Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Parties, interest groups, and politics in the Second Reich

  The era of modern nationally organized parties came to Germany as to other countries in the second half of the nineteenth century, but with a peculiar rhythm and shape. Organization proceeded at once more quickly and more slowly than in England and France: the Socialists established a modern structure with determination, and at a rhythm that easily outpaced their counterparts elsewhere, but no other major party moved at the same speed. The latter all started out as clusters of notables associated with parliamentary delegations, a form that survived until after World War I in the powerful Center Party for which large numbers of Catholics voted, especially in the south, and for a long time in the case of the liberals too. The latter moved toward more formal ties around the turn of the century but without creating a structure to rival that of the Socialists. This does not mean that Germany in the fin-de-siècle lacked national entities devoted to propaganda, influencing elections, and giving direction to government policy, but the chief groups set up to engage in these activities through local chapters tied into a central structure were not parties seeking parliamentary representation, they were interest groups (Interessenverbände), dedicated to protecting and furthering the concerns of particular and restricted parts of society. The conservatives in particular relied on one such group, the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte) to organize electoral support. This situation both reflected and intensified the political differences between Germany and her neighbors.

  The chief reason for the different German pattern was that the Empire established in 1871 had the appearance of a parliamentary regime but not its substance. The national representative body, the Reichstag, was elected by universal male suffrage, and it had a certain part in passing legislation and influencing policy. But government ministers were not responsible to it, only to the emperor, who was also the king of Prussia, and only he could appoint and remove them. More powerful than the Reichstag (especially in regard to initiating legislation and putting it into effect) was a second representative body, the Bundesrat, whose members were chosen not by voters but by the governments of the individual states that made up the Empire. It was specifically intended as a brake on popular sovereignty. In addition many powers were left to the states, each of which elected its own assembly using a suffrage system of its own, none of them as democratic as the one in place for the Reichstag. Some of these arrangements distinguished between voters on the basis of status or function (giving special representation to clergy or landowners), but most famous was the Prussian one, which divided voters into three classes based on the taxes they paid, giving one-third of the delegates to the small number of very rich landowners and Bürger whose payments provided the top third of government revenues, an equal number to the larger but still limited group who provided the next third, and the remaining seats to the mass of voters, chiefly peasants and workers, who together contributed the rest. Since the constitution gave a dominant place to Prussia in both the Reichstag and the Bundesrat, the degree to which representative institutions could control policy, and with it the rationale for seeking to organize voters, was less than in England or France.

  One might wonder why any moves toward organizing modern national parties were made at all in these conditions. One large reason was the example set by the social democrats, who achieved unity through merger of two separate organizations in 1875 and who saw common action of all kinds as a vehicle for achieving working-class solidarity and self-consciousness. By the 1890s the two wings that came to face each other inside the Party, revolutionary and reformist, each developed its own interpretation of this vision, the first (like their French comrades) seeing it as a preparation for revolutionary action, the second regarding the mix of unions, party committees, and social and cultural activities (including singing societies, lending libraries, theatrical projects, athletic clubs) as already containing the social relations of the future in embryo, so that (as the revisionist theorist Eduard Bernstein put it) preserving and expanding “the movement,” not setting some end beyond it, was what mattered most. Fearing the power this organization might generate, the government seized an opportunity to outlaw the Party in 1878, giving it a pariah status that lasted until 1890 (socialist candidates could still run for office, but only under the cover of being independents); impediments were put in the way of other kinds of workers’ associations too, leading many clubs and societies to hide their political aims. Once it was able to operate in the open again in the quarter-century before World War I, this complex constituted a kind of archipelago of diverse but interconnected groupings. The Party itself stood at the center, based on a well-articulated system of local units tied into a central structure of administration that allowed for sharing information and resources, organizing support, and providing encouragement and direction to the whole. By the time of the Reichstag election of 1893 this structure made it possible for the Social Democrats to garner more votes than any other party; a skewed way of drawing up electoral districts still kept them from having the largest number of seats, but in 1912 they became the largest Party by that measure too.19

  The political power of the Social Democrats remained largely a matter of potential as long as the restrictions on representative government imposed by the Bismarckian constitution stayed in place, but it would become real enough once the Empire fell and Germany became a republic in 1918. Meanwhile the network’s wide reach and the connections it provided to scattered and distant people and resources furnished individuals and groups with real and potential benefits that no merely local ties could provide. A certain number of people were able to make careers inside this structure, as clerks, officials, or journalists, and many more experienced it as providing resources for personal development – books, periodicals, social relations, participation in musical, dramatic, or athletic activities – they could obtain nowhere else, so much so that critics inside the movement feared that the life some workers led was making them “bourgeois.” That these worries stemmed in part from worker participation in activities organized through intersecting chains of connection is a sign that what had long been chiefly a bourgeois form of existence was becoming part of the experience of people hitherto excluded from it. What Joel Mokyr says about knowledge and information in this period was true of other kinds of network ties too: as the webs became wider and thicker the “access cost” of such connections fell. Under the conditions that obtained before the second half of the nineteenth century participation in distant networks was generally open only to people who brought some species of personal assets to them, some store of wealth, or culture (literacy, knowledge about distant places), or social experience (family or business connections to people elsewhere). What marked the new forms of worker politics and culture was precisely that the more developed means available to establish mediated and distant connections meant that individuals required fewer personal assets in order to participate in them: little had to be asked of workers in order to join up. To be sure, the success of the Social Democrats in creating their thick mesh of associations owed much to a shared sense of class-based exclusion on the part of many workers, but it was also testimony to the special benefits that participation in relations at a distance now offered to people whose resources had not been sufficient to enter into them before.

