns of life and death and the changing of the seasons, making nature, indeed the entire cosmos, appear as an expression of “pansexuality” (Allgeschlechtlichkeit).78

74 76

77 78

75 Auf der Schwelle der neuen Zeit, 40. Hirschfeld, Verstaatlichung, 17. Grossmann’s assumption that the institute was financed by the SPD-governed state of Prussia has been disputed by Sigusch. Atina Grossmann, “Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexualreform und die Neue Frau: Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft und das Weimarer Berlin,” in Der Sexualreformer Magnus Hirschfeld: Ein Leben im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft, ed. Elke-Vera Kotowski and Julius H. Schoeps (Berlin: Be.bra Wissenschaft, 2004); Volkmar Sigusch, Geschichte der Sexualwissenschaft (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008), 201. Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: Püttmann, 1924), vol. i, 3. Ibid., 3–4.

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Like Wilhelm Bölsche and Ernst Haeckel, to whom Hirschfeld had dedicated an earlier book, Hirschfeld was a master of the popular science genre, which literary critic Kurt Tucholsky disdained as “a rather nasty mixture of kitschy sentimentality, false romanticism and pseudo-science.”79 Like Marx, Hirschfeld operated with a tripartite model of historical development in which humanity moved past unconscious unity to present alienation to a future return to unity in a redeemed, conscious form. But whereas Marx saw the economic organization of society as the key, Hirschfeld focused on its sexual organization. Primitive humanity, like all animal life, had had an essentially healthy, albeit unconscious sexuality. This had been followed by the unhealthy, dualistic sexuality of the “ascetic worldview,” based on a false understanding of the relationship of mind and body. This phase was now closing with the rise of a new monist worldview based on the embrace of the “body-soul” (Körperseele) as the key to true happiness and correct science. Hirschfeld laid blame for the two-thousand-year rule of the ascetic worldview at the doorstep of Christianity. Although he believed that churches were the clearest enemy of healthy sexuality, he understood the antagonism between religion and sexuality to be part of a larger interconnected evolution, based on the “transformation and reorientation of sexual into religious drives, their reciprocal substitution, irrespective of whether the sexual extreme leads to the ascetic [extreme] or runs in the contrary direction.” The substitution was “only possible due to a certain affinity that exists between religious and sexual ecstasies.”80 The misrecognition and misuse of sexual drives, once overcome, would serve a higher purpose. Just as Hegel and Feuerbach had once argued that the invention of a personal God located in the beyond was a useful illusion because it allowed for the growth of human self-consciousness, Hirschfeld argued that the ascetic worldview developed by Buddha, Paul and Augustine had led to the overvaluation of mind against body. Once overcome, this overvaluation would revert, bringing consciousness back into the body and leading to the healing of the “body-soul.” Because Hirschfeld, like Paul Krische, believed that biological drives underpinned all mental phenomena, he could not accept the basic premises of Freudian psychology. First, Freud’s notion that human subjectivity developed though the psycho-sexual experiences of infants and young children, in which the frustration of desire at that age was a necessary step in the formation of

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Cited in Herzer, Magnus Hirschfeld, x. Karl Kraus was another sharp-tongued critic, who poked fun at Hirschfeld. When Hirschfeld blamed public rejection of nakedness on the over-alcoholized society, Kraus responded that “excessive anti-alcoholism appears to have as deleterious an effect on human brain function as alcohol.” Die Fackel, 3/76 (May 1901): 9. Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde, vol. i, 42.

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adult identity, contradicted Hirschfeld’s utopian view of human sexuality. Like his contemporary, the sexologist Wilhelm Reich, and like the New Left advocates of sexual liberation of the 1960s, Hirschfeld argued that sexual neuroses had to be overcome through a return to healthy sexuality. Second, whereas Freud explained human subjectivity out of interaction, Hirschfeld looked to biology. He accepted Freud’s proposition that “mental life is rooted in sexual life,” but insisted, in a further step, that “sexual life is rooted in glandular life.” “Psychoanalysis digs deep,” he wrote, “but not deep enough, otherwise it would not stop at childhood, but descend deeper . . . to the maternal womb . . . penetrate into the Ur-foundation of the spirit-cells and the fountainhead of the cell-soul, out of which all later [manifestations] pour like the rays and waves out of a radium molecule.”81 Third, Freud’s theory contradicted Hirschfeld’s original contribution to the monist theory of sexuality, namely the biological rather than social explanation of homosexuality. Sexuality depended on “sexual glands and their chemistry and has nearly nothing to do with psychic causes, complexes, and infant experiences.” By insisting on the biological grounding of homosexuality, Hirschfeld naturalized it and made it the centerpiece of his monistic theory of gender. “The human is not man or woman, but man and woman.”82 Just as the embryo conjoined male and female germ cells, humans were comprised of both male and female biological and sexual attributes in different combinations. Hirschfeld placed homosexuality within a series of “intermediary sexual stages” that gave it a natural and therefore legitimate place within the totality of human sexuality. Already in the prewar Monist League, Hirschfeld had pushed fellow monists to accept homosexual rights as a central plank of their movement, arguing that anyone committed to overcoming “oppositions like force and matter, God and nature, one and all, body and soul” also had to abandon the “dualism of the sexes.” For the sexes existed in an “eternally present fusion of both in one. . . already the male sperm and the female egg are male-female hermaphroditic formations, this monism of the sexes is the center of the origin and essence of personality.”83 Although Hirschfeld grounded his theory of sexuality in biology, he did not believe it was fixed. To sustain a neo-Lamarckian argument for sexual mutability, he relied on experimental evidence of the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was being produced in laboratory experiments by Richard Semon and Paul Kammerer, who like Hirschfeld were closely associated with Haeckel. Kammerer was outspoken about the progressive political valence of his neo-Lamarckism. Because the rival genetic theories of Gregor Mendel and 81 83

82 Ibid., 226, 207. Ibid., 203, 5. Quoted in a review of Hirschfeld’s book on transvestism in: Diskussion: Kultur-Parlament, 2 (1910): 83.

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August Weissmann saw inheritance as unchanging, Kammerer called them “reactionary” positions that favored racism and class prejudice. The theory of environmental adaptation, by contrast, meant “that we are not exclusively slaves of the past – slaves helplessly endeavoring to free ourselves of our shackles – but rather captains of our future, who in the course of time will be able to rid ourselves, to a certain extent, of our heavy burdens and ascend into higher and ever higher strata of development.”84 Hirschfeld was a strong supporter of eugenics as the “art of raising people,” noting that “if science had concerned itself as much with human breeding as with animal and plant breeding, humanity would be in a better place.”85 Like most left-wing monists, he took an environmental approach towards eugenics, which focused on the protection of the genetic material from harmful environmental influences rather than on selection. As Kammerer wrote in 1913, “the possibility of perfecting the entire race through the improvement of life conditions and education places serious obligations on city government: high investment in schools, adult education, research, improvement of working and living conditions, lowering the price of foodstuffs, rejection of sources of revenue that come from poisonous luxury goods.”86 Opposition to the latter was crucial to Hirschfeld, who since the 1890s had promoted abstinence based on the belief that alcohol damaged the germ cells and that the damages to the protoplasm could be passed on to the offspring. This meant that epileptics born of alcoholic parents would be more likely to bear epileptics, leading in this way to what Swiss monist and sexologist August Forel called the “alcoholic degeneration of the race.”87 In the first volume of Geschlechtskunde, Hirschfeld relied on the recent theories of Kammerer and Eugen Steinach, who argued that human development, sexuality and longevity were steered by the hormonal glands. Steinach claimed that an operation (vasoligature) could rejuvenate animals and the transplantation of testicles could switch their sexual orientation. Kammerer took this claim further and argued that vasoligature might rejuvenate humanity and help usher in the socialist New Man.88 He propagated this view in the Austrian Social Democratic Party and found support among Soviet scientists, who offered him a chair at a research institute in Russia. Yet despite its

84 85 86 87 88

Paul Kammerer, The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924), 31. Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde, vol. i, 149. Paul Kammerer, Sind wir Sklaven der Vergangenheit oder Werkmeister der Zukunft? (Leipzig: Anzengruber-Verlag, 1921), 25. Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde, vol. i, 151. Florian Mildenberger, “Magnus Hirschfeld und der Monismus: Wechselseitige Befruchtung oder Austausch von Irrtümer?,” Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen, 26 (2007): 97.

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popularity amongst socialists and secularists,89 neo-Lamarckism was far from accepted wisdom among contemporary biologists. In 1926, a leading US scientist accused Kammerer of falsifying his research by injecting ink into amphibians, in order to prove that skin adaptations caused by environmental changes were being passed on to offspring. Shortly thereafter, the Austrian biologist committed suicide.90 Kammerer’s death and mounting challenges to Steinach’s theories robbed Hirschfeld of his evidentiary support for neoLamarckism. He retreated towards the Weismannian paradigm, and in 1927 he claimed that intersexuality was caused by a gene and not influenced by environmental conditions.91 Hirschfeld always combined his theoretical work on sexuality with advocacy of applied monism, in the form of hygienic body practices. He advocated physical exercise and a vitamin-rich diet, praised the beneficial effects of sunlight and fresh air, and promoted nudism and “above all hiking” in nature. He opposed the use of “nerve poisons” (alcohol, narcotics) to create artificial equivalents for “the natural ecstasy [Rausch]” of sex. Yet, he recognized that sexual pleasure remained a complicated contemporary problem and devoted much attention to the “sexual crisis” (Sexualnot) affecting young people in Germany. He opposed both wild sexuality and masturbation as solutions. A similar totalizing approach to sex was promulgated by Helene Stöcker, the other great sex reform pioneer of Wilhelmine monism who enjoyed wide reception in Weimar Kultursozialismus. She promoted a “New Ethics” of sexuality that reconciled the “highest eroticism with deepest altruism,” and promised to usher in improvements in women’s rights, motherhood and family life, to further develop the race, and even to pacify international relations.92 Hirschfeld lectured and showed his informational films in socialist associations, whose members were drawn to his combination of emancipatory life reform, popular science and the racy topic of sexuality.93 Hirschfeld found particularly strong support in secularist associations across the political spectrum. In Berlin, he lectured frequently to the Association for Freethought and Cremation (VfFF) and at the Freethinkers’Volkshochschule. The mutual attraction between Hirschfeld and the radical freethinkers lay in the perceived 89

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One example for support of neo-Lamarckism: Hugo Efferoth, Die Ketzerbibel: Waffensammlung für den kämpfenden Freidenker gegen Aberglauben und Volksverdummung (Berlin: Der Freidenker, 1926). Ohad Parnes, “Paul Kammerer und die moderne Genetik: Erwerbung und Vererbung verfälschter Eigenschaften,” in Fälschungen: Zu Autorschaft und Beweis in Wissenschaften und Künsten, ed. Anne-Kathrin Reulecke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 216–43; Sander Gliboff, “Monism and Morphology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in monism, ed. Weir. 92 Mildenberger, “Hirschfeld,” 99. Omran, Frauenbewegung, 389–90. Hirschfeld’s lecture series “Sexual problems” topped the bill of the meeting of the national secularist organization RAG in Berlin 1925.

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connection between anticlericalism and sex reform. A Freethought newspaper reported in 1927 on Hirschfeld’s recent speeches, in which he blasted the church, “which at all times has seized control of the regulation of sexual life, indeed which has made a business out of the guilty consciences of its faithful.”94 The Institute for Sexual Research sheltered and gave employment to a number of younger sexual reformers, who went further than Hirschfeld and attempted to fuse monistic sex reform with Marxism. The expressionist author Bruno Vogel provides one such example. Upon his return from the trenches of the First World War, Vogel entered into conflict with his parents over his homosexuality and left the church. In 1922, he formed a homosexual organization in Leipzig called Community “We” (Gemeinschaft Wir), which, according to an ad placed in gay newsletters, welcomed “earnest introverts as well as gentlemen with an objective interest in the introverts’ movement,” thereby echoing Hirschfeld’s combination of activism and science.95 Vogel published a hard-hitting attack on German militarism Long Live War! (Es Lebe der Krieg!), a book that was serialized in 1925 in Proletarischen Heimstunden by editor Arthur Wolf. The book caused a scandal because of its obscenity and its repeated attacks on the Christian churches, and both Vogel and Wolf were tried for blasphemy. Vogel later found refuge within the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Vogel joined the SPD in 1926 but, as a committed pacifist, quit two years later, when the party backed a spending bill that included new battleship construction.96 Another socialist sex reformer with closer ties to monism was physician Max Hodann, who from 1926 to 1929 headed up the sexual counseling and the “eugenic department for mother and child” of the Institute for Sexual Research. Together with his wife Maria (later called Mary Saran), Max Hodann was the Berlin leader of Leonard Nelson’s ISK.97 Hodann actively combined sexual reform, socialism and secularism in a wide-ranging program of public agitation. He gave sexual advice in a monist youth journal, for example about female orgasm, and argued against the confessional organization of public welfare in a socialist conference.98

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Der Pfaffenspiegel: Wochenzeitung gegen den sozialreaktionären Klerikalismus, Oct. 30, 1927, 7. Raimund Wolfert, Nirgendwo daheim das bewegte Leben des Bruno Vogel (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, 2012), 23–24. On Vogel, see ibid.; Wolfgang Schütte, Arthur Wolf und die Wölfe (Leipzig: Passagen-Verlag, 1988); Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller and Nicolai Clarus (eds.), Mann für Mann: Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte von Freundesliebe und männlicher Sexualität im deutschen Sprachraum, vol. i (Münster: LIT, 2010). Lemke-Müller, Ethischer Sozialismus. Max Hodann, “Nicht Sprechen Können. . .,” Moju: Freigeistige Zeitschrift der MonistischenJugend, 7/1 (January 1927): 7–9. Max Hodann, Martha Arendsee, and Hanneh Luther, Lasset

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Maria Krische was another monist sex reformer. Together with Hirschfeld, she co-edited the popular-scientific sex reform journal The Enlightenment (Die Aufklärung), which fell victim to obscenity laws shortly after its launch in 1928.99 Maria Krische’s work shows the close connection between sexual reform, biology and the struggle for female emancipation. Nature, she argued, had burdened women with the main tasks of reproductive labor, producing a position of dependence. Women naturally clung to the churches as the only social instance that upheld the ethics of familial responsibility. To break free of clerical domination, women had to be given greater control of reproduction through free access to birth control and abortion and greater economic independence through a state-provided pension for mothers. Women’s liberation would challenge received ideas about the nature and the gender of the divine, because in an era of equality “there is no room for a deity that only represents the male principle.”100 The Krisches believed that society had gone through a matriarchal phase akin to primitive communism, which had been overthrown through patriarchal domination and capitalism.101 The religion of the future would not return to that phase, nor would it “bring back a polytheistic conception of God.” Maria Krische concluded that “the future will thus lead to a godless conception, in which the religious feeling will express itself as community consciousness [Gemeinschaftsbewußtsein] and, as such, religion in its traditional sense will become superfluous.”102 Nudism, Gymnastics and Socialism: Adolf Koch A photo taken at Motzen Lake outside of Berlin shows five naked adults, including Magnus Hirschfeld and Paul and Maria Krische (Figure 8.1). It appeared in a journal edited by Adolf Koch, the foremost popularizer in the socialist milieu of a movement of physical exercise and nudism known in German as “free body culture” (Freikörperkultur or FKK).103 This section takes up Koch’s activities to explore the intellectual contribution of monism to this movement.

99 100 101 102 103

die Panzerkreuzer zu mir kommen, den Kindern ist das Himmelreich!! (Düsseldorf: Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe Bezirk Niederrhein, 1928). Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 120. Maria Krische, “Die Frau in der freigeistigen Bewegung,” Der Freidenker, 1/4 (May 1, 1925). Paul Krische, Das Rätsel der Mutterrechtsgesellschaft: Eine Studie über die Frühepoche der Leistung und Geltung des Weibes (Munich: Georg Müller, 1926). Maria Krische, “Die Frau in der freigeistigen Bewegung.” On FKK, see Wedemeyer, “Zum Licht”; See also John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford University Press, 2007), 23–62.

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Figure 8.1 Seated figures, left to right: Magnus Hirschfeld, Maria Krische, Paul Krische, Motzen Lake. (Source: Bilderbuch der Körperkulturschule Adolf Koch, Leipzig: Oldenbourg, 1933)

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Born in 1897 and thus three decades younger than Hirschfeld, Koch had entered a training program to become a primary school teacher soon after his confirmation in the Protestant Church in 1911. To escape the confines of this church-run teachers’ college, he signed on with the military at the outbreak of the war and served until 1918 as a combat medic. Upon returning to Berlin in 1919, he joined the SPD and matriculated in the Berlin University, where he heard lectures on social and sexual hygiene, and encountered Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Science. During his education, Koch developed a monistic understanding of human psychology. In 1920 he obtained his teacher certification with a final essay on the role of “Individual Education in the Formation of the Will in Each Sex.” In it, Koch argued that the human will develop out of dialectical interaction of physical experience and consciousness. Women’s experience of the vulnerability of the female body had led them to have a weaker will, while the male will had been strengthened through men’s more active role in the sexual act. To remedy this imbalance of wills, which Koch believed was “inherited through the centuries,” individual education of each sex was required. However, because individual education of the will “cannot cultivate the sense of community [Gemeinschaftssinn],” it needed to be accompanied by “education of the will in the community.”104 Koch’s essay reveals the persistent attraction of the Romantic-monist synthesis of sex, experience and intellect to a next generation of secularists coming of age around the First World War.105 When Koch entered school service in the proletarian Kreuzberg district of Berlin in autumn 1920, he was posted to one of the city’s new secular (weltlich) primary schools. Surveying his pupils, he diagnosed a state of physical and psychological misery. The mechanization of life had turned them into “machine people” who had lost the “inner unity of body and spirit.” Because schools focused too much on mental training, they were in fact deepening this division. To counteract this, Koch argued for a novel pedagogy that would renew the body starting from the activities of “daily life” and “seize people from below and inject new life forces into the sick social body [Volkskörper].” He appointed one pupil to act as “cleaning commissar” and check hands and fingernails, and directed her classmates to undertake a daily regime of rubbing and washing the entire body. The core practice, however, was physical exercise.106 104 105

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Quotations in: Andrey Georgieff, Nacktheit und Kultur: Adolf Koch und die proletarische Freikörperkultur (Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, 2005), 40–42. In 1918, the young leftist intellectual and future high-ranking GDR cadre Alfred Kurella, whose father was a noted monist psychiatrist, expressed similar viewpoints in his article “Body-Soul.” See Robert P. Newton, Form in the Menschheitsdämmerung: A Study of Prosodic Elements and Style in German Expressionist Poetry (The Hague: De Gruyter, 1971), 236. See also Krabbe, Gesellschaftsveränderung. Georgieff, Adolf Koch, 44.

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Koch’s belief that physical exercise could form the foundation of a social reform program was not uncommon after the First World War, when Germany was gripped by a widespread anxiety about the physical state of the defeated nation. Bringing physical education into schools was seen as a patriotic task by participants of the Reich School Conference of 1920, and, as one observer noted, those gymnastics associations “that used to lead their existence in a dreamy corner of public life, have now moved into the center of public interest.”107 Yet, Koch was not satisfied with traditional forms of exercise. He considered team sports competitive and hence capitalistic, and found the drills practiced in workers’ gymnastics associations (Turnvereine) too external, mechanistic and authoritarian. Instead, he embraced “rhythmic gymnastics,” which proposed that rhythm, originating in breath and circulation, was the core experience of life. Its advocates argued that through rhythmic exercises, a modern alienated individual could reconnect to his or her organism and restore the natural unity of spirit, body and subconscious. As historian Edward Ross Dickinson has shown, there was a deep engagement with the monism of Ernst Haeckel among the gymnastics and dance circles of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, which widely believed that rhythmic action could bridge the conscious and unconscious and lead to reciprocal improvement of body and spirit.108 The Swiss theorist Émile Jaques-Dalcroze claimed that the practice of rhythmic exercises to set music could develop a physical “muscle memory,” which could be expanded to provide the practitioner with a new experience of self, rooted in physical proprioception or “muscle sense.” His method was opposed by Rudolf Bode, who, following the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) of Ludwig Klages, rejected exercises according to “musical tact” as too mechanical and aimed solely at the faculty of reason. Rhythm was, for Bode, cloaked “in the colors of the unconscious” and rooted in the “irrational foundation of the world.”109 Koch agreed with Bode that rhythm had to be generated from the inner impulses of the individual and extended to the entire body. He developed a system of expressive exercises rooted in the individual’s physical experience with the aim of rebuilding bodies damaged by modern life. What set Koch’s approach apart from better-known theorists was the connection he established to socialism and to secularism. As Koch developed his exercise method, he began to explore nudism as well. Through pupils’ families he established connections to a working-class

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Alexander Dominicus, “Leibesübungen,” in Die Reichsschulkonferenz in ihren Ergebnissen (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920), 131–36. Edward Ross Dickinson, Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 169–74. Georgieff, Adolf Koch, 45–46.

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socialist nudist association that had a youth section called “Sun-Land.” It was here that Koch was first able to teach his exercises to naked children. Following his transfer to a different secular school, Koch set up an afterschool gymnastics program. The secular school context was a critical factor in the development of his movement, as it meant that the parents had chosen a form of schooling that had close structural ties to secularism and socialism. In a manifesto published in June 1923 to announce the formation of a Parents’ Organization for Free Body Culture, Koch connected socialism and secularism to nudism and gymnastics. To overcome the neglect of the body caused by monotonous work and Christian morality, the organization aimed to enable “the new, religious person to create out of his own experience” by restoring to him a healthy body through “natural nakedness” and “education to a liberated body feeling.” Koch praised the parents, who in leaving their Christian beliefs behind, placed greater value on their bodies and opened themselves to a new dimension of religion.110 In late 1923, Koch organized a private demonstration of free body culture to win over teachers and parents to allow naked training in school. After witnessing such a performance, Magnus Hirschfeld provided an expert testimony praising Koch’s efforts in achieving “a harmony between intellectual, physical and spiritual development” and complimented the children on having demonstrated that “the naked human presents the natural figure in a higher, purer form.”111 With forty-three boys and forty-two girls taking part in early 1924, Koch’s modest enterprise prompted a scandal after a Christian parents’ association protested the “naked dancing” at the “religionless” school. Accompanied by extensive press coverage, the matter was debated in the city council. The socialist councilor Hermann Weyl (like Hirschfeld a Jewish naturopathic physician) insisted that naked gymnastics were not immoral and that “for the pure [person] everything is pure and for the swine everything is swinish,” while a conservative nationalist councilor depicted Koch’s effort as a “sign of decline that is nothing else but a consequence of the Jewish subversion of our national character [Volkstum]. . . a Jewish pigsty [Schweinewirtschaft].”112 The “naked dancing” scandal led to Koch’s temporary suspension from school service; however, it provided him the opportunity to assume the role of the prophet of a “revolutionization of the body” in the wider socialist milieu. He milked scandal for publicity. He held political rallies and opened his own 110 111 112

Ibid., 58–59. Quotation from his expert opinion for Adolf Koch. Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde, vol. i, 32– 33. Georgieff, Adolf Koch, 67–74. Der Atheist expressed incredulity at Koch’s suspension, because “whoever understands something about gymnastics, knows that they must be practiced without clothes . . . so that the trainer can observe the play of tension and relaxation in the muscles of the learners.” “Nacktkultur und Schule,” Der Atheist, 20/10 (October 1924): 114.

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nudist school in the district of Neukölln with a summer camp on a piece of land on Motzen Lake donated by the city council. In June 1924, he organized a new proletarian FKK organization, the Bund freier Menschen (League of Free People) which set up chapters in the centers of the socialist culture movement in Saxony, Thuringia, Westphalia, Rhineland, and developed its own journal: The Naked Human (Der nackte Mensch).113 Although Koch shared core monist assumptions about how FKK would overcome the alienation of the spirit from the body, his increasing appeal to theories of revolution and class struggle set him apart from most other life reformers, who couched their projects in an anti-civilizational Kulturkritik. In a 1925 publication, he blamed the failure of the Revolution of 1918/19 on the alienation of workers from their own bodies due to capitalist exploitation, commercial culture, alcohol and superficial eroticism. To redress this, consciousness had to be restored to the body, not principally by way of the intellect but through physical education and nudity. The “new will” would originate in the “penetration of families by the idea of body culture.” This inner revolution would precede the outer revolution.114 As he shifted his focus from the world of secular schooling to the wider public sphere, Koch also increased the secularist embedding of his message. He spoke of “a new religion” rooted in “the recognition that we belong to the earth, which we must prepare for ourselves.” He moved more clearly into the associational universe of the secularist movement and began to publish in the journals of the Kultursozialisten. His school found a temporary home in the Ernst Haeckel auditorium in Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science (Figure 8.2). He associated his new organizations with Paul Krische’s SOL movement and asked members to donate 5 percent of their net earnings to the FKK school.115 Although initially subordinated to the practice of rhythmic gymnastics, nudity itself became increasingly portrayed as a revolutionary act: “Being naked requires the overcoming of inner inhibitions, for many it is a small inner revolution . . . a struggle against the familiar environment . . . For thinking and striving people this automatically results in the struggle against feelings of shame and all factors that seek to prevent this first necessary, true affirmation of the body.”116 Koch sought to distance his movement from the 113 114 115

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Maren Möhring, Marmorleiber: Körperbildung in der deutschen Nacktkultur (1890–1930) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 45. Adolf Koch, Körperbildung, Nacktkultur: Anklagen und Bekenntnisse (Leipzig: Ernst Oldenburg, 1932), 9–11. Atheist, Feb 1924, no. 2.; Hans Graaz, Nacktkörperkultur (Berlin: Der Syndikalist, 1927). After the Second World War, at the latest, Koch became active in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation. Georgieff, Adolf Koch, 87.

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Figure 8.2 Body Culture School Adolf Koch, Kulturwille, 1926, 86.

“philistine” middle-class nudists. His book Wir sind nackt und nennen uns Du! (1932) contains a number of vignettes from the life of his school, which show his young followers as examples of a rough, new proletarian type. Written in Berlin dialect, their dialogues are confident and proclaim the equality of the sexes, also in questions of sexuality. One girl, whose father was “still” in the church and wanted her to remain a virgin, stated: “I used to think that was right, too, but since we joined the FKK school and have realized how ignorant and dumb our parents left us, I got rid of the old prejudices myself.”117 Koch assured the reader that naked culture does not raise petty-bourgeois prudes, as nudists were sometimes portrayed.118 “All members know about their bodies. They know how to protect themselves from the consequences of sexual encounters. They also know that they have to act responsibly in sexual matters. Every member has a special health file and is regularly called to sexual responsibility.”119 The regular medical examination of the young members alluded to here was carried out with eugenic purposes in mind by Dr. Hans Graaz, who, like his mentor Magnus Hirschfeld, believed that alcohol and 117 118 119

Adolf Koch, Wir sind nackt und nennen uns Du! (Leipzig: Ernst Oldenbourg, 1932), 22. This type is satirized in Hans Fallada, Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). Koch, Wir sind nackt, 22, 42.

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incorrect living were leading to a degeneration of the German physical stock.120 Koch also argued for a direct eugenic benefit of nudism. He proposed that men and women meet naked prior to marriage to ensure future sexual compatibility and improve their offspring, presumably because aesthetic attraction was considered a spiritual precondition of monist unity.121 Koch had trouble finding entry for his association in the larger socialist umbrella organization for sports clubs (Zentralkommission für Arbeitersport und Körperpflege). Instead, he approached the socialist association of naturopathic medical associations, the Association for People’s Health (Verband Volksgesundheit), which was centered principally in Saxony and East Thuringia and encompassed roughly 12,000 members in 1925. Yet, there too he experienced friction and subsequently founded his own organization, the Circle for Free Body Culture (Freie Körperkulturkreis) in April 1926. Following further feuds within the national FKK scene, Koch focused instead on his school, which had thirteen chapters and reached a reported enrollment of between 700 and 4,000 in Berlin alone. The estimated number of organized FKK activists in the socialist milieu was roughly 60,000 in 1929, thus more than organized in the “bourgeois” organizations (30,000).122 Although traditional working-class sports organizations and party officials often maintained their distance, FKK formed a staple element in the journals of Kultursozialismus. Urania issued a regular supplement called Der Leib (the Body) and Kulturwille made body culture the topic of special issues.123 In a 1927 Urania article on “physical exercise and culture,” the chairman of the national Socialist Workers’ Youth association (SAJ), Heinrich Hoffmann, argued for an insertion of monistic “body culture” into the enormous workers’ sports movement. Based on Müller-Lyer’s concept of culture as “humanization” or “the highest perfection of people and their social organization,” Hoffmann argued that physical exercise could “lift man to his fullest physical perfection, training his organs for greatest performance, and thus also create the conditions for the mental perfection of man.” In line with the monist lessons he likely heard as a student at the adult education boarding school in Tinz, Hoffmann stated that although the sublimation of animal drives could only be achieved once a classless society has been established, the struggle for perfection through sport could deliver important weapons needed to wage class 120 121 122

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Graaz, Nacktkörperkultur. For an account of the invasiveness of the sexual advice given at the Koch school, see Georgieff, Adolf Koch, 111–15. Möhring, Marmorleiber, 366. Georgieff, Adolf Koch, 100–06, 119–20; Möhring, Marmorleiber, 70–71; Bernd WedemeyerKolwe, ‘Der neue Mensch’: Körperkultur im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 223. Arno Herold, “Der Spießer und wir,” Urania (1928), 255–56. Dr. Lily Wagner, “Berlin Heraus aus der Stadt! Die Bedeutung des Ultravioletts,” Kulturwille, May 1929.

