August Bebel Research Articles

Affirmative Orientalism: August Bebel, Islam, and World History

In 1884, during the period of the Socialist Laws, August Bebel took the time to publish a historical work entitled Die mohamedanisch- arabische Kulturperiode. In it Bebel positioned Islam and the early caliphates as the unacknowledged link between Greco-Roman traditions of knowledge and the blossoming of European culture that, he argued, had occurred since the Renaissance. He also used the book as an opportunity to reject claims that Christianity had played this key role in world historical progress. Through an examination and contextualization of Bebel's writings on Islam, this article shows how he viewed the role of different religious traditions within world history and how his views intersected with contemporary questions regarding the relationship between religion and socialism. The article also examines how Bebel's work fits within a longer tradition of socialist solidarity with the Ottoman Empire.

Metallography of tailings from the Mansfeld copper mining area

Abstract The copper slate deposit of the Mansfeld copper mining area was mined in the 19th and 20th century. Mineral collectors can still find traces of copper smelting activities on the slag heaps of the various copper smelters. A piece from the Krug smelter slag heap mainly consists of Cu and Fe sulfides. The piece in question might be the intermediate product copper matte. The pieces from Hettstedt and the August Bebel smelter contain clearly visible metallic copper. The Hettstedt specimen might be a piece of furnace lining with adhering slag. Cr and Mg could be found, suggesting that chromium magnesia was used as refractory material. The piece from the August Bebel smelter contains up to 18 wt. % Cu. It does, however, not contain any sulfur. It is most likely Fe2SiO4 slag (fayalite) with a high proportion of FeO. The presence of Sn and Zn suggests that this slag was formed during the processing of bronze or brass.

Jürgen Schmidt. August Bebel: Social Democracy and the Founding of the Labour Movement.

With a life spanning from 1840 to 1913, August Bebel, the longtime leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), witnessed the dramatic transformation of the German lands. He saw Germany’s transition from a set of disparate states in an era of revolution and reaction to a powerful force within Europe on the brink of war. Bebel’s Germany was constantly torn between reform and repression. With its policy on universal manhood suffrage, it was a beacon of democracy. With national laws on social insurance and vast infrastructure schemes following its rapid industrialization and population growth from the middle of the century, Germany was also a locus of social reform. And yet, Germany under the conservative Bismarck also had effectively banned socialism and turned a blind eye to working conditions. Bebel was both a central actor in as well as witness to these enormous changes over the course of his lifetime. His story, told in this masterful but concise biography by Jürgen Schmidt, is not only relevant but also compelling reading for all those interested in German history or, indeed, the history of Europe in the long nineteenth century.

LEFTISM AND NON-NORMATIVE SEXUALITY IN LATVIA AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

In the context of the history of the leftist ideas, the relations of their repre- sentatives with the non-normative sexuality have been peculiar and controversial. In the European countries, the attitude of the leftist circles towards the non-normative sexuality was controversial – it was interpreted both as a manifestation of the depravity of the degenerate aristocracy and as a phenomenon to be accepted by the new society, separated from the church and the dogmas of the bourgeois morals. Even before World War I, the polemic opinions of the advocates of the leftist ideas were voiced in the public space of Latvia – a historical explanation of sexuality can be found in the translations of Friedrich Engels and August Bebel; Andrejs Upīts and other local Marxists waged a war against the depravity, including the glorification of sodomy, allegedly found in the so-called decadents’ works, even though nowadays it is difficult to find grounds for such reproaches. On the other hand, among the decadents, there are authors (Haralds Eldgasts, Atis Ķeniņš), who, at least episodically, have propagated the triumph of the new morals and a new literature, when the artist has the right to obtain impressions from the most diverse phenomena, including passions and vices, among them unnatural desire; yet, overall, the use of the non-normative sexuality for mocking and humiliating one’s political and aesthetic adversaries prevails, as during this period, Latvia, unlike Germany or Russia, lacks culture personalities who would become advocates for this kind of sexuality in the public space.

