During the war’s first two years varieties of opposition of every description remained scattered and powerless. Popular support for the war extended deep into the labor movement and ensured that agitation against the war found little resonance, while the deputy commanding generals had no difficulty in suppressing the occasional manifestation of dissent. In this respect, the second half of the war was more dramatic. The accumulating burdens of war succeeded, where agitation earlier had failed, in breeding the potential for mass unrest.
Industrial unrest: the labor movement splits
In 1916 on May Day, the traditional day of labor protest, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Berlin. Many of them carried placards that called for “Bread, freedom, and peace!” Before the police could break up the crowd, Liebknecht mounted a podium and shouted, “Down with the war! Down with the government!” He was arrested. In June a military court convicted him of treason and sentenced him to four years in jail. In protest against the court’s proceedings, 55,000 metalworkers from forty of Berlin’s major factories went out on strike, as did sympathetic workers in Stuttgart, Bremen, Braunschweig, and Essen.
The events of May and June 1916 crowned Liebknecht as the martyr and political symbol of resistance to the war. They also represented a pivotal moment in the history of the opposition. They featured an industrial strike, which became the principal manifestation of protest during the second half of the war. This was also the most ominous form of protest, for, unlike the food riot or random acts of violence, it could paralyze the war economy. In this light, the statistics of the war’s last three years offered cause for alarm (see Figure 13). The alarming feature of these statistics was not so much the growing frequency of strikes after 1916 as it was their size and duration, which were measured in the number of workdays lost to the factories. The strikes of 1917–18 also extended a pattern laid down in the protests of 1916, insofar as they became more explicitly political. Like the workers who on May Day in 1916 had demanded “Bread, freedom, and peace,” strikers more routinely coupled demands for economic relief, such as higher rations, higher wages, and shorter hours, with calls for political reform and an end to the war. The very distinction between economic and political strikes now blurred, as hunger and material shortages drew the authority of the state and employers alike into question.
Figure 13 Industrial strikes, 1916–18 Source: Gerald D. Feldman, Eberhard Kolb, and Reinhard Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1917–1920),” Politische Vierteljahrschrift 13 (1972), 93.
The open politicization of labor protest during the last years of the conflict accompanied a critical transformation in popular thinking about the war. The protesters began to question the legitimacy of the material hardships that they were being asked to bear; and they called for remedies beyond the immediate satisfaction of material wants. Their actions reflected their growing receptivity to a radical reading of the war, which traced misery to institutional injustice and the obstinacy, if not the evil designs, of Germany’s leaders. The affinities between this representation of the conflict and the ideology of the Marxist opposition were transparent, as the politicization of war-weariness and hardship among the poor fed popular support for the strikes.
So did events to the east. In March 1917 the Russian capital city of Petrograd became the scene of a grand “polonaise.” Massive bread riots, accompanied by the fraternization of soldiers and rioters, prompted the abdication of the tsar and the establishment of a provisional government of liberal and moderate socialist politicians. While the new leaders resolved to continue the war against Germany, they set plans in motion to produce a democratic constitution for their country. Insecurity lent urgency to their efforts, for the legitimacy of their new government was in dispute. In the capital, the provisional government faced a more radical organization called a soviet, a council that claimed to represent the city’s workers and soldiers. And in their name it issued a public call for an immediate end to the war on the basis of “no annexations and no indemnities.”
The Russian events had an electrifying impact in Germany. For one thing, they removed the Russian autocracy, the bogey that had persuaded the German Socialists to support the war in 1914. For another, the Russians furnished a model in practice of how economic issues, such as bread shortages, could be exploited to bring democratic reform and (although this question remained open) an end to the war. In the event, a new wave of strikes bathed German industrial centers in specific political demands, which featured the democratization of politics in Germany and an immediate peace on the basis of no annexations. Despite efforts by the military authorities to block them with the arrest and conscription of agitators, the strikes culminated in April 1917, when the announcement of reduced bread rations drew out some 300,000 strikers in Berlin, the most conspicuous of whom were metalworkers from the city’s armaments factories. News of these developments brought similar actions among industrial workers in Leipzig, Braunschweig, Halle, and Magdeburg. The strikers’ calls for bread, freedom, and peace now resonated to the Russian achievements, as did the formation of workers’ councils in Germany to coordinate these strikes.
These councils, which were called Räte in German, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the soviets in Russia. Their appearance advertised a remarkable feature of the strikes: they took place largely over the opposition of the union leadership. Denied union support, the strikers devised alternative forms of organization; and their protest against the war turned as well against the established institutions of the labor movement, which were themselves implicated in the war. New institutions grew out of the organization of labor on the shop floor, as well as networks of formal and informal communication among workers at different plants – including, paradoxically, the committees that helped administer the Auxiliary Service Law.43 A pivotal role in the movement fell to the so-called shop stewards, who, because workers elected them directly from their own ranks as factory representatives, enjoyed an authority independent of the union hierarchy. These representatives then became leading members of the strike councils, which in many cities survived the end of the strikes to become organizational rivals to the unions.
