Authority and upheaval in Leipzig, 1910-1920: the story of a relationship

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AUTHORITY AND UPHEAVAL IN LEIPZIG, 1910–1920

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AUTHORITY AND UPHEAVAL IN LEIPZIG, 1910–1920 the story of a relationship

SEAN DOBSON

columbia university press

new york

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2001 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dobson, Sean. Authority and upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920 : the story of a relationship / Sean Dobson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-12076-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Revolutions—Germany—Leipzig—History—20th century. 2. Leipzig (Germany)—Politics and government. 3. World War, 1914–1918—Influence. 4. Germany—Politics and government—1918–1933. 5. Leipzig (Germany)—Social conditions. 6. Socialism—Germany—Leipzig—History—20th century. I. Title. DD901.L58 D63 2000 943′.2122087—dc21 00-055460

Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

Le succès fut tonjours un enfant de l’audace. —Voltaire


CONTENTS

list of plates ix list of figures xi list of tables xiii acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1

part 1 Portrait a Relationship: 1910–January 1915 21 1. Standards of Living and Social Mobility in Prewar Leipzig 23 2. Experience in the Social Realm in Prewar Leipzig 52 3. Politics in Prewar Leipzig 66 4. Wage and Salary Relationships in Prewar Leipzig 101 5. Elite Authority Strengthens: August 1914–January 1915 124

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part 2 The Relationship Dissolves: January 1915—10 November 1918 131 6. Elite Authority Erodes: Wartime Leipzig, January 1915–January 1917 133 7. Elite Authority Vanishes: January 1917–November 1918 148 8. Final Dissolution of the Old Relationship: 8–9 November 1918 178

part 3 A New Relationship Constitutes Itself: 10 November 1918–April 1920 189 9. Expectations and Disappointment: 10 November–January 1919 191 10. General Strike: February–12 March 1919 221 11. Final Drive of the Proletarian Works Council Movement: 12 March–25 May 1919 254 12. Remnants of the Proletarian Works Council Movement and the Resurgence of the Lower-White-Collar Councils: June–December 1919 265 13. The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch and the End of the Revolution: January–April 1920 278 conclusion 290 appendixes 297 abbreviations 319 notes 323 bibliography 407 index 457

LIST OF PLATES

1. A mechanical excavator 2. Visitors to the Petersstraße during the Leipzig fair 3. Children of workers, dressed as cowboys and Indians 4. Fraternity brothers at the University of Leipzig administering “dueling scars” 5. Leipzig’s fortresslike Neues Rathaus 6. Fifty thousand Leipzigers demonstrating for democracy 7. Two nodal-point workshops in a Magdeburg machine-making factory 8. A revolutionary crowd in the Augustusplatz on 10 November 1918 9. Freikorps machine-gun nest atop a bank building 10. Freikorps guarding entrance to city center 11. Armed workers occupy a barricade in the Dresdner Strasse 12. Volkshaus following Reichswehr attack 13. Luxury villa apparently torched in retaliation for the destruction of the Volkshaus


LIST OF FIGURES

i.1. Relative Growth in Black and Brown Coal Consumption in Leipzig, 1887–1910 i.2. Changing Modes of Transportation in Leipzig, 1906–1913 i.3. Employees Per Firm in Selected Big Cities, 1913 i.4. Population Growth in Leipzig, 1835–1914 i.5. Comparison of Population Growth in Old and New Leipzig, 1871–1910 1.1. Owners of Leipzig’s Housing Stock by Group, 1913 1.2. Geographical Mobility of Different Groups in Leipzig, 1910–1911 1.3. Geographical Mobility of Different Groups in Leipzig, Recession of 1907–1908 1.4. Different-Sized Businesses as a Percentage of All Registered Businesses in Leipzig, 1902–1912 1.5. Health of Leipzigers Compared to Residents of Other Big German Cities in 1911 1.6. Intragenerational Social Mobility of Leipzig Workers, 1893–1913 (Expressed in Percentages)

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LIST OF FIGURES

1.7. Intragenerational Social Mobility of Leipzig Nonworkers, 1893–1913 1.8. Intergenerational Social Mobility of Workers in Leipzig from Late Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century 1.9. Intergenerational Social Mobility of Nonworkers in Leipzig from Late Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century 1.10. Social Background of Residents in Buildings Inhabited by Different Groups in Leipzig, 1870–1913 1.11. Group Segregation in Leipzig: Comparison of the Social Composition of New Versus Old Leipzig, 1913 2.1. Social Background of Godparents of Children from Laboring Families in Leipzig, 1880 and 1910–1913 2.2. Social Background of Godparents of Children from Laboring Families, 1910–1913: Comparison of City Center to Outlying Industrial Neighborhood of Thekla 2.3. Nonworker Marriage Patterns in Leipzig-Thekla, 1896–1914 3.1. Stages of Bürgerliche Coalescence in Leipzig’s Prewar Reichstag Elections 7.1. Average Employment Tenure in Days of Wageworkers in Two Leipzig War Factories: Comparison of Prewar Period, Early War, and Late War 8.1. Percentage of Leipzig Workers Remaining Resident in the City for Twelve Consecutive Months: Comparison of War and Prewar Periods

LIST OF TABLES

i.1. Growth of Communications in Leipzig, 1890–1913 1.1. Sample of Types of Jobs Considered Unskilled Labor 1.2. Sample of Types of Jobs Considered Skilled Labor 1.3. Sample of Types of Professions Considered Alter Mittelstand 1.4. Sample of Types of Professions Considered Lower White Collar 1.5. Sample of Types of Professions Considered Elite


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IT PLEASES ME to thank publicly the individuals and institutions without whose help this project would not have been possible. A President’s Fellowship from Columbia University (known as the Hofstadter Fellowship inside the history department) enabled my graduate career. The German Academic Exchange Service financed a year of research in Germany during which Professors Heinrich August Winkler and Martin Geyer provided advice. There I also benefited from the helpfulness of archivists at the Landeshauptarchiv Magdeburg (as well as its Außenstelle in Wernigerode), Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig im alten Rathaus, Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Stadtarchiv Leipzig, and the Zentrales Betriebsarchiv der Leuna-Werke, as well as from the librarians of the Deutsche Bücherei, the Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Stadtbibliothek Leipzig, Bibliothek des Dimitrov-Museums, and the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Pastors at the Thomaskirche and Kirche der Hohen Thekla, both in Leipzig, allowed me to examine the archives of those churches. Administrators at the HumboldtUniversität in Berlin and Universität Leipzig patiently explained the intricacies of matriculation, etc. A special thanks to the Vorwerk family in Leipzig for taking me into their home and under their wing. I also wish to thank the Robert Bosch Stiftung for widening my acquaintance with today’s Germany and permitting me to participate, as a spouse, in many of the activities in its program for young American professionals. Professor Eberhard Kolb read the entire manuscript very carefully, as did my advisers at Columbia, Professors Istvan Deak, David Cannadine, Andreas Huyssen, Ira Katznelson, and Robert Paxton. Their suggestions improved the early drafts a great deal. My

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doctoral adviser, Professor Fritz Stern, played an active role in the thesis from its inception through completion. His knowledge and editorial gifts improved the dissertation in too many ways to recount here. And his encouragement kept my spirits from sagging during periods when the project encountered obstacles. In his doctoral seminar I trotted out ideas before a patient group of peers. Portions of later drafts found sensitive readers in Professors Lenard R. Berlanstein, Thomas Luckett, and Friedrich Schuler. The manuscript also benefited from criticisms offered in the Translatantic Doctoral Seminar hosted by Georgetown University and the German Historical Institute, the Columbia University Seminar on Western Europe, and the Washington Area Germanist Seminar. Last, but certainly not least, thanks go to Kate Wittenberg, editor-in-chief of the Columbia University Press, as well as her anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions improved the manuscript. To my wife, Caroline Fredrickson, who worked in Germany as a Bosch fellow while I rummaged through the archives, I owe . . . well, my sweet, you already understand.

AUTHORITY AND UPHEAVAL IN LEIPZIG, 1910–1920


INTRODUCTION

IN THE AUTUMN of 1918, after it had become clear that the war was lost, revolution broke out in Germany. The spark igniting the revolutionary powder keg came from the northern ports, where sailors mutinied on 3 November in response to the order to set sail on a “death ride” against the Royal Navy, a hopeless effort by the admiralty to salvage its honor during delicate negotiations with the Allies. The mutineers at first demanded better food and more humane treatment from officers. Within a day or two they also began electing revolutionary “Soldier Councils” that stripped officers of the right of command, displaced local governments in the port cities, and demanded immediate peace and real democratization of the government. Workers in all of Germany’s urban centers joined the upheaval with astonishing rapidity. By 9 November Worker and Soldier Councils (Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, or asre) held power almost everywhere in the Reich. The asre, composed in the big cities of a hodgepodge of soldiers, ordinary workers, and union and socialist leaders, borrowed from the Bolsheviks only nomenclature, not ideology. They arrogated the right of command from the officer corps and supervised officials of the old regime. The latter were retained provisionally to ensure distribution of food and coal and help with demobilization. Most local asre thought that further action was unnecessary because they expected sweeping initiatives from the Council of People’s Deputies (Rat der Volksbeauftragten, or RdV) in Berlin to purge antidemocrats in the civil service, judiciary, and above all officer corps as well as to socialize big industry. With its seat in the capital and its members comprising the national leaders of the two socialist parties (the Social Democratic Party

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INTRODUCTION

of Germany, or spd, and the more radical Independent Socialists, or uspd), the RdV commanded the allegiance of almost all local asre. But the asre of urban Germany were mistaken in believing that the RdV would implement revolutionary changes. For the spd along with the more moderate uspd members of the RdV intended merely to elect a National Assembly as quickly as possible, the only body, they believed, with the legitimacy to make fundamental decisions. To achieve this goal, they sought to work with rather than purge the bureaucracy and officer corps of the old regime. By late January 1919, as it became clear that the national authorities would not socialize big industry and democratize the civil service, judiciary, and officer corps, the frequency and size of strikes in Germany’s industrial centers—the Ruhr, Berlin, and the Leipzig region—increased. Leipzig not only played a major role in this second wave of the revolution, but events there diverged from those in Berlin and the Ruhr in two important ways. First, unlike the general strikes of the Ruhr (where only miners participated in great numbers) and Berlin (where politically active metalworkers represented the driving force), the strike around Leipzig (the area then referred to as Mitteldeutschland, or central Germany) involved the participation of all industrial workers, bringing the life of an entire region to a standstill and almost forcing the national government to acquiesce to its demands. Second, the central German movement featured a unique ideology that set it apart from those in the Ruhr and Berlin and also left a permanent mark on subsequent German history. The ideological program of the Ruhr strikers envisioned nationalization of the coal industry (albeit with guarantees of some control of the mines by workers at the point of production), while that of the Berlin strikers focused mostly on the political role of the asre as a substitute for or complement to traditional parliamentary democracy. By contrast, the central German strikers aimed above all to acquire control of their individual companies and then operate them through democratically elected Works Councils (Betriebsräte). In some places workers actually achieved—for a short time—some of these goals, obtaining a position of parity with management or, less often, taking complete control of their firms. This book, relying on previously unexamined company records, explores this rare experiment in the democratization of a capitalist economy. While some historians disparage the Betriebsräte movement as “immature,” others view it as the first step on the long road toward contemporary Germany’s system of industrial codetermination (Mitbestimmung). The uprising in Leipzig itself, then Germany’s fourth-largest and perhaps most industrialized big city, was unusually radical. Unlike most industrial

INTRODUCTION

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cities, in which the local asr was composed equally of members of the spd and uspd, the Leipzig asr contained only the latter. This radical asr refused to acknowledge the authority of the more moderate Reich and Saxon provisional governments, in effect creating, for a time, a miniature socialist republic.

HISTORIOGRAPHY While we know much about the revolution in the Ruhr and Berlin, there exist no reliable, scholarly monographs on the revolution in central Germany, one of modern Germany’s most important and, in Western historiography since 1945, neglected regions.1 The single serious investigation of events in central Germany published before 1945 was financed by the chemical industry’s employers’ association and reflects the bias of its sponsor.2 All other pre1945 accounts were written by participants in the revolution with their own prejudices.3 After 1945 the only monographs examining Leipzig and central Germany in the revolution were written in the German Democratic Republic (gdr). The reason for this was simple: only Leninist historians were allowed access to the relevant archives.4 The resulting works, varying in their technical quality, follow to the letter guidelines laid down by the gdr’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. These may be summarized as follows: the onset of the monopoly stage of the capitalist mode of production in the late nineteenth century required the advanced nations to embark on an imperialist scramble in a doomed effort to find outlets for surplus investment and exports; these sharpened international tensions led directly to July 1914; the unprecedented strains of total war created the objective conditions for a socialist revolution in Germany by 1917; unfortunately, the necessary subjective factor for successful revolution, the Leninist vanguard party, had not ripened to the same degree of perfection as in Russia; thus the revolutionary (but inexperienced) masses were easily misled by the “traitorous” majority Socialists and “opportunistic” independent Socialists.5 As the beating of a dead horse offers few charms, I refrain from polemic against an interpretation long since discredited. Below I quote from gdr studies only when they provide useful facts. The more I researched, the clearer it became that the revolution in Leipzig and Mitteldeutschland remains incomprehensible without detailed knowledge of the region before 1918, indeed, before 1914. In other words, strong continuities mark the decade of 1910–20 in Leipzig. Rather than analyze the period 1918–20 in a vacuum, rather than deliver a minute-by-minute chroni-

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INTRODUCTION

cle of even the least significant events of the revolution, I devote significant space to the search for its causes and the prerevolutionary factors shaping its outcome. Viewing the revolution in a longer-term perspective represents a departure from almost all the previous literature and generates this study’s three major theses.6 First, it calls into question a pair of related orthodoxies held by many current historians, especially in Germany: (a) that Wilhelmine elites were making progress in reform efforts, above all by implementing relatively generous welfare programs; and (b) that, partially as a result of this, workers were largely “integrated” into the existing social-political order. In the pages below, I paint a starkly different picture. Of course, findings in a single city do not overturn an interpretation purporting to explain the entire German scene. But I hope they will prompt other historians to test these historiographical orthodoxies with detailed local studies of their own. Second, a longer-term perspective unsettles received opinion about the causes of the revolution. The question of the depth of antagonism between workers and nonworkers in pre-1914 Germany should interest not only students of the imperial period but those of the revolution as well. Most of the latter accept uncritically the orthodoxies about the prewar Reich outlined above. Consequently, they ascribe the outbreak of the revolution—when bothering at all to search for its antecedents—not to long-term factors (workers were largely integrated before 1914, after all) but rather to the shortterm factor of increasing war weariness after 1914. I hope that my study will put the search for the revolution’s causes on the historiographical agenda and contribute to the debate as to whether the Kaiserreich was reformable or whether popular rebellion represented the only way to bring democracy to Germany. Finally, such a perspective highlights the importance of leadership to the success of any political mobilization, be it that of workers, elites, or other social groups. If readers finish the book, they will discover that this last thesis can transcend platitude.

METHOD This study not only plugs significant historiographical holes, it also contributes to two theoretical discussions occupying the attention of scholars in a number of disciplines: the debate on class and, related to it, that on collective identity formation.

INTRODUCTION

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Wageworkers of both sexes were the authors of the revolution in Leipzig. True, sailors and soldiers sparked the initial upheaval in Leipzig on 8 November 1918, but after that first day their importance rapidly diminished (for this reason, the mutiny emanating from Kiel was merely the occasion, not the cause, of the revolution). Granted, intellectuals in the leadership of the spd (and after 1917 the uspd) played a part, but, as I shall demonstrate below, at all times between 1910 and 1920 ordinary wageworkers—often acting against the wishes of party leaders—were the main agents of upheaval. But approaching the category of “worker” presents more difficulties than one might suspect. In the past fifteen years the debate over the terms “worker,” “class,” and “working class” has reached such proportions that any historian using them must take a position in it.7 The discussion centers on the breakdown of the old Marxist-Weberian definition of worker as someone who is wage-dependent. In the past, labor historians typically examined only those individuals conforming to this definition, often presenting this group as a working class with varying degrees of class consciousness. Over the past couple of decades, however, numerous monographs have demonstrated that the mere existence of a group of wage laborers does not permit expectations that its members will develop a shared subjective identity, not to mention a specific ideology (Marxism). In fact, real workers in real historical settings construe their situations in innumerable ways.8 Other critics point out that focusing on wage dependency privileges male laborers (most of whom worked for a wage) while excluding from historical investigation most laboring women (who as maids, homeworkers, agricultural laborers, prostitutes, etc., did not earn wages but instead piece rates, room and board, or lumpsum payments).9 Still others complain that equating class with wage dependency minimizes the effects of political and cultural factors outside the workshop on worker identity and behavior.10 The increasing untenability of defining class as an objective condition (i.e., wage dependency) has prompted ever more historians to present it as a subjective identity. According to this view, a class exists when individuals believe they constitute one. With its focus on mentalité, such an approach starts from the supposition that cultural influences and not material life conditions represent the most important determinants shaping class identity. E. P. Thompson inaugurated this trend with the publication of The Making of the English Working Class in 1963. Although he devotes whole chapters to describing living and working conditions, his real quarry is the cultural influences—most predating industrialization—that shaped the consciousness of what he claims was an emerging working class in the decades before 1832.11 In

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INTRODUCTION

the 1970s the rediscovery of the writings of Antonio Gramsci (particularly his emphasis on the importance of cultural hegemony), as well as Althusserian Marxism’s view of culture as largely autonomous from the economic base, further induced social historians to view class as an identity rather than a relation to the means of production. Since the 1980s this linguistic turn in social history has become even sharper under the impact of cultural anthropology and poststructuralism, both of which insist that culture, not material reality, determines consciousness. Adhering to Clifford Geertz’s dictum that “all experience is construed experience,” historians influenced by cultural anthropology focus on the perception of reality rather than reality itself, on thought worlds rather than objective life conditions, on the extent to which authority was deemed legitimate rather than its terms, all by uncovering the so-called symbolic forms that imbue reality with (arbitrary) coherence.12 Poststructuralists follow a similar approach, labeling these cultural influences “discourses,” a term made famous by Michel Foucault but that he and his disciples define inconsistently.13 It appears to refer not only to high political/social theory and public rhetoric but also to any custom or social practice that, by acquiring widespread acceptance, comes to appear as logical, natural, and necessary and therefore beyond political contestation. A hegemonic discourse, by discouraging debate, helps perpetuate social hierarchies.14 Common to both approaches is the conviction that class does not exist objectively, does not precede its perception, but instead is the product of that perception, the latter determined (entirely) by symbolic forms and prevailing discourses: in a word, by culture.15 Limitations of space have obliged me to present in somewhat caricatured form the respective approaches of the Marxist-Weberians and their critics; most of the historical works cited above rely on a variety of methodologies. These same confines prohibit a full critique below. Suffice it here to say that, while shamelessly borrowing from all those criticizing the Marxist-Weberian definition, I align myself fully with none. For all the reasons adduced above by the critics, I will not attempt to find an objective working class or formulate a universally valid definition of “worker.” But while critics have succeeded in demolishing the Marxist-Weberian definition of class, they fail to provide an alternative. For in defining class as a cultural identity, they concede that it shifts depending on context. The sense of class identity of a Polish migrant coal miner in the late-nineteenth-century Ruhr, for instance, would have contained a strong ethnic and religious dimension. To him, class would have meant not only difficult, dangerous toil and wage dependency but also ethnic pride, Catholic piety, the experience of social discrimination from the

INTRODUCTION

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German majority, and so on. By contrast, a native German female textile worker in Leipzig would have had a completely different sense of class, hers conditioned by sexual discrimination and a host of factors peculiar to Leipzig. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a definition is “exactly what a thing is or what a word means.” In providing a definition of class that shifts according to context, the critics offer none at all. In short, neither the old nor newer schools devise a persuasive definition of class. I personally have attempted several times to formulate my own, always with sorry results. A historian has no right to use a word he cannot define. Therefore, although the revolution in Leipzig is a story of conflict between workers and nonworkers, this book will not depict a working class struggling with a bourgeoisie. Instead, it will examine the interaction of different social groups. The city’s wageworkers, as the authors of the revolution in Leipzig, constitute the most important of these groups. Notice, however, that I focus on workers not because they conform to an abstract criterion (wage dependency) but because they made the revolution. The starting point for inquiry, then, is empirical, not definitional. If the revolutionaries had shared only the characteristic of brown eyes, I would concentrate on browneyed Leipzigers. In fact—and as shall be demonstrated repeatedly below— the concrete characteristic unifying the revolutionaries in Leipzig was the fact that all labored for a wage. For purposes of shorthand I refer to them simply as “workers.” I realize this term excludes people who labored manually but not for a wage (homeworkers, agricultural laborers, domestic servants, prostitutes, etc.). The fact that these other types of laborers played no role in the revolution justifies their exclusion in the pages below. This study concerns itself, then, with a social group. But the term “group,” like most monikers, must be approached carefully. For just as a thing can only exist as part of a larger ensemble, so, too, a group exists only in relation to other groups. A paper clip is small only in relation to the person holding it; compared to a proton it is gigantic. Its function, too, is not fixed: when bent a certain way it becomes a sculpture, a tool, a weapon. All the qualities of the paper clip (is it still a paper clip?) shift depending on its connections to broader constellations. Without relations of any kind (an ontological impossibility) it loses all characteristics and ceases to exist. Likewise with social groups: individuals adopt a collective identity only in contradistinction to an Other. In relation to his apprentices, a seventeenth-century resident of Bonn believed himself a master; to fellow butchers, a guild brother; to university students, a resident; to peasants, a burgher; to Protestants, a Catholic; to state, a subject; to Mainzers, a Bonner; to Prussians, a Rhinelander; to

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INTRODUCTION

French, a German; and so on. On which of these identities should the historian focus? It depends on the type of knowledge she wishes to acquire. Analyzing all the identities of our single Bonner would produce a monstrously long biographie totale. Choices need to be made. But whichever the identity investigated, it can only be grasped as a relationship. In late imperial Leipzig, there were countless group relationships. Only one produced the city’s most important political changes: that between workers and nonworkers. Understanding this relationship and charting its change over time represents the book’s objective. Part 1 reviews the most important dimensions of the prewar relationship between workers and nonworkers or, stated differently, the sites of their most intensive contact. Chapter 1, after defining who is meant by “worker” and “nonworker,” explores their relationship in the social sphere, the everyday realm in which Leipzigers spent money, raised children, rubbed shoulders, found housing, joined clubs, chose spouses, and so forth. Chapter 2 continues this exploration of the social realm, relying less on quantitative and more on qualitative evidence. Chapter 3 examines their interaction in the arena of formal politics; chapter 4 that within the wage relationship. “Social,” “political,” and “work,” then, constitute the main dimensions of the relationship to be explored. In contrast to recent Marxist approaches positing a one-way sequence from wage labor to social consciousness to political solidarity culminating in “class für sich,”16 these dimensions are to be viewed as simultaneous, dialectical moments of the overall relationship. As such, they cannot be regarded as progressive, let alone teleological. To discourage such a misreading, I eschew the above Marxist sequence in favor of an arbitrary juxtapositioning of the social realm (chapters 1 and 2), formal politics (chapter 3), and wage relationship (chapter 4). Rearranging the order of these chapters would have changed my findings not one whit. For the wage relationship does not—ontologically, chronologically, or as a determinant of consciousness— precede the social and political spheres. Was the wage relationship’s genesis inevitable, metahistorical, prior to, and therefore uninfluenced by social and political factors? How can one understand both its persistence and modifications without considering the role of the state? How to make sense of social patterns in, say, housing without considering that poverty stemming from the wage relationship allocated the worst dwellings to workers? How to understand politics while ignoring the anger generated by social discrimination? How many historians today still feel comfortable privileging work relationships over social and political ones when weighting influences on collective identity?17 In Part 1, I keep the three realms separate for analytical purposes while remaining cognizant of their interactivity.

INTRODUCTION

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If part 1 employs synchronic analysis to portray the antagonistic yet enduring relationship between Leipzig’s workers and nonworkers before 1915, the rest of the book shifts over to narrative, tracing the relationship’s dissolution during the later war years (part 2) and the constitution of a new relationship during the revolution (part 3). One might define “relationship” as the manner in which two parties behave toward each other. Behavior in turn flows from each party’s subjective appreciation of the other. Obviously, first-person accounts by the historical actors themselves offer the most direct access to these attitudes. Nonworkers in Leipzig bequeathed a wealth of such utterances, and I consult them frequently in the pages that follow. Workers, however, left behind very few testaments in their own voice. Uncovering their mentality presents challenges. And that is where the successors to the Marxist-Weberians can help, for they have shown how the police reports, court documents, newspaper accounts, social investigations, and so on describing popular praxis can be used to tease out the mentality informing it.18 A food riot, horseplay, the killing of cats contain more meaning than meets the eye. How they were done and the significance contemporaries attached to the gestures, implements, and symbols employed illuminate landscapes of subjectivity. Documents such as these also expose the writer’s assumptions: a police spy describes a wartime demonstration and unwittingly betrays his sympathy for the goals of the protesters; a point not raised in a formal polemic reveals shared assumptions unrecognized by two adversaries; the very topic of the polemic throws more light on their worldview than their respective arguments. But why limit evidence to texts? Any human artifact—the design of a building, the route of a tram line, the shape of a machine—opens vistas into the soul of its maker. In the pages below I make liberal use of the methodologies of the linguistic turn in order to understand the assumptions, motivations, and aspirations of Leipzig’s workers and nonworkers. Not that I endorse these methodologies unreservedly. But limitations of space foreclose even a superficial critique. A perceptive reader will discern methods adopted and spurned in the pages below. Suffice it here to note that a historian with Thompsonian instincts can borrow from the repertoire of cultural anthropology and even poststructuralism but reject an underlying epistemology leading to solipsism (or worse) and a conception of human nature degrading the individual to a mere subject-position inscribed by dominant discourses.19 If one had to choose a single adjective to characterize the prerevolutionary relationship between workers and nonworkers, it would be “authoritarian.” I employ the term “authority” not to mean “tyranny” but in its precise, neutral

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INTRODUCTION

meaning of “the power or right to enforce obedience” (Oxford English Dictionary). The superordinate party in the relationship might not have to enforce obedience because the subordinate party might obey voluntarily, but, if necessary, the former can enforce its will through coercion. As I will examine in detail below, nonworkers wielded considerable authority over workers in prerevolutionary Leipzig, especially in the political arena and on the shop floor. Because it can cover both economic and political relationships, the category “authority” replaces the more precise but overly narrow “class.” In that sense, “authority” functions as the book’s master concept (a fact reflected in its title), since at all times I will focus on the strength of nonworker authority over Leipzig’s workers. Authority of any kind rests on three pillars: custom, legitimacy, and force. I review each in turn. Almost all humans accept, at least initially, the social relations into which they are born. The weight of custom therefore benefits the superordinate parties to any authoritarian relationship. Most young children dislike aspects of parental authority, but it is a rare child who rejects that authority altogether. Born into this relationship, the child can imagine an alternative to the parent’s authority only with difficulty. If custom generates the subordinate party’s semi- or unconscious consent to its domination, then legitimacy does so on the conscious level. A ruling group enjoys full legitimacy when both it and the subordinate party share a set of values justifying the hierarchical relationship. In medieval Europe, monarchs ruled by divine right, a doctrine accepted both by dominators and dominated. Today, in the advanced nations, ruling elites derive their legitimacy from elections in accordance with democratic constitutions. That these same countries never experience revolutions attests to the nearly ubiquitous acceptance of this ideology and its importance in sustaining authority. The effect of an extraordinary personality and/or success in political, military, and economic endeavors also creates legitimacy. If these are impressive, they can endow a hierarchical relationship—even in the absence of a commonly accepted ideology—with a great deal of legitimacy. Placing the imperial crown on his own head, Napoleon did not enjoy the legitimacy flowing from divine right. Nevertheless, domestic stability characterized his reign because of a string of military and political triumphs. Success alone, however, provides a shaky foundation for authority because legitimacy can vanish with a serious setback, such as a lost war. An elite finds itself much more secure if its ascendancy also rests on a widely shared legitimating ideology. To the extent that custom and legitimacy wane, the inferior party becomes

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11

less willing to obey. If the relationship is to continue, rulers must possess the means and will to employ force to impose their authority. To summarize: My analysis begins with Leipzig’s workers not because they conformed to an abstract definition (wage dependency) but because they did something (made a revolution). The first step in answering the question “why,” part 1 investigates their prewar relationship with nonworkers. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the social dimension of that relationship; chapter 3 the political; chapter 4 interaction within the wage relationship. Employing synchronic analysis, this section of the book paints a portrait of the prewar relationship of workers and nonworkers in Leipzig with the aim of ascertaining whether one can speak of longer-term (i.e., pre-1914) causes of the revolution. Parts 2 and 3 shift over to narrative in order to describe and explain how this relationship dissolved and then reconstituted itself under different terms, or, expressed more concretely, how workers in Leipzig challenged nonworker authority before succumbing to it again, albeit in modified form. I will argue that wageworkers in prewar Leipzig, far from being integrated into the Wilhelmine social order, felt radical dissatisfaction with it. A number of factors, however, restrained them from frontally challenging elites. The experience of total war—above all, Germany’s military defeat—removed these inhibitions. Revolution ensued. The upheaval’s failure to achieve a more secure democratic republic or a more equitable wage relationship stemmed largely from ineffective Social Democratic leadership.

BACKGROUND ON LEIPZIG An important point of exchange since the Middle Ages, Leipzig became by the early modern period Central Europe’s leading inland trading city. Despite the declining political fortunes of the kingdom of Saxony after 1815, Leipzig continued to prosper, with ever more of its wealth earned from manufacture rather than trade. The city was especially well positioned for the upswing in intra-German commerce resulting from the formation of the German Zollverein in 1834.20 Trade brought with it currency, and the city became during these years a significant banking center, a mark of which was the ability of native banks and merchants to finance Friedrich List’s project of connecting Leipzig and Dresden by rail in 1834, one of the first lines on the continent. Within fifteen years Leipzig enjoyed rail connections to all major German and most European cities, a development further boosting the volume of trade.21

12

INTRODUCTION

Leipzig had been for centuries a center of fur and tobacco processing, publishing, and graphics, and—because of its trade—banking,22 but only the latter helped spark the city’s industrial expansion in the 1860s. Specifically, it was largely native capital that launched mostly native entrepreneurs in sectors such as textiles, machine making, and brown coal (lignite) exploitation.23 Serving ever larger markets brought about by the creation of the North German Federation in 1866 and then the Reich in 1871,24 native capitalists demonstrated that Leipzig was a good place to do business. Larger joint-stock companies, often from Berlin and the Ruhr, took note and moved in during the 1870s and 1880s. These larger capitalists were attracted by Leipzig’s obvious advantages: a large pool of skilled wage labor; its location at the hub of the central European rail network; and its proximity to abundant cheap energy, namely, brown coal.25 As the sectors associated with the second industrial revolution—especially Leipzig’s infant but rapidly growing chemical sector—were all energy intensive, the breakthrough in the exploitation of brown coal in the 1880s merits closer attention. Leipzigers had been burning brown coal in limited quantities for centuries,26 but because of its high water content it possessed too few calories per kilogram for industrial application. Three technological advances erased this drawback. First, the creation of a regional rail network made it cost-effective for industry to burn raw lignite in massive amounts—as long as the transport route did not exceed roughly thirty-five kilometers. This limitation represented no problem since Leipzig sits in the middle of one of Europe’s three richest deposits of brown coal (the lower Rhine and northwestern Bohemia are the other two). Second, as most lignite was won from open pits rather than mines, the cost of its extraction dropped dramatically after 1880 with the development of huge mechanical excavators (see plate 1). Requiring only machinery and unskilled navvies and haulers, companies could dispense with skilled, expensive hewers who, because they worked underground, posed the further disadvantage of being unsupervisable. Brown coal consumption climbed even faster after repeated improvements in the waterextraction process made it economical for home heating. By the 1880s it was being pressed into relatively dry “briquettes” that could be shipped to and burned in homes at prices competitive with black coal.27 This booming sector attracted many thousands of unskilled migrants seeking jobs. In the nearby Borna region, for instance, brown coal production employed ten thousand workers, mostly navvies, one-third of whom were listed as “Ausländer” (the term could mean Slavs from the east or merely non-Saxon Germans).28

INTRODUCTION

13

Mechanization also transformed the region’s growing potash industry, whose open pits clustered around Halle. Leipzig’s spectacular economic expansion in the late nineteenth century took place within two contexts, one geographical, the other organizational. Geographically, the western half of the kingdom of Saxony formed a part of what was then informally called Mitteldeutschland: an agroindustrial region also comprising the Prussian province of Saxony and most of Thuringia. This area was one of the most heavily industrialized and densely populated in Germany, producing machines, precision instruments, chemicals, and brown coal and selling much of this output in foreign markets.29 In contrast to the Ruhr and Silesia, where heavy industry predominated, Mitteldeutschland featured a diversified economic base with an accent on light to medium industry: textiles, precision engineering, chemicals, optics, publishing.30 Central Germany cohered not only economically but also politically, for throughout this period it was well to the left of the rest of Germany. For this reason and as shall be demonstrated repeatedly in the pages below, Leipzig should be viewed as belonging primarily to central Germany rather than to the kingdom of Saxony. Organizationally, Leipzig’s spectacular growth unfolded in a larger German economy, which Heinrich August Winkler terms “organized capitalism.” With the onset of a twenty-three-year “Great Depression” in 1873—a period of continuing real growth but, because of the near absence of inflation, tight profit margins—German entrepreneurs joined with agricultural interests in successfully lobbying the state to abandon its policy of relative laissez-faire in favor of fixing internal markets and protecting native producers from foreign competition. Within this context, the German economy continued to expand: As a latecomer to capitalism, German industry could start at the highest technological level relative to Great Britain, France, and Belgium, especially in new sectors such as chemicals, precision instruments, advanced engineering, automotives, optics, and power generation. With the encouragement of a wellcapitalized, highly concentrated banking network, German industry made precocious and extensive use of the more efficient joint-stock form of organization. High tariffs afforded industry and agriculture a huge (and, because of population growth, expanding) captive home market while price- and output-fixing by cartels (not just tolerated but encouraged by the state) prevented painful competition among firms. The state also played an important active role: repressing labor unions and Social Democracy ensured that labor costs and taxes for social welfare remained low while investing more in public

14

INTRODUCTION

schools than the other advanced nations enabled German industry to take the lead in the (then) high-tech fields named above.31 A glance at late imperial Leipzig reveals that there, too, capitalists acted in concert. Although at the founding of the empire the city’s industrialists advocated free trade, by the eve of the war, with some reservations, they saw their interests best protected by a cartelization of the domestic market and protection from foreign competition.32 Among large entrepreneurs, the most important organization lobbying for these views was the Union of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter, which pressured Reich, state, and local governments and facilitated cooperation among different branches of industry on common problems. After 1909 it worked closely with the national Hansa-Bund in the hopes of ending the disproportionate power of large agriculturalists in the Saxon and Reich governments. Economic collaboration among employers took place within each sector, many of which were cartelized. The brown coal producers, who for years had informally set production and price targets, created in 1905 a permanent organization, the Sales Association of Saxon Brown Coal Works, Ltd., which in turn coordinated its policies with producers further afield through the Central German Brown Coal Syndicate. The cartel served the coal magnates well as the price of brown coal rose 14.4 percent between 1905 and 1908.33 Smaller business owners in Leipzig were also well organized, forming a patchwork of branch-based associations that in 1905 succeeded in pressuring

1,600,000

Black coal

Brown coal

1,400,000 1,200,000 1,000,000 800,000 600,000 400,000 200,000 0

1887

1895

1910

figure i.1 Relative Growth in Black and Brown Coal Consumption in Leipzig, 1887–1910 (Expressed in Tons) source: Karl Juckenburg, Das Aufkommen der Großindustrie in Leipzig (Leipzig: Veit, 1912), 20, 22.

INTRODUCTION

15

1400 1200 1000

Number of horse drawn carts Number of trucks Number of autos

800 600 400 200 0

1906

1910

1913

figure i.2 Changing Modes of Transportation in Leipzig, 1906–1913 source: Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 235 ff.

the municipal and royal governments into passing discriminatory legislation against department stores and cooperatives. (Small retailers saw no inconsistency, however, when in that same year they formed their own purchasing cooperative so as to buy cheaply in mass quantities).34 The master artisans were also well organized, boasting thirty-seven guilds with 6,500 members.35 Within the context of organized capitalism Leipzig’s private sector grew explosively during the twenty-five years before the Great War. Contemporaries noted the city’s dynamism, swelling population, and the severity of its boom-bust cycles, as indicated by a letter that the metalworker August Bromme received from a friend, probably during the recession of 1900–1902: Dear Friend! Again no luck finding work in Ronneburg, Schmölln, and Altenburg. I therefore came here today. I find Leipzig interesting. The big-city buildings really impress me, even more the nice wide streets. It all reminds me of Chicago. . . . I’m really glad to be breathing the air of a big city again. [But] unfortunately the regrettable specter of grinding poverty appears also all too often. Hordes of unemployed stream through the city.36

Although the precise growth rate in Leipzig during these decades is not ascertainable, a glance at the development of different sectors leaves little doubt that it was impressive (see fig. i.1). The use of other types of power also skyrocketed during this period. From 1905 to 1910 consumption of gas climbed

16

INTRODUCTION

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

kf

ur

t /M C ol og ne D re sd en Be rli n H am bu rg M un ic h

zi g Le

ip Fr an

C

he

m

ni

tz

0

figure i.3 Employees Per Firm in Selected Big Cities, 1913 note: The figure for Leipzig had increased 36.29 percent over the preceding twenty-five years. See Statistik des Deutschen Reichs 1882, vol. 6 (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1882), part 2, 136; Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, vol. 217, 1907 (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1907), p. 299. source: Karl Juckenburg, Das Aufkommen der Großindustrie in Leipzig (Leipzig: Veit, 1912), 19.

76 percent and that of electricity by 109 percent.37 Transportation became rapidly motorized, as figure i.2 depicts. Meanwhile, kilometers traveled per year on the city’s trams increased between 1896 and 1913 by 529 percent, while fares paid per day jumped 348 percent in the same period.38 Cause and effect of Leipzig’s economic growth was the economy of scale obtained by its industry (see fig. i.3). An economy characterized by an advanced division of labor requires intensive communication between firms and individuals, as table I.1 illustrates. Between 1870 and 1913 Reichwide, industrial production nearly quintupled,39 while real wages climbed from an annual average of 466 marks to 834 (79 percent).40 Leipzig’s growth rate was almost certainly higher since the city’s economy was dominated by precisely those sectors performing best: machine making, chemicals, and precision instruments. It was also in these newer sectors where mechanization, capitalization, and increasing economies of scale were most salient. Older branches still prominent in Leipzig such as textiles, printing, and construction also performed well. As a sign of the city’s em-

INTRODUCTION

17

brace of capitalism, the Petty Traders’ Guild (Krämerinnung) dissolved itself and merged with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 1886 while in that same year one of the most impressive stock exchanges in Central Europe was inaugurated (and expanded in 1911).41 Twelve years later Leipzig opened Germany’s first publicly funded high school of commercial arts, and four years after that the city completed construction of one of the largest rail stations on the continent.42 Attesting to its industrialism is the fact that Leipzig, in comparison to other big German cities, had the lowest percentage of the workforce employed in the public sector or free professions. The average number of employees per firm in Leipzig was second in Germany only to Chemnitz. Machine-making and printing concerns were the single largest employers, with the former overtaking the latter around the turn of the century. However, unskilled sectors taken as a whole (chemicals, textiles, food and paper processing, brown coal production, casual labor at the fairs) employed greater numbers than all skilled sectors together.43 table i.1 growth of communications in leipzig, 1890–1913 outgoing outgoing long-distance letters per telegrams telephone year per year conversations per year 1890 1913 Total percentage change

56,476,368 220,072,102 +290

384,372 1,106,129 +188

15,682,245 58,844,377 +275

source: Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18, 235 ff.

Meanwhile, although trade was declining relative to manufacture, the fairs—at this time transformed from venues of mass exchange into modern trade shows where models are inspected and orders placed—continued their brisk absolute growth. From 1900 to 1914 the number of firms participating in them doubled (see photo plate 2).44 The further Leipzig’s industrialization progressed, the more deskilled all sectors became,45 with the exceptions of construction and graphics, which both retained their semiskilled to skilled character for decades to come. In addition to those jobs that had always been unskilled (quarry workers, casual laborers, navvies, and porters, the latter of which abounded in Leipzig because of employment opportunities at the fairs), most new jobs in basic met-

18

INTRODUCTION 700,000

Population

600,000 500,000

Rate of population growth jumps with advent of second industrial revolution

400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000

0 1835 1845 1855 1865 1875 1885 1895 1905 1914

figure i.4 Population Growth in Leipzig, 1835–1914 source: Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 10.

450,000

Old Leipzig New Leipzig

400,000

Population

350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0

1871

1895

1910

figure i.5 Comparison of Population Growth in Old and New Leipzig, 1871–1910 source: Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 1, 1911 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1913), 11.

al production, textiles, chemicals, shoes, glass, cement, paper, brewing, and food processing went to unskilled factory hands.46 And of these unskilled jobs, an increasing share went to women.47 A booming economy offering plentiful unskilled and semiskilled jobs enticed the surplus rural population to Leipzig. Figure i.4 illustrates the city’s

INTRODUCTION

19

exploding rate of population triggered by the second industrial revolution. Most of this population increase took place in Leipzig’s rapidly industrializing suburbs, known as New Leipzig, rather than in the city center, known as Old Leipzig, and most of these suburbs were incorporated into Leipzig itself during the 1890s (see fig. i.5). Of the total population increase, only 33 percent came from births. In-migration accounted for 23 percent, and incorporation of suburbs 45 percent.48 But since new arrivals from the countryside comprised the vast majority of growth in the suburbs, one can safely conclude that in-migration actually contributed at least two-thirds of Leipzig’s population expansion during these years. Also, as I shall show in the next chapter, Leipzigers benefited from a dramatic drop in the mortality rate in the decade before the war. But as the city’s birthrate fell even faster in that decade, in-migration remained the most important component of the city’s population growth.49 With consternation, the owners of agricultural estates surrounding Leipzig, looking back on the past few years, took note of this migration pattern: There is an increasing shortage of native workers. The economic upswing had created increased demand for industrial workers. Young men and women migrated in great numbers away from the countryside [to the city]. Even medium-sized farms find themselves ever more obliged to hire foreign workers. . . . These migrant workers come mostly from Poland, Galicia, Russia and Hungary.50

By the outbreak of the war, industrial Leipzig, teeming with recent immigrants and sprawling outward along the spokes of its tram and rail lines, was Germany’s fourth largest city in terms of population and third in terms of value of economic production.51


part 1

PORTRAIT OF A RELATIONSHIP 1910–JANUARY 1915


chapter 1

STANDARDS OF LIVING AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN PREWAR LEIPZIG

IN THE INTRODUCTION I asserted that animosity between workers and nonworkers produced Leipzig’s most important political events between 1910 and 1920. This chapter takes the first step in demonstrating this claim by showing that workers and nonworkers tended to inhabit separate neighborhoods and enjoyed, with some qualifications, divergent living standards and social opportunities. As segregation and inequality need not breed enmity, in the remainder of part 1 I examine the extent to which the two groups developed collective identities in contradistinction to each other, concentrating on their interaction in the social realm (chapter 2), in political arena (chapter 3), and on the shop floor (chapter 4).

DEFINITION OF GROUPS The analysis below is comprehensible only if I define “worker” and “nonworker.” Where necessary, I break down the category “worker” into two finer subsets: “unskilled” and “skilled.” I include in the former any occupation requiring less than a few weeks to learn. Market helper, stoker, factory worker, and wagon driver represent the most common of these in Wilhelmine Leipzig. Moreover, I place any individual listed as “worker” or “handworker” into the unskilled category because any such laborer would have named a more skilled trade had he practiced one. I chose the five names in table 1.1 randomly from my notes to illustrate the types of jobs I consider to be “unskilled labor.” I list only men because my sources (most importantly the Leipzig Ad-

24

PORTRAIT OF A REL ATIONSHIP

dress Book and the police department’s registry of inhabitants, the Polizeimeldebücher), which focus on “heads of household,” tend to provide only male names and professions. In most of the social analysis in chapter 1, therefore, the samples are exclusively male. This is regrettable but unavoidable. table 1.1 sample of types of jobs considered unskilled labor name

occupation

english translation

Jaitner, Sebastian Jäkisch, August Jakobs, Friedrich Jandausch, Franz Jander, Paul

Arbeiter Markthelfer Arbeiter Kellner Kutscher

Worker Market helper Worker Waiter Coachman

“Skilled worker” comprises all trades requiring more than a few weeks to learn. I also include in this category journeymen and apprentices learning a skilled occupation because such persons were usually destined for skilled status. As before, I chose the five names in table 1.2 randomly from my notes. table 1.2 sample of types of jobs considered skilled labor name

occupation

english translation

Keilpart, Theokar Keilwagen, Alfred Keiss, Anton Kelker, Heinrich Kellberg, Constantin

Schlosser Notenstecher Böttcher Schneider Notenstecher

Machine fitter Typesetter Cooper Tailor Typesetter

At all times between 1910 and 1920 a group of Leipzigers resisted proletarian efforts at self-emancipation. This group I label “nonworker” because its members shared a single characteristic: they were not wage laborers. I make no theoretical claims for this category; it is merely a term of convenience designed for this project. For much of the analysis below, “nonworker” is too broad, a fact necessitating its division into three subsets: “alter Mittelstand,” “lower-white-collar employees,” and “elites.” “Alter Mittelstand” (literally old middle class or old middle estate) comprises Leipzig’s master artisans and small proprietors. I could be confident that skilled workers were not mixed with master artisans

STANDARDS OF LIVING AND SOCIAL MOBILITY

25

in the sources available for social analysis (Leipzig’s Address Book and the Polizeimeldebücher), because the latter were very particular to have themselves listed with the suffix “-meister” attached to the name of their trade. The reason was twofold: first, as this book will show, their entire sense of selfworth depended on not being confused with wage laborers but instead being considered members of the bourgeoisie (Bürgertum); second, the Address Book also functioned as an advertiser, listing not only a person’s home but also his business address if he had one. I chose the five names in table 1.3 randomly from my notes to illustrate some of the professions I consider to belong to the alter Mittelstand: table 1.3 sample of types of professions considered alter mittelstand name

occupation

english translation

Klar, Joseph Klarholz, Emil Klarich, Wilhelm Klas, Oswald Klasing, Hermann

Konditor Delikatessenhandlung Schneidermeister Schmiedemeister Schildermalerei

Sweetshop owner Fine food shop owner Master tailor Master blacksmith Owner of a sign-painting firm

I place in the category “lower-white-collar employee” Beamter (civil servant) and Bankbeamter (employee in a bank) because anyone so labeled would have given more a more specific job title (e.g., Direktor, Prokurist, Bevollmächtiger, or Handelsvertreter) had he been higher up in his organization. I also include traveling salesmen (Reisender) as well as all clerical help (Copist, Buchhalter, Kontorist) and sales help (Commis, Handlungsgehilfe). I chose the five names in table 1.4 randomly from my notes. table 1.4 sample of types of professions considered lower white collar name

occupation

english translation

Kopke, Paul Koppisch, Heinrich Koppisch, Rudolf Korb, Carl Koroll, Max

Postassistent Sekretär Versicherungsbeamter Buchhalter Buchhalter

Postal assistant Secretary Insurance employee Bookkeeper Bookkeeper

26


High-ranking politicians, bureaucrats, and army officers are the most obvious members of any elite. An elite maintains itself not only through force applied by police and army but also through persuasion (i.e., the propagation of legitimating ideologies). Clergymen, university professors, and newspaper editors played the leading role in this enterprise and are therefore also placed among the elite. I also include establishmentarian, not bohemian, artists, such as members of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. An elite not only rules the polity but also manages the economy and appropriates surplus, thus requiring inclusion of big business owners as well as top managers and executives. I include Fabrikbesitzer (factory owner) but not Fabrikant (translatable as factory owner but also as manufacturer) because the latter group could include petty producers, perhaps not even using mechanized power. An economy characterized by an advanced division of labor needs technicians who, because of their skills, acquire a great deal of power. Thus engineers, architects, and above all lawyers must be included in any definition of elite. University students and junior barristers (Referendare)—both tracked for elite status—also gain admittance.1 I chose the five names in table 1.5 randomly from my notes. table 1.5 sample of types of professions considered elite name

occupation

english translation

Liederley, Fritz Lienenkampf, Otto Lienkämpfer, Paul Lindenblatt, Walter Linge, Albert

Firmendirektor Generaldirektor Prokurist Redakteur Schuldirektor

Firm director Firm director Executive Editor School principal

Now that the social actors have been introduced, I can begin the analysis.

STANDARDS OF LIVING Income from Earnings Data from Leipzig company archives for the period 1907–14 reveal that yearly wages for men ranged from a low of 931 marks for a municipal swimming pool maintenance worker and 1000 marks for most market porters and unskilled male factory hands, to 1300 marks for an underground miner, 1500 for


27

a construction carpenter, and 1670 for a semiskilled metal turner, to 2700 marks for a highly skilled copperplate engraver. Women’s earnings averaged 45 percent less than their male colleagues.’ In only one-third of all cases did women’s annual earnings exceed 1500 marks.2 Earning better than average were male skilled and unskilled metalworkers. A survey of six families headed by Leipzig metalworkers in 1907 reveals that average annual family expenditure was 1805 marks (to which wives and children contributed on average 25 percent).3 The final piece of evidence on average family income is also the least precise: summaries of tax returns. In 1912 46 percent of all Leipzig taxpayers reported annual family incomes of only 300–1100 marks, and another 35 percent reported incomes of 1100–1900.4 Assuming that the earnings of wives and children went unreported and assuming further—as was the case with the six metalworkers above—that this hidden income added on average 25 percent to what the male head of household declared on the tax return, then a large majority of Leipzig’s working families earned less than 1900 marks per annum. The exact percentage cannot be determined because of the breadth of the income categories used by the city’s tax statisticians (300–1100 and 1100–1900 Marks, respectively).5 Based on all this evidence, one can conclude that an average Leipzig working family on the eve of the war earned roughly 1500 marks per annum and that wageworkers constituted about 65 percent of the city’s taxpayers. To earn this income male laborers in Leipzig toiled on average fifty-five to sixty hours per week (not including breaks and lunch hour),6 but the time away from home was often considerably longer because many—unable to move closer to work out of reluctance to abandon the only housing they could afford and neighborhood support networks of friends—had to commute several hours each day, often on foot.7 Combining work for money as well as household chores, women worked even longer hours, often laboring past midnight.8 Nonworkers in Leipzig fared much better. Lower-white-collar employees numbered those in the private sector (Angestellten) as well as petty civil servants without tenure. They included clerks, typists, stenographers, bookkeepers, middle-level postal employees (mail carriers excluded), and publicschool teachers. Also included was the ambiguous and growing category of technical foremen (Techniker), who earned salaries but, in addition to organizing production, also partly worked with their hands as troubleshooters in workshops. Salaries started as low as 1700 marks per year (Handlungsgehilfen, Techniker), but in most cases ranged between 2000–3500 marks, with a minimum of one week paid vacation and some sort of health insurance.9 The

28


length of the average workweek could not be determined. Lower-white-collar employees constituted 10–13 percent of all taxpayers in Leipzig.10 Leipzig’s alter Mittelstand, composed of master artisans, small retailers, and publicans, fared less well. At first glance, the master artisans impress, with their thirty-seven guilds containing sixty-five hundred members.11 But these organizations—prohibited from regulating prices, output, or entrance into their trades—were poorly positioned to enable members to circumvent the rigors of market competition.12 While some guilds maintained the trappings of an apprentice training system and set quality standards for members, the majority were shadow organizations representing master artisans in the process of becoming retail outlets for factory-produced goods (rope makers, hatmakers, cutlery makers, potters, soap makers) or forced ever more into repair work (shoemakers, tailors).13 Police reports note that the guilds spent most of their time devising strategies to counteract the wage demands of their so-called apprentices (i.e., workers) and in any event were losing members to small business associations.14 Indeed, 1893 tax returns reveal that fully 61 percent of Leipzig’s master artisans earned less than 1250 marks per year, placing their income just above that of skilled workers in that year. Even among the most prosperous—the butchers—average reported income in 1893 was a mere 1400 marks, while 75 percent of them employed only two workers or less.15 If one assumes that the annual income of Leipzig’s alter Mittelstand kept pace with the growth of real entrepreneurial income in Germany as a whole,16 then by 1913 a typical small proprietor in Leipzig earned about 2000 marks per year, slightly more than skilled metalworkers but less than Leipzig’s most skilled laborers in the graphics industry (e.g., letterpress printers, engravers, etc.). While I could not locate precise statistics on workweeks, one can assume that the members of Leipzig’s alter Mittelstand, like small proprietors the world over, put in long hours. The alter Mittelstand represented about 15 percent of taxpayers in Leipzig. Among elites in the private sector, salaries for executives began at 3500 marks and ranged as high as 8000 per year, and these figures omit the generous profit-sharing plans available to nearly all as well as fringe benefits (e.g., free health insurance, free housing and utilities etc.) available to many.17 In the civil service, salaries of 3500 marks per year also mark the point at which the middle grades of the civil service begin. Besides receiving an explicit guarantee of life tenure, senior municipal bureaucrats could look forward to higher pay than most private managers, in some cases earning more than 10,000 marks per year. On the other hand, fringe benefits were not as gener-


29

ous as in the private sector.18 Professors, clergy, and army officers, also employees of the state, were treated much like civil servants, likewise receiving lifetime job security. Salaries for senior army officers, university professors, clergy, lawyers, architects, engineers, and newspaper editors could not be ascertained but most probably exceeded 3500 marks.19 For none of these job categories could the length of an average workweek be determined (employment contracts stipulated only “faithful service”). According to tax returns, this elite earning above 3500 marks annually comprised 5–10 percent of Leipzig’s population.20

Assistance from Welfare To what extent was the disposable income of workers and the more marginal in the alter Mittelstand boosted by welfare? In chapter 3 I examine state programs affecting the wage relationship, such as unemployment insurance, workplace health and safety regulations, and services easing the burden of working mothers (such as public child-care facilities). The analysis here limits itself to those programs designed to boost disposable income, reviewing municipal, Land, and Reich welfare in turn. When the city of Leipzig took responsibility for poor relief from private charities in 1881 it did not augment benefits or even replace amateur almsgivers with professional administrators. The goal of welfare remained (as it was across Europe at this time) “less eligibility.” That is, it was believed that by making the acceptance of welfare as unremunerative as it was demeaning (in that recipients were closely monitored by police or required to live in poor- and workhouses differing little from jails), costs could be kept down since only the most desperate would ever apply for assistance.21 The city classified as welfare spending all funds allocated to its Health Office (Gesundheitsamt) and Poor and Youth Welfare (Armen- und Jugendfürsorge). Scrutiny of these categories reveals, however, that the Health Office administered no welfare programs but instead activities that any city must undertake to ensure public health (e.g., sewage, water supply, building and food inspection, operation of city hospitals, pest extermination, etc.).22 Looking strictly at what was spent to help the poor, one discovers that 1913 outlays amounted to 3,992,684 marks, or 5.72 percent of the municipal budget. When to this figure is added the 439,967 marks that all private charity spent on the poor in that year, one finds that a grand total of 10.91 marks of assistance was available to each 406,250 Leipzigers livings in households headed by a wage earner.23 The

30


finding that municipal welfare benefits in Leipzig (the Reich’s fourth-largest city) were so parsimonious will hopefully stimulate research to test the claim recently advanced that during these years cities across imperial Germany were augmenting and improving welfare programs.24 The kingdom of Saxony undertook no independent welfare programs but instead provided about 40 percent of the funding for the municipal welfare examined above.25 This leaves the federal government as the only institution that might have boosted disposable income.26 In 1883 it instituted compulsory sickness insurance Reichwide. Employers assumed one-third of its costs and workers twothirds, paying into a bewildering variety of insurance societies (based in the factory, guild, town, or approved private insurance fund). In the event of illness, insurance payments covered on average 50–60 percent of the worker’s normal wage, benefits only marginally more generous than Poor Law rates (which at least workers did not have to finance out of their own pockets). After thirteen weeks, payments ceased. If the worker was still unable to return to employment, he or she had to apply for support from accident or old-age insurance. In some cities, union functionaries had achieved influential positions on the scheme’s oversight board, but that was not usually the case. Although workers barely mention the sickness insurance in autobiographies, there exists some evidence that the spd and unions—after initially opposing the scheme because workers financed most of it—came to recognize that it was better than no system at all. The following year the federal government instituted compulsory accident insurance. Employers were required to finance the scheme fully (on the assumption that full liability would motivate them to create safer workplaces), but workers had to limit claims to two-thirds of their wages in the event of total disability. The insured were pooled into Trade Societies (Berufsgenossenschaften), which were statutory bodies funded by the employers but nominally supervised by the newly created Federal Insurance Board (Reichsversicherungsamt). In fact, the employers—since they paid the bills— dictated policy. That the Berufsgenossenschaften paid out benefits to only 17 percent of claimants on average is explained by three factors. First, accident victims were for the first thirteen weeks covered by sickness insurance (financed two-thirds by workers) and in most cases healed before these benefits expired. Second, the law allowed a distinction between accidents stemming directly from work and those that could have occurred anywhere. The employer-controlled boards found most accidents to be random. Finally, many participating doctors were either employed by or received most of their busi-


31

ness from the (employer-financed) Berufsgenossenschaften. Anxious not to jeopardize their main source of income, few were willing to ascribe a worker’s injury to a dangerous workshop. Workers permanently handicapped but able to work in any capacity (mostly those with lost limbs) received no long-term compensation at all for the injury, the argument being that they were now able to support themselves (though earning a fraction of former wages). In 1889 the federal government completed its major welfare initiatives by implementing compulsory old-age and invalid insurance. The state contributed only 50 marks per year per policy, with the real costs borne by employers (one-third) and workers (two-thirds). The unit of administration could be based on the company, individual workshop, or guild, with a representative of the state or municipality acting as chairman. Since it was nearly impossible to collect, this was the least popular of the Reich insurance schemes among workers. As discussed above, a worker had to be totally disabled before qualifying for the invalid insurance. And in order to collect the old-age insurance an individual had to work forty-eight years (with a year defined as three hundred working days!). Even for those few who did receive benefits, the pension did not approach previous wages. Finally, widows and orphans could not receive a wage earner’s benefits upon his death. In most cases, then, the scheme claimed a large share of workers’ lifetime earnings without giving any of it back to them or their survivors. Small wonder that many workers too old to continue working ended up on local poor relief. For those lucky enough to receive it, the old-age and invalid insurance was “too little to live on and too much to die on.”27 All three insurance programs only covered wage earners, leaving out farm laborers and live-in domestics. Moreover, in the putting-out industry both employers and (mostly female) homeworkers had an incentive to avoid participation since neither wanted to pay the extra taxes. In other words, these insurance schemes affected only about half of the German workforce. And this modest start sputtered to a halt after 1893 when Kaiser Wilhelm II, realizing that his “New Course” of trying to woo workers with welfare legislation would not wean them from Social Democracy, effectively abandoned a social legislative agenda.28 Of course, the Reich insurance schemes were far more ambitious than anything undertaken in France, Great Britain, or the United States at that time. But my purpose here is not to compare the Bismarckian insurance programs to those in other Western countries but to discover the extent to which they boosted disposable income. And the fact is that the old-age/invalid and accident insurance schemes failed to lift the living standard of those workers

32


they covered while the sickness insurance evinced, at best, mixed results. These findings force me to reject the contention put forward by the two preeminent historians of labor in Wilhelmine Germany, Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, that municipal welfare along with federal sickness and accident insurance led to real improvements in the lives of workers while the oldage insurance, despite its defects, came to be accepted by the majority.29

Levels of Consumption and Comfort As welfare did not appreciably augment income, one concludes that average yearly family income in prewar Leipzig equaled about 1500 marks for workers, about 2500 for alte Mittelständler (including hidden consumption), about 2500 for lower white collars, and about 5000 for elites. What type of lifestyle did these levels of income purchase? In 1907 an unskilled Leipzig market porter, his wife, and four children spent a total of 1713 marks, of which 52.1 percent went for food, 20.5 for rent, 13.1 for clothes, 4.6 for utilities, 4.0 on education and child rearing, 1.4 on taxes, and 1.7 for “other,” with 2.6 percent left over, presumably for leisure and savings.30 Among a group of six skilled and semiskilled metalworkers in Leipzig in that same year, average yearly family expenditure was 1805 marks, of which 50.5 percent was spent on food and only 0.41 saved (with two of the six families actually taking on debt in order to finance consumption).31 These seven cases strongly indicate that 1700 marks per year purchased for a typical family in late imperial Leipzig one year of the cheapest type of food, shelter, and clothing, with precious little remaining for leisure and usually nothing for savings.32 The fact that a typical working family in Leipzig actually earned somewhat less than 1700 marks warrants the conclusion that simply paying the bills represented a challenge for most families headed by a wageworker. That average annual reported family income for Leipzig’s alter Mittelstand hovered around 2000 marks suggests that this group enjoyed a thin margin between independence and mere subsistence. Any such conclusion must be tempered, however, by the recognition that, as business owners dealing in cash, alte Mittelständler were in a position to hide income from tax authorities while counting a good portion of personal consumption as a business expense. The relatively high living standard of lower white collars can be glimpsed in the budgets of seven families headed by lower white collars in Leipzig between 1906 and 1909. The average yearly income of 2290 marks of this sample group easily outdistanced that of workers. And because of job security, they were often able to obtain bank loans. While the working families had to


33

spend half their income on food, the lower-white-collar families spent only 38 percent. Moreover, they were able to consume twice as much meat per capita as the working families did. And the meat they purchased tended to be beef instead of the sausage and pork consumed by the working families. Lower white collars resembled workers only in that they were unable to save any of their income.33 Disparities in living standards reveal themselves most clearly when data on housing is examined. Scrutiny of two hundred fifty randomly selected names of heads of households from the 1871 and 1913 editions of the Leipzig Adreßbuch discloses that in 1871 only 13.9 percent owned a home, a figure dwindling to 5.3 percent by 1913 (see fig. 1.1).34 Fully 95 percent of workers rented their domiciles. But at what price and for what quality? The poorest 60 percent of Leipzig’s population (i.e., working families headed by unskilled and semiskilled males) lived in flats with one or two heatable rooms,35 for which they paid on average 250–350 marks per year.36 Contemporary studies noted that in apartments of this size inhabitants normally outnumbered beds and that living conditions, in the eyes of the middle-class observers, were often abysmal.37 Landlords enjoyed the right to hike rents and terminate leases without notice or explanation.38 Workers in Leipzig were poorly housed around the turn of the century, and the trend did not promise improvement for the future. If from 1890 to

Percentage

25 20 15 10 5 0

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

figure 1.1 Owners of Leipzig’s Housing Stock by Group, 1913 A = Workers B = Lower white collars C = Private organizations D = Alte Mittelständler E = Elite F = Firms and banks G = Unclear (e.g., widows, retirees, etc.) source: Leipziger Adreßbuch, 1913.

34


1905 the average number of people per heatable room in one- to two-room apartments in Leipzig decreased slightly from 2.66 to 2.50, this improvement was more than offset by the fact that during this same period the percentage of the total population inhabiting such apartments increased from 41 to 57 percent.39 Families headed by Leipzig’s unskilled workers found themselves forced to move frequently from one cramped apartment to another. Tracing the fate of five hundred randomly selected Leipzigers (for a sample of one hundred from each social subgroup) from 1910 to 1911 revealed that the city’s unskilled either left town or changed address within Leipzig twice as frequently as other groups (see fig. 1.2). During economic downturns pressure on the unskilled intensified, forcing nearly half (!) during the recession of 1907–8 to change abodes, and these data exclude the poorest among the unskilled, the small army of transients and subtenants (Untermieter, Schlafgänger, Schlafbursche, Schlafleute) not listed in the Adreßbücher (see fig. 1.3). Evidence collected from other big cities at the time indicates that the unskilled, especially during recessions, often moved several times in the course of one year.40 Data from Reich statisticians implicitly support these findings by uncovering, for instance, that in 1911 (a boom year, incidentally) there were nearly 224,000 separate changes of address reported inside Leipzig.41 It is difficult to believe that 224,000 separate Leipzigers—or 38 percent of the total population—changed abode in 1911 (a figure that the figures above do not corroborate); rather, what seems much more likely is that a smaller core group of the poorest Leipzigers (i.e., the unskilled) moved repeatedly during that year, thereby accounting for most of the 224,000 separate changes of address. Unfortunately, one is forced to obtain data from the Adreßbuch, a source that misses these multiple domiciliary changes since it was published only once per year. The figures for the recession in figure 1.3 are of further interest for what they reveal about groups other than unskilled workers. An industrializing economy required skilled workers to such an extent that they were not only as sedentary as more affluent groups during good times but were spared the impact of the recession of 1907–8 (as were lower white collars). Moreover, these data confirm my earlier findings of distress among some members of the alter Mittelstand who during this recession were forced to move more frequently even than skilled workers (though few actually quit the city).42 The high rate of mobility evinced by the elite during the recession presents a mystery. Finally, it is worth noting that Leipzig’s rate of geographic mobility was about average for German big cities.43


35

Sedentary Moving within Leipzig Leaving Leipzig A B C D E 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

figure 1.2 Geographical Mobility of Different Groups in Leipzig, 1910–1911 A = Elite B = Lower white collars C = Alter Mittelstand D = Skilled workers E = Unskilled workers note: So as not to include among those “Leaving Leipzig” residents who died, Bleek advises that calculations for this category take into account Wilhelmine Germany’s 15 percent decennial urban mortality rate. As only adults (who died at a slower rate than children) are included, this figure must be revised down to 10 percent and then annualized, in effect subtracting 1 percent from the out-migration rates for all groups to obtain the figures listed above for the category “Leaving Leipzig.” See Stephan Bleek, “Mobilität und Seßhaftigkeit in deutschen Großstädten während der Urbanisierung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1 (1989): 10–31. source: Leipziger Adreßbücher, 1910 and 1911.

Trends in Living Standards While the living standard of workers (especially the unskilled) was quite low, there is no evidence that Leipzig teemed with homeless paupers. Almost all of Leipzig’s workers, while poor, had enough food to eat and some sort of roof over their heads. Moreover, there can be no doubt that the absolute living standard of all Leipzigers, including workers, was rapidly improving before the war, as I will demonstrate below. In the introduction I noted that Leipzig’s economy in the late imperial period was growing quickly. I will now attempt to determine how much of the

36


Sedentary Moving within Leipzig Leaving Leipzig A B C D E 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

figure 1.3 Geographical Mobility of Different Groups in Leipzig, Recession of 1907–08 A = Elite B = Lower white collars C = Alter Mittelstand D = Skilled workers E = Unskilled workers note: The caveat in figure 1.2 on factoring mortality rates into those “Leaving Leipzig” also applies here. source: Leipziger Adreßbücher, 1907 and 1908.

fruit of this expansion was claimed by each of the groups already introduced (workers, lower white collars, alter Mittelstand, and elite). Unfortunately, it is impossible to determine exact movements in real income for each group in Leipzig: the municipal statisticians used income brackets that were too broad, while the tax returns themselves are no longer available. Three other problems will handicap the investigation. First, as I do not know what the overall rate of growth for Leipzig’s economy was, I cannot assign a precise numerical value to income growth rates for each group. Instead, I have had to content myself with ascertaining trends. Second, the nature of the data requires that wage and salary earners be lumped together in a single category; that is, it is impossible to examine workers and lower white collars separately. Finally, the time spans for the two runs of available data are not identical. One covers twenty-five years (1882–1907), and the other twenty-three years


37

(1890–1913). That they are very close in length and largely overlap chronologically, however, permits one to use them with the aim of obtaining a crude idea of the movements of group income over time. In the mid-1880s, salary and wage earners together constituted 56.8 percent of all taxpayers and claimed 36.6 percent of all income in Leipzig. Continuing industrialization produced near-full employment for Leipzig’s wage and salary earners while adding to their numbers, so that by 1913 they constituted 75.7 percent of all taxpayers and claimed 48 percent of all income. During this quarter century, then, the ratio of salary and wage earners to their total share of income fell barely, from 1:0.64 to 1:0.63. It would be tempting to conclude from these ratios that real earnings remained flat during this period, but one must bear in mind that the total economy was growing quickly; that is, their share of the pie (as expressed by the above ratios) remained static, but these were shares in a growing pie. Thus real income for salary and wage earners kept pace with the overall rate of economic expansion. Unfortunately, as already mentioned, we do not know what that exact rate was, only that it was impressive. While real income of workers and white collars kept pace with Leipzig’s economic growth rate, that of those living from profit, interest, and rent far outstripped it. In the 1880s rentiers and business owners accounted for 42.8 percent of all taxpayers and claimed 63.4 percent of all income in Leipzig. By the eve of the war, their relative numbers had atrophied to 24.3 percent while their share of income had shrunk less rapidly to 52 percent. Thus their ratio of percentage of taxpayers to share of income exploded from 1:1.48 to 1:2.14 (an increase of 44.6 percent).44 When one considers further that this was a rapidly growing share of a rapidly growing pie, it becomes clear that late imperial Leipzig offered those living from profit, interest, and rent a favorable climate, indeed. But not all capitalists partook equally in the bonanza. With a rate of population increase exceeding the rate of new building construction, there existed a shortage of dwelling and business space that enabled those living from rent to claim a more rapidly growing share of Leipzig’s economic pie than those living from profit and interest.45 Moreover, big capitalists outperformed smaller ones, as figure 1.4 illustrates. These data do not at all mean that smaller proprietors were going bankrupt in droves. During the twenty-five or so years before the war, the absolute number of those living from profit, interest, and rent increased nearly 100 percent.46 This growth, however, did not nearly keep pace with a rate of total population growth of 319 percent,47 causing the share of capitalists relative to

38


70

Small business

60 50 40 30 20

Medium-sized business

10 0 1902

Large business 1912

figure 1.4 Different-Sized Businesses as a Percentage of All Registered Businesses in Leipzig, 1902–1912 note: “Small business” defined as taxable annual revenue not exceeding 1600 marks, “medium-sized business” as 1601 to 1900 marks, and “large business” as more than 1901 marks. source: Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–1918 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 128.

the total population to decline precipitously, from 42.8 to 24.3 percent. And, as figure 1.4 depicts, within this shrinking group the number of smaller capitalists was declining relative to that of larger ones (and quickly at that, if one considers that figure 1.4 covers only a ten-year period). All these data combined with the evidence presented earlier in this chapter on the problems facing the alter Mittelstand permit the conclusion that small proprietors were not doing nearly as well as larger ones. And one could speculate further that the more marginal among them were probably being squeezed. When determining living standards, no statistic counts as much as the mortality rate. By that measurement, conditions in Leipzig were improving rapidly. Annual fatalities (including stillbirths) plummeted between 1892 and 1913 from 24.7 to 13.6 per thousand Leipzigers (i.e., by 44.8 percent).48 The rate declined in lockstep with those of other German municipalities. On the eve of the war, the health of Leipzigers was about average for urban Germans, as figure 1.5 illustrates. To be sure, Leipzig’s affluent benefited disproportionately from these developments,49 but as a result of the sheer mass of Leipzig’s laboring population (about 65 percent of the total), such dramatic improvement in the health statistics would have been impossible had workers missed out on it entirely. While, as I have shown, state welfare for the indigent could not have played


Annual rate per 1000 residents

25

39

Total mortality rate incl. stillbirths Infant mortality rate

20 15 10 5

tz Br es la u

m he C

Le

ip

ni

zi

g

ic h un M

Be rli n

D ue ss el do rf H am bu rg

0

figure 1.5 Health of Leipzigers Compared to Residents of Other Big German Cities in 1911 (Rates Expressed per Thousand) source: Statistisches Jahrbuch deutscher Städte, vol. 20 (1914) (Breslau: Verlag von Wilhelm Gottlieb Korn, 1915), 70.

an important role in improving the living standard, general public health measures (e.g., construction of sewage and water systems, municipalization of garbage collection, building codes, food inspection, improved state intervention during epidemics, etc.) were crucial. Above all, improving health was due to economic growth so strong and sustained that it hoisted the living standard of all Leipzigers. Among laborers, skilled male wage earners gained the most,50 but crumbs falling from the banquet table of Leipzig’s expanding economic feast found their way into all hands. A final demographic note: As discussed in the introduction, Leipzig’s rapidly declining mortality rate on the eve of the war was matched by a declining birthrate. Thus the city’s growing population can only be explained by massive in-migration, most of it coming from the rural districts of Mitteldeutschland and, to a lesser extent, points east.51

SOCIAL MOBILITY Even if workers’ absolute living standards were improving, the eve of the Great War still found a majority of them laboring fifty-five to sixty hours a week for wages enabling mere subsistence, inhabiting cramped apartments,

40


and subject to frequent moves. Most probably wished to escape manual toil altogether and move into better paying, more satisfying employment as small proprietors or lower white collars. This section assesses their chances.

Educational Opportunity Upward social movement in a market society depends on acquiring skills in literacy and numeracy that only a solid public educational system can provide. How did each group in Leipzig fare in obtaining them? Potentially, the gymnasium—since it prepared children for university and elite technical colleges—could have acted as the main conveyor belt in this process, providing talented children from working families with the skills necessary to assume managerial tasks. However, a review of the parent lists for the 1355 students attending the three most prestigious gymnasia in town—the Thomasschule, the Nikolaischule, and the Königin-Carola-Schule—reveals that 80.5 percent of the children had elite fathers, 16.5 percent had lower-white-collar fathers, 1.6 percent alter Mittelstand fathers, and 1.4 percent working fathers.52 Besides indicating a difficult path upward for children of working families, these data once again point to an alter Mittelstand that could not be at all confident of the future prospects of its children. Lack of family income constituted the most important reason that so few children from working and alter Mittelstand families attended the gymnasia. In order to obtain admittance, a child had first to attend private preparatory schools charging tuitions that such families could ill afford. If somehow the money for such a school was found, then paying the 250-mark-per-year gymnasial tuition (with very few scholarships available) presented a nearly insuperable barrier.53 Finally, attendance at such a school lasted five years longer than study at a lower Volksschule, five years a working family was deprived of the high earnings of a teenage son.54 Over time there was no expansion of opportunity to attend Leipzig’s gymnasia or Oberrealschulen (the latter being the less prestigious route to the university). From 1900 to 1913 the percentage of Leipzig students in these types of schools remained steady at about 3.3 percent of all children in that age group.55 Girls from affluent families were admitted neither to the gymnasia nor to the Oberrealschulen but instead had to content themselves with the upper schools for girls (die höheren Schulen für Mädchen) where preparation for the Abitur (a qualifying examination for university entrance that only top students could hope to pass) was much less intensive. Such an elementary and secondary schooling system ensured that only the


41

offspring of elites (and, to a much lesser extent, lower white collars) could obtain access to a higher education. Of the University of Leipzig’s 5000 students in 1913 (4 percent of whom were women), 71.2 percent had graduated from a gymnasium, 6.8 percent from an Oberrealschule, and the remaining 22 percent had no diploma (Reifezeugnis).56 In order to pass the Abitur, this last group must have received its education at home from private tutors, ruling out the possibility that children from working families were to be found in its ranks. Based on these data, then, there could not have been more than a handful of students from working families in the entire university. The evidence warrants a similar conclusion for the city’s business college, where none of the students had received their secondary education from a Volksschule.57 Meanwhile, the only institution in Leipzig offering postsecondary education to women, the Higher School for Women’s Professions, was founded explicitly on the premise that such an opportunity be reserved for women “of the appropriate social order” (Stand). In any event, a Volksschülerin from a working family with thoughts of rising above her station would have been deterred from applying by the school’s high tuition fee.58 Children of workers and alte Mittelständler were denied not only the opportunity to get on the university track but also adequate resources for their own schools. For every teacher in a Leipzig gymnasium or Oberrealschule, there were 16.8 students. The corresponding figure for the Realschulen (designed for middle-class children preparing for careers in business or the lower grades of the civil service)59 was 17.9, for girls’ vocational schools 25.1, for boys’ vocational schools 33.5, and for the Volksschulen 38.1.60 Further narrowing educational opportunities for children from working families was the necessity of earning for themselves (thereby detracting from study time), cramped and disorderly home lives, and parents who themselves lacked education and therefore frequently did not recognize its value.61 Leipzig, then, did not have a single school district but rather two hermetically sealed systems: one for the children of elites and, to a lesser extent, lower white collars (gymnasia and Oberrealschulen for the university-bound, Realschulen for those beginning careers earlier, and upper schools for girls); and one for the 91.3 percent of all students who remained (vocational schools, Volksschulen).

Intragenerational Social Mobility The United States during these years did not have an especially equitable educational system, yet high rates of upward social mobility were the rule.62

42


Did a similar situation prevail in Leipzig? For each of the social subgroups, I randomly selected one hundred names from the 1893 Adreßbuch and then looked for them again in the 1913 edition to trace career trajectories over a twenty-year arc. I devoted special attention to the frequency with which workers passed into nonmanual occupations and vice versa. As always, the Adreßbuch as a source contains advantages and drawbacks. One benefit is that it lists only taxpaying “heads of household,” thus I could be confident that the members of the 1893 cohort were probably somewhere in midcareer, allowing me to follow their fortunes over two decades. The disadvantage is that the Adreßbuch ignores Leipzig’s large number of transients and subtenants (mostly unskilled) and thus overlooks a group that may have found upward social mobility especially difficult. Figure 1.6 depicts the data obtained. Over the twenty-year period, 82 percent of the unskilled and 62 percent of the skilled workers had either died or left town. Workers seldom migrated willingly since valuable neighborhood survival networks and job contacts would be lost.63 Out-migration, then, was tantamount to downward mobili-

Skilled workers

Percentage rising out of manual labor Percentage remaining in manual labor Percentage left town or died

Unskilled workers

(1)

0%

(2)

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

figure 1.6 Intragenerational Social Mobility of Leipzig Workers, 1893–1913 (Expressed in Percentages) (1) This block represents 4 percent ending up in an unskilled trade and 22 percent remaining skilled workers. (2) This block represents 14 percent remaining unskilled workers and 6 percent acquiring a skill. source: Leipziger Adreßbücher, 1893 and 1913.


43

ty or, at best, remaining in one’s social group. With this caveat in mind, it becomes clear that upward mobility for workers was rare, indeed. Among unskilled workers only 6 percent became skilled laborers, and a mere 2 percent escaped wage labor altogether. The performance of skilled workers is hardly more impressive, with 10 percent becoming master artisans, and another 2 percent adopting that ambiguous title Handelsmann. The only bright spot for skilled workers was that they had no need to fear downward mobility (unskilled laborers could not drop further as they were already in the lowest group).64 Of nonworkers who had not migrated or died, only alte Mittelständler had any reason to fear downward mobility, with 16 percent of them dropping to manual labor (see fig. 1.7). These data confirm my earlier findings that the more marginal elements among the alter Mittelstand faced the threat of proletarianization. By contrast, lower white collars became déclassé in only 1 percent of cases, while elites found themselves secure at the top of the heap.

Lower Alter white Mittelstand collars

Elite

Percentage left town or died Percentage remaining in same group Percentage moving between nonproletarian groups Percentage dropping to manual labor

0%

(1)

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

figure 1.7 Intragenerational Social Mobility of Leipzig Nonworkers, 1893– 1913 (Expressed in Percentages) (1) This block represents 12 percent falling to skilled and 4 percent to unskilled labor. source: Leipziger Adreßbücher, 1893 and 1913.

44


Intergenerational Social Mobility With the exception of downward movement in the alter Mittelstand, intragenerational social mobility barely existed in Leipzig. What hopes could parents entertain for their children; that is, what was the extent of intergenerational social mobility? To calculate this figure, one would need a source providing a child’s date of birth, occupation of the father, and information on the child’s career at least into early adulthood. The Police Registry of Inhabitants (Polizeimeldebücher), into which all residents were required to report changes of address, alterations of matrimonial status, and births or deaths in the family, provides exactly this information. It was possible to select randomly six hundred children with fathers belonging to the six social subgroups investigated so far (i.e., samples of one hundred from each subgroup) and who were born between 1875 and 1890 (since this generation came of age on the eve of the revolution). In cases where the Polizeimeldebücher failed to disclose the child’s occupation in early adulthood, this information was traced using the 1913 Leipziger Adreßbuch. The cohort was revisited later in life, using the 1928 Adreßbuch.65 Either born in or moving to the city at a young age, this cohort comprised native Leipzigers fortunate enough to remain in the city into young adulthood. Among workers, then, they were a privileged group. One must bear this fact in mind when analyzing the data below (see fig. 1.8). Since the Polizeimeldebücher forced me to exclude from the sample the large number of laborers who, searching for work, arrived as adults without job contacts or support networks, the data it generates somewhat overstate real rates of upward social mobility. In fact, what little upward social movement sons of workers achieved happened early in their careers: of those still remaining in Leipzig by 1928, only a handful had risen above their 1913 level.66 If the son of a worker found it very difficult to rise above his father’s station, the son of a nonworker (excepting those in the alter Mittelstand) barely faced a risk of declassment (see fig. 1.9). Downward social movement is rare for each group except the alter Mittelstand, in which fully 43 percent slid into proletarian trades. This corroborates earlier findings pointing to distressed elements within the alter Mittelstand. Small proprietors had to worry not only about their own ability to stave off proletarianization but also that of their children. While proletarianization presented no threat to the other groups, downward mobility within the nonworker groups appears, at first glance, to have struck elites in high numbers, as 28 percent of elite sons took lower-white-


45

Sons of unskilled Sons of skilled manual workers manual workers

Remaining as manual laborers Up to alter Mittelstand Up to lower white collar Up to ambiguous middle class* Up to elite

0%

(1)

(2)

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

figure 1.8 Intergenerational Social Mobility of Workers in Leipzig from Late Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century (Expressed in Percentages) (1) This block breaks down into 41 percent following their fathers into unskilled work and 38 percent moving into a skilled trade. (2) This block represents 51 percent following their fathers into a skilled trade and 21 percent dropping to unskilled work. *I devised this new category, “ambiguous middle class,” to include those individuals whose professions were definitely not proletarian but who could have been just about anything else. A Handelsmann or Händler, for instance, could have been a major wholesaler earning thousands of marks per year or a petty street hawker living in poverty (though the latter was far less likely to be the case). A Kaufmann could have been any of these or an executive in a firm. Leipzig, a trading city, contained so many of these types (and they were listed so frequently in the earlier Polizeimeldebücher) that excluding them might have distorted results. sources: The original cohort, born between 1875 and 1890, was generated from StadtaL Polizeimeldebücher, 140–160. Their careers were then traced using the Leipziger Adreßbücher, 1913 and 1928.

collar employment and 24 percent moved to the ambiguous middle class. Any such conclusion, however, should be tempered by the consideration that many sons of firm owners had to start careers as lower white collars in order to learn the family business while those claiming the vague title “Kaufmann” (and thus assigned to the “ambiguous middle class”) could have been sub-

46


Remaining in father’s group Moving between nonproletarian groups Dropping to manual labor A B C (1) D 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

figure 1.9 Intergenerational Social Mobility of Nonworkers in Leipzig from Late Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century (Expressed in Percentages) A = Sons of members of the elite B = Sons of members of the ambiguous middle class C = Sons of members of lower white collars D = Sons of members of the alter Mittelstand (1) Among sons of the alter Mittelstand, 43 percent slipped into manual labor, while 29 percent found employment as skilled and 14 percent as unskilled workers. The original cohort, born between 1875 and 1890, was generated from StadtaL Polizeimeldebücher, 140–160. Their careers were then traced using the Leipziger Adreßbücher, 1913 and 1928.

stantial traders, merchants, or manufacturers. The picture of sons of the elite would have been clearer had it been possible to trace their careers on a longer trajectory, but only 16 percent of the original cohort remained in Leipzig by 1928 (perhaps because of a high mortality rate as officers in the war). This finding of lack of social mobility (the alter Mittelstand excepted) contrasts sharply with the situation in Leipzig fifty years earlier. At that time, during the beginning phases of industrialization and the original formation of a wage workforce, fully 43 percent of a sample of 2654 workers were from a “nonproletarian background,”67 indicating a rapid process of proletarianization for weaker artisans, shopkeepers, sharecroppers, and small farmers (along with their children). By the Wilhelmine period, social mobility had settled—indeed, rigidified—to the point where one is tempted to speak of castes rather than social groups. With the partial exception of the alter Mittelstand, workers and nonwork-


47

ers in late imperial Leipzig constituted two discrete economic and demographic groups. The remainder of this chapter examines the scope and nature of the social contact between them.

GEOGRAPHICAL SEGREGATION To what extent did workers and nonworkers rub shoulders during the course of the day? The Adreßbücher listed residents alphabetically as well as by address, with the latter entries also recording the other “heads of household” inhabiting the same building and their respective professions. It was possible, then, to select randomly one hundred representatives from each of the five categories—unskilled workers, skilled workers, alte Mittelständler, lower white collars, and elites—to see what types of people shared their buildings (see fig. 1.10). To illustrate, for each unskilled worker I kept track of what types of people lived in his building, added together the results for all one hundred of the unskilled workers, and converted these results into percentages in order to obtain the social composition of an average building in which an unskilled worker resided. In 1870 there was little group segregation. Only elites appear rarely in other people’s buildings, but that is attributable less to segregation than to the fact that they constituted less than 10 percent of the population and were therefore only seldom observed (in their own buildings, elites lived with a healthy mix of other groups). Workers were not packed into their own neighborhoods but instead strewn out across the city, inhabiting the garret, basement, or dark back apartments in buildings where they were often outnumbered by nonworkers and sometimes worked as Hausmeister in addition to their normal jobs.68 By 1913 the picture had changed dramatically. First, the average number of residents per building for all groups increased from 7.1 to 10.4 (47 percent). Moreover, workers now lived largely in their own buildings, isolated from the rest of the population. By contrast, nonworkers (with the slight exception of elites) preserved the same mix of groups in their buildings as had been the case in 1870. In other words, during those forty years all new housing for Leipzig’s burgeoning laboring population was constructed only for workers, while the nonlaboring population continued to occupy the older housing stock in the old socially mixed pattern. This supposition corresponds to contemporary descriptions of the vast new proletarian and industrial neighborhoods in New Leipzig, which contrasted with the commercial and more af-

Unskilled Skilled Lower white collar Ambiguous middle class Unclear Alter Mittelstand Elite

Top to bottom in legend corresponds to left to right in bar graph

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figure 1.10 Social Background of Residents in Buildings Inhabited by Different Groups in Leipzig, 1870–1913


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figure 1.10 Continued

fluent old city center.69 A further reason that New Leipzig contained so many workers stems from the fact that these outlying areas were already industrial and proletarian before they were incorporated into the city beginning in the 1880s. Examination in the 1913 Adreßbuch of one hundred randomly selected inhabitants on five randomly chosen streets in New and Old Leipzig (for a total of one thousand names) confirms this hypothesis (see fig. 1.11).

50


Unskilled Skilled Alter Mittelstand Lower white collar Ambiguous middle class Elite Worker subtotal

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figure 1.11 Group Segregation in Leipzig: Comparison of the Social Composition of New Versus Old Leipzig, 1913 source: Leipziger Adreßbuch, 1913

Thus during these years the old pattern of mixed housing in the city center persisted for those already living in Leipzig, but hundreds of thousands of newly arriving workers were shunted off into their own neighborhoods, mostly in New Leipzig. This finding contrasts somewhat with those of other studies, which portray the increasing ghettoization of workers in urban Germany as a simple process of separation of the classes.70 Massed together in one- to two-room apartments in their own slums and obliged to change abodes frequently, Leipzig’s working families were markedly poorer than the rest of the population. State welfare programs did almost nothing to ameliorate their condition. Nevertheless, while neither workers nor their children could hope to rise out of this predicament into nonmanual professions, they did enjoy a steadily rising absolute standard of living as measured by real income and health statistics. By contrast, the city’s group of nonworkers evinces less homogeneity. While all three of its subgroups enjoyed a higher living standard than did workers and tended to share the same nonproletarian neighborhoods, some members of the alter Mittelstand struggled economically and suffered higher


51

rates of downward social mobility than did lower white collars and elites. All this suggests that the category “nonworker” represents a somewhat fissiparous compound. At this point in the investigation, then, workers offer a clearer group profile than do nonworkers. The remainder of part 1, in examining the extent to which these groups formed distinct collective identities, will bring the outlines of both into sharper focus.

chapter 2

EXPERIENCE IN THE SOCIAL REALM IN PREWAR LEIPZIG

CHAPTER 1 UNCOVERED the outlines of two groups in prewar Leipzig—workers and nonworkers—as measured by living standards, life opportunities, and segregation. While the first emerged clearly, the second group proved more elusive, especially in that one of its components, the alter Mittelstand, struggled against proletarianization. One determines a group’s cohesion not only by outward characteristics (e.g., poverty, segregation, etc.) shared by members but also by the extent to which individuals feel themselves to be a group. The remainder of part 1 investigates whether workers and nonworkers developed respective collective identities. As an identity never forms in isolation but always in relation to an Other, attention concentrates on how the two groups interacted with each other, that is, what they thought of each other. Prewar Leipzig contained a number of sites of contact between workers and nonworkers. This chapter examines the everyday realm in which children play games with each other and adults play their own games when joining clubs, making friends, choosing spouses. In so doing, chapter 2 will bring the still nebulous contours of each group into sharper, yet imperfect, focus. Before proceeding, I should interject a caveat about sources. In the introduction I noted the advantages and drawbacks of different types of evidence when teasing out popular mentalities. The tricky task of uncovering subjectivity—especially that of people who did not leave behind many written records in their own voice—obliges the historian to exploit all sources as creatively as possible. The archival documents and membership lists I use in the remainder of part 1 require no special commentary. But the first-person accounts on which I rely call for evaluation.

EXPERIENCE IN THE SOCIAL REALM

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Moritz William Bromme, who held a variety of manual jobs in and around Leipzig, composed an autobiography around the turn of the century chronicling his first three decades of life.1 That it is not a memoir but instead an autobiography composed during the period it describes makes it an extremely useful document for my project. Arthur Heimburger’s memoir of his childhood in Leipzig before the war represents a source only slightly less valuable, for although he composed it years later as a sed functionary, Heimburger clutters his account with surprisingly little Marxist-Leninist interpretation, indeed, with little overt retrospective analysis of any kind.2 Lower on the scale of helpfulness yet valuable nonetheless are two separate investigations whose respective authors disguised themselves as workers so as to report firsthand on proletarian conditions and attitudes.3 Although based on eyewitness, contemporaneous observation (indeed, participation) and written with sensitivity and rigor, the respective accounts by Paul Göhre and Minna Wettstein-Adelt suffer from the obvious drawback that they were composed by nonworkers. On the other hand, in focusing on a relationship (see the subtitle of this book), I interest myself not only in proletarian but also nonproletarian mentality. Göhre and Wettstein-Adelt often unwittingly betray information about the latter, as I shall show below. That they do not examine conditions in Leipzig but instead Chemnitz represents another weakness of these sources. As an industrial boomtown in Mitteldeutschland, however, Chemnitz bore a striking resemblance to Leipzig. In drawing from all these sources, I privilege anecdotes about collective behavior and attitudes since episodes involving only individuals pose the danger of being unrepresentative.

INTERGROUP SOCIAL CONTACT IN CHILDHOOD The previous chapter noted that most proletarian families, often with subtenants, occupied one- to two-room apartments in the tenement houses (Mietskasernen) of their own slums in New Leipzig, the outlying, industrial part of the city. Göhre argues that such conditions helped foster a group consciousness among workers. Here he describes the neighborhood inhabited by his factory colleagues: One need only think how close apartments stand next to each other in these shoddily constructed proletarian tenements [Arbeitermietskasernen] . . . without any barriers between them, with such thin walls, how clearly each

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word of the neighboring family can be heard, and how the three or four “flats” [Stuben] on a given floor must share a single corridor, water-tap, toilet, etc. All that leads to a commonality of . . . family life that shocks the observer and must spell the death of any type of family existence. Indeed, it can only be that the children of these [neighboring] families live with each other as siblings . . . the boys and girls come into the most intimate contact, the men must continually exchange opinions . . . the women know precisely every corner, fault, piece of clothing and utensil of the neighboring family . . . and by borrowing and lending them cover their own lack of such utensils in a most communistic manner. Furthermore, the narrow confines of the apartments themselves compel their occupants to escape in the evening, whenever possible, outdoors, on to the street and into the courtyard, into the better, roomier apartment of a neighbor or into pubs and meetings. One must consider further how these confines become narrower in the presence of subtenants [der fremden Schlafleute].4

Largely isolated in their own neighborhoods and in effect attending a separate school system, children of workers nonetheless came into social contact with nonworkers. The evidence suggests that these contacts represented, at best, moments of indifference but more often wariness or even antipathy. Heimburger remembers from his early childhood the fear inspired by the landlord. For when the rent could not be paid punctually, “many landlords called the bailiff, who in turn saw to it that the family in question was literally thrown out into the street.”5 Even before occupying an apartment, the landlord’s power engendered deference: “Before we were allowed to occupy the modest apartment in the Hedwigstrasse, we had to introduce ourselves to the ‘House Pasha,’ who lived in one of the best neighborhoods. Father and mother donned their Sunday finest, and I was presented as a clever little boy. We passed the audition” (72). In his new neighborhood, Heimburger relates how occasionally the local kids encountered children from “better” families: “Children from families of a higher social rank did not participate in the games of the proletarian children [Arbeiterkinder]; nor did we allow them. They sought in vain to join in; but if they succeeded because we needed more playmates, [our] rough ways made them cry for their Mamas, at which point we had nothing more to do with them” (49–50). A few years later, as a result of his father’s improving wages, Heimburger’s family could afford to leave its proletarian neighborhood in New Leipzig and move to a better, socially mixed one, presumably in Old Leipzig (the city cen-


55

ter). Conforming to the findings of chapter 1, the family’s apartment lay on the top floor, while more affluent families lived on the floors below. But while Arthur now lived in the same building as nonworkers, he saw them rarely. On the fourth floor the proletarian families [Arbeiterfamilien] interacted in the usual manner. Frau Rieth came in and out of our apartment. She helped my mother with chores and errands. Also Mother Nollau—an industrious woman who early each morning went to her job as a janitor at the local insurance office—found time for a chat. . . . But the atmosphere of this building was for me totally new. Unlike the dwellers of the upper floors or our experiences hitherto, the “better families” remained reserved, almost fearful, and cut themselves off from us. . . . What did we know about those who lived under us and what they thought of us? (114)

These latent tensions found more open expression each year during the festival known as the “Taucha Annual Market,” or, more commonly, the Tauscher. The origins of this Volksfest date back at least to the eighteenth century, when Leipzig’s plebeians, seeking to evade municipal strictures on popular amusements, abandoned the city for one day each year and held a festival in neighboring Taucha where, under the pretext of attending that town’s market, they could revel unmolested by the authorities. By the mid-nineteenth century, the festival, keeping its original name, migrated to Leipzig, confining itself to the poorer neighborhoods in the city’s east, where the police tacitly tolerated it. The festival transformed itself once again in the 1890s when proletarian youth, dressed as cowboys, Indians, and trappers, became the main celebrants, frolicking across the entire city (see photo plate 3).6 Or was the merriment quite so innocent? As Heimburger recalls from his youth: Indians and trappers banded together into hordes with leaders at their head. Hundreds ran through the streets with wild war cries, preferably also in those neighborhoods where white-collar employees and owners of small businesses lived. It was a game of “scare the bourgeois” [Bürgerschreck]. These latter, who wanted to enjoy a calm evening, were not at all delighted. . . . The streets were dark. The roar of the running horde echoed off the buildings, died down gradually, then was heard again in a side street, then finally returned to its old spot at full volume—a spectral apparition, a demonstration of poverty and love of life. Proletarian parents [Arbeitereltern] and older siblings enjoyed costuming the boys and girls and supported them to

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the best of their ability. They certainly did not mind that the complaisant burghers in the “better” houses were a bit frightened.7

This passage highlights some limits to the antagonism between workers and nonworkers: the aggression was symbolic, the main actors were children, and the youthful gangs, grouped by neighborhood, sometimes battled each other (47–48). Nevertheless, enmity towards nonworkers clearly animated not only the children but also their parents, who encouraged the mischief makers “to the best of their ability.” Children of nonworkers returned the sentiment. Moritz Bromme’s father was employed as a railroad technician [Bahnwärter], a nonmanual position that placed him, despite his membership in the spd, on the border of petty bourgeois respectability and provided an income sufficient to send Moritz to the Mittelschule. Convicted of a petty crime, the father lost his job and his freedom, obliging the teenaged Moritz to work as a beer deliverer in order to help his desperate family: “Now I was often scorned and mocked [by the other students]. They called me the ‘social’ [den Sozialen]. In this way, almost all of these little sons of the bourgeoisie tried to make it plausible to me that I actually didn’t belong in the Mittelschule.”8 Bromme found it impossible thereafter to renew the ties to his old school chums (49–50). Linguistic clues in all these passages also reveal tension. As discussed in the introduction, I employ the terms “worker” and “nonworker” so as to disencumber the investigation of teleological expectations inseparable from Marxist terms such as “working class” and “bourgeoisie.” The narrators of the above passages, by referring to these same groups repeatedly, confirm their social significance but bestow on them their own monikers of Arbeiter (worker) and Bürger. The latter, translatable as “citizen,” “town resident,” “burgher,” or “bourgeois,” was at that time socially charged with exclusivist, antiproletarian valences.9 Hence, in the very act of naming self and Other, each group reveals a consciousness fashioned, at least partly, from mutual antipathy. A look at associational patterns of adult Leipzigers will show that the tensions observed above persisted beyond childhood and will uncover other elements informing the collective identity of each group.

CLUBS IN PREWAR LEIPZIG As of 1907 there were eight hundred fifty clubs (Vereine) in Leipzig dedicated to everything from stenography to theater to cycling to gardening to Es-


57

peranto.10 In most cases there were two clubs for each activity: one for workers, one for nonworkers. Organized by the spd, the worker clubs—for the most part sexually integrated—were monitored by the police, who kept an especially close watch on the larger organizations. Nearly half the city’s workers (i.e., 208,232) pooled their resources for health insurance in an Ortskrankenkasse administered by spd functionaries. Anxious to provide authorities no pretext to seize funds, the insurance society steered clear of politics. In any event, it had enough strife on its hands haggling with the city’s doctors over payments. In 1905 it even took the step of importing fifty-two doctors to Leipzig to work especially for the insurance society at reasonable rates. At first the outraged Leipzig medical establishment ostracized the newcomers, but within a couple of years the new doctors had joined the old guard in demanding that the Ortskrankenkasse reimburse at higher rates.11 The other giant among proletarian associations was the Food Coop (Konsumverein Leipzig-Plagwitz), which as of 1908 had a central warehouse-store as well as seventy-two outlets servicing fifty-five thousand families representing no less than one-quarter of the city’s population. One observer estimated that “70–80 percent of members” were workers.12 With gross annual revenues of 3,000,000 marks, profits of 176,147 marks (plus a 10 percent annual refund on all purchases to members) the Coop was a formidable establishment, and the spd functionaries who managed it made sure not to risk these assets by running afoul of laws prohibiting political activity for nonprofits. The Coop continued to grow despite discriminatory municipal ordinances—enacted under pressure from small retailers—regulating its business hours, prices, and what it was allowed to sell.13 A proletarian organization slightly more daring in political matters was the General Workers’ Educational Institute. In addition to operating the Social Democratic library and organizing forty subsidized dramatic performances at city theaters attended by 46,613 people in 1910, the institute also arranged literary recitations and sponsored concerts.14 The police expressed special concern about the 9,000 members of the Free Gymnasts of the Leipzig Region who were organized into eighty neighborhood clubs, noting that their newsletter was full of political commentary. Hardly less alarming were the 2,658 worker-choristers who performed subversive songs at party gatherings, not to mention the 2,200 proletarian cyclists who distributed spd literature around the countryside at election time.15 While Leipzig boasted a number of soccer teams, they were composed entirely of workers; nonworkers considered the new sport too rough and unrefined.16 Finally, a dozen or

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so spd youth clubs with about 2,000 members (two-thirds of them boys) organized lectures and discussion circles (usually on historical or sociological topics presented with a socialist perspective), as well as excursions and parties. Dwarfed in size by various nonworker hiking and scouting clubs, the spd youth groups played no independent political role in the final years before the war (a contrast to the period before 1905, when they attempted to push the national party to the left).17 If anything, nonworkers organized even more clubs, perhaps because they had more free time to devote to hobbies. While presenting a dazzling diversity in terms of activities pursued, all these associations had one characteristic in common: almost no manual laborers belonged to them.18 The biggest were the various veterans’ organizations (Militärvereine), which, in addition to frequent social gatherings, espoused strong support for a German Weltpolitik as well as ceaseless propaganda against Social Democracy, barring socialist veterans from membership.19 Another of the largest bürgerliche clubs was the General Gymnastic Club of Leipzig, with a 1914 membership of 1,710, of whom only 7.1 percent were workers. Of further interest is the fact that alte Mittelständler in this organization likewise constituted only 7.1 percent of membership.20 Once again, among nonworkers alte Mittelständler were marginalized. Of the 835 members of the Colonial Society (supporting the expansion of Germany’s worldwide empire), not a single one was a worker. As in so many other nonworker clubs, here, too, alte Mittelständler were underrepresented compared to their percentage of the total population, lower white collars slightly overrepresented, and elites greatly overrepresented.21 Neither of the alter Mittelstand’s leading political figures, master stonemason Otto Schwabach (a Conservative Party politician) and master baker Louis Simon (a member of the executive committee of the Unified Citizens’ Election Committee) enjoyed membership in any of the elite social clubs.22 Even lower white collars were not fully accepted socially by elites. On the eve of the war they had twenty-three clubs of their own in Leipzig, reflecting both denied admission to elite clubs and a distinct lower-white-collar identity.23 Neither of the city’s two most influential lower-white-collar employees, Bernhard Claus (president of the Leipzig Teachers’ Association) and Hugo Prager (a member of the executive committee of the Unified Citizens’ Election Committee)24 were members of any of the leading social clubs of Leipzig. But what were these leading social clubs and who exactly belonged? Elites in Leipzig enjoyed shooting. From 1910 to 1914 members of the Sportsmen’s Club included Deputy Mayor Roth, Vice-Speaker of the City Council Enke,


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and Police Director Wagler, while belonging to the board of directors were City Senator Schmidt, City Councillors Pflaume and Joachim, and Mayor Dittrich.25 Leading politicians as well as factory owners, judges, pastors, university professors, and attorneys also dominated the Colonial Society. Enjoying corporate membership in this organization were the university’s most prominent student fraternities (Burschenschaften such as Corps Lusatia, Arminia, Dresdensia, Carmania, and the Union of German Students) as well as the entire junior faculties of the university and municipal business college.26 There were also twenty-two Freemason lodges in Leipzig.27 All pledged themselves to educational activity (Bildungsarbeit) for the lower classes, yet none admitted workers into their own ranks. High membership fees (100–200 marks yearly) and a requirement that members be “educated men” (Gebildete, i.e., in possession of a university degree) also served to exclude alte Mittelständler and lower white collars. As the Masons preached a nebulous doctrine of universal brotherhood, however, a handful of alte Mittelständler and lower white collars were admitted, probably as tokens. Three of the lodges—Minerva, Balduin, and Three Stars—were especially exclusive, composed overwhelmingly of high public officials, bank directors, factory owners, and leading artists (the latter mostly musicians in the Gewandhaus Orchestra).28 No less discriminating than the Freemasons was the Harmony Society, the organizer of lavish charity balls that were the highlight of the social season. Once again, admittance depended on belonging to the “educated orders” (gebildete Stände).29 Applicants to the other elite charity-ball association, the Concordia Society, faced an identical requirement. This key- and code word Bildung—roughly translatable as education, refinement, and familiarity with culture—appears repeatedly in the rules governing admission to these most exclusive clubs. German elites throughout the nineteenth century placed a high value on acquiring and creating Kultur. At its best, this was conceived as a continual striving to cultivate one’s potentialities (Persönlichkeit), to deepen self-knowledge, expand one’s ability to think and emote, take from and give to the world.30 Most German elites, however, failed to appreciate Bildung in this higher sense, defining it less as an ongoing project of self-improvement and more as familiarity, often superficial, with a fixed canon of philosophical and artistic truths, mostly from the ancient Greek and modern German idealist traditions.31 Expenditures at Leipzig’s exclusive Businessmen’s Club illustrate this disparity between pro-

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fessed goals and reality in the cultural realm. The city’s economic elite had originally founded the organization to enhance the Bildung of members through educational lectures. Over time, however, ever more of the club’s resources were channeled into soirees and masked balls so that by 1914 it had become, essentially, a convivial association.32 As chapter 1 described, only elites enjoyed access to a university education. Thus the ostentatious display of one’s Bildung allowed elites to recognize each other and exclude those lower on the social ladder without having to admit that the possession of money and power constituted the actual criterion for acceptance. It comes as no surprise, then, that the club with the highest concentration of elite membership was the Art Society (Leipziger Kunstverein). While factory owners and bankers probably found little pleasure in attending lectures on the history of ceramics, they recognized that acceptance into this club represented public confirmation of status as a Gebildeter.33 In the next chapter I will investigate the ways that elites used their monopoly on Bildung to legitimate their political dominance. For a city of 625,000 residents, it is astonishing how the same one hundred or so names appear and reappear on the membership lists of these elite social clubs. In the thumbnail biographies of Leipzig’s notables presented in appendix 3, the reader can trace the overlapping memberships of these clubs and obtain an idea of how elites, by associating only with each other, established valuable contacts and smithed a collective social identity.

INTERGROUP FRIENDSHIP One might object that the above review of Leipzig’s associational life does not prove the impossibility of cross-group friendship since it might have taken place outside a club environment. I tested this possibility by consulting the baptismal records of the Lutheran parishes of St. Thomas (in the city center) and Church Hohen Thekla (in a recently incorporated, rapidly industrializing neighborhood in New Leipzig). I randomly selected two hundred names of children born to manual laboring fathers for the years 1880 and 1910–13, for a total sample of 400.34 These four hundred children had between them 681 godparents. The baptismal records of both parishes list the profession of the parents and godparents.35 Since for the most part parents select their friends to act as godparents, these records provide an idea of the extent of cross-group friendship in Leipzig and its trend over time,36 as figure 2.1 summarizes.

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figure 2.1 Social Background of Godparents of Children from Laboring Families in Leipzig, 1880 and 1910–1913 (Expressed in Percentages) sources: Pfarramt der Kirche Hohen Thekla, Leipzig, Taufbuch 1910–14, and Evangelisch-Lutheranisches Pfarramt St. Thomas-Matthäi, Leipzig, Taufregister 1880 and 1912/13.

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figure 2.2 Social Background of Godparents of Children from Laboring Families, 1910–1913: Comparison of City Center to Outlying Industrial Neighborhood of Thekla (Expressed in Percentages) sources: Pfarramt der Kirche Hohen Thekla, Leipzig, Taufbuch 1910–14, and Evangelisch-Lutheranisches Pfarramt St. Thomas-Matthäi, Taufregister 1880 and 1912/13.