Im Schatten August Bebels. Sozialdemokratische Antisemitismusabwehr als Republikschutz 1918–1932

Antisemitism was a key, if not the defining feature of the political culture of Imperial Germany. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, antisemitic groups and parties attracted considerable public support, cutting through different religious milieus and social classes in the otherwise diverse and often divided German Empire. Perhaps unlike any other political movement, the antisemites could muster the support of parts of the ruling elites as well as of the various strata of the middling classes. Antisemites in Germany, but also in the German-speaking parts of Austria-Hungary, sought to present themselves as a ‘Christian-Social’ alternative to the growing socialist movement by combining demands for state intervention and welfare with an anti-Jewish critique of modern capitalism. It was against this backdrop that August Bebel (allegedly) described antisemitism as the ‘socialism of fools’. What Bebel referred to here, and in several speeches at party conferences, was the misguided attack on the excesses and growing inequalities of capitalism as a ‘Jewish problem’ rather than as a product of an exploitative economic system. Antisemites might well be opposed to capitalism, but they had no practical way of overcoming it because of their obsession with ‘Jewish capital’. Bebel’s intervention marked the beginning of the continuous struggle of the SPD against antisemitism in Germany throughout the Wilhelmine period and during the Weimar Republic.

Biographies of Labor Activists: Trajectories, Daringness, and Challenges

AbstractThis comment discusses three topics. First, John French's biography of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is located in the broader trajectory of the production of biographical narratives of activists under the auspices of the historiography of the labour movement. Second, French's daring gesture of comparing the trajectories of Lula and August Bebel, who lived in such different contexts, and the impact of this in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of labour history in Brazil is discussed. Finally, we look at some of the challenges faced by writers of biographies of working-class leaders, notably in relation to the intersectionality between class, race, and gender.

Common Men, Exceptional Politicians: What Do We Gain from an Embodied Social Biographical Approach to Leftist Leaders Like Germany's August Bebel and Brazil's Luis Inácio Lula da Silva?

AbstractLula and His Politics of Cunning explores the origin, roots, and evolution of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's vision, discourse, and practice of leadership as a process of becoming. This commentary invites historians of labor movements and the left to think beyond their geographical and chronological specializations. It argues that there is much to gain from thinking globally if we wish to achieve meaningful causal insights applicable to the sweep of capitalist development.

Working-Class Leaders and Their Political Work Between Civil-Societal Engagement and Class Conflicts: The Case of August Bebel – A Comment to John D. French

AbstractJohn D. French's stimulating article, which explores the scope for comparing working-class leaders across time and space, is considered in this contribution by reference to my biography of August Bebel and with a particular focus on the following topics: a) historical actors as shaped by their own particular time and place; b) the importance of personal relationships and networks in making people who they are; c) the importance of psychological elements and the risk in interpreting them in retrospect – recovering them depends upon the sources available; d) how charisma reflects an interdependence between attribution and individual qualities; e) the importance of political milieux for the flourishing of individual working-class leaders; and f) the relationship between political work to both civil society and existing class relations. Using these approaches allows us to write cross-border and cross-temporal “embodied social biographies”, as suggested by French.

The Cold War: A World History

The Cold War: A World History

The Comintern, Communist women leaders and the struggle for women's liberation in Britain between the wars: a political and prosopographical investigation, part 1

The literature on Communist women is sparse and touches tangentially on the lives of female activists, even those who participated in the Communist Party leadership. This is the first part of a two-part article which examines 15 of the 18 very unusual women who figured on the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) between 1920 and 1939. It outlines Communist perspectives on women's liberation documenting their roots in the Marxist analysis associated with Frederick Engels, August Bebel and Clara Zetkin, pioneered in the Second International and the German Social Democracy (SPD), taken up by the Bolsheviks, and adopted in the early 1920s by the infant Comintern. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses displayed by this theoretical tradition and its critique of its rival, feminism. It traces attempts to translate it into practice in Britain thwarted by the resilience of conventional consciousness and the development of Stalinism. In that context, the article adopts a prosopographical approach. It provides a statistical survey of the leading women who made up a mere 13% of CC membership between the World Wars. High turnover hindered female cadre building; 83% of our subjects served only a single term. The cohort was more middle-class than male CC representatives or women in the party at large. While 60% had Communist partners, in a surprising 70% of these cases the woman was more prominent politically. Children and family did not preclude high levels of activism and greater loyalty to the CPGB measured by longevity of party membership than their male CC counterparts. The second part of the paper explores the lives and careers of individual women leaders.

Interview and interior: Procedures of narrative surveys around 1900.

