17.4: Culture Struggles--Germany

The stakes of political and cultural identity had changed significantly over the course of the nineteenth century. Within the nations of Europe, it was appropriate to speak of nations instead of just “states”. After all, liberal and nationalistic legal frameworks had triumphed almost everywhere in Europe. However, in significant ways, the enfranchisement of each nation’s citizens was still limited. Most obviously, women did not have the right to vote, and women’s legal rights were severely curtailed everywhere. Likewise, conflicts remained concerning citizenship itself. (Generally, universal manhood suffrage came about in the aftermath of World War I.)

Struggles over national identity and legal rights occurred across Europe. Following German unification, Otto von Bismarck led an officially-declared culture struggle – a Kulturkampf – against Roman Catholicism, and later, against socialism. The term also lends itself to a number of conflicts that occurred in Europe (and the Americas) around the turn of the century, especially among women and European Jews.

The Kulturkampf was a product of Germany’s unique form of government, a political structure set apart from the far more liberal regimes in western Europe. While there was an elected parliament, the Reichstag, it did not exercise the same degree of political power as did the British parliament or the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate. The German chancellor and the cabinet answered to the Kaiser (the emperor). While the regional governments had considerable control locally, the federal structure was highly authoritarian. In turn, there was a comparatively weak liberal movement in Germany because most German liberals saw the unification of Germany as a triumph and held Bismarck in high regard, despite his arch-conservative character. Likewise, most liberals detested socialism, especially as the German socialist party, the SPD, emerged as one of the most powerful political parties in the 1870s.

Bismarck represented the old Lutheran Prussian nobility, the Junkers, and loathed socialism as well as Catholicism. Along with many northern Germans, he regarded Catholicism as alien to German culture and an existential threat to German unity. Since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the majority of northern Germans had been Lutherans. Still, 35% of Germans were Catholic, mostly in the south, and the Catholic Center Party emerged in 1870 to represent their interests. The same year the Catholic church issued the doctrine of papal infallibility - the claim that the Pope literally could not be wrong in manners of faith and doctrine - and Bismarck feared that a future pope might someday order German Catholics not to obey the state.

Thus, in 1873, he began an official state campaign against Catholics. Priests in Germany had to endure indoctrination from the state in order to be openly ordained, and the state would henceforth only recognize civil marriages. More laws followed, including the right of the state to expel priests who refused to abide by anti-Catholic measures. A young German Catholic tried to assassinate Bismarck in 1874, which only made him more intent on carrying forward with his campaign.

Soon, Bismarck realized that the state might need the alliance of the Catholic Center Party against the growing number of socialists. Thus, he relaxed the anti-Catholic measures (although Catholics were still kept out of important state offices, as were Jews) and focused on measures against the SPD. Two assassination attempts against the Kaiser, despite being carried out by men who had nothing to do with socialism, gave Bismarck the pretext, and the Reichstag immediately passed laws that amounted to a ban on the SPD itself.

Whereas early socialists rarely organized into formal political parties, socialists in the post-1848 era became increasingly militant and organized. In September of 1864, a congress of socialists from across Europe and the United States gathered in London and founded the International Workingmen’s Association - the “First International” - in order to better coordinate their efforts. Within the nations of Europe, socialist parties soon acquired mass followings among the industrial working class. Sister parties emerged in France, Britain (where it was known as the Labour Party), Italy, and elsewhere.

Founded in 1875, the SPD resulted from the merging of socialist unions and parties. After the party's ban of 1878, individual socialists could still run for office and campaign for socialism. Bismarck’s response was typically pragmatic: he supported social legislation, including pensions for workers, in a bid to keep the socialists from attracting new members and growing even more militant. Thus, in an ironic historical paradox, some of the first “welfare state” provisions in the world were passed by a conservative government to weaken socialism.

In 1890, the SPD was re-legalized, following the new Kaiser’s firing of Bismarck. The party issued a new manifesto that represented an explicit Marxist ideological stance. The party’s leaders asserted that capitalism would inevitably collapse. As such, the party’s primary goal was to prepare the working class to rise up and take over in the midst of the coming crisis. In the meantime, the party should focus on securing universal suffrage and trying to shore up the worker's quality of life.

The resulting tension culminated in a fierce debate between two of the leaders of the SPD: Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. Kautsky, who had written most of its theoretical manifestos, continued to insist that the real function of the party was to reject parliamentary alliances and to agitate for revolution. However, Bernstein claimed that history had already proven that the party should improve the lives of workers in the present, not wait for a revolution that may or may not ever happen in the future. Bernstein wanted the SPD to build socialism gradually under his theory of “revisionism.” Ironically, the SPD rejected Bernstein's revisionism, but what the party actually did was indeed “revisionist”: fighting for legal protection of workers, wages, and labor conditions.

As the century drew to a close, there were increasingly democratic parliaments and mass parties, and at least in some cases, the beginning of social welfare laws. On the other hand, rather than the state socialist doctrines of Louis Blanc, the revolutionary, “scientific” socialism of Marxism became the official ideology of the majority of socialist parties. The controversy between the two main types of socialism would have serious consequences for the next hundred years of world history.