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The data in figure 2.1 make plain the rareness of friendship between workers and nonworkers, with a trend toward ever less contact. Moreover, the results, when broken down by neighborhood, confirm earlier findings of a higher degree of proletarian isolation in the outlying industrial areas of town (where the vast majority of workers lived) than in the old city center, as figure 2.2 illustrates. Impressionistic evidence supports these numbers on lack of intergroup friendship. Heimburger reports that workers mocked petty clerks as “ ‘whitecollar proletarians’ and hit the nail on the head, though their joking did nothing to bring about an understanding” (between the two groups).37 That both Göhre and Wettstein-Adelt present their experiences in the same breathless tone with which contemporary explorers described journeys to the interior of Africa further illuminates the social gulf between workers and nonworkers: “The innermost thoughts of [the workers], the attitudes that they only express among themselves and when unobserved . . . that, above all, was exactly what I wanted to know. But how to capture that which so gladly escapes the researcher’s eye? Going among the people myself, hearing with my own ears and seeing with my own eyes their predicament offered the best, most direct, if not most comfortable, way.”38 Highlighting, perhaps unconsciously, the social distance between the two groups, Göhre repeatedly refers to workers as living “down there” (dort unten, da unten), from whence they may only look up (aufschauen) to the Gebildeten, the Bürger.39 In directing their gaze upward, workers expected to find little sympathy, as Göhre reveals in this aside: “I do not believe that any of [my factory colleagues] obtained a correct notion of my identity and plan. . . . The thought that an educated man [ein Gebildeter], if even for a limited time, might abandon all his comforts, his profession, and his lofty social position voluntarily and for their sake did not occur to them and was probably for them simply unthinkable.”40 Of course, one should not exaggerate the extent of enmity between workers and nonworkers. As I shall show in the next chapter, workers viewed nonworkers with some admiration. And among nonworkers, Göhre and Wettstein-Adelt were not alone in wishing to improve the lot of their less fortunate compatriots. But even reformers with the best intentions sometimes betrayed how the social chasm bred not just ignorance about but also condemnation of workers. After describing the abysmal housing that her colleagues inhabited, Wettstein-Adelt lays much of the blame on the workers themselves: “In proletarian families [Arbeiterfamilien] where the wife had


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been a maid and never worked in the factory, I found cleanliness, order, aesthetic sense, and more of an imitation of bürgerliche circles. These families accepted subtenants very seldom.”41 In an otherwise sympathetic investigation, Wettstein-Adelt in this passage succumbs to three faulty assumptions presumably informing the attitudes of many nonworkers, even reformers: that proletarian wives could choose to remain at home and forgo a wage; that working families could afford to pass up the extra cash provided by

Brides coming from...

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figure 2.3 Nonworker Marriage Patterns in Leipzig-Thekla, 1896–1914 (Expressed in Percentages) note: Names to the left of the vertical axes correspond to the grooms and colors within each bar represent the social background of the brides. source: Pfarramt der Kirche Hohen Thekla, Trauungenbuch, 1896–1914.

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subtenants; and that the only path to domestic virtue lay in imitating nonworkers.

MARRIAGE PATTERNS As Leipzigers befriended only members of their own groups, so, too, did they marry at their own station, with the notable exception of alte Mittelständler, who married into both groups. From 1896 to 1914 two hundred randomly selected proletarian grooms at the Hohen Thekla church married women from working households 93.5 percent of time.42 Four hundred randomly selected nonworker grooms (one hundred in each subgroup) in the same parish chose brides as indicated in figure 2.3. Nonworkers married women from laboring families seldom, with the exception of grooms from the alter Mittelstand, who took brides from laboring households fully 43.8 percent of the time. As in chapter 1, the alter Mittelstand presents an anomaly among nonworkers. These data offer other evidence of lack of social cohesion among nonworkers in that elite grooms chose brides from all subgroups while neither alte Mittelständler nor lower white collars were permitted to marry into the elite. Refusing to associate with, befriend, or—the alter Mittelstand excepted— marry each other, workers and nonworkers in prewar Leipzig stood on opposite sides of a social canyon. From either rim they viewed each other not merely with indifference but with wariness that at times became enmity. These group mentalities began in childhood and persisted thereafter. The existence of collective identity in the social realm—one for workers, one for nonworkers, and each founded on antagonism toward the other—brings the outlines of each group into clearer relief. But if the category “worker” continues to exhibit integrity, that of “nonworker” still raises questions. While nonworkers refused to mix with workers (alte Mittelständler forming a partial exception in that they were willing to take brides from proletarian households), they also refused to mix with each other. Elites kept lower white collars and alte Mittelständler at a social distance and refused to let them marry into their subgroup; lower white collars did the same to alte Mittelständler. Sharing the same rim of the canyon, nonworkers offered each other no fraternal hugs or even slaps on the back. The evidence uncovered in this chapter, then, echoes that found in chapter 1: Leipzig’s group of workers constituted a socially homogeneous bloc while


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that of nonworkers evinced internal heterogeneity and fissiparity but not necessarily conflict. Did the social antagonism between workers and nonworkers find a political echo? If so, in what ways did political confrontation affect the outlines of the two protagonists? Did Leipzig’s socially fissile group of nonworkers cohere in the political arena? These and other questions find answers in the next chapter.

chapter 3

POLITICS IN PREWAR LEIPZIG

CONTINUING THE INVESTIGATION as to whether or to what extent workers and nonworkers formed collective identities, in this chapter I examine the political dimension of their relationship. Two main questions guide the inquiry: Did the social antagonism between the two groups, uncovered in the previous chapter, spark political conflict? If so, did the social fissility characterizing Leipzig’s group of nonworkers handicap it vis-à-vis its socially more cohesive opponent? I begin by describing the constitutional parameters of prewar politics in Leipzig before turning to the city’s various actors and their interaction.

CONSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS In Reich matters, the emperor overshadowed all other offices and institutions, answering to nobody in the formulation of foreign policy and command of the armed forces. In domestic politics, his was the right to appoint and dismiss the chancellor and all other federal officials; to summon, prorogue, and close the Reichstag; and to initiate legislation and interpret the constitution. The Federal Council (Bundesrat) presented a further firewall to democracy. Composed of delegates from the twenty princely Länder and three Hanseatic cities, its major tasks lay in inspecting legislation proposed by the crown before it reached the parliament and deciding on measures of constitutional alteration. Its conservatism derived from the fact that not only were its delegates chosen by Germany’s princes and trading patriciates but


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also the Prussian delegates—representing the Land where authoritarian institutions were most deeply entrenched—formed a blocking minority of seventeen votes. By contrast, the parliament (Reichstag) exercised little power. For the most part it could not initiate legislation, its majority could not form a government, it possessed no right of interpellation, and its members, until 1907, were unpaid (thus discouraging less affluent, potentially radical politicians from running for office). Its democratic potential stemming from election by universal manhood suffrage and secret ballot was partially offset by severe gerrymandering in favor of rural districts (where landowners could pressure agricultural laborers to support the conservative parties) and by a split-ballot system that permitted the weaker parties to agree on a common candidate in the second round of voting once the strongest party (often the spd) had been identified. The constitution did grant the Reichstag power to block domestic legislation proposed by the crown, but before 1914 majorities willing to do so materialized rarely. And by agreeing to decide on army and naval budgets in multiyear cycles, parliament not only renounced its right to detailed, annual review of the federal budget’s largest component, it also released its hold on the only lever by which it might have extracted more power from the crown.1 As regards the division of competencies between provincial and federal governments, the federal government exercised authority in the fields of foreign, military, tariff, commercial, transportation, communications, and banking policy, as well as matters pertaining to currency, weights, measurements, and patents. It also issued all criminal law. The federal government financed itself through collection of customs tolls, fees, and indirect taxation, as well as annual contributions from the Länder. The Länder possessed jurisdiction in civil liberties as well as in most areas affecting the safety and daily life of subjects, such as education, health, and law enforcement. They also enjoyed the sole right, until 1913, to levy direct taxes (40–41). At the Land level in Saxony, the royal house of Wettin appointed governments, but during the imperial period no cabinet ruled for long without the support of the parliament. That parliament, relative to the other Länder, was elected by a liberal censitary suffrage that in the years following the lapse of the Socialist Law in 1890 allowed fourteen Social Democrats to win seats in Saxony’s Lower House.2 Alarmed at this growth in socialist representation, a coalition of Conservatives, National Liberals, and Progressives voted in 1896 to narrow the suffrage considerably. Under the new law, only Saxon men who were at least twenty-five years old, had lived in one Saxon town for the past six months, and paid real estate or income taxes could vote (women were not

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permitted to vote). Those meeting these requirements were then divided according to taxes paid into three classes that made up 81, 16, and 3 percent of the voters. In each electoral district, each of the three classes had equal weight in electing a delegate to an electoral college. The college of electors then met and in turn elected the deputies to the parliament. These new suffrage rules thinned the ranks of the Social Democrats in the parliament so that by 1903 there was only one left (at a time when twenty-two of Saxony’s twenty-three representatives in the Reichstag, elected by universal manhood suffrage, were Social Democrats).3 The three-class suffrage was so regressive, however, that two of its architects, the National Liberals and Progressives, came to believe that they, too, were its victims and demanded yet another reform. In 1909 it was transformed into a plural voting system under which each taxpayer was given one vote but then could obtain up to three more votes based on age, property, income, and education. This reform made the suffrage only marginally more equitable, for under the new rules, a nonsocialist deputy required on average 1,414 votes to be elected while a socialist required 13,656.4 As a result of the revolution of 1830, the king of Saxony granted to his subjects in the larger cities a new municipal constitution.5 Its basic elements not only remained in force until the revolution of 1918 but became even less democratic over time. To become a voter (Bürger) in municipal elections, one had to meet a series of criteria laid down by the royal government. One had to own property, be a Saxon subject who had lived in Leipzig or another Saxon city for the previous two years with no police record, be at least twentyfive years of age, have received no welfare in the last two years, and have paid royal and municipal taxes.6 This final criterion was in fact an income hurdle, since in order to pay taxes at all, one had to earn a certain minimum income. But even without this requirement, the fact that many workers, because of poverty, either fell afoul of the police or were forced periodically to accept charity meant that a sizable percentage was disqualified from the suffrage. High rates of geographical mobility among workers in search of employment disqualified even more. Unlike most other Länder, Saxony did not explicitly bar female municipal suffrage, but the property qualification in fact eliminated all but a handful of rich widows and singles since under Reich marriage law a wife’s property belonged to her husband.7 These various restrictions, plus a complicated voter registration process, ensured that the share of those eligible to vote in municipal elections never rose much above 15 percent of the adult population.8 The above set of criteria represented the maximum of democracy that the crown was prepared to tolerate in its larger cities. Municipalities were free to


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restrict the suffrage further, a right that Leipzig’s town fathers exercised by depriving women of the suffrage and then dividing the few males eligible to vote into three classes according to payment of income and real estate taxes. Although the first class contained 80, the second 15, and the third 5 percent of the voters, each class received twenty-four representatives in the city council (Stadtverordnetenversammlung). Moreover, while electors in the smaller two classes each voted for a citywide slate of candidates, those in the largest were gerrymandered into four subdistricts, in two of which nonworkers formed a majority of voters.9 Obviously, the constitution discriminated against those with limited incomes, but by placing such weight on the payment of real estate taxes, it also favored property over income, thus benefiting the city’s alter Mittelstand of shopowners and small businessmen over lower-white-collar employees.10 Finally, the crown structured municipal government so that oligarchic tendencies would predominate. Technically, the most powerful branch in the municipality was also its most democratic: the city council. Important fiscal legislation became law only with its consent. But the constitution undermined the city council’s real power in various ways. Its members were unpaid, ensuring that they would not be able to devote much time to their duties. Charged with overseeing the senate and administration, it lacked any means or staff to control or discipline them. Finally, mindful of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, in which the city council had failed to support the crown adequately, the royal Ministry of the Interior reserved the right to dissolve it at any time.11 The impotence of the city council becomes clearer when one scrutinizes the real powers of the other branches of municipal government. Elected from the midst of the city council, the senate (Rat der Stadt) was nominally the council’s executive arm, charged with overseeing the daily work of the administration. But as nine of its twenty-four members were paid (including very hefty salaries for the police director, deputy mayor and mayor), as its members enjoyed life tenure if they won reelection, and as it employed a large and efficient support staff, the senate was manageable in size and enjoyed continuity as an institution and a monopoly on information, allowing it to overshadow the city council. Its de facto supremacy can be read in the first line of motions passed by the city council, which invariably read, “The city council decides to entreat [ersuchen] the senate to undertake. . . .” If the city council were actually in charge, it would not “entreat” but rather order the senate to implement its decisions. An electoral college of city council and senate members elected the mayor

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(Oberbürgermeister), who, before taking office, needed the further approval of the royal district supervisor (Kreishauptmann). The mayor served for life and functioned as a kind of chairman of the senate (30–31). Because of the presence of nine full-time, paid colleagues in that body, he could never arrogate to himself complete control, but he remained the prime mover in city politics. Most mayors were able to manage the senate rather than be managed by it.

THE POLITICAL ACTORS IN LEIPZIG Nonworker Organizations As chapter 1 discussed, the alter Mittelstand missed out on much of Leipzig’s economic growth in the decades before the war. This caused it to blame its problems on everybody around it, especially organized workers and Jews. As employers alte Mittelständler felt threatened by a movement advocating worker unity, and as those nonworkers most threatened by declassment they loathed most what they might become. Leipzig’s various alter Mittelstand groupings (Homeowners Association, Election Union of the Guilds, Small Business Association, Publicans and Hoteliers Association, etc.) united under the banner of the Leipzig Chapter of the Saxon Union of the Middle Class (Sächsische Mittelstandsvereinigung). Boasting thirteen thousand members in 1908, this organization was disproportionately powerful in municipal politics because of the extra weight given to ownership of real property by local and Land suffrage laws. The Mittelstandsvereinigung defined itself negatively: against Jews, unions, the spd, consumer cooperatives, attempts to change suffrage laws, discount and department stores, and even big business, refusing to join the Hansa-Bund in 1909. Vociferous support for Germany’s military buildup and Weltpolitik constituted the only positive plank in its platform. Still, despite its reactionary stance, it claimed it was a reform organization (the name of its journal was Progress), and despite nearly continual political mobilization, it insisted that it was nonpolitical, forced onto the political stage by the machinations of those seeking to undermine the “stable middle class,” the “healthy element in society.”12 Its leader both in Leipzig and Saxony, Dr. Theodor Fritzsch, was an anti-Semite of national stature. The police noted that almost all members of Leipzig’s two anti-Semitic organizations, the German Reform Party and the German Social Union, also


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belonged to the Mittelstandsvereinigung. Although the anti-Semitic parties began to lose members after 1903, membership in the Mittelstandsvereinigung remained steady.13 Despite its size and potency, the members of the Mittelstandsvereinigung were willing to take political direction from their social betters in the Conservative Party.14 During election years, the two organizations formed a common United Citizens’ Election Committee (Vereinigtes Bürgerwahlkomitee) that was directed by Conservative politicians. With only eight hundred members, the Conservative Party—composed of big landowners resident in Leipzig, upper civil servants, and a smattering of big industrialists and bankers—was nonetheless a political player because of suffrage laws privileging income and especially real property. In addition to the Mittelstandsvereinigung, the Conservative Party could also count on the support of the right-wing clubs (Pan-German League, veterans’ organizations, and, to a lesser extent, the Naval League and Colonial Society, both of whose members also supported the National Liberals). It advocated reforming the suffrage by giving even more weight to immovable property and attacked the National Liberals and Hansa-Bund almost as vitriolically as it did Social Democracy.15 Of the thirty-six university student clubs listed in the city’s club address book, not one was Social Democratic, Liberal, or even National Liberal.16 All were either of a social nature, pugnaciously right wing, or both. Animosity between students and Social Democrats was open, illustrated by the behavior of hundreds of students who, after learning of the victory over the spd in the Reichstag election of 1907, gathered outside union headquarters (das Volkshaus) and jeered, some even throwing objects and harassing people trying to leave and enter the building.17 Extremely nationalistic, they successfully demanded that the number of foreign Slavic students at the university be reduced because they abhorred studying with “Jews and [Russian] revolutionaries.”18 (See photo plate 4.) The National Liberal Association was Leipzig’s party of big business par excellence, working closely with the chamber of commerce and supporting its program. It enjoyed the backing of the vast majority of Leipzig’s elites (only a few hundred belonged to the Conservative Party).19 Bringing it into conflict with the Conservatives, the National Liberals sought to put other types of property on an equal footing with real estate when determining how much weight each vote would receive (both parties vehemently opposed universal suffrage). And joining German business’ Reichwide effort to diminish

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the political influence of immovable property, the National Liberals founded in 1909 a local chapter of the Hansa-Bund that thereafter enjoyed rapid growth in this manufacturing and trading city.20 If anything, the National Liberals supported Germany’s military buildup and pursuit of world empire more fervently than did the Conservatives. Although its three thousand members were not structured into a permanently organized party (indeed, they referred to themselves as an association), the National Liberals sponsored speeches, rallies, and lectures year-round, intensifying this activity during election cycles.21 A shade to the left of the National Liberals were the various groupings that coalesced into the Progressive People’s Party in 1910.22 The party numbered twelve hundred members at its founding and enjoyed the support of most of the city’s lower-white-collar organizations of salaried employees, petty civil servants, and public school teachers.23 One such group was the Electoral Association of Salaried Public Officials (Wahlverein der Festbesoldeten); with such a name, it was plainly important to the members of this organization that they not be confused with wageworkers. Another mainstay of the party were the public school teachers. The Progressive People’s Party made its top priority a reform of the municipal and Land suffrage under which income and movable property would receive more weight than real property.24 That the local chapter opposed institution of an equal, secret, and universal ballot while also refusing to endorse suffrage for women placed it to the right of the national party and far to the right of local chapters in relatively liberal Baden and Württemberg.25 In most elections, the Progressives cooperated with the National Liberals, forming a joint Free Citizen Committee [Freier Bürgerausschuß].26 In the years before the war, the police counted twenty-two separate women’s organizations, all but one of which they labeled “bürgerlich”27 (I examine Social Democratic women below). The police did not view the women’s organizations as a potential source of subversion.28 The largest of them, the German Women’s Union, was also the most conservative. Explicitly nonpolitical, it sponsored speeches and lectures on health and welfare topics and engaged in charity work. Slightly more liberal was the General German Women’s Association, which belonged to the largest Reichwide women’s organization, the Union of German Women’s’ Clubs (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine). Although the national organization had its headquarters in Leipzig, publicly opposed the most patriarchal elements of the German Civil Code (marriage and divorce law, compulsory health examinations of prostitutes,


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etc.), and supported granting (upper-income) women the suffrage, the Leipzig chapter appears to have been more conservative, billing itself as nonpolitical and limiting itself to sponsorship of lectures that—while calling for a more vigorous state policy of eugenics and health care for women—shied away from demanding female suffrage. The only group in Leipzig to make such a demand, the Association for Female Suffrage, was not a player in city politics because of its small size and the fact that it refused to protest in the street.29 Despite the plethora of names by which the various nonworker subgroups identified themselves (Mittelstand, Festbesoldeten, Hausbesitzer, etc.), at election time they crystallized around the term Bürger, among conservatives in the Vereinigtes Bürgerwahlkomitee and among liberals in the Freier Bürgerausschuß. Many issues divided them—above all the weighting of movable versus immovable property in determining suffrage—yet nonworkers still shared a basic political identity as Bürger. As noted in the previous chapter, this slippery term, meaning “citizen,” “town resident,” “burgher,” or “bourgeois,” also contained an antiproletarian dimension. As I shall show in detail below, liberal and conservative Bürger set aside their differences in electoral runoffs to join forces against the spd. It also comes as no surprise that the city’s constitution used precisely the word Bürger to designate the privileged 20 percent of Leipzig’s adult population with the right to vote in municipal elections.30 What were the main elements of a bürgerliche political identity? As the paragraphs above make clear, all nonworker political organizations were antisocialist and intensely nationalistic. These two convictions—and the attempt to rally nonworkers around them—found expression in a 1911 letter mailed to the burghers of Borsdorf, a rapidly industrializing suburb of Leipzig, a few weeks before an election for its town council. Unlike Leipzig’s three-class municipal suffrage, Borsdorf appears to have grouped electors into two classes: those who owned real estate (ansässig) and those who did not (unansässig). Nonworkers in Borsdorf had a difficult time keeping the spd candidate from winning the second tier of the suffrage thanks to the many workers resident there. The letter outlines a strategy to surmount this challenge: Dear Sir: As you probably know, a Bürgerliches election committee has formed in Borsdorf that has set for itself the task of winning representation for nation-

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al-minded [national gesinnte] residents in the second tier of suffrage in the December 10 elections to the town council. Of course, success is only possible when all national minded Bürger cast their votes for one candidate; the slightest lack of solidarity would deliver victory to the Social Democratic Party. The committee thus invites you to a meeting . . . with the goal of bringing about an agreement on a common candidate. With national greetings [Mit nationalem Gruß], The Bürgerliche Election Committee31

The authors of this letter address fellow nonworkers as Bürger and recruit them on the basis of a shared nationalism and antisocialism. One also notices the defensive tone of the missive: it offers no positive program save that of thwarting the spd. The term Bürger, in addition to the meanings already discussed, exuded socially defensive, exclusivist overtones.32 If in the Middle Ages Leipzig’s Bürger had built walls to defend themselves from passing armies and overweening barons, by this time their chief fear had become a growing proletariat and its political demands. This new fear, this defensive mindset, articulated itself not only in words but in stone: When Leipzig outgrew its Renaissance altes Rathaus (city hall) around the turn of the century, the town fathers decided to build a new, bigger one. Significantly, they constructed it on the site and in imitation of a fortress, the Pleißenburg, whose origins stretched back to the sixteenth century. Completed in 1905, the imposing bulk of the new Rathaus stood on the inner side of the southwest corner of the Ringstrasse, a boulevard that, because it followed the path of Leipzig’s demolished medieval walls, circled the city center. From this spot das Neue Rathaus—its sheerest, least accessible sides facing outward toward proletarian New Leipzig—seemed to guard the old city center, where many of the better neighborhoods and most important governmental buildings were situated (see photo plate 5). Would it be fanciful to suggest that in choosing this design and location, elites betrayed their anxiety about a future in which they might have to defend Bürger from worker, Kultur from barbarism, authority from upheaval, privilege from democracy? My later examination of the determination with which elites forbade proletarian demonstrations in the city center will make this surmise appear less far-fetched. Before turning to workers and their political organizations, I should like to note the poverty of civic discourse among the bürgerliche groupings. None attempted to justify its program by reference to universal principles, such as those of classical liberalism, Burkean conservatism, or divine right monarchy. The demand of the Homeowners’ Association for a repeal of all proper-


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ty taxes—a desideratum announced without any accompanying argument as to how it might serve the common weal—illustrates the cynicism with which Leipzig’s nonworker political organizations operated. In that same pamphlet the association reveal a general political philosophy that reduced itself to the pursuit of special interest: That a homeowner has more enemies than friends hardly requires explanation. Since each person must find shelter, but only a small percentage own their own dwelling, the large majority of all people must live in rented rooms. This fact alone already sufficiently explains a certain animosity felt by many renters toward homeowners. With near certainty the homeowner can count on the friendship only of his fellow homeowners. . . . In a situation where other professional and interest groups unite to defend their own special interests, the homeowner should not lag behind if he wishes to avoid getting pressed to the wall. Only he who vigorously defends his own skin can hope to keep his nose above water [sic].33

Of course, all political groups pursue special interests but usually under cover of an ideology, genuinely believed or not, claiming that the attainment of these ambitions promotes the common good. Nonworkers in Leipzig did not bother with this camouflage and thus demonstrated their inability to formulate a convincing justification for their rule, a vital element of any dominant group’s ability to govern. They were not democratically elected, and nobody, least of all workers, believed in divine right monarchy. The Reich until 1914 did not find itself at war, a situation preventing a complete displacement of internal tensions on to an external enemy. Lacking any of these justifications, Leipzig elites only partially overcame the crisis of legitimacy besetting them, depending above all on their monopoly on Bildung. As chapter 2 described, exclusive access to quality education enabled them to discriminate socially against workers. But it also provided a partial justification for ruling over them, for possession of the eternal verities of Kultur led elites to believe that only they could appreciate its sublimity and that they alone were fit to govern. It was feared that if the masses ever came to power they would engage in the kind of social and educational leveling that would make preservation of the precious legacy impossible.34 Germany’s most renowned historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, articulated this fear when he assessed the potential impact of universal suffrage: “Our Idealism has always been our strongest national asset; thus it is absolutely un-German to let stupidity and ignorance have the decisive voice” (19).

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Workers and the SPD In this, the chapter’s longest section, I attempt to discern the basic political orientation of workers before examining their political party, the spd. Although nearly all workers supported the party, the two should not be conflated, a thesis informing much of the rest of the book. ordinary workers The term “ordinary worker” will recur repeatedly, so I should define it. It means an urban, ethnically German wage laborer, male or female, with a Volksschule education who, like most workers, belonged to neither a political party nor a union. As stated in the introduction, farm laborers—whether native or migrant—as well as Leipzig’s small number of Czech and Polish workers do not come under investigation because none of these groups played a role in the city’s politics. I argue here that ordinary workers in Leipzig were not the politically integrated workforce found by a number of historians of imperial Germany. Instead, they are better described as partially integrated with a salient revolutionary potential. A number of factors explain their partial integration. As I discussed in the introduction, elites in all societies benefit politically from the weight of custom. Subordinate groups may grumble about this or that element of the hierarchical political system into which they were born, but having lived in no other they are not likely to question the system itself. This universally observable phenomenon partially explains why ordinary workers in Leipzig submitted to elite rule before 1914. Other determinants also stabilized elite ascendancy in Leipzig. Elites, while unable to justify their rule by reference to a widely accepted ideology, partially overcame this deficit of legitimacy (see introduction) thanks to their prestige, a prestige accruing, at least in part, from their monopoly on Bildung. This claim to rule by virtue of superior education found resonance among workers since it capitalized on the traditional respect for Kultur found at all levels of German society. One marker of this respect was the determination with which many workers attempted to acquire Bildung for themselves. Bromme describes how even after a twelve-hour day in the factory he read difficult books every weeknight until 2 a.m.35 “The modern worker,” he explains, “demands at least to be able to participate in the enjoyments of this world. He wants to further his education. . . . I always wanted to know more” (223). In his autobiography, he never wastes an opportunity to display a thin knowledge of history, literature, and philosophy while also expressing


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profound admiration for a factory colleague who could recite passages from Faust from memory (258). Göhre, too, notes the importance of Bildung to those who lacked it. It was precisely this hunger, he argues, which explains the phenomenal growth of the spd, for the party offered the most ambitious among workers education beyond the Volksschule as well as a satisfying worldview allegedly based on science: This drive for education [Bildungstrieb] is an elemental power in the minds of many workers. . . . The mob down there [da unten] of education-hungry [Bildungshungrigen] pounces greedily on the offerings that are made available. That was . . . what they sought and desired for so long; that is why they have envied so long and with such bitterness the “gentlemen” above them: for the truth, knowledge, and refinement in the latter’s possession. The workers wanted to have at least these things since they could not have their money, well-being, and property. Intellectually, they wanted to be at their level—nay, superior to them. And that’s what made the promise of the Social Democratic leaders so attractive: that under the sign of this new truth and science, the world could become different, that the new, wonderful, socialist future state [Zukunftsstaat] could come into being.36

Indeed, in response to rank-and-file interest, the spd in Leipzig established adult education centers to raise proletarian cultural horizons. But attempts by organizers to introduce workers to avant-garde culture met with either indifference or hostility, for the workers interested themselves only in the classics of literature, theater, and art, that is, Kultur as defined by elites.37 A simple spd precinct meeting enhanced one’s Bildung. In Göhre’s eyewitness account, workers attend less to plan political initiatives and more for the educational benefits: The chairman of our precinct committee demanded of us lively participation and justified this demand always in the same words: “The debates are the most important part of these precinct meetings. It is hoped that all will speak out. Even if this happens in the most embarrassing manner, nobody need fear mockery, because that is why we come together every two weeks: to school ourselves so that we can answer our opponents successfully in the big public assemblies.” . . . The answering of questions scribbled on notecards, which were then deposited in the “Question Box,” formed the continuation of these debates. The questions usually requested enlightenment on a point raised in the debate, a foreign word, or a difficult passage in the newspaper.

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. . . An atmosphere of earnest concentration pervaded the room, for such evenings were for these men no mere amusement but rather difficult work and always hours of eager learning, serious consideration, renewal, and inspiration in their dreary, monotonous proletarian lives.38

Workers here view the acquisition of Bildung not only as an end in itself but also as a means of meeting their bürgerliche opponents on an equal footing. The autodidacts garner not just knowledge but confidence and self-respect.39 The prestige of elites rested not only on their Bildung but also on their historically successful record. It was they, and especially the officer corps, who had brought about the long-desired goal of German unity. Though antimilitaristic (more on that directly below), workers nonetheless grudgingly respected an officer corps that could boast such an achievement.40 Not at all jingoistic (more below), workers were nonetheless proud, if even unconsciously, of Germany’s transformation from Europe’s battlefield to hegemon, an ascent impossible without the military establishment. Furthermore, it was economic elites who could plausibly take credit for Germany’s robust rate of economic growth, a rising tide lifting yachts fastest but also elevating the smallest dinghy.41 Elites, then, had to legitimate their rule by reference to a partially persuasive claim to superiority based on education buttressed by an historically successful record. The weakness of such a position was that it depended on permanent economic, diplomatic, and military achievement in order to obtain the continual acquiescence of the dominated. Leipzig’s—and Germany’s— elites enjoyed little margin for error, an insecurity that might explain their bellicosity, preference for military uniforms, and refusal to compromise politically. The chapters in part 2 on Leipzig during the Great War examine the consequences of their dearth of legitimacy. Workers only partly accepted the elite’s claim to leadership. What were the other elements of their political worldview? While they possessed views on individual issues, the evidence indicates that the vast majority of them did not develop a systematic political ideology. Göhre estimates that “hardly 3, at most 4 percent” of his factory colleagues understood socialist theory.42 Wettstein-Adelt is even less charitable, doubting whether any of the “girls” (Mädchen) with whom she worked in the textile factory had “even the slightest interest in current events and public affairs.” In the next breath, however, she admits that the older, married women among her colleagues possessed some opinions as a result of having been “dragged into the Social Democratic vortex by their husbands and eventually, in this way, played a [political] role themselves.”43


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Their lack of an overarching ideology resulted largely from the fact that— while they admired Kultur from a distance—few of them read books. Among the minority who could afford books,44 most found that the ten- to elevenhour workday left little time or energy for intellectual activity. As Bromme describes his evenings: “I arrived home only at about 8 p.m. It was already 8:45 by the time I had washed and eaten. Usually I would play with one of my children for a half hour so that only at 10:15 could I get to my private work, i.e., I wrote, dealt with party and union business, or went to meetings and rallies.”45 With household chores occupying them often past midnight, women enjoyed even less free time. In short, harried workers could obtain political information only from “half-digested articles from the infrequently read Social Democratic press, partly from lectures and speeches at Social Democratic meetings, partly from personal contact with more sophisticated comrades.”46 Even among those who did read books, few received exposure to political theory. Only fifteen thousand workers borrowed regularly from Leipzig’s Social Democratic libraries each year.47 Among this relatively small group, almost none attempted works of sociology, political economy, or serious history.48 Workers’ choice of reading matter differed hardly from that of middle-class borrowers at the rival municipal library: among women, romances; among men, travel, adventure, or war stories (173–74, 182, 187 ff). Thus even among the most literate and politically aware workers (i.e., active borrowers from Social Democratic libraries), the vast majority could not have been familiar with Marxism or, indeed, any political theory. Sociological lectures organized by the General Workers’ Educational Institute offered another conduit by which Leipzig workers might have learned the rudiments of Marxism. The lectures, however, were lightly attended.49 Lacking an overarching framework with which to analyze politics, workers in Leipzig did hold opinions on individual issues. The most pronounced of these was antipathy to what they commonly called the “class state” [Klassenstaat].50 This animosity resulted from unpleasant contact with the state and its officials, beginning at a young age. Heimburger, recalling the Tauscher Volksfest, reports that “in general, [the police] did not appear when it came to scuffles between individual bands [of Cowboys and Indians]. Such battles were probably not unwelcome to the authorities, as long as they did not take place in petty bourgeois [kleinbürgerlichen] neighborhoods.”51 If police did not take kindly to the kids, the latter returned the sentiment. “We didn’t like the police. From a safe distance we yelled at them ‘Ille’ [“Ilya,” in reference to Russian Cossacks?] and ran” (53). Even in its guise as school administrator, the state often left a bad impression on proletarian children. Bromme de-

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scribes the abrupt end of his education at the age of sixteen: “Slowly, the end of my time at the Mittelschule drew near. Until then I had imagined that I would receive stipends to continue studying since I had already attended the Mittelschule free of charge for some years. Alone one day, I was summoned by the [principal] into his office. He said to me, ‘Bromme, don’t have any illusions. Nothing will come of it. Your father is a Social Democrat. But take note: the son should not succumb to the sins of the father!’”52 In adulthood, a worker’s everyday encounters with the state became no friendlier. Göhre, when disguised as a worker, noticed that police treated him rudely.53 Workers could not even hold a festival in the countryside without police harassment: Only after the police had inspected [the grounds] could the male choir begin to sing. . . . In a corner of the festival grounds stood the “Booth of Curiosities.” It contained wonderful rarities such as a big cudgel (“the Club of Cain”), a dried herring (“a giant whale”), an old rusted saber and knives (“weapons of 1848”). I had just entered when the royal gendarme accompanied by a municipal police officer were inspecting the somewhat dubious premises. I must say, it was a ridiculous scene: the two officers examining the curiosities with dark, serious faces; the impudently naive responses to their questions of the well practiced cashier and fortune-teller; the schadenfrohe smiles of the revelers. As the officers turned and left, many in the crowd laughingly thumbed their noses at them. (100)

Discriminatory treatment at the hands of the state sometimes produced more serious consequences. Bromme’s father, a Social Democrat, after being convicted, perhaps wrongfully, of fencing stolen goods of modest worth, received a jail sentence of two-and-a-half years. An absence of this length was guaranteed to plunge his family into destitution. When the verdict was delivered, the court’s officer told him, “Bromme, you were given such a heavy sentence only because of your political views.”54 Not surprisingly, resentment represented workers’ dominant attitude toward the Klassenstaat, a sentiment finding its clearest expression in their opinion of its founder. “No man,” reports Göhre, “is more bitterly and hotly hated down there [da unten] than the founder of the German Reich. Regarding him, there prevailed but one view, one attitude. ‘Bismarck is the greatest enemy of workers’ and ‘Bismarck is a liar.’ Those are direct quotations that I heard more than once.”55


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Workers wished to make the state more accountable by democratizing it. Politics, they believed, should take place “in a parliamentary and free state. Not the number of fists but rather the number of votes should decide issues” (128).56 Göhre, the moderate social reformer, insists, however, that workers desired democratic reform less as an end in itself and more as the only way to secure their highest priority: more rights vis-à-vis employers. What drives workers politically, he argues, is “the deep yearning of the entire proletariat for greater respect and recognition and, in contrast to political-formal, also social-practical equality, i.e., the belief that a better ordering of economic production, despite everything, is possible . . . and that it is precisely the now mature workforce [Arbeiterstand] that has been called to bring this about through the democratic pressure of the masses, masses working through parliament and still seemingly finding approval at court” (213). Below, when I examine workers’ protests in Leipzig, it will become clear that workers did demand democratic reform for its own sake. Here I note that Göhre wrote these lines in 1890, when the young Kaiser Wilhelm II had just launched, with great fanfare, his “New Course”: an effort to win over workers to the regime through the passage of welfare legislation. Göhre believed change could unfold peacefully as long as the government adhered to this New Course. But he also warned darkly, “I do not deny for one moment the danger of a revolution. It does not lie in the current . . . political and social disposition of the people but instead in the possible neglect or delay of a thorough social reform” (128). Precisely “neglect” characterized the situation after 1894, when the kaiser discontinued the New Course and thereafter opposed reform of any kind. To be sure, one can find evidence suggesting acquiescence among Leipzig’s workers to their political nonage. Two foreign socialists, the Austrian Friedrich Stampfer and Belgian Hendrik de Man, came to Leipzig during this period to work for what they believed to be the most radical local chapter of Europe’s most radical socialist party. Both grew disillusioned, coming to view Leipzig’s militant reputation as overblown. As proof they cite the meekness with which audiences allowed the police to dissolve political meetings on two separate occasions.57 Yet neither anecdote specifies precisely whether those audiences were composed of ordinary workers or party members (Stampfer’s, in particular, appears to concern only the latter). As becomes obvious below, one must make a distinction between these two groups. Poorly disposed to the state, workers exhibited little affection for its embodiment, be it king or kaiser. A police observer noted with relief that a visit of the Saxon monarch to Leipzig in 1907 transpired without any “outrages”

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committed by workers, such as whistling, booing, or catcalls. It was self-evident to the officer that workers were hostile to the house of Wettin and that low turnout represented the best scenario at such events.58 As for the kaiser, newspapers report no proletarian organizations or deputations participating in the well-attended public celebrations of Wilhelm II’s birthday.59 Lack of piety among workers might help explain why they gave such little credence to monarchs who ruled, at least in theory, by divine right. Although the city was officially 92 percent Lutheran,60 a confidential report by Saxon church officials in 1910 conceded that only 20 percent of those registered as evangelical actually attended service in Leipzig’s two largest parishes.61 The police doubted that a single laboring male was among this pious minority.62 The repeated efforts of the Lutheran National-Social Union led by Friedrich Naumann to win support among Leipzig’s workers met with no success. During public meetings, the proletarian audiences treated the Naumannite missionaries with respect, but it was clear from their questions that they viewed Christianity with extreme skepticism, even hostility.63 Most working families did elect, however, to baptize their children, often under pressure from wives who, if not devout themselves, still wished to observe the major sacraments.64 In short, if religion helped buttress elite rule in other areas of Germany (one thinks of the somewhat stabilizing role played by Catholicism in the Rhineland and Silesia), it did not do so in Leipzig. Workers, especially women, held the state accountable for the rising price of food. They believed, correctly in fact, that the state, seeking to protect the income of domestic producers, especially that of East Elbian growers, was slapping high customs duties on imported meat and grain. “The wife aggressively lobbies her husband ‘to vote for a better one at the next election,’ for then the price of bread would certainly become cheaper. In this case, women exercise influence on the political choice of the men in so far as the latter, as fathers, support those [candidates] who oppose grain custom duties.”65 Women, as managers of the household budget, viewed politics more through a consumerist lens than did men. Their sensitivity in this regard, above all to the price of food, prompted them to confront the state directly during the war, as I shall investigate in detail in part 2. While leery of the state, many workers believed it should do more for them. During the recession of 1907–9, the unemployed in Leipzig held a number of spontaneous demonstrations. Such events followed a typical pattern. A few dozen unemployed, on learning at the employer-run labor exchange that no jobs were available, usually marched to the town hall, where they elected representatives to importune the mayor and city senate for relief. The angry crowd milled around outside until these representatives returned


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with a bromide answer from the authorities. Often they dispersed only when the police threatened them with arrest.66 Workers in Leipzig evinced little jingoism. None belonged to the city’s chapter of the Pan-German League.67 Only 3 out of 111 organizations participating in Leipzig’s twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Sedan were proletarian: the Roofers’ Union, the right-wing German Waiters’ Union, and the Men’s Chorus of the Leipzig Wool Mill, the latter of which might have been pressured into participating by the factory’s management. The baker, barrel maker, watchmaker, and butcher journeymen were also present, but here too one strongly suspects pressure from master-artisan employers to participate.68 Finally, workers neither attended the ultranationalistic dedication ceremony of the monument to the battle of Leipzig (Völkerschlachtdenkmal) in 191369 nor belonged to the organization that built it, the Patriotic Union. That group recruited exclusively from bürgerlich and noble circles.70 Not nationalistic, most male workers nevertheless remembered time under the colors with nostalgia.71 But these fond memories, Göhre argues, flowed neither from dynastic loyalty nor endorsement of a foreign policy bellicose even by the standards of the day: I explain this [nostalgia for military service] less from the fact that one is proud to be able to serve his king in the army—as is the case in the nobility and bourgeois circles [Bürgerkreisen]—and much more from the joy of the people in a colorful uniform and military glamour and pageantry; from the fresh, free, happy, carefree life that has been granted to a strapping, energetic proletarian lad at this time in his life (and probably never to recur); and from the not less important fact that his time in the service represents the longest, fullest, most splendid variety in the desolate monotony of his factory existence. (121–122)

The rejection of jingoism and militarism expressed itself in a folk tune sung by Bromme and his buddies while drinking: Ich bin Soldat, doch bin ich es nicht gerne Als man mich nahm, hat man mich nicht gefragt. Man schleppt mich fort, hinein in die Kaserne Gefangen werde ich, wie ein Wild gejagt. Ja, von der Heimat, von des Liebchens Herzen Mußt ich hinweg und von der Freunde Kreis.

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Denk ich daran, fühl ich der Wehmut Schmerzen Fühl in der Brust des Zornes Glut so heiß. Ihr Brüder all ob Deutsche, ob Franzosen Ob Ungarn, Dänen, Ruß und Niederland Ob grün, ob rot, ob blau ob weiß die Hosen Reicht Euch statt Blei zum Gruß die Bruderhand.72 I’m a soldier, but not gladly When they dragooned me, they didn’t ask. They took me away, into the garrison I was held like a prisoner, hunted like an animal. I had to leave my hometown, my sweetheart And my circle of friends. I think about them, feel melancholy’s pain And in my breast the hot glow of anger. Brothers! Whether German or French Or Hungarian, Danish, Russian, or Dutch; Whether trousers be green, red, blue, or white Offer each other a fraternal hand, not bullets. Proletarian distrust of the state’s conduct of foreign policy revealed itself in spectacular manner during the tense summer of 1914. Only three days before the declaration of war against Russia, at least twenty thousand Leipzig workers refused to believe the claims of the authorities that Germany was being attacked, staging an antiwar protest whose size and turbulence surprised the local spd leadership.73 An even larger protest scheduled for two days later was canceled by the district military commander exercising the powers available to him during a state of war.74 At a moment when nonworkers exulted patriotically, Leipzig’s workers continued to distrust their own government. Indeed, as no workers belonged to Leipzig’s chapter of the Colonial Society, they seem not to have supported Germany’s acquisition of a worldwide empire.75 One might object that the absence of workers from organizations such as the All-German League and Colonial Society does not prove proletarian lack of nationalist sentiment, only that associational life was segregated (as I demonstrated in the previous chapter). If that were the case, then Leipzig’s workers would have formed their own nationalist societies. They did not. They were also more socially liberal than nonworkers. There is no sign that male or female workers succumbed to anti-Semitism in Leipzig, a movement finding its staunchest support in the alter Mittelstand.76 As for female


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emancipation, nonworkers overwhelmingly opposed it, even the women among them, as my review of Leipzig’s bürgerlich women’s clubs indicated. Proletarian views on this subject were more varied. Wettstein-Adelt reports that her female colleagues “know nothing about the improvement of the lot of women.”77 On the other hand, speeches on female suffrage organized by an informal group of spd women sometimes drew crowds—mostly female— topping two thousand.78 Among men, too, views on this topic resist categorization. For instance, while sympathetically describing how his wife usually worked past midnight sewing for piece rates, cleaning the apartment, and minding their six children, it seems never to have occurred to Bromme to lend a hand.79 Leipzig’s May Day protests were held, as stipulated by the police, in the outlying, proletarian neighborhood of Stötteritz. The bulk of participants belonged neither to the spd nor unions. Thus discourse at these events—often in the form of songs and poems—provides a rough indicator of the views of ordinary workers. This bit of doggerel, intercepted by police, expresses many of the proletarian views reviewed above: Es bangt am 1. Maientage der biedre Spießer schauerlich Und in der Tat ist seine Lage bedenklich und bedauerlich. Ist Stöttritz [sic] doch der Massen Ziel die da mit Weib und Kind mobil. . . . Sie suchen nach dem starken Hebel für das Gebäude der Kultur und dem Parteipapst August Bebel gehört schon früh ihr Treueschwur. So daß, der Staat in Trümmer sinkt wenn dieser rote Unhold winkt.80 May 1st finds the philistine bourgeois scared out of his wits. And in fact his predicament is grave and pitiable. Stötteritz is the destination of the masses who go with wife and kid in tow. . . . They search for the powerful lever,

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for the House of Culture. To the party’s pope, August Bebel, They pledge allegiance from the start, So that the state will sink into rubble when this red demon gives the signal. The first line identifies the figure whom workers perceived as their main antagonist: the Bürger, here referred to by the common and lightly deprecatory term of der biedre Spießer. That this personage’s predicament is characterized as “grave and pitiable” can be read as long-term optimism that workers will ultimately prevail in their struggle. In the next line the author genders the “masses”—here, the poem’s protagonist and by extension the main agent of history—male; wives and children are portrayed as merely an addendum. Strength flows from the acquisition of Kultur. And this strength will be used to overthrow the Klassenstaat. But the assault on the state must await the signal from the undisputed leader of the workers, the “party’s pope,” August Bebel. For all workers, whether party members or not, supported the spd, and especially Bebel, without troubling themselves about the fine points of doctrine.81 The only exception to uniform proletarian support for the spd were Leipzig’s ten thousand or so Polish and Czech workers, whose only political cause lay in bringing about greater autonomy for their homelands.82 In light of all the evidence assembled in this section and cognizant of the ambiguities, one can conclude that ordinary workers in Leipzig, unable to articulate a sophisticated political ideology, felt deep animus toward the state and opposed most of its policies.83 The largely integrated workers found by a number of historians of Wilhelmine Germany do not appear in Leipzig. What restrained these Leipzigers from more aggressive opposition to the Klassenstaat was the weight of custom and the partial legitimacy enjoyed by elites. Lacking the self-confidence to devise a strategic plan to bring about radical democratic reform, they relied on the Social Democratic leadership, above all August Bebel, to do it for them. In other words, while most ordinary workers would have supported an assault on the Klassenstaat, the ultimate success of such a venture would depend on the quality of leadership provided by the spd. the spd The national party demanded the institution of a parliamentary democracy in Germany (whether republican or constitutional-monarchical remained an


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open question).84 In so doing, it provided ordinary workers with a vocabulary to critique the authoritarian status quo. Moreover, the party’s Marxist discourse, which portrayed political conflict as a struggle between bourgeoisie and working class, seems, at least in rough form, to have reached most workers. While unaware of the details of socialist ideology, many workers referred to themselves as members of the working class (die Arbeiterklasse). Unwittingly reinforcing spd rhetoric was an elite discourse in newspapers, political speeches, and the like worrying about the “working class,” “worker problem,”“social problem,” and doubtful loyalty of blue-collar “fellows without a fatherland” [vaterlandslose Gesellen]. Without this spd and elite discourse highlighting a working class, it seems doubtful that so many workers would have settled on precisely this term. But it was not a discourse alone that made Leipzig’s workers believe they were a group—a class, as they called it—with interests opposed to those of the Bürgertum and authoritarian state. Rather, their group consciousness stemmed from a complex interaction between, on the one hand, their objective and hereditary life situations (poverty, geographical and social segregation, discrimination, and political subordination, all examined earlier in this and the previous chapter) and, on the other hand, a general discourse labeling them a unitary working class and assigning to them a privileged role in the historical process. Expressed differently, without exposure to such a discourse, workers still would have felt anger and probably developed some sort of rough collective identity, but one can only speculate as to what kind of group identity and what target the anger would have found. In Wilhelmine Leipzig, the general rhetoric of class helped shape this naturally generated, inchoate dissatisfaction into a specific collective identity (Arbeiterklasse) and identified a specific foe (Klassenstaat) In the decade before the war, the main political aspiration of most workers was the replacement of this Klassenstaat with something more democratic.85 When it came to the active pursuit of this goal, however, the national spd evinced extreme caution.86 This conservatism had a number of roots. The unions, because of their financial clout, possessed much influence within the spd executive and used it to moderate the party’s policy (I analyze unions in the next chapter). Moreover, the party leadership had succumbed to the notion that winning elections to the Reichstag (a largely powerless parliament) represented the only path to democratic reform. Electoral success required organizational stability and full coffers, neither of which the leadership wished to risk through a frontal attack on the state in the form of revolutionary agitation and street demonstrations. The executive ensured that its views

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became official policy by having rural, more conservative party locals as well as the very largest locals (notably Berlin)—where party members often barely knew each other and therefore did not unite against executive-appointed functionaries—overrepresented at party congresses. And, as noted, the leadership (especially Bebel) could count on the passive support of ordinary, ideologically unsophisticated party members. A growing phalanx of paid bureaucrats implemented the policy of the executive, functionaries for whom the welfare of the organization, rather than the ignition of a revolution, had become an end in itself. Their conservatism had nothing to do with cynicism: most honestly believed that only a strong party organization could ensure the long-term success of the movement. Nor did it stem from embourgeoisement: the vast majority of the party’s administrators was of proletarian origin.87 But the fact remains that their secure, relatively well-paying positions would be lost if the state banned the party, as it had from 1878 to 1890. The final element of the conservative alliance within the spd were the revisionists. Some were intellectuals who believed that democracy and socialism could be achieved through gradual reform rather than through revolution.88 Others were politicians—notably Ludwig Frank in Baden, Wilhelm Keil in Württemberg, and Georg Heinrich von Vollmar in Bavaria—who had obtained a taste of cooperative parliamentary politics in the more liberal southern states and argued that the national party should follow their example of approving state budgets and working for modest reforms. Opposing this conservative coalition was a much smaller group, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, that believed Social Democracy could only be achieved through revolution and that the party should therefore actively prepare for it. While they were few in number and enjoyed little support from a rank and file barely acquainted with their ideas, their position as some of the party’s outstanding intellectuals and their control of some of its leading journals forced the executive to take them seriously. The leadership placated the left by adhering to a revolutionary rhetoric proclaiming that only revolution would bring about the final goal while de facto following a policy of moderation. Karl Kautsky, the executive’s chief ideologist, elevated attentisme to the level of high theory, arguing that the party need only maintain its doctrinal revolutionary purity and thereby retain its hold on the masses; meanwhile, the contradictions of capitalism coupled with the imperialist scramble would inevitably destroy the ruling classes, causing power to fall into the lap of the spd.89 Under the influence of this conservative coalition, the national spd drifted ever further to the right in the


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years before the war, ending the autonomy of its leftist youth movement, attempting to soften the Socialist International’s radical antiwar and anti-imperialist resolutions, and recanting its earlier support for the May Day strike and general strike.90 If Bebel and his lieutenants believed the liberal parties would reward the spd for its moderation by offering them a political alliance, they were to be disappointed. After the spd’s 1912 electoral victory, making it by far the largest party in the Reichstag, hopes arose in the party for an spd-Liberal coalition “stretching from Bebel to Bassermann.” The National Liberals, however, showed no interest in such a partnership while the Progressive People’s Party placed impossibly high conditions on its cooperation. Its strategy of moderation bankrupt yet unable to summon the gumption to abandon it, the spd leadership found itself on the eve of the war sunk in apathy and gloom.91 Radicals in Leipzig had played a leading role in the genesis of the spd. The various socialistic and democratic groupings that ultimately coalesced into Ferdinand Lassalle’s General German Workers’ Union in 1863 were located mostly in Leipzig, the most prominent being the Leipzig Workers’ Club (Leipziger Arbeiterverein). The other early current of German socialism, August Bebel’s and Wilhelm Liebknecht’s Social Democratic Workers’ Party, stemmed from various groupings concentrated in Saxony and above all Leipzig.92 These two organizations merged in 1875 to form the Social Democratic Party of Germany (spd) and immediately found strong support in Leipzig. The antisocialist law of 1878–90, which banned the party organization while allowing its leaders to run for office, as well as a “minor state of siege” (kleiner Belagerungszustand) declared in Leipzig in 1881 to stamp the party out, barely checked the growth of its popularity among workers. Despite a biased suffrage, August Bebel represented the city in the Saxon Landtag during these years.93 After the antisocialist law was allowed to lapse, the spd continued its rocketing growth, whose impact on city politics I examine more closely later in this chapter. But despite a reputation for radicalism, by the late Wilhelmine period the Leipzig spd was almost as moderate as the national executive. Here, too, a small group of left-wing intellectuals fought a losing battle against the moderate leadership and functionaries. What made Leipzig different, however, was that the rank and file, when it stirred itself, succeeded in pushing the leadership to the left. The left-wing intellectuals were concentrated in the editorial staff of the Leipziger Volkszeitung (hereafter lvz). Boasting a circulation of fifty thousand

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(with many of these copies sold outside Leipzig) and a press producing millions of posters and flyers each year, the lvz was second in influence only to Vorwärts among Social Democratic publications. Franz Mehring, Social Democracy’s leading literary critic and later a prominent communist,94 edited it from 1901 to 1907, and Rosa Luxemburg was a frequent contributor.95 On national issues the paper took a leftist position, while its local coverage specialized in polemic against the municipal government and satire of the city’s notables, especially their patriotic rituals, such as the celebration of the anniversary of the battle of Sedan and the dedication ceremony in 1913 for the monument to the battle of Leipzig.96 Its critical coverage landed several editors each year in prison, where they served terms up to a full year for offenses such as lèse-majesté, disrespect to judges, and libel.97 The police observed that the editorial staff clashed with the local party leadership on policy, notably on the issue of the general strike.98 The local spd became increasingly dominated by paid functionaries or people removed from manual toil. Sitting on the local party’s various leadership committees (in charge of elections, recruitment, finances, securing meeting places, etc.) were newspaper editors, store clerks, shopkeepers, petty traders, and publicans. The only manual laborers appearing on these lists are graphics workers (especially letterpress printers), who, as I shall show, were the most highly skilled and politically moderate among wage earners.99 Likewise, the party’s top choices to run as candidates in the Reichstag election anticipated for 1914 included the owner of a cigar-making factory, two union functionaries, two food coop managers, a newspaper editor, and a store clerk. The first worker named appears tenth on the list, a cigar roller named A. Marxen.100 Most of these nominees probably began their careers as workers, but the fact remains that they had achieved a lifestyle qualitatively different from that of their proletarian constituents. This gulf in social standing partially explains why the local leadership preferred to support the moderate national leadership. On the far left of this local party was Friedrich Geyer, Reichstag deputy for the thirteenth district. Born in 1853, as a young man he had experienced firsthand the creation of the spd. Like so many other Social Democratic leaders, he came from a craft background, starting his career as a cigar roller (at that time a thriving industry in Leipzig) and ultimately founding a small cigar-making factory. As time went on, he devoted ever more time to politics and editing the national journal of the tobacco workers’ union. In 1886 he won election to the Reichstag where he remained on the national party’s left wing. He continued to serve in the Reichstag, with short interruptions, into the Weimar era. While


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he was very popular with ordinary party members in Leipzig and much sought after as an orator,101 he held few organizational posts and appears to have been somewhat isolated from the local functionaries. Far more typical of the views of the leadership was Fritz Seger. Originally from Baden, in the 1890s he moved to Leipzig, where he became an official of the tailors’ union while also holding numerous posts in the party. In 1901 he landed a job at the lvz and in 1911 won election to the city council.102 In that body he never tired of attempting to pass reform legislation despite the fact that the nonsocialist parties had completely excluded the spd from legislative influence (more on the city council below). On the right of the local party in Leipzig was Richard Lipinski. Born in Danzig in 1867, he settled in Leipzig around 1890. There, he worked as a shop assistant and made a name for himself attempting to organize his colleagues into unions. Eventually he managed to become an independent book dealer, ultimately founding his own publishing house. He worked as a writer at the lvz from 1903 to 1906 and became the chairman of the entire party in Leipzig in 1907.103 As I discuss further below, from this position he counseled his comrades to avoid street demonstrations and confrontation with the police. Only an aroused rank and file was able to push the functionaries to the left. This rank and file were mostly young adult men: women rarely accounted for more than 10 percent of membership,104 and more than half of Leipzig’s members were between the ages of twenty-five and forty.105 Ninety-two percent wageworkers, the rank and file was markedly more proletarian than the leadership and one of the most proletarian in Germany.106 Most but by no means all of these members came from the skilled trades.107 While laborers constituted the vast bulk of the local membership, not all workers in the city belonged. Leipzig’s ten thousand or so Czech and Polish workers did not involve themselves in German politics.108 Moreover, the spd and unions enjoyed no success organizing agricultural laborers in the surrounding countryside, many of them Polish migrant workers whose attitudes to Social Democracy ranged from indifference to hostility.109 Even among ethnically German, male wageworkers, party membership was rare. The Leipzig party’s total membership on the eve of the war was 45,049 (89 percent concentrated in the industrial outlying neighborhoods of the city).110 Chapter 1 established that wage earners and their dependents constituted 65 percent of the city’s 1914 total population of 625,000. Thus party members accounted for a mere 11 percent of Leipzig’s laboring population. Very few workers, then, came into contact with the party’s moderate, reformist praxis. Nevertheless, as seen above, the vast majority lent the party

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their passive support because it was the only organization to question, no matter how cautiously, the legitimacy of the Klassenstaat. As noted above, among this relatively small group of party members, women constituted only about 10 percent. As Saxony—unlike most other Länder—did not bar women from belonging to political organizations,111 low levels of female membership must be partially explained by their disinclination to join. Working women, as I have discussed, did not have enough time to join organizations: between paid work and household responsibilities, they often labored past midnight.112 The rare woman with enough free time to join the party also had to overcome personal psychological hurdles. Socialized from birth to believe that her primary responsibility lay in the domestic sphere, she would probably have been reluctant to participate in organizational politics. Some women were actually hostile to Social Democracy, an attitude stemming less from conservatism than from resentment against the movement for claiming their husbands’ few free hours.113 The fact that spd leaders offered women few incentives to join also explains their near absence from the party. Social Democratic leaders viewed women as a mere addendum to the working class proper, auxiliaries whose “highest historical task [lies in] raising the next generation to be socialists.”114 The local party’s 1905 program demanded no initiatives that might have been helpful to working women, such as female suffrage, public child-care facilities, more funding for maternal and infant care, right to abortion, equal pay for equal work, and so on.115 In that same year the female auxiliary to the party was dissolved because of “lack of interest on the part of the women.” While this was probably an important reason, one gets the feeling that male comrades were not sorry to see the auxiliary liquidated. Auxiliary members were amalgamated into the larger party, where they received almost no leadership positions.116 All these factors contributed to a situation in which, as Richard Lipinski complained, “[the only female members we have are] the wives and daughters of party comrades, but not women factory workers.”117 While hardly represented in the party, women had their own style of political expression. Prevented from sustained organizational involvement, they nonetheless participated in public demonstrations, rallies, and parades. Speeches on female suffrage organized by an informal group of spd women sometimes drew crowds topping two thousand. The police also noted high female participation in public demonstrations, especially May Day strikes.118 My examination of Leipzig during the war and revolution looks more closely at this distinctive feminine style of political mobilization. The party’s mostly male rank and file usually passively followed the local


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leadership. When it did rouse itself, however, it invariably pressured the leadership to the left. The instructions that the rank and file gave to Leipzig’s delegates to the 1913 party congress in Jena represent such an occurrence. In the wake of the manifest failure of the party’s reformist strategy following the 1912 Reichstag election, the Leipzig delegates to the congress were instructed to pressure the national leadership to embark on a more radical course. The delegates were also ordered to rebuke the executive for the spd Reichstag deputies’ vote supporting the government’s request for increased military spending in return for implementation of a wealth tax. The evidence indicates that the local party leadership opposed these resolutions but had to acquiesce in the face of such strong rank-and-file feeling.119 To minimize the frequency of challenges from below, the Leipzig spd leadership shied away from such divisive questions, highlighting instead local matters or national issues on which all Social Democrats agreed. In 1906 and 1907 the local party organized many of its rallies and literature drives around the issue of the city’s shortage of affordable meat. Its other main activities included leading a boycott of local publicans who refused to allow Social Democrats to meet in their taverns, agitation to reform local taxes and education, and propaganda against the Reich associational law and tax code.120 By early 1914 the local party was demanding reform of laws affecting unions and the right to strike, instructing workers on how to renounce membership in the Lutheran church, and—bowing to rank-and-file sentiment—warning against impending war. There was one volatile question, however, that the party leadership could not afford to ignore. Because of the intense desire of ordinary workers to democratize the political system, the leadership was often obliged to go along with public protests regarding this issue. In late 1905 the Leipzig party rank and file, as a result of growing dissatisfaction with Saxony’s three-class suffrage, the example of demonstrations demanding universal suffrage in Berlin, and the revolution in Russia, pressured the leadership to hold a large prodemocracy rally. The police approved the request but stipulated that the rally be held indoors in several halls strewn across the city so as to prevent the formation of a monstrous, outdoor demonstration. After the conclusion of these meetings and without the consent of the party leadership, about twenty thousand demonstrators spontaneously marched to the city center, converging in front of the town hall, the offices of the royal prefect, and the garrison of the district military command, where they chanted “Long live the universal right to vote!” The party leadership had lost control of the demonstration, and the police were caught off guard, but ultimately the demonstra-

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tors dispersed peacefully. In the following weeks the demonstrations spread to other Saxon cities—notably Dresden, where police inflicted saber wounds to clear the crowd—and then to Hamburg, Alsace, Brunswick, Hessen, and back to Berlin. Resolving to suppress any further popular mobilizations, the Leipzig police forbade a rally requested for January 1906 in support of the revolution in Russia. The editors of the lvz as well as most of the party regulars wanted to defy the police, but the leadership persuaded them to respect the prohibition. As compensation, local leaders agreed to hold a party gathering at which the assembled voted to demand that the national party return to its earlier support for the general strike as the preferred weapon to bring about democratic reform. The police noted the discomfort with which the local leadership accepted this resolution and its relief when the issue was resolved later, at least temporarily, at the spd’s national conference at Mannheim, where the national executive renewed its support for the general strike in principle but claimed that current conditions made its implementation ill advised.121 To prevent control slipping from its hands again, the local leadership began to limit its requests for outdoor demonstrations and to cooperate with police to ensure that the few that did take place would unfold without incident. Between police and party leadership a kind of asymmetrical partnership developed in which both sides strove to avoid confrontation and the possibility of violence. The police, acting as senior partner, did not forbid all spd demonstrations, allowing about two per year, but always required that they be held either in several halls strewn across the city or on the edge of town. Under no circumstances were demonstrators allowed to mass in the city center. The party leadership, acting as junior partner, reviewed with police beforehand every detail of each event: the route of the march, the location of the rally, the topic of the speech, even the content of the placards, making all changes as the police ordered. During the assemblies the leaders never tired of exhorting listeners to “behave reasonably,” “maintain discipline,” and above all shun spontaneous marches toward the city center.122 The authorities appreciated the “responsibility” of the party leaders and functionaries, contrasting it to the radicalism of the editors at the lvz.123 Two examples illustrate party leaders’ determination to avoid street confrontations with the police. In the autumn of 1908, as the Saxon Landtag prepared to switch from the three-class to a slightly less regressive plural suffrage, interest in democratic reform revived among the rank and file, obliging the leadership to organize a demonstration demanding the ballot. In accordance with police guidelines, the protesters assembled on the edge of town, heard speeches, and then marched in orderly columns to the Königsplatz and


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Roßplatz (neither of which lay in the city center) before dispersing (see photo plate 6). The police noted with satisfaction that despite a turnout of fifty thousand, the demonstration “did not attract much attention to itself.”124 Two years later the Leipzig leadership rejected demands from the lvz and many members that the local party organize rallies in support of renewed Prussian demonstrations demanding the ballot.125 Resisting popular enthusiasm for street demonstrations in 1905, 1908, and 1910, strictly controlling those that did occur, cooperating with police, and channeling party resources into elections to pseudoparliaments, the leadership was animated by the praiseworthy objective of avoiding bloodshed. But after the disappointingly modest reform of the Saxon suffrage in 1909, the failure of the effort to reform the Prussian suffrage in 1910, and the National Liberals’ and Progressives’ rejection of an alliance with the spd after the 1912 Reichstag elections, it was clear to even the most cautious Social Democrat that the strategy of moderation would never bring democracy to Germany. Only by exploiting its superiority in numbers through a general strike and confronting police in the streets—both entailing the likelihood of bloodshed—could the spd hope to compel the acquiescence of elites to democracy. The spd leadership in Leipzig lacked the nerve for such a challenge and in effect submitted to the authoritarian status quo. In so doing, it failed to act on the aspirations of ordinary workers for a more democratic political order.126 At an unconscious level, the local leadership perhaps found relief in following such a futile strategy. One even wonders whether they truly wanted power. Stampfer, the visiting Austrian socialist, recounts a conversation he had with Lipinski and colleagues in a Leipzig pub. “Your Saxony is the Red Kingdom and you have a majority in most of its Reichstag districts,” Stampfer began. “If an unforeseen event suddenly brought you to power, would you be in a position initially to govern Saxony, if not better, then at least as it has been governed?” The answer was explosive. Laughter filled the room, and voices roared, each one louder than the next. “That’s great, just great. . . . WE are going to govern! You, Kleemann, you’ll be the Finance Minister!” “Ha, ha, ha,” another bellowed, “Kleemann as Finance Minister!” and they all bent over from laughter. “And you, Lipinski, you would be the police minister!” Obviously it had been a while since they had found something so funny.127

In November 1918 Lipinski was to find himself interior minister in Saxony’s revolutionary government.

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INTERACTION OF THE POLITICAL PLAYERS IN LEIPZIG If workers electorally supported the spd with near unanimity, nonworkers supported a welter of nonsocialist parties that coalesced around two axes: among conservatives, the Vereinigte Bürgerwahlkomitee; among liberals, the Freier Bürgerausschuß. The fact that both organizations feature the term Bürger indicates that nonworkers—despite their social heterogeneity and disagreements, especially over the weighting of movable versus immovable property in determining the suffrage—shared a basic political identity. As Kocka has shown, this identity had little positive content; instead, it defined itself primarily in negative terms, as antiproletarian and anti-spd.128 Below, I shall show that in Leipzig it also contained a positive element: support for a strong German imperial policy (Weltpolitik). In Reichstag elections Leipzig was gerrymandered into two districts. The twelfth district coincided with the small city center. The thirteenth district encompassed the much more populous outlying industrial neighborhoods. Elections were decided by universal manhood suffrage. If no candidate won an absolute majority, the two top finishers competed in a runoff. In the twelfth district the nonworker parties ran separate candidates in the first round but then united behind the National Liberal candidate (running now as the representative of the “Cartel”) in the runoff (see fig. 3.1). Only in 1903 did the spd manage to win here when the feud between conservatives and liberals over the weighting of movable versus real property in determining Land and municipal suffrage became so acrimonious that they were unable to agree on a common candidate for the runoff. After that defeat, they decided that the dispute should not undermine future collaboration and were able to reclaim the seat in the next election. In the thirteenth district the spd always won with an absolute majority in the first round. The left-wing Social Democrat Friedrich Geyer represented the district from 1890 onward. The “Hottentot Election” of 1907 illustrates the other issue, support for Germany’s Weltpolitik, around which the nonworker parties could rally. In the twelfth district liberals and conservatives ended their spat and—in a departure from earlier elections—ran a common candidate in the first round under the banner of the “National Cartel.” Their candidate easily beat the Social Democratic incumbent. In the thirteenth district the cartel increased its share of the vote, but still lost handily to the spd. A breakdown of the returns reveals that the dramatic change was due not to the spd losing votes but rather to the participation of thousands of new voters desiring to express

Nonworker subgroup

Primary political representative

Alter Mittelstand

Mittelstandsvereinigung

Alliance for first round of election

Grand alliance for runoff against SPD

..

Vereinigtes Burgerwahlkomitee Elites (agrarian/ upper civil servants)

Conservative Party (Nationales) Kartell

Elites (Commercial/ industrial)

National Liberals ..

Freier Burgerausschuβ Lower white collars

Progressive People’s Party

figure 3.1 Stages of Bürgerliche Coalescence in Leipzig’s Prewar Reichstag Elections

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their support for Germany’s worldwide empire (voter participation jumped from 81 to about 87 percent of those eligible). Almost all these new voters supported the cartel.129 In 1909 the rules of voting for the Landtag were changed from a threeclass suffrage to a plural voting system under which an individual, depending on his income, property, occupation, and education, could obtain up to four votes. If no candidate won an absolute majority, the two top finishers met in a runoff. In all Landtag elections in Leipzig save one the nonworker parties ran separate candidates in the first round but then united behind the National Liberal candidate in the second round. The only time they failed to do so— in 1905 over the same dispute that divided liberals and conservatives in the Reichstag election of 1903—the Social Democrats still failed to pick up many new seats because of the asymmetrical suffrage.130 A three-class suffrage regulated municipal elections. The nonworker parties did not have to worry about a Social Democratic threat in the first class (where the richest 5 percent of electors could vote) or the second class (where the next richest 25 percent cast their ballots). Consequently, each nonworker party could run its own slate, the result of which was that the National Liberals/Liberals controlled the first class and the Conservatives/alte Mittelständler the second. In the third class the spd possessed such a commanding lead that its opponents either abstained from participating or ran token candidates. The result of this system was that each grouping possessed about one-third of the seats on the city council. In the council, however, the one-third of seats belonging to the Social Democrats translated into no power because the liberals and conservatives excluded them from legislative dealmaking.131 Elections under these conditions resulted in nonworker control of the state at the municipal, royal, and Reich levels. This control bestowed on nonworkers benefits too numerous to catalog here. What follows below partially lists the ways that they used the state to suppress Social Democracy. Earlier in this chapter I discussed how paragraph 130 of the Criminal Law Code fostered the fining and imprisonment of Social Democratic writers and editors critical of the government. But censorship went further. All printed material (posters, flyers, books, pamphlets, even song lyrics) required police approval before being published. Even after clearing this hurdle, the publisher could be punished retroactively—under a variety of provisions, especially paragraph 184 of the Criminal Code—if the material was deemed to be subversive.132 Further impediments to free speech included a ban on the flying of red flags, the playing or singing of dozens of political songs, the wearing of revolutionary symbols (which could include a simple red kerchief around the


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neck), the use of revolutionary rhetoric, the chanting or display of subversive slogans (such as “Wage war against war” or “Down with capitalism”), and advocating boycotts.133 Freedom of association suffered equally. Until the Saxon Law of Association was superseded by a Reich law in 1908, all meetings had to be reported in advance and could be supervised by the police. After 1908 all meetings still had to be reported in advance but could be supervised only if they were open to the public and dealt with so-called public issues (interpreted widely by the authorities). The new law contained only one other liberalization: during elections meetings could convene without prior police notification. As before 1908, all associations still had to register with the police, no meetings could be held on the evening before Sundays and holidays (religious or otherwise), any meeting in open air required prior police approval (rarely granted), paragraphs 20 and 22 gave the police discretionary power to dissolve any club that might cause public disorder, the police could prohibit any festival or party on the grounds that it might endanger public morals (in effect blocking spd social gatherings), persons below the age of eighteen were not permitted to attend political gatherings of any kind, and, finally, the police made liberal use of the building code to prohibit Social Democratic meetings, claiming potential safety hazards.134 That in 1913 the police supervised 875 meetings and 186 public gatherings (more than before the 1908 law) while maintaining a photographic and biographical archive on eighteen hundred subversive Leipzigers underscores the fact that the new law of association did not diminish police harassment of the spd and unions.135 The social enmity between workers and nonworkers observed in earlier chapters bred and was bred by antagonism in the political arena. There, the different nonworker subgroups proved able to set aside their acrimonious disputes and form a local Sammlungspolitik—founded on a shared identity as Bürger—to exclude workers from power. The findings of this chapter thus bring into sharper focus the integrity of the category “nonworker,” a group found to be somewhat fissile in chapters 1 and 2. It also suggests that a group need not be socially homogeneous to prove politically effective.136 The objective life conditions reviewed in chapter 1, the social discrimination examined in chapter 2, and the lack of political rights discovered in this chapter produced among workers a collective identity based on anger toward what they called the Bürgertum and its instrument, the Klassenstaat. Their group consciousness was further smithed by a general Wilhelmine discourse designating them a working class with an important political role to play.

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Transforming the Klassenstaat into a parliamentary democracy represented their top political desideratum. That elites could not fully legitimate their ascendancy by reference to a shared set of values (such as popular sovereignty or divine right monarchy) emboldened workers to pursue this goal. Discouraging them was the weight of custom as well as the partial legitimacy of elites resulting from the latter’s historically successful record and monopoly on Bildung. Given these countervailing influences, much depended on the tactical militance and audacity of the spd. Party leaders lacked both qualities. That they retained the confidence of ordinary workers stemmed from the party’s use of Marxist rhetoric, which lent it a revolutionary appearance, as well as the workers’ poor education, which denied them the tools and self-confidence to question their leaders. In that workers constituted a monolithic, if poorly led, political bloc, the findings of this third chapter underscore those of the first and second, which found a high degree of proletarian cohesion. The category “worker” remains analytically robust. Still, partially legitimate elite authority prompting ineffective challenges from below—the essence of politics in prewar Leipzig—might have continued indefinitely had elites produced continual economic, diplomatic, and military success.

chapter 4

WAGE AND SALARY RELATIONSHIPS IN PREWAR LEIPZIG

COMPLETING THE REVIEW of prewar intercourse between workers and nonworkers, chapter 4 examines one of their main modes of contact: the wage relationship. In so doing, it will bring into much stronger relief the contours of each group. While the wage relationship occupies the bulk of my attention, scrutiny will also fall on the salary relationship between lower white collars and their bosses in the offices of Leipzig. This additional investigation is necessary because workers were not the only group in the revolution attempting to restructure the workplace: lower white collars, too, sought to create a more democratic relationship with superiors. Thus I examine the prewar manifestation of Leipzig’s salary relationship in order to determine whether one can speak of longer-term (i.e., prewar) causes of the lower-white-collar mobilization during the revolution.

THE WAGE RELATIONSHIP To ascertain whether the roots of the revolutionary challenge to the wage relationship lay partially in the prewar period, I examine its terms and especially how workers perceived them.

Legal Parameters By the eve of the war, wageworkers made up about 65 percent of the taxpayers listed in Leipzig’s census.1 As the official head of household signed the tax

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form, almost all these taxpayers were men. The figure of 65 percent, then, provides a reliable estimate of the share of adult male Leipzigers drawing its livelihood from wages. As Reich and city statisticians lumped female wage earners together with homeworkers (who were compensated by the piece),2 the exact percentage of women in Leipzig who worked for a wage could not be determined. It was surely less than that of men, probably around 35 percent.3 In this chapter, when I refer to “workers,” I mean the 65 percent of adult male and 35 percent of adult female Leipzigers who labored for a wage. As labor law did not yet exist as a separate corpus in imperial Germany, the federal government, because of its competency over the Länder in commerce (Gewerbebetrieb), regulated these matters ad hoc, beginning from the following basic principle: “The making of the relationship between the independent entrepreneur and the worker is the object of free agreement.”4 This represents the classical liberal “employment at will” wage relationship, so named because either party can terminate the contract with no notice (i.e., “at will”). A Reich law of 1891 mandated the posting of rules (Arbeitsordnungen, sometimes called Fabrikordnungen) in all workshops with twenty or more employees (397 ff.). Scrutiny of hundreds of them reveals that the principle of “employment at will” governed the wage relationship in all cases in prewar Leipzig.5 A classical liberal would argue that the “employment at will” wage relationship does not translate into employer authority over a worker but instead represents a freely made contract. This argument founders when one inspects the so-called freedom of the two parties. The worker, owning no means of production or wealth on which he or she can fall back, must enter into a wage relationship in order to eat and pay the rent. Once in the relationship, he or she will end it reluctantly since termination raises the specter of hunger and homelessness. By contrast, the employer neither must enter into nor continue the relationship for in most periods the availability of a reserve army of unemployed enables him to be selective in his hiring practices while firing any employee with impunity. Even during an economic upswing, when new orders stream in and the labor market tightens, the capitalist is not obliged to enter into a wage relationship with a given worker, for in refraining he will merely miss some additional profits by not being able to meet the increase in consumer demand. Rather than a contract between equals, the wage relationship is in fact an arrangement in which the employer wields authority over the worker.6 The exact power imbalance varies from society to society depending on the extent of workplace safety laws, the strength and militancy of unions, the tautness of the labor market, and so forth.

WAGE AND SAL ARY REL ATIONSHIPS

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State intervention hardly modified employer authority in Leipzig.7 Unemployment insurance, for instance, can greatly undermine an employer’s power since, if this insurance is generous enough, loss of a job will not lead to acute privation. Before the revolution, however, there existed no unemployment insurance in Germany. Only poor relief and meagerly funded municipal make-work programs supported the unemployed.8 Other types of state intervention were equally ineffective. Reich legislation in 1902 required that business courts (Gewerbegerichte) be installed in all cities with more than twenty thousand residents to mediate disputes between employers and employees. As their judges were unpaid, appearance before them optional, and their decisions nonbinding, these courts possessed almost no potency. An initiative a decade later in the Reichstag to strengthen them somewhat through the creation of work boards (Arbeitskammer) organized by profession died when the government withdrew the legislation.9 The Reich government mandated factory inspection in 1878 but left implementation of the scheme to the Länder. With the exception of Baden, they administered it lackadaisically.10 As a teenager employed in a button-making factory, Bromme witnessed how easily the inspector was outwitted: he was instructed by his supervisor to lie about hours worked; meanwhile, underage child laborers were whisked out the backdoor before the inspector’s arrival.11 In 1911 Leipzig’s construction workers questioned the sincerity of Land efforts to inspect work sites in this resolution adopted unanimously at an outdoor protest: “We the assembled note with outrage that the building inspectorate [das Baupolizeiamt] as well as the royal prefecture [die Amtshauptmannschaft] have left unanswered the complaints of our workplace safety commission. . . . We the assembled pledge not to rest until the demand of the workforce for the hiring of a construction site inspector is fulfilled. We might also emphasize that of the seventy-two complaints lodged with the authorities this year, we have received only one reply.”12 Finally, in Leipzig, as in most cities, the state showed no interest in creating labor exchanges. The municipal government chose instead to subsidize the employer-run exchange that was often used to deny employment to blacklisted union “troublemakers.”13 Juvenile and female wage earners received more extensive state protection, chiefly through a series of statutes and regulations issued by the Reich between 1891 and 1908. Designed to codify and improve the grab bag of Prussian laws that had been pressed into service in 1871, these new regulations barred children under fourteen years of age from wage labor. The workday for both sexes between fourteen and sixteen years of age could not exceed ten

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hours. By 1908 the Reich also set the maximum workday for adult women at ten hours (eight hours on Saturday or any day preceding holidays) while banning Sunday and night work. One hour’s rest per day was also mandated (with at least half of that falling at midday). Women received two weeks paid leave during the final stages of pregnancy and were required to take six weeks unpaid leave after delivery. Finally, they were barred from especially unhealthy industries (e.g., foundries and construction) and situations that might lead to “moral problems” (e.g., underground work in mines).14 Loopholes vitiated most of these protections. With inspection staffs underfunded and fines for violations in the range of 2 to 10 marks, many employers simply ignored the regulations.15 Employees, whose families needed the income, could not afford to forgo the wages lost as a result of compulsory maternity leave. Indeed, women were fined more often than employers for violating this particular regulation.16 Moreover, an employer could usually circumvent the regulations legally, most often by shifting production to the unregulated sector of home work or by claiming special needs (e.g., an emergency in filling orders, pressing foreign competition, etc.). In Bavaria, for example, fully 26 percent of companies investigated had legally circumvented regulations protecting female workers. In most cases a factory owner needed merely to claim such needs, not to demonstrate them.17 As modest as these worker protection laws were, they exceeded in scope those in most other industrial nations at the time. The fact remains, however, that they did little to circumscribe employer authority within the “at will” wage relationship.

Intervention by the Unions This section examines only the city’s Social Democratic “free unions,” which represented 98 percent of those organized in Leipzig.18 Christian and liberal unions played virtually no role in worker-employer relations in Leipzig. If the state was not willing to modify seriously the wage relationship, unions were not able to do so. For one thing, they operated in a hostile environment. Workers in Saxony had been granted the formal right to unionize in 1861, a right reiterated by paragraph 152 of the Reich’s Gewerbeordnungsnovelle of 1891.19 But the very next paragraph largely undermined this right by devolving upon local police wide administrative powers to dissolve unions if they were found to be “coercing” workers to join or if they interfered with other workers’ “right to work” during a strike (the latter offense carried with it up to three months in prison).20 Leipzig police made ample


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use of this authority and noted with satisfaction that they could depend on support from the judiciary in such matters “almost without exception.”21 The state in its guise as employer was even more antiunion. Any employee of the kingdom of Saxony could be fired for belonging to a union, the spd, or even a Social Democratic food cooperative.22 The same was true for employees of the railroad.23 Private employers also waged war against unions. Master artisans routinely dismissed apprentices and journeymen suspected of membership in the unions or party.24 Larger employers, applying a slightly more complicated strategy, pursued the same goal. The small carrot in their plan consisted of providing, in some cases, company welfare (especially old age and invalid support) as well as company housing. The much larger stick consisted of fostering yellow—that is, company-sponsored—unions, making employment conditional on not joining a Social Democratic union, coordinating with other employers on strike and lockout strategy (a task lightened by the relatively concentrated nature of Leipzig’s industry as well as by the employer associations and cartels, both examined in the introduction), and refusing to negotiate with unions. Moreover, given that they controlled Leipzig’s biggest labor exchange, employers could ensure that those they deemed troublemakers found no work. Some employers also did not begin to pay newly hired workers until the second paycheck, in this way forcing them to forgo a paycheck if they decided to strike (the missing paycheck was distributed on termination of employment). Owners of big factories—where most unskilled workers were employed—found it easiest to implement these tactics. The unskilled were often freshly arrived from the countryside and therefore unaware of the benefits of unionization.25 The narrow, repetitive tasks they performed in large factories diminished the chance that they would come into contact with their colleagues, in turn undermining solidarity. And their lack of skill made them dispensable.26 In addition to employers and the state, economic downturns also beset unions with problems. During recessions workers lost jobs or suffered wage cuts, preventing them from paying union dues (or joining a union), factors that in turn reduced union membership. Only during boom years did unions attract recruits.27 Recessions also undermined unions’ ability to strike. The number of strikes in Leipzig dropped sharply during the recessions of 1900–2, 1907–9 and 1913–14.28 Blunders committed by union leaders compounded these externally imposed difficulties. They largely ignored the women streaming into Leipzig’s waged workforce: on the eve of the war, 90 percent of those organized re-

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mained men.29 Granted, women were more difficult to organize than men. Many of them, socialized from birth to regard the domestic sphere as paramount, viewed unions with indifference. By contrast, boys were taught to believe that their primary field of activity lay in the public sphere (waged work outside the home, camaraderie at the pub). And as adults—with wives doing all the domestic chores and child rearing—men enjoyed more free time. Both these factors enabled them to join party and unions more frequently than did women. But despite these obstacles, one strongly suspects that with more effort the unions could have increased the paltry numbers of women in their ranks. Instead, they concentrated on skilled men. Masons, carpenters, roofers, machine makers, and the like were the heirs to centuries of artisanal organizational life, a tradition that valued fraternal assistance and independence based on skill. They controlled a work process in which contact with colleagues was frequent, enabling them to get to know each other and fostering solidarity.30 These traditions and their relatively strong position with respect to employers meant that they were the easiest to organize and most likely to strike, with carpenters, masons, and skilled metalworkers employed in small and medium-sized enterprises the most militant.31 In addition to the letterpress printers, these were the only laborers in Leipzig with the benefit of collectively bargained agreements.32 Despite the clarity and rapidity with which entire job categories were being deskilled, the craft unions generally refused to adopt the industrial model, opting instead to amalgamate with other craft unions when their own trades had lost their distinctiveness through dequalification. In this way, between 1890 and 1914 the number of craft unions in the General Commission of German Unions only dropped from fifty-three to forty-eight. The unions structured on the industrial model—the metal-, construction, factory, transport, wood- and textile workers—were all underrepresented in the union umbrella organization, the General Commission. And even in these industrial unions, the leaders came overwhelmingly from a craft background and often displayed reluctance to organize the unskilled, especially women.33 All these factors help explain the ideology they developed. Instead of going on the offensive, the leadership chose to accept the unfavorable parameters created for them by employers and state, hoping to obtain for their members the best possible terms within them.34 Such a strategy required husbanding resources and avoiding conflict with employers until an economic upturn, at which point it was hoped that a tight labor market would provide leverage to extract higher pay and better working conditions for members. Even during


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upturns, however, the unions were never strong enough for an onslaught against the employers. Instead, they had to find the weakest employers and pick them off individually with separate strikes (a strategy meeting with infrequent success since employers usually combated unions in concert).35 The leadership also avoided conflict for another reason: it spent ever less revenue on strike pay and ever more on welfare programs for members. Heads of what often amounted to friendly societies, union leaders did not wish to risk coffers on strikes with little prospect of victory.36 To keep revenue flowing in while minimizing the chance of a catastrophic defeat at the hands of employers, the leadership became increasingly risk averse. Not surprisingly, it vigorously opposed the movement within the spd to make the general strike the chief weapon to wring democratic reform from elites.37 While avoiding conflict with capital may have safeguarded the survival of the organization, it did not promise to raise wages for workers. If real wages were rising, this was due to near full employment, for unions managed to organize only 20 percent of all wageworkers by 1913 (though that number was rising).38 Few Leipzig workers, then, came into contact with the moderate ideology of the unions. The preceding chapter ascertained that even fewer of them belonged to the spd. The fact that workers were left to develop their own ideas beyond the reach of the unions and party was to have repercussions during the Great War and revolution.

Intervention by the SPD When discussing the wage relationship, party leaders in Leipzig limited themselves to demanding the eight-hour day and abolition of discriminatory laws against unions.39 These desiderata, if achieved, would limit the worst excesses of employer authority. Of importance here is the fact that the local party very rarely questioned the authority itself, a great irony considering the enshrinement of Karl Marx in its pantheon of thinkers. In this regard, it resembled a national spd leadership that dismissed planning for the socialist future as “utopian.”40 Only once did I come across an attempt by the local party to conceptualize an alternative to the wage relationship. An essay entitled “The Future State” (Der Zukunftsstaat) appeared on the editorial page of the lvz during the 1912 Reichstag election. It reads in part: Bürgerliche dominance cannot continue. For the more the oppressed classes see clearly and feel physically where this leads, the more they will struggle

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against it and seek to steer developments in another direction. The largescale, industrial organization of labor, which no longer contents itself with private property, of itself indicates a new goal. The organization of economic life, the big, well-organized factories, the advanced machinery—all that we want to keep. But we do not need the capitalist magnates at the top, for they are totally superfluous. When the democratic state—as the representative of the masses—takes their place, exploitation will be abolished [aufgehoben], no more profits will fall to capital, and the working masses will receive the full product of their labor, which will then be directed exclusively to the satisfaction of the needs of society. That is the socialist state of the future [Zukunftsstaat]: not a perfected, completed picture, but rather the essence of a new set of developmental forms for society.41

Whether the new socialist society will arrive via reform or revolution, the essay does not specify. But arrive it must, for “bourgeois dominance cannot continue.” And despite the essay’s nebulousness (“not a perfected, completed picture, but rather the essence of a new set of developmental forms for society”), it definitely foresees a state-owned and state-directed economy in which only the top layer of capitalist owners and managers would be replaced by state administrators. Beyond those generalities, the reader learns nothing. Thus, in perhaps its only attempt to propose an alternative to the wage relationship, the local party formulated a plan characterized by teleology, vagueness, and incipient etatism. Part 3, when following the course of the revolution in Leipzig, examines the consequences of this dimly conceived socialist agenda in detail.

Experience at the Point of Production The feebleness of state and Social Democratic intervention afforded Leipzig employers a great deal of authority within the “at will” wage relationship, authority expressing itself in the dozens of regulations contained in the Arbeitsordnungen. Chatting, horseplay, failure to keep equipment clean, waste of materials, errors, and lateness resulted in fines ranging from a few pfennigs to 20 marks.42 Punctuality was the rule most commonly violated: “At the stroke of 6 a.m. and again at 1 p.m. the porter closed the factory gate . . . sometimes in such a way that the bars almost hit the noses of those rushing to arrive on time. Ten or twenty workers found themselves locked out, for the distances that many had to travel from home led easily to being one or two minutes late.”43 Most Arbeitsordnungen required overtime with no notice and at the


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normal wage: “Variations from the normal schedule will be posted. Each worker is required to work after the end of the day at his normal wage rate” (58). And with surprising frequency these rules also attempted to regulate employees’ political choices: “Each worker pledges to belong neither to a union nor to a Social Democratic organization. Furthermore, reading the Leipziger Volkszeitung is forbidden.”44 Of course, not all these stipulations could be applied all the time. Implementation depended on foremen who might soften certain provisions in practice.45 Nevertheless, perusal of hundreds of these documents in the staatsal leaves no doubt that the formal authority of employers was nearly total. The final decade before the war saw that authority increasing. In the good old days, workers, especially those paid by piece rate, could often leave the premises without informing management or even curl up in a corner and take a nap. Bromme, writing around 1900, looked back nostalgically to the more relaxed work rhythms of his youth: “The reader will wonder how it was possible that one could leave the work site just like that. I myself in later times have wondered about it. We viewed these liberties as entirely self-evident.”46 Bromme also reports that skipping work on “Blue Monday”—a time-honored custom of sleeping off the effects of Sunday drinking—resulted in dismissal ever more frequently (249). How did employer authority manifest itself concretely? Whereas the strip mines in the countryside employed more wage laborers than any other industry in Mitteldeutschland, engineering represented the biggest sector in Leipzig itself, overtaking publishing around the turn of the century.47 A male preserve,48 engineering jobs were in the process of being dequalified. As late as the 1880s accuracy still depended on the skill of the workman. But advances thereafter in the automated cutting, boring, and grinding of metal led to a situation where most workers needed merely to set the gauges of a machine, turn it on, and mind it.49 Entire job categories within machine making—Fräser, Bohrer, Hobler, Schlosser, Schweißer, Dreher, Schmied—were reinvented during these years. By the turn of the century, the line between skilled and semiskilled labor had become so blurred that workers shuttled back and forth, depending on the type of job available (a situation unthinkable a few decades earlier for the proud, skilled machine maker).50 As dequalification advanced, truly skilled machine makers did not disappear, but their relative numbers decreased as their tasks became ancillary: setup, troubleshooting, model making. Nevertheless, machine making remained at least a semiskilled profession until after the Great War, when the work process finally shifted from nodal-

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point production to the conveyor belt. In the former system, a piece for, say, a locomotive made its way through the workshop where it was formed, cut, ground, and bored by different workers—a process requiring extensive communication between them—before ending up at the point of assembly with the other pieces of the engine. There the highly skilled fitter (Monteur) specially ground down or recast those pieces that did not fit. Perhaps on the ninth or tenth attempt the locomotive could finally be assembled and put through a test run. The advent of gauged, self-regulating machinery, however, meant that individual pieces could be created to within one one-thousandth of a millimeter of blueprint specifications. Such accurate parts could be screwed together by unskilled hands on an assembly line. Already before the war superaccurate gauged machinery had become increasingly common, although slowness in recognizing its potential delayed the introduction of the conveyor belt in German machine making until the taylorization wave of the 1920s (see photo plate 7).51 Hours were long and, for the semiskilled, filled with tedium and fatigue: My colleagues at the end of the day were tired and languid. . . . It’s no triviality to persevere at one’s task for eleven hours each day with 120 other men in a hot room pregnant with oily, greasy haze and coal and iron dust. Actually it was not the heavy physical work that made the factory labor so utterly exhausting but rather this close living together, this breathing together, sweating together of many people, as well as the heavy air pressure and the relentless, nerve-deadening, violently screeching, droning, rattling noise and the uninterrupted eleven hours of standing in perpetual solitude in a single spot.52

As the cutting and grinding of metal constitutes the essence of machine making, “over everything lay a thick blanket of . . . iron dust. [The workshop] was bleak, barren and black” (41). And yet over all this also lay “nobility and poetry. Not only when sunlight flooded in from [the glass roof] above and illuminated even the dirt and iron, but also when gray skies made the bleakness, blackness, and bareness even bleaker, blacker, and more barren” (44). Dust not only covered the workshop, it endangered those in it. “As a result of the continuous dust, [the workshop] was very unhealthy. The worker there succumbed, sooner or later, to tuberculosis. The dust would destroy even the strongest organism. He who receives a decent wage [and] eats and drinks well can last, in any event, ten years. Usually, however, he must visit a tb clinic two


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or three times during this period, until his number is up [bis es aus mit ihm ist].”53 When not in particle form, steel posed other dangers. As Göhre reports: During my [three months] in the factory, only one major accident occurred. It kept the victim at home for fourteen days. An iron rail of about twenty pounds fell on his foot. Its sharp edge bored through his boot, tore through the flesh, and separated it from the bone. By contrast, smaller accidents happened all the more frequently: crushing of fingers and toes, painful injuries of the fingernail, wounding of hands by sharp edges and corners, injury to the eyes by iron splinters. The latter happened especially frequently.54

The typical engineering worker in Leipzig suffered 10.46 sick days in 1909, more than counterparts in any other male-dominated profession (e.g., construction work, transportation, carpentry) and 51.83 percent more than average for these industries.55 Although hardly any women found employment in machine making, they constituted, as noted above, fully 26.56 percent of Leipzig’s waged workforce in 1910. Disproportionately represented in the city’s least skilled trades, they made up 46 percent of the chemical, 48 percent of the leather (predominantly unskilled factory shoe production), 60 percent of the paper, and fully 69 percent of the textile workforce.56 Lack of skill at least partially explains why they earned, on average, only half of a man’s wage.57 Very few girls obtained skills because what little money parents had was used to apprentice sons. A girl was expected to learn homemaking and be pretty, in the hope of finding a prosperous husband and avoiding wage work.58 But even if somehow a girl were to gain skills, few employers would give her a chance to demonstrate them. In any event, she would probably not hear of job openings since, in the absence of effective labor exchanges, such information was usually acquired through hearsay, often at the local pub, an entirely male domain.59 Just as detachment from the means of production rendered all workers dependent on employers, so detachment from skill obliged women to remain under the authority of fathers or husbands from whom many might have wished to part.60 The few not living at home or married sometimes found themselves obliged to take on a rich sugar daddy61 or turn to prostitution.62 Leipzig’s textile sector employed more women than any other. Unable to boast a tradition of artisanal textile production (as in, say, Krefeld or the Oberlausitz), Leipzig made textiles the modern way: in factories.63 Mills in Leipzig, almost all devoted to wool and cotton production, tended to be

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modern and big, the largest being the Kammgarnspinnerei Stöhr and Co. (employing three thousand) and the Leipziger Wollkämmerei (employing seventeen hundred).64 In such establishments, workers—be they spinners or weavers—remained rooted to one or more machines producing spools of thread or units of fabric. Since they did not collaborate on a common piece (as was the case in engineering under the nodal-point system), personal interaction was difficult. Weaving required more skill than spinning and paid higher wages,65 but within each of these branches, supervisors assigned skilled or unskilled status arbitrarily, reserving so-called skilled positions for men, who earned 30 to 50 percent more than female colleagues.66 Temperature and humidity rose to uncomfortable levels. Like their counterparts in engineering, textile workers endured long hours and noisy, unhealthy conditions, as Wettstein-Adelt attests: [In the mills] the girls work eleven hours [ten hours after 1908—Au.] in an atmosphere of dust that caused a serious cold to develop in my lungs on the third day of my employment. Small tufts of the loosened wool fill the air, settle on clothes and hair, fly in nose and mouth. The machines must be brushed off every two hours causing the dust to be inhaled by the girls since they are not allowed to open the windows. Moreover, one must contend with the horrible, nerve-shaking noise of the rattling machines that prevents one from hearing one’s own voice. She who does not scream at the top of her lungs cannot speak to her neighbor. With unbelievable daring, the girls reach into working machines, pull out the flying shuttle, and lay it, now full, back in. As long as I was there no injuries occurred—nor had any in recent memory. . . . The girls work hard, very hard. Many told me how in their first four weeks on the job they collapsed from the strain and how most suffered for months from lung and throat illnesses until becoming accustomed to the dust. . . . One should not underestimate the work of the carpet weaver. . . . When following a complicated, Turkish model, the weaver must make use of the seconds in which the spools are transformed into different colors; they must think and add, calculate and be alert, and concentrate all their thoughts. . . . In most factories work begins at 6:30 a.m. From 8:00 to 8:30 there is breakfast; from 12 noon to 1 p.m. lunch break. At 4:00 p.m. one gets a twenty- to thirty-minute break, after which work continues until the final whistle at 7:00 p.m. On Saturdays work finishes at 5:30 p.m. [3:30 after 1908— Au.] in order to leave the workers time to clean and oil their machines thoroughly before the closing [a half hour later].67


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The typical textile laborer in Leipzig reported 13.15 sick days in 1909, more than their counterparts in any other female-dominated profession and 36 percent more than average for these industries.68 Lunch break offered most women no rest, for the main meal of the day needed either to be brought to a husband’s workplace or prepared at home for him, the children, and lodgers (Schlafleute).69 “The general custom: hundreds of proletarian women and children carrying food and hurrying down the street shortly before noon in order to be with a waiting, hungry father or husband. . . . On the municipal benches one saw the resting men with a steaming pot of food in one hand, a spoon in the other, wife or child seated next to him, often also eating.”70 Not surprisingly, few factory laborers in Leipzig, male or female, enjoyed their jobs. Bromme describes his as “an immense sum of want, misery, care, and anxiety.”71 Discussing those who built the ancient pyramids, one worker remarks, “They were the beasts of burden, the slaves of four thousand years ago. We factory workers of today are the slaves and beasts of burden of the present.”72 Göhre describes the aspirations of his colleagues as “being no longer the deaf, mindless tools of a higher will, not . . . the obedient machines but rather potent and cooperating people, not only hands but also heads” (213). To be sure, workers took pride in skill. And a fortunate few were assigned challenging tasks requiring creativity.73 The majority, however, viewed their jobs with indifference or distaste.74 Resentment among workers sometimes soured a job even further. Wettstein-Adelt’s colleagues in the textile mill clove into two groups: hereditary proletarians and former servants. “In general, the two parties regard each other with open hostility. The genuine workers view the former servants for the most part as degenerate creatures to whom they feel superior. The servant, on the other hand, always speaks of the ‘fine people’ she formerly served and by whose example she knows best how a ‘fine person’ behaves.”75 Although no evidence specific to Leipzig could be uncovered, anecdotes from other German cities suggest that the relationship between men and women, when they labored together, could be charged with tension. Specifically, women often endured harassment from male colleagues, mostly in the form of aggressively dirty jokes and stories.76 Perhaps the most important distinction between workers was that based on skill. In a machine-making factory, for instance, the fitters, as those with the most skill, “adopted the role almost of a foreman vis-à-vis their underlings. Their relationship to them was half that of superior, half that of comrade.”77

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Hierarchy among workers, however, paled in comparison to that between workers and supervisors. “The foreman’s . . . higher social position manifested itself clear as day during and, even more, outside work. Even their clothes differentiated them from everybody else in the factory. They wore no worker’s smock but instead, even during work, the usual stylish jacket, tie, and white shirt. They are . . . the sergeants of the factory” (83). The relationship between workers and foremen was one not only of hierarchy but of antipathy. Bromme describes how, as a teenager, he never met a single sympathetic foreman on his many jobs and even got his ears boxed by a number of them.78 An engineering worker earns the scorn of his colleagues because he deferentially removes his cap when addressing the foreman (261). Bromme himself incurs their disapproval on account of his friendship with the foreman’s brother (287). Unfriendliness also characterized contact between workers and lower white collars. Göhre’s colleagues “viewed . . . clerks, draftsmen, and engineers . . . all as belonging to an entirely different social class and as having nothing, inwardly or outwardly, to do with them. That was promoted by the fact that these [lower white collars] came into contact with workers seldom and rarely entered the factory itself. When this did happen, the complaint I heard among the workers in my half of the factory about cold and arrogant behavior was, according to all my observations, justified.”79 Bromme experienced this coldness when, after six years of service to his company, he was forced to quit because of job-related tuberculosis. “I went to the office and requested my papers. Without losing a word, without asking the reason for my departure, I received them from the bookkeeper, who attached a certificate expressing the disapproval of the manager.”80 Female workers viewed whitecollar supervisors even more resentfully, for they had to contend with the latter’s continual sexual harassment.81 Wettstein-Adelt writes, “Their hatred for what they call the ‘ink wipers’ [Tintenwischer]—the scribes and salesmen who work in the office—can only be described as fanatical. . . . As long as I remained a worker I shared this opinion entirely.” That a bookkeeper called Wettstein-Adelt herself into his office and propositioned her only deepened her resentment. Surprisingly, she retained her job despite rebuffing him.82 Behind measures enacted by foremen and clerks, workers often perceived the will of the employer himself. A case of the flu kept Bromme at home almost two weeks. “As I returned to work, the foreman greeted me with a scowl and said, ‘This can’t continue, this constant sickness! Your machines can’t remain untended. If it happens again, you’ll have to find another job.’ Naturally, I raised objections. How could I help it if I were sick? ‘That’s not my con-


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cern. The boss [der Alte] and engineer won’t stand for it, and I get grief on your account.’ ”83 The foreman’s intransigence becomes comprehensible when one considers that his predecessor had been fired for being too mild with the workers (255). Laborers sometimes came into direct contact with employers, especially when they worked in smaller firms. Bromme recalls his relationship with the owner of a Leipzig restaurant where he waited tables as a teenager. “The boss said to me more than once: ‘You’ve been stealing!’ That really gnawed at me. Add to that the other insults and eternal boxing of my ears. I was already seventeen years old . . . and I didn’t want to kiss the hand that continually struck me. And finally these repeated suspicions, despite the fact that I was honest and had a good attitude! That truly rankled me” (142). Later in life Bromme, as a machinist in a woodworking factory where unhealthy dust plagued him and his colleagues, persuaded a state inspector to visit the workshop. Soon after the inspector had ordered the firm to install a ventilation system, the boss called Bromme into his office. “ ‘Now, Bromme,’ he began, ‘you are of course the one who called that inspector in here. You are not doing well [financially] at the moment. You should concern yourself more with your family than with party and union escapades. Naturally, you are through here in fourteen days. And you suffer more for it than I. Ingrates such as you—to whom we gave a raise and yet who sic the inspectors on us— we don’t wish to employ. Make sure you get out of here: in fourteen days it’s over’” (230). Considering the lack of state and union protection, only a tight labor market shielded workers from capitalist authority. As noted in the introduction, precisely this state of affairs pertained in boomtown Leipzig. Despite recessions in 1900–1902, 1907–9, and 1913–14, the unemployment rate rarely rose above 6 percent.84 With labor in demand, workers utilized their only undisputed right within the wage relationship: they quit. During this period, the average length of tenure for workers at the Sack Engineering Factory and Bleichert Transportation Works was only 1.2 years. This figure is dwarfed by an average tenure of 6.5 years for white-collar employees at the Leipzig Cotton Mill during the same period.85 While data from the personnel records of only three companies encompassing three hundred case histories must be viewed with caution, they strongly suggest that average tenures for wageworkers were brief and, in any event, significantly shorter than those of white-collar employees. Impressionistic evidence buttresses this claim, for the insecurity of employment, constant need to quit, and recurring search for a new position represent the dominant motif in proletarian autobiogra-

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phies.86 One changed jobs “in order to improve one’s condition but often jumped from the frying pan into the fire.”87 Aware of this risk, workers sometimes decided to stick with a current job and make it more bearable by evading the boss’s strictures. They did so most commonly through behavior that Alf Lüdtke labels Eigensinn. Lüdtke defines this word, translatable as “willfulness” or “obstinacy,” as “a striving for time and space of one’s own . . . a self-willed distancing” from authority.88 One might supplement this definition by noting that in any given situation individuals attempt to extricate themselves, often in a semiconscious manner, from limits on their freedom of action. This drive manifests itself most often in a prosaic manner as a generalized urge to liberate the self from material want: hunger prompts the individual to seek food; cold, clothing and shelter; and so on. But one also observes this willfulness, this Eigensinn, in social relations in that authority breeds resistance among those subordinate to it. One rarely encounters children who obey their parents in every respect; it is rarer still to find such teenagers. Of course, in contesting authority one usually relies on the cultural tools, the discourses, available in one’s society. But that authority automatically provokes some resistance, no matter how ineffective, seems to me indisputable. How did Eigensinn manifest itself in the wage relationship of prewar Leipzig and Mitteldeutschland? At its most basic level, through shirking. Wettstein-Adelt relates how “normally [my colleagues] are already out the door when their machines are only beginning to come to a halt. If, by chance, the foreman or manager appears, they scurry quickly back to their machines and pretend to work. He distinguishes, however, the lazy from the industrious, and these encounters rarely end without a reprimand.”89 Similarly, Bromme describes how two colleagues in his engineering workshop “often borrowed my Volkszeitung and read. Once, Heilmann laid himself out on a crate behind the main belt drive. Only the very tip of the newspaper was visible. Then the foreman came along, spotted it, and approached him. Wasting no words, he snatched the paper away and put it in his vest, naturally in order to read it himself. Then he came over to me and said, ‘Altenburger Volkszeitung? Of course, it would be you . . . who contaminates the entire shop with this Social Democratic poison.’ ”90 Using examples provided by Göhre, Lüdtke has shown how workers, through ostentatious horseplay, signaled to management that they would not be cowed by the Arbeitsordnungen.91 Other sources document tomfoolery on the shop floor: “In the weaving mills, where dust and dirt reign, the girls must completely change their clothes. . . . Although the Fabrikordnung stipulates


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that the female workers may only change in the dressing room, very few do so. With the greatest lack of modesty they simply strip down to their underwear while cracking jokes about their own clothes.”92 One of WettsteinAdelt’s colleagues went further than that, habitually exposing her private parts and uttering expletives (31). Bromme recalls from his youth how he and his pals repeatedly played jokes on each other, including this one on an older colleague, Wagner, who was whiling away a Blue Monday at the pub and therefore in danger of being fired: A certain Kurze brought a cabbage into the factory and carved a face into it. Then he put some boxes and crates on Wagner’s seat, put the cabbage on top, and hung a coat around the entire figure. An old hat was put on top of the cabbage, and the sleeves stuffed accordingly. From behind it looked like a man at work. Now an apprentice was sent to the [pub] to whisper in Wagner’s ear, “Franz, your spot is taken!” . . . Like a wild man, the old man stomped into the factory. He stopped behind the figure and screamed at it: “Away from my machine!” When no response followed, he shoved the figure in the side, causing the entire apparition to collapse. The whole factory exploded in laughter.93

Sometimes flouting the rules harmed an employer’s interests more directly. Workers used company tools, materials, and time to fashion articles for personal consumption.94 The young Bromme, waiting tables at yet another restaurant, retaliated against a stingy boss by stealing lunches of fine cheese. “It tasted superb!” he boasts to the reader, without a trace of guilt.95 Wettstein-Adelt’s colleagues also viewed appropriation of an employer’s property as legitimate. “A theft of small quantity does not count as shameful. The girls steal openly in front of each other, for they don’t squeal on each other. . . . Yarn was stolen in massive amounts, always in small skeins. The women knit it into stockings.”96 The antipathy behind these acts sometimes expressed itself more crudely: “Very many of the girls—and not the novices but more the experienced workers, even the overseers [Directricen]—ruin factory property with a poorly repressed Schadenfreude. When, as a new hire, I sought to use every scrap of material and wool, I was mocked and reviled as a ‘friend of the factory’ [fabrikfreundlich] and treated rudely even by the overseer” (22–23). Disrespect for company property might also become political, as when anonymous workers in Göhre’s factory covered its walls with pro-spd graffiti around election time.97 Conflict with bosses generated a rough group consciousness among work-

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ers. Addressing each other with the informal Du, they reserved the formal Sie for supervisors (4, 79). Workers often dubbed a newly hired colleague with a nickname, usually humorous and slightly deprecating.98 On the shop floor, this new identity received from the group took precedence over any individual sense of self. For whatever differences of skill divided them, in general “they all were and felt themselves to be workers [Arbeiter].”99 This collective sense of “us” vis-à-vis management permeated the workshop: “When, for example, management introduced an innovation in production, work times, mode of compensation, one could observe exactly how the majority of workers hesitatingly, undecidedly reserved their judgment and opinion until all at once the ‘official line’ formed itself. And when this official position did not please some of the workers, ran counter to their interests, it nonetheless represented a power that one respected and against which one only seldom dared to protest” (102). Such was the hold of this group consciousness that workers viewed all management decisions with distrust, even those that, at first glance, appeared harmless or even accommodating. In Göhre’s factory, for instance, they greeted the boss’s decision to form an elected worker committee (ArbeiterAusschuß)—created ostensibly to facilitate communication between workers and management—with wariness. “After a few days the workers reached consensus . . . that the whole thing, at the very least, had started poorly but that probably it was a clever ruse by management against the workers. The method of election alone proved it. Open voting was ordered so as to learn the opinions of each individual man” (139). Management employed various means to fragment proletarian solidarity. They let workers know there were spies among them,100 and they paid laborers with the same seniority doing the same job wildly different wages so as to promote jealousy.101 Workers who attempted to foster unity in the face of the employer were usually fired.102 While these and other measures probably helped thwart the formation of unions, they failed to dissolve the rough group consciousness reviewed above. “[The worker] recognizes and experiences . . . today’s unbridgeable contradiction of interests between himself and the employers.”103 This antagonism, however, rarely induced workers to depart from the realm of Eigensinn and challenge employers directly. Aware of their dispensability and largely unorganized, semi- and unskilled laborers rarely attempted strikes. Only skilled workers—above all those in construction, carpentry, and engineering—enjoyed the kind of union strength that permitted walkouts with a chance of success.104 Letterpress printers and engravers, numerous in


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Leipzig because of the scale of the city’s publishing and printing industry, were also highly skilled and unionized.105 For the most part, however, they chose not to confront employers but instead cooperated with them. The letterpress printers were especially moderate: their union was the only one within Leipzig’s Cartel of Free Unions to abstain from endorsing the spd.106 Their use of the formal (and bürgerlich) Sie with colleagues rather than the informal (and proletarian) Du also indicates an outlook diverging from that of other types of workers.107 Occasional strikes did erupt among the lesser skilled, usually in pursuit of higher wages or fewer hours. The 1903 strike of seventy-five hundred textile workers in Crimmitschau—a factory town in Mitteldeutschland to the south of Leipzig—offers a case study. Women made up 58 percent of the strikers, and half the women were unorganized. Considering the dual burden examined earlier in this chapter, it is not surprising that shortening the workday from eleven to ten hours represented their chief demand. With a slogan of “One more hour for us! One more hour for our families!” they placed special emphasis on forcing management to observe the legally mandated one-hour lunch break for female employees. Despite a coordinated lockout by the employers and, eventually, a “state of siege” declared in Crimmitschau by Land officials, the strikers held out for six months. Although they achieved none of their immediate demands, the national attention they attracted “was widely viewed by contemporaries as ‘ripening the climate’ for the revision of the labor code in 1908 and the introduction of the mandatory ten-hour day for female workers.”108 Despite a low rate of unionization, women were as likely to strike as unskilled male counterparts.109 The fact that most contemporary observers and modern historians have discovered only apathy among female workers makes this finding in Leipzig a surprise.110 But it becomes less astonishing when one considers the extreme subordination they suffered within the wage relationship. The workshop floor in Leipzig did not breed apolitical women but instead a distinctive style of mobilization inclining them to strike with surprising frequency considering their lack of union organization. Even the relationship between master artisans and journeymen—a relationship supposedly characterized by paternal concern on one side and filial respect on the other—sometimes dissolved in rancor.111 Strikes enraged alter Mittelstand employers because they undercut their claim to be father figures motivated not by capitalist greed but by a disinterested desire to initiate dependents into the “mysteries of the trade.” As seen throughout this chapter, employers enjoyed a number of advan-

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tages vis-à-vis workers when it came to shaping the terms of the wage relationship. But at least one factor helped workers in this struggle: neighborhood. The social interdependency characterizing their uniformly proletarian, densely packed neighborhoods facilitated the enforcement of solidarity. Those not supporting colleagues in a dispute with an employer found themselves personally vilified in the “Union Movement” column of the lvz.112 Once identified, they might find themselves snubbed by neighbors, ignored at the pub, or even denied service at the corner grocer.113 To summarize the first section of this chapter, constant job changes, Eigensinn, and, less importantly, union membership and strikes failed to make the “at will” wage relationship agreeable to Leipzig’s workers. Its unpleasantness permits the surmise that many must have yearned for a radical, egalitarian transformation of shop floor conditions.114 Those attempting to envision this with any degree of precision, however, received virtually no help from the unions or the spd. Part 3 reports the consequences of this dearth of theory.

