Antisocialism and Electoral Politics in Regional Perspective

44 Pages·2007·2.52 MB·English

2
Antisocialism and Electoral Politics in
Regional Perspective:
The Kingdom of Saxony
JAMES RETALLACK
ANTISOCIALISM AND REGIONAL HISTORY
In this essay I explore the degree to which an alleged antisocialist
consensus among Imperial Germany's elites was evident in the arena
of electoral politics. This is the first of three items on my agenda. I
1
am interested only tangentially in rehearsing the strengths and weak-
nesses of a general perspective - dominant in the mid-1970s - that
emphasized the coherence and durability of right-wing attempts to
contain the threat of Social Democracy. As this perspective came to
2
dominate the field, it became de rigueur to argue that agrarian
Junkers, heavy industrialists, and other elements of the educated or
propertied Burgerturn enjoyed fundamental, long-lasting agreement
about the dangers of revolution. In part because the authors who
supported this view produced such a mountain of scholarship, most
readers still believe that Imperial German elites practiced "unanimous
I am grateful to Brett Fairbairn, Roger Chickering, and Peter Steinbach for their thoughtful
comments on early drafts of this essay; to Kenneth Mills and Greg Smith for research as-
sistance; to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial
support; and to the librarians of Stanford University and the University of Toronto.
1. Among the most notable recent studies of elections in the Kaiserreich are Stanley Suval,
Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985); Brett Fairbairn, "The
German Elections of 1898 and 1903" (D. Phil, diss., Oxford University, 1987); see also the
essay by Fairbairn in this volume; Karl Rohe, ed., Elections, Parties and Political Traditions
(New York, 1990); Gerhard A. Ritter and Merith Niehuss, Wahlgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch
(Munich, 1980); G. A. Ritter, ed., Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Munich,
1990); Peter Steinbach, "Wahlrecht und Wahlbeteiligung im Furstentum Lippe bis zum
Ende des Kaiserreichs," Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde 58 (1989): 171—
232; and P. Steinbach, Die Zdhmung des politschen Massenmarktes: Wahlen und Wahlkdmpfe im
Bismarckreich, 3 vols. (Passau, 1990).
2. For the historiographical background seej. Retallack, "Social History with a Vengeance?
Some Reactions to H.-U. Wehler's Das Deutsche Kaiserreich," German Studies Review 7
(1984): 423-50; and Retallack, "Wilhelmine Germany," in Gordon Martel, ed., Modern
Germany Reconsidered (London, 1991). Limits of space compel me to refer collectively to the
work of Volker Berghahn, Fritz Fischer, Dieter Groh, Hans-Jiirgen Puhle, Klaus Saul, Dirk
Stegmann, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler.
49
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50 James Retallack
discrimination" against socialists, both at the polls and when defend-
ing unfair franchise laws. However, a survey of electoral politics
conducted with instruments of a finer calibration reveals quite an-
other landscape. Here rhetorical flourishes about the "red specter" all
too often evaporate under the impact of momentary crisis, cynical
calculation, and personal ambition. Local elites choose to engage the
enemy on one front and refuse on another. They pursue ill-defined
goals with limited resources, and they break off the battle before they
achieve their ultimate goal. All this can be seen only when the anti-
socialist intentions of Imperial elites are considered together with the
actual implementation of their plans, particularly at the local and re-
gional levels. James Sheehan seemed to understand this when he
wrote that "a great deal of the political activity that goes on at the
national level is designed to simplify issues, to clarify alignments, to
reduce politics to a set of binary choices. . . . But ... in the worlds
of local politics, choices are frequently more fluid, alliances more
uncertain, combinations more complex." For this reason, the histo-
3
rian must make a special effort to view political choices as contempo-
raries saw them: not as clear alternatives but as confused options; not
as national politics writ small but as reflections of autonomous rules
and traditions. From this perspective, the antisocialist campaign in
Imperial Germany emerges not as a kind of grand strategy drawn up
before battle, but as tactical warfare constantly being adjusted to
changing circumstances. Far from substantiating the view from "on
high," the observer in the trenches sees confused armies advancing to
exploit fleeting opportunities and retreating in the face of poor gener-
alship and logistical constraints.
