Moab riots

When Moab unrest (including Moab riots ) the violent clashes between are striking workers and resident population on one side and police and strikebreakers called on the other side, which in September 1910 at the Berlin district of Moabit took place. Two people died and over 100 people were seriously injured. At the height of the conflict, around 30,000 people took an active part in the riots. In addition to the (supposed) suddenness and severity of the clashes, the spontaneous self-organization of the workers, who were relegated to themselves because of the reluctance of the unions and the SPD, caused a sensation. The event also attracted some attention in other European countries, as during the riots four British journalists who - as Franz Mehring commented - "were guilty of the crime of looking too closely at the wonders of the Prussian state" were beaten up by police officers.

course

The starting point of the unrest: Sickingenstrasse in Moabit (status 2011)

On September 19, 1910, the workforce of the coal merchant Ernst Kupfer & Co. located in Moabiter Sickingenstrasse - a total of 141 people - closed down their work. The company was majority owned by Hugo Stinnes GmbH and the German-Luxembourgish Mining and Hütten-AG . Most of the strikers (coal shippers and coachmen) were members of the German Transport Workers' Association , with whose local management the work stoppage had been agreed. The company management had previously rejected the wage increase requested by the workers. At that time, the workers in this company were paid an hourly wage of 43 pfennigs, and the daily working hours were an above-average twelve to fourteen hours.

The company refused to negotiate with the strikers, asked the police for help on September 19, and tried to recruit strikers. By 23 September, however, only 18 “willing to work” had been recruited, who only managed a fraction of the approximately 100 trips previously made every day. The wagons were escorted by police as the strikers tried to disrupt deliveries. During the nights, workers tried to tear up the pavement at the driveways to the company premises. Strikebreakers and police officers were occasionally thrown with pieces of coal.

At first, the development after the start of the strike was not out of the ordinary. That changed when professional strike breakers arrived on September 23 , whom the company manager Buschmeyer had recruited in Hamburg . These were aggressive and some were armed with pistols. Apparently, large parts of the resident population, who were initially uninvolved, also perceived this as a provocation. According to the police, on the afternoon of the 23rd several hundred people were accompanying the coal wagons as they left. On the 24th this crowd swelled to a few thousand people. In Rostocker Strasse, participants in the casserole disarmed one of the strike breakers and then cut up the dishes of his team. Thereupon mounted policemen hit the demonstrators with sabers, which, according to the police chief's report, they acknowledged with a "hail of coal and stones on those willing to work and officials". A functionary of the transport workers' association finally succeeded in "appeasing the excited crowd."

On the evening of September 24th, Hugo Stinnes complained by telegram to the Prussian Interior Minister von Dallwitz that the number of police officers deployed was "absolutely inadequate". Although Police President Traugott von Jagow then dispatched 300 more officers to Moabit, Stinnes intervened personally with Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg just one day later in order to arrange for “top-level intervention”. Thereupon the deployed police force was increased to 1000 men, to which some detectives dressed in “local civilian clothes” were added. Meanwhile, the situation continued to escalate. On the 25th, Stinnes received a telegram from the company Kupfer:

“Now there is a full battle. Cut the harness of our horses. Provision for willing workers impossible. Camp without police cover as the guard had to move out to fight. Help urgently. Copper."

On September 26th, according to the police, workers from large Moabite companies ( AEG and Ludwig Loewe & Co. ), some of whom were armed with metal tools, "intervened" in the excesses. Flower pots, bottles and other objects were thrown at police officers from numerous residential buildings. Jagow's report said about the situation in Rostocker Strasse:

"The road embankment was so covered with broken glass and porcelain as well as other objects that had been thrown that mountaineers could no longer be sent in."

