The SPD had more difficulty cracking Berlin’s city assembly and the Prussian Landtag (state parliament), where Prussia’s three-class voting system made electoral clout directly proportional to the amount of taxes a citizen paid. In 1909, for example, each class elected forty-eight delegates to the city assembly, but the first class, whose members paid a minimum annual tax of 42,000 marks, contained only 1,800 voters; the second, paying a minimum of 178 marks, embraced 32,000 voters; and the last class, consisting of all the remaining eligible voters (males over twenty-four), numbered 336,000. Elections for the city assembly and Prussian parliament, moreover, were not direct; voters chose “electoral representatives” who then cast the final votes in a public ballot. As an added hurdle to the Socialists, the city assembly required that one-half of its membership be composed of home owners, which ruled out most workers. Frustration over this rigged system induced many proletarians to abstain from voting in municipal elections; in 1903 some 48 percent of the third-class voters did not go to the polls; in 1907 the figure was 58.5 percent. Yet even here the Socialists managed to gain a foothold; in 1890 they won eleven seats in the assembly and in 1900 doubled that figure to twenty-two (out of 144). They made their first inroads into the Prussian parliament in 1908, when the SPD sent seven representatives (out of 443) to that body, six of them from Berlin.
The SPD’s electoral successes in the national capital were due in part to the party’s ability to transcend class boundaries. Although socialism remained overwhelmingly a working-class movement, it also attracted bourgeois intellectuals and professionals who dreamed of a truly democratic and socially unified Germany, and who envisaged Berlin as the catalyst for that transformation. Most of the men whom the party sent to the various political bodies came from this group rather than from the working-class rank and file.
Paul Singer, who represented Berlin’s fourth district in the Reichstag from 1884 until his death in 1911, was a case in point. The son of a Jewish businessman, he built the family clothing firm on Berlin’s Dönhoffplatz into a thriving enterprise. As a political moderate, he worked effectively with his non-Socialist colleagues in the parliament. Singer found theoretical ammunition for his pragmatic approach in the writings of Eduard Bernstein, a Berlin intellectual who called for replacing the Marxian dogma of inevitable social revolution with a policy of practical reformism.
Karl Liebknecht (middle) and Rosa Luxemburg, 1909
The reformist approach preached by Bernstein and applied by Singer gained momentum within the Socialist movement, especially in Berlin, because the SPD’s electoral successes held out the promise of power through ballots rather than through bullets or barricades. On the other hand, the reformists had to admit that increased Socialist representation in the Reichstag would not bring genuine democracy to Germany unless that body itself attained greater clout in the political system. Still, the very act of electoral campaigning was a sign of faith that the system could be changed, and it undoubtedly absorbed energies that might otherwise have gone into revolutionary activism. The radical fervor of the party’s rank and file, meanwhile, was gradually blunted by improvements in wages, working conditions, and social welfare. Moreover, Berlin’s workers, like those of Germany as a whole, were increasingly proud of their nation’s accomplishments. The SPD officially professed loyalty to the international brotherhood of workers, but under the surface its members were often quite patriotic, even nationalistic. In Berlin a typical working-class parlor might display portraits of Bismarck and Moltke side by side with Marx and Engels.
The trade unions to which many Socialist workers belonged also encouraged reformism. The union movement advanced in Berlin along with the city’s rapid industrialization. In 1905 the Berlin Union Commission embraced 224,000 members in eighty organizations, of which the metal workers, transport workers, and builders were the largest. Like the Social Democratic Party, the Union Commission built a new headquarters at the turn of the century. Berlin workers called the imposing Gothic-style pile on the Engelufer their “palace,” and it looked no different from the heavily ornamented headquarters of the various employers’ associations. The union leaders had struggled hard to build up their organization and were disinclined to embrace any measures or ideas that might compromise what they had gained. In essence, they were willing to try to work through the capitalist system in which they had carved a place for themselves.
This policy was anathema to a radical wing of the SPD led by Franz Mehring, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht. Inspired by the 1905 revolution in Russia, these figures believed that proletarians across Europe must gird themselves for a revolutionary struggle against the possessing classes. Luxemburg was especially adept at preaching the radicals’ message to the masses of Berlin. This is ironic, for she was not a Berliner, nor even a German, but a Polish Jew who in 1898 (in the words of one of her biographers) had “descended upon the massive gray city like an exotic colorful bird.” Yet it would be a mistake to confuse her prowess as a tub-thumper for genuine influence; her following in Berlin remained quite small.
While Luxemburg and her friends tended to exaggerate their influence, their questioning of the reformists’ efforts to work peacefully within the system had some validity. For the most part, Germany’s economic and political leadership was disinclined to cooperate with the organized Left, whom the kaiser famously branded “scoundrels without a Fatherland.” In the Wilhelmian period the unions did not yet enjoy the unquestioned right to bargain collectively. As often as not, employers simply ignored the unions when they tried to press for higher wages or better working conditions for their members. This left the unions with little option but to strike, which was dangerous given the employers’ readiness to bring in strikebreakers and the authorities’ willingness to support the bosses, with force if necessary. Berlin, as headquarters both of the German labor movement and of the chief employers’ associations, became the country’s primary center of labor strife in the decade before World War I.
Every year, it seemed, some faction was in the streets, carrying placards and shouting demands. In 1900 the tram workers went out for several days, throwing the city into chaos. The troops were called out, and Kaiser Wilhelm, who had balked at the prospect of a civil war when he took the throne, told the commanding general that he hoped “five hundred people [among the strikers] might be gunned down.” Two years later the German Metal Workers’ Association, Berlin’s largest union, walked off their jobs to protest the firing of a worker’s representative who had been fired for trying to restore the docked wages of a colleague. When the employers brought in strikebreakers, other unions staged sympathy strikes, which shut down the proletarian district of Wedding for fourteen days. The metal workers won that round, but they were less successful when they struck for higher wages in two waves of walkouts in 1905–6 and 1910–12; in every instance, the police came out in force to protect the scabs who broke the strikes.
Economic grievances were not the only cause for work-actions. Berlin’s workers tried to use the strike weapon to force the government to liberalize the Prussian electoral system that so patently discriminated against the lower classes. A token reform in 1910, which did nothing to alleviate the basic injustice, prompted a series of Sunday demonstrations in the capital, each larger than the one before. In February the Berlin police president banned the demonstrations on the grounds that the streets were “reserved for the exclusive use of traffic.” Wishing both to evade a clash with the police and to score a symbolic victory, on March 6 the SPD announced a “suffrage promenade” to Treptow Park, which drew the forces of law and order to that outlying district. Meanwhile, the real march occurred right in the middle of town and was over by the time the exhausted police arrived to break it up.