My second aim is to make this discussion specific and concrete by
using the case-study approach. I focus on the Kingdom of Saxony:
the empire's third largest state, dominated by small-scale industry
and handicrafts, and effectively the cradle of both German Social
Democracy and political anti-Semitism. Saxony deserves attention
because of the political fireworks set off by conservatives, liberals,
and socialists struggling to revise the Saxon Landtag franchise to
their own advantage (two fundamentally different revisions were en-
acted in March 1896 and May 1909). But the case of Saxony also
provides a unique opportunity to examine the texture of anti-
socialism in finer detail. The present essay concentrates on anti-
3. J. Sheehan, "What Is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German
History and Historiography," Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 21f.
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Antisocialism and Electoral Politics 51
socialism before 1900 as part of a larger research project that, when
completed, will provide a comprehensive account of electoral politics
in Saxony from 1866 to 1918. The following analysis examines the
interplay among five mutually reinforcing processes: (1) qualitative
and quantitative changes in the level of political mobilization in Sax-
ony, especially after 1890 but also in the 1880s; (2) the increasing
strength of Social Democracy; (3) the arrival of political anti-
Semitism as a new and unwelcome player on the scene; (4) the effort
of Conservatives and the government to preserve antisocialist unity at
the polls; and (5) the campaign to revise the Landtag franchise in
order to exclude the lower classes from political influence. Where
appropriate, the interplay among local, state, and national politics is
also sketched.
It bears emphasizing that my larger hypothesis about the relative
disunity of antisocialist elites in both Saxony and the Reich is based in
part on an examination of developments after 1900 that cannot be
discussed here. For the Saxon case these developments included a
bitter feud between liberals and Conservatives about a second fran-
chise reform (and about many other issues besides); the repercussions
of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and of reform movements else-
where in the Reich; and the inability of right-wing forces to unite
against the socialist threat during the Landtag elections of 1909 and
the Reichstag elections of 1912. One aspect common to these investi-
gations is nonetheless also found in the present study: the belief that
antisocialism as displayed at the rhetorical and legislative levels is
intimately connected with antisocialism as practiced at the ballot box.
Alliances between parliamentary caucuses, appeals for governmental
preferment, grass-roots agitation, franchise reform, the simple cast-
ing of a ballot - these were all struggles for power in one form or
another. Because the act of restricting the franchise and the act of
voting were both intimately bound up with issues of power and
representation, considering these two political acts together makes
each more meaningful.
Third, a study of Saxon politics provides a rare opportunity to
launch a debate based on archival documents freely available to
North American scholars. The copious materials published by the
Saxon statistical office are available on microfilm, as are most of the
4
diplomatic reports sent to Berlin by one of the KaiserreicWs most
4. The Zeitschrift des K. Sdchsischen Statistischen Bureaus was used in or borrowed from the
Stanford University library (MFilm N.S. 1529, reels 10-12).
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52 James Retallack
insightful (but hitherto anonymous) political observers: the Prussian
envoy to Saxony, Count Carl von Donhoff. Perhaps some readers
5
will dig more deeply into these sources and suggest alternative read-
ings of Saxon elections. But just as Richard Evans did with his study
of franchise disturbances in Hamburg in January 1906, this essay also
seeks to make a more comprehensive statement about the fruitfulness
of combining quantitative history, local history, and social history.
6
There is currently much talk of using new kinds of sources - indeed,
using events and facts themselves, including institutions and social
relations of authority - as "texts" from which we can read the lan-
guage of politics in imaginative ways. Might not the electoral records
used in this study qualify as texts? If they do, one must also recognize
that context becomes crucial when dealing with both local history
and quantitative history. Numbers, like language, can be duplicitous
and cryptic. Like spies, they have to be tortured and decoded before
they reveal their secrets, and sometimes diplomatic communiques
from far-off lands provide the only means to understand such coded
language. Therefore, like the lower classes who were excluded from
representation in Saxony, election returns have to be listened to and
considered in their full contemporary context. As Pierre Bourdieu
has written: "The dominant language discredits and destroys the
spontaneous political discourse of the dominated. It leaves them only
silence or a borrowed language." Although Saxon elites sought to
7
silence the "little man" politically, the electoral record shows that
they accomplished this only incompletely. By studying that record in
a new way, we may be able to clarify important issues of agency in
Imperial German politics and identify remaining gaps between the
rhetoric and the reality of antisocialism.