In the evenings, young people roamed the streets and destroyed street lights. Occasionally the shop windows of shops whose owners had delivered goods to the strike breakers were thrown in. The main focus of the dispute was on Sickingen, Berlichingen, Rostocker, Wittstocker, Wiclef, Beussel, Wald, Gotzkowsky and Huttenstrasse. Jagow, who had been instructed by the interior minister to insure against the strike break at copper, ordered the use of firearms on September 27. In the meantime, Stinnes turned to the Reich Chancellor again and more or less openly demanded the use of military force:

“I do not misunderstand the difficulty of the situation and the resolution. Nevertheless, with regard to the future, I have to express the certain expectation that the Police President of Berlin will be instructed to fully protect the threatened business enterprise and the employees working in it, if necessary to hand over this protection to those organs of state power that are responsible for this are strong enough. "

Jagow's officials fired a total of 173 aimed pistol shots on September 27. The next day, carbines were also given to the police. Thereupon the resistance subsided; on September 29th there were only isolated clashes. On 26./27. According to the police, around 30,000 people (15–20% of the then resident population of Moabit) took an active part in the unrest. According to police surveys, the majority of workers arrested were politically and / or unionized.

As a result of the calm that had occurred, Jagow Stinnes telegraphed the "full start of operations" for October 3rd. However, this turned out to be impracticable, as the copper workforce, contrary to expectations, continued the strike and pickets were also able to persuade some of the recruited scabs to give up their work. During the third week of the strike, there were even isolated solidarity strikes in other Berlin coal shops. At this point, however, the leadership of the transport workers' union decided to call off the strike. On October 8th, Werner's Berlin district manager, Werner, appeared at a gathering of copper workers and claimed that “the business situation is really such that a wage supplement is currently not feasible”. As a result, a majority of those gathered decided to resume work on October 10th. They themselves freely admitted that the union officials argued mala fide to the workforce . An article published on February 19, 1911 in the Courier - the magazine of the transport workers' union - stated that the strikers did not want to break off the strike. The decision to do so was “the product of a well-considered action by our Berlin local administration.” This in turn had no objective reason, but “merely motivated the effort to create peace and order in Moabit”.

About 18 people arrested in Moabit in September were eventually charged and tried in two parallel trials. These ended in January 1911 with 4 acquittals and 14 convictions. A total of 67½ months were imprisoned. 95 police officers deployed in Moabit were demonstratively awarded medals. Stinnes made 10,000 marks available for the injured police officers.

Four weeks after the events in Moab, riots broke out in Wedding when the police intervened against a solidarity strike for sacked butchers. Smaller clashes also occurred in Cologne , Remscheid and Bremen in October 1910.

classification

The bourgeois press stood almost unanimously behind the police. Conservative papers discussed the events as a terrifying example of “mob rule”, and liberal voices were hardly more cautious. Franz Mehring wrote about this in Die Neue Zeit :

“Even such free-spirited papers, which have recently tried to give the impression that they really have some interest and understanding for the working class, have failed in the most shameful way on this occasion. (...) For example, the Berliner Tageblatt , which tries to pretend to be heaven knows how sublime above the liberal newspaper throng, not only glossed over the bloody police economy in Moabit, but also closed its columns to the complaints of respected officials (...) had felt the police saber on their own body. This attitude of the bourgeois press is by no means the least remarkable symptom (...). (...) Because the Moabite riots weren't too bad a test of bourgeois intelligence and bourgeois courage. "

It is seldom noticed that the Moab riots also represent a stage in the progressive public self-understanding and consolidation of the right wing of the SPD. On September 29, an editorial in Vorwärts said that the "Social Democrats (...) face the whole process with absolute passivity." One was "completely uninvolved". This emphasis on unconditional legalism went hand in hand with an open distancing from the strikers and demonstrators, who were discredited in the same place as a “handful of wheelers” and accused of “gross excesses”. After the end of the unrest, the Vorwärts even offered government agencies to intervene "reassuringly" - as the "better police", as it were in the future in similar incidents. For this, those responsible would only have to approach the SPD:

“But even the organizations of the class-conscious proletariat would not have refused to cooperate in the immediate restoration of calm - and with completely different success than the police! - if they had been asked to do so by the authorities! "