SALARY RELATIONSHIP The bulk of this chapter has concerned itself with the wage relationship in prewar Leipzig. But scrutiny must also fall on the salary relationship between lower white collars and their superiors in the offices of Leipzig. This additional investigation is necessary because the wage relationship was not the only type of work relationship to come under challenge during the revolution: lower white collars also sought to create a more democratic relationship with employers. I examine the prewar manifestation of Leipzig’s salary relationship in order to determine whether one can speak of longer-term (i.e., prewar) causes of the lower-white-collar mobilization during the revolution. By 1907 the percentage of Leipzig taxpayers drawing a salary had risen to 15.4 percent, up from 10.8 percent in 1882.115 Career salary earners were almost entirely male.116 Upper managers were of course basically satisfied with the salary relationship (I examined their generous levels of compensation chapter 1). This section therefore limits itself to male lower white collars such as clerks, scribes, schoolteachers, secretaries, technical foremen, and so on. As a general rule, a salary differed from a wage in at least two ways. First, it was not paid in return for narrowly circumscribed manual labor but instead for duties that tended to be nonmanual in nature and much more wide-rang-


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ing (salary contracts in prewar Leipzig required simply “faithful service” from employees). Second, wages were paid by the hour and reflected the expectation that the relationship would be short term, terminated “at will” by either employer or worker. By contrast, most salary contracts uncovered in Leipzig’s company archives provided multiyear employment. Payment was not by the hour but by the month. Lower white collars thus enjoyed a privileged position compared to wageworkers. In an economy requiring ever more of their skills, Leipzig’s lower white collars enjoyed average employment stints of six-and-a-half years.117 With a steady source of income, they found it much easier to obtain bank loans.118 Finally, their working environment was much safer than that of wageworkers.119 No office employee contended with the temperatures reaching fifty degrees centigrade and dust “that would kill the strongest organism” that Bromme describes in his machine-making factory.120 Despite this comparatively favorable situation, there are signs that many lower white collars in Leipzig were not entirely satisfied. Domineering superiors were not unknown in the offices of Wilhelmine Germany.121 Moreover, after 1890 lower white collars faced an economic trend that left them increasingly nervous. As Jürgen Kocka writes: Upper management standardized and streamlined its policy toward the growing number of lower and middle white collars. The latter’s specialization increased. Their chances for career advancement probably declined. They became easier to replace. Considerations of market and job performance determined their salary and security more than before. In this way their similarity to workers grew. Many were subjected to ever closer control and received ever less information about events in the company as a whole. This change appeared to the lower white collars—whose collegial and “civil servant” self-image came ever more into conflict with their real condition as private-industrial employees—as a degradation.122

Paradoxically, then, despite a robust economy bestowing on them a rising living standard and enormous de facto job security, white collars felt, because of the advancing division of labor in the office, increasingly vulnerable. To defend themselves, ever more in Leipzig joined the professional organizations of this new middle class (Neuer Mittelstand). About 55 percent of the organized in Leipzig belonged to the conservative Association of German-National Office Assistants, 35 percent to the liberal Association of German Office Assistants, and less than 10 percent to the Social Democratic Central Associ-

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ation of Office Assistants of Germany. In the public sector, lower civil servants were also organized into various groupings.123 That lower white collars felt it necessary to create their own professional associations indicates not only that they were in the process of forming a distinct consciousness but also that they did not perceive their interests as being perfectly in tune with those of employers. Despite this tension, no lowerwhite-collar organizations in Leipzig struck or even threatened to do so. The police were confident that, with the exception of the small local chapter of the Central Association of Office Assistants of Germany, none would ever ally itself with the unions or spd.124 Only the Public School Teachers’ Association (representing Volksschule instructors) publicly voiced its grievances, demanding that instruction be secularized and teachers and parents gain the right to codetermine school policy with the hitherto omnipotent principal. Rather than justify these demands by reference to democratic or liberal values, the teachers chose a rhetoric of efficiency and nationalism, attacking the royal government’s modest educational reform bill as “not corresponding to the latest findings in pedagogical science and not up to the great tasks of our time challenging the German people in this age of rapid change and national competition.” Although the government ultimately dropped all efforts at reform, the teachers neither threatened to strike nor held a public protest, let alone accepted the Social Democrats’ offer to pressure the government jointly on the issue.125 To conclude: one can speak of a certain tension in the salary relationship in prewar Leipzig, but there was little indication that lower white collars would seek to revise its terms through aggressive collective action. The results of this chapter accord with those of earlier ones in that workers continue to exhibit a high degree of cohesion. As in the social and political spheres, so, too, in the wage relationship did they refer to themselves as Arbeiter and posit interests opposed to those of Bürger, here in the guise of supervisors and employers. While differences of sex and skill divided workers on the shop floor, these faded in comparison to their commonly felt animosity toward foremen and bosses. Unhappiness with the wage relationship probably stimulated workers to muse about alternatives to it, but no evidence emerged of a detailed blueprint. In any event, they received no help in this endeavor from the unions or the spd, both of which limited themselves to questioning the worst excesses of employer authority but not its legitimacy. In the case of the authoritarian political relationship, workers at least had an alternative before their eyes in the form of the Western-style parliamentary


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democracy demanded by the spd. No such alternative to the wage relationship was conceived, let alone discussed, which produced consequences once the revolution broke out. If chapters 1 and 2 raised questions about the cohesiveness of nonworkers, chapter 3, by revealing their shared political identity as Bürger and political solidarity, highlighted their coherence. This chapter underscores that integrity. Elites, lower white collars, and alte Mittelständler all sought to uphold the wage relationship with workers because each benefited from it: economically (surplus appropriated), sexually (favors extracted), and psychologically (the right to command and even beat). Leipzig’s group of Bürger, despite internal social cleavages, acted with impressive solidarity in safeguarding its authority over workers. And this formidable authority grew even stronger with the outbreak of war in August 1914, as the next chapter explores.

chapter 5

ELITE AUTHORITY STRENGTHENS: AUGUST 1914–JANUARY 1915

THE POLITICAL AND wage relationships between workers and nonworkers in Leipzig became stabler and more hierarchical as a result of the outbreak of the Great War. I have already shown how workers protested against imminent war in July 1914. After the Russian general mobilization of 31 July, however, all such overt opposition to the war ceased.1 On 1 August many workers participated in a spontaneous prowar demonstration on Leipzig’s main square, the Augustusplatz.2 On that same day the lvz abandoned its criticisms of the government’s handling of the crisis, presenting the war as a sad but inevitable event; it even ran a progovernment account of the war’s origins originally published in the conservative Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.3 The police noted with satisfaction that the lvz, without prodding by military censors, remained basically uncritical of the government for the remainder of the year.4 Party leaders also fell into line, while the unions placed their organizations at the disposal of the state to help prosecute the war effort. The end of opposition by Leipzig’s spd and unions was “greeted with joy by the Bürgertum.”5 Because the czar and his officials had been clumsy enough to order mobilization before the German government, the latter could portray the war effort as a defensive struggle against Russia.6 This paid the imperial regime high political dividends, especially in terms of proletarian attitudes, for besides the normal patriotic reflex to be expected after a declaration of war, anti-Slav and especially anti-Russian sentiment explain the sudden end of proletarian opposition to the government. While, as I have discussed, almost none had succumbed to the nationalism and anti-Semitism rife among non-

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workers, evidence indicates that many workers felt antipathy toward Slavs and viewed the Russian empire as a despotism to which the Rechtsstaat of Wilhelmine Germany compared favorably. In nearby Mulda, for instance, ethnically German workers did not mix with Czechs off the job and sometimes referred to them as “Bohemian dogs.”7 In Chemnitz, a Saxon industrial boomtown not dissimilar to Leipzig, German and Czech workers led separate social lives and, when encountering each other by chance, sometimes traded insults leading to brawls.8 Hamburg workers resented the presence in their city of Polish migrants who depressed wages, split the union movement, and attended church. The Hamburgers, though admiring the urban workers who had made Russia’s 1905 revolution, expressed hatred for the czar’s empire and believed it was bent on expansion.9 The last two chapters mentioned how in Leipzig German and Slavic workers did not mix. Although no proof could be uncovered, a surmise that tension existed between them would not be fanciful. While, as observed throughout part 1, workers were suspicious of the Wilhelmine state, they were even leerier of a Russian empire that had served as European despotism’s gendarme throughout much of the nineteenth century and only nine years earlier had crushed a democratic uprising of its own people. Unenthusiastically, Leipzig’s workers marched off to battle believing they were defending the fatherland against the czarist knout.10 If workers and their political representatives now supported state policy, they received nothing in return: elites did not democratize the constitution, or promise future democratic reform, or even explicitly recognized the legitimacy of the spd and unions.11 Indeed, political subordination intensified since, because of the near-dictatorial powers devolving on district military commanders in wartime, an already narrow freedom to assemble, speak, and strike was severely curtailed.12 Moreover, stark employer authority within the wage relationship remained unaltered. And in terms of distribution, the state made no move to ease the hardship of war for workers on the home front. In the next chapter I examine the factors affecting the population’s standard of living and the state’s response during the period when ever more workers withdrew their support for the government. Here I limit my analysis to a review of state measures affecting living standards during that period—from the outbreak of war until early 1915—when Leipzig workers still supported the government’s war effort. Expressed differently, the rest of this chapter reviews the state’s quid pro quo in distributional terms for proletarian political loyalty. Under a Reich law of 1888, women with husbands both fighting at the front and in the Reich insurance scheme were entitled to federal support pay-

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ments. When the war broke out, the level of support was increased, and eligibility widened to include women with husbands under the colors in any capacity. Despite this augmentation of funding, the sum offered was so meager that Leipzig officials felt compelled to double it with municipal money (only one-quarter of all German cities took this step). During the course of 1914, twenty-nine thousand families received support that was not allowed to exceed 60 percent of the 1913 wages of the breadwinner in uniform. From this sum was deducted about half of what the wife earned. Recognizing that this created an incentive for women not to work, the authorities terminated support for any woman who refused to work, even if she had several children (later in the chapter I review the extent to which the state helped with child care). Free medical care and dental care at reduced cost supplemented these paltry sums. A family was not allowed to receive both war support and regular welfare.13 Poor families whose main breadwinner remained at home fared no better. In chapter 1 I examined the modest welfare benefits available until 1914. During the war the federal government refused to supplement these initiatives,14 limiting itself to the enactment of so-called welfare programs whose real goal was to depress consumption and thereby free up resources for war production. These measures included the abolition of night bakery work, the reduction of shopping hours on Sundays, and the requirement that all shops remain closed at least seven consecutive hours out of twenty-four.15 Further efforts to husband resources included tightening the distribution of benefits in the Reich insurance schemes.16 Many women outside the wage workforce before 1914 were obliged to enter it after the war’s outbreak in order to support themselves and their children. The federal government not only failed to ease their extra burdens but actually increased them. The Emergency Law of 4 August 1914 empowered local officials to approve exceptions to workplace health and safety regulations and explicitly encouraged them to suspend regulations affecting women and children because they would now constitute a large percentage of the wage workforce. In Leipzig, most of the requests from employers to suspend such regulations were granted, while the number of factory inspections dropped to a handful during the first seven months of 1914. Homeworkers (a large percentage of whom were women) also lost their Reich insurance coverage. Finally, Leipzig’s few child-care facilities were left in private hands and received no extra funding from the city.17 The transition to a war economy dislocated thousands of workers in Leipzig. By the fall of 1914 fully 30 percent of male workers could not find


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jobs.18 During the first six months of the war the female unemployment rate increased 57 percent.19 Reich authorities did nothing in response to the crisis,20 while the city began paying unemployment “support” (purposely not labeled “insurance” so as to emphasize its temporary character) only at the beginning of 1915.21 In addition, the city did not bother to attack unemployment by centralizing labor exchanges, preferring to leave them in the control of the employers.22 Between the sharp drop in income and the failure of authorities to provide welfare, living standards plummeted in 1914 for Leipzig’s workers, especially for women.23 In effect, elites obtained worker endorsement of the government and war effort while giving nothing in return. Leipzig’s workers would probably have forgiven this had elites produced a quick military victory. January 1915, however, found Germany’s armies not marching through the Arc de Triomphe but dug into trenches in the west and locked in combat with a battered but resilient foe in the east. Casualties were climbing, and hardship on the home front intensifying. Enjoying only partial legitimacy for their authority and unable to achieve the kind of success on the battlefield that would have compensated for this deficit, Germany’s rulers found that time was now their enemy.

SUMMARY OF PART 1 The category “nonworker” proved itself a somewhat fissiparous compound. Elites and to a lesser extent lower white collars refused to socialize or intermarry with alte Mittelständler. Moreover, the alter Mittelstand suffered high rates of downward social mobility. Despite its instability, however, the category “nonworker” cohered more often than not. Elites and lower white collars socialized together somewhat (while shunning workers completely); elites, lower white collars, and alte Mittelständler occupied the same neighborhoods in the old city center (while workers inhabited the outlying districts); all three nonworker subgroups rallied around a shared political identity as Bürger to thwart proletarian drives for greater democracy; and all three benefited from the “at will” wage relationship with workers. One can therefore speak of a fairly cohesive group of nonworkers in pre-1914 Leipzig. The category “worker” exhibited even greater integrity. Cracks along the lines of sex and skill were not deep enough to split Leipzig’s wageworkers into separate blocks (for that reason, the distinction between “skilled” and “unskilled” observed in chapter 1 did not turn out to be significant). Most types

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of workers enjoyed a family living standard well below that of nonworkers (though it was climbing swiftly in absolute terms), were massed together in cramped apartments in their own neighborhoods, befriended and married only each other, could not entertain serious hopes for themselves or their children of upward social mobility, enjoyed few political rights compared to nonworkers (women were especially disadvantaged in this regard), and labored in the “at will” wage relationship. When interacting with nonworkers, they tended to refer to them as Bürger and to themselves as “workers” or as members of the working class. Geographically and socially isolated from each other, Leipzig’s workers and nonworkers represented two distinct groups, and their encounters tended toward antipathy. In politics, the different bürgerlich subgroups, while bickering among themselves over a number of issues, closed ranks to exclude workers from power. This situation produced bitterness among workers. As Göhre summarizes his firsthand observations, the workers carried “at all times a feeling of icy cold, of alienation, of mistrust against these ‘superior’ classes, a marked consciousness of the endless chasm between the two, which indeed rarely had a personal edge but exactly for that reason lent an even darker impression to the general observation. One of my friends accurately named it objective hatred.”24 This antagonism toward the Bürgertum and its instrument, the Klassenstaat, engendered in workers a desire for more democracy. Inclining them to act was the fact that elites could not legitimate their authority by reference to a universally accepted set of values. An official spd program demanding democratization of the Klassenstaat and the party’s general discourse privileging the working class as the agent that would one day bring this about further emboldened proletarians. Restraining them from an assault on the status quo, however, was the weight of custom as well as the partial legitimacy of elites as a result of their historically successful record (e.g., unifying the Reich, leading Germany to great-power status, presiding over economic growth) and monopoly on Bildung. The final factor deterring workers from frontally challenging elite rule was the tactical moderation of their own leaders in the spd. In 1905, 1908, and 1910 local spd leaders, from fear of possible bloodshed, dampened proletarian enthusiasm for aggressive prodemocracy street demonstrations. Unhappiness with the wage relationship probably stimulated workers to muse about alternatives to it, but no evidence emerged of a detailed blueprint. In any event, they received almost no help in this endeavor from their Social Democratic leaders, who saw their task as improving current working


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conditions within the wage relationship, not questioning its legitimacy. In the case of the authoritarian political relationship, workers at least had an alternative before their eyes in the form of the Western-style parliamentary democracy demanded by the spd. No such alternative to the wage relationship was conceived, let alone discussed, with consequences once the revolution broke out. As the absolute standard of living was rapidly improving in Wilhelmine Germany, poverty could not have played a big role in fomenting proletarian disenchantment. Rather, this unrest stemmed from workers’ experience of bürgerliche authority in the social, political, and economic realms. Expressed differently, exploitation was less a factor than was subordination in generating dissatisfaction among workers. The war temporarily deflected proletarian anger onto the foreign, especially Russian, enemy. That nonworkers lacked a legitimating ideology for their ascendancy required them, however, to produce continual political, economic, and military success. Their failure to do so during the first six months of the conflict meant that, as of New Year’s Day in 1915, the war began to undermine their authority. This finding of deep proletarian disenchantment with the prewar status quo calls into question a widely accepted view among historians, an interpretation finding its most influential proponents in Gerhard Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde. After presenting considerable evidence to the contrary,25 they write that “in the long term, state and municipal social welfare policies created mass loyalty—if even in hidden form—to the state and thereby substantially facilitated the integration of workers into state and society.”26 By neglecting to define the term “integration,” Ritter and Tenfelde create the (perhaps unintended) impression that wage workers were fundamentally content with their lot before 1914.27 This might have been the case elsewhere in Germany (though I doubt it, especially after 1905), but it certainly was not true in Leipzig. Chapter 1 found that welfare programs made no appreciable difference in the lives of Leipzig’s workers and therefore could not have served to integrate them. Chapters 3 and 4 uncovered substantial evidence of their yearning for more democracy in the political and wage relationships. If workers in Leipzig were partially integrated, it had nothing to do with an allegedly generous welfare system. Instead, it stemmed mostly from the partial legitimacy of elites, which rested not on the solid foundation of a universally accepted set of values but rather on a prestige resulting from perceived refinement and past success. Thus, while not totally alienated (as were their counterparts in the indus-

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trial centers of the Russian empire), Leipzig’s workers nonetheless harbored a profound desire for radical political and social change. However, the weight of custom, partial legitimacy of elites, and moderation of spd deterred them from acting on that desire. The Great War, as Part 2 will show, removed all three of these blocking agents in Leipzig, allowing this discontent to find revolutionary expression. The prewar dissatisfaction of Leipzig’s workers, then, represented a necessary precondition of the revolution’s outbreak. While not in acute crisis, imperial Leipzig was not a stable society. This insight obliges the historian to view the revolution not in the traditional time frame of 1914–1920 but instead to expand it to include prewar antecedents and continuities. I hope to demonstrate this argument definitively in Part 2.

part 2

THE RELATIONSHIP DISSOLVES JANUARY 1915–10 NOVEMBER 1918


chapter 6

ELITE AUTHORITY ERODES: WARTIME LEIPZIG, 1915–1917

AS SEEN IN part 1, elites, lacking the legitimacy of democratic elections, could justify their ascendancy only through continual economic, diplomatic, and military success. A setback in any of these areas would have damaged their legitimacy and thus raised the specter of revolution. It was therefore crucial that they intervene in the war economy to support living standards (economic success) and win the war (military success). This chapter reviews their record until 1917, the response of Social Democracy to state policy, and finally the reactions of ordinary workers. The final two war years, falling after passage of the landmark Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law (das vaterländische Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz) of December 1916, receive separate treatment in the next chapter.

THE CHALLENGE OF TOTAL WAR History’s first total war required almost every young man in Leipzig to serve under the colors. Thus nearly every Leipziger on the home front had a close relative or friend at the front. Such a situation of course bred anxiety. But anxiety turned to dread as the 1915 casualty rate of Leipzigers at the front doubled over that of 1914.1 And now that the conflict had become a war of attrition, the slaughter might continue indefinitely. The Great War also upended Leipzig’s economy, leading to a catastrophic drop in the production of consumer goods. One of the most important factors behind this decrease in production was the shrinkage of the city’s popu-

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T H E R E L AT I O N S H I P D I S S O LV E S

lation between 1914 and 1918 by 13 percent, mostly as a result of the draft.2 These eighty-two thousand Leipzigers were among the city’s most economically productive residents: young male workers, lower-white-collar employees, and small business owners. Simultaneously, the city’s economy was converting willy-nilly to a war footing, requiring a massive redeployment to war industries of labor from sectors such as food processing, textiles, leather, woodworking, and the building trades. As I discussed in the preceding chapter, economic conversion lasted at least a year, creating severe unemployment in Leipzig well into 1915, especially among women. Other factors depressing production of consumer goods included the Entente’s naval blockade, which cut off the foreign markets on which Leipzig’s export-oriented economy depended and also led by 1915 to a shortage of raw materials, especially oil, rubber, and cotton. In the helter-skelter of conversion, workers unfamiliar with the making of metal and chemicals received poor training, worked extended shifts, and proved therefore less productive than those they replaced. The many accidents they suffered on the job further reduced productivity.3 While I could not ascertain the precise drop in Leipzig’s industrial production, it was probably roughly equal to that in Germany as a whole, about 45 percent.4 One must bear in mind that a large portion of this shrunken output was devoted to military goods, thus indicating a very severe decline in the production of consumer goods. Diminished production of consumer goods depressed living standards for all urban Germans, but Leipzigers were especially hard hit, above all because of the reduced food supply. As one of Germany’s most densely populated regions, western Saxony had little arable land per resident, and Leipzig’s peculiar geographical position further undermined its ability to obtain agricultural products. The western half of the kingdom of Saxony was part of what was at that time informally called Mitteldeutschland, an agroindustrial region also comprising the province of Saxony and most of Thuringia.5 These areas, most of which were under Prussian control, supplied prewar Leipzig with most of its food. With the outbreak of the war, however, officials in each of Germany’s Länder strove for autarchy in an effort to feed their respective populations. Consequently, Leipzig city officials obtained food shipments from Prussia only with difficulty.6 Greatly compounding these difficulties was the Entente naval blockade. In terms of food supply, then, Leipzig was probably worse off than most other German cities. Less food and fewer consumer goods lead, of course, to a drop in the general standard of living. But two groups can brake this fall to a large extent. Farmers need not worry about hunger. And in an inflationary economy

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where the rules of barter increasingly govern exchange, they possess the one commodity for which there is always demand: food. Business owners and upper-level managers also find themselves in a privileged position. A drop in income for most of them means merely smaller savings accounts, not decreased consumption. Moreover, as those who own or control the means of production, they can hide much of their personal consumption as “company expense.” Finally, like farmers, they possess real goods that can be exchanged in a barter economy. By contrast, workers and lower-white-collar employees generally do not enjoy such advantages in a war economy, for their wages and salaries tend to fall behind the rate of inflation. Their living standard can be protected from a disastrous drop only through: (a) financing the war as progressively as possible; (b) redistributing income from rich to poor; (c) ensuring that the cities are supplied with food, requisitioning agricultural produce if necessary; and (d) regulating prices. The extent to which elites succeeded in these four areas would have a great impact on their legitimacy and therefore ascendancy.

THE RESPONSE OF THE STATE TO THE CHALLENGE OF TOTAL WAR Assuming a nation lacks a preexisting war chest, it can finance a war only through taxation, printing money, borrowing, or a combination of all three. To pay for the First World War, Germany relied overwhelmingly on debt. While tax revenue covered 20 to 30 percent of Britain’s war costs, it covered only 6 percent of Germany’s expenses. And because of the peculiarities of the Bismarckian constitution, which prohibited the Reich from levying a direct income tax, the burden of this 6 percent fell on the shoulders of the less affluent in the form of higher sales and excise taxes and fees for use of stateowned enterprises.7 Only in 1916 did the Reich finally impose a 50 percent tax on war profits that, judging from the negligible revenue it raised, was easily evaded. Ultimately, Reich direct and indirect taxation raised only enough money to cover the rising interest on the state’s war debt. The debt itself— about 150 billion 1913 Marks—remained outstanding.8 Borrowing to finance a war carries with it at least two advantages. It provides the state with an immediate lump sum of money and, in the event of victory, the debt can be amortized by exacting reparations from the vanquished foe (which is what Germany did to France in 1871). Indeed, under certain circumstances, debt can be a valuable element of an overall strategy to finance a war. Britain’s precocious ability to raise huge loans gave it a deci-

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sive advantage over France in their duel for global hegemony in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In most cases, however, the drawbacks of extensive debt outweigh its benefits. First, relying on debt squanders the opportunity to raise taxes at the moment of least political resistance (i.e., at the outbreak of a war, when selfsacrificing patriotism surges to its height). Raising taxes also immediately transforms civilian demand for consumer goods into the state’s ability to procure war materiel. Moreover, debt-financing offers a poor strategy to a state locked out of international capital markets. The British government borrowed so successfully during the eighteenth century because it enjoyed access to the City of London and the banks of Amsterdam, both denied to the Bourbons and later Napoleon. Similarly, during the Great War, both Britain and France could borrow freely in New York, an option foreclosed to Germany. The Reich was therefore obliged to borrow from its own subjects. But as Germans became increasingly reluctant to subscribe to war loans, the state had to avail itself of short-term credit from the Reichsbank, in effect adding to the money supply and thereby accelerating an already galloping inflation rate resulting from the shortage of goods. This represented an inflation tax that fell indiscriminately on net creditors, people on fixed incomes, and wage and salary earners. The only people who do well in such an environment are those who possess the means—in the form of collateral—to take on debt, which they can repay later with depreciated currency. In other words, rich noncreditors benefit from inflation, creating social tension at a time when the state requires domestic harmony in order to prosecute the war. Furthermore, in the event of a defeat or stalemate, the debt must be paid back with higher taxes at exactly the moment when the citizenry is least willing to sacrifice (i.e., after an exhausting struggle during which the standard of living has plummeted). Raising taxes after a war further damages the torn fabric of society by transferring income from (poorer) taxpayers to (wealthier) bond holders. And in a postwar environment where the state’s ability to meet its obligations is uncertain, bonds often become discounted and therefore a kind of cash, increasing the money supply and further stoking inflationary fires.9 In opting for debt over taxes, Reich authorities in effect gambled that Germany would prevail and then be able to compel its enemies to pay for the war. If that failed to transpire, the costs would be borne by the poorer groups in society.10 In matters financial, then, the Wilhelmine state continued to favor elites, even after the outbreak of total war. If the state failed to find an equitable way to finance the war, perhaps it compensated workers by supporting them against employers? Until the pas-


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sage of the Auxiliary Service Law in December 1916, this would have been accomplished primarily through the policies of the deputy commander in each army corps district. Under an 1874 law, Germany was covered by seventeen (later increased to twenty-four) such districts. During a state of war, the commanding general of each corps led his troops at the front; back in the district, the competence of his deputy extended to anything connected to the war effort. Thus, in addition to his military duties (recruiting, caring for the wounded, maintaining forts and depots, etc.), he also formulated policy normally reserved to civilian officials: supervision of the press, suppression of political subversion, management of the war economy. This last required that he regulate labor, prices, transport, procurement, and distribution of raw materials, welfare, and food supply. The Nineteenth Army Corps covered western Saxony and had its seat in Leipzig. Under a wrinkle of the 1874 law, deputy commanders in Saxony answered formally to the Saxon, not Prussian, war ministry (most other deputy commanders in Germany answered formally to Berlin). In fact, however, all army corps deputy commanders followed more closely the directives of the General Staff (Oberste Heeresleitung, or ohl), since the ohl, not the Saxon war ministry, exercised de facto control over promotions. The ohl granted each deputy commander wide latitude in setting policy, in effect turning each into a kind of satrap. Consequently, the degree to which the military intervened in political and economic matters varied a great deal from one district to the next, and policy between districts was rarely coordinated.11 No evidence emerges from scores of files in the municipal and Land archives of Leipzig and Dresden indicating that the deputy commander of the Nineteenth Army Corps, General von Schweinitz, attempted to support living standards of workers between the outbreak of war and the enactment of the Auxiliary Service Law in December 1916. Only at the end of 1915 did the royal Saxon war ministry in Dresden instruct district deputy commanders to begin systematic organization of the war economy through the creation of special economic departments (volkswirtschaftliche Abteilungen).12 Starting from scratch, the Leipzig Economic Department was not able to intervene in the war economy during its first year of operation, instead spending most of 1916 building staff and gathering information for its daunting tasks. These included: (a) ascertaining which workers were indispensable for the war economy and which could serve on the front; (b) regulating labor relations; (c) supervising rail transportation; (d) helping local industry procure raw materials; and (e) obtaining foodstuffs for the city’s population.13 Besides playing no role in collective bargaining, the district deputy com-

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mander also chose not to involve himself in disputes between individual workers and employers, delegating their mediation to the business court (Gewerbegericht) that had been in existence in Leipzig since the 1870s. The court, whose rulings were nonbinding, tried a mere 2,428 cases in 1915, a total dropping to 1,598 in 1916. Thus no more than 0.5 percent of Leipzig’s 350,000 workers could have come before it. In 1916 the court found in favor of management in 36 percent of cases, in favor of the worker in 15.3 percent of cases, mediated a compromise in 48.2 percent of cases, and rendered an indeterminate opinion in 0.8 percent of cases.14 That this nonbinding court heard so few cases and, even when doing so, rarely found in favor of workers indicates further that the Wilhelmine state in Leipzig retained its bias against workers during the first two years of the war. With the state failing to intervene on their behalf, ever more workers probably wished to strike in order to reverse their sliding standard of living. The police, presumably with the approval of General von Schweinitz, forbade all such actions, usually with the implicit threat that male agitators would be drafted and sent to the front. This ban on strikes extended even to companies not producing for the war. Employees at a local ice-making company, for instance, were forbidden to strike in pursuit of a modest raise.15 The state also exhibited little interest during the first two war years in boosting the living standard of workers through welfare. The modest benefits available to families whose breadwinner was fighting at the front (described in chapter 4) were supplemented annually with a cost-of-living allowance. These colas, however, fell far behind the rate of inflation, rendering already inadequate benefits more slender each year.16 Furthermore, the repeal of workplace safety regulations remained in force, and employers continued to control the city’s labor exchange during this period. While evincing no humanitarian concern for workers, the state nonetheless had an interest in braking the slide in their living standard so as to promote war production. Above all, a workforce requires food if it is to endure fifty-six to seventy hours of heavy labor per week. Because of its high population density and reliance on Prussian grain, Leipzig could have procured a steady food supply only through determined state intervention.17 Despite the importance of the problem, General von Schweinitz during this period ignored it. In late 1914 the royal prefect attempted to fill the breach by facilitating negotiations on the sale of food between the city of Leipzig and surrounding rural townships. Realizing that the price of food would climb as long as the war lasted, the estate owners demanded extremely high prices and refused to lock themselves into long-term contracts. The negotiations ulti-


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mately collapsed. Of interest here is the fact that the royal prefect neither compelled the farmers to provide foodstuffs at an affordable price nor requested that General von Schweinitz—who under the law of 1874 possessed the requisite authority18—impose a solution. That the royal prefect and deputy military commander were prepared to tolerate hunger among workers in the kingdom’s largest city again underscores the inability of the state to compel elites to sacrifice in the interest of prosecuting the war. Unable to obtain affordable food from its immediate environs, city officials enrolled Leipzig in the distribution scheme of the Reich Grain Board (Reichsgetreidestelle). The board was set up to regulate a rational, Reichwide grain trade and control prices if necessary. Under the Reich plan, Leipzig would receive most of its grain from the Prussian province of Saxony. The board, however, proved itself unable or unwilling to force Prussian authorities—who wanted the grain for their own cities—to deliver the promised shipments to Leipzig.19 Thus Leipzigers faced a serious shortage of grain and a critical dearth of meat, dairy products, and vegetables. City officials attempted to deal with this deficit by instituting a system of food stamps in January 1915. Theoretically, all food entering the city was to be stored in warehouses and distributed, against the stamps, at central points throughout Leipzig, chiefly the municipal market hall in the city center. In fact, the system functioned much differently. Possessing very little experience in such matters, city officials spent all of 1915 simply setting up the program, leaving consumers to fend for themselves. The city secured control only over grain and potatoes (other foodstuffs remained largely on the black market). Distributing potatoes from the market hall had to be abandoned in February 1916 because the two to three thousand people lining up daily had assumed such a menacing demeanor that officials feared the outbreak of a food riot. Henceforth, potatoes were distributed by local shops, a solution less efficient but politically safer.20 The shop owners, however, often charged customers more than the allowable maximum. In September 1915—more than a year after the outbreak of the war and only after repeated private protests by representatives of the city’s teachers and postal employees—the city created a special committee to monitor prices of all foodstuffs.21 Even had city officials set up an efficient rationing program, the chief problem remained a thriving black market that siphoned off a large portion of available food before it could enter the official distribution network. Not until the final year of the war did selling on the black market become an offense punishable with prison. Until then, those apprehended were merely

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banned from doing business in Leipzig. During the course of the entire war only fifty-one individuals were thus chastised,22 and even that punishment was easily circumvented since a banned trader needed merely to sell to another black marketeer, who in turn could smuggle the contraband into the city. But the root cause of the burgeoning black market in food was, of course, farmers who refused to sell their produce at below-market prices to the state. I could uncover no evidence that authorities at any level of government exacted requisitions from or punished area farmers during the first two war years. Undoubtedly there existed in Leipzig a number of dedicated public servants—concentrated in the municipal government—who were alarmed at the slide in the proletarian living standard and sought to combat it. But in rectifying it, they faced difficult hurdles. First, the Entente naval blockade shut import-dependent Germany out of world grain markets. Second, as part 1 described, the welfare state in Germany at that time was so rudimentary that they had few instruments at their disposal. Finally, their efforts were more than offset by the indifference of their more numerous colleagues in the municipal, Land, and Reich bureaucracies, as well as those on Schweinitz’s staff.23 In the end, the state did very little to protect the living standard of Leipzig’s workers in 1915 and 1916.

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN LEIPZIG DURING THE EARLY WAR Between 1915 and 1917 the Leipzig unions continued their high-profile support for a war that was undermining the living standard of their members, distributing government propaganda flyers and holding informational (aufklärische) meetings where they exhorted workers to “stay the course.”24 In so doing, the local unions took their cue from the national union leadership, whose prowar stand was summed up in the journal of the German Metal Workers’ Union: “Especially in the struggle for the world market it is essential that German workers look out for their own interests, which to a certain extent coincide with the common weal. It cannot be a matter of indifference to the German proletarian how this [war] turns out, whether it ends on terms favorable or unfavorable for Germany.”25 That same union also endorsed Friedrich Naumann’s Mitteleuropa-Programm, which envisaged a postwar economic zone under German domination stretching from the low countries to the Persian Gulf.26 In supporting the war effort and renouncing the weapon of the strike, the


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unions believed they would achieve a number of goals. In the short term, they hoped that employers would recognize them as negotiating partners, make collective bargaining the normal mode of setting wages and working conditions, and grant unions the right to codetermine company welfare policy. In the long term, the unions hoped that in a postwar Germany such concessions would become permanent and that the Reich’s rulers would agree to democratic reform. In both their short- and long-term aspirations, the unions had badly miscalculated. During the first two years of the war, employers refused to recognize unions formally as bargaining partners. Meanwhile, the proletarian standard of living continued its free fall at a time when war profits went essentially tax-free. In the long term, the employers made no promises about the contours of a future relationship with the unions, while state officials gave no indication that they would introduce democratic reforms.27 I noted in part 1 that few workers in prewar Leipzig belonged to unions. During the first two years of the war this already small number fell by half, to 32,095 members, as a result of the draft.28 The unions made little effort to recruit new workers (often women), as is evidenced by the drop in female membership in Leipzig unions during these same years from 8,530 to 8,065.29 Thus the small number of Leipzig’s workers in contact with the moderate ideology of the unions dropped even more. But even had there been more contact between ordinary workers and the unions, one suspects that the influence of the latter would have waned anyway. After 1915 almost all workers increasingly yearned for peace. The unions’ support of the war effort therefore discredited them in the eyes of many, if not most, ordinary workers in Leipzig. Later, when I examine worker radicalization, it will become clear how little influence the unions exercised on those striking and protesting. While the union leadership in Leipzig continued to promote the war effort throughout 1915 and 1916, the local spd leadership—partially as a result of rank-and-file pressure—expressed ever more criticism of it. Its final position of intransigent opposition led it by late 1916 to break with the national spd—the latter remaining true to the spirit of the Burgfrieden—and create a new, antiwar socialist party. In the preceding chapter I noted how until 1915 lvz coverage remained basically uncritical of governmental policy. In early 1915 this began to change. In a single issue in March, for instance, the paper still ran patriotic headlines such as “New Accusations [of Atrocities] Against French Supreme Command” and “Giant German Victory on the Financial Battlefield.” But in this same issue the lvz also portrayed antiwar leader Karl Liebknecht in a favor-

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able light while disparaging “social patriots” in the party such as Konrad Haenisch, made repeated reference to the fact that elites—by refusing to tax themselves and agree to democratic reform—were failing to honor their end of the implicit deal accompanying the Burgfrieden, and carried a story on fraternization of German troops with the enemy during Christmas 1914.30 That same month increasing criticism of the state’s inept handling of the food shortage prompted authorities to reprimand it for the first time.31 A few days later it was expressing, in veiled language, opposition to the Reichstag’s granting further war credits to the government.32 On 9 June one thousand party functionaries from around Germany signed a written protest against the national spd’s continued support for the war, which the lvz published. A number of Leipzig party leaders, such as Hans Block, Eugen Prager, Alfred Herre, Georg Schumann, Gustav Jakob, and even Fritz Seger, were among the signatories.33 Later in the month it published a manifesto signed by some of the spd’s leading intellectuals (including Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein) demanding that the government seek immediate peace based on the status quo antebellum. General von Schweinitz responded by forbidding publication of the lvz for eight days.34 These antiwar views found a strong echo among the party’s rank and file. On 9 May 1915 party members at a meeting of the thirteenth Reichstag electoral district (covering the industrial, outlying neighborhoods of the city) voted against further war credits, 535 to 10. On 20 July a similar meeting of the twelfth district (covering the old city center) voted 122 to 8 on the same question. These votes indicate the intense antiwar sentiment of the Leipzig party organization compared to those in other big cities. A similar vote in Dresden, for instance, yielded a result of only 77 to 56, while spd members in Chemnitz and Zwickau actually approved further war credits.35 Later in the month at a full conference of the entire Leipzig party, it was decided unanimously with only one abstention that no further war credits should be granted and that the party’s parliamentary group should pressure the government to seek a “peace of understanding” with no annexations.36 As the fourth vote on war credits in the Reichstag drew near in December 1915, the lvz dropped its Aesopian language and openly opposed the war.37 Hereafter General von Schweinitz began suppressing the paper with regularity while assessing lvz writers and editors repeated fines.38 The vote itself, on 21 December, saw the first breach of party discipline on this issue as forty-three socialist deputies defied their leaders and refused to grant the government’s request for more war credits. A leader in the group voting against the request was thirteenth district representative Friedrich


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Geyer; among those abstaining was eleventh district deputy Karl Ryssel (representing the Mulde valley outside Leipzig).39 At the end of 1915 the police concluded that the group of moderate functionaries that had run the Leipzig party in the prewar period and would have preferred to support the national spd leadership remained in power only by adopting the antiwar stance of the rank and file.40 Cognizant that the national spd leadership would support the government’s war effort to the end, antiwar and left-wing Social Democrats over the course of 1916 took decisive steps toward seceding from the mother party. The Leipzig party organization moved to the fore of this movement. In late March 1916 antiwar spd Reichstag deputies founded the Social Democratic Working Group, which opposed the war as a bloc. Friedrich Geyer was a key player in the creation of this new group.41 The lvz immediately came to its support, declaring that it viewed the new group as the “legitimate political representative of the party’s left,” and demanded that the remaining spd deputies join it immediately.42 With reluctance and only as a result of overwhelming support for the working group among Leipzig’s Social Democrats, the moderate leadership of the local party (notably Richard Lipinski and Karl Ryssel) declared its allegiance to the new group.43 The fight between the spd and working group over the party’s assets that broke out in September 1916 signaled the end of the old spd. By April 1917 the schism had completed itself, producing a second socialist party growing out of the working group: the Independent Socialist Party of Germany (uspd).44 The mother party obtained control of the Berlin daily Vorwärts and the assets of the party in most cities across Germany. Leipzig was one of the few places where the uspd, acting through the local party, won ownership of Social Democratic assets and organizations.45 Along with Die Freiheit in Berlin, the lvz became the most important national organ of the uspd, with editions also appearing in Dresden, Chemnitz, and Plauen.46 With the exception of about five hundred people led by a handful of union functionaries, Leipzig’s entire spd went over to the uspd.47 For the remainder of the war and revolution, the uspd remained in effect the only socialist party in Leipzig,48 making the city one of the few in Germany where the abandonment of the mother party was so complete.49 In Dresden, for instance, only about 10 percent of spd members crossed over to the uspd.50 However, the transformation from spd to uspd in Leipzig did little to stanch the hemorrhage in party membership, which dropped from forty thousand in 1913 to about ten thousand by 1918, largely because of the draft.51 I noted in the preceding chapter how Friedrich Geyer, the thirteenth dis-

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trict Reichstag deputy, was on the far left of the local spd before 1914. He continued this orientation after the outbreak of the war, acting as the only leader in Leipzig who was as eager as the rank and file to split from the majority Socialists. At the national level he played a leading role in the creation of the new uspd and thereafter acted as a lieutenant to party leader Hugo Haase. Far more typical of the views of the local leadership was Karl Ryssel. He was the paid vice-chairman of the thirteenth Reichstag district party organization and in 1914 became a Reichstag deputy after winning a special election to the eleventh district’s seat, representing the nearby Mulda valley. In early 1915 he attempted to defend the prowar policy of the national party to his constituents but over the course of the year moved away from this position. As noted above, he was one of twenty-three socialist Reichstag deputies to abstain from granting the government more war credits in December 1915. The police reports identify him as a moderate and indicate that his break with the national party stemmed mostly from his recognition that failure to do so would result in loss of influence in the local party. He ultimately assumed a position on the executive board of the Leipzig uspd. Local party chairman Richard Lipinski continued his prewar support of the national spd executive throughout 1915 and was one of the last of the Leipzig leadership to join the working group in 1916. As during the prewar period, he sought above all to avoid confrontation with the police, opposing, for instance, the distribution of peace propaganda because it would have prompted retaliation from the authorities. His basic strategy during the war, the police believed, was to preserve the party’s organizational integrity and wait to see how events would unfold.52 Once schism became inevitable, he decided to join his comrades and take the entire local party into the new uspd and thereby maintain its unity.53

ORDINARY WORKERS The increasing opposition to the war in the spd rank and file reflected the yearnings of ordinary workers not belonging to the party. As the casualty rate of Leipzigers at the front doubled in 1915,54 as governments at all levels refused to take action to reverse the slide in the standard of living, as the unions continued to act as a quasi-auxiliary of the state, and as the party remained preoccupied with its schism and too cautious tactically to exploit the popular discontent, in 1915 ever more of Leipzig’s workers began expressing their anger in increasingly unruly street disturbances. Although willing to demon-


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strate, however, few workers walked off the job during the first two years of the war, at least partly because of the ban on strikes imposed by General von Schweinitz. It is worth noting, however, that those who did strike were as likely to be skilled as unskilled and as likely to be employed in war industries as not and that female participation in the strikes was about equal to their overall share of the workforce. The strikers advanced no political demands, refraining even from the call for peace. Rather, they hoped to achieve pay hikes to match the inflation rate. In only one case—the strike of transport workers at the end of 1916—did they achieve notable success.55 From 16 to 17 October 1915 disorders in front of Leipzig food shops were serious enough to prompt the Reich’s Supreme Censorship Office in Berlin to instruct its representative in Leipzig to forbid publication of stories about the incidents.56 During the next two weeks smaller disturbances broke out, convincing the authorities that a “ventilation of grievances” might help calm the masses. Accordingly, they permitted the spd to hold a meeting to discuss food policy, accepting assurances from Lipinski and the union leadership that it would proceed without incident. Two thousand Leipzigers attended the event, held at the Zentraltheater, which began smoothly. At its conclusion. however—and despite Lipinski’s repeated requests for “calm and reasonableness”—about eighty spectators marched spontaneously to the offices of the royal prefect, where another five hundred Leipzigers joined them. There they demanded peace and more vigorous policies to combat the food shortage. This event marked the first public demands for peace in Leipzig. Police scattered the protesters after half an hour. Recognizing that the party leadership could not control its members, the police prohibited future public meetings to discuss food policy.57 The ban failed to prevent Leipzig’s workers from finding other occasions to express their discontent. On 16 March 1916, as part of the spd’s drive to acquire female members to replace the many male comrades who had been drafted, the party held a meeting attended by two thousand spectators, mostly women, at the Zoological Garden. The speeches dealt with the condition of working women and female suffrage. At the meeting’s close, some of the spectators—again, mostly women—spontaneously formed a column and marched off toward the new city hall in the city center, almost reaching it before police dispersed them. Scores of people were arrested.58 The food riots of 14–20 May 1916 represented the most serious public disorder in Leipzig during the first two years of the war. In the months leading up to it, disturbances on food lines became so frequent that police ceased to note them individually. Indeed, these reports became so perfunctory that

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they do not contain much information on the social composition and motivations of the demonstrators, a real pity considering that women, so often overlooked in other sources, played a leading role in these protests. From what we do know, the tumults followed a similar pattern. Almost invariably, they broke out after women on a queue had concluded that a shop owner was holding back goods for sale so as to put them on the black market. This pattern suggests that the perception of unfair distribution rather than the shortage itself sparked the disturbances.59 The front windows of the shop would then be smashed, and inventory looted. While men fled the arriving police, women and youngsters often remained, “jeering, whistling, and yelling,” and could be driven from the street only when the police began making arrests. The exceptionally violent food riot lasting the entire third week of May 1916 resulted from a conjuncture of two events. First, an unusually large attack on a store in the proletarian neighborhood of Leipzig-Lindenau took place on 14 May and could only be halted with “every available man on the police force . . . as well as two infantry companies and sixty Ulans, supported by one hundred police officers.” The very next day, as rumors of the street battle began to circulate, news that the potato ration would sink from seven to five pounds per head weekly became known. Angry crowds immediately formed in front of the new town hall and on the Königsplatz just outside the city center. Police and infantry broke up the demonstrations, arresting twenty-seven people in the process, including nine women. Over the following six days crowds ransacked twenty-four stores across the city. All but two of them were food stores, indicating that hunger, not desire for loot, motivated the plundering. By the time authorities had finally cleared the streets, hundreds of Leipzigers were in police custody. Ultimately, the court punished 124, among them 106 youths of both sexes.60 In response to the disorders, the police again decided to allow a controlled ventilation of discontent and lifted the ban on meetings to discuss the food shortage. In August 1916 the party held another meeting on food policy, this time at the Kristallpalast, at which the assembled four thousand people—no doubt influenced by the increasingly antiwar tone of the lvz—voted unanimously for immediate peace without annexations. A month later a second meeting of similar size, held at the Brewery Garden in Leipzig-Stoetteritz, followed an identical course. At both meetings women were heavily in attendance, and spectators obeyed the calls of their leaders to shun spontaneous demonstrations.61 As 1916 closed, the national military authorities singled out Leipzig as a city in a revolutionary mood because of the worsening food shortage.62


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Part 1 reported that one of the chief agents blocking popular political radicalization in prewar Leipzig was a rising standard of living for which elites could take credit. That the spontaneous demonstrations of 1915 and 1916 so often took place in front of the new town hall and the prefect’s office suggests that ordinary workers blamed the state—and therefore elites—for economic hardship. Specifically, they reproached elites less for the shortage of food itself than for the their patent lack of interest in distributing the dwindling supply equitably. The failure of elites to manage the war economy damaged their legitimacy and thereby weakened one of the pillars on which their authority rested. That the food riots did not become revolutionary, however, indicates that elites had not lost all legitimacy in the popular mind, probably because of the expectation that Germany would prevail militarily in the near future. For despite appalling and climbing casualty counts, popular hopes for a quick victory rose when Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg along with his deputy General Erich Ludendorff—a team that had achieved relative success in the east—became the new ohl in August 1916. Moreover, in the latter part of that year the newspapers covered debates in the Reichstag on a bill designed to tighten the government’s management of the war economy. This legislation probably raised hopes that the shortages might soon end. In the next chapter, I examine the extent to which this legislation, the Auxiliary Service Law of December 1916, protected workers and thereby repaired the fraying legitimacy of elite authority.

chapter 7

ELITE AUTHORITY VANISHES: JANUARY 1917–NOVEMBER 1918

WHILE DEMANDING GREAT sacrifices from the workforce, Germany’s rulers had proved unable by autumn 1916 to offer a quid pro quo in the form of a military victory, more democracy, or even a modest redistribution of income. A continuation of this state of affairs ran the risk of transforming the anger of workers, which had thus far dissipated itself in food riots, into a direct political challenge. This chapter, which covers the final half of an increasingly desperate war, examines first how the state (and therefore elites) dealt with the domestic ramifications of military stalemate. Attention will then turn to the effects of these policies on organized Social Democracy and, finally, ordinary workers.

STATE POLICY Rather than persuade the new, third ohl of Hindenburg and Ludendorff of the desirability of a negotiated peace, the horrific and indecisive battles of Verdun and the Somme in 1916 steeled their determination to prevail over the Entente at any cost. A victorious peace, they believed, would make possible the annexation of vast new territories for the Reich and thwart growing pressure from below for democratic reform. Industry, a gaggle of pressure groups, and the nonsocialist parties in the Reichstag (with the partial exception of the Progressive People’s Party) shared this view. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg had his doubts, but he expressed them timidly and in any event lacked the political muscle to block the ohl (which forced him from office in July 1917).

ELITE AUTHORITY VANISHES

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The failure of unrestricted submarine warfare against Entente and neutral shipping, the entrance of the usa into the war in April 1917, and increasing hunger on the home front prompted the Catholic Center and Progressives to join the socialist parties in passing a resolution in July calling on all belligerents to fashion a peace of understanding without annexations or reparations. However, Germany’s improving military prospects during the second half of 1917—that is, the failed British offensive at Paschendaele in September, the Italian disaster at Caporetto in October, and the second Russian Revolution a month later, with the accompanying Bolshevik request for immediate peace—convinced the Center and Progressives that a victorious peace (Siegfrieden) was possible after all.1 Helping silence any remaining advocates of a negotiated peace was the enormous success of the Fatherland Party, founded in 1917 at the initiative of the ohl, whose one-and-a-quarter million vociferous members demanded victory, annexations, and the suppression of “defeatist” and “unpatriotic” calls for domestic democratic reform.2 Under such circumstances, the parties to the right of the mspd either supported or no longer opposed the bid for a Siegfrieden, pinning their hopes on Ludendorff ’s offensive in the west in the spring of 1918.3 By the time the new ohl assumed command, Germany had already lost about 800,000 soldiers, with countless more wounded, crippled, or psychically broken. Thanks to the bid for a Siegfrieden, the death toll was to rise to 1.7 million, for a mortality rate of 2.63 soldiers for every hundred citizens.4 The corresponding numbers among Leipzigers were 17,263 total dead and 2.78 per hundred citizens.5 With mounting casualties in the face of superior enemy manpower reserves, the ohl realized the only hope for victory lay in breaking out of the war of attrition and seeking a decisive engagement. To do this successfully, Germany would need to diminish the Entente’s superiority in materiel. The ohl’s solution, the Hindenburg Program, issued in August 1916, stipulated a massive boost in the manufacture of steel, weapons, and munitions by mandating more efficient use of raw materials and increasing labor productivity. The plan’s sponsors hoped to achieve the first goal by obliging businesses to join the war boards (Kriegsgesellschaften) that disbursed raw materials in each sector (metals, chemicals, textiles, etc.). Those that refused would be denied raw materials and government contracts. The plan foresaw a further savings of raw materials through the compulsory closure of smaller, less efficient business. More productivity would be squeezed out of labor by prohibiting changes of employment and controlling wages (the ohl saw no need to limit the guaranteed profits flowing to employers). A new, mammoth War

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Office (Kriegsamt), with branches in each army corps district, would implement the plan and answer to the ohl rather than to the war minister or chancellor.6 Although the team of Hindenburg and Ludendorff enjoyed great prestige and could conduct military operations without civilian oversight, the constitution required that a plan such as the Hindenburg—with its far-reaching political and economic ramifications—obtain the approval of parliament before becoming law. The final product of the Reichstag’s deliberations, the Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law (das vaterländische Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz, hereafter hdg) of 5 December 1916, embodied certain components of the Hindenburg Program while adding entirely new clauses. Specifically, the law: (a) increased the draft; (b) created boards in each army corps district— chaired by a military officer and staffed by representatives of management, the unions, and government—to determine which workers could be sent to the front and which were needed for war production; (c) mandated worker and employee committees (Arbeiter- und Angestellten-Ausschüsse) in each large factory producing for the war that, while having no direct powers, had to be heard during the making of company welfare policy and could bring workforce grievances to the attention of management; (d) set up conciliation boards in each army corps district—chaired by a military officer and composed at parity of representatives of the unions and management—that were supposed to mediate disputes that could not be resolved by management and the worker and employee committees; and (e) provided the military with the authority to idle inefficient businesses. The law did not require that workers be tied to their jobs but instead allowed them to switch positions in pursuit of higher pay.7 The hdg incorporated only those elements of the Hindenburg Program that regulated business: the granting of authority to the military to close inefficient firms and the requirement that companies join the Kriegsgesellschaften. The ohl’s desire to turn wage labor into, essentially, industrial serf labor remained unrealized. That the Reichstag could defy the powerful third ohl requires explanation. Part 1 described how the Reichstag lacked the constitutional prerogatives of parliaments in France and Great Britain and, moreover, how all the parties except the Socialists and Progressives evinced little desire to expand its competence since they endorsed Germany’s undemocratic constitution. Nevertheless, because of its ability to block legislation, the Reichstag possessed considerable potential power and its rewriting of the Hindenburg Program represented one of the rare instances when it used it. The Reichstag’s agree-


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ment to the ohl’s demand for authority to close inefficient enterprises and require firms to join the Kriegsgesellschaften is not surprising: many big business cartels—which enjoyed enormous influence with the National Liberals and Progressives and even the Conservatives and Center—supported this provision since they would control the Kriegsgesellschaften (and therefore the distribution of raw materials and military contracts) and be well positioned to buy up, at bargain prices, the assets of forcibly closed smaller enterprises.8 The Reichstag’s defiance of the ohl on the question of job switching, however, is more puzzling given that this move benefited none of the constituencies supporting the nonsocialist parties. One might speculate that it stemmed from the insight that concessions to the workforce were necessary in light of the hdg’s lack of controls on the war profits flowing to capitalists.9 Whatever the reason, the Reichstag’s refusal to acquiesce to all the ohl’s demands was a rare event (though, as I shall discuss, it did defy the ohl once more during the war). As it turned out, the hdg helped lame the war economy in that it neglected to limit war profits, refused to get tough with agriculturalists selling on the black market, ensured the continuation of high labor turnover in the factories,10 and failed to demarcate the competence of the local Kriegsamt representative versus that of the deputy commander of the army corps district.11 In most of Germany, the local office of the Kriegsamt (hereafter referred to as the Kriegsamtstelle) answered—formally—both to Kriegsamt chief, General Wilhelm Groener, and to the Prussian war minister. In Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony, Kriegsamtstellen answered to Groener and to their respective Land war ministries.12 Thus the newly instituted Kriegsamtstelle of the Nineteenth Army Corps District, with its seat in Leipzig, reported to the Kriegsamt in Berlin and to the Saxon war ministry in Dresden.13 The files indicate, however, that it obeyed only Groener and merely sent copies of its reports to Dresden. From his first day on the job in Leipzig on 23 December 1916, the new Kriegsamtstelle chief, a Captain Ritter, came into conflict with the deputy commander of the Nineteenth Army Corps, General von Schweinitz. The latter attempted to assert his authority early, issuing a memorandum outlining their respective spheres of competence. Schweinitz claimed for his own staff authority in the following areas: (a) decisions on which workers went to the front and which to the war factories; (b) procurement of raw materials; (c) trade; (d) responsibility for the nutrition of workers employed in war factories; and (e) supply of the army with troops, horses, and other sundry items. Schweinitz left to the discretion of the Kriegsamtstelle the following matters:

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(a) anything having to do with the hdg; (b) questions pertaining to women workers and their welfare; (c) increasing production of weapons, munitions, and other war materiel; and (d) transportation. Obviously, his memo offered rich opportunities for bureaucratic turf battles. “Anything having to do with the hdg” might have included any economic question, industrial or agricultural. “Increasing production of weapons, munitions, and other war materiel” intruded directly into the sphere that Schweinitz had reserved to himself, namely, “procurement of raw materials.” And how could one keep “trade” and “transportation” separate? Schweinitz’s subsequent attempt to delineate responsibilities definitively by assigning to the Kriegsamtstelle all economic matters directly related to the war while reserving all nonwar economic issues for his own volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung failed to dispel the confusion. For example, is the production of food a war or nonwar matter? Schweinitz clearly did not perceive the complexity of the problem. The two offices quarreled and duplicated each other’s work throughout 1917, with the Kriegsamtstelle, backed by the ohl, winning ever more responsibility for itself. The two offices had still not settled on a division of labor at the time of Groener’s ouster in August 1917, after which the balance of power in Leipzig swung back in favor of the deputy commander.14 Multiple examples of the lack of coordination between the Kriegsamtstelle and deputy commander in Leipzig present themselves. Limitations of space allow an examination of only one area: the setting of agricultural policy. Although Schweinitz believed that securing the nutritional needs of the urban workforce should have been his bailiwick, the Kriegsamtstelle quickly recognized its importance for war production and intervened. Complicating the dispute between the two offices was the presence of a third player in agricultural policy: the war economic offices (Kriegswirtschaftsämter) created by decree of the Prussian war ministry but in Saxony staffed by Land officials and military officers and charged with overseeing agriculture. Making matters worse, both the Kriegsamtstelle and the Kriegswirtschaftsämter had representatives with the identical title of county adviser (Kreisreferent) roaming the countryside, a fact that led to acrimonious disputes. Only in early 1918 did the three organizations begin to cooperate, with the Kriegswirtschaftsämter assuming the lion’s share of responsibility because they had the most knowledgeable staff and a presence in most farming towns throughout western Saxony.15 Despite a worsening shortage of food and precise knowledge that farmers were selling much of their produce on the black market,16 the authorities never compelled farmers from the surrounding countryside to hand over


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food to the state at official prices. At a meeting with city officials in October 1917, officers of the Kriegsamtstelle justified this inaction by arguing that farmers would produce only for profit, not under compulsion.17 Two months later they adduced further alibis for their passivity: the military lacked the “technical means” for such intervention, and such a gambit would “lack the necessary popular support.”18 The military authorities did, however, find the “technical means” to protect farmers from roving bands of hungry city dwellers during the final months of the war, posting nine hundred troops across the countryside of the Nineteenth Army Corps District.19 They also helped farmers, at considerable expense, to obtain raw materials.20 As I pointed out in the introduction, the farmers around Leipzig were not peasants but substantial landowners. In turning a blind eye to their black-market dealings, the imperial state once again demonstrated its inability—even during the late stages of a desperate war and when cognizant of hunger among workers in the cities—to implement policies detrimental to the interests of elites.21 While showing no inclination to solve problems of food supply, military officers in Leipzig also displayed poor judgment in managing its distribution. Only workers employed in the war factories obtained the status of “heaviest laborers” and therefore received extra food stamps. Although the economy was now on a war footing, these laborers remained a minority within the workforce. But the inequality extended further. In Leipzig’s full-employment war economy, companies found it difficult to attract and retain the most qualified workers. To maintain a steady workforce, the owners of the biggest factories therefore obtained food (and sometimes coal and clothing as well) on the black market and then distributed it to employees in the factories at or below cost. A review of dozens of company files in municipal and Saxon archives reveals that such activity, though illegal, was practiced in all big war factories and openly acknowledged.22 Military officials in Leipzig not only tolerated this practice but encouraged it, even receiving the backing of superiors in Berlin23 and Dresden.24 Only owners of large factories possessed the means to buy in bulk on the black market, and only they could count on the cooperation of the Kriegsamtstelle. Thus the only workers benefiting from this violation of the law were those employed in the largest war factories, a fact that rankled workers in smaller enterprises.25 It will be recalled that the cause of the food riots of May 1916 was less the shortage of food itself than the perception of its unequal distribution.26 By flagrantly favoring a minority of workers, officials of the Leipzig Kriegsamtstelle risked radicalizing the majority of the city’s workforce. Offi-

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cials in the mayor’s office recognized the political dangers “when the military authorities, in striving to improve the nutrition of the war workers, reach[ed] for means that endanger[ed] the regulation of consumption for the rest of society.”27 The state’s mismanagement of food distribution required Leipzigers to supplement official rations with black-market purchases. A state that in effect encourages law breaking toys with its own future. The hdg gave local Kriegsamtstellen de facto authority to mediate disputes that could not be resolved by management and the worker and employee committees.28 In Leipzig, this mediation board was composed equally of representatives of the unions and employers and chaired by a Major Bachstein. Although officers of Leipzig’s Kriegsamtstelle boasted that the mediation board had intervened in “hundreds” of industrial disputes,29 the evidence indicates that it involved itself very rarely in such conflicts. First, it is difficult to believe that its staff of only six people30 would have been able to keep track of the complicated technical questions regarding working conditions and pay in hundreds of disputes simultaneously. Moreover, perusal of dozens of files from this period pertaining to industrial disputes turned up very few mentions of the Kriegsamtstelle mediation board. Last, the yearbook of the German Metalworker Union noted that the mediation board of the Nineteenth Army Corps District—covering not just Leipzig but Chemnitz, Zwickau, and Plauen—had intervened in only forty-three disputes during 1917.31 Lack of activity was not the only reason the mediation board failed to improve the living standard of Leipzig’s workers. At the height of the revolution, Leipzig’s new, radical union leadership seized the Kriegsamtstelle’s files and, in an effort to discredit their conservative wartime predecessors, published excerpts from them.32 These selections leave little doubt that Major Bachstein viewed matters from the perspective of the employers. For instance, he replaced the three industry representatives on the board—perceived by the employers’ organizations as “too soft”—with hard-liners recommended by Leipzig’s Association of Metal Industrialists. He also expressed his desire to supplant the union representatives with more pliable people but refrained from doing so out of concern for the possible political repercussions.33 Given Bachstein’s attempts to shuffle the personnel of the mediation board, it is hardly surprising that when the Kriegsamtstelle intervened in disputes at all, it tended to “mediate” in favor of employers. In late June 1917, for instance, Leipzig metalworkers—without the approval of their union leaders—began demanding a cost-of-living allowance to ameliorate the effects of inflation. To forestall a wildcat strike, union officials ultimately agreed to bring the demands of the workers to management. After the employers re-


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fused to negotiate, union officials turned to the Kriegsamtstelle for mediation. Rejecting worker requests for more pay, fewer hours, and better treatment, a Captain Niemann of the Kriegsamtstelle promised only that he would attempt to secure more food for the workers but made no promises that he would succeed. The metalworkers union representative from the head office in Berlin, Moritz Fromm, agreed to these terms and effusively thanked Captain Niemann for his time.34 This pattern repeated itself one month later at the strip mine Belohnung outside Borna, where workers struck in retaliation for management’s refusal to honor its earlier pledge to increase food rations and wages. The strike widened after management had posted signs castigating the strikers. The following exchange between Captain Ritter of the Kriegsamtstelle and union secretary Dölle, excerpted from the protocol of their negotiation, illustrates the ease with which the military handled union functionaries: captain ritter: In this case there were mistakes made on both sides. I therefore suggest a compromise: the workers agree to return to work and the Kriegsamt will attempt to have the signs removed. secretary dölle: There is especially bad blood that the promised 10 percent wage hike has not yet been paid even though it is clear that since June 1 coal prices have been raised—indeed, not just by two marks but by four. ritter: I’ll have the matter looked into and will attempt to bring about the payment of the promised wage increases. But it must be granted that some of the strip mines are having major problems making a profit. . . . dölle: Above all I ask you to see to it that the employers negotiate with me. ritter: I’ll try. But since I am in no position to force them, I’ll need a certain amount of time to bring them around.35

Secretary Dölle ultimately agreed to return the miners to work, accepting as quid pro quo Captain Ritter’s vague assurances.36 I uncovered only one instance where the military authorities imposed conditions on capitalists. In late August and early September 1918 skilled machinists at the strip mines around Leipzig, initially against the wishes of their union leaders, threatened to strike for more pay. The Kriegsamtstelle met with the workers, convinced them to limit their demands, and then took their proposals to the employers’ association. When the latter refused even to negotiate, the Kriegsamtstelle threatened to place the strip mines under military authority. This move comes as a true surprise given that, as will be observed directly below, the military tended to favor employers more than ever during

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the final year of the war. Ultimately, the employers agreed to pay the machinists far less than what the latter had originally demanded. The single case in which the Kriegsamtstelle coerced employers, then, did not end up costing the mine owners much money.37 After Groener’s ouster in August 1917 and the consequent decline of the Kriegsamt’s power, Schweinitz reasserted his authority in the Nineteenth Army Corps District and continued the intransigence against strikers that had marked his policy during the first two years of the war. The ohl reinforced this hard line, instructing all deputy commanders in January 1918 to suppress future strikes in preparation for the final push on the western front planned for that spring. From this point on—with a few exceptions, one of which was described in the paragraph directly above—the favoritism shown to employers throughout 1917 increased in 1918.38 In preparation for a possible rail worker strike in early 1918, for instance, Schweinitz had special military units kept in reserve and instructed to use live ammunition if necessary. These months also saw a brisk correspondence between officers of different army corps districts comparing notes on the best way to employ soldiers against strikers and bring unruly factories under military control.39 Leipzig’s other mediation committee, the municipal business court (Gewerbegericht), for the most part handled conflicts between individual workers and employers. In this task, it continued the low level of activity that characterized its operation during the first two years of the war (see preceding chapter). In 1917 only 0.44 percent of Leipzig’s workers appeared before it, and the few who did won cases even less frequently than they had during the war’s first two years.40 The business court also attempted on occasion to conciliate disputes involving employers and an entire workforce or even conflicts in whole sectors. These efforts foundered on the employers’ refusal to participate.41 Chapter 4 reported that state support paid out to families with a breadwinner at the front (Kriegerfamilienunterstützung) did not, at the outbreak of the war, exceed 60 percent of the breadwinner’s 1913 earnings, and chapter 5 notes that colas did not nearly keep pace with the rate of inflation. In any case, the majority of workers were not eligible for these benefits because most did not have a breadwinner at the front. The only support for their falling living standard was traditional welfare (Armenfürsorge). Receiving no help from the Reich,42 the city of Leipzig had to finance all such programs on its own. In 1913 the city spent 3,992,684 marks on welfare, to which was added that year’s total of 439,967 marks in charitable contributions, for a grand total spent on


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welfare of 4,432,651 marks. Part 1 demonstrated that these prewar levels of welfare funding failed to better living conditions for the city’s workers. Thus, for welfare to have made a difference during the war, its funding would have had to rise substantially above 4,432,651 marks. By 1918 the city was spending 7,837,227 marks on welfare, and private charity contributed another 905,412 marks, for a grand total of 8,742,639 marks per year.43 Over the course of the war, then, welfare spending rose 97.23 percent in nominal terms. This nominal increase, however, did not nearly keep pace with a wartime inflation rate of about 200 percent.44 One concludes, then, that real spending on welfare dropped by 34 percent, a cut coming at a time of acute and increasing hardship for Leipzig’s workers.45 Officials employed very few of these scant funds to ameliorate the problems facing wageworking women, many of whom had children. Leipzig’s few kindergarten and day care facilities were not expanded and remained in private hands during the war.46 Some factories attempted to help their female workers by assigning factory welfare officers (Fabrikpflegerinnen) to counsel them and to help with household chores, shopping, and child minding. But considering that these welfare officers were only mentioned once in the Leipzig sources (and that at the end of the war)47 and that there were only 745 such Fabrikpflegerinnen for a female factory workforce of at least a million wage earners in Germany as a whole,48 one can conclude that they made practically no difference in the lives of female workers in wartime Leipzig. Neither the Reich nor city officials increased funding for programs that might have contained rising levels of illness in the city. Benefits paid out by insurance societies (Krankenkassen) participating in the Reich sickness scheme did not come close to keeping pace with the rate of inflation.49 The city’s funding for civilian patients at its two hospitals, St. Georg’s and St. Jakob’s, also fell far behind inflation.50 Doctors at the latter hospital devoted ever more of their shrinking resources to patients with the means to pay: total care days for wealthier private patients (Privatkranke) actually doubled during the war, while those for poorer public patients (Saalkranke) only rose 8.31 percent.51 The municipalization of the labor exchange in June 1917 constitutes the only real service the state rendered to Leipzig’s workers during the war. Until that time it had been under the control of the employers.52 The above review of welfare in Leipzig demonstrates what the military authorities themselves admitted: all such programs combined played little role in braking the slide in the living standard of the city’s workers.53 As in food

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policy and labor-management relations, so too in welfare matters was the Wilhelmine state unable to protect workers, for doing so would have required elites to make a few sacrifices. Elites were also spared sacrifice when it came to financing the war during its final two years. The state refused to impose on them an extra income tax or capital levy or even to limit their war profits, instead continuing to rely on debt to finance the war.54 As the war progressed, however, the public proved increasingly unwilling to buy government bonds,55 obliging the state to borrow ever more from the Reichsbank, in effect, printing more money and adding to an already accelerating inflation rate resulting from the shortage of goods. In Leipzig official prices climbed 150 percent during the course of the war.56 This estimate falls short of the real inflation rate because it overlooks much higher black-market prices, which consumers had to pay to cover about 40 percent of their nutritional needs.57 Kocka estimates a real wartime inflation rate for Germany as a whole of about 200 percent.58 Leipzig’s was almost certainly higher because of the relative lack of arable land in highly populated western Saxony and the reluctance of Prussian officials to deliver food to the kingdom of Saxony, two facts discussed in the previous chapter. Leipzig was not the only German city in which elites mismanaged the economy. A recent and exhaustive study of wartime Berlin, Paris, and London finds that—even when one makes allowance for the Allied blockade— German officials did a worse job than their British and French counterparts in regulating dearth equitably.59

STANDARD OF LIVING The worsening shortage of food and consumer goods, accelerating inflation, and the state’s failure to combat these developments led to a drastic fall in the living standard of workers and lower white collars in Leipzig as elsewhere. In military industries throughout Germany, real wages dropped on average 18 percent; in the civilian economy, 44 percent. When these figures are weighted to account for the numbers of workers employed in each sector, average real wages for all workers fell about 35 percent between 1914 and 1918.60 This figure is actually optimistic as it factors in only the inflation rate of official prices. Real inflation, because of the black market, was higher. When one considers that an already modest prewar income lost at least 35 percent of its purchasing power, one begins to comprehend how badly off workers were


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during the war. The drop in female wages was slightly less steep than that of men.61 On the other hand, female wages started from a much lower initial point, so any drop was especially painful for women, particularly at a time when many of them had lost a husband’s wage as a result of the draft. The wages of skilled workers fell more swiftly than those of the unskilled: the 30 percent gap in their earnings before 1914 narrowed to 9.8 percent by 1918 and continued to close well into the 1920s.62 For these dwindling wages, laborers, especially in war factories, worked more hours. From the 1870s until the outbreak of the war, the average workweek for manual laborers in Germany as a whole fell from sixty-five to about fifty-six hours.63 Between 1914 and 1917 this figure shot back up to sixty-three hours per week in Leipzig’s war factories.64 In the civilian economy, it was somewhat less.65 If women toiled slightly fewer hours on average than men, it was only because they were concentrated more heavily in these civilian branches. Those women employed in war factories usually worked the same hours as men.66 Over the course of the war, the amount of overtime worked by women increased by 50 percent.67 Between 1914 and 1917 the accident rate in Germany as a whole for wageworking women tripled and that for minors doubled.68 The figures were far higher in the war industries.69 The increase stemmed not only from the repeal of health and safety regulations on 4 August 1914 but also from the fact that employers, anxious to fulfill pressing military contracts, failed to train women and juvenile workers with no experience in the production of metal and chemicals. This explanation finds support from the fact that the accident rate for men—most of whom had some experience in this type of work—actually declined during the course of the war.70 This lack of training, besides harming and even killing growing numbers of women and minors,71 also helped contribute to a drop of between 20 and 33 percent in national industrial productivity during the war72—a slide surely contributing to Germany’s ultimate military defeat. In many cases the women themselves chose the most dangerous jobs because they paid better. Women also often preferred night shifts because they left free time during the day to stand in food lines for their families.73 The standard of living for workers also declined in ways defying quantification. Soap, for instance, became so expensive that many people were driven to use substitutes that caused a variety of skin disorders. The high price of clothing led to the wearing of loosely fitting homemade garments that were hazardous around machines and probably contributed to the climbing workplace accident rate.74 Although the rise in the price of bread did not outstrip

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the general rate of inflation, its quality in Leipzig deteriorated after the authorities decided to save on grain by mixing increasing amounts of filler (Erstreckungsmittel) into the dough. City officials noted that this prompted much grumbling among Leipzig’s workers but that more anger was expressed over the fact that consumers in the surrounding countryside still had access to pure bread.75 This indicates yet again that it was less shortage itself and more perceived inequalities in distribution (and the state’s failure to rectify the inequity) that sparked the most discontent among workers. Partially because of the declining nutritive value of food, official rations in German cities by 1918 provided about half the calories necessary for labor of medium to heavy physical intensity.76 To compensate, Leipzigers had no choice but to resort to the black market, offering in exchange for food whatever they had. Children were especially hard hit by those aspects of the declining standard of living that resist quantification. Since many of their teachers had been drafted, schools closed earlier than they had before the war. After school, there was often no place for children to go: sports centers (Turnhallen) were often commandeered by the military; mothers now worked for a wage; and in any event apartments were so cold because of the shortage of coal that there was not much incentive to stay at home. Contemporaries noted an increase in minors illegally working for wages, unsupervised children on the streets, and juvenile delinquency. Teenage boys, because of the tight labor market, earned more than they would have otherwise, but the breakdown of the apprenticeship system during the war deprived them of skills that would have laid the foundation for more secure careers after the war.77 The drop in living standard and especially the shortage of food led to a sharply increased civilian mortality rate in Leipzig during the war. Lung diseases and influenza (the latter by 1918 an epidemic) represented the most lethal illnesses in Leipzig,78 contributing to a civilian death rate that by 1918 was 51 percent higher than it had been in 1913.79 This wartime rate in Leipzig was 37 percent higher than that of the Reich as a whole.80 The global influenza epidemic, in particular, struck with horrible speed, killing victims in a matter of weeks or even days. After claiming only a handful of victims per month throughout most of the war, it levied a toll of 84 Leipzigers in July 1918 before subsiding again. Then it returned with greater ferocity in October, killing 651 in October, 377 in November and 109 in December.81 That the epidemic reached its peak in the autumn added yet another apocalyptic note to the regime’s final days. Municipal statisticians did not break down the figures on mortality by socioeconomic group, but considering the direct link between poor nutrition


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and death just reviewed, one can assume that those with the least purchasing power (i.e., workers) perished in disproportionately high numbers. The mortality rate for young women increased much more quickly than that of other groups,82 probably a result of their high accident rate on the job, the fact that they had to work long hours while also caring for a family (often without a man’s wage), and their propensity to deny themselves food in favor of their children. The statistics show that the sharpest deterioration in the living standard occurred during the notorious “turnip winter” of 1916–17. Contemporaries confirm this finding. An Australian musician stranded in Leipzig during the war wrote in February: Coal has run out. The electric light is cut off in most houses (I have gas, thank Heaven!), the trams are not running, or only in the very early morning, all theatres, schools, the opera, Gewandhaus and concerts and cinematographs are closed—neither potatoes nor turnips are to be had—they were our last resource—there is no fish—and Germany has at last ceased to trumpet the fact that it can’t be starved out. Added to that the thermometer outside my kitchen window says 24 deg. Fahr. below zero. I have never seen that before.83

Collectively, workers responded to the plunge in their living standard by striking and protesting, a development examined in detail below. Individually, they sought to keep their earnings abreast of inflation by frequently changing jobs in pursuit of higher wages. The rate of turnover among wageworkers at two of Leipzig’s larger war factories increased dramatically compared to the prewar period and rose throughout the conflict, as figure 7.1 illustrates. One could object that the shorter tenures after 1914 might be due to the fact that many workers were drafted into the military. This explanation might be valid for 1915–16, but by 1917–18 factory workers were no longer being sent to the front in high numbers because the ohl had decided that their skills were better used producing for the war economy.84 Thus these figures reflect a massive increase in job turnover.85 The Auxiliary Service Law— which was designed to improve labor productivity—did nothing to impede job switching; indeed, the rate only accelerated after the law’s enactment in December 1916. If workers had grievances, they knew they could not rely on the mediation boards and business courts of the state; instead, they used the only means at their disposal: their feet. Workers were not the only group in Leipzig whose standard of living fell

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T H E R E L AT I O N S H I P D I S S O LV E S 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0

Prewar

1915–1916

1917–1918

figure 7.1 Average Employment Tenure in Days of Wageworkers in Two Leipzig War Factories: Comparison of Prewar Period, Early War, and Late War note: Sample group of one hundred workers, fifty per company, for each time period. source: staatsal Bleichert Transportanlagen GmbH, no. 201; staatsal Sack Maschinenfabrik, nos. 48, 49.

during the war. Married lower-white-collar employees of the city, for instance, all of whom earned less than 3,000 marks per year, were granted an “extraordinary bonus” (purposely not termed a raise so as to stress its temporary character) amounting to 10 marks extra per month for the final thirty-four months of the war. Of course, this 340 marks came nowhere close to keeping pace with Leipzig’s 200 percent inflation rate during these years. By contrast, the highest-ranking city officials earning 13,000 marks per year received a permanent 10 percent raise at the beginning of the conflict and monthly bonuses thereafter of 25 marks per month, raised to 90 marks per month in 1917, making a grand total of 3,484 marks extra income earned during the course of the conflict. Starting from a much higher base, then, upper municipal officials received ten times as much extra pay during the war as did clerks, scribes, and office assistants.86 Lower-white-collar employees in the private sector fared no better. A survey by the largest organization of such employees, the German-National Office Assistants Association, found that in the first three years of the war nominal earnings had only risen 18.2 percent (from 2,393 to 2,829 marks per year), well behind a Reich inflation rate of about 150 percent during those three years.87 Like workers, lower white collars responded to this drop in their living


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standard by quitting their jobs and seeking higher pay elsewhere. The wartime average tenure for white-collar employees at the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei was barely one-fifth as long as it had been before the war, dropping from 2347 to 488 days.88 Such a dramatic fall in length of tenure cannot be ascribed entirely to the fact that many lower white collars were drafted. Many others must have quit their jobs. At first glance, it would appear that alte Mittelständler also did very poorly. Concentrated in civilian sectors, their markets had vanished; they enjoyed little clout with the military and therefore often saw their best employees (or even themselves) drafted; they possessed scant influence on the war boards (Kriegsgesellschaften) and therefore were not in a position to receive government contracts or allocations of raw materials; and finally, under the Auxiliary Service Law, they could be shut down by the military if found to be inefficient.89 In fact, however, their situation was not as catastrophic as it might appear. During the course of the war the number of enterprises with fewer than ten employees fell by 10 percent, a drop only slightly steeper than the prewar trend. And the number of microcompanies with a single owner and no employees actually grew during the war. Moreover, if forced to close by the military authorities, small business owners were handsomely compensated by the taxpayers and often obtained high positions in the new amalgamated enterprises resulting from the closures.90 Finally, business ownership enabled them to label personal consumption a business expense, while possession of real goods provided them with commodities to exchange in an inflationary black-market economy increasingly governed by barter. To summarize: lower white collars certainly and alte Mittelständler possibly suffered a relatively larger erosion in their living standard than did workers, but by war’s end they were still ahead of workers in an absolute sense.91

RESPONSE OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY One might expect that the unions—as the organizations pledged to defend the short-term material interests of workers—would have pressured the state to provide more welfare for workers while leading strikes for higher wages. In fact, the unions adhered to their earlier support for the government, a position motivated at least in part by their concern that military defeat would lead to German exclusion from world markets, in turn depressing the standard of living for German workers.92 Although preferring a German victory, the national union leadership also would have accepted a negotiated peace in

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which the Reich retained its access to world markets.93 To avoid losing all influence over their increasingly antiwar rank and file, most union officials in Leipzig felt compelled to join the new uspd. They nevertheless continued their de facto support of the progovernment policy of the mspd and national union leadership.94 The police, recognizing the usefulness of the local unions in prosecuting the war, lobbied the military to recall union functionaries from the front so that they could agitate for the war effort among Leipzig’s workers.95 Union leaders believed that their continuing support of the government during the late stages of the war brought them a number of benefits. All levels of government not only officially recognized them but allowed union officials to serve on governmental boards to regulate food supply, mediate industrial disputes, and so on; the infamous paragraph 153 of the Gewerbeordnung punishing with up to three months in prison any attempt to hinder the right to work during a strike was abolished; in the Reich Ministry of the Interior a special Office of Economic and Social Policy was created; the Auxiliary Service Law contained a number of provisions that appeared to benefit unions; and the kaiser, in his Easter message of 1917, had for the first time addressed the need for some sort of democratic reform, to be undertaken after the war. In fact, however, most of these gains were purely formal. While recognizing their existence, employers only negotiated with unions when forced to by wildcat strikes; while the state had formally recognized the unions, local deputy commanders had been instructed by the ohl to repress all strikes severely in preparation for the final offensive of 1918; the repeal of paragraph 153 had no immediate effect because strikes had been prohibited for the duration of the war; the kaiser’s promise to incorporate democratic provisions into the constitution had been limited to Prussia and was so vague as to be almost meaningless; and the formal gains outlined above did almost nothing to slow the fall in the proletarian standard of living.96 Gerald Feldman concludes that “at the cheapest possible price” the authorities had managed to persuade the union leadership “to support a war whose success would have strengthened the hand of their opponents.”97 As Leipzig’s workers turned increasingly against the war, the unions’ close identification with the government cost them more members. By 1918, membership in Leipzig’s unions had dropped to only 36 percent of its prewar level.98 By contrast, the other arm of Social Democracy in Leipzig, the uspd, made opposition to the war the centerpiece of its program. The preceding chapter examined the replacement of the spd by the uspd in Leipzig. As else-


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where in Germany, Leipzig’s Independent Socialists held divergent views on questions of tactics, strategy, and what a future society should look like. The new party was held together by a single shared goal: opposition to the war. And even this common position sprang from different sources. Following Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, a small group of left-wingers interpreted the war as the death throes of the capitalist mode of production and hoped it would radicalize the masses and make a socialist revolution possible. Most Independent Socialists, however, simply wanted to stop the bloodbath as quickly as possible and return German socialism to the tradition of Bebel.99 The leadership of the uspd in Leipzig, especially Lipinski and Seger, fell into this latter category, continuing to demand immediate peace without annexations but refraining from even veiled calls for revolution until the autumn of 1918. At party gatherings, the leadership never tired of exhorting the assembled to behave “sensibly and reasonably,” warning them of the unforeseeable consequences of spontaneous demonstrations.100

INCREASING STATE REPRESSION IN PREPARATION FOR THE FINAL PUSH All the factors discussed above—the horrifying casualty rates, the failure of the state to distribute burdens on the home front more equitably, the unions’ function as quasi-auxiliary of the state, and the resulting catastrophic slide in the standard of living—bred seething discontent among Leipzig’s workers. Still, the state might have blunted this radicalization—even at this late stage of the war—had it done one of two things: introduced sweeping democratic reforms or prevailed militarily. Democratization would have acted as a kind of reward to workers for the death of loved ones and the hardships they had endured; a military victory would have saved those still alive in the trenches and restored the damaged legitimacy of elite authority. I investigate the political consequences of military defeat below. As for democratization, ruling elites were determined to block it. In September 1917, a coalition of Conservatives and National Liberals in the Landtag buried in committee a proposal to reform the Saxon suffrage.101 Indeed, during the final eighteen months of the war, state officials not only refused to introduce democratic reforms but actually intensified their repressive policies against workers, this at a time when the state continued to ignore the war profits accruing to industrialists and massive black-market dealings of the estate owners. General von Schweinitz now subjected each

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edition of the lvz to precensorship and even scrutinized internal publications of the uspd.102 Beginning in January 1918, the police forbade most uspd meetings. Some key activists in the party responded by holding illegal smaller gatherings. When detected, they could count on receiving fines and prison terms.103 I discussed above how, after Groener’s fall, the ohl ordered local deputy commanders to get tougher with striking workers. The strike of 31 January to 2 February 1918 illustrates the determination of the military to suppress anything that might have disrupted production for the final offensive in the west. Despite a stern public warning from Schweinitz on 29 January that strikers would be drafted and sent to the front,104 about five thousand Leipzigers joined much larger walkouts under way in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg, and Hamburg (as well as Vienna and Budapest).105 One thousand workers at the Deutsche Fleugzeugwerke in Leipzig-Lindenthal, many of them women, represented the largest single contingent of strikers. Schweinitz immediately brought the factory under military control.106 He also had meetings of strikers broken up by mounted police. Without union support, the strike petered out in three days.107 Schweinitz also began drafting and sending subversives to the front in higher numbers. Each firm producing for the war in Leipzig had to submit to the deputy commander a list of employees with a red check next to those workers whose services were not crucial, in other words, those recommended for military service.108 But the induction of troublemakers did not always suit the needs of the military. For example, in July 1917, the deputy commander decided to silence the lvz writer Alfred Herre by drafting him into the navy. If Herre had caused the authorities difficulties in Leipzig, he did more damage as a member of the Second Torpedo Group in Wilhelmshaven, where he ceaselessly agitated against the war and played a leading role in the mutiny of the summer of 1917. He was ultimately jailed.109 While officially prohibiting all public meetings, police in fact allowed groups supportive of the war to hold assemblies. Their favorite was the Fatherland Party that, as noted above, had been founded in September 1917 on the initiative of the ohl to propagandize for the war and against the “inner enemy” of Social Democracy. It was led in Leipzig by university professor Erich Brandenburg, a leader of the National Liberals during the prewar period. The Fatherland Party enjoyed great popularity among nonworkers in Leipzig, drawing most of its support from the National Liberals. During the final offensive of spring 1918, its many rallies attracted enthusiastic crowds often numbering in the tens of thousands.110 One might speculate that the Fa-


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therland Party’s nonstop and voluble demands for everything Leipzig’s workers opposed probably served to radicalize the latter further.

THE DIALECTIC OF POPULAR RADICALIZATION In 1917 the discontent of Leipzig’s workers reached a new height. Food riots continued with the same frequency as before, but they were now supplemented by ever more crimes against property and a sharp rise in the number of strikes. The police admitted that compared to the first two years of the war, “respect for law and authority ha[d] dwindled to an alarming degree.”111 To understand this radicalization, one must bear in mind that “dominating urban life was the fate of the armies.”112 Unalterably opposed to democratic reform, elites could have diminished popular rage had they led Germany to military victory. A Siegfrieden would have saved loved ones still alive at the front, ended the material immiseration of workers, and, most important, repaired the badly damaged legitimacy of the elites. Indeed, when one traces the timing of the waves of strikes culminating in revolution in November 1918, it becomes clear that their frequency and intensity were directly linked to Germany’s overall military predicament. With each success of German arms, worker radicalism subsided; when military stalemate returned, the strikes resumed with greater forcefulness than before, in effect advancing according to a dialectic of expectation and disappointment.113 An examination of the strikes also reveals that all types of wageworkers—not just men employed in war factories—participated and that the strikes always broke out against the wishes of union functionaries. The decision to commence unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 lifted public hopes that victory might be in the offing.114 The mood soured soon thereafter, however, when the usa entered the war and the food shortage worsened during the infamous “turnip winter.”115 Meanwhile, the February Revolution in Russia undoubtedly provided workers with some ideas about transforming their own political system.116 Discontent among German workers was therefore running especially high when Reich authorities announced a cut in the bread ration in the middle of April 1917. Major strikes erupted in several cities, most spectacularly in Berlin and Leipzig.117 In Leipzig ten thousand workers—at first mostly in the war factories— spontaneously walked off the job after hearing about the ration reduction. Not only did union leaders play no part in this action, they were totally unin-

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formed, learning of it from the deputy military commander himself. The functionaries immediately went into conference with municipal and military officials, apprising them of the aims of the strikers as news filtered in from their contacts in the rank and file. They also promised the authorities that no union funds would be used to support the wildcat walkout. Military officials were grateful for this collaboration but doubted that the union leadership could still exert influence on the workforce.118 The strike quickly came under the direction of Lipinski, representing the uspd, and Arthur Lieberasch, a left-wing oppositionist functionary in the German Metalworkers’ Union. They decided not to invite the union leaders to the rally planned for the next day but did inform them of the demands made in individual factories and also arranged a meeting for the next morning, 17 April, to include the mayor, the city senate, and military officers. At the meeting, Lipinski began the discussion by pointing out that the demands were not just economic (restored bread ration, better food supply, higher wages, fewer hours) but also political (end of the censorship and political arrests, democratization of local government). The union leaders immediately contradicted him, arguing that politics had no place in a strike, and began discussing with military officials the extent to which wages could be raised, hours reduced, and food supply improved. The files do not indicate whether Lipinski and Lieberasch raised their political demands again during the meeting.119 Later that day the rally filled the hall at Leipzig-Stoetteritz with seven thousand strikers while another three thousand stood outside. About onethird of those present were women. Significantly, Lipinski and Lieberasch had decided against holding the rally in the city center, probably in deference to police wishes and certainly in keeping with their prewar practice. Lieberasch opened by reporting the results of the meeting with the authorities that morning: the Kriegsamtstelle had promised to supply the city with more food and would see to it that midday meals were distributed in the larger war factories. He then argued that a major goal of the strike should be to ensure that nobody involved be drafted or arrested. Lipinski spoke next, urging that the strikers raise political demands: end of the state of siege, introduction of democracy, and immediate peace with no annexations. He received the most applause for the final demand. At that point a deputation was elected—comprising Lipinski, Lieberasch, and a young left-wing writer at the lvz named Hermann Liebmann—to present all these demands to Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. The meeting then ended. Later in the day in the same hall Friedrich Geyer and Liebmann led a second meeting, attended


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by thousands of workers, most of them from the metal trades. The complaints from the crowd focused on insufficient wages and food, the forced pace of production and long hours, the employers’ refusal to hold proper elections for the worker committees mandated by the Auxiliary Service Law, the government’s rejection of the recent Russian peace offer, and the incarceration of political prisoners. Both Geyer and Liebmann pointed out that peace would only come when Germany had a democratic government. At the conclusion of the meeting, the delegation departed for Berlin to seek its meeting with Bethmann Hollweg.120 By its third day, 18 April, the strike had spread to all trades involved in war production as well as to the city’s largely female textile factory workforce, encompassing now about thirty thousand workers. Women workers in war factories participated in the strike as frequently as their male colleagues, and workers in smaller workshops were as likely to strike as those employed in larger establishments.121 With its leaders in Berlin, the strike on this day came increasingly under the control of the union leaders, who made public the concessions that the employers were prepared to offer: reduction of the workweek from sixty-three to about fifty-three hours; abolition of Sunday and overtime work except in emergencies; and a cost-of-living-allowance for most workers (with women receiving the smallest). Meanwhile, in Berlin, the delegation did not meet with Bethmann Hollweg but instead with Under State Secretary Wahnschaffe, president of the War Nutrition Office von Batocki, and Kriegsamt chief Groener. The government officials refused to discuss the political demands of the strikers but pledged to use their influence to improve living and working conditions for Leipzig’s workers. By the next day the strike in Leipzig was over.122 The demands advanced by strikers in Leipzig were more political in nature than those put forward in other cities, where typically only food supplies and wages were at issue.123 When workers in Berlin heard of the demands made in Leipzig, however, they incorporated them into their own strike.124 Only the occupation of a number of factories with troops and the drafting of the ringleaders finally brought the Berlin strike to an end.125 The eagerness with which Leipzig’s union leadership cooperated with the authorities during the April strike cost it the support of many organized workers. After the conclusion of the strike, the members of the Leipzig local of the Metalworkers’ Union voted to withdraw from the city’s cartel of unions (Gewerkschaftskartell), stating that they no longer cared to work with the “social patriots” (as the left termed collaborationist Social Democrats) in the union leadership. In the following months the action of the metalworkers

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local was followed by the local unions representing the factory workers, roofers, sales help (both male and female), tobacco workers, coppersmiths, tailors, bricklayers, saddlers, wallet makers, and butchers, altogether representing about 40 percent of Leipzig’s organized workforce. The above list of unions seceding from the local Gewerkschaftskartell represented both skilled and unskilled, factory and craft, male and female workers (women were especially numerous in the sales help, factory worker, and tailor unions). The radicalization of the workforce, then, was not confined to male metalworkers, as has been argued in many studies of the German home front. In November 1917, the renegade unions decided to form their own cartel, under the leadership of Liebmann, to oppose the old Gewerkschaftskartell. Leipzig was the only city in Germany where worker frustration with the conservatism of the leadership led to a schism in the local union movement. At this point the national union leadership intervened to heal the rift, persuading Liebmann to return the breakaway unions to the Gewerkschaftskartell by January 1918 in return for new elections to that body. Liebmann agreed to this deal because he and his radical allies were confident they could win such an election. Once in power, they planned to end union collaboration in the war effort.126 Even without the radicals in their ranks, a general assembly of the rump Gewerkschaftskartell in that same November voted to forbid the leadership from holding informational (aufklärische) meetings at which it distributed propaganda urging workers to support the war effort.127 Only two months after the April 1917 strike, another wave of wildcat walkouts swept Leipzig and continued throughout the summer. The local Gewerkschaftskartell supported none of the strikes.128 Kriegsamt officers believed the renewed discontent sprang mostly from the increasing food shortage and above all perceived inequities in distribution: “Great bitterness stems from the rumors that other federal states do not suffer from the same food shortage as does Saxony. . . . Also the recurring promise in resort advertisements that ‘excellent dining is guaranteed’ must cause deep discontent among the poorer population.” The police noted further that only the recent military successes in Galicia prevented a worse deterioration of spirits.129 The largely female workforce at the Brandstetter printing plant began the summer strike wave, walking out from 7–14 July for higher pay (they did not win a raise).130 Immediately thereafter several thousand workers of both sexes, employed both in large factories and smaller workshops, struck spontaneously, again without union support, resurrecting the demands of the April strike. Some among them won colas.131 On 2 August a crowd of about five thousand heard Friedrich Geyer deliver an antiwar speech at the Zoological


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Garden. At its end the crowd chanted in unison: “We want bread, we want freedom, we want peace.”132 During the course of that month, a series of wildcat strikes in pursuit of colas erupted in the construction and woodworking trades.133 On 15 August about two thousand workers from a variety of trades abandoned their workplaces and met at the Volkshaus to decide how to pressure the authorities to end the war. The uspd leaders counseled the strikers to return to work because they had been warned by the police that this particular strike would be dispersed with violent means if necessary. Without leadership, the walkout ended within a day, though not before many of the strikers had clashed with police in the western part of town. The police arrested forty-two people of both sexes, adults and minors.134 The Kriegsamt noted a temporary lift in the public’s mood in September 1917 as a result of Russia’s military collapse,135 but the strikes resumed a month later. On 5 October the largely female workforce at the Teubner printing plant struck for but failed to receive a cola.136 The end of the month saw an antiwar demonstration in Leipzig, attended by several thousand, at which the kaiser was repeatedly disparaged. The police did not dare break it up.137 A month later yet another wave of wildcat strikes in a variety of trades swept over the city.138 January 1918, then, found the mood of Leipzig’s workers at another low point, which explains the outbreak of a large strike at the end of that month,139 already examined above in this chapter. A number of its features are worth noting briefly. First, it highlighted the ambiguous effect of the Russian Revolution on Germany’s workers. On the one hand, Russia’s military collapse improved Germany’s strategic prospects and thereby undercut worker radicalism. On the other, the fact that urban laborers were the driving element of the Russian Revolution undoubtedly gave Leipzig’s workers ideas of their own about how to bring about the peace and democracy for which they yearned so strongly. In this regard it was surely no accident that the strikers demanded immediate peace at two well-attended demonstrations on 31 January and 1 February.140 Second, with only six thousand participants the Leipzig strike was smaller than simultaneous walkouts in Berlin, Düsseldorf, and other cities involving hundreds of thousands of workers.141 Finally, as in other wartime strikes, all types of workers in Leipzig—male and female, factory and craft, skilled and unskilled—took part. In his meticulously researched monograph, Hans-Joachim Bieber claims that workers in Leipzig elected a Worker Council (Arbeiterrat) to direct the strike.142 I could uncover no archival evidence to support this contention. As noted earlier, the military and police crushed the strike after only three days.

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Throughout the spring of 1918, the success of German arms—that is, the final defeat of Russia embodied by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the punitive Peace of Bucharest with Rumania, the renewed and seemingly successful offensive in the west—led to a near-disappearance of strikes, for even the most intransigent pacifist had no desire to undercut the men at the front.143 But as it became clear in July that there would be no victory in the west, reports about strikes and food riots from Zwickau and Chemnitz as well as middlesized towns such as Oschatz, Altenburg, Crimmitschau, and Meißen began flooding into the Kriegsamtstelle in Leipzig.144 At this same time, bands of hungry city dwellers began roving the countryside, especially on weekends, in search of food, sometimes forcing farmers to part with it for a “just price.” The deputy military commander responded by posting nine hundred troops across rural western Saxony.145 With the opening of the Allied counteroffensive in July the number of strikes increased. Two thousand woodworkers (one-third of them women) in forty-four firms struck for higher wages,146 while in several strip mines around the city workers lay down their tools. Even the prisoners of war assigned to the strip mines joined in the strike. The miners returned to work only after the deputy commander threatened to place them all under military discipline.147 I have already noted that the strikes and demonstrations intensified and subsided mostly in response to the military situation and that all types of workers participated. Four other characteristics of the late-war radicalization deserve comment. First, young people, usually teenagers, played a prominent role. Their rowdiness and chants at the end of uspd meetings often stirred those attending to embark on spontaneous demonstrations. Teenagers also proved themselves more willing to battle police in the streets and defy the ban on distributing antiwar literature. Their insubordination cannot be dismissed as the activity of adolescent thrill seekers: within the party’s youth hiking and singing clubs, teens discussed politics in a serious manner and tended to arrive at more left-wing positions than their elders. It was among socialist youth, for instance, that support for a general strike to end the war found its strongest adherents.148 Second, working women struck as often as men, displayed at least as great a willingness to confront the police in the street, and attended peace and hunger demonstrations in disproportionately high numbers.149 At the same time, however, they continued their prewar disinclination to join party or unions. A uspd effort in May 1917 to replace comrades at the front with women, for instance, attracted few recruits. As the police concluded: “While the women appear fairly numerously at the great public rallies of the party lead-


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ership, attempts to hold meetings specifically for women [to attract them into the party] remain almost without any success.”150 How did women construe their own identity when protesting: as “consumers,” “women,” “workers,” or “the poor”? The sources are scanty on food riots: the newspapers were censored, and police reports chronicle only that women rioted, not how or in which guise. Information becomes more detailed on strikes. In these events, the demands of striking women were indistinguishable from those of male comrades: in the early war, complaints focused exclusively on the food supply; by midwar, they added the call for better wages and peace. A number of explanations suggest themselves for this distinct style of mobilization. Working for a wage and managing a household (often without the wages of a drafted husband), women lacked the time to attend party and union meetings, which explains their reluctance to join these organizations. Moreover, party and especially union leaders made no sustained efforts to attract female members (the uspd recruitment drive mentioned directly above was the sole such attempt). In part 1, I speculated on how the experience of working women might have bred in them a more intense dislike of elites (especially managers), at least partially explaining their willingness to face police and army in the street. The war added other reasons: endless lines for food, hyperexploitation at work, hungry children, loved ones in danger at the front. That they could not be drafted and were less likely to receive prison sentences may also have emboldened them (this last point also applies to young people). In any event, the findings of this book cast doubt on arguments advanced by many historians that working women in Germany were apolitical or even conservative.151 Third, over the course of these two years the worker committees (ArbeiterAusschüsse) of the Auxiliary Service Law and, by late 1918, spontaneously elected shop stewards (Vertrauensleute) came to displace the unions as leaders on the shop floor. When a strike broke out, management found itself obliged to ignore the unions and instead negotiate with the worker committees and shop stewards because they alone commanded the loyalty of the workforce.152 Their direct descendants—the Worker Councils (Arbeiterräte)—were ultimately to topple the state itself in November 1918. Finally, while the call for democratic reform of government was voiced in many strikes, higher wages and immediate peace represented the most frequent demands. As long as the possibility existed that elites might win the war, their weakening legitimacy remained intact, and workers were thus reluctant to demand the abolition of the regime itself. Only with the shattering

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news of the Allied breakthroughs in the late summer of 1918 did the demand for democracy come to predominate. The police also noted with concern the increasing war weariness of many lower white collars and alte Mittelständler after 1916. Their yearning for peace, however, was punctuated by periods of heady nationalism whenever the military situation improved. Although Leipzig’s lower white collars and alter Mittelstand may have withdrawn their support for the regime in the final months of the war, they never openly protested and certainly did not express support for the uspd.153

DÉNOUEMENT: SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1918 Under the onslaught of the Allied counteroffensive, Germany’s western front began its final stage of collapse in late September 1918. A few days later its position in the Balkans became equally untenable when its ally Bulgaria sued for peace and Romania announced that it would reenter the war on the side of the Allies, a move that would cut off Germany’s main supply of oil and require the withdrawal from the war of its only remaining ally, Austria-Hungary. Finally recognizing the hopelessness of the situation, Ludendorff and Hindenburg informed the civilian government on 29 September of the necessity of asking the Allies for an armistice.154 The kaiser assented and the next day announced his intention to form a government responsible to parliament. He entrusted this task to Prince Max of Baden, a liberal, who succeeded on 3 October in assembling a cabinet composed of the Progressive People’s Party, the Catholic Center Party, and the mspd, with the goal of drafting a new constitution.155 By obtaining a key position in what it believed was a democratic regime, the mspd leadership achieved what had been its most cherished goal for decades. The leadership hoped to consolidate the new order and then work within it for gradual reform. After 3 October, therefore, the national spd and union leadership opposed anything—above all an unruly popular mobilization—that might disturb what they thought had been a smooth transition to parliamentary democracy.156 In fact, however, the new order was far from democratic. The October constitution did nothing to rein in the military, which continued to function as a state within a state. Throughout October, when the army high command bothered at all to inform the new government of its decisions, it negotiated with it as an equal;157 meanwhile, the admiralty


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systematically deceived civilian authorities about its plan for a final “death ride” against the Royal Navy, a hopeless effort to rescue its honor during a time of delicate negotiations with the Allies. Women still lacked the right to vote; the suffrage in the provinces remained glaringly inegalitarian; the undemocratic federal council (Bundesrat) still possessed authority to veto legislation; electoral districts remained gerrymandered. Given that the Reichstag had not even attempted to reform these vestiges of the old order when drafting the October constitution, there was no reason to expect that they would disappear any time soon. Finally, there was the question of the legitimacy of the new order. The partial democratization granted in October by the old elites, above all the officer corps, could logically be revoked by them. If democracy were to have a chance, it would need a firmer foundation than the sufferance of General Ludendorff.158 Despite the formation of Prince Max’s government, the strikes, riots, and demonstrations in Leipzig examined throughout this chapter gained momentum. The uspd leadership, which hitherto had usually limited itself to demanding immediate peace, began to attack the very legitimacy of the regime in public, thereby providing ordinary workers with a vocabulary with which they could conduct their own revolutionary critique. In mid-October the lvz began to ignore the censor and call for revolution. “No more by ‘God’s Will’ but rather through the will of the people should Germany be governed! . . . There can be no more standing around, no more waiting on events!” The same issue of the newspaper demanded immediate introduction of a democratic constitution.159 Looming military defeat emboldened uspd leaders to deliver ever more radical speeches. Conversely, the representatives of the state lost their self-confidence, their will to rule: a precondition for any revolution. For instance, the radical son of Friedrich Geyer, Curt, castigated the kaiser in the waning days of October before a large crowd. The police representative—who during the war attended all uspd meetings and usually sat prominently near the podium—stood up and declared, “But, Dr. Geyer, I must ask you to moderate your language!” Geyer replied, “ ‘Oh no, Mr. Police Director, those days are over. I decide what is said in this meeting and not the police, and I decide when it will end!’ The crowd jumped to its feet as one man and yelled ‘Jawohl’! and began to cheer. [The police director] sat down resignedly. It was the end of police supervision of [uspd] meetings.”160 Even before public assemblies were again permitted by order of Prince Max’s government on 2 November, the police ceased dispersing public gatherings. At many of these the talk was openly of revolution.