In the spring of 1893, the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr began interviewing various people on antisemitism, a subject of heated discussion in the European feuilleton around 1900. "Once again, I am travelling the world sounding out people's opinions and listening to what they have to say," he wrote in his introduction to a series of articles on that issue that appeared in the feuilleton of the Deutsche Zeitung between March and September 1893. A year later, the Berlin publishing house S. Fischer turned Bahr's articles into a book. Bahr conducted a total of thirty-eight interviews with prominent personages, such as August Bebel, Theodor Mommsen, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen and Jules Simon. Bahr did not focus on the arguments in favour or against antisemitism. Instead, he set out explicitly to investigate the sentiments, perceptions and opinions on this topic within the cultured classes. Yet, as I will show in this article, Bahr tried to capture not only the "sentiments" [Empfindungen] aired by his interviewees, but also the settings and interiors in which the interviews took place. I argue that these descriptions of physical space served Bahr as authentication, as a three-dimensional certificate for the "facts of opinion" [Meinungstatsachen] he recorded.

Jürgen Schmidt, August Bebel: Social Democracy and the Founding of the Labour Movement

Jürgen Schmidt, <i>August Bebel: Social Democracy and the Founding of the Labour Movement</i>

August Bebel: Social Democracy and the Founding of the Labour Movement

August Bebel: Social Democracy and the Founding of the Labour Movement

Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933 by Jill Suzanne Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933 by Jill Suzanne Smith Esther K. Bauer Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933. By Jill Suzanne Smith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 221 + 14 b/w illustrations. Paper $27.95. ISBN 978-0801478345. Toward the end of Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith writes that, “between the years 1890 and 1933, Berlin was known as a city of whores” (185). Smith’s study concentrates on the debates surrounding the figure of the prostitute and the institution of prostitution in Wilhelmine and Weimar Berlin. Informed by feminist Gayle Rubin’s work on the sociocultural import of sex, it reveals the many ways in which these debates contributed to the periods’ larger discourses on changing gender roles and the development of new paradigms of morality and female sexuality, including open lesbian relationships and the so-called New Woman. For her erudite analysis, Smith draws on her own archival research as well as scholarship in history, art history, sociology, gender studies, and culture studies. Smith reads a wide variety of texts that deal with prostitution ranging from works of literature and art, to writings by politicians, social activists, philosophers, and cultural critics, to police reports and film reviews. This broad scope enables her to create a mosaic of different perspectives that shows that the prostitute was a central figure of the turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century gender debates and that talking about prostitution was always also talking about the female social role and notions of female respectability as well as gender relations at large. As a result, Smith’s study offers a nuanced view of the role of prostitution and the prostitute that goes beyond the more usual conceptual dichotomy that defines the prostitute either as victim of social circumstances and patriarchal structures or as morally reprehensible source of venereal diseases and hence a threat to public health and morality. At the same time, Berlin Coquette emphasizes the extent to which social reality and cultural production [End Page 173] were intertwined and shaped each other. Through her focus on prostitution and her careful close readings, Smith highlights often neglected connections and continuities between the gender debates before and after World War I. Equally important, her work sheds new light on familiar texts, while drawing readers’ attention to works traditionally not read in the context of the wider debates on female social roles. Smith devotes particular attention to the figure of the Kokotte, a type of prostitute who cultivated a veneer of bourgeois respectability while fulfilling the sexual desires of her bourgeois clientele. Maintaining a balance between “titillation and restraint” the cocottes represented “a concomitant eroticization of the bourgeoisie and an ‘embourgeoisement’ of prostitutes” (13). At the same time as prostitutes came to look and act ever more bourgeois, middle-class women joined the workforce and ventured into social spheres and engaged in activities that throughout the nineteenth century had been associated with prostitution. As a result, the boundaries between cocottes and flirtatious coquettes, i.e., sexually and economically increasingly independent women who engaged in erotic exchanges in public, became fluid. Indeed, often such bourgeois coquettes flirted in the hope of finding a suitor who would financially support them. Many of the texts Smith explores engage in a similar blurring of lines and thus invite readers to reevaluate existing notions of morality, sexuality, and female social roles. Smith combines analyses of nonfictional texts with those of novels, dramas, art works, and films, and thus can highlight not only their interconnections, but also the fact that many literary, cinematic, and artistic works stretched the boundaries of gender roles and bourgeois propriety much further than did cultural critics and politicians, and thus encouraged their audiences even more strongly to think beyond the status quo. In chapter 1, Smith reads late nineteenth-century texts by the socialist August Bebel, the sociologist Georg Simmel, and the playwright Otto Erich Hartleben, who examine the socioeconomic dynamics of prostitution and bourgeois marriage and a “double moral standard” that silently endorsed pre- and extramarital sexual contacts for men while proscribing them for women. As they present prostitution and marriage as...

