After his death Lassalle’s General Working Men’s Association continued to gather support, but a rival, the Eisenach Party, was created in June 1869 under August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht and it soon began to dominate workers’ politics in southern Germany. This bizarre and disorganized group recruited under the slogan ‘Down with sectarianism, down with the leadership cult, down with the Jesuits who recognize our principle in words but betray it in deed.’ In a desperate move to gain socialist credibility, Liebknecht and Bebel linked up with the Marxist First International.75 This gave the Marxists a foothold in Germany, making the ideology much more fundamental to the working-class movement than might well have been the case.
In reality the deep rift which marred early relations between the Eisenach group and the Lassalleans had less to do with differences about Marx than with conflicting views on German statehood. Lassalleans supported Prussian unification of Germany while Liebknecht and Bebel were both Saxons who hated Prussia and hated Berlin. The party’s early speeches were filled with appeals to ‘all democrats and Prussian-haters’ to join them, and it was only because German unification brought such dogged persecution of both groups that the two were forced to either work together or perish. They reluctantly came together to form the Socialist Labour Party at the May 1875 Gotha Congress, but without Lassalle’s towering presence it was overwhelmed by the Marxists, who stood for everything Lassalle had come to detest. Ironically Marx refused to attend because of the very presence of the Lassalleans and instead put his energies into writing a Critique of the Gotha Programme; the commemorative scroll for the Congress shows Marx and Lassalle standing shoulder to shoulder, but looking in opposite directions.76
Despite its shaky beginnings the new party became the largest and best organized in Europe and began to exert an extraordinary political, economic, social and cultural hold on the working class of the city. One reason was the essential rootlessness of the workers in Berlin. Most were immigrants who were not integrated culturally or socially into the community or the Church, which left them more open to socialist ideas. Its members founded new organizations which took the form of political clubs, cycling and rambling societies and singing groups (by 1880 there were 200 of these), and all manner of cultural and social gatherings which combined entertainment with political indoctrination. Earnest women met to discuss their rights at sewing parties; youth groups commemorated the victims of 1848 and went to salute their graves even though the police confiscated the wreaths which they brought to the Friedrichshain cemetery. The party organizations were cheap copies of their bourgeois counterparts, but Marxist jargon, revolutionary rhetoric and naive optimism made up for the shabbiness, and their popularity increased rapidly. Most important of all, the Social Democrats began to mobilize the hundreds of thousands of immigrants and workers to vote. The establishment was shocked by their phenomenal success.
The SPD first participated in Berlin municipal elections in 1883 and secured five seats, but it had already entered the national scene in 1871, gaining 124,000 votes and sending two deputies to the Reichstag. In the elections of 1874 they increased their share to 352,000 votes and nine deputies, and in 1877 the vote went up by 40 per cent to twelve deputies. In the following election the SPD would get more votes than any other German party. This new political force horrified Bismarck, and he began to search for an excuse to crush the menace which might one day threaten his powerful empire. His chance came in 1878.
On 11 May the old Kaiser was being driven in a carriage down Unter den Linden, enjoying the sights and sounds of his city, when a man who had been hiding behind a cab leapt up and fired at him. He missed, and after capture the demented mechanic announced that he was only trying to draw attention to the plight of the working classes. On the basis of this confession Bismarck immediately tried to introduce anti-socialist laws, but he failed when it was revealed that the man had actually been barred from the party because of his extremist views. Fortunately for Bismarck, a second, more damaging attempt was made a few days later. On 2 June 1878 the Kaiser was once again being driven along Unter den Linden when Karl Nobiling fired from a nearby apartment window, hit him with about thirty pellets of swan shot in the face, arms and back, turned the gun on himself and attempted suicide. The Kaiser was rushed to the palace streaming with blood, and this time it took months for him to recover.
Bismarck wasted no time on the state of the king’s health; indeed it would be over a week before he visited his monarch. Instead he shouted gleefully, ‘Now we’ll dissolve the Reichstag!’, rushed to parliament and began to ram through his anti-socialist laws. The growing conservative middle class and the old aristocracy backed Bismarck in his campaign, and the Reichstag passed the Bill by 221 to 149. As a result of the vote the SPD, the left-wing Progress Party and the Catholic Centre Party were denounced as enemies of the state, and the first clause of the new law read that ‘Associations which aim by social democratic, socialist or communist means to overthrow the existing state or social order, are banned.’
The workers, who had never heard of Nobiling and who rather liked the old Kaiser, were shocked to see the police bearing down on their districts in retribution for his crime. The industrial areas were soon in a state of siege; hundreds of people were arrested and sixty-seven leading socialists were rounded up and deported from the city without a court hearing and with no provision for their families. Police shut down the earnest new working-class clubs and associations. The socialist press was silenced; in 1878 forty-five out of forty-seven leading newspapers were banned, including Vorwärts, Die neue Rundschau, Die Zukunft and Berliner freie Presse; over 150 periodicals and 1,200 non-regular publications were suppressed and all ‘social-democratic, socialist, or communist associations, assemblies and publications’ were forbidden.
Bismarck justified his actions to the general public by announcing that Nobiling’s evil deed had been inspired by ‘Socialist agitators’, and the popular response in Berlin was unpleasant and extreme. Scores of people were reported to the police for harmless remarks ‘against the Kaiser’, with the courts viewing all charges with utter seriousness. A woman who had quipped, ‘At least the Emperor is not poor; he can have himself cared for,’ was given eighteen months in prison. On a single day in June 1878 the Berlin court sentenced seven people to twenty-two years and six months for ‘insulting the Emperor’. Employers were called upon to dismiss all workers with socialist inclinations and most obliged. Bismarck had so exaggerated the threat of the ‘Red Menace’ that people genuinely believed the social and political order to be in imminent danger of collapse if all left-wing activity was not stopped immediately; indeed Otto Vossler once remarked that Bismarck’s attacks against the socialists were of such a fanatic severity that they were not used against the country’s most dangerous external enemies even at war. In what was supposed to be a modern constitutional state the treatment of the socialists was absurd. It was also counter-productive.
Far from stamping out the party, Bismarck’s policy served not only to strengthen it, but to radicalize it. The ‘heroic years’, as they were later called, became the foundation upon which dozens of working-class myths were based. Some of the tales were based on fact; activists did sneak out at night and hang red banners on bridges, on public buildings, even on the statue of Frederick the Great. The new party newspaper Sozialdemocrat, founded in Zurich in September 1879 and edited by Georg Vollmar and later by Eduard Bernstein, was printed and smuggled into Berlin along with dozens of other papers. The party postal service delivered the more than 3,600 different pamphlets printed before 1879, and although there were 1,500 members in prison