Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

1848.⁶⁸ But his plans were fundamentally flawed. Schulze-Delitzsch and his associates believed that workers should not participate directly in politics until they had become educated, had been rid of ignorance and prejudice, and had earned their ‘passport to civil society’. When he talked about ‘workers’ he was referring to the ambitious man who wanted to pull himself into the middle class, not to the inarticulate slum dweller. Schulze-Delitzsch tried to bring these changes about by founding workers’ and consumer and production co-operatives to enable workers to become self-employed and financially independent. He also helped to set up the Central Association for the Welfare of the Working Class to provide support funds for company pensions. Nevertheless, most of these ‘workers” organizations had few working-class members and some, like the Nationalverein or German National Society, imposed such high membership fees that workers were excluded altogether. Schulze-Delitzsch might have referred to workers as ‘honourable members’ but in practice they had no power and no say in ‘their’ organizations. The leaders of the Fortschrittspartei or Progressive Party might have called the workers the ‘pillars of the emerging German nation’, but they insisted that workers must learn the ways of the bourgeoisie before they could have a political voice. All such groups rejected the idea of universal male suffrage. It was inevitable that, as industrialization spread, workers would become better organized, more independent, and increasingly resentful of liberal paternalism. The first groups formed by and for workers appeared in Berlin in the 1860s.

      Like their liberal predecessors the first true working-class activists were moderate and, like Schulze-Delitzsch, wanted to introduce simple, workable measures to ease life in the factories and in the slums, and to give people a chance to work their way out of poverty.⁶⁹ Two of the most prominent were Friedrich Held, who was deeply concerned about conditions for factory workers and became popular among machinists through his publication Lokomotive, and Stephan Born, who published Das Volk, the most sophisticated of the labour papers. Both had read Marx and Engels but rejected the call for a revolution, saying that it would ‘only bring anarchy’. They were the forerunners of those trade unionists who advocated careful organization, political pressure and steady improvement rather than a violent overthrow of the system. By the 1860s over sixty workers’ associations had been formed in Berlin, including education societies and bourgeois foundations for workers. It was tragic that these moderate voices were ignored by the rulers of Prussia. The reformers were practical and decent men who simply wanted to give the new underclass some kind of place in society. The ‘fourth class’ was not yet agitating for revolution and most of its members still wanted to be part of the existing system. But the elite, from the newly declared Kaiser to the army to the new industrialists, were terrified of any threat to their power and rejected change out of hand, opting for a course of ever greater repression, banning workers’ groups and arresting leaders. In the end the lack of acceptance at this early stage helped to radicalize the working-class movement. It would not be Schulze-Delitzsch or Friedrich Held who would lead them into politics; it would be the heirs of the radical tradition who as early as 1848 had hoped that the Frankfurt parliament would collapse in a second revolution. They were led by a young man who detested the liberals and who hated Schulze-Delitzsch above all – Ferdinand Lassalle.

      Lassalle was an extraordinary figure in Berlin history. He was a mass of contradictions: a working-class leader posing as an aristocrat; an activist longing for academic life, and a friend of two of the most powerful enemies of the nineteenth century, Marx and Bismarck. And it was Lassalle who defied the liberal agenda and who explained to workers that they should demand more than honorary membership of the bourgeoisie. It was he who put ‘Red Berlin’ on the political map of Europe.⁷⁰

      Even as a schoolboy in Breslau, Lassalle was convinced that he was destined for great things and confided to his diary: ‘Had I been born a prince I would be an aristocrat body and soul. But as I am merely middle class I shall be a democrat.’ At twenty-one he met Heinrich Heine, who was impressed by his wit and perception; in the same year he met the wealthy Countess Hatzfeldt, who was losing in a spectacular divorce suit against her loutish husband. Lassalle, moved perhaps less by her plight than by the social opportunities afforded by association with her, helped her to win one of the most sensational divorce cases of the century. In return the grateful countess presented Lassalle with a pension for life which allowed him to pursue his political career. He threw himself into the radical movement and set off to the Rhineland to join his hero, Karl Marx.

      Lassalle became a devoted member of Marx’s sycophantic entourage, and the Düsseldorf police soon noticed that his ‘energy and powers of persuasion’, his ‘wildly leftist ideas’ and his ‘not inconsiderable financial resources’ made him a most dangerous enemy in his own right. But in 1857 a bitter quarrel erupted between the two men, and Lassalle moved to Berlin by himself. While Marx was working alone in the British Library, Lassalle was dashing around Berlin, agitating for change and inciting the workers to act. Marx referred to the ‘would be labour dictator’ as ‘that ridiculous person’. He once complained that ‘not only did Lassalle consider himself the greatest scholar, the most profound thinker, the most gifted investigator, etc., but in addition he was also Don Juan and the revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu’.⁷¹ The men clashed on three fundamental issues: Marx believed that the revolution was inevitable, while Lassalle did not; in his view one had to create a state in which the working class could have real political power. Second, Marx believed the state would wither away, whereas Lassalle saw the state as the future guarantor of workers’ rights. Finally Marx believed in the International, while Lassalle was concerned with change only within the state itself. By the 1850s it was clear to all who knew them that the two men detested one another.

      To Marx’s chagrin Lassalle took Berlin by storm, setting himself up in beautiful apartments at 13 Bellevuestrasse which he crammed with expensive works of art and priceless books. Monday evenings would find him at Fanny Lewald’s for dinner; later in the week he would visit the Varnhagens or Lina Dunker’s salon, and everyone from Ernst Dohm to Fürst von Puckler-Muskau were guests in his house. He must have been an extraordinary sight, fulminating about the future of the working class from behind the red velvet curtains and marble pillars, or expounding about factory conditions over the customary champagne and hashish, but in his spare time he did work hard for his cause, writing pamphlets and rushing off to factories in his beautiful clothes and top hat and white gloves to tell the spellbound audience how to fight their capitalist oppressors.

      The decisive moment came in 1862. That year the liberal German National Society sent a delegation of workers to the World Exhibition in London. The visitors were so impressed that upon their return they decided to call for the formation of their own General German Workers’ Congress. A mass meeting was held in Berlin that year to choose delegates for the conference to be held in Leipzig. The liberals, who had initially supported the idea, were horrified to find that the delegates chosen were not their own members but were radical democrats who called for universal suffrage and even for the creation of a separate workers’ party, a move which the liberals knew would effectively wipe out their mass support. Schulze-Delitzsch began a massive campaign against the Congress. The delegates were forced to turn to the one man in Berlin who could help them: Ferdinand Lassalle.

      On 1 March 1863 Lassalle responded to their demands in his Open Reply; he made it clear that the liberals were the arch enemy. The ‘iron law of wages’ meant that capitalists would always keep workers poor unless the cycle was destroyed, but the only way to do this was to split from the liberals and organize their own political party.⁷² The Berlin workers were divided between support of Schulze-Delitzsch and of Lassalle, but in 1863 the dream of a working-class political party became reality with the foundation of the General Working Men’s Association. It was a turning point in the history of Germany.⁷³

      Ironically it was also the mutual hatred of the liberals which brought Lassalle and Bismarck together in Berlin to form one of the most unlikely friendships of the century. A bundle of letters found in 1928 revealed that the two shared a great many things, not least a lust for political power; Lassalle wrote to his mistress, ‘Do I look as if I would be satisfied with any secondary place in the kingdom? … No! I will act and fight, but I will also enjoy the fruits of the combat.’ The words could have been Bismarck’s. Their friendship was a calculated political gamble: Lassalle wanted Bismarck