  Indeed the Social-Democratic organizations had some of their roots in earlier attempts by bourgeois liberals to accord such benefits to workers. In a way the whole archipelago of worker associations in place by 1914 was an extension of the culture of Vereine built up by bourgeois from the eighteenth century in support of Aufklärung and reform. Until late in the 1870s many German workers, like their English counterparts, gave support to liberal candidates, and cooperation across class lines was furthered by the efforts of middle-class liberals and democrats to aid in setting up and advancing workers’ organizations – cooperatives, educational societies, and self-help groups. Out of these efforts there emerged in 1863 the League of German Worke
rs’ Associations (Verband deutscher Arbeitervereine), which aimed to coordinate the activities of workers’ clubs and societies across the country, thereby extending the cooperation between workers and liberals. In 1869 leading figures in this League, notably Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, would be instrumental in founding the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (dubbed the “Eisenach Party” after the city where it was set up), one of the two groups that merged to form the united Social Democrats in 1875. The other, called the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeine deutsche Arbeiterverein), contrasted with the Verband in that it sought a form of working-class activity that did not involve cooperation with liberals, but it still relied on Bürger leadership. Its founder was the colorful and eccentric figure Ferdinand Lassalle, whose mix of romantic panache and radical enthusiasm won him a following before his death in a duel in 1864, and who preferred cooperation with the Prussian state to efforts to curb its power (in 1863 he held a series of secret meetings with Bismarck, hoping to effect a kind of conservative-worker alliance over the heads of the liberals). Lassalle’s call for workers to form independent organizations pointed toward the future, but in the conditions of the 1860s it produced only limited results, as Bebel later noted in his memoirs. Even after the Social Democrats began to set up their own organizations for education, leisure, and personal development beginning in the mid 1870s, liberal notions about the relationship between culture and self-improvement remained alive in them, and in some places middle-class people were notable among the participants.20 Only in the 1880s and 1890s would the originally Bürgerlich vision of social and individual development through participation in such activities find effective embodiment in a specifically working-class organizational structure.

  As this structure began to realize its political potential, its presence highlighted the failure of the liberals to establish a counterpart to it. This failure had many roots, one of which lay in the nature of earlier liberal politics. Just as English liberalism before the 1870s was not an organized movement but (in John Vincent’s words) “a habit of cooperation and a community of sentiment,” so was its German counterpart (as James Sheehan puts it) an “assemblage of convictions.”21 The liberal “party” of the 1860s was a loosely connected collection of notables (Honoratioren), and it retained this stamp even after unification, consisting of what Dieter Langewiesche describes as an aggregate of “influential persons, linked by a thick network of acquaintanceship, associations, and committees of all kinds, in communities, provinces and individual states.” The political relations maintained by such people drew on personal, family or business connections that might reach back over generations, and that were sustained by resources of wealth and education sufficient to maintain them without the support of a formal framework. Leadership in some cities and regions easily passed from father to son.22 By the 1890s the rise of the social democrats encouraged liberals to expand their efforts at organization, creating closer ties between local organizations and central administrative organs, and calling regular national party conventions; the number of local associations allied with the National Liberal Party grew from around 300 to over 2,000 by 1914. But Sheehan makes clear that these efforts bore only limited fruit. Liberal organizations remained dominated by the leaders of party factions, providing little role for “the full-time staff or the convention delegates,” so that as late as 1907 one official complained that liberal organization only existed “for the most part on paper.” The inability of both National Liberals and their cousins in the South German liberal Volkspartei “to attract the masses of new voters who came into the political system after 1890 was partly due to the failure of liberal organizations to provide these groups with satisfactory sources of information, cohesion, and direction.”23

  It is revealing to note, however, that those on the left side of the spectrum of liberal opinion and action were regularly more interested and more successful in establishing effective organizational ties than were their more moderate colleagues. In 1849 the democratic faction on the left of the Frankfurt Assembly created the Centralmärzverein, an organ that has been called “the first German political party with a modern character” because it sought to impose a central direction on the local associations tied in with it. By contrast the more moderate liberals set up only a less formal umbrella organization to share information.24 The difference persisted in the period of unification, for instance in the enthusiasm shown by left-liberals such as Eugen Richter for a solid and organized base (which he succeeded in establishing to some degree for the Progressives he led) at a time when people to his right in the movement dragged their feet.25 The divergence resembled the one that emerged in Britain when radicals such as Chamberlain set up their Caucus in the mid 1870s, as a kind of “machine” to organize electoral support on a basis that did not depend on the personal influence on which the Whig magnates had relied in times of a narrower suffrage, and which Gladstone, with his personal charisma, did not require.

