Truce policy

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The postponement of internal political conflicts and economic disputes in the German Empire during the First World War is referred to as Burgfriedenspolitik (or Burgfrieden for short ) . In France at the same time the term Union sacrée and in Portugal the term União Sagrada became common. All-party governments often ruled in wartime .

The metaphor 'Burgfrieden' is occasionally used to this day.

Emergence

Before the beginning of the First World War, there was a strictly anti-militarist and peace policy stance in social democratic parties in some countries , which was enshrined in international conferences of the Second International, such as in Stuttgart in 1907 and in Basel in 1912 . Concrete measures to force a European peace on the part of the workers' movement , however, were not specified.

On August 4, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II gathered the members of all parties represented in the Reichstag in Berlin and delivered his speech from the throne on the outbreak of war, pre-formulated by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg . In a personal ending to the speech, he stated:

“I don't know any political parties anymore, I only know Germans! As a sign of the fact that you are determined to stick with me through thick and thin, through hardship and death, without any party differences, without tribal differences, without religious denominations, I urge the parties' boards to step forward and pledge that to me . "

These sentences met with almost undivided approval from parliamentarians even from the opposition SPD - the strongest parliamentary group in the Reichstag. A key reason for this was that the government had succeeded during the July crisis in convincing the public that the German Empire was in a defensive war against Russia . This also applied to large parts of the SPD and the unions close to them . The Reichstag voted - with two abstentions - closed for the required warfare war credits . Russia, under the rule of Tsar Nicholas II, was the epitome of oppression and reaction for social democracy long before 1914. Already Karl Marx had the Tsarist empire a bastion of reaction called. At the 1907 Essen Party Congress , August Bebel repeated the key statements of his famous “shotgun speech” in the Reichstag on March 7, 1904, that he wanted to defend the “fatherland” like everyone else in an attack on Germany, and added explicit reference to an attack Russia, which he called the "enemy of all culture and of all oppressed".

The General Commission of the German Trade Unions , the umbrella organization of the free trade unions close to the Social Democrats , had already announced on August 2 that it would refrain from wage movements and strikes during the war. The liberal Hirsch-Duncker trade unions and the Christian trade unions made similar statements .

On August 4, the Reichstag decided to forego new elections after the end of the legislative period and even to forego possible by-elections. He also refrained from public plenary sessions during the war.

The press, too, ceased public disputes with the government during the war and practiced self-censorship. However, the declaration of a state of war according to Article 68 of the Imperial Constitution meant that freedom of the press was restricted by censorship measures during the war.

Impact of the truce policy in the SPD

A few days earlier, the SPD had held mass demonstrations for peace and called for resistance to the war. On July 25, the party executive announced in Vorwärts :

“There is imminent danger. The world war looms! The ruling classes, who enslaved, despised and exploited you in peace, want to abuse you as cannon fodder. Everywhere the rulers must ring in the ears: We do not want war! Down with the war! Long live international brotherhood! "

At the time of the appeal, the SPD leadership assumed that the Reich government ( Bethmann Hollweg cabinet ) had an interest in preventing war. The SPD leadership saw the Austrian-Hungarian government ( Stürgkh Ministry ) to be blamed for the escalation . But immediately after the start of the war, their position changed significantly; the protests, which were initially successful, were not continued, but deliberately dampened. Opponents of the war like the reformist Eduard Bernstein and the representatives of the left wing of the party Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht became isolated in the SPD. Representatives of the right wing such as Eduard David , Wolfgang Heine , Albert Südekum and Ludwig Frank pushed through the approval of the Reichstag faction to the war bonds in the short time between the start of the war on August 1 and the Reichstag decision on August 4, 1914 . The SPD and, above all, its right wing took the opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and to refute the accusation that Social Democrats were “ journeymen without a fatherland ”. Former members of the left wing of the SPD also became supporters of war policy. The most important association was the Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch group , whose representatives quickly turned into staunch advocates of war, some with openly nationalist positions.

Still based on the conviction that one was waging a defensive war against the aggression of Russia, it said in the forward on July 31 :

"When the fateful hour strikes, the patriotic journeymen will do their duty and in no way allow themselves to be outdone by the patriots."

On August 2, the parliamentary group's executive committee decided to approve the war loans by four votes to two. The parliamentary group decided to adopt them with 78 votes against 14 and approved the approval of the loans in the Reichstag. The reason for the approval was given by the SPD chairman Hugo Haase in the Reichstag on August 4th: In it he named imperialism and the arms race as the causes of the war, assigned responsibility for it to the “carriers of this policy” and emphasized that the SPD was facing a war have warned. He followed up on the SPD's positions on the “war of defense” and Russian tsarism, in that he saw the future of freedom of the people endangered if “bloodthirsty Russian despotism” were to win. He rated the war as a war of conquest forced upon Germany and emphasized the “right of a people to national independence and self-defense” according to the decisions of the International. He expressly reiterated the SPD's intention “not to abandon one's own fatherland in the hour of danger”.

