The Red Flag: A History of Communism (12 page)

Nikolaus Osterroth, born in 1875, was a devout Catholic and a clay miner in Bavaria. On his return from military service in the mid-1890s, he found the mine-owners determined to reduce wages by introducing a new piecework system (paying workers according to how much they produced). Initially, he and the other miners turned for support to the local priest, but they received little sympathy. The priest declared that the employers were appointed by God, and had to be obeyed. Osterroth, in his autobiography, written thirty years later, recalled this incident as provoking a ‘crisis of conscience’, after which he left the church with ‘an empty head and a dying heart’. It was in this low mood that he read a Social Democratic leaflet, thrown through his window by a group of ‘Red Cyclists’ who were passing through the village. ‘The leaflet,’ he remembered, ‘affected me like a revelation’:

This Damascene moment of almost religious revelation, followed by ‘conversion’ to socialism, can be found in several socialist autobiographies of the period. Conflict with bosses could trigger a more general questioning of their old value system, particularly amongst those who had been Christian believers. Once Osterroth began to think about his economic predicament, he found that there was a whole alternative worldview available to him – one founded on the notion that workers had power and dignity:

He became a Social Democratic activist, and ultimately a politician, replacing the old ‘dark, vengeful and punishing’ Mosaic God, with a ‘new trinity’ – one that included a new, charitable God, together with Faust and Prometheus, ‘god-men who embody the deepest yearnings of our race’.
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The Red Cyclists continued to woo Osterroth, giving him a copy of the party’s Marxist Erfurt programme to read. But Osterroth was typical of many German workers in showing little interest in the details of Marxist economics or in the notion that workers would take control of production. Most workers joined the SPD not out of a profound interest in Marxist economic ideas, but because they were angry about wages and conditions and, commonly, out of a sense of humiliation at the hands of bosses. Some felt that they were being treated ‘like dogs’, sworn at and humiliated;
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others resented bosses’ control over their lives. The cigar-maker Felix Pauk, for instance, became sympathetic to the Social Democratic cause when a fellow worker was sacked for suggesting to his boss that sales would improve if the picture of the Kaiser on the cigars were replaced with one of the Marxist leader August Bebel.
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However unschooled in Marxist theory, it is probable that many members of the party, even at its lower levels, had at least a rudimentary idea of its fundamental principles, learnt from popularizations of the ideology. These included the idea of Marxism as a science, the centrality of economic forces in historical development, the class struggle, the proletariat’s status as the progressive class emancipating the whole of mankind, and the ultimate crisis of capitalism. But workers had little interest in studying the details of Marxist theory, however much Social Democratic intellectuals encouraged them. A survey of Social Democratic workers’ libraries between 1906 and 1914 shows that 63.1 per cent of books borrowed were imaginative literature, and only 4.3 per cent were in the social sciences, including Marxist texts. Zola was number one or two on most library lists, much to the irritation of socialist intellectuals who regarded him as a pessimist, with too little faith in human reason.
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But there was much the SPD could offer beyond theory, or even political radicalism: it provided an alternative world to that of the factory, where workers were accorded dignity and could improve themselves. For Otto Krille, an unskilled factory worker from Dresden, this was its main attraction. He despaired of the ‘general stupor’ in his factory, and felt ‘completely isolated’ amidst his fellow workers’ parochialism and ‘erotic banter’; for him, Social Democracy provided an escape from this grim world. He observed that ‘only a tiny fraction [of party members] are socialists from scientific conviction; most come to socialism from a vast internal and external wasteland like the people of Israel out of the wilderness. They have to believe in order not to despair.’
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Krille’s attitude was typical of the average Social Democratic Party member: a young, urban, male and Protestant worker, with ambitions to better himself.
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In place of Krille’s ‘wasteland’, the Social Democratic Party provided a world of culture, self-improvement and orderly recreation.
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Educational societies promised a socialist version of
Bildung
, or cultivation and learning – precisely what gave the bourgeoisie its status in German society – through lectures and classes. The subjects covered included ‘socialist’ and ‘scientific’ topics, like political economy and hygiene, as well as the study of conventional ‘bourgeois’ culture – art, literature and music. Even more popular were the leisure societies. A whole range of activities and societies were on offer under the party’s auspices, from shooting and cycling clubs to choral societies (which had 200,000 members), and even smoking clubs. The ideological content of the clubs’ activities varied. Some had their own club languages: members of gymnastic clubs used the greeting ‘
Frei Heil!
’ (‘Hail to Freedom!’) from the late 1890s.