Feminism in the German Democratic Republic: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois Literary Tradition

The paper investigates the literary treatment of historical women figures from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as vehicles for the discussion of feminist issues in the East German literature of the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast to the SED's allegiance to a socialist feminist tradition derived from August Bebel and Clara Zetkin, focussing on social policy to promote women's emancipation, Christa Wolf's work on the women Romantics turns to the critique of patriarchal structures and the strengthening of female subjectivity through group solidarity. The closeness of this position to Western feminism, together with increasing interest within the West German academy in women writers hitherto sidelined within the classical literary canon, ensures Wolf's ascendancy as a feminist figurehead at this time. Other GDR writers, Sigrid Damm, Renate Feyl, and Brigitte Struzyk, also establish themselves in the West German book market by writing on women from the age of Goethe.

In Praise of Amateur Politics

Left intellectuals often like to lament that there once was socialism in America—that between 1901 and the end of the First World War, a small ingathering of urban reformers, trade unionists, and German immigrants banded together to create an American counterpart to European social democracy. The apex of this movement was 1912. That year, the Socialist Party controlled seventy-nine mayoralties, published a weekly newspaper that had a national readership of over 750,000, and ran a presidential candidate who won nearly a million votes in a contested four-way race. Such was the pride and envy of European socialists that even the ever-dour August Bebel proclaimed that, at this rate, “Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist Republic.”

Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933. By Jill Suzanne Smith (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2013) 221 pp. $69.95 cloth $27.95 paper

Smith’s book is an exciting contribution to the growing scholarship about the history of prostitution in modern Germany. With the intent of moving beyond the standard dichotomy of victim/villain, Smith uses myriad sources to sketch a vibrant picture of women in Berlin’s sex trade from the Kaiserreich to the end of the Weimar Republic. In doing so, she argues that cultural texts (popular novels, plays, social-hygiene films, police records, and sociopolitical essays) should be read not only as reflections of their historical time periods but as important shapers of contemporary debate and discourse.For instance, Chapter 1 uses two Otto Erich Hartleben plays, Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (Berlin, 1900) and August Bebel’s influential Die Frau under der Sozialismus (Berlin, 1879) to examine fin-de-siècle debates about bourgeois marriage, “free love,” and prostitution. Smith concludes that although the authors use the sex trade to criticize the institution of bourgeois marriage, none of them is “truly able to imagine a world in which women can be both sexually and economically autonomous” (62).Similarly, in Chapter 2, Smith examines the writings of the prominent German feminists Anna Pappritz, Helene Stöcker, and Hanna Bieber-Böhm to inform her reading of Margarete Böhme’s bestselling novel of 1905, Diary of a Lost Girl. Thus does Smith confirm what several other scholars have contended, that Germany was home to a vibrant and multifaceted reform culture in the early years of the twentieth century. For instance, although many feminist reformers placed the blame for sex-trade conditions at the feet of male johns and pimps, opinions about the culpability of female sex-trade workers were constantly shifting.In Chapter 3, Smith focuses on such cultural artifacts as cinematic works, cabaret performances, and a visitor’s guide to “naughty” Berlin to illustrate the links between gendered public spaces, male anxiety, and female emancipation in the Weimar metropolis. In Chapter 4, Smith uses fictional works to gauge the effects of the controversial 1927 Law to Combat Venereal Diseases. As in earlier chapters, she uncovers a multiplicity of experience, which confirms one of her overarching arguments, that texts examining female prostitution should not be read “simply as indicator[s] of women’s oppression”; in fact, a reading of diverse cultural texts “reveals the fragility of gender relations and new modes of sexual expression in the Weimar era without resorting to defeatist conclusions” (184).Berlin Coquette is an innovative interdisciplinary work that succeeds in illustrating the complicated nature of the urban German prostitution trade in the years before and after World War I. Smith defends the book’s narrow geographical focus by qualifying Berlin as “one of the quintessential modern cities of twentieth-century Europe” (3). Although this label is tough to dispute, a sole focus on the German capital ignores rich sources in cities such as Munich, Hamburg, and Dusseldorf, let alone the smaller cities and towns that sought to deal with “prostitution problems” in their own ways. That said, Smith’s work will be read with interest by scholars and students of German history and literature, gender and sexuality, and culture and media studies.