The growth of grass-roots organizations of labor protest accompanied the split of the Social Democratic Party. In March 1916 the majority of the Socialists in the Reichstag, who had lost patience with the indiscipline in their own ranks, voted to expel eighteen of their members who had voted against another round of war loans. The banished Socialists thereupon constituted themselves as the “Social Democratic Working Group” (Sozialdemokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft), an independent caucus that remained formally within the old party. The expulsion of the dissidents nonetheless marked the beginning of the SPD’s formal dissolution, as some local party organizations began themselves to fracture along the same ideological lines, and organizations in the more radical centers rallied to the support of the working group. Relations between the two factions deteriorated until April 1917, when, in the wake of the Russian upheaval, the dissidents formally founded their own party, called the Independent German Social Democratic Party (USPD).44
This momentous event signaled the death of working-class solidarity in Germany. The great ideal, which had energized the German labor movement almost since the moment of its birth, was a casualty of the war. Two Socialist parties, the Independents and the old party, now called the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD), henceforth competed for the loyalties of German workers. The parties were by now divided less by the war, however, than by the issue of how to bring it to an end. Fatigue had spread in the ranks of the MSPD too, most of whose leaders now favored a negotiated peace and democratic reform; they remained committed as well, however, to supporting the country’s civilian and military leadership in achieving this end. The new party was not.
Atop the USPD stood a parliamentary group, which by the spring of 1917 had grown to twenty-four members. They were united foremost in their op
position to the war loans, although they also opposed the Auxiliary Service Law as an additional burden on the working class. The basis of the new party consisted of about 100 local organizations that had also broken with the mother party. These groups were concentrated in Germany’s great industrial hubs, in Berlin, in Saxony (particularly in Leipzig and Halle), and along the axis that extended down the Ruhr valley to the lower Rhine. The party was also strong in several other cities, such as Hamburg, Bremen, Stuttgart, and Braunschweig, which had been centers of labor militancy before the war. By 1918 the USPD numbered perhaps 100,000 adherents, many of whom were young, less skilled male workers in the large factories. These workers, many of them in their teens, had joined the labor force since the outbreak of war and were less practiced in union discipline and respect for the unions’ authority.
The new party was troubled from the beginning. Opposition to the war continued to imply conflicting strategies. The “Centrist” position, which called for an immediate end to the war as the prelude to social and political reform, was still the dominant view, but the party’s left wing, which was now known as the “Spartacus League” after the newsletters that had been its principal focal point, continued to advocate social and political revolution as the means to stop the war. In November 1917, after Ludendorff had packaged Lenin home to Russia from Switzerland, these German radicals found a new model in the Bolshevik revolution. As long as the war continued, however, the USPD provided accommodation for both positions and a focus for the mobilization of labor protest against the war.
The most dramatic and frightening sign of the party’s importance was the massive anti-war strike that began late in January 1918.45 This one was triggered by news of a general strike in Vienna, but it had gestated in the networks of the USPD in Germany. Its epicenter was once again the munitions and metal plants in the German capital, where some 400,000 workers struck at the end of the month. Within days the strike had spread to other industrial centers, from Kiel and Hamburg to Mannheim and Augsburg. Over a million workers went out, demanding an end to the war, democratic reform, and a catalogue of remedies for their material grievances. The leaders of the MSPD and the unions, whose authority was challenged no less than the state’s, responded by joining the strike committees in hopes of regaining control of the movement. The army’s swift intervention served the same purpose by other, more direct means: the soldiers arrested the strike’s leaders and dispatched many of them to experience the war at the front. Although the demonstrations then dissipated after several tense days, the strike was the most defiant sign yet of the unrest that the war had generated. It represented, as one historian has noted, “an action with more revolutionary overtones than anything the modern German labor movement had known previously.”46 It revealed not only the effectiveness of the new institutions of labor protest but also the degree to which the war and domestic reform had become linked as the issues that drove political debate throughout Germany.
War aims and constitutional change
The radicalization of the German labor movement was based on the ideological convergence of domestic and foreign-policy goals. During the last two years of the war strikers called in the same breath for an immediate peace without annexations and for democratic reform at home. The juncture of domestic and foreign policy questions was not the invention of the USPD, however; it had been implicit in all colorations of political thinking since the beginning of the war. Even so, when the great industrial strikes drove it into the open, it became the issue on which the collapse of the Burgfrieden culminated.
Discussion of Germany’s aims during the war was wedded to visions of what the country’s political institutions would look like after the war.47 Consensus reigned that Germans were to be rewarded after the war for their suffering. The left-wing advocates of a compromise peace – from the USPD to the middle-class Progressives – argued that the rewards were to take the form of democratization at home. Most of them agreed that this goal required abolishing the discriminatory suffrage system in Prussia and other German states, establishing responsible parliamentary government throughout Germany, and preserving the gains that organized labor had achieved during the war. An alternative vision surfaced with brutal clarity in November 1914, in the observations of Alfred Hugenberg, a member of the board of directors of the Krupp works and one of the most powerful industrial leaders in Germany. His subject was just these gains of organized labor.
