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C h a p t e r t h r e e The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy 1 8 7 8 – 1 8 8 5 In 1879, Franz Mehring began a series of articles on the history of Socialism for the family magazine Die Gartenlaube (The Arbor), the most popular magazine in the German Empire. Mehring, an advocate of social reform measures to aid the working classes, had turned hostile to the socialists as their rift with liberal workers’ organizations had widened in the 1860s and 1870s. The criticisms in this series of articles echoed those he had voiced in the pre–Socialist Law era. Centrally, he felt that the Social Democrats acted in ways that did not serve the workers’ cause. “Never have they attempted to take part in the Reichstag’s business with zeal and seriousness,” he complained. When they bothered to show up, Social Democratic Reichstag deputies offered only “the repetition of the same threatening speech, sometimes in a halfway decent form, other times so strongly biting that a scent of petroleum wafted through the entire house.” Mehring’s allusion to the Paris Commune’s fabled pétroleuses linked the Social Democrats to the popular conception of violent revolutionary excess that conservatives so often invoked.1 He denounced the Socialist movement for inflaming the working classes with “hate, envy, ire, dissatisfaction, rage, and all of the wild and unrestrained passions of the human breast” and ultimately attempting to “bury all that is connected to the honor of the German name, to tear from the worker’s heart every trace of human awe.” As part of the Socialists’ defamation campaigns against their opponents, anyone who spoke against the party “would immediately find his private honor and position malevolently and slanderously attacked.” The liberal jour- The Specter of Anarchism and the Normalization of Social Democracy 71 nalist concluded sadly that this “formal system of terrorism” was all that the Social Democrats had built from the toil and sacrifice of the German working classes.2 Mehring’s pro-worker, anti-socialist attitude typified a large swath of liberal opinion in Germany. Until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, liberal and socialist workers’ organizations shared strong ties. The fissures that finally separated the two camps grew out of tensions over who would lead the movement, educated middle-class thinkers or workers themselves, as well as conflicting assessments of German unification under Prussia and of the Paris Commune.3 Mehring’s hostility toward the Social Democrats, though at times couched in similar terms, had little in common with conservative anti-socialism, which was rooted in a broad hostility to democracy and social change. Despite his thoroughgoing criticism of the Social Democrats for their allegedly dishonorable and irresponsible behavior, Mehring, along with left liberals like Albert Hänel and the Kathedersozialisten, did not object to the socialist goal of advancing workers ’ rights but only the means Social Democrats employed. A scant 12 years after condemning Social Democracy for setting itself “against modern culture, the rich heir of a rich millennium, in favor of a gloomy and uncertain future ,”4 Franz Mehring joined the newly christened German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and quickly rose to a position of prominence. Among his many writings as a Social Democrat, Mehring produced a new, laudatory history of the movement, soon acknowledged as the official party version.5 Though not every liberal evolved into a Social Democrat, Mehring’s story illustrates a trend evident over the years of the Socialist Law: the growing acceptance of Social Democrats as legitimate actors in the public sphere. To convince a man like Mehring to support the party, the Social Democrats needed both to illustrate the positive and productive elements of their political program and to disavow the revolutionary rhetoric, the “scent of petroleum,” that had been prominent among party leaders such as Most and Hasselmann, but Bebel and Liebknecht as well, in the 1860s and 1870s. A key element of this success involved transforming the public image of Social Democracy from that of a violent sect bent on the destruction of modern culture into that of a political party devoted to responsible social change. Socialist anti-anarchist rhetoric contributed a crucial element to this transformation by displacing many popular anti-socialist tropes onto anarchists and positioning Social Democracy as anarchism’s opposite. Over the course of the Socialist Law, the Social Democrats convinced not only Franz Mehring but also a significant sector of...

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