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struggle: “It raises the culture consciousness of the worker, counteracts the physical and mental crippling of the modern industrial proletariat, acts upon the will and emotional state of the worker and develops the ethical drives.”124 Another leader of the socialist body culture movement similarly argued that “the social must be accompanied by a personal revolution – the work on oneself, on one’s own body.” Instead of going dancing or drinking, workers needed to train their bodies. He gave concrete suggestions that even the poor proletarian could follow. After examining oneself naked every day – “objectively, joyfully, but with an earnest critical eye” – one should take a sponge bath and practice deep breathing, followed by self-massage, especially of the trunk. This would help “return to our body the capacities for development and creativity that it has lost through our social condition.”125 The heyday of the socialist body culture organizations was between 1925 and 1930. The Vatican observed this development with a wary eye. In 1930 the papal nuncio to Germany wrote the Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli that nudism had experienced slow growth in prewar life reform and youth circles, but that “the last brakes of modesty had been removed publicly only in 1918/19, during that revolutionary orgy that raged in Germany, and particularly in Berlin, immediately after the war.” The nuncio concluded on an optimistic note that fortunately rule of law had now been restored and the civil authorities were taking steps to curtail the “collective insanity.”126 Archival evidence bears this out. State intervention combined with the impact of the economic depression on working-class incomes crippled the nudist movement in the period 1930 to 1933. Two of the three socialist nudist organizations found in the Leipzig area in those years had essentially collapsed prior to the Nazi seizure of power.127 Koch’s schools were shut down by the police in late December 1932.128 Ritual and Theater: Max Zelck The third area of monistic activity to be investigated in this chapter is socialist festival culture, which some historians have treated as the quintessence of Kultursozialismus, in part because of the originality of new forms of

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Heinrich Hoffmann, “Leibesübungen und Kultur,” Urania, 3 (Dec. 1927): 93–96. Hermann Schmidt, “Die körperliche Befreiung des Proletariats,” Urania, 1 (1927): 29–32. Hermann Schmidt, “Die Forderungen für die Befreiung des Körpers,” Urania, 2 (1927): 63–64. “Sulla ‘Nacktkultur’ in Germania,” Orsenigo to Pacelli, June 8, 1930, Vatican Archives, Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, SO 535/1930, no. 327, fol. 31. Leipzig Stadtarchiv, 2517/575, 1642. “Endlich: Die Adolf-Koch-Schule aufgelöst,” Börsenzeitung, Jan. 3, 1933. Georgieff, Adolf Koch, 101.

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performance, such as the Sprechchor. Drawing on the older festival forms of the chorus and the tableaux vivants, Sprechchor was a Gesamtkunstwerk of theater, choir and poetry that was louder, more provocative and militant, and far greater in scope than its Wilhelmine predecessors. A writer for Kulturwille painted a vision of the upcoming Festival of Proletarian Body Culture in Nuremberg in 1929, at which he expected “15,000 young people or more, who in a festival performance of [the Sprechchor, T. W.] ‘Free Yourself!’ and a torch parade through the city will embody the fire of excitement for a new era, for the ideal of socialism.”129 In preparation for the 1931 Socialist Culture Week, Hamburg city councilor Max Zelck claimed that the purpose of socialist celebrations was to connect the “inner impulses” of individuals in a collective social experience that would give form to a new “shared, spiritual ethicalworldview foundation.”130 Scholars have framed such novel modes of performance within the history of theater, of the expressionistic avant-garde, and of Soviet festival culture, yet their evaluations have ranged widely. Some have depicted the new socialist rituals as manifestations of the revolutionary spirit of interwar socialism, while others have termed them a “holiday façade” that offered a weak compensation for the failure of revolution.131 Yet, there are good reasons to consider this one of the key areas of monist influence on Weimar-era Kultursozialismus. We can begin with Zelck, who was born in 1878 to a master saddle maker and trained and worked as a primary school teacher. After moving to Hamburg, he became a self-acknowledged monist activist and pacifist which brought him into association with Carl von Ossietsky. Zelck joined the USPD in 1918 and served on the Hamburg City Council from 1919 to 1933, first for the USPD and later for the SPD. He became a leading figure in school reform and from 1923 until 1933 he was district school councilor.132 In his 1931 brochure The Cultural Will of Socialism, Zelck provided a monistic framework for socialist celebration. His starting point was “the new category of secularity [Weltlichkeit],” the “sign under which art, pedagogy, 129 130 131

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“Ein Fest proletarischer Körperkultur,” Kulturwille, June 1929, 113. Max Zelck, Der Kulturwille des Sozialismus: Jubiläums-Festschrift für die Sozialistische Kulturwoche 1931 in Hamburg (Verlag des Bildungsausschusses Hamburg, 1931), 13–14. For an affirmative account of the “Sprechchor as a proletarian art form” see Wilfried van der Will and Rob Burns, Arbeiterkulturbewegung in der Weimarer Republik: Eine historischtheoretische Analyse der kulturellen Bestrebungen der sozialdemokratisch organisierten Arbeiterschaft (Berlin: Ullstein, 1982), 167–226. The phrase “holiday façade” is from Langewiesche, “Zukunftsentwürfen,” 51–52. See also Guttsman, “Arbeiterkultur in der Spannung”; Jon Clark, Bruno Schönlank und die Arbeitersprechchor-Bewegung (Cologne: Prometh-Verlag, 1984); Pia Janke, Politische Massenfestspiele in Österreich zwischen 1918 und 1938 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2010). Der Freiheit verpflichtet: Gedenkbuch der deutschen Sozialdemokratie im 20. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Schüren, 2000), 361. Carl von Ossietzky, Carl von Ossietzky: 1889–1938, ein Lebensbild (Weinheim: Quadriga, 1988), 278.

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morality and the new worldview are formed,” because secularity directed human attention to the existing connections in the here-and-now: “what we know of the individual and the world, of the thousand threads that bind man to man and man to world, of the great monism of all life!” Socialist rituals must thus be centered on “man in his earthboundedness and secularity” and on the mass in its striving for self-salvation. The “extrasensory and transcendental” are excluded: “it is about the enthronement of the human.” Secular experiences of transcendence in ritual form could only take place in collective experience, for, as Zelck put it, “secularity and community [Gemeinschaft] [are] two words [with] one meaning!” Zelck argued that the form best suited to generating the experience of Gemeinschaft was the “speaking and movement choir” (Sprechund Bewegungschor) because it could generate “the will to be a mass, speak to the mass and . . . evoke the mass.” In order to create a “path to active joint experience and participation by those who now just sit and listen, . . . the new mass celebrations should be an experience of the mass for the mass. The performers and the mere audience should come physically closer to one another.” The mass rhythm exercises of the movement choir raise up the “long despised human body”; their development forms “one of the most important tasks for the realization of socialist worldview.”133 Zelck’s manifesto identified three forms of dualism or division that he hoped to overcome through pioneering forms of theater and ritual: the duality of the beyond and the here-and-now; the duality of representation and reality; and the division between individuals. The aims were also characteristic of developments in the young Soviet Union. Richard Stites and others have described large-scale artistic experiments, such as one in which an entire city was treated as a stage for musical performance utilizing factory whistles as instruments.134 In 1926, Wilhelm Spohr, who in the 1890s had been an active member of the Jungen and the Friedrichshagen naturalists, hailed the “new Russian festival policy” for having torn down the “silken wall” between the spectators and actors and having created “ecstasy [Rausch] and an unchaining without [creating] masses.”135 This relationship between Soviet avant-garde culture and Kultursozialismus was not a one-way street. As historian Igor Polianski has shown, German and Austrian prewar monism was an intellectual wellspring of the key architects of Soviet culture policy after the Revolution. The Minister of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky had studied “biopsychology” with Ferdinand Avenarius in Zurich in the late 1890s, and together with physician Alexei Bogdanov he came under fire from Lenin in 1908 for the philosophy of “empirio-monism” and the desire to turn socialism into new religious forms of 133 135

134 Zelck, Kulturwille des Sozialismus, 14–15. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 155–62. Wilhelm Spohr, Kultur der Feste, Dürer Bund: Flugschriften zur Ausdruckskultur (Munich: Callwey, 1926), 11.

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“god-building.”136 During and after the Civil War, these men achieved positions of some power, which allowed them to bring elements of monism into Soviet cultural policy. Bogdanov wrote a programmatic essay for the growing Proletkult movement on “paths to proletarian creativity” centered on “monism and conscious collectivism.” He defined communist art policy as a practical form of monism: “the striving to meld art and work, to make art into a tool for the active, aesthetic transformation of life in all dimensions.” Its aim was to take “initially spontaneous and unconscious” expressions of collectivism and make them conscious. Collectivism he defined not just as an expression of “human life, but also the life of nature; nature as a field of collective labor and its unity and harmony.” Speaking in tones very similar to the Krisches, he concluded that “the essential difference between the new and the earlier creativity lies in the fact that for the first time creativity understands itself and its role in life.”137 Art, in other words, became a key site for producing biological-social collective consciousness. The Russians engaged in ongoing exchange with German and Austrian socialist freethinkers. Proletarische Heimstunden published Bogdanov’s essays and Proletkult was represented in the exploratory meeting convened in 1922, which led to the formation of the International of Proletarian Freethought. The Soviet Union offered refuge to monist biologists Julius Schaxel and Paul Kammerer when their work in Germany and Austria became untenable. After Kammerer’s suicide in 1926, Lunacharsky took his story and wrote a screenplay for the film Salamander, which depicted Kammerer as the innocent socialist victim of a plot hatched between a priest and a prince.138 The Soviet Union continued to support Kammerer’s theories, which culminated in the backing Stalin gave to the neo-Lamarckian Trofim Lysenko, whose innovations in agronomy proved disastrous for Soviet and later East German agriculture.139 136

137

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On Avenarius’s influence on Lunacharsky’s monism, see Nyota Thun, “Anatoli Lunatscharski: Revolution und Kunst: Programmatik und Praxis,” Weimarer Beiträge, 33/10 (1987): 16–32. See the critique in Lenin, “Materialismus.” Bogdanov in Peter Gorsen and Eberhard Knödler-Bunte (eds.), Proletkult 2: Zur Praxis und Theorie einer proletarischen Kulturrevolution in Sowjetrussland 1917–1925, Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Problemata, 1974), 49–50, 51. Nikos Pegiou, “Artists and Radicalism in Germany, 1890–1933: Reform, Politics and the Paradoxes of the Avant-Garde,” PhD, London, University College London (2015). When fired from the University of Jena due to his “Marxism” in 1933, Julius Schaxel was appointed to the Severtsov-Institute for Evolutionary Morphology in Moscow. For details on Lunacharsky’s film, see the biography of Paul Kammerer written by Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad (New York: Random House, 1971), 144–46. In an article on “Eugenics as Tool of Class Struggle,” the German-language Godless journal of Kharkiv favorably compared socialist eugenics based on environmental manipulation to capitalist eugenics based on selection. Neuland 1931, 55–57. Polianski, “Lockerung der Erbanlagen.”

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By the mid-1920s, Sprechchor performances became a standard part of many socialist events. Bruno Schoenlank, Jr., who alongside Ernst Toller was one of the best-known lyricists of Sprechchor, wrote a special piece for performance at Jugendweihe.140 Through the Jugendweihe, secularists made their most obvious contribution to socialist ritual culture. Participation in the Jugendweihe increased dramatically after 1920; in Leipzig, the center of the postwar workers’ culture movement, it reached 30 percent of the primary school graduates in 1924. The Berlin Free Religious Congregations remained the main provider of the preparatory ethical instruction for socialists in Berlin until the mid-1920s,141 when this task was increasingly taken over by the rapidly expanding Proletarian Freethinkers for Cremation (VFF) and the socialist parties themselves.142 Many monist intellectuals officiated at Jugendweihe ceremonies in the Weimar Republic, and Siemsen, Schaxel, Graf and Zelck each edited special Jugendweihe books in conjunction with local socialist party offices.143 These books were handed to each of the young participants during the ritual of confirmation, a symbolic gift of the new worldview. Following the format developed by nineteenth-century Free Religious Congregations, the books combined brief and inspiring excerpts from a variety of genres: citations by leading socialists, poems by classic and naturalist writers, snippets of Sprechchor texts, secularist declarations and short popular-scientific texts showing the upward path of nature through evolution. For example, the Jugendweihe book commissioned by the USPD in 1920 was published in the Freiheit under the direction of Ernst Däumig and edited by Georg Engelbert Graf. Graf chose fire as a running theme to connect pieces, from Goethe’s poem “Prometheus” to an excerpt from a Jack London story Before Adam, in which a modern man follows a biological memory and dreams of an encounter between primitive cave dwellers and more advanced “fire people,” in which the cave dwellers fail to harness the power of fire and flee into the woods.144

140 141

142 143

144

Bruno Schönlank, Seid geweiht!: Ein Sprechchorspiel zur Jugendweihe (Berlin: Arbeiterjugend-Verlag, 1927). Theo Mayer, Feiern und Feierstunden freidenkender Menschen: Ein Leitfaden zur Abhaltung und Gestaltung von Feiern und Veranstaltungen für alle in Frage kommenden Gelegenheiten (Leipzig: Freidenker-Verlag, 1925); Rudloff, “Jugendweihegedankens,” 121. On the cooperation of USPD and SPD and later KPD in the Berlin Jugendweihe, see Günther Dehn, Proletarische Jugend: Lebensgestaltung und Gedankenwelt der grossstädtischen Proletarierjugend (Berlin: Furche, 1933), 24. Manfred Isemeyer, “100 Jahre proletarische Jugendweihe in Deutschland: Ein historischer Überblick,” in Isemeyer and Sühl (eds.), Feste der Arbeiterbewegung, 11–38. Julius Schaxel, Menschen der Zukunft (Jena: Urania, 1929); Max Sievers et al., Laßt uns Kamaraden sein! Eine Jugendweihegabe (Jena: Urania-Freidenker, 1933); anon., Wir sind Kampfgenossen! (Berlin: Deutscher Freidenker-Verband, 1933). Georg Engelbert Graf, Ins Leben hinein (Berlin: Freiheit, 1920), 22–23.

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Education Reform: Fritz Gansberg and Kurt Löwenstein The majority of our cohort of Weimar monists were schoolteachers, and it was in the domain of pedagogical theory and practice that monism arguably had its greatest influence on socialist culture. Monists, like other secularists, pursued apparently contradictory aims in school reform. They fought to secularize schools by removing clerical oversight, and at the same time sought to replace religious instruction with courses on ethics that were based on their monist worldview. This apparent contradiction was shaped by the nature of the confessional field, in which schools formed one of the key sites of contention. Among the leaders of the movement advocating for “secular” (weltliche) schools in the nineteenth century were Free Religious preachers, such as Berlin preacher G. S. Schaefer, who simultaneously taught ethics to prepare children for the Jugendweihe. Schaefer’s successor at the Humanist Congregation, Rudolf Penzig, became one of Germany’s leading theorists of secular ethics, which became known as “science of life” or Lebenskunde.145 Some of the school reform efforts of liberal Wilhelmine monists reappeared in socialist guise in the Weimar Republic, as was the case in the Hanseatic city of Bremen. There a circle of radical schoolteachers had formed around the dissident Protestant minister Albert Kalthoff, who in 1906 became the founding chairman of the German Monist League. In 1905, members of this circle, including the left liberal Fritz Gansberg, submitted a petition to the city council on behalf of Bremen’s largest teachers’ association, in which they called for removal of biblical instruction from the schools. Not only did they argue that the “separation of church and state in the school system lies in the development of the age,” but went on to assert that “Advances in philosophical and scientific education . . . have led to the conviction [held by] the modern-thinking person that the principle, which preserves and directs the world, is a unitary and internally generated (immanent) one that operates according to eternal laws (natural laws). . . . In short, one understands the world monistically.”146 The petition sparked the “Bremen School Dispute” which reached national attention and continued for several years, but without achieving the school secularization desired by the monists. During the Revolution, Gansberg joined the USPD and entered into school reform efforts. In 1919, the new school curriculum proposed by the SPD was nearly identical to the curriculum Gansberg had developed in 1905.147 145

146 147

Enders, Moralunterricht; Horst Groschopp, Weltliche Schule und Lebenskunde: Dokumente und Texte zur Hundertjahrfeier ihrer praktischen Innovation 1920 (Aschaffenburg: Alibri Verlag, 2020). “Petition an die Senatskommission für das Unterrichtswesen,” Sept. 1905, Bremen Staatsarchiv, sig. 451, vol. 2. “Leitsätze und Stoffplan – Entwurf zur Frage der Umgestaltung des Religionsunterrichts an den bremischen Schulen,” Nov. 7, 1919, Bremen Staatsarchiv, sig. 451, vol. 2, unpag.

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Gansberg was not the only example of how the Revolution lifted a monist educator up to a position of greater influence. As an elected official of the Reichstag and the Berlin City Council, Kurt Löwenstein was one of the most important school reformers of Weimar Germany. His starting point was the conviction that traditional schooling had alienated children from their biological, psychological and social being. The necessary correction would come from the harmonization of methods and contents with the lived reality of children, according to the maxim: “We should learn not only for, but also like life.” In his notes for a series of lectures to the Berlin Monist League in January 1920, Löwenstein defined education as “the development of all capab[ilities and] dispositions of a grow[ing] person, to the extent that the development and use of these d[ispositions] is held to be valuable.”148 In his most important work, The Child as Bearer of the Coming Society from 1924, Löwenstein argued that the educational process had to follow the growth of the child, which, like human evolution, proceeded in stages. Yet, Löwenstein rejected the notion that children required religious instruction simply because they needed to go through the stage of religious belief to reach the stage of secular consciousness. Instead, with a nod to the Marxist belief that “social being determines social consciousness,” he argued that modern production and urban living had destroyed the earlier unity of life to which traditional religion corresponded.149 The task of educators was not to return to the past, but to reharmonize the individual with modern life through lessons that were oriented on practical tasks in the workplace. Thus, like Sprechchor pieces that broke down the divisions between performer and audience and between representation and reality, monist educators tried to overcome the division between classroom and world. Another monist schoolteacher, Max Hermann Baege, had praised precisely this aspect of the new “production school” being developed by the Russian Proletkult. Unlike traditional schools, it was “not a self-enclosed miniature society, a type of small state within the state, rather it is in every way an organ that stands in closest interaction with other organs in the entire social organism.”150 German socialists built this principle into the workers’ boarding school in the rural town of Tinz, which had been founded following USPD domination of the local state government in the elections of 1919. According to Otto Jenssen, the Tinz school sought to teach young adult learners not what to do but rather how to do: “This is not the famous ‘praxis’ that stands in the same dualistic relationship to ‘theory’ as dear God to the party central committee.”151 148 149 150 151

“Inhaltsangabe des 1. Vortrags in Monistenbund, 29.1.1920,” AdsD, Löwenstein papers. Löwenstein, Kind als Träger, 209. P. P. Blonskij, Die Arbeits-Schule (Berlin: Verlag Gesellschaft und Erziehung, 1921). Otto Jenssen, Grundfragen der Funktionärsschulung (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1930), 202.

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Tinz was conceived of as a worldview institute, at which, in addition to Jenssen, also Georg Engelbert Graf and Anna Siemsen taught. As an important training centers for union organizers and socialist party officials in the Weimar Republic, its classes aimed to integrate a critical understanding of society in a unified worldview based on the “totality principle” of Marxism.152 This holistic approach to pedagogy also entailed collective forms of learning to stimulate changes in social consciousness. At Tinz, “the democratization of mental work is naturally attempted in the form of a working collective [Arbeitsgemeinschaft],” wrote Jenssen. Although the inbred obedience of workers towards authority made it difficult, some successes had been achieved on the “basis of democratic self-government.” His co-teacher Anna Siemsen – stated that socialist education had to live according to its ultimate aim, which was to help young people form “communities” (Gemeinschaften) that “exclude domination, violence and compulsion.”153 This also required reform of school discipline. In his lectures to the Berlin monists, Löwenstein insisted that “retribution punishment” be replaced by “community protection” under student jurisprudence. Acknowledging the importance of environment, Löwenstein called for “hygienically ideal community spaces (sleeping, eating, work and recreational rooms)” to create social cohesion and individual responsibility.154 Socialist control of local and regional governments and the associational matrix of the socialist milieu offered monist educational reformers multiple sites to promulgate their message and to influence curricula. Löwenstein founded some of the first secular schools in Berlin and became the leader of the largest socialist teachers’ organization and the parents’ association. He is perhaps best known, however, for his development of the socialist children’s movement, the Kinderfreunde, which was launched in November 1923 by the General German Union Federation, the Workers’ Welfare Association (Arbeiterwohlfahrt), Socialist Workers’ Youth and the SPD. The movement grew rapidly from 70 chapters in 1924 to 400 in 1928.155 The Kinderfreunde organized summer camps called “Kinderrepubliken,” in which children were given a taste of the socialist future with experiences of equality and democracy

152

153 154 155

Ines Lange, “Auf der Suche nach dem ‘Neuen Menschen’: Die Heimvolkshochschule Tinz und die Geraer Gemeinschaftsschule,” in Stromauf: Das Moderne Gera zwischen 1900 und 1930 (Jena: Glaux, 2005), 121–26; Manfred Overesch, Hermann Brill in Thüringen 1895–1946: Ein Kämpfer gegen Hitler und Ulbricht (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1992), 179–94; Bettina Irina Reimers, Die neue Richtung der Erwachsenenbildung in Thüringen 1919–1933 (Essen: Klartext, 2003), 206–17. Anna Siemsen, Erziehung im Gemeinschaftsgeist (Stuttgart: Ernst Heinrich Moritz, 1921), 38, 57. “Inhaltsangaben des 2.3.4 Vortrags im Monistenbund 1920,” AdsD, Löwenstein papers. Report to Card. Gasparri, Oct. 1, 1928, ASV, Nuziatura Monaco, no. 421, fasc. 73, fol. 286.

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Figure 8.3 Kurt Löwenstein at a Kinderrepublik, 1932. (Source: AdsD 6/FOTA007500)

(Figure 8.3).156 The Vatican, by contrast, saw in the Kinderfreunde a “very dangerous organization of the German socialist movement for deChristianizing the young.”157 Conclusion In the Kölnische Volkszeitung in February 1931, the chief apologist of the Catholic Church in Germany, Father Konrad Algermissen, argued that monism had become more dangerous as it passed from the educated middle classes of the Wilhelmine period to the working class of his day: In our universities today there is not a single scholar of even moderate significance who dares to promote the flat Monism of the second half the nineteenth century. By contrast, however, the broadest masses of the working population have been infected by this Monism through the decade-long “enlightenment work” of socialism . . . The most 156

157

Heinrich Eppe, Erziehung für eine Zukunft, die nicht kam? Zur Bedeutung und Aktualität der politischen Pädagogik Kurt Löwensteins (Oer-Erkenschwick: Archiv der Arbeiterjugendbewegung, 1989); Helmut Uitz, Die Österreichischen Kinderfreunde und Roten Falken 1908–1938: Beiträge zur sozialistischen Erziehung (Vienna: Geyer-Edition, 1975). ASV, Nuziatura Monaco, no. 421, fasc. 73, fol. 282, Gasparri to Torregrossa, Sept. 14, 1928.

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important philosophical [weltanschaulich] branches on the tree of Marxism today are the Kinderfreunde and the proletarian Freethought movements [. . .] both led by the desire to make the god-free monistic worldview of Marxism fruitful for the renewal of today’s life communities [Lebensgemeinschaften].158

This chapter has substantiated Algermissen’s claim, and, in so doing, it has challenged existing historical accounts that have placed monism within the context of the technocratic fantasies of middle-class supporters of antipolitical Kultur in late Wilhelmine Germany.159 It has argued, instead, that it was in the Weimar workers’ culture movement that monism achieved its widest practical dispersal. It has traced the journey of a group of left liberals, who were pushed to embrace socialism by their opposition to war and monarchy, but also lured by the promise of wide fields of influence opened by the Revolution in local government, union educational institutions and the expanding universe of socialist cultural associations. Several clustered around the secular schools, that were made possible by the restructured confessional system that emerged out of the compromises of the Weimar Constitution. This chapter has also opened a window on the utopian dimension of Weimar political discourse, in which the terms “Gemeinschaft” and “Weltanschauung” were mobilized by actors across the party spectrum to give form to their future ideals. Monists had played a central role in the rise of these concepts in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and after the First World War they used them to articulate proposals for cultural reform in the movement of Kultursozialismus. They had concrete ideas about how to overcome body-soul dualism and make possible the “New Man” and “New Woman.” Ultimately, the socialist monists lost the struggle for control of the terms, and after 1933 the National Socialists were able to exert a monopoly over their public use. Yet already before Hitler’s appointment to chancellor, the monist socialist visions of “Gemeinschaft” and “Weltanschauung” had begun to lose their luster, and not merely as a result of economic crisis and the increase in police repression that followed the installation of the presidential regime in 1930. The eclipse of socialist monism also reflected transformations in the cultures of socialism and secularism that had begun in the mid-1920s and that became readily apparent by 1930. The resultant shift in red secularism concerns us in the next chapter.

158 159

Konrad Algermissen, “Die Gottlosen Internationale: Wahrheit oder Dichtung?,” Kölnische Volkszeitung, Feb. 16, 1931. Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland: Studien zu ihrer Geschichte (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1963); Hübinger, “Monistische Bewegung.”

9

Culture War at the End of the Weimar Republic

In September 1928, thousands of Germans assembled in Magdeburg for the Katholikentag, the annual gathering of Germany’s far-flung Catholic associations, which provided an important national platform for Catholic political and religious leaders to address the wider public. Eugenio Pacelli, the nuntius to Germany and future Pope Pius XII, was on hand to inaugurate Catholic Action, a global initiative of the Vatican to mobilize the Catholic laity to combat secularism under the militant banner of St. George. To make the case for a mobilization in Germany, the Jesuit intellectual Friedrich Muckermann told of the recent bloody suppression of the Cristero rebellion by the Mexican government and warned the audience that “everything indicates that we are about to face a worldwide Kulturkampf, to which Mexico is but a weak prelude.”1 Muckermann’s prediction proved accurate. Later that year, the Soviet Union began its violent campaign of forced collectivization of agriculture, which included a direct attack on the Orthodox Church, as a mainstay of the traditional rural order. By late 1929, the German press reported on horrific events taking place in the Soviet Union, where churches were being demolished, and priests, monks and nuns were being exiled or executed. On February 9, 1930, Pope Pius XI called for a “crusade of prayer” to oppose these crimes “against God and the souls of the innumerous population of Russia.”2 In April, the Protestant General Superintendent of Berlin, Emil Karow, described a great army “gathering in the east and pointing its weapons at everything born of faith in the living God. The battle of the Antichrist against Christ has begun. The eschatological pictures of the Bible are becoming reality . . . Darkness and light, unspirit and spirit stand in battle, a battle that will perhaps decide the spiritual countenance of centuries.”3

1 2

3

Bericht über den Katholikentag 1928 (Paderborn: Generalsekretariat, 1928), 206, 208. Letter of Pius XI to Cardinal Pompili, printed on Feb. 9, 1930 in L’Osservatore Romano. Reprinted in Laura Pettinaroli, “La politique russe du Saint-Siège (1905–1939),” PhD, University of Lyon (2008), 1049–51. Emil Karow, “Christus oder Antichristus?,” Der Ring, 6 (April 6, 1930).

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Between 1928 and 1933, Germany formed a key battlefield in a global culture war between Rome and Moscow that spilled over into German politics and added a religious dimension to the “latent civil war” that characterized the last years of the Weimar Republic. German secularists willingly joined the global attack on religion, but they also served as a foil onto which opponents could project fears of Soviet “godlessness.” The culture war led to confessional mobilization, not just by secularists in the socialist milieu, but also by Catholics and Protestants in their respective milieus. Anxiety about “godlessness” provided a key component in the rising calls for a “national revolution” on the right. And ultimately, the antisecularist policies of the National Socialists helped carry them to power. This chapter examines red secularism at the intersection of transnational secular–religious conflicts, the rise of the authoritarian right, and the bitter struggles between the communists and Social Democrats. It reveals organized secularism to have been both a protagonist in the German culture war, as well as a casualty. In arguing that secularism returned to center stage in German political history at the end of the Weimar Republic, this chapter challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of the state crisis in Germany in the years 1930 to 1933. It also provides a correction to more recent accounts of the role of religion in the rise of National Socialism. Until the mid-1990s, the failure of Weimar democracy formed the central puzzle of modern German history and two generations of scholars set down their solutions to this puzzle in synthetic accounts that remain unsurpassed today.4 Their omission of the interwar Kulturkampf reflects not only a certain deafness to religious issues common to much social history of that era, it also reflects their overriding concern with shrinking political choices available at Weimar’s end.5 When considering Christian support for antidemocratic groups, scholars emphasized hostility engendered by the birth of the “godless republic” in military defeat, socialist revolution and the destruction of Godappointed authority, rather than long-term religious–secularist conflicts.6 It was from the margins, among church historians seeking to connect religious and political history in the 1980s and 1990s, that attention was first

4 5

6

This is the conclusion of Andreas Wirsching’s 2008 survey of the literature, in Die Weimarer Republik: Politik und Gesellschaft (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008). Helmut Walser Smith, “The Vanishing Point of German History: An Essay on Perspective,” History and Memory, 17/1–2 (2005): 267–95. Other historiographical reflections: Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?,” Journal of Modern History, 68/3 (Sept. 1, 1996): 629–56; Benjamin Ziemann, “Weimar Was Weimar: Politics, Culture and the Emplotment of the German Republic,” German History, 28/4 (Dec. 1, 2010): 542–71. Jonathan R. C. Wright, Above Parties: The Political Attitudes of the German Protestant Church Leadership 1918–1933 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).