The consequences of the war will in themselves be unfavorable for the employers in many ways. There can be no doubt that the capacity and willingness of the workers returning from the front to produce will suffer considerably when they are subordinated to factory discipline. One will probably have to count on a very increased sense of power on the part of the workers and labor unions, which will also find expression in increased demands on the employers and for legislation. It would therefore be well advised, in order to avoid internal difficulties, to distract the attention of the people and to give fantasies concerning the extension of German territory room to play.48
Here Hugenberg invoked a hoary motif in German policy: the rewards to the German people were to come not in domestic reform but, instead, in massive German territorial acquisitions abroad. Annexations were to compensate for the privations of the war, while hegemony on the European continent would fire German national pride and validate an authoritarian constitutional system that had emerged victorious from the war. The historical verdict on democracy was to be its defeat at home and abroad.
Those who embraced this logic were not hard to identify. They populated the groups that had dominated politics and society in Imperial Germany before the war. They included the country’s business elites, particularly the heavy industrialists who presided over the war economy, the agrarian elites, the right-wing political parties, the patriotic societies, the military leadership, and the public civilian bureaucracies, which were recruited from the Bildungsbürgertum. After 1916, however, the bastion of this thinking was located in the OHL. Its most important proponent was Ludendorff, who was well connected to these elite groups.49 The meaning of a “Ludendorff peace” or “Hindenburg peace” was thus transparent. The strength of the other side resided principally in the Reichstag, among the left-wing parties – the USPD, MSPD, Progressives, and parts of the Catholic party – that represented the sectors of German society that were enduring most of the war’s burdens.50
For the first three years of the war it was the lot of Bethmann Hollweg to mediate between these two positions, which became more obdurate as the war continued. His agreement in the fall of 1916 to unwrap censorship on discussions of war aims represented a gesture to the right; and it came at the insistence of the OHL. The manifestos that immediately emerged in public were difficult to square with the idea of a defensive war. As they enumerated in remarkable precision the annexations that would attend a German victory, they documented the consolidation of the right wing behind the position that Hindenburg and Ludendorff now symbolized. They also encouraged the consolidation of forces on the left, which occupied the chancellor’s attention, too, as it accelerated dramatically in early 1917. A month after the March revolution in Russia had brought parliamentary reform to that land, along with an offer of compromise peace in the east, the American declaration of war on Germany altered profoundly the ideological terrain on which the war was being fought. Germany, now Europe’s most autocratic power, found itself in a war against the world’s leading democracies.
Nowhere did the implications of these developments sit more uncomfortably than in the MSPD. Not only did events in Russia and America undercut the Socialists’ argument that a German victory was necessary to defeat political reaction in Europe, but the radicalization of the labor movement at home also challenged the party for the loyalties of its own constituency. The party’s leadership thus faced growing pressure from its membership to break ranks with the government and to call publicly for a compromise peace and constitutional reform. The growing turmoil on the left c
onvinced the chancellor that some gesture towards reform was essential, and in this spirit he embraced the idea of a “new orientation” in German domestic politics. The dimensions of this new orientation were anything but clear, however; and the impediments to political change remained formidable. The most Bethmann could achieve was to coax the Kaiser into issuing a statement, the so-called “Easter message” (Osterbotschaft), which was published on the same day that the USPD was founded in April 1917. William’s statement appeared to promise constitutional reform at the war’s end, but it was couched in such ambiguity and evident distaste as to carry little credibility. Nor was Bethmann’s own credibility above suspicion, for he simultaneously (although unbeknown to the party leaders) endorsed the Supreme Command’s demands for German annexations in France, Poland, and the Baltic lands.
When the turmoil migrated to still another camp, it brought a parliamentary crisis. Within the Catholic party, the continuation of the war had exacerbated a number of basic tensions, which reflected the social diversity of this party’s constituency.51 Vocal support for the war within the church hierarchy corresponded to the sentiments of the party’s industrial and agrarian wings. The left wing, by contrast, reflected the sentiments of the Catholic labor movement, much of which was anchored in the mining and textile centers of the northwest, where the war had inflicted enormous strains. The leader of the left wing was Matthias Erzberger, an ambitious, impetuous, and influential figure, whose interventions had created several parliamentary sensations before the war.52 Erzberger had been an early champion of annexations. He had nonetheless become alive to accumulating doubts about the war within his own camp when, in the spring of 1917, he learned from Austrian officials about the growing desperation of Germany’s principal ally. When he then shared this news with his party colleagues in Berlin, Erzberger engineered another parliamentary sensation.
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