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Although elites were losing their nerve in the face of the popular and uspd challenge, they still could not bring themselves to believe that the old regime was dying. Only on 30 October did the Saxon king convene a special council of state to consider constitutional changes. Acting on its recommendations, he appointed a new cabinet the next day, headed by a National Liberal and containing two spd ministers (Frätzdorf and Heldt). Both bodies, along with the Landtag, began debating constitutional reform in a leisurely manner. On the day before the revolution swept across Saxony, the Landtag spent its time considering such weighty matters as the complaint of one Christian Dressel about his tax assessment and the petition of the village of Niederoderwitz for state funds to build a public loading dock.161 The pace of political change during these days left the town fathers of Leipzig equally dumbfounded. Only on 30 October did the city council pass a motion calling for a “general, equal suffrage” that in the future would decide the composition of that body. The bill made no mention of making the suffrage secret or of reforming the city senate, office of the mayor, and Leipzig’s gerrymandered electoral districts. The city council, with the votes of the Progressive People’s Party, specifically quashed an effort by the uspd to include female suffrage in the bill (again indicating how much more conservative the local Progressives were compared to the national party).162 On 2 November the city senate and mayor reviewed the bill together in private. Mayor Rothe remarked that, if passed, it would lead to a socialist majority in the city council and therefore should be blocked. City senator Göhring saw in the bill a dangerous attempt to “politicize” city government. Politics, he argued, should be left to Reich and Land. At the municipal level, he continued, affairs were managed in a beneficial, nonpartisan manner because those with a permanent stake in the city, Leipzig’s property owners, held sway. He feared the consequences of the “great, fluctuating mass” obtaining a voice in municipal matters. Pointing out that conservatives had thwarted efforts to democratize the suffrage in Prussia, he advised tabling the bill and waiting on events. The senate voted as Göhring had recommended.163 In this its final meeting before the revolution erupted in Leipzig, the senate then moved on to other pressing issues, such as whether to install a new heating system in the city-owned Kaffee Reichskanzler.164 The final days before the revolution found even the normally astute political judgment of the Kriegsamtstelle officers palsied. On 7 November—several days after the naval mutiny in the northern ports and the very day before the uprising in Leipzig—the officers busied themselves with requesting from


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the Kriegsamtstelle in Altona a special lever machine for a factory in Leipzig.165 A ruling group’s power rests on custom, legitimacy, and, to the extent that these fail, the ability and will to apply force. By November 1918 elites in Leipzig possessed none of these requirements for continued rule. After four years of unprecedented social change, increasing numbers of workers perceived the mutability of customary hierarchies. Elites had never enjoyed full legitimacy because their ascendancy did not result from democratic elections and nobody believed in divine right monarchy. The remnants of that legitimacy were destroyed by elite mismanagement of the war effort, both economic and military. These failures also undermined their own self-confidence, the conviction that they deserved to rule. And even if they still possessed the will to dominate, could soldiers be found to fire on unarmed demonstrators? The old relationship could no longer continue. The smallest impetus would be enough to prompt Leipzig’s workers to dissolve that relationship completely. It appeared in the form of some soldiers waiting for a train.

chapter 8

FINAL DISSOLUTION OF THE OLD RELATIONSHIP: 8–9 NOVEMBER 1918

WHEN ON 29 October the Reich admiralty issued the order to set sail on the “death ride” mentioned in the preceding chapter, the sailors mutinied, joining forces with revolutionary workers in their localities to form Worker and Soldier Councils (Arbeiter und Soldatenräte, or asre). These organizations not only stripped officers of authority but also compelled local officials to recognize their supremacy. By 3 November they were in control of the northern port cities and demanding that Germany be transformed into a democratic republic. In the following days their emissaries succeeded in converting to the revolution workers and soldiers in ever more big cities across Germany.1 Revolutionary sailors had not quite reached Leipzig when, on the morning of 8 November, about three hundred soldiers marooned in the city’s train station found themselves in a highly irritated mood.2 Ordered to the front to fight in a war now lost, they could find no food to still the gnawing hunger that had been growing while they waited for a connection already several hours late. The men began conferring with each other and resolved to take action. Under a hastily fashioned red flag, they formed a column and marched off toward Leipzig’s union headquarters (das Volkshaus), seemingly without a specific plan of action. Other soldiers quickly joined them, perhaps attracted by the fun of stopping officers on the street and pulling them out of trams, disarming them, and stripping them of their epaulettes. The marchers ripped their own imperial cockades off and tied red kerchiefs around their arms, parading thus through the city center in a serpentine path toward the Volkshaus. Within minutes, the mayor heard of the mutiny and feared the soldiers might invade the town hall. Realizing that his own police would not oppose the armed mutineers, he telephoned General von Schweinitz, re-

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questing that he dispatch troops to protect the municipal government. “Mr. Mayor, unfortunately I cannot do that,” replied the general, “for you know that according to my latest orders I can only act after receiving direct instructions from the Land government. In any event, I can rely on the troops in the garrison as little as you on the police—you realize the situation.”3 In the event, the mutineers, now numbering about five hundred, ignored the town hall and arrived at the Volkshaus, a bit outside the city center, at around 1:00 p.m. There they hoisted a red flag atop the building, elected from their midst a Soldier Council, and heard the city’s most prominent Social Democrat, Richard Lipinski, tell them of the revolution’s success elsewhere in Germany. About forty-five minutes later they resumed their march, this time heading south toward the neighborhood of Connewitz where they hoped to bring over to the revolution the soldiers quartered there in various inns and commandeer as many weapons as possible. Lipinski called the other uspd leaders in Leipzig to the Volkshaus, where they constituted themselves as Leipzig’s provisional Worker Council (Arbeiterrat). Sometime during the afternoon the Worker Council established contact with the mayor, who agreed to submit to its authority. As the city’s new supreme political entity got down to the task of drafting a revolutionary agenda, curious workers continually wandered into its meeting and random soldiers popped in to inquire about accommodations in the city, while the sounds of the ever-increasing throngs in the street below made it difficult to confer. At around 4:00 p.m. the column of soldiers, now greatly enlarged and outfitted with weapons seized from various depots, arrived at the headquarters of deputy commander General von Schweinitz but found that he had already capitulated to another group of soldiers from one of the local garrisons. Revolutionary soldiers then occupied the post office, train station, and other public buildings and invaded the central police station, liberating the political prisoners (and many more besides). Festooned with a huge red ribbon on his cap and wearing a saber that dragged on the ground as he walked, Corporal Erich Geschwandtner, chairman of the Soldier Council, returned in triumph to the Volkshaus to announce that the revolutionary soldiers now controlled the city.4 To secure these gains, the provisional Worker Council drafted and had distributed throughout the city the following call for a three-day general strike to begin the following morning: The hour has arrived when action is needed! The Revolution has triumphed in Kiel, Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover, Schwerin, Oldenburg, Rostock. Bavaria is a republic! Rise up to take political power! Shake off the yoke of capitalism!

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Abandon the factories for the socialist republic! General strike to wrest political power! Walk out to support the soldiers! Rise up! General strike! —Worker and Soldier Council, Leipzig5

Since there existed no unified Worker and Soldier Council in Leipzig, the provisional Worker Council acting alone had composed this announcement. The Soldier Council raised no objections to this fait accompli when the two bodies met at 6:00 p.m. to constitute themselves the provisional Worker and Soldier Council (Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat, or asr) and plan the agenda for a mass meeting to be held that evening in the hall of the train station. As news of the revolution spread, the city center filled with thousands of Leipzigers, the vast majority of them workers (and among these a high percentage of women and teenagers). Smiling and laughing, crowds of workers and soldiers destroyed symbols of the old regime, such as the coat of arms of the Hohenzollerns and Wettiner displayed on shops that delivered to the imperial and royal courts, respectively. They also disarmed the few officers encountered on the street and cut off their epaulettes (almost never meeting with resistance). Although the police were nowhere to be seen, neither violence against persons nor serious damage to property occurred.6 By 9:00 that evening crowds thronged the train station for the mass meeting. Given the presence of representatives of the different military barracks around the city, it was clear that almost all the soldiers quartered in Leipzig had joined the revolution. Friedrich Geyer, the Reichstag deputy for Leipzig’s thirteenth district, addressed the boisterous crowd, reviewing the day’s events and congratulating those present for their revolutionary élan. He repeated the call for the general strike to begin the following day and explained the rules by which the permanent asr would be elected: the Soldier Council was already elected; the composition of the worker half of the asr would be decided by elections in each of Leipzig’s firms; for every five hundred employees, one representative to the asr would be elected; smaller firms would amalgamate in order to reach the five-hundred-employee minimum and then together elect a representative; white-collar employees would have the right to vote but would not enjoy separate representation (i.e., their votes would be swamped by those of workers); the new asr would meet in plenum the following evening.7 Geyer ended his speech by emphasizing that the revolution was only beginning and that the insurgents were sure to encounter fierce resistance in building the socialist republic. The Leipzig area’s other


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uspd Reichstag deputy, Karl Ryssel, then spoke briefly, pointing out that if the revolution failed, Germany’s working class would have to bear the full cost of the war. The last to speak was Johannes Schöning, a moderate uspd functionary who was serving as the representative of the Soldier Council (Geschwandtner, the titular head, was unaccustomed to public speaking). Schöning called for discipline among the soldiers and strict observance of the orders of the Soldier Council. The meeting ended with a thunderous “Long Live the Socialist Republic!” News of the revolution in Leipzig sparked rebellion in Saxony’s other big cities, Dresden and Chemnitz, as well as a host of smaller towns. By the next day, the last of the Wettin monarchs, Frederick August II, fled with his family to the Moritzburg and from there to Silesia, where a few days later he instructed his former interior minister to announce his abdication.8 As in most other big cities, soldiers took the initiative on the first day of the revolution in Leipzig, the most immediate target of their wrath being the officer corps, and party leaders were late to involve themselves.9 Events in Leipzig differed from those in other cities, however, in equally significant ways. Its uspd leadership, unlike the mspd in other cities, made no effort to brake the rebellion once it was under way. Moreover, this first day of the revolution featured calls not only for peace and democracy but for a socialist republic (though nobody defined what that might be). The next morning, 9 November, workers across the city met in their firms and factories, elected representatives to the asr, and then went out on strike, usually marching together under a red flag toward the city center. Every worker in the city—with the exception of those in the transportation and food sectors, whom the provisional Worker Council had exempted—participated in the general strike.10 Even prisoners of war laboring in Leipzig’s factories as well as the employees of the municipal theater took part in the strike.11 White-collar employees chose not to participate.12 The three major newspapers reported high numbers of women and minors among those streaming toward the downtown. Untold thousands of Leipzigers packed the city center. The preceding chapters have described what a high priority the police had placed on keeping demonstrators out of the downtown before and during the war. By now controlling this area, workers emphatically demonstrated popular sovereignty. Banners with a big red number 8 (the call for the eight-hour day) and pictures of Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel bobbed on an ocean of red flags, red clothes, and the red paper flowers worn by many female strikers. The Freiheitslied and Marseillaise wafted through the air, with liberated

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British, French, and Russian prisoners of war joining in on the latter. Street corner speeches ended with the cry “Long Live the Socialist Republic!” The thousands of soldiers with red armbands were not necessary to maintain public order since there was no sign of violence or criminality among the festive strikers. For the second day in a row police dared not show themselves. At around 10:00 a.m. a portion of the crowd surrounded the new town hall, milling about confusedly before electing a delegation to demand that the municipal authorities recognize the authority of the asr. The mayor and city senate repeated their pledge of the day before that they would henceforth conduct themselves “on the basis of the new facts” and that they looked forward to working with the asr to overcome the enormous difficulties plaguing the city. They also asked all civil servants to stay on the job during “Germany’s hour of need.”13 Resignation punctuated by moments of panic characterizes the tone of the nonsocialist press during these first two days of the revolution. While admitting that the destruction of the old regime proceeded with an astonishing lack of violence, the National Liberal Leipziger Tageblatt expressed fears over the fate of private property while also urging its female readers to stay indoors since nothing prevented drunken soldiers from molesting them. The next paragraph of the story then noted with relief that at least the revolutionaries in Germany would be less extreme and licentious than their counterparts in Eastern Europe, the latter characterized as “excitable Romanians” and “lazy Slavs.”14 That evening the six hundred representatives elected earlier in the factories convened for the first assembly of the asr. At most only a handful of women appeared among the delegates.15 Comments from the floor stressed the need to ensure that military officers accept the authority of the asr. During that same meeting the assembled delegates confirmed in power a self-appointed executive committee (Engerer Ausschuß), consisting of eleven representatives of the Soldier Council and eleven uspd members, supplemented by three “leading personalities of the Leipzig worker movement” (Karl Ryssel and the Geyers, father and son). The party therefore controlled a majority of votes on the asr, rather than the more moderate soldiers. Lipinski and a soldier by the name of Schaudler served as cochairs of the executive committee. As Schaudler never spoke at this or subsequent meetings, Lipinski was in fact in charge. The executive committee then announced the formation of subcommittees responsible for the following tasks: control of the Nineteenth Army Corps command, control of the Kriegsamtstelle, regulation of output


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in war factories (with the goal of converting them to civilian production), constitutional matters, and procurement of food, clothing, and coal.16 Lipinski stepped to the podium and asked the assembly for its approval of the program hammered out by the executive committee prior to the meeting: 1. declaration of the socialist republic 2. expansion of the authority of the asr to include the entire Nineteenth Army Corps District 3. maintenance of current military formations and supervision of officers by the executive committee of the Soldier Council 4. requirement that all military officers recognize the authority of asr with failure to comply resulting either in forced resignation or incarceration 5. dissolution of the political police 6. supervision of the regular police by Johannes Scheib (a functionary of the party and moderate ally of Lipinski) 7. supplementation of police patrols with soldiers under the command of the asr 8. freedom of the press with the stipulation that newspapers devote front page space to announcements of the asr 9. surveillance of telegrams but not telephone conversations

Lipinski announced further that the city council would be dissolved shortly and replaced by a democratically elected body.17 The assembly approved all these measures by acclaim and also voted to free the prisoners of war who had been forced to toil in the worst factory jobs. The first meeting of Leipzig’s asr ended with another cheer of “Long Live the Socialist Republic!” Significantly, the revolutionary program of the asr announced no economic initiatives except for the institution of a “socialist republic,” a term nobody bothered to define. Moreover, the asr, though dissolving the city council, inexplicably left the equally undemocratic (and more powerful) city senate and mayor’s office unmolested. Both these omissions were to produce major consequences in the weeks to come. Also on 9 November workers in the smaller cities surrounding Leipzig (Taucha, Eilenburg, Wurzen, Zwenkau, etc.) formed their own asre, which followed the lead of Leipzig in matters of policy.18 That evening, news from Berlin of the collapse of the imperial monarchy and its replacement with a German republic spread across the city. On the following day the streets and squares of Leipzig remained full of jubilant crowds.

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As of the evening of 9 November, with the imperial and royal monarchies overthrown and its officials under the control of the asr, the old political relationship between workers and Bürger in Leipzig had come to an end. As I shall show, the political collapse of elites, the declaration of a “socialist republic” in Leipzig, and the widespread expectation of the impending socialization of big industry and landholdings all led many workers to believe that the wage relationship would also be dissolved, to be replaced shortly by something more democratic. Their efforts to bring this about will occupy much of part 3.

SUMMARY OF PART 2 Since well before the war, workers in Leipzig had wanted to replace the authoritarian political relationship with something much more democratic. But three blocking agents before 1914 restrained them from embarking on revolution: the weight of custom, the partial legitimacy of elites, and the refusal of the spd leadership to lead a frontal assault. The war dissolved all three of these blocking agents. Having witnessed massive social change for the past four years, many workers who had hitherto been resigned to their fate recognized that the social and political relations into which they had been born could be altered; by mismanaging the economy and especially losing the war, elites knocked out the remaining pillars supporting their authority; and finally, in Leipzig, the moderate spd was replaced by the more aggressive uspd. In addition to dissolving these three blocking agents, the war added two further reasons to rebel: desire to save loved ones at the front and material immiseration. In the fall of 1918, removing the current regime—desired by Leipzig’s workers since before 1914—seemed the surest means of solving both these new problems. This conclusion runs counter to the conventional wisdom on the causes of the revolutionary radicalization of Germany’s workers, a thesis finding its most eloquent proponent in Gerhard A. Ritter: In order to understand this process of the destabilization [of the workforce leading to its radicalization], one must direct one’s attention to the inadequate rootedness of, above all, the workers in the war factories, especially to the lack of family and other types of connections that result from living in one community for a long time, to the violent fluctuation [of the workforce]


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and the high levels of intra- and interurban mobility, to the continual reduction in real wages and the insufficient supply of basic commodities. . . . Finally, their insufficient contact with the traditional union and political organizations—which had been weakened as a result of the drafting of numerous members and functionaries and whose organizations were built on geographical districts rather than the factories themselves—led to the growing disorientation of the industrial workforce during the war years.19

Without providing statistical evidence, Ritter argues here that the factory jobs left open by men drafted into the military were filled by people with no experience as proletarians (presumably rural migrants to the city as well as women). Alienated, hyperexploited, hungry, with no experience of factory labor (and therefore unaccustomed to its rigors and sharp subordination), no contact with the moderating ideology of the unions, and, in the case of recent rural migrants, no connection to their neighborhoods (and therefore no access to the survival networks that would have eased the transition to urban life), these people lashed out at a situation they could not understand in a kind of existential revolt.20 This explanation suffers from a number of problems. Peasants and agricultural laborers were precisely the group drafted in the highest numbers, a fact that left few able bodies in the countryside to work the fields.21 Since their labor was so valuable in the countryside, why would those remaining on the land migrate to the cities? Such a move seems especially improbable when one considers that they could maintain access to the dwindling supply of food only by remaining in the countryside (nothing but declining real wages and hunger awaited them in the cities). Ritter’s argument appears to be on firmer ground when the focus shifts to former housewives and female homeworkers as the most likely candidates to have filled the factory jobs opened up by the draft. Indeed, in Leipzig the percentage of women in the wage workforce increased from 30 percent in 1913 to 46 percent in 1918.22 Closer scrutiny of these figures reveals, however, that three-quarters of these new wage earners found employment in trade, transportation, and insurance (where strikes almost never occurred) while only one-quarter took jobs in industry (where strikes were frequent).23 In fact, seasoned native proletarians occupied the jobs in Leipzig’s war factories. Skilled positions in these factories were held by the same laborers who had always occupied them, for the ohl had concluded by 1917 that these men were best utilized not on the front but at home producing for the war.24 Semi- and unskilled positions in the war factories were occupied largely by

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women who before the war had worked in factory jobs producing for the civilian economy (i.e., textiles, paper, shoes, food processing, etc.). The police in Leipzig noted the strong flow of female workers from traditionally feminine (weibliche) factory jobs into the war industries.25 Evidence from outside Leipzig corroborates this conclusion.26 As female factory workers moved into jobs in the war industries, nobody filled their old positions in the peace industries: sectors such as textiles and food processing simply atrophied.27 Thus the strikes and demonstrations in Leipzig culminating in the revolution were the work not of rural migrants and women with no factory experience but instead of seasoned native proletarians, male and female. Figure 8.1 makes it clear that Leipzig was not a city losing its native population to the draft while filling up with recent migrants (or, in Ritter’s words, characterized by high rates of “intra- and interurban mobility”). Contrary to Ritter’s thesis of a higher rate of “intra- and interurban mobility” during the war, the rate actually declined after 1914. The low number of Leipzigers who disappeared from the Adreßbuch during 1916 is especially surprising when one considers the city’s extraordinarily high mortality rate during the war and the fact that many residents were drafted. Those drafted were not replaced in the city by rural migrants; rather, the city simply shrank, losing about 13 percent of its population by 1918. Leipzigers who were not drafted remained residents in the city,28 usually occupying the same apart-

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1907–8

1910–11

1916–17

figure 8.1 Percentage of Leipzig Workers Remaining Resident in the City for Twelve Consecutive Months: Comparison of War and Prewar Periods note: Sample is of one hundred workers per year; 1907–8 was a recession year and 1910–11 a boom. source: Leipziger Adreßbücher, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1916, and 1917.


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ment for the length of the conflict, while changing jobs frequently in pursuit of higher pay (for this last point, see chapter 6). Finally, Ritter argues that the wartime hemorrhage in union membership helped promote radicalization by removing workers from the moderating influence of those organizations. This was undoubtedly true, but it is important to bear in mind what was discovered in part 1: unions had never succeeded in organizing many workers in Leipzig and therefore had never exerted much influence on them. That workers were left to their own devices during the war represented no significant departure from the prewar situation.29 According to the Ritter thesis, the workers who made the revolution were new to factory work and therefore acted out of reasons specific to their wartime experience. In other words, embedded in his argument is the assumption that the causes of the revolution’s outbreak are to be found exclusively in the war period.30 Such an explanation fits snugly with another of Ritter’s claims—examined in part 1 and found to be false in Leipzig—that workers during the prewar period were largely “integrated” into the social order of imperial Germany. If so, they harbored no revolutionary grievances before 1914, therefore their radical discontent could have been created only during the war. This argument evinces a number of weaknesses. If, as Ritter believes, the upheaval stemmed mostly from a desire to end the war, workers would have limited themselves to that demand. This was indeed one of their chief demands, but in November 1918 they also replaced the Hohenzollern and Wettin monarchies with republics and took steps toward democratizing municipal government.31 This is hardly surprising considering the finding here that it was native seasoned proletarians who made the revolution. These native Leipzigers nursed grievances predating 1914, examined in part 1, the best articulated of which was their animosity toward the authoritarian state. It is certainly correct, as Ritter argues, that a declining standard of living during the war helped radicalize workers. But labeling the revolution a simple reaction to material immiseration overlooks the fact that the hunger riots stemmed less from the food shortage itself than from popular outrage at the state’s indifference to unequal distribution. The revolution represents, then, not an oversized bread riot but the culmination of increasingly bitter protests against the authoritarian state and its bias against workers. Moreover, the waves of demonstrations and strikes were tied less to the supply of food than to the vicissitudes of the military situation. Although their living standard deteriorated between 1917 and 1918, workers in Leipzig protested less often during the second year because it appeared that Germany might win the war. In other words, their resentment against the state (which they saw as the

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source of their troubles) was held in check by the legitimacy that returned to elites as a result of improved military prospects. If workers had wished merely to raise their standard of living, they would not have made a revolution but instead pressured the government to redistribute food, income, and coal. In fact, a revolution definitely took place, and the insurgents sought nothing less than a fundamental alteration of power relations. The claim that an erosion of elite legitimacy rather than material immiseration represented the key cause of the popular radicalization finds its strongest support not from real evidence but from a thought-experiment. Imagine two counterfactual scenarios. In the first, the German army suffers a stunning defeat in the autumn of 1914, forcing the Reich to surrender. Even though workers would have suffered no drop in their living standard and would not have had time to become war weary, it seems almost certain that the monarchical system in Germany would have collapsed under such a blow. Elites would have been so discredited that there would have been some sort of popular upheaval and a change of regime (as in France in 1870). By contrast, speculate about the consequences of a successful German offensive in the spring of 1918 that crushed the inexperienced U.S. divisions, hurled the British back across the Channel, and delivered Paris into Ludendorff ’s hands, thus ending the war on terms favorable to the Reich. German workers would have been war weary, hungry, and exploited, but it seems very unlikely that they would have rebelled following such an event, for victory would have legitimated elite authority and thereby deterred a popular uprising. The immiseration of the masses during the war only partially accounts for the outbreak of the revolution. I have argued here that factors predating 1914 also played a role, the most salient of which was a strong yearning on the part of Leipzig’s workers to replace what they believed was an oppressive regime with something more democratic. Part 1 revealed that in addition to this yearning Leipzig’s workers wished to limit the authority of the bosses within the wage relationship. Union, spd, and later uspd leaders never articulated this desire, but it remained an aspiration for most workers, increasing in intensity as a result of the hyperexploitation they suffered during the war. In normal times, this aspiration probably would have remained a dimly conceived wish. But the breakdown of elite authority in the political realm after November 1918, the declaration in Leipzig of a socialist republic, and the expectation of the imminent socialization of big industry and landholdings all led ever more workers to believe that elite authority in the wage relationship could be challenged as well. How this challenge unfolded will occupy much of the coming chapters.

part 3

A NEW RELATIONSHIP CONSTITUTES ITSELF 10 NOVEMBER 1918–APRIL 1920


chapter 9

EXPECTATIONS AND DISAPPOINTMENT: 10 NOVEMBER–JANUARY 1919

WITH THE OUTBREAK of the revolution, Leipzig’s workers believed they were ushering in a completely new society in which democracy would reign not only in the political sphere but also on the shop floor, in which people would continue to have to work but without fear of the overweening power of the boss or arbitrary loss of employment. They referred to this vague program as socialism. The fact that their revolutionary leaders did not achieve it—or even attempt to do so—left them scarcely two months later embittered and determined to pressure the national government from the streets into fulfilling their aspirations.

FORMATION OF THE REICH REVOLUTIONARY PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT On 9 November 1918, after asre had assumed power in most of the big cities across Germany and seemed poised to do so in Berlin, the chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, decided that his regime was no longer tenable. While leaving open the question of the survival of the monarchy itself, he let it be known that the kaiser and crown prince intended to relinquish their respective claims to the throne and then handed his portfolio to the head of the mspd, Friedrich Ebert, asking him to compose a cabinet and call a constituent National Assembly to determine the form the new state should adopt. During his first twenty-four hours in office, Ebert had to accept three major (and to him alarming) developments. Without his approval, his fellow Social Democrat, Philipp Scheidemann, abolished the monarchy when, at the end of a

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speech, he exclaimed, “The Hohenzollerns have abdicated. Long live the great German Republic!” Second, with the revolutionary tide rolling toward Berlin (where the uspd was almost as powerful as the mspd), Ebert found himself obliged to share power with the Independent Socialists, forming with them, after difficult negotiations, a council of people’s commissars [Rat der Volksbeauftragten, or RdV], composed of three members from each party. This new RdV claimed to be the revolutionary provisional government for the Reich. Finally, as part of the deal with the uspd, Ebert was compelled to recognize that sovereignty rested with the asre and that therefore the RdV governed only with their approval. The formal supremacy of the asre was spelled out on the evening of 10 November when the RdV received its mandate from the Berlin asr, which pretended to speak for all the asre across Germany. Now that President Wilson’s chief demand that Germany rid itself of crowned rulers was satisfied, the first steps toward peace became possible. On the next day, 11 November, Germany and the Allies concluded the Armistice of Compiègne.1

THE EXPECTATIONS OF ORDINARY WORKERS Urban workers across Germany expected the RdV to embark on a radical program to democratize the civil service, the judiciary, and especially the officer corps, as well as to socialize big industry. Or as Eberhard Kolb describes their expectations, “irrespective of party affiliation, a determined will manifested itself to bring about . . . a ‘democratization’ of conditions in the broadest sense of the word . . . of conditions within the firm, in the administration, in the army.”2 How to purge the state of old regime personnel was self-evident. But workers had no clear conception of what socialization of the economy might look like. As in the prewar period, they trusted party leaders to conceive the details for them, with, as shall become evident, major consequences. This widespread set of expectations manifested itself in many ways. For example, while confirming the RdV in its power on 10 November, the Berlin asr—composed of delegates from the city’s factories and therefore reflecting the desires of most ordinary workers in the capital—instructed the new body to undertake immediate steps to socialize big industry.3 Even a conference of all representatives of the Soldier Councils on the western front—a group

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more conservative than most Worker Council because of the high percentage of peasants serving in the army—demanded on 1–2 December that the RdV order the socialization of so-called ripe industries.4 Leipzig workers repeatedly expressed and acted on this desire for a “ ‘democratization’ of conditions in the broadest sense of the word.” On 14 November representatives of the Leipzig asr (in conjunction with the Chemnitz and Dresden asre) issued a sharply worded protest to the RdV about that body’s decision to leave intact the officer corps’s powers of command over enlisted men.5 The neighborhood asre from New Leipzig and asre from the townships surrounding the city purged a number of old regime officials (Gemeindeältesten).6 Believing that a constituent National Assembly would oppose measures to democratize the state apparatus and socialize the economy, the younger Geyer began at this time to make speeches calling for a postponement of elections until the provisional government could carry out such a program. He reports that these speeches were very well received by the city’s workers.7 On 8 December a conference of representatives of asre from across the Leipzig region (Kreishauptmannschaft) voted eighty-three to three in support of Geyer’s proposal.8 Four days later at a plenary session of the Leipzig asr, the delegates voted that a congress of representatives from all of Germany’s asre should convene before elections to a National Assembly. They believed that such a congress would mandate the immediate socialization of industry and creation of universal welfare programs, measures that would represent permanent revolutionary gains and, by neutralizing the political power of wealth, ensure a fair election to the National Assembly.9 Although the demand for socialization recurred at many of these meetings in Leipzig, proponents never defined the term beyond the stipulation that it would require more than a mere transfer of ownership from private monopoly to state monopoly.10 That the delegates to all these asr meetings had been elected in Leipzig’s firms and factories means that their resolutions reflected the views of ordinary workers in the city. A Reich Congress of asre did indeed convene, on the orders of the Berlin asr,11 from 16 to 21 December, with the purpose of instructing the RdV on its future course of action. Besides the 86 Soldier Council representatives,12 almost all the remaining 292 delegates were elected by suffrage rules allowing only wageworkers to vote. Thus the decisions of the congress can be viewed as a rough indicator of proletarian aspirations in Germany as a whole. The delegates were divided between 288 Majority Socialists, 80 Independent Socialists, and only 10 Spartacists (the left fringe of the uspd).13 After over-

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whelmingly endorsing parliamentary democracy over a soviet republic as the state’s future form,14 the congress passed the following resolution almost unanimously: “The Congress of asre delegates to the government the task of beginning immediately the socialization of all ripe industries, especially the mines.”15 The delegates also advocated the second great wish of ordinary workers—the destruction of the power of the old officer corps—by passing what came to be known as the “Hamburg Points.” These required, among other provisions, that the armed forces accept the authority of the RdV, the standing army transform itself into a people’s militia, the system of ranks be abolished, and officers be elected by their soldiers.16 Understanding that the provisional government would encounter massive resistance from employers and the military in implementing such a program, the congress sought to give the RdV the sweeping executive powers of a kind of committee of public safety, ceding its supervisory authority over the RdV to a more manageable, twenty-seven-member Central Council that could work more intimately with the RdV and make speedier decisions.17 Such was the confidence among the delegates that the RdV would move immediately to socialize industry and reform the military that it agreed to Ebert’s request that elections to a constituent National Assembly be held relatively early, on 19 January 1919.18 During the first two months of the revolution, ordinary urban workers placed their faith in the RdV because they believed it would implement the program mandated by the Congress of asre.19 True, the mspd had lost some credibility among workers after 1914 for refusing to oppose an unpopular war, but now that the conflict was over, many workers assumed it would honor its pledge, repeated over four decades, to “socialize the means of production.”20 Had not both Germany and Saxony been declared “socialist republics”? Had not the RdV reduced the workweek, instituted unemployment insurance, and created a special commission to draw up a plan for the socialization of industry?21 The sovereign Congress of asre had given the RdV specific instructions to begin the socialization of big industry “immediately.” And even if one doubted the radicalism of the Majority Socialists, were not half the seats of the RdV occupied by the more left-wing uspd?22 In November and December 1918 the average worker had good reason to believe that the socialization of big industry was in the offing. Such was the confidence of workers about an impending socialization that even the savvy Berlin metalworkers, who as a group were politically more sophisticated than most other laborers, rejected on 5 January 1919 a collectively bargained agreement with employers on the grounds that there was no need to make deals with capitalists on the verge of expropriation.23 Saxon workers


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had even more reason to expect the socialization of big industry, for the provincial RdV in Dresden had declared Saxony to be a “socialist republic” and placed the socialization of all big business at the top of its agenda.24 It instituted its own socialization commission, whose recommendation to socialize most of Saxon industry became public knowledge in late December 1918. As a result of this plan, the commission’s head, the sociologist Otto Neurath, became very popular with Saxony’s workers.25 Even the seasoned Leipzig uspd politician Friedrich Geyer—a radical himself with no incentive to deceive his audience of workers—told a meeting of the Leipzig asr in early January 1919 that socialization of the coal sector in Saxony would soon come to pass.26 Workers were not the only ones who, during the first months of the revolution, believed that some sort of socialization of the economy was unavoidable. In December the Leipzig chapter of the Federation of Saxon Industrialists informed its members in a confidential memo that according to the latest drafts produced by the socialization commission [in Berlin], the owner—whose enterprise (from the largest to the smallest) will be declared national property—will be subjected to the supervision of his own and outside managers and workers. In the future he will be retained as ceo only on a salary basis. One-third of the value of the enterprise that he has so painstakingly built up will go to the Reich without compensation; the remaining two-thirds will be controlled by his workers and white-collar employees.27

Indeed, a surprising number of nonsocialists believed that a partial socialization of industry was not only inevitable but would be beneficial because it would calm the masses and make the country governable again. The Berliner Tageblatt, for example, criticized the RdV and Reich Socialization Commission for “failing to deliver to or even promise the masses—who have been roused by the radicals to make unreasonable demands—anything positive. . . . The atmosphere is currently so strongly charged that the masses do not want to wait, and it has been perhaps a mistake that the government, despite the difficulty of conditions, has not taken into account this psychological mood by at least offering a positive program.”28 Although there was a general expectation that at least a partial socialization of industry lay around the corner, workers realized that to achieve it the socialist forces would have to be unified. They therefore could not understand why “intellectuals” in the two socialist parties persisted in their doctri-

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nal “hairsplitting.”29 One of the clearest examples of this desire for socialist unity occurred during the revolution’s first days in Kiel. There, the insurgents saw no contradiction in the slogan “Scheidemann for President, Liebknecht for Minister of Defense” or in inviting Hugo Haase and Georg Ledebour, two leaders of the uspd, to represent them while also nominating the conservative Majority Socialist Gustav Noske as mayor.30 Considering, then, the trust that ordinary workers placed in the RdV to implement the program of democratization and socialization, and considering their will to socialist unity, it comes as no surprise that at the Congress of asre delegates voted to give the RdV executive and legislative powers, creating a kind of committee of public safety whose speedy and sweeping decisions would be reviewed only retroactively by the Central Council.31

EXPECTATIONS UNFULFILLED The remainder of this chapter examines why the aspirations of ordinary workers for a “ ‘democratization’ in the broadest sense of the word” remained unfulfilled during the first two months of the revolution. Their disappointment was to have consequences influencing the course of the revolution not only in Leipzig but in Germany as a whole.

The Policy of the RdV The determination of the RdV not to fulfill the program of socialization and military reform laid down by the Congress of asre stemmed from a variety of factors. Chief among these was its self-perception as a caretaker institution with no right to make fundamental decisions. Only a constituent National Assembly, the RdV believed, would possess the legitimacy to make such farreaching changes. Accordingly, it strove to promote “calm and order” (Ruhe und Ordnung) at all costs while bringing about parliamentary elections as quickly as possible.32 From the RdV’s perspective, even the limited task of preserving order for a few months was fraught with dangers. Primary among these was its expectation of a coup attempt from the Spartacists, the left-wing fringe of the uspd, whom Ebert believed would try to exploit the fall of the monarchy to erect a soviet dictatorship. Only hours after taking office on 9 November, he promised the new chief of the army, General Wilhelm Groener, that he would defend the officer corps from attempts to dismantle or transform it, in ex-


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change for the general’s pledge to protect the new regime from a Bolshevik putsch. Ebert honored his side of the bargain during the first days of the revolution by reversing the decision of most Soldier Councils to strip officers of the power of command over enlisted men and again in December when he quietly refused to implement the Hamburg Points mandated by the Congress of asre.33 Ebert’s decision to ally the RdV with the officer corps rested on an overestimation of the danger from the Spartacists, who at this juncture could count only a few thousand supporters in all of Germany.34 Much evidence indicates that the RdV could have organized its own republican security force and thereby avoided the pact with the officer corps and its right-wing paramilitary formations (Freikorps). Successful popular militias were set up in Baden, Württemberg, Frankfurt, Gera, Erfurt, and other cities (including Leipzig, as I will discuss below).35 It was a worker militia that suppressed the coup attempt in Berlin in early January 1919, a job largely completed before the arrival of Freikorps in the capital. Finally, the example of the new Austrian republic, which was able to maintain public order with a prorepublican security force, casts further doubt on the need for the RdV to rely on the officer corps.36 This alliance not only placed the republic at the mercy of its armed enemies in the antidemocratic officer corps and Freikorps, it also later helped undermine worker support for the RdV when the pact became public knowledge. Demobilizing an army of millions, integrating the troops back into the workforce, and converting the economy to peacetime production represented the second major anxiety plaguing the RdV. Convinced it lacked enough trained administrators in the Social Democratic movement to man the civil service and manage demobilization, it turned to the bureaucracy of the old regime. Three days after coming to power the RdV created a special demobilization office, headed by an army officer and staffed by royal officials, to oversee this task.37 Ultimately, however, demobilization took care of itself: soldiers found their way home without the assistance of officers and bureaucrats; four years of pent-up consumer demand and accelerating inflation led to a mini–economic boom that in turn eased the conversion to peacetime production; and the displacement of millions of women from their jobs—a policy explicitly supported by the RdV and unions—enabled most returning veterans to find employment.38 In short, the RdV had overestimated the difficulty of demobilizing the army and therefore the value of the experts in the bureaucracy. The last of the RdV’s chief worries lay in augmenting a gross domestic product that the war had nearly halved. Any attempt to socialize industry, the

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RdV feared, would not only hinder this task but produce economic chaos.39 It recognized, however, that to oppose publicly the strong desire of ordinary workers for some sort of socialization of industry ran the risk of generating civil unrest. It therefore instituted a socialization commission on 4 December 1918 (already mentioned above), ostensibly charged with drawing up a plan to socialize selected sectors of the economy. The RdV hoped that the commission’s deliberation would last several months, enough time to keep the workers pacified and allow the election of a constituent National Assembly, the only body, the RdV believed, with the legitimacy to decide such fundamental issues. In fact, the socialization commission issued its preliminary recommendation to nationalize the mines and selected other industries two weeks before the election. The RdV ignored these recommendations and sought to undermine the commission’s further work by denying it funding.40 A number of historians have questioned the validity of these fears, arguing that nationalization of big industry, especially the mining sector, might have boosted output faster than relying on market signals and private investment.41 Indeed, the rapid recovery of the French economy following the Second World War was made possible by a concerted state effort to channel scarce investment into nationalized industry in basic sectors such as energy, metal, and transportation rather than dissipating it on consumer production.42 As I will show in the next chapter, production actually rose in many of the firms that workers took over during the late winter of 1919. But whatever the economic impact, socializing big industry would have produced the purely political benefit of neutralizing the heavy industrialists, who as a group opposed the new republic.43 Rather than attempt to alter property relations, the mspd planned to use its expected majority in the National Assembly to redistribute income by expanding the welfare state. As I will examine below, this parliamentary majority never materialized, which in turn blocked the mspd’s legislative agenda. The biggest advances in welfare coverage came during the first weeks of the revolution by fiat of the RdV: end of the master-servant laws applying to domestic servants and agricultural laborers; reintroduction of the modest worker protection laws of the Kaiserreich; creation of unemployment insurance; and declaration of the eight-hour day (loopholes, legal and otherwise, largely vitiated this final measure).44 The uspd members of the RdV supported their Majority Socialist colleagues on most issues. As during the war, the uspd was composed both of left-wingers and pacifists. Aside from its opposition to the war, it hardly differed ideologically from the mainstream Majority Socialists, and it was pre-


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cisely this group—Hugo Haase, Rudolf Hilferding, Rudolf Breitscheid, Karl Kautsky, Heinrich Ströbel, Eduard Bernstein, and Wilhelm Dittmann—that formed the national leadership of the uspd. Most of these men agreed with the mspd on the need to hold early elections to a constituent National Assembly (rather than undertake revolutionary reforms on the authority of the RdV) and avoid “risky economic experiments” (such as socialization).45 What led seasoned politicians such as Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, and Hugo Haase—all of them fervent democrats—to misperceive the domestic political constellation so fundamentally, allying with the very people who posed the gravest threat to the new regime? It has been argued persuasively that their defects of judgment flowed from a deficit of self-confidence. Shut out of power during the Kaiserreich, Social Democrats had little confidence in their ability to rule and believed that the so-called experts in the old-regime bureaucracy and officer corps were indispensable at this moment of military defeat and economic collapse.46 One might speculate further that the traditional German reverence for Bildung examined in part 1 further disposed them, not least the former saddler’s apprentice Ebert, to view the university-educated old-regime officials with exaggerated respect. Whatever the origins of their insecurities, Ebert and his colleagues went beyond merely collaborating with old-regime officials in that they strove to protect the latter’s prerogatives. In late November the RdV instructed local asre to refrain from administrative activity and instead limit themselves to monitoring the work of old-regime officeholders and bureaucrats. In that same order, the RdV forbade local asre from arresting counterrevolutionary old-regime officials or requisitioning food and coal without the approval of old-regime judges.47 As in domestic politics, so, too, in foreign affairs did the RdV underestimate its room to maneuver. It justified its refusal to socialize big industry and reform the military by claiming that the Allies would not tolerate such policies.48 In fact, however, no evidence indicates that the Allies would have vetoed the socialization of selected industries in Germany (or that they planned to seize state industry in lieu of reparations or as collateral therefor). The Allies were concerned only that no Bolshevization of Germany occur and that a regime establish itself that would be stable enough to negotiate a peace treaty.49 And considering President Wilson’s distrust of the “military masters and monarchist autocrats” who had ruled Germany for so long,50 the Allies would have welcomed a purge of the officer corps and the transformation of the army into a people’s militia. Not surprisingly, the policies of the RdV, and especially its chairman,

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Ebert, remain controversial to this day. Ebert’s defenders then and now stress, not without justification, the enormous, perhaps insoluble difficulties confronting the Reich: military defeat, economic breakdown, the continuing Allied blockade, Polish incursions across Germany’s eastern border, peace negotiations with the vengeful Allies. Considering these circumstances, they ask, is it realistic to think that the RdV could have embarked on revolutionary changes? Was it not preferable to strive for orderly conditions, even if that meant placing the new democracy on the shaky foundation of a disloyal officer corps, bureaucracy, and judiciary while postponing indefinitely the socioeconomic goals of the workers? Perhaps. But Ebert’s advocates must concede that opposing arguments also persuade: it is precisely following the collapse of a regime—when old practices and elites are discredited and social conditions most plastic—when major reforms are easiest to implement; it would have been far preferable to install in key positions slightly underqualified but prodemocratic administrators and judges than to rely on old-regime personnel fundamentally opposed to the new republic; appointing loyal democrats would not have alienated old elites since the latter were already implacably hostile to the new regime; socialization of the coal and metal sectors would have neutralized the political power of the most antidemocratic wing of big business while cementing the loyalty of the industrial workforce to the new order; and relying on the military and Freikorps to protect the new regime was like trusting two wolves to guard the chicken coop.

The Policy of the Saxon Provisional Government Most contemporaries were surprised that the provisional government in Saxony—labeled the radical “Red Kingdom” during the imperial period— turned out to be as moderate as the Reich RdV. The Saxon RdV formed itself in the following manner.51 On 9 November 1918, a few hours later than in Leipzig, workers and soldiers in Dresden swept out the Wettin monarchy and declared the rule of an asr. As the mspd played a negligible role in this event, it could not prevent an influx of uspd and even kpd activists into the Dresden asr. This left-wing body then invited its counterparts in Chemnitz and Leipzig to send representatives to the capital in order to form a provisional government for the new Saxon state. The Leipzig asr delegated this mission to Friedrich Geyer, Richard Lipinski, and Fritz Seger, all uspd members. They were joined in Dresden by a Chemnitz delegation also dominated by the uspd. In fact, the uspd predominance on the Chemnitz asr (as on the Dresden asr) was ephemeral since it resulted from the fact that Chemnitz’s smaller uspd had played a disproportionately large role in the initial upheaval


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there. On 14 November the new uspd-dominated provisional government of Saxony issued a maximally radical program, declaring Saxony a socialist republic until it could be subsumed within a unified German socialist republic (to include Austria), calling for the socialization of all land and big industry, demanding the convocation of a sovereign Reich Congress of asre to instruct the RdV in Berlin on its future course, abolishing master-servant laws, instituting the eight-hour day and full freedom of press and assembly, reinstituting all pre-1914 worker protection laws, separating church and state, promulgating stiff punishment for black-market food dealers, liquidating the old hierarchical school system in favor of unified public elementary and secondary schools, expropriating royal property, and promising the rapid expansion of welfare programs. The Saxon provisional government also rebuked the Reich RdV for restoring to the old-regime officer corps the right of command over enlisted men. This radical manifesto elicited immediate protests from the Chemnitz and Dresden asre, where the mspd had recovered from the shock of the revolution and was beginning to reassert itself. The objections led the Saxon provisional government to change its composition the next day, the fifteenth, replacing three of its left-wingers with Majority Socialists. Lipinski acted as chair as well as foreign and interior minister of the reconstituted provisional government. On the sixteenth it issued a program markedly less radical than that of its predecessor, no longer calling for immediate socialization of big industry and landholdings but instead positing this as a long-term goal. It also decreed that henceforth local asre were forbidden to interfere with the work of old-regime bureaucrats; if an asr found a particular policy objectionable, it could not countermand it but merely lodge complaint with the minister of the interior in Dresden. Public funds were still controlled by the civil servants, not the asre. And these same civil servants were not required to take an oath of loyalty to the republic.52 It will be recalled that in the days immediately following the revolution asre in many of the townships surrounding Leipzig dissolved undemocratic town councils while dismissing mayors and civil servants of the old regime. The outraged royal prefect von Fink protested to his new employer, Interior Minister of the Republic of Saxony Lipinski, that the asre were not “legally constituted bodies” and therefore had no right to take such actions. Fink, a monarchist attacking the very legitimacy of the new order, received unconditional support from Lipinski, who instructed the local asre to desist from further firings in the interest of preserving “calm and order” (Ruhe und Ordnung) until new elections could be held.53 I observed in part 1 that Lipinski’s highest goal as leader of the Leipzig par-

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ty before 1914 was to avoid confrontation with the police; part 2 described how he joined the new uspd very late in the day, only after it had become clear that failure to do so would result in the loss of his political influence in the city. Once out of the relatively radical environment of Leipzig and ensconced in the Saxon RdV in Dresden, he could return to his moderate roots, as his pronouncements on a variety of issues make clear. Justifying his refusal to purge the monarchist bureaucrats whom he inherited as interior minister—or even discipline the most reactionary among them—he declared: The old regime had barred Social Democrats from participating in the administration. [When the revolution broke out] we could not wait for a new generation of Social Democrat civil servants to mature. . . . Even the few Social Democrats [we appointed] were attacked endlessly by the upper civil servants, who threw down the gauntlet to the socialist government, an effrontery without parallel that in the old regime would never have been tolerated and proof of the endless patience and tolerance of the socialist ministers.54

Like the mspd ministers in Berlin who were so convinced of the indispensability of the “experts,” Lipinski never entertained the notion that slightly underqualified Social Democrats serving in high posts would have been infinitely preferable to a situation in which the enemies of democracy could subvert the new republic from within. Lipinski sounded much like Ebert in other respects, positing a questionable either-or between early elections to a National Assembly or civil war.55 He also opposed the socialization of industry, relying on the following argument: “One can’t socialize industry in a single day because we have here in Germany not only big factories of advanced industry but also small master artisan shops and cottage industry. . . . The uspd must take the position that socialization can only be reached by a process of organic development.”56 By this logic the socialization of industry lay on the most distant horizon given that it would take decades for every master artisan’s shop to evolve into the type of big factory that Lipinski thought ripe for socialization. In short, the Saxon RdV was a force for moderation in the revolution, not least because its uspd chairman followed a policy very similar to his mspd colleagues.57 Meanwhile, the Land asr in Saxony was if anything more moderate than the Saxon RdV. Throughout November the mspd and uspd bickered over the allotment of delegates each city would receive in the Land asr. The uspd controlled only the Leipzig asr, had some power in Chemnitz, and wielded


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very little influence in Dresden, Zwickau, and Bautzen. The Leipzigers therefore tried to minimize the number of delegates that the latter three cities could send to a Land asr. As the mspd continued gaining control of asre in other cities during the course of November, it became clear that the mspd would soon enjoy a majority throughout Saxony. The uspd tried to preempt such a development by settling for a deal in late November in which it thought it had obtained near parity with the mspd on a Saxon asr. When the delegates convened on 3 December, however, it was evident that the mspd had won a sizable majority, prompting the uspd to conclude that it would achieve very little in such a body. Although still officially represented in the Land asr, the uspd delegates in fact ceased to participate. They completed their withdrawal on the twenty-seventh of that month after rejecting an mspd offer of two out of nine seats on the new Central Council being set up to monitor the Saxon RdV. Henceforth the uspd, above all in Leipzig, refused to accept the authority of the Land asr .58 In any event, the Land asr passed little legislation and never interfered in the work of the Saxon RdV.

The Policy of the Unions The unions emphatically supported the moderate course of the Reich and Saxon RdVs because the socialization of big industry might interfere with the grand deal they had struck on 15 November 1918 with the national employer organizations.59 Named after its two main architects—Hugo Stinnes, the lower Rhine industrialist, and Carl Legien, head of the General German Federation of Unions—the Stinnes-Legien agreement contained the following major provisions: the employers agreed not to negotiate with yellow (i.e., company-sponsored) unions; to the extent possible, wage and working conditions would be determined in Reichwide agreements under the aegis of a new central working group (Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft, or zag] composed equally of representatives of organized labor and capital; local unions and employer organizations would then negotiate the details of these agreements pertinent to specific localities; adherence to the contracts were to be monitored by worker committees to be elected in all firms with more than fifty employees; the eight-hour day was henceforth to be the norm in industry.60 While the unions viewed the agreement as a victory, the real winners were the employers. The worker committees had no real power: they could only lodge complaints with the zag if they believed a contract had been violated. The language stipulating the eight-hour day was vague enough to allow Sun-

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day work and overtime shifts while failing altogether to cover agricultural laborers.61 No clause mandated Reichwide collectively bargained agreements; it therefore stood to reason that when the revolutionary tide had passed, the employers would refuse to participate in such negotiations. This highlights the most beneficial aspect of the Stinnes-Legien agreement for the employers: by appearing to settle definitively the labor-capital relationship, it functioned to remove the economy from consideration for revolutionary reform. Why bother socializing industry when workers had such an advantageous arrangement? This was the line of argument employed by the RdV to dampen enthusiasm for the program of the Congress of asre. The employers were well aware of the benefits of the agreement, above all, that the unions would help them to block the socialization of industry. In a discussion of the agreement in the executive committee of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists on 14 November 1918, Privy Councillor Hilger declared: “Yes, gentlemen, we should be happy that the unions still find themselves ready to deal with us in the manner in which they have, for only through negotiation with the unions, through our agreement with the unions, can we prevent, call it what you will, anarchy, Bolshevism, rule of the Spartacists, or chaos.”62 That the employers viewed the zag as a temporary measure to protect them against the revolutionary tidal wave is revealed by confidential memos circulated among industrialists in Saxony. Looking back on the early months of the revolution from the vantage point of the summer of 1919, metal industrialists recognized that the zag had helped them to beat back wildcat strikes and thwart campaigns to socialize industry. “Without doubt, the zag brilliantly served its purpose during the first months of the revolution . . . contributing to the maintenance of order in individual regions. . . . The opportunity to point to the relatively moderate decisions of the zag [when dealing with wildcat local unions] gave individual industrialists a crucial support.” Now that the political situation had stabilized, however, the report suggested that the zag should be scrapped.63 Not content with dismantling the zag, the Federation of Saxon Industrialists was anticipating as early as January 1919 the abolition of the eight-hour day and repeal of the few welfare provisions enacted by the Reich RdV.64

The Leipzig ASR The uspd in Leipzig was well aware of the anti- (but not counter-) revolutionary attitude of the national provisional government. During the first days of the revolution the official organ of the Leipzig asr wrote, “The appoint-


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ment of Ebert [to succeed Prince Max of Baden] is only an attempt to rescue from the revolution what can still be rescued. Against these efforts the goal of the movement must be the creation of the socialist republic.”65 At the end of December the Leipzig party condemned by a vote of six hundred to ten the decision of the Reich Congress of asre to bestow full legislative and executive power on the RdV. In other words, the vast majority of Leipzig party members—in contrast to ordinary, normally unpolitical workers—recognized that the RdV intended to hamper the effort to socialize big industry and democratize the state apparatus.66 At the beginning of this chapter, I noted how ordinary workers and rankand-file uspd members in Leipzig strongly desired precisely this program. Considering this desire, and considering the precise knowledge that the local party had about the moderate intentions of the Reich RdV, one would expect that the local party would have taken steps to pressure the RdV to adopt a more radical course (perhaps accomplishing this by socializing industry and purging monarchist bureaucrats in Leipzig itself while coordinating such actions with asre in Germany’s radical industrial cities and northern ports). Almost no steps were taken in this direction. While capable of sporadic radical actions, the local uspd leadership during the first two months of the revolution very rarely implemented policies that brought it closer to its professed goals of democratizing the state apparatus and socializing large industry. Its few radical undertakings included placing General von Schweinitz, the deputy military commander of the Nineteenth Army Corps, on indefinite leave; arresting twelve officers on Schweinitz’s staff who, it was believed, were subverting the new Soldier Council; requiring each opposition newspaper to print asr announcements on its front page; dissolving the city council and political police while placing an Independent Socialist, Johannes Scheib, in charge of the municipal police; obliging employers to pay full wages to workers for shifts missed during the general strike of 9–10 November;67 requisitioning hoarded food and distributing it to the public at a controlled price;68 closing the Freikorps recruiting station that was forming units to fight, ostensibly, on Germany’s eastern borders (in fact, many if not most were used to combat domestic left-wingers);69 and on 9 January dispatching one of its security formations, the Revolutionary Sailor Company, to block Freikorps trains en route to Berlin to suppress the Spartacist coup. When one of these trains was stopped just outside the city, at the Leutzsch train station, a shootout ensued, leaving two Leipzigers dead and another pair wounded, with many more casualties on the Freikorps side. Several more exchanges of fire

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broke out in the following days when other Freikorps trains bound for Berlin were halted by the Revolutionary Sailor Company.70 On closer examination, each of these seemingly radical actions also reveals the moderation of the Leipzig asr. General von Schweinitz was not actually fired, merely put on leave; the arrested officers never faced a court martial and were soon set free; while required to print asr announcements, opposition newspapers could otherwise print what they pleased; while the undemocratic city council was dissolved, the equally undemocratic (and more powerful) city senate remained in place while the old-regime mayor was permitted to continue governing; Scheib’s oversight of the police, as I will discuss below, was extremely lax; the asr, while requiring employers to pay workers for participating in the revolutionary general strike, left all other employer prerogatives unmolested; the asr redistributed only food and coal (not income), limiting itself only to those supplies that had been stored in illegal hoards; although the asr closed the Freikorps recruiting center, it had been the Soldier Council, acting on its own, that had originally established it, even advertising for it in the lvz and in the asr official organ; after the shootout of 9 January, the asr leadership ordered that the train be allowed through anyway, exacting only a verbal promise from its commanding officer that this particular Freikorps unit would travel to the eastern border, not Berlin. Other policies pursued by the Leipzig asr between November and January were even less radical, a fact explained by the continued sway of the moderates even after Lipinski’s departure for Dresden in mid-November. Like Lipinski, the new chair of the asr, Fritz Seger, had adhered to the Kautskyite center of the old mspd before 1914, joining the uspd reluctantly during the war. While publicly demanding more power for the asre and Works Councils (i.e., councils elected within each firm by the workforce—in German, Betriebsräte—that are not to be confused with the political organs called Worker and Soldier Councils, referred to as asre; there will more on their origins, development, and behavior in the next chapter), he thought that the Congress of asre had missed the chance to expand their influence and that the revolution therefore was over. This failure of the Congress of asre, he believed, reflected the political immaturity of the working class as a whole. With no further chances to drive the revolution to the left, the task of the party, he felt, lay in educating the working class to assume, in the distant future, its historic role as creator of the socialist society. This would be accomplished not by organizing a general strike or pressuring the government from the street but by building up the party and union organizations and winning


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elections.71 These views—essentially pre-1914 Kautskyism with a genuflection in the direction of the councils—were shared by Seger’s lieutenant on the asr, Hans Block.72 A moderate, Seger nonetheless was capable of delivering radical speeches—lustily cheered during plenum sessions of the asr and citywide party meetings—calling for insurrection against the government in Berlin if the program of the left uspd went unfulfilled.73 Paradoxically (and perhaps intentionally), this fire-eating oratory often had the effect of dissipating momentum in the asr to do something concretely radical. For instance, floor delegates at an asr meeting in late December demanded that it embark on a more confrontational policy, suggesting that all officers in Leipzig be stripped of their weapons and epaulettes and that more street demonstrations be organized so as to pressure the Reich and Saxon provisional governments to socialize industry and democratize the officer corps. Seger, who as chairman controlled all asr debates from the podium, dismissed these demands as narrow and missing the major issue of the revolution, which, he contended, lay in achieving socialism through an expanded role for the Works Councils. Characteristically, Seger did not suggest practical steps to achieve this objective. After his lengthy remarks, the asr moved on to other business without acting on the original proposals from the floor.74 The moderation of the asr leadership exhibits itself most clearly when one examines its relations with the officials of the old regime. During the first days of the revolution the asr allowed top civil servants to remain on the job if they swore to obey the new government.75 A week later, Seger accommodated these officials further, instructing the delegates at a meeting of the asre from New Leipzig and the industrial villages surrounding the city (Gemeinden) to cease firing civil servants who were found to be disobeying the revolutionary regime. Instead, such officials were merely to be suspended. Seger’s policy unleashed a storm of protest from the delegates. Ultimately, they reluctantly accepted his guidelines but elected from their midst special commissars to monitor such officials more tightly than in the past.76 It will be recalled that during the first hours of the revolution the asr abolished the city council but inexplicably allowed the equally undemocratic and more powerful city senate (of which the mayor was a member) to remain in existence. Of greater surprise is the fact that the asr actually assumed a subordinate role to the city senate. Specifically, it respected an ordinance of the Reich RdV prohibiting local asre from taking control of municipal funds. The Leipzig asr was thus forced into the absurd position of requesting each month an operating budget from the very officials it sup-

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posedly overthrew in November! The senate granted the asr a mere 20,000 marks for the month of November and demanded an account of expenditures.77 Requesting funds on a monthly basis from the senate not only publicly humiliated the asr, it also denied it the means by which it could expand support for the revolution through the creation of welfare programs and government patronage jobs.78 This modest allowance enabled the asr to maintain a staff of only nineteen, a number that never rose higher during the revolution and at all times was dwarfed by that of the staff of the city senate. The senate, thanks to its superior staffing, retained its monopoly on governmental information.79 The asr failed to assert itself as an institution vis-à-vis the senate in other respects. Instead of simply claiming office space in the new town hall, it requested accommodations from the senate. That body lodged it in a series of temporary quarters in the new town hall, grudgingly providing it a single typewriter and telephone, before informing it in late December that it would have to quit the premises altogether and move into smaller offices in the Harkortstraße. After meekly objecting, the asr acquiesced.80 Aside from the practical consideration that frequent moves hinder the work of an organization, the asr missed an opportunity to demonstrate the power and permanence of the new regime when it neglected to occupy the best offices in the new town hall on its own authority. Even in matters where the law was on its side, the asr chose not to challenge the senate. In accordance with guidelines issued by the Reich and Saxon provisional governments, the Leipzig asr sent two monitors to sit in on the meetings of the senate in late December. The senate denied the monitors entrance, prompting the asr to protest. The negotiated agreement was a clear victory for the old-regime officials: henceforth representatives of the asr were not permitted to attend senate meetings but instead had to content themselves with a copy of its agenda after the meeting had concluded; if the asr wished to know the agenda beforehand, it had to contact the mayor’s office before 10 a.m. on the day of the meeting.81 Perhaps lulled by Seger’s assurances that “history can never go backward; the old system is definitely over,”82 the asr neglected to form a dependable security organization. Less than a week after dissolving the political police, it rearmed the old municipal police and put it back on the beat.83 Military patrols overseen by the Soldier Council supplemented the police. These one thousand soldiers were not screened for political reliability, and there is some evidence that they were more conservative (or at least less politically committed) than the members of the asr as a whole. This stands to reason since,


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as demobilization continued, the only soldiers remaining in uniform were those who chose it willingly, that is, those attracted to the military lifestyle. Among such a group, conservatives would probably appear in higher numbers than among ordinary workers in Leipzig. Members of the asr complained about this trend and suggested that membership in the security organization be made more attractive by boosting pay. But Seger and the leadership ignored them.84 The nominal leader of asr security was Johannes Schöning, a moderate mspd functionary before the war who became an ally of Lipinski thereafter and in late November 1918 replaced the feckless Geschwandtner as head of the Soldier Council. The fact that he placed advertisements for the Freikorps recruiting station mentioned above, withdrawing them only after much protest in the asr, indicates his political orientation.85 Day-to-day direction of the security force was assumed by a Major Kell, a man whose political sympathies remain unknown, but who—as a German officer, a member of General von Schweinitz’s staff during the war, and, in peacetime, a big industrialist—probably had little use for the uspd. Partially offsetting the moderate/conservative inclinations of the main security contingent was the five-hundred-man-strong Revolutionary Sailor Company led by the colorful “Sailor Franz.”86 The company earned much applause from asr delegates when it brought over to the revolution the last soldiers loyal to the old regime, the dreaded Uhlans. Doubting their ability to control the Revolutionary Sailor Company, however, Seger and his allies tried to disband it.87 But the popularity of the sailors among the asr delegates obliged Seger and Schöning not only to tolerate their continued presence but to put them on the payroll of the asr’s security organization. The sailors took up residence in a building in the city center and evinced a greater willingness than their soldier counterparts to face danger, volunteering, for instance, to stop the Freikorps trains at Leutzsch and also posting armed pickets in front of factories to enforce the general strikes of 9–11 November 1918, 11 January 1919, and 18 January (more on the latter two strikes below). Although exuberant, they were a disciplined unit, and while more left-wing than the asr leadership, they followed its orders.88 A particular incident, however, resolved the asr leadership to rid itself of the sailors. A demonstration of unemployed in late November 1918 demanded a 5-mark-per-week raise in benefits to offset the effects of inflation. When Sailor Franz presented this demand to Mayor Rothe, the latter replied that he had no time for such matters and departed for his office. Enraged, Franz dispatched a detail of twenty armed men to pick up the mayor and bring him

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back to the sailors’ headquarters. Once returned, the mayor claimed that the city lacked the funds to augment unemployment benefits. In that case, Franz responded, he could no longer guarantee the security of the new town hall from angry demonstrators. Mayor Rothe offered to raise benefits by 3 marks per week, a deal to which Franz agreed. Many of the demonstrators were dissatisfied with this increase and massed in front of the new town hall. The machine guns that Franz had posted there in fulfillment of his agreement with the mayor deterred them from storming it. Party leaders concluded from this episode that Franz might jeopardize their relations with the mayor, on whom the asr was financially dependent. They therefore persuaded the landlord of the building in which the sailors were headquartered to close it for renovations, thus obliging the sailors to move to barracks on the edge of town where they would be less of a political factor. Ultimately the asr and mayor terminated funding for the Revolutionary Sailor Company.89 The moderation of the Leipzig asr stood in sharp contrast to the behavior of a radical minority of asre in the region that had ousted old-regime politicians and bureaucrats, sometimes assuming full political control in their respective municipalities. These included the asre in many of the industrial villages (Gemeinden) surrounding the city,90 as well as towns such as Zwenkau,91 Liebenwerda, Limbach, Bernsbach, Bockwa, Lauter, Wimmelberg, Oberpfannenstiel, Wolfen, and Pöhla.92 The Saxon RdV reluctantly recognized the legitimacy of the purges that took place before 15 November. Thereafter, in the interest of preserving “calm and order,” it forbade such actions.93 In that it treated old-regime officials with circumspection during the first two months of the revolution, the Leipzig asr resembled the majority of asre in central Germany, Saxony, and the Reich.94 Yet only by replacing these officials in Leipzig with reliable democrats en masse (or at the very least instilling fear into the bureaucracy by ousting prominent reactionaries such as Fink), expropriating local capitalists, coordinating these actions with asre in other radical cities, and—in the event of unresponsiveness from the national authorities—preparing to launch a general strike in concert with these allies, could the Leipzig insurgents have hoped to pressure the RdV into adopting more left-wing policies. Ordinary workers, expecting radical measures from Berlin, remained unaware in November and December of the need for such measures. But party members in Leipzig were well apprised of the moderate intentions of the Reich RdV. Perhaps assured by the radical rhetoric of the


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asr leadership, the rank and file permitted Seger and his fellow moderates to continue their policy of inaction.

The Reassertion of the Old Elites As glimpsed directly above, the officials of the old regime began resisting— and in many respects gaining the upper hand over—the asr only a week after the initial upheaval. It will be recalled that in the opening hours of the revolution the asr abolished the old city council but left the senate and mayor’s office intact. On 11 November Mayor Rothe circulated a memo to his subordinates. In it, after exhorting them to remain on the job during this period of crisis, he instructed them not to oppose the new asr openly but at the same time to view as valid only the orders of their direct superiors in the town hall.95 In a meeting later that day, the mayor and senate characterized the revolution as a “misfortune” (Unglück) and agreed that only by staying on the job and keeping the civil service intact could the anticipated radical policies of the asr be thwarted.96 The next day, the mayor and senate continued their correspondence with the city council despite the fact that the asr had abolished that body.97 Perhaps emboldened by the senate’s resistance to the asr, the suppressed city council attempted to restart its activity in late November.98 It desisted only after receiving a telegram from Saxon Interior Minister Lipinski pointing out that city councils abolished before 15 November could not come back into existence (those terminated after that date were not only permitted to resume activity but encouraged to do so).99 Most open in their defiance of the new regime were the royal Saxon officials stationed in Leipzig, above all Prefect (Amtshauptmann) von Fink. As noted above, in the first days of the revolution a number of neighborhood asre in New Leipzig and asre in the industrial villages surrounding the city (Gemeinden) dissolved neighborhood and local municipal councils and school boards while firing political officials (Gemeindeältesten). On 19 November Fink advised his subordinates to resist these actions because the asre were not “legal bodies,” basing his argument on the guidelines issued the day before by Saxon Interior Minister Lipinski that old-regime officials were to be retained in the interest of preserving “calm and order.”100 The next day, in an aggressively worded letter to asr chair Seger, Fink expanded his attack on the legitimacy of the asre by noting that they were also not constituted in accord with nineteenth-century Saxon law (!).101 Impressed by this logic, Seger

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in a meeting on the twenty-first (examined above in this chapter) instructed local asre to cease purging old-regime officials, suggesting instead that they suspend any found to be counterrevolutionary. Later that week Fink received the unconditional support of Interior Minister Lipinski.102 Meanwhile, Fink’s superior, the royal district supervisor (Kreishauptmann), chose not to confront the asr openly but instead to keep it in the dark, sending copies of his reports and decisions regarding the asr only to the interior ministry in Dresden, never to the Leipzig asr itself.103 In so doing he violated decrees issued by the Reich and Saxon provisional governments requiring that officials of the old regime place themselves under the supervision (Kontrolle) of local asre. At about this time Leipzig’s municipal and state civil servants formed themselves into the city’s chapter of the Association of Higher Saxon Civil Servants.104 It was this pressure group that, through the threat of strike and work slowdowns, achieved de facto veto power over appointments of Social Democrats to civil service positions. Interior Minister Lipinski never attempted to bring the higher civil servants to heel.105 Elites other than state officials also reasserted themselves quickly. On 15 November—only a week after the upheaval—a group led by three Leipzig notables (privy councillor Professor Walter Goetz, factory owner H. Kunath, and publisher B. Thalacker, all of whose short biographies appear in appendix 3) issued an appeal in the nonsocialist press to the Leipzig citizenry (Bürgerschaft) to form a citizens’ committee (Bürger-Ausschuß, hereafter referred to as ba].106 The new organization’s goal was to safeguard the interests of those not represented by the asr. Two days later representatives of one hundred nonsocialist organizations in Leipzig meeting at the Businessmen’s Club constituted the new organization and elected Professor Goetz as chairman.107 A historian of Renaissance Italy and Germany at the university, Goetz also wrote a great deal about contemporary politics. That he did so from the left liberal perspective of the Progressive People’s Party put him in a minority among Leipzig’s prewar notables, most of whom were conservative National Liberals. Despite his position as a reserve officer, he publicly supported a “peace of understanding” as early as 1917. Since 9 November he had come to accept the fact that the monarchy was extinct and urged his fellow nonsocialists to engage politically in order to shape the new republic so that worse could be averted.108 That Leipzig’s notables chose Goetz to lead the ba indicates that they had accepted the disappearance of the monarchy. Although elites played the leading role in creating the ba (Mayor Rothe was one of its first members), they made sure to include in the organization


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non-notables who might also feel their interests threatened by the revolution. Fully seven out of the ten original executive board members of the ba did not appear in any lists of prewar notables. They included the master artisan A. Thalheim, the guild official Sauer, and the public school teacher B. Claus, the latter also heading the Electoral Association of Securely Salaried Public Officials (Wahlverein der Festbesoldeten).109 To be sure, prewar notables soon came to occupy half the seats on the ba’s board.110 But that elites in this moment of crisis included on the board those they normally ignored attests to their political acumen. Non-notables were even better represented among ordinary members. Corporate membership in the ba did not limit itself to elite organizations such as the senate of the university, the Association of Tenured Municipal Civil Servants, the German Union of Doctors’ Organizations, and the Leipzig Association of Attorneys but also included nonelite groupings such as the Organization of Career Kindergarten and Preschool Teachers, the Union of Bookstore Clerks, the German Federation of Technical Foremen, and the Leipzig Committee of Guilds.111 Based on the membership of this last set of groups in the ba, one can safely conclude that Leipzig’s lower white collars and alter Mittelstand were ill disposed to the revolution. Significantly, there was not one organization of manual wage earners in the ranks of the ba. What began as a representational organization for those excluded from the asr112 quickly fixed as its goal the moderation of the revolution: The Bürgertum can see clearly enough to realize that today the task boils down to this: actively participate; don’t grumble. Yes, much of what was dear to us has gone under, but we must cheerfully recognize the new times. . . . The Leipzig ba strives to unify all men and women of Leipzig to promote the maintenance of public order, preservation of law, further functioning of the economy, and protection of cultural goods. It adheres to no political party. . . . It steers clear of any attempts at counterrevolution and wishes merely the quickest possible election of new popular representation in the Reich, in Saxony, and in all cities and villages, followed by an accounting of all measures and expenditures that have been undertaken by the provisional powers. The ba announces its most earnest expectation that no interventions into political, economic, and cultural life will take place, that such decisions will be left to the discretion of the new, legally constituted popular representatives.113

As during the prerevolutionary era, nonworker subgroups again proved able during moments of proletarian challenge to overlook the differences divid-

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ing them and unite around a shared identity of Bürger (hence the reference to themselves as the Bürgertum and choice of the name Bürger-Ausschuß for their organization). The above manifesto reveals other clues about their worldview. For people who only one month earlier had overwhelmingly supported an authoritarian monarchy, their program represented a curiously speedy conversion to democracy. Their eagerness for elections to a National Assembly can be read less as genuine enthusiasm for popular sovereignty and more as the insight that parliamentary democracy was a lesser evil than asr rule. What held the group together was its opposition to socialism. Thus much of the program cited above can be understood as a compilation of antisocialist code phrases. “Promoting the maintenance of public order, preservation of law” was a slap at the asr, a body, the ba believed, lacking legal authority that through its anticipated “interventions in political, economic, and cultural life” would create chaos. Its concern for the “further functioning of the economy” expressed the fear felt by nonworkers of an impending socialization of industry. Implicit in this phrase was the conviction that such a socialization would necessarily wreck the economy. This passage also contains a number of phrases encountered in part 1 in the examination of prewar bürgerlich political discourse. Its claim not to adhere to any political party sounds very similar to their assertions before 1914 that they stood above politics. And its stress on protecting culture echoes a prewar rhetoric in which elite rule was equated with the preservation of German Kultur. The ba, after establishing a suite of offices with four telephones in the luxurious Hotel Königshof, spent November and December building an organization that ultimately encompassed some two hundred groups representing seven thousand individuals.114 All four nonsocialist parties in Leipzig—the German Democratic Party, the German People’s Party, the German National People’s Party, and the Center Party—urged their members to join the ba.115 The ba also agitated ceaselessly, establishing a propaganda department that employed journalists from Leipzig’s nonsocialist newspapers as well as university professors and docents. Its weekly newspaper enjoyed a circulation of 50,000, and its bimonthly journal, Brennende Tagesfragen, reached 150,000 readers per issue. Brochures on individual topics were distributed to 250,000, while uncounted millions of fliers and placards were also printed in the ba’s own publishing house. Its library contained five hundred volumes and all the major newspapers in Germany and Austria, while its school for public rhetoric trained 234 individuals in 1919. When the dates of Reich, Saxon, and municipal elections were announced, it employed these considerable resources to attack the uspd and urge the Bürger of Leipzig to support only the bürger-


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lichen parties.116 Contemporaries agreed that the ba was by far the most important nonsocialist institution in Leipzig during the revolution.117 University students made up another group of elites mobilizing around the preservation of Kultur. Around mid-November they formed a Kulturbund to represent them politically, later changing its name to the Student Council.118 One night toward the end of the month, a group of students climbed to the top of the main university building, tore down the red flag the asr had hoisted there, and put in its place the flag of the fallen Wettin monarchy. The nocturnal commandos left a message on the university’s bulletin board the next morning justifying their action in the following terms: We understand the need for profound social reforms outside these walls, and we respect each limb of our national body politic [jedes Glied unseres Volkes], as long as it works in harmony, respect, and a spirit of sacrifice for others! But a people such as the Germans must not perish! We need no dictators of any party, but instead the free self-determination of all classes in our national community. . . . As students we must protect the interests of our academic life and continually remain conscious of our sublime cultural tasks. . . . We must be proud of ourselves and the [cultural] goods for which we have fought! (17–18)

After the asr ordered the president of the university to remove the Wettin flag and hoist two new red ones, the outraged students called a meeting for 29 November, at which, after impassioned denunciations of the asr, several students remounted the building and brought the red flags down to the auditorium, prompting wild cheers from the assembled. At that point, a detachment of soldiers from the asr arrested the leader of the Student Council and deposited him at a nearby police station. The enraged students, numbering about five hundred (and, according to some accounts, armed),119 marched off to rescue their comrade, thronging in front of the police station and threatening to storm it. The police, described as amicably disposed toward the students, released the prisoner, at which point the jubilant multitude marched back to campus singing the Deutschlandlied. Ultimately, the ministry of culture in Dresden mediated a compromise under which no flag would be flown atop the university building.120 Students, many of whom had served as officers during the war, also assumed a leading role in forming the first armed resistance to the new regime. Around mid-December, students and Bürger formed separate paramilitary

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groups, each numbering a couple of hundred. The formations were organized with the help of officers in Leipzig’s barracks, the same officers whom the asr had decided to keep on the job in November. After the crushing of the Spartacist uprising in early January (more on that below), these separate units amalgamated.121 As the following chapters will show, this underground Freikorps was to play an important role in Leipzig later in the revolution. To summarize, as in the prerevolutionary period, one cannot speak of an unpolitical Bürgertum in revolutionary Leipzig. Nonworkers displayed high levels of political activism in both periods. Before 1918 this took the form of vociferous support for a state they believed was safeguarding their interests. Following November 1918 they remained highly mobilized, but a different environment forced them to alter ideology and tactics. The Hohenzollerns were so discredited as a result of the war that the elites could no longer advocate monarchism. Given the available options, they chose the lesser of evils: as conservative a republic as possible, constituted as quickly as possible. Tactically, the temporary paralysis of the state—the institution that had protected their interests before 1918—forced them to fashion new organizations and methods of struggle. They improvised brilliantly. Within the state, oldregime officials began almost immediately to resist their nominal masters in the asr, while in civil society nonworker groups closed ranks in the ba to meet the anticipated revolutionary onslaught. That onslaught did not come as early as expected (i.e., in November), and neither did it come from the quarter expected (i.e., the asre). But—as the next chapter describes—come it did, and the organizational spadework performed by Leipzig’s nonworkers during the first three months of the revolution was to serve it in good stead.

The Living Standard of Workers Although the real standard of living probably rose slightly following the armistice,122 it did so unevenly and not nearly quickly enough to satisfy most workers. The poor relief rolls in Leipzig expanded by 35 percent between November 1918 and February 1919.123 Meanwhile, the number of unemployed, while not exploding to the extent that officials had feared it would, rose from about eighteen thousand in November 1918 to forty thousand by the New Year.124 That demonstrations of the unemployed broke out repeatedly during these months—most rowdily in late November 1918, 17 January 1919, and 5 February 1919—suggests that many workers feared the problem would get worse and that, in any case, benefits from the new unemployment insurance were inadequate.


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Among those fortunate enough to have jobs, many worked as many hours as they had during the war. As described earlier, although the Stinnes-Legien agreement established the eight-hour day as the norm, there existed enough loopholes in its language for employers to exact long hours from workers. The unions, negotiating collective agreements within the newly created zag, rarely insisted that the eight-hour day be honored.125 And neither the Reich nor Saxon provisional governments, despite having both passed decrees mandating the eight-hour day, enforced it.126 As the next chapter relates, the fact that one of the major gains (Errungenschaften) of the revolution existed only on paper embittered many workers in and around Leipzig, driving increasing numbers of them to embark on wildcat strikes beginning in January 1919. The continuing shortage of food required the state to maintain the wartime system of rationing, a situation that meant the black market, with all its inequities, persisted. Although the food rationing system was hardly popular, most workers recognized that a free market in food would be worse. But it was exactly toward a free market that the new government appeared to be heading when it announced in January 1919 the abolition of extra bread rations for workers employed in most categories of heavy manual labor.127 As part 1 revealed, there existed before 1914 in Leipzig a dearth of housing for workers, and the trend was becoming worse. This deficit increased dramatically during the war as housing starts dropped from 3,268 in 1913 to a mere 69 by 1918, rising only to 393 the following year.128 By New Year 1919, forty thousand Leipzigers—many of them new families as a result of a booming marriage rate following demobilization—were forced to crowd in with friends or relatives. Tens of thousands more inhabited dilapidated apartments whose maintenance had been neglected during the war.129 Those lucky enough to find apartments were obliged to keep them cold. Between November 1918 and February 1919 German coal production—as a result of workforce exhaustion, equipment and rails degraded by wartime overuse, and increasing strikes by miners dissatisfied with zag agreements and the absence of socialization—fell by 66 percent, exacerbating the already acute wartime shortage.130 The Reich rationed coal and electricity for each city, and each municipality in turn rationed it for individuals and organizations.131 The result was perpetually chilly rooms along with frequent brownand blackouts. As winter arrived, the situation grew worse, prompting the city government to begin buying up coal “no matter how expensive.”132 The shortage became so serious that factories were shut down for lack of energy,133 while housewives were unable to cook at home.134

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Final Events Radicalizing Leipzig Workers Beginning in late December a series of events, following each other in rapid succession, snapped the patience of ordinary workers in Leipzig, convincing them once and for all that the central government would not socialize industry and democratize the state apparatus. From this point on it rapidly became clear to Leipzig’s workers that if they desired these goals, they would have to bring them about themselves. These same events, however, did little to shake the confidence of most urban workers elsewhere in Germany that the mspd would fulfill its pledges. Only the elections of January and February 1919—examined in the next chapter—persuaded growing numbers of workers outside Leipzig of the need to pressure the national government from the street. As part of the anticipated socialization of industry, most workers expected that significant power would devolve on them through an expanded role for the Works Councils (Betriebsräte). It therefore came as a shock when the Reich RdV decreed on 23 December that the essentially powerless worker committees and white-collar employee committees (Arbeiter- und Angestellten-Ausschüsse) of the hdg, with a few trivial alterations, would remain the only representation for workers on the shop floor.135 Five days later, without the knowledge of their uspd colleagues, the mspd members of the Reich RdV ordered Freikorps to crush a mutinous unit of sailors in the capital, a battle leaving dozens of casualties. Such disregard for their views proved too much even for the moderate uspd members of the RdV, who resigned from the government.136 The illusion of socialist unity was shattered, a development that alienated many Leipzig workers from the RdV. This could be seen clearly during the suppression of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin a week later. Although very few workers in Leipzig supported the Spartacists, they were enraged by the open alliance of the majority socialist RdV and the Freikorps, which killed around one hundred insurrectionists. Their anger was further stoked by the shoot-out at Leipzig-Leutzsch between the Revolutionary Sailor Company and Freikorps on 9 January, examined above. On the eleventh, the asr called a one-day general strike in sympathy for the Berlin workers involved in the coup. The fact that nearly all wage earners in Leipzig—young and old, factory and craft, skilled and unskilled, men and women—participated highlights how unpopular the Reich RdV had become among the city’s workers.137 White-collar employees did not support the strike,138 and in some cases workers enforced it by posting armed pickets before factories and firms to prevent more moderate colleagues in the


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graphics trades and white-collar employees from punching in.139 At the afternoon strike rally on the Augustusplatz a portion of the crowd stormed the adjacent university building, damaging property and fighting with students.140 Five tense days passed before the report of the Freikorps murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht became known in the city. The news struck the Leipzig workforce “like a lightning bolt.” This event, by linking the mspd to the murder of two popular socialists, may have played the single greatest role in turning Leipzig’s workers against the national authorities.141 The next day, in an unrelated incident, the Independent Socialists resigned from the Saxon RdV following a shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Dresden.142 Now denied the cover of uspd collaboration in Saxony as well, the mspd lost even more support among Leipzig’s workers. The Leipzig asr called another one-day general strike, this time to protest the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Again, nearly all workers participated, with no support from white-collar employees.143 Again, they posted armed pickets in front of several firms.144 And again the high point of the strike was a rally on the Augustusplatz, with attendance this time topping one hundred thousand demonstrators. The anger of the workers seemed to exceed that of the rally the week before: they not only stormed the university building again but chanted for “retaliation, for weapons, for the overthrow of the Reich government, which they held responsible for the murders, for retaliation against the Bürgertum and Majority Socialists in Leipzig.”145 Similar strikes erupted in all the industrial centers of central Germany that day.146 By mid-January, the Majority Socialists enjoyed little support among Leipzig’s workers, a fact reflected by the results of the elections to the constituent National Assembly, held on 19 January 1919, in which the mspd garnered only 20.7 percent of the vote in Leipzig versus 38.6 percent for the uspd.147 A growing majority of Leipzig’s workers realized that the mspd would never attempt to socialize big industry or democratize the military and civil service. This hostility contrasted with the attitude of urban workers elsewhere, who gave the mspd 37.9 percent of the total Reich vote versus only 7.6 percent for the uspd.148 The developments reviewed in this chapter—the refusal of Reich, Land, and municipal revolutionary governments to fulfill the desire of ordinary workers for a “ ‘democratization’ of conditions in the broadest sense of the word”; a living standard barely advancing beyond its already depressed wartime level; and the precocious and unchecked reassertion of the old elite—all created

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by mid-January 1919 a mood of extreme bitterness among Leipzig’s workers. The revolution did not deliver what they had expected, and if action was not promptly taken, it never would be. As the next chapter reveals, this deep frustration gripped ever more workers outside Leipzig as well, for following the elections, even those who still trusted the mspd had to admit that its coalition with the Center and German Democratic parties meant that the Majority Socialists would not be able to enact even their modest welfare agenda, let alone alter property relations. How increasing numbers of Germany’s urban workers attempted to influence this situation constitutes the topic of the next chapter.

chapter 10

GENERAL STRIKE: FEBRUARY–12 MARCH 1919

AS THE PRECEDING chapter revealed, most Leipzig workers had concluded before the elections to the constituent National Assembly of 19 January 1919 that the mspd would not fulfill its pledge to socialize big industry and reform the military and civil service. They accordingly voted for the uspd. By contrast, the vast majority of urban workers elsewhere in the Reich still believed the mspd would implement this program and therefore supported the Majority Socialists in the election. This chapter traces the increasing frustration of urban workers—in and around Leipzig but also in the Ruhr and Berlin—when, in the aftermath of the elections, it became clear that the mspd, even if it had wished to implement the program of the Congress of asre, would be hemmed in by its coalition partners, the Center Party and German Democratic Party. In February/March 1919 hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of workers across Germany attempted to force the national government to embark on more radical policies through a general strike, an event representing what one contemporary labeled “the decisive battle over the further progress of the revolution.”1

THE COMING OF THE GENERAL STRIKE Throughout this section I will examine the developments leading up to the general strike in and around Leipzig. In the final section of the chapter, my attention turns to the strike itself.

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Worker Disappointment Following the Elections As the preceding chapter described, the Majority Socialists had no intention of socializing industry, reforming the military, or purging the old-regime bureaucracy. And the fact that they won only 37.9 percent of the vote in the election to the constituent National Assembly on 19 January 1919 (and were thus obliged to form a coalition government) ensured that even their relatively modest plan to expand welfare programs would also not become law. One week later, on 26 January 1919, the city of Leipzig held elections to decide the composition of the new city council (the old-regime city senators and mayor remained in office), with results equally disappointing to Leipzig’s workers. The uspd’s thirty-three seats were balanced by the thirty-three won by the bloc of nonsocialist parties, with the mspd taking the remaining six.2 The moderate Independent Socialists Seger and Scheib were elected to the posts of chairman and vice-chairman of the city council, respectively.3 Instead of disbanding the city senate and dismissing the mayor, Seger brought forward as one of the uspd’s first pieces of legislation a bill to communalize chimney-sweep services.4 Plainly, Seger did not intend to embark on radical policies. And even if he did, the mspd with its six votes would have joined the nonsocialist parties to block him. One week later, on 2 February 1919, elections to the Saxon Landtag were held in which the mspd won forty-two seats, the nonsocialist parties thirtynine, and the uspd fifteen. In Leipzig itself, the mspd won few votes—indeed, fewer than it had garnered two weeks earlier in the elections to the National Assembly.5 However, in most other Saxon cities, especially those in the eastern half of Saxony, the mspd easily bested the uspd.6 Significantly, these same cities in eastern Saxony—Dresden, Bautzen, Görlitz, and Meißen—refused three weeks later to join the general strike. In the days following the Saxon election, the two socialist parties could not agree on how or whether to incorporate the asre and Works Councils into the constitution and were therefore unable to form a governing coalition. In the face of increasing worker radicalization (examined in detail below) the Majority Socialists dared not form a coalition with any of the nonsocialist parties for fear of losing more proletarian support. The mspd therefore decided to govern alone, forming a minority government, headed by Dr. Georg Gradnauer.7 The Majority Socialist cabinet continued the policy of its predecessor, the Saxon RdV: avoiding risky economic “experiments” such as socialization and hoping instead to stabilize economic conditions by promoting the zag as the mediator of disputes between labor and capital.8

GENERAL STRIKE

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Most Leipzig workers supported the uspd in the elections. But a majority of workers Reichwide voted for the mspd in the National Assembly elections and a preponderance in Saxony did likewise in the Landtag election two weeks later. Many of the workers outside Leipzig supported the mspd in the belief that it would socialize industry and reform the military and civil service. As they came to understand after the elections that this would not happen, ever more workers began forming revolutionary Works Councils (Betriebsräte) and going on strike in the industrial centers across Germany. In the section below I review the beginnings of this movement as it unfolded in and around Leipzig.

The Growth of the Works Council Movement Even before the elections, as early as December 1918, the coal miners of central Germany, disappointed with the contracts negotiated for them by the unions, began striking in large numbers.9 In most such strikes, the miners ignored calls of union leaders to return to work and empowered their own Works Councils (Betriebsräte) to negotiate with management without union participation.10 On 8 January 1919 thousands of potash miners around Halle also began to strike.11 Within days they were joined by copper miners from the Mansfeld region near Halle whose Works Councils initiated negotiations with management, again without the participation of the unions.12 In midJanuary Leipzig’s rail workers succeeded in wresting higher wages from employers.13 A few days later rail workers in Halle followed the example of their colleagues in Leipzig by electing their own Works Council and going on strike.14 The Works Council at one of Leipzig’s largest machine-making factories succeeded in extracting from management a pay raise, the abolition of piece rates, and the incorporation of apprentices into all future contracts so that they could not be used to undercut wages.15 Also in mid-January the city’s tram workers went on strike,16 followed a few days later by the municipal utility workers.17 By crippling the city’s transportation system and disrupting power generation, these two strikes brought the economic life of the city to a crawl. Even union headquarters (das Volkshaus) in Leipzig suffered a strike by its own waiters.18 Female workers, especially in textile factories, also struck repeatedly, for example winning a raise of 35 percent from the Sächsische Wollgarnfabrik in late January.19 Laborers from all trades went on strike throughout western Saxony, notably in Glauchau, Zwickau, and Oelsnitz and in the prefecture of Stollberg.20 At the end of January the brown coal workers of the Dölitz region outside Leipzig resumed their wildcat strikes, demand-

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ing higher wages, the abolition of piece rates, and income supplements for food, clothing, and shoes.21 In early February Works Councils in the mines of the Borna region sent delegates to form a regional Works Council called the Commission of Four (Die 4er Kommission) that, without the participation of the unions, began negotiating a regional contract with the employers’ association. The Commission of Four also agitated among the miners to elect their own Works Councils and prepare for a general strike to bring about the socialization of the coal industry.22 A similar organization, the Council Commission (die Rätekommission), came into existence at this time to represent the coal workers of the Altenburg region.23 As noted, on 9 November 1918, the second day of the revolution in Leipzig, nearly all the city’s workers elected Works Councils in order to send representatives to the Leipzig asr. And I will discuss below, almost all workers in Leipzig and central Germany participated in the general strike of late February/early March 1919 with the goal of forcing the government to grant Works Councils enhanced authority vis-à-vis management at the point of production. But while all workers supported this program, those mentioned in the paragraph above strove for its realization more militantly, taking direct action to increase the powers of the Works Councils. The workers who took this step during January and February shared a single characteristic: they worked in large factories, rail yards, and coal pits. While more skilled workers in smaller craft workshops also had elected Works Councils and were to support the coming general strike, their Works Councils did not participate in this first strike wave. In short, it was male and female workers in the largest enterprises who evinced the strongest attachment to the program of increasing the power of the Works Councils.24 One might speculate along with Peter von Oertzen that the reason for their especially strong support for the Works Council movement lay in their experience of the wage relationship before 1914 and during the war: it was precisely in the largest enterprises where unions were weakest, control of the bosses strongest, and the workforce most exploited. Now that elites seemed vulnerable, it was precisely these workers who seized the opportunity to negate the authority of capital through democratically elected Works Council.25 The Works Councils came into being with few antecedents. As I discussed in part 1, the handful of pre-1914 socialist theorists who speculated at all about a future socialist society tended to make facile reference to a “socialization of the means of production” without describing this event in detail. Moreover, the revolutionary Works Councils, with their claims to real power, bore little resemblance to the blue- and white-collar committees of the hdg

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(these continued in existence by decree of the RdV on 23 December 1918), which were designed merely to facilitate communication between management and workers. Only in late December 1918, at the Reich Congress of asre, did left uspd leaders, especially those from Berlin, begin to speculate as to how the Works Councils might become elements of a future socialist economy (more on ideology in coming chapters).26 Very few workers in central Germany, however, were aware of these theoretical beginnings. And while almost all German workers were cognizant of the soviets (i.e., Works Councils) in Russia, few knew details about them. The movement therefore must be viewed as a largely spontaneous initiative of ordinary workers attempting to create more democratic conditions on the job.

Behavior of the Works Councils The militancy of the Works Councils exhibited clear limits. While the vast majority hoped to pressure the government into enacting a socialization law, very few undertook unilateral actions to expropriate their own employers. Most limited themselves to planning a general strike by contacting one another and forming regional organizations while assuming the function that the unions had performed so timidly (i.e., bargaining with management over wages and working conditions). If socialization were to happen, then, it would have to be directed from above, either by the Reich or Saxon government. In some cases, however, individual Works Councils showed more initiative. As of January 1919, at brown coal pits in both the Meuselwitz-Rositz and Altenburg regions, for instance, management could dismiss a miner only with the assent of the Works Council. If management insisted on the dismissal, its only option was to appeal for binding arbitration before a panel composed at parity between workers and managers and chaired by a neutral outsider.27 At various individual mines throughout central Germany the Works Councils assumed responsibility for production and blue-collar personnel matters, leaving sales and strategic planning to management.28 The clearest form of codetermination unfolded in the brown coal pits and giant chemical works in and around Wittenberg, forty kilometers northeast of Leipzig, in the Prussian province of Saxony. There, in mid-February 1919, a coalition of Works Councils and employers from the Reich Nitrogen Works, the Westphalian-Anhalt Explosive Works ag, and the Bergwitzer Coal Works—with the participation of the Wittenberg asr—introduced the following democratic elements into the operation of their respective firms:

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Management is [henceforth] supplemented and supported by the Works Council. . . . Together management and the Works Council control the firm and strive to bring about the highest possible level of production. The Works Council is granted the right to inspect all management decisions each quarter. . . . Management and Works Council decide jointly on dismissals of blue- and white-collar employees. Management takes responsibility for the execution of all decisions arrived at jointly with the Works Council.29

To this agreement the Reich Nitrogen Works added the following astonishing incentive for employee creativity and initiative: “All discoveries, improvements, and ideas to enhance operations are to be reviewed jointly by management and the Works Council. If they turn out to be useful, such discoveries and improvements are to belong to the firm, but the Works Council is to ensure that the discoverer is adequately compensated.”30 In isolated cases, Works Councils during January and early February 1919 attempted to seize complete control of their firms. But even these instances reveal the reluctance of ordinary workers to act without authorization from the state. In early January at the Halle Potash Works in Schlettau, for example, miners elected their own Works Council, which in turn demanded from management higher pay for the workforce. Management not only rejected the demand but also refused to acknowledge the Works Council as the legitimate representative of the workers. On 9 January the Works Council dispatched a large deputation of miners to accompany the firm director from his home to the pit. The council held the director in a company dressing room for more than an hour while deciding what to do next. Then, in front of the assembled workforce, the Works Council chairman, Otto Peters, demanded that the director sign an agreement granting the workforce more pay. The director signed the document thrust in front of him but inserted a clause stating that he considered himself coerced. The Works Council again confined the director to the dressing room, conferred, and then obliged him to delete the offending paragraph. With its chief demands fulfilled and lacking support from any political authorities to retain control of the firm, the Works Council then allowed the director to resume management of the company.31 On 3 February the workforce at the Clara-Group of mines in west Halle elected a Works Council and decided to take immediate steps to socialize its firm. The next day, apparently with the encouragement of the Halle asr, the Works Council replaced the firm’s director with a member of the Halle asr by the name of Schiebe and hired a manager from Leipzig to assume day-to-

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day direction of the firm. At this point the white-collar employees at the mine quit the premises, apparently taking the books with them. One day later, after failing to receive the backing of the Halle asr and regional miners’ Works Council (Bezirks-Bergarbeiterrat Halle-Merseburg), the Clara Works Council abandoned its experiment, claiming that it had not intended to socialize the firm but merely exercise its right of intervention into management decisions. The old management team was reinstalled.32 Of significance in this episode is the fact that the local Works Council unilaterally democratized its firm only with the encouragement of higher political authorities (in this case, the Halle asr) and immediately desisted when that support disappeared.33 That the most radical Works Councils were all located in industrial villages outside of the big cities and beyond the reach of party organizations confirms a thesis advanced by both Erhard Lucas and Mary Nolan.34 In her research on the revolution in the Ruhr and lower Rhine Nolan noticed two distinct types of worker radicalism. In outlying industrial villages, often with only a single employer (typically a mine or metal works), the factor most unifying workers was their common experience on the shop floor. Their political activity therefore concentrated on democratizing the workplace, and their Works Councils exhibited a strong syndicalist hue. In taking direct action to increase the power of their Works Councils, however, they often lapsed into provincialism and neglected purely political questions, such as the need to coordinate actions with radicals elsewhere and influence events at the Reich level. By contrast, workers in the larger cities such as Düsseldorf, where diversified economies had created a heterogeneous workforce with few common experiences on the shop floor, or cities such as Remscheid with a long Social Democratic tradition were united only through the agency of the party (i.e., the uspd). While electing Works Councils and demanding expanded powers for them, they rarely undertook direct syndicalist action in their own firms. Instead, they looked to the party to organize political initiatives to pressure Reich and Land authorities. This was the case in central Germany as well. The most syndicalist Works Councils were all located outside the big cities, usually at coal and potash mines, whereas the Works Councils in big cities such as Leipzig limited themselves to bargaining with management over pay and working conditions while waiting for their leaders in the asr and uspd to organize a general strike to achieve socialization. The final characteristic of this strike wave meriting comment was its sexism. With the exception of female-dominated factories in textiles and food processing, almost no women were elected to Works Councils. Moreover, in every case where a mixed male and female workforce went out on strike, the

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Works Council demanded less generous raises for women than for men, leaving women earning roughly half the pay of their male colleagues. Neither Works Councils, nor management, nor the media remarked on this facet of the strikes. It appeared self-evident to them that women should earn less than men. Female workers concurred in that they wholeheartedly supported strikes whose goals promised them only a fraction of the raises received by male colleagues. As in their acceptance of the demobilization policy that pushed them out of jobs to make room for returning veterans, so too in the question of pay did female workers assent to their inferior status.35 Evidence presented throughout this study has shown that women mobilized enthusiastically in the streets but not against these and other types of sexual discrimination. Instead, during the imperial period they protested against the Klassenstaat, and during the revolution they demonstrated on behalf of the Works Council movement.

Unlikely Insurgents: Lower-White Collars and University Students Part 1 described the often authoritarian nature of the relationship between lower white collars and superiors in the offices of Leipzig; and part 2 discussed how elites did nothing to brake the fall in the living standard of lower white collars during the war. The bitterness this treatment engendered did not prompt lower white collars to participate in the November revolution or support the proletarian Works Council movement, but it did lead them to exploit the elite’s moment of vulnerability in January and February 1919 to extract a range of benefits from their erstwhile allies. The first to act were lower white collars in the private economy (Angestellten). As early as December 1918 they unified the white-collar-employee committees (Angestellten-Ausschüsse) of the hdg into a single Association of White-Collar-Employee Committees of Greater Leipzig that advised individual committees of their rights and pressured employers to improve working conditions.36 Thus, despite the fact that white-collar employees had always been strewn along the political spectrum in various groupings (i.e., the German-National Sales Assistants Organization, the Organization of German Sales Assistants, etc.), they were able in Leipzig to pursue higher pay and better working conditions in a fairly unified manner. Taking their cue from workers but not joining forces with them, Leipzig’s lower-white-collar employees began in late January 1919 to become more aggressive in pursuit of their goals. On the twenty-fifth of that month around five hundred unemployed lower white collars demonstrated in the city center

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against the reluctance of firms to fire all female employees in order to make room for returning veterans. The demonstrators marched to the machinemaking factory of Karl Krause—which was rumored to have accumulated huge profits during the war—stormed the building, and confronted the owner with their demands. Krause agreed to dismiss his remaining female whitecollar employees. The demonstrators then made their way to the wholesale towel-dealing firm of the Brothers Heine, where managers also agreed to fire female clerical and sales staff.37 In early February the two thousand lower white collars in Leipzig’s bookstores and publishing industry extracted from employers higher salaries, a forty-eight-hour workweek, and the mediation of all future disputes by a board composed at parity of employers and employees. One of the biggest book dealers in the city, Koehler and Volckmar, feared that employers would be forced to make more concessions in the future because the white-collar-employee committees were now led by radicals who “make impossible promises to their colleagues in meetings.”38 The same firm noted in a memo to the chamber of commerce that the ringleaders were younger employees who had wrested control of the committees away from older, more moderate colleagues.39 On 7 February sales assistants in the city’s department stores went out on a strike that ended three days later with a boost in pay.40 During this same period the white-collar-employee committee at the mammoth basf chemical works in nearby Leuna was able to satisfy many of its grievances in weekly meetings with upper management.41 As part 2 reported, all white collars suffered during the war, but lower civil servants were especially poorly treated. While the upper municipal civil servants gave themselves hefty raises, the cost-of-living increases they granted to their underlings did not approach the wartime rate of inflation. This contemptuous treatment coupled with the elite’s loss of prestige following November 1918 inspired police and fire officers as well as clerks and messengers in city hall to elect their own civil servant committees (Beamten-Ausschüsse) in November and December 1918. While these committees played no role in the political upheaval of November and made no effort to ally with the asr, they began voicing the grievances of the lower civil servants to the city senate. That body, however, refused to take the new committees seriously and continued to treat subordinates in the usual authoritarian manner. Their patience exhausted, the lower civil servants met on 28 January 1919 and resolved to strike, explicitly citing the example of the many worker strikes erupting in Leipzig at that time.42 The decision to strike represented a startling departure from precedent: nobody could remember the last time lower civil servants had threatened to walk off the job. They issued the following

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demands: higher pay, an eight-hour day, and “the right of codetermination [das Mitbestimmungsrecht] in all aspects of work.” This final demand was especially important to the lower civil servants because they believed that only increased powers for their civil servant committees would ensure that promotions be based on competence, not favoritism. “The assembled civil servants feel themselves justified in saying that for them too the phrase ‘an open path for talent’ must find application and any preference for ‘favorites’ must be eliminated.”43 As their own union, the Association of Leipzig Municipal Civil Servants, refused to support the strike, the lower civil servants elected a wildcat strike committee. The next day, 29 January, the city senate agreed to raise their salaries but rejected the other two demands. While the lower civil servants debated among themselves whether to accept this proposal, City Senator Böhme informed them on 7 February that the senate had rescinded its offer. After receiving assurances from the asr that it would not interfere with their pickets, the lower civil servants decided unanimously to strike. The committee posted armed pickets (mostly police- and firemen) at the entrances of the new city hall, barring entry to the mayor, senate, and upper civil servants, in effect closing down the municipal government. The senate immediately granted the strikers a pay raise and agreed to recognize the civil servant committees as their legitimate representatives, though it remained silent on exactly how much power it would cede to these committees. The strikers accepted the offer and were back at work by 12 February.44 During the following months, the civil servant committees gained the right to review the personnel files of petty officials and petition to have them altered. The committees also participated in judging petty officials accused of misconduct.45 The success of lower civil servants in Leipzig was not an isolated phenomenon in Saxony. During this period Land civil servants won for themselves the right to review their own personnel files and even delete unflattering passages about their performances.46 Inspired by the victory of the lower civil servants, the city’s one thousand Volksschule teachers declared at a rally three days later their determination to strike if Land authorities refused to fulfill the following demands: better pay, a shorter workweek, appointment of principals by the Teachers Council (Lehrerrat) in each school, self-administration of each school under the joint direction of the Teachers Council and principal, formulation of citywide educational policy by a municipal Teachers Council and Land officials. The teachers stressed that their top priority lay in ending the “dictatorship” of the principals, who hitherto had enjoyed complete authority over teachers and

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collectively had set citywide educational policy in their own Conference of Principals. Within a few days Land officials agreed to most of the teachers’ demands: within each school, the Teachers Council won the right to determine policy on an equal footing with the principal and a committee of parents; citywide, the delegates from these councils enjoyed similar powers opposite the Conference of Principals.47 Only Volksschule teachers participated in this initiative. Teachers at the more elite Oberrealschulen and Gymnasien remained aloof.48 The general breakdown of elite authority also led students and junior faculty (Dozenten) to challenge professors and administrators at the university, in the process obtaining long-sought-after desiderata. This challenge comes as something of a surprise considering that it was these same students and junior faculty who were militantly opposed to the asr. For example, when the conflict over which flag would be flown atop the main university building was resolved through a compromise stating that no flag would be flown, the university’s junior faculty immediately accused the president of weakness for accepting this proposal and, in an unprecedented move, demanded that he resign. The Student Council added its no-confidence vote. Overwhelmed by the difficulty of directing the university during a revolution and feeling betrayed by the students and junior faculty, the president quit.49 The students then vetoed the tenured faculty’s first choice for a successor, complaining that he was too moderate. Ultimately, a conservative was appointed.50 The students then succeeded in pressuring the new president into abolishing a variety of student fees and academic rules, as well as the university’s disciplinary court. Meanwhile, junior faculty members won from the university a minimum salary (hitherto their sole source of income had been fees paid by students to attend their courses) and representation on university policy committees (hitherto the preserve of tenured professors). The docents also pressured the university into adopting a mandatory retirement age of seventy so as to improve their own chances of receiving tenure.51 One contemporary attributed the assertiveness of the students and junior faculty to the fact that, having served as officers in the Great War, they felt entitled to more liberty and respect than had been the case before 1914.52 To summarize, while the alter Mittelstand remained loyal to elites throughout the revolutionary period, lower white collars, university students, and junior faculty exploited the elite’s weakness in the aftermath of November 1918 to obtain greater control on the job and in the classroom. Once achieved, they again closed ranks with elites in the face of the common threat of the proletarian general strike.