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given to the interwar struggle over secularism.7 Religion has since moved to center stage of Weimar history with the response of the Christian churches to National Socialism coming under intense scrutiny. Historians have tied the susceptibility of members of the Protestant clergy to their nationalism and Lutheran authoritarianism but not to the antisecularist activism displayed by many ministers.8 Studies of the Catholic Church have shown how Vatican anticommunism weakened the hand of German Catholics who wanted to oppose National Socialism.9 Although most of the new literature on the Weimar-era churches acknowledges that Bolshevism represented “the most dangerous threat” to the churches, its authors allow the struggle over secularism to quickly recede into the background, so that the church encounter with the mobile force of National Socialism can step forward to take center stage.10 A handful of studies have moved beyond axiomatic statements of the importance of antisecularism to Christian mentalities and have examined its political implications, but these have been largely limited to the Catholic case and have not opened up a broader reconsideration of Weimar politics.11 Other historians have emphasized how much interwar society continued to be structured by the competitions between the socio-religious milieus inherited from the Kaiserreich.12 Historian Manfred Kittel brought fears of secularism into his analysis of milieu rivalry, when he concluded that “strengthened in their 7

8

9

10 11

12

Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände; Kurt Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik: Zum politischen Weg des deutschen Protestantismus zwischen 1918 und 1932 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1981); Heribert Smolinsky, “Das katholische Rußlandbild in Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg und im ‘Dritten Reich’,” in Das Rußlandbild im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), 323–55. Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2012). A study that does incorporate secularism into its account: Björn Mensing, Pfarrer und Nationalsozialismus: Geschichte einer Verstrickung am Beispiel der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Bayern, 2nd edn (Bayreuth: Rabenstein, 1999). Gerhard Besier and Francesca Piombo, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, trans. Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Pettinaroli, “Politique russe”; Thies Schulze, “Antikommunismus als politischer Leitfaden des Vatikans? Affinitäten und Konflikte zwischen Heiligem Stuhl und NS-Regime Jahr 1933,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 60/3 (2012): 353–79. Olaf Blaschke, Die Kirchen und der Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2014), 60. Ulrich Kaiser, Realpolitik oder antibolschewistischer Kreuzzug? Zum Zusammenhang von Rußlandbild und Rußlandpolitik der deutschen Zentrumspartei 1917–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005); Smolinsky, “Katholische Rußlandbild”; Stefan Ummenhofer, Wie Feuer und Wasser? Katholizismus und Sozialdemokratie in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: WVB, 2003); Horst Heitzer, “Deutscher Katholizismus und ‘Bolschewismusgefahr’ bis 1933,” Historisches Jahrbuch, 113 (1993): 355–87. Siegfried Weichlein, Sozialmilieus und politische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik: Lebenswelt, Vereinskultur, Politik in Hessen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996); Bösch, Konservative Milieu; Norbert Haag, Protestantisches Milieu in der Provinz: Das württembergische Dekanat Herrenberg 1918 bis 1945 (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca Academica Verlag, 2007).

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confessionalism, ever more Protestants gave in to the illusion that the NSDAP was an anti-ultramontane party. And, what is more, precisely through their brutal manner the National Socialists appeared as a suitable defensive shield against the ever more frequently invoked danger of the Bolshevik godless movement.”13 Yet, Kittel’s approach suffers from a conceptual limitation inherited from the literature on the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf, namely a too narrow understanding of Konfession as applying solely to Catholics and Protestants. Rather than approaching red secularism as a danger “invoked” by conservatives that led to the “illusion” of National Socialist support for Christianity, this chapter analyzes the interwar Kulturkampf as a profound clash between three principal milieus: the socialist/communist, the Catholic and the conservative Protestant. It begins with the rise of Freethought and the political struggles between the SPD and KPD that transformed the culture of red secularism, and then casts the net wider with an analysis of the mobilization of the Catholic and Protestant churches. The chapter follows this Christian mobilization against secularism into the realm of party politics, where politicians on the right competed to guide and shape the fears of religious– secularist civil war. The logic of the interwar Kulturkampf initially bolstered Chancellor Brüning’s minority government and its fragile coalition of Catholic, liberal and conservative parties. Yet, the shared semantics of religious war did not make for true allies. By 1931, the forces of the far right were lambasting the Brüning government and the Centre Party for the supposed failure to curb secularism. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how vociferous opposition to secularism helped the NSDAP portray itself to conservative Christians as their best champion in the war against godlessness. In the minds of many Christians, the latent civil war fought between communists and Nazis in the streets of Germany had a religious complement in the war between Christianity and the godless. Proletarian Freethought in the Weimar Republic A glance through the newspaper clippings and police reports found in German church archives reveals that the high point of the Freethought movement both in terms of numbers, but also in terms of public attention, came in the latter years of the Weimar Republic. This growth and notoriety were accompanied by a dramatic internal transformation of the culture of socialist secularism. One of the most astute observers of red secularism, the Protestant minister Helmuth Schreiner, reflecting on this change in 1930, argued that the secularist content 13

Manfred Kittel, “Konfessioneller Konflikt und politische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik,” in Konfessionen im Konflikt Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter, ed. Olaf Blaschke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 290.

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was rapidly being marginalized within socialist Freethought. Schreiner had been asked by the Prussian Minister of Culture to provide his opinion on the request of Germany’s largest Freethought association, the DFV, to become a corporation of public law. The law required that the core task be the “cultivation [Pflege] of a worldview.” The older Freethought, Schreiner found, did convey a worldview based on “purely immanent natural-scientific or historical conception of world activity and human fate,” which “could not be denied a religious stance.” This variety of secularism, which “one could nearly call a fourth ‘confession’, was being driven into the background,” by two new forces operating in German Freethought: commercial activity and politicization.14 Because Schreiner’s analysis was not disinterested and may have been guided by a desire to prevent the granting of state recognition and even protection to the Freethinkers, one needs to approach his report with caution. However, his conclusions fit with those of historian Jochen-Christoph Kaiser and the evidence at hand and provide a guide to the significant transformation of organized secularism between 1925 and 1930. Whereas Kaiser has stressed the role of the cremation insurance business in these transformations, I focus in this section on the effect the competition between the socialist and communist parties had on each of the major Freethought organizations. The Community of Proletarian Freethinkers (GpF) At the end of the First World War, there were around 8,000 members of the Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers (ZpF), which renamed itself Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker (or GpF) in 1922. There were some other regional associations of red secularism outside this umbrella organization, most prominently the Berlin Free Religious Congregation with its 3,000 members. The intellectual dominance of the GpF among German secularists coincided with the maximal influence of monism in the worker culture movement detailed in the past chapter. This influence also extended to the formation of an international association of socialist Freethought. Seeking to launch a socialist alternative to the “bourgeois” Brussels Freethought International, members of the GpF joined with Austrian and Czech Freethinkers in meetings in 192215 that led to the formation of the 14 15

Helmuth Schreiner, “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand und die geistige Struktur der FreidenkerBewegung,” Sept. 13, 1930, EZA 1 / A2 /464/1, p. 138. Participants in the initial meeting in Leipzig in April 1922 included Adolph Hoffmann from FRC Berlin, Carl Peter from the FRC Leipzig, Bernhard Menke, Paul Krische and Arthur Wolf from the ZpF, as well as Frantzl from the League of Austrian Freethinkers. The Russian ProletKult and Belgian and French Freethinkers were represented by two Germans, Schiller and Fritsche. Krische and Wolf held the programmatic speeches. Der proletarische Freidenker, 1/5 (May 1922): 3.

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International of Proletarian Freethinkers (IPF) in Vienna in October 1924.16 The 1924 charter of the IPF gave a typical statement of the secularist compromise with the socialist parties, which began with the acknowledgement that “the full mental liberation of the working class depends on its economic liberation,” and required functionaries to stand “completely and fully on the foundations of Marxism,” but then argued that Freethought had a “special task,” which was the “realization of classless communitarian culture (Gemeinschaftskultur) embracing all peoples and races” to be achieved through the “destruction of religious and bourgeois ideologies in the heads of the proletariat.”17 The foundation of the IPF in the Czechoslovakian town of Teplitz-Schönau in May 1925 was a triumph for three prewar monists, in addition to chemist Paul Krische, schoolteacher Theodor Hartwig and Viktor Stern who had formulated the IPF’s guidelines together with Arthur Wolf, the leader of the GpF.18 The IPF was initially a predominantly German-speaking affair. Its largest members (with greatly inflated claims to membership) were the GpF (120,000); Communist Federation of Freethought (Federace komunistických osvětových jednot, Czech-speaking, 14,000); League of Proletarian Freethinkers of Czechoslovakia (German-speaking, 7,000); League of Proletarian Freethinkers of the Rhineland and Westphalia (23,000); Freethought League of Austria (100,000). In December 1925 the Soviet League of the Godless (Soyuz bezbozhnikov) joined the organization with a reported membership of 145,000.19 The GpF was centered in Saxony, Thuringia, the Rhineland, Hamburg and Franconian Bavaria, and had a substantial outreach into the working-class milieu through its newspaper Der Atheist, which by 1924 was being published in an edition of 60,000 copies. It was a fractious organization. Kaiser found one source of tension in the social difference between the movements’ intellectuals and its more working-class functionaries. Kaiser correctly noted that the better educated intellectuals found in Freethought an arena in which to realize their desire for recognition, yet one should question his identification of these figures as outsiders, because most came from other secularist 16

17 19

Protokoll der Konstituierenden Sitzung der ‘Internationale Proletarischer Freidenker’ (I.P.F.) in Teplitz-Schönau, am 31. Mai und 1. Juni 1925 (Vienna, 1925); Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des II. Kongresses der Internationale Proletarischer Freidenker (IPF) in Leipzig, 30. und 31. Januar 1926 (Leipzig, 1926). On the IPF, see Johannes Gleixner, “Socialist Secularism between Nation, State, and the Transnational Movement: The International of Proletarian Freethinkers in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Freethinkers in Europe: National and Transnational Secularities, 1789–1920s, ed. Carolin Kosuch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 235–70. 18 Protokoll IPF 1925, 11–14; Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 187–230. Protokoll IPF 1925. Protokoll IPF 1926. According to Kaiser the more likely maximum membership numbers for the GpF are 50,000, and the Austrian Freethought League 48,000. Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 147.

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organizations, such as the Monist League.20 Rather than class difference, the more important source of internal strife originated in the political struggles between the various members. The GpF repeatedly claimed that it represented the “third column” of the labor movement, alongside the political parties and the trade unions. As party political fronts increasingly divided the latter, the GpF took pride in the inclusion of both socialists and communists in its ranks. As we saw in Chapter 6, there was a strong correlation between secularism and membership in the USPD. This legacy expressed itself after the reintegration of the USPD into the SPD in 1922, by the fact that most Freethought associations were dominated by SPD functionaries, who often took stances in opposition to the SPD mainstream. In its militant self-description in the 1924 handbook of the national freigeistig coordinating body RAG, the GpF demanded that its members “publicly and completely align themselves with the revolutionary principle of the modern working-class movement and not allow themselves to be used to prop up the [existing] order,” which was a thinly veiled criticism of the state-supporting politics of the SPD. Only an organization “free of all encumbrances,” which the SPD with its coalition politics clearly was not, could lead the “anti-religious culture movement.”21 A further demonstration of its independence was praise in the Freethought press for the religious policies of the young Soviet Union. In the second half of the 1920s, many leading socialist Freethinkers, including IPF chairman and Social Democrat Theodor Hartwig, wrote positive reports of their study trips to the Soviet Union and the movement took pride in being nonpartisan.22 And, although it officially excluded anarcho-syndicalists, in fact, the Freethought movement remained a refuge for left-wing splinter groups such as anarchists, oppositional communists (KPDO), the ISK and the SAJ. The culture of the GpF revealed great continuities with prewar secularism and was expressed on the cover of a special issue of Der Atheist released at the launch of the first large, coordinated campaign to encourage church-leaving in April 1925 (see Figure 9.1). It is taken from the frontispiece of a book by leading “bourgeois” monist Wilhelm Bölsche, Der Mensch der Zukunft, which appeared in the main popular-scientific series of Kosmos in 1915 (see Figure 1.1). Der Atheist affirmed with the choice of this image the vision of the individual monist hero that united all secularists, and added to it some socialist framing. Like this image, the culture of red secularism of 1925, dominated at 20 21 22

Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 152. Wege und Ziele der freigeistigen Verbände der deutschen Republik (Berlin: Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung, 1924). Theodor Hartwig, Fritz Lewy and Max Seydewitz (eds.), Unsere Stellung zu Sowjet-Russland: Lehren und Perspektiven der russischen Revolution (Berlin: Marxistische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1931).

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Figure 9.1 Church-leaving special issue of Der Atheist, April 1925. “People awaken, Free Humanity.”

the time by the Community of Proletarian Freethinkers, would have been largely recognizable to earlier secularists. Such an image would unlikely have been used after 1928, when Freethinkers preferred crude anticlericalism to such romantic humanism.

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Association of Freethinkers for Cremation (VFF) The “commercialization” of Freethought took place through the astonishing growth of the Association of Freethinkers for Cremation (Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung, VFF). The association had been founded in 1905 in Berlin as an auxiliary service for Freethinkers and remained nearly invisible until after the war, when it grew to 12,750 members by December 1919. Following his defection from the Communist Party in 1921, Max Sievers, a former follower of Ernst Däumig, became the chairman of the VFF and under his capable leadership its cremation insurance grew by leaps and bounds, reaching 273,540 members (policy holders) by April 1924. The decision to unite the intellectually strong but organizationally and financially weak GpF with the wealthy, but politically quiescent VFF was reached in principle in 1921, but fusion did not take place until 1927. Sievers drove a hard bargain and, in the end, retained control of the united organization, which was named the Association for Freethought and Cremation (Verband für Freidenkertum und Feuerbestattung, VfFF). This merger marked a high point of Proletarian Freethought. With it, the VFF committed resources to the propagation of worldview, and the official newspaper Der Freidenker achieved a circulation of some 200,000 copies. Der Atheist, which had boasted a circulation of 60,000, now became the official organ of the IPF.23 Membership soared to nearly 600,000 members in 1928, with 226,369 in Berlin alone. For more detailed information about Proletarian Freethought in the Weimar Republic, readers are directed to Jochen-Christoph Kaiser’s unsurpassed account. Without questioning his factual basis, I contest three implicit conclusions regarding the VfFF. First, Kaiser proposed that the commercial interests of the organization trumped its secularist aims. Kaiser argued that the investment of the VFF and later VfFF in cultural activities, which included subsidizing an expensive newspaper, may have been partially motivated by a desire to appear as an organization principally dedicated to propagating worldview, thereby preventing the tax authorities from scrutinizing its accounts that did not follow the policies for holding sufficient reserves that applied to the insurance industry. However, even if cremation was a lucrative business, it was not opposed to but rather part of the cultural aims of secularism. As discussed in Chapter 2, cremation contravened church injunctions against destruction of the physical body, which had made it an ideal means to challenge the church monopoly over burial since the 1880s. As such, cremation was of a piece with other projects through which socialist Freethinkers

23

Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 160.

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sought to replicate the milieu-building functions of the churches. These included the Jugendweihe and secular (weltliche) schools. Following the failure of the Weimar Republic to create unified schools without religious education, the VFF demanded “Freethought instruction (religious studies and studies of community [Gemeinschaftskunde]).”24 In 1924, Proletarian Freethinkers in the industrial town of Leichlingen organized a year-long strike by schoolchildren, demanding creation of a secular school.25 By 1931 there were 289 secular schools in Prussia, and many more in regions that had enjoyed strong left-socialist majorities.26 Such evidence supports the claims of historians Peter Lösche and Franz Walter that the apogee of working-class cultural associations was reached not in imperial Germany, but in the late 1920s.27 The second revision I have of Kaiser’s account is his interpretation of the political valence of the VFF (and VfFF), specifically its relationship to the SPD hierarchy. According to Kaiser, the leadership of the VFF/VfFF, in particular chairman Max Sievers, were reformists who generally supported the party line of the SPD against “antireformists” in the membership.28 However, this is to be questioned. First, Sievers had consistently followed the most radical line of the USPD and reached a high rank in the Communist Party prior to his exit in 1921. He spoke of “class struggle” and obligatory Marxism throughout the 1920s. One demonstration of his commitment to secularist worldview came when a new post of intellectual leader of the united Freethinkers was created. Rather than delegate it to another functionary, he assumed that role himself. Although he was a pragmatist trying to please both the freethinking base and the party leadership, he did periodically enter into conflict with the SPD in the name of secularist ideals. As such, he carried forward the traditional oppositional stance of red secularism, as well as the more immediate past of the USPD during the German Revolution. A key moment of friction came in 1925, when the SPD leadership sided with Center Party leader Wilhelm Marx in the run-off election for Reich President against the archconservative Paul von Hindenburg after their own candidate Otto Braun failed in the first round. While the GpF took a clear line against Marx, Sievers was more circumspect in his lead article on the election in Der Freidenker. He rejected communist demands that Freethinkers vote for their candidate Ernst Thälmann, stating that the movement must avoid becoming a “playfield for party struggles” and hence he would not tell members who to vote for. However, he concluded,

24 25 26 27 28

“Richtlinien für den Kampf gegen das Reichsschulgesetz,” Der Freidenker, 1/9 (Oct. 1, 1925). Die weltliche Schule in Leichlingen 1925–1933 (Leichlingen: Stadtarchiv Leichlingen, 1996). Groschopp, Weltliche Schule, 177. Lösche and Walter, “Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung.” Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 148.

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“The Center Party is our mortal enemy, our position towards it is a given.” The fact that Freethinkers found themselves in a conflict of conscience between loyalty to the party and their secularist principles, revealed the “entire political misery of our present day.” The long-term solution was to propagate church-leaving, “then the greed for power of the black cowls will be eliminated. Church-leaving propaganda, that is the correct slogan right now.”29 Third, Kaiser concluded that despite the continual growth of Freethought during the 1920s, the result of its agitation was not increasing influence, but rather the “continually stronger distancing of the party from the forces, who as Social Democrats had carried the church-leaving campaign before the war.”30 Regional studies have challenged this characterization. Dietmar Klenke found that in Leipzig the Freethinkers held top positions in the party apparatus and were able to carry out their anticlerical actions essentially as party policy.31 In fact, Freethinkers worked through the party apparatus to expand into virgin territory, as the example of the semi-industrial town of Luckenwalde near Berlin shows. In 1930 the chairman of the 4,500-member-strong Freethought Association (which represented over one sixth of the town’s population) described its humble beginnings with 72 SPD and USPD members, who had founded a branch of the Proletarian Freethinkers (ZpF) following a speech he gave in February 1920 on “The Workers, Church, Religion and Science.” The group began an educational program with well-known secularist speakers from Berlin and Leipzig, undertook political agitation for church-leaving and for secular schools, and began to hold Jugendweihen with speeches by “comrade (Maria) Krische” among others. In his rosy prognosis of future growth, Bauer made clear that the Freethinkers recruited through the SPD organizations and the unions.32 This ability of Freethinkers to work within the SPD was attested to in a letter to the Protestant Consistory by Paul Piechowski, a minister and leader of Berlin’s “religious socialists.”33 He was alarmed at the speed with which the Freethinkers were “gaining ground among the workers.” They were

29 30 31 32

33

Max Sievers, “Politik und Freidenkertum,” Der Freidenker, 1/4 (May 1, 1925). Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 37. Dietmar Klenke, Die SPD-Linke in der Weimarer Republik (Münster: LIT, 1987), 869–905. In 1930 Luckenwalde had 26,000 inhabitants of whom 4,500 were Freethinkers. This group had grown from 70 members in first year, to 500 in the second, to 2,000 in the third. In 1930 every third child attended the secular school (weltliche Schule). Freidenker Treffen: Anlässlich des 10 jährigen Bestehens (Luckenwalde: Deutscher Freidenkerverband Ortsgruppe Luckenwalde, 1930). The movement of “religious socialism” arose after the war and formed an inner-party opposition to the Proletarian Freethinkers. The maximum membership reached 10,000–30,000 by the late 1920s, a figure, which, when compared to the Freethinkers, shows how resistant the socialist milieu was to the formal connection of Christianity or Judaism with socialism. On the Bund der religiösen Sozialisten Deutschlands, see Siegfried Heimann and Franz Walter, Religiöse Sozialisten und Freidenker in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: J. H.W . Dietz, 1993).

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providing slide shows to the socialist parties, who gladly accepted them because they were free and because the party deputies (Abteilungsleiter) “are nearly all Freethinkers themselves.”34 Thus there was a continuation of the prewar pattern of local support of secularism at the grass roots and mid-level of many regional party bodies, while the national leadership continued to criticize the Freethinkers whenever they attempted to inject their program into public party strategy.35 Indeed, socialist police chiefs and ministers used state power to intervene against Freethinkers in the late Weimar period.36 Communist Freethought Rather than commercialization through the cremation insurance business, the key development that transformed secularist culture was the effort by the Communist Party to turn Proletarian Freethought into a vehicle for its version of class struggle. This effort was prompted by the slow crystallization of a clearer communist policy on religion and by its rivalry with Social Democracy. Once the possibility of violent revolution passed with the last shudders of armed conflict in 1923, the communists increasingly turned to cultural politics. At the same time, global communism was consolidating its ideology under the conditions of dictatorship in the Soviet Union, an ideology that would become known as “Leninism.” In light of this ideological development, communists within the GpF and IPF increasingly rejected the radical humanism, naturalistic monism and life reform that made up core elements of the traditional culture of German Freethought and demanded instead adherence to Leninism. Lenin’s viewpoint on religion became more widely received in secularist circles following the publication by Hermann Duncker in 1926 of a translation of Lenin’s On Religion. Walter and Anna Lindemann, two communist teachers from Thuringia, demanded in their theoretical work of 1926 that the notion of Freethought as a “third pillar” was erroneous: all action needed to be considered from the viewpoint of class struggle. Yet, the Lindemanns did not

34 35

36

Piechowski to the Konsitorialrat, April 5, 1926, LABB 14/2519, unpag. Austrian party chief Otto Bauer had made this point at the Linz Party Congress in 1926. Freethinkers were free to operate within the party, “but we defend ourselves from one thing, namely against someone saying to us: whoever is not a Freethinker cannot be a Social Democrat or is a bad Social Democrat.” Quoted in: Franz Sertl, Die Freidenkerbewegung in Österreich im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Vienna: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 1995), 216. In a letter of Dec. 22, 1931, the socialist Police President of Berlin Albert Grzesinski wrote to the Prussian Minister of the Interior Severing that he had planned to forbid the DVF newspaper Freidenker for an article and libelous poem but decided against it because he felt it would help the KPD. He recommended that the matter be dealt with internally by the Party Directorate. IISG, Grzesinski papers, no. 310.

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argue that Freethought should be subsumed under the leadership of the Party. If it sacrificed the special claim to worldview, red secularism could retain its organizational autonomy.37 This autonomy was challenged by the shearing force of the communist– socialist rivalry, which played into the power struggle within the GpF between Arthur Wolf and the SPD-oriented board members that broke out in 1925. Each accused the other of serving outside interests: Wolf spoke of the “party directives” coming from the SPD group and the latter accused Wolf’s group of being “Moscow’s mercenaries.” Eventually a compromise between the warring factions was reached, though Wolf was ousted in 1926. In 1926 about 20,000 Freethinkers centered in Leipzig broke away from the VfFF and formed their own regional League of Socialist Freethinkers (BsF) under socialist control. Following the merger of GpF and VfFF in 1927, the national Freethought movement came under tighter control of Max Sievers, and thus the SPD. Communist Freethinkers increasingly took aim at the secularist worldview. Peter Maslowski, himself identified by Hermann Remmele as a former member of the circle of Hamburg monists turned communists, disparaged the monist-Marxist synthesis being popularized in the GpF. Maslowski published an article in Die Internationale in 1926, in which he argued that the Proletarian Freethinkers should not waste their energy fighting the religious socialists, but should instead attack Paul Krische, Müller-Lyer and Freud. “Why are people avoiding this? Haven’t they recognized the danger for Marxist worldview of the theory of autonomous drives as religious factors?”38 Communists often opposed the close cooperation of Proletarian Freethinkers with the “bourgeois” secularists organized in the RAG in joint church-leaving campaigns. In 1927, an oppositional newspaper was formed calling itself the Pfaffenspiegel. In October of that year, it argued that the times of a Feuerbach, a Strauss, the great Freethinkers are long gone. The materialists Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott are forgotten. The last great bourgeois Enlightener Haeckel was only a historical personality when he died in the year 1919. The Freethought movement no longer takes its theory from a Feuerbach, Strauß or Haeckel, but rather tries to orient itself ever more clearly on Karl Marx. Even the Monists cannot entirely resist this development.39

The author concluded that even the Free Religious were finding that their proletarian members were no longer interested in the religious ceremony and “were striving for new consciously proletarian forms of community action.” 37 38 39

Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 169–70. Peter Maslowski, Klerikalismus und Proletariat: Zur Religionsfrage und andere frühe Schriften (Aschaffenburg: Alibri, 2003), 56. “Remmele-Memorandum December 25, 1932,” 300. Diakon, “Die Führerrolle des Proletariats im Kampf gegen die Kulturreaktion,” Pfaffenspiegel, 1/4 (Oct. 9, 1927).

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Until 1928, communist agitation was an internal matter brought into Freethought by party members, who like Maslowski and the Lindemanns, had long-term commitments to secularism. This began to change once the Communist International embraced antireligious agitation as a key element of its global revolutionary strategy. This attention to religion was driven by the antireligious campaign that accompanied collectivization and the “cultural revolution” in the Soviet Union, which began in earnest in 1928 and quickly radicalized. To drive the campaign against the churches, the communist regime in Russia launched its own Freethought movement, the League of the Godless (Soyuz bezbozhnikov). The organization consistently failed to reach the goals of membership and action set by its central organs; however, it nonetheless showed remarkable growth figures, even if inflated, from 100,000 members in 1925 to 700,000 in 1929.40 The first inklings of what Soviet religious policy would mean for Germany came at the IPF Congress in Cologne in January 1928, which was dominated by two organizations not present at its founding in 1924, the German VfFF and the Soviet League of the Godless, each with over half a million claimed members. In his speech in Cologne, the representative of the Russian Godless, Sheinmann, took on the central plank of SPD religious policy, which was the precondition for its cooperation with the Catholic Center Party: “Religion is not a private matter of the believer, but it is – like every ideology found in the hands of the ruling, exploiting class – a tool of class rule and reaction. . . . We must show that the opinion, that historical materialism does appear as an obligatory atheist theory, is nonsense.”41 Such barbed comments, which IPF General Secretary Frantzl euphemistically called “a sort of mating competition of the socialist parties” at the time, soon led to an open struggle for control of the movement.42 In the course of 1928, the Comintern declared the SPD to be an agent of “social fascism” and urged the KPD to abandon covert infiltration and instead take overt steps to wrest control of the mass organizations of the German working class from the largely socialist leadership. KPD directives of 1929 and 1930 make clear that one of the aims of increasing the anticlerical activism was to outflank the SPD and draw its more radical adherents to the communist side. With its savage brand of anticlericalism, the Communist Party aimed not just to mobilize the working-class milieu in the service of a purported “class war,” but also to split it in the fratricidal struggle with the SPD. Religion was a promising area for agitation, because in its religious policies the SPD was 40 41 42

Peris, Storming the Heavens, 118. Protokoll III. Kongress der ‘Internationale Proletarischer Freidenker’, in Köln am Rhein 4.–8. Jänner 1928 (Vienna: Internationale Proletarischer Freidenker, 1928), 49. Protokoll IPF 1928, 19.

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Figure 9.2 “We will not leave you, if you bless us!” under the headline article “Concordat = Fascism.” (Der Gottlose, vol. 2, no. 3, March 1929)

vulnerable to the seemingly absurd charge that it was fascist. A cartoon from a communist Freethought newspaper Der Gottlose in March 1929 depicted the socialist Minister President of Prussia Otto Braun kneeling together with Benito Mussolini at the feet of Pius XI (see Figure 9.2). As a concession to his Catholic coalition partner, Braun had just agreed a concordat between the state of Prussia and the Holy See. According to the KPD, this made him equal to the Italian leader, who had recently signed the Lateran Accords. Communists ridiculed the idea of a worldview besides Marxism and demanded an end to “Kulturfreidenkertum.”43 In essence, they sought to split secularism’s constitutional integration of anticlericalism and monistic worldview and place anticlericalism at the service of the political aims of the Communist Party. Accordingly, the KPD simply assigned its members to join the VfFF and used atheistic militancy to try to compromise the socialist leadership in the eyes of the organization’s rank-and-file members. This effort backfired and by 1930 the communists had been trounced out of the VfFF and lost access to its funds and audiences. They then formed a duplicate, communist Freethought organization, the Zentralstelle (later Verband) proletarischer Freidenker, which achieved a membership of 153,000 by early 1932. The VfFF took further steps to dissociate itself from communist Freethought and in early 1930 applied to the Prussian government for the status of a corporation of public law, leading the communist press to call them “Konkordatsfreidenker.” It assumed the more moderate name German Freethought Association (Deutscher Freidenkerverband, DFV) in 1931. These developments replicated themselves internationally when communist organizations failed to take over the 43

Peter Maslowski, “Zur Religionsfrage,” in Die Internationale (1926) reprinted in: Maslowski, Klerikalismus und Proletariat, 40–59.

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IPF and created a communist rival organization of the same name in 1930. Meanwhile, the socialist IPF took steps to reunite with the “bourgeois” Freethought International that it had abandoned in 1925.44 Party Politics, the Authoritarian State and Religion Although the KPD failed to take over the Freethought movement, the fact that it undertook its antireligious agitation through the Freethought associations, and drew on the traditional techniques of secularists, including church-leaving, public blasphemy and popular science, to do so, altered not only the culture of red secularism, but also its public image. The growing culture war drew secularists of all political stripes to take increasingly radical stances, and to ridicule the churches in public with a high degree of vulgarity, such as during a street demonstration in Königsberg in 1929, when a man dressed in the robes of a Protestant pastor stopped periodically to demand that all participants kneel down and recite “a communist Lord’s Prayer.”45 According to the Berlin Police President in 1931, antireligious skits made agitprop theater groups the “most effective and at the same time ugliest method of KPD agitation.”46 In the eyes of conservative and clerical observers, the line between domestic Freethought and international communism became blurred and all were lumped together as “godless,” a term taken from the Russian bezbozniki. On January 15, 1930, the head of the Soviet Godless, Jaroslavskii, called in Pravda for communists to “penetrate all antireligious parties” and found “an international antireligious central that will help all communist parties lead the growing movement against religion.”47 This set off a wild speculation in Germany’s confessional and conservative press that Berlin was to become the center of global godlessness. The international tensions caused by Soviet anticlericalism boiled over in early 1930. In February, the Pope signaled the definitive shift in Vatican strategy from quiet negotiation to open hostility by announcing his “crusade of prayer” which was launched in a public mass in St. Peter’s Square on March 19 that drew a crowd of 50,000, including many foreign leaders, such as the head of

44 45 46

47

Gleixner, “Socialist Secularism.” See membership figures for the various socialist-secularist organizations around 1930 in Appendix 2. Letter from Protestant Consistory of East Prussia, Aug. 9, 1930. Evangelisches Zentralarchiv (EZA) 7/3569, 149. The Police President of Berlin Albert Grzesinski (SPD) described a performance in Essen in which three clerics appeared (Catholic, Protestant and Jewish) and sang a song against workers that ended with the refrain, “Yes, you can pray again, as we give your arse a kick; when hunger’s got the prolet by the throat, we get a raise from the republic.” IISG, Grzesinski papers, no. 1424. EZA 7/3569, 105.

