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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 to help smash the Prussian constitution if in return he would curb the economic absolutism of the capitalists and give the workers social security; but Bismarck, by far the more crafty of the two, wanted to use Lassalle and the threat of universal suffrage to frighten the liberals into political obedience.⁷⁴ Bismarck used Lassalle to help him to crush the centre, and then he threw him away. Lassalle did not live long enough to retaliate, and one can only imagine the sigh of relief breathed on opposite sides of Europe by both Bismarck and by Marx when they heard the news that Lassalle had been killed in a duel fighting over his lover on 28 August 1864. Although only thirty-nine years old he had already become a pivotal figure in Berlin working-class history. Karl Kautsky would later write that ‘In so far as the origins of German Social Democracy may be viewed as the work of a single individual, it was the creation of Ferdinand Lassalle.’ But without his leadership the Berlin working class was destined to follow the powerful Marxists who were putting pressure on them from the south.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