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CHAPTER 3 German Social Democrats on the Völkisch Movement In the 1880s the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) for the first time in its history had to confront a noisy, antisemitic agitation, led by the Protestant court preacher Adolf Stöcker in Berlin. The so-called Berlin movement transformed the “Jewish Question” into an issue of German electoral politics. It was instigated after Stöcker had failed in his initial attempts to win the Berlin workers for German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s social legislation . Stöcker’s Christian-Social movement emerged at a time when the antisocialist laws had driven the SPD underground and deprived the working class of any meaningful political freedom. Troubled by proletarian indifference and hostility to the newly united German fatherland, the monarchical State and Lutheran Christianity, Stöcker tried to mobilize the discontent of the petty-bourgeois masses (Kleinbürgertum) against the recently emancipated Jews. The SPD had every reason in the early 1880s to oppose this crusade, which they identified with Bismarck’s authoritarian efforts to root out social democracy by Prussian strong-arm methods. While Stöcker denounced the “atheistic,” materialistic, and unpatriotic SPD, the socialists in their turn vehemently opposed a demagogue whom they regarded as the “spiritual gendarme” of Bismarck.1 Resistance to the Jew-bait thus became part of the broader working-class defiance of the Bismarckian regime and its witchhunt against German Social Democracy. The SPD campaign against Stöcker was essentially an act of self-defense in the face of what they saw as a repressive clerical-authoritarian State. By the 1890s, however, the situation had changed. The Protestant “Christian socialism” of Stöcker with its echoes of Luther’s tirades against the Jews, had given way to a new anti-Christian, radical-populist brand of agitation. The strongholds of the antisemitic movement were no longer in Berlin and other big cities, but in the provinces, among the peasantry and the rural Mittelstand. The new demagogues of antisemitism like Otto Böckel, Hermann Ahlwardt, and Theodor Fritsch spoke the language of blood and race, and evoked the virtues of the Germanic Volk. They had no interest in German Social Democrats on the Völkisch Movement 112 the ideology of the Christian State. Their propaganda was directed against the ruling Prusso-German establishment instead of being orchestrated from above as in the early 1880s. Fin-de-siècle German populism was anticapitalist and anti-Junker as well as being antisemitic in orientation. This new democratic trend in völkisch antisemitism presented the SPD with an awkward tactical dilemma, heightened by its own internal evolution since the 1880s. With the end of the anti-socialist laws in 1890, the Social Democrats had emerged as a powerful factor in State and society, strengthened by their experience of governmental repression. Their gradual integration into the German political system encouraged an increasingly reformist “praxis”: at the same time, the SPD still espoused a revolutionary Marxism in questions of theory, stubbornly clinging to its utopian belief in the imminent demise of capitalist society. This belief was interpreted in a peculiarly mechanistic and determinist manner—far removed from the idealism which had animated the party in an earlier phase of its history. Antisemitism was one of the more important political phenomena of the 1890s which needed to be fitted into the general perspective of Marxian doctrine as interpreted by SPD leaders after the Erfurt Congress of 1891. The German Marxist consensus regarded it as “reactionary degeneration” of feudal “socialism,” following the definition given by Frederick Engels in a well-known article published in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung in May 1890. Engels had unequivocally pinpointed the reactionary features of antisemitism, which he deduced from its social basis in the Mittelstand— those intermediate strata between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which according to Marxian theory, were doomed to disappear. The SPD accepted Engels’s viewpoint but gave it a fatalistic interpretation which further reinforced the trend towards passively waiting on events that would characterize party policy in the 1890s. Instead of considering antisemitism as a direct threat to social democracy (as it had a decade earlier), it now saw the movement as preparing the road for socialism itself. The campaign against the Jews was expected to awaken the lethargic lower middle-class strata of German society to a more “progressive” standpoint. According to Marx and Engels, modern capitalist society would inevitably polarize into two great camps—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Mittelstand, so it was...

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