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the German Center Party, Msgr. Ludwig Kaas.48 Following the lead of the Vatican, the German church hierarchies, Protestant and Catholic alike, instructed priests and lay organizations to undertake extensive defensive campaigns against German secularists, as part of a global battle with unbelief. We turn now to the respective confessional mobilizations among Catholics and Protestants. The Catholic Milieu Coinciding with the papal “crusade,” Germany’s cardinals made headlines in February 1930 with public calls for action against the godless movement. Large demonstrations soon followed. On April 13, 1930, over twenty Catholic organizations published a declaration condemning the “antireligious propaganda, influenced and supported by Moscow . . . and carried out with ever rising brutality by the German Freethinkers in recent years, and especially in this year.”49 A systematic strategy for the German church was unveiled at the summer episcopal conferences: priests were called on to exert greater influence on school-age youth, but the decisive role was assigned to Catholic lay organizations. If Russian children were being turned into “apostles of Bolshevism” and the godless were organizing cells and chapters, bishops were told, then the Catholic Church must use “the same means” and begin to educate and organize the Catholic laity.50 In other words, the clergy was urged to match the strategy of socialist Freethinkers and the KPD, which was milieu mobilization. When speaking of the Catholic milieu in the singular, it is important to recognize that milieu is a heuristic concept. German Catholics were by no means a homogeneous group, and among those who identified their politics with their faith, there were important subgroups, such as aristocratic conservatives and reform Catholics, who often opposed the policies of the dominant Center Party.51 Nonetheless, the bulk of Catholic politicians, clergy and lay leaders cooperated in what is considered the most successfully integrated political-religious milieu of modern Germany. Forced into a defensive position by the Kulturkampf of the 1870s, most Catholic leaders and the ecclesiastical hierarchy rallied to the Center Party and developed a host of confessional organizations. At the center of these lay the People’s Association for Catholic

48 49 51

Pettinaroli, “Politique russe,” 813–19; Philippe Chenaux, L’ église catholique et le communisme en Europe (1917–1989) de Lénine à Jean-Paul II (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2009), 86–87. 50 Märkische Volkszeitung, April 13, 1930. Kaiser, Realpolitik, 208. For a summary of the debate on the existence of a Catholic milieu, see Weichlein, Sozialmilieus, 20–25. On Catholic conservatives, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Franz von Papen, Catholic Conservatives, and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1933–1934,” Journal of Modern History, 83/2 (2011): 272–318. On reform Catholicism, see Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford University Press, 2010).

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Germany (Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland), founded in 1890 to “defend the Christian order of society.” The bishops entrusted this organization with the main responsibility for combatting atheism in 1930. Under the energetic leadership of priest Konrad Algermissen, its Apologetics Department developed a comprehensive strategy of trainings, public demonstrations and lectures.52 Another center of apologetic effort was the Windthorst League, the youth organization of the Center Party named after the party chief during the Kulturkampf, which joined the fray in winter 1931 with a campaign “against Soviet star and swastika.”53 Speeches on the dangers of atheism were high on the agenda of the 1930 and 1931 Katholikentag, which created its own Committee for the Struggle against Bolshevism comprised of prominent representatives of the Catholic press, labor unions, the Center Party and the clergy.54 Antisecularism went hand in hand with calls to reinforce the boundaries of the Catholic milieu generally, not only against atheists but also against Protestants. Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli reported in 1929 that the weak faith of Protestants had opened the door to church-leaving in Germany, while the Fulda episcopal conference in August 1930 found that Catholics were most susceptible to Freethought in confessionally mixed industrial religions, where “the boundary between socialist and non-socialist lifestyles appears to be eroding more and more.”55 The bishops restated their traditional ban on mixed Protestant-Catholic marriages, now reframed as a defense against secularism. The connection between apology and milieu resuscitation was expressed in a model sermon against Godlessness circulated to all German priests by the Volksverein in 1931: “Just as the Kulturkampf once purified and steeled religious life . . . so the great trials of our day will prove to be a source of blessing for us.”56

52

53

54 55

56

Between Jan. 1930 and Aug. 1931, the Volksverein held 1,737 meetings against radicalism and conducted 76 conferences for priests on Freethought. Herbert Gottwald, “Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland,” in Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte: Die bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Parteien und Verbände in Deutschland (1789–1945) (Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1986), 436, 460. Wolfgang Krabbe’s figure of 3,000 meetings appears high: Wolfgang Krabbe, Die gescheiterte Zukunft der Ersten Republik: Jugendorganisationen bürgerlichen Parteien im Weimarer Staat (1918–1933) (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1995), 103. Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, Algermissen papers, no. 15/7/5. Eugenio Pacelli, Die Lage der Kirche in Deutschland 1929, ed. Hubert Wolf (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 40; Heinz Hürten, Akten deutscher Bischöfe über die Lage der Kirche 1918–1933 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 1067–74. Richard Bigenwald, “Sermon on Christ the King Sunday: Modern Godlessness and Catholic Faith,” copy found in the Vatican Archive, AES, Germania IV, pos. 585, fasc. 93, fol. 32. The feast of Christ the King had been introduced in 1925 by Pius XI in Quas Primas against the “plague of anticlericalism.”

Party Politics, the Authoritarian State and Religion

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The dynamic relationship between antisecularism and milieu consolidation also manifested itself in the Center Party. During the Kaiserreich, the hostility of the Protestant-dominated state had aided party cohesion. But under the pluralistic conditions of Weimar, where the Center participated in all national government coalitions, it became more difficult to bridge the diverging political and social interests of its constituents. Following the collapse of the Center-led coalition under Wilhelm Marx in 1928, conflicts erupted over the role of Christian labor unions and over the party’s commitment to republican government. The election of a priest, Ludwig Kaas, to party chair in December 1928 helped resolve these crises, because it returned the party to its core worldview in Catholicism.57 Party intellectuals proudly and with increasing frequency announced that among all Weimar parties, Center represented “the party of worldview.”58 Antisecularism reinforced this confessional character and provided a campaign around which most party factions could come together. Yet, it widened other rifts. The Kulturkampf deepened the dissatisfaction of reactionary Catholics, such as Prussian Landtag deputy Franz von Papen, who opposed the Center Party’s policy of entering coalitions with the SPD and instead called for a return to an authoritarian state.59 The Conservative Protestant Milieu Some Protestant leaders worried that by showing greater leadership in the antisecularist struggle, the Catholic Church stood to gain ground in the age-old confessional competition. Baron Wilhelm von der Ropp, leader of the Christian Regiments (Kampfscharen), a Berlin-based evangelical youth sports program, admonished his “flabby” church to take on board what he saw as the military discipline of the Catholics.60 Such views spoke to the insecurity of Weimar Protestantism, which had lost the Protestant monarch and lacked a political party such as the Center Party to represent its interests. Despite its

57

58

59 60

Ulrich von Hehl, “Staatsverständnis und Strategie des politischen Katholizismus in der Weimarer Republik,” in Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933: Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, ed. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke and Hans-Adolf Jacobson (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1987), 251; Heinz Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken 1918–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1992), 96. On Center politics, see also Noel D. Cary, The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 121–28. Karl-Anton Schulte, “Das Zentrum und die neue Zeit: Grundsätze und politischer Ideengehalt der Partei,” in Nationale Arbeit: das Zentrum und sein Wirken in der deutschen Republik, ed. Karl-Anton Schulte (Berlin: Andermann, 1929), 31. Jones, “Franz von Papen.” Friedrich von der Ropp, Die Kirche in der Entscheidung (Berlin-Neutempelhof: Runge, 1933), 9.

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fears, the Protestant Church, too, developed a substantial antisecularist campaign that was comparable to Catholic efforts and followed similar patterns of milieu mobilization. In March 1930, the coordinating body of the German Protestant churches directed pastors to report on the local activities of the godless, and it issued a public protest against religious persecution at its Berlin conference in November.61 In June 1931, the Protestant Higher Church Council (Evangelische Oberkirchenrat or EOK) of the Old-Prussian Union, Germany’s largest church, directed its general superintendents to prepare an offensive against godlessness. Following instructional conferences in every district in October, pastors were to undertake intensive discussions with the laity of every congregation in November. The action would culminate with a Repentance Day (Buß- und Bettag) church collection to fund the struggle “For Christ against Godlessness.”62 Like its Catholic counterpart, the Protestant Church identified lay organizations as the key to combatting secularism. It formed an “Action Committee for Lay Training” and placed it under the leadership of the Central Office for Apologetics, a body created in 1922 to fight the growing worldview threats. The overarching umbrella for this effort was provided by the Inner Mission, the evangelizing wing of the Protestant Church.63 With a small staff of highly educated theologians, the Central Office for Apologetics acted in the realm of policy, training and publishing, and produced subtle analyses of Freethought. The Protestant Press Association (Evangelischer Pressverband), another creation of the Inner Mission, took an entirely different approach. It churned out articles for Germany’s leading conservative newspapers that were drastic in tone and not devoid of rumors and misinformation. Its publishing house put out numerous anti-godless brochures and books with racy titles, such as Lenin Anti Christus and Die Entfesselung der Unterwelt (Unchaining the Underworld).64 A host of other lay Protestant organizations held demonstrations against the threat of godlessness, including the roughly 300,000-member-strong Protestant League and its vituperatively anti-Catholic offshoot, the Luther Ring, founded in 1928 by the reactionary former Court Chaplain Bruno Doehring.65 Otto Dibelius, the General Superintendent for Kurmark, was one of the regional church leaders who made the struggle against Freethought a

61 63 64 65

62 EZA 7/3569. Nowak, Evangelische Kirche, 312. Decree of June 30, 1931, EZA 1/746. EZA 1/745. Matthias Pöhlmann, Kampf der Geister: Die Publizistik der ‘Apologetischen Centrale’ (1921–1937) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1998). EZA 7/3571, 198. Reichsbote, Nov. 28, 1931. Walter Fleischmann-Bisten and Heiner Grote, Protestanten auf dem Wege: Geschichte des Evangelischen Bundes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 100.

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primary field of personal action. He addressed it repeatedly in his regular newspaper column and on the radio, and, when communists announced an “anti-Easter march” through Brandenburg in 1930, Dibelius prepared to repel the anticipated siege. Churches were adorned with flags, bells rung, and all parishioners called to attend services at the time of the planned Freethought demonstrations. Such events were useful for building what Dibelius called “church front will” (kirchlichen Frontwillen).66 Even in deeply pious rural Württemberg, regional church leaders viewed developments in the cities of the north with grave concern. The deacon of Herrenburg told his church council in 1930 that “our district is no island. Diverse threads tie it to the outside world: through the agricultural crisis the numbers seeking employment in the city are growing, and the spirit of antireligious enmity seeks entry through all possible channels, even by exploiting economic distress.”67 Yet the deacon concluded that the struggle promised opportunities for the renewal of church life, a sentiment echoed elsewhere. In March 1932, the Saxon Consistory reported to the EOK: “On a whole, we have the impression that nothing in recent years has brought more new life into our congregations than the storm of godlessness, so that here again the Bible word has proven true: ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.”68 Conservative apologists linked the interwar Kulturkampf to political and theological struggles within their church, arguing that secularism could only be defeated if the church filled the void left by the dissolution of the ‘Christian State’ of imperial Germany and became a powerful national church, a Volkskirche. According to Dibelius, “forces hostile to Christianity” required not less but more church, a “church as fighting organism . . . We say to the liberalism of yesterday that, with its concept of the state, it is not suited to the hard reality of the present.”69 From Confessional to Political Mobilization The intense mobilization of the churches that began in February 1930 lasted until the National Socialist takeover three years later. The role of red secularism in this crisis period of the Weimar Republic came less from its concrete threat to the political order of the republic, and rather more from the way in which its agitation led to confessional mobilization. As we have seen in our coverage of the church-leaving campaign of 1913 and the 66 67 68 69

“Protokoll über den Ephorenkonvent der Kurmark am 1. und 2. Mai 1930,” EZA 7/3568, 114. Haag, Protestantisches Milieu, 266. Protestant Consistory Province of Saxony to EOKR, March 22, 1932, EZA 7/3571, 99. Otto Dibelius, “Beschwichtigung?,” Der Ring, 3/12 (March 23, 1930): 226–27.

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Revolution of 1918, secularist agitation in the late Weimar Republic triggered the underlying hostilities and rivalries between the various social milieus. And just as in the earlier periods, this confessional mobilization flowed directly into party politics. Statistical information gathered by the Reichstag on the confessional status of its members clearly demonstrates the correlation between religion and party affiliation (see Table 9.1). The KPD profiled itself as the party of atheism and made church exit all but mandatory for its leadership. Yet, most KPD members expressed this through the confessional marker of dissident, which in the parlance of the day stretched from Free Religious to atheist, to what one might consider the more secular choice of “not specified.” The SPD, although overwhelmingly comprised of dissidents, did have a significant number of Christian- and Jewish-identified members in the Reichstag. For the non-socialist parties, even the often anticlerical liberal and National Socialist parties, public identification with secularism was essentially anathema. Antisecularism and the ‘Conservative Revolution’ As the interwar Kulturkampf unfolded, milieu organizers sought to secure loyalty by emphasizing core religious (or secularist) values. This contributed to the political sea change of the late Weimar Republic, in which the parties that represented particular social interests gave way to parties that espoused worldview and emphasized member integration.70 At the same time, however, on the level of political rhetoric, the Kulturkampf contributed to the growing sense that the political field was dividing into two hostile camps. The polarization found expression in novel semantic formulations on the left, such as “Kulturreaktion.” The binary opposition of “Western civilization” (Abendland) and “cultural Bolshevism” (Kulturbolschewismus) proved a particularly effective weapon in the semantic arsenal of the right. The antisecularist imprint of “cultural Bolshevism” has been overshadowed in the work of scholars more interested in its use against political liberalism and artistic modernism.71 However, church presses published most of the brochures dedicated to this subject and church organizations formed the bulk of the signatories to a 1929 declaration against “cultural Bolshevism.”72

70 71

72

Sigmund Neumann, Die Parteien der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965), 105–07. Georg Bollenbeck, “German Kultur, the Bildungsbürgertum, and Its Susceptibility to National Socialism,” German Quarterly, 73/1 (2000): 67–83; Björn Laser, Kulturbolschewismus! Zur Diskurssemantik der ‘totalen Krise’ 1929–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2010). The 1929 petition was sponsored by DNVP-affiliated German Women’s Fighting League (Frauenkampfbund). Smolinsky, “Katholische Rußlandbild,” 336.

Table 9.1 The confessional identification of Reichstag deputies 1918–1933a Communist (KPD)

Socialist (SPD)

Liberal parties

Center

Conservative parties (DNVP)

Other

Völkisch parties

NSDAP

Total number of deputies

213

341

195

214

212

43

27

347

Protestant Catholic Jewish Dissidents Not specified

2 (1%) 0 0 199 (93%) 12 (6%)

43 (13%) 14 (4%) 5 (1%) 217 (63%) 62 (18%)

165 (85%) 17 (9%) 4 (2 %) 2 (1%) 7 (4%)

19 (9%) 194 (91%) 0 0 1 (0.5%)

182 (86%) 28 (13%) 0 0 2 (1%)

31 (72%) 9 (21%) 0 0 3 (7%)

24 (89%) 2 (7%) 0 0 1 (2%)

262 (76%) 64 (18%) 0 3 (1%) 18 (5%)

a

Martin Schumacher, M.d.R.: Die Reichstagsabgeordneten der Weimarer Republik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus: Politische Verfolgung, Emigration und Ausbürgerung 1933–1945: Eine biographische Dokumentation (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994), 29. Figures for the confessional orientation of NSDAP parliamentarians are taken from Max Schwarz, M.d.R. biographisches Handbuch der Reichstage (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1965).

307

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Kulturbolschewismus tied socialism and liberalism to Soviet communism by pointing to a common secularist root. Karl Hutten, a Protestant minister, called communism “not only a political movement – in our German Bolshevism that is perhaps not even the essential matter – rather it is a spiritual orientation [Gesinnung].” This “worldview of radical immanence [Diesseitigkeit] and godlessness” has its origin “above all in fallen liberalism. There is almost a straight line between ruined liberalism and Bolshevik cultural revolution.”73 A similar formulation is found in the May 1931 encyclical “Quadragesimo Anno” that called on Catholics to “bear in mind that the parent of this cultural Socialism was Liberalism, and that its offspring will be Bolshevism.” Shared opposition to secularism fed into hopes on the far right for a “conservative revolution” or “national opposition” that might unite Catholics and Protestants.74 In February 1930, the Bavarian chapter of Stahlhelm, Germany’s largest veterans’ organization and one of the key forces of the nationalist right, proposed to both state churches a combined battle against godlessness.75 Joint ventures of clergy and politicians formed with such programmatic names as the Christian Front and the German League for the Defense of Western Culture. Many of the leaders of these efforts, such as Protestant General Superintendent Otto Dibelius or Catholic aristocratic politician Franz von Papen, were simultaneously agitating for a fundamental revision of the political order in the form of an “organic” state under authoritarian leadership. They enjoyed close ties to the entourage of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, who took a decisive step towards authoritarianism following the collapse in March 1930 of the last German government backed by a parliamentary majority. Hindenburg appointed the conservative Center Party politician Heinrich Brüning to head a minority cabinet that ruled by emergency presidential decree. Dibelius and Papen were both close to the aristocratic Deutsche Herrenklub (Lords’ Club), a Berlin-based association that functioned as a conservative clearinghouse.76 With the collapse of Hermann Müller’s SPD-led government 73 74

75

76

Karl Hutten, Kulturbolschewismus: Eine deutsche Schicksalsfrage (Stuttgart: Verlag des Ev. Volksbundes, 1932), 1, 3–4. Hermann Beck, The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light (New York: Berghahn, 2008); Larry Eugene Jones (ed.), The German Right in the Weimar Republic: Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism (New York: Berghahn, 2014). Letter from Führer of the Bavarian Stahlhelm, Ritter von Lenz, to the President of the Protestant Church in Bavaria on Feb. 11, 1930. EZA 7/3568, 57; “Stahlhelm-Aufruf an Kardinal Faulhaber,” Der Tag, Feb. 13, 1930. In 1932, 229 of 394 members of the Herrenklub were nobles. Stephan Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer: Sozialer Niedergang und politische Radikalisierung im deutschen Adel zwischen Kaiserreich und NS-Staat (Berlin: Akademie, 2003), 422–37; Manfred Schoeps, “Der deutsche Herrenklub: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Jungkonservativismus in der Weimarer Republik,” PhD, Erlangen, Friedrich Alexander University (1974), 47; Yugi Ishida, Jungkonservative in der Weimarer Republik: Der Ring-Kreis 1928–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988).

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in March 1930 and the transition to the “presidential system,” direct ties to the military and Hindenburg’s entourage gave the Herrenklub unprecedented access to power. Many supported the appointment of Brüning, to head a cabinet that excluded the “Marxists” and united the major “bourgeois” parties. However, the new cabinet did not win universal support on the right. Far from it. The DNVP, Stahlhelm and NSDAP maintained a fierce animosity towards the Center Party, which stemmed from its identification with the hated Weimar “system” but also reflected their confessional antipathy for Catholicism. Those who backed the Brüning cabinet mobilized the language of the Kulturkampf against the völkisch-Protestant right. In October 1929 Franz von Papen published an article in Der Ring, the Herrenklub’s house journal, arguing that what was needed was not a “national opposition,” as championed by the far right, but a “conservative opposition” rooted in a common Christian worldview: Timor Dei initium rerum. An inner rebirth of Germany – and that is also the basis for its external liberation – can only take place via a Christian regeneration. An opposition from the right made up of forces, who like the ‘völkischen’ in their fanatical attitude toward ‘Rome’ show no understanding of Christian principles upon which rest the relationship of Catholic Germany to its state, can never be a conservative opposition.77

Remarkably, the author of this harsh condemnation of the völkisch right was the man who later did most to facilitate Hitler’s appointment to chancellor in 1933. Most historical accounts of the demise of the Weimar Republic introduce Papen at the point of his own appointment to Chancellor in June 1932, as a “largely unknown quantity [unbeschriebenes Blatt], [who] thus promised to be a steerable chancellor” for General von Schleicher, the chief string-puller of the Reichswehr.78 Yet, if one examines Papen’s involvement in the antisecularist struggle in the late Weimar period, one discovers not a fumbling crony, but a nationalist organizer, who single-mindedly pursued an antidemocratic conservative agenda in the name of Christianity.79 Between 1929 and 1932 Papen promulgated strategies to overcome Germany’s foreign policy dilemmas from a Christian perspective. To restore Germany’s international credibility and revise the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Papen advocated reconciliation with foreign conservatives, particularly in France, on the basis of shared Christian values.80 The threat of Soviet 77 78 79 80

Latin: “Fear of God is the beginning of things.” Franz von Papen, “Konservative Opposition,” Der Ring, 2/40 (Oct. 6, 1929): 769–70. Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich: Beck, 1993), 477. Jones, “Franz von Papen.” Since 1927 Papen had taken part in international meetings of conservative Catholic leaders and stated that socialist internationalism could be counteracted by the “universality of our Church.” Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge

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godlessness led him, in January 1930, to describe a new international constellation of power that made the old question of primacy in Europe incidental. For, if France were to seek continued conflict with Germany, Papen asserted that it would soon find itself “standing before the ruins of a fully godless, spiritless, Bolshevized Europe.”81 A similar argument was advanced by Werner von Alvensleben, another Herrenklub insider, to General von Schleicher. Only if Germany embraced “a common European task of overcoming Bolshevism,” he argued, could it escape from three interlocked fetters: the “formal democracy” of the Weimar Constitution that led to partisan polarization and class war; the “international democracy” of self-determination imposed by the Versailles treaty; and the international isolation brought by the Rapallo treaty.82 In 1930 Alvensleben and Papen created a pressure group to promote their position, the German League for the Protection of Western Culture (Deutscher Bund zum Schutz der abendländischen Kultur). It began on the eve of Brüning’s appointment with a meeting in the Herrenklub on March 14 to “discuss the religious persecution in Soviet Russia” and form an “action committee.”83 In addition to Papen, the list of speakers included his future Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Baron von Gayl, three former cabinet ministers, as well as leading church officials, including Catholic Bishop Christian Schreiber and General Superintendents Dibelius and Karow. The proximity of these men to government circles led to loud protests from the Soviet Foreign Office. A state secretary reported to German Foreign Minister Julius Curtius that the meeting was significant, “because it originated in the Center [Party] and lies in the hands of Mr. von Papen. We will accordingly have to reckon with a seemly strong position by Center against the Rapallo Treaty. I would like to recommend a prompt paralyzing of the expected initiative.” Curtius sought out Papen to discuss Russia, and obtained assurances from Brüning that he would not endanger the benefits Germany enjoyed from its cooperation with the Soviet military.84 Because the Foreign Office prohibited government officials from campaigning against the Rapallo alliance, the League for the Protection of Western Culture was, on one level, a dead letter even before it was officially constituted

81 82 83 84

University Press, 2007), 66–70; Jürgen Bach, Franz von Papen in der Weimarer Republik: Aktivitäten in Politik und Presse 1918–1932 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 155–56. Franz von Papen, “La bonne ou la mauvaise Allemagne?,” Der Ring, 3/2 (Jan. 12, 1930): 23–24. Alvensleben to Schleicher, Jan. 20, 1931, Bundesarchiv Freiburg, Kurt von Schleicher papers, no. 76, vol. 1, p. 51. Der Montag, Feb. 24, 1930; Rote Fahne, Feb. 25, 1930. Note of March 20, 1930; Curtius to State Secretary von Schuber, March 22, 1930, in Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945: Serie B: 1925–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), 405, 403.

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in June 1930. Yet, by operating in the “non-political” field of religion and culture, the League enabled members of the political establishment, whom police characterized as “right-oriented almost without exception,” to undermine Germany’s pro-Soviet foreign policy, while building a common platform with other European conservatives.85 Thus Alvensleben tried to lure Schleicher, Hindenburg, Brüning and other ministers to attend the League’s November 1930 demonstration “for culture and faith against the world revolution” in the Berlin Sportpalast with the tantalizing prospect that Winston Churchill would appear as a speaker. Instead, the former police Commissioner of London, Brig. General William Horwood spoke.86 Police reported that among the 8,000 to 9,000 spectators were some 800 members of the KPD, who interrupted the speeches of Greek Orthodox priest Seraphim and General Superintendent Karow with choruses of “Down with the church!” and “Long live Karl Marx! Long live Bolshevism!” When communists struck up the Internationale, they were drowned out by choruses of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”87 The Kulturkampf provided a supportive, ecumenical environment for the project of a non-revolutionary transition to authoritarian rule under Hindenburg and Brüning. However, the government required greater parliamentary support, and, seeking a popular mandate, Brüning called a snap election for September 1930. Instead of the desired outcome, the oppositional National Socialists made dramatic gains, increasing their seats from 12 to 107 at the expense of the conservative and liberal parties. This narrowed the parliamentary support for Brüning’s cabinet, forcing it to rely on toleration by the SPD, a party that appeared, because of its ties to the Freethinkers, to be on the opposite side of the Kulturkampf. This would prove a mortal danger to the new government, despite its own vigorous action against godlessness. When false rumors began to circulate in late 1930 that Berlin was to become headquarters of an “International of the Godless,”88 the League for the Defense of Western Culture and the Prussian Protestant Church Council appealed 85

86 87 88

The presidium of the League included, among others, former government ministers (the Kaiser’s former chief of staff von Berg, former Interior Minister Walter von Keudell, Count Keyserlingk-Cammerau, former security commissar Hermann Kuenzer, former government president von Miquel), DNVP politician von der Osten-Warnitz, high-ranking Center Party conservatives (Franz von Papen, Count Praschma and Prince Alois zu Löwenstein), Center deputy Prelate Georg Schreiber, former Court chaplain Bruno Doehring, Oskar Wassermann of the Deutsche Bank. Report of the Police Office (IA), Berlin, Dec. 1, 1930, BArch, R 1501/ 20133, 204. Alvensleben to Schleicher, Oct. 28, 1930, Bundesarchiv Freiburg, Kurt von Schleicher papers, no. 76, vol. 1, p. 33. Der Montag, Nov. 17, 1930; Die Welt am Abend, Nov. 17, 1930; BArch R 1501/20133, 204. “Die bolschewistische Internationale der Gottlosen etabliert sich in Berlin unter dem Schutz Severings – Was gedenkt Herr Wirth zur ‘Rettung der christlichen Kultur’ zu tun?,” Völkische Beobachter, Nov. 22, 1930; “Neujahrs-Offensive der Gottlosen,” Deutsche Zeitung, Dec. 29,

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directly to the Chancellor and Interior Minister for intervention.89 In early 1931, the government signaled a tougher line by opening up blasphemy cases,90 and on March 5, the Minister of the Interior Joseph Wirth gave a fiery speech against “cultural Bolshevism” in the Prussian parliament. Wirth, a former Chancellor and leading figure in the Center Party, deemed the existing liberal law of association insufficient to the task of stemming the “outgrowths of barbaric crudity” and promised to use “all means to end the appalling incitement” of anticlerical agitprop troupes.91 At a meeting on March 18, 1931, the interior ministers of the German states agreed that existing legislation did not provide sufficient legal instruments to combat godlessness. An emergency decree was drawn up, for which the Bavarian interior minister proposed the name “security of the state” to avoid having it appear as a “pure Kulturkampf law.”92 Historians of the Weimar Republic have highlighted the resultant “Decree to Combat Political Excesses” of March 28, 1931 as an important curb on political rights. However, they have given scant attention to the ample evidence that Freethought anticlericalism was central to its genesis.93 Issued one day before Easter, it specifically prohibited meetings “that slur or maliciously ridicule a public religious society, its institutions, practices or objects of worship.” Wirth announced the decree in a radio address as a “great Christian deed to save culture . . . directed above all against the godless movement.”94 The first major target of the decree was a massive Jugendweihe for 2,000 children of Berlin communists held in the Sportpalast on March 30.95 On May 30, 1931, Wirth summoned some of Germany’s highest Catholic and Protestant Church officials to coordinate the struggle against Proletarian Freethought. General Superintendent Karow proposed the formation of “cells” (Zellenbildung), which Wirth agreed to finance with a secret fund. He then told

89 90 91 92 93 94 95

1930; “Vormarsch der ‘Gottlosen’ auf Europa,” Berliner Börsenzeitung, Dec. 3, 1931; “BerlinMoskau kulturpolitsche Solidarität,” Berliner Börsenzeitung, Feb. 13, 1931. Kapler to the Minister of the Interior, Feb. 24, 1931, EZA 7/3569, 17. BArch R 1501 (St. 10)/37 no. 95–100, 198–212. Quoted in KPD Urantrag no. 6710, March 17, 1931, GStA PK I HA, Rep. 169, D, XII, F, no.1, p. 12. BArch R 1501/126031, 46; R 1501/20631, 153. Dirk Blasius, Weimars Ende: Bürgerkrieg und Politik 1930–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 27; Winkler, Weimar, 401. Braunschweigische Landeszeitung, March 19, 1931. Wirth to Kapler, March 28, 1931, EZA 1/ 741, 5. According to the Rote Fahne (March 31, 1931) 15,000 attended the Jugendweihe. Following songs by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, the agitprop group “Red Hammer” began a puppet show with large priests to show “the struggle of the working class against the cultural reaction,” whereupon the police dissolved the ceremony. See also “Hetzversammlung der Gottlosen aufgelöst,” Der Tag, March 30, 1931.

