Berlin

It soon became apparent that Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law, designed to break the back of the Social Democratic Party, was serving only to stiffen its spine. A Berlin police report of December 1879 admitted that the party had “lost nothing of its membership, energy, and hope for the future.” Denied the basic rights of the other parties, the Socialists pulled more closely together. Decried as anti-Christian, they acted in reality much like the Christians of ancient Rome, drawing strength from their very persecution.

Bismarck’s high-handed methods, moreover, also provoked opposition from some elements of the liberal camp, which of course had been tarred with the same “red” brush as the Socialists. Berlin’s mayor, Max von Forckenbeck, a National Liberal, opposed his party’s kowtowing to the chancellor, whom he accused of trying to run roughshod over parliamentary rights. “Are we not being sucked deeper and deeper into the mire?” he asked in January 1879. “Is not opposition our duty?... I for one will under no circumstances swim with the reactionary tide; I’d rather go under.” In April 1881 Theodor Fontane thought he detected a “storm” brewing among the people of Berlin against Bismarck, that plague upon the city. Bismarck’s popularity in the capital might once have been “colossal,” he wrote, but now the chancellor’s reputation was sinking like a rock due to the Berliners’ growing appreciation for the “smallness” of his character.

Bismarck’s failure to curb the opposition, especially in Berlin, was evident in the Reichstag elections of October 27, 1881. In the capital, 45.5 percent of the electorate voted Social Democratic, while the Progressives also fared well. Summing up the result, the left-liberal Berliner Volks-Zeitung

said it was obvious that the government had not achieved “in the least” what it wanted. The Bismarckian regime, opined the paper, was like a coachman who could not control his horse, and who responded to advice to go easier on the animal by flailing away all the more vigorously with his whip.

In fact, however, the government was beginning to rethink the tough tactics, if not the principles, of its anti-Socialist campaign. In his first speech to the newly elected parliament, Bismarck spoke of a need to heal “social wounds” and suggested that this might be achieved “not only through [continued] containment of Social Democratic excesses, but also through advancing the welfare of the workers.” He announced that he would consider new insurance and pension programs for incapacitated and elderly workers. Privately, he admitted that what he had in mind was a scheme “to reconcile the workers to the state.” Although expensive, the program would be well worth it if it undercut the influence of the Social Democratic Party and “warded off a revolution.” Here then, was a juicy carrot to go along with the government’s sharp stick.

Bills providing for illness and accident insurance and old-age benefits accordingly worked their way through parliament and became law in 1884. The government’s dubious motives notwithstanding, these measures represented a bold new departure that put Germany in the forefront of the industrialized world in terms of the “social net” it provided its workers. Moreover, the initiatives were combined with a new “mild practice” in the application of the Anti-Socialist Law. The government hoped that German workers, even in unruly Berlin, would now see that the state was their friend.

Like the earlier harsh approach, however, the “mild practice” did not achieve its intended results. Berlin’s workers took advantage of the relaxed climate to build trade unions and to mount strikes for higher wages and better working conditions. In summer 1885, 12,000 Berlin masons went on strike. Because their action drew support from other workers, they managed to win a ten-hour workday and a ten-penny-an-hour wage increase.

Faced with developments like this, Bismarck’s government reversed its field once again, returning to the hard line. Prussian interior minister Johannes Putkammer instructed the police to apply the full weight of the Anti-Socialist Law against all strikers and to step up expulsions of “agitators” in industrial centers like Berlin. Henceforth, all public assemblies in the capital would require police permission.

Yet, especially in Berlin, the Socialist and trade union movement was now too well entrenched to be uprooted from the scene. The unions continued to grow in the second half of the 1880s and mounted successful strikes despite police intervention. The Berlin ceramics workers, for example, forced employers to grant them a nine-hour workday. As for the Social Democratic party, it increased its vote nationwide by one-third in the Reichstag elections of 1887. It did even better in the capital, where it won 40 percent of the electorate, making it the strongest party in the city.