  One reason why organization made little progress in the liberal camp was the important place occupied within it by the Bildungsbürgertum. Although many rank-and-file members of the liberal Nationalverein in the 1860s were businessmen, the group’s national leadership consisted almost entirely of Bildungsbürger, and this remained true of the movement as a whole up to 1914. Rooted in traditional humanistic studies and the sometimes elitist values they fostered, many such people were uncomfortable at the prospect of addressing or participating in big and perhaps unruly meetings, and some used the label “professional politician” as a term of abuse. In the 1860s and early 1870s, before large-scale organization really got off the ground, liberals formed associations intended to influence government action, notably the Social Policy Association (Verein für Sozialpolitik) of 1872, but by the end of the decade it had become less involved in public life and more devoted to academic discussion of social issues. The notion grew that educated people who spoke out on questions of the day should do so as experts, not as “party men.” A number of people who declared their sympathy with liberal views and cast ballots for liberal candidates resisted involvement in organizations, preferring to see themselves as acting on the basis of “reason” or “good sense,” not political loyalty. The novelist Theodor Fontane thought that his sharing views with the National Liberals and voting for them, while shunning concrete ties to the Party, made him “a typical National Liberal.”26

  Not all Bildungsbürger were liberals, however, which is one reason why the same social and cultural factors that slowed down the move toward formal organization in the liberal camp were also at work outside it. This was notably true of the Catholic Center Party with which Bismarck often cooperated after he put an end to the anti-church Kulturkampf that provided one ground for his temporary reconciliation with liberals before 1878; especially strong in the south, the Party would be part of the coalition with liberals and social democrats that established the Weimar Republic after the War. In the period before 1914 it was a Party practically without any defined organization, relying on the influence of local notables both religious and secular (many of them educated Bürger), and on a number of figures with national reputations who traveled about to address meetings and whose views were diffused in newspapers. The Center’s electoral success (it had the largest percentage of votes in Reichstag elections between 1878, when it first outdistanced the liberals, and 1890, when it was overtaken by the Socialists, and remained the second largest party until 1914) rested on organization all the same, but in the form of the already-existing web of connections within and surrounding the Catholic Church rather than any specifically political structure. Catholic associations, orders, meetings, retreat and pilgrimage sites, and the ties established by the hierarchy itself were the vehicles by which the Party diffused information and called for support (much as did French Legitimists). As long as the Center could rely on this inherited scaffolding of convictions and loyalties, it did not seek to set up a separate structure that might have called this les
s formal one’s persisting relevance into question.27

  Catholics can be rightly described as an interest group, and the Center Party’s reliance on the Church’s panoply of organizations to firm up its support among voters resembled the way other parties employed Interessenverbände for similar ends. Of these the most prominent example was the already-mentioned Bund der Landwirte that worked on behalf of candidates of the Deutschkonservative Partei. Founded in 1876, the Conservative Party was the biggest vote-getter in elections of the 1880s and early 1890s, although its support fell off afterwards. Like the Center, it was a party almost wholly without any infrastructure (although it sometimes held conventions), but it employed different substitutes. One of these was the enormous influence big landowners were able to exercise over the mass of rural workers in Prussia, a mix of traditional dominance, monopolization of publicity organs, and tactics of encouragement and intimidation at election time some have described as quasi-terroristic; the other was the already-mentioned Bund der Landwirte. Founded in 1893, this Agrarian League had some 300,000 members, most of them small peasant proprietors and villagers, but it was organized and dominated by wealthy agrarians, and it hired journalists to mount propaganda campaigns in its papers. Its hostility to both socialism and urban capitalism made it a major vehicle for spreading anti-Semitic notions in the fin-de-siècle, a function that has led historians to recognize it as having had a significant role in developing the brew of racism and anti-modernism later brought to a boil by the Nazis (a point to which we will return in a moment). But in organizational terms it resembled other interest groups, including some looked to as sources of support by liberals, such as the Central Association of German Industrialists, founded in 1876, whose highly elaborated structure eventually drew power away from the manufacturers who set it up and toward its own permanent officials (some of whom had ties to the conservatives as well as to liberals). Another prominent interest-group in the years between 1909 and the War was the so-called Hansabund, which sought to defend the interests of modest consumers – shopkeepers, small traders, and white-collar workers in both industry and government – against heavy industrialists and large landowners who supported high tariffs. Other organizations too numerous to consider here grew up alongside these, representing the concerns of professional and occupational groups, regions, or people who shared cultural and leisure activities.28