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the assembled church leaders that because of the limited ability of his ministry to “crack down” (durchgreifen), the “lay world” should help by lodging complaints with the police and “if necessary even breaking the windows of offensive locales.”96 This incitement to vandalism by a politician who is considered a pillar of Weimar democracy reveals the government’s untenable position. As long as it stayed within the framework of the rule of law and protected constitutionally guaranteed free speech, the liberal state could only set boundaries to Freethought anticlericalism. For those inside the churches who sought not containment but suppression, the Brüning government appeared weak. In December 1931, the Archbishop of Breslau wrote to the Chancellor of his concern that “the same government that has shown a strong hand in the use of bureaucratic means to protect state authority has not proven strong enough against the godless movement in the eyes of the best circles of the Catholic population. Mistrust is growing in these circles to a worrying degree.”97 Criticism of the state’s handling of the godless movement featured prominently in the growing opposition to Brüning’s government from the right. At a demonstration in Berlin in February 1931, Bruno Doehring declared that the sole means of defeating Bolshevism was the “return to a pious national feeling.” He described two fronts: on one side stood the anticommunist Orthodox Russians and German nationalist Protestant clergy, and, on the other, the Center Party, the SPD and the godless. “Chancellor Dr. Brüning!” he asked “which front do you stand in?”98 The implied answer was that the Catholic chancellor was aiding godlessness by allowing the Center–SPD coalition government to continue to govern the state of Prussia. For conservatives, state protection of the rights of socialist Freethinkers in Prussia was the best proof of Center hypocrisy. And, like the communists, they sought to evoke moral outrage by depicting the Prussian coalition as an unholy union. This rhetoric figured prominently in Stahlhelm’s agitation for the 1931 plebiscite to dissolve the Prussian state government. At a large Easter rally in Magdeburg, Stahlhelm leader Franz Seldte mused that if the plebiscite triggered a war with Social Democracy, “this is also a war of Christian versus 96

97

98

EZA 7/3569, 108. 45,316 marks were secretly paid to the Protestant Church for its antiFreethought activities between July 1931 and April 1933, EZA 1/746 (unpag.). Kaiser assumes that similar amounts were probably paid to the Catholic Church. Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 308–10. Bertram to Brüning, Dec. 24, 1931, BArch R 43II/149, 19–21. Two weeks earlier Cardinal Faulhaber had sought the Pope’s blessing for “the greatest task we face in the new year: the defense against Bolshevism,” and complained that the German government was opening the door to atheism by allowing Moscow’s agents to operate in all German cities. Faulhaber to Pius XI, Dec. 15, 1931, in Ludwig Volk (ed.), Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917–1945, vol. i (Mainz: Grünwald, 1975), 599–600. “Soll Deutschland gottlos werden?,” Deutsche Zeitung, Feb. 9, 1931.

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godless worldview.” Aiming at the Center Party, he asked: “Is it then so difficult for the churches to join together with those who act on behalf of positive Christianity, or does it appear more advantageous to join with those who for political, trade union or other reasons propagate the Marxist doctrine that heaven is empty?”99 In June 1931 the DNVP, Stahlhelm and NSDAP used the supposed collusion with atheism to justify the formation of a nationalist opposition to the Center Party called the Working Committee of Catholic Germans.100 In October, these organizations met in the town of Bad Harzburg to demonstrate their opposition to Brüning’s government. A midday military church service officiated by Protestant and Catholic priests portrayed the “Harzburger Front” as a bulwark against godlessness.101 In his own speech, Adolf Hitler sketched out the religious dimension of the war between the forces of nationalism and Marxism: “One part sees in religion a necessary foundation for the ethical, moral education of the people, another part declares the category of God as non-existent.” Hitler took the liberal state to task for not addressing the core conflict and “only fighting against the final brutal consequences of the differences of worldview.” Rather than allowing “the expansion of worldviews that ridicule the category of God,” Hitler demanded that the state decide the battle between worldviews. “Woe, if in addition to its confessional division, Germany also develops a lasting political one. Woe, if the worldviews of a political nature became petrified as we have experienced with our confessions.”102 Antisecularism and National Socialism Hitler’s speech reveals the strategic logic of the religious plank of his party’s 1920 program, which supported “positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination.” Because it lacked any theological content, some historians have taken this advocacy of a non-dogmatic Christianity for trickery.103 This misses the crucial point: “positive Christianity” was principally a statement on confessional politics. Division between Catholics and Protestants was a central theme in Hitler’s understanding of the weakness of the German state. It was to be overcome not through religion, but rather by shelving theological disputes and offering instead, as 99

100 101 102 103

Braunschweigische Landeszeitung, March 29, 1931; Deutsche Zeitung, March 28, 1931. Volker R. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm: Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918–1935 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1966), 168. “Verordnungsblatt der Reichsleitung der NSDAP,” June 10, 1931. Deutsche Zeitung, Oct. 12, 1931. Speech in Bad Harzburg, Oct. 11, 1931, in Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, vol. iv/3 (Munich: Saur, 1999), 126. John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–1945 (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1997), 5–6.

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Hitler put it in another speech, a “political sign that will unite the people, who stand on the foundation of a non-Marxist, non-materialist . . . deeply idealistic worldview.” He stated that a pagan symbol, the swastika, could be more Christian than the cross, because the parties that represented the cross had made that symbol impotent against Marxism.104 While scholars are now addressing the confessional logic of “positive Christianity,” they have underappreciated the centrality to it of antisecularism.105 Hitler explained this connection at a large public gathering in Munich in 1927: They have accused us of being against the church, [of being] bad Christians or not Christian at all. If under Christianity they understand only Konfession, then we are indeed bad Christians. If however the word of the Lord is authoritative, then we are the best. We National Socialists refuse to bring confessional strife into our ranks . . . We serve Christ more than those [i.e. the Center Party, T. W.] who form electoral alliances with Marxists, atheists and Jews.106

Many Protestants quite clearly understood that Hitler’s Christian deed did not stem from a Christian conviction. In 1931, a minister in Bavaria likened Hitler’s attack on the godless in Russia to the providential role played by the heathen Persian King Cyrus in liberating the Jews from Babylonian captivity. Catholics found Hitler’s antisecularism less appealing, for while nominally promising to rescue their milieu, he was, in fact, attempting to split it in two.107 In their religious rhetoric, the National Socialists were not far from Stahlhelm. Where they differed from other members of the “National Opposition” was their willingness to disregard legal constraints in rolling back secularism. Upon entering state governments, Nazi ministers reversed prior secularization of the educational system, for example by introducing compulsory antisemitic school prayers in Thuringia in 1930 and closing secular (weltliche) schools in Brunswick in 1932.108 104 105

106 107

108

Speech in Munich, Oct. 25, 1930, Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, vol. iv/1 (Munich: Saur, 1996), 33. Samuel Koehne, “Reassessing the Holy Reich: Leading Nazis’ Views on Confession, Community and ‘Jewish’ Materialism,” Journal of Contemporary History, 48/3 (July 1, 2013): 423–45; Blaschke, Kirchen. For my position, see Todd H. Weir, “Hitler’s Worldview and the Interwar Kulturkampf,” Journal of Contemporary History, 53/3 (July 1, 2018): 597–621. Speech in Munich, May 24, 1927, Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, vol. ii/1 (Munich: Saur, 1992), 317–18. Mensing, Pfarrer und Nationalsozialismus, 130. On Hitler’s rhetoric against the Center Party, see Thomas Fandel, Konfession und Nationalsozialismus: Evangelische und katholische Pfarrer in der Pfalz 1930–1939 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997), 50, 52. Günter Neliba, Wilhelm Frick: Der Legalist des Unrechtsstaates (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1992), 57–62. In March 1932 the NSDAP Minister of Education closed secular schools in Brunswick: “Klagges neuster Streich: Abbau der weltlichen Schulen in Braunschweig,” Der Funke, March 27, 1932.

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Estimations of the balance of forces on the religious front varied widely in early 1932. State officials believed that they were successfully containing anticlericalism. In January, the Interior Ministry announced that it had put an end to the most offensive methods of godless propaganda, and a conference of the provincial ministers of culture concluded that no further emergency decrees were needed.109 Despite the drop in anticlerical action, the churches extended their fight against Freethought, providing more trainings and publications and holding demonstrations.110 Such was the apparent disparity between anticlerical agitation and conservative Christian response that a left-liberal paper asked pointedly in April 1932, “whether or not there has ever really been such a movement in Germany” to match the rumors: “Certain papers from the provinces have attempted to paint the capital in particular as a true hell of the godless, filled with the bacchanalian screams of the devil’s adepts. But in Berlin one has noticed none of that.”111 News of Germany’s greatest anticlerical scandal of 1932 circulated almost entirely in the right-wing press. On March 22, a revue was performed at the Tivoli Theater in Dessau to coincide with the socialist Jugendweihe. Particularly offensive to the reporter from the Börsenzeitung was the performance of the agitprop troupe Red Fanfares, composed largely of members of the Young Socialist Workers (Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend). Their satire of “religion, God, clergy, authority, and morality . . . boggles the imagination. Words flowed from the lips of the twenty-year-old ‘master of ceremonies’ like abortion, sodomy, lecherous priests, etc. God was portrayed as a naked Chinese coolie, a puppet whose mask was ripped off by the chorus (Sprechchor). Then two ‘Catholic priests’ sang a couplet fit for a sailors’ bar.”112 The nationalist press kept circulating this report because it provided excellent ammunition in the electoral campaigns that maintained Germany in a near constant state of agitation between March and July of 1932.113 The story broke during Hitler’s unsuccessful run-off election against Hindenburg for Reich President and was sustained in the Nazi papers for

109 110

111 112 113

BArch R 1501/20133, 243; Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 306. In late February 1932, 12,000 men and women took part in a mass rally against godlessness in Paderborn (Germania, Feb. 29, 1932) and throughout 1932 new antisecularist organizations continued to pop up within the nationalist Protestant milieu, such as Nationale Abwehrstelle gegen bolschewistische Umtriebe, Vereinigung Deutscher Wille, Liga zur Abwehr des Bolschewismus, Apologetische Kampfgruppen. Die Welt am Montag, April 9, 1932. Berliner Börsenzeitung, n.d., copy in EZA 1/744, 14. The Börsenzeitung report appeared in Anhalter Anzeiger, April 24, 1932; Reichsbote, April 16, 1932; Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, April 19, 1932; Völkische Beobachter, June 29, 1932.

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the subsequent election campaign for the Prussian parliament. Der Angriff published a full-page broadsheet addressed “To Protestant Christendom!” that pointed to “the growing millions of the godless movement” and called on “Christian men and women” to “erect a dam . . . against the filth of atheism.”114 On the eve of the elections, the chief apologist of the Catholic Volksverein, Konrad Algermissen, urged the Ministry of the Interior to take firmer action against Freethought, as the “National Socialists are making huge profits out of the shameless performance of the socialist Freethinkers of Dessau.”115 Such drumming on the right further eroded Hindenburg’s trust in Brüning. Feeling isolated from the nationalist right, Hindenburg wanted to balance the April 13 ban on Nazi paramilitary formations with a ban on the socialist Reichsbanner. Minister of the Interior Groener refused, but as partial compensation, he acceded to another of Hindenburg’s wishes and dissolved the communist Freethought associations on May 3.116 However, rather than shoring up support on the right, this action opened the government to new attacks. The nationalist press immediately accused it of halfmeasures because the socialist Freethinkers had been spared.117 On May 30, 1932, Hindenburg forced Brüning to resign and appointed Papen to replace him. Papen had already broken ranks with his party with the warning that “Center will be Christian-conservative – or it will no longer be. Germany demands this decision, because it wants to be a Christian state!” After formally resigning from the Center Party on May 31, Papen announced the formation of a largely aristocratic and nonpartisan cabinet based on “the unchanging principles of Christian worldview” and opposed to “cultural Bolshevism.”118 The new Minister of the Interior von Gayl stated his wish for a new school law that would bar confessionless teachers and close secular schools that “have no relationship to German national character [Volkstum].”119

114 115 116

117 118 119

Der Angriff, April 19, 1932. Algermissen to Lengriesser, April 22, 1932. BArch R 1501 (St. 10)/37, nos. 61, 62. Johannes Hürter, Wilhelm Groener: Reichswehrminister am Ende der Weimarer Republik (1928–1932) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), 347; Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1984), 949. Reichsbote, May 7, 1932; Völkische Beobachter, May 12, 1932; Tägliche Rundschau, May 14, 1932; Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, May 22, 1932; Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 332. “Von Papen begründet seine Stimmenthaltung,” Der Ring, 5/16 (April 15, 1932); Winkler, Weimar, 480. These measures were meant to “ensure and protect the free development of Christian schools and the Christian foundation of all education,” wrote Interior Minister von Gayl to state ministers of education on July 28, 1932. Quoted in Rainer Bölling, Volksschullehrer und Politik: Der Deutsche Lehrerverein 1918–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 217.

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In the run-up to the July 31 Reichstag elections, which brought the NSDAP 37 percent of the popular vote, the DNVP and the NSDAP tried to outmatch each other in calling for an end to red secularism. Each party submitted parliamentary legislation to extend the ban on the communist Freethought organization to its socialist counterpart as well.120 The Center Party spoiled these draft bills in committee by appending to them a ban on pagan-völkisch nationalist groups. A Center Party delegate justified this obstruction as a defense of the Christian milieus: “If one desires tolerance for oneself, one must also give it to others. Should the Social Democrats and Communists gain the majority, then we can expect retaliatory measures against Christian organizations if we now move against the Freethought organizations without sufficient justification.”121 In autumn 1932, the head of the Protestant Higher Church Council acknowledged that state action was driving Freethought from the streets of Germany, but, following a dubious logic, he urged redoubled church efforts because the enemy was now working “in hidden and ever new ways,” making it “more difficult to identify and thus more dangerous.” The head of the Central Office for Apologetics stated baldly that “the Freethinkers are feeling uncertain and the situation is ripe for an offensive by the Protestant side.”122 Police reports and internal documents of the KPD show that the state repression of the communist Freethinkers was increasingly effective and that the socialist DFV had been weakened as well.123 Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor raised expectations for a quick resolution of the perceived religious civil war. To demonstrate resolve, the NSDAP declared that it would close secular schools on Easter 1933 and make religious instruction a mandatory school subject for all.124 After the election victory of its coalition on March 5, 1933, the NSDAP moved decisively against the socialist Freethinkers. On March 16, the party forbade all upcoming socialist and communist Jugendweihe events, and the following day, it sent SA units to shut down the Berlin headquarters of the DFV.125 State persecution was so thorough that the German bishops recommended that the Vatican refrain from

120 121 122 123 124 125

GStA PK, I HA, Rep 169 D, no. 9, appendix 1, p. 205. Protocol of the main committee of the Prussian Parliament, 8th Session, Sept. 27, 1932; in GStA PK, I HA, Rep 169 D, Xc Religion, A, no. 3; Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 332. Letter from Kapler, EOK to the Superintendents of Germany, Oct. 24, 1932, EZA 7/3571, no. 266; Protocol of the Action Committee for Lay Education, Sept. 13, 1932, EZA 7/3571, 302. Police report, Berlin, Nov. 1, 1932, BArch R 1501/20637, 10; R 1501/20728, 39; Police Presidium report of Aug. 9, 1932 on the situation in Württemburg, BArch R 1501/126002, 81. Hartmut Fritz, Otto Dibelius: Ein Kirchenmann in der Zeit zwischen Monarchie und Diktatur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 386. Andreas Meier, “Struktur und Geschichte der Jugendweihen/Jugendfeiern,” Working Papers, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung 2001.

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issuing a proposed encyclical condemning godlessness in Germany, in part because they deemed church action superfluous.126 Otto Dibelius led a religious service at the “Day of Potsdam” in March 1933, as part of a ceremony that made Hitler the symbolic heir to the Prussian kings. Dibelius expressed pleasure at the restoration of authority in Germany in his sermon “With God towards a new future!” Yet his repeated reminders to the National Socialists of their Christian responsibilities sounded an undertone of unease.127 Ambivalence also permeated a meeting held that same day in the Central Office for Apologetics. The speakers recognized the new order as positive, even “providential,” but worried that it might veer into intolerance. They voted to seek cooperation with the Nazi-affiliated movement within the church, the German Christians.128 Although the Catholic clergy had remained largely united in their opposition to National Socialism until Hitler’s appointment, the threat of godlessness helped them accept the new regime, if only as the lesser of two evils. Algermissen wrote to Cardinal Bertram at the end of March 1933 that should the Nazis fail, “Bolshevism would claim a terrible inheritance, so that we can only wish that National Socialism reaches its economic, social and political goals.”129 One month later the Bishop of Regensburg stated that although the Nazi suppression of civic freedom “has created much disappointment and bitterness, nonetheless many well-meaning [people] still see in it, even today, a champion against Bolshevism, against a godlessness and immorality that threatened to break all dams.” For this the regime “has earned great sympathy from the people and truly deserves thanks.”130 Such formulations provided a rationale for quietism by Christian leaders who felt uneasy about National Socialism.131 Efforts were made by numerous secularist organizations to find a niche in the new regime, but the price was to divorce their worldview or reform work from dissent and most importantly, from socialism. The Leipzig nudist Group for Proletarian Life Reform and FKK attempted to evade closure by renaming

126

127 128 129 131

Card. Faulhaber to Orsenigo, March 5, 1933; Bishop Michael of Regensburg to Orsenigo, March 3, 1933. Archivio della Congregazione della Fede, Vatican, R.V. 1933 no. 15, S.O. Germaniae – Segr. di Stato, pp. 41, 53. Fritz, Dibelius, 397–406. Dibelius held a training course on godlessness in his church province on March 27, 1933. Protocol of the study conference for domestic mission (Volksmission), March 21, 1933, EZA 7/3572, unpag. 130 Quoted in Kaiser, Realpolitik, 277. Volk (ed.), Akten Faulhabers, vol. i, 703. The motto of the 1934 Protestant Repentance Day was: “With a strong hand our state has broken the public resistance of the antichristian powers.” EZA 14/2157, unpag., April 11, 1934.

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itself a garden club in March 1933; however, its property was confiscated soon thereafter by the National Socialist state. Adolf Koch’s FKK school in Berlin was similarly seized in April 1933, but he was allowed to refound his organization in 1934 as the “Adolf-Koch-League for Social Hygiene, Physical Education and Gymnastics,” only to have this incarnation closed the same year. In 1935 he reopened as the Institute for Eubiotic.132 Conclusion What role did red secularism play in the politics of the Weimar Republic? The most comprehensive answer to this question has been offered by JochenChristoph Kaiser, who argued that Proletarian Freethought was something of a paper tiger. Albeit one of the largest cultural organizations of the socialist milieu with over half a million members, Kaiser found the VFF to be largely a cremation business with modest political impact. The more authentically secularist wing represented by the GpF remained for Kaiser a thorn in the side of the SPD, a constant irritant that was out of step with the reformist direction of the party. This chapter has sought to revise this interpretation in two directions. First, it has argued that red secularism was firmly integrated into the socialist milieu, and that despite its failure to achieve its political aims, its cultural impact was significant. During the 1920s, participation in the Jugendweihe increased dramatically, secularist periodicals reached much greater circulation, and church-leaving campaigns paralleled prewar efforts. The cultural associations and the secular schools provided secularists with a limited but nonetheless significant institutional anchoring in cities such as Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and regions such as Saxony, Braunschweig and Thuringia. The strategic choice by the Communist Party to unleash its antireligious offensive from within the secularist movement was motivated, in part, by the attractiveness of this movement and its resources, and it had significant transformative effects. Communists rejected the socialist synthesis of monism and Marxism and sought to extirpate the idea of a special worldview of secularism. This was a fundamental challenge to the culture and the autonomy of red secularism and ushered in a deep internal crisis. Outwardly, the communist offensive meant that red secularism lost control of its brand. Conservatives promulgated the theory of “cultural Bolshevism” which depicted Freethought as the atheist face of Marxism. Thus, after

132

Leipzig Stadtarchiv, 2517/575, 1642. Giselher Spitzer, “Die ‘Adolf-Koch-Bewegung’: Genese und Praxis einer proletarischen Selbsthilfe-Organisation zwischen den Weltkriegen,” in Arbeiterkultur und Arbeitersport, ed. Hans Joachim Teichler (Clausthal-Zellerfeld: DVS, 1985), 98.

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1930 red secularism became a victim as much as a protagonist of the Kulturkampf. The SPD-led DFV was pulled into the dynamic and its leaders sought to affirm their party loyalty while still calling out the churches as mainstays of rising fascism and “Kulturreaktion.” Second, the ultimate ramifications of the participation of red secularism in the interwar Kulturkampf are not to be sought in the mobilization of the socialist and communist milieus, but rather in the Protestant and Catholic milieus. Given the formative role played by religion in the structuring of Weimar politics and society, the interwar Kulturkampf triggered anxieties slumbering in Germany’s other confessional milieus. For many Christians, it represented a religious emergency that called into question the ability of the liberal state and the parliamentary system to master it. It cast a pall over the cooperation between the SPD and the Center Party, upon which the health of German democracy depended, by highlighting their divergent worldview interests and pitting the right to freedom of conscience against the need to protect the state churches. The Brüning cabinet promised a conservative solution to these dilemmas and it initially received support from major church apologists. Yet, because Brüning’s own Center Party broke neither with the SPD nor with core tenets of the liberal state, it appeared ineffective to many who wished for an end to secularism. The völkisch right aimed directly at this contradiction at the heart of the Brüning government and mobilized the conceptual arsenal forged by church apologists and Christian conservatives to argue that only through the destruction of both the Center Party and secularism could confessional divisions be eliminated and Germans united in a supra-confessional “positive Christianity.” The Kulturkampf provided Hitler the opportunity to portray his as the best Christian party, not in religious terms, but in confessional ones. Just as the violent deeds of the brownshirts gave the NSDAP prominence in the lowgrade civil war fought between paramilitaries, so its call for extreme measures against Freethought allowed it to appear as the standard-bearer of the Christian West in the religious war. With this in mind, the NSDAP did not relent from its attacks on Freethought, even after the state had driven the movement into relative disarray using the emergency decrees of March 1931 and May 1932. The party increased its antisecularist propaganda in the crucial elections in 1932. Inclusive calls for a defense of Christianity help explain some of the inroads made into the Catholic milieu, a feat that has led some historians to the call the NSDAP the first Volkspartei.133 Yet the

133

Jürgen Falter, “The First German Volkspartei: The Social Foundations of the NSDAP,” in Elections, Parties and Political Traditions: Social Foundations of German Parties and Party Systems, 1867–1987, ed. Karl Rohe (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1990), 53–91.

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anti-Center implications of Nazi antisecularism spoke directly to the Protestant nationalist camp, where its growing core of support lay. And even for many of those conservative Christians – Protestant and Catholic alike – who did not vote for the Nazi Party, antisecularism provided a Christian justification for entering into an alliance with the NSDAP in January 1933.

Epilogue

Two years after the elimination of the Proletarian Freethought movement by the National Socialist regime in spring 1933, the literary critic and philosopher Ernst Bloch cast a critical eye on the relationship of the two cultures of socialism and secularism. At the Writers’ Conference for the Defense of Culture in Paris, Bloch stated that the cold rationality of revolutionary Marxism had ended the socialist movement’s prior infatuation with the monist worldview propagated by figures such as naturalist poet Richard Dehmel or the artist Fidus, who had designed the masthead for Der Freidenker. Thirty years ago, tintinnabulation still filled the air, Dehmel sang the praises of the workingman, poets ran off to socialism like on an adventure. Back then, matter still had wine leaves in its hair, the here-and-now was not a naked fact, but ‘naked as life,’ inhabited by Fidus-figures, radiated by that sun that has now become the weekend of the Dionysian petty bourgeois. The present day, by contrast, demands a different currency; the revolution despises the graeculi, the dancing, the dreamy, the beautiful poets; it has Roman iciness. . . . Marxism keeps experimental poets . . . much further away than do the cynical bourgeoisie.1

This sarcastic sendoff of the fantasy of the “Dionysian petty bourgeois” was an early application of the theory of secularization to the history of red secularism, drawing in equal measure from a communistic perspective in the era of Stalin and the disenchantment theory of his former teacher Max Weber. West German social historians would later draw similarly dismissive conclusions about the incongruity of worldview secularism with a politically mature Social Democracy. This book has argued against the repeated use of secularization theory to provide an underlying narrative to the history of secularism and socialism. It has demonstrated that on the level of culture, the rejection of worldview secularism by party leaders did not eliminate the robust culture of red

1

Wolfgang Klein (ed.), Paris 1935: Erster Internationaler Schriftstellerkongress zur Verteidigung der Kultur: Reden und Dokumente (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1982), 324.

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secularism that was anchored in socialist milieus, particularly in urban areas with large populations of former Protestants. At the same time, we have shown that radical secularists lacked the power to achieve the thoroughgoing separation of church and state. It is noteworthy that the one party in which they were able to attain high posts, the USPD, was largely excluded from the process of framing the separation laws of the Weimar Constitution. The degree of secularity achieved by this constitution was not enough to significantly reduce the appeal of red secularism, as demonstrated by the growth of Proletarian Freethought and the associations of Kultursozialismus in the 1920s. While highlighting the wide scope, vigor and recrudescence of the culture of red secularism, this study has not found that it achieved historical influence on par with the other pillars of the working-class movement, the parties and unions. Instead, it has argued that the impact of socialist secularism stemmed precisely from the marginality of its monist Weltanschauung and the marginality of its organizations within confessional society and within the wider socialist culture. The culture of red secularism formed a sectarian reservoir for revisionist and radical critiques of the party. It played an oversized role in the dynamics of confessional politics, in part because it was identified by sympathizers and enemies alike as the religious face of the far left, whether Democratic, Social Democratic or Communist. Red secularists were the self-appointed specialists in these parties for confessional questions and happily spoke on behalf of the socialist milieu and the religiously disaffected. Because confessional belonging mapped onto political parties and because state-sanctioned confessional privileges continued to shape the school system until 1933, red secularists could periodically reach deep into the heart of the political system and shake its confessional foundations. It did this at three key moments in the time period covered by this book, in the churchleaving movement of 1906–1914, during the German Revolution of 1918, and at the end of the Weimar Republic. Anticlerical actions taken at these times more firmly consolidated the notion cultivated in conservative Christian circles since the French Revolution that secularism was the religious face of socialism. Red Secularism after 1933 Looking past the period of this study and considering briefly the developments after the Second World War, we are confronted with a somewhat paradoxical situation. Despite the freedom of association guaranteed by the liberal order of West Germany, and despite the socialist-communist monopoly of power in the East, red secularism largely failed to re-establish the self-organizing culture it had sustained prior to 1933. How might we account for this? In the first instance, we should look to the various stages in the socialist confrontation

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with communism and National Socialism between 1930 and 1960, first within Germany and then in the context of the Cold War. In the last chapter, we identified the profound impact of the communist embrace of anticlericalism in the late 1920s on the culture of German secularism. Despite this, signs of a significant realignment of socialist religious politics only emerged in the midto-late 1930s, largely, it would seem, as a response to developments in National Socialism. In the early phase of the “Third Reich” most secularists and their Christian enemies continued to view the political struggle in the same terms as they had before Hitler’s appointment. In May 1933, the Protestant Church of Braunschweig publicly celebrated the victory over “international Marxism,” which the weak liberal state of Weimar had allowed to “educate the German people to godlessness and even blasphemy.”2 In July 1933, the Catholic Bishop of Trier thanked the new regime for blocking “the unworthy sedition of the Godless” and putting “an end to the spiritual degeneration of the people [through] Bolshevism.”3 Leading Christian apologists initially enjoyed support from the new regime. In April 1933, the Nazis handed over the rooms in the DFV’s central office to Karl Themel, a leader of the German Christian movement of the Protestant Church, who opened a bureau for processing the readmission of Freethinkers into the Church. Another Protestant apologist, Adolf Ehrt, set up the office of the Anti-Komintern in Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute.4 Catholic priest Konrad Algermissen joined the Nazi-supported international Catholic organization Pro Deo. Part of the reason that such apologists worked with the regime was that the transnational Kulturkampf was far from over. In Austria, the socialist Freethinkers were banned on June 12, 1933 for ridiculing the Catholic Church.5 In the same month, there was a hefty debate in the Swiss parliament over rumors fanned by the Catholic church and Pro Deo that the IPF would relocate to Basel.6 Shortly after news spread of Hitler’s meeting with von Papen to begin to lay the groundwork for his appointment as Chancellor, the socialist satirical magazine Der Wahre Jacob printed a cartoon showing Hitler under the clerical control of the Center Party (Figure 10.1). In this vein, many socialist Freethinkers initially blamed Christians for the fascist dictatorship. Willi 2

3 4 5

6

Quoted in: Dietrich Kuessner, Landesbischof D. Alexander Bernewitz 1863–1935 (Braunschweig: self-published, 1985), 95. On 1933 as a religious experience, see Manfred Gailus, Gläubige Zeiten: Religiosität im Dritten Reich (Verlag Herder Freiburg, 2021), 15–25. Cited in: Smolinsky, “Katholische Rußlandbild,” 341. “Back from the USSR: The Anti-Komintern’s Publications about Soviet Russia in Nazi Germany (1935–1941),” Kritika, 10 (2009): 527–56. Stéphanie Roulin, Un credo anticommuniste: La commission Pro Deo de l’Entente internationale anticommuniste, ou la dimension religieuse d’un combat politique: 1924–1945 (Lausanne: Éditions Antipodes, 2010); Sertl, Freidenkerbewegung, 290–97. Lukas Schenker, “Der Mariasteiner Gebets-Kreuzzug wider die ‘Gottlosenbewegung’,” Schweizerische Kirchengeschichte, 96 (2002): 67–78; Roulin, Credo anticommuniste.