RED KINGDOM OR AUTHORITARIAN PLAYGROUND?
Comparisons both implicit and explicit colored most descriptions of
Saxony during the Kaiserreich. Often called the "model land of liber-
5. Found in the Political Archive of the German Foreign Ministry in Bonn (hereafter cited as PA
Bonn); some files were consulted in Bonn, but most were acquired from the Center for
Research Libraries, Chicago, which holds copies of films from the American Historical
Association and University of Michigan projects (T 149, esp. reels 178-80). This essay was
written before an extended visit to the Staatsarchiv Dresden and the Sachsische Landes-
bibliothek in the autumn of 1991. The same is true of a complementary essay, James Retallack,
" 'What Is to Be Done?' The Red Specter, Franchise Questions, and the Crisis of Conservative
Hegemony in Saxony, 1896-1909," Central European History 23 (1990):271-312.
6. Richard J. Evans, " 'Red Wednesday' in Hamburg: Social Democrats, Police and Lumpen-
proletariat in the Suffrage Disturbances of 17January 1906," in idem, Rethinking German History
(London, 1987), 248-90.
7. Cited in Bryan Palmer, Descent into Discourse (Philadelphia, 1990), 217.
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Antisocialism and Electoral Politics 53
alism," after 1903 it was also known as the "red kingdom of Sax-
ony." Dresden, the state capital, was known as "Florence on the
8
Elbe." Chemnitz was the "Manchester of Saxony." There were par-
ticularly good reasons for describing Saxony as the "workshop of the
German Reich." Whereas the proportion of persons employed in
industry, crafts, and mining averaged 42.8 percent for both Prussia
and the Reich in 1907, the corresponding figure for Saxony was 59.3
percent - not only highest among all federal states, but exceeding
even the Rhineland and Berlin. The 1907 census reported that all 23
9
of Saxony's Reichstag constituencies were included among those 197
constituencies in the Reich where the proportion of employees in
industry and trade represented an absolute majority. Yet whereas
large concerns and heavy industry predominated elsewhere, Saxony
retained a great deal of household and craft industry. Thousands of
family-owned firms, typically with just a handful of employees, also
produced a wide variety of consumer goods. Of over 22,000 indus-
trial enterprises in Dresden around the turn of the century, 86 percent
had five or fewer workers. Meanwhile, between 1871 and 1895, the
10
populations of Saxony's largest cities grew at astounding rates:
Leipzig grew from 107,000 to 400,000 inhabitants; Dresden from
177,000 to 336,000; Chemnitz from 68,000 to 161,000; and Plauen
from 23,000 to 55,000."
In the 1860s Saxony became the heartland of German socialism,
providing the two most important socialist leaders after Ferdinand
Lassalle's death, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. By the time
the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei
Deutschlands) was founded in 1875, the party's four local secretariats
in Saxony included 18 percent (N = 4,597) of the national mem-
bership, even though Saxons represented just 6.7 percent of the pop-
ulation of the Reich. In this period the socialists' share of the
12
Reichstag vote was also growing rapidly: It virtually doubled - from
8. For much of the following see Rudolf Kotzschke and Hellmut Kretzschmar, Sdchsische
Geschichte (Frankfurt a.M., 1965), 371ff.; Donald Warren, Jr., The Red Kingdom of Saxony:
Lobbying Grounds for Gustav Stresemann, 1900-1909 (The Hague, 1964), Iff.; Gerhard A.
Ritter, "Das Wahlrecht und die Wahlerschaft der Sozialdemokratie im Konigreich Sachsen
1867-1914," in Ritter, ed., Aufstieg, 50ff.