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The Leftward Movement of the Leipzig ASR As ever more strikes erupted in February 1919 across industrial Germany, most observers believed a general strike would soon break out.53 In order to succeed in forcing the national government to make concessions on the question of socializing industry and enhancing Works Council power at the point of production, it would need determined, radical leadership. Yet at this very moment uspd leaders in Leipzig were counseling moderation. Having resigned in mid-January from the provisional government in Dresden, Lipinski resumed his leadership of the uspd in Leipzig. At a local party conference from 13–16 February, the delegates demanded that steps be taken to launch a general strike in concert with radicals in the Ruhr and Berlin. Lipinski opposed this motion, arguing that: The workers are disappointed at the course and tempo of the revolution. But this disappointment is not appropriate. Essentially, the demands the workers had before the revolution are satisfied: personal freedom is secured; censorship abolished; full freedom of assembly and association [achieved]; general and equal suffrage obtained, also for women. . . . That large portions of the workforce, especially the millions of front soldiers and women, have not been sufficiently politically enlightened has prevented a full exploitation of the revolution. Therefore there remains no other way but gradually to dismantle the old state and construct a new one.54

Socialism, he continued on the conference’s final day, could not be achieved in one blow through a general strike but only through the organic development of the economy, through the concentration of the means of production stemming from capitalist competition. Only when firms had become monopolistic should they be brought into community ownership through acts of parliament. At the current time, he concluded, the German working class lacked the maturity to recognize this fact. The top priority of the party therefore lay in educating the masses for their historic mission.55 Radicals in the local party such as Hermann Liebmann and Paul Böttcher attacked Lipinski, pointing out that such a philosophy postponed the realization of the socialist republic indefinitely. Both received much applause from the delegates, indicating the rank and file’s growing impatience with the party’s moderate leadership.56 The fact that Lipinski and Seger, as adherents of the Kautskyite worldview, would never agree to organize a general strike prompted local party members to search for more radical leadership. They found it in the

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group of young men, mostly in their late twenties and early thirties, surrounding Dr. Curt Geyer.57 As a native of the city, son of the popular uspd Reichstag deputy Friedrich Geyer, and a former leader of socialist youth groups in Leipzig, Curt Geyer was well known in the local party despite being only twenty-seven-years old. After earning a doctorate in history at Leipzig University (writing his thesis on radical leadership in the revolution of 1848) he became a reporter at the lvz. Early in the war he accepted an offer to edit the Social Democratic paper in Würzburg. With the party’s schism in 1917, however, he lost this position because the Majority Socialists who controlled the Würzburg party organization had little use for the young left-winger. After returning to Leipzig he quickly won acclaim from his uspd comrades through radical speeches and bravado, for example, ridiculing members of the Fatherland Party at their own meeting about their delusions of a German military victory. After the outbreak of the revolution, Geyer’s comrades elected him the Leipzig delegation chief to the first Reich Congress of asre and then nominated him to be one of three uspd deputies to the Reichstag. Geyer and his young allies Liebmann, Böttcher, and Arthur Lieberasch were the direct beneficiaries of the rank and file’s increasing disenchantment with Lipinski and Seger. Although the Young Turks were not quite popular enough to take over the local party (where prewar social democratic traditions of discipline provided the old leadership with a reservoir of support), they possessed enough votes by mid-February 1919 to assume leadership of the asr, where ordinary workers without party affiliation predominated. On the twenty-first of that month Geyer displaced Seger as chair of the asr. The change of leadership was not announced to the press, presumably so as not to alert Leipzig’s Bürgertum to the asr’s radical turn.58 As Seger busied himself thereafter in the city council with legislation to communalize chimney sweep services, the new asr began preparing for the coming general strike.

The Works Council Movement Elsewhere: Berlin and the Ruhr The strike wave gaining momentum throughout January and February did not confine itself to central Germany but was also cresting in Germany’s two other main industrial centers, the Ruhr and Berlin. As in central Germany, the strikes in these regions were propelled by the growing understanding in the workforce following the elections that the government, if left to its own devices, would refuse to socialize big industry or reform the military and civil service.59 By February regional organizations, based on the Works Coun-

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cils, were in place and could serve as leadership in all three areas to direct a possible general strike. In Berlin, such an organization—the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (revolutionäre Obleute)—had come into being as early as June 1916 to lead the Berlin strike protesting the arrest of Karl Liebknecht. Independent of the unions and only loosely affiliated with the uspd, the eighty or so Revolutionary Shop Stewards tended to be skilled metalworkers elected by their colleagues in the factories. In contrast to the largely intellectual leadership in the Ruhr and central Germany (more on that below), the Revolutionary Shop Stewards were from the same social background as their followers. They had already led Berlin’s workers in wartime strikes, the November days, and the unsuccessful Spartacist uprising of January 1919. By mid-February 1919, they and their followers were prepared for yet another attempt to push the policies of the national government to the left.60 In the Ruhr and central Germany, by contrast, leadership structures were more recently evolved, growing out of the strike wave of January and February 1919 when individual Works Councils elected from their ranks delegates to regional organizations. Miners in the Ruhr set the pace in this process, providing the model and major elements of the ideology for the central German movement. As ever more strikes broke out in Ruhr mines in December and the first week of January, radical leaders there wished to give them a focus so as to maximize their impact on the national authorities and so improve their chances of pressuring them into socializing industry. On 9 January the Essen asr declared, citing the order of the Reich Congress of asre, the socialization of mines in the Ruhr. Two days later it backed up this decree by occupying the offices of the Ruhr coal employers’ association. While declaring that the mines were now under the control of the Works Councils, the Essen asr also set wage and price controls in the mining industry and urged workers to boost production so as to help Germany out of its coal shortage.61 On 13 January the Essen asr set up the Commission of Nine (Neunerkommission), headed by the majority socialist lawyer E. Ruben, to encourage the election of Works Councils in all the mines, pressure the government to grant the Works Councils official powers and socialize the coal sector, and prepare for that socialization by urging individual Works Councils to acquire more powers in relation to management.62 In the following days the Commission of Nine issued its plan for a socialized coal industry, a conception combining formal state ownership with control of the pit by the individual Works Councils. (This plan was copied by the central German movement, and I will examine it in greater detail below when looking at events there.) The commission then called on all mines to elect their own Works Councils, an order that was fol-

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lowed almost without exception. Now that miners believed socialization was finally going to happen, strikes in the Ruhr ceased for the next six weeks, until mid-February.63

Leadership of the General Strike in Central Germany Imitating the Essen asr’s creation of the Commission of Nine, the asr of the Halle-Merseburg region (Bezirks-Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat Halle-Merseburg) appointed a five-member Regional Coal Worker Council (Bezirksbergarbeiterrat) on 16 January to direct the election of Works Councils in individual pits in central Germany and pressure the government to socialize the coal industry. The asr of the Halle-Merseburg region also followed the Essen asr’s precedent in that it seized control of the symbol of authority in the central German coal industry by occupying the offices of the Prussian coal inspectorate in Halle.64 While supporting these measures, the Leipzig asr played no active role in them; rather, the impetus came from Wilhelm Koenen, thirtythree, a newspaper editor and uspd Reichstag deputy from Halle, and Bernhard Düwell, twenty-eight, an editor at the uspd newspaper in Zeitz. Considering the youth and educational background of Koenen and Düwell, as well as the new asr leaders in Leipzig, there is no question that the radical leaders of the central German movement were relatively better educated and younger than the more moderate Independent Socialists they had eclipsed.65 In its first meeting on 27 January, the five-member Regional Coal Worker Council ordered all mines in central Germany to hold immediate elections for Works Councils to replace any remaining employee committees of the hdg. It also adopted almost without alteration the blueprint for the socialization of the coal industry, dubbed the Essen Model, that the Commission of Nine in the Ruhr had drafted. The Essen Model envisioned a coal industry formally owned by the state but controlled by an ascending system of Worker Councils. Workers in each cluster of shafts would elect a Pit Area Council (Steigerrevierrat), whose members in turn would send a representative to the Works Council (Betriebsrat). The Works Council, composed of five members, at least one of whom had to be a white-collar employee, would enjoy equal power with management. Each Works Council would in turn send a representative to an Area Coal Council (Bergrevierrat), presumably to oversee production in a given locality, and its members in turn would send a delegate to the highest body, the Regional Coal Worker Council (Bergbezirksarbeiterrat), which would oversee the coal industry in all of central Germany (or at least in the Prussian province of Saxony; it remained unclear).66 Two days later, on 29 January, a conference of delegates from all asre in

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the Halle-Merseburg-Leipzig area confirmed the decisions of the Regional Coal Worker Council, urged miners to produce as much coal as possible to ease Germany’s economic plight, and threatened to call a general strike in the event that the Reich government refused to move on socialization and recognize the powers of the Works Councils. In the following weeks, not only all mines but also most big factories in central Germany elected Works Councils in accordance with the directives of the Regional Coal Worker Council.67 In an effort to discourage the type of “wild socialization” of companies undertaken by isolated Works Councils (examined above), on 13 February the Regional Coal Worker Council issued provisional guidelines meant to clarify the proper activities of the Works Council. If the Essen Model was meant to adumbrate the overall architecture of a socialized economy, the guidelines were to serve as a constitution for the individual factory. These guidelines represent the core demands of the central German general strike, so the major clauses merit citation in full: 2. The most important task of the Works Council is to prepare the firm for socialization as quickly as possible and without disturbance. 3. The Works Council controls management and the workforce and strives to bring about the highest possible level of production. 5. Three members of the Works Council are to receive on demand the right to inspect all management decisions within the firm [i.e., inspect the books]. 6. The Works Council and management together are to regulate all salary and wage disputes. 7. No white- or blue-collar employee may be dismissed without the approval of the Works Council. 12. Disputes between management and the Works Council are to be mediated by the Area Coal Council. Either side may appeal such decisions for final judgment before the Regional Coal Worker Council located in the offices of the Prussian coal inspectorate in Halle.68

The second clause reveals that Works Councils acquired power in relation to management not only as an end in itself but also in order facilitate the socialization decree expected from the Reich government. The next clause highlights again that their goals were not entirely selfish: they were aware of Germany’s economic crisis and saw no reason why worker control should preclude increased production.69 Clauses five, six, and seven leave the im-

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pression that the Works Council was not supposed to assume day-to-day direction of the firm but instead repeal management decisions found to be objectionable (an activity captured by the German verb kontrollieren). The architects of the guidelines did not believe that complete worker control at the point of production was necessary because, according to clause twelve, disputes between management and Works Council would be resolved by arbitration boards composed entirely of workers.70 These guidelines left open whether production in a socialized economy would be guided by market signals, a centrally imposed plan, or a combination of both. On the day that Koenen issued the guidelines, 13 February, his representatives were negotiating with Reich Labor Minister Gustav Bauer (mspd) and Economics Minister Rudolf Wissell (mspd) in Weimar on ways to avert the planned general strike.71 Koenen had chosen his brother, Bernhard Koenen, and G. Rausch, a member of the Regional Coal Worker Council, to represent the central German workers in Weimar. They were joined by representatives of the Ruhr miners, as well as leading industrialists and union functionaries. The government offered a compromise that fell far short of the program outlined in the guidelines: the government refused to recognize the Commission of Nine in the Ruhr and Regional Coal Worker Council in Merseburg as legitimate bodies; it agreed to recognize the Works Councils only provisionally; in the meantime, each provisional Works Council could enjoy very limited rights to inspect company books (and no right to information on company profits); the only area where the Works Council might receive any authority was in its right to veto management decisions to dismiss individual employees (but since the government intended to do away with the Works Councils, such powers could be exercised only in the short term); higher appellate bodies to mediate disputes between Works Council and management would not be worker-controlled but instead controlled by employers and government officials.72 Perhaps awed by their surroundings in Weimar, the inexperienced proletarian negotiators accepted this so-called compromise— in effect, gelding the Works Council movement before it had a chance to test its power in a general strike.73 Wilhelm Koenen and Düwell now faced a dilemma: should they urge their followers to accept the disappointing deal negotiated in Weimar, thereby giving up on the goal of socialization and opening themselves up to the charge of incompetence, or should they declare the negotiations a failure and launch the general strike? They chose the latter course.74 But a variety of factors ensured that central Germany’s workers were to strike alone, without the added weight of their comrades in the Ruhr and Berlin.

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The Question of Coordinating a National General Strike Radical leaders in the Ruhr, Berlin, and central Germany had never been in close touch with each other. Instead, a loose association of younger, more radical Independent Socialists—whose members had first met at the Reich Congress of asre in December 1918—hatched hazy schemes for a Northwest German Republic, to comprise industrial central Germany, the Hanseatic cities, Ruhr, and lower Rhine, in the event that the Reich government adhered to its conservative course.75 As the Works Council movement gained momentum, the young men dropped their separatist daydreams and placed their hopes instead in a general strike that would force the Reich government to acquiesce to the socialization of industry and augmentation of Works Council power. Oddly, however, they made almost no effort to ensure that such a general strike would be nationally coordinated so as to cripple all of German industry simultaneously. Instead, each group of radicals prepared for the strike in its own region, rarely communicating—let alone planning—with counterparts elsewhere. The first communication regarding the general strike between radical leaders in central Germany and the Ruhr took place only on 6 February, when a delegate of the central German Works Council movement attended the conference of Ruhr asre in Essen.76 In the coming days, the two sides appear to have coordinated their demands so that they were able to present a common program—the Essen Model—during the negotiations with the Reich government one week later in Weimar.77 Thereafter, coordination broke down completely. The Ruhr leaders assumed that central Germany would automatically follow them into a general strike.78 When they rejected the government’s “compromise” at the Weimar negotiations, the Ruhr leaders set 17 February as the date for the general strike without consulting their central German allies.79

THE GENERAL STRIKE The General Strike in the Ruhr, Berlin, and Upper Silesia The Ruhr strike actually broke out one day earlier than planned, on the sixteenth. Unlike the central German movement, which enjoyed fairly unified leadership under the left uspd, an assortment of Majority Socialists, union functionaries, Independent Socialists, communists, syndicalists, and ordi-

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nary workers formed the leadership in the Ruhr. This fragile coalition split over whether to accept the Reich government’s offer made in Weimar, with the Majority Socialists and union leaders approving the deal and everybody else rejecting it.80 On that same day, 14 February, the Seventh Army Corps under General Watter marched into the Ruhr, occupying Herverst-Dorsten. The Essen asr responded by informing the Reich government that the general strike would start on the seventeenth if Watter’s troops did not immediately withdraw. On the sixteenth, however, a hastily convened conference of communists and syndicalists in Mühlheim declared the beginning of the general strike on that day. A large number of miners heeded this call. On the eighteenth, with thousands of miners striking and Watter’s troops advancing further into the Ruhr, the Majority Socialists and union leaders withdrew their support for a general strike. Recognizing that the genie could not be put back in the bottle, the rump commission decided to go forward with the unfolding general strike. Ultimately, 180,000 miners, representing half of the Ruhr coal workforce, participated, some arming themselves to resist Watter’s troops. Because of the strike’s poor organization and the occupation by the Reich troops, however, it collapsed after only three days.81 From the perspective of the radicals, the failed strike generated one positive result: the unreliable Majority Socialists and unionists lost so much prestige among ordinary miners that they were expelled from the leadership. The Commission of Nine, still intact, would be ready to renew the struggle two months later.82 While the Ruhr general strike broke out too early, the strike in Berlin began too late. No evidence could be uncovered even hinting at a link between the Revolutionary Shop Stewards in Berlin and the radical leadership in central Germany and the Ruhr. Nevertheless, the shop stewards were aware of the plans afoot in those two regions and wished to make the looming strike in the capital part of a national effort. To ensure that all Berlin’s workers took part in the strike (and not just those in the metal industry), they believed it would need the approval of the Reich Congress of asr. The shop stewards hoped to reconvene this congress, have it condemn the Reich government for refusing to implement its directive on socialization, and then call a general strike. Only the Central Council of the Congress, however, had the authority to call the congress into plenary session, and the Central Council was controlled by the Majority Socialists. Not surprisingly, the Central Council found a number of reasons not to call a plenary session. When the strike broke out in the Ruhr, the shop stewards gave up on their plan of having the Congress of asre call the general strike in the capital and turned instead to the Berlin asr. But this body, too, was controlled by the Majority Socialists

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(with additional help from a large contingent of left democrats), which meant that the Berlin asr declared the general strike only on 3 March, a juncture when the strike in the Ruhr had long since been crushed while that in central Germany (examined below) was declining rapidly.83 The next day, the Berlin strikers published their demands: (1) constitutional recognition of a political role for the asre; (2) acceptance of the Hamburg Points to reform the military; (3) release of all political prisoners; (4) formation of a proletarian militia; (5) dissolution of the Freikorps; (6) establishment of diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia. Only in the second half of the program did the Berlin strikers demand more power for the Works Councils at the point of production. By giving such low priority to the question of the Works Councils, the Berlin strike differed from its counterparts in the Ruhr and especially central Germany. After the government rejected these demands, the strike leadership extended the walkout to the food industry and municipal waterworks. This step prompted the Majority Socialists and unionists to resign from the strike leadership. As Reichswehr Minister Noske’s troops marched into the capital, the Independent Socialists called off the strike. Street fighting during the following week left twelve hundred insurgents (mostly armed workers and sailors) dead.84 A poorly led strike of miners in Upper Silesia during these same days with roughly the same demands as those in Berlin likewise ended in defeat.85

The Central German General Strike The workers of central Germany, then, were to strike with little support from other regions. Koenen and Düwell attempted to move quickly toward launching the strike in the hopes of synchronizing its start with that in the Ruhr. Only on 23 February, however—several days after the collapse of the Ruhr strike—were they able to convene in Halle a central German conference of delegates from local asre and Works Councils in the coal, electrical, chemical, and rail sectors across central Germany. The conference called the general strike for the next day and set as its goal increased powers for Works Councils in accordance with the guidelines of 13 February.86 Two days later, the executive committee of the Leipzig asr along with delegates from the city’s Works Councils met at the pub Drei Linden and voted to recommend to the city’s workforce that it join the central German general strike proclaimed in Halle. The referendum on this proposal held in Leipzig’s factories the next day, the twenty-sixth, revealed a clear majority in support of the strike (about thirty-four thousand to five thousand). The next day, the twenty-seventh, the workers of Leipzig walked off the job.87

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Although without the help of the Ruhr and largely unsupported by Berlin and Upper Silesia, the central German movement possessed several characteristics that meant that, even alone, it might have compelled the Reich government to make concessions. First, its huge proportions commanded respect. Centered on Halle, the strike stretched eastward into southern Brandenburg, northeastward to Wittenberg, northwestward to Helmstedt, westward to Nebra, southwestward to encompass most of Thuringia, and southward to include all of western Saxony.88 Second, unlike in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia (where only miners participated) and Berlin (where metalworkers played the dominant role), in central Germany practically all industrial workers laid down their tools, a fact that meant the strikers must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands.89 At a time of shortage, the government had to take seriously the threat of such a massive work stoppage. Third, the strike in central Germany was unique in that it enjoyed fairly unified leadership under the left wing of the uspd.90 Fourth, Leipzig’s position as the hub between northern and southern and eastern and western Germany meant that a walkout by its rail workers would lame transportation for the whole Reich. Richard Müller summed up the threat that the strike posed to the government: The [central German] strike began with elemental power. The entire central German coal industry was shut down. The power plants that supplied Berlin and other cities with electricity were partially out of commission. Rail transport—with the exception of a few passenger trains operated under emergency conditions by white-collar employees—was stilled. Southern Germany was split from northern Germany. . . . The Reich government and National Assembly sat in Weimar, in the middle of the strike region. Surrounded by a wall of loyal troops, canons, and weapons of all kinds, they had no need to fear attack. They were at once protected, bound, and buried.91

Finally, unlike the strikers in Berlin, who demanded that the asre receive political power, the central German strikers focused mostly on acquiring more economic power for the Works Councils. Because such a demand was compatible with the new constitution, the central German strike enjoyed better prospects by leaving the government more leeway to find a compromise. In short, the central German general strike at its outset appeared capable of achieving at least partial success. Although incorrectly attributing the cause of the strike to the machinations of “communist string pullers” intent on importing “Russian conditions” into Germany,92 the newly installed Scheidemann cabinet recognized

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the alarming scope of the challenge and quickly abandoned the intransigent attitude it had displayed during the negotiations in Weimar.93 The gigantic strike obliged the government to give the appearance of making progress on the socialization of industry and enhancement of Works Council power.94 It hastily pushed through a socialization bill during the central German strike, between 4 and 13 March.95 The actual terms of the legislation, however, did not mandate but merely “enabled” the socialization of certain branches of industry (and required full compensation for owners in the event that it ever came to pass). In the coming weeks the National Assembly also passed “enabling” legislation pertaining specifically to the coal and potash sectors.96 At the urging of the spd parliamentary group on 28 February,97 the cabinet began a propaganda offensive to accompany the legislation, issuing a statement on that same day similar to many others released during the coming weeks: Just as important as political is economic democracy! We’re at the task right now of creating the law book of economic democracy. . . . The Works Councils, as we already suggested during the negotiations with the coal miners from the Ruhr and Halle, must be the . . . representatives of all workers. We will achieve the goal of economic democracy: the constitutional factory on the basis of democracy, all in connection with the socialization of branches of industry—above all, coal and energy production.98

Beginning on 28 February the government loosed on Germany a blizzard of flyers and posters with the headlines “Socialization is on the march!” and “Socialization is here!”99 The government also performed a rhetorical U-turn on the question of “anchoring” the Works Councils in the constitution. As late as 21 February, it had refused to include a clause on Works Councils in its draft of the constitution. By early March, however, the government’s draft included language on the Works Councils (but granted them no real powers).100 The strike also spurred the government to endorse, in vague terms, Works Councils in its public rhetoric.101 At precisely this time the government also dropped its insistence that they be referred to by their old hdg name of “blue- and whitecollar employee committees” (Arbeiter- und Angestellten-Ausschüsse), adopting instead the more revolutionary designation of “Works Councils” (Betriebsräte) favored by the strikers.102 In private, however, cabinet members remained clear with each other that the Works Councils were to receive only consultative powers in relation to management.103

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The Central German General Strike in Leipzig the social composition of the strikers Throughout this study it has been clear that all major popular mobilizations—beginning with the prewar campaign for a more democratic suffrage and continuing through the wartime strikes, the November days, and the protest strikes of January 1919—were supported by all types of wage earners in Leipzig, male and female, skilled and unskilled, craft and factory. This pattern continued during the general strike of February–March 1919, with the exceptions and partial exceptions examined in the following paragraphs. A small percentage of workers actually opposed the strike publicly. In keeping with their traditional conservatism, letterpress printers104 and senior locomotive drivers with civil-servant status105 both condemned the strike. Not opposing the strike but remaining indifferent to it were the agricultural laborers employed on estates surrounding the city. Although on some estates workers used the occasion of the general strike to demand higher wages, none joined the movement or endorsed its goals.106 A number of factors explain this passivity: many of the rural laborers were Polish migrant workers with little concern for German politics; ethnic German workers in the countryside had traditionally protested unbearable conditions not through political action but by migrating to the cities; finally, the Leipzig asr gave rural laborers no reason to support the revolution or general strike, for example, by expropriating large estates and redistributing the land to the laborers. A smallish minority of workers in Leipzig, clustered exclusively in the public sector, declared their neutrality in the strike. Laborers in the municipal cemeteries and waterworks along with fire- and policemen refused to support either the general strike or nonworker counterstrike (examined below), often claiming that interruption of their work might pose a health and safety risk to the community as a whole. This justification rings hollow, however, when one considers that only two weeks earlier these same workers had struck in pursuit of better pay and more power for their own Works Councils (examined above). Now that they had obtained their desiderata, these relatively privileged workers—especially fire- and policemen—resumed their normal posture of political moderation.107 Joining them in neutrality (i.e., continuing to work) were the telephone workers and operators,108 as well as manual laborers in the postal service.109 Not all workers employed in public and semipublic enterprises remained aloof from the strike. Railroad, tram, and utility workers all supported the

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strike, as did those employed in the state-owned textile mills producing uniforms, tents, and so forth for the Nineteenth Army Corps. Workers (but not white-collar employees and actors) at the municipal theater also joined the strike.110 Aside from these exceptions, all other workers in Leipzig, in the private and public sectors, supported the general strike. the social composition of the counterstrikers Immediately after the decision to strike, the leadership had placards posted across the city which that read: “Workers! The bourgeoisie must recognize that it cannot live without you but that you can survive without it!”111 Leipzig’s nonworkers, led by the BA, decided to test this claim by staging their own counter-strike, hoping to inflict at least as much damage on the strikers as the strikers were causing the good burghers. Almost all nonworkers in Leipzig supported the counterstrike. The most important element of this coalition were businesses, all of which closed their doors (although food stores soon reopened, fearing plundering at the hands of striking workers).112 The counterstrike also found support from almost all of Leipzig’s independent master artisans, publicans, and shopkeepers.113 While a few of the poorer among the alter Mittelstand stayed open, none went over to the side of the workers.114 In some cases, the masters in a guild joined the counterstrike while their apprentices (i.e., workers) joined the general strike.115 Lower-white-collar employees in the private economy (Angestellten) also heeded the call of the ba. Sales help at all the department stores save one endorsed the counterstrike.116 And office employees joined, too, notably clerks in insurance companies117 and banks.118 Office help in the coal companies headquartered in Leipzig followed the example of their colleagues throughout central Germany in supporting the counterstrike, even volunteering to perform emergency manual labor to keep the mines from flooding.119 In addition to their traditional opposition to proletarian strikes, another reason prompted the lower white collars to support the counterstrike: instead of the current arrangement in which they were represented together with workers in a common Works Council and consequently outvoted by blue-collar majorities, they wanted their own white-collar employee committees to be independent organizations.120 Lower civil servants championed the counterstrike with equal fervor. Petty officials in the town hall, with the tacit support of Mayor Rothe, joined the counterstrike. As the dispensers of unemployment benefits, the municipal clerks’ decision to stay home threatened to cut off income to many workers

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without jobs.121 Petty officials of the Land Saxony, with the public approval of their boss, Prefect von Fink, also rallied to the counterstrike. This also caused problems for the strikers because Land officials distributed food cards (Leipzig maintained its wartime system of food rationing).122 Meanwhile, the lower officials of the railways not only joined the counterstrike but also passed a resolution demanding that Reich troops occupy the main rail junctions in central Germany.123 Furthermore, gymnasial teachers, also employees of the Land, unanimously supported the counterstrike, as did most teachers in the Real- and Volksschulen.124 During these tense days the president and tenured faculty decided to keep the university open as a demonstration of its nonpolitical character. But a rally of students and junior faculty demanded solidarity with the ba’s counterstrike, and the president was obliged to reverse his decision.125 Thereafter the students gathered daily to keep abreast of events.126 Another important group adhering to the counterstrike were area farmers (most of them large estate owners). Their decision to end food deliveries to the city hurt upper-income Leipzigers less than workers because of the former’s superior purchasing power and stored provisions.127 The counterstrike did not only diminish the supply of food; it also all but eliminated medical service as both doctors and apothecaries rallied to the banner of the ba.128 In taking this unusual step, Leipzig’s doctors were not entirely improvising: during the late imperial period doctors struck in a number of German cities under the direction of the largest national organization of M.D.’s, the Hartmannbund;129 and earlier in the revolution, doctors in Halle had also struck to protest the policies of the asr in that city.130 The doctors nonetheless maintained a skeletal staff at the city’s major hospitals in order to tend to the seriously ill. Claiming that the lack of light and heat resulting from the general strike forced them to focus scarce resources on the truly sick, doctors at St. Jacob’s hospital evicted 250 patients.131 This action by the doctors (and their justification for it) begs a few questions. First, the lack of heat stemmed from the fact that Leipzig’s coal dealers had joined the ba’s counterstrike. No evidence indicates that the doctors asked the coal dealers to resume deliveries. True, the asr was in possession of coal confiscated from businesses and wealthy individuals, but why did not the doctors go to the asr and ask for special deliveries? Did not their Hippocratic oath require them to attempt to find suitable accommodations for the discharged patients instead of tossing them on the street? There is good reason to believe that the patients evicted were not necessarily the least sick but the least able to pay.132 The least flattering aspect of the doctors’ counterstrike was its hypocrisy:

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while claiming in public that they would return to work when heat and light became available, they admitted to the mayor in private that they would do so only after the workers’ general strike had been crushed.133 As perhaps the most dynamic organization of its kind in the Reich,134 the Leipzig ba orchestrated the most formidable counterstrike in central Germany. Other cities where local bas organized impressive counter-strikes included Halle, Merseburg, Weißenfels, Naumburg, Zeitz, and Erfurt, to name a few.135 chronology of the strike and counterstrike in leipzig The twenty-seventh of February marked the first day of the general strike in Leipzig. All firms were closed, except food stores, which quickly sold out. The lack of electricity and coal drove tens of thousands out of cold and dark apartments onto the streets, which were also thronged with automobiles and horse carts charging high taxi fares in the wake of the stoppage of tram service. Amid the smiling faces of ordinary workers pleased to reclaim the public spaces they had conquered back in November and January, street hawkers peddled out-of-town newspapers with reports about the strike as well as candles for the coming night without electricity. The only local newspaper the asr permitted to appear was the lvz.136 Also on the twenty-seventh the asr began requisitioning coal from businesses and wealthy individuals. It ordered its security forces to occupy all train stations in and around Leipzig and to stop train traffic attempting to pass through. At the same time, it sought to ensure that food shipments continued to reach the city by rail.137 The asr further threatened to replace municipal and Land civil servants helping the counterstrike with clerks and officials of the Social Democratic food cooperative.138 The following day, the last in February, thousands of workers gathered at eighteen rallies across the city to hear reports about the strike.139 After the meetings, Curt Geyer went to Halle to negotiate with Reich Labor Minister Bauer. No agreement was reached.140 Meanwhile, the asr recognized that the counterstrike of the civil servants in charge of distributing food cards and unemployment benefits represented a challenge it could not ignore and ordered Prefect von Fink and his staff to return to work. After refusing, Fink was arrested, at which point his superior, Land District Supervisor (Kreishauptmann) von Burgsdorff, negotiated a deal with the asr under which officials responsible for food cards would return to work in exchange for Fink’s freedom. After witnessing what had happened to the prefect, the municipal clerks in charge of disbursing unemployment benefits also returned to work. The rest of the civil service in the prefecture and city hall, however, remained

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true to the counterstrike.141 On this same day, doctors at St. Jacob’s ejected 250 patients from the public ward of the hospital.142 With the number of makeshift taxis reaching intolerable proportions, the asr ordered all vehicles except official ones off the streets on 1 March.143 It also presented the director of the municipal market hall, who had closed this important food distribution center as part of the counterstrike, with a choice: either reopen or face incarceration on authority of the asr. The market hall opened.144 And seeing that the lack of electricity during the night invited crime, the asr imposed a curfew from 9 p.m. until 4 a.m., to remain in effect until the end of the strike. Between the lack of power and the curfew, nights in Leipzig were pitch black, pierced only by the flashlight beams of asr security patrols. Later that day, when news of the evictions at St. Jacob’s had spread, a crowd of five hundred plundered the mansion of City Senator Seifert, whom the lvz had named as the one responsible for the decision. The crowd then moved on to the Cafe Merkur on the Dittrich Ring, a prominent right-wing locale, and confiscated its food supply. Arriving units of the Revolutionary Sailor Company dispersed the crowd.145 Toward the end of the day two depressing reports filtered into the city: One of the main pillars of the central German strike, the Borna coal workers, had decided to return to work in return for a slight wage increase and recognition of Works Councils with only consultative powers with regard to management.146 Even more ominous was the entrance of Reichswehr and Freikorps troops under the command of General Georg Maercker into Halle by armored train. Numbering three thousand and armed with machine guns, flamethrowers and cannons, the troops required three days to subdue the lightly armed strikers, a battle that left twenty-four dead and sixty-seven wounded. Halle was the center of the strike, and its fall removed what little regional leadership the strike had enjoyed.147 On 4 March the Leipzig strikers received the demoralizing news that the representatives of their central German comrades had agreed to meet with the government to end the strike. In Weimar, the negotiators were infuriated to learn the insulting deal Bernhard Koenen and Rausch had accepted for them three weeks earlier. This discovery, coupled with Maercker’s occupation of Halle and Merseburg,148 seems to have sapped the negotiators’ will to resist. They quickly accepted the government’s disappointing offer: 1. eventual socialization of “ripe” industries by parliament (a promise never kept) 2. recognition of Works Councils in all branches, not just the coal sector, but with only consultative powers in connection to management

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3. the “anchoring” of Works Councils in the constitution 4. the right of the Works Councils to review company books, except for “company secrets” as defined by management (this provided management the excuse it needed to prevent Works Councils from seeing the information that matters most during wage negotiations: profits and losses) 5. a provision (but not a requirement) that disputes between Works Councils and management be appealed to special boards chaired by a government official for nonbinding mediation 6. a ban on Works Councils’ sending delegates to higher Works Councils (i.e., no future Commissions of Nine or Regional Coal Worker Councils)149

In short, the deal represented a total defeat for the workers. Seeing the weakness of the strikers, the representatives of business at the negotiations wished to impose even tougher conditions. Labor Minister Bauer, however, pressured them to accept the deal, pointing out that a too bitter defeat would only lead to more general strikes in the future. The employers ultimately assented, but only on the condition that local employer organizations and individual firms be free, in local negotiations, to whittle down these Works Council powers further. On 12 March the agreement was signed.150 As their central German comrades began to drop out, the Leipzig strikers gained a new ally when the Berlin workforce finally began its general strike on 4 March. Despite this boost, the waning endurance of the Leipzig strikers convinced the leadership that only radical measures could keep the movement going.151 On this same day, therefore, the asr issued a new strike program: the demand for greater economic powers for the Works Councils was now number two on the list, replaced by the determination to erect a German Soviet Republic of asre.152 To defend Leipzig against the expected invasion by Maercker, the asr also organized a one-thousand-man people’s militia (Volkswehr).153 In addition, the asr severed the city’s communication with the rest of Germany, forbidding persons and vehicles from leaving the city (unless engaged in the food trade or on official asr business) and shutting down telephone and telegraph service.154 Moreover, it compelled apothecaries, all of whom supported the ba’s counterstrike, to return to work or face incarceration,155 picked up the pace of coal and food requisitions from businesses and wealthy individuals,156 and had the sailors rough up anybody caught distributing ba propaganda.157 And in an especially hard move, it refused to restore power to a military hospital in town where sixty-five hundred patients were suffering from the cold.158

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The following days also saw the asr claim full authority over the municipal police department, replacing the old chief with the leader of the police strike of two weeks earlier, Wilhelm Kayser. The mayor and city senate refused to recognize Kayser as the new chief, while the majority of police officers remained undecided. After about a week, with the strike rapidly collapsing, Kayser resigned.159 With the strike entering its second week, increasing numbers of Leipzig’s workers lacked the money to put food on the table. In addition to losing their wages, they were also denied welfare benefits because the municipal clerks in charge of disbursement remained in the counterstrike. Meanwhile, those officials who had returned to work to distribute unemployment benefits were now claiming that the city had exhausted its cash reserves. On 4 March the asr sent a delegation to the Allgemeine Deutsche Credit-Anstalt, where the city kept most of its money, to demand that the funds be turned over to the asr. The bank president claimed that such a transfer could be made only with the approval of the mayor. Suspecting that the president had been coached by the most important banker in town, Reichsbank Director Grüner, Geyer had the latter arrested.160 The arrest of Grüner failed to open the city’s bank account. If Geyer wanted the money, he would, in his own words, “have to break the will of the mayor.” On 5 March, Geyer, accompanied by two armed sailors, appeared at city hall and presented the mayor with the choice of transferring the money or spending his nights in the municipal shelter for the homeless. Geyer granted him two hours to ponder the offer and returned to the asr (which was in nearly continuous session throughout the strike). At the appointed time, he delegated his father, Friedrich, and two of his political allies, Johannes Scheib and Jacob Krug, along with an armed detachment, to solicit the mayor’s reply. Rothe, claiming that only the entire senate could transfer all municipal funds, declared himself prepared to transfer to the asr the available cash reserves of the city, 374,500 marks. The asr delegation declared itself satisfied with this sum for the time being.161 Ultimately, the asr allocated about 125,000 marks to widows of fallen soldiers and the remainder to pay back wages of the rail workers, who were beginning to waiver in their commitment to the strike.162 The city was cut off from the rest of Germany. A proletarian security force numbering twenty-five hundred patrolled the streets and surrounding countryside while redistributing food and coal from rich to poor. The director of the Reichsbank sat under house arrest, much of the civil service had been compelled to serve the new regime, and the police force was under the con-

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trol of the asr. Leipzig became during this week a kind of miniature soviet republic, one of the rare instances in history of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. The mayor admitted as much, complaining in a memo to the Saxon minister of the interior that the asr, not he, held real power in the city.163 With the city under asr control, the Berlin strike reaching its apex, and Maercker’s troops lurking within twenty kilometers of Leipzig, the asr met in plenary session from the fifth to the sixth of March to deliberate on strategy. Schöning, in charge of asr security, pleaded for restraint in policy so as not to provoke Maercker to invade Leipzig. But he noted that if it came to that, asr security would meet the foe in the suburbs so as to spare Leipzig the kind of damage inflicted on Halle a few days earlier. Seger then took the podium and argued that the strike, now with no prospects of success, should be terminated. It would have been wiser, he claimed, to close down only one or two sectors as a warning to the government about socialization. In any event, he continued, the poor coordination among the Ruhr, Berlin, and central Germany doomed the strike from the start, and it should be ended before more damage resulted. A number of speakers attacked Seger, noting that he had originally supported the idea of a general strike but now had gotten cold feet. At the end of its second day, 6 March, the plenary session broke up in near panic when a report came in that Maercker’s troops had taken Markranstädt, a village just outside Leipzig. In fact, a Reichswehr unit had picked up some farm machinery destined for the Allied powers and used the opportunity to reconnoiter.164 The next day the strikers heard more bad news: the strike in Berlin was beginning to collapse.165 Now Leipzig’s only allies were the miners in far-off Upper Silesia. Meanwhile, continual reports of an imminent invasion by Maercker’s troops led the asr to distribute the weapons of the Nineteenth Army Corp’s arsenal to roughly ten thousand proletarians.166 This small army (along with the twenty-five-hundred-strong asr security formation) seems to have deterred Maercker, as his troops pulled back from Leipzig and began subduing other striking cities. Although the city was now militarily secure, the endurance of the strikers was collapsing. Geyer assented to the inevitable and moved toward ending the strike, accepting the offer of the Saxon minister of economic affairs, Albert Schwarz, to mediate a solution. While employing conciliatory rhetoric in public, Schwarz informed Geyer in private that refusal to accept his offer would result in an order to Maercker to occupy Leipzig.167 Geyer agreed to

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Schwarz’s terms: (1) acceptance by the strikers of the agreement reached a few days earlier in Weimar to end the central German strike; (2) resumption of work by 11 March; (3) return of the weapons confiscated from the Nineteenth Army Corps; (4) maintenance of the other asr security units until their fate could be decided by Reich legislation. In an unpublished part of the agreement, the asr also agreed not to intervene in the city administration but instead to limit itself to supervision (Kontrolle). In a series of public meetings during the two days thereafter, the strikers, after much debate, narrowly accepted Schwarz’s offer.168 While none of the strikers’ demands were achieved, the Geyer-led asr remained intact and still in control of the city. Moreover, very few of the workers returned confiscated weapons to the Nineteenth Army Corps. The end of the strike therefore left radical Leipzig in a position to fight another day for its Works Councils. noteworthy aspects of the strike in leipzig Compared to other big cities, the general strike in Leipzig unfolded with an astonishing lack of violence. Directly before the outbreak of the strike, the Leipzig Soldier Council placed all officers of the Nineteenth Army Corps on indefinite leave because the chief of staff had been detected plotting the dissolution of the Soldier Council with the Saxon ministry of war.169 In other words, military officers of the old regime played no role in maintaining public order during the strike. The impressive accomplishments in this regard must be attributed to the asr’s own security formations (notably Sailor Franz’s Revolutionary Sailor Company) and the police (who were under the control of the asr for much of the strike). A strictly enforced curfew actually led to a drop in crime during the strike (despite pitch darkness each night),170 while the timely intervention of Revolutionary Sailors on numerous occasions prevented popular anger from destroying property or causing injuries.171 Even the nonsocialist press remarked on the very low level of violence and disorder in Leipzig during the strike.172 The second arm of asr security during the strike was the thousand-man people’s militia (Volkswehr) that was created around the fourth of March. Ninety-four percent of its officers were native Leipzig workers: skilled and unskilled, factory and craft.173 Once again, the most militant supporters of the revolution in Leipzig turn out to be workers of all kinds. Although the people’s militia patrolled the streets with police and sailors, repelling an anticipated invasion from Maercker’s troops appears to have been its raison d’être. It dug defensive positions on the edge of town, undertook patrols as far afield as the Prussian border on the Halle road, and on 6 March, when it

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was believed that Maercker was marching in, mobilized along with the sailors and ordinary soldiers in the barracks.174 In policing and soldiering, armed workers performed respectably in Leipzig, again raising doubts about the claim that the Majority Socialists in Berlin and Dresden had no choice but to rely on the officer corps and right-wing Freikorps for security. Is there a sociological explanation for the peculiarities of the strike in Mitteldeutschland? Specifically, why did all industrial workers there support the strike whereas in Berlin metalworkers and in the Ruhr miners played the leading roles? What accounts for the keen desire of strikers in Mitteldeutschland for greater Works Council power and their relative indifference to purely political questions (as in the program of Berlin strikers) and formal state socialization of the economy (as in the Ruhr program)? Here the historian must exercise caution. In that all three regions were heavily industrialized and sectorally diverse, their sociological similarities impress more than their differences. Moreover, there were plenty of industrial cities that remained aloof from the strike (Hamburg, Magdeburg, Stuttgart). One can conclude only that a large proletariat created a necessary but not sufficient precondition for a region’s participation in the strike. Whether workers in a given city joined the strike and what they emphasized programmatically depended, above all, on leadership. In this latter regard, one notices a rough correlation between the strength of the local mspd and a tendency to eschew the general strike.175 What ultimately brought the strikers to their knees was a lack of allies in the Ruhr, Berlin, and even in the rest of central Germany. But the ba’s counterstrike also did some damage. That it met everyday to assess the situation, exhort its own supporters, and organize the distribution of literature—all despite asr bullying—attests to the ba’s tenacity.176 It also evinced cleverness: for instance, seeing to it that municipal civil servants joining the counterstrike received their salaries two days earlier than usual (i.e., before the banks shut down), while municipal workers were denied pay on the pretext that the key to the cash box could not be found.177 Earlier I examined the counterstrike of Leipzig’s doctors and apothecaries. The ba also took measures to cut off the city’s food supply, rallying estate owners to the counterstrike while also probably playing a role in the decision of the vice president of the railway, Mittig, to have the track between Wurzen and Leipzig torn up so as to prevent food trains from reaching the city.178 Considering its potential impact on an anemic economy, a unified general strike encompassing the Ruhr, Berlin, and central Germany would have pos-

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sessed enough strength to compel the Scheidemann cabinet to recognize at least some new powers for the Works Councils. That this did not happen stemmed from the failure of regional strike leaders to coordinate their actions so as to produce a truly national effort. Even after the defeat of the general strike, however, the prospects for the Works Council movement were far from hopeless. In the Ruhr, the Commission of Nine remained intact, and the fighting spirit of the miners unbroken. In central Germany, as later chapters shall show, there was good reason to expect a renewed popular mobilization in the near future, while in Leipzig the radical asr remained in control of the city, and thousands of workers were still armed. The challenge, then, lay in constructing a national organization that could coordinate and lead a future general strike. The national uspd—divided between moderates and radicals and suffering from extreme regional heterogeneity—could not fulfill this task in its existing form. One of the chief themes examined below is the extent to which the proponents of the Works Councils were able to overcome this organizational disarray while waiting to catch what they believed would be the imminent third wave of the revolution.

chapter 11

FINAL DRIVE OF THE PROLETARIAN WORKS COUNCIL MOVEMENT: 12 MARCH–25 MAY 1919

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES the two months from the end of the general strike until the invasion and occupation of Leipzig by the forces of General Maercker. These nine weeks represented the final and in many ways most determined phase of the Works Council movement in Leipzig. Ironically, it was during this same period that the radical leadership’s appreciation of the challenges confronting it became even faultier.

AFTER THE GENERAL STRIKE: AN OPEN SITUATION As noted in the last chapter, one of the conditions ending the general strike in Leipzig was the agreement of the asr not to intervene in the affairs of the city government. The asr’s position appeared to be weakened further when, in the days following, the mayor and senate terminated funding for the asr’s security force.1 Shortly thereafter the Leipzig asr agreed to transfer formal authority over these units to the Ministry of Military Affairs in Dresden.2 The asr’s seeming impotence masked a power constellation in which it still enjoyed the upper hand in Leipzig. It found ways to finance its security units.3 And while the ministry in Dresden claimed formal authority over them, they in fact obeyed only the asr.4 Moreover, asr security, not the municipal police, continued to play the dominant role in patrolling streets and maintaining public order.5 With its main instrument of coercion intact, the asr could still, when it chose, compel the municipal government to change policies.6 The mayor admitted as much,7 informing the Saxon Ministry of

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the Interior that only the occupation of Leipzig by federal troops would bring the asr to heel.8 Its power preserved, the leadership of the asr could view the future with some optimism as of mid-March. Abroad, the council idea appeared to be gaining ground as the Red Army had begun to turn the tide of the civil war in Russia while its counterpart in Hungary had tallied a string of victories in Slovakia and was advancing on Bratislava.9 In Germany, a series of events promised an imminent third wave of the revolution that might create new opportunities for the Works Council movement. At the beginning of April workers in Stuttgart and the surrounding industrial cities staged a general strike demanding more power for the Works Council.10 Meanwhile, the government continued to commit blunders, for example, alienating even more workers from the mspd on 1 April when it abolished the extra bread allowance for those performing heavy manual labor (except for miners and transportation workers).11 Less than a week later, the workers of Magdeburg crippled their city with a general strike.12 Simultaneously, a new and much larger general strike broke out in the Ruhr, supported by three-quarters of the miners (about 350,000). In addition to demanding greater powers for the Works Councils in accordance with the Essen Model, the strikers also called for six-hour shifts, a 25 percent wage hike, the implementation of the Hamburg Points to reform the military, the release of political prisoners, the formation of a proletarian militia, the dissolution of the Freikorps, the payment of strike shifts, and the establishment of diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia. The strike in some mines lasted a month, but in most areas it began to peter out after two weeks when the government granted the strikers a seven-hour shift and extra food rations while also arresting the strike leaders and intensifying the military occupation of the region.13 During these same days the miners in the Lugau-Oelsnitz black coal region of southwestern Saxony called a strike to support their comrades in the Ruhr, likewise demanding more power for the Works Councils. Government troops and Freikorps quelled the strike four days later.14 Amid these chaotic conditions the second Reich Congress of asre convened in Berlin on 8 April 1919. Proponents of the Works Councils hoped it would rebuke the national government for failing to carry out the first Congress’s order to socialize industry and reform the military. In such a case, the radicals hoped that the second congress would give focus to the separate strikes breaking out across Germany during these days, perhaps even directing a national general strike. These hopes were dashed. Cowed by Noske’s

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Freikorps in the capital, the second congress meekly requested greater powers for the Works Councils before agreeing to the transfer of sovereignty to the National Assembly effectuated a week earlier by its Central Council. It then adjourned, in effect liquidating itself as an institution.15 Despite the moderation of the second congress, popular mobilization across Germany continued. On 13 April radicals in Munich seized power and declared Bavaria a soviet republic. Three days later the asr in Brunswick, already leading a general strike, proclaimed that city a soviet republic (Maercker’s troops quashed the experiment within one day). In Leipzig, the second half of April saw strikes by blue-collar workers in the postal service, municipal garbage and morgue workers, letterpress apprentices, carpenters, and tram workers.16 Considering the continuing unruliness of the workforce and the unbroken power of the Leipzig asr, it is not surprising that many of the city’s nonworkers concluded that Leipzig, too, would soon become a soviet republic.17 The Scheidemann cabinet shared these fears and frequently discussed ways to combat a renewed general strike, especially in central Germany, well into May.18

PREPARING FOR THE REVOLUTION’S THIRD WAVE These anxieties were well justified as the Leipzig asr moved continually to the left during these weeks. On 5 March the Central Council of the Reich Congress of asre ordered local asre to hold elections with a new suffrage. Under the new guidelines any citizen—worker or not—who earned less than 10,000 marks per year (thereby including most lower white collars and alte Mittelständler) could participate. The ballot would be secret (in many factories in Leipzig, votes for the asr in November had been cast at open meetings), and electors would be organized by geographical district (not by factory, as had been the case in Leipzig).19 Because this new suffrage would result in more votes for the mspd and left Democrats, the Leipzig asr refused to implement it. Instead, on 26 March Geyer unveiled his own plan for a new suffrage before a plenary session of the asr. To reduce the influence of the politically more moderate soldiers, Geyer proposed that they be allowed to send one representative to the asr per thousand voters. Workers, by contrast, were to be better represented than before. Any firm with between one hundred fifty and five hundred employees could send one delegate to the asr. For every five hundred additional employees, the firm could send another


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delegate. Workers in firms of less than one hundred fifty employees could pool their votes into groups of five hundred and send one delegate to the asr (this rule applied also to the unemployed). Finally, only those workers who were either members of the uspd or a union and who “supported the socialist republic” would be allowed to vote. While some asr delegates objected to the fact that Geyer’s plan would bar lower white collars and politically moderate workers from voting, nobody noticed that it also excluded female home workers, domestic servants, and casual laborers (none of whom worked for a wage), as well as retired workers of all kinds.20 Geyer also proposed to replace the asr’s current executive committee (Engerer Ausschuß) with a smaller “presidium” consisting of five members. He argued that this smaller executive would be better able to make speedy decisions during the expected third wave of the revolution. The delegates overwhelmingly ratified both of Geyer’s proposals.21 Although outvoted and subjected to catcalls during the meeting, Seger and his fellow moderates attacked Geyer from a number of angles. Forgetting that the old-regime mayor and city senate were still in office, Seger claimed that the municipal government was now democratic; thus, he argued, the asr should abandon its political role and instead act as a mouthpiece for the purely economic Works Councils. He also charged that the new presidium would turn the plenary asr into a rubber stamp. Again highlighting the generational aspect of the struggle for control of the asr, he questioned the experience of the young hothead, noting, “I have been active in the local movement four years longer than Dr. Geyer has been alive.”22 On 15 April the asr held elections employing the new suffrage. The result was an overwhelming victory for the left uspd, with Geyer firmly in charge of presidium.23 During these same weeks Geyer also assumed de facto control of the lvz (though he never succeeding in wresting the local party organization from Seger and Lipinski).24 Further strengthening Geyer’s position was the fact that Leipzig’s traditionally moderate union leadership no longer opposed him: on 22 April it was ousted by the radical opposition. The new union leadership included among its priorities the expansion of Works Council power.25

GEYER’S INTENTIONS Having centralized power in his hands, Geyer believed he would be able to use it in the near future when the anticipated third wave of the revolution

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broke over Leipzig. With local soviet republics establishing themselves and general strikes breaking out across the Reich, such an expectation was not far-fetched. Moreover, the Allies’ hard peace terms—presented to the Reich government on 7 May—promised to create further opportunities for the radicals since it appeared likely that the National Assembly would reject them.26 In such a case, workers would strike not just in support of the Works Councils but also against a resumption of the war. Geyer believed that the left uspd, by promising peace, would be able to take power in Germany as the Bolsheviks had in Russia.27 Amid his calculations and speculations, however, Geyer neglected to contact radicals elsewhere in Germany to ensure that a general strike would be national in scope. Although he was probably correct to believe that such an event would erupt spontaneously,28 he failed utterly to recognize that only coordinated national leadership thereafter would be able to guide it so as to bring maximal pressure on the Reich government. In this sense, Geyer missed the most important lesson from the failed general strike of February/March. The leaders of the central German movement intended to use the expected general strike not merely to enhance the powers of the Works Councils but to topple the regime itself, for during these weeks the left wing of the uspd was evolving rapidly toward an antiparliamentarian embrace of a “pure council system.” Geyer played a prominent role in developing these ideas as head of the uspd caucus at the second Reich Congress of asre in April. The uspd plan called for all political power to be transferred to the asre, which in turn would elect regional asre, in turn electing provincial asre, in turn electing a national Congress of asre. This congress, acting as the supreme national authority, would then elect a Central Council that in turn would appoint and monitor the executive, the Council of People’s Deputies. In the economic realm, Works Councils would exercise control over management in each firm. These same Works Councils would also group themselves into sectors (e.g., energy, transportation, metal, banking and insurance, etc.) and then send delegates to regional sectoral councils convening in Germany’s seven or eight major economic regions (e.g., the Ruhr, central Germany, northern ports, etc.). The different regional sectoral councils would then elect a single regional economic council, which would oversee all production in that region. These same regional sectoral councils would also elect Reich sectoral councils, which in turn would elect a Reich economic council. The latter, a kind of economic parliament, would plan and manage the entire German economy.29 This pure council system, then, while perhaps allowing individ-


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ual Works Councils some autonomy in solving technical problems within their respective firms, reduced them to mere organs charged with executing an economic plan drafted in Berlin. Immediately after the congress, Geyer elaborated on the uspd program in his pamphlet Sozialismus und Rätesystem. A capitalist economy, he argued, necessarily creates more commodities than the workforce can buy, thus producing recessions, depressions, unemployment, and the immiseration of the working class. To synchronize production and consumption he advocated state ownership and centralized planning of the economy. A strong, centralized government was not only best equipped to perform this Herculean feat of organization, it also would possess the requisite power to break the political resistance of the bourgeoisie. Geyer claimed that the rights of lower councils to recall higher ones ensured that the centralized state would not become tyrannical. He agreed with his left uspd comrades, however, that the Works Councils should possess little autonomy at the point of production. Their primary role lay in executing the plan.30 Geyer developed these étatiste views under the influence of the Bolshevik example. During the month of April, he became increasingly convinced of the need to merge the uspd and kpd and then lead the new Leninist party into Moscow’s Third International, which had been founded the month before.31 Geyer made little effort to disguise his Communist sympathies. On 23 April, at the first meeting of the new asr, he claimed that the programs of the left uspd and kpd were identical: dictatorship of the proletariat on the basis of a pure council system.32 He repeated these views ten days later and called for the abolition of parliamentary government in Germany.33 Ordinary asr delegates did not share these antiparliamentarian goals, instead hoping merely to augment the powers of individual Works Councils vis-à-vis management. Nevertheless, they continued to support Geyer, probably because he was the only local uspd leader promising vigorous action on behalf of the Works Councils.

THE IMPENDING INVASION OF LEIPZIG As part of the armistice, all conscripted troops in Germany had to be demobilized by 1 April 1919. The minister of military affairs in Dresden announced that after that date the Land government would no longer contribute to the pay of soldiers remaining in the barracks. Although this cut deeply into what had been the Leipzig asr’s respectable fighting force, Geyer made no effort to find new recruits.34

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Meanwhile, evidence mounted that Maercker would shortly invade Leipzig. The Saxon government continually warned the Leipzig asr to drop its pretensions of autonomy or else face a military occupation.35 On 12 April a group of wounded veterans protesting in Dresden against the government’s decision to terminate their benefits tossed Military Affairs Minister Neuring from the Augustus Bridge into the Elbe and then shot him dead as he attempted to swim to shore. The government immediately placed the whole province under a state of siege. When the Leipzig asr refused to recognize this decree, the Saxon government had the legal pretext it needed to call in federal troops to subdue the city.36 Ten days later the Reich, under article 68 of the constitution, also placed Saxony under a state of siege.37 It was clear that military action against Leipzig lay in the offing. By late April stories with details of the coming invasion filled Leipzig’s newspapers.38 Emboldened by Maercker’s imminent arrival, six hundred students and right-wing gymnasts (Turner)—whose paramilitary organization had until then remained underground—held military exercises between Schönau and Rückmarsdorf between 2 and 6 May. The asr made no attempt to suppress this open defiance of its authority.39 What were the options available to Geyer and his fellow leftists in the uspd? They claimed to be Leninists; that is, they hoped to impose a minority dictatorship (i.e., that of the uspd acting on behalf of a class-conscious proletariat) on society.40 Lenin himself understood that such a venture would stimulate armed resistance and consequently created the Red Army as an instrument that could enforce the will of the Bolshevik government. In that sense, Lenin matched means to ends. By contrast, Geyer and his allies announced their Bolshevik intentions but took no steps toward creating a national, or at least regional, proletarian militia to combat the Freikorps. Their unwillingness to match Leninist means to Leninist ends meant that, as of spring 1919, the left uspd was not yet fully Bolshevized. Of course, such a gambit almost certainly would have failed in the Germany of 1919: while many ordinary workers were prepared to launch a general strike for increased Works Council power, few were willing to engage in a civil war in order to establish a minoritarian dictatorship. This recognition probably explains Geyer’s failure to organize a military response to Maercker’s imminent invasion. Years later, in his memoirs, Geyer claimed that the military forces available to the Leipzig asr were hopelessly outmatched by Maercker’s troops. Had he attempted to supplement these forces by arming the proletariat, he claimed, Maercker still would have taken Leipzig, but at a


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cost of more dead workers and destruction of property. Rather than attempt a pointless defense of the city, Geyer hoped to deter Maercker by threatening a general strike. This approach seemed to offer much better prospects of success given that so many workers, especially in the Ruhr, Berlin, and central Germany, enthusiastically supported it. But as in the case of their self-professed Leninism, so too when it came to leading a general strike did Geyer and his allies fail to match means to ends, even though the clear lesson of the failed first general strike was the necessity of ensuring that such an event be national in scope. Throughout March and April left uspd leaders made no effort to coordinate the numerous strikes erupting in different localities. The enormous proletarian yearning for enhanced Works Council power remained unfocused, leaving the Freikorps with the relatively simple task of suppressing, one by one, isolated local movements. Even on the question of launching a general strike in Leipzig alone, Geyer remained paralyzed. On 9 and 10 May, as reports of Maercker’s approach streamed into the city, Geyer proved unable or unwilling to call the strike. Leipzig’s small group of communists, exasperated by his indecisiveness, forced the issue by distributing flyers calling for a general strike. The asr responded by posting its own placards reading: “The call for a general strike was not issued by the leadership of the asr. The asr calls on the workers not to allow themselves to be brought into confusion [but instead] to follow the orders only of their legitimate authorities. Noske’s troops are not here.”41 That night, several thousand troops and Freikorps under the command of Maercker invaded the city.

THE BA’S CONTINUED ADROITNESS While the asr was drifting under Geyer’s captaincy, the ba continued to navigate the political waters with skill, striving above all to create a situation in Leipzig that would prompt Noske to order an invasion. To that end, a series of anonymous letters of identical content appeared on the front pages of the nonsocialist press in the first week of May, claiming that the asr intended to take a number of Leipzig’s notables hostage in the event of a Maercker invasion. Geyer had no intention of using violence to resist an invasion, therefore it is reasonable to assume that the anonymous letters were part of a ba propaganda campaign that served at least two purposes. First, it galvanized the city’s Bürger to resist the asr: the business community, for instance, an-

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nounced that it would respond to the taking of hostages by firing all workers and calling a counterstrike. Second, it furnished yet another justification for Noske to quell the “Bolshevik terror” in Leipzig.42 The ba also succeeded in sowing confusion in the ranks of the asr and workers. On 25 April a plane dropped leaflets on the city accusing Dietz and Schöning, the leaders of asr security, of having betrayed the general strike of February/March by secretly cooperating with the Ministry of Military Affairs in Dresden. Both men had to defend themselves before their comrades in the asr.43 And on the eve of Maercker’s invasion, leaflets—composed in the voice of a proletarian—appeared across the city urging workers not to follow asr leaders who, by calling a general strike, “will cause us nothing but misery while achieving greater power for themselves.”44

LEIPZIG UNDER MAERCKER On the night of 10–11 May several thousand troops, three armored trains, two armored cars, and a tank company, all under Maercker’s command, entered the city.45 Achieving complete surprise, they encountered no resistance and secured the city within hours.46 Gymnast and student paramilitary units, alerted beforehand of the invasion, helped soldiers round up so-called subversives that night, especially the officers of the Volkswehr.47 Rosters compiled by the ba listing the names and addresses of most of the militants facilitated this task.48 The next morning, Maercker banned the lvz for three days (after which it was placed under censorship), forbade public assemblies, dissolved the asr and its security formations, and arrested all asr, uspd, and union leaders.49 Many of those rounded up were judged by military tribunals for alleged crimes committed during the general strike of February/March.50 Many more were mishandled (though apparently nobody was tortured or killed).51 Maercker also used the occasion to ransack union offices, especially those of the now left-wing Cartel.52 Despite the occupation, Leipzig’s workers began organizing a general strike only two days later. By 13 May several thousand workers in dozens of firms—mostly metalworkers, but also brewery and precision instrument workers—had laid down their tools. They were joined by most of the municipal gas workers as well as miners on the outskirts of the city. Maercker dispatched troops to disperse the strikers’ pickets and arrest those distributing literature, deployed technically trained officers to restart the gasworks, and


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imposed a curfew on the city. Employers threatened strikers with dismissal and the police handed over forty-three of the ringleaders to Maercker’s military tribunals. The strike collapsed after three days.53 A list of thirty-two arrested strikers reveals that in two respects they resembled insurgents during the war and early revolution: they were young (the average age was thirty-five) and hailed from a variety of trades. In a departure from the earlier pattern, however, almost no women were found in their ranks, and metalworkers were disproportionately represented.54 Not all Leipzigers resisted Maercker’s occupation. The ba placed its propaganda machine at the General’s disposal, identified troublemakers for arrest, and helped troops find their way around the unfamiliar city.55 Otto Mylau, Majority Socialist and conservative head of the bookbinders’ union, accepted the appointment of the Saxon government to advise Maercker on political questions. Mylau’s enthusiastic collaboration drove even the moderate bookbinders to expel him from their union after Maercker’s departure.56 Most eager to assist Maercker were the university students. Maercker strove to organize and arm the city’s Bürgertum so that he would not have to return to Leipzig in the future. To that end he created a small Regiment Saxony whose members served full-time and were eventually to be integrated into a future Reichswehr, a much larger Volunteer Regiment Leipzig whose members served part-time but under Reichswehr officers and equipped with heavy arms, and finally a Residents’ Militia that was to answer to municipal authorities, carry lighter weapons, and supplement police in case of riots. The last formation never materialized because of uspd and mspd opposition in the city council. The Volunteer Regiment Leipzig, then, was to constitute henceforth the major element of armed power for Leipzig’s Bürgertum.57 Several hundred public employees and teachers, perhaps under pressure from superiors, enlisted.58 But the heart of the unit, both in terms of numbers and élan, were the university students who volunteered in droves after Maercker’s recruitment speech to them on the twenty-third, bringing the size of the regiment to about three thousand.59 With the asr broken and a Freikorps in place, Maercker was able to withdraw most of his troops on 25 May. Though unvictorious in the general strike of February/March, hundreds of thousands of workers in Germany’s industrial cities, not least in Leipzig, remained as determined as ever to obtain more powers for the Works Councils. A general strike encompassing Germany’s main industrial centers almost certainly would have compelled the weak Scheidemann cabinet to recognize

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some of these demands. Instead of finding focus in a coordinated, national effort, however, the immense popular frustration dissipated itself in a series of unconnected local strikes and putsches between February and May 1919. If November–December 1918 had been a missed chance to place political democracy on a secure footing,60 then February–May 1919 was a fumbled opportunity to institute at least partial economic democracy through enhanced Works Council power. Both were failures of political leadership. In the first period, an overly cautious RdV allowed antidemocrats to remain in the bureaucracy, judiciary, and officer corps. In the second, the left uspd failed to direct the abundant popular discontent into productive channels. In understanding the failure of early 1919, the example of Leipzig instructs. Having gained nearly total authority within the Leipzig worker movement, Geyer proved unequal to the challenge facing him, above all by neglecting to coordinate a general strike with leaders of the Works Council movement elsewhere in Germany. (One doubts strongly that his rivals, Lipinski and Seger, would have performed better considering their decades-long antipathy to street actions). Instead, Geyer deluded himself with visions of a Bolshevik dictatorship without the necessary popular support or armed power. Of course, the actions of a single local asr leader did not doom the entire Works Council movement. But reviewing Geyer’s policies during the crucial months of March and April throws light on the leadership weaknesses of the council movement and left uspd as a whole.

chapter 12

REMNANTS OF THE PROLETARIAN WORKS COUNCIL MOVEMENT AND THE RESURGENCE OF THE LOWER-WHITE-COLLAR COUNCILS: JUNE–DECEMBER 1919

PART 3 TRACES the reconstitution of the relationship between Leipzig’s workers and nonworkers until it achieved a certain stability. By summer 1919 that had not yet come to pass. In the economic realm, though government troops had quashed the general strike, workers, as I discuss below, remained fiercely attached to the Works Council idea, and individual Works Councils remained in existence in nearly all sectors, many of them leading walkouts that threatened to erupt into another general strike. In the political realm, though the government had subdued the various miniature soviet republics, Leninists in the uspd were coming ever closer to taking over their party, an event that would transform it into a revolutionary organization. Considering that the uspd was growing rapidly at the expense of the mspd during these months, such a development did not bode well for the stability of the new order. But the most serious threat to the status quo was the growing strength of the antidemocratic right. Its increasing power led right-wingers to attempt a coup against the republic only a few months later (I examine this in the next chapter). In short, by summer 1919 the terms of the relationship between workers and Bürger had not yet achieved the kind of firmness that would allow one to conclude that the revolution was over. In this chapter I examine the continuing—albeit diminished—Works Council movement in central Germany, its increasing ideological elaboration, a resurgent drive among lower white collars for greater powers with regard to superiors, and the activities of the political right. In order to make sense of these developments, it will first be necessary to sketch the international and national context in which they unfolded.

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INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL CONTEXT Geyer’s fondest hope—that the National Assembly would be foolish enough to reject the Allied peace terms and resume the war—did not quite materialize. On 23 June 1919, only minutes before the deadline laid down by the victors, the National Assembly agreed to the terms, including the infamous “war guilt” clause.1 Peace meant the end of the Allied blockade, which in turn permitted German industry to obtain vitally needed raw materials and resume exports. Strong consumer demand, which had been pent up during the war, continued to fuel the economy. This demand was artificially enlarged by growing inflation throughout 1919 as the government continued to print too much money and float short-term loans at high interest to pay its staggering debt. Inflation also made German exports more attractive, further expanding production. And the fact that reparation payments to the Allies were not yet due allowed the miniboom to continue.2 The domestic political power constellation in the second half of 1919 can be characterized as disorganization on the left and growing confidence on the right. On the left, the mspd Reich and Saxon governments—thanks to their alliance with the military, opposition to the Works Councils and socialization, and disappointing performance in enacting welfare legislation— were hemorrhaging support among ordinary workers and even losing the confidence of the party’s rank and file.3 The mspd’s main institutional prop, the General German Union Federation (adgb), in an effort to avoid the bitter disputes besetting the two socialist parties, withdrew from the political arena, declaring its neutrality at its congress in Nuremberg in June-July 1919.4 Meanwhile, the uspd, paralyzed by the battle between Leninists and democrats over the question of soviet republic versus parliamentary democracy, was in no position to capitalize on the mspd’s weakness.5 After the Central Council of the Reich Congress of asre had announced the dissolution of that body in October 1919,6 local and regional asre entered their final stages of decomposition.7 Finally, no popular mobilizations furnished the left with support. Following the unsuccessful general strike and military occupation of Germany’s industrial centers in the spring, ordinary workers were, for the moment, exhausted.8 How quickly they would recuperate and whether they would attempt another drive for Works Council power remained an open question. While the socialist parties drifted, the far right was gaining in self-confi-

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dence. The failure of the Majority Socialists to organize a democratic militia meant that the only fighting forces in Germany at this point were the Freikorps and a Reichswehr manned mostly by right-wing volunteers. This monopoly on armed power was one of the chief factors leading right-wingers to attempt a coup against the republic a few months later (an event examined in the next chapter). Moreover, the exhaustion of the Works Council movement provided the employer organizations time to regroup and take measures to prevent future popular mobilizations (reviewed below).

POLITICS IN LEIPZIG During his occupation of Leipzig, Maercker dissolved the asr and ordered that it be reelected according to the guidelines issued by the Central Council of the Reich Congress of asre. In the new Leipzig asr, elected 22 June, the left uspd under Geyer’s leadership retained a majority. But with a strong Freikorps and Reichswehr presence in the city as well as a continuing state of siege permitting Land officials to harass radicals, the asr was in no position to assert its authority over the municipal government. Instead, it agitated for Works Council power. That an exhausted workforce was unable to strike for this goal meant, however, that the asr became a mere debating society. Meanwhile, the municipal government whittled away at its budget, applying the coup de grâce on 19 January 1920 when it granted the asr its final 8,000 marks and instructed it to wind up business.9 The decline of the asr returned political authority to the municipal government.10 There, the uspd found itself blocked not only by an mspd-bürgerliche majority in the city council11 but by the continued presence of the oldregime city senate and mayor. Only in June did the uspd city councillors attempt to strip the senate and mayor of their power, legislation that foundered on the resistance of the rest of the city council and the Land government.12 Not surprisingly, subsequent efforts to pass municipal welfare legislation enjoyed little success.13 When Maercker marched into Leipzig, Geyer happened to be in Berlin. That he waited seven weeks to return to Leipzig—until the occupation was over—exposed him to charges of cowardice. This, coupled with his poor leadership of the asr on the eve of the Maercker invasion, discredited him within the local party.14 Thereafter, he was never again in a position to challenge Lipinski and Seger for control of the Leipzig uspd.15 Instead, he had to content himself with the leadership of the asr. When it became clear beyond

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a doubt in early 1920 that the asr was finished and that the local workforce would not revive it through a general strike, he decided to reestablish himself in Hamburg, where he had received an offer to coedit the uspd newspaper. Despite abandoning his power base in Leipzig, Geyer retained his seat in the National Assembly, now as a candidate on the party’s national list. His goal thereafter remained merging the uspd with the kpd and then leading the new revolutionary party into Moscow’s Third International.16 The great question dividing not just the local party but the national uspd was this: should socialism be achieved legally, through majority decisions in parliament, or through a dictatorship of a minority of the population—the class-conscious proletariat—through the pure council system? This question was fought out on the proxy issue of whether the uspd should enter the Third International, for the Bolsheviks only accepted parties endorsing the latter path to socialism. Paradoxically, despite Geyer’s personal eclipse in Leipzig, his ideas gained ground in the local party. On 20 October 1919, at a conference of the Greater Leipzig uspd, the delegates, by a vote of 910 to 558, passed a nonbinding resolution recommending that the national party join the Third International.17 They left the final decision to a local party conference scheduled to meet two weeks later. After ceaseless propaganda in the lvz,18 much arm-twisting, and lip service in support of an eventual dictatorship of the proletariat,19 Lipinski and Seger managed to reverse this result at the second conference by a vote of 3938 to 3333.20 This ideological division ensured that the local party—despite becoming the uspd’s largest local chapter, with 43,774 members—remained politically paralyzed throughout the second half of 1919.21 The same disenchantment driving party members to the left was also radicalizing ordinary workers in Leipzig. Whereas the mspd had won 17.1 percent of the Leipzig vote in the January 1919 National Assembly elections, it garnered only 7.3 percent eighteen months later in the 1920 Reichstag election.22 Clearly, ever more of Leipzig’s workers were moving leftward or despairing of politics altogether. But while many may have been seeking more radical political solutions, the exhaustion stemming from an unsuccessful general strike, military occupation, the continuing state of siege, and growing inflation prevented them from relaunching an aggressive Works Council movement. While the Works Council idea found the passive assent of increasing numbers of workers over the course of 1919,23 and while Works Council delegates in central Germany intermittently convened to discuss ways to pressure the government,24 the only people attempting to restart the movement on a


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full-time basis were the small group of intellectuals on the left of the uspd who had led the general strike in February/March.25

REMNANTS OF THE WORKS COUNCIL MOVEMENT As they had no mass following, the intellectuals spent most of their time elaborating a theory of council power. This task was all the more pressing because, as in Russia in 1905, the Works Councils in Germany had come into existence spontaneously, without prior planning or theoretical preparation.26 If the movement was to advance, it would need a clear ideology and goals. In the preceding chapter I examined Geyer’s vision of a dictatorship of the proletariat exercised through ascending levels of councils, both political and economic. At the apex of the economic cone was to be a Reich economic council that would plan output for the entire economy, leaving individual Works Councils with little more to do than execute decisions made in Berlin. The other main leader of the central German movement, Wilhelm Koenen, shared this basic view. While during the general strike he had sought to please his proletarian audiences by stressing the creative autonomy of the individual Works Council in a future socialist economy, only one month later he called for a planned economy directed by a dictatorial central government.27 The ideas of the other main theoretician of the Works Councils, Richard Däumig of the Berlin Revolutionary Shop Stewards, likewise evolved in a statist, Leninist direction during these months.28 Geyer and Koenen enjoyed scant success in translating these blueprints into reality. Although the first conference they organized, held in Halle on 27 July, was attended by eight hundred delegates representing 162 firms and revolutionary entities (including the Leipzig asr) from across Germany, those assembled had to admit that under the current circumstances they could only agitate against government legislation making its way through the National Assembly that would leave the Works Councils with no real powers. The delegates also established the Central Office for the Works Councils (later renamed the Central Office for the Revolutionary Works Councils of Germany) in Halle.29 As it never exercised influence on ordinary workers, the Central Office’s only noteworthy function was to serve as a gathering point for left Independent Socialists where they could discuss ideology and plot tactics before party congresses.30 Bankrupt by 1920, it was taken over by the unions and eventually liquidated.31

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The remnants of the proletarian movement were fractured along sectoral lines as Works Councils in coal, metal, chemicals, and so forth pursued their respective goals in isolation from each other. The most active Works Councils were in the coal pits. And those in the Borna region were the most radical in central Germany during these months. They not only excluded the moderate Coal Workers’ Union from most negotiations with employers but even attempted to displace it altogether with a revived, syndicalist Commission of Four. The Works Councils in Borna’s strip mines led frequent strikes throughout the summer, usually in pursuit of higher pay and better working conditions.32 One of the largest of these broke out on 19 July and involved more than a thousand miners around Borna.33 Strikes for higher wages and an end to piece-rate payment continually swept the area thereafter. In November the miners of the Leipzig-Dölitz region joined their colleagues in Borna. The expanded strike was led against the wishes of the Coal Workers’ Union by a new syndicalist organization, the Council Organization for the Mines (Räteorganisation für den Bergbau), which claimed to have five thousand members. The walkout finally ended in January 1920 with a wage hike for the miners.34 Meanwhile, workers in the salt and potash mines of central Germany— most of which were clustered to the west and north of Halle—struck less often but made the demand for Works Council codetermination a central goal of their walkouts. Although they had participated in the general strike of February/March, their employers claimed that the salt and potash mines were not part of the central German strike area and therefore not covered by the settlement that had ended the strike. Accordingly, they refused to recognize the Works Councils. The miners responded to this provocation by forming a regional organization in June to pressure the employers, excluding the unions from their efforts. After continued employer intransigence, almost ten thousand miners (about half those employed in the salt and potash industry) walked off the job on 4 August, demanding a new contract, a shorter workweek, and recognition of the Works Councils. The strikers returned to the mines one week later having obtained none of their demands.35 In their face-to-face dealings with management at the company level, Works Councils almost never claimed for themselves powers of codetermination. The single exception to this rule was the Works Councils of the Meuselwitz-Rositz brown coal region, which won for themselves in July 1919 the right to inspect profits and losses in company books.36 The minutes of three coal Works Councils outside the Meuselwitz-Rositz region indicate, however, that coal Works Councils elsewhere made no radical demands dur-


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ing their regularly scheduled meetings with management. In the immediate wake of the general strike, these three Works Councils seized the initiative, usually setting the date and controlling the agenda of meetings, which took place at least once every two weeks. By autumn, however, management was setting the agenda for meetings, which convened only once every two months or so. At these meetings, the Works Councils did not demand powers of codetermination but instead limited themselves to presenting the grievances of individual workers while requesting raises for the workforce and improvements in working conditions. The ceos typically granted modest importunements but rejected expensive requests. They also avoided needlessly antagonizing the Works Council in that they addressed members politely and granted them extra wages for time spent on Works Council business. If anything, managers benefited a great deal from these meetings because the members of the Works Councils—all senior, experienced workers—volunteered information to improve production, identify ineffective foremen, reduce pilfering, and the like.37 In contrast to coal Works Councils—most of which had lost their powers of codetermination following the defeat of the general strike—Works Councils in Leipzig’s metal sector had preserved many of their rights. In June 1919 management recognized these prerogatives in a contract covering all metal firms in the Leipzig area. Under its terms, the Works Council and not management designated which workers were unskilled, semiskilled, or skilled. This was an important prerogative because it could be used to protect the pay of workers who had been deskilled as a result of the introduction of taylorist methods, now just beginning in Germany. Moreover, disputes in interpreting the contract were subject to the binding arbitration of a panel composed at parity between union and employer representatives.38 In less than a month, however, employers were able to roll back these Works Council powers in the metal sector. According to the new contract, signed in July and renewed in November, Works Councils merely enjoyed the right to be heard in matters affecting the workforce. Furthermore, decisions of the arbitration panel were no longer binding.39 In other sectors, support for the Works Council idea remained strong, though individual Works Councils rarely challenged the prerogatives of management. On 5 July several thousand Leipzig rail workers demonstrated for more Works Council power.40 In October municipal laborers demanded Works Council codetermination in all matters but failed to obtain it.41 In January 1920 thousands of Leipzig workers from all trades gathered to protest the government’s Works Council bill, then nearing adoption by the National

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Assembly, which promised to leave the Works Councils with no real authority.42 Chemical workers between Halle and Magdeburg struck unsuccessfully between 4 and 11 August 1919 to force employers to recognize their Works Councils.43 And on 9 January 1920 Leipzig chemical workers threatened to organize a general strike if the government’s legislation on the Works Councils became law.44 But while chemical workers struck and demonstrated, their individual Works Councils did not aggressively pursue more power at the company level. At the largest chemical factory in central Germany, basf, in Leuna, the Works Council claimed no powers of codetermination but instead limited itself to requesting better wages and conditions for the workforce.45

CONTINUAL WAGE STRIKES If exhaustion prevented ordinary workers from relaunching an aggressive Works Councils movement after May 1919, it did not impede them from embarking on repeated strikes over wages and working conditions. Two factors in particular assisted them in this endeavor. First, the economic boomlet of 1919, noted at the beginning of this chapter, was, if anything, more pronounced in Leipzig than in Germany as a whole.46 This upswing tightened the labor market, in turn enabling workers to strike without fearing dismissal. Second, slowly building inflation—only 15 percent in Leipzig according to official prices47 but probably double that when factoring in the black market—eased profit margins for employers, in turn permitting them to acquiesce to the wage demands of the strikers. Kolb, Feldman, and Rürup, noting this phenomenon across Germany in 1919, argue correctly that the ability of employers to accede to wage demands opened the social pressure valve during the second half of 1919, allowing popular discontent that might otherwise have expressed itself in revolutionary ways to dissipate itself in repeated and successful strikes in pursuit of colas.48 Above I examined such strikes in the strip mines around Leipzig. Inside the city they began even before the departure of Maercker’s occupation troops. From 12 to 17 May, for instance, brewery workers struck for and won higher wages.49 Beginning in June and continuing until the Kapp putsch nine months later, Leipzig’s metalworkers struck repeatedly, almost always winning some sort of wage increase.50 In August the thousands of unskilled porters employed in Leipzig’s book industry walked off the job for a month before winning raises of between 20 and 40 percent.51 In that same month the woodworkers of Leipzig struck for higher pay and more vacation time.52


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As in the early revolution, strikes during the second half of 1919 brought female workers proportionally less than their male colleagues: they continued to earn only about half that of their male colleagues.53 A tight labor market in which workers are determined to achieve wage hikes is an environment conducive to unions. In 1919 union membership increased 120 percent in Leipzig. This figure, while impressive, lay well behind the explosive rate of 500 percent in Germany as a whole.54 The previous chapter noted that, unlike in most German cities, left-wing oppositionists in Leipzig had been able to take over the local union cartel. Unlike the old union leadership, the new cartel officials supported the Works Council movement and appear not to have raised objections when Works Council members joined them in negotiations with the employers.55

THE DRIVE FOR CODETERMINATION AMONG LOWER-WHITE-COLLAR EMPLOYEES While the laborers of central Germany shifted their energies away from the Works Council movement and into wage strikes, lower white collars renewed the drive for codetermination in the office that they had begun in the early revolution (examined in chapter 9). It will be recalled that they broke off this campaign in order to close ranks with employers to meet the common threat posed by the proletarian general strike of February/March 1919. Once this had been suppressed, however, they recommenced their efforts, often conquering for their white-collar-employee committees (AngestelltenAusschüsse) or aae] impressive rights in relation to management. Chapter 9 revealed that during the early revolution the most successful among the lower white collars in winning aa codetermination had been those employed in the public sector, specifically petty officials and teachers. By contrast, those in the private sector had won only pay raises. Now, beginning in the spring of 1919, the latter group began making up for lost time. In April lower white collars in Leipzig’s metal industry threatened to strike if their aae were not granted a veto right on firing decisions. The employers not only acquiesced to this demand but also agreed to submit all disputes over interpretations of contracts to the binding arbitration of a panel composed at parity between managers and lower white collars. Technical foremen (Werkmeister)—who were paid a salary and considered to be lower white collars—fared even better: they and not management got to decide into which pay category individual foremen would be placed (bei Einreihen in die ver-

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schiedenen Gehaltstafeln). Leipzig’s metal aae enjoyed these privileges until stripped of them by the Reich Works Council Law of February 1920.56 Lower white collars in Leipzig’s banks also strove to enhance the powers of their aae. In April they struck for the right to codetermine hiring, firing, and layoff policy.57 During the summer the movement spread across much of central Germany.58 Leipzig’s bank aae ultimately won these powers and exercised them until the passage of the Reich Works Council Law.59 The aae in the many chemical firms of central Germany won the right to decide which individual employees would be placed in which pay categories. Furthermore, differences in contractual interpretation were resolved through binding arbitration by a panel composed at parity of representatives of management and lower white collars.60 The aa at the massive Giesecke and Devrient printing works in Leipzig also decided into which pay category each lower white collar would be placed. Moreover, it exercised the right to configure exact working hours for each lower white collar within the forty-hour-hour week as well as an informal veto over management firing decisions.61 In October the lower civil servants committee (Beamten-Ausschuß) in town hall began threatening to strike over the city senate’s refusal to consult it on personnel matters. Eventually, the senate granted the lower civil servants committee the power to block senate personnel decisions affecting lower white collars. If no compromise could be found, disputes would be resolved by the Interior Ministry in Dresden.62 Not all lower white collars succeeded in winning expanded powers for their aae. Beginning in the summer, lower white collars in the central German coal industry repeatedly demanded codeterminative powers for their aae, especially on questions of hiring and firing. Sometimes these demands were made behind closed doors in meetings with management,63 more often in public during strikes.64 Management appears never to have acquiesced. The seven thousand lower white collars employed in Leipzig’s two hundred book publishing and sales firms likewise failed to obtain codetermination for their aae when they struck between 9 August and 11 September 1919.65 Lower white collars, acting through their unions and aae, also succeeded in pressuring employers to limit female white-collar salaries to a fraction of men’s,66 prohibit the employment of new women in their firms,67 and dismiss those hired during the war.68 In this, they continued their efforts during the early revolution to reserve office jobs for men (examined in chapter 9). In all these endeavors, lower white collars joined forces with blue-collar


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workers very rarely. Thus one cannot speak of a single Works Council movement in central Germany during the revolution but instead of two movements with a common opponent. The ability of lower white collars to detach themselves from and even defy elites intermittently underscores what part 1 discovered: Leipzig’s Bürgertum sometimes dissolved into its component subgroups when proletarian challenges to it receded. As before the revolution, the category “nonworker” proves itself a somewhat fissiparous compound. But considering the extreme antipathy felt by all bürgerliche subgroups for workers and Social Democracy, it should not be surprising that lower white collars never considered allying themselves with the proletarian Works Council movement.

THE GROWING STRENGTH OF THE RIGHT Following the withdrawal of Maercker’s troops, the ba continued to maneuver as adroitly as it had during the early revolution and general strike. It assisted the Reichswehr in recruiting engineers for a so-called technical emergency service that would operate water-, gas-, and electrical works in the event of future general strikes.69 It also established a finance committee in June 1919 that aggressively raised funds from Leipzig’s employer organizations and guilds. The total sum collected must have run into the millions considering that the textile employers alone contributed 30 marks per employee. The finance committee also solicited contributions from wealthy individuals and advised banks to encourage big depositors to donate. Officially, the money went to charity. In fact, the lion’s share secretly went to Leipzig’s Freikorps, which received 24,000 marks per month and up to 100,000 marks at a time for equipment purchases (in addition to this money the Freikorps, as the preceding chapter reported, received government funding as well as hidden subsidies in that its volunteers continued to draw company salaries while on duty). According to minutes of the finance committee’s meetings, the second largest recipient of funds was a “secret matter.” This probably refers to the Reichswehr units posted in Leipzig that by obtaining funds in this way circumvented military spending limits imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.70 While the ba was organizing the forces of conservatism politically and militarily, the employer organizations were doing so in the economic realm. Now that the initial danger of a socialization of industry was past and a reli-

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able military force existed to protect property, the employers judged they could afford to dispense with the zag created with the unions back in November 1918.71 But rather than replace the zag with an anarchic system of labor-capital relations in which each firm fended for itself, employers in each sector cooperated with each other against the strikers and Works Councils. The best organized were the coal capitalists, who acted in concert through the central German Employer Federation of Brown Coal Works. None of its members offered concessions to strikers without first clearing it with the Employer Federation. And in their strategy sessions, the owners recognized the importance of holding the line on Works Council power: concessions on wages could always be renegotiated, but once the Works Councils had gained authority in relation to management, it would be very difficult to roll it back. While fending off the Works Councils, they attempted to bolster the prestige of the unions (which they preferred as negotiating partners) while lobbying the government ceaselessly to approve hikes in the price of coal.72 Sectors other than coal were not able to organize themselves regionally, acting instead at the municipal level. The largest such grouping in Leipzig was the Federation of Metal Industrialists in the Leipzig Region. After setting wage maximums for each type of worker, it fined individual firms 10 marks per employee when they paid workers more. In this way, Leipzig’s metal capitalists maintained a united front during strikes. Federation members met at least once and often twice a week to devise counterstrike strategy. The federation also formed a number of different committees to negotiate with strikers, compile information on wages, lobby the government, and so on.73 They also attempted to act in unison with Leipzig employers in other sectors, for example, regularly submitting wage information to the employer umbrella group, the Union of Leipzig Employer Organizations. This group made such information available to employers in all sectors, a practice that enabled capital to keep the wages of the unskilled fairly uniform throughout the city.74 Considering the degree of organization attained by the employers and the utter lack of leadership in the proletarian Works Council movement, it is hardly surprising that the latter was able to win only wage increases during the second half of 1919. By contrast, lower white collars in most sectors were able to wrest significant powers of codetermination for their aae. By the end of 1919 workers in Leipzig and central Germany had much cause for bitterness. Their Works Councils still did not enjoy powers of codetermination, a fact made more galling by the success of lower white collars in this regard. Moreover, government at all levels produced almost no welfare legis-


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lation, inflation devoured wage hikes won in strikes, and even political democracy appeared increasingly imperiled by the growing and patently antidemocratic Freikorps. In the next chapter I examine the series of events in early 1920 that fanned these embers of frustration into a flame, a fire representing the most spectacular and final incandescence of the revolution.

chapter 13

THE KAPP-LÜTTWITZ PUTSCH AND THE END OF THE REVOLUTION: JANUARY–APRIL 1920

BY EARLY 1920 the relationship between workers and nonworkers in Leipzig— and throughout Germany, for that matter—had not yet achieved the kind of stability that would allow one to conclude that the revolution was over. Among workers, a series of developments during these months bred increasing frustration and bitterness, a discontent so profound that—even without the provocation of the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch—they might well have relaunched an aggressive Works Council movement. Meanwhile, large numbers of nonworkers believed the moment ripe to topple the new republic and win back many of their old privileges by force. After the failure of this assault from the right in March 1920, both sides were too exhausted to attempt, for the time being, any further revisions. With this provisional firming of the relationship between workers and Bürger, my study reaches its conclusion at the end of this chapter.

DISAPPOINTMENT AND TENSION ON THE EVE OF THE KAPP-LÜTTWITZ PUTSCH In the preceding chapter I observed how the German government—servicing its gargantuan war debt by printing ever more money and offering shortterm notes to the public at high interest rates—created slowly building inflation throughout 1919. A number of international influences caused this climbing but manageable rate of inflation to explode in early 1920. To beat back war-related inflation in its own country, the U.S. government sent the

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American economy into a sharp recession during 1919–1920. The slump in turn prompted Congress to pass a spate of protectionist legislation. This drying up and closure of the U.S. market had especially doleful repercussions on Germany, an exporting nation, quashing any hope that it might grow out of its war debt. U.S. policy also hurt its allies, for as the Americans were depressing international trade and thereby hindering the ability of Great Britain and France to earn dollars and gold, they were also demanding immediate repayment of war debts to the U.S. government and Wall Street. This pressure led Britain and especially France—already inclined to seek vengeful peace terms at Versailles—to demand high reparations from Germany (ultimately reaching 10 percent of German national income during the early 1920s). As it was clear that the German government would never be able to honor its war debt plus pay incalculable future reparations, the public lost all confidence in the Reich’s finances. The widespread and correct expectation was that the government would continue encouraging inflation so as to pay back its domestic creditors with debased currency. The public began dumping Reichsmarks and discounting increasingly worthless government bonds, the latter action further adding to the monetary supply. This ocean of money chased ever fewer goods as during the course of 1919—thanks to the disruption of demobilization, shortages stemming from the blockade, workforce exhaustion, and strikes—grain output fell by 16 and industrial production by 26 percent.1 The upshot in Leipzig was an inflation rate reaching 61 percent during the first three months of 1920 alone.2 Accelerating inflation in early 1920 coincided with the dismantling of food, clothing, and fuel subsidies that had been offered by many Leipzig firms in the hopes of reducing workforce turnover during the full-employment days of war and early revolution.3 The authorities also reported shortages of bread, potatoes, and coal, all of which, they feared, might lead to public unrest in the near future.4 The decline in the standard of living did not only lead to increasing numbers of paupers,5 it also sparked a renewed round of wage strikes. In the winter of 1919–1920, tailors, woodworkers, streetcar operators, bookbinders, and locomotive repair workers all struck for higher wages in Leipzig. Those whose threat to strike led to wage increases included roofers, graphics, and chemical workers.6 The continued state of siege in Saxony required that the Freikorps patrol Leipzig’s streets, a situation leading daily to vituperative exchanges between strikers and paramilitary.7 The constant state of tension led General Maercker, who as chief of Defense District IV was responsible for ensuring “calm and order” throughout central Germany, to conclude that

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Leipzig might well erupt in a general strike in the near future.8 Events in Leipzig mirrored those in the rest of central Germany, where frequent strikes coupled with a state of siege in various localities led to the constant possibility of wage strikes escalating into political confrontations.9 Aside from a declining standard of living and Freikorps provocations, other factors served to embitter workers in early 1920. By January it was clear beyond a doubt that the government’s Works Council bill would leave these organizations with no real power.10 On the twelfth of that month, several thousand of Leipzig’s workers gathered to protest the legislation, a demonstration at which they also voiced their anger at the continued state of siege and rising cost of living. Insults were exchanged with the Freikorps, which had been mobilized for the occasion.11 Later that day the military commander of western Saxony, General-Major Bodo Senfft von Pilsach, responded to the protest with a proclamation declaring that he would repress any popular uprisings “with armed power and without mercy” and had given his men orders “to fire no warning shots . . . even if it involves [demonstrators who are] women, children, and war wounded.”12 On the next day, 13 January, a demonstration in Berlin against the Works Council bill left 42 dead and 105 wounded.13 In its wake, Pilsach’s superior, Maercker, banned the lvz for “publishing articles . . . whose aim is to stir up different classes in the population against each other.”14 The altercations with the Freikorps in Leipzig continued thereafter.15 The new Works Council law put the final nail in the coffin of economic democracy, one of the two major desiderata among ordinary workers during the revolution. In addition to their increasing material woes, therefore, many workers believed that the revolution had delivered only half its promise. And on 13 March 1920 an event transpired that threatened to strip them of the one goal they had achieved: the democratic republic.

THE KAPP-LÜTTWITZ PUTSCH From the moment Scheidemann had proclaimed its birth from the balcony of the Reichstag building, the right hated the republic. Only the recognition of its own weakness deterred it from attempting to topple the new regime. That assessment changed in early 1920, for following the massacre in Berlin of 13 January 1920, the Freikorps and Reichswehr received carte blanche from the cabinet to restore order throughout Germany and in the process stamped out the last organized resistance to the government. With no more revolu-


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tionary challenge to fear from the left and the government dependent on them, many officers believed the moment was ripe for a putsch.16 General Walther Freiherr von Lüttwitz took the initiative, placing before President Ebert on 10 March a set of unfulfillable demands, notably that the clause of the Versailles Treaty mandating the reduction of the Reichswehr be deleted. When Ebert rejected these, Lüttwitz ordered the marine brigade of Captain Hermann Ehrhardt to march into the capital and overthrow the government, which it did in the early morning of 13 March. The government discovered to its chagrin that the army, under the leadership of General Hans von Seeckt, refused to protect it, instead assuming a position of neutrality (evidently, the officer corps took the Ebert-Groener pact less seriously than did the mspd). President Ebert, along with Chancellor Bauer, Reichswehr Minister Noske, and Foreign Minister Müller, fled to Dresden and from there to Stuttgart. The putschists named the reactionary politician Wolfgang Kapp to head the new regime. Officials of the mspd in the capital called for a national general strike to oppose the military dictatorship.17 Whereas in Berlin the mspd and unions were not able to form a strike committee with the uspd, the kpd, and independent leftists, in most other cities (including Leipzig) the unions and two main socialist parties forged a common front.18 Leipzig’s tiny kpd refused to cooperate because the program of the uspd-mspd-union coalition included only demands for the restoration of democracy and arming of the proletariat, not the creation of a soviet republic.19 The strike committee organized not only against the putschists in Berlin but against a Freikorps in Leipzig giving every indication of being in contact with and supporting the conspirators. Leipzig’s Freikorps mobilized a full day before Ehrhardt’s brigade marched into Berlin.20 And in an offhand remark in his memoirs, a retired Leipzig Freikorps member let slip that at the time of this mobilization he and his comrades had been informed of the planned putsch.21 Their oath to the constitution required them to inform the authorities of the impending coup; they did nothing of the sort. It also obliged them to assist the general strike ordered by the legally constituted authorities. Instead, Leipzig’s Freikorps took up positions across the city, proclaimed the need for “calm and order” (Ruhe und Ordnung), and promised to suppress any signs of a general strike. In this they followed the orders of their commanding officer, General Maercker. In meetings with the Saxon government and Bauer cabinet (the latter in transit to Stuttgart) on 13 March, Maercker refused to state his support for the legally constituted authorities.22 Later that day, he issued a proclamation to the population claiming that the

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government’s call for a general strike was “incorrect” and that he would suppress any attempts to strike.23 That same day in Leipzig, the leaders of the uspd, mspd, and unions called on the city’s workers to begin the general strike with a public demonstration against the Kapp regime the next day.24 They then attended a meeting convened by the ba, in which the mayor, leading civil servants, and representatives of the political parties and military also participated. Speaking for the mayor, ddp, and Center Party, the ba declared its opposition to Kapp but condemned the general strike. The representatives of the dvp and dnvp claimed that they could not speak for their respective parties. The commanding officers of the Freikorps and Reichswehr were exceedingly vague as to their loyalties, stating only that they would take measures to safeguard “calm and order.”25 And because they did not want their men to “mix in politics,” they refused to allow the ba to distribute in the barracks literature urging the soldiers to uphold their oath to the constitution.26 Later that day the ba received a telegram from General von Pilsach in which he appeared to express his support for the constitutional regime, if in sibylline terms.27 At 10 p.m. the commander of the Freikorps informed the mayor and police chief that his men would not interfere with the demonstration planned for the following day as long as it remained peaceful and outside the inner city.28 In this last respect, the Freikorps betrayed the same anxiety about demonstrators in the city center as had officials before 1918. On the morning of the fourteenth, a Sunday, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered at eighteen points across the city to demand an end to the military dictatorship. In orderly columns they then converged on the Augustusplatz—the site of so many other revolutionary demonstrations over the past year and a half—which lay on the Promenadenring circling the inner city. As neither the Promenadenring nor the Augustusplatz were considered part of the inner city, nobody anticipated that the Freikorps would interfere with the rally. Even so, armed Freikorps had sealed off the Promenadenring, blocking access to the Augustusplatz from the southwest. When the demonstrators arrived, the Freikorps opened fire. Seconds later, machine guns on the roof of the Deutsche Bank sprayed the Augustusplatz and Königsplatz with bullets, leaving roughly fifty dead and one hundred wounded (see photo plate 9).29 Of those killed on “Bloody Sunday,” I could determine the names, sexes, and occupations of forty-eight. This list provides a good idea of who was willing to risk injury by protesting in the vicinity of armed Freikorps, that is, who in Leipzig was most attached to the democratic republic. Of the fortyeight slain, forty-three were manual laborers (89.58 percent). Most of these


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were skilled workers, and the average age was thirty-seven. Only three women were among the slain, a fact perhaps explained by the reluctance of Freikorps to aim at them (more on that below).30 Despite the machine-gun fire, a handful of demonstrators managed to overpower individual Freikorps members and turn their weapons on the soldiers. Before the day was over about three thousand demonstrators armed themselves, against the wishes of the uspd-mspd-union leadership, obtaining some of their weapons from Reichswehr arsenals throughout the city. In the following days they also seized weapons from university dormitories and the surrounding countryside. Electing their own commanders, they erected barricades along the Promenadenring and exchanged fire with the approximately thirty-four hundred Freikorps and handful of Reichswehr soldiers holding the inner city and main rail station as well as forward posts on the Johannisplatz, Roßplatz, and Königsplatz. Soldiers in barracks across the city were immediately besieged by armed insurgents. Civil war engulfed Leipzig (see photo plates 10 and 11).31 Who exactly were the antagonists? The Freikorps was composed overwhelmingly of university and gymnasial students.32 By contrast, proletarians made up at least 80 percent of the barricadists.33 Although not armed, women participated in the fighting, helping to build barricades, supplying the insurgents, and even emerging from cover to halt Freikorps fire so that male comrades could scramble to better positions. Women and children also surrounded Freikorps forward posts, abusing the soldiers verbally and throwing objects at them. Proletarian women were especially active in beating Freikorps who had fallen into the hands of the insurgents. Indeed, a Captain Ansbach of the Freikorps—captured while trying to slip out of the inner city—was attacked by a group of women and stabbed with his own knife.34 The next day, a Monday, all manual workers—except those employed in food distribution, utilities, and newspapers, who had been exempted by the strike leadership—adhered to the general strike.35 Among lower white collars, only bank employees joined the strike. Petty civil servants, while publicly opposing Kapp, continued working. Public school teachers also would have preferred to work, but the military situation made it so dangerous for children on the street that the schools were closed.36 As the national general strike paralyzed the German economy and few military units unambiguously supported the putschists, it was clear by Tuesday, the sixteenth, that Kapp’s days were numbered. This led the dvp in Leipzig to condemn the coup (the dnvp continued to support Kapp’s demand for new elections).37 It also prompted both the Reichswehr and Freikorps in Leipzig to state—finally—their support for the constitutional gov-

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ernment.38 On this same day, President Ebert dismissed Maercker39 and lifted the state of siege—which had covered Saxony for almost a year—in order to facilitate the general strike.40 The latter action by the president prompted General von Pilsach to protest to mspd minister-president Georg Gradnauer in Dresden that it would be folly to end the state of siege in Leipzig at a moment when armed Bolsheviks were attempting to take control of the city. He demanded that the siege be reinstated in Leipzig and that he be given dictatorial authority. Gradnauer granted Pilsach these powers until the arrival of Economics Minister Albert Schwarz, who would act as plenipotentiary in administering the renewed state of siege.41 While disapproving of the armed struggle against the Freikorps, the uspdmspd-union leadership was in touch with the barricadists and could therefore piece together a minimalist set of demands that, if fulfilled, would induce them to lay down their arms: end of the Kapp regime; withdrawal of all outside Reichswehr and Freikorps units from Leipzig; confinement of the Leipzig Reichswehr to its barracks; dissolution of the Leipzig Freikorps and creation of a new citizens’ militia in which workers would constitute a majority. The strike leadership transmitted these demands to the city senate. The latter, horrified by the ferocity of street battles employing grenades and trench mortars, agreed to the terms.42 Now the question was whether General von Pilsach would accept them as well. The next day, the seventeenth, Kapp resigned. Despite this, the national strike leadership, led by adgb chief Carl Legien, refused to call off the general strike until the government took measures to prevent a recurrence of the putsch, above all by forming a more left-wing government and replacing the Freikorps with a security force composed of workers and democrats.43 Perhaps hoping to capitalize on the momentum of the continuing general strike, the uspd and mspd members of the city council worked up enough nerve to pass on this same day a bill transferring executive power from the old regime city senate and mayor to a mixed committee composed mostly of city councillors (all of whom had been elected under the postrevolutionary democratic suffrage) with some city senators. The revolt in town hall did not last long. Within a few days the Land district supervisor (Kreishauptmann) quashed the proposal, noting its incompatibility with the city’s nineteenth-century constitution (!). Seger and Lipinski raised no objections to this argument.44 Although Kapp had resigned on seventeenth, the street battle raged fiercer than ever in Leipzig, which raises the question: why did the workers and Freikorps keep shooting? A number of factors contributed to the determination of workers to continue fighting after Kapp’s resignation. Throughout


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this study their hatred for the military and right-wing university students has been apparent. The Leipzig Freikorps—students in uniform—combined both these despised groups in a most provocative manner. In addition, the friction between workers and Freikorps had grown during the months preceding the putsch. With this in mind, the fighting can be viewed, at least partially, as the discharge of tension that had been building for a long time. Moreover, most workers wanted vengeance against the authors of Bloody Sunday. Disgusted by the overall course of the revolution, what better target for their wrath than the insolent children of privilege in uniform? Against the counsel of their leaders in the uspd and unions, workers in the daily strike meetings demanded guerre à outrance against the Freikorps.45 As for the Freikorps, they viewed their mission not as protecting a regime “that might be temporary” but as safeguarding “German morals and culture” against the cancer of Bolshevism, a Russian import responsible for all troubles since 1918. Unwilling or unable to recognize the moderation of Lipinski and Seger, they viewed the uspd in Leipzig as a band of Lenins and Trotskys hoping to use the general strike to impose a Soviet dictatorship. In the Freikorps Weltanschauung the Bolshevik menace was also equated with “the mob’s lust for robbery and murder.” To repulse these assaults on morality, law, and culture, the men of Leipzig’s Bürgertum “grew together like the lions on the city’s coat of arms, erect and firm” (!). Not an oath to an abstract constitution but the defense of Germanness (Deutschtum) animated them. And in this regard they congratulated themselves on their refusal to engage in partisan politics.46 The identification of their self-interest with the defense of German culture and the insistence that they stood above politics place the Freikorps squarely in the tradition of bürgerliche political discourse examined throughout this study. No matter how “erect and firm” the men of the Freikorps stood, the fact remains that the poorly armed workers were besting them in battle. The insurgents quickly gained control of Freikorps and Reichswehr barracks in the outlying neighborhoods and began drawing the noose ever tighter around the inner city.47 The Freikorps themselves admitted, in guarded language, that their predicament obliged Pilsach to call in reinforcements from the Nineteenth Reichswehr Brigade.48 The violence did not confine itself to set battles. Aside from the beating of prisoners, both workers and Freikorps committed a number of atrocities. On the sixteenth, for instance, a Freikorps member was caught trying to slip out of the inner city in order to deliver a military order. As the armed workers decided what to do with him, a crowd of mostly women and youngsters set

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upon the soldier, pummeling, kicking, and scratching him. The mob continued its sickening work even after the man had collapsed, bloodied and unconscious. Somebody finally interceded and called an ambulance. It is not known whether the man lived.49 The Freikorps, for their part, excelled at random shootings, preferably into unarmed crowds. While in this pastime they attempted to target only workers,50 they also managed to kill several nonworkers. The sniper fire reached such alarming proportions that even the ba raised a protest, while the city senate seemed relieved to have to dissolve the Freikorps the following month in order to comply with the reduction of German military forces under the Versailles Treaty.51 By showing identification, one could pass through worker lines on the Promenadenring to commute to jobs in the inner city. A number of these commuters were killed by stray bullets and Freikorps target practice. Many more spent hours crouching in doorways and lying flat on the ground waiting for firefights to end.52 The Freikorps exploited the relatively free flow of people in and out of the inner city to send spies—dressed as workers and shabby clerks—to reconnoiter enemy positions.53 Meanwhile, ten thousand visitors to the Leipzig Technical Fair scheduled for that week cowered in their hotel rooms. When two Swiss businessmen ventured out, they were shot dead.54 As during the general strike of February/March 1919, the city was cut off from the outside world as workers allowed only food trains into the city while checking the identification of people entering or leaving via the major roads.55 Toward the end of the seventeenth, Minister Schwarz arrived from Dresden. Instead of assuming plenipotentiary authority, he shared power with General von Pilsach.56 Perhaps because of the tightening noose around the inner city, the two initiated cease-fire negotiations to which all the interested parties were invited. The terms of the agreement, if one can call it that, represented something of a victory for the workers: the Reichswehr and Freikorps had to withdraw to their barracks while the Reich government decided their fate in accordance with the Versailles Treaty; only then were the workers obligated to end the general strike and return their weapons. The reason the agreement barely merits the name stems from the fact that, though he signed it, Pilsach explicitly stated that he could not vouch for his soldiers’ accepting such “humiliating” conditions. The general’s refusal to commit fully to the deal did not deter Lipinski from leaving the meeting, which had run into the early-morning hours of 18 March, with the conviction that he had brought the bloodshed to a stop.57 In fact, Pilsach had negotiated in bad faith. For even before the talks began, he had called in Reichswehr reinforcements to


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impose a military solution in Leipzig.58 He had given his equivocal support to the cease-fire only to buy time until the Reichswehr arrived. As morning broke on the eighteenth, workers and Freikorps ignored the cease-fire and continued shooting.59 Now certain of the Reichswehr’s imminent arrival, Pilsach declared that the workers had violated the cease-fire, rendering it void.60 Not realizing that he had been duped in the negotiations the night before and believing Pilsach’s explanation for the termination of the cease-fire, Lipinski admonished the workers for having violated the truce.61 He then accepted Pilsach’s terms to end the fighting: worker withdrawal from all military positions; end of the general strike; surrender of weapons to the Reichswehr; liberation of Freikorps prisoners.62 The next day the barricadists showed no sign of following Lipinski’s lead in accepting Pilsach’s terms. As they fought on, however, it became clear that Pilsach enjoyed a decisive advantage resulting from the artillery of the Reichswehr brigade.63 As thousands of workers attended the funerals of fallen comrades at the city’s southern cemetery, the Reichswehr undertook the major campaign of the day, departing from the new town hall in the direction of union headquarters (das Volkshaus). Despite being equipped with armored cars, machine guns, flamethrowers, and artillery, the brigade suffered seven dead and twenty wounded on the way. Once in front of the Volkshaus, it bombarded the facade, took the Volkshaus personnel prisoner, and then torched the entire structure. Eleven workers were left dead or wounded. The attack demolished the organizational center of Leipzig’s union movement and the symbol of Social Democracy in Leipzig, a million-mark edifice whose construction had been financed with the pfennigs of individual workers (see photo plate 12).64 That night, apparently in retaliation, two mansions in the wealthy neighborhood of town as well as the headquarters of the bürgerliche youth group Sturmvögel went up in flames (see photo plate 13).65 Meanwhile, the Reich cabinet ended the national general strike by agreeing to Legien’s demands (in the event, it never implemented them). On the twentieth, the Reichswehr in Leipzig began to establish control over the city. Fighting ceased the next day, after which Reichswehr soldiers patrolled the streets, searched workers’ apartments for weapons, interrogated prisoners, and so forth. Its mission complete by the thirty-first, it withdrew to the barracks, and a reduced Freikorps assumed responsibility for maintaining public order. Shortly thereafter the latter was dissolved in compliance with the Versailles Treaty.66 While there exists no definitive casualty count for Leipzig during the putsch, the following estimates are not far off the mark. The dead numbered

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seventy barricadists, fifty-seven pedestrians, twenty-one to twenty-eight Reichswehr soldiers, and seven Freikorps. Whereas Liebmann’s estimate of thirteen hundred wounded and injured is surely too high, a guess of several hundred would represent no exaggeration.67 At the Freikorps funeral, the Land district supervisor, prefect, mayor, and city senate delivered eulogies praising the fallen as “defenders of our Father City.” These officials did not see fit to pay final respects to fallen barricadists.68 In the other industrial cities of central Germany, the socialist parties and unions had likewise responded to the coup by forming action committees in order to direct the general strike and limit the violence of military hostilities. Whether fighting broke out in a given city depended on the attitude of Reichswehr units stationed there. Most local Freikorps—in contrast to those in Leipzig—surrendered to the armed strikers.69 In Borna, after firing a few shots, the local Reichswehr agreed to steer clear of the armed strikers and stay in its own section of town.70 Local Reichswehr and Freikorps also displayed little zest for combat in Halle, Merseburg, Leuna, Weißenfels, Zeitz, Bitterfeld, Aschersleben, Staßfurt, the Geisel Valley, and the Mansfelder mining region. Not until rescued by Reichswehr reinforcements following Kapp’s resignation did they go on the offensive.71 Much farther afield, in the Ruhr, strikers organized a fifty-thousand-man “Red Army” that drove the Freikorps and Reichswehr completely out of the region. An augmented Reichswehr then reinvaded the Ruhr, committing numerous atrocities against prisoners and civilians before finally stamping out resistance in late April.72

AFTERMATH OF THE PUTSCH In the following weeks, growing numbers of Majority Socialists came to realize that, in relying so heavily on the Freikorps and Reichswehr, their party had strayed too far to the right. Chancellor Gustav Bauer was demoted to finance minister, and Noske lost his job. But the new cabinet headed by Majority Socialist Hermann Müller did not embark in a new direction: the Reichswehr remained unaccountable to civilian authorities (indeed, Seeckt was actually promoted to the command of the armed forces), while the putschists were not seriously pursued (only one, Traugott von Jagow, served time in prison, and then a mere three years). Its continued moderation cost the mspd dearly in the June 1920 Reichstag elections as workers deserted it in droves. Thereafter the party retreated into the opposition.73 A similar story unfolded at the Land level in Saxony. There, Minister-Pres-


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ident Gradnauer and Interior Minster Uhlig were replaced by equally cautious Majority Socialists. Like its predecessor, the new cabinet, an mspd-ddp coalition, achieved no noteworthy reforms.74 The putsch also had repercussions for the uspd. The party, with its deep internal fissure, had been unable to translate the enormous popular energy unleashed by the putsch attempt into tangible gains, let alone a revolution. The radicals on its left wing became more determined than ever to break up the uspd and take what they could into the kpd, the only organization, they believed, capable of sparking and leading a revolution.75 On 3 October 1920, however, Lipinski and Seger won a crucial referendum when 60 percent of Leipzig members voted to reject Lenin’s twenty-one conditions for entrance into the Third International.76 This was tantamount to a vote against merging the uspd with the kpd. At the national congress nine days later in Halle, the Leipzig delegates along with those from the rest of Saxony, Berlin, and Brunswick remained in the party, while the representatives from Halle, Thuringia, Hamburg, the lower Rhineland, and western Westphalia seceded, ultimately fusing with the kpd.77 The schism prompted 16,000 of Leipzig’s 65,000 Independent Socialists to leave the party, with 11,400 of these joining the kpd and the remainder dropping out of party politics altogether.78 Lipinski and Seger continued to lead the rump uspd in Leipzig, imbuing it with a kind of prewar Kautskyite ideology in which the foremost duty of the party lay in educating the proletariat for its distant task of assuming power.79 The Leipzig organization, along with Berlin, remained the largest local chapter in the rump uspd until it rejoined the mspd in 1924.80 Late spring 1920 found the Works Council proponents crushed militarily, the kpd still too small to be considered a major political player, and the antidemocratic right discredited after its failed putsch. None of these actors was in a position to contemplate for the foreseeable future a renewed assault on the status quo. In both the economic and political realms, then, one can speak of the relationship between workers and Bürger in Leipzig as achieving a kind of stability that merited the conclusion that the revolution was over.