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Figure 10.1 “Loving Congregation!” (Der Wahre Jacob, January 14, 1933)

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Eichler had been a leading member of the dissident movement ISK and second secretary of the Göttingen Proletarian Freethinkers in 1925. In 1934 he argued that “in the long term, the deadliest enemy . . . of socialism is Catholicism with its clerical garde and its tendency to organize humanity into a herd of sheep.” Hence he advised socialists to stand aside and let the Nazis and the church battle it out “and be happy that they make trouble for one another.”7 The former head of the DFV Max Sievers fled Germany in spring 1933 with some of the cash reserves of the organization, which he used to publish Der Freidenker in French-occupied Saarbrücken. In 1935 he argued that the answer to National Socialism was to win “wide masses of the population for the anti-church struggle” to break the antidemocratic “political influence of the church.”8 Only after having escaped to Belgium in 1935 and with the broader acceptance of the “popular front” strategy among the socialist left, did Sievers begin to shift his focus away from anticlericalism in favor of a socialist revolutionary perspective. In 1936 the Communist IPF agreed to merge with the Brussels International to form the World Union of Freethinkers, a sign of the weakening of anticlericalism in Soviet policy. The willingness of socialist secularists to enter coalitions with liberal and even Christian opponents of Nazism coincided with the ratcheting up by the National Socialists of their antagonist relationship to the German churches in the so-called Church Struggle which peaked in the years 1936 to 1939. During this time they engineered an exodus from the churches that far exceeded that achieved by the secularist church-leaving campaigns prior to 1933. To avoid association with the left-wing tradition of Free Religion and secularism, the National Socialist party members eschewed the designations “confessionless” or “dissident,” and took instead the new term “gottgläubig” (believer in God).9 The Cold War and Divided Germany The legacy of red secularism in postwar Germany has yet to be fully explored. Freethought was not allowed to reconstitute in East Germany, because the new communist leadership found it a potential liability. “What do we need freethinkers’ associations for?” asked Walter Ulbricht in 1946. “So that they can start a war against the church . . . and drive some Christians over to the side of 7 8

9

Martin Hart (Willi Eichler), “Christlicher oder unchristlicher Faschismus?” Sozialistische Warte, 1/3 (July 1934). Heiner Jestrabek, “Wer war Max Sievers (1887–1944)? Freidenker, Sozialist, Antifaschist” (http://jestrabek.homepage.t-online.de/sievers.jpg). Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, “Max Sievers in der Emigration 1933–1944,” IWK, 16 (1980): 33–57. Manfred Gailus, “‘Ein Volk – ein Reich – ein Glaube’? Religiöse Pluralisierungen in der NSWeltanschauungsdiktatur,” in Europäische Religionsgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Klaus Große Kracht (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 247–68.

328

Epilogue

the reaction?”10 Yet, following the popular uprising of June 17, 1953, the new regime looked to the secularist tradition for elements of its cultural politics. Following the example of the Soviet Union, which had transformed the League of the Godless into a society for science popularization in 1947, in 1954 the SED founded the Society for the Propagation of Scientific Knowledge. In the same year, the Jugendweihe was adopted as a national ritual, and in keeping with its secularist origin, youth instructors were told in 1955 that “opinions on a paradise in heaven are not to be discussed in the preparation for the Jugendweihe, instead the unity of perspectives regarding paradise on earth.”11 At the ceremony, each child was presented with a monistically inspired picture book of materialist-socialist worldview entitled Weltall Erde Mensch.12 Whereas some historians see the development of a culture of atheism under Khrushchev and Ulbricht as a pragmatic strategy to capture Christian populations through religious replacements,13 our study suggests that greater attention is needed to the long-term presence of dissenting secularist cultures within socialism. Many former secularists eagerly participated in “building socialism” in order to achieve their own cultural ends. In postwar West Germany, the German Freethought Association (DFV) was reconstituted in 1951 under the leadership of Hermann Graul, the former General Secretary of the Weimar-era DFV, with the aim of “spreading the secularist [freigeistig] worldview, influencing legislation in all culturalpolitical questions as well as supporting a community of peoples [Völkergemeinschaft] that is built up and penetrated by the idea of socialism.”14 Yet, socialist secularism failed to flourish in West Germany of the 1950s. This was partly due to the ongoing struggle between communists and socialists, which, under the pressure of the ban of the German Communist Party in 1956, led to a split between the SPD-affiliated Berlin chapter and the national organization based in Dortmund, which fell under the sway of the German Communist Party. More importantly, arguably, was the sea change in the relationship of Christians and German socialists, which saw some former secularists turn against the movement. It is impossible to know what course 10 11

12 13 14

Heléna Tóth, “Ritual Governance: Socialist Name Giving Ceremonies and Funerals in East Germany and Hungary, 1949–1989,” Habilitation, Bamberg (2022), 40–41. From a 1955 instruction for youth leaders, cited in: Igor Polianski, “Das Rätsel DDR und die ‘Welträtsel’: Wissenschaftlich-atheistische Aufklärung als propagandistisches Konzept der SED,” Deutschland Archiv, 2 (2007): 269. See also Schmidt-Lux, “Helle Licht der Wissenschaft.” Gisela Buschendorf and Horst Wolffgramm, Weltall Erde Mensch: Ein Sammelwerk zur Entwicklungsgeschichte von Natur und Gesellschaft (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1956). Smolkin, Soviet Atheism; Tóth, “Ritual Governance.” Horst-Dieter Strüning, “Die Geschichte der deutschen sozialistischen Freidenkerbewegung: Eine Skizze,” in Freidenker: Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Joachim Kahl and Erich Wernig (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1981), 9–71 (citation at 63).

The Cold War and Divided Germany

329

Max Sievers might have taken had he not been arrested in Belgium in 1943 and executed in Berlin in 1944. However, the other prominent secularist quoted above, Willi Eichler, embarked on a path during that war that led him ultimately, as chairman of the party commission to draft the new party program, to play a leading role in the party’s fundamental change of position on religion in 1959 at Bad Godesberg. In 1936, the ISK, the militant splinter group led by Eichler, affirmed that the “socialist republic is a state of free thought . . . which rejects the claims of all dogmatic theories as the presumptions of superstition.”15 Yet, once in England from 1939, Eichler began a fundamental reorientation of his political and religious thought. In a pamphlet from 1942 he clearly signaled that once the war against fascism was over, the socialists would have to square off against communism. It was, he wrote, “one of the most important problems of peace, whether they [socialists] should orient themselves fully on the example of Russia, or whether they should develop their own plans.”16 The following year, Eichler promoted a “federation of Europe based on self-determination of peoples.”17 In 1945, Eichler disbanded the ISK and rejoined the SPD. Working as a journalist and parliamentarian back in Germany, he published in 1949 a series of articles on “Christianity and Socialism” in which he called for a fundamental rejection of the hitherto commonly understood antagonism between Christians and socialists. Against the backdrop of the “relativism and cynicism” of ruined Germany, Christians and socialists were coming to realize that they shared much in common. The task at hand was not “to wait until all people are united on the final scientific, dogmatic, ethical and theological points,” but rather to find common ground in the shared goal of improving human conditions of life.18 This change depended on similar changes in Christian attitudes. Eichler cited recent Catholic and Protestant voices from the USA critical of the past complacency of Christians on social matters. He asked the German churches if they were truly “ready to practice true Christian and democratic tolerance. This question can, in fact, be termed a ‘Gretchen question’ for our modern society.”19 Here, Eichler proposed a novel solution to socialism’s Gretchen question regarding religion and secularism, which was to pose it simultaneously to its erstwhile Christian opponents, and to propose, as an answer, that socialists and Christians find common ground in their joint commitment to social reform and 15 16 17 18 19

Ernesto Harder, Vordenker der ‘ethischen Revolution’ Willi Eichler und das Godesberger Programm der SPD (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 2013), 177. Willi Eichler, Russland und die Komintern (ISK: London, 1942), 3. Henry Hauck and Willi Eichler, Towards European Unity: French-German Relations (London: ISK, 1943), 12. Willi Eichler, Christentum und Sozialismus (Bonn: Parteivorstand SPD, 1950), 9. Ibid., 7, 11.

330

Epilogue

abandon their disagreements over truth. In the lead-up to Bad Godesberg, he developed this strategic position into a theoretical critique of worldview. In 1954 he declared that socialism was not tasked with determining which worldview was true; however, socialism did require the sort of ideals provided by worldview or religions. Harkening back to the neo-Kantian ethical theory of his teacher Leonard Nelson, Eichler insisted that socialism depended on the ethical ideals that socialists brought from worldview or religion. Yet, to enable a pluralistic socialism to emerge required a critical distance from worldview. He concluded: “There will be no socialist worldview, but there can be no socialist without a worldview or without the struggle for one.”20 In line with these sentiments, the Godesberg Program declared: “Socialism is no substitute for religion [Religionsersatz]” and that “religious or worldview advocacy may not be misused for party-political or antidemocratic purposes.”21 Although this book has argued against some historiographical assumptions built around secularization theory for the period before 1933, secularization does appear to have played a role in the decline of organized secularism in postwar Germany. To begin with, the church opponents began to dissociate secularism from secularization, which robbed secularism of some of its power as a force to be feared. In 1953, theologian Friedrich Gogarten called secularization “the necessary and legitimate consequence of Christian faith” and secularism a “perversion [Entartung] of secularization” that occurs when the secular impulse of “questioning non-knowledge” oversteps its bounds and attempts to explain or deny the totality that is the preserve of faith.22 In 1962 Karl Hutten, a Protestant apologist who, like Gogarten, had been active in church debates around secularism in the Weimar Republic, described an ongoing crisis and decline in German secularism, in which the DFV was alarmed that “its recruitment was so ineffective and its membership numbers stagnating.” Hutten concluded that the Freethinkers were falling victim to very same forces of secularization threatening the churches during the economic boom: “the attractive vices of this world – the atmosphere of affluence – the television – the fat years.”23 A similar shrinkage was affecting the Free Religious, who had reconstituted in 1949 with 70,000 members, but dropped to 55,000 in 1967 and 39,500 members in 1979.24 Explaining the decline of 20 21 22 23

24

Willi Eichler, Weltanschauung und Politik: Reden und Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1967), 74. Ibid., 177. Friedrich Gogarten, Verhängnis und Hoffnung der Neuzeit: Die Säkularisierung als theologisches Problem (Munich: Siebenstern, 1966), 143–44. Karl Hutten, “Die Situation im Bereich der Weltanschauungen und Sekten,” EZW-Information, 4 (1962). For his contribution to the theory of “cultural Bolshevism” in 1932: Hutten, Kulturbolschewismus. Manfred Isemeyer, “Freigeistige Bewegungen in der Bundesrepublik 1945 bis 1990,” Humanismus Aktuell, 20 (2007): 84–95.

Three Ending Points

331

postwar worldview secularism has not been part of this study; however, it appears likely that a critical role was played by the fundamental realignment of political and religious fronts over the course of the “long” 1960s. This, together with the depillarization of German society, brought about the erosion of the confessional order.25 The 1960s was clearly a turning point in the history of religion and secularism. Dechurching across Western Europe coincided with the “death of God theology” and liberation theology, while esoteric spirituality broke through in popular culture. Many of the motifs of early twentieth-century socialist secularism, from anti-authoritarian critique to support of gender equality and homosexual rights, recurred in the new social movements of the late 1960s, yet little evidence exists of substantive reception of the earlier secularist movement. This raises the important question about the long-term impact of the culture of secularism studied in this book. Historian Callum Brown has made a strong case for the correlation of rising atheism in the late twentieth century and shifting gender roles. Yet, he found little evidence of the long-term impact of the Freethinking feminism of the early twentieth century. Instead, he attributed the rise of secular life narratives to shifting discourse around sexual morality and demographic developments. Brown also argues that today’s atheists are marked by a growing disinterest in religion.26 This was certainly not the case of the secularists we have examined in this book. Thus, we can conclude that the atheism that has gained mass acceptance since the 1960s had a different political-confessional embedding than the earlier atheism promulgated by socialist secularists.27 Three Ending Points Developments leading up to and following German reunification in 1990 offer three ending points for our consideration of red secularism. First, the exodus of Germans from the churches that began in West Germany in the 1960s, increased after reunification, and continues into the twenty-first century, has far exceeded numbers of church-leavers in the Weimar Republic or the “Third Reich.” Yet, unlike earlier church-leaving waves, it has occurred without a significant contribution by secularist organizations or anticlerical state actors 25

26

27

Heléna Tóth and Todd H. Weir, “Religion and Socialism in the Long 1960s: From Antithesis to Dialogue in Eastern and Western Europe,” Contemporary European History, 29/2 (May 2020): 127–38. Callum G. Brown, Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 89–91; Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001), 170–92. I make this case in Todd H. Weir, “Modern Germany,” in The Cambridge History of Atheism, ed. Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse, vol. ii (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 874–97.

332

Epilogue

and it has not led to an increase in the number of organized secularists. Rather the opposite can be concluded. The weakening of Christianity’s hold over European societies increasingly robbed Freethought of its nemesis. Many secularist organizations do not advertise their membership numbers anymore, likely because they have fallen off so dramatically. It is telling that, in 1991, the final issue of the newsletter of the once numerous Munich chapter of the DFV concluded with an advertisement for its old-age home Ludwig Feuerbach: “Here freethinkers and communists, socialists and humanists find a good atmosphere, in which they can spend the twilight of their lives in the company of like-minded people.”28 While the communist-affiliated national DFV wandered into political isolation, a second ending point was achieved by its Social Democratic rivals in West Berlin, where Freethinkers had been providing alternative ethical instruction on a modest scale since the early 1980s. Reunification brought an unexpected opportunity for growth. The number of pupils attending secular ethics instruction in Berlin grew sixteen-fold in the course of a decade from ca. 2,000 in 1990 to 33,374 in 2001.29 This meant that the West Berlin Freethinkers had finally gained access to a key privilege hitherto reserved for the state churches and for which they had fought repeated battles in Berlin, Munich and beyond between the 1890s and 1933. Unlike prior secularist educational efforts, however, the West Berlin Freethinkers looked beyond the children of their own members and claimed the right to educate the growing number of confessionless German citizens. In keeping with this ambition, the Berlin DFV changed its name to the Humanist Association of Germany (Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands, HVD) in 1993. The HVD took a moderate political position that made it a reliable partner for government parties. By disaffiliating itself from narrow political or religious positions, it established itself as a responsible provider of ethical instruction in schools. It has also taken up a series of other caritative functions and presents itself as a service provider, not to its members, but to the public. Its services, which range from ethics instruction, humanistic schools, youth groups, ritual culture (Jugendweihe), hospices and grief counseling, are remarkable for how similar they are to those offered by the churches and for the fact that they are likewise heavily financed by the state. In 2013, 50 percent of the budget of the Bavarian HVD came from state coffers and additional amounts were received for school-related activities and chaplaincy, leaving a 28 29

Freidenker-Info, Sept.–Dec. 1991. “20 Jahre Lebenskunde in Berlin,” in Lebenskunde: Informationsbrief für Eltern, May 2001, 4. The Freethinkers had received the right to teach Lebenskunde in schools following a trial against Dr. Erich Bromme of the Bund für wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung for Auschwitz denial. Frank Schütte, “20 Jahre MIZ,” MIZ: Mitteilungen und Informationen zur Zeit, 21/2 (1992).

Three Ending Points

333

mere 2 percent from the membership fees of individual humanists.30 While distancing itself from the sectarianism of some other freigeistig associations, the HVD has devoted considerable scholarly energy towards defining humanism as a worldview and writing its own history, thus fulfilling the legal stipulation of the Weimar Constitution, which required organizations to “cultivate a worldview” in order to become state-supported public corporations. The Humanistic Academy Berlin-Brandenburg was founded in 1997 and subsequently replicated by other chapters. It opened a debate in 2005 on whether humanism should be considered the “third confession” of Germany.31 Yet, any claim to represent the secularized population must be questioned, because, despite the growth in the number of pupils receiving ethical instruction and the continued popularity of the Jugendweihe, there has not been a parallel swell in the number of organized secularists. Contemporary Germans are apparently disinclined to turn to secularist organizations for the cultivation of a worldview. A third ending point for red secularism can be located in the terminal crisis of state socialism. In 1988, the East German politburo identified the Protestant churches as a chief source of growing political protests. Young theologians, it claimed, were misusing Mikhail Gorbachev’s slogans and undermining the understanding reached in 1978 between the SED and the Protestant Church, whereby the church was granted some autonomy in exchange for remaining non-political. In a policy paper of September 1988, a party commission proposed a two-pronged response. The main strategy was to work through the church apparatus and the “block parties” to get the church hierarchy to discipline its members. In addition, however, the commission proposed the creation of an organization of Freethinkers to undertake atheistic propaganda. In December, the Central Committee approved the formation of a Verband der Freidenker (Association of Freethinkers) with a sizable annual budget of 2.1 million marks and eighty employees. This pressure group was to appear nominally independent and thus not violate the religious neutrality of the state, but it was to be “led politically by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the SED.”32 The importance of this initiative by the GDR was underscored by the membership of Erich Honecker – Walter Ulbricht’s

30 31 32

“Unsere Finanzierung,” HVD Landesverband Bayern, www.hvd-bayern.de/index.php?q= inhalt/unsere-finanzierung (accessed Sept. 18, 2013; this webpage has since been modified). Umworbene ‘dritte Konfession’ Befunde über die Konfessionsfreien in Deutschland, Special issue of Humanismus Aktuell (Berlin: Humanistische Akademie, 2006). “Politbüro Beschluss,” Dec. 6, 1988, in Horst Groschopp and Eckhard Müller (eds.), Letzter Versuch einer Offensive: Der Verband der Freidenker der DDR (1988–1990) (Aschaffenburg: Alibri Verlag, 2013), 80–85.

334

Epilogue

successor as General Secretary of the SED – once the association was founded in June of 1989.33 In an essay on the “religious turn” in the study of Eastern Europe, historian Brian Porter-Szucs stated that “the evaporation of the communist regimes freed the imaginations of historians to pursue new questions with new methodologies.”34 Yet, we must question the extent to which the turn to religion by historians after 1989 was really an act of free imagination, given that the last generation of communist leaders had themselves become increasingly concerned with religion. Their responses went in different directions. Victoria Smolkin has shown how Gorbachev courted the Orthodox Church of Russia, when searching for new sources of ideological support for his transitional state as it departed from Marxism. Honecker’s participation in and sponsorship of a state-controlled Freethought movement in the waning days of East Germany, which Horst Groschopp has called “the last attempt at an offensive” for the SED regime, reveals another approach.35 Just as it had borrowed from the culture of secularism to respond to the crisis of legitimacy that arose with the revolt of June 17, 1953, the communist state again looked to red secularism for inspiration in its final days. Yet, when the communists retrieved the heritage of red secularism from the dustbin of socialist history in 1988, it emerged as something of a foreign object that required explication and translation.36 The earlier intense concern of socialists with religion was no longer self-explanatory. In an interview given in 1990, the then recently deposed Honecker attempted to explain the presence of secularism in his days as a young communist in the Saarland in the late 1920s. Although his socialist parents had signed him out of the otherwise mandatory religious instruction given in his public primary school, he hastened to add that of course, this does not mean that I remained without knowledge in this field, whether it was the Bible, the Old and New Testament, or the problems of that worldview. Because in those days there were very sharp discussion in the streets . . . As a young communist

33

34

35 36

Andreas Fincke, Freidenker – Freigeister – Freireligiöse: Kirchenkritische Organisationen in Deutschland seit 1989 (Berlin: Evangelische Zentralstelle für Weltanschauungsfragen, 2002), 8. Brian Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction: Christianity, Christians, and the Story of Modernity in Eastern Europe,” in Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe, ed. Brian Porter-Szűcs and Bruce R. Berglund (Budapest: CEU Press, 2010), 14. Smolkin, Soviet Atheism; Groschopp and Müller (eds.), Letzter Versuch. The overview given by the head of the new VdF reveals the break in historical continuity with the earlier Freethought movement. It misspelled Max “Siewers” and claimed incorrectly that Wilhelm Liebknecht had been one of the founders of the 1881 German Freethought Association. Doc. 11, “13. Januar 1989: Referat Helmut Klein auf der Gründungsversammlung des Arbeitsausschusses,” Groschopp and Müller (eds.), Letzter Versuch, 96–107.

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335

I stood fully and completely on the ground of the materialist worldview . . . We discussed as atheists sometimes with the Protestant boys and girls, sometimes with the Catholics. We didn’t want this division, as it existed back then. Today that might be hard to understand.37

The terms Honecker let fall to describe the way socialists encountered religion – “materialism,” “worldview,” “(confessional) division” – reveal the lasting traces of the confrontation with secularist culture in the memory of one of the twentieth century’s leading communists. Unearthing and explaining the history of red secularism has been the task of this book.

37

Reinhold Andert and Wolfgang Herzberg, Der Sturz: Erich Honecker im Kreuzverhör (Berlin: Aufbau, 1991), 119–20.

Appendixes

Appendix 1 Membership of Secularist Organizations in 19141

Weimar Cartel

1

2

Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers (ZpF)

4,900–6,400

Free Religious Congregations

18,0002

German Freethought Association

5,000

German Society for Ethical Culture

850

German Monist League

6,000

German League for Secular Schools and Moral Instruction

2,050

German League for Mothers’ Protection

3,500

Henning, Handbuch. These figures include many double memberships and corporate memberships. Alternative figures for the Proletarian Freethinkers in 1914 were 6,115 and 6,400 respectively, in Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 353, and Guttsman, Social Democratic Party, 169. 50,000 “souls” are estimated.

337

Appendix 2 Membership of Secularist Organizations in 19301

Members of the National Working Group of Freigeistig Associations (RAG)

1 2

Association of Proletarian Freethinkers (VpF communist)

123,000 (95,161)

German Freethought Association (DFV socialist)

590,000 (575,794)

League of Socialist Freethinkers (Leipzig, socialist)

20,000

People’s League for Spiritual Freedom (formed from the merger in 1921 of the Free Religious Congregations and the “bourgeois” Freethinkers)

60,000

German Monist League (“bourgeois”)

6,0002

Carl Schweitzer and Walter Künneth, Freidenkertum und Kirche: Ein Handbuch (Berlin: Wichern, 1932), 48. Figures in parentheses from Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände, 354, 357. This number appears significantly inflated.

338

Appendix 3 Short Biographies of Socialist Secularists

This list contains short biographical data about the socialist secularists mentioned in this book. Each entry consists of the following:       

name life dates confession at birth and date of church exit (if known)1 father’s occupation training and occupation secularist affiliations political affiliations and elected positions

Abbreviations for secularist affiliations as follows: Free Religious Congregation: FRC Freethought Associations: ZpF, GpF, VFF, VfFF German Monist League: DMB German Society for Ethical Culture: DGEK Political affiliations are abbreviated as follows: SPD, USPD, KPD, SAP, SED, membership in Reichstag (RT). Chief sources are reference works: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Reichstag Handbooks (RTHB) and standard works on the history of secularism [Kaiser, Prüfer, Weir].2 Where further biographical data is given in this book, the chapter is indicated. Altmann (-Bronn), Ida

1 2

(1862 Oberschinken – 1935 Berlin), Jewish exit 1891, father farmer, teacher’s exam 1881, six years in Petersburg as a

Although dates are not provided for most, it should be assumed that all individuals in the list officially left their confession (with the exception perhaps of Carl Pinn and Max Maurenbrecher). NDB is now available online (www.deutsche-biographie.de/ndbonline), as are the biographical entries in the Handbooks of the German Reichstag (www.reichstag-abgeordnetendatenbank.de); Kaiser, Freidenkerverbände; Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion; Weir, Fourth Confession.

339

340

Appendix 3

Baader, Ottilie

Baege, Dr. Max Hermann

Beisswanger, Konrad

Borchardt, Dr. Bruno

3 4

private teacher. Joined Berlin FRC in November 1890, first lecture 1893, elected to the board in 1894 and subject to police fines with Bruno Wille for teaching forbidden Sunday school lessons in 1895, attended Freethinker Congress in Rome 1904, SPD, secretary of the women’s branch of the socialist labor unions ca. 1905–1908.3 (1847–1925 Berlin), seamstress, church exit and member Berlin FRC 1877, SPD 1879, leader in socialist women’s movement and unions, board member Workers’ Education Association 1891, central agent of the SPD in 1900. [NDB; Prüfer, 236] (1875 Jeßnitz – 1939), university study of natural science and philosophy, schoolteacher, left school service due to Free Religious and socialist orientation 1903, FRC, DMB, USPD 1917, served in Prussian ministry of culture 1918–1919, later Volkshochschule Nuremberg.4 (1869 Oettingen – 1934 Nuremberg), Protestant, typesetter, FRG since 1890s, editor of Der Atheist 1905–22, founding member of ZpF 1908, founded the Nuremberg Freethought Association in 1912, member of the USPD in 1917, joined the KPD in 1919. [Kaiser, 98–110] (1859 Bromberg – 1939 Falkensee), Jewish, teacher forced to resign due to socialist sympathies, later journalist, member of Berlin Freethought “Lessing” from 1882, revisionist wing of SPD, elected Berlin City Council in 1920. [Weir, 147]

Uwe Voigt “Freie Selbstbestimmung ist unser leitender Grundsatz: Zum Lebensweg von Ida Altmann (1862–1935),” Humanismus Heute, 1 (1997), 78–82. “Max Hermann Baege,” in Kritische Online-Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis (1917–1929), Biographie Nr. 2075, www.pacelli-edition.de/gnd/117534889.

Appendix 3

Bosse, Friedrich

Brass, Otto

Braun, Lily

Däumig, Ernst

Dulk, Albert

Duncker, Hermann

341

(1848 Hessen – 1907 Leipzig), painter, later publicist, dramatist, politician, Freethinker, SPD. [See details in Chapter 5, pp. 135–36] (1875 Wermelskirchen – 1950 Masserberg), filemaker, Remscheid FRC, Berlin FRC as board member until 1933; 1897 chair of the filemakers’ union, from 1900 active in health insurance funds, worked as publisher and editor of several socialist newspapers, chairman of the Lower Rhine USPD, later SPD, National Assembly 1919/20, RT 1920–24. [RTHB] (1865 Halberstadt – 1916 Berlin), Protestant, father military officer, DGEK 1892, later SPD, revisionist, leading figure in socialist women’s movement. [NDB] (1866 Halle –1922 Berlin), Protestant, father reputedly a church deacon, dropped out of grammar school, served in French Foreign Legion 1887, German military, marginal participant in prewar churchleaving campaign, Berlin FRC during war, later elected to board, SPD 1898, editor at various newspapers, co-chair of USPD from December 1919, RT 1920–22, cochair KPD 1920–21, USPD 1922. [NDB] (1819 Königsberg – 1884 Stuttgart), Protestant exit 1849, PhD in chemistry 1846. Founding member of International of Freethought in Brussels 1881, founded Freethought Association Stuttgart 1882; SPD 1873, candidate for RT in 1878 and 1881. [NDB; Kaiser, 82] (1874 Hamburg – 1960 Bernau), father businessman, teacher, SPD in 1893, active in worker education in Saxony, Spartakus/ KPD 1918, co-founder of the Rote Fahne, since 1923 leader of the Department of Education and Propaganda of KPD. Taught at several socialist educational institutions in the Weimar Republic, including Freethinkers’ Academy in Berlin, after the war became a member of

342

Appendix 3

Eichler, Willi

Fricke, Theodor

Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm

Futran, Alexander

Gansberg, Fritz

Graf, Georg Engelbert

5 6

the SED and professor in Rostock, husband to Käte Duncker (1871 Loerrach – 1953 Bernau), who was active in the same movements. [Kaiser, 262]5 (1896–1971 Bonn), father postal employee, Freethinker, follower of neo-Kantian Leonard Nelson, SPD 1919, expelled 1925, chair of International Socialist Fighting League (ISK) 1927, exiled to France 1938 and London, SPD 1945, key author of Godesberg Program 1959.6 (life dates unknown) active in Hamburg, student of theology, founding member and later chairman of ZpF 1908. [Kaiser, 96–98, 114, Groschopp, 207] (1825 Leipzig – 1905 USA), illegitimate, cigarmaker, Deutschkatholische Congregation of Leipzig, later Berlin FRC, active in communist-socialist activities in Switzerland; fought on the barricades in Dresden in 1849; co-founder and Vice President of ADAV in 1863, formed union of cigarmakers in 1865, Norddeutsche RT 1868–71, RT 1877 to 1881, exiled from Berlin 1878, emigration to USA 1881. [RTHB; Prüfer, 234] (1879 Odessa – 1920 Berlin), Jewish, engineer, BNV, DMB, USPD, city councilor in Berlin-Köpenick, executed during revolutionary clashes in Berlin. [See details in Chapter 8, p. 217] (1871 Bremen – 1950 Bremen), Protestant, father janitor, schoolteacher, school reformer, DMB. [NDB; see also Chapter 8, p. 280] (1881 Botstadt – 1952), some university studies, editor, author, teacher in Central Educational Committee SPD 1909–16,

“Duncker, Hermann,” “Akten der Reichskanzlei. Weimarer Republik” online, www .bundesarchiv.de/aktenreichskanzlei/1919-1933/0000/index.html. Lemke-Müller, Ethischer Sozialismus.

Appendix 3

Harndt, Adolf

Hartwig, Prof. Theodor

Heimerich, Dr. Hermann

Heine, August

Hennig, Gustav

Herre, Alfred

7

343

Director of Tinz Volkshochschule 1919–21, Director of Economic School of Metalworkers’ Union after 1926, RT 1928–33. [RTHB] (1874 Berlin –1932 Berlin) wallpaperer, author, leading functionary of Berlin FRC, SPD, later USPD. (1872 Vienna – 1958 Brno) Jewish, converted to Catholicism in 1895, Gymnasium schoolteacher, Brünn/Brno, active in socialist and Freethinking circles in prewar Brünn/Brno, Freethinker, Chairman of IPF. [Kaiser, 195–99]7 (1885 Würzburg –1963 Heidelberg), church exit 1911, father judge, lawyer, later communal politician, Nuremberg FRC 1911, DMB, SPD 1911, city councilor in Nuremberg SPD in 1923, mayor of Kiel 1925–27. [NDB] (1848 Halberstadt – 1919 Halberstadt), father was Free Religious, hatmaker, later editor, chairman of FRC Halberstadt 1877, member of the national FRC in 1885, founded a workers’ education association 1862, SPD 1874, city councilor 1879–85, RT 1890–93. [RTHB; Prüfer, 236] (1868 Seifersdorf – 1948 Eisenberg), Leipzig, apprenticed as a machine worker, later bookseller, librarian, Freethought Association “Humboldt” in Leipzig, SPD, Arbeiterbildungsverein, chair of People’s Association of the neighborhood PlagewitzLindenau 1898, secretary of the Workers’ Education Institute Leipzig. USPD 1919, later SPD, Tinz School, later SED. [See details in Chapter 5, pp. 137–142] (1875 Leipzig – 1934), journalist for socialist Leipziger Volksstimme, editor of Der Atheist in 1924. [Kaiser, 143]

“Theodor Hartwig,” Der Freidenker: Organ der Freigeistigen Vereinigung der Schweiz, Nov. 15, 1932.