Resisting Bellamy: How Kautsky and Bebel Read Looking Backward

Abstract Scientific socialism as developed by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the world's largest workers' party, and the Second International, basically a creation of German socialists, viewed utopianism as empirically unverifiable. The publication, wide circulation, and enormous success in Germany of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward therefore posed a strong challenge to the leaders of the SPD, Karl Kautsky and August Bebel, and it attracted their criticism on several occasions. Such high-level condemnations of Bellamy call for an explanation. The SPD, freshly out of illegality in 1890, scored a decisive victory over Bismarck, and the party's big electoral gains led to utopian hopes among the rank and file. In this expectant milieu, Looking Backward was interpreted as a model for immediate action. However, socialist leaders saw it differently. Kautsky and Bebel reasoned that the immediatism of the American utopia flagrantly violated the ineluctable tendencies of history, recklessly rushed historical destiny, and put the achievements of the socialists at risk. It was not without irony that Kautsky found the absence of utopianism one of the SPD's greatest accomplishments. It was into this utopian vacuum that right-wing futuristic blueprints increasingly moved, portraying Caesaristic leadership, interclass harmony, world power, and racial exclusivity to a rapidly expanding audience. By rejecting future gazing, as exemplified by their rebuff of Looking Backward, socialist leaders failed to wage an extended cultural campaign for hegemonic influence over sectors other than the working class. Their claim that they essentially had no ideals to realize and their adherence to the strategy of fatalistic waiting for the collapse of capitalism came at a high price, as their inaction in face of and even support of colonialism and World War I would reveal.

Review of Roland Boer and Jorunn Okland, eds.Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible

Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible is an anthology of nine articles edited by Roland Boer and Jorunn Okland. It is introduced by an article from the editors. The book includes an index of biblical and ancient references and one on subjects. In ‘Towards a Marxist Feminist Biblical Criticism,’ Boer and Okland begin this anthology by pointing out how their introduction to the essays differs from most. Instead of trying to whet the appetite of their readers for each essay by summarising it, they provide a much needed deeper introduction to the field itself and suggestions for future direction. They do, however, refer to the authors and articles as the opportunity arises during their discussion. In this introduction, they especially point out misconceptions about current Marxist theory. For example, there is no longer the old mono-causal Marxist perspective that everything can be reduced to the economic. Neo-Marxists today generally acknowledge that things are more complicated than the old Marxism had realised. In the first essay, ‘The Early Fathers of Marxist Feminism and the Holy Book,’ Milena Kirova discusses the work of J. J. Bachofen, Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and August Bebel. She sees both positive and negative in the work of these early Marxists on feminism. Positively, she sees them turning toward scientific naturalism versus traditional moralism to explain the development of gender differentiation. Thus, human sexuality stems from the animal world and is not to be explained via Scripture. Negatively, this transition was still entrenched in essentialism, i.e. being gendered is determined by nature and not social construction. But she also shows how this transition involves a return to the mythological notion of an egalitarian pre-history, which aligns this movement closely with biblical strategies of explanation. In ‘Schizoid Coitus: Christ and the Feminine,’ Tamara Prosic argues that Christianity, as a spinoff of Judaism, represents a movement from monotheistic patriarchy to a more liberating BOOK REVIEWS

The Violent Destruction of Community during the ‘Century of Genocide’

Much of the early criticism of colonial genocide and genocidal practices elsewhere came from Marxists such as August Bebel, Antonio Gramsci and Ho Chi Minh. The German Left were strong critics of the colonial policy that led to the genocide against the Nama and Herero peoples. When Marxist regimes came to power after the First and Second World Wars, they initiated population politics which were highly detrimental to historical ethnic communities. This has led to a serious crisis of legitimacy on the Left. Clearly, the legacy of debates of the early inter-nationalists is still relevant as we discuss genocide as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon, but it is also essential that we use the full range of new analytical approaches as well as the comparative approach to understand and even begin to prevent this phenomenon.