CONCLUSION

WORKERS IN PREWAR Leipzig in large part were not integrated into the dominant social order. Instead, they were deeply dissatisfied with their lot, above all with the authoritarian political and wage relationships. In politics, lack of a legitimating ideology for elite rule and an spd discourse privileging the working class as the agent of democratic transformation inclined workers to challenge the status quo. However, at least three factors simultaneously deterred them. First, the weight of custom in all societies helps persuade those born into hierarchical relationships that inherited practices are somehow natural and immutable; second, elites enjoyed partial legitimacy as a result of past success and cultural refinement; finally, the spd, out of abhorrence for the probable bloodshed, was unwilling to lead a revolutionary assault. All these factors meant that by 1914 elite political dominance was insecure but not in crisis. This social and political instability constituted an important precondition (but by no means sufficient cause) of the revolution’s eventual outbreak. Total war dissolved all three of the blocking agents just listed and thereby allowed the bitter discontent workers had harbored since before 1914 to express itself. Having witnessed massive social change between 1914 and 1918, many workers who had hitherto been resigned to their fate recognized that the political system into which they had been born could be altered; by mismanaging the economy and especially by losing the war, elites had undermined what remained of their legitimacy; finally, in Leipzig, a cautious spd was replaced by a somewhat more aggressive uspd. In addition to dissolving these three blocking agents, the war added two further reasons to rebel: alarm

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for the safety of loved ones in uniform and material immiseration. By the fall of 1918 removing the current regime seemed the surest way to solve both of these new problems. Workers in pre-1914 Leipzig also wished somehow to introduce more democratic elements into the wage relationship by limiting the authority of the employer. In critiquing this particular relationship, however, they received much less help from prevailing discourses. There were no alternatives to the wage relationship in the industrial nations, and the spd, aside from transmitting nebulous slogans such as “socialization of the means of production,” made no effort to conceive of a democratic workplace. For this reason, the authoritarian wage relationship—despite the fact that it engendered intense unhappiness among workers, especially during the hyperexploitation of the war years—was much more firmly established than the authoritarian political relationship. In November and December 1918 wageworkers—male and female, skilled and unskilled, factory and craft—replaced the authoritarian monarchy with a democratic republic. The declaration of a socialist republic in Saxony and Leipzig and the widespread expectation of an imminent socialization of big industry dispelled the normal fatalism of ordinary workers regarding the wage relationship, leading many of them to believe that this type of hierarchy, too, could be democratized. These hopes were dashed. Neither the Reich, nor the Land, nor the municipal provisional governments attempted to create a more egalitarian alternative to the wage relationship but instead hoped that the zag would lead to better working conditions, a hope that proved illusory. Compounding proletarian frustration was the fact that these same governments also placed the new republic on a shaky foundation through their refusal to purge antidemocratic elites in the officer corps, civil service, and judiciary. This process of disillusionment with the provisional government affected Leipzig’s workers more rapidly than those in most other German cities, a reflection of which was the clear uspd victory over the mspd in Leipzig in the January 1919 National Assembly election. That the mspd won only 38 percent of the vote Reichwide meant that it had to form a coalition with the German Democratic Party and Catholic Center Party, and this in turn ensured that the mspd would not be able to implement the program of the Congress of asre or even enact a modest welfare agenda. This understanding drove increasing numbers of wageworkers in the Ruhr, Berlin, and central Germany to strike with greater frequency and elect Works Councils. Without much help from Social Democratic leaders or in-

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tellectuals, miners in the Ruhr developed a sophisticated ideology for the Works Councils, understanding them as organs of worker self-management at the point of production within the context of a state-owned socialized economy. Hundreds of thousands of workers of all types in central Germany—men and women, skilled and unskilled, factory and craft, young and old—adopted this program, placing more emphasis on shop floor control through the Works Council than state ownership of the means of production. Many Works Councils in Mitteldeutschland ousted the unions as the workforce’s representatives before employers. And some of those representing unskilled workers in large enterprises outside the cities actually imposed a relationship of codetermination on management in the daily operation of their firms. Works Councils hesitated, however, to take full control of their firms without approval from political authorities. To pressure the national government to provide such authorization, increasing numbers of workers demanded a general strike and replaced the moderate Independent Socialists in the leadership with younger, more radical men who promised to lead them to this goal. A unified general strike encompassing the Ruhr, Berlin, and central Germany almost certainly would have compelled the weak Scheidemann cabinet to accede to some of these demands. Instead of finding focus in a coordinated, national effort, however, the immense proletarian frustration of early 1919 dissipated itself in a series of unconnected local strikes and putsches. If November–December 1918 had been a missed opportunity to place political democracy on a secure footing, then February–May 1919 was a fumbled chance to institute economic democracy through enhanced Works Council power. Both were failures of political leadership. In the first period, overly cautious provisional governments at all levels allowed antidemocrats to remain in the bureaucracy, judiciary, and officer corps. In the second, the left uspd failed to direct the abundant popular discontent into productive channels, above all by neglecting to coordinate actions in the Ruhr, Berlin, and central Germany. The Leipzig case illustrates with especial clarity the faulty leadership provided by the young men of the left uspd in early 1919. General Maercker’s occupation of the city effectively ended the proletarian Works Council movement in Leipzig. Compared to wageworkers, lower white collars enjoyed much more success in democratizing their workplaces. After having played no role in the political upheaval of November 1918, lower white collars exploited the elite’s moment of vulnerability thereafter to win for their own civil servant committees and white-collar employee committees impressive powers of codeter-

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mination. Once achieved, they again closed ranks with elites. Meanwhile, the alter Mittelstand never wavered in its support for elites. By early 1920 workers in Leipzig and central Germany had much cause for bitterness. The Reich Works Council bill had driven the final nail in the coffin of economic democracy. Government at all levels had produced little welfare legislation. And inflation was devouring wage hikes won in strikes. What generated rage among them, however, was the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, an event promising to rob them of the only real gain of the revolution: the democratic republic. That putschists in Leipzig were the very group workers despised most—university students—lent the street battles added ferocity. With the thwarting of the coup, the new republic gained a respite for the foreseeable future. Thus as of April 1920 the relationship between workers and nonworkers had settled into a stability warranting the conclusion that the revolution was over.

THEMATIC ANALYSIS What justifies the particular time frame for this study, namely, 1910 to 1920? The more I researched, the more persuaded I became that, despite the massive changes wrought by the revolution, continuities during this decade were at least as salient. The revolution in Leipzig was not—as Gerhard A. Ritter supposes—the work of new proletarians, fresh off the land and out of the kitchen, who, “disoriented” by the rigors of wartime factory labor, embarked on an oversized bread riot. Instead, it was the creation of experienced native workers of both sexes nursing grievances stretching back well before 1914. At any given moment between 1910 and 1920, this same group of workers was pushing for more democracy in politics and on the shop floor; at any given moment the unions were attempting to restrain their demands; at any given moment the party (spd or uspd) was split but overall more moderate than ordinary workers; and at any given moment nonworkers, calling themselves Bürger, were attempting to thwart emancipatory initiatives of any kind. Over these ten years the political and, to a much lesser extent, wage relationships changed, but the parties to those relationships—workers and Bürger—remained the same. Pursuing what they construed as their self-interest, these groups employed changing organizations, ideologies, and methods of struggle, but the social composition of each persisted. Old wine, new bottles. If the constellation of groups for and against emancipation remained remarkably consistent during these ten years, so, too, did the behavior of each

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CONCLUSION

group taken individually. Nonworkers in Leipzig cooperated throughout the decade in a Sammlungspolitik at the local level, muting their raucous internal disputes to present a unified front against workers. Before 1914 this happened most clearly in the electoral arena, where the bürgerliche parties almost always agreed on a common candidate in the second round of voting against the spd candidate in Reichstag elections. The revolution forced nonworkers to change the form but not content of this basic strategy. Specifically, November 1918 partially deprived them of the instrument by which they had suppressed proletarian challenges to their authority in the past: the state. The new situation obliged them to invent a new method of struggle, a new form of Sammlungspolitik. They improvised brilliantly, creating the BürgerAusschuß, which provided leadership for all nonsocialist, nonproletarian groupings and proved more than a match for the asr (whether under Seger’s or Geyer’s leadership). Among nonworkers, elites always overshadowed and guided the alter Mittelstand and almost always did the same to lower white collars, yet they recognized the necessity of sharing more power with these two groups when they formed the ba during the emergency of November 1918. The group most eager for physical confrontation with workers throughout this decade—be it in the form of pelting the Volkshaus with eggs in 1907, threatening to storm the police station to free a comrade jailed on orders of the asr during the flag-flying incident in November 1918, or shooting at workers during the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch—were university students. At all times during this decade Leipzig’s Bürger remained highly mobilized politically yet claimed they were the nonpolitical defenders of German Kultur. Despite their internal social cleavages, Bürger usually bested their proletarian counterparts in the political arena. This finding warns against sociological reductionism when explaining political outcomes. The goals and behavior of workers, too, exhibited marked continuity. Their dissatisfaction with the authoritarian political and wage relationships predated 1914 and persisted, even intensified, during the war. Partially as a result of their experience in these two types of relationships and partially as a result of a general discourse highlighting the notion of “working class,” workers believed themselves to be a group with a role to play on the political stage. Accordingly, their main goal after November 1918 became strengthening the newly created democratic republic and extending that democracy to the workplace. During the entire decade, workers of all types—men and women, skilled and unskilled, factory and craft—participated in the effort to expand democracy, though these different subgroups displayed distinct styles of mobilization (e.g., men were more inclined to join the party and unions, and

CONCLUSION

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women to embark on wildcat strikes and mobilize in the street; all proletarians supported the Works Council movement in 1919, but the unskilled in large enterprises displayed the most willingness to impose codetermination on management). Throughout the ten-year period, proletarian organizations—be they unions, party, asr, or Works Councils—had few women in their ranks and exhibited little interest in pursuing policies to benefit women specifically (e.g., female suffrage, reform of property law, equal pay for equal work, public child care, abortion rights, access to contraception, maternal welfare, etc.). And throughout that decade, proletarian women themselves evinced little consciousness as feminists or even as women when engaging in politics. They never objected to their ejection from the paid workforce during demobilization and lack of representation in the asr and Works Councils or to the fact that strike victories delivered to them only a fraction of the raises won by male colleagues. They did participate politically—demonstrating at least as much willingness as men to engage in confrontational, outdoor forms of protest—but the admittedly imperfect evidence indicates that they did so defining themselves as members of a working class, not as women per se. We need more archival research on women and protest during this period to probe these findings. Finally, one is struck by the strong continuity in the personnel and style of worker leadership. Except for an eighty-day period between late February and early May 1919, the same group of cautious Social Democrats surrounding Lipinski and Seger led the left in Leipzig. At all times these leaders sought to moderate the demands of the rank and file and ordinary workers. Before 1914 they discouraged street demonstrations to force the issue of democratic reform; during the war they obeyed the directives of police and military (that is, until October 1918, after the latter’s authority had vanished); and during the revolution they attempted to block a general strike to augment Works Council power while also resisting calls to purge old-regime bureaucrats. Even during the brief interlude of the Geyer-controlled asr, proletarian leadership remained ineffective, now less for reasons of timidity than the inability to coordinate the general strike with allies in Berlin and the Ruhr. The unions meanwhile were even more conservative, not just discouraging revolution between 1914 and 1918 but eagerly collaborating with elites. With the revolution’s outbreak, they opposed the Works Council movement while deluding themselves as to the possibility of partnership with employers under the aegis of the zag. Even after the radical takeover of the Leipzig Cartel of Unions in April 1919, the new leadership did not use its organizational

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muscle to promote the Works Council movement but merely ceased to oppose it, content to look on with benign indifference. Authority without legitimacy always breeds an unfocused discontent among the downtrodden, but the meaning generated by that discontent depends on the interpretive prisms (or to employ the current term, discourses) available to ordinary people to help them make sense of their predicament. And that is why effective leadership is so important in popular emancipatory initiatives. Without it, the subordinated and poorly educated are forced to reach for the most readily available discourses to help them interpret the causes of their unhappiness. Most such discourses fail to identify the real sources. The student of popular politics can easily lose sight of the truism that ordinary people born into relationships of subordination are not likely to overturn them without sophisticated and audacious leaders. Even if they manage to conceive an alternative to the hierarchical relationship, they still require leaders to guide them in combating old elites and shaping a new order after the initial upheaval. Hence the rareness of successful revolutions, peasant uprisings, slave rebellions, feminist agitation, and the like throughout history. (I can only hope that it is not necessary to explain how this conception of effective popular leadership differs from the Leninist endorsement of a vanguard of conspirators that, in a quasi-coup, makes a revolution and then, through terror, imposes a minoritarian dictatorship on society). In Leipzig between 1910 and 1920 spd calls for the end of the authoritarian monarchy focused the inchoate antipathy of ordinary workers to the Klassenstaat. Workers received no such help in critiquing the wage relationship. Astonishingly, they managed to develop, largely on their own, a sophisticated ideology for the Works Councils during the revolution. In translating these plans into reality, however, their leaders either discouraged them (Lipinski/Seger) or led them incompetently (Geyer). For those today who can imagine egalitarian alternatives to the wage relationship, Leipzig’s tumultuous transition from Kaiserreich to Weimar Republic offers rich food for thought.

APPENDIXES


appendix 1

WAGES FOR DIFFERENT GROUPS OF WORKERS IN LATE IMPERIAL LEIPZIG

job category

year

wage unit provided by sources

calculated earnings in marks for one year 1

unskilled Municipal laborer Municipal gardener Municipal pool worker Municipal lifeguard Municipal streetsweeper

1908 1908 1908 1908 1909

0.50 mk/hr 0.27 mk/hr 19 mk/wk 23 mk/wk 0.39 mk/hr

1470.002 793.80 931 1127 1147

factory Unskilled male Unskilled female Apprentice female Unskilled male steelworker Factory metalworker Factory paper worker Unloader Transmission oiler Steam engine oiler

1913 1913 1913 1911 1910 1913 1911 1911 1911

0.38 mk/hr 0.27 mk/hr 0.20 mk/hr 0.35 mk/hr 0.38 mk/hr 0.33–0.45 mk/hr 0.35 mk/hr 0.35 mk/hr 0.48 mk/hr

1024 728 539 978 1061 1000–1350 1000 1000 1392

other unskilled Market porter Cart driver Transport worker Packer

1907 1911 1911 1911

15–26 mk/wk 31 mk/wk 20–29 mk/wk 23 mk/wk

735–1274 1519 980–1421 1127

300

Strip mine navvy in Borna Gardner on estate Female agricultural worker Male teenage agricultural worker Male adult agricultural worker

APPENDIXES

1908 1906 1906

unknown 60 mk/month 1 mk/day

1150 7203 300

1906

1.20 mk/day

360

1906

2.25–2.35 mk/day

675–705

semiskilled Cigar roller Underground coal miner Metal turner Mechanic/fitter (Schlosser) Machinist Factory textile worker Machine worker Mechanic/fitter (Schlosser) Crane operator Metal presser Metal grinder metal turner Turner smith (Dreherschmied) Mechanic/fitter (Schlosser)

1908 1913 1913 1913 1913 1911 1913 1910 1911 1908 1908 1908 1908 1908

piece rate 2.50–4.50 mks/shift 23–25 mk/wk 20–24 mk/wk 19–22 mk/wk 0.28–0.35 mk/hr 0.54 mk/hr 0.55 mk/hr 0.38 mk/hr unknown unknown unknown unknown unknown

614 750–1323 1127–1225 980–1176 931–1078 810–1050 1455 1536 1061 1320 1382 1670 1260 1569–1580

skilled Mechanic/fitter (Schlosseranschläger) Typesetter Type pourer (Schriftgießer) Roofer Mason Carpenter Cement worker Assistant construction worker Assistant cement worker Asphalt worker Municipal foundation mason Carpenter Construction-carpenter Instrument maker Burnisher (Polierer) Lathe turner Carpenter (Tischleranschläger) Electrical insulator (Isolierer)

1913 1911 1908 1908 1913 1913 1913 1913 1913 1913 1908 1912 1913 1913 1913 1913 1913 1911

0.64 mk/hr 20–30 mk/wk 20–30 mk/wk 0.65 mk/hr 0.72 mk/hr 0.72 mk/hr 0.66 mk/hr 0.57 mk/hr 0.57 mk/hr 0.53 mk/hr 0.59 mk/hr 40 mk/wk 0.60 mk/hr 0.58 mk/hr 0.58 mk/hr 0.58 mk/hr 0.70 mk/hr 55 mk/wk

1725 1000–1500 1000–1500 14794 12855 12855 11895 10185 10185 9265 11506 1960 1535 1563 1563 1563 1887 1482

APPENDIXES

Butcher journeyman Skilled factory textile spinner Factory mason Factory saddle maker Boiler smith Factory coppersmith Turner Carpenter Model-making carpenter Mechanic/fitter (Schlosser) Joiner

301

1910 1911 1911 1911 1911 1911 1911 1911 1911 1911 1911

skilled graphics workers 7 Copper setter (Kupferstecher) 1913 Engraver 1914 Map lithographer 1907 Guillocheur (?) 1913 Electrotyper 1910 Copper presser 1908 Lithographic printer 1913 Drawer 1913

14–33 mk/wk 0.40–0.90 mk/hr 0.47 mk/hr 0.50 mk/hr 0.50 mk/hr 0.57 mk/hr 0.51 mk/hr 0.47 mk/hr 0.55 mk/hr 0.51 mk/hr 0.50 mk/hr

686–1617 1200–2700 1363 1450 1450 1653 1479 1363 1595 1479 1450 2604 1700–2200 2100 2640 1820 1750 2000 2868

1. Assuming three hundred workdays when a daily wage is given by the sources and forty-nine workweeks when a weekly wage rate is given. If the sources did not provide hours worked per week, I assumed sixty. 2. Assuming fifty-five hours per week and forty-nine weeks per year. 3. Does not include various subsidies a rural worker often received, typically cheap housing and food. 4. Assuming sixty-five hours per week (construction workers tallied many hours, weather permitting) but for only thirty-five weeks per year because of occasional inclement weather in the summer, very slack employment during the winter, and high rates of debilitating accidents. Not included here is estimated income earned during the off-season in other trades. 5. According to the collectively bargained agreement providing these data, normal worktime was eight-and-a-half hours, six days per week. Annual income was calculated assuming that one out of ten potential workdays in the summer was lost because of inclement weather, that two weeks were taken off for sickness/vacation, and another eight weeks because of slack employment in winter. As with the roofers, earnings during the off-season are not factored in. 6. Municipal outdoor workers in Leipzig did not work under collectively bargained agreements. The calculation of yearly earnings assumes a workweek of sixty hours with 10 percent of workdays lost because of bad weather, another eight weeks lost in winter, and a week off sick.

302

APPENDIXES

7. This group of printing and graphics workers was so skilled that each worker had an individual employment contract with the firm, of ten years duration or longer, and was paid a salary like a white-collar employee. sources: staatsal Grundherrschaft Kriebstein, no. 1175, Bl. 49–57, no. 1573, no. 1557; staatsal, ah Borna 5424, Bl. 124 ff.; staatsal, PP-V, no. 2574, no. 2884, no. 3866, no. 2812, no. 1967, no. 2995, no. 3980, no. 3970, no. 3969, no. 3972, no. 3975–6, no. 2738, no. 2756; staatsal Meier und Weichelt, no. 295; staatsal, Bleichert, no. 201, no. 210; staatsal, Giesecke und Devrient Buchdruckerei, nos. 152–53; staatsal, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, no. 61, no. 37; staatsal, Sächsische Wollgarnfabrik vorm Tittel und Krueger, no. 196; staatsal Schroeder’sche Papierfabrik, no. 82; staatsal, Dresdner Bank, nos. 182, 196; staatsal Thueringer Gasgesellschaft, Leipzig, nos. 792, 763, 766, 788, 756, 754, 918, 929, 953, 982, 738, 731; staatsal, Rositzer bkw, no. 164; Untersuchungen über die Lage des Handwerks in Deutschland mit besonderer Rücksicht auf seine Konkurrenzfähigkeit gegenüber der Großindustrie, vol. 6, Königreich Sachsen, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. 67 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1897), 246.

appendix 2

SOURCES AND METHOD USED FOR SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF IMPERIAL LEIPZIG

IN PART 1 I perform a number of social analyses (for geographical mobility, social mobility, etc.) that take their raw data from the Adreßbücher and to a lesser extent from the police department’s register of inhabitants (Polizeimeldebücher), as well as from church records. In the body of the book I specify any provisos regarding individual tests. All the tests, however, share a number of common features that, in order to avoid repetition, I discuss here. Because the Adreßbücher designate only “head of household,” while the Polizeimeldebücher rarely name a woman’s occupation (listing her usually as “wife”), most of the social analysis in chapter 1 examines only male Leipzigers. This was regrettable but unavoidable. Women were included, however, in samples taken from church records because these usually listed the woman’s occupation or that of her father. I excluded anybody with both a non-German family name and Christian name. Such people were probably foreign migrant workers and therefore much more likely to quit the city than ethnic Germans. Also omitted from consideration were occupations that provide no clue about that person’s social position. Was a Privatmann/Privata a wealthy or poor retiree? To which social group does a Feldwebel (sergeant), Polizist (police officer), or Witwe (widow) belong? The Adreßbücher and Polizeimeldebücher provide skewed data. New arrivals to Leipzig were supposed to report to the police for registry in the Polizeimeldebücher and then report again if they changed address. But many poor in-migrants did not bother because, in the absence of secure employ-

304

APPENDIXES

ment prospects, they could not be sure they would remain in Leipzig. Thus the Polizeimeldebücher underreport the poorest among the city’s inhabitants: young journeymen on the compagnonnage, permanently mobile unskilled workers, and tramps. The fact that more fortunate Leipzigers are overrepresented becomes clear from a random sample of one hundred males born between 1860 and 1890 taken from the Polizeimeldebücher.1 Only 40 percent of this group were listed as manual laborers even though all other evidence shows that wage workers made up at least 65 percent of the male population. Results obtained from the Polizeimeldebücher, then, will be too optimistic regarding the need to migrate or chances for upward social mobility because the least fortunate of Leipzigers are underrepresented in the samples. Much the same applies to data culled from the Adreßbücher. Only “heads of household” are listed, thus obscuring the numerous subtenants (Untermieter and Schlafgänger, both of which were sometimes also referred to as Kostgänger), who often only had enough money to rent out a bed. By contrast, the tests run on nonworkers are much more reliable because these people were far less likely to be skipped over by the Polizeimeldebücher and Adreßbücher. I drew random samples from these imperfect sources by transcribing names in the order in which they appeared, that is, alphabetically. I see no reason why such a method would further distort the sample because Leipzigers whose names began with, say, the letter k differed in no socially significant way from Leipzigers whose names began with other letters. In a typical bit of analysis, I compare one hundred workers, one hundred alte Mittelständler, one hundred lower white collars, and one hundred elites, for a total of five hundred names. One must bear in mind that the sample size for such a test is one hundred, not five hundred. Sampling error for a sample of one hundred is 10.3 percent.2 I could have reduced this painfully high error rate to 7.2 percent had I doubled sample sizes. Alas, time constraints in the archives foreclosed such an option. In any event, marginally reducing sampling error would have made little difference to an argument that, considering the skewed sources of the data, is necessarily impressionistic rather than scientific. In all tests involving intergenerational mobility, I took into account an annual urban adult mortality rate of about 1.2 percent. Had this been overlooked, the tests would have generated artificially high out-migration rates by including some people who had actually died. In interpreting the tests involving social mobility, it is important to bear in mind that out-migration for certain groups was tantamount to downward mobility or at best remaining at one’s original station in life. Workers, for in-

APPENDIXES

305

stance, were heavily dependent on neighborhood social networks for job tips as well as assistance in the event of emergencies (i.e., the incapacitation of a breadwinner or the loss of his job). Few workers would voluntarily abandon these networks; one can assume that most who quit the city did so under duress and that in a new city—lacking family and friends for support—most would not have risen out of manual labor.3 A similar proviso applies to the alte Mittelständler, whose livelihood depended on connections in the local guilds as well as the loyalty of regular clientele (Stammgäste, Stammkunden). Out-migration for the alter Mittelstand signaled hardship, in turn indicating probable downward mobility. Despite the caution with which results ought to be viewed, these analyses throw at least some light on prewar society in Leipzig. In particular, the cumulative impression of all the tests combined helps in evaluating the qualitative evidence supplied elsewhere in part 1.


appendix 3

INDEX OF LEIPZIG NOTABLES AND THEIR CLUB AFFILIATIONS DURING THE LATE IMPERIAL PERIOD

NOTE: I LEFT untranslated names of clubs whose meaning will be obvious to anglophone readers. Ackerman, Alfred: Extremely rich publisher in late Kaiserreich; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Augustin-Franke, Paul: Factory owner; royal commercial councillor; member of Samariterverein and Kolonialgesellschaft. Bauer, W.: Businessman; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig. Begemann, Wilhelm: School director; prominent member of Free Mason Balduin Lodge. Biagosch, Heinrich: Owner of Krause Metal and Machine-Making, Inc., one of largest firms of its kind in central Germany; member of General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig and Kolonialgesellschaft. Bieler, Eugen: Company director; member of executive committee of Union of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter. Bleichert, Hermann: Engineer and owner of Bleichert and Co., one of largest machine-making firms in central Germany; member of Samariterverein, Kolonialgesellschaft, and Kunstverein. Brandenburg, Erich Professor (1868–1946): Head of Leipzig chapter of National-Liberal Party as of 1910; wife was member of Kunstverein. Brause, Prof. Adolf von: Director of a Realschule; royal councillor on education; knight of the Second Class; leader of local National-Liberals; member of General

308

APPENDIXES

Gymnastics Club of Leipzig; head of Union of Patriotic Associations, comprising twenty-five right-wing clubs in Leipzig (e.g., Kolonialgesellschaft, Naval League, Alldeutscher Verband, etc.). Through this organization he attempted to coordinate their activities and agree on a common list of candidates for election. Successful enough in this enterprise that police labeled him the most important personality on the respectable right in Leipzig politics. Bressensdorf, Erwin von: Man of private means; commander of the Second Class (knightly order); leader of rapidly growing Naval League in the years before the war; member of Samariterverein, Kolonialgesellschaft, and Kunstverein. Bretschneider, ?: Police director until about 1910; honorary member of Samariterverein. Brück, Heinrich: Company director of Leipzig Gummiwarenfabrik; member of executive committee of Federation of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and Kunstverein. Brückner, Dr.: Conservative party activist; representative in Saxon Landtag; member of Kolonialgesellschaft. Burckas, Dr.: Lawyer; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft, General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig, and Kunstverein. Credner, H.: Book wholesaler; royal privy councillor; member of executive committee of Kolonialgesellschaft; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Dimpfel, Arthur: Member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; member of Kunstverein. Dittrich, Rudolf: Doctor of law and philosophy; royal commander of the Second Class (knightly order); royal adviser on finances; mayor of Leipzig from about 1909 until 1917; honorary member of Samariterverein; member of Kunstverein. Dufour-Feronce, Albert: From one of richest families in Leipzig; owner of iron foundry and other types of factories, including Sachse and Co.; executive committee member of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie from 1905 to 1914; member of Samariterverein, Kunstverein, and General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig. Dufour-Feronce, Heinrich: Brother of Albert; businessman; from 1905 to 1914 a member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie. Dybwad, Peter: Architect; imperial councillor on construction; knight of the Second Class; from 1905 to 1914 a member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein.

APPENDIXES

309

Dähnhardt, Alfred Oskar: Headmaster of prestigious Nikolaischule; member of Kolonialgesellschaft. Eger, Paul: Book merchant; member of executive committee of Society of Friends of the Poor; member of Kunstverein. Eggert, Eduard: Member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; member of General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig. Enke, Otto: Master stonemason; owner of a brick factory; royal councillor on construction; member of Saxon Landtag representing Conservative Party; national vice president of Association of German Construction Employers; member of local Samariterverein and General Gymnastics Club; member of Kunstverein. Although still officially listed in some places as “master stonemason,” he was the only alte Mittelständler encountered who was accepted as a member of the elite. Fick, R.: Medical doctor; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband, Leipzig chapter; member of General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig and Kolonialgesellschaft. Fritzsche, Hermann Traugott: Royal privy commercial councillor; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft; member of Kolonialgesellschaft as of 1899; member of Samariterverein (leaving it 20,000 marks upon his death in 1907); wife was member of Kunstverein. Geibel, Dr. Adolph Karl: Publisher and book wholesaler; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie; member of Samariterverein, Kolonialgesellschaft, and Kunstverein. Giesecke, Georg: Royal commercial councillor and general consul to foreign governments in Leipzig; owner and director of one of largest printing establishments in central Europe; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and General Gymnastics Club; member of executive committee of Kunstverein. Goetz (sometimes Götz), Dr. Walter: professor of history at the university; royal privy councillor. Gontard, Friedrich “Franz”: Factory owner; leading member of local National Liberal Party and representative in Saxon Landtag; chairman of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie from 1900 to 1905, 1908 to 1912, and 1914; member of executive committee of Kunstverein. Graf, Hugo: Factory owner; member of Kunstverein. Gross, Hugo: Member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; member of Samariterverein and General Gymnastics Club. Grund, H.: Businessman; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband, Leipzig chapter; member of General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig.

310

APPENDIXES

Habenicht, Theodor: Factory owner; royal commercial councillor; leader of local National Liberal Party; vice chairman of Kolonialgesellschaft as of 1899 and eventually leader; member of General Gymnastics Club, Samariterverein, Alldeutscher Verband, and Kunstverein. Harrwitz, Paul Julius: Director of Allgemeine Deutsche Credit-Anstalt; prominent member of Freemason Balduin Lodge; member of very exclusive ConcordiaGesellschaft; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Hase, Dr Oskar von: Book merchant; royal privy councillor; treasurer of Bach Society; member of General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig, Kolonialgesellschaft, Alldeutscher Verband, and Kunstverein. Hasse, Prof. Dr.: Director of municipal statistical office; member of Reichstag; member of executive committee of Kolonialgesellschaft; member of General Gymnastics Club and Alldeutscher Verband. Heffter, Hugo: Chairman of Businessmen’s Club from 1903 to 1904; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft; member of Alldeutscher Verein, Kolonialgesellschaft, and Kunstverein. Hilliger, Dr.: University official; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of General Gymnastics Club. Hirzel, Ernst: Factory owner and consul to foreign governments in Leipzig; member of Samariterverein, Kolonialgesellschaft, and Kunstverein. Hädicke, Dr.: Medical doctor; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft, General Gymnastics Club, and Kunstverein. Irmler, Emil: Factory owner; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and Kunstverein. Jahn, Max: Factory owner; member of Samariterverein. Junck, Dr. Johannes: Royal justice councillor; member of Reichstag representing Conservative Party; member of Kunstverein. Jungmann, Prof. Dr. E.: Royal privy educational councillor; headmaster of prestigious Thomasschule; member of Kunstverein. Keil, E. von: Member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie from 1905 to 1914; member of Samariterverein. Keil, Otto: Member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; member of Kunstverein. Kell, Arno: Owner of construction firm; royal councillor on construction; member of Kunstverein. Keller, Hugo: Director of Allgemeine Deutsche Credit-Anstalt; royal commercial councillor; member of both Samariterverein and Kunstverein.

APPENDIXES

311

Kießling, Johann Friedrich: Doctor of philosophy; director of a machine-making factory; head of Mason Lodge Apollo; member of Samariterverein and Kolonialgesellschaft. Kirchbach, General Rudolf Hans Bodo von: Commanding general of the army’s Nineteenth Military District; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie; member of Kunstverein. Kirchner, Ernst: Royal commercial councillor; member of executive committee of Union of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter; member of Samariterverein and Kolonialgesellschaft. Kob, C. Friedrich: Factory owner; knight of the Second Order; leader in local Conservative Party; member of Kunstverein. Krause, Max: Businessman and consul to foreign governments in Leipzig; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and Kunstverein; eventually chairman of prestigious social/ charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie from 1920 to 1922 Kürsten, Paul: Owner of a publishing house; member of executive committee of prestigious Ballgesellschaft Concordia; member of Kunstverein. Lamprecht, Dr. Karl: University professor of history; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of General Gymnastics Club and Kunstverein. Lange, Carl: Businessman; member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; member of Kunstverein. Langerhans, Dr. Ernst: Medical doctor; major left liberal politician and after 1909 head of new Progressive People’s Party in Leipzig; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Limburger, Dr. Walter: Lawyer; member of municipal senate; member of executive committee of Kunstverein. Lodde, Emil: Member of executive committee of prestigious Ballgesellschaft Concordia; member of Kolonialgesellschaft. Lohse, Gustav: Royal privy councillor; royal councillor on justice; member of executive committee of prestigious Ballgesellschaft Concordia; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Mäder, Johann: Businessman; member of General Gymnastic Club; member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club. Marquart, Felix: Member of Reichstag; leading member of Patrioten-Bund, the organization that took the lead in erecting the monstrous monument to the battle of Leipzig unveiled in 1913. Mehnert, Dr. Paul: Very privy councillor to the king; head of Conservative Party in Saxony through which he exercised enormous influence in provincial politics.

312

APPENDIXES

Meissner, Paul Julius: Royal commercial councillor; member of executive committee of prestigious Ballgesellschaft Concordia; member of Samariterverein, Kolonialgesellschaft, General Gymnastics Club, and Kunstverein. Meißner, Otto: Member of municipal senate; prominent member of Freemason Balduin Lodge; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Mey, Dr. Ernst: Medical doctor; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft; member of Kolonialgesellschaft. Meyer, Dr. Hans: University professor; member of executive committee of Kolonialgesellschaft; member of Kunstverein. Müller, Otto: Factory owner; Conservative Party politician; member of Samariterverein and General Gymnastics Club. Nagel, Philipp: Municipal senator; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of General Gymnastic Club and Kolonialgesellschaft. Naumann, Dr. C. Otto: Owner and director of a brewery; member of executive committee of Federation of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter (retained this position into the revolutionary period); member of Samariterverein and Kolonialgesellschaft. Ohrtmann, Louis: Member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie from 1905 to 1914; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and Kunstverein. Pache, Oscar: Member of city council; prominent member of Freemason Balduin Lodge. Raydt, Prof. H.: Director of municipal business school; member of executive committee of both Kolonialgesellschaft and Alldeutscher Verband; member of General Gymnastics Club. Reclam, Hans Heinrich: Owner of one of biggest publishing houses in Germany; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft; member of Samariterverein, Kolonialgesellschaft, General Gymnastics Club, and Kunstverein. Rehwoldt, Dr. Friedrich: Factory owner; royal privy commercial councillor; member of municipal senate; member of executive committee of Kolonialgesellschaft; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of both prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie and of Kunstverein; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft; member of Alldeutscher Verband, General Gymnastics Club, and Kunstverein. Reissmann, Karl: Factory Owner; Conservative candidate for elected office; member of Federation of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and General Gymnastics Club.

APPENDIXES

313

Richter, Bernhard Friedrich: Musical director at St. Thomas Church; member of executive committee of Bach Society; member of Kunstverein. Rothe, Dr. Karl: Director of Leipziger Hypothekenbank; from 1899 until 1917 member of city council, after 1909 its speaker; from 1918 to 1930 mayor of the city; member of Kolonialgesellschaft, General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig, and Kunstverein; from 1945 to 1948 member representing Liberal-Democratic Party and legal adviser to the city. Rössger, Dr. Richard: Deputy director of municipal educational institute on trade; member of executive committee of Kolonialgesellschaft; member of Alldeutscher Verband; wife was member of Kunstverein. Sack, Rudolf: Owner and director of one of largest machine-making factories in central Germany; member of Samariterverein and Kolonialgesellschaft; wife was member of Kunstverein. Schill, Otto: National Liberal politician; member of very exclusive ConcordiaGesellschaft; member of Kunstverein. Schmidt, Dr. A.: Member of Samariterverein; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie. Schmidt, Friedrich: Consul to foreign governments in Leipzig; member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; member of Kolonialgesellschaft as of 1899. Schmiedt, Dr.: Medical doctor; member of General Gymnastics Club of Leipzig and Kolonialgesellschaft; chairman of Alldeutscher Verband. Schnauss, Wolfgang Heinrich: Lawyer and royal justice councillor; Conservative Party politician and leading member of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft, General Gymnastics Club, and Kunstverein. Schneider [sometimes hyphenated “-Dörffel”], Hugo: Factory director; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and General Gymnastics Club. Scholze, Oskar: Professor; member of executive committee of Society of Friends of the Poor; member of Kunstverein. Schreck, Dr. Gustav: Cantor of St. Thomas Church; professor and musical director at the Conservatorium; chairman of Bach Society; member of Samariterverein; wife was member of Kunstverein. Schreiber, Dr.: Royal privy councillor; university professor; museum director; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of General Gymnastics Club. Schröder, Georg: Member of executive committee of prestigious Ballgesellschaft Concordia; member of Kunstverein. Schröder, Paul: Businessman and trade judge; chairman of prestigious social/charity

314

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club Gesellschaft Harmonie from 1905 to 1907; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Schulze-Sander, Otto: Factory owner and trade judge; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft and of Kunstverein. Schuster, Dr.: Director of Kunstverein; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and General Gymnastics Club. Schwalbach, Carl: Businessman; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Schwarze, Rudolf von: Councillor to Reich supreme court; member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; honorary member of Samariterverein; member of Kunstverein. Spitzner, Johannes: Doctor of philosophy; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and General Gymnastics Club. Steche, Dr. A.: Factory owner; during imperial period and throughout war and revolution chairman of Federation of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and Kunstverein; after 1909 head of local chapter of HansaBund; National Liberal candidate for Landtag 1909. Stellmacher, Dr. A.: Councillor to Reich supreme court; member of executive committee of both Kolonialgesellschaft and of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie. Sternburg, Freiherr Speck von: Baron of the Empire; brewery owner; member of executive committee of Union of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter; member of Samariterverein. Stiegel, Adolf: Businessman; member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; member of General Gymnastics Club. Strohal, Dr.: Royal privy councillor; professor; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of General Gymnastics Club and Kunstverein. Stöhr, Eduard: Royal commercial councillor; factory owner and director; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft; member of Samariterverein, Kunstverein, and Kolonialgesellschaft. Teichmann, F. K.: Businessman; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft.

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315

Thieme, Dr. Clemens: Architect; royal privy councillor and Conservative Party politician; chairman of Patrioten-Bund and therefore the driving force behind the erection of the monument to the battle of Leipzig (das Völkerschlachtdenkmal); member of Freemason Lodge Apollo and thus able to raise money from fellow Masons for the monument; member of Samariterverein; after the revolution chairman of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie. Tröndlin, Dr.: Lawyer (?); mayor before 1908; honorary member of Samariterverein; member of Kolonialgesellschaft. Ulrich, Dr. August: Member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie from 1905 to 1914; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and General Gymnastics Club. Voigtländer, Robert: Wholesale book merchant; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft, General Gymnastics Club, and Kunstverein. Wach, Dr. Adolf: Royal privy councillor and professor; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of both prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie and of Leipziger Kunstverein; member of Samariterverein and Kolonialgesellschaft. Wagler, Dr. Ludwig: Police director during imperial period, war, and into the revolution; knight of the Second Class; member of Sportsmen’s Club. Wallmann, Heinrich: Book merchant; member of executive committee of Society of Friends of the Poor; member of Kunstverein. Walther, Paul: Businessman; member of executive committee of Businessmen’s Club; member of General Gymnastics Club. Wangemann, Johannes: Lawyer; municipal senator; pastor; member of executive committee of Kolonialgesellschaft; member of General Gymnastics Club. Wappler, Georg Gustav: Businessman and prominent National Liberal politician; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft; member of Samariterverein and Kunstverein. Weichelt, Curt: Owner and director of major metal production and machine-making factory; member of Kolonialgesellschaft. Weickert, Otto: Businessman; chairman of prestigious social/charity club Ballgesellschaft Concordia; member of Samariterverein, Kunstverein, and Kolonialgesellschaft. Wendt, Hermann: Law student; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and General Gymnastics Club.

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Wendtland, Dr.: Royal justice councillor; member of executive committee of chamber of commerce. Weniger, Dr. Ernst: Royal justice councillor; member of General Gymnastics Club, Kunstverein, and Kolonialgesellschaft. Wildhagen, Dr. Georg: Privy justice councillor; lawyer; from 1905 to 1914 member of executive committee of prestigious social/charity club Gesellschaft Harmonie; member of Samariterverein and Kolonialgesellschaft; wife was a member of Kunstverein. Wislicenus, Dr. Johannes: Privy royal councillor; professor; member of executive committee of Kolonialgesellschaft; member of General Gymnastics Club. Woelker, Georg Christian Wilhelm: Consul to foreign governments in Leipzig; chairman of prestigious social/charity club Ballgesellschaft Concordia; member of Kunstverein and Kolonialgesellschaft. Worlitzer, J. W.: Member of executive committee of Federation of Saxon Industrialists, Leipzig chapter; wife was member of Kunstverein. Wunderlich, Dr. Karl: Royal justice councillor; member of very exclusive ConcordiaGesellschaft; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and Kunstverein. Zeitz, J. F.: Businessman; member of executive committee of Alldeutscher Verband; member of Kolonialgesellschaft and General Gymnastics Club. Zweiniger, G.: President of chamber of commerce; member of executive committee of Kolonialgesellschaft; member of very exclusive Concordia-Gesellschaft; member of General Gymnastics Club; wife was member of Kunstverein. Zöphel, Dr. Georg: Lawyer and leader of Young National Liberals; member of General Gymnastics Club and Kunstverein.

appendix 4

BRIEF REVIEW OF THE HISTORIOGRAPHY ON PROLETARIAN INTEGRATION INTO IMPERIAL SOCIETY

ROBERT MICHELS AT the beginning of the century applied the term “integration” not to ordinary workers but instead to a Social Democratic leadership in Germany that was becoming increasingly reformist in the decades before the Great War.1 Fifty years later, Carl Schorske continued in this vein.2 The work of Guenther Roth expands on this view, finding that this integrated spd helped bring about a “negative integration” into the Wilhelmine order of the entire working class.3 By this term, Roth means that workers, while occasionally grumbling, were functionally integrated in that their largely self-created cultural and political ghetto posed no systemic threat to imperial society and also veiled a high degree of proletarian loyalty fostered by indoctrination in the schools and military. Dieter Groh elaborates on the concept of “negative integration,” making it the centerpiece of his massive tome.4 Assuming Social Democracy to be identical to the entire working class, he uses evidence showing integrated party leaders as proof of integrated workers. Mary Nolan attacks Groh’s argument but only insofar as it posits an integrated party; she does not engage his assertion about integrated workers.5 Adalheid von Saldern, citing a dearth of sources providing access to the attitudes of ordinary workers, restricts her inquiries to party members, for whom sources on mentality—mostly in the form of protocols—exist. In Göttingen she finds a reformist spd;6 elsewhere the party’s profile varied from city to city.7 Like Saldern, Dick Geary insists that the paucity of sources requires caution when making claims about proletarian integration. Until new research throws light on the question one should not, he advises, conflate the views of Social Democratic leaders with those of ordinary workers.8 Richard Evans concurs but

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doubts, based on the evidence at hand, the thesis of proletarian integration advanced by Roth, Groh, Ritter, and others.9 How does my argument fit into this historiography? Leipzig’s Social Democratic leaders might be called “integrated” in that they lacked the nerve to lead aggressive prodemocracy demonstrations. But I found no evidence of an integrated workforce in Leipzig. Workers there, while recognizing a partial legitimacy of elites stemming from the latter’s cultural refinement and past success, nonetheless bitterly opposed what they called the Klassenstaat and wished, before 1914, to democratize it along Western lines. In the main body of the book I advance this argument in opposition to today’s most influential proponents of the integration thesis: Ritter and Tenfelde. These two authors, it must be conceded, do avoid the error of equating the attitudes of Social Democratic leaders with those of ordinary unorganized workers.

ABBREVIATIONS

abbreviation

full name

english translation

aa

Angestellten-Ausschuß

Lower-White Collar Employee Committee

adgb

Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund

General German Union Federation

ahm

Amtshauptmannschaft

Prefecture

asr

Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat

Worker and Soldier Council

asr mitteilungsblatt

Mitteilungsblatt des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrats Leipzig für das 19. Armeekorps

Information sheet of the Leipzig Worker and Soldier Council for the Nineteenth Army Corps District

ba

Bürger-Ausschuß

Citizen committee

cola

Cost-of-living-allowance

dmz

Deutsche MetallarbeiterZeitung

German Metal-Worker Newspaper

dnvp

Deutsch-Nationale Volkspartei

German National People’s Party

dvp

Deutsche Volkspartei

Germany People’s Party

gdr

German Democratic Republic

320

ABBREVIATIONS

hdg

das Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz Compulsory Auxiliary Service Law

iwk

Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung

International Scholarly Correspondence on the History of the German Workers’ Movement

kpd

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands

Communist Party of Germany

lam

Landeshauptarchiv Magdeburg

Main Land Archive, Magdeburg

law

Landeshauptarchiv Magdeburg, Außenstelle Wernigerode

Main Land Archive, Wernigerode Branch

Leuna

Zentrales Betriebsarchiv der Leuna-Werke, Leuna

Central Company Archive of the Leuna Works

lnn

Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten

The Leipzig Latest News

ltb

Leipziger Tageblatt

Leipzig Daily Journal

ltz

Leipziger Tageszeitung

Leipzig Daily Times

lvz

Leipziger Volkszeitung

Leipzig People’s Times

lzhb

Leipziger Zeitung und Handelsblatt für Sachsen

Leipziger Times and Commercial Press for Saxony

mspd (see also spd) Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany

ohl

Oberste Heeresleitung

Army Supreme Command/ General Staff

pb

Polizeibericht

Police report

RdV

Rat der Volksbeauftragten

Council of People’s Deputies

rm

Reichsmark

sed

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Socialist Unity Party

ABBREVIATIONS

sml

321

Stadtgeschlichtliches Museum Leipzig im alten Rathaus

City Historical Museum in the Old Town Hall

spd (see also mspd) Sozialdemokratische Partei Social Democratic Party of Deutschlands Germany sr

Soldatenrat

Soldiers Council

SRdV

Sächsischer Rat der Volksbeauftragten

Saxon Council of People’s Deputies

staatsad

Sächsisches Saxon Main State Archive, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden Dresden

staatsal

Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig

Saxon State Archive, Leipzig Branch

StadtaL

Stadtarchiv Leipzig

City Archive of Leipzig

uspd

Unabhängige Independent Social Sozialdemokratische Partei Democratic Party of Germany Deutschlands

zag

Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft Central working group


NOTES

IN REFERENCES TO archival sources, German abbreviations have been retained. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

INTRODUCTION 1. Demokratische Bewegungen in Mitteldeutschland (Weimar: Böhlau), a series of volumes currently being edited by Helga Grebing, Hans Mommsen, and Karsten Rudolph, will add considerably to our knowledge of central Germany in modern times. 2. Fritz Curschmann, “Die Entstehungsgeschichte des mitteldeutschen Vorläufers des Betriebsrätegesetzes,” in Sozialpolitische Betrachtungen: Beiträge zur Sozialpolitik der chemischen Industrie, ed. Fritz Curschmann (Halle: Gebauer-Schwetschke, 1930). This study moreover ignores events specific to Leipzig in favor of the Works Council movement in all of central Germany. 3. Presentations designed for political consumption at that time include Hans Block and Fritz Seger, Zum ersten Jahrestag der deutschen Revolution vom 9. November 1918 (Leipzig: Landesvorstand der usp Sachsens, Schrörs, 1919); Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921); Richard Lipinski, Der Kampf um die politische Macht in Sachsen (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1920). The following memoirs suffer from the added handicap of having been written decades after the revolution: Wilhelm Koenen, Die Novemberrevolution 1918 in Deutschland (Halle: Kreisleitung der sed, 1958); Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion (Bonn: Dietz, 1976). 4. The only exception appears to have been the West German historian Peter von Oertzen, who based his examination of the central German general strike partly on East German archival sources. See his Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution: Eine

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politikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung über Ideengehalt und Struktur der betrieblichen und wirtschaftlichen Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Revolution 1918/1919 (Bonn: Dietz, 1976). His account of that event, while accurate and appropriately short for his Reichwide survey of the Works Council movement, deals little with purely political developments in Leipzig and, because of its brevity, requires supplementation. 5. The author of this official line was none other than the sed’s general secretary, Walter Ulbricht. See his “Begründung der Thesen über die Novemberrevolution” and “Ueber den Charakter der Novemberrevolution: Rede in der Kommission zur Vorbereitung der Thesen über die Novemberrevolution,” both in special issue “Zum 40. Jahrestag der deutschen Novemberrevolution 1918,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 6 (1958): 28–54 and 717–29, respectively. He also almost certainly wrote Die Novemberrevolution in Deutschland (Thesen anläßlich des 40. Jahrestages) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1958). Local and regional studies of central Germany adhering to (and in some cases anticipating) these guidelines include Aus revolutionären Tagen . . . (Erlebnisberichte aus der Zeit der deutschen Novemberrevolution 1918) (Halle/Saale: sed, n.d.); “Zum Anteil der Leipziger Arbeiter bei der Niederschlagung des konterrevolutionären Kapp-Putsches im März 1920: Eine Quellendokumentation erarbeitet von einem Studentenkollektiv der Sektion Geschichte der Karl-Marx-Universität unter Leitung von Bernd Rüdiger,” Jahrbuch zur Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig, 1980: 22–43; Helga Albert, “Die Auseinandersetzung um die Sozialisierung des sächsischen Steinkohlenbergbaus nach dem 1. Weltkrieg.” (Ph.D. diss., Freiberger Bergakademie, 1963); Helmut Arndt, “Das Echo des Roten Oktobers in der Leipziger Arbeiterbewegung von 1917–27,” Jahrbuch der Geschichte zur Stadt Leipzig 3 (1977): 27–49; idem, “Der Kampf der Leipziger Arbeiter gegen die Kapp-Putschisten,” Jahrbuch zur Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig 6 (1980): 7–22; S. Beckert, “Der Kampf der Linken in Chemnitz gegen Krieg und Opportunismus, für die Herausbildung einer neuen revolutionären Partei und für die Ziele der Novemberrevolution (April 1917 bis Januar 1919)” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1969); Fritz Beier, Die revolutionäre Tradition der Leipziger Arbeiterbewegung: Drei öffentliche Lektionen des Parteikabinetts (Leipzig: Bezirksleitung der sed, 1956); Horst Beutel, “Die Novemberrevolution von 1918 in Leipzig und die Politik der Leipziger uspd-Führung bis zum Einmarsch der konterrevolutionären Truppen des Generals Maercker am 12. Mai 1919,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universitaet Leipzig, 7th annual ed. (1957/58), Gesellschaft- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Series, vol. 4; W. Bramke and B. Rüdiger, eds., Dokumentation zum erfolgreichen Kampf gegen Kapp in Leipzig . . . (Leipzig: Abteilung Agitation/Propaganda der Bezirksleitung Leipzig der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands 1980), 13 ff.; Ewald Buchsbaum, “Die Linksentwicklung der Gothaer Arbeiterbewegung von 1914 bis 1920 (Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Entstehung und Entwicklung des linken revolutionären Flügel der uspd bis zu dessen Vereinigung mit der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands im Dezember 1920)” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1965); Die rote Fahne über Leipzig: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Novemberrevolution 1918 in Leipzig (Leipzig: Bezirksleitung der sed, 1958); Horst Dörrer, “Die Dresdener Arbeiterbewegung während des Weltkrieges und der Novemberrevolution 1918” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Leipzig,

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1960); H. Gebler, “Die Novemberrevolution 1918 und die Bewegung der Lehrerräte— dargestellt am Beispiel der Lehrerbewegung in Leipzig,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Universität Leipzig 14 (1965); Carmen Georgi, “Das Wirken der Leipziger Sozialdemokratie unter den Bedingungen der relativ friedlichen Entwicklungsphase des deutschen Imperialismus in den Jahren 1900–07” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Leipzig, 1984); Ruth Götze, “Die Widerspiegelung der Lebenslage der Leipziger Arbeiterbevölkerung im Streikgeschehen der Jahre 1914 bis 1922: Ein Beitrag zur Auswertung der Akten des Leipziger Gewerbegerichts,” Arbeitsberichte zur Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig 12, no. 2 (1974): 67–75; W. Gutsche, Die Kämpfe der Erfurter Arbeiter gegen die Reaktion im Frühjahr 1919: die Beseitigung des Arbeiterates durch die Konterrevolution und der Sozialisierungsschwindel (Erfurt: Gutenberg-Druckerei, 1963); idem, Die revolutionäre Bewegung in Erfurt während des ersten imperialistischen Weltkrieges und der Novemberrevolution (Erfurt: Gutenberg-Druckerei, 1963); G. Kotowski, “Zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Mittel- und Ostdeutschland: Ein Literaturbericht,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 8 (1959): 409–70; Peter Kuhlbrodt, “Herta Geffke und Gertrud Morgner: Zwei hervorragende Kämpferinnen der Novemberrevolution 1918/1919,” Mitteilungsblatt der Forschungsgemeinschaft “Geschichte des Kampfes der deutschen Arbeiterklasse um die Befreiung der Frau” (Leipzig) 2 (1980): 113–39; “Leipzig in den Tagen der Novemberrevolution: Eine Chronik. Erarbeitet von einem Studenten-Kollektiv der Sektion Geschichte der KarlMarx-Universität unter Leitung von Bernd Rüdiger,” Jahrbuch zur Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig (1978): 79–121; Annaliese Matthes and Lothar Matthes, “Die Entwicklung des deutschen Metallarbeiterverbandes—‘Verwaltungsstelle Leipzig’—und des ‘Vereins Leipziger Buchdrucker und Schriftgeißergehilfen’ in den Jahren 1914–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Leipzig, 1966); G. Meisel, “Der Kampf der Werktätigen des Leuna-Werkes in den Jahren 1919–21” (Ph.D. diss., Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 1961); Hans Mittank, “Der Lösungsprozeß des linken Flügels der uspd und seine Vereinigung mit der kpd in Leipzig von 1919 bis 1920” (M.A. thesis, Karl-MarxUniversität, Leipzig, 1959); Walter Pöhlandt, “Die Entwicklung der Arbeiterbewegung in Ostthüringen 1914–1920 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Herausbildung des revolutionären linken Flügels der uspd” (Ph.D. diss., Universität HalleWittenberg, 1965); Gerhard Puchta, “Der Arbeiter und Soldatenrat in Leipzig: November 1918 bis vor dem 2. Rätekongress Anfang April 1919,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx Universitaet Leipzig, 7th annual ed. (1957/58), Gesellschaft- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Series, vol. 4, 363–84; Werner Raase, “Der Kampf um revolutionäre Betriebsräte in den Jahren 1919–1920, dargestellt vor allem an den Kämpfen im Industriegebeit von Halle-Merseburg” (Ph.D. diss., HumboldtUniversität, Berlin, 1960); Bernd Rüdiger, “Revolutionäre Kommunalpolitik und Kommunalpolitik in der Revolution: Zur Rolle der Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte in den Städten Sachsen während der Novemberrevolution bis zum 1. Reichsrätekongreß,” Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 7 (1979): 121–85; K. Schneider, “Der politischideologische Differenzierungsprozeß in der Leipziger Arbeiterbewegung während des Ersten Weltkrieges” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Leipzig, 1964); K. Schneider and Kurt Baller, “Die Entwicklung der Leipziger Arbeiterbewegung vom Ausbruch des Ersten

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Weltkrieges bis zur Gründung der kpd,” Arbeitsberichte zur Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig (Leipzig: Stadtarchiv, 1968); E. Schultz, “Rolle und Anteil des linken Flügels der uspd im ehemaligen Regierungsbezirk Halle-Merseburg bei der Herausbildung und Entwicklung der kpd zur revolutionären Massenpartei (1917–20)” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1968); E. Schulz, “Zu den Bestrebungen in der dvp Sachsens nach einer Zusammenfassung aller sogenannten ‘Parteien der Mitte’ in den Jahren 1918–22,” Jenaer Beiträge zur Parteiengeschichte 23 (1968): 147–54; Gerhard Schulze, Die Novemberrevolution 1918 in Thüringen, ed. sed, Bezirkskommissionen zur Erforschung der Geschichte der örtlichen Arbeiterbewegung bei den Bezirksleitungen Erfurt, Gera, Suhl, und dem Rat des Bezirkes Erfurt, Abteilung Kultur (Erfurt: Bezirksleitung der sed, 1976); Eberhard Stein, “Anfänge und Entwicklung der kpd im mitteldeutschen Industriegebeit zur Massenpartei in den Jahren 1919/1920,” in Die Volksmassen—Gestalter der Geschichte, ed. Hans-Joachim Bartmuss et al., 406–30 (Berlin: Rütten and Loening, 1962); Eberhard Stein, “Die Entstehung der LeunaWerke und die Anfänge der Arbeiterbewegung in den Leunawerken während des Ersten Weltkrieges und der Novemberrevolution” (Ph.D. diss., Universität HalleWittenberg, 1960); Egon Stelzner and Walter Buhr, Beiträge zum Kampf der Bornaer Bergarbeiter gegen den Kapp-Putsch 1920 (Borna: sed-Kreisleitung, 1962); Haro Uhlmann, “Der Einfluß der Novemberrevolution auf die Entwicklung der Bergarbeiterbewegung im sächsischen Steinkohlenbergbau,” in Freiberger Forschungshefte, Kultur und Technik, D. 27., Zum 40. Jahrestag der deutschen Novemberrevolution. Beiträge zum Verlauf und zu den Auswirkungen der Novemberrrevolution im sächsischen Steinkohlenbergbau, zusammengestellt vom Institut für Gesellschaftswissenschaften der Bergakademie Freiberg, Abteilung Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus (Berlin: Akademie, 1959); Rosemarie Wiezorek and Egon Stelzner, Beiträge zum Kampf der Bergarbeiter des Lugau-Oelsnitzer Steinkohlenreviers und des Bornaer Braunkohlenreviers gegen den Kapp-Putsch im März 1920, Freiberger Forschungshefte D 35 (Berlin: Akademie, 1960); W. Wimmer and K. Mammach, “Bemerkungen über im Bezirk Halle erschienene Veröffentlichungen zum 40. Jahrestag der Novemberrevolution,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 1 (1959): 386–94. 6. The very few studies viewing the revolution in a longer-term framework include Klaus-Dieter Schwarz, Weltkrieg und Revolution in Nürnberg: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1971); Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Gerald Feldman, Eberhard Kolb, and Reinhard Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1917–1920,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 13, no. 1 (1972): 86 ff.; Juergen Tampke, The Ruhr and Revolution: The Revolutionary Movement in the Rhenish-Westphalian Industrial Region, 1912–1919 (Norwalk, Conn.: Australian National University Press, 1978); Erhard Lucas, Arbeiterradikalismus: Zwei Formen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1976). 7. Presented chronologically, contributions to this discussion include William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime

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to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Jürgen Kocka, “Klassen oder Kultur? Durchbrüche und Sackgassen in der Arbeitergeschichte,” Merkur 36, no. 10 (1982): 955–65; Gareth Stedman Jones, The Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); John Foster, “The Declassing of Language,” New Left Review 150 (March–April 1985); James Epstein, “Rethinking the Categories of Working Class History,” Labour/Le Travail 18 (fall 1986): 195–208; Robert Gray, “The Deconstruction of the English Working Class,” Social History 11, no. 3 (1986): 363–73; Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg, eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Patrick Joyce, ed., introduction to The Historical Meanings of Work (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Patrick Joyce, “In Pursuit of Class: Recent Studies in the History of Work and Class,” History Workshop Journal 25 (spring 1988): 171–77; Central European History 22 (September/December 1989) (special issue entitled “German Histories: Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique”); Peter Schöttler, “Historians and Discourse Analysis,” History Workshop 27 (spring 1989): 37–65; Wilfried Spohn, “Zum methodologischen Verhältnis von Sozialgeschichte, historischer Soziologie und Geschichtsphilosophie am Beispiel einiger jüngerer Interpretationsansätze der Klassenformierung der Arbeiterschaft,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 71, no. 2 (1989): 487–502; Geoff Eley, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday—A New Direction for German Social History?” Journal of Modern History 61 (June 1989): 297–343; Alf Lüdtke, ed., Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrung und Lebensweise (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1989); Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. introduction; William H. Sewell, Jr., “How Classes Are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-Class Formation,” in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, 50–77 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Lenard R. Berlanstein, “Working with Language: The Linguistic Turn in French Labor History; A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (April 1991): 426–40; James Epstein, “The Populist Turn” (book reviews), Journal of British Studies 32 (April 1993): 177–89; David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, “Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language,” Social History 17 (May 1992): 165–88; Kathleen Canning, “Gender and the Politics of Class Formation: Rethinking German Labor History,” American Historical Review 97 (June 1992): 736–68; Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830–1871 (Princeton: Princeton

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University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 1 and conclusion; James Vernon, “Who’s Afraid of the ‘Linguistic Turn’? The Politics of Social History and Its Discontents,” Social History 19 (January 1994): 81–97; Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Geoff Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald, 193–243 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Hans Medick, Introduction, Hans Medick, Introduction to Weben und Überleben in Laichingen, 1650–1900: Lokalgeschichte als allgemeine Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1996). 8. Vernon Lidtke, “Burghers, Workers, and Problems of Class Relationships, 1870–1914: Germany in Comparative Perspective,” in Arbeiter und Bürger im 19. Jahrhundert: Varianten ihres Verhältnisses im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986), 33 9. Canning, “Gender.” 10. Jacques Rancière, “The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History,” International Labor and Working Class History 24 (fall 1983): 1–16; Michael Sonenscher, review article, Social History 13 (October 1988): 385–88. 11. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963). See also idem, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971); and idem, “Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?” Social History 3 (May 1978): 133–65. Notable works influenced by Thompson include Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, Oxford University Press, 1971); Robert Darnton, “Workers’ Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 1984), 75–106; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Much of the Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life) emanating from Germany exhibits a strong Thompsonian influence. See Alf Lüdtke, “Organizational Order or Eigensinn? Workers’ Privacy and Workers’ Politics in Imperial Germany,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz, 303–34 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); idem, ed., Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrung und Lebensweise (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1989); David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Horst Steffens, Autorität und Revolte: Alltagsleben und Streikverhalten der Bergarbeiter an der Saar im 19. Jahrhundert (Weingarten: Drumlin, 1987); Dorothee Wierling, Mädchen für alles: Arbeitsalltag und Lebensgeschichte städtischer Dienstmädchen um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1987. Microhistory, a school similar to Alltagsgeschichte, also bears the mark of Thompson’s example. See Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, trans. Eren Dawes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 93–113 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); and, most

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famously, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 12. The foundational texts are Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973); idem, “On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” American Scientist 63 (January-February 1975): 47–53; and idem, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1983). Many of the authors cited in note 11 above borrow from the methodological repertoire of cultural anthropology. Yet in portraying society as riven with conflict (rather than as a timeless, Geertzian monolith) and acknowledging that not just culture but also material reality shape consciousness, they follow more closely the Thompsonian paradigm. 13. “Instead of reducing the rather fluctuating meanings of the word ‘discourse,’ I believe that I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualized group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements; and have I not allowed this same word ‘discourse,’ which should have served as a boundary around the term ‘statement,’ to vary as I shifted my analysis or its point of application, as the statement itself faded from view?” (Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith [New York: Pantheon, 1976], 80). 14. Among the founders of poststructuralism—a group including Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Hayden White, among others—Foucault has exercised the most influence on labor historians, though his own work deals with hierarchies other than class. For some attempts to apply poststructuralist methods to class analysis, see Gareth Stedman Jones, “Rethinking Chartism,” in Languages of Class; Joan Wallach Scott, “Work Identities for Men and Women: The Politics of Work and Family in the Parisian Garment Trades in 1848,” in Gender; John Smail, “New Languages for Labour and Capital: The Transformation of Discourse in the Early Years of the Industrial Revolution,” Social History 12 (January 1987): 49–72; Jacques Ranciäre, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); David Levine, “Punctuated Equilibrium: The Modernization of the Proletarian Family in the Age of Ascendant Capitalism,” International Labor and Working-Class History 39 (spring 1991): 3 ff. (see also the commentary that follows). 15. Stedman Jones, introduction to Languages of Class. 16. Hartmut Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung des Proletariats als Klasse: Strukturuntersuchung über das Leipziger Proletariat während der industriellen Revolution (Berlin: Akademie, 1978). While I depart from Zwahr’s model of class formation, I could not have developed my own without his pioneering work. 17. Jürgen Kocka’s improvement of Zwahr’s scheme succumbs to some of these weaknesses. See his “Problems of Working-Class Formation in Germany: The Early Years, 1800–1875,” Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 279–351. Chief among them, he posits wage dependency as prior to the social and political “levels.” This latter, unfortunate term as well

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as the logic of his approach smack of teleology, or at least unilinearity. See Canning, “Gender,” 736–68. 18. Lüdtke, Alltagsgeschichte, 19–20. 19. Georg G. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein kritischer Ueberblick im internationalen Zusammenhang (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1993), 54. 20. Ernst Kroker, Handelsgeschichte der Stadt Leipzig: Die Entwicklung des Leipziger Handels und der Leipziger Messen von der Gründung der Stadt bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig: W. Bielefeld, 1925), 219–20 and 224–25; Rudolf Kötzschke, Heimatgeschichte für Leipzig und den Leipziger Kreis, ed. Karl Remuth (Leipzig: Dürrsche Buchhandlung, 1927), 215 ff.; Gustav Wustmann, Kleine Chronik von Leipzig, 1015–1908 (Leipzig: Merseburger, 1908), 10 ff. 21. Kroker, Handelsgeschichte, 226–40; Wustmann, Kleine Chronik, 12; Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung, 35; Kötzschke, Heimatgeschichte, 241. With prosperity, patronage for the arts, especially for music, bloomed. The Gewandhaus Orchestra under the direction of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy developed an international reputation at the same time that Richard Wagner studied in Leipzig. In the following decades Robert and Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, and Gustav Mahler all passed significant creative sojourns there. See Kötzschke, Heimatgeschichte, 248; Wustmann, Kleine Chronik, 12 ff. 22. Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig (hereafter staatsal), Giesecke and Devrient ag, Nr. 224; Karl Juckenburg, Das Aufkommen der Großindustrie in Leipzig (Leipzig: Veit, 1912), 143; Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung, 44; Fritz Staude, Sie waren stärker: Der Kampf der Leipziger Sozialdemokratie in der Zeit des Sozialistengesetzes, 1878–1890 (Leipzig: veb Bibliographisches Institut, 1969), 20. 23. Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung, 33–34. 24. Kocka, “Problems of Working-Class Formation,” 296–307. 25. Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung, 33–34. 26. G. Aubin, “Die wirtschaftliche Einheit Mitteldeutschlands,” in Mitteldeutschland auf dem Wege zur Einheit (Merseburg: Stollberg, 1927), 8–12. 27. staatsal, ah Borna 5424; Emil Treptow, Grundzüge der Bergbaukunde einschließlich Aufbereitung und Brikettieren, vol. 1 (Vienna: Waldheim-Eberle, 1917), 25–26, 101, 246–51; Friedrich Hübener, “Antrittsrede des neuen Rektors Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hübener: Die Bedeutung der Fördertechnik für das Braunkohlentagebau,” Schriften des Hessischen Hochschulen. Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, 2d annual edition (1934), book 2: 25; Georg Klein, Handbuch für den Deutschen Braunkohlenbergbau (Halle: Knapp, 1915), 288 ff. 28. staatsal, ah Borna 5424; staatsal, ahm Borna, Nr. 2871, Bd. 1, Bl. 118–119, 136. 29. Aubin, “Die wirtschaftliche Einheit,” 5–6; Walter Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930; reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 9 ff. 30. Gerhard A. Ritter, “Das Wahlrecht und die Wählerschaft der Sozialdemokratie im Königreich Sachsen, 1867–1914,” in Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Sozialdemokratie und Freie Gewerkschaften im Parteiensystem und Sozialmilieu des

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Kaiserreichs, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990), 36. 31. Heinrich August Winkler, ed., Organisierter Kapitalismus: Voraussetzungen und Anfänge (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1974). 32. Compare Gutachten der Handelskammer zu Leipzig über einige auf den ZollTarif bezügliche Petitionen vom 18. Februar 1876 (Leipzig, 1876) to Jahresbericht der Handelskammer zu Leipzig, Jahre 1908 (Leipzig: Handelskammer zu Leipzig, 1908) and Jahresbericht der Handelskammer zu Leipzig, Jahre 1912 (Leipzig: Handelskammer zu Leipzig, 1912). 33. staatsal, ah Borna 5424; see also the introduction in “Mitteldeutsches Braunkohlensyndikat Leipzig. Findbuch,” an unpublished manuscript complied in 1990 by the staatsal. The vast majority of brown coal producers around Leipzig were large joint-stock companies. During the final two decades before the war, they were able to pay stockholders an average dividend of 8 percent per annum (staatsal ah Borna 5424). 34. Stadtarchiv Leipzig (hereafter StadtaL), Polizeibericht (hereafter pb) 1905, 30. 35. Untersuchungen über die Lage des Handwerks in Deutschland mit besonderer Rücksicht auf seine Konkurrenzfähigkeit gegenüber der Großindustrie, vol. 6, Königreich Sachsen, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. 67 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1897), 145 ff., 201, 319 ff., 550 ff., 244 ff., 647–97, 618–45; StadtaL pb 1905, 64b ff.; pb 1908, 168. 36. Moritz William Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbeiters, ed. Paul Göhre (Jena: Diederichs 1905), 226. This autobiography was a valuable source for this study since Bromme’s career unfolded in and around Leipzig. 37. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 235 ff. 38. Ibid. 39. Paul Jostock, “The Long-Term Growth of National Income in Germany,” trans. Charlotte Boschan, in Income and Wealth, series 5, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1955), 103. 40. A. V. Desai, Real Wages in Germany, 1871–1913 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 125. 41. Kroker, Handelsgeschichte, 270–72; Wustmann, Kleine Chronik, 16. 42. Staude, Sie waren stärker, 23; Ida Kisker, Die Fraunearbeit in der Kontern einer Großstadt: Eine Studie über die Leipziger Kontoristinnen, mit einem Anhang über die Berufsvereine der Handlungsgehilfinnen, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, supp. vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1911), 1 ff.; Kroker, Handelsgeschichte, 268. 43. Statistik des Deutschen Reiches: Berufs- und Betriebszählung vom 12.6.1907. Berufsstatistik, vol. 207 (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1907), 4 ff., 29 ff., 193 ff., 248 ff., 275 ff., 342 ff.; Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung, 44. Statistik des Deutschen Reichs only surveys firms that were resident within the city limits. This obscures the immense importance of brown coal production for the Leipzig region. In the nearby Borna area, for instance, brown coal production employed ten thousand workers, mostly navvies, one-third of whom were listed as “Ausländer” from the east (the term

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could mean Slavs from eastern Germany and beyond or merely non-Saxon Germans). See staatsal, ah Borna 5424; staatsal, ahm Borna, Nr. 2871, Bd. 1, Bl. 118–119, 136. 44. Kroker, Handelsgeschichte, 273–278. 45. Hans-Joachim Bieber labels deskilling “the basic fact of labor” in imperial Germany. See Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 1:34 ff., 42. See also Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918, trans. Barbara Weinberger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 12–13. In all the autobiographies of workers that I consulted, shuttling between skilled and unskilled positions is presented as commonplace. 46. Aubin, “Die wirtschaftliche Einheit,” 10; David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 257 ff., 287–89; Eckhard Brockhaus, Zusammensetzung und Neustrukturierung der Arbeiterklasse vor dem ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Trikont, 1975), 12–26; Die Schwereisenindustrie: Ihre Entwicklung und ihre Arbeiter. Nach vorgenommenen Erhebungen im Jahre 1910 bearbeitet und herausgegeben vom Vorstand des deutschen Metallarbeiter-Verbandes (Stuttgart: A. Schlicke, 1912), 70. 47. While the sexual composition of Leipzig’s entire workforce could not be determined, union membership lists indicate that women filled the ranks of the unskilled workforce in disproportionate numbers. Ten percent of Leipzig’s total unionized workforce, women were virtually absent from unions representing the most skilled types of crafts (metalworkers, woodworkers, letterpress printers, construction workers) but were heavily overrepresented in the least skilled trades (bookbinders, textile workers, factory workers). See Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–1918 [figures on prewar Leipzig], 275. 48. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 1, 1911 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1913), 12. 49. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 3, 1913 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1914), 24, 28. 50. Report, “Der Landwirtschaftliche Kreisverein Leipzig,” as printed in the Leipziger Volkszeitung (hereafter lvz), 7 December, 1911. 51. Kisker, Die Fraunearbeit, 1.

1. STANDARDS OF LIVING AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN PREWAR LEIPZIG 1. Since the pioneering studies of Mosca and Pareto, the concept of “elite” has remained surprisingly undertheorized. In what little modern work exists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists fail to agree on even the rudiments of a definition, let alone a framework to explain the formation, rise, fall of and turnover within elites. See, for instance, George E. Marcus, Elites: Ethnographic Issues (Albu-

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querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983); George Moyser and Margaret Wagstaffe, eds., Research Methods for Elite Studies (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), ch. 1; John Scott, ed., Sociology of Elites (Hants, uk: Elgar, 1990); and Eric Carlton, The Few and the Many: A Typology of Elites (Hants, uk: Scolar, 1996). In the absence of guidance from sister disciplines, I have cobbled together the functionalist definition in the text based on what any elite does: rule politically, manage economically, appropriate and dispense surplus, and produce high culture. 2. See the detailed tables and sources in appendix 1. Polish migrant laborers worked seasonally on the estates surrounding Leipzig and earned far less than urban workers. See appendix 1. As they played no role in the revolution, they do not figure prominently in this book. 3. Fr. Tägtmeyer, “Die Entwicklung der Lebensmittelpreise der Stadt Leipzig und ihr Einfluß auf die Kosten der Lebenshaltung von 1894–1912,” in Kosten der Lebenshaltung in deutschen Großstädten, ed. Franz Eulenburg, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. 145, part 1, section 5 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1914), 246. 4. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 3, 1913 (Leipzig: Dunker and Humblot, 1914), 72. 5. Destroyed in a bombing raid in World War II, the completed tax returns are not available for a finer analysis. 6. staatsal, Bleichert, Nr. 201; staatsal, PP-V 3970. These figures correspond exactly to Reich averages for male wageworkers. See Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn: Dietz, 1992), 364, 376–78. 7. Moritz William Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbeiters, ed. Paul Göhre (Jena: Diederichs, 1905), 225. 8. Annaliese Neef, Mühsal ein Leben lang: Zur Situation der Arbeiterfrauen um 1900 (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1988), 92 ff.; Barbara Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent: Women and German Industrialization, 1871–1914 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 113–114; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 358–60. 9. staatsal, Giesecke and Devrient Buchdruckerei, Nrs. 152, 153; staatsal, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Nr. 61; staatsal, Thüringer Gasgesellschaft, Nrs. 792, 763, 766, 788, 756, 754, 918, 929, 953, 982, 738, 731. 10. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 3:72 11. StadtaL, pb 1908, 168. 12. Heinrich August Winkler, Zwischen Marx und Monopolen: Der deutsche Mittelstand vom Kaiserreich zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 18, 32–37. 13. Untersuchungen über die Lage des Handwerks in Deutschland mit besonderer Rücksicht auf seine Konkurrenzfähigkeit gegenüber der Großindustrie, vol. 6, Königreich Sachsen, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. 67 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1897), 145 ff., 201, 319 ff., 550 ff., 244 ff., 647–97, 618–45. 14. StadtaL, pb 1905 64b ff. 15. Untersuchungen über die Lage, 53 ff., 108 ff. 16. See figures in Paul Jostock, “The Long-Term Growth of National Income in

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Germany,” trans. Mrs. Charlotte Boschan. Income and Wealth, series 5, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1955), 108–9. 17. staatsal, Giesecke and Devrient Buchdruckerei, Nrs. 152, 153; staatsal, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Nr. 61; staatsal, Thüringer Gasgesellschaft, Nrs. 792, 763, 766, 788, 756, 754, 918, 929, 953, 982, 738, 731. 18. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge der Stadt Leipzig in der Kriegszeit, 1914–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919), 110 ff. (The first volume contains information on prewar Leipzig.) 19. At the start of a career, individuals in these professions were actually paid far less than 3500 marks annually, obliging them to rely on family money and partially explaining why such jobs were closed to children of parents with modest means. 20. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 3:72. I examine later in this chapter the portion of the elite that was so wealthy it did not draw a salary but rather lived from independent means. 21. Elisabeth Dietzmann, Die Leipziger Einrichtungen der Armenpflege bis Uebernahme der Armenverwaltung durch die Stadt, 1881 (Leipzig: Steiger, 1932), 154–55. 22. Verwaltungsbericht der Stadt Leipzig für die Jahre 1909–1913 (Leipzig: Schunke, Rossberg’sche Buchhandlung, 1914), 456 ff., 673 ff. 23. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht des Rates der Stadt Leipzig für die Kriegsjahre 1914–1918 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 1:363 (volume 1 contains information on years directly before the war). 24. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 713–14. 25. Verwaltungsbericht der Stadt Leipzig, 672 ff. 26. Unless otherwise noted, the following discussion of the various federal insurance schemes relies on Gerhard A. Ritter, Social Welfare in Germany and Britain: Origins and Development, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1983), 103 ff.; Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 708–12; Jürgen Tampke, “Bismarck’s Social Legislation: A Genuine Breakthrough?” in The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany, ed. W. J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Mock (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 71–83; George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 125–31. 27. This popular adage is quoted by Alfred Kelly, ed., The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 19. Most evidence indicates that the workers themselves—as opposed to union and party functionaries—did not think highly of the other Reich insurance programs either. See, for instance, Richard J. Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities: Pub Conversations in Hamburg,” in Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War, ed. R. J. Evans (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 157–58; Jean H. Quataert, “Workers’ Reaction to Social Insurance: The Case of Homeworkers in Saxon Oberlausitz in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (IWK) 20 (March 1984): 17–35. 28. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 397; Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in


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Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 2:26–27. 29. Ritter, Social Welfare, 103 ff.; Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 709–10, 715. Elsewhere in an otherwise splendid book Ritter and Tenfelde contradict this claim several times. First, they admit that municipal, Land, and federal governments together redistributed only 5 percent of the gnp, money that ruling elites then reclaimed by levying high customs duties on imports (especially food products) and regressive taxes on consumer goods. Second, they concede that the impact of worker health and safety legislation was negligible, serving only as a precedent for more serious efforts undertaken after the war. Last, they acknowledge that this legislative beginning lost momentum after 1895. See Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 151, 393, 397. 30. Tägtmeyer, “Die Entwicklung,” 232 31. Ibid., 246 32. For the reasons examined in the introduction, the cost of living was relatively high in Leipzig. In other big German cities, working families could subsist on about 100 marks less per year than their counterparts in Leipzig. See the budgets of fortytwo worker families in Erhebung von Wirtschaftsrechnungen minderbemittelter Familien im Deutschen Reiche: Bearbeitet im Kaiserlichen Statistischen Amte, ed. Arbeiterstatistik (Berlin: Heymanns, 1909), 206–9. 33. Tägtmeyer, “Die Entwicklung,” 238 ff.; Erhebung von Wirtschaftsrechnungen, 101–102. 34. Leipziger Adreßbücher, 1871 and 1913. The Adreßbücher, a treasure trove of information listing all heads of household, their occupations, addresses, whether they owned or rented their dwellings, and a host of other facts, constitutes an important source for much of the social analysis below, especially in this chapter. For a discussion of method and sources, see appendix 2. 35. L. Niethammer and F. Brüggemeier, “Wie wohnten die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976): 90. This article contains a good deal of information pertaining specifically to Leipzig. 36. A. V. Desai, Real Wages in Germany, 1871–1913 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 124. These figures show that housing in Leipzig was expensive compared to other German cities. 37. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 582–600; Paul Göhre, Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche: Eine praktische Studie (Leipzig: F. W. Grunow, 1891), 18–19. Göhre went on to describe a typical apartment in a proletarian neighborhood of Chemnitz—a Saxon industrial boomtown not dissimilar to Leipzig—in these terms: “It is difficult to label the rooms that these people possess as ‘family apartments.’ Or can one use this term to describe a two-windowed room and an attached one-windowed alcove? . . . The tiniest and least inhabitable apartments occupied the numerous back buildings of these new streets, which were not to be outdone in terms of the poverty of their inner and outer appearance and their surrounding area. For this reason [workers] spoke . . . only about their ‘rooms’ [Stube], not about their ‘apartments.’ Significantly nicer, larger, and cozier were the apartments that were composed of one room and two alcoves . . . or two heatable rooms and one alcove. Nevertheless

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these, too—as in all cases—often lacked a kitchen, but on the other hand they possessed at least a kind of loft, that is, a narrow protruding board under the roof outfitted with a hatch door” (ibid.). 38. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 582–600. 39. Niethammer and Brüggemeier, “Wie wohnten die Arbeiter,” 90. 40. Ibid., 95 ff.; Stephan Bleek, “Mobilität und Seßhaftigkeit in deutschen Großstädten während der Urbanisierung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1 (1989): 10–31; Dieter Langewiesche and Friedrich Lerger, “Internal Migration: Persistence and Mobility,” in Population, Labour, and Migration in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany, ed. Klaus J. Bade (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), 95; David F. Crew, Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 61 ff. 41. Statistisches Jahrbuch deutscher Städte, vol. 20, 1914 (Breslau: Verlag von Wilhelm Gottlieb Korn, 1915), 68, 74. Among big German cities in that year, only Hamburg registered more changes of address than Leipzig (ibid.). 42. That members of the alter Mittelstand would abandon the city only with great reluctance becomes clear when one considers that they owned their homes in higher percentages than the population as a whole and that their livelihoods depended on cultivating a core clientele (Stammkunden, Stammgäste). Recessions might force the poorer among them to change dwellings within Leipzig, but only a catastrophe would force them to leave the city altogether. An examination of long-term geographical mobility in Leipzig bears out this hypothesis, revealing that of all groups, the alter Mittelstand remained in Leipzig in the highest numbers. For each group, one hundred names were randomly selected from the 1893 Adreßbuch. Twenty years later, 24 percent of unskilled workers remained in Leipzig, 38 percent of skilled workers, 43 percent of the alter Mittelstand, 34 percent of lower white collars, and 34 percent of elites (data from Adreßbücher, 1893 and 1913). 43. Statistisches Jahrbuch deutscher Städte, 20:68. 44. All data for these calculations was taken from Tägtmeyer, “Die Entwicklung,” 211; and Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 3:74. 45. Ibid. 46. Tägtmeyer, “Die Entwicklung,” 211. 47. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–1918 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 10. 48. Ibid., 42–43. 49. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 152–54, esp. 575. 50. G. Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 83 ff. 51. See the complaints of the estate owners of Mitteldeutschland about the exodus of native labor from the countryside to the cities in lvz 7 Dec. 1911. 52. StadtaL, Thomasschule, Schülerverzeichnis 1912; StadtaL, Nikolaischule, Nr. 136, Schülerverzeichnis 1910, Bl. 3 ff.; Jahresbericht des Königin-Carola-Gymnasiums (2. staatliches Gymnasium) in Leipzig für das Schuljahr 1909–1910 (Leipzig: Jahn, 1911), 18–26. Results for Jahresbericht 1910–11 were identical. About three-quarters of the


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children of white collars had fathers who were civil servants (as opposed to employees in the private sector). Of the nineteen working fathers sending a son to these gymnasia, only one was an unskilled laborer. 53. For the high tuitions and lack of scholarships at such schools, see StadtaL, Nikolaischule, Nr. 135, “Bericht über das Schuljahr 1910/11”; see also Jahresbericht des Königin-Carola-Gymnasiums, 26, 29. 54. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 719 55. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 5:149. 56. Ibid., 147–48. 57. Ibid. 58. Festschrift zur Feier des 50 jährigen Bestehens der Höheren Schule für Frauenberufe zu Leipzig (Leipzig: Hartmann and Wolf, 1925), 17–64. 59. Margaret Kraul, “Bildung und Bürgerlichkeit,” in Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland in europäischem Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Ute Frevert (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 3:52–53. 60. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 5:152. The figure for Leipzig’s private gymnasia (schooling 15 percent of gymnasial students) was only 1:10 (176). 61. See the autobiography of the Lausitz textile worker Richard Richter in Adolf Levenstein, Aus der Tiefe: Arbeiterbriefe. Beiträge zur Seelenanalyse moderner Arbeiter (Berlin: Morgen, 1909), 82. See also Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 723–24. Besides the educational system, the apprenticeship system presented another obstacle to upward social mobility. For example, if a sixteen-year-old was fortunate enough to obtain a coveted apprenticeship as a clerk at the Thüringer Gasgesellschaft, he then faced the prospect of three years of annual pay of only 300–780 marks per year with no health insurance before being considered for a full-time position. For each applicant, the company required a written promise from the father that he would supplement the boy’s stipend to ensure subsistence. Few working families were in a position to make such a long-term sacrifice. See staatsal, Thüringer Gasgesellschaft, Nrs. 792, 763, 766, 788, 756, 754, 918, 929, 953, 982, 738, 731. Young August Bromme discovered this bitter fact when he was rejected for an apprenticeship in a Leipzig bookshop because of his parents’ lack of means (Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 89–90). 62. Hartmut Kaelble, “Sozialer Aufstieg in den usa und Deutschland, 1900–1960: Ein vergleichender Forschungsbericht,” in Sozialgeschichte Heute, ed. H. U. Wehler (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1974, 525–42. 63. Tips from fellow workers, especially neighbors, were the best and sometimes only way to obtain information on job openings. See Göhre, Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter, 70–71; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 104, 112. 64. For similar figures in Bochum, see Crew, Town, 75–87. Not all impediments to upward mobility were external: some workers viewed the prospect with reservations, either out of loyalty to their own class or, more likely, lack of self-confidence. See Karl Ditt, Industrialisierung, Arbeiterschaft, und Arbeiterbewegung in Bielefeld, 1830–1914 (Dortmund: Gesellschaft für Westfälische Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1982), 218 ff. 65. Some children reported in the Polizeimeldebücher fail to show up in the Adreßbuch of 1913, probably because their families moved out of the city. I excluded

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these cases from the examination, including only those children whose occupations as of early adulthood could be determined. For that reason, 100 percent of the cohorts appear again in 1913 (though that figure drops off sharply by 1928). 66. For similarly low rates of intergenerational social mobility in Bochum, see Crew, Town, 87–90. For significantly higher rates in Bielefeld, see Ditt, Industrialisierung, 188–90. 67. Hartmut Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung des Proletariats als Klasse: Strukturuntersuchung über das Leipziger Proletariat während der industriellen Revolution (Berlin, Akademie, 1978), 132–33. One could quibble with aspects of Zwahr’s method. For instance, why are “Lohnkellner,” “Gärtner,” and “Wärter” counted as coming from a nonproletarian background while “Soldat” and “verabschiedeter Soldat” (who in fact were mostly peasant lads) are counted as coming from proletarian families? Nevertheless, the sheer size of his sample partially offsets some of these problems and provides a roughly accurate picture of social mobility in midcentury Leipzig. 68. A glimpse at the 1870 Adreßbuch entry for Elisenstraße 13b illustrates this pattern: floor front building Ground floor 1st 2d 3d back building Ground floor 1st 2d 3d

name

profession

Ehlig, W. M. Blech, J. O. G. Lange, E. Krumbiegel, C. F Moritz, F. A. Wirth, J. C.

Restaurateur Kaufmann Teacher Teacher’s widow Kaufmann Wild game merchant

Müller, J. W. F. G. Gutwasser, C. M. V. Beil, F. Havelland, J. Steinborn, L.

Carpenter Postal secretary Postal assistant Typesetter Lackey [Aufwärter]

69. C. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 39; Arthur Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende: Erinnerungen eines Veteranen (Berlin: Tribüne, 1977). 70. Heinz Reif, “Arbeiter und Unternehmer in Städten des westlichen Ruhrgebiets, 1850–1930: Räumliche Aspekte einer Klassenbeziehung,” in Arbeiter und Bürger im 19. Jahrhundert: Varianten ihres Verhältnisses im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986), 151–182. Dolores L. Augustine, “Arriving in the Upper Class: The Wealthy Business Elite of Wilhelmine Germany,” in The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century, ed. David Blackbourn and Richard Evans (London: Routledge, 1991), 50–51.

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2. EXPERIENCE IN THE SOCIAL REALM IN PREWAR LEIPZIG 1. Moritz William Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbeiters, ed. Paul Göhre (Jena: Diederichs, 1905). 2. Arthur Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende: Erinnerungen eines Veteranen (Berlin: Tribüne, 1977). 3. Paul Göhre, Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche: Eine praktische Studie (Leipzig: F. W. Grunow, 1891); Minna Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin: Eine practische Studie (Berlin: Leiser, 1893). 4. Göhre, Drei Monate, 38–39. For similar descriptions in Mitteldeutschland, see Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 70 ff.; and Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 57–61. 5. Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende, 72. 6. Susanne Schottke, “Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung des Tauscher: Ein Volksfest und seine Wandlungen,” Feste und Feiern: Zum Wandel städtischer Festkultur in Leipzig, ed. Katrin Keller (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1994); Gustav Wustmann, “Der Tauchischer Jahrmarkt,” in Leipzig: Ein Städte-Lesebuch, ed. Esther Gallwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1989), 598–601. 7. Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende, 47. 8. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 74. 9. Jürgen Kocka, “Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit als Problem der deutschen Geschichte vom späten 18. zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” in Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1987), 33. 10. Vereins-Adreßbuch für Leipzig und Umgebung: 1907 (Leipzig: Wedekind, 1907). 11. StadtaL, pb 1906–10 (sections on the Ortskrankenkasse). 12. Werner Sombart, Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung, 8th ed. (Jena: Fischer, 1919), 207–8. 13. StadtaL, pb 1906, 44b; pb 1908, 70; pb 1913, 55. The chamber of commerce supported small retailers in their efforts against the Coop. See Jahresberichte der Handelskammer zu Leipzig, Jahre 1905, 1908, 1912 (Leipzig: Handelskammer zu Leipzig, 1905, 1908, 1912). 14. StadtaL, pb 1910, 55 ff.; pb 1906 27 ff. 15. StadtaL, pb 1908, 66 ff.; pb 1913, 53. 16. Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende, 90–91. 17. StadtaL, pb 1909, 27–8; 1910, 37 ff.; pb 1913, 133 ff. 18. This was the rule throughout Germany. See Vernon Lidtke, “Burghers, Workers, and Problems of Class Relationships, 1870–1914: Germany in Comparative Perspective,” in Arbeiter und Bürger im 19. Jahrhundert: Varianten ihres Verhältnisses im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986), 43. 19. Section on Vereine in StadtaL, pb 1905–14 20. Allgemeiner Turnverein zu Leipzig von 1845: Jahrbuch 1915 (Leipzig, 1915), 60–103.

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21. Abteilung Leipzig Deutscher Kolonialgesellschaft: Verzeichniß der Mitglieder (Leipzig, 1899–1906). 22. Only in the Polytechnical Society did alte Mittelständler mix on an equal footing with lower white collars and elites. Financed by the city and state, the society ran a business school for adolescents, held lectures on technical and commercial matters, and sponsored social evenings, usually celebrating patriotic events such as the kaiser’s birthday. Although the membership was mixed, alte Mittelständler held only four of the fifteen seats on the governing board. See Polytechnische Gesellschaft, Gewerbeverein (Leipzig, 1911). 23. Vereins-Adreßbuch für Leipzig, 61–65. In Germany as a whole, white collars did not mix much socially with other nonworker subgroups. See Mario König, Hannes Siegrist, and Rudolf Vetterli, “Angestellte am Rande des Bürgertums: Kaufleute und Techniker in Deutschland und in der Schweiz,” in vol. 1 of Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Ute Frevert (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1988). 24. For more on both of these organizations, see the next chapter, on politics. 25. Werner Scholz, “Die Rolle der Kommunalpolitk in Leipzig bei der Vorbereitung des ersten Weltkrieges,” Militärgeschichte 24, no. 4 (1985): 327. 26. Abteilung Leipzig, passim. 27. Vereins-Adreßbuch für Leipzig, 68–70. 28. Joachim Schlesinger, Die Freimaurer in der Stadt Leipzig: Vesuch einer Annäherung (Leipzig: Leipzig Vereins-Anzeiger, 1993), 32–72. 29. Ernst Kroker, Die Gesellschaft Harmonie in Leipzig, 1776–1926 (Leipzig, 1926), 1, 67. 30. Bildungsromans such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich, Adalbert Stifters’s Nachsommer, and Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg all trace the development of the main character’s Persönlichkeit. 31. Wolfgang Beutin, Deutsche Literaturgeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 3d ed. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1989), 259; Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 15–18. 32. Susanne Schötz, “Feste und Feiern des Kaufmännischen Vereins zu Leipzig,” in Feste und Feiern: Zum Wandel städtischer Festkultur in Leipzig, ed. Katrin Keller (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1994), 174 ff. 33. For the high rate of elite membership in this club, see the thumbnail biographies of Leipzig’s elite in appendix 3. 34. The second cohort had to be spread over the four years running from 1910 through 1913 because none of these years taken singly provided the requisite number of two hundred children with professions listed for both parents and godparents. 35. Even the social background of female godparents was provided in that for each the source notes her job or that of her husband. 36. In fewer cases, parents select acquaintances above their social level so that the child will have a powerful guardian in the event that he or she is orphaned. See, for instance, Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 242. Figure 2.1, then, probably overestimates the

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degree of cross-group friendship because such relationships are based less on real affection than on ambition. 37. Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende, 117. 38. Göhre, Drei Monate, 2 39. Göhre, Drei Monate, 125, 152, 206. 40. Göhre, Drei Monate, 10. 41. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 64. 42. Pfarramt der Kirche Hohen Thekla, Trauungenbuch 1896–1914. The cohort is spread over eighteen years because no year taken singly in the records of the Hohen Thekla church provides enough marriages for a statistically reliable sample. Limitations of time did not permit obtaining samples from more parishes in Leipzig. When assigning social background to the bride, the occupation of the bride’s father was determining because a young woman from a laboring family employed, say, as sales help would have been at that moment lower white collar but would have had to quit this job and move into part-time manual labor (above all, home work) after the birth of her first child. Thus her position as a lower white collar in her teenaged years and early twenties would not represent a permanent move upward. When no occupation for her father or mother was given, her occupation at the time of marriage was determining, even if at that moment she was a lower white collar.

3. POLITICS IN PREWAR LEIPZIG 1. Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 39–55. 2. Walter Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930; reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 15. 3. Richard Lipinski, Der Kampf um die politische Macht in Sachsen (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1920), 6–8; Fabian, Klassenkampf, 15; Karsten Rudolph, Die sächsische Sozialdemokratie vom Kaiserreich zur Republik, 1871–1923 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1995), 53. 4. Lipinski, Der Kampf, 6–8; Gerhard A. Ritter, “Das Wahlrecht und die Wählerschaft der Sozialdemokratie im Königreich Sachsen, 1867–1914,” in Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Sozialdemokratie und Freie Gewerkschaften im Parteiensystem und Sozialmilieu des Kaiserreichs, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter and Elisabeth MüllerLuckner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990), 84 ff.; Rudolph, Die sächsische Sozialdemokratie, 58 ff. 5. Ernst Kroker, Handelsgeschichte der Stadt Leipzig: Die Entwicklung des Leipziger Handels und der Leipziger Messen von der Gründung der Stadt bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig: W. Bielefeld, 1925), 228; Hartmut Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung des Proletariats als Klasse: Strukturuntersuchung über das Leipziger Proletariat während der industriellen Revolution (Berlin, Akademie, 1978), 218. 6. Revidierte Städteordnung vom 24. April 1873 nebst darauf bezüglichen gesetzlichen Bestimmungen sowie Ortstatut der Stadt Leipzig und Pensions-Regulativ für die

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Stadt Leipzig vom 20. Dezember 1877 nebst sonstigen ortstatuarischen Bestimmungen und Regulativen, ed. Stadtschreiber Cerutti (Leipzig: Bär and Hermann, 1878), 7–8, 15, 20. 7. Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 10. 8. For a comparison of the size of the suffrage before and after the revolution, see Mitteilungsblatt des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrats Leipzig für das 19. Armeekorps, ed. A, nos. 2 and 9 (1918–1919). 9. Lipinski, Der Kampf, 6; see also StadtaL, pb 1906, 18. For the remainder of part 1 the Polizeiberichte will constitute a valuable source, so a few words should be said about them. At the end of each year the police prepared a confidential report on all political events in Leipzig for the mayor, deputy mayor, chief of police, city senate, and royal authorities in Dresden. These annual reports averaged 150 pages in length and concentrated on “subversives,” above all the spd and unions. They draw on a range of sources, including spies in these organizations, and exhibit fine political judgment and writing style. 10. StadtaL, pb 1906, 18; Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 1 (commenting on prewar conditions). 11. Revidierte, 14, 17, 23–24, 28. 12. StadtaL, pb 1907, 14, 108–9; pb 1908, 116 ff.; pb 1910, 157–59; pb 1914, 117 ff. Alter Mittelstand political activity in Leipzig was more or less typical for other big German cities. See Heinrich August Winkler, Zwischen Marx und Monopolen: Der deutsche Mittelstand vom Kaiserreich zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 7–11, 24, 25–26, 29. 13. The city’s elite kept its distance from the movement. Leipzig’s most public anti-Semites, Dr. Alexander Bennewitz (senior teacher at a municipal Realschule), Otto Klötzsch (head of the German Social Union), and Fritzsch, were not members of any of Leipzig’s leading social clubs. See appendix 3. 14. Alter Mittelstand deference to social betters and tight alliance with the Conservative Party were the norm across Germany. See Winkler, Zwischen, 7–11, esp. 24; and Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn: Dietz, 1992), 144. 15. StadtaL, pb 1905, 5 ff.; pb 1910, 152–53, 162; pb 1914, 4–5. 16. Vereins-Adreßbuch für Leipzig und Umgebung: 1907 (Leipzig: Wedekind, 1907), 54 ff. 17. StadtaL, pb 1907, 57 ff. 18. StadtaL, pb 1907, 60–61; pb 1913, 61–62. 19. The main planks of the chamber of commerce’s program included abolition of welfare programs because the expense undermined the ability of German business to compete in world markets, enactment of legislation discriminating against consumer cooperatives, termination of the special representative bodies of the artisans (Handwerkskammer) because artisans should be represented by the chamber of commerce, repeal of laws requiring a day off from work on Sunday, end of factory inspec-


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tions, abolition of home-work regulations, and expansion of Germany’s worldwide empire. In a change from its position of free trade in the 1880s and 1890s, the chamber became ever more favorable to high duties on imports. See Jahresberichte der Handelskammer zu Leipzig, Jahre 1905, 1908, 1912 (Leipzig: Handelskammer zu Leipzig, 1905, 1908, 1912). For its earlier free trade position, see Gutachten der Handelskammer zu Leipzig über einige auf den Zoll-Tarif bezügliche Petitionen vom 18. Februar 1876 (Leipzig, 1876). 20. StadtaL, pb 1909, 119. On the Hansa-Bund, see the introduction. 21. StadtaL, pb 1908, 113 ff.; pb 1910, 153. 22. StadtaL, pb 1909, 114; pb 1910, 154–55. 23. StadtaL, pb 1905, 5b; pb 1914, 4–5, 14; pb 1909, 114; pb 1910, 154–55. While mostly supporting the Progressive People’s Party in electoral politics, private-sector lowerwhite-collar employees (Angestellten) were capable of supporting more conservative organizations. In the 1907 elections for employee representatives to Leipzig’s Business Court (Kaufmannsgericht, a nonbinding body mediating disputes between salaried employees and employers), 74 percent of 6,562 lower white collars eligible to vote participated. The results of the election therefore provide a good idea of the political outlook of this group in Leipzig. Fifty-five percent cast their ballots for candidates of the right-wing Association of German-National Employees, 36 percent for the centrist Association of German Employees, and only 9 percent for the social democratic Central Association of Employees of Germany (the remaining votes went for smaller parties and independent candidates). The police noted moreover that a large portion of support for the anti-Semitic parties came from lower-white-collar employees. See StadtaL, pb 1907, 93, 107–8. 24. StadtaL, pb 1906, 5, 52; pb 1913, 19–20; pb 1914, 8. 25. See Rudolph, Die sächsische Sozialdemokratie, 53. 26. StadtaL, pb 1907, 14. 27. StadtaL, pb 1906, 31; Vereins-Adreßbuch für Leipzig, 65–68. 28. See all Polizeiberichte between 1905 and 1914. A good example of this general assessment is found in StadtaL, pb 1907, 29. 29. StadtaL, pb 1910, 33–35; Evans, The Feminist Movement, 37–41, 93. 30. Revidierte, 7. 31. The lvz obtained a copy of one of these letters and printed it in its 6 December 1911 edition. 32. Jürgen Kocka, “Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit als Problem der deutschen Geschichte vom späten 18. zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” in Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1987), 33. 33. Zeitschrift für den Grundbesitz: Organ des Verbands der Hausbesitzer-Vereine Leipzigs, 1 September 1908, 227–28. 34. Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 18. 35. Moritz William Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbeiters, ed. Paul Göhre (Jena: Diederichs, 1905), 285.