The most visible aspect of Social Democratic culture was the parade – especially the May Day parade. Despite the threat of harassment by the police, thousands attended and watched processions celebrating socialism and workers’ trades. Some of the symbolism came from the socialist past, stretching back to the classicism of the French Revolution. A central place in the 1910 Nuremberg Social Democratic choral festival was taken by the ‘Goddess of Freedom’ – a figure in a white Grecian gown, a Phrygian cap on her head, a ‘Freedom banner’ in her right hand, surrounded with busts of Marx, the German socialist leader Lassalle, and a lion, symbolizing power.
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Other festivals, however, had a more explicitly military style, complete with uniforms, marching bands, standards and flags. Many Social Democratic songs reveal the martial culture:

The appeal of military types of organization was not, of course, new, and Marx himself had used military metaphors when discussing socialism. Indeed Marxism was committed to a strong, disciplined socialist state, unlike anarchists to the left and reformists to the right. But Marx’s and Engels’ vision was more commonly an industrial one, and the military style of German Social Democracy probably owed much to the political culture of Imperial Germany – even though the party’s ideology favoured internationalism.
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Whilst the party – like other Social Democratic parties – in theory championed the equality of women, in practice party members frequently saw women as apolitical and ‘backward’, and the party culture was highly masculine. A high value was also placed on discipline and even hierarchy. Gymnastic exercises were regimented, and teams were organized in military fashion: an elected overseer presided over a number of squad leaders, who, in turn, organized the teams. As the ‘gymnastic code’ ruled: ‘Ranks must be strictly held in each team. No one may move from the team without special permission.’
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It was discipline and organization that appealed to Otto Krille – a man educated in a military school but expelled as ‘unfit’. As he remembered:

For Krille and many others, the SPD provided a parallel state in which workers could achieve some dignity, and which had the organization necessary to defend the working class against a fundamentally hostile German Empire.

The Social Democratic culture could therefore have a martial flavour, as was captured by ‘The Red Flag’ – the song written by the Irish journalist James Connell in 1889, inspired by a London meeting of the Social Democratic Federation:

Connell’s second verse was designed to underscore the international appeal of Social Democracy’s red flag:

Yet references to the ‘sturdy German’ were distinctly patronizing, given how central the Germans were to the movement. In 1914, seven Social Democratic parties had at least a quarter of the national vote: the Austrian, the Czech, the Danish, the Finnish, the German, the Norwegian and the Swedish.
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But the German party was by far the most successful of all. On the eve of World War I it had over 1 million paid-up members and in the 1912 elections attracted over 4 million votes – about a third of the electorate, though the skewed franchise deprived it of a majority of seats in the Reichstag. The trade unions associated with the SPD – the Free Trade Unions – also had a membership of about 2.6 million. This was the largest Marxist party in the world, and became a model for socialists throughout Europe.

Even so, there were real limits to Social Democratic influence. Whilst some parties, like the French SFIO and the Swedish, forged alliances
with peasants, the SPD was committed to the rigid view that peasant agriculture was an outmoded form of production.
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But even in Europe’s proletarian heartlands, such as the mines of the Ruhr, Social Democrats could only attract a third of the vote, and they faced stiff competition from Catholicism and liberalism.
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They were also unable to integrate Polish migrant workers, revealing Social Democracy’s difficult relationship with nationalism. The Austrian party faced some of the greatest problems, as it hoped to preserve the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrians’ solution was to create a federal party of the Empire’s constituent peoples, but they were still seen as overbearing big brothers by the Czech Social Democrats and other smaller parties.
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Women were another group Social Democracy could have done more to attract, although women did constitute 16 per cent of the German Party’s membership, and their organization remained one of the most radical groups in the SPD.
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However, despite such failures, the youthful Marx’s ambition to move the centre of socialist politics from France to the German lands had been achieved. The somewhat chauvinistic leader August Bebel declared: ‘It is not by chance that it was Germans who discovered the laws of modern society… It is furthermore not by chance that Germans are the pioneers who bring the socialist idea to the workers of the various peoples of the world.’
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