Democratic Association

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The Democratic Association (DV) was a political party in the German Empire.

The DV was founded in 1908 by former members of the Liberal Association , who were skeptical of their party's factional community with the Liberal People's Party and the South German People's Party , and who were skeptical about the participation of this factional community in the so-called Bülow Block , a Reichstag majority made up of left-wing liberals, national liberals and conservatives, strictly discarded. They saw in it an alliance against the SPD and the working class, in which they did not want to participate.

The DV program contained demands for general, equal, secret and direct suffrage, the separation of church and state or the uniform structure of the school system. With its current understanding of social liberalism, the association was temporarily "the extreme left wing of liberalism" in Germany. Many of their reform demands were incompatible with the political reality of Wilhelmine Germany - yet the DV, as a bourgeois opposition party, was neither revolutionary nor principally anti-monarchical.

Its most important members included Theodor Barth , her “spiritual father”, Rudolf Breitscheid , its first chairman, and Hellmut von Gerlach , who stopped at numerous parties on his way “from right to left”. Carl von Ossietzky had also been a member since 1908, and from 1911 he published in Das frei Volk , the DV weekly newspaper. The women's rights activist Minna Cauer , the educationalist Georg Schümer and the journalist and later MP Wolfgang Bartels also belonged to the DV.

Although the organizational structure of the party made good progress in the first few years - according to its own statements, it had around 11,000 members in 80 local clubs in 1911 - its future prospects dwindled quite soon after it was founded. Theodor Barth died as early as 1909 at the age of almost 60, and in the same year the Bülow Block collapsed, from whose criticism the DV's right to exist was primarily derived. In 1910, the other left-liberal parties finally merged to form the Progressive People's Party , which soon turned out to be a much more interesting ally for the SPD than the small DV, which found it difficult to define and maintain its place between these two parties.

In the Reichstag elections in 1912, the Democratic Association, which only ran for election in a fraction of the constituencies, was unable to win a mandate. Only Gerlach came into the runoff election in the constituency of Marburg -Frankenberg, in which he was defeated by his anti-Semitic opponent. After this result, Breitscheid declared the party founding experiment to have failed and joined the SPD. A number of members followed him, while Gerlach now took over the party leadership. With the outbreak of the First World War , party work effectively came to a standstill. In 1918 Gerlach belonged to the Berlin founding group of the German Democratic Party (DDP) with some remaining loyal followers .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The program adopted by the Democratic Association in 1910 can be found in S (iegfried) Nestriepke: What is, what does the Democratic Association want? Democratic Publishing Company, Berlin-Schöneberg 1911, pp. 6–22.
  2. ^ Karl Holl : Thoughts on German social liberalism. In: Karl Holl, Günter Trautmann, Hans Vorländer (eds.): Social Liberalism. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1986, ISBN 3-525-01333-7 , pp. 227–232, here p. 229.

literature

  • Rudolf Breitscheid : The left's most important task is criticism. Journalism 1908–1912. Edited by Sven Crefeld. edition Rubrin, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-00-050066-4 .
  • Ludwig Elm : From Naumann to Barth and Breitscheid: Hellmut von Gerlach as co-founder (1908) and chairman (1912–18) of the Democratic Association (DV). In: Christoph Koch (Ed.): From Junker to Citizen. Hellmut von Gerlach - Democrat and Pacifist in the Empire and Republic. Meidenbauer, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-89975-156-7 , pp. 71-88.
  • Burkhard Gutleben: “Association for a critical examination of the political situation”? The Democratic Association (1908–1918). In: Liberal. Vol. 30, H. 1, 1988, ISSN  0459-1992 , pp. 81-91.