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36. Paul Göhre, Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche: Eine praktische Studie (Leipzig: F. W. Grunow, 1891), 154–55. 37. StadtaL, pb 1906, 27 ff.; pb 1910, 55 ff. For a similar trend in Germany as a whole, see Günther Roth, “Die kulturellen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie im kaiserlichen Deutschland,” in Moderne Deutsche Sozialgeschichte, ed. H. U. Wehler (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1975), 350; Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung in Wilhelminischen Reich: Die Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands und die Freien Gewerkschaften (Berlin: Colloquium, 1963), 224–26. 38. Göhre, Drei Monate, 90–91. 39. Workers across Germany shared this hunger for education. See the six thousand proletarian responses to a questionnaire on their lives as presented in Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage. Mit besonder Berücksichtigung der sozialpsychologischen Seite des modernen Grossbetriebes und der psychophysischen Einwirkungen auf die Arbeiter (Munich: Reinhardt, 1912), 175–212; see also worker autobiographies in idem, Aus der Tiefe: Arbeiterbriefe. Beiträge zur Seelenanalyse moderner Arbeiter (Berlin: Morgen, 1909), 7 ff., 20–21, 87, 88–89; as well as in Jochen Loreck, Wie man früher Sozialdemokrat wurde (Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft, 1977), 174–76. 40. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 737. See also H. Wiedner, “Soldatenmißhandlungen im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich, 1890–1914,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 22 (1982): 175–85. 41. See chapter 1. 42. Göhre, Drei Monate, 111. 43. Minna Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin: Eine practische Studie (Berlin: Leiser, 1893), 71 ff. 44. Dieter Langewiesche and Klaus Schönhoven, “Arbeiterbibliotheken und Arbeiterlektüre im Wilhelminischen Deutschland,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976): 133 ff., 187. Much of the article focuses on Leipzig. 45. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 285. For a similar point, see Langewiesche and Schönhoven, “Arbeiterbibliotheken,” 136. 46. Göhre, Drei Monate, 112. 47. StadtaL, pb 1910, 55 ff. 48. See Langewiesche and Schönhoven, “Arbeiterbibliotheken,” 194 ff., for figures on Leipzig. The only exception to this rule was the popularity of August Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus, especially among women. This tract reached more worker readers than all other political/historical/sociological works combined. Ibid., 195. 49. StadtaL, pb 1910, 55 ff.; pb 1906, 27 ff. 50. Levenstein, Arbeiterfrage, 286–322. 51. Arthur Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende: Erinnerungen eines Veteranen (Berlin: Tribüne, 1977), 47. 52. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 87. 53. Göhre, Drei Monate, 3. 54. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 68. 55. Göhre, Drei Monate, 129. 56. Göhre, Drei Monate, 128. This sentiment filled urban workers across Germany. See Levenstein, Arbeiterfrage, 286–322.


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57. Hendrik de Man, Gegen den Strom: Memoiren eines europäischen Sozialists (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953), 81–82; Friedrich Stampfer, Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse: Aufzeichnungen aus meinem Leben (Cologne: Verlag für Politik und Wissenschaft, 1957), 42–43. 58. StadtaL, pb 1907, 122. 59. See coverage in the lvz, lnn, and ltb from 1910 to 1914 on January 28, the day after Wilhelm’s birthday. Evidence from other cities indicates that the kaiser was not popular among workers, though many would have tolerated a constitutional monarchy such as Britain’s. See Richard J. Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities: Pub Conversations in Hamburg,” in Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War, ed. R. J. Evans (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 161–63. 60. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Königreich Sachsen (1911) (Dresden: Heinrich, 1912), 16, and Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Königreich Sachsen (1913) (Dresden: Heinrich, 1914), 208–9. 61. StadtaL, pb 1910, 124. 62. StadtaL, pb 1906, 45b. Male proletarian impiety appears to have been the rule across urban Germany during this period. See Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 770 ff.; Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities,” 156; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 220. 63. StadtaL, pb 1907, 66. 64. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 220. 65. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 75 ff. 66. See, for example, StadtaL, pb 1909, 170 ff. 67. Jahresbericht der Ortsgruppe Leipzig des Alldeutschen Verbands (Leipzig, 1900). 68. Max Lange, ed., Volkstümliche Feier des Sedan-Tages zu Leipzig: die Leipziger Sedan-Feier 1870–1895, in Tabellen dargestellt (Leipzig: Reusche, 1895). 69. See coverage in lvz, 17–20 October 1913. 70. Peter Hutter, “Die feinste Barbarei”: Das Völkerschlachtdenkmal bei Leipzig (Mainz: Zabern, 1990), 80 ff., 183 ff. Freemasons in Leipzig played a leading role in the Patriotic Union. The designer of the monument was Clemens Thieme, a member of the Mason’s Apollo lodge. See Die Freimaurerloge Balduin (Leipzig: Bär Hermann, 1926), 212. 71. Göhre, Drei Monate, 118 ff. 72. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 132. 73. StadtaL, pb 1914, 17 ff.; C. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 43. 74. StadtaL, pb 1914, 17 ff. 75. Abteilung Leipzig Deutscher Kolonialgesellschaft: Verzeichniß der Mitglieder (Leipzig, 1899–1906). 76. StadtaL, pb 1905–14, section on anti-Semitic parties. Evans finds similarly tolerant workers in Hamburg; see “Proletarian Mentalities,” 167–73. 77. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 71 ff. 78. StadtaL, pb 1906, 30 ff.; pb 1907, 29; pb 1908, 87; pb 1910, 33–35; pb 1913, 17. 79. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 350–68. For similar attitudes in Hamburg, see Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities,” 164–66.

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80. StadtaL, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 2706, Bl. 57, as cited in Jutta Seidel, “Leipziger Maifeier, Gewerkschafts-, und Arbeitervereinsfeste im letzten Jahrzehnt des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Feste und Feiern: Zum Wandel städtischer Festkultur in Leipzig, ed. Katrin Keller (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1994), 188. 81. Police note this as if it were self-evident. StadtaL, pbe 1900–14, sections on spd. See also Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende, 100; Göhre, Drei Monate, 103, 108–11; Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 71 ff. Full support for the spd characterized the stance of almost all urban workers Reichwide. See Levenstein, Arbeiterfrage, 286–322; idem, Aus der Tiefe: Arbeiterbriefe. Beiträge zur Seelenanalyse moderner Arbeiter (Berlin: Morgen, 1909), 17, 20–21, 22; and Alfred Kelly, ed., The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 276; Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities,” 148–51. 82. StadtaL, pb 1906, 36 ff., 68. 83. For a similar finding in Hamburg, see Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities,” 180 ff. For the Reich as a whole, see Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 1:63. 84. Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm (Berlin, 1891; reprint, Berlin: Dietz, 1965). 85. For examples of how available discourses shape popular consciousness and expression, see E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?” Social History 3 (May 1978): 133–65; William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Politics, Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1780–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). This insight of course predates the linguistic turn in labor historiography: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International, 1963), 15. 86. The following discussion of the national spd relies on Helga Grebing, Arbeiterbewegung: Sozialer Protest und kollektive Interessenvertretung bis 1914 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1985), 106–20; Dick Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914,” in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1985), 128 ff.; Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1972), 111 ff. 87. Robert Michels, “Die deutsche sozialdemokratische Parteimitgliedschaft und


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soziale Zusammensetzung,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 1906: 537 ff., 556. 88. Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1899). 89. Karl Kautsky, Der Weg zur Macht, 3d ed. (Berlin: Buchhandlung “Vorwärts,” 1920). In a highly revealing moment he characterized the spd as a “revolutionary, but not a revolution-making party.” See Gerhard A. Ritter, “Sozialistische Parteien in Deutschland zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik,” in Staat und Gesellschaft im politischen Wandel: Beiträge zur Geschichte der modernen Welt, ed. Werner Pöls (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 109 n. 32. 90. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 80 ff. 91. Ibid., 225–62. 92. Jürgen Kocka, “Problems of Working-Class Formation in Germany: The Early Years, 1800–1875,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 343 ff. 93. Fritz Staude, Sie waren stärker: Der Kampf der Leipziger Sozialdemokratie in der Zeit des Sozialistengesetzes, 1878–1890. (Leipzig: veb Bibliographisches Institut, 1969), 73–117. 94. Wolfgang Beutin, Deutsche Literaturgeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 3d ed. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1989), 305. 95. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 35 n. 29. 96. StadtaL, pb 1913, 24–31. 97. Ibid. 98. StadtaL, pb 1914, 17. For a finding of cooperation between the lvz and local party leadership, see Karsten Rudolph and Manfred Hötzel, “Richard Lipinski (1867–1936): Demokratischer Sozialist und Organisator politischer Macht,” in Demokratie und Emanzipation zwischen Saale und Elbe: Beiträge zur Geschichte der sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung bis 1933, ed. Helga Grebing, Hans Mommsen, and Karsten Rudolph (Essen: Klartext, 1993), 241. 99. StadtaL, pbe 1905–1913, sections reviewing spd. 100. StadtaL, pb 1914, 6–7. 101. Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende, 101. 102. Thomas Adam and Michael Rudloff, eds. (with assistance of Jürgen Schlimper), Leipzig: Wiege der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Metropol, 1996), p. 114 n. 254. 103. Rudolph and Hötzel, “Richard Lipinski,” passim. 104. Michels, “Die deutsche sozialdemokratische Parteimitgliedschaft,” 534. See also StadtaL, all pbe 1905–14, sections on spd. 105. Dieter Fricke, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung, 1869–1914: Ein Handbuch über ihre Organisation und Tätigkeit im Klassenkampf (East Berlin: Dietz, 1976), 273. 106. Michels, “Die deutsche sozialdemokratie Parteimitgliedschaft,” 504, 509. In that youngish, male workers composed the rank and file, however, the Leipzig chapter resembled urban counterparts across Germany. See ibid., 471 ff., 502 ff., 518 ff.

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107. Carmen Georgi, “Das Wirken der Leipziger Sozialdemokratie unter den Bedingungen der relativ friedlichen Entwicklungsphase des deutschen Imperialismus in den Jahren 1900–07” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Leipzig, 1984), 11 ff. 108. StadtaL, pb 1906, 36 ff., 68. 109. StadtaL, pb 1906, 21; pb 1913, 14. Bromme describes how as a teenager distributing socialist literature in the countryside south of Leipzig he was sometimes physically attacked. See Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 190–92. 110. StadtaL, pb 1914, 33. 111. After 1908 the new Reich Associational Law allowed women in all Länder to belong to political organizations. Until that time, only Saxony and Hamburg permitted women to join such groups. See Jean Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 146. 112. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 34; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 358–60. 113. See the autobiography of Lausitz textile worker Richard Richter in Levenstein, Aus der Tiefe, 88. See also Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 16; Kelly, German Worker, passim, especially 114–115; Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee, eds., The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 269; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 223, 227 ff. 114. StadtaL, pb 1908, quoting the lvz. 115. StadtaL, pb 1905, 15–17. All other Polizeiberichte until 1914 likewise disclose that the local party never made issues of concern to women a priority. 116. StadtaL, pb 1905, 35. 117. Quoted in Evans, Feminist Movement, 266. 118. StadtaL, pb 1906, 30 ff.; pb 1907, 29; pb 1908, 87; pb 1910, 33–35; pb 1913, 17. 119. StadtaL, pb 1913, 4–7. Arthur Heimburger, a young Social Democrat in Leipzig at that time, also argues that the city’s party leadership stood to the right of the rank and file. See Heimburger, Um die Jahrhundertwende, 102. 120. StadtaL, pb 1906, 8–10; pb 1908, 76. 121. StadtaL, pb 1905 7 ff.; pb 1906, 3 ff. On the Mannheim conference, see Schorske, German Social Democracy, 47–52. 122. StadtaL, pb 1905–1914, sections on social democracy, especially reports on May Day celebrations, above all that of 1908 in pb 1908, 14–15. See also de Man, Gegen den Strom, 81–82. 123. StadtaL, pb 1913, 24–31. For a portrayal of a much more radical spd leadership in Leipzig—a portrayal resting on no archival sources—see Rudloff and Adam, Leipzig, 70–72. 124. StadtaL, pb 1908, 3; “Wahldemonstrationen in Leipzig: Mit Abbilder,” Der Leipziger 3 (1908): 1346 ff. For a very similar description of police-supervised and increasingly tame May Day protests, see StadtaL, pb 1914, 14–15. 125. StadtaL, pb 1910, 115. 126. For a finding of moderation in local spd leaderships elsewhere, see Adelheid von Saldern, “Sozialdemokratische Kommunalpolitik in der wilhelminischen Zeit: Die Bedeutung der Kommunalpolitik für die Durchsetzung des Reformismus in der spd,” in Kommunalpolitik und Sozialdemokratie: Der Beitrag des demokratischen

4. WAGE AND SAL ARY REL ATIONSHIPS

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Sozialismus zur kommunalen Selbstverwaltung, ed. Karl-Heinz Naßmacher (Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft, 1977), 18–62. For a more radical local, see Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 167–250. 127. Cited in Rudloff and Adam, Leipzig, 100. 128. Kocka, “Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit,” 33. 129. All above information on Reichstag elections from StadtaL, pb 1907, 6; and pb 1906, 19–22b. This pattern of Reichstag elections in Leipzig supports Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s explanation of politics at the national level, above all his concepts of Sammlungspolitik and “social imperialism.” See his The German Empire, 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (New York: Berg, 1985), 90–99, 170–79. 130. StadtaL, pb 1905, 1 ff.; pb 1907, 15 ff.; pb 1909, 1 ff. 131. StadtaL, pb 1906, 18; pb 1910, 8–10. 132. StadtaL, pb 1910, 94, 96; pb 1909, section on published material. 133. StadtaL, pb 1908, 82–83; pb 1909, 112; pb 1913, 21–22; pb 1914, 14–15 134. StadtaL, pb 1907, 68 ff.; pb 1908, 82–83; pb 1909, 41, 83; pb 1910, 100 ff.; Lipinski, Der Kampf, 4. 135. StadtaL, pb 1913, 81. Police enjoyed broad powers not only in Saxony but Germany as a whole. See Eric A. Johnson, Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), passim, esp. 15–52. 136. Leipzig was not the only place in Germany where Bürger, despite internal social tensions, thwarted the spd. See Heinz Reif, “Arbeiter und Unternehmer in den Städten des westlichen Ruhrgebiets 1850–1930: Räumliche Aspekte einer Klassenbeziehung,” in Arbeiter und Bürger im 19. Jahrhundert: Varianten ihres Verhältnisses im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986), 151–82.

4. WAGE AND SALARY RELATIONSHIPS IN PREWAR LEIPZIG 1. Fr. Tägtmeyer, “Die Entwicklung der Lebensmittelpreise der Stadt Leipzig und ihr Einfluß auf die Kosten der Lebenshaltung von 1894–1912,” in Kosten der Lebenshaltung in deutschen Großstädten, ed. Franz Eulenburg, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. 145, part 1, section 5 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1914), 211; Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 2, 1912 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1914), 157–61. I include under the rubric of “taxpayer” factory workers compensated by piece rates. 2. Barbara Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent: Women and German Industrialization, 1871–1914 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 18 ff. 3. Of all Leipzig wageworkers in 1911, 26.56 percent were women, up from 21.85 percent in 1882 (Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 1, 1911 [Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1913], p. 27). One must remember that just because a woman did not earn a wage did not mean she could avoid working for money. A husband’s modest wage almost always required supplementation. The vast majority of wives who them-

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selves did not labor for a wage either performed home work for piece rates (e.g., cigar rolling, sewing, etc.) or odd jobs for money (laundering, charring, minding children, cooking for lodgers, [Schlafleute], etc.). 4. From paragraph 105 in title 7 of the Reichsgewerbeordnung of 1869/71, as quoted by Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn: Dietz, 1992), 390. 5. In the staatsal, the records of hundreds of Leipzig companies operating during the empire are preserved. Many contain Arbeitsordnungen. For a discussion of what these sources reveal about working conditions, see Jürgen Kocka, “Problems of Working-Class Formation in Germany: The Early Years, 1800–1875,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 322. The machine maker August Bromme confirms that employment in the Leipzig area was “at will” since workers were often fired without cause or explanation or because they had contracted work-related illnesses (Moritz William Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbeiters, ed. Paul Göhre [Jena: Diederichs, 1905], 252 ff., 283). 6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. M. Nicolaus (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 274–75 and especially 281–89. 7. The presentation below limits itself to state programs affecting the wage relationship. I examined broader welfare initiatives designed to redistribute income in chapter 1. 8. In a typical year, the Leipzig municipal government funded make-work programs at only 35,000 marks. See Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht des Rates der Stadt Leipzig für die Kriegsjahre 1914–1918 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 6:42 (information on prewar expenditures); StadtaL, pb 1910, 217; and pb 1913, 73–74. For the refusal of Reich authorities to institute unemployment insurance, see Anselm Faust, “State and Unemployment in Germany, 1890–1918: Labor Exchanges, Job Creation, and Unemployment Insurance,” in The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Mock (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 156–58. 9. Stephan Grabherr, “Die Arbeitskammervorlagen der kaiserlichen Regierung von 1908/1909: Interessenvertretung der Arbeiterschaft oder staatliche Schlichtungsinstanz?” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 1990 (June): 141–58; Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 395–96. 10. Wolfgang Bocks, Die badische Fabrikinspektion: Arbeiterschutz, Arbeiterverhältnisse, und Arbeiterbewegung in Baden, 1879–1914 (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1978). 11. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 105. See also the evidence from Düsseldorf presented in Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49. On the other hand, most of the inspectors themselves, working with inadequate resources, strove to perform their duties. Alerted to dangerously poor air quality in a Saxon workshop, the factory inspector there ordered installation of a vent. In retaliation, however, management fired the worker who provided the tip (Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 227).


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12. lvz, 8 December 1911. 13. StadtaL, pb 1913, 73; Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge der Stadt Leipzig in der Kriegszeit, 1914–18 (Leipzig, Duncker and Humblot,1919), 1:38 (information on prewar expenditures). 14. Franzoi, At the Very Least, 71–77; Jean Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 36 ff. 15. A. Seidel, Frauenarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg als Problem der staatlichen Sozialpolitik: Dargestellt am Beispiel Bayerns (Frankfurt am Main: R. G. Fischer, 1979), 19–28. 16. Ibid.; Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 43. 17. For an overview, see Sabine Schmitt, Der Arbeiterinnenschutz im Deutschen Kaiserreich: Zur Rekonstruktion der schutzbedürftigen Arbeiterinnen, Ergebnisse der Frauenforschung, no. 37 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1995), esp. 91 ff., 190 ff. See also Seidel, Frauenarbeit, 19–28; Franzoi, At the Very Least, 71–7; and Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 36 ff. 18. StadtaL, pb 1905, 58 ff.; Die Tätigkeit des Leipziger Gewerkschaftskartells und der Leipziger Gewerkschaften während der Kriegszeit (Leipzig: Gewerkschaftskartells, 1919), 7 (information on prewar period). 19. Kocka, “Problems,” 338. 20. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 394; Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 1:387. 21. StadtaL, pb 1913, 11. 22. StadtaL, pb 1908, 70. 23. StadtaL, pb 1908, 41; pb 1910, 148. 24. Ibid. 25. Klaus Schönhoven, Die deutsche Gewerkschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 78; Florian Tennstedt, Vom Proleten zum Industriearbeiter: Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialpolitik in Deutschland, 1800 bis 1914 (Cologne: Bund, 1983), 413; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 227–28; Paul Göhre, Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche: Eine praktische Studie (Leipzig: F. W. Grunow, 1891), 60–61. 26. Schönhoven, Die deutsche Gewerkschaften, 84; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:32 ff., 42–43; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 245–46. On the widespread practice of blacklisting union agitators, see the worker autobiographies in Adolf Levenstein, Aus der Tiefe: Arbeiterbriefe. Beiträge zur Seelenanalyse moderner Arbeiter (Berlin: Morgen, 1909), passim. 27. Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1972), 28–29. 28. StadtaL, pb 1905–14, esp. pb 1908, 75; pb 1910, 219; pb 1913, 70–71; and pb 1914, passim. For the trend in this respect Reichwide, see Schorske, German Social Democracy, 89–91. 29. StadtaL, pb 1905, 58 ff.; Die Tätigkeit, 7 (information on prewar period). 30. Kocka, “Problems,” 351. 31. StadtaL, pb 1905, 64b ff.; pb 1906, 50 ff.; pb 1913, 72.

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32. staatsal, pp-v, Nrs. 3866, 2884, 2574, 2812, 1967, 3972. See also StadtaL, pb 1913, 76. 33. Schönhoven, Die deutsche Gewerkschaften, 64 ff.; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:39–46. 34. Schönhoven, Die deutsche Gewerkschaften, 59; Tennstedt, Vom Proleten, 420–1. 35. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:32 ff., 42–43. 36. Fritz Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband während des ersten Weltkrieges und der Revolution (Hannover: Norddeutscher Verlaganstalt Goedel, 1957), 27 ff. 37. Schönhoven, Die deutsche Gewerkschaften, 69. 38. StadtaL, pb 1913, 73. 39. See, for example, Mitteilungen des Agitationskomitees der sozialdemokratischen Partei für den Bezirk Leipzig, 1909–1913 (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1909–1913); Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Agitationskomitee der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Leipzigs für das Jahr . . . 1912, 1913 (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1912–13); Jahresbericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats des Sozialdemokratischen Vereins für den 13. sächsischen Reichstagswalhkreis, 1907–13 (Leipzig: Sozialdemokratischer Verein für den 13. sächsischen Reichstagswahlkreis, 1907–13); Halbjahrs-Bericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Leipzigs, 1913–1916 (Leipzig: Sozialdemokratischer Verein für den 13. sächsischen Reichstagswahlkreis, 1913–16). See also spd programs as reported in StadtaL, pb 1905, 24–26; and pb 1910, 98–99. 40. Karl Kautsky, Der Weg zur Macht, 3d ed. (Berlin: Buchhandlung “Vorwärts,” 1920). One of the few prerevolutionary social theorists attempting to sketch the future socialist society was Werner Sombart. He envisaged the supplementation of parliamentary democracy with plebiscites, the abolition of private property, and economic production determined by a central plan rather than market signals. See Sombart, Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung, 8th ed. (Jena: Fischer, 1919), 23–57. 41. lvz, 13 December 1911. 42. See hundreds of Arbeits- and Fabrikordnungen preserved in the staatsal under company names. For anecdotes, see Minna Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin: Eine practische Studie (Berlin: Leiser, 1893)), 22; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 264. 43. Göhre, Drei Monate, 63. 44. Fabrikordnung of the Leipzig woodworking firm of Schlobach-Böhlitz-Ehrenberg, as printed in the lvz, 13 December 1911. 45. Göhre, Drei Monate, 64, 75. 46. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 132, 164. 47. Statistik des Deutschen Reiches: Berufs- und Betriebszählung vom 12.6.1907. Berufsstatistik (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1907), 207:4 ff., 29 ff., 193 ff., 248 ff., 275 ff., 342 ff. 48. Only 1.36 percent of Leipzig’s metalworkers were women (Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18, 275 [figures on prewar Leipzig]). Göhre reports that not a single woman worked in his machine-making factory (Drei Monate, 44). 49. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 252. Göhre, Drei Monate, 49. 50. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:34 ff.


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51. Eckhard Brockhaus, Zusammensetzung und Neustrukturierung der Arbeiterklasse vor dem ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Trikont, 1975), 12–26; Die Schwereisenindustrie: Ihre Entwicklung und ihre Arbeiter. Nach vorgenommenen Erhebungen im Jahre 1910 bearbeitet und herausgegeben vom Vorstand des deutschen Metallarbeiter-Verbandes (Stuttgart: A. Schlicke, 1912), 70; Conrad Matschoss, Ein Jahrhundert Deutscher Maschinenbau: Von der Mechanischen Werkstätte bis zur Deutschen Maschinenfabrik, 1819–1919 (Berlin: Springer, 1919), 90–99; David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 287–89, 296 ff., 317, 556 n. 121; Hans Mauersberg, Deutsche Industrien im Zeitgeschehen eines Jahrhunderts: Eine Historische Modelluntersuchung zum Entwicklungsprozess Deutscher Unternehmen von ihren Anfängen bis zum Stand von 1960 (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1966), 191; Karl Ditt, Industrialisierung, Arbeiterschaft, und Arbeiterbewegung in Bielefeld, 1850–1914 (Dortmund: Gesellschaft für Westfälische Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1982), 201–2. For a description of the nodal-point system in Mitteldeutschland, see Göhre, Drei Monate, 9, 42 ff. For a nodal-point machine-making factory in Berlin, see the autobiography of the worker M. Przybelski in Levenstein, Aus der Tiefe, 124–25. The description and photographs of one of most advanced machine-making factories in Germany on the eve of the Great War, located in Magdeburg, make clear that despite employment of mostly gauged, self-regulating machinery, the nodal-point system remained the norm. See Matschoss, Die Maschinen-Fabrik R. Wolf, Magdeburg-Buckau, 1862–1912 (Magdeburg: Wohlfeld, n.d.), 103–19, and photographic appendix, plates 14, 15, 20, 32, 36, 37, 41, 43. Nodal-point manufacture also prevailed in Germany’s infant automobile industry before the war. See Mauersberg, Deutsche Industrien, 178–201. 52. Göhre, Drei Monate, 73–74. After such a day an hour-long commute home on foot was not uncommon (17–18). See also Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage: Mit besonder Berücksichtigung der sozialpsychologischen Seite des modernen Grossbetriebes und der psychophysischen Einwirkungen auf die Arbeiter (Munich: Reinhardt, 1912), 81–102; idem., Aus der Tiefe, passim. 53. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 251. He wrote these words from a tb sanatorium. 54. Göhre, Drei Monate, 72. 55. Krankheits- und Sterblichkeitsverhältnisse in den Ortskrankenkassen für Leipzig und Umgebung: Untersuchungen über den Einfluss von Geschlecht, Alter und Beruf, ed. Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt (Berlin: Heymann, 1910), 1:114, 123. 56. Statistics taken at the outbreak of the war in Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 5:252. 57. See the wage tables in appendix 1. 58. Franzoi, At the Very Least, 93; Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 32 ff.; Alfred Kelly, ed., The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 67 (autobiography of a seamstress). 59. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 14. 60. Seventy-five to 90 percent of unmarried women working in factories still lived with their parents. See Franzoi, At the Very Least, 93.

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61. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 28 ff. 62. Of Leipzig’s 339 registered prostitutes, the occupation of 278 could be determined. Of this group, all were laborers (most commonly factory workers, maids, and waitresses) except for one office helper (Kontoristin). See Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 2:98. 63. Karl Juckenburg, Das Aufkommen der Großindustrie in Leipzig (Leipzig: Veit, 1912), 143 ff. For the growth of the textile industry in Leipzig and its increasing economy of scale, compare Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, vol. 6 (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1882), part 2, 136, to Statistik des Deutschen Reichs: Berufs- und Betriebszählung vom 12.6.1907, 217:299. For the prominence of factory textile production relative to other German cities, see the data in ibid., 4 ff., 29 ff., 193 ff., 248 ff., 275 ff., 342 ff. 64. Ernst Kroker, Handelsgeschichte der Stadt Leipzig: Die Entwicklung des Leipziger Handels und der Leipziger Messen von der Gründung der Stadt bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig: W. Bielefeld, 1925), 258–68. 65. Marie Bernays, “Berufsschicksale . . . ,” Die Frau 18 (December 1910); Robert Wilbrandt, Die Weber in der Gegenwart (Jena: Fischer, 1906). 66. Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 296. 67. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 19 ff. 68. Krankheits- und Sterblichkeitsverhältnisse, 1:114, 123. 69. Ibid., 15; Göhre, Drei Monate, 31–32. 70. Göhre, Drei Monate, 36. 71. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 242. 72. Göhre, Drei Monate, 168. 73. Wettstein-Adelt describes the pleasure afforded to colleagues allowed to weave complicated carpets from start to finish (Dreieinhalb Monate, 20). 74. The evidence from across Germany supports that found in Leipzig and Mitteldeutschland. When six thousand workers Reichwide were queried as to their jobs, fully 65 percent either disliked or found no interest in them, 15 percent found some satisfaction, and the rest did not respond. Individual responses reveal that many workers thought of themselves as “slaves” and “beasts of burden,” persevering only “out of an instinct to survive” or to provide for their children. See Levenstein, Arbeiterfrage, 61–77. Worker autobiographies—in which daily labor is described as “horrible,” “cursed torture,” “servitude,” “a prison,” “the capitalist yoke”—corroborate the questionnaire responses nearly unanimously. See idem, Aus der Tiefe, passim. 75. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 18. 76. Proletarian autobiographies, male and female, note this practice as if it were self-evidently commonplace. See, e.g., Levenstein, Aus der Tiefe, 12; Kelly, The German Worker, 255 ff., 273. 77. Göhre, Drei Monate, 81. 78. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 90–160, describes the series of jobs he endured as a teenager. 79. Göhre, Drei Monate, 85. 80. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 292.


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81. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 26 ff.; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 216– 217. Proletarian autobiographies from elsewhere in Germany present sexually harassing supervisors as a self-evident fact of life. See Kelly, The German Worker, 126 ff., 132–33, 255 ff., 273, 378–79. 82. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 26 ff. 83. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 283–84. 84. Kelly, The German Worker, 17. 85. staatsal, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, 142; staatsal, Sack Maschinenfabrik, 48 and 49; staatsal, Bleichert Transportanlage GmbH, 201. 86. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 91–102. For a description of the special hardships that Czech migrant workers, so-called Sachsengänger, faced while searching for employment in Saxony, see Wenzel Holek, Lebensgang eines Handarbeiters (Jena: Diederichs, 1930). For evidence outside Mitteldeutschland, see Levenstein, Aus der Tiefe, passim; Kelly, The German Worker, passim; Rosa Kempf, Das Leben der jungen Fabrikmädchen in München (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1911): 93; Franz Bergg, Ein Proletarierleben, ed. Nikolaus Welter (Frankfurt am Main: Neuer Frankfurter, 1913); Georg Eckert, Aus den Lebensberichten deutscher Fabrikarbeiter (Brunswick: Limbach, 1953). 87. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 110. 88. Alf Lüdtke, “Organizational Order or Eigensinn? Workers’ Privacy and Workers’ Politics in Imperial Germany,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 304–5, 312 ff. 89. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 16. 90. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 246–247. 91. Lüdtke, “Organizational Order”; idem, “Cash, Coffeebreaks, Horseplay: ‘Eigensinn’ and Politics Among Factory Workers in Germany ca. 1900,” in Confrontation, Class Consciousness, and the Labour Process: Studies in Proletarian Class Formation, ed. Michael Hanagan and Charles Stephenson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986), 65–96. 92. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 16. 93. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 121–22. 94. Göhre, Drei Monate, 172. 95. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 150–51. 96. Wettstein-Adelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 39. For a similar finding in Hamburg, see Michael Grüttner, “Working-Class Crime and the Labour Movement: Pilfering in the Hamburg Docks, 1888–1923,” in The German Working Class, 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 54–80. 97. Göhre, Drei Monate, 101–2. 98. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 205. 99. Göhre, Drei Monate, 48. 100. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 243. 101. Ibid., 281; Göhre, Drei Monate, 115–16. The wage table in appendix 1 highlights how in many cases unskilled workers earned more than semiskilled, and semiskilled

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more than skilled workers, while workers performing identical jobs often earned very different wages. 102. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 245–46, 258–59. 103. Göhre, Drei Monate, 128. See also ibid., 108. The evidence from across Germany supports that found in Leipzig and Mitteldeutschland. Levenstein asked workers Reichwide, “What oppresses you most, low wages, dependence on the boss, or lack of prospects for upward mobility?” The first two of these tied as the leading response. Of significance here is the fact that almost none of the respondents believed he or she was justly treated and fairly compensated. All believed, usually intensely, that they were exploited and oppressed. See Levenstein, Arbeiterfrage, 133–54. This is the dominant impression left behind by proletarian autobiographies. See Kelly, The German Worker, passim; Rosa Kempf, “Das Leben,” 93; Bergg, Ein Proletarierleben; Eckert, Aus den Lebensberichten; and Holek, Lebensgang. 104. See the “Gewerkschaftsbewegung” column in lvz, 1910–1914. 105. Indeed, many among them did not even labor for an hourly wage, instead negotiating individual, multiyear salary contracts with employers. See, for instance, staatsal, Giesecke and Devrient, Nrs. 145, 224. Appendix 1 reports their high pay compared to other types of workers. 106. StadtaL, pb 1905, 62; and pb 1908, 165. 107. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:39. 108. Canning, Languages, 261 ff. 109. StadtaL, pb 1906, 64 ff. For a similar finding among female textile workers Reichwide, see Canning, Languages, 316. 110. Contemporary statements include the autobiography of Adelheid Popp in Kelly, The German Worker, 122 ff.; Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 227 ff.; and WettsteinAdelt, Dreieinhalb Monate, 144–45. Historical investigations finding apathetic women on the shop floor include Günther Roth, “Die kulturellen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie im kaiserlichen Deutschland,” in Moderne Deutsche Sozialgeschichte, ed. H. U. Wehler (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1975), 347; Nolan, Social Democracy, 121–24; Evans, “Politics and the Family: Social Democracy and the Working-Class Family in Theory and Practice Before 1914,” in The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 269 ff. The only study I have encountered that finds female militancy against employers is Canning, Languages. 111. See, for example, the account of a strike of baker journeymen reported in lvz, 19 December 1911. Leipzig’s ancient and annually celebrated tradition of the “Fishing Party” (Fischerstechen)—in which the city’s dwindling number of river anglers delighted crowds with waterborne antics—was suspended in 1911 because of a dispute between the guild’s masters and journeymen. 112. See, for instance, lvz, 25 November and 7 December 1911. 113. Göhre reports that most publicans and tradesmen in proletarian neighborhoods were, or at least pretended to be, Social Democrats (Drei Monate, 93, 94). 114. Workers Reichwide responding to Levenstein’s questionnaire expressed a powerful but poorly articulated desire for just such a transformation that would free


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them from the “chains of capitalist domination” and permit them to partake of the simple pleasures of this world: secure and dignified work, a decent home, enough free time to pursue hobbies and enjoy nature. Repeatedly they describe their hopes as the attainment of “a life worthy of a human” (menschenwürdiges Leben) and believed it would only be possible under “socialism.” To create the “state of the future” (Zukunftsstaat), they believed they would have to “sweep out capital,” “take power ourselves,” and establish “the control of the masses over production and consumption.” See Levenstein, Arbeiterfrage, 286–322. See also idem, Aus der Tiefe, passim, esp. 72. 115. Tägtmeyer, “Die Entwicklung,” 211. 116. While there were growing numbers of female office helpers (Kontoristinnen) in Leipzig, almost all of them came from middle-class backgrounds and therefore retired upon marriage. And while female sales help (Verkäuferinnen) came more often from blue-collar families and were therefore more likely to remain employed after marriage, it was precisely this group that usually received a wage, thus excluding them from this examination of the salary relationship. See Ida Kisker, Die Frauenarbeit in den Kontern einer Großstadt: Eine Studie über die Leipziger Kontoristinnen, mit einem Anhang über die Berufsvereine der Handlungsgehilfinnen, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, supp. vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1911), esp. 4, 53–63, 98–101; Ursula Nienhaus, “Von Töchtern und Schwestern: Zur vergessenen Geschichte der weiblichen Angestellten im deutschen Kaiserreich,” in Angestellte im europäischen Vergleich: Die Herausbildung angestellter Mittelschichten seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1981), 313–14, 320 ff. 117. See, for instance, the personnel files in staatsal, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, 142. 118. Tägtmeyer, “Die Entwicklung,” 238 ff. 119. Workplace accident and fatality rates for lower white collars in Leipzig were significantly lower than those of all manual occupations and were dwarfed by those of brown-coal workers, the latter engaged in what was possibly imperial Germany’s most dangerous profession. See Krankheits- und Sterblichkeitsverhältnisse, 1:114, 135, 143; staatsal, ah Borna, 5424. 120. Bromme, Lebensgeschichte, 248, 251. 121. Mario König, Hannes Siegrist, and Rudolf Vetterli, “Angestellte am Rande des Bürgertums: Kaufleute und Techniker in Deutschland und in der Schweiz,” in Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Ute Frevert (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1988), 1:228. 122. Jürgen Kocka, Die Angestellten in der deutschen Geschichte, 1850–1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1981), 82. 123. StadtaL, pb 1907, 93, 107–8; pb 1910, 14; pb 1913, 18–19. 124. StadtaL, pb 1906, 52. Kocka finds that lower white collars, when raising protests about working conditions, always did so behind closed doors, politely importuning bosses, sometimes in the form of anonymous letters. See Die Angestellten, 82 ff. 125. Memorandum of the Volksschule teachers as printed in lvz, 22 December 1911. See Jahresbericht des Leipziger Lehrervereins über das 67. Vereinsjahr 1912 (Leipzig,

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1912), passim, esp. 4; StadtaL, pb 1910, 124–25, 164; and pb 1913, 1 ff. The teachers demonstrated their love of fatherland at every opportunity, occupying a prominent spot in patriotic festivals. See, for example, Max Lange, ed., Volkstümliche Feier des Sedan-Tages zu Leipzig: die Leipziger Sedan-Feier 1870–1895, in Tabellen dargestellt (Leipzig: Reusche, 1895).

5. ELITE AUTHORITY STRENGTHENS 1. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht des Rates der Stadt Leipzig für die Kriegsjahre 1914–1918 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 1:64. 2. Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 43. 3. lvz, 1 August 1914. 4. StadtaL, pb 1914, 23. 5. StadtaL, pb 1914, 2, 17 ff. While most of the local party leadership supported the government, Friedrich Geyer was one of only fourteen Reichstag deputies in his party to oppose the government’s request for war credits in the famous spd caucus of 3 August 1914. See Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1972), 264–82. 6. Volker Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 216–18. 7. Wenzel Holek, Lebensgang eines Handarbeiters (Jena: Diederichs, 1930), 95, 101. 8. Paul Göhre, Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche: Eine praktische Studie (Leipzig: F. W. Grunow, 1891), 129. 9. Richard J. Evans, “Proletarian Mentalities: Pub Conversations in Hamburg,” in Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War, ed. R. J. Evans (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 179 ff. 10. Across Germany an identical development unfolded as workers ceased opposition to the war after the Russian mobilization of 31 July and thereafter grimly accepted the government’s call to fight. See Jeffrey Todd Verhey, “ ‘The Spirit of 1914’: The Myth of Enthusiasm and the Rhetoric of Unity in World War I Germany” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1992). For similar findings at the local level, see Friedhelm Boll, Massenbewegungen in Niedersachsen, 1906–1920: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung zu den verschiedenen Entwicklungstypen Braunschweig und Hannover (Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft, 1981), 151–54; Klaus-Dieter Schwarz, Weltkrieg und Revolution in Nürnberg: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1971), 106–14; Volker Ullrich, Die Hamburger Arbeiterbewegung vom Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges bis zur Revolution 1918/19 (Hamburg: Lüdke, 1976), 140 ff. 11. Although the kaiser on 4 August declared that “I no longer recognize parties; I recognize only Germans,” the spd and unions did not receive an explicit, official recognition and remained shut out of governmental decision making during the first year of the war. 12. W. Deist, ed., Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg, 1914 bis 1918. Quellen zur

6. ELITE AUTHORITY ERODES

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Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politische Parteien (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1970), xli–xliii. 13. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge der Stadt Leipzig in der Kriegszeit, 1914–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919), 1:5–63; lvz, 19 January 1915; Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (1949; reprint, Bonn: Dietz, 1975), 37; HansJoachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 1:87, 91–92; A. Seidel, Frauenarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg als Problem der staatlichen Sozialpolitik: Dargestellt am Beispiel Bayerns (Frankfurt am Main: R. G. Fischer, 1979). 14. Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 5. 15. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:201. 16. Preller, Sozialpolitik, 34, 37. 17. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 6:16; Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 24, 93; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:422; Seidel, Frauenarbeit, 99–103; Preller, Sozialpolitik, 34, 37; Die Frauenarbeit in der Metallindustrie während des Krieges, dargestellt nach Erhebungen im Aug./Sept. 1916 vom Vorstand des Deutschen Metallarbeiterverbandes (Stuttgart: A. Schlicke, 1917), 5–6. 18. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:85. 19. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 6:43–44. 20. Preller, Sozialpolitik, 34–35, 61; Fritz Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband während des ersten Weltkrieges und der Revolution (Hannover: Norddeutscher Verlaganstalt Goedel, 1957), 44–45. 21. StadtaL, pb 1915, 46. I will examine the generosity of this support in the next chapter 22. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge, 1:38. 23. The lvz reported, for instance, that the number of visitors at the city’s only soup kitchen increased threefold during the course of the year. See lvz, 23 March 1915. 24. Göhre, Drei Monate, 210, 25. See especially pp. 790–91 in Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn: Dietz, 1992). 26. Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter, 715; see also 103 ff. 27. A number of historians have found different types of proletarian integration into imperial society. Not wishing to clutter the text with more polemic, I restrict my criticisms to Ritter and Tenfelde. Readers desiring a more nuanced examination of the historiographical career of the concept of integration can consult appendix 4.

6. ELITE AUTHORITY ERODES 1. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 6, 1919–1926 (Leipzig: Schunke, 1928), 68. 2. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 10.

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3. Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918, trans. Barbara Weinberger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 27–28; Walter Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930, reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 9 ff. 4. Paul Jostock, “The Long-Term Growth of National Income in Germany,” trans. Charlotte Boschan, in Income and Wealth, series 5, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1955), 103. The following statistics indicate the collapse of Leipzig’s civilian economy: After climbing at a fantastic pace during the prewar period, the number of kilometers traveled per year on the city’s trams dropped during the war by 38 percent. The number of trucks on Leipzig’s roads declined by 10.16 percent and the number of automobiles by 26.37 percent. The number of registered firms dropped by 16.97 percent. The only sector showing growth was communications: the number of long-distance telephone calls increased by 8.87 percent during the war years, while that of outgoing telegrams remained steady. See Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 5:235–51. 5. Fabian, Klassenkampf, 9 ff.; G. Aubin, “Die wirtschaftliche Einheit Mitteldeutschlands,” in Mitteldeutschland auf dem Wege zur Einheit (Merseburg: Stollberg, 1927), 5–6. See also my remarks on Mitteldeutschland in the introduction. 6. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge der Stadt Leipzig in der Kriegszeit, 1914–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919), 2:8–9. 7. A comparison with British war taxes provides an idea of how regressive the German approach was. By 1918 in Britain 77.2 percent of total government nondebt revenue came from relatively progressive direct taxes, 21.6 percent from relatively regressive indirect taxes, and 1.6 percent from stamp duties. By contrast, the numbers in Germany for that year were 43.4, 47.9, and 8.7. See C. L. Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation, 1914–1923: Ursachen und Folgen in internationaler Perspektive (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 118. 8. Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation, 117–18; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:144–45. 9. Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation, 107–8, 118–20. 10. The kingdom of Saxony followed a similar strategy, borrowing heavily to offset new expenses while slapping ungraduated and increasing surcharges onto its already regressive tax structure. See lvz, 21 May 1919. The city of Leipzig did likewise, explicitly covering all war-related expenses (for the most part, the welfare payments to families whose breadwinner was at the front, examined in chapter 4) through borrowing. See ibid., as well as lvz, 9 January 1919; lvz, 23 January 1919; and Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht des Rates der Stadt Leipzig für die Kriegsjahre 1914–1918 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 1:13. 11. W. Deist, ed., Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg, 1914 bis 1918. Quellen zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politische Parteien (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1970), xv–xx. 12. Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (hereafter staatsad), Kriegsarchiv (P), 25229. 13. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25427, 25428, 25229. 14. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 47, Bl. 181–184, and Gewerbegericht, Nr. 89, Bl. 36. See also Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 6:34.


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15. StadtaL, pb 1915, 45 ff. 16. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge, 1:5–63. I will examine the precise inflation rate in greater detail in the next chapter during the discussion of living standards during the final two years of the war. 17. The following exposition of state efforts in this regard takes its information from Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge, 2:7–28. 18. Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 102 ff. 19. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge, 2:7–28. 20. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 4:18. 21. StadtaL, pb 1915, 37. 22. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 6:8–13. 23. For a similar explanation of the failure of food rationing Reichwide, see Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 336 ff. 24. StadtaL, pb 1915, 15, 20–21. 25. Deutsche Metallarbeiter-Zeitung (hereafter dmz], no. 22 (27 May 1916): 89, as quoted by Fritz Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband während des ersten Weltkrieges und der Revolution (Hannover: Norddeutscher Verlaganstalt Goedel, 1957), 40. On the progovernment policy of unions as a whole, see Klaus Schönhoven’s introduction in idem, ed., Die Gewerkschaften in Weltkrieg und Revolution, 1914–1919 (Cologne: Bund, 1985). 26. dmz, no. 50 (11 December 1915): 537; and no. 51 (18. December 1915): 550, quoted by Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband, 40. 27. Schönhoven, Die Gewerkschaften, 16–17; Kocka, Facing Total War, 45–46, 63 ff. 28. Die Tätigkeit des Leipziger Gewerkschaftskartells und der Gewerkschaften während der Kriegszeit (Leipzig: Gewerkschaftskartells, 1919), 7. 29. Ibid. 30. lvz, 23 March 1915. 31. StadtaL, pb 1914, 23. 32. lvz, 26 March 1915. 33. Dieter Engelmann, “Das Phänomen Leipzig: Zum 70. Jahrestag der Gründung der Leipziger uspd-Organisation,” Sächsisches Heimatblatt 33, no. 4 (1987): 149, quoting from Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, ser. 2, vol. 1, Juli 1914–Oktober 1917, ed. Institut für marxismus-leninismus beim zk der sed (Berlin: Dietz, 1957/1958): 170. 34. Engelmann, “Das Phänomen,” 149. 35. StadtaL, pb 1915, 19. 36. K. Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß in der Leipziger Arbeiterbewegung während des Ersten Weltkrieges” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Leipzig, 1964), app. 7, quoting from Richard Lipinski, Arbeiterführer für das Jahr 1924 (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1925). 37. lvz, 15 December 1915. 38. StadtaL, pb 1916, 15. 39. StadtaL, pb 1915, 27 ff.

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40. StadtaL, pb 1915, 14. 41. Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1972), 264–82. 42. lvz, 26 March 1916. 43. StadtaL, pb 1916, 21 ff.; Karsten Rudolph, Die sächsische Sozialdemokratie vom Kaiserreich zur Republik, 1871–1923 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1995), 99 ff. 44. For the final organizational wrangling between the mother party and local party activists, see StadtaL, pb 1917, 21 ff. 45. David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 39–52. 46. StadtaL, pb 1917, 25; Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 35 n. 29. 47. Jahresbericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats des sozialdemokratischen Vereins für den 13. sächsischen Reichstagswahlkreis Leipzig: April 1921 (Leipzig: Sozialdemokratischer Verein für den 13. sächsischen Reichstagswahlkreis, 1921), 2 ff.; Hartfrid Krause, “Einleitung,” in Protokolle der Landesversammlungen der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Sachsens 1919–22, ed. Hartfrid Krause (Berlin: Dietz, 1979), viii; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:516. 48. The old spd—despite the help of the military authorities in procuring paper for its newspaper, the Freie Presse, and the assistance of the chamber of commerce in distributing it in the factories—never weaned Leipzig’s workers away from the uspd. See the letter of the Handelskammer to its members printed in Mitteilungen der Bezirksleitung für den Bezirk Leipzig der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Sachsens, 25. Juni 1917 (Leipzig: Schroers, 1917). See also Kriegsamtstelle documents printed in Arbeiterführer als Verräter: Dokumente aus der Kriegszeit. Aus den Akten der Kriegsamtstelle Leipzig (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1919), 11–12. 49. Other cities where the uspd became the dominant socialist party were Zwickau, Merseburg, Halle, Brunswick, Bremen, and Düsseldorf. Cities in which the uspd achieved parity with the spd included Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Essen, and Oberhausen. See Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin: Dietz, 1984), 64. 50. Krause, “Einleitung.” 51. Jahresbericht, 2 ff. 52. Besdes StadtaL, pbe 1915–1917. 53. Karsten Rudolph and Manfred Hötzel, “Richard Lipinski (1867–1936). Demokratischer Sozialist und Organisator politischer Macht,” in Demokratie und Emanzipation zwischen Saale und Elbe: Beiträge zur Geschichte der sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung bis 1933, ed. Helga Grebing, Hans Mommsen, and Karsten Rudolph (Essen: Klartext, 1993), 245 ff. 54. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 6:68. 55. StadtaL, pb 1917, 58; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 90–178; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 145, Bl. 1–9; staatsal, Leipziger bkw ag, Nr. 89. 56. Deist, Militär, 266 n. 10, quoting from naval archives. This month also saw the

7. ELITE AUTHORITY VANISHES

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first food riots erupt in Berlin. See Thierry Bonzon and Belinda Davis, “Feeding the Cities,” in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, ed. Jean-Louis Robert and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 336–37. 57. StadtaL, pb 1915, 34 ff.; pb 1916, 8–9. 58. StadtaL, pb 1916, 9, 31–2. 59. For a similar finding in Berlin, see Bonzon and Davis, Capital Cities, 340–41. 60. StadtaL, pb 1916, 8, 40 ff.; StadtaL, Verfassungsamt, Nr. 7, Bl. 10–13; Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 1:65. 61. StadtaL, pb 1916, 27 ff. 62. Deist, Militär, 420, quoting from naval archives.

7. ELITE AUTHORITY VANISHES 1. Both parties approved the expansionist Brest-Litovsk treaty of March 1918 with Soviet Russia. Even the mspd did not oppose it in that it abstained from voting. See Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 391. 2. Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 429 ff. 3. Even the mspd’s position during this period invites questions. A lead article in its official newspaper, Vorwärts, during Ludendorff ’s offensive, while noting that the drive for unconditional victory had not originally been the mspd’s policy, nonetheless exhorted party members to support the government: “There is no other exit for Germany than a quick, full victory in the West . . . [no other way] than the promised military victory” (Vorwärts, 8 April 1918, quoted in Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im ersten Weltkrieg [Düsseldorf: Droste, 1974], 298; italics in original). 4. Statistik des Deutschen Reichs: Bewegung der Bevölkerung in den Jahren 1914 bis 1919 (Berlin: Statistisches Reichsamt, 1925), 276:xlix. 5. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 6, 1919–26 (Leipzig: Schunke, 1928), p. 68. Other big cities also had a higher-than-average mortality rate, calling into question the conventional wisdom that peasants perished in disproportionate numbers at the front. See comparative tables in Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, 276:xlix. 6. Feldman, Army, 150 ff. 7. For a translated text of the law itself, see the appendix in Feldman, Army. 8. Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918, trans. Barbara Weinberger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 74. One of the few exceptions was the Association of Saxon Industrialists, the most important business group in Leipzig, which protested vigorously against this incursion of the state into the private economy. See ibid., 138, quoting the Deutsche Arbeitgeber Zeitung of 16 and 15 July 1917. 9. Feldman, Army, 249 ff. 10. The key clause regulating conditions under which a worker could leave his or her job read: “The worker can change his job only when an important reason for his

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quitting exists. Counting as an ‘important reason’ would be especially a reasonable improvement in work conditions in patriotic auxiliary service” (Der Arbeiter kann die Arbeitsstelle nur wechseln, wenn ein wichtiger Grund für das Ausscheiden vorliegt. Als wichtiger Grund soll insbesonders eine angemessene Verbesserung der Arbeitsbedingungen im vaterländischen Hilfsdienst gelten.) (quoted in Der Deutsche Metallarbeiter-Verband im Jahre 1917 [Stuttgart: A. Schlicke, 1917], 26 ff). Even the most conservative Kriegsamt officer would have to interpret such a law as allowing a worker to change jobs in pursuit of higher pay. 11. Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft: Beruf, Familie, und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1989), 74–88; Kocka, Facing Total War.; and Feldman, Army, 168 ff., 235 ff., and 248–49. 12. A. Seidel, Frauenarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg als Problem der staatlichen Sozialpolitik: Dargestellt am Beispiel Bayerns (Frankfurt am Main: R. G. Fischer, 1979), 125. 13. See, for instance, StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 178. 14. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25427, 25428, and 25229. Preller argues that the ohl dismissed Groener under pressure from the industrial lobby, which was anxious about the Kriegsamt chief ’s plans to combat inflation with wage and price controls. See Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (1949; reprint, Bonn: Dietz, 1975), 45. 15. All information on intramilitary disputes is from staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25427, 25428, and 25229. 16. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25444. 17. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25441. 18. Ibid. One finds it difficult to believe that hungry urban workers would oppose stern measures against black-marketeering farmers. 19. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25229. 20. Ibid. 21. Further supporting this statement is the fact that the head of the Saxon Central Office for Army Supplies, whose main task was to procure foodstuffs for the army from the Saxon countryside, was Dr. Paul Mehnert, the leader of the Conservative Party in Saxony. As the big landowners who formed the backbone of the Conservative Party were the very people with an interest in maintaining the high price of food, his appointment indicates yet again the captivity of the state to elites. 22. See, for instance, staatsal, Meier and Weichelt, 226 (“Bericht der Lebensmittelstelle”). 23. To ensure that the nutritional requirements of the war workers were met, Groener’s office in Berlin provided the following instructions to the Leipzig Kriegsamtstelle: “In dealing with the food question, first ascertain to what extent the most pressing needs can be satisfied by company management,” an obvious reference to black-market operations. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 178. The memo gives the impression that this was a general set of instructions going out to all Kriegsamtstellen in Germany. 24. In particular the office of the Feldzeugmeisterei in the Saxon war ministry gave


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factory owners explicit approval to procure food on the black market for distribution to their workforce. See StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269, Bl. 9. 25. See the complaints of Leipzig union leaders representing workers not employed in war sectors in StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269, Bl. 9, 17–18. 26. For Leipzig, see Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht des Rates der Stadt Leipzig für die Kriegsjahre 1914–1918 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 1:65. For similar observations on the Reich as a whole during this period, see Kocka, Facing Total War, 44. 27. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 97, Bl. 6 ff. 28. Unions and employers seem always to have accepted the decisions of the Kriegsamtstelle. Thus, in practice if not in law, the mediation board was in fact an arbitration committee (its German name of Schlichtungsausschuß can be translated either way). For an example of this power, see staatsal, Leipziger bkw ag, Nr. 89. 29. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25445. 30. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25579 and 25580. 31. Der Deutsche Metallarbeiter-Verband, 385–86. 32. Arbeiterführer als Verräter: Dokumente aus der Kriegszeit. Aus den Akten der Kriegsamtstelle Leipzig (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1919). Unfortunately, I was not able to recover the full set of Nineteenth Army Corps Kriegsamt files. Despite this, Leipzig’s Kriegsamt left behind such an immense paper trail that I was able to reconstruct its activity. Based on my own detailed knowledge of these files, I am confident of the authenticity of the excerpts published in Arbeiterführer als Verräter. 33. Arbeiterführer als Verräter, 6–7. 34. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269, Bl. 00083–86. 35. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25452, Bl. 125. 36. In a similar manner, an officer of the Kriegsamt easily persuaded representatives of the construction workers union to send their members back to work building the massive basf chemical factory in nearby Leuna. The breakneck speed at which the factory was being constructed—dictated by the German military’s acute shortage of nitrates, vital in the production of explosives—led to dangerous working conditions, prompting the wildcat strike. See Leuna, A 1305, Bl. 3 ff. 37. See agreement of 9 September 1918 between the Worker Council and management of Breunsdorf Braunkohlenwerk in staatsal, Leipziger Braunkohlenwerk ag, Nr. 89. 38. See Schweinitz’s January 1918 memo to his subordinates outlining the new policy, as well as copies of placards posted throughout the army corps district warning workers about the consequences of striking in staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25445. 39. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 23698. 40. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 6:34–35; see also StadtaL, Gewerbegericht, Nr. 89, Bl. 36; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht, Nr. 47, Bl. 181. 41. For the refusal of Leipzig’s metal employers on three separate occasions to allow the business court to mediate disputes with workers, see staatsal, Gewerbegericht, Nrs. 214, 140, and 269, Bl. 73–78. 42. Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 5.

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43. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 3:15 ff.; Verwaltungsbericht der Stadt Leipzig für die Jahre 1909–13 (Leipzig: Schunke, Rossberg’sche Buchhandlung, 1914), 363. 44. More on inflation directly below. 45. That during this same period municipal officials quintupled the staff of the political police, from ten to fifty-one, reflects their priorities. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 1:66–67, 71 ff. To their credit, city officials successfully targeted meager welfare funds toward prenatal and infant care. During the war years in Leipzig stillbirths as a percentage of total births actually declined, from 3.9 percent to 3.2 percent. And from 1915 to 1918 the mortality rate for children under two years of age fell 37.81 percent. See Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–1918 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 30–33, 44–51. This success was duplicated in Germany as a whole. See Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, 276:xxx ff. As I shall show below, however, welfare programs could not stop a sharp climb in mortality levels in Leipzig for children aged two to fifteen and for adults. 46. Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 24, 93. 47. Leitfäden für Fabrikpflegerinnen. Zusammengestellt von der Kriegsamtstelle Leipzig (Leipzig:; Kriegsamtstelle Leipzig, 1918). 48. Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen, 101–2; Seidel, Frauenarbeit, 160–90. 49. Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 1:422. 50. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 4:50, 58–60. 51. Ibid., 52. 52. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269, Bl. 14–15; Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 6:46. 53. See Stimmungsbericht of January 1918 in staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25441. On the inadequacy of welfare measures in Germany as a whole, see Preller, Sozialpolitik, 85. 54. C. L. Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation, 1914–1923: Ursachen und Folgen in internationaler Perspektive (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 113. In the preceding chapter I examined the ineffectual tax (not limit) on war profits. Only in June 1918 did the ohl advocate limits on war profits. No attempt was made to act on this recommendation, however, and in any event the war was lost by then (Feldman, Army, 496–97). By contrast, the British government had been able to limit war profits on its contractors to 20 percent (ibid., 228). 55. Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation, 117. 56. Friedrich Lübstorff, Preise und Kosten der Lebenshaltung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Leipzigs, Mitteilungen des statistischen Amtes der Stadt Leipzig, new ser., vol. 1 (Leipzig: Dunckler and Humblot, 1920), 37. 57. Based on a detailed study of the eating habits of fifty-nine Leipzig families in 1917–18 reported in W. Kruse and K. Hintze, Sparsame Ernährung: Nach Erhebungen im Krieg und Frieden (Dresden, 1922). Unfortunately, I could not find this important source in U.S. libraries, so I must resort to the citations in Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 46.


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58. Kocka, Facing Total War, 22. 59. Jean-Louis Robert and Jay Winter, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), passim, esp. chs. 16 and 17. See also Offer, The First World War, passim, esp. parts 1 and 4. 60. G. Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 74 ff., 211. For similar estimates, see Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin: Dietz, 1984), 155 ff. 61. Bry, Wages, 74 ff., 211. For a similar conclusion, see Seidel, Frauenarbeit, 250. 62. Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation, 235; Bry, Wages, 83 ff., 218. 63. Paul Jostock, “The Long-Term Growth of National Income in Germany,” trans. Charlotte Boschan, in Income and Wealth, series 5, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1955), 99. 64. StadtaL, pb 1917, 23 ff.; pb 50 ff.; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269, passim, and 59, Bl. 178 ff.; lvz, 20 April 1917. Munitions workers across Germany during the war worked similar hours. See Bry, Wages, 46; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:200–202; Kocka, Facing Total War, 190. 65. Leipzig textile workers labored on average fifty-eight hours per week in early 1917. See StadtaL, pb 1917, 23 ff.; 50 ff.; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269, passim, and 59, Bl. 178 ff; lvz, 20 April 1917. Bry finds similar hours worked in other German cities (Wages, 46). 66. Seidel, Frauenarbeit, 60. 67. Preller, Sozialpolitik, 9. This figure is for Prussia. 68. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:422; see also Die Frauenarbeit in der Metallindustrie während des Krieges, dargestellt nach Erhebungen im August/September 1916 vom Vorstand des Deutschen Metallarbeiterverbandes (Stuttgart: A. Schlicke, 1917), 5–6. 69. Preller, Sozialpolitik, 10–11. 70. Seidel, Frauenarbeit, 63–67. 71. Fritz Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband während des ersten Weltkrieges und der Revolution (Hannover: Norddeutscher Verlaganstalt Goedel, 1957), 53. 72. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:424–25. 73. Seidel, Frauenarbeit, 63–64. In her study of women workers in Bavaria during the war, Seidel found an Ingolstadt chemical company in which 109 of its 160 pregnant employees worked the night shift (ibid.). 74. Ibid., 71. 75. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge der Stadt Leipzig in der Kriegszeit, 1914–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919), 2:32–33. 76. Kocka, Facing Total War, 25–26. 77. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:212. 78. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 4:35–42; Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 5:44–51. 79. In 1913 there were 13.64 deaths per year per 1000 Leipzigers, compared to 20.53 in 1918 (ibid., 5:42–43). See also Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 1:10–11.

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80. For rates in Germany as a whole, see Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:422. 81. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 5:51. 82. Ibid., 5:53–59; Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 4:.35–42. 83. Caroline Ethel Cooper, Behind the Lines: One Woman’s War, 1914–1918, ed. Decie Denholm (London: Jill Norman and Hobhouse, 1982), 181. See also StadtaL, pb 1917, passim, esp. 1–3. 84. Kocka, Facing Total War, 17. 85. For similar figures in Prussia, see ibid., 18–19. 86. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge, 1:110 ff. 87. Kocka, Facing Total War, 85. See also Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:425 ff. 88. staatsal, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Nr. 142. 89. Kocka, Facing Total War, 102–4. 90. Ibid, 29 ff., 37–38, 104 ff. 91. Winkler, Von der Revolution, 155 ff. 92. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:487–88; Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband, 73–74. 93. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:488–90. 94. StadtaL, pb 1917, 51 ff.; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:273, 445. 95. Documents printed in Arbeiterführer als Verräter, 14 ff. 96. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:387; Preller, Sozialpolitik, 46, 75; Kocka, Facing Total War, 45–46. For a somewhat more charitable assessment, see Schönhoven’s introduction to Die Gewerkschaften in Weltkrieg und Revolution, 1914–1919, ed. Klaus Schönhoven (Cologne: Bund, 1985), 17–20. 97. Feldman, Army, 520. 98. Die Tätigkeit des Leipziger Gewerkschaftskartells und der Leipziger Gewerkschaften während der Kriegszeit (Leipzig: Gewerkschaftskartells, 1919), 7. 99. David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 36–37; Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik, 1918/1919 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1962), 37 ff. 100. StadtaL, pb 1917 and 1918, section on uspd. 101. Richard Lipinski, Der Kampf um die politische Macht in Sachsen (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1920), 6–8. 102. Jahresbericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats des Sozialdemokratischen Vereins für den 13. sächsischen Reichstagswahlkreis Leipzig: April 1918 (Leipzig, Sozialdemokratischer Verein, 1918), 3. 103. Ibid., 3, 7 ff. 104. Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (hereafter lnn), 29 January 1918. 105. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 2:980 n. 6. 106. See Schweinitz’s announcement in lnn, 1 February 1918. 107. K. Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß in der Leipziger Arbeiterbewegung während des Ersten Weltkrieges” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Leipzig, 1964), 250 ff., l (appendix). 108. See, for example, staatsal, Giesecke and Devrient, Nr. 145.


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109. From naval archives, quoted in W. Deist, ed., Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg, 1914 bis 1918: Quellen zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politische Parteien (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1970), 763 n. 9, 999, 1026, 1216. 110. Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 65–66; Jahresbericht, 6–7. 111. StadtaL, pb 1917, 1–3, passim; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 178 ff., 235–36; staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25441. The year 1917 saw a sharp jump in the number of strikes Reichwide as well. See Kocka, Facing Total War, 61. 112. Robert and Winter, Capital Cities at War, 530. 113. For a review of this dialectic in Germany as a whole, see Kocka, Facing Total War, 61 ff. 114. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25441. 115. Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß,” 168–69. 116. Miller, Burgfrieden, 291–92. 117. Feldman, Army, 337 ff.; Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß,” 170 ff. 118. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25452, Bl. 25–70; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269; Deist, Militär, 733, quoting from naval archives; Arbeiterführer als Verräter, 20. 119. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269, passim. 120. StadtaL, pb 1917, 23 ff.; 50 ff.; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 178 ff., and 269, passim; staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25452, Bl. 29–70; lvz, 20 April 1917; Deist, Militär, 733; summary of “Bericht des überwachenden . . . ,” in the appendix to Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß.” A number of historians have incorrectly labeled the deputation sent to Berlin the first of the Worker Councils (Arbeiterräte) that were to play a dominant role in the revolution. Kriegsamt chief Groener himself was under the impression that a Worker Council had been elected in Leipzig. See Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß,” 189. In fact, the assembled workers merely elected a deputation (Deputation, Abordnung) to go to Berlin. See StadtaL, pb 1917, 50, and staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25452, Bl. 29–70. The historiographical confusion results perhaps from the fact that an attempt was made at the meeting—probably by Liebmann under the influence of the Russian Revolution—to elect a Worker Council. The Kriegsamt officer monitoring the meeting quoted the proposal thus: “To promote the effective representation of worker interests the assembled call upon all trades to send representatives to form a Worker Council with the representatives of the metal workers and Independent Socialist party” (staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25452, Bl. 29–70). It does not appear that a vote was held on the proposal. Nevertheless, after the war Liebmann claimed that under his direction Germany’s first Worker Council was formed during this strike. See his “Der erste Arbeiterrat in Deutschland,” lvz, 8 November 1919. 121. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25452, Bl. 29–70; StadtaL, pb 1917, 50; appendix to Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß,” xxxviii ff. 122. StadtaL, pb 1917, 23 ff.; 50 ff.; StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 269, passim, and 59, Bl. 178 ff; lvz, 20 April 1917. 123. Schönhoven, Die Gewerkschaften, 350 ff. See also F. L. Carsten, Revolution in

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Central Europe 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 14; Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte, 56; and Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband, 61. 124. Groener himself remarked with great annoyance how the political demands of strikers in Leipzig set an example for workers elsewhere. See Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß,” 189. 125. Feldman, Army, 337 ff. 126. StadtaL, pb 1917, 54–59; lvz, 16 November 1917; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:514. 127. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25441. 128. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 1:65; Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß,” 238 ff. 129. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25441. 130. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 205. 131. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25452, Bl. 127; StadtaL, pb 1917, 31; appendix to Schneider, “Der politisch-ideologische Differenzierungsprozeß,” xlix. 132. StadtaL, pb 1917, 32. 133. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 210 ff. 134. StadtaL, pb 1917, 32–33. 135. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25441. 136. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 225, 232. 137. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 2:564. 138. Allgemeiner Verwaltungsbericht, 1:65. 139. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25441. 140. See the summary of the strike prepared by the Kriegamtstelle of the Nineteenth Army Corps in StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 235 ff. 141. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 2:980 n. 6. 142. Ibid., 1:452. 143. For a review of reports on mood written by Kriegsamtstellen around the Reich during the spring of 1918, see Feldman, Army, 505. Curt Geyer, a left-wing Independent Socialist and son of Friedrich, complained that as long as the possibility of military victory remained, uspd propaganda had little influence on workers. See Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 65. On solidarity with fathers, sons, and brothers at the front during offensives, see Robert and Winter, Capital Cities at War, 13 ff. 144. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 24175, 75 ff. 145. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25229. 146. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 248–56. 147. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 24175. 148. StadtaL, pb 1916, 33 ff.; and pb 1917, 39–46. 149. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 59, Bl. 219. The female proclivity for confrontational outdoor forms of social protest has been observed in other cities during the war. For Munich, see Seidel, Frauenarbeit, 222–27. For Paris, see Jean-Louis Robert, “The Parisian Strikes (August 1914–July 1919),” in Strikes, Social Conflict, and the First World War: An International Perspective, ed. Leopold Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992), 40–43; and Laura Lee Downs, “Women’s Strikes and the Politics of Popular Egalitarianism in France, 1916–1918,” in Rethinking


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Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard Berlanstein (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 114–48. For the industrial centers of northern Italy, see Giovanna Procacci, “State Coercion and Worker Solidarity in Italy (1915–1918): The Moral and Political Content of Social Unrest,” in Strikes, Social Conflict, and the First World War: An International Perspective, ed. Leopold Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992), 172; as well as Stefano Musso, “Political Tension and Union Struggle: Working-Class Conflicts in Turin During and After the First World War,” in Strikes, Social Conflict, and the First World War: An International Perspective, ed. Leopold Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992), 232. For St. Petersburg, see, in the same volume, Leopold Haimson and Eric Brian, “Labor Unrest in Imperial Russia during the First World War: A Quantitative Analysis and Interpretation,” 421 ff. 150. StadtaL, pb 1917, 36–38. 151. Historical investigations finding apathetic women on the shop floor include Roth, “Die kulturellen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie im kaiserlichen Deutschland,” in Moderne Deutsche Sozialgeschichte, ed. H. U. Wehler (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1975), 347; Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 121–24; and Richard J. Evans, “Politics and the Family: Social Democracy and the Working-Class Family in Theory and Practice Before 1914,” in The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 269 ff. The only study I have encountered finding female militancy against employers is Kathleen Canning, “Gender and the Politics of Class Formation: Rethinking German Labor History,” American Historical Review 97 (June 199’2): 736–68, and, in more detail, Canning’s recent book, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 152. See, for instance, the protocol of negotiations between the worker committee and management at the Breunsdorf strip mine in staatsal, Leipziger bkw ag, Nr. 89. For a similar example of the displacement of the union by a worker committee, see Leuna, A 1305, Bl. 3 ff. 153. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25444; StadtaL, pb 1917, 2. For a similar finding in Germany as a whole, see Kocka, Facing Total War, 107 ff. 154. Feldman, Army, 513–14. 155. Ibid., 517. 156. Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte, 35; Erich Matthias, “Der Rat der Volksbeauftragten: Zu Ausgangsbasis und Handlungsspielraum der Revolutionsregierung,” in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972): 112–13. Gerhard A. Ritter labels the spd the “main opponent of a revolutionary movement” in “Sozialistische Parteien in Deutschland zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik,” in Staat und Gesellschaft im politischen Wandel: Beiträge zur Geschichte der modernen Welt, ed. Werner Pöls (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 112–13. A few days before the proclamation of the German republic, Ebert confided to Prince Max, “I hate the social revolution like sin” (A. J. Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918: A Study of

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German Socialism in War and Revolt [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967], 169). 157. Astonishingly, the parliament itself failed to correct the autonomy of the army when it completed the new constitution at the end of October. In that document, the Reichstag claimed political supremacy for itself and took control of the navy but assumed only partial authority over the army “through the expansion of the competence of the war minister,” leaving the kaiser with considerable rights of command (Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die Sozialdemokratie, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 55–56. 158. Reinhard Rürup, “Problems of the German Revolution, 1918–1919,” Journal of Contemporary History 3, no. 4 (1968): 116. 159. lvz, 19 October 1918. 160. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 71–72. 161. Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930; reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 21 ff.; Lipinski, Der Kampf, 6–8; Karsten Rudolph, Die sächsische Sozialdemokratie vom Kaiserreich zur Republik, 1871–1923 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1995), 61 ff.; Eduard Bernstein, Die deutsche Revolution, ihr Ursprung, ihr Verlauf, und ihr Werk,. vol 1, Geschichte der Entstehung und ersten Arbeitsperiode der deutschen Republik (Berlin: Gesellschaft und Erziehung, 1921), 57–58. 162. lvz, 13 and 23 January 1919. 163. StadtaL, Kap. 7, Nr. 36, Bd. 2, esp. Bl. 91 ff. 164. StadtaL, Kap. 74A, Nr. 68, Bl. 326–27. 165. staatsad, Kriegsarchiv (P), 25657.

8. FINAL DISSOLUTION OF THE OLD RELATIONSHIP 1. Daniel Horn, The German Naval Mutinies of World War I (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 198 ff. 2. Unless otherwise noted, all information in this chapter comes from the lvz, the Leipziger Tageblatt (hereafter ltb), and the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (hereafter lnn), 9–12 November 1918. 3. Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 75. Geyer was able to eavesdrop on this conversation after a switchboard operator—a member of the uspd—had phoned him and connected him to the other line. 4. Ibid., 73 ff. 5. Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, ser. 2, vol. 2, November 1917–Dezember 1918 (Berlin: Dietz, 1957), 323. 6. In addition to newspaper coverage, see eyewitness accounts in Rudolf Kittel, Die Universität Leipzig im Jahre der Revolution 1918/19: Rektoratserinnerungen (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1930), 7; and Caroline Ethel Cooper, Behind the Lines: One Woman’s War, 1914–1918, ed. Decie Denholm (London: Jill Norman and Hobhouse, 1982). Cooper, an Australian musician, found herself stranded in Leipzig for the duration of the war.

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7. The uspd leaders in Leipzig knew of course that their method of composing the asr would exclude nonworkers. Nobody remarked, however, that it also excluded workers not laboring for a wage: retired wage workers, maids, homeworkers, and the like. 8. Walter Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930; reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 27; E. Kittel, “Novemberumsturz 1918: Bemerkungen zu einer vergleichenden Revolutionsgeschichte der deutschen Länder,” Blätter zur deutschen Landesgeschichte 104 (1968): 53–57. 9. Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik, 1918/19 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1962), 83–84; Kittel, “Novemberumsturz 1918,” 58. 10. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 175. 11. Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 39. 12. Ibid. Newspaper coverage refers to those walking out as the “workforce” (Arbeiterschaft), as if it were self-evident that they were the only strikers. 13. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 7. 14. ltb, 9 November 1918. 15. Female underrepresentation was the case in asre throughout Germany. See Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 429. 16. Memo of the Rat der Stadt to the Krieshauptmann (royal prefect) in Leipzig, StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 5. 17. Leipzig was one of the few cities in Saxony where this happened. See Bernd Rüdiger, “Revolutionäre Kommunalpolitik und Kommunalpolitik in der Revolution: Zur Rolle der Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte in den Städten Sachsen während der Novemberrevolution bis zum 1. Reichsrätekongreß,” Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 7 (1979): 131. 18. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 46, Bl. 11–12. 19. Gerhard A. Ritter, “Sozialistische Parteien in Deutschland zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik,” in Staat und Gesellschaft im politischen Wandel: Beiträge zur Geschichte der modernen Welt, ed. Werner Pöls (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 101. 20. Hence Professor Ritter’s curious choice of the word “disorientation” to describe the state of mind that led workers to replace the kaiser with a democratic republic. 21. Ulrich Kluge, Die deutsche Revolution 1918/1919: Staat, Politik, und Gesellschaft zwischen Weltkrieg und Kapp-Putsch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 40–41. 22. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 250. 23. During the war years nineteen thousand Leipzig women who had never held wage jobs entered the workforce. Fourteen thousand of these went into “trade, transportation, and insurance,” and only five thousand into “industry” (Ernst Kroker, Handelsgeschichte der Stadt Leipzig: Die Entwicklung des Leipziger Handels und der Leipziger Messen von der Gründung der Stadt bis auf die Gegenwart [Leipzig: W. Bielefeld, 1925], 286). For an identical finding in Bavaria, see Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in

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der Kriegsgesellschaft: Beruf, Familie, und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1989), 36–49. Further damaging Ritter’s thesis, Daniel finds that among female wartime factory workers, only 2.8 percent had been farm laborers, and this in the largely rural kingdom of Bavaria (ibid.). 24. Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918, trans. Barbara Weinberger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 17. 25. StadtaL, pb 1917, 59–60. 26. A. Seidel, Frauenarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg als Problem der staatlichen Sozialpolitik:Dargestellt am Beispiel Bayerns (Frankfurt am Main: R. G. Fischer, 1979), 52–53; Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 1:203. 27. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 1:203; Kocka, Facing Total War, 18. 28. Low rates of intra- and interurban mobility among workers also characterized St. Petersburg on the eve of the Russian Revolution. See Leopold Haimson and Eric Brian, “Labor Unrest in Imperial Russia During the First World War: A Quantitative Analysis and Interpretation,” in Strikes, Social Conflict, and the First World War: An International Perspective, ed. Leopold Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992), 426–38. 29. For similar observations on the Reich as a whole, see Geary, “Radicalism and the Worker: Metalworkers and Revolution, 1914–23,” in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 267 ff. 30. For similar arguments, see also Kluge, Die deutsche Revolution, 39–54; Miller, Die Bürde; and David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 54–55. None of the distinguished contributors to the volume edited by Eberhard Kolb, Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972), mentions prewar conditions as contributing to the outbreak of the revolution, a puzzling omission considering the title of that book. Among the few studies that stress the importance of pre-1914 factors in the outbreak and development of the revolution are Gerald Feldman, Eberhard Kolb, and Reinhard Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1917–1920,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 13, no.1 (1972): 86; Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); idem, “Workers and Revolution in Germany, 1918–1919: The Urban Dimension,” in Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925, ed. James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 118; Klaus-Dieter Schwarz, Weltkrieg und Revolution in Nürnberg: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1971); Jürgen Tampke, The Ruhr and Revolution: The Revolutionary Movement in the Rhenish-Westphalian Industrial Region, 1912–1919 (Norwalk, Conn.: Australian National University Press, 1978); Erhard Lucas, Arbeiterradikalismus: Zwei Formen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1976).

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31. One might rebut that the masses deposed the kaiser as a result of the third note from President Wilson to the German government on 23 October 1918. While somewhat vague, the note seems to demand the removal of the entire monarchical system, not just Wilhelm II, as a precondition for an armistice. See the extended excerpt of the note in Gerhard A. Ritter and Susanne Miller, eds., Die deutsche Revolution 19918/19: Dokumente (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1975), 29–30. Nevertheless, Germans of all political persuasions interpreted it as a demand merely that Wilhelm II abdicate, not that the monarchy be abolished. See the review of press coverage after 23 October in Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte, 22–23; and Wolfgang Sauer, “Das Scheitern der parlamentarischen Monarchie,” in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972), 78. Ebert and Scheidemann were also under the impression that the monarchy itself could be saved, working energetically toward this goal until the popular uprising shattered their hopes. See Miller, Die Bürde, 58–60; Kittel, “Novemberumsturz 1918,” 50–51. Thus the historian is not entitled to interpret the institution of the republic as an antiwar reflex (i.e., an attempt to comply with the peace conditions of Wilson’s note) because in the minds of the insurgents the Allies had only demanded that Wilhelm go, not that the monarchy itself be liquidated. Moreover, such an argument fails to explain why the revolutionaries in Leipzig declared the Saxon king deposed while striving to democratize municipal government.

9. EXPECTATIONS AND DISAPPOINTMENT 1. The armistice governed the relationship between victors and vanquished until the conclusion of a comprehensive peace treaty. It stipulated that Germany renounce the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest; withdraw its troops from France, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, the entire left bank of the Rhine, and the right bank to a distance of thirty-five kilometers; submit to Allied occupation of Cologne, Koblenz, and Mainz: and surrender airplanes, ships, submarines, and so forth to the victors. The Allies for their part continued the naval blockade. See Edmund Marhefka, ed., Der Waffenstillstand, 1918–1919 (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1928). Significantly, the ohl persuaded the German state secretary Matthias Erzberger to sign the document, thereby helping itself to avoid responsibility for the military defeat. 2. Eberhard Kolb, “Räte-Wirklichkeit und Räte-Ideologie in der deutschen Revolution von 1918/1919,” in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972), 180. For a nearly identical description of the mood of urban workers in Germany at this time, see Peter von Oertzen, Die Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung und der Mitbestimmung in der Revolution von 1918, unter bes. Berücksichtigung der Metallindustrie (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, 1965), 24. To save space, I will hereafter employ the term “state apparatus” to refer to the civil service, judiciary, and officer corps taken together. 3. David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the

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German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 122–23. 4. “Resolution des Vertretertages der Soldatenräte des Feldheeres zur politischen Lage,” in Quellen zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, 2d ser., Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der Politischen Parteien (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 2:22 ff. 5. Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig im alten Rathaus (hereafter sml), D 1296/68. 6. lvz, 22 November 1918. 7. Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 79–80. 8. lvz, 9 December 1918. 9. lvz, 13 December 1918. 10. See, for example, the speech from the podium of a meeting of the Leipzig asr on 21 December in Mitteilungsblatt des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrats Leipzig für das 19. Armeekorps (henceforward asr Mitteilungsblatt), no. 3, 3. Unless otherwise noted, all cites to the asr Mitteilungsblatt will be to its edition A, which covered events in Leipzig. 11. Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 111–12. 12. The more moderate Soldier Councils were overrepresented at the congress as compared to the Worker Councils: each of the former’s delegates represented only one hundred thousand soldiers, whereas each of the latter’s represented two hundred thousand workers (explanatory comment of Robert Wheeler, ed., in Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 80 n. 35). 13. Dick Geary, “Radicalism and the Worker: Metalworkers and Revolution, 1914–23,” in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 270. 14. Miller, Die Bürde, 128–29. 15. H. Schieck, “Die Behandlung der Sozialisierungsfrage in den Monaten nach dem Staatsumsturz,” in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972): 150–51. 16. Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin: Dietz, 1984), 105 ff.; Miller, Die Bürde, 136 ff. 17. Miller, Die Bürde, 136–37. The uspd, convinced that it would win few seats on such a body, boycotted the elections to it, allowing the Central Council to fall under the control of the mspd (ibid.). 18. Ibid., 115; Peter von Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution: Eine politikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung über Ideengehalt und Struktur der betrieblichen und wirtschaftlichen Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Revolution 1918/1919 (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 102–3. 19. Erich Matthias, “Der Rat der Volksbeauftragten: Zu Ausgangsbasis und Handlungsspielraum der Revolutionsregierung,” in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972), 104.


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20. Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 2:582–83. 21. Miller, Die Bürde, 145; Jürgen Tampke, The Ruhr and Revolution: The Revolutionary Movement in the Rhenish-Westphalian Industrial Region, 1912–1919 (Norwalk, Conn.: Australian National University Press, 1978), 80 ff. 22. Schieck, “Die Behandlung,” 140–41; Geary, “Radicalism,” 272–73. 23. Fritz Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband während des ersten Weltkrieges und der Revolution (Hannover: Norddeutscher Verlaganstalt Goedel, 1957), 85, quoting from dmz, 1919, no. 10, 38, and from Correspondenzblatt der Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands 43 (1919): 541 ff. 24. Walter Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930; reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 30–31; Eduard Bernstein, Die deutsche Revolution, ihr Ursprung, ihr Verlauf, und ihr Werk, vol. 1, Geschichte der Entstehung und ersten Arbeitsperiode der deutschen Republik (Berlin: Gesellschaft and Erziehung, 1921), 59–61. 25. M. Schippel, Die Sozialiserungsbewegung in Sachsen, Vorträge der GeheStiftung zu Dresden, vol. 10 (1920), no. 4 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1920), 4–5; Fabian, Klassenkampf, 47; Miller, Die Bürde, 160–61. 26. asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 3, 40. More on events in Saxony below. 27. staatsal, Nachlaß Kurt Weichelt, Nr. 3, Bl. 204. 28. Berliner Tageblatt, 17 January 1919, as quoted by Richard Müller, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution, vol. 3, Der Bürgerkrieg in Deutschland (1925; reprint, Berlin: Olle and Wolter, 1979), 130–31. 29. Geary, “Radicalism,” 272–73; Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 2:582–83. For workers in Berlin demanding a unified mspd-uspd front, see Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter, 80–81. In Hamburg, many workers could barely distinguish between the two parties and could not understand why the schism persisted. See Richard Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 60 ff. 30. Daniel Horn, The German Naval Mutinies of World War I (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 249; Geary, “Radicalism,” 271–72. 31. The text of the decisions is reproduced in Gerhard A. Ritter and Susanne Miller, eds., Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19: Dokumente (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1975), 141, 153 ff. 32. Matthias, “Der Rat,” 112–13. 33. Winkler, Von der Revolution, 106–7. 34. Heinrich August Winkler, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Revolution von 1918/1919: Ein Rückblick nach sechzig Jahren (Berlin: Dietz, 1979), 64. 35. Miller, Die Bürde, 187–88. 36. Richard N. Hunt, “Friedrich Ebert und die deutsche Revolution von 1918,” in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972): 132–34; F. L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 77 ff.

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37. Miller, Die Bürde, 155 ff. 38. On the firing of millions of women in the early months of the revolution, see Richard Bessel, “ ‘Eine nicht allzu grosse Beunruhigung des Arbeitsmarktes’: Frauenarbeit und Demobilmachung in Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 211–29. In Leipzig, female workers do not appear to have protested against this policy. See staatsal, Meier and Weichelt, 226, “Li,”“S.” This accords with the evidence in the rest of the Reich. Bessel argues that most women believed the veterans had a right to their old jobs and, after four years of sacrifice, wished to marry, start families, and with luck avoid wage work altogether (220, 227). Although the mass firings quickly depressed the female share of the wage workforce to its prewar level, women began rapidly reentering the wage workforce after 1920. See Winkler, Von der Revolution, 89 ff. 39. Schieck, “Die Behandlung,” 146. 40. Ibid., 148 ff.; Matthias, “Der Rat,” 108; Kolb, “Räte-Wirklichkeit,” 177–78. 41. See, for example, Gerald Feldman, Eberhard Kolb, and Reinhard Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1917–1920,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 13, no. 1 (1972): 91. 42. Richard Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chs. 7 and 8. 43. Winkler, Die Sozialdemokratie, 42–53. 44. Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (1949; reprint, Bonn: Dietz, 1975), 228–36. 45. Kolb, “Räte-Wirklichkeit,” 158–59; Matthias, “Der Rat,” 115; Miller, Die Bürde, 145–46. 46. Matthias, “Der Rat,” 112–13; Feldman, Kolb, and Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen,” 91. 47. Instructions of the RdV to local asre as printed in lvz, 27 November 1918. 48. Miller, Die Bürde, 159–60. 49. Eberhard Kolb, “Internationale Rahmenbedingungen einer demokratischen Neuordnung in Deutschland, 1918/19,” in Politische Parteien auf dem Weg zur parlamentarischen Demokratie in Deutschland. Festschrift für E. Matthias, ed. L. Albertin and W. Wink (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1981): 147–76. See also Winkler, Die Sozialdemokratie, 42–53; and Ulrich Kluge, Die deutsche Revolution 1918/1919: Staat, Politik, und Gesellschaft zwischen Weltkrieg und Kapp-Putsch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 23, 181 ff. 50. From Wilson’s “Third Note to the German Government,” as quoted in Ritter and Miller, Die deutsche Revolution, 29–30. 51. Unless otherwise noted, the following examination of the formation and early policy of the Saxon RdV relies on sml, D 1296/68; lvz, 10–15 November 1918; Fabian, Klassenkampf, 30 ff.; and Bernstein, Die deutsche Revolution, 59–61. 52. Decree as published in the ltd, 17 November 1918. Significantly, the signatories referred to themselves as the “full ministry” (Gesamtministerium), not as the more revolutionary-sounding “Saxon Council of People’s Deputies” (Sächsischer Rat der Volksbeauftragten). For further decrees from the Saxon RdV prohibiting local asre


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from interfering with officials of the old regime, see lnn, 28 November 1918, and ltd, 30 December 1918. 53. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 48, Bl. 16–28. 54. Richard Lipinski, Der Kampf um die politische Macht in Sachsen (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1920), 27–28. 55. lvz, 24 November 1918. His fellow Leipziger and uspd comrade on the Saxon RdV, Finance Minister Friedrich Geyer, likewise did little to avert early elections. On the stump, Geyer attacked the mspd policy of holding early elections, pointing out that they would deny the provisional revolutionary government enough time to implement sweeping reforms. Behind the closed doors of the Saxon RdV, however, he does not appear to have seriously contested its decision to hold elections for the city councils on 26 January and for the Saxon Landtag on 2 February. See Fabian, Klassenkampf, 35–37. In other words, the elder Geyer acquiesced in the determination of his colleagues to make the Saxon RdV a caretaker institution that left fundamental decisions to a future Saxon Landtag. 56. lvz, 9 February 1919. 57. The mspd newspaper in Leipzig agreed that Lipinski was ideologically in tune with the Majority Socialists. See Freie Presse, 6 December 1918. 58. lvz, 22 November 1918; E. Kittel, “Novemberumsturz 1918: Bemerkungen zu einer vergleichenden Revolutionsgeschichte der deutschen Länder,” Blätter zur deutschen Landesgeschichte 104 (1968): 66–7; Fabian, Klassenkampf, 35–37; Morgan, The Socialist Left, 172–73. Saxony was one of the few Länder in which uspd and mspd were unable to work together on the Land asr. 59. Schieck, “Die Behandlung,” 153–55. 60. Winkler, Von der Revolution, 76. 61. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 2:612. 62. Quoted in Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914– 1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 523 ff. See also Matthias, “Der Rat,” 109. 63. staatsal, Meier and Weichelt 137, Bl. 63–64. 64. Confidential pamphlet distributed to members: Veröffentlichungen des Verbands Sächsischer Industrieller, vol. 24, Vertrauliches Protokoll über die am 7. Januar 1919, vormittags 1/2 10 Uhr in Sitzungskammer des Arbeits- und Wirtschaftsministerium geführten Verhandlungen zwischen Vertretern der sächsischen Regierung und dem Vorstandsrat des Verbandes Sächsischer Industrieller (Dresden: Risse, 1919). 65. asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 1, 1, 12. 66. For a text of the resolution, see ltd, 24 December 1918. 67. asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 1; lvz, 13 November 1918. 68. Most of the foodstuffs were seized from the warehouses of companies that had obtained them on the black market and were distributing them to their own employees. See lvz, 10 December 1918. 69. Erwin Könnemann, Einwohnerwehren und Zeitfreiwilligenverbände: Ihre Funktion beim Aufbau eines neuen imperialistischen Militärsystems (November 1918 bis 1920) (Berlin: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1971), 161–62. 70. sml, Dokument D 13807167, “Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen des Führers der

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Leipziger Matrosenkompagnie Franz, Section 2,” 7 ff. This source is probably not a “diary” but instead a memoir given that the author admits in the text that he is recalling events that happened thirty-eight years earlier. For other sources on the Leutzsch shootouts, see lvz, 10 January 1919, and lnn, 13 January 1919. 71. Fritz Seger, essay in Hans Block and Fritz Seger, Zum ersten Jahrestag der deutschen Revolution vom 9. November 1918 (Leipzig: Landesvorstand der usp Sachsens, Schrörs, 1919), 13–20. The conservative president of the university referred to Seger as “in theory radical but in praxis quite reasonable” (Rudolf Kittel, Die Universität Leipzig im Jahre der Revolution 1918/1919: Rektoratserinnerungen [Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1930; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1930], 88). 72. See Hans Block’s essay in Block and Seger, Zum ersten Jahrestag, 5–12. 73. See, for example, his speech before the asr as reported in lvz, 28 November 1918. 74. Report of asr plenum session in ltd, 25 December 1918. 75. asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 1, 3 ff. 76. lvz, 22 November 1918. 77. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 23. 78. A review of all editions of the asr official organ (asr Mitteilungsblatt) during the first two months of the revolution reveals that the asr created neither new welfare programs nor municipal jobs. 79. Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 78–79. 80. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 40–44; ltd, 17 December 1918. 81. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 47. 82. lvz, 13 November 1918. 83. Joint announcement of the mayor and the asr in lvz, 16 November 1918. 84. ltd, 28 December 1918. Richard Comfort finds that the security organization in Hamburg was well to the right of the local asr (Revolutionary Hamburg, 54). 85. For the original advertisements, see lnn, 28 December 1918, and lvz, 28 December 1918. For Schöning’s abrupt announcement, under pressure from the asr, that those who had responded to the Freikorps ads should no longer feel themselves bound to induct themselves, see asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 3, 46. 86. Different sources report his real name as, variously, Franz Otto, Franz Papsch, and Franz Beiersdorff, but all knew him by the name “Sailor Franz.” A native Leipziger, he was disciplined repeatedly in the navy during the war for drinking, fighting, and political subversion. After returning to his hometown from Kiel in early November, he quickly attracted a following of armed sailors. Unless otherwise indicated, the information below on the revolutionary sailors comes from sml, D 13807167, “Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen des Führers der Leipziger Matrosenkompagnie Franz, Section 2.” 87. After thanking the sailors for their heroism, the asr leadership urged them to return to Kiel to help with the task of delivering Germany’s naval assets to the Allies (lvz, 17 November 1918). 88. Even the editors of the nonsocialist Leipziger Zeitung, after visiting the sailors’


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headquarters, admitted that “strict discipline seems to reign. . . . The public has not the slightest reason to view the sailors as any kind of danger” (lvz, 4 January 1919, quoting from an unknown issue of the Leipziger Zeitung). See Hugo Hertel and Curt Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment in Leipzig (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1935), 11. 89. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 68 ff., esp. 85. 90. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 46, Bl. 9; lvz, 22 November 1918. 91. staatsal, Dep. Stadtarchiv Zwenkau, Nr. 386, Bl. 35, 9–61. 92. Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1968), 186–87. 93. staatsal, Dep. Stadtarchiv Zwenkau, Nr. 386, Bl. 359–61. 94. Even in traditionally radical Merseburg and Halle, the asre rarely challenged old-regime authorities. See Werner Raase, “Der Kampf um revolutionäre Betriebsräte in den Jahren 1919–1920, dargestellt vor allem an den Kämpfen im Industriegebeit von Halle-Merseburg” (Ph.D. diss., Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 1960), 23–25, 79–81. This was true throughout Germany, especially in rural areas. See Kittel, “Novemberumsturz 1918,” 64–65; Walter Tormin, Zwischen Diktatur und sozialer Demokratie: Die Geschichte der Rätebewegung in der deutschen Revolution 1918/19 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1964), 59 ff. 95. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 10. 96. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 12. 97. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 79, Bd. 14, Bl. 77–78. 98. The mspd member of the old city council, Otto Pollender, was instrumental in attempting to revive this undemocratic institution. See lvz, 21 November 1918. 99. lnn, 19 December 1918. For Lipinski’s policy that local bodies dissolved after 15 November should resume activity, see staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 48, Bl. 28. 100. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr.48, Bl. 6 ff., and Nr. 46, Bl. 9–17. The contradiction of citing guidelines issued by one revolutionary body (the Saxon RdV) to attack the legitimacy of another (the local asr) was lost on Fink. 101. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 48, Bl. 9–10. 102. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 48, Bl. 16–21. 103. See, for example, StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 14. 104. StadtaL, Kap. 35, Nr. 1273. 105. Lipinski, Der Kampf um die, 25 ff. 106. Bürger can be translated as “citizen” but also as “bourgeois.” 107. Tätigkeitsbericht (Leipziger Bürgerausschuß) 1 (1918/1919): 2. 108. Wolf Volker Weigend, Walter Wilhelm Goetz, 1867–1958: Eine biographische Studie über den Historiker, Politiker, und Publizisten, Schriften des Bundesarchivs, no. 40 (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1992). 109. StadtaL, Kap. 35, Nr. 1232, Bl. 1b, 6. For the list of prewar notables, see appendix 3. 110. I obtained this information by checking the names of the executive committee members listed in Tätigkeitsbericht (Leipziger Bürgerausschuß) 1:8–9, against my own list of prewar notables in appendix 3. 111. Leipziger Abend-Zeitung, 22 November 1918.

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112. StadtaL, Kap. 35, Nr. 1232, Bl. 1b, 6. 113. Ibid., Bl. 3; ltd, 18 December 1918. 114. Unless otherwise noted, the information on the ba was culled from Tätigkeitsbericht (Leipziger Bürgerausschuß) 1. 115. lnn, 10 April 1918. 116. See the collection of political fliers distributed during the election to the National Assembly in the Library of the University of Leipzig, “Deutsche Geschichte 10409,” esp. Bl. 58. 117. See, for instance, Gerhard Kunze, Erinnerungen an die Revolutionstage 1918: Zu Adolf Kittel’s Rektoratserinnerungen. Ein Abschiedsgruß an die Leipziger Studenten (Leipzig: Winter, 1933), 9; Halbjahrs-Bericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats des Sozialdemokratischen Vereins für den 13. sächsischen Reichstagswahlkreis: Oktober 1919 (Leipzig: uspd, 1919), 2. Hans-Joachim Bieber finds across Germany impressive nonworker political mobilization during the first two months of the revolution, precisely the period when an earlier historiography described them as “passive,”“stunned,” and “unpolitical.” And the Leipzig ba was perhaps the most dynamic of them all. See Hans-Joachim Bieber, Bürgertum in der Revolution: Bürgerräte und Bürgerstreiks in Deutschland, 1918–1920 (Hamburg: Christians, 1992), 11 ff., 257–58. 118. Kittel, Die Universität, 13. 119. asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 2, 24. 120. Kunze, Erinnerungen, 5–9; see also Kittel, Die Universität, 18 ff.; lvz, 5 December 1918. 121. Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 13 ff.; Könnemann, Einwohnerwehren, 162. In Germany as a whole, students were the most likely group to found and join Freikorps units. See Ernst Troeltsch, Spektator-Briefe: Aufsätze über die deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik, 1918/22 (Tübingen: Scientia, 1924), 128. 122. Winkler, Von der Revolution, 157–58. 123. Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 117. 124. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge der Stadt Leipzig in der Kriegszeit, 1914–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919), 1:37. 125. For example, the miners union for the brown coal industry around Halle negotiated a contract with the employers’ organization in which underground miners had to work nine hours each day and laborers in strip mines ten, both receiving only normal wages for the extra hours, not overtime. Landeshauptarchiv Magdeburg, Außenstelle Wernigerode (hereafter referred to as law), Rep F38 XXa 168, Bl. 24. 126. To circumvent legally the eight-hour maximum in the central German mining industry, for instance, an owner had to obtain permission from the mining inspectorate. In fact, however, owners simply ordered workers to take Sunday and overtime shifts with no bonus and then retroactively, sometimes months later, informed the authorities of the sum total of overtime hours logged. I came across no instance in which inspectors disciplined or even admonished owners for this practice. See, for example, staatsal, bkw Kriebitzsch-Zechau, Nr. 14, correspondence of the mine management with the Thüringer Bergamt Altenburg. Across Germany the eight-hour maximum was largely ignored during the revolution. See G. Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 46–47.

10. GENERAL STRIKE

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127. lvz, 23 January 1919. 128. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung im Jahre 1920 (Leipzig, 1921), 44. 129. On the increase in marriage, see Winkler, Von der Revolution, 157–58. For housing statistics in Leipzig, see Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 110. 130. Winkler, Von der Revolution, 192. There is more on the causes of the coal shortage in the next chapter. 131. See the description of the rationing system in staatsal, Dresdner Bank ag, Nr. 197, memo of Zentralausschuß der Leipziger Arbeitgeberverbände. 132. StadtaL, Akten, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 16. 133. lvz, 20 January 1919. 134. staatsal, ahm, Nr. 2671, Bl. 4–5. 135. Oertzen, Die Probleme, 141. 136. Miller, Die Bürde, 209–11. 137. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 175, Gewerbegericht 155, and Gewerbegericht 157, Bl. 17. 138. staatsal, Koehler and Volkmar, “An die Handelskammer,” Bl. 4. 139. StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 2 ff. 140. Kittel, Die Universität, 76. 141. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 92–93. 142. Lipinski, Der Kampf um die, 17. 143. StatdaL, Gewerbegericht 175; Gewerbegericht 155. staatsal, Koehler and Volkmar, Nr. 16, “An die Handelskammer,” Bl. 4. 144. StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 2 ff. 145. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 93–94. See Kittel, Die Universität, 76–79, for an account of the storming of the university. 146. Raase, “Der Kampf,” 82–83. 147. The following summary of the returns of the 1919 National Assembly election (in percentages) provides an idea of the relative radicalism of Leipzig and its fellow central German cities of Halle and Merseburg:

uspd spd

reich 7.6 37.9

halle-merseburg 44.1 16.3

leipzig 38.6 20.7

berlin 27.6 37.9

düsseldorf 22.5 34.6

source: Geary, “Radicalism,” 275–76. 148. Geary, “Radicalism,” 275–76.

10. GENERAL STRIKE 1. Richard Müller, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution, vol. 3, Der Bürgerkrieg in Deutschland (1925; reprint, Berlin: Olle and Wolter, 1979), 126. 2. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 301.

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10. GENERAL STRIKE

3. Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 1 ff. 4. Ibid., 55–56. 5. The Landtag election returns in Leipzig indicate a radicalization both on the left and right in the two weeks after the election to the Reich National Assembly. The total number of voters dropped sharply, hinting at increasing disaffection with electoral politics, probably clustered among workers who were coming to the conclusion that the ballot box would not solve their problems. Within this smaller turnout, support for the mspd fell, while the parties on the extreme left and right (the uspd and German National People’s Party, respectively) gained relatively. See Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 5:301. 6. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, 5:301. 7. Richard Lipinski, Der Kampf um die politische Macht in Sachsen (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, 1920), 16; Walter Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930, reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 47 ff. 8. As described by Economic and Labor Minister Schwarz to the Federation of Saxon Industrialists in January 1919. See the confidential pamphlet for federation members, Veröffentlichungen des Verbandes Sächsischer Industrieller, vol. 24, Vertrauliches Protokoll über die am 7. Januar 1919, vormittags 1/2 10 Uhr in Sitzungskammer des Arbeits- und Wirtschaftsministerium geführten Verhandlungen zwischen Vertretern der sächsischen Regierung und dem Vorstandsrat des Verbandes Sächsischer Industrieller (Dresden: Risse, 1919), 28–29. Later, Gradnauer revealed just how moderate he was when he refused to support legislation making either 9 November or 1 May holidays in Saxony. See Fabian, Klassenkampf, 59. 9. For an overview of the coal contracts negotiated in central Germany, see staatsal, bkw Leonhardt ag, Nr. 54, Bl. 65–71. 10. law, XXa 95, Heft 2, Bl. 140 ff.; lvz, 13 December 1918 and 31 January 1919. 11. Peter von Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution: Eine politikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung über Ideengehalt und Struktur der betrieblichen und wirtschaftlichen Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Revolution 1918/1919 (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 135. 12. Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 1968), 349. 13. StadtaL, Kap. 28, Nr. 352, Bd. 1, Bl. 120; staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 2722, Bl. 167; lvz, 11, 14, 15, and 16 January 1919; asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 4, 5. 14. Illustrierte Geschichte, 348–50. 15. staatsal, Gebrüder Brehmer, Nr. 10, Bl. 31. 16. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 2722, Bl. 167, 172, 180; lvz, 17 January 1919. 17. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 175, Bl. 25; lvz, 21–23 January 1919. 18. lvz, 23 January 1919. 19. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 175, Bl. 22. 20. H. Hürten, ed., Zwischen Revolution und Kapp-Putsch: Militär und Innenpolik, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 327–28, 337 ff. 21. lvz, 31 January 1919

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22. staatsal, Bleichertsche bkw Neukirchen-Wyhra, Nr. 109; staatsal, bkw Borna ag, Nr. 489. 23. law, Rep F. 38 VIII b73, Bl. 155–59. 24. In his review of the Works Council movement across Germany during these months, Oertzen arrives at a similar conclusion. See Die Betriebsräte, 38–43. 25. Ibid., 278 ff. 26. Ibid., 102–3; Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 128 ff. 27. On Meuselwitz-Rositz, see staatsal, bkw Leonhardt ag, Nr. 54, Bl. 79 ff. On mines in the Altenburg region, see law, Rep. F 38 VIII b73, Bl. 155–59. 28. Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 174. The evidence Oertzen unearthed across Germany indicates that many such democratized firms earned high profits despite the continuing Allied naval blockade, galloping inflation, and the unsettled labor market stemming from demobilization (ibid., 173 ff.), 29. law, Rep F 38 VIII b 73, Bl. 145–46. 30. Ibid. 31. law, XXa 95, Heft 2, Bl. 134 ff. His willingness to use force with management won Peters great popularity among miners across central Germany. He was to play a prominent role in the general strike that broke out several weeks later. 32. law, Rep F 38 VIII b 73, Bl. 33–34, 58 ff. 33. The willingness of uncounted thousands of Works Councils in Russia (soviets) to take complete control of their firms probably stemmed from the encouragement they received from the Bolshevik government. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution: 1917–1932 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 72. 34. Erhard Lucas, Arbeiterradikalismus: Zwei Formen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1976); Mary Nolan, “Workers and Revolution in Germany, 1918–1919: The Urban Dimension,” in Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925, ed. James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 117–42. For a similar argument, see Jürgen Tampke, The Ruhr and Revolution: The Revolutionary Movement in the Rhenish-Westphalian Industrial Region, 1912–1919 (Norwalk, Conn.: Australian National University Press, 1978), 5–6, 22–23, 159 ff. For an overview of studies suggesting this pattern, see Adalheid von Saldern, “Arbeiterradikalismus-Arbeiterreformismus: Zum politischen Profil der sozialdemokratischen Parteibasis im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Methodisch-inhaltliche Bemerkungen zu Vergleichsstudien,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 4, no. 84: 483–98. 35. For the new contract stipulating lower pay for women negotiated at the Brothers Brehmer machine-making factory in Leipzig, see staatsal, Gebrüder Brehmer, Nr. 10, Bl. 64, 30 ff. For an overview of coal contracts in central Germany in which women were to earn 40–50 percent less than their male colleagues, see staatsal, bkw Leonhardt ag, Nr. 54, Bl. 65–71; and staatsal, bkw Kriebitzsch-Zechau, Nr. 190, Bl. 91, 99. In the strike of tram workers in Leipzig, the Works Council demanded that women be paid less than the youngest unskilled male. See staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr.

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2722, Bl. 167, 172, 180; lvz, 17 January 1919. Despite winning their strike, female workers in the municipal gas and electric works still only made 65 percent the earnings of their male colleagues. See lvz, 21–23 January 1919. 36. staatsal, Bleichertsche bkw Neukirchen-Wyhra, Nr. 109. 37. lvz, 28 January 1919. 38. staatsal, Koehler and Volckmar, 16. 39. staatsal, Koehler and Volkmar “An die Handelskammer,” Bl. 4–5. 40. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 155; lvz, 10 February 1919. 41. Leuna, A 1308, Bl. 1–20. 42. Unless otherwise indicated, all information below on the civil servant strike comes from StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4 passim; Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Beiheft 1; Kap. 10, no. 426 Personalamt, Bl. 1 ff., as well as from lvz, 10 February 1919 and 17 February 1919, Beilage 1. 43. lvz, 14 February 1919. 44. In private, the city senate was furious at the physical coercion exercised by the armed strikers but recognized that firing the ringleaders would only provoke another walkout. It therefore decided to bring charges in court. On 28 November 1919 the court found one of the members of the strike committee guilty of criminal intimidation but sentenced him to only ten days in prison or a 100-mark fine. See StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4 passim; and Kap. 10, Nr. 426 Personalamt, Bl. 1 ff. 45. Bericht über die soziale Fürsorge der Stadt Leipzig in der Kriegszeit, 1914–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919), 1:118. 46. Lipinski, Der Kampf um die, 27, 40–41. 47. lvz, 17 February 1919; Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 84–85. See also H. Gebler, “Die Novemberrevolution 1918, und die Bewegung der Lehrerräte: Dargestellt am Beispiel der Lehrerbewegung in Leipzig,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Universitaet Leipzig 14 (1965): 197–203. 48. Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 84–85. 49. Rudolf Kittel, Die Universität Leipzig im Jahre der Revolution 1918/1919: Rektoratserinnerungen (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1930; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1930), 22 ff., 27 ff. 50. Gerhard Kunze, Erinnerungen an die Revolutionstage 1918: Zu Adolf Kittel’s Rektoratserinnerungen. Ein Abschiedsgruß an die Leipziger Studenten (Leipzig: Winter, 1933), 9 ff. 51. Kittel, Die Universität, 120 ff. 52. Kunze, Erinnerungen, 9 ff. 53. Müller, Geschichte, 142. 54. lvz, 14 February 1919. 55. lvz, 17 February 1919. 56. Ibid. 57. Geyer himself noted the correlation between youth and radicalism within the uspd, not only in Leipzig but across Germany. See Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, ed. Robert Wheeler (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 10 ff., 109. 58. ltb, 11 March 1919.

