The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century by Sheri Berman

Author:Sheri Berman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

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1It is important to note, however, that they did this at least partially under the false impression that Germany was in danger of attack by Czarist Russia.

2Julius Braunthal, History of the International 1914–1943 (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1967), 7.

3During the war, the party had not been able to meet normally, so this meeting gave vent to a discussion and anlaysis of party activities from 1914 onward.

4Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1973), 362, also 376–7.

5Ibid., 377.

6On November 9, the Kaiser finally abdicated, the office of Chancellor was transferred to the SPD’s Friedrich Ebert, and his colleague Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the founding of the German Republic from the balcony of the Reichstag. Susanne Miller, Die Bürde der Macht. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1978), 35.

7Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1924 (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1984), 11.

8Heinrich August Winkler, “Eduard Bernstein as Critic of Weimar Social Democracy,” in Roger Fletcher, ed., Bernstein to Brandt (London: Edward Arnold, 1987).

9Ibid. Part of the reason for this shift back was that in 1922, the democratic elements of the USPD (the independent socialist party that split from the SPD during the war to protest its support for the war effort) rejoined the SPD, and the old radicals from the USPD strongly opposed any weakening of the party’s traditional stance.

10Wolfgang Luthardt, Sozialdemokratische Verfassungstheorie in der Weimarer Republik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), 3; Richard Saage, Rückkehr zum starken Staat? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 108; idem, “Parlamentarische Demokratie, Staatsfunktionen und Das Gleichgewicht der Klassenkräfte,” in idem, ed., Solidargemeinschft und Klassenkampf (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986).

11This was a characterization used by Bauer in particular. Norbert Leser, Zwischen Reformismus und Bolshevismus. Der Austromarxismus als Theorie und Praxis (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968).

12Otto Bauer, Austrian Revolution (London: Leonard Parsons, 1925); Leser, Zwischen Reformismus und Bolshevismus, 119; Anson Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 40ff.

13See, for example, the SDAP’s important Linz party program. Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism, 119.

14Norbert Leser, “Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Contemporary History, 11, 1976, 146; Leser, Zwischen Reformismus und Bolshevismus, 136, 429; Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism, 123ff; idem, “Ernst Fischer and the Left Opposition in Austrian Social Democracy” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1973), 67.

15Leser, Zwischen Reformismus und Bolshevismus, 350.

16Robert Mead, “The Stuggle for Power: Reformism in the French Socialist Party, 1919–1939” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1952), 61ff.

17Joel Colton, Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1966), 66.

18One reason that the SFIO was probably able to maintain its somewhat ambiguous relationship to bourgeois parties and institutions for so long was the very strength of French democracy and the at least implicit belief that even if socialists refused responsibility for the Republic, parties of the center and center-left would defend it. Thus, at least until the 1930s, socialists were never forced to confront the possibility that their unwillingness to participate might actually mean the end of the Republic.

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