344

Appendix 3

Hirschfeld, Dr. Magnus

Hodann, Dr. Max

Hoffmann, Adolph

Ihrer, Emma

Jenssen, Otto

Kammerer, Dr. Paul

Kessler, Gustav

(1868 Kolberg – 1935 Nice), Jewish, physician and sexual reformer, Berlin, DMB, no proof of SPD membership, lectured in socialist circles. [NDB] (1894 Neisse – 1946 Stockholm), physician, sexual reformer, member of the Association of Socialist Physicians, active in Freethought and Monist circles. [Der Freidenker, Dec. 1, 1927] (1858 Berlin – 1930 Berlin), Protestant exit 1886, trained as engraver and gilder, became a journalist in 1890, publisher since 1893. Active in FRC Berlin since 1870s. SPD 1876, RT 1893, 1904–06 and 1920–24, Prussian parliament from 1908–18 and 1928–30, Berlin City Council 1900–20 and 1925–30, USPD 1917, Co-Minister of Culture in Prussia for USPD in 1918, KPD 1920–22, return to SPD 1922. [NDB] (1857 Glatz –1911 Berlin), husband apothecary, labor leader, moved to Berlin and joined SPD in 1881, member of FRC since 1888, leading figure in Berlin socialist women’s movement. editor of Die Arbeiterin, then Die Gleichheit with Clara Zetkin. [LAB A Pr. Br. 030, 15049, 369; NDB] (1883 Hannover – 1963 Gera), father printer, schoolteacher, Freethinker, took part in the annual congress of VfFF 1930, joined SPD in 1909, joined SED in 1946. [Kaiser, 183] (1880 Vienna – 1926 Puchberg), Protestant mother, Jewish father, biologist, Vienna, DMB. [See details in Chapter 8, pp. 245–248, 265–267] (1832–1904 Berlin), carpenter then architect, Freethought Association “Lessing,” Progressive Party then SPD 1883, edited SPD Volksblatt for TeltowBeeskow-Storkow, union functionary,

Appendix 3

Koch, Adolf

Krische, Maria

Krische, Dr. Paul

Kunert, Fritz

Ledebour, Georg

8

345

defended “localism” in unions and edited journal Einigkeit since 1897.8 (1897 Berlin–1970), Protestant, schoolteacher, leading figure in socialist nudist movement. [See details in Chapter 8, pp. 267–75] (1880 Cologne –1945 Mecklenburg), early death of father, schoolteacher, life and sexual reformer, teacher at Berlin FRC from 1918, USPD 1918, co-edited with Magnus Hirschfeld Die Aufklärung 1918. [See details in Chapter 8, pp. 225, 252–267, 295] (1878 Göttingen – Berlin 1956), Protestant, chemist, life and sexual reformer, Berlin, DMB, FRC, USPD 1918, later SPD. [See details in Chapter 8, pp. 225, 253–267, 290] (1850 Altlandsberg – 1931 Berlin), Protestant exit 1887, schoolteacher quit in 1887 because of religious instruction, opened a cigar shop, religious teacher of FRC, elected to Berlin City Council 1887, editor of Volksblatt in 1889, moved to Breslau in 1889, 1893 moved to Friedrichshagen, 1894–1917 editor Vorwärts, 1917 USPD, later SPD, RT 1890–93, 1896–1907, 1909–18, 1919–24, 1919/20 Member of National Assembly. [RTHB] (1850 Hannover – 1947 Bern), Protestant, business apprenticeship, worked in England 1876–82, joined Freethought Association “Lessing” in 1883 and FRC at end of 1885, quit in May 1887 following dispute with Social Democratic members. Involved in Hirsch-Duncker’schen labor unions, joined Waldeck-Verein in May 1882, editor of Demokratische Blätter, organ of the Democratic Party

Eduard Bernstein, Die Geschichte der Berliner Arbeiter-Bewegung (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1907), 357.

346

Appendix 3

Lindemann, Anna

Lindemann, Walter

Löwenstein, Dr. Kurt

Maslowski, Peter

Maurenbrecher, Max

Menke, Bernhard

9 10

1885–87, SPD 1891, journalist and editor of Vorwärts 1890–98, RT 1900–18, 1920–24, founding member of USPD, later SPD then SAP. [NDB; Weir, 147] (1892 Bielefeld – 1959 Berlin), father businessman, university studies, active in Freethought movement, KPD, professor and dean of Hans Eisler Music Conservatory in GDR.9 (1893 Halberstadt – 1985 Halle), father factory owner, husband of Anna Lindemann, following university studies grammar school teacher, GpF, KPD ca. 1919, professor of education in the GDR.10 (1885 Bleckede/Elbe – 1939 Paris), father businessman, Jewish later exit, schoolteacher, educational theorist, Berlin, DGEK, DMB, FRC, USPD 1918, SPD 1922, RT 1920–33, leader of Kinderfreunde. [NDB] (1893 Berlin – 1983 Sommerhausen), incomplete university study, writer, editor, Freethinker, USPD, KPD 1920, RT 1924, 1928–33, expelled from KPD 1936, SPD 1945, founding member International League of Confessionless 1976. [Kaiser, 235–38; RTHB] (1876 Königsberg – 1930 Olshausen) Protestant minister, Free Religious speaker in Nuremberg 1909–11, Mannheim 1911–16, follower of Friedrich Naumann, SPD 1903–13, re-entry to Protestant Church 1917, Fatherland Party 1917, Pan German League 1918. [NDB] (1876 Hannover – 1929 Dresden), father worker, lithographer, leader of ZpF 1910–22, union organizer 1903–19,

Ibid., 280–81. Mario Hesselbarth, Gelebte Ideen: Sozialisten in Thüringen: Biographische Skizzen (Erfurt: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Thüringen, 2006), 280–81.

Appendix 3

Metzner, Theodor

Peus, Heinrich

Pinn, Carl

Riemann, Dr. Robert

11 12

347

member of International Group 1915, UPSD 1917, City Council Dresden 1919, Saxon parliament 1919–29, borough mayor of Dresden-Heidenau 1922–23, Police President Dresden 1923–24, member of the board of the German Hygiene Museum 1927–29. [Kaiser, 114]11 (1830 Berlin –1902 Berlin), shoemaker, as of 1895 restaurateur, FRC since 1870s; Representative of ADAV for Berlin 1864, left ADAV in 1868 to join VDAV, attended the International Congress in Zurich in 1893, elected to Berlin City Council 1892–95 and again 1902.12 (1862 Elberfeld – 1937 Dessau), Catholic, then Protestant, incomplete university study of theology, philology, politics, history, economics in Berlin starting 1883, lectured at FRC starting 1890, later DMB, active in Ido artificial language movement and workers’ abstinence league. SPD in 1890, editor of Volksblatt für Anhalt since 1891, RT 1896–98, 1900–06, 1912–18, 1928–30, elected Anhalt parliament 1902–06, 1918–1933, including President 1918–28.13 (1861 Bromberg – ?), Jewish, father merchant, incomplete university study, journalist and writer, active in FRC Berlin and Ethical Society, socialist circles since 1891, banned from party 1897. [See details in Chapter 4, pp. 101–6] (1877 Bielefeld – 1957 Berlin), grammar school teacher, literary scholar, Protestant, grammar school teacher, Leipzig, DMB, SPD, later SED. [NDB]

“Menke, Bernhard,” “Akten der Reichskanzlei. Weimarer Republik” online, www.bundesarchiv .de/aktenreichskanzlei/1919-1933/0000/index.html. 13 Bernstein, Berliner Arbeiterbewegung, 149. Kupfer, Weg zum Bündnis, 65.

348

Appendix 3

Rüdt, Dr. Philipp August

Rühle, Otto

Schaxel, Prof. Julius

Schmidt, Dr. Conrad

(1844 Mannheim – 1918 Munich), Catholic, incomplete university study, schoolteacher, Free Religious since 1870, delegate in Eisenacher VDAV congress 1869, socialist editor of Waffe and Volkswacht 1869, member of Badenese parliament for Mannheim 1891–94, expelled from SPD in 1895, moved to Munich in 1899 and led local Freethought Association until dismissed in 1903. Formed new socialist Freethought Association “Darwin” around 1909. [Prüfer, 37] (1874 Groß-Voigtsberg – 1943 Mexico City), Protestant, father railway official, teacher, school reformer, author, editor, lost teaching position due to SPD membership, Freethinker, active throughout the Weimar Republic in Proletarian Freethought movement; SPD 1896, “wandering teacher” in prewar worker education, RT 1912–18, cofounder of KPD 1918, expelled in 1919, participated in various communist opposition groups, married to psychologist Alice Gerstel. [NDB] (1887 Augsburg – 1943 Moscow), Protestant, biologist, studied under Ernst Haeckel, DMB Jena, 1918 SPD, 1923 councilor in Thuringian ministry of culture, active in Freethought movement, founded Urania publishing house, exile to Soviet Union in 1934. [NDB] (1864 Köngisberg – 1932 Berlin), grandson of Julius Rupp, founder of FRC Königsberg, brother of Käthe Kollwitz, raised Free Religious, university in Königsberg and Berlin, dissertation in 1887 in economics, writer/editor at Vossische Zeitung then socialist Volkstribüne, religious teacher of Association for the Cultivation of Free Religious Life in 1890, lectured at FRC

Appendix 3

Schweichel, Robert

Siemsen, Anna

Sievers, Max

Sommer, Bruno

14

349

Berlin in 1890, founding member and after 1897 chairman of Freie Volksbühne. Went to London for several months to study with Engels, joined SPD around 1887/88, leading revisionist.14 (1821 Königsberg – 1907 Berlin), incomplete study of law, publicist and journalist, Freethought Association “Lessing,” active in revolution of 1848, correspondent for Democratic paper Die Reform in 1848. Following political exile returned to Germany in 1861, joined circles around August Bebel and Johann Jacoby, wrote program for VDAV in 1868, contributor to Neue Zeit. [NDB] (1882 Mark bei Hamm – 1951 Hamburg), Protestant exit 1916, father Protestant minister, following PhD in Germanistik 1909 teacher, pacifist, joined Bund Neues Vaterland in 1917, during Weimar Republic published in secularist journals and Jugendweihe books, lectured at Austrian Freethinkers’ Congress October 1931, USPD 1917, city councilor in Düsseldorf, school reformer, 1923 entered school service in Thüringen, honorary professor in Jena, RT 1928–30, SAP 1931. [NDB; Der Freidenker, 14/21 (1931), 164] (1887 Berlin – 1944 Brandenburg), illegitimate, commercial training, since 1922 secretary of VfFF, later DFB, founded Der Freidenker 1926, UPSD 1918, editor of Der Arbeiter-Rat in 1919/ 20 under Däumig’s leadership, KPD 1920, editor Der Rote Fahne, USPD/SPD 1921–22. [Kaiser, “Max Sievers”] (1857 Dresden – ?), co-founder of Lichtstrahlen, prewar member of ZpF, SPD since 1881, took part in International

Alexandra von dem Knesebeck, Käthe Kollwitz: Die Prägende Jahre (Petersberg: Imhof, 1998), 251.

350

Appendix 3

Sontheimer, Joseph

Stern, Jakob

Stern, Viktor

Teistler, Hermann

Türk, Julius

Tutzauer, Franz

Workers’ Congress in Paris 1889, member of Jungen. [Kaiser, 111; LAB A Pr. Br. 030, no. 13313] (1867 – 1919 Munich), chairman of the Freethought Association of Munich, anarchist, executed as member of the Bavarian Soviet Republic 1919. [See details in Chapter 6, pp. 168, 190–91, 208] (1843 Niederstetten – April 4, 1911 Stuttgart, suicide), Jewish exit 1883, father merchant and mohel (circumciser), rabbi from 1873–80, suspended for freethought and socialist association, assumed leadership of the Freethinker Congregation after Dulk’s death in 1884, SPD candidate for RT in 1887. [Prüfer, 235] (1885 Moravia – 1958 Berlin), Jewish, father rabbi, PhD Vienna 1908, philologist, philosopher, party functionary, published in Das monistische Jahrhundert, later a leading functionary in the international Proletarian Freethought movement, joined Austrian SP, USPD 1919, KPD 1920, expelled to Austria 1921, became member of Austrian CP politiburo, editor of Viennese Rote Fahne, 1923 moved to Czechoslovakia, leading in Communist Party, 1946 joined SED and 1947 became leader of philosophical faculty of the Party Institute Karl Marx in Berlin. [See details in Chapter 8, pp. 228, 244, 290] (1867 Oberschönau – 1937 Berlin) publisher of Freethought journal Lichtstrahlen, editor of socialist newspapers. [See details in Chapter 3, pp. 71] Jewish, founding member of DGEK 1892, member of executive committee of Volksbühne 1890–91, SPD. [Weir, 134] (1852 Berlin – 1908 Berlin), Catholic exit 1878, carpenter, Berlin FRC since 1878, ADAV 1871, SPD Berlin City Council 1884–92, RT 1893–1907. [RTHB]

Appendix 3

Vogtherr, Ewald

Wabnitz, Agnes

Welker, Georg Werner, Wilhelm

Wille, Dr. Bruno

Wolf, Arthur

Zelck, Max

351

(1858 Landeshut, Silesia – 1923 Berlin), father deutschkatholisch preacher, attended Realschule in Bunzlau, then commercial training, spoke at Freethought Association “Lessing” in 1887, joined Berlin FRC 1887, edited Die Geistesfreiheit and Der Freidenker, joined SPD in 1888 and was elected to Berlin City Council 1890–1900. RT 1893–98 Berlin, RT 1912–18 Stettin, RT 1920 Pomerania, Nov. 1918 to Jan. 1919 state secretary to the Navy, Justice Minister in Braunschweig 1922–23. [RTHB] (1842 Gleiwitz, Silesia – 1894 Berlin), Protestant, seamstress, joined FRC in Sept. 1879, SPD by 1881. [See details in Chapter 4, pp. 106–13] Free Religious preacher in Wiesbaden, delegate at 1902 SPD Congress. (1859 Berlin – ?) Protestant, typesetter, Berlin FRC, SPD by 1881, attended Paris Workers’ Congress in 1889. [LAB A Pr. Br. 030, no. 16632] (1860 Magdeburg – 1928 Aeschach), Protestant, author, educator and political activist; active in Democratic and socialist circles as a student, literary naturalist; joined the Berlin FRC Oct. 16, 1888, shortly after first speech there, and became the most frequent speaker and chief religious teacher in 1890s; editor of Der Freidenker; founder of Freie Volksbühne, Giordano Bruno League and Freie Akademie; left the SPD in 1891. [See details in Chapter 3, pp. 71– 75, 80–88] (life dates unknown) publisher, Dresden ZpF, leader GpF 1921–25, editor of Der Atheist 1922–25. [Kaiser, 142–44] (1878 Schwartau – 1965), Protestant, schoolteacher, Hamburg, DMB. [See details in Chapter 8, pp. 276–79]

352

Appendix 3

Zepler, Dr. Georg

(1859 Breslau – 1925 Berlin), Jewish, gynecologist, communal politician, editor of secularist Der Weg, leading member League of Confessionless, wrote for Sozialistische Akademiker. [See details in Chapter 5, pp. 179, 177, 212]

Appendix 4 Lectures at the Arbeiterbildungsverein Nord 1889–18911

15.2.1889 10.3.1889 25.3.1889 9.4.1889 16.4.1889 30.4.1889 7.5.1889 20.5.1889 2.7.1889 22.7.1889 16.7.1889

27.8.1889 10.9.1889 24.9.1889 22.10.1889 13.11.1889 19.11.1889 4.12.1889 16.12.1889 20.1.1890 28.2.1890 18.3.1890 16.4.1890 24.4.1890 1.5.1890 15.5.1890 3.6.1890

1

Founding meeting. Speech by Bruno Wille: “How do the Workers of Berlin view the Foundation of a Workers’ Educational Association?” 200 persons in attendance Paul Ernst, “Education and the Educational Means of Workers” (dissolved by police) Pastor emeritus Kendziora “Which Educational Means are Best for the Workers?” Bruno Wille, “Darwinism and Socialism,” 150 persons Max Schippel, “Rodbertus: The Latest Social Science” Ewald Vogtherr, “Free Religion and the Education of the People”, 80 persons [Curt] Baake, “Malthusianism” [Julius] Türck, “Modern Poetry and the Workers’ Movement,” 18–42 persons Bruno Wille, “The Press: As It Is and As It Should Be” (dissolved) [Julius] Türck, “The Economic Upheavals of the French Revolution,” 150 persons Lawyer and city councilor Arthur Stadthagen, “Ans Vaterland ans theure schliess dich an [Quote from Schiller’s William Tell, T. W.],” 180–90 persons (dissolved for discussing themes not on the agenda) Ewald Vogtherr, “Old and New Popular Education,” 150 persons Fritz Kunert, “The Position of Social Democracy on the Free Religious Congregations” (dissolved, “Socialist Laws”), 200 persons Gerisch, “On the Soldier Trade in the Middle Ages,” 50 persons Arthur Stadthagen, “Ans Vaterland ans theure schliess dich an,” 400 persons Dr. Huber, “On the Old and New Weltanschauung,” 20 persons Kühn, “The Burdening of Workers though Indirect Taxes and the Means of Relief,” 400 persons Stadthagen, “Obligations and Rights of the Accused,” 500 persons Lawyer Wolfgang Heine, “Work Contracts and the Rights of Workers,” 120 persons Theodor Metzner, “The Upcoming Reichstag Elections and their Significance for Workers,” 50 persons Julius Türck, “The Origin and Conditions of Rural Workers,” 24 persons. Fritz Zubeil, “On Trade Courts” (cancelled) Wilhelm Bölsche, “Art and the People,” 70 persons (in support of Wille’s call for the foundation of a Freie Volksbühne) Julius Türck, “The Conditions of Rural Workers,” 40 persons “How Should We Respond to the Decision of the Paris Workers’ Congress Regarding the Shortening of the Working Day?” Reichstag deputy Bruhus, “Malthusian Theory of Overpopulation,” 200 persons. Heinrich Peus, “Capitalist and Socialist Morality,” 130 persons

LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, 14970.

353

354

Appendix 4

Wilhelm Bölsche, “Spiritism,” 40 persons Heinrich Peus, “Utopia by Thomas More,” 100 persons Julius Türck, “The Women’s Movement” Mertner, “Ferdinand Lassalle and His Era,” 20 persons Ewald Vogtherr, “Looking Backward from the Year 2000 by Bellamy,” 60 persons Pastor Kendziora “Plato’s State and Its Applicability to Social Democracy,” 60 persons 13.10.1890 Heinrich Peus, “Fourier’s Utopian Socialism as Opposed to the Contemporary Concept of Social Democracy,” 25 persons 31.10.1890 Carpenter Blücher on “Freethinkers and Freethought,” 70 persons (essentially about the history of the Berlin Free Religious Congregation) 16.12.1890 Heinrich Peus, “The Meaning of ‘Marxism’” 5.1.1891 Theodor Metzner, “The Religion of the Future,” 50–60 persons 13.2.1891 Reichstag deputy Wilhelm Schmidt, “Colonial History and German Colonial Policy,” 130 persons 2.3.1891 Gründel, “Popular Nutrition,” 38 persons 18.3.1891 Reichstag deputy Ullrich, “The Historical Significance of the 18th of March,” 200 persons 20.4.1891 Heinrich Peus, “To what Extent are We Social Democrats Idealists?” 28.4.1891 Vote to dissolve the association and join the Arbeiter-Bildungsschule.

24.6.1890 23.7.1890 5.8.1890 26.8.1890 9.9.1890 25.9.1890

Archives Used

Archiv des diakonischen Werkes (ADF) Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD), Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bonn Kurt Löwenstein papers Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich (BayHStA) Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) Wilhelm Ostwald papers Bremen Staatsarchiv Bundesarchiv (BArch), Berlin Bundesarchiv, Freiburg Kurt von Schleicher papers Dortmund Stadt- und Landesbibliothek (DStLB) Julius Hart papers Ernst Haeckel Haus, Jena (EHH) Ernst Haeckel papers Erzbischöfliches Archiv, Munich Cardinal Faulhaber papers Evangelisches Zentralarchiv, Berlin (EZA) Geheimes Staatsarchiv – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (GStA) Ministry of Culture, I HA, Rep. 76 Ministry of Interior, I HA, Rep. 77 Parliament, I HA, Rep. 169 International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam (IISG) Albert Grzesinski papers Karl Kautsky papers Wilhelm Liebknecht papers Landesarchiv Berlin (LAB) Police presidium, A Pr. Br. Rep 030 Court Charlottenburg, Registry of Associations, LAB B Rep. 042 Landeskirchliches Archiv Berlin Brandenburg (LABB) Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftensammlung, Berlin Staatsarchiv Munich (StaM) Pol. Dir. Munich 355

356

Archives Used

Stadtarchiv Leipzig Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach Algermissen papers Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv, Berlin (SAPMO) Hermann Duncker papers Vatican Archives Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede Secretary of State (AES) Vatican Secret Archive (ASV) Private collections: Adolf Harndt papers, used with permission of Friedrich Bork, Berlin

Index

Page numbers in italic refer to short biographies of socialist secularists in Appendix 3. abstinence movement, 8, 158 Adeline, 144, 150 Adler, Alfred, 254 Adler, Max, 228, 233, 250, 251 Adorno, Theodor, and the antiauthoritarian type, 92 Algermissen, Konrad, 283, 284, 302, 317, 319, 325 Altmann (-Bronn), Ida, 84, 144, 205, 339 as schoolteacher, 77, 93 in FRC Berlin, 77 popular science speaker, 148 union official, 78 Alvensleben, Werner von, 310 anarchism, 20, 73, 99, 184, 291 and Gustav Landauer, 112 and the Jungen, 12, 73 of John Mackay, ix, 69 in Munich, 160, 185 and secularism, 7, 158 Anderson, Margaret, 21 Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 91 anti-Catholicism, 157, 172, 195, 204, 305 anticlericalism, 2 anticlericalism versus secularism, 1–3 Anti-Dühring, 119 Anti-Komintern, 325 antisemitism, 44, 182, 194, 271 Apitz, Bruno, 141 Apologetische Centrale. See Central Office for Apologetics Arbeiterbildungsschule. See Workers’ Education School, Berlin Arbeiterbildungsverein Nord. See Workers’ Education Society North, Berlin Arbeiterverein, Leipzig, 135–36 Archenhold, Friedrich, 58 Arco, Count Georg von, 204 Aron, Raymond, 21 Arons, Leo, 95, 104, 165

artificial languages and secularism, 101, 137, 347 Asad, Talal, 3 atheism and the “lunatic fringe,” 97 Atheist, Der, 17, 88, 206, 210, 248, 291 Auer, Erhard, 168, 184 Auer, Ignaz, 112 Avenarius, Ferdinand, 277 Baader, Ottilie, 59, 77, 144, 154, 340 in FRC Berlin, 77 Baake, Curt, 104, 150 Bachem, Julius, 156 Baden, 210 Baege, Max Hermann, 245, 246, 248, 281, 340 Baltzer, Eduard, 4 Bauer, Otto, 118, 296 Bavaria, 167, 194, 223 secularist agitation, 167–71, 183–93 Bavarian Landtag, 185, 186, 189 Bebel, August, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 16, 62, 68, 70, 71, 81, 115, 126, 128, 135, 148, 154, 155, 171, 174, 254 Beisswanger, Konrad, 91, 208, 340 editor of Der Atheist, 206, 257 Bell, Daniel, 21, 25 Berger, Adeline, 144 Berlin, 13, 18, 71, 333 church-leaving movement, 160–67, 176–83 demographic change around 1890, 30 Moabit district, 178, 179 Neukölln district, 247, 272 Prenzlauer Berg district, 37, 57, 166 secularist organizations of, 29–62 Wedding district, 31, 179 Berliner Tageblatt, 96, 105 Bernstein, Eduard, 18, 73, 92, 119, 155, 172, 175, 181, 208, 253, 345, 347 Bertram, Cardinal Adolf, 319

357

358

Index

Bibliothekar, Der, 122, 137, 141 Bismarck, Otto von, 16, 109, 194 blasphemy, 12, 30, 76, 78, 83, 85, 88, 96, 97, 106, 110, 113, 160, 182, 195, 266, 300, 312, 325 Bloch, Ernst, 26, 323 Bode, Rudolf, 270 Bogdanov, Alexei, 277, 278 Bollenbeck, Georg, 132 Bölsche, Wilhelm, 32, 36, 39, 42, 48, 57, 58, 63, 67, 72, 85, 94, 101, 115, 128, 173, 204, 259, 262, 291, 353 educational background, 77 and the Free Academy, 46 in FRC Berlin, 77 and monism, 243 photo of, 56 Bolshevism, 26, 196, 310, 311, 313, 325 and monism, 27 as political religion, 27 Borchardt, Bruno, 57, 340 Bosse, Friedrich, 135, 136, 341 Bourdieu, Pierre, 93, 134 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 22 Brandenburg, 31, 225, 305, 333 Branting, Hjalmar, 28 Brass, Otto, 235, 341 Braun, Lily, 144, 341 Braun, Otto, 175, 294, 299 Breitscheid, Rudolf, 243 Bremen, 224, 280 Bremen School Dispute of 1905, 280 Bromberg, 102 Brown, Callum, 331 Brüning government and secularism, 310–14 Brüning, Heinrich, 309 Büchner, Ludwig, 41, 43, 95, 115, 116, 134, 158, 297 Bülow-Bloc, 156 Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV), 204, 205, 213, 243, 244, 342 Burgfrieden, 198–99, 206, 208, 209, 211, 213 Catholic Action, 285 Catholic Church, 122, 167, 169, 172, 184, 194, 198, 210, 283, 287, 301, 304, 313, 325 Bavaria, 188 Bavarian socialists and, 167, 192 competition with Arbeiterjugend, 138 Munich, 167 and National Socialism, 325 opposition to Freethought, 313 opposition to secularization, 216 Cauer, Minna, 147 censorship, 212

Center Party, 156, 168, 170, 171, 172, 179, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 198, 210, 211, 212, 218, 219, 220, 221, 238, 294, 298, 301, 312 Central Office for Apologetics, 304, 318, 319 Chemnitz, 11 Christian Social Party, 30 Christian state, 5 church-leaving movement, 18, 71, 72, 160, 176, 189, 195, 244, 295, 297, 320 Bavaria, 189 Berlin, 160–67, 176–83, 188 National Socialist, 327 and party division in 1917, 210 SPD opposition to, 181 in Weimar Republic, 223 clothing, reform, 97 Cold War, x, 1, 21, 24, 25, 26, 325, 327 Cologne, 18, 216, 298 communism and political secularism, 27 Communist International, 235 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 19–20, 227, 232, 235, 298–301, 306, 311 membership, 12 monism and, 244 Opposition (KPDO), 291 Communist Working Collective (KAG), 235 community (Gemeinschaft) marriage as, 150, 259 secularist theories of, 244, 250, 253, 256, 257, 258–59, 266, 282, 284, 289 confession biography and, 76–77, 83, 90–91, 139 field theory and, 6 fourth, 6 confessionlessness, 11, 160, 327 confirmation, secularist. See Jugendweihe correspondence theory of truth, 116, 133 council movement, 226–34 cremation, 38 cultural Bolshevism, 306, 312, 321 cultural socialism, 19, 23, 239–42 culture, theories of, 6–8 Curtius, Julius, 310 Czechoslovakia, 290 Damaschke, Adolf, 46, 157 Darwin, Charles, 55, 57 Darwinism, 32, 57, 67, 135, 353 and literary naturalism, 67 and monism, 10, 41, 48, 124, 190 and revisionism, 119

Index and socialism, 57, 133, 251 survival of the fittest, 75, 80, 255 Darwinsim and monism, 48 Daum, Andreas, 40, 42, 49 Däumig, Ernst, 19, 341 co-chair of the KPD, 235 and church-leaving campaign, 179, 180 conflict with Bolsheviks, 230–32 death, 237 and Max Sievers, 294 and Revolutionary Stewards, 214 and the Comintern, 235 and the division of the USPD, 235 and USPD, 279 antiwar stance, 205 author of Free People’s Catechism, 212 author of Maifeier, 86 photo of, 214 revolutionary council theorist, 226–34, 238 David, Eduard, 118 dechurching, 31 Democratic movement, 39, 159 Demokrat, Der, 176 Dibelius, Otto, 220, 305, 308, 319 Diederichs, Eugen, 172–73 dissidence, religious, 83, 90, 95, 139, 146, 160, 162, 164, 238 Dodel-Port, Arnold, 17, 124, 134 Doehring, Bruno, 305, 311, 313 Dresden, 11, 13, 52, 68, 72, 115, 140, 155, 180, 207, 225, 346, 351 Dühring, Eugen, 119 Dulk, Albert, 15, 52, 341 Duncker, Franz, 43 Duncker, Hermann, 141, 296, 341 in Arbeiterverein Leipzig, 136 as wandering speaker, 120 on worldview, 122 Duncker, Käte, 119, 122, 136, 342 Ebert, Friedrich, 18, 196 education, socialist in Leipzig, 134–43 Ehrt, Adolf, 325 Eichler, Willi, 327, 329–30, 342 Einstein, Albert, ix Eisner, Kurt, 174, 208, 233 Emmerich, Wolfgang, 132 end of ideology debate, 21 Engels, Friedrich, ix Ernst, Paul, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 104, 353

