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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 and the socialists were forced to hold their congresses abroad Berliners continued to organize secret meetings throughout the city. The clandestine world of protest would become the stuff of left-wing legend. One typical 1920s socialist film showed an illegal Hinterhof meeting suddenly interrupted by the police, but although they turned the flat upside down they found nothing. On their way out they stopped, puffed out their silver-buttoned chests and saluted an enormous smiling bust of the Kaiser perched on a shelf by the door. Once they had gone the socialists picked up the statue and, laughing at the police and their ‘Kaiser cult’, pulled out the wads of paper hidden inside. Despite their clear propaganda value such films had a point: the police could not stop the meetings, the funerals, birthday celebrations, picnics or other gatherings where information was passed or mass demonstrations organized; they could not force workers to be antagonistic to those who had been taken prisoner; they could not stop people from treating men like Ignaz Auer and Heinrich Rackow with kindness as they made their way into exile, or lining up along the platform to salute the elderly August Bebel as he was led to prison accompanied by his pet canary and a cartload of books.⁷⁷ This callous treatment of innocent men persuaded many to join the party of the downtrodden, the poor, the factory worker and the slum dweller.⁷⁸ (Later, when the Nazis carried out a much more brutal ‘cleansing’ of the Berlin working-class districts, the Social Democrats and the Communists deluded themselves into thinking that they could once again fight the police and win, and the tales of the ‘heroic years’ obscured the fact that their new enemy was not merely an extension of the Bismarckian repression, but was far more deadly.) When it finally became clear to Bismarck that his policy of repression had failed he tried another tack that Hitler would never have accepted for the despised radical left: appeasement.

      Bismarck was not accustomed to losing a battle, and if the troublesome workers could not be intimidated, perhaps they could be bought. His change of heart was inspired by a number of factors, including a new-found faith in the Prussian tradition of state paternalism embodied by Frederick the Great, who had at one time referred to himself as the ‘King of the Beggars’, and by Napoleon III, whom he believed had at one time ‘secured the loyalty and allegiance of the peasantry by means of his social legislation’. Above all Bismarck was influenced by his friend Disraeli, whom he had met during the Berlin Congress of 1878. In his novel Sybil Disraeli had described the two groups ‘between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … The Rich and the Poor’, and he, like Bismarck, had been shocked to think that there were people in Berlin or London who were living ‘lower than the Portuguese or the Poles, the serfs of Russia or the Lazzaroni of Naples’. Bismarck was so taken by the British Prime Minister that he put his portrait beside the only others on his desk – ‘My monarch, my wife, and my friend’ – and when his policy of repression failed it was Disraeli who inspired him to push through his social reforms.

      The first state insurance measure was announced by the Kaiser in 1881. Health insurance was introduced in 1883 and over 14 million were covered by 1913; accident insurance was introduced in 1884, accompanied by the most sophisticated and thorough code of factory legislation in Europe. At the same time a number of projects were completed in Berlin: hospitals were set up in the densely populated areas of Friedrichshain, Wedding and Kreuzberg, a new sewer system was built, a central slaughter house and market were completed in 1881 and hundreds of schools were put up. But although the changes were far-reaching it was too little, and far too late. The workers were happy to take advantage of the new measures but they were certainly not going to forget the recent repression, or the dreams of fundamental political change which had been nurtured by it.

      It says something of the immense ignorance of Berlin’s ruling class that they vehemently opposed Bismarck’s modest proposals. The nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke proclaimed that the workers were ‘poor and should remain so’; the highest values of culture and politics were never intended for the masses because ‘the millions must plough and hammer and plane in order that the several thousand may carry on scientific research, paint and govern’. For him ‘the masses must for ever remain the masses’, and the ‘poor man should know that his lament: why am I not rich? is no more reasonable even by a hair’s breadth than the lament, why am I not the German crown-prince?’⁷⁹ There were thousands like him in imperial Berlin, and they made compromise with the moderate left virtually impossible.

      Faced with this intransigence the СКАЧАТЬ