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CHAPTER 5 Anti-Capitalism or Antisemitism? The Enigma of Franz Mehring The Marxist labor movement in Wilhelminian Germany viewed the “Jewish Question” as an inseparable aspect of the crisis of modern bourgeois society. It also recognized that Jewish emancipation had been brought about by capitalism but considered that the process could only be completed in a new, classless society. By the end of the 1870s it was already evident that liberalism was on the defensive in Germany and one of the symptoms of its fading hegemony was the deflection of social tensions against the Jewish minority.1 Discontented groups in German society who opposed the liberal status quo now began to focus their offensive against the Jews who were depicted as a domineering and privileged clique. This led to the formation of a number of antisemitic political parties who achieved temporary electoral successes in the early 1890s, only to subside again in the first decade of the twentieth century.2 At the same time, it has been widely claimed that the German Social Democratic Party (SPD)—which had many Jewish intellectuals in its top ranks—was more resistant than any other political party to the impact of antisemitism in Wilhelminian Germany.3 The evidence for and against this assumption has been documented by me elsewhere and it is mixed.4 However, a detailed examination such as I have carried out in this book, reveals that the German labor movement adopted a more equivocal attitude towards Jews than is widely believed. A case-study of one of the leading publicists of the German labor movement, the revolutionary socialist and widely admired historian Franz Mehring, is particularly illuminating in this respect. No other German socialist wrote as extensively on the “Jewish Question” in this period. Hence an examination of Mehring’s writings on this topic can tell us a great deal about the tactical and ideological dilemmas which confronted the labor movement with the emergence of völkisch antisemitism in the 1890s. More than any of his contemporaries in the German workers’ movement, Mehring exhibited attitudes which illustrate the difficulty in clearly demarcating the Marxist from the antisemitic critique of liberal capitalism. In particular, he Anti-Capitalism or Antisemitism: The Enigma of Franz Mehring 154 insisted on regarding so-called philosemitism as a more dangerous threat than antisemitism to the labor movement. Franz Mehring was born in to a middle-class Pomeranian family in 1846. Nothing in his early journalistic career suggested that many years later he would, together with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, become one of the co-founders of the German Communist Party. His road to Marxism followed a long and painful detour which necessitated a sharp break with his class, culture, and family background. He had gone through a militant antisocialist phase—one in which he had written antisemitically-tinged articles for the Saale-Zeitung which even led to calls for a boycott of the paper by Jewish advertisers and subscribers—something of which he was actually proud rather than apologetic. Mehring combined a rebellious and artistic temperament with a chivalrous sympathy for the oppressed masses. More than any other German socialist he sought to transmit the heritage of German classical philosophy, poetry, and drama to the proletariat. In the words of Rosa Luxemburg, who hailed him on his seventieth birthday as “the representative of authentic intellectual culture in all its brilliance,” Mehring had taught the German workers “through every line from your wonderful pen, that Socialism is not merely a knife-and-fork question, but a civilizing movement, a great and proud world-view.”5 Nevertheless, Mehring did not finally commit himself to the labor movement until 1890, when at the age of forty-four he became the Berlin correspondent of the Marxist review, Die Neue Zeit. By this time his views on the Jews in Germany had definitively crystallized. If, therefore, his writings after 1890 clearly reflect the ideological prism of historical materialism and the German socialist consensus , they also express pre-Marxist attitudes which had taken shape at least a decade earlier. Franz Mehring first encountered the “Jewish Question” in Berlin at the end of the 1870s. As an independent young journalist in his early thirties he witnessed at first hand the rise of a new literary antisemitism. The embittered social climate which gave rise to this trend also produced some convergence between conservative and radical critiques of the dominant liberal-capitalist order. Conservative publicists like Rudolf Meyer and Hermann Wagener as well as Kathedersozialisten...

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