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C h a p t e r t w o Debating the Socialist Law 1 8 7 8 Nine days after the Reichstag decisively voted down Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation and concluded its session, the majority coalition that had defended equality under the law faced a severe challenge on which it would temporarily founder as the paperedover divisions among National Liberals came back into stark relief and the conservative warnings of imminent revolution gained credibility. On June 2, a second would-be assassin , Dr. Karl Nobiling, fired on the imperial carriage, which the defiant Kaiser Wilhelm had continued to ride along the same route on Unter den Linden as he had been accustomed to do before the attack of May 11. Nobiling fired a shotgun from his lodging house into the street below, gravely wounding the emperor. As an angry group of bystanders stormed the building, Nobiling shot himself in the head, inflicting an injury that put him in a coma and led to his death three months later. August Bebel recalled in his autobiography feeling reassured when he heard this second would-be regicide’s name and it was completely unfamiliar to him. The following morning, wrote Bebel, he pored over the first news reports of the attack, which made no mention of the attacker having any Socialist affiliation, and “breathed a sigh of relief, entering the editorial office [of the party paper Vorwärts] with the words, ‘No, they can’t pin this on us.’” No one else in the office had heard of the attacker either.1 Minutes later, the official Wolff telegraph service issued a news bulletin claiming that Nobiling had confessed to being a Social Democrat (though no evidence that he regained consciousness after shooting himself ever appeared). It soon came out that Nobiling had attended Social Democratic meetings, but only to harangue the speakers and expound his own views. He had also attended National Liberal meetings and at various times had subscribed to Socialist, National Liberal, Catholic, and conservative newspapers.2 44 ASSASSINS and CONSPIRATORS While the kaiser’s life hung in the balance, Bismarck plunged into action, asserting that this second attack on the monarch proved the government’s charge that Social Democracy posed a serious threat to the nation’s security. The absence of any evidence tying Socialists to Nobiling’s act did not dissuade the conservative press from trying to stoke anti-socialist fears in the German public. Bismarck convinced the Bundesrat to dismiss the already-out-of-session Reichstag on June 11 and call for new elections to take place at the end of July.3 In preparation for the new Reichstag’s fall session, the chancellor promised to draft a new anti-socialist law that would be harsher than the one rejected a few weeks earlier. In the meantime, he directed the government to use the police and judiciary’s full might to hobble the Socialist movement. Recalling the campaign of repression that followed, party theoretician Eduard Bern­ stein wrote, half a century later, “Whoever did not live through those days can only with great difficulty imagine the storm that broke over the Social Democrats. Remembering it and its immediate results affects me strongly even today.” Government mouthpieces branded Social Democracy the “party of assassins and conspirators” and sought to excite popular fury against them. “The most impudent lies against Social Democrats, concocted by unscrupulous reporters, were willingly peddled by the same newspapers that toutedtheirownliberalism.Nosurprisethenthatamongthebourgeoispublicatruefear of the socialist specter took hold.”4 Bebel accused Bismarck of having used his so-called “reptile fund [Reptilienfond]” (originally an anti-Guelph slush fund created through the expropriation of money from the dispossessed Hanoverian monarch in 1866) to buy anti-socialist coverage from the press, which helped “to whip up among the populace a fanatical hatred of Social Democracy.”5 According to Ignaz Auer, a leading Social Democrat and later Reichstag deputy, the conservative and National Liberal papers obscured the clear evidence of Nobiling’s insanity, while offering up an “unbelievable” number of “lies, contortions, and smears” against the Socialists. Even the Progressives put prominently in their election call the cry, “Out of the Reichstag with the Social Democrats!”6 Supported by this furor in the press, police authorities began a massive anti-Socialist assault. Across the empire, police raided the dwellings of known Social Democrats looking for any evidence connecting them to Nobiling or, failing that, any pretext to arrest them for encouraging attacks. Socialist publishers were prosecuted for allegedly...

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