9. Gerd Hohorst, Jiirgen Kocka, and Gerhard A. Ritter, eds. SozialgeschichtlichesArbeitsbuch, 2nd
ed. (Munich, 1978), 2:73; Volker Hentschel, "Erwerbs- und Einkommensverhaltnisse in
Sachsen, Baden und Wurttemberg vor dem ersten Weltkrieg (1890—1914)," Vierteljahresschriji
JurSozial- und Wirtschafisgeschichte 66 (1979): 33, 38f.
10. Kurt Koszyk, Gustav Stresemann. Der kaisertreue Democrat (Cologne, 1989), 88.
11. Kotzschke and Kretzschmar, Sdchsische Geschichte, 371.
12. Hartmut Zwahr, "Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung im Lander- und Territorienvergleich
1875," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1978):466-8.
Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007
1912 88.8 8.0 1.7 21.9 8.7 0.3 55.0 4.0 0.4 1 K 1 R 1 N 19S 1 Rp

1907 89.7 7.7 2.9 26.1 0.8 4.4 0.5 48.5 6.9 2.2 2K 1 R 6N 2FV 8S 3Rp 1WV

1903 83.0 10.1 1.3 12.5 0.3 4.0 0.6 58.8 9.8 2.6 22 S 1 A

1898 73.9 18.1- 14.7- 2.5 0.3 49.5 12.1 2.8 5K 4N 11 S 3Rp
12 1893 79.6 21.5 3.6 8.4- 5.1 0.1 45.8 15.8 0.1 5K 1 R 2N 2FV 7S 6Rp author.
871-19 1890 82.0 22.6 5.4 19.7 9.2 0.0 42.1 1.0 10K 3R 3N 1 DF 6S ed by the
1 at
of Saxony, 1884 1887 58.579.6 22.724.0 11.810.4 17.731.1 12.25.7 0.00.2 35.328.7 0.10.1 8K8K 4R3R 3N10N 4DF1 DF 5S ome figures calcul
ngdom 1881 52.4 24.3 10.7 14.0 4.5 17.9 - 28.2 0.4 5K 4R 5N 1 LV 4F 4S 980), 89; s
the ki 1878 58.5 16.2 12.7 19.9- 12.8 0.6 37.6 0.2 4K 5R 5N 3F 6S unich, 1
n M
i (
ctions 1877 57.7 17.4 6.7 22.8- 14.3 0.6 38.0 0.2 4K 3R 7N 2F 7S beitsbuch
g ele 1874 49.5 7.2 14.2 27.1- 14.0 1.0 35.8 0.7 1 K 5R 7N 4F 6S hes Ar
chsta 1871 45.1 5.2 2.8 22.4 13.1 27.0 - 17.5 12.0 5L 8N 8F 2S chichtlic
Rei hlges
Table 1. Percentage of Vote Won, First Ballot Voter turn-out, percent Conservative Party (K) Imperial (Free Conservative) Party (R) National Liberal Party (N) Liberals (L), Liberal Union (LV), Radical Union German Radical Party (DF) Ger. Progressives (F), Radical People's Party (FV) Progressive People's Party Center Party (Z) Social Democratic Party (S) German Reform Party (Rp), other anti-Semitic (A) Other (including BdL and Economic Union (WV)) Seats Won Source: Gerhard A. Ritter with Merith Niehuss, Wa
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Antisocialism and Electoral Politics 55
18 to 35 percent - between the elections of 1871 and 1874 (see Table
1). At this time, one of every five votes for socialists in the Reich was
cast by a Saxon. By the time of the Reichstag elections of 1898, the
SPD was winning about 50 percent of the Reichstag vote in Saxony
(see Figure 1), and the number of party members in the state had
grown to about 25,000.
