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Book Reviews
It is now over four decades since the pioneering works on the German Social Democratic labour movement by Carl E. Schorske in the United States (German Social Democracy, 1905-1917. The Development of the Great Schism, first published 1955) and Gerhard A. Ritter in West Germany (Die Arbeiterbewegung im wilhelminischen Reich, first published 1959). In the 1960s and 1970s, the explosion of interest in both labour history and socialist theory and political movements generated a great deal of important work in this field, both within Germany and elsewhere. The following decades saw research which integrated German labour history first into social, then also into cultural history.
Both in terms of the evolution of the historiography dealing with socialism and communism in Germany and in terms of the wider historical context, this is a good time for a volume like the present collection edited by David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz to appear. Their collection of essays is able to give a sense of the longue durée of the history of the German Left over one hundred and fifty years, and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989-90 both provides a logical caesura in the history of German communism and has also left its own mark on the historiography. While the end of the GDR has brought benefits, in terms of freeing historians from Cold-War ideological confrontations and easing access to East German archives for Western scholars, there has been some cost to scholars in the field in the (former) GDR, where the history of the socialist labour movement had previously enjoyed a central, and privileged (albeit often strait-jacketed), position in the historical profession.
Following a magisterial historiographical survey in the editors’ introduction (the editors also contribute a chapter each, Barclay on Rudolf Hilferding in exile from Nazism, and Weitz on communism and the public spheres of Weimar Germany, plus a postscript by Weitz on the passing of German communism), this very substantial volume contains twenty-three chapters by historians from the United States, Germany and Britain. It is, of course, impossible within a short review to do justice to each essay in such a sizeable collection. It is, however, possible to state that the editors have succeeded in achieving a good thematic coverage of aspects of German socialism and communism from the Vormärz period (i.e. before the 1848 revolution) to the 1990s, a nice balance in the choice of contributors, including both well-known authorities in the field and younger scholars, and a high standard of work overall. Particularly welcome to teachers of German history in the English-speaking world is the fact that the volume gives students access, in English, to the work of German specialists such as Toni Offermann (on the socialist labour movement in the 1860s) and Adelheid von Saldern, on the Social Democratic Party in the “provinces” (i.e. Göttingen) from 1890 to 1920.
The volume also strongly reflects the contribution of historians working from a perspective influenced by the historical study of gender, for example in the chapters by Mary Jo Maynes, whose chapter on the mobilisation of women by the pre-1914 Social Democratic Party significantly qualifies common generalisations about “proletarian anti-feminism”; Atina Grossmann, on pronatalism, population policy and abortion in the founding years of the East German state; Anna Sabine Ernst, on everyday life in the 1950s GDR; and Hanna Schissler, on the limitations of the West German Social Democratic Party’s policies towards women in the 1950s and 1960s. With the exception of Diethelm Prowe’s essay on post-1945 trade unions, contributions tend to focus more on political parties than on union organisation, although many chapters manage to encompass both. All in all, this impressive collection shows that the field of German labour movement history has not only come of age, but also still has a good deal of life in it.
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