In response to irritated inquiries from their own party, it was emphasized that the Moabit transport workers are often "many freshly immigrated from the eastern provinces with their poor school conditions, that is, people for whom the educational work of the unions has only just begun". Sometimes the strikers and demonstrators - although it was known that the overwhelming majority were politically and unionized and came from the local resident population - were simply assigned to the " lumpen proletariat " or disqualified as "inferior elements". In an electoral district in which 71.66% of the vote in the Reichstag elections of 1907 went to the SPD, this could hardly be perceived as anything other than open abuse of one's own base. The relevant rhetoric of the SPD leadership was also attentively noted in the Berlin police headquarters. In an internal overview of the general situation of the social democratic and anarchist movement in 1910 , with reference to the events in Moab, it was stated in summary that the accusation made by the left wing of the SPD against the “civil servant leadership” was “largely a brake inclined ”,“ not unjustified ”. In contrast to the party executive committee, individual local SPD branches carried out several protests in October 1910 in solidarity with the strikers. For example, 32 events took place in Hamburg and the surrounding area on October 14, in which tens of thousands of people took part. Meetings of various sizes were organized in Barmen , Bremen, Elberfeld , Erfurt , Frankfurt am Main , Gotha , Halle , Lübeck , Magdeburg , Solingen and Züllichau , among others .

In terms of social history, the events in Moabit can be classified into a longer-term trend of growing strike activity and radicalism, which has been demonstrable since around 1900. By the turn of the century, the previously rapid growth in nominal and real wages had slowed dramatically; The unrestrained increase in prices in many areas - especially for food and housing - caused real wages to at least stagnate and tend to fall. In Berlin the prices for meat products rose from 1901 to 1910 by 25–28%, for bacon by 21%, for butter by 12% and for wheat bread by 30%. Apartment rents in the capital rose by an average of 34% over the same period. A large number of previously politically and trade union inactive workers were now at least ready for internal disputes. Since 1903, the number of strikes throughout Germany has increased sharply year after year. According to the (incomplete) official statistics, the rate of increase was only 0.4% compared to the previous year 1902, in 1903 it was 29.62% compared to 1902 and in 1910 - the year of the Moab unrest - compared to 1909 it was 37.47%. This strike movement did not reach the extent and depth of the parallel waves of mass strikes in Britain and Russia , but it pointed in the same direction. Around 10% of all strikes carried out in the Reich between 1900 and 1910 took place in Berlin (without taking into account industrialized (then) suburban communities such as Lichtenberg , Charlottenburg , Rixdorf and Spandau ). The state countered the activism of the strikers with an absolute and relative expansion of police and public prosecutor's involvement. In 1904 the police took active action against them in 21.6% of all strikes (arrests, cordoning off of industrial facilities, protection of strike breakers, etc.). In 1912 this proportion was already 35.9%. If the Moabit events are included in these contexts, they no longer appear as the singular "excess" as which they were discussed by both conservative and social democratic contemporaries.

literature

• Anonymous, Moabit. A picture of arbitrary police rule , Berlin 1911.
• Eighth, Udo (Ed.), Don't beg, don't ask. Moab strike riots 1910 , Essen 2011.
• Bleiber, Helmut, Die Moabiter Unruhen 1910 , Berlin 1954 (diploma thesis, Philosophical Faculty of the Humboldt University, copied by machine).
• Tim Westphal: The newspaper coverage of the Moabite strike riots of 1910 . In: Journal of History, jg. 66, 2018, pp. 336-356.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Mehring, Franz, Die Moabiter Krawalle, in: Die Neue Zeit, vol. 29, pp. 33–35.
2. ↑ ^{a b} See Bleiber, Helmut, Die Moabiter Unruhen 1910, Berlin 1954, p. 21.
3. ↑ ^{a b} See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 22.
4. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 23.
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 24.
6. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 25.
7. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 25.
8. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 57.
9. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 26.
10. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 27.
11. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 32.
12. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 56.
13. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 38.
14. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 27.
15. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 36.
16. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 28.
17. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 35.
18. ↑ ^{a b} See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 40.
19. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 39.
20. ↑ ^{a b} Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 41.
21. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 58.
22. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 37.
23. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 49.
24. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 28.
25. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 29.
26. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 31.
27. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 33.
28. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 46.
29. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, pp. 32, 46.
30. ↑ See Statistical Yearbook of the City of Berlin, vol. 31, p. 478.
31. ↑ Quoted from Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 19.
32. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 43.
33. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 7.
34. ↑ See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 8.
35. ↑ ^{a b} See Bleiber, Unruhen, p. 15.
36. ↑ See Metzsch, Alfred, The Statistics of Strikes and Lockouts in Germany from 1909 to 1919, Erlangen (Diss.) 1923, p. 73.