Only gradually did a more differentiated attitude take hold in the party and opposing positions emerged. At the second meeting, Liebknecht voted against the approval of the war loans and thus laid the foundation for the later split of the USPD (Independent SPD) from the SPD. Otto Rühle , who had also appeared publicly as an opponent of the war, voted on March 20, 1915 at the third meeting with Liebknecht against the loans. In the further course of the war, the number of SPD members who spoke out publicly against the war increased.

The resistance of those who opposed the truce against the war, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin , for example , led to the exclusion of Liebknecht and others from the SPD. Many opponents of the truce, including Liebknecht and Luxemburg, were sentenced to long prison terms in 1916, from which they were only released at the end of the war. The revolutionary truce opponents were 1914, the " Group International ", which consists of 1916, the Spartacus group, and in November 1918 the Spartacus League emerged. The Spartakusbund formed the left-wing revolutionary wing of the USPD until the end of the war. Apart from its anti-war stance, the USPD was characterized by very heterogeneous content.

Together with other left-wing revolutionary groups, the German Communist Party (KPD) was founded after the war in the course of the November Revolution in January 1919 . This marked the final split of social democracy into a revolutionary ( communist ) and a reform-oriented (social democratic) party. The USPD was crushed between these two poles until 1922 and then hardly played an important role in the Weimar Republic .

Softening the truce policy

With the increasing duration of the war and the lack of victory, the truce gradually began to crumble. As early as 1915, insufficient supplies and exhaustion from war led to the first wildcat strikes and demonstrations. The end of the political truce came in 1916, when the question of the war objective could now also be discussed in public. In addition to the representatives of a mutual agreement , advocates of annexations such as the right-wing German Fatherland Party appeared on the scene. The social unrest, particularly among the workers, intensified as the war continued and the unions were ultimately hardly able to keep the workforce under control. The Reich government reacted to the crumbling of the truce with an offer of peace from the Central Powers published in December 1916 ; this was intended to make the government's desire for peace credible to the German population.

literature

Monographs
  • Susanne Miller : truce and class struggle. German social democracy in the First World War . Verlag Droste, Düsseldorf 1974 (contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties, volume 53).
  • Wolfgang Kruse : War and National Integration. A reinterpretation of the social democratic Treaty of 1914/15 . Klartext Verlag, Essen 1993, ISBN 3-88474-087-3 .
Essays
Lexicons
  • Truce . In: Dictionary of History. AK . Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1983, p. 150.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Loth: The German Empire. Authority and Political Mobilization . DTV, Munich 1997. ISBN 3-423-04505-1 .
  2. ^ Protocol on the negotiations of the party congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Held in Essen from September 15 to 21, 1907. Vorwärts bookstore, Berlin 1907, p. 255 .
  3. ^ Wilhelm Loth: The German Empire. Authority and Political Mobilization . DTV, Munich 1997, p. 144.
  4. ^ Call of the party executive on July 25, 1914 in Vorwärts ; quoted from Susanne Miller: The SPD before and after Godesberg , in: Susanne Miller / Heinrich Potthoff: Small history of the SPD, presentation and documentation 1848–1983 . 5th revised edition, Verlag Neue Gesellschaft GmbH, Bonn 1983, ISBN 3-87831-350-0 , p. 73.
  5. ↑ Jörn Wegner: The anti-war protests of the German workers on the eve of the world war and their disarmament by the SPD leadership , Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Volume II / 2014, pp. 39-52.
  6. ^ Wilhelm Loth: The German Empire. Authority and Political Mobilization . DTV, Munich 1997, p. 143.
  7. ↑ Im Vorwärts on July 31, 1914; quoted from Susanne Miller: The SPD before and after Godesberg , in: Susanne Miller / Heinrich Potthoff: Small history of the SPD, presentation and documentation 1848–1983 . 5th revised edition, Verlag Neue Gesellschaft GmbH, Bonn 1983, ISBN 3-87831-350-0 , p. 73.
  8. ^ Stenographic reports of the German Reichstag . Vol. 306, p. 8 ff.
  9. ↑ Cf. Ottokar Luban : The struggle of the Berlin SPD base in the first year of the war against the war credit approval , in: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Volume II / 2014, pp. 53–65.