13
Long before someone coined the label "red kingdom" for Saxony,
another term might have been more appropriate: "playground of
authoritarianism." The government's long record of discrimination
against "outgroups" in Saxon society reveals that the Saxon polity
was more highly charged, and the Saxon administration far more
partisan, than contemporary observers liked to imagine. Official dis-
crimination extended first and foremost to socialists. As early as
November 1871, Saxony's government leader, Baron Richard von
Friesen, warned publicly that the rise of socialism threatened the
state. Consequently Bismarck's antisocialist laws were invoked with
particular rigor in Saxony between 1878 and 1890. Of 647 legal
actions taken against socialist Vereine (associations) and newspapers in
the Reich, 156 occurred in Saxony, compared to 304 in all of Prussia
and only 18 in Bavaria. This discrimination also touched trade
14
unionists and simple workers, the tiny minorities of Jews and Catho-
lics in the state, and (most broadly of all) those members of the
growing commercial and industrial classes who aspired to greater
political influence and responsibility in government.
One advantage of focusing on a single region is that it allows us to
define antisocialist elites more concretely than we can at the national
level. In particular it provides an opportunity to consider when it is
legitimate to ascribe an antisocialist consensus to "the right"; to a
specific coalition of conservative, liberal, and anti-Semitic parties; or
to members of local social and economic elites. Deciding when this
ascription is valid in the case of Saxony is especially important for
three reasons. First, a number of historians have stressed the need to
distinguish between the German bourgeoisie's apparent lack of suc-
cess in storming the bastions of political power on the one hand -
indeed, their relative disinterest in "pure" politics at all - and their
many successes in the social, economic, and cultural realms on the
other. A study of Saxony illustrates how closely social status, eco-
15
13. Cf. Dieter Fricke, Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1869 bis 1917, 2
vols. (Berlin, 1987), 1:314-16, 329ff.
14. Kotzschke and Kretzschmar, Sdchsische Geschichte, 368-70.
15. See David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans, eds., The German Bourgeoisie (London, 1991);
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57 James Retallack
nomic influence, and political power were intertwined and thereby
suggests why this distinction must not be overdrawn. Second, many
historians have pointed to the way in which continued power in
municipal councils largely compensated German liberals for their
declining influence at the state and national levels. Although this
16
argument is convincing in the broad sense, the Saxon case illustrates
that any such distinction becomes problematic when it suggests that
municipal, state, and national politics were independent spheres of
activity between which liberals had to choose. Third, Conservatives,
National Liberals, and left liberals in Saxony tended to share com-
mon social origins, were closely connected in the business world,
and held similar outlooks on the rise of Social Democracy. Therefore
there is a real danger in equating the terms "liberal" and "bourgeois."
Most members of the Saxon Conservative Landesverein (state associa-
tion) were at the same time impeccably bourgeois and staunchly
conservative. Yet it is difficult to imagine how most members of
Saxony's National Liberal Party could be described as anything but
conservative on a whole range of issues. Some of these issues were
peculiar to Saxon politics; but many, including both antisocialism
and franchise reform, were not, and some of these issues evoked a far
less progressive response from liberals in Saxony than they did from
liberals elsewhere in the Reich.
How, then, were left liberals, National Liberals, Conservatives,
and anti-Semites oriented in the Saxon party constellation? From
what social groups did each party recruit its supporters, and how did
each party fare at the polls? Statistical overviews of Landtag elections
are provided in Table 2 and Figures 2 and 3. To interpret these data,
one must know that after 1869 only one-third of the Landtag's eighty
seats were contested every two years, and deputies were elected for a
term of six years. Hence what might appear to be mystifying fluctua-
tions in the data from one election year to the next are explained by
the fact that voters in the same twenty-six or twenty-seven constitu-
David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984);
similar points were raised by Roger Chickering in his commentary on an earlier version of
this essay.
16. James Sheehan, "Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany," Past & Present
51 (1971): 116—37; Helmuth Croon, "Das Vordringen der politischen Parteien im Bereich
der kommunalen Selbstverwaltung," in Helmuth Croon, Wolfgang Hofmann, and Georg
Christoph von Unruh, eds., Kommunale Selbstverwaltung im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung
(Stuttgart, 1971), 15-58; Karlheinz Blaschke, "Entwicklungstendenzen im sachsischen
Stadtewesen wahrend des 19. Jahrhunderts (1815-1914)," in Horst Matzerath, ed., Sta'd-
tewachstum und innersta'dtische Strukturverdnderungen (Stuttgart, 1984), 56ff.; see also Hartmut
Pogge von Strandmann's essay in this volume.
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