Auszug aus: IWK, Heft 1/2004, S. 1 - 21 (ohne Anmerkungen) [Heft bestellen]

Breaking and Remaking a Party

The Division and Militancy of German Social Democracy Reconsidered, 1914 - 1918

Von Dieter K. Buse

World War I transformed German Social Democracy (SPD). The war's slaughter, inflation, brutalization and destruction of moral values affected German workers and their political party as much as the rest of European society. In 1913 no one would have predicted that within six years Germany's labor movement would be split with the leaders prepared to physically destroy each other. No one could have imagined that part of the socialist leadership would ally itself with German big business, the Prussian officer corps and the bourgeois parties "to save what could be saved" of the German nation-state. The world war turned German politics upside down, even if most social institutions survived. [...]

Historians have recognized the period’s importance for the SPD in that they repeatedly sought to explain the "tragedy", the "betrayal", the "integration", or the "unused alternatives". The quantity of different views on what happened and why underscores the significance attached to the world's largest labor party's split, its inability to prevent or even shorten the war, and its failure to transform society during a period of revolutionary unrest at war's end. In addition to significance, an assumption common to many accounts has been that the movement did not realize its original potential and that different actions might have resulted in a less immoral and destructive history for Germany and the world. While one can sympathize with such historical preferences and humane hopes, do they explain historical events, or do they end by adding to the applause and dismay of contemporaries? The following essay seeks to return to the situation faced by the Social Democrats during a world war, especially in the context of the actions and perceptions of its opponents. At first the essay outlines traditional and newer scholarly approaches to the division of the party, then it presents evidence suggesting new perspectives on how the division came about, the new factions which emerged and what tactics the main group employed, and how the majority group in the split party retained a mass following. This essay is a continuation and companion piece to a previous article which explained how pre-war German Social Democracy remained unified despite its divergent factions. The pre-war mechanisms developed by the leadership for maintaining unity could not withstand the novel situation of a world war and this essay seeks to explain why. [...]