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59. Miller, Die Bürde, 138–41, 253. 60. Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 73–78. 61. Ibid., 110 ff. 62. Peter von Oertzen, Die Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung und der Mitbestimmung in der Revolution von 1918, unter bes. Berücksichtigung der Metallindustrie (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, 1965), 42–45. 63. Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin: Dietz, 1984), 166–71. 64. law, Rep F 38 VIII b 73, Bl. 14, 54–57; Müller, Geschichte, 142–48. The regional asr’s control over the Prussian coal inspectorate was more formal than real as bureaucrats there maintained a lively correspondence with superiors in Berlin and the employers’ association discussing ways to rid themselves of unwelcome intrusions from the revolutionaries. See law, Rep F 38 VIII b 73, Bl. 52–57 65. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 109. 66. Fritz Curschmann, “Die Entstehungsgeschichte des mitteldeutschen Vorläufers des Betriebsrätegetzes,” in Sozialpolitische Betrachtungen: Beiträge zur Sozialpolitik der chemischen Industrie, ed. Fritz Curschmann (Halle: Gebauer-Schwetschke, 1930), 181 ff. 67. Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 136 ff.; Curschmann, “Die Entstehungsgeschichte,” 184 ff. 68. Volksblatt (Halle), 13 February 1919 69. As seen above in Wittenberg and again in the pronouncement of the conference of asre from the Halle-Merseburg region on 29 January, the Works Councils saw part of their mission as boosting production, indicating that greater democracy in the firm might even have enhanced economic efficiency. Examples from outside central Germany confirm this speculation. In the Ruhr, Works Councils made increased production of coal a major priority. Moreover, during its negotiations with the government, the Commission of Nine claimed that the miners would gladly take a pay cut in exchange for more Works Council authority over management. It should also be recalled that it was precisely the adoption of the Essen Model in the Ruhr that put an end to the destructive strikes of January 1919 and helped increase coal output. See Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 113–33. Oertzen’s research has uncovered a number of democratized firms around the Reich in which production and profits increased (ibid., 172 ff.). Much farther afield, the Works Councils in northern Italy, especially Turin, which took control of their firms in the summer and fall of 1920, made increasing efficiency a major goal. See Musso, “Political Tension and Union Struggle: WorkingClass Conflicts in Turin During and After the First World War,” in Strikes, Social Conflict, and the First World War: An International Perspective, ed. Leopold Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992), 236 ff. 70. For Koenen’s ideas on clause twelve, see Oertzen, Die Probleme, 57. 71. Wissell, along with his state secretary, Wichard von Moellendorf, advocated a socialization of the economy in which firms would remain under the day-to-day control of management but be subject to the oversight of economic councils (Wirtschaftsräte) composed equally of representatives of the state, unions, and employers.

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Production would be geared more to a centralized plan than to market signals. There was no place in Wissell’s plan for the Works Councils springing up in Germany at this time, and he therefore shared the opinion of his cabinet colleagues that the general strike had to be thwarted. In the event, his own plan was ultimately rejected by the cabinet. See Oertzen, Die Probleme, 66–67. 72. Landeshauptarchiv Magdeburg (hereafter referred to as lam), Rep C 20 I b, Nr. 1996, Bd. 1, Bl. 62 ff.; Die Sozialisierung des Bergbaus und der Generalstreik im rheinisch-westfälischen Industriegebeit: Herausgegeben von der Neunerkommission für die Vorbereitung der Sozialisierung des Bergbaus im rheinisch-westfälischen Industriegebeit (Essen: Lucas, 1919), 17. 73. law, Rep F 38 VIII b 73, Bl. 137 ff. 74. Koenen claimed later that he had tried to persuade his followers to accept the compromise but they had insisted on launching the general strike. See his remarks in E. Heilfron, ed., Die deutsche Nationalversammlung im Jahre 1919 in ihrer Arbeit für den Aufbau des neuen deutschen Volksstaates (Berlin: Norddeutsche Buchdruckerei, 1919), 3:1476. After sifting through the evidence, Oertzen offers the far more persuasive explanation that Koenen and Düwell simply called the strike after learning of the disastrous results of the Weimar negotiations. See Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 140–43. 75. For Curt Geyer’s description of the contact between younger, radical Independent Socialists (many of them sons of more moderate Social Democratic leaders), see Die revolutionäre Illusion, 82 ff., 95 ff. On the lack of coordination between left uspd leaders across Germany, see Koenen’s statement to Oertzen in Die Betriebsräte, 125 n. 4. For the regional asr Merseburg’s plan of a Northwest German Republic, see Hallesches Volksblatt, 29 January 1919. 76. The detailed Geschichte der Essener Sozialisierungsbewegung: Denkschrift (n.p., n.d.; presumably Essen, 1919), written by Neunerkommission chairman E. Ruben, is a formerly lost manuscript that was discovered recently in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. A chronicle of the Ruhr movement into late January, it makes no mention of contact among leaders in the Ruhr, central Germany, and Berlin. For the first contact at the conference in Essen, see Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 137. 77. Die Sozialisierung, 13; lam, Rep C 20 I b 1996, Bd. 1, Bl. 62 ff. 78. Die Sozialisierung, 18. 79. Ibid., 22–3. In his description of events leading up to the strike, Wilhelm Koenen makes no mention of coordination with leaders in the Ruhr. See Heilfron, Die Deutsche Nationalversammlung, 3:1475 ff. The leader of the Berlin movement, Richard Müller, likewise notes the absence of consultation between radical leaders on setting a date for the outbreak of the strike. See Müller, Geschichte, 140–42. 80. Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 86. 81. Winkler, Von der Revolution, 168–70. 82. Oertzen, Die Probleme, 42–45. 83. Müller, Geschichte, 124–63. 84. Winkler, Von der Revolution, 178–81; David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 232 ff.

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85. Miller, Die Bürde, 266–267. 86. Dokumente und Materalien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, ser. 2, vol. 3, Juli 1914–Oktober 1917, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim zk der sed (Berlin: Dietz, 1957/8), 198 ff.; Curschmann, “Die Entstehungsgeschichte,” 193 ff. 87. ltb, 26 and 27 February 1919 and 11 March 1919; Leipziger Zeitung und Handelsblatt (hereafter lzhb), 11 March 1919. No evidence emerged to substantiate Gerald Feldman’s claim—based on a report written by the royalist district supervisor [Kreishauptmann], von Burgsdorff—that many workers in Leipzig were coerced into joining the general strike. See his “Labor Unrest and Strikes in Saxony, 1916–23,” in Strikes, Social Conflict, and the First World War: An International Perspective, ed. Leopold Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992), 307–8. 88. On the geographical dimensions of the strike, see lam, Rep C 20 I b Bd. 1996, Bd. 1. Highly industrialized Magdeburg, where the mspd was the dominant party, did not join the strike. See Volksstimme (Magdeburg), 27 February 1919; and Zweiter Allgemeiner Kongress der Arbeiter-, Bauern-, und Soldatenräte Deutschlands vom 8. bis 14.4.1919 im Herrenhause zu Berlin, Stenographisches Protokoll (Berlin, 1919), 44–45. As in parts 1 and 2, once again the finding is that radical Leipzig was politically more akin to central Germany (Mitteldeutschland) than to Saxony, the eastern half of which remained aloof from the strike. 89. Müller, Geschichte, 142; Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 134. More on the social composition of the strikers below. 90. Winkler, Von der Revolution, 175–76. Officials of the local union cartel in Leipzig remained neutral until 2 March, adhering to their tradition of resisting popular mobilizations until they were well under way. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung im Jahre 1919 (Leipzig: Verlag des Gewerkschaftskartells, 1921), 10; asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 3, 47. The tiny mspd in Leipzig condemned the strike. 91. Müller, Geschichte, 144. 92. Reichswehr minister Gustav Noske, for instance, described the Works Council movement in the following terms: “Among the unorganized workers, psychopaths and characterless opportunists won influence and drove them to all manner of escapades. . . . The whipping up of the coal miners by emissaries of an uncertain origin led to a kind of rebellion after the convening of the National Assembly. One [Works Council] meeting followed another, mines were often immobilized by a small number of bold rascals, almost always from outside the company, who operated through force in the coal mines. . . . Through murder and arson, to which they were misled by communist string pullers, the miners ended up in crisis and misery” (Erlebtes aus Aufstieg und Niedergang einer Demokratie (Offenbach: Bollwerk, 1947): 92–93, 100. President Ebert and Chancellor Scheidemann shared this view. See Friedrich Ebert, Schriften, Aufzeichnungen, Reden, ed. F. Ebert, Jr. (Dresden: Reissner, 1926), 2:164; and P. Scheidemann, The Making of the New Germany: The Memoirs of Philipp Scheidemann, trans. J. E. Michels (New York: Appleton, 1929), 2:305. 93. For excerpts from the protocols of those negotiations, see Curschmann, “Die Entstehungsgeschichte,” 187. On the seriousness of the strike for the government, see

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Gerald Feldman, Eberhard Kolb, and Reinhard Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1917–1920,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 13, no. 1 (1972): 100; and Hagen Schulze, ed., “Enleitung,” Das Kabinett Scheidemann 13. Februar bis 20. Juni 1919: Akten der Reichskanzlei in der Weimarer Republik (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1969), xxxviii–xxxix. 94. Schulze, Das Kabinett Scheidemann, 10 ff. 95. Ibid., 68. For discussions of the bill within the spd parliamentary group, see Heinrich Potthoff and Hermann Weber, eds., Die SPD-Fraktion in der Nationalversammlung, 1919–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1986), 50–60. 96. For the text of the original enabling bill, see Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (1949; reprint, Bonn: Dietz, 1975), 240. See also Miller, Die Bürde, 361; Winkler, Von der Revolution, 197; and the editorial comment in Schulze, Das Kabinett Scheidemann, 68. On 28 February—as the central German strike was breaking out—the new Saxon Landtag incorporated a clause into Saxony’s provisional constitution mandating the eventual socialization of all “ripe” industries. It was never acted upon. See Fabian, Klassenkampf, 50 ff. 97. Potthoff and Weber, Die SPD-Fraktion, 48–49. 98. Schulze, Das Kabinett Scheidemann, 10. 99. Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 144–45. 100. Schulze, Das Kabinett Scheidemann, 72, esp. n. 6. On the powerlessness of the Works Councils ultimately included in the Weimar constitution, see Eberhard Kolb, “Räte-Wirklichkeit und Räte-Ideologie in der deutschen Revolution von 1918/1919,” in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972), 166; Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 156; and Preller, Sozialpolitik, 242. 101. See, for example, the speech of spd parliamentary speaker Richard Fischer on 28 February in the National Assembly stressing that the Works Councils must be anchored in the constitution and that they should have a “wide field of activity” (Potthoff and Weber, Die SPD-Fraktion, 47–48, esp. n. 10). See also ibid., 53–54, esp. nn. 6 and 7. 102. Schulze, Das Kabinett Scheidemann, 103–4; Koenen in Zweiter Allgemeiner Kongress, 237. For the government’s adamant use of the term “blue- and white-collar employee committees” during the 13–14 February negotiations, see Curschmann, “Die Entstehungsgeschichte,” 185 ff. 103. See, for instance, the cabinet discussion of 4 April 1919 in Schulze, Das Kabinett Scheidemann, 131–33. 104. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung im Jahre 1919, 10; asr Mitteilungsblatt, no. 3, 47. 105. sml, D 6989/69. 106. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 2722, Bl. 190, 197, 201; ahm Leipzig, Nr. 2671, Bl. 4, 20; ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1708, Bl. 10–16. One obtains an idea of the different universe inhabited by agricultural laborers when examining the disturbance on the estate of Karl Fritzsche in the village of Niederwünsch, near Merseburg, during the general strike. In an event reminiscent of an early modern jacquerie, the laborers of the estate stormed the manor house, pummeled Fritzsche and his sons to the ground, and then

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plundered his belongings, concentrating on the wine cellar. Fritzsche reported that he recognized one of his Polish seasonal workers in the mob, and the man hissed at him: “Today we’re in charge” (lam, Rep C 20 I b 1996, Bd. 1, Bl. 103 ff., 175. 107. lnn, 11 March 1919; ltb, 11 March 1919. On the change of heart of firemen over the course of just fourteen days, compare StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Beiheft 1, with StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Beih. 2, Bl. 30. 108. lnn, 11 March 1919. 109. ltb, 27 February 1919. 110. Ibid. 111. StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 19. 112. lzhb, 11 March 1919. 113. lvz, 1 March 1919; Kittel, Die Universität, 87. 114. ltb, 12 March 1919; lnn, 11 March 1919. 115. ltb, 12 March 1919. 116. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 155. 117. lnn, 11 March 1919. 118. staatsal, Dresdner Bank 182. 119. law, Rep F 38 VIII b 73, Bl. 106; Die Saale Zeitung, 25 February 1919. See also Wilhelm Koenen’s remarks on the behavior of lower white collars in the coal companies during the strike in Heilfron, Die Deutsche Nationalversammlung, 6:4372. 120. See the demands of the lower white collars during the negotiations to end the general strike in law, Rep F 38 VIII b 73, Bl. 101, 140. 121. lnn, 11 March 1919. For Mayor Rothe’s tacit approval of the municipal clerks’ decision to join the counterstrike, see the summary of his conversation with the head of their union in lvz, 13 March 1919. 122. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1708, Bl. 38 ff.; lnn, 11 March 1919; ltb, 12 March 1919. 123. lnn, 11 March 1919. 124. ltb, 12 March 1919; lzhb, 11 March 1919. 125. Kittel, Die Universität, 91 ff.; ltb, 11 March 1919. 126. lzhb, 11 March 1919. 127. lvz, 3 March 1919. Smaller farmers in the hilly countryside of Thuringia often remained neutral. After the strike, a delegation of them at the offices of the Prussian agricultural ministry expressed regret at their aloofness and promised that they would refuse to deliver food to the cities during any future general strike. See Thüringer Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 March 1919. 128. ltb, 12 March 1919; lnn, 11 March 1919; lvz, 3 March 1919. 129. Gerhard A. Ritter, Social Welfare in Germany and Britain: Origins and Development, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1983), 107 ff. 130. Gertrud Kling, Die Rolle des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrates von Halle in der Novemberrevolution (Nov. 1918–März, 1919) (Halle/Saale: sed, 1958), 33–34, 41. 131. ltb, 12 March 1919; lnn, 11 March 1919. 132. The conservative lnn reported that those evicted came exclusively from the public ward of the hospital. See lnn, 11 March 1919. The asr posted placards claiming

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that some of the doctors reportedly told the evicted, “If the workers want to lounge around [i.e., strike], then we don’t have to care for them” (StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 19). 133. StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 31. 134. Hans-Joachim Bieber, Bürgertum in der Revolution: Bürgerräte und Bürgerstreiks in Deutschland, 1918–1920 (Hamburg: Christians, 1992), 257–58. 135. Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 February 1919; Thüringer Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 March 1919. See also the summary of the strike in the Prussian province of Saxony in lam, Rep. C 20 Ib, Bd. 2, Bl. 92–94. 136. lnn, 11 March 1919; Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 March 1919. Thus all cites in this chapter to nonsocialist newspapers writing about the general strike begin on 11 March, when the asr lifted the ban. 137. lvz, 28 February 1919; ltb, 11 March 1919. 138. StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 19. 139. ltb, 11 March 1919. 140. lnn, 11 March 1919. 141. StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 31; ltb, 12 March 1919. 142. lnn, 11 March 1919. 143. ltb, 12 March 1919. 144. Ibid. 145. lnn, 11 March 1919; ltb, 12 March 1919. 146. staatsal, bkw Werk Kraft I, Thräna 59; and bkw Borna ag, Nr. 489. 147. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 99 ff.; Illustrierte Geschichte, 352. 148. On the occupation of Merseburg, see lam, Rep. C 20 I b, Bd. 2, Bl. 92–93. 149. law, Rep F 38 VIII b 73, Bl. 137–46, 176–79. For further background on the agreement, see staatsal, bkw Borna ag, Nr. 489; and Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 146. For the ways that management could use the clause on the protection of company secrets to keep Works Councils entirely out of the books, see the memo of the Arbeitgeberverband der chemischen Industrie of 27 March 1919 in Leuna, A 1309. 150. Curschmann, “Die Entstehungsgeschichte,” 201–27. 151. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1708, Bl. 24b; ltb, 11 March 1919; lzhb, 11 March 1919. 152. lvz, 4 March 1919. 153. lnn, 11 March 1919. More on the social composition of this body below. 154. ltb, 11 and 12 March 1919; Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte, 299. 155. lvz, 8 March 1919. 156. ltb, 11 and 12 March 1919. 157. ltb, 12 March 1919. 158. lnn, 11 March 1919. 159. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Beiheft 1, Nr. 90 passim. 160. StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 31. See also the police report in lnn, 11 and 13–14 March 1919. For further details, see Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 and 24 March 1919; and Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 104. 161. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 104 ff.

11. FINAL DRIVE OF THE PROLETARIAN WORKS COUNCIL MOVEMENT

393

162. ltb, 13 March 1919. A courier entrusted with 100,000 marks destined for the rail workers absconded with the money, embarking on a tour of the bars and cathouses of Leipzig and Halle. He was arrested two days later, having dissipated more than 16,000 marks. See lnn, 13–14 March 1919; Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 and 24 March 1919. Ultimately, the city brought charges of extortion against the two Geyers, Scheib, and Krug. The former two were immune because of their status as deputies in the National Assembly. The latter two each received a jail sentence of four months. See Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 61 ff. 163. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Beiheft 1, Nr. 90. 164. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1708, Bl. 24b; ltb, 11 March 1919; lzhb, 11 March 1919. 165. Illustrierte Geschichte, 354. 166. ltb, 11 March 1919. 167. staatsal, Dresdner Bank 182. 168. StadtaL, Kap. 75 S, Nr. 4, Bl. 45 ff.; and Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 55; lzhb, 11 March 1919; lvz, 10 and 11 March 1919; ltb, 11 and 12 March 1919; lnn, 11 March 1919. 169. ltb, 11 and 12 March 1919. 170. lnn, 13 March 1919. 171. A particularly dangerous moment followed the understanding among workers on 9 March that the strike was lost. Brawls and window smashing began in the city center, but these were quickly suppressed by the sailors. See lnn, 11 March 1919. 172. ltb, 12 March 1919; lzhb, 11 March 1919. All the evidence contradicts Gerald Feldman’s contention that frequent plunderings characterized the general strike in Leipzig. See Feldman, “Labor Unrest,” 307–8. 173. The names and addresses of the Volkswehr’s officers are listed in a secret report of the ba found in staatsal, Dresdner Bank 182. These names were then checked against the Leipziger Adreßbuch for 1919 to determine the professions of the Volkswehr officers. 174. staatsal, ahm, Nr. 2671, Bl. 10; Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 102. See also the summaries of the strike in the lvz, lnn, and ltb, 11–13 March 1919. 175. On the difficulty of isolating variables to explain militancy in one city and moderation in another, see Saldern, “Arbeiterradikalismus.” 176. ltb, 11 March 1919. 177. Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 61. 178. This accusation was made by none other than Saxon Minister for Economic Affairs Albert Schwarz in the ltb, 11 March 1919. Mittig claimed he had the track torn up in order to prevent trigger-happy asr security units from commandeering food trains and redirecting them to Leipzig (ibid.).

11. FINAL DRIVE OF THE PROLETARIAN WORKS COUNCIL MOVEMENT 1. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd.1, Bl. 95–98. 2. Freie Presse, 14 March 1919.

394


3. [Ludwig Rudolf] Georg Maercker, Vom Kaiserheer zur Reichswehr: Geschichte des freiwilligen Landesjaegerkorps. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Leipzig: Koehler,1921), 244–49. 4. Freie Presse, 14 March 1919; Erwin Könnemann, Einwohnerwehren und Zeitfreiwilligenverbände: Ihre Funktion beim Aufbau eines neuen imperialistischen Militärsystems (November 1918 bis 1920) (Berlin: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1971), 161–62. 5. Hugo Hertel and Curt Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment in Leipzig (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1935), 12. 6. See anecdotes in Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, ed. Robert Wheeler (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 112–13. 7. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Beiheft 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 5–9. 8. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 56. 9. F. L. Carsten, Reichswehr and Republic, 1918–33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1966), 226 ff. 10. Manfred Scheck, Zwischen Weltkrieg und Revolution: Zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Württemberg, 1914–1920 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1981), 216–30. 11. staatsad, MdI, Sekt. 9, Nr. 11137, Bl. 586. 12. Hagen Schulze, ed., Das Kabinett Scheidemann 13. Februar bis 20. Juni 1919: Akten der Reichskanzlei in der Weimarer Republik (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1969), 143–44; Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 1968), 402–3. 13. Peter von Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution: Eine politikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung über Ideengehalt und Struktur der betrieblichen und wirtschaftlichen Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Revolution 1918/1919 (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 117 ff. 14. Illustrierte Geschichte, 401. 15. Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 350 ff. 16. lvz, 17, 23, 24, and 26 April 1919. 17. See, for instance, the gloomy assessment of the situation in an internal memo of the Federation of Metal Industrialists in the Leipzig Region in staatsal, Meier and Weichelt, Nr. 137, pp. 110–116. See also lnn, 9 April 1919. 18. Schulze, Das Kabinett Scheidemann, 10 ff. For an overview of the continual turbulence throughout the region during these weeks, see lam, Rep C 20 I b, Nr. 1996, Bd. 1 passim and esp. Bl. 331–38. 19. Freie Presse, 21 and 25 March 1919. 20. lnn, 27 March 1919; lzhb, 27 March 1919. 21. ltb, 27 March 1919. 22. lvz, 28 March 1919. See also ltb, 27 March 1919; lnn, 27 March 1919. 23. lzhb, 24 April 1919; lvz, 25 April 1919; ltb, 24 April 1919; Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 April 1919; lnn, 24 April 1919. 24. Freie Presse, 5 May 1919. 25. lvz, 23 April 1919; Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung im Jahre 1919 (Leipzig: Verlag des Gewerkschaftskartells, 1921), 9.

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26. Miller, Die Bürde, 274. 27. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 116–18. 28. Ibid., 93–95. 29. “Richtlinien für den Ausbau des Rätesystems,” as printed in the appendix of Kurt Geyer, Sozialismus und Rätesystem. Anhang: Die Richtlinien der Fraktion der USPD auf dem zweiten Rätekongreß für den Aufbau des Rätesystems (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei Aktiengesellschaft, 1919). 30. Geyer, Sozialismus und Rätesystem, passim. 31. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 111–12. 32. lzhb, 24 April 1919; see also Freie Presse, 24 April 1919; ltb, 24 April 1919; lvz, 24 April 1919. 33. ltb, 3 May 1919. 34. lnn, 13 March 1919; lzhb, 26 March 1919; Freie Presse, 4 April 1919. 35. See newspaper coverage throughout April in lnn, ltb, and Leipziger AbendZeitung. 36. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 74, Bl. 1 and 74, Bl. 1b; lvz, 14 April 1919; Walter Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930; reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 69–71. 37. Editorial remarks in Schulze, Das Kabinett Scheidemann, 232 n. 7; H. Hürten, ed., Zwischen Revolution und Kapp-Putsch: Militär und Innenpolik, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 274 n. 1. 38. See, for example, lvz, 25 April 1919. 39. lvz, 9 May 1919; Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 13 ff. 40. David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 341 ff.; and the statements of left Independent Socialists such as Geyer, Koenen, and Walter Stöcker in Bericht vom außerordentlichen Parteitag der USPD in Berlin vom 2. bis 6. März 1919 (Berlin: “Freiheit,” 1919) 41. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 74, Bl. 11a; lvz, 10 May 1919. 42. See, for instance, lnn, 1 May 1919; ltb, 1 May 1919; Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 May 1919. 43. lnn, 25 April 1919. 44. lvz, 9 May 1919. 45. Maercker, Vom Kaiserheer, 244–49. 46. Ibid.; sml, Dokument D 13807167, “Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen des Führers der Leipziger Matrosenkompagnie Franz, Section 2,” 11. 47. Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 12 ff.; Könnemann, Einwohnerwehren, 162. 48. staatsal, Dresdner Bank 182. 49. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 79; Fabian, Klassenkampf, 70–71; Maercker, Vom Kaiserheer, 242–50. 50. These tribunals were of doubtful legality since Germany, though still technically in a state of war, was no longer engaged in hostilities. But the Ministry for Military Affairs in Dresden instructed the prefect on the scene to support the tribunals

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because “possible legal concerns must retreat in the face of general political and practical considerations” (staatsal, ahm Döbeln, Nr. 2399, Bl. 165). 51. Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 64–66; lvz, 26 May 1919 and days following. 52. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung, 10–11; Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 2:730. 53. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 173 passim; staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1707, Bl. 6, 12, 21; Maercker, Vom Kaiserheer, 252–53. 54. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1707, Bl. 26. 55. Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 12 ff. 56. Bieber, Gewerkschaften, 2:730. 57. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 22–23, 63. 58. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 28–57; Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 24–25. 59. lnn, 24 May 1919; Maercker, Vom Kaiserheer, 254, 256–60; Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 22. University students played perhaps the leading role in Freikorps units across Germany during the revolution. See Ernst Troeltsch, SpektatorBriefe: Aufsätze über die deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik, 1918/22 (Tübingen: Scientia, 1924), 128. 60. Eberhard Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik, 3d ed., Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte, vol. 16. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), 11, 161 ff.

12. REMNANTS OF THE PROLETARIAN WORKS COUNCIL MOVEMENT AND THE RESURGENCE OF THE LOWER-WHITE-COLLAR COUNCILS 1. Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 283–97. 2. C. L. Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation, 1914–1923: Ursachen und Folgen in internationaler Perspektive (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 126 ff.; Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin: Dietz, 1984), 157–58; Fritz Opel, Der deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband während des ersten Weltkrieges und der Revolution (Hannover: Norddeutscher Verlaganstalt Goedel, 1957), 100. 3. For the Scheidemann and Bauer cabinets, see Miller, Die Bürde, 358–59; Peter von Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution: Eine politikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung über Ideengehalt und Struktur der betrieblichen und wirtschaftlichen Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Revolution 1918/1919 (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 154 ff.; Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (1949; reprint, Bonn: Dietz, 1975), 228–51. For Saxony, see Walter Fabian, Klassenkampf um Sachsen: Ein Stück Geschichte, 1918–1930 (1930; reprint, Berlin: Arbeitswelt, 1972), 57 ff.; Hartfrid Krause, “Einleitung,” in Protokolle der Landesversammlungen der Unabhängigen Sozialdemo-

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kratischen Partei Sachsens, 1919–1922, ed. Hartfrid Krause (Berlin: Dietz, 1979), xv. Between the 1919 National Assembly elections and the Reichstag elections eighteen months later the mspd share of the national vote dropped from 37.9 to 21.6 percent, while that of the uspd rose from 7.6 to 18.8 percent. See Miller, Die Bürde, 412. 4. Preller, Sozialpolitik, 246. 5. David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 296 ff.; Miller, Die Bürde, 322 ff.; Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, ed. Robert Wheeler (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 141, 150 ff. 6. Miller, Die Bürde, 354. 7. The asre now in the process of disbanding were in no way replaced by the Worker Councils envisioned in article 165 of the constitution, passed on 31 July 1919. Article 165 called for ascending levels of councils, beginning with Works Councils, which in turn would elect regional Worker Councils, in turn electing a Reich Worker Council. Next to these were to be regional economic councils and a provisional Reich economic council, both containing representatives from the unions and capital. In extremely hazy terms, article 165 foresaw both structures serving “at the side” of the Reichstag, with some authority in economic matters. In fact, the plan was never implemented. See Ulrich Kluge, Die deutsche Revolution 1918/1919: Staat, Politik, und Gesellschaft zwischen Weltkrieg und Kapp-Putsch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 178; Preller, Sozialpolitik, 242 ff. Article 165 did not specify the powers of the individual Works Council in relation to management. These were circumscribed by a special law enacted in January 1920 (examined in the next chapter). 8. Gerald Feldman, Eberhard Kolb, and Reinhard Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1917–1920,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 13, no. 1 (1972): 101. 9. StadtaL, Kap. 1, Nr. 90, Bl. 96 ff.; Jahresbericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats der USP Groß-Leipzig: April 1919, April 1920, April 1921 (Leipzig: Selbstverlag, 1919–21); Leipziger Tageszeitung (hereafter ltz), 23 June 1919; ltb, 27 May 1920. On the ultimate demise of the asr, see ltb, 19 January and 25 June 1920; Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 78. 10. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 2671, Bl. 13 ff. 11. Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 3 ff. 12. Ibid., 65–66. 13. Ibid., passim. 14. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 114 n. 98. See the internal party memo marked “An die Parteifunktionäre” and “streng vertraulich” in Leipzig’s DimitroffMuseum attacking Geyer for his dictatorial personality, mistakes while chief of the asr, and determination to turn the uspd into an instrument of the kpd (and by extension, of Moscow). 15. staatsal, Dresdner Bank 182; lvz, 24 May 1919. 16. Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 126 ff., 160 ff. 17. lvz, 21 October 1919.

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18. lvz, 21 October–1 November 1919. 19. Halbjahrs-Bericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats des Sozialdemokratischen Vereins für den 13. sächsischen Reichstagswahlkreis: Oktober 1919 (Leipzig, uspd, 1919), 3. 20. lvz, 3 November 1920. 21. Jahresbericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats der USP Groß-Leipzig: April 1921 (Leipzig: Selbstverlag, 1921). 22. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5., 1915–18 (Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 301. As seen above, this trend was taking place in Germany as a whole. 23. See the resolutions of metal-, coal, transport, textile, municipal, and state workers endorsing powers of codetermination for Works Councils at their 1919 national congresses. Even traditionally conservative graphics workers moved closer to the Works Council idea during 1919. Peter von Oertzen, Die Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung und der Mitbestimmung in der Revolution von 1918, unter bes. Berücksichtigung der Metallindustrie (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische VerlagsAnstalt, 1965), 59–61. 24. See, for example, the Works Council conference in Wansleben in April attended by delegates from brown coal pits, potash mines, and assorted industries, covered in Volksblatt (Halle), 25 April 1919. 25. Eberhard Kolb, “Räte-Wirklichkeit und Räte-Ideologie in der deutschen Revolution von 1918/1919,” in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972), 178–79. 26. Curt Geyer notes that before the revolution nobody on the left predicted the coming of the asre and Works Councils. See Die revolutionäre Illusion, 68 ff. 27. For his views during the general strike, see his detailed remarks in the National Assembly in E. Heilfron, ed., Die Deutsche Nationalversammlung im Jahre 1919 in ihrer Arbeit für den Aufbau des neuen deutschen Volksstaates (Berlin: Norddeutsche Buchdruckerei, 1919), 3:1464–82. For his more Leninist conception only one month later, see Zweiter Allgemeiner Kongress der Arbeiter-, Bauern-, und Soldatenräte Deutschlands vom 8. bis 14.4.1919 im Herrenhause zu Berlin, Stenographisches Protokoll (Berlin, 1919), 111, 232 ff.; and Heilfron, Die Deutsche Nationalversammlung, 6:4373–74. 28. Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte, 91–92. For more detail on Däumig’s ideas, see his Der Aufbau Deutschlands und das Rätesystem: Koreferat und Schlußwort auf dem zweiten Rätkongress in Berlin (Berlin: Der Arbeiterrat, 1919) and “Der Rätegedanke und seine Verwirklichung in Revolution,” in Unabhängiges sozialdemokratisches Jahrbuch 1920 (Berlin: uspd, 1921), 84 ff., as well as his journal, Der Arbeiter-Rat, especially the issues during the summer and fall of 1919. 29. Volksblatt (Halle), 5 August and 27 October 1919. 30. law, Rep F 38 VIIIb 75, Heft 1, Bl. 125 ff.; Die Freie Volkswille, 31 October 1919; and Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion, 143 ff. 31. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung im Jahre 1920 (Leipzig: Verlag des Gewerkschaftskartells, 1921), 13. 32. staatsal, bkw Kriebitzsch-Zechau, Nr. 191, Bl. 304, 312–13; staatsal, ahm Borna, Nrs. 11, passim, 544, Bl. 2–17 and 2871, Bd. 1, Bl. 54–61, 96–116. At several mines,


399

however, Works Councils also chased unpopular foremen and managers off the premises. And at the Witznitzer mines the Works Council actually fired the firm’s ceo and assumed day-to-day responsibility for operations. It did so not only to demonstrate its support for a socialization of the mines but also in retaliation against the ceo’s efforts to close down the Works Council. In this, the Works Council enjoyed the passive support of the firm’s white-collar employee committee (AngestelltenAusschuß), which had been similarly mistreated by the ceo. This was one of the few cases of white- and blue-collar cooperation I uncovered during my research into the revolution. To isolate what it termed the “wild socialization” of the Witznitzer mines, the Saxon government immediately dispatched officials to negotiate with the Works Council. The government agreed to place the ceo on a five-week leave of absence while investigating the charges against him and to lobby the Bauer cabinet in Berlin for legislation granting Works Councils powers of codetermination. Employers and government officials expressed concern that not just the Witznitzer Works Council but those across the Borna region were setting the kind of radical example that might spark another general strike (ibid.). 33. staatsal, ahm Borna, Nr. 2871, Bd. 1, Bl. 96–116. 34. Ibid., Bl. 116–29, 135–43; Nr. 11, Bl. 1 ff.; staatsal, Kriebitzsch-Zechau, Nr. 191, Bl. 266–68, 276 ff.; Volkszeitung für das Muldental, 17 November 1919 and 9 October 1920. 35. lam, Rep C 20 I b, Bd. 1996, Bl. 371, 384; law, XXa 95, Heft 2, Bl. 276–89; Rep F 38 VIIIb 75, Heft 1, Bl. 60; and Rep F 39 VIII b 73, Heft 2, Bl. 198 ff. 36. staatsal, bkw Leonhardt, Nr. 54, Bl. 199. 37. See the protocols of Works Council–management meetings between March 1919 and January 1920 in staatsal, Bleichertsche bkw Neukirchen-Wyhra, Nr. 59; Anhaltinische Kohlenwerke Zechau, Nr. 15; and bkw Borna ag, Nrs. 483 and 505. 38. staatsal, Meier and Weichelt 137 passim. 39. staatsal, Gebrüder Brehmer, Nr. 10, Bl. 1–5. 40. lvz, 10 July 1919. 41. StadtaL, Kap. 10, Nr. 451, Bl. 1–5. 42. lvz, 13 and 14 January 1920; lnn, 13 January 1920. 43. law, XXa, Heft 2, Bl. 276, 289. 44. lvz, 9 January 1920. 45. Leuna, A 1305–9, 1311, 1312. 46. Jahresbericht der Handelskammer zu Leipzig, Jahre 1919 (Leipzig: Handelskammer zu Leipzig, 1919), 14 ff. 47. Friedrich Lübstorff, Preise und Kosten der Lebenshaltung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Leipzigs, Mitteilungen des statistischen Amtes der Stadt Leipzig, new ser., vol. 1 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humboldt, 1920), passim, esp. 23. This estimate is almost certainly low, given that the inflation rate for Germany as a whole in 1919 was 28 percent and there is no reason to think that it would have been lower in Leipzig than elsewhere. See Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation, 17. 48. Feldman, Kolb, and Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen,” 91. 49. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 177 passim.

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50. See, for example, staatsal, Gebrüder Brehmer, Nr. 10. 51. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 156. 52. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 176. 53. On male versus female wage hikes as a result of strikes in the textile industry, see the summary of agreements negotiated across Saxony printed in Mitteilungen des Verbandes von Arbeitgebern der Sächsischen Textil-Industrie, no. 3, 15 June 1919; and staatsal, Saechsischen Wollgarnfabrik vormals Tittel und Krueger, Nr. 196. In the coal industry, see staatsal, bkw Kriebitzsch-Zechau, Nr. 190, Bl. 91, 99; and staatsal, bkw Leonhardt, Nr. 54, Bl. 168–78. In the brewing industry, see StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 177. In metal, see staatsal, Gebrüder Brehmer, Nr. 10, Bl. 5. 54. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung, p. 68. For the Reich as a whole, see Hans-Joachim Bieber, Gewerkschaften in Krieg und Revolution: Arbeiterbewegung, Industrie, Staat, und Militär in Deutschland, 1914–20 (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 2:583. 55. See, for instance, the Works Council participation in the negotiations over a citywide contract for the metal industry in staatsal, Gebrüder Brehmer, Nr. 10. 56. staatsal, Meier and Weichelt, Nr. 35, Nr. 137, Bl. 108, 226, “Ang.-Fuers.,” and 217. See also staatsal, Unruh and Liebig 18; and lvz, 19 April 1919. 57. lnn, 14 April 1919. 58. Heilfron, Die deutsche Nationalversammlung, 6:4372. 59. lvz, 5 March 1920. 60. See the copy of the contract covering all lower white collars in the central German chemical industry in Leuna, A 1308, Sek. “Tarifverhandlungen Angestellte,” Bl. 1–20. 61. staatsal, Giesecke and Devrient 155 passim. 62. StadtaL, Kap. 10, Nr. 451, Bl. 1–5. 63. staatsal, Bleichertsche bkw Neukirchen-Wyhra, Nr. 59, 109. 64. staatsal, bkw Borna ag, Nr. 489; bkw Kriebitzsch-Zechau, Nr. 191, Bl. 265, 275–83, 309–10; and Heilfron, Die deutsche Nationalversammlung, 6:4372. 65. StadtaL, Gewerbegericht 156, passim. 66. staatsal, bkw Borna ag 489, Giesecke and Devrient 155, and Unruh and Liebig 18. 67. staatsal, bkw Leonhardt, Nr. 54, Bl. 97 ff. 68. staatsal, bkw Borna ag, Nr. 489. 69. Tätigkeitsbericht (Leipziger Bürger-Ausschuß), vol. 1, 1918/1919 (Leipzig, 1919), 3–7. 70. staatsal, Dresdner Bank 182, 196. See also Tätigkeitsbericht, 1:8. Local bas were funneling money to the Freikorps across Germany during this period. See HansJoachim Bieber, Bürgertum in der Revolution: Bürgerräte und Bürgerstreiks in Deutschland, 1918–1920 (Hamburg: Christians, 1992), 11 ff. 71. See the internal memo of the metal employers’ organization in Saxony in staatsal, Meier and Weichelt 137, Bl. 63–64. 72. staatsal, Kriebitzsch-Zechau, Nr. 191, Bl. 261–317; and bkw Leonhardt, Nr. 54, passim. 73. staatsal, Meier and Weichelt 137, passim. 74. staatsal, Dresdner Bank 197, memo of Zentralausschuß der Leipziger Arbeit-

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geberverbände to members dated 7 October 1919; staatsal, Nachlaß Kurt Weichelt, Nr. 3, Bl. 130.

13. THE KAPP-LÜTTWITZ PUTSCH AND THE END OF THE REVOLUTION 1. C. L. Holtfrerich, ed., Die deutsche Inflation, 1914–1923: Ursachen und Folgen in internationaler Perspektive (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 121 ff.,153, 192–93. 2. Friedrich Lübstorff, Preise und Kosten der Lebenshaltung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Leipzigs, Mitteilungen des statistischen Amtes der Stadt Leipzig, new ser., vol. 1 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humboldt, 1920), passim, esp. 23. For an almost identical figure, see Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 5, 1915–18 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1920), 295–96. 3. See, for example, staatsal, Meier and Weichelt 227, “Arb.-Fürs.” 4. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 2671, Bl. 22–28. 5. The number of Leipzigers on poor relief jumped during 1919 by 17.1 percent, from 4823 to 5645. See Hermann Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre Stadtverordnetentätigkeit der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1921), 117. 6. lvz, January–March 1920, esp. 9, 14 January, and 26 February. During these same months in Leipzig lower white collars at all levels of government and the post office as well as those employed in the municipal streetcar company, movie theaters, and insurance societies also struck or threatened to do so. See lvz, 3 and 8 January, 26 February 1920. 7. See, for example, lvz, 13 and 14 January 1920. 8. As quoted from a newspaper interview in Mitteilungen des Landesvorstandes der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Sachsens, 24 January 1920, 4. 9. lam, Rep C 20 I b, Bd. 2, Bl. 8–9, 43, 62, 72; law, XXa 95, Heft 2, Bl. 216–35; Leuna, A 1305–9, 1311, 1312; Werner Raase, “Der Kampf um revolutionäre Betriebsräte in den Jahren 1919–1920, dargestellt vor allem an den Kämpfen im Industriegebeit von Halle-Merseburg” (Ph.D. diss., Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 1960), 237. 10. On its specific provisions, see Peter von Oertzen, Die Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution: Eine politikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung über Ideengehalt und Struktur der betrieblichen und wirtschaftlichen Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Revolution 1918/1919 (Bonn: Dietz, 1976), 154 ff. 11. lvz, 13 and 14 January 1920; lnn, 13 January 1920. 12. lnn, 13 January 1920. 13. David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 313 ff.; Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 358–59. 14. lnn, 19 January 1920. 15. See, for example, ltb, 14 January 1920; lzhb, 17 January 1920. 16. Johannes Erger, Der Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Innenpolitik, 1919/20 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1967), 1–153. Unless otherwise noted, the portrayal of national events during the putsch relies on Erger.

402


17. Ibid., 153 ff. 18. Ibid. See Miller, Die Bürde, 381, 392. 19. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung im Jahre 1920 (Leipzig: Verlag des Gewerkschaftskartells, 1921), 8. Rudolph finds evidence that Leipzig’s kpd participated in the organization of the strike. See Karsten Rudolph, Die sächsische Sozialdemokratie vom Kaiserreich zur Republik, 1871–1923 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1995), 246. 20. Hugo Hertel and Curt Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment in Leipzig (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1935), 56. 21. Ibid. 22. Erger, Der Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, 172. 23. Erwin Könnemann and Hans-Joachim Krusch, Aktionseinheit contra KappPutsch: Der Kapp-Putsch im März 1920 und der Kampf der deutschen Arbeiterklasse sowie anderer Werktätiger gegen die Errichtung der Militärdiktatur und für demokratische Verhältnisse (Berlin; Dietz, 1972), 309. 24. Excerpt from lvz, date unknown, in StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 2, Bl. 85; Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung, 8. 25. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1710, Bl. 66; ltb, 14 and 15 March 1920; Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung, 8. 26. Könnemann and Krusch, Aktionseinheit contra Kapp-Putsch, 362–64, quoting from Freiheit, 1 April 1920. 27. See text of telegram in ltb, 14 March 1920. 28. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 155–58; staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1710, Bl. 76. 29. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1710, Bl. 66; ltb, 15 and 16 March 1920; Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung, 8–9; 26. Könnemann and Krusch, Aktionseinheit contra Kapp-Putsch, 362–64, quoting from Freiheit, 1 April 1920. 30. See list of the slain in lvz, 15 March 1920. 31. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 2, Bl. 85; sml, Dokument D 13807167, “TagebuchAufzeichnungen des Führers der Leipziger Matrosenkompagnie Franz, Section 2,” 12 ff.; ltb, 16 March 1920; lvz, 18 March 1920; M. Freimüller, Die Schreckenstage in Leipzig (Leipzig: Utewegs, 1920), 12; Wolf Volker Weigend, Walter Wilhelm Goetz, 1867–1958: Eine biographische Studie über den Historiker, Politiker, und Publizisten, Schriften des Bundesarchivs, no. 40 (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1992), 202. 32. While no definitive list of Freikorps members could be uncovered, Hertel and Rakette furnish the names of the seven Freikorps members killed during the fighting (Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 84). Obituary notices from Leipzig’s conservative paper, the lnn, list the occupations of five of these seven. Of this group of five, four were students. While hardly a scientific sample, this finding strongly suggests that the regiment was composed mostly of students. Impressionistic evidence confirms this finding. See, for instance, lvz, 15 and 24 March 1920; Fünfundzwanzigjahrfeier des Königin-Carola-Gymnasiums in Leipzig 1927 (Leipzig, 1927), 46; Freimüller, Die Schreckenstage, 10. 33. I pieced together the social composition of the insurgents from a list published by the police that contained the names and occupations of the 134 total fatalities in Leipzig during the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch. See ltb, 15 April 1920. From this list I


403

deleted the names of the seven fallen Freikorps and the demonstrators massacred on Bloody Sunday. By combing the obituaries of the four major newspapers, I tried to determine who had been killed as a pedestrian caught in the cross fire. These names, too, were scratched from the police list. The remaining seventy names roughly indicate the social background of those killed on the barricades. Of this group, 80 percent were manual laborers (evenly divided between skilled and unskilled, with very few women). This finding jibes with the impressionistic evidence because all contemporaries referred to those on the barricades as “the workers.” See, for example, lvz, ltb, lnn, lzhb, 14–24 March 1920; and Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 37 ff. 34. ltb, 15 March 1920; Freimüller, Die Schreckenstage, 8–9; Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 37–38. 35. lvz, 15 March 1920. 36. lvz, 16, 18, and 23 March 1920. 37. ltb, 16 March 1920; lvz, 17 and 18 March 1920. 38. lvz, 16 March 1920. 39. lvz, 17 March 1920. 40. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung, 9. 41. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 154 ff; lvz, 17 March 1920; Jahresbericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats der USP Groß-Leipzig: April 1920 (Leipzig: Selbstverlag, 1920), 3. 42. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 148 ff.; lvz, 17 March 1920. 43. Erger, Der Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, 265; Miller, Die Bürde, 381 ff. 44. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 151–89. 45. See, for instance, Neue Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung, 21 March 1920. 46. Der Zeitfreiwillige (journal of the Leipzig Freikorps) 4 (April 1920): 50–60; Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 67–68. See also the comments of Leipzig’s police chief defending the Freikorps in StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 159. 47. Dresdener Anzeiger, 17 March 1920; lvz, 18 March 1920. 48. Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 35–38, 40–41, 56–62. 49. Freimüller, Die Schreckenstage, 12–13. 50. Wagon drivers were especially vulnerable. See ibid., 14. 51. staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1710, Bl. 69–70. See complaints by civil servants and the ba about Freikorps brutality in lvz, 17 and 18 March 1920, 52. Neue Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung, 21 March 1920, 53. Gerhard Kunze, Erinnerungen an die Revolutionstage 1918: Zu Adolf Kittel’s Rektoratserinnerungen. Ein Abschiedsgruß an die Leipziger Studenten (Leipzig: Winter, 1933), 15 ff.; Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 77 ff. 54. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bl. 118–22. 55. lvz, 17 March 1920; ltb, 20–21 March 1920. 56. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 158–64. 57. lvz, 18 and 19 March 1920. 58. Hertel and Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment, 40–41. 59. lvz, 19 March 1920. 60. Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung, 9 ff.; ltb, 20–21 March 1920. 61. See Lipinski’s statement in lvz, 19 March 1920.

404


62. lnn, 20 March 1920. 63. ltb, 20–21 March 1920; lvz, 21 March 1920. 64. ltb, 20–21 March 1920; lvz, 21 March 1920; Die Leipziger Gewerkschaftsbewegung, 10–11. 65. StadtaL, Kap. 72, Nr. 75, Bd. 1, Bl. 163; lnn, 22 March 1920; lvz, 21 March 1920. 66. lvz, 21 March and 1 April 1920; lnn, 22 March 1920; ltb, 26 March 1920; Freie Presse, 6 April 1920. 67. Estimates derived from ltb, 15 April 1920; lvz, 26 March and 7 April 1920; Liebmann, Zweieinhalb Jahre, 76. 68. lvz, 23 March 1920; lnn, 24 March 1920. 69. On the fecklessness of locally recruited Freikorps in the industrial villages (Gemeinden) surrounding Leipzig, see staatsal, ahm Leipzig, Nr. 1710, Bl. 24, 42, 46, 92–97. For those in the Borna region, see staatsal, ahm Borna, Nr. 2695, Bl. 59 ff. 70. ltb, 20–21 March 1920. 71. Leuna, A 1305–9, 1311–12; Raase, “Der Kampf,” 292 ff. 72. Miller, Die Bürde, 404–6. 73. Ibid., 396–97, 404–8; Morgan, The Socialist Left, 342 ff. 74. Fabian, Klassenkampf, 74–81; Hartfrid Krause, “Einleitung,” in Protokolle der Landesversammlungen der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Sachsens, 1919–1922, ed. Hartfrid Krause (Berlin: Dietz, 1979), xv. 75. Morgan, The Socialist Left, 342 ff. 76. lvz, 3, 4, and 18 October 1920. 77. Morgan, The Socialist Left, 375 ff. 78. Jahresbericht des Vorstandes und Sekretariats der USP Groß-Leipzig: April 1921 (Leipzig: Selbstverlag, 1921), 2 ff.; Krause, “Einleitung,” viii. 79. See, for example, the pronouncement in Jahresbericht: April 1921, 4. 80. Morgan, The Socialist Left, 426.

APPENDIX 2. SOURCES AND METHOD USED FOR SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF IMPERIAL LEIPZIG. 1. StadtaL, Polizeimeldebücher, 140–60. 2. Herbert F. Weisberg, Jon A. Krosnick, and Bruce D. Bowen, An Introduction to Survey Research and Data Analysis, 2d ed. (Boston: Scott, Foresman, 1989), 58 ff. 3. The worker autobiographies consulted bear this out.

APPENDIX 4. BRIEF REVIEW OF THE HISTORIOGRAPHY ON PROLETARIAN INTEGRATION INTO IMPERIAL SOCIETY 1. Robert Michels, “Die deutsche sozialdemokratische Parteimitgliedschaft und soziale Zusammensetzung,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 1906: 471–556.

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2. Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1972). 3. Günther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster, 1963). 4. Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und Revolutionäre Attentismus: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1973), esp. 1–198. 5. Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. 167–250. 6. Adalheid von Saldern, Auf dem Wege zum Arbeiterreformismus: Parteialltag in sozialdemokratischer Provinz Göttingen (1870–1920) (Frankfurt am Main: Materialis, 1984). 7. Idem, “Arbeiterradikalismus-Arbeiterreformismus: Zum politischen Profil der sozialdemokratischen Parteibasis im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Methodisch-inhaltliche Bemerkungen zu Vergleichsstudien,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 4, no. 84: 483–98. 8. Dick Geary, “Radicalism and the Worker: Metalworkers and Revolution, 1914–23,” in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1978), esp. 267 ff. 9. Richard J. Evans, introduction to The German Working Class, 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1982).


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INDEX

AAe (Angestellten-Ausschüsse, or whitecollar-employee committees), 273–75 Accident insurance, 30–31 Adreßbücher (Address Books) as source, 34, 42, 303–4 Agriculture, see Farmers and estate owners; Farm laborers Allied blockade, 134, 140, 266 Alter Mittelstand (middle class/old middle estate): anti-Semitism of, 70–71; average yearly income, 32; club affiliations, 58; consumption/comfort levels, 32; continuing support for elites, 293; defined, 24–25; frequent changes of domicile, 34; godparents’ social backgrounds, 61fig.; groups formed by, 70; home ownership, 33fig.; ill-disposed to revolution, 213; income from earnings, 28; intergenerational social mobility, 44–46, 46fig.; intragenerational social mobility, 43fig., 43; loyalty to elites during general strike, 231; marriage patterns, 63fig., 64; out-migration as downward mobility, 305; social background of building residents, 49fig., 50–51; social networks’

importance, 305; suffrage restrictions benefitting, 69; threatened by worker unity movement, 70; types of jobs, 25table “Ambiguous middle class,” 45n Anti-Semitism, 70–71, 84 Anti-socialism, 73, 74 Antiwar protests (August 1914), 84 Apprentices, 28, 111 Arbitration/mediation of labor disputes: business courts, 103, 156; conciliation boards set up by HDG, 150, 154–56; decision no longer binding after June 1919, 271; metal industry employers agreeing to, 273–74 Armistice, 192; see also Peace ASRe in general (Arbeiter und Soldatenräte, or Worker and Soldier Councils): assuming power across Germany by 9 November 1918, 1; composition and demands, 1, 178, 194, 198; disappointment in RdV, 2; in Essen, 234; formal supremacy over RdV, 192; in Halle- Merseberg region, 235; meekness and self-liquidation at second Reich Congress, 255–56, 266; radical ASRe in towns and villages

458

ASRe in general (Continued) surrounding Leipzig, 210; Reich Congress, 193–94 ASR in Leipzig: call for general strike, 180; calls for discipline, 181; changed suffrage rules for, 256–57; control of Leipzig during general strike, 248–51; failure to form security organization, 208–9; first assembly of delegates, 182; instigation of, 180; lacking land reform proposals, 243; leftward shift, 232–33, 256; Maercker’s arrest of officers, 262; merger with Worker Council, 179; moderation of, 204–11; program by executive committee, 183; purge of old regime officials, 193; radical leaders as better educated and younger, 235; radicals in control at end of general strike, 253; reconstituted and powerless after June 1919, 267; seeming impotence masking power, 254–55; unbroken power in April 1919, 256; “Young Turks” assuming leadership, 233 Austria-Hungary, 174 Authority of elites: augmented with outbreak of war (August 1914–January 1915), 124–25; automatically provoking some resistance, 116; defined, 9–10; preserved with improved military prospects, 187–88; prewar worker dissatisfaction with, 184, 290 Authority of elites erodes (1914–17): among ordinary workers, 144–46; with challenge of total war, 127, 129, 133–40; with failure to manage war economy and consequent drop in living standard, 125, 147 Authority of elites vanishes (January 1917-November 1918): dénouement in September-November 1918, 174–77; destroyed by mismanagement of war

INDEX

effort, 177, 184; elites losing nerve, 175–76, 177; final collapse on 9 November 1918, 183–84; increasing state repression, 165–67; radicalization of workers, 167–74, 187; response of social democractic organizations, 163–65; state policy in face of wartime shortages, 148–58; worsening standard of living, 158–63 BA (Bürger-Ausschuß, or citizens’ committee): continued adroitness, 261–62, 275; counterstrike, 244, 245, 246, 252; formation and objectives, 212–15, 216; opposing military dictatorship, 282; welcoming Maercker, 262 Banking industry, 11, 12, 274 Baptism, 82 Bauer, Gustav, 237, 248, 281, 288 Bavaria, 256 Bebel, August, 86, 89 Bernstein, Eduard, 199 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 148 Betriebsräte, see Works Councils (Betriebsräte) Bibliographical sources and caveats, 52–53, 303–5 Bieber, Hans-Joachim, 171 Bildung (education, refinement, and culture), 59–60, 76–78, 199 Birthrate, 39 Bismarck, Otto von, 80 Blacklisting of “troublemakers,” 103 Black market: employers’ participation in, 153; estate owners’ participation in, 165; increasing real rate of inflation, 158, 272; no punishments for farmers profiting from, 140, 151, 152–53; persisting with postwar rationing, 217; siphoning off food from official distribution network, 139; women protesting against shop

INDEX

owners, 146; workers with no alternative to, 160 Blockade by Allies, 134, 140, 266 Block, Hans, 142, 207 “Bloody Sunday,” 282–83 “Blue Mondays,” 109 Bolshevism, see Communism/Bolshevism/Leninism Böttcher, Paul, 232, 233 Bourgeoisie (Bürgertum), 26 Brandenburg, Erich, 166 Bread ration, 159–60, 167, 255 Breitscheid, Rudolf, 198 Brewery workers, 272 Britain, 135, 136 Bromme, Moritz William: on accusation of theft, 115; on after-work reading, 79–80; assessment of autobiography as source, 53; on desire for education, 76–77; on easy outwitting of factory inspectors, 103; on enmity of office clerk toward workers, 114; on father’s loss of job and imprisonment, 56, 80; on foreman’s warning against sickness, 114–15; on hostility of foremen to workers, 114; on practical jokes, 117; on relaxed work rhythms of earlier times, 109; as unhelpful husband, 85; on workers as “beasts of burden,” 113; on workers’ resistance to authority, 116, 117 Brunswick, 256 Bulgaria, 174 Bundesrat (Federal Council), 66 Bürger: as exclusivist, antiproletarian term, 56, 73; perceived as workers’ main antagonist, 86; preferring parliamentary democracy to ASR rule after November 1918, 214; see also Elites; Nonworkers Bürgertum (bourgeoisie), 26 Business courts, 103, 156 Businesses by size, 38fig.

459

Cartels, 13, 14, 96, 98 Censorship and persecution of LVZ, 90, 94, 98, 142 Chemical industry and workers, 225–26, 272 Chemnitz, 53 Child labor, 103–4, 126, 159, 160 City council: considering “general, equal suffrage,” 176; dissolved, 206, 207; elections to, 98, 222; mayor consulting even after dissolution, 211; prewar relative impotence, 69–70 City senate, 183, 206, 207–8, 211, 222, 254, 284 Civil servants, 28, 212, 229–30, 244–45, 246–47, 274 Clara Group of mines, 226–27 Class and groups: consistency in makeup and behavior over long period, 293–94; enmity among textile workers, 113; importance of social realm experiences to understanding, 52; importance of work realm experiences in fostering group consciousness, 117–18; intergroup friendships, 60–64; Klassenstaat (class state), 79, 87, 99–100, 128, 129; problem of defining, 5–8; tensions in childhood contacts between, 53–56; worker cohesion and group/class consciousness, 87, 127–28; worker ghettos fostering group consciousness, 53–54; workers’ consciousness and dissatisfaction with, 87; see also Elites; Nonworkers; Workers Claus, Bernhard, 58 Clothing, 159 Club affiliations: of Leipzig notables, 307–16; in prewar Leipzig, 56–60 Coal industry, workers, and shortages, 12, 14fig., 14, 217, 246, 249, 255, 270, 274, 276

460

Codetermination, 270–71, 273–75 COLAs (cost-of-living allowances), 138, 156, 272 Commission of Nine (Neunerkommission), 234, 237, 239, 253 Communications workers, 243 Communism/Bolshevism/Leninism: ASRe borrowing nomenclature, not ideology from, 1; belief in need for minority dictatorship, 260, 296; discredited theories of causes of revolution, 3; fear of, by elites and right-wingers, 262, 285; influence on Curt Geyer, 259; influence on Däumig of Revolutionary Shop Stewards, 269; influence on USPD radicals, 289; Lenin’s Third International, 268, 289; reflected in establishment of socialist and soviet republics, 3, 183, 187, 201, 250, 256, 258, 265, 266, 280–88, 291 Conservative Party, 71 Crimmitschau, 119 Culture, see Kultur Curfew, 247, 251 Custom: defined, 10; as deterrent to revolt, 86, 177, 184, 290; promoting submission to elite rule, 76, 100 Czech workers, 76, 86, 91, 125 Däumig, Richard, 269 “Death ride,” 1, 175, 178 De Man, Hendrick, 81 Democratization of political processes: consistent efforts by workers, 294–95; demands accelerating with news of Allied breakthroughs of summer of 1918, 174; expected by ordinary workers, 192–96; failings of October Constitution, 174–75; failures of leadership, 292, 295–96; growth of social democracy in early war

INDEX

(1915–17), 140–44; imperiled by Freikorps, 277; intensification of resistance by elites, 165–67; restriction by limited suffrage, 68–69; Russian revolution giving ideas and hope, 171; yearning of workers for, 188; see also Revolution Democratization of workplace: core demands for, 236–37; as goal of Works Councils, 224; lower white collar workers’ drive for codetermination, 273–75; lower white collar workers’ efforts and success, 120–22, 292–93; RdV instructed by ASRe to begin, 194; unions’ hopes for misplaced, 141; workers’ efforts, 291, 294–95; workers’ ultimate failure to achieve, 292; see also Works Councils (Betriebsräte) Demonstrations: by lower white collar workers, 228–31; over food shortages, 145; by teachers, 230–31; by unemployed, 216; by university students, 231; see also Strikes Disability insurance, 31–32 Discourses: inconsistent definitions, 6; providing no alternative to wage relationship, 291; workers as agent for democratic reform, 290 Dittmann, Wilhelm, 199 Doctors, 245–46, 247 “Du” versus “Sie,” 118, 119 Düwell, Bernhard, 235 Ebert, Friedrich, 191, 192, 196, 197, 199–200, 281, 284 Education, 14, 17, 40–41, 74, 111 Ehrhardt, Hermann, 281 Eigensinn (resistance to authority by workers), 87, 116–18 Elections of January and February 1919: blocking MSPD legislative agenda, 222; MSPD’s loss in, 291;

INDEX

persuading workers of need to go to street, 218; revealing powerlessness of MSPD, 220; to Saxon Landtag, 222 Electricity shortages, 217, 246, 247 Elite authority, see Authority of elites Elites: access to education, 40–41; authority strengthened with outbreak of war, 125; average yearly income, 32; benefitting from debtfinancing of war, 136; capitalists, shrinkage in relative terms, 37–38; defined, 26; enjoying little margin for error, 78; favoritism shown employers during war, 156; frequent changes of domicile, 34; godparents’ social backgrounds, 61fig.; historical success, 78; historiographical orthodoxies challenged, 4; home ownership, 33fig.; income from earnings, 28–29; index of Leipzig notables and club affiliations, 307–16; intensification of resistance to democracy, 165–67; intragenerational social mobility, 43fig., 43; and Kultur (cultural refinement), 75, 76, 214, 290; marriage patterns, 63fig., 64; minor loss in wartime standard of living, 163; social background of building residents, 49fig., 50–51; types of jobs, 26table, 26; war profits despite hunger of workers, 153; see also Authority of elites; Legitimacy of elite rule; Nonworkers; Rightwingers Empire, 98 Employees per firm in selected big cities, 16fig. Employers, see Nonworkers “Employment at will” wage relationship, 102–4, 108, 120 Essen Model and ASR group, 234, 235, 238

461

Factory inspections, 103, 115, 126 Farmers and estate owners, 134–35, 138, 140, 151, 152–53, 243, 245 Farm laborers and peasants, 76, 91, 185 Fatherland Party, 149, 166–67 Federal Council (Bundesrat), 66 Federal government, 67 Feldman, Gerald, 164, 272 Females, see Women Food Coop, 57 Food riots, 145, 147, 167 Food shortages: bread ration, 159–60, 167; declining nutritive value of food, 160; during general strike in Leipzig area, 245, 246, 249, 252; food riots, 145, 147, 167; postwar, 217, 279; “turnip winter” of 1916–17, 161, 167; wartime, 134–35, 138–40, 145, 152–54, 172; women opposing rising price for food, 82 Foremen, 114 Foucault, Michel, 6 France, 198 Frank, Ludwig, 88 Freedom of association, suppression of, 94–95, 99 Free market, 217 Freemasons, 59 Free speech, impediments to, 90, 94, 98–99, 142, 262, 280 Freikorps: closure of recruiting station, 205; collaboration in Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, 281–82; confrontation with strikers, 205–6; continuing violence against anti-Putsch strikers, 279, 280, 284–86; cowing ASRe at second Reich Congress, 255–56; dissolution in compliance with Treaty of Versailles, 287; funding by right-wingers, 275; given carte blanche to restore order, 280; imperiling democracy, 197, 277; massacre of demonstrators on “Bloody Sunday,” 282–83; murders of

462

Freikorps (Continued) Luxemburg and Liebknecht, 219; no opposition by proletarian militia, 260; ordered against sailors, 218; rounding up subversives during Maercker’s invasion, 262; stating support for constitutional government, 283–84; suppression of isolated Works Council movements, 261; university students and rightwingers joining, 215–16, 263, 267; viewing mission as protection of Kultur, 285; Volunteer Regiment Leipzig, 263 Friendships between social classes, 60–64 Fringe benefits, 28–29 Fritzsch, Theodor, 70 Geertz, Clifford, 6 General strike of February–12 March 1919: aftermath and prospects, 252–53; call for, by provisional Worker Council, 179–80; causes in worker disappointment at elections of January and February 1919, 222–23; core demands, 236–37; gaining momentum, 233–34; lack of coordination and leadership, 238, 240, 253; lower white collar workers exploiting elites’s vulnerability, 228–31; loyalty of alter Mittelstand to elites, 231; major potential impact in central Germany, 235–37, 240–42; nonstrikers pressure for change, 228–31; in Ruhr, Berlin, and Upper Silesia, 238–40; total defeat in acceptance of Weimar offer, 247–48; violence and casualties, 240; see also Works Councils (Betriebsräte) General strike in Leipzig area: chronology of strike and counterstrike, 246–51; curfew, 247, 251; neutral laborers in some sectors,

INDEX

243; noteworthy aspects, 251–52; as radical and nearly successful, 2–3; security force in Volkswehr people’s militia, 248, 249, 250, 251–52, 254; social composition of counterstrikers, 244–46; social composition of strikers, 243–44; violence and casualties, 247, 251 General strike outcome and repercussions: BA’s continued adroitness, 261–62; Geyer’s intentions, 257–59; impending invasion of Leipzig, 259–61; Leipzig under Maercker, 262–63; an open situation, 254–56; preparing for revolution’s third wave, 256–57; see also Works Council movement remnants (June-December 1919) Geographical mobility (changes of domicile), 33–35 Gerrymandering, 67, 96, 175 Geyer, Curt: assenting to inevitable end of general strike, 250–51; assuming de facto control of LVZ, 256; assuming leadership of ASR, 233; attempt to negotiate general strike, 246; background, 233; Bolshevist and communist sympathies, 259, 260; calling for postponement of elections, 193; exposed to charges of cowardice, 267–68; intentions and failure to coordinate national action, 257–59, 261, 264; plan for new suffrage of ASR, 256, 257; public castigation of kaiser, 175 Geyer, Friedrich: on ASR’s executive committee, 182; background, 90–91; belief in advent of socialization of coal industry, 195; calling for general strike, 180; as Leipzig district representative to Reichstag, 96; as member of provisional Saxon government, 200; refusing to vote for government’s request for more war

INDEX

credits, 142–43; seeing democracy as only road to peace for Germany, 169 Ghettoization of workers, 47–48, 48fig., 49fig., 50fig., 50, 53–54 Godparents’ social backgrounds by class, 61fig. Goetz, Walter, 212 Göhre, Paul: on adventures among workers, 62; on alienation of workers and mistrust of “superior” classes, 128; on aspirations of colleagues, 113; assessment as source, 53; on group consciousness fostered by slums, 53–54; on importance of Bildung, 77–78; on lack of understanding of socialist theory among workers, 78; on nostalgia for military service, 83; on rudeness of police, 80; on wariness of any management initiatives, 118; on workers’ desire for democratization of workplace, 81; on work-related injury, 111 Gradnauer, Georg, 222, 284, 289 Gramsci, Antonio, 6 The Great War, see War Groener, Wilhelm, 151, 156, 196 Groups, see Class and groups; Elites; Nonworkers; Workers Guilds, 28 Haase, Hugo, 144, 196, 198, 199 Haenisch, Konrad, 142 Halle Potash Works, 226 HDG (Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz or Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law): inadvertently accelerating worker turnover, 161; origins in attempt to tighten management of war economy, 147; passage in December 1916, 137, 150; provisions of, 150; Reichstag’s role in design, 150–51; ultimately hindering war effort, 151–58

463

Health issues, 39fig., 39; dust and tuberculosis, 110–12, 113; influenza, 160; lung disease, 110–12, 113, 160; mortality rate, 38, 304; safety regulations suspended for women and children in wartime, 126; sickness and threats of termination, 114–15; textile laborers, 113; wealthy versus poor, 157; work injuries, 111 Heimburger, Arthur: assessment of autobiography as source, 53; on fear of landlords, 54–56; on mockery of clerks, 62; on workers’ resistance to authority, 116 Herre, Alfred, 142, 166 Hilferding, Rudolf, 198 Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz, see HDG (Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz or Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law) Hindenbuerg, Paul von, 147, 148, 150 Hindenbuerg Program, 149, 150 Historiographical considerations: 3ff., Appendix 4 (317–8) Home ownership by class, 33fig. Horseplay by workers, 116–17 “Hottentot Election” of 1907, 96 Hours worked: alter Mittelstand, 28; children and juveniles, 103; eighthour day, 198, 217; machinists, 110; manual laborers in wartime, 159; men, 27; overtime, 108–9; semiskilled workers, 110–11, 112; Stinnes-Legien agreement and eight-hour day, 203–4; vague stipulation of eighthour day, 203–4; women, 27, 79, 92, 104, 106, 119; women in textile mills, 112 Housing: average number of residents per building, 47; fifty percent of population renting, 33; frequent changes of domicile, 34, 35fig., 36fig.; owners of, by group, 33fig., 33; in postwar period, 217; profitability of owning rentable property, 37; worker

464

Housing (Continued) ghettos fostering group consciousness, 53–54; workers’, 92; workers isolated in “ghettoized” new proletarian neighborhoods, 47–48, 48fig., 49fig., 50fig., 50

Imperialism, 98 Income from earnings, 26–29 Independent Socialist Party of Germany, see USPD (Unabhaengige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Inflation: postwar, 66, 272, 277, 278, 279; and printing of money, 266, 278; protectionism as cause, 82; wartime, 136, 156, 157, 158, 197 Influenza, 160 “Ink wipers,” 114 Inspections of factories, 103, 115, 126 Insurance issues, 30–32, 126, 198 “Integration” of workers into sociopolitical order: 4, 76, 129, 187, Appendix 4 (317–8) Interest rates, 278

Jagow, Traugott von, 288 Jakob, Gustav, 142 Juveniles: delinquency, 160; role in USPD radicalization, 172

Kaiser Wilhelm: assenting to parliamentary government, 174; autocratic rule, 66; birthday celebrations boycotted by proletarian organizations, 82; collapse of imperial monarchy, 183; intention to relinquish throne, 191; mention of democratic reform in Easter message of 1917, 164; “New Course” welfare legislation, 81; Scheidemann’s

INDEX

proclamation of “abolition” of, 191–92 Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch (January-April 1920): aftermath, 288–89; calls from MSPD for general strike to oppose, 281, 282; chronology, 280–88; civil war engulfing Leipzig, 283; demonstrators arming, 283; destruction of union headquarters (das Volkshaus), 287; Freikorps collaboration in, 281–82; growing strength of antidemocratic right, 265; massacre of demonstrators on “Bloody Sunday,” 282–83; as military dictatorship, 281; preceded by disappointment and tension, 278–80; resignation of Kapp, 284; strike leaders’ demands, 284; as threat to democratic republic, 293; violence and casualties, 284–86, 287–88 Kapp, Wolfgang, 281, 284 Kautsky, Karl, 88, 199 Kayser, Wilhelm, 249 Keil, Lugwig, 88 King of Saxony, 81–82 Klassenstaat (class state), 79, 87, 99–100, 128, 129 Kocka, Jürgen, 96, 121 Koenen, Bernhard, 237, 247 Koenen, Wilhelm, 235, 237, 240, 269 Kolb, Eberhard, 192, 272 Krause, Karl, 229 Kriegsamtstelle, 151, 152, 153, 154–56, 176–77 Krug, Jacob, 249 Kultur (culture): as determinant in defining class identity, 5; familiarity with, as proof of Bildung, 59–60, 76–78, 199; as legitimizing factor for elites, 75, 76, 214, 290; university students mobilizing around preservation of, 214, 215, 285 Kunath, H., 212

INDEX

Labor exchanges, 103, 105, 111, 127, 138, 157 Land and Länder, 66–67, 202–3 Landlords (rentiers), 37, 75, 304 Land reform, 243 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 89 Leadership: elites excelling in, 294; failure to coordinate general strikes, 238, 240, 253, 258, 261, 264; importance to political initiatives and mobilization, 4, 296; RdV’s deficit of self-confidence, 199; requiring tactical militancy and audacity, 100; SPD leaders’ conservatism, tactical moderation, lack of nerve, and caution, 87–89, 93–95, 100, 128–29, 184, 290; unions as weak, risk averse, and blundering, 105–7; workers’ failures of, 292, 295–96; Works Council movement weaknesses, 264 Ledebour, Georg, 196 Legien, Carl, 203, 284 Legitimacy of elite rule: accepted until war, 86; defined, 10; in monopoly on Kultur, 75, 76, 214, 290; promoted by custom, 76, 100, 184; requiring military victory, 167; undermined by mismanagement of economy and war effort, 177, 290–91; see also Relationship between workers and nonworkers Leipzig: coal consumption growth, 14fig.; communications, 17fig.; demand for unskilled labor, 17–18; economic expansion, businessmen, artisans, and industrialists, 13–15, 16–19; as Germany’s fourth largest city, 19; as leading inland trading and banking center, 11, 12; population growth, 18fig., 18–19; population shrinkage in wartime, 133–34; power consumption, 15–16; severity of

465

boom-bust cycles, 15; transportation, 15fig.; see also General strike in Leipzig area; Politics in prewar Leipzig Leisure spending, 32 Leninism, see Communism/Bolshevism/Leninism Lieberasch, Arthur, 168 Liebknecht, Karl, 88, 141–42, 165, 219 Liebmann, Hermann, 168, 170, 232, 233, 288 Lipinski, Richard: allegiance to Leipzig party organization, 143, 144; appointed interior minister of Saxony, 95, 201–2; in charge of ASR executive committee, 182; desire to avoid confrontations with police, 144; duped by Pilsach, 286, 287; encouragement to mutineers, 179; failing to rein in higher civil servants, 212; as Kautskyite, 232, 289; leadership of 17 April 1917 strike, 168; on low female membership rate, 92; as member of provisional Saxon government, 200; opposing general strike, 232; orders to retain oldregime officials, 211; refraining from call for revolution, 165; as SPD leader, 91 Lower white collar workers: average yearly income, 32; club affiliations, 58; consumption/comfort levels, 32–33; as counterstrikers in Leipzig area, 244–46; defined, 25; drive for codetermination, 273–75; enmity toward workers, 114; exploiting elites’s vulnerability during general strike, 228–31; godparents’ social backgrounds, 61fig.; home ownership, 33fig.; ill-disposed to revolution, 213; income from earnings, 27–28; intragenerational social mobility, 43fig., 43; marriage

466

Lower white collar workers (Continued) patterns, 63fig., 64; professional organizations of, 121–22; salary relationships, 120–22; sense of vulnerability to loss of status, 121; social background of building residents, 49fig., 50–51; success in democratization of workplace, 292–93; suffrage restrictions on, 69; teachers, 122, 230–31, 245, 273; types of jobs, 25table; wartime drop in standard of living, 162–63 Lucas, Erhard, 227 Ludendorff, Erich, 147, 148, 150 Lüdtke, Alf, 116 Lung disease, 110–12, 113, 160 Lüttwitz Walther Freiherr von, 281 Luxemburg, Rosa, 88, 90, 165, 219 LVZ (Leipziger Volkszeitung): antiwar sentiment ends with coming of war, 124; antiwar sentiment growing by 1916, 141–44; banned, 262, 280; censorship, self-censorship, and persecution, 90, 94, 98, 142; Geyer assuming de facto control, 256; ignoring censor, 175; as influential SPD publication, 89–90, 94; as most important organ of USPD, 143; publicly pressuring workers who failed to support colleagues against management, 120; supporting secession of Leipzig party organization from SPD, 143 Machine making industry and workers, 12, 109–10 Maercker, Georg: arrest of officers of unions, ASR, and USPD, 262; commanding Freikorps and Reichswehr troops, 247; dismissed, 284; expecting another general strike in Leipzig, 279–80; invasion of Leipzig, 260, 262–63; nearing Leipzig, 250; occupation ending Works

INDEX

Council movement in Leipzig, 292; ordering Freikorps to suppress strikers opposing Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, 281–82 Marriage patterns, 63fig., 64–65, 217 Marxism, 79, 87, 107 Marxist-Weberian definition of worker, 5, 6, 8 Masons, 59 Maternity leave, 104 May Day protests, 85–86 Mayor of Leipzig (Karl Rothe): admitting to lack of power, 250, 254–55; agreeing to welfare assistance during general strike, 249; arrest and agreement to increase in unemployment benefits, 209–10; attempts to replace with committee, 284; elected and serving for life and “chairman” of city senate, 69–70; inexplicably left in power by ASR, 183, 206, 207, 222; planning to thwart radicalism of ASR, 211; terminating ASR’s funding for security force, 254 Meat consumption, 33 Mediation boards, see Arbitration/mediation of labor disputes Mehring, Franz, 90 -Meister suffix, 25 Metal industry and metalworkers, 2, 194, 271, 272, 273, 276 Middle class, see Alter Mittelstand (middle class/old middle estate) Migration into central Germany and Leipzig, 12, 19, 39, 185, 186fig., 186–87 Militarism, 83–84 Military draft, 150, 159, 161, 166, 185 Militias, see Paramilitaries and popular militias; see also Freikorps Mines and miners, 2, 12, 13, 155–56, 223–24, 225, 226–27, 234–37, 255, 270; coal industry, workers, and shortages, 12, 14fig., 14, 217, 246, 249,

INDEX

255, 270, 274, 276; potash industry and workers, 13, 226, 270; salt miners, 270 Mitteldeutschland, 13 Monarchy, see Kaiser Wilhelm Mortality rate: civilian, 38, 160–61, 304; military, 149 MSPD (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Majority Socialist Party of Germany): besting USPD, 222; blocked legislative agenda, 198, 222; call for strike to oppose Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, 281, 282; election losses in Leipzig, with gains elsewhere, 219; hemmed in by coalition partners, 221; hemorrhaging support by workers, 266; loss of support with link to murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, 219; as part of new cabinet (1918), 174; realization of error in alliance with old elites, 299; winning sizable majority in Saxony, 203; withdrawal of support for general strike, 238, 239 Müller, Hermann, 288 Müller, Richard, 241, 281 Mutiny, 1, 166, 178–79, 181, 218 Mylau, Otto, 263 Nationalism, 71, 73, 78, 83, 122 National Liberal Association, 71–72 Naumann, Friedrich, 82, 140 Networks of social contacts, 304–5 Neunerkommission, see Commission of Nine (Neunerkommission) Neurath, Otto, 195 “New Course” (kaiser’s welfare legislation), 81 Nolan, Mary, 227 Nonworkers: advantages of ZAG to employers, 203; club affiliations of Leipzig notables, 58–60, 307–16; cohesion and solidarity in safeguarding authority, 123, 127;

467

control of state at all levels, 98–99; as counterstrikers in Leipzig area, 244–46; defined, 24–25; excelling in improvisation, leadership, and cooperation, 294; as fissiparous category, 51; income from earnings, 27–28; intergenerational social mobility, 44–46, 46fig.; intragenerational social mobility, 43fig., 43; lobbying for, 14; marriage patterns, 63fig., 64; political organizations, 70–75; poverty of civic discourse, failure to justify rule, 74–75; refusal to intermix, 65; sharing desire to exclude workers from power, 99; thwarting emanicipatory initiatives, 293; unified front against workers, 294; see also Alter Mittelstand (middle class/old middle estate); Elites; Lower white collar workers; University students Noske, Gustav, 196, 281, 288 Oertzen, Peter von, 224 OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung or General Staff), 137, 147, 148 Old-age insurance, 31–32 Orphans, 31 Out-migration as downward mobility, 42–43, 304–5 Overtime, 108–9 Paramilitaries and popular militias: established by Bürger and university students, 215–16; established in many cities, 197; inadequate steps taken to create from proletariat, 260; Reichswehr, 247, 267, 275, 280, 283–84, 286–87, 288; Revolutionary Sailor Company, 205–6, 209–10, 218, 247, 251; Volkswehr people’s militia, 248, 249, 250, 251–52; Volunteer Regiment Leipzig, 263; see also Freikorps; Security forces

468

Parliament (Reichstag), 67 Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law, see HDG (Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz or Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law) Peace: with abolition of monarchy, 192; Allies’ hard terms, 258; bringing economic boomlet, 266, 272; demobilization, 197; end of Allied blockade, 266; reparation payments, 266, 279; tightening labor market, 272, 273; Treaty of Versailles’ military spending limits, 275; war debt, 278, 279; “war guilt” clause, 266 Peasants and farm laborers, 76, 91, 185 Peters, Otto, 226 Pilsach, Bodo Senfft von, 280, 282, 284, 286–87 Police: allowing prowar assemblies, 166; ASR claiming authority over, 249; cessation of dispersals of public gatherings, 175; forbidding all strikes during wartime, 138; forbidding USPD meetings, 166; rearmed by ASR, 208; suppression of freedom of association, 94–95, 99; threat of violent suppression of strikes, 171; under ASR, helping prevent violence during general strike in Leipzig area, 251; unions dissoluble by, 104–5; urging recall of union functionaries from front, 164; and workers, mutual hostility, 79–80 Polish workers, 76, 86, 91, 125, 243 Political activity restrictions on workers, 109 Political parties: Conservative Party, 71; Fatherland Party, 149, 166–67; National Liberal Association, 71–72; Progressive People’s Party, 72; Saxon Union of the Middle Class, 70; see also MSPD (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Majority Socialist Party of Germany); SPD

INDEX

(Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Social Democratic Party of Germany); USPD (Unabhaengige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Independent Socialist Party of Germany) Politics in prewar Leipzig: constitutional arrangements, 66–70; enmity between workers and nonworkers, 99–100; interaction of political players in Leipzig, 96–100; nonworker political organizations, 70–75; representatives and alliances of nonworkers in Reichstag elections, 97fig.; SPD, 86–95; workers’ organizations, 76–86 Polizeimeldbücher (Police Registry of Inhabitants) as source, 44, 303 Poor relief, see Welfare assistance Population growth in Leipzig, 18fig., 18–19 Poststructuralism, 6, 9 Potash industry and workers, 13, 226, 270 Prager, Eugen, 142 Prager, Hugo, 58 Press: BA’s newspaper, 214; censorship and other impediments to free speech, 98–99; censorship, selfcensorship, and persecution of LVZ, 90, 94, 98, 142; with revolution, resignation and panic in nonsocialist papers, 183; urging partial socialization of industry, 195; see also LVZ (Leipziger Volkszeitung) Printing industry and printers, 274 Printing of money, 266, 278 Prisoners of war, 182, 183 Professions, 24–26, 25table Progressive People’s Party, 72 Propaganda, 214, 242, 261–62, 263 Prostitution, 111 Protectionism: German, against foreign meat and grain, 82; legislated by American Congress (1919), 279

INDEX

Provincial governments, 67 Public health measures, 39 Railways and railway workers, 11, 105, 223, 243, 271 Rausch, G., 237, 247 RdV (Rat der Volksbeauftragten or council of people’s commissars): allied with officer corps, 197; failure to implement revolutionary change, 1–2; formation, 192; Freikorps ordered to crush sailor mutiny, 218; leaders’ deficit of self-confidence, 199–200; powers of, 194; protecting prerogatives of old-regime officials, 199, 200, 201; Saxon, 200; support for Stinnes-Legien agreement, 204; undermining recommendations for socialization, 198; unpopularity with workers, 218–19 “Red Kingdom” of Saxony, 200 Regional Coal Worker Council, 235 Reich Congress of ARSe, 193–94 Reich Grain Board, 139 Reich Nitrogen Works, 226 Reichstag (parliament), 67 Reichswehr, 247, 267, 275, 280, 283–84, 286–87, 288 Reich Works Council bill, 293 Relationship between workers and nonworkers: as antagonistic, 4, 23; defined, 9–11; final collapse with revolution on 9 November 1918, 183–84; importance of definition of “groups,” 7; profound worker discontent, 278; stability ultimately achieved, 289, 293; workers’ deep, long-term dissatisfaction with, 4, 11, 290; see also Elites; Workers; Work realm experiences Renting: fifty percent of population, 33; rentiers (landlords), 37, 75; subtenants, 304 Reparation payments, 266, 279

469

Revolutionary Sailor Company, 205–6, 209–10, 218, 247, 251 Revolutionary Shop Stewards, 234, 239 Revolution (entries in chronological order): as creation of experienced native workers with long-standing grievances, 2, 4, 5, 7, 186, 187, 293–94; errors of conventional interpretations of causes, 184–88; public talk of (late 1918), 175; sparked by mutinying sailors and soldiers (November 1918), 1, 166, 178–79, 181, 218; happy, nonviolent crowds, 180, 182; soldiers joining, 180; other large cities joining, 181; calls for socialist republic, 181; general strike on 9 November 1918, 181; announcement of collapse of imperial monarchy, 183; expectation of socialization of big industry and land holdings, 188, 191; formation of provisional government (9 November 1918), 191–92; expectations of ordinary workers (November 1918), 192–96; disappointment (10 November–early January 1919), 191, 196, 219–20; RdV policy (November 1918–early January 1919), 196–200; policy of Saxon provisional government (November 1918–early January 1919), 200–203; policy of unions (November 1918–early January 1919), 203–4; moderation of Leipzig ASR (November 1918–early January 1919), 204–11; antirevolutionary strategizing and reassertion of old elites (November 1918–early January 1919), 211–16; living standard of workers (November 1918–early Jan 1919), 216–17; final events radicalizing workers (December 1918–mid January 1919), 218–19; coming of general strike (February–12 March 1919), 221; third wave appearing

470

Revolution (Continued) imminent in April 1919, 255; end of, 289; see also ASR in Leipzig; ASRe in general (Arbeiter und Soldatenräte, or Worker and Soldier Councils); General strike of February–12 March 1919; RdV (Rat der Volksbeauftragten or council of people’s commissars) Right to work, 164 Right-wingers: counterstrike strategy, 276; funding of Freikorps, 275; gaining self-confidence, 266–67; growing in strength, 265, 275–76; monopoly on armed power, 267; remaining in power, 291, 292; university students as, 71, 285; see also Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch (January-April 1920) Ritter, Captain, 151, 155 Ritter, Gerhard A., 32, 129, 184–85, 186, 187, 293 Romania, 174 Rothe, Karl, see Mayor of Leipzig Rürup, Reinhard, 272 Russia: revolution in, 167, 171; role in outbreak of war, 124–25; see also, Communism/Bolshevism/Leninism Ryssel, Karl, 143, 144, 181, 182 Safety regulations: inspections of factories, 103, 115, 126; suspended in wartime, 126, 138; workplace accident rate, 159 Sailors: Revolutionary Sailor Company, 205–6, 209–10, 218, 247, 251; sparking revolution by mutinying, 1, 166, 178–79, 181, 218 Salary relationships: for lower white collar workers, 120–22; see also Wage relationship Salt miners, 270 Sammlungspolitik, 99 Sampling error, 304 Savings, 32

INDEX

Saxon Union of the Middle Class, 70 Scheib, Johannes, 205, 222, 249 Scheidemann, Philipp, 191–92, 199 Schöning, Johannes, 181, 209, 250, 262 Schools (education), 14, 17, 40–41, 74, 111 Schumann, Georg, 142 Schwabach, Otto, 58 Schwarz, Albert, 250, 284, 286 Schweinitz, General von: censorship of LVZ, 142, 165–66; conflict with Kriegstamtstelle chief Ritter, 151–52; forbidding strikes in wartime, 138; ignoring food shortages, 138; no attempt to support workers’ standard of living, 137; placed on indefinite leave, 205, 206; reasserting authority and intransigence, 156; recognition of powerlessness in mutiny, 178–79 Security forces, 208–9, 248, 249, 250, 251–52, 254; see also Paramilitaries and popular militias Seeckt, Hans von, 281, 288 Seger, Fritz: arguing moderation and support of Works Councils, 257; caution and moderation of, 206–7; elected to city council, 222; ignoring warnings about security forces, 209; as Kautskyite, 232, 289; as member of provisional Saxon government, 200; orders to retain old-regime officials, 211–12; refraining from call for revolution, 165; signing written support of war, 142; as SPD leader, 91; urging end of general strike in Leipzig area, 250 Senate (Rat der Stadt), 69; see also City senate Siegfrieden, 149 Simon, Louis, 58 Skilled workers: defined, 23; intergenerational social mobility, 44–45, 45fig.; intragenerational social mobility, 42fig., 42–43; less frequent changes of domicile, 34; social

INDEX

background of building residents, 47, 48fig., 50; types of jobs, 24table; wages for different groups, 300–1table Slavs, 125 Soap, 159 Socialism: expectation of, 1, 192–96, 291; expectations unfulfilled, 196, 219–20; foreign visitors disappointed in German socialism, 81; “hairsplitting” by “intellectuals,” 195–96; lack of definition of, 192, 193; in Leipzig, 89; LVZ essayist’s vision of, 107–8; opposition of nonworkers to, 214; see also Communism/Bolshevism/ Leninism; Democratization of political processes; Democratization of workplace Social mobility: educational opportunity, 40–41; geographical segregation, 47–51; intergenerational, 44–47; intragenerational, 41–43; workers’ hopes for, 39–40; see also Social realm experiences Social realm experiences: clubs in prewar Leipzig, 56–60; godparents’ social backgrounds, 61fig.; importance to understanding groups, 52; intergroup friendships, 60–64; marriage patterns, 63fig., 64–65; tensions in intergroup social contact in childhood, 53–56; see also Work realm experiences “Soldier Councils,” 1 Soldiers’ revolt, 178–79 Sources and caveats, 52–53, 303–5 Spartacists, 196, 197, 218 SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Social Democratic Party of Germany): antiwar sentiments end with coming of war, 124; apathy and gloom by 1914, 89; clubs organized by, 57; domination by paid functionaries, 88, 90; drive to

471

acquire female members, 145; electoral history of 1912, 89; end of, with formation of USPD in April 1916, 143; few women in, 92; Food Coop, 57; intervention in wage relationship, 107–8; lack of theoretical discourse, 291; leaders, 90–91; leaders’ conservatism, tactical moderation, lack of nerve, and caution, 87–89, 93–95, 100, 128–29, 184, 290; leftward pressure from rank and file, 93, 94; Leipzig breakaway to form antiwar party, 141, 143; membership at small percentage of city’s workers, 91–92; offering education (Bildung) to workers, 77; partnership with police to avoid confrontations, 94; as political force in prewar Leipzig, 86–95; revisionists, 88; revolutionists, 88 Stampfer, Friedrich, 81, 95 Standard of living: bonuses and raises to elites, 162; with drop in, authority of elites erodes, 125; income from earnings, 26–29; levels of consumption and comfort, 32–35; postwar, 266–67, 279; prewar trends in, 35–39, 50; radicalization of workers by wartime immiseration, 187; wartime drop for lower white collar workers, 162–63; wartime drop for workers, 127, 134–35, 137, 157–63; wartime reduction minor for elites, 163; welfare assistance, 29–32; see also Welfare assistance Stinnes, Hugo, 203 Stinnes-Legien agreement, 203–4, 217 Stock exchange, 17 Strikes: continuing for better wages and working conditions, 272; with crimes against property, 167; during 1915, 145; during 1917, 167–71; during 1918, 166, 171, 181, 223–24; during 1919, 217, 218–19, 229–30, 255, 256, 262–63, 270,

472

Strikes (Continued) 272–73; during 1919–1920, 279–80; during 1920, 283; failures of coordination and leadership, 292, 295; following cut in bread ration, 167; forbidden during wartime, 138, 156, 164; infrequent in trade, transportation, and insurance job categories, 185; linked to overall military predicament, 167; none by lower white collar workers, 122; participation by all types of workers, 106, 118–19, 167; protesting murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, 219; recessions undermining, 105; rightwingers’ counterstrike strategy, 276; by women, 119, 146, 168, 169, 172, 181, 223, 283, 295; see also General strike of February–12 March 1919 Ströbel, Heinrich, 199 Student Council, 215 Submarine warfare, 149, 167 Subtenants, 304 Suffrage: denied to women, 67–68, 69; failure to reform, 95; inegalitarian under October Constitution (1918), 175; for Landtag elections, 98; for municipal elections, 68–69, 98; organizations favoring expansion, 73, 85, 92, 93, 94–95; organizations favoring restriction, 71, 72, 75, 176; proposal to reform, 165; for Reich Congress of ASRe, 193; universal male, for parliamentary elections, 67, 96 Syndicalism, 227 Tardiness penalties, 108 Tariff protectionism, 13, 14 Tauscher annual market/popular celebration, 55 Taxes, 135, 136 Taylorist methodology, 271 Teachers, 122, 230–31, 245, 273

INDEX

“Technical emergency service” engineers, 275 Telephone workers, 243 Tenfelde, Klaus, 32, 129 Textile industry and workers, 12, 111 Thalacker, B., 212 Third International, 268, 289 Thompson, E. P., 5 Trade shows and fairs, 17 Transportation industry and workers, 12, 15fig., 223, 243–44 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 75 Tuberculosis, 110–12, 113 “Turnip winter” of 1916–17, 161, 167 Turnover rates for workers on the job: employers reducing with wage collusion, 276; prewar, 115–16; wartime, 161, 162fig., 163 Uhlans, 209 Unemployment: and “employment at will” wage relationship, 102–4, 120; and family destitution, 80; insurance benefits for, 103, 198; and labor exchanges, 103, 105, 111, 127, 138, 157; municipal “support” during wartime job dislocations, 126–27; postwar, 216; severe for women with conversion to war economy, 135; see also Welfare assistance Unions: acceptance of flawed October Constitution, 174; antiwar sentiments end with outbreak of war, 124, 163; attempting to resist demands of members, 293; company-sponsored (“yellow”), 105; craft-based, 106; destruction of headquarters by Reichswehr, 287; displaced by shop stewards on shop floor, 173; dissoluble by police, 104–5; employers preferring to Works Councils, 276; failing to gain points in dispute mediation, 154–55; fear of defeat and exclusion from world

INDEX

markets, 163–64; general-strike tactic opposed by, 107; importance as “interpretive prisms,” 296; interventions in wage relationship, 104–7; leaders as weak and riskaverse, 107; leaders’ blunders, 105–7; leaders powerless to prevent wildcat strikes, 168; in Leipzig, supporting Geyer, 257; loss of prestige by approval of Weimar offer, 239; loss of support after leaders’ cooperation with authorities, 169–70; low percent of organization, 107; Maercker’s arrest of officers, 262; management thwarting formation of, 13, 105, 118; membership and influence falling, 141, 164, 187; miscalculation in hopes for democratization of workplace, 141; as moderating influence on SPD, 87; opposition to Works Councils (Betriebsräte), 295–96; post-strike increase in membership, 273; problems during recessions, 105; professional organizations of lower white collar workers, 121–22; schism in Leipzig, 170; state employees forbidden to join, 105; of teachers, 122; ultimately ousted as workers’ representatives, 292; see also Works Councils (Betriebsräte) United States: sharp recession of 1919–1920, 278–79; Woodrow Wilson, 192, 199 University students: anti-Semitism, 71; club affiliations, 71; as counterstrikers in Leipzig area, 245; crowds of workers fighting with, 219; demonstrations by, 231; despised by workers, 293; eagerness for physical confrontations, 294; eagerness to assist Maercker, 263; mobilizing around preservation of Kultur, 214, 215–16, 285; openly defying ASR

473

authority, 260; as right-wingers, 71, 285 Unskilled workers: defined, 23; demand for, in Leipzig, 17–18; frequent changes of domicile, 34; intergenerational social mobility, 44–45, 45fig.; intragenerational social mobility, 42fig., 42–43; social background of building residents, 47, 48fig., 50; types of jobs, 24table; wages for different groups, 299–300table USPD (Unabhaengige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany): antiwar position, 164–65; blocked after June 1919, 267; caution of leaders regarding “risky economic experiments,” 198–99; continuing hemorrhage in party membership, 143; counseling moderation in face of general strike, 232; divided between moderates and radicals, 253; election gains in Leipzig over MSPD, 219; Leninists close to taking over, 265; Maercker’s arrest of officers, 262; meeting forbidden by police, 166; origins in schism with SPD (April 1916), 143; paralysis over question of Third International, 268, 289; paralyzed by battle between Leninists and democrats, 266; plan for ASRe assumption of power, 258–59; publicly attacking legitimacy of regime, 175; rejection of Lenin’s conditions for Third International, 289; resignations from RdV, 218; Spartacists, 196, 197, 218; withdrawal from Land ASR, 203 Vaterländische Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz, das, see HDG (Hilfsdienstpflichtgesetz or Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law)

474

Violence and casualties: atrocities in Leipzig between workers and Freikorps, 285; in demonstration in Berlin on 13 January 1920, 280; destruction of union headquarters (das Volkhaus), 287; in general strike of February–12 March 1919, 240; in general strike in Leipzig area, 247, 251; in Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, 287–88; massacre of demonstrators on “Bloody Sunday,” 282–83; threats of, by police, 171 Volkswehr people’s militia, 248, 249, 250, 251–52 Vollmar, Georg Heinrich von, 88 Volunteer Regiment Leipzig, 263 Wage relationship: as authoritarian, 291; employer authority strengthened with coming of war, 125; employers colluding on wages for unskilled workers, 276; “employment at will,” 102–4, 120; excludes most laboring women, 5; intervention by SPD, 107–8; interventions by unions, 104–7; lack of alternatives to, 108, 122–23; legal parameters, 101–4; management fostering jealousy by means of widely variable wages for same jobs, 118; nonworkers benefiting from and upholding, 123; severe wartime drop in real wages, 158; worker dissatisfaction with, 290; see also Relationship between workers and nonworkers; Work realm experiences Wageworkers, see Workers War: Allied blockade, 134, 140, 266; Allied breakthroughs in summer of 1918, 174; Armistice and peace, 192; casualties and mortality rate, 149; debt financing of, 135–36; draft shrinking population of Leipzig, 133–34; leading to relationship

INDEX

between workers and nonworkers, 290–91; submarine warfare, 149, 167; successes in spring of 1918, 172 War boards (Kriegsgesellschaften), 149, 150, 151 War debt, 278, 279 “War guilt” clause, 266 War profits, 135, 138–39, 141, 149, 151, 165 Welfare assistance: by companies, 105; denied during general strike, 249; government failing to provide, 103, 276–77, 293; insurance societies, 30–32; kaiser’s “New Course,” 81; little help during first two years of war, 138; municipal, 29–30, 156–57, 267; nonreceipt as requirement to vote, 68; postwar expansion of rolls, 216; some improvements in RdV legislation, 198; unemployment “support” during wartime job dislocations, 126–27; war support to wives of soldiers, 125–26, 138 Wettstein-Adelt, Minna: on adventures among workers, 62–63; assessment as source, 53; on group enmity among textile workers, 113; on ignorance of women regarding women’s issues, 85; on lack of interest in public affairs among female workers, 78; on women workers’ hatred for white collar supervisors, 114; on workers’ resistance to authority, 116, 117; on working conditions of textile workers, 112 Widows, 31 Wilson, Woodrow, 192, 199 Winkler, Heinrich August, 13 Wissell, Rudolf, 237 Women: barred from certain jobs/industries, 104; concurring in sexist demands of Works Councils, 227–28; denied suffrage, 67–68, 69, 176; difficulties finding employment, 111; dismissal demanded by lower

INDEX

white collar workers, 229; displacement from jobs by demobilized soldiers, 197; drop in real wages, 159; earning less than men for same work, 27, 273, 274; emancipation opposed by nonworkers, 85; few joining SPD, 92; harassment from male colleagues, 113–14; increased hardship during wartime, 157; as increasing percentage of workforce during war, 185; lack of education, 40, 41, 111; limitation of information sources for, 303; little free time, 79; lunch delivery to menfolk, 113; maternity leave, 104; mortality rate, 161; nonwage workers excluded from typical wage relationship, 5; obliged to go to work after start of war, 126; opposing rising price for food, 82; organizations for, 72–73; participation in strikes, food riots, and demonstrations, 119, 146, 168, 169, 172, 181, 223, 283, 295; preferring night shifts, 159; property belonging to husband, 68; in prostitution, 111; severe unemployment with conversion to war economy, 135; slain on “Bloody Sunday,” 283; in textile industry, 111–13; under authority of fathers and husbands, 111; unions ignored by, 172–73; unions ignoring, 105–6; as unknown percentage of wage workers, 102; in unskilled jobs, 18; in war factories, 185–86; welfare assistance as wives of soldiers, 125–26; working longer hours than men, 27, 79, 92, 104, 106, 119 Woodworkers, 272 Workers: antipathy to Klassenstaat, 79, 87, 99–100, 128, 129; attempts to acquire Bildung, 76–78; average yearly income, 32; clubs for, 57–58; cohesion and group/class

475

consciousness, 87, 127–28; consistency in makeup and behavior over long period, 294; consumption/comfort levels, 32; difficulty of defining, 5–7; difficulty of uncovering mentality, 9; disillusionment with provisional government, 292; employees per firm in selected big cities, 16fig.; godparents’ social backgrounds, 61fig.; hatred of police, 79–80; home ownership, 33table; homogeneity, 64–65; income from earnings, 26–27; “integration” into socio-political order, 4, 76, 129, 187; intergenerational social mobility, 44–45, 45fig.; intragenerational social mobility, 42fig., 42–43; to keep, employers providing food and coal, 153; lacking systematic political ideology, 78–79, 86; major role in revolution’s second wave, 2–3; marriage patterns, 63fig., 64; as not “integrated” into socio-political order, 4, 76, 129, 187; out-migration as downward mobility, 304–5; political organizations, 76–86; radicalization and discontent, 165; revolution as creation of, 293–94; social background of building residents, 47, 48fig., 50; social networks’ importance, 304–5; underrepresentation in information sources, 304; wages for different groups, 299–302table; wartime turnover rates, 161, 162fig., 163; see also Relationship between workers and nonworkers; Skilled workers; Standard of living; Unskilled workers; Wage relationship “Working class” as label, 87 Workplace inspections, 103, 115, 126 Work realm experiences: demand for labor and worker turnover, 115–16,

476

Work realm experiences (Continued) 161, 162fig., 163, 276; employer authority in “at will” wage relationships, 102–4, 108, 120; forms of address, “Du” versus “Sie,” 118, 119; fostering rough group consciousness, 117–18; group enmity, 113; long hours, dust, and noise, 110–11, 112; lower white collar workers versus domineering superiors, 121; malefemale enmity, 113–14; management attempts to fragment proletarian solidarity, 118; master artisanjourneyman enmity, 119; overtime, 108–9; political activity restrictions, 109; solidarity fostered by social interdependency of neighborhoods, 120; tardiness penalties, 108; termination for calling in inspectors, 115; in textile industry, 111–13; worker enmity toward employers, bosses, and lower white collar workers, 114, 115, 122; workers’ anti-authoritarian Eigensinn, hatred of work, and shirking, 87, 113, 116–18; work injuries, 111; see also Social realm experiences; Wage relationship Works Council bill, 293 Works Councils (Betriebsräte): acceptance in Weimar of powerless position, 237; allowed vague “consultative” role in government, 242; behavior of, 225–28; in Berlin and Ruhr, 233–35; in coal industry, 235–37; creation in frustration, 291–92; as democratization of

INDEX

workplace, 2, 224; and elected shop stewards, 173; growth of movement, 223–25; lapse into provincialism and neglect of political questions, 227; leadership weaknesses, 264, 295–96; movement’s final drive (12 Mar–25 May 1919), 254–64; opposition of unions, 295–96; origins and instigation on 8 November 1918, 173, 179; precursors in HDG, 150; RdV failing to recognize, 218; sexism, 227–28; sophisticated ideology for, 292; as spontaneous initiative of ordinary workers, 224–25; syndicalist hue, 227; see also General strike of February–12 March 1919 Works Council movement remnants (June–December 1919): continual wage strikes, 272–73; exhaustion of workers by late 1919, 268–69; failing to claim power of codetermination, 270–71; fractured along sectoral lines, 270; international and national context, 266–67, 279; politics in Leipzig, 267–69; post-strike theorizing on ideology and goals, 269 World War I, see War “Yellow” unions, 105 “Young Turks” of ASR, 233 ZAG (Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft, or central working group), 203, 204, 276, 291, 295; formation and powers of, 203; viewed by employers as successful, temporary measure, 204

plate 1 The development of mechanical excavators such as this one led to accelerated exploitation of central Germany’s rich deposits of brown coal in the decades before the Great War and ensured that the industry would employ largely unskilled navvies and haulers in its open pits. source: Emil Treptow, Grundzüge der Bergbaukunde einschlließlich Aufbereitung und Brikettieren (Vienna: Waldheim-Eberle, ), :.

plate 2 Visitors throng the Peterstraße during the Leipzig fair circa . source: Stadtarchiv Leipzig, as printed in Leipzig: Fofgrafien  bis  mit einer Einführung von Karl Czok (Leipzig: Fotokinoverlag Leipzig, ), .

plate 3 Children of workers, dressed as cowboys and Indians, rule the streets during the Tauscher, . source: Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, as printed in Susanne Schottke, “Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung des Tauscher: Ein Volksfest und seine Wandlungen,” in Feste und Feiern: Zum Wandel städtischer Festkultur in Leipzig, ed. Katrin Keller (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, ), .

plate 4 Fraternity brothers at the University of Leipzig administer “dueling scars” to each other around . Notice the bandaged faces of some of the brothers viewing the action. source: Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, as printed in Leipzig: Fotografien  bis  mit einer Einführung von Karl Czok (Leipzig: Fotokinoverlag Leipzig, ), 

plate 5 Completed in , Leipzig’s fortresslike Neues Rathaus—presenting its sheerest, least accessible sides outward toward proletarian New Leipzig— appears to guard the city center. source: Leipzig: Fotografien  bis  mit einer Einführung von Karl Czok (Leipzig: Fotokinoverlag Leipzig, ), .

plate 6 Fifty thousand Leipzigers demand democracy in front of nobody on the edge of town. source: Wahlrechtsdemonstration in Leipzig am . November : Ein Gedenkblatt für die arbeitende Klasse im Kampfe für das allgemeine, gleiche, geheime, und direkte Wahlrecht in Sachsen, – (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei, ).

plate 7 Two nodal-point workshops in a Magdeburg machine-making factory circa . This production process required intensive interaction among workers in at least two ways: first, laborers at each workstation needed to consult with the draftsman and fitter as to the exact specifications of each piece before boring, cutting, or grinding it; second, if a piece were done inaccurately, workers at different workstations had to confer about corrections. Despite extensive deskilling before the war, the machine-making sector did not succumb to the conveyor belt until the s. source: Conrad Matschoss, Die Maschinen-Fabrik R. Wolf, Magdeburg-Buckau, – (Magdeburg: Wohlfeld, n.d.), –.

plate 8 A revolutionary crowd fills the Augustusplatz on  November . source: Leipzig: Geschichte der Stadt in Wort und Bild (Berlin:  Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, ), .

plate 9 Freikorps machine-gun nest atop a bank building overlooking the Königsplatz (today, Leuschnerplatz). source: Hugo Hertel and Curt Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment in Leipzig (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, ), photo plate.

plate 10 Freikorps guarding entrance to city center with sign that reads, “Halt! Whoever proceeds beyond this point will be shot.” source: Hugo Hertel and Curt Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment in Leipzig (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, ), photo plate.

plate 11 Armed workers occupy a barricade in the Dresdner Strasse. source: Leipzig: Geschichte der Stadt in Wort und Bild (Berlin:  Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, ), .

plate 12 Volkshaus following Reichswehr attack. source: Hugo Hertel and Curt Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment in Leipzig (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, ), photo plate.

plate 13 Luxury villa, apparently torched in retaliation for the destruction of the Volkshaus. source: Hugo Hertel and Curt Rakette, Zeitfreiwilligenregiment in Leipzig (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, ), photo plate.

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