Professional Documents
Culture Documents
could operate locally under emergency decree for up to a year. A legal loophole
did, however, exist, meaning that the S.P.D. could stand for election.
*In the following years, the state-sponsored persecution of socialists continued
across Germany: 45 of the 47 socialists newspapers were, for example, closed
down; Sixty-seven leading socialists were expelled under a state of siege from
Berlin in 1879, with a similar state of siege the following year in Hamburg, which
saw 100 activists expelled, leading to many emigrating to the U.S.A.; prior to the
1881 election, 600 S.P.D. members were arrested forcing the leaders August
Bebel and Karl Liebknecht to stand in 35 and 16 separate constituency elections
respectively.
As a result of this persecution, many more moderate S.P.D. members left the
party and the S.P.D. vote in the 1881 elections was cut by a third.
*Another tactic Bismarck used against the socialist was a policy of State
Socialism (*see economic section below) whereby he sought to undermine the
S.P.D. with welfare reforms to help the workers to prevent them from feeling the
need to follow the S.P.D.
*OVERALL, HOWEVER, BISMARCKS PERSECUTION OF THE
SOCIALISTS ONLY EVENTUALLY SERVED TO TOUGHEN THEIR
RESOLVE:
*Liebknecht and Bebel were forced by all this, for example, to drop anarchists
and terrorist tactics and pursue a more tightly organised party resistance.
*A new socialist paper, called the Social Democrat, was published in Zurich and
then smuggled across the Swiss border and secretly distributed among members
to keep them informed about party plans and policies.
*Secret socialists conferences were also held abroad in Switzerland (in 1880
and 1887) and in Denmark (in 1883).
*A Socialist counter-culture was established whereby, although ostracised from
mainstream society, party members could benefit from educational courses,
libraries, sports clubs and choirs run by the S.P.D.
*The chance to have a voice in public affairs was increased by the societies for
municipal elections set up in big cities to allow the S.P.D. to take part legally in
day-to-day political activity.
#As a result of all this, the number of social democrat deputies in the Reichstag
increased from 13 in 1881 to 35 in 1890, while, by the same year, membership of
trade unions had rocketed up to 278,000.
*There were, however, also some far less palatable effects of the growth of
Germanys economy in the 1871-90 period.
-The domination of the countryside by the few enterprising farmers to benefit
from the protective tariffs and shift in agricultural technology (as well as the
Junkers) led to the majority of farmers and agricultural labours feeling
forced to emigrate to the nearby towns to find work as labourers in the
factories proliferating there. This rural depopulation and consequent
explosion in the population of Germanys cities and towns (Berlins
population, for example, grew from 967,000 to 1,588,000 from 1875 to 1890)
led to severe overcrowding and desperately harsh (and poorly paid) working
conditions in the towns, which continued, for many, long after Bismarcks
welfare reforms:
-In Berlin, there were 10,000 homeless people in 1871.
-Typically an urban German working class family had to spend 25% of their
income on often unsafe and cramped accommodation.
-12 hour working days (for children and adults alike), six days per week
constituted a normal weekly working pattern.
-In many of Germanys largest cities the average life expectancy was less than
40 throughout the 1880s.
Although, like the Krupps of Essen, there were some philanthropic
industrialists who helped their factory workers, the majority really only
sought to look after one thing: profit.
-Unsurprisingly, all this suffering led to a growth in support for the socialists.
Similarly, a new political group called the Mittelstand emerged, which was
made up of independent farmers, skilled craftsmen and small shopkeepers,
many of whom had been put out of business by the industrialisation and 1873
depression. A more worrying trend, however, was the anti-Semitism it began
to encourage by the 1880s. This was allowed to happen partly because 45% of
the German banking system (who demanded back loans from bankrupt
farmers and labourers) and many of the big chain stores putting small
shopkeepers etc. out of business were owned by Jewish people. Newspapers
and political parties played on the prejudices concerning Jews deliberately
profiteering from the agricultural depression, one Catholic newspaper in
Wurttemberg, for example, printing in bold the names of any Jewish people
convicted of crimes