359 Esperanto. See artificial languages and secularism Ethical Culture, German Society for, 33, 38, 39, 44, 47, 58, 169, 247, 258, 337, 339 Ethical Society (socialist), 58–61 eugenic thought of Adolf Koch, 274 and feminism, 150 of Magnus Hirschfeld, 264 of Paul and Maria Krische, 252 eugenics, 252, 264, 278 Evans, Richard, 144 Faulhaber, Cardinal Michael, 188, 218 Faust, 14, 43, 64 feminism. See women’s movement Feuerbach, Ludwig, 109, 116, 124, 254, 255, 262, 297, 332 Fleck, Ludwik, 40 Foerster, Wilhelm, 47, 50, 58 fortress peace. See Burgfrieden Fortschrittspartei. See Progressive Party Frankfurt am Main, 207 Frantzl, Karl, 289, 298 Frederick II, the Great, 177, 200 Free Religious Congregations, 5, 11 Berlin, 10, 33, 289 class structure, 38 and early socialism, 8 League of, 33, 200 Leipzig, 135 Ludwigshafen, 11 Munich, 187 Nuremberg, 91, 187 rituals, 34–38 Stettin, 97 Freethinkers for Cremation, Association of (VFF), 293–96 Freethought, 5 Austrian, 85, 290 Czechoslovakian, 290 Darwin Association in Munich, 183, 185 English, 3 Humboldt Association Leipzig, 136 International Association of Freethinkers, 10 Lessing Association Berlin, 33, 44 Munich, 168, 332 Freethought and Cremation Association for (VfFF), 293–96 Freethought League, German, 10, 11, 177 Freie Hochschule. See Free Academy Freie Wort, Das, 200 Freikörperkultur or FKK. See nudism

360

Index

Freud, Sigmund, ix, 297 and authoritarian personality, 92 monist reception of, 254, 262 Fricke, Dieter, 25, 57 Fricke, Theodor, 206, 208, 342 Friedeberg, Raphael, 76 Friederici, Otto, 53, 61, 79 Friedrichshagen writers’ colony, 36, 69, 70, 78, 89, 91, 277 Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 51, 92, 342 Fürth, 11 Fürth, Henriette, 205 Futran, Alexander, 217, 245, 342 Gansberg, Fritz, 245, 280, 342 Gayl, Wilhelm Baron von, 310, 318 Geertz, Clifford, 7 Gelsenkirchen, 207 Gemeinschaft. See community, secularist theories of Gerlach, Hellmuth von, 159, 174 German Christian movement, 325 German Democratic Republic, ix, 63 Germania, 210 Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung von Volksbildung (GVV). See Society for the Promotion of Popular Education Geyer, Curt, 228 Giordano Bruno League, 39, 87 Globig, Fritz, 137, 139, 141 Glogau, Bertha, 108 Gneist, Rudolf, 43 Godesberg line, 24, 25 Godesberg Program of 1959, 1, 15, 22, 24, 342 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 14, 41, 63, 64, 140, 279 Gogarten, Friedrich, 330 Göhre, Paul, 127, 165, 181, 193, 195 Goldscheid, Rudolf, 173, 203, 245 Gollwitzer, Helmut, 24 Görlitz Party Congress 1921, 19 Gorter, Herman, 118, 119 Gotha Program of 1875, 15 gottgläubig, 12, 327 Graaz, Hans, 273 Graf, Georg Engelbert, 245, 247, 248, 279, 342 at Tinz, 282 Grebing, Helga, 22 Gretchen question of Social Democracy, 14, 15, 18, 19, 22, 24, 28, 329 Gretchenfrage. See Gretchen question Groschopp, Horst, 7, 334 Grote, Heiner, 24 Gubela, Hedwig, 144 Guillaume-Schack, Gertrude, 144

Günther, Siegmund, 189 Gurian, Waldemar, 25 Gurlitt, Ludwig, 176, 178 Guttzeit, Johannes biographical analysis of, 97–101 gymnastics, 135, 140, 239, 270, 271, 320 Haase, Hugo, 18, 215 Haeckel, Ernst, 5, 28, 41, 95, 115, 122, 126, 133, 148, 151, 157, 176, 201, 204, 207, 213, 248, 261, 270, 272, 348 and creation of monist worldview, 41–42 and Darwinism, 32 General Morphology, 41 political legacy of, 151 support of war, 200 Halbbildung. See semi-education Halle Congress of the SPD 1890, 16 Hamburg, 11, 92, 124, 125, 128, 140, 159, 175, 180, 205, 225, 226, 235, 243, 244, 247, 276, 290, 297, 320, 341, 342, 349, 351 Handworkers’ Association, Berlin, 61 Harnack, Adolf von, 212 Harndt, Adolf, 140, 224, 343 Hart, Julius, 85 Hartwig, Theodor, 95, 248, 343 chair of IPF, 290 Harzburger Front, 314 Hasselmann, Wilhelm, 92 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 86, 98, 129 Hegel, G.W.F., 26, 28, 244, 262 Heimerich, Hermann, 245, 343 in Nuremberg Free Religious Congregation, 189 in Young German Culture League, 169 Heine, August, 52, 343 Heine, Heinrich, 107 Held, Heinrich, 190 Hennig, Gustav, 139, 343 and Walter Ulbricht, 139, 141, 142 and workers’ education in Leipzig, 136–37 Henrich-Wilhelmi, Hedwig, 61, 144, 150 Herre, Alfred, 139, 142, 343 Herrenklub, 309 Hertling, Georg von, 185–90 Herzog, Dagmar, 146 Hilferding, Rudolf, 118, 235, 256 Hindenburg, Paul von, 308 Hirsch, Max, 8, 43, 44, 45, 50 Hirsch-Duncker’schen Workers Associations, 44, 345 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 344 Hitler, Adolf, 14, 282, 284, 287, 294, 309, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 321, 325, See also National Socialism and secularism

Index Hodann, Max, 245, 246, 248, 251, 266, 344 Hoffmann, Adolph, 17, 19, 37, 59, 83, 92, 106, 127, 146, 155, 176, 195, 218, 289, 344 antiwar agitation, 208–9 as autodidact, 106 and Bruno Wille, 83–86 childhood, 91 church-leaving movement, 164–66, 179, 180, 181 city councillor, 78 educational status, 77 and formation of the USPD, 206, 224 in FRC Berlin, 77 international secularism, 176 national secularism, 175, 184 in Prussian Landtag, 78, 155, 199, 211 as Prussian co-minister of culture, 215–20 as publisher, 87, 108 and Revolution of 1918, 215, 238 and women’s movement, 145 at Zimmerwald Conference, 206 Hoffmann, Heinrich, 274 Hoffmann, Johannes, 186 Holyoake, George, 3 Holz, Arno, 80 homosexual rights movement, 8, 152, 266 Magnus Hirschfeld and, 260, 263 Honecker, Erich, 335 Horneffer, Ernst, 169–71, 184 antipolitics of, 174 confessionless moral instruction, 187–89 wartime patriotism, 194, 198 Huber, Franz, 58 Hübinger, Gangolf, 67, 213 humanism, 132, 146, 234, 238, 292, 296, 333 Humanist Association of Germany (HVD), 332 Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands. See Humanist Association of Germany Humboldt Academy, 44–46 Humboldt, Alexander von, 40, 44, 48, 50 Kosmos, 32, 40, 46 hunger strike, 110 Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, 2 Hutten, Ulrich von, 43 Ido. See artificial languages and secularism Ihrer, Emma, 60, 344 popular science speaker, 58 in women’s movement, 144, 145 inheritance of acquired characteristics, 263 International Socialist Fighting League (ISK), 250, 266, 291, 329 Jacobs, Aletta, 150 James, William, 93

361 Jansson, Anton, 28 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, 270 Jenssen, Otto, 118, 245, 251, 344 at Tinz, 282 Jewish secularists, 33, 44, 95, 102, 144, 217, 271 Judaism, 6, 59 reform, 33 secularism and, 59 Jugendweihe, 25, 36–37, 58, 74, 139, 188, 199, 224, 229, 279, 280, 294, 313, 316, 319, 320, 328, 332, 349 Kaas, Ludwig, 301 Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph, 24, 162, 193, 289, 293, 320 Kalthoff, Albert, 129, 280 Kammerer, Paul, 245, 344 inheritance of acquired characteristics, 263–65 and the Soviet Union, 278 and Weimar monism, 248 Kampffmeyer, Paul, 57, 69, 73, 74, 104 Kant, Immanuel, 133, 200, 244 Kappstein, Theodor, 50 Karlsruhe, 128 Karow, General Superintendent Emil, 285, 310, 311, 313 Kautsky, Karl, 66, 73, 106, 118 postwar criticism of, 249 Kerr, Alfred, 81, 86 Kessler, Gustav, 102, 344 and localism, 76 Kippenberger, Hans, 244 Klages, Ludwig, 270 Klein, Maximilian, 46 Knilling, Eugen von, 190, 191 Koch, Adolf, 267–75, 345 after 1933, 320 Kocka, Jürgen, 22 Kołakowski, Leszek, 26 Kolb, Wilhelm, 210 Komitee Konfessionslos, 176–80 Kommunistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft. See Communist Working Collective (KAG) Konfession. See confession Königsberg, 11 Korsch, Karl, 227 Koselleck, Reinhart, 100 Kosmos, book series, 42, 248, 291 Kraus, Karl, 86, 262 Kreuzzeitung, 176, 182 Krische, Maria, 295, 345 profession, 245 and “science of community”, 252–53 and sexual reform, 267 in USPD, 224

362

Index

Krische, Paul, 272 and Bolsheviks, 254 and Community of Proletarian Freethinkers, 289 and IPF, 290 profession, 245 theory of biological drives, 254, 256, 262, 297 theory of matriarchy, 267 in USPD, 224, 253 and Weimar monism, 263–65 Kultur and liberal antipolitics, 128, 175–76 secularism, 6 socialist appropriation of, 240 Kulturbolschewismus See cultural Bolshevism, 306 Kulturkampf, 6, 15, 16, 67 interwar, 19 Kultursozialismus. See cultural socialism Kulturwille, 239, 274, 276 Kunert, Fritz, 345 Berlin City Council, 78, 79, 165 conflicts with party leadership, 79, 80, 353 in FRC Berlin, 77, 84 newspaper editor, 78 opposition to war credits, 205 photo of, 214 Reichstag deputy, 78, 96 rejects religious compromise of Weimar Constitution, 223 as schoolteacher, 77, 93, 246 in USPD, 206, 215 labor unions, 59 Landauer, Gustav, 73, 75, 100, 112 Lange, Helene, 147 Langewiesche, Dieter, 23, 120, 241 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 51, 62, 354 League New Fatherland (BNV). See Bund Neues Vaterland League of the Godless, Soviet, 27, 298 Lebensreform. See life reform Ledebour, Georg, 58, 345 in Berlin Workers Education School, 69 and council movement, 228, 232 and Democratic movement, 104 educational background, 77 in FRC Berlin, 53, 77 and Lou Andreas-Salome, 91 newspaper editor, 78 Reichstag deputy, 78 in revolution, 215 USPD, 206, 210 at Zimmerwald Conference, 206

Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto, 195 and Giordano-Bruno League, 176 and Komitee Konfessionslos, 176, 182 and monism, 148 pacifism, 204 and United Committee for Church-Leaving, 180 Leipzig, 11, 13, 52, 63, 115, 134–42, 224, 225, 226, 240, 242, 244, 266, 275, 279, 320, 338, 341, 343 Leipziger Volkszeitung, 136 Leixner, Otto von, 98–99 Lenin, Vladimir, ix, 27, 114, 122, 206, 231, 238, 249, 277, 296, 305 Leninism. See Marxism-Leninism lèse-majesté, 30, 78, 106, 110, 201 Levenstein, Adolf. See worker autobiographies liberal secularism Munich, 160, 169, 176, 184 liberalism, 305, 308 and antipolitics, 67, 170, 171, 175 in Bavaria, 186 and political secularism, 3 and popular science, 40, 44, 50 and secularism, 157 and socialism, 5, 31, 159 library movement, workers’, 136–37 Lidtke, Vernon, 7 Liebknecht, Karl, 18, 155, 179, 193, 206, 208, 209 church-leaving agitation of, 180, 193 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 15, 16, 23, 55, 62, 69, 70, 102, 116, 125, 334 life reform, 5, 8, 14, 19, 20, 97, 99, 135, 137, 140, 142, 215, 252, 258, 259, 260, 265, 296 and Free Religion, 43 and nudism, 320 theory of, 100, 101 Vatican opposition to, 275 and Weimar cultural socialism, 239, 250, 253 Lindemann, Anna, 296, 298, 346 Lindemann, Walter, 296, 298, 346 Löbe, Paul, 143 educational background, 127 localism, labor union, 76 Löwenstein, Kurt, 346 and cultural socialism, 251 and Franz Müller-Lyer, 257 and Kinderfreunde, 282 and marriage community, 259 as monist intellectual, 247 in revolution, 226, 246, 251 in USPD, 257

Index monist educational theory, 281, 282 prewar secularism, 247 Reichstag deputy, 248 schoolteacher, 245 Luckenwalde, 295 Ludwigshafen, 11, 168, 188, 189 Luhmann, Niklas, 7 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 277, 278 Lux, Heinrich, 46 Luxemburg, Rosa, 117, 118, 121, 154, 174, 206 Lyssenko, Trofim, 278 Mach, Ernst, 244 Mackay, John, ix, 69, 80, 82 Malia, Martin, 26 Malthus, Thomas, 57 Manasse, Waldeck, 38, 59, 78, 94, 95, 164, 199, 203, 224 antisemitic agitation against, 182 Berlin City Council, 79 educational background, 77 in FRC Berlin, 77 Mannheim, 120, 168 Mannheim, Karl, 67 Mao Tse Tung, 28 Marx, Karl, ix, 2, 297 Marx, Wilhelm, 294 Marxism-Leninism, ix, 10, 19, 23, 296 Maslowski, Peter, 346 communist Freethinker, 298 critique of cultural socialism, 297 mass strike debate, 117, 154, 165, 168, 193 relation to church-leaving, 179 materialism historical versus scientific, 17 Maurenbrecher, Max, 58, 122, 128, 173, 187, 201, 213, 339, 346 exit from SPD, 174 National Social movement, 46 teacher in FRC Nuremberg, 174 and Vaterlandspartei, 213 and völkisch Protestantism, 201 wartime nationalism, 201 Mauthner, Fritz, 96 May, Ludwig, 51, 53, 79 Meerfeld, Johannes, 18 Mehring, Franz, 52, 69, 73, 104, 121, 122, 133 criticism of the Jungen, 69, 70 Meinecke, Friedrich, 212 Meisel-Hess, Grete, 144, 150 Mendel, Gregor, 263 Menke, Bernhard, 346 antiwar agitation, 207, 208 in church-leaving movement, 180 and formation of the IPF, 289

363 leader of ZpF, 180 in USPD, 206 Menschenthum, 55 Metzner, Theodor, 39, 53, 60, 77, 78, 347, 353, 354 Berlin City Council, 79 educational background, 57 in FRC Berlin, 51, 77 and localism, 76 speaker at Workers’ Education Society North, 57 as working-class intellectual, 59 Meyer, Heinrich, 244 Meyer, M. Wilhelm, 47–49 Michels, Robert, 67 Miller, Susanne, 23, 196, 237 Moleschott, Jacob, 116 monism definition of naturalistic, 10 idealist, 132 and Marxism, 10 naturalistic, 41–42 and popular science, 40–42 USPD and, 245 Monist League, Austrian, 173, 203 Monist League, German, 5, 18, 39, 63, 94, 117, 144, 157, 169, 177, 178, 217, 222, 242, 247, 252, 280, 291, 337, 338, 339 anti-Catholicism, 157 church-leaving movement, 163, 176–79 Franz Müller-Lyer, 254 Heinrich Peus in, 201 Kurt Löwenstein, 281 Magnus Hirschfeld, 263 Munich, 158 pacifism, 243 shrinkage in Weimar Republic, 244 wartime conflicts within, 203 wartime pacifism within, 203–5 Wilhelm Ostwald and, 176 monists in Weimar socialism, 242–45 More, Thomas, 57 Morgenstern, Lina, 144 Most, Johann, 16, 51, 73, 91, 92, 96 Mothers’ Protection and Sexual Reform, League for, 157, 337 Motzen Lake nudist colony, 267, 272 Müller, Heiner, 65 Müller, Richard, 215 Müller-Lyer, Franz, 204, 254–56, 274, 297 Munich, 13, 85, 169, 170, 176, 184, 193, 225, 315, 332 Munich Cultural Cartel, 157 Mutterschutz. See Mothers’ Protection and Sexual Reform, League for

364

Index

National Liberal Party, 29 National Social movement, 46, 127 and anti-Catholicism, 156 National Socialism, 20 and secularism, 314–20 Naumann, Friedrich, 46, 127, 128, 133, 156, 157, 159, 171, 172, 174, 175, 201, 202, 222, 229, 346 and worker autobiographies, 127 Nelson, Leonard, 250, 266, 330 neo-Kantianism, 330 and cultural socialism, 249–51 neo-Lamarckism, 149, 263, 278 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix, 89, 91, 132, 133, 173, 200, 244 Nipperdey, Thomas, 153 Nordau, Max, 107 nudism, 270–75 Nuremberg, 11, 31, 189, 194, 208 Ossietzky, Carl von, 202, 243, 255, 276 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 18, 95, 101, 117, 157, 163, 168, 172, 187, 193, 195, 197, 203, 248 support of war, 200 Pacelli, Eugenio, 219, 220, 275, 285, 302 Papen, Franz von, 308–11, 317 Penzig, Rudolf, 159, 178, 197, 203, 212 People’s Association for Catholic Germany. See Volksverein Peris, Daniel, 27 Peters, Louise, 144 Petrich, Franz, 118 Peus, Heinrich, 35, 347 and church-leaving movement, 72, 179, 181 collaboration with liberals, 94, 174, 212 in FRC Berlin, 35, 77 in Monist League, 194, 243, 245 incomplete university education, 55, 77 newspaper editor, 78 popular science lecturer, 57 Reichstag deputy, 202 and revisionism, 76, 155, 170 speaker in Arbeiterbildungsverein Nord, 353 wartime patriotism, 201, 205 working-class childhood, 94 Pfaffenspiegel, 297 Pfannkuche, August, 127 Pfungst, Arthur, 157 phylogenetic principle, 48 Piechowski, Paul, 295 Pieper, August, 212 Pinn, Carl, 347 biographical analysis, 101–6 in FRC Berlin, 77

incomplete university studies, 94 popular science lectures, 43 schoolteacher, 93 Pius XI, Pope, 285, 301 Plekhanov, Georgi, 242 Poland, 107 Polanyi, Karl, 248 police Berlin, 71 suppression, 61, 144, 145, 179 surveillance, 43, 62, 102 undercover, 62, 84 political religion, theory of, 25, 26, 27 popular science, 8 and secularism, 39–42 and worldview, 40 Porter-Szucs, Brian, 334 positive Christianity, 20, 187, 190, 314, 315, 321 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni, 254 Privatdozenten, 44 Pro Deo, 325 Progressive Party, 29, 30, 43, 51, 159, 211, 344 Proletarian Freethinkers Central Association of, 10 communist opposition within, 296–300 Community of, ix, 289–93 Göttingen, 327 Hamburg, 159 International of, 10, 95, 290, 291, 298, 300, 325, 327 Leipzig, 207, 295, 297 Munich, 159 Rhineland, 159 socialist versus communist, 12 USPD and, 294 Proletarische Heimstunden, ix Proletkult, ix, 278, 281 Prometheus myth, 63–65, 76, 89, 140 Protestant Church, 13 attendance rates, 31 competition with Arbeiterjugend, 138 in East Germany, 333 Inner Mission, 31, 146, 304 and National Socialism, 325 opposition to Freethought, 288, 304, 313 opposition to Jugendweihe, 199 opposition to secularization, 216, 218 Press Association, 304 response to church-leaving, 180 traumatic experience of revolution, 217 Prüfer, Sebastian, 24 Prussia, 167 Prussian Landtag, 12, 78, 164, 166, 211 Quidde, Ludwig, 185, 189

Index Radbruch, Gustav, 250 Rancière, Jacques, 114 Reformation, 26, 142, 170, 198, 219 Reichenbach, Andreas, 10 Reichsbote, 84, 182, 205 Remmele, Hermann, 244, 297 Reuter, Ernst, 244 Revolution of 1848, 5 Revolutionary Stewards, 214, 215 Rhineland, 42, 180, 186, 217, 224, 226, 272, 290 Riemann, Robert, 242, 347 on Weimar monism, 242 schoolteacher, 245 Rieß, Max, 169 rituals, secularist, 36, 277, 328 Roosevelt, Theodore, 97 Ropp, Wilhelm von der, 304 Rüdt, Philipp August, 348 at Halle Party Congress 1890, 70 and Munich Freethought, 168, 183–84 Rühle, Otto, 348 and Dresden Freethinkers, 207 antiwar agitation, 206, 208 as wandering speaker, 120 lecturer to Freethinkers, 122 Reichstag deputy, 208 Russian Revolution of 1905, 117, 165 of 1917, 211, 229, 230 Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, 68, 71, 72 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 92 Saxony, 8, 94, 139, 162, 167, 180, 223, 225, 272, 274, 290, 305, 320, 341 Schaefer, G.S., 33, 51, 280 conflict with socialists, 51–54 on women and religion, 145 Schaxel, Julius, 248, 348 and cultural socialism, 248 editor of Urania, 248, 279 prewar monism, 245 and the Soviet Union, 278 Schmidt, Conrad, 71, 348 and the Jungen, 73 educational background, 77, 94 Free Religious upbringing, 90 in FRC Berlin, 77 and revisionism, 57, 76 Schmidt-Lux, Thomas, 27 Schmitt, Carl, 25 Schmitz, Oscar A.H., 117 Schoenlank, Bruno, 104 schools, secular, 157, 271, 282, 284, 294, 295 Schreiner, Helmuth, 288

365 Schulz, Heinrich, 120 Schulze-Delitzsch, Hermann, 43 Schundliteratur. See trash literature Schwaner, Wilhelm, 46 Schwartz, Laura, 4, 146 Schweichel, Robert, 349 Scott, Joan Wallach, 2, 3, 4, 146 secularism and gender, 13 female leadership, 59 and psychology, 99 political divisions within, 51 political versus worldview, 2, 4 Protestant, 2 pure versus extended, 11 socialist or “red”, 5 as “third pillar” of the workers’ movement, 25, 296 and vegetarianism, 100 secularist publishers, 128 secularization, 170, 226, 237, 330 after 1933, 330 of schools, 186, 220, 221, 316 versus secularism, 330 secularization theory, 2 as apologetic, 21, 23 and history of socialism, 24, 25, 28, 323 and social history, 21, 22, 23 origins of, 258 role of Gemeinschaft discourse in, 258 Segitz, Martin, 189 semi-education, 48 Semon, Richard, 263 Siemsen, Anna, 245, 248, 349 and cultural socialism, 251 at Tinz, 282 monist educational theory, 282 Sievers, Max and the Communist Working Collective (KAG), 235 and the council movement, 228 chairman of VFF and VfFF, 293, 294, 297 exit from Communist Party, 293 in exile, 327 relationship to SPD leadership, 294 working-class upbringing, 91 Silesia, 104 Simmel, Georg, 44 Singer, Paul, 80, 104, 106, 145 Slezkine, Yuri, 26 Smith, Helmut Walser, 153 Smolkin, Victoria, 27, 334 Snow, C.P., 6

366

Index

Social Democratic Party (SPD), 1, 8, 14, 18, 29, 30, 72, 103, 196, 210, 264 Bavaria, 184, 188 membership, 12 Munich, 167 Social Democratic Party, Independent (USPD), 13, 19, 137, 143, 196, 206, 208, 221, 223, 230, 257, 279 Berlin, 246 council movement and, 226–31 secularist relationship to, 20, 224–26 secularists in the formation of, 198, 205–12 Social Democratic Party, Majority (MSPD), 19, 196, 209, 210, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 230, 231, 232, 237, 238, 250 social history, x, 21, 22, 24, 114, 323 Socialist Laws, 1878-1890, 13, 16, 24, 51, 52, 54, 55, 67, 68, 71, 72, 107, 353 Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SDAP), 1 Society for the Promotion of Popular Education, 42–43 Sommer, Bruno, 349 editor of Lichtstrahlen, 72 initial support of war, 207 working-class upbringing, 91 Sontheimer, Joseph, 350 and anarchism, 168 anticlerical agitation, 190 in Bavarian Socialist Republic, 208 and “birth strike”, 191 and Munich Freethought, 168 Soviet Union, 19, 26, 27, 139, 241, 277, 278, 285, 291, 296, 298, 328, 348 Sozialistische Akademiker, Der, 75, 352 Spartacist League, 206, 214 Spinoza, Baruch, 41 Spohr, Wilhelm, 277 Sprechchor, 240, 276–79, 281 and Jugendweihe, 279, 317 Stalin, Joseph, 244, 254, 278, 323 Steinberg, Hans-Joseph, 114 Steiner, Rudolf, 58 Stern, Jakob, 52, 350 Stern, Viktor, 228, 244, 350 and IPF, 290 Stettin, 157 Stöcker, Helene, 52, 96, 144, 148, 149, 150, 243, 253, 265 Stoecker, Adolf, 52, 96, 127, 145, 182 stoicism, 136 Ströbel, Heinrich, 253

suffrage introduction of universal, 30, 50 liberal debates over universal, 158, 213 three-class, 30, 154, 159, 165 women’s, 107 systems theory, 7 tableaux vivants, 87, 113, 276 Tat, Die, 173 Teistler, Hermann, 350 editor of Lichtstrahlen, 72 Tepper-Laski, Kurt von, 176, 204 Teuchert, Hugo, 134 Themel, Karl, 325 Thimme, Friedrich, 212 Thompson, E.P., 114 Thuringia, 224, 225, 272, 274, 290, 296, 316, 320 Tiburtius, Franziska, 147 Tille, Alexander, 80 Tinz, adult education boarding school, 274 trash literature, 137, 140, 142 Troeltsch, Ernst, 212 Tschirn, Gustav, 34, 200, 212 church-leaving agitation of, 177–81 Democratic politics of, 174 on women, 149 Türk, Julius, 350, 353 Tutzauer, Franz, 79, 350 Two Cultures, 6 Ulbricht, Walter, 139–43, 151 Unold, Johannes, 158 Urania, 274 Urania planetarium, 39, 46–49 elite control of, 50 Urn, cremation society, 38 Vatican, 19, 156, 275, 283, 285, 301, 319 vegetarianism, 8, 239, 258 Vienna, 85, 240, 243, 290 Voegelin, Erich, 25 Voelkel, Titus, 43, 50, 77, 82, 93, 96, 136 Vogt, Karl, 116 Vogtherr, Ewald, 50, 102, 351 in Berlin City Council, 78, 79 and Berlin Workers’ Education School, 55 church-leaving agitation, 71, 72, 178, 179 educational background, 77 Free Religious upbringing, 90 in FRC Berlin, 38, 71, 77 graveside eulogist, 112 photo of, 205 popular science speaker, 43 Reichstag deputy, 78

Index and Revolution of 1918, 215 in USPD, 206, 210, 215, 224 and women’s movement, 146 völkisch thought, 46, 151, 171, 174, 194, 201, 211, 252, 309, 318, 321 Volkshaus, Leipzig, 135, 140 Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland, 302, 303, 317 Volks-Zeitung, Berliner, 54 Vorländer, Karl, 249 Vorwärts, 15 Vossische Zeitung, 105, 163, 348 voting laws. See suffrage Wabnitz, Agnes, 59, 351 biographical analysis of, 106–13 critique of anarchists, 113 educational status, 77 family background, 91 in FRC Berlin, 77 photo of, 98 popular science speaker, 58, 147, 148 women’s union organizer, 144 in Working Women’s Association of the North, Berlin, 144 Wanner, Catherine, 27 Weber, Alfred, 67, 158 Weber, Max, 67, 99, 129, 158, 173, 213, 323 Weg, Der, 176, 182, 352 wartime censorship, 205 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 153 Weimar Cartel, 157, 169, 177, 337 Weimar Constitution, 221–23, 284, 310, 324, 333 ‘limping’ separation, 221 Weissmann, August, 264 Welker, Georg, 16–17, 351 Weltall Erde Mensch, 328 Weltanschauung. See worldview Welträtsel, Die. See World Riddle Werner, Wilhelm, 80, 351 Westphalia, 226, 272, 290 Whitman, Walt, ix, 257 Wille, Bruno, 103, 106, 112, 233, 351 arrests, 84, 85 church-leaving agitation, 177, 179 confrontation with August Bebel, 69 critique of socialist leadership, 233 editor of Der Freidenker, 63 education, 77 and Eugen Diederichs, 128 exit from socialist movement, 101 and the Free Academy, 46 Free Religious teacher, 36

367 and Freethought, 159 in GVV, 50 initial support of war, 203 intellectual elitism, 80 on Johannes Guttzeit, 98 and the Jungen, 68, 71–75 and Jugendweihe, 229 and monism, 243 photo of, 56 popular science speaker, 59 satire of, 80 staging as secularist intellectual, 80–88 and Workers’ Education Society North, 56, 353 Winkler, Heinrich August, 23 Wislicenus, Paul, 43 Wolf, Arthur, 351 antiwar stance, 207 edit of Proletarische Heimstunden, 266 editor of Der Atheist, 257 in GPF, 290, 297 in IPF, 290 women’s movement, 8, 13 eugenics, 150 secularism and, 62, 143–50, 331 worker autobiographies Adolf Levenstein and, 128–34 of Max Lotz, 130–32 of Richard Richter, 129–30 Paul Göhre, 127 worker education societies, 8 workers’ culture in Leipzig, 134–42 Workers’ Education School, Berlin, 12, 55 Workers’ Education Society North, Berlin, 56–58 Working Women’s Association of the North, 144 World Riddle, 41, 129, 151 World War, First, 94, 101 worldview and aesthetics, 46 Christian, 309, 318 initially not applied to Marxism, 10 naturalistic monism as, 10 Zelck, Max, 276–79, 351 Zepler, Georg, 212, 352 antisemitic agitation against, 182 Komitee Konfessionslos, 179 League of Atheists, 177 Zetkin, Clara, 120, 144, 344