Red Kingdom

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Red Kingdom (also The Red Kingdom , occasionally also Red Saxony ) was an epithet or nickname for the Kingdom of Saxony , which was introduced at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries , due to the social democracy, which has a large number of members and is extremely successful in the Reichstag elections in Saxony was used especially from the Reichstag election in 1903 . In the Saxon parliamentary area from 1896 until the state elections in 1909, the Social Democrats in no way had any noteworthy MPs, but this was due to the extremely reactionary suffrage in the Kingdom of Saxony at that time.

starting point

After overcoming a general economic crisis in the 1830s, industrialization began in the Kingdom of Saxony and became increasingly important for the economic development of this German state. This also led to a very strong numerical growth in the workforce, especially in West Saxony, the Chemnitz and Leipzig areas. After the end of the reaction era (in 1854 political associations were banned in the entire German Confederation ), new opportunities for development opened up for the labor movement at the beginning of the 1860s. Initially, workers' education associations emerged, some of which were supported by liberal and democratic politicians, whose organizational density in Saxony developed rapidly and was extraordinarily high. In mechanical engineering and in the textile industry, the most important branches of the economy in Saxony alongside agriculture, trade union organizations have developed since 1862 - after the legal framework for organized workers had been liberalized. Significant impulses for founding a workers' party came from their environment.

The beginnings of social democracy in Saxony

The fact that German social democracy received its most important impetus from central Germany is closely related to personalities such as Ferdinand Lassalle , August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, as well as to setting the course such as the establishment of the General German Workers' Association in Leipzig.

During a meeting in Leipzig in 1862, under the impression of a visit to the world exhibition in London , it was decided to convene a general German workers' congress. August Bebel, Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche and Julius Vahlteich belonged to the preparatory committee from the environment of the Leipzig Trade Educational Association . On May 23, 1863, the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) was founded during this congress in the Pantheon in Leipzig by Ferdinand Lassalle and delegates from Leipzig and Dresden, but also Hamburg , Cologne , Düsseldorf and Frankfurt am Main . Besides Vahlteich and Fritzsche, the founding members also included Theodor Yorck and Bernhard Becker . Lassalle, who died in 1864, was elected president for an initial five years.

Bebel, on the other hand, withdrew from the preparations because at that time he was still working with bourgeois democrats, which ultimately led to the establishment of the left-wing liberal Saxon People's Party in 1866 , which existed until 1869. In 1869 it was converted to the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP).

In Crimmitschau had also founded in 1869 the first textile workers' union of Saxony in Chemnitz was in 1871 held by about 6,500 employees, a large for that time labor dispute, which remained without success.

The Saxon People's Party finally merged with the ADAV in Eisenach in 1875 to form the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (renamed Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1890 ).

Already in the Reichstag election in 1874 , six SDAP members from Saxony entered the Reichstag, which led to great concern among Bismarck that the nickname Red Kingdom went back to himself and this Reichstag election.

Saxony under the Socialist Law

The growth of the organized labor movement finally led the empire-wide conservatives with Bismarck at their head, after two assassinations of Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1878, to the enactment of the Socialist Law, which forbade social democracy until 1890, its repeal (or non-renewal) of the law, and all activities Imposed a punishment that extended to expulsion. On the one hand, it resulted in considerable interference with organized social democracy, but acquired Reichstag mandates, such as those of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, remained, and they were even re-elected as persons, albeit not in Saxony. The actual political expatriation of the social democratic opposition was accompanied by considerable social exclusion. This persecution aroused the solidarity of large sections of the workforce and, since 1881, has led increasingly to election successes for the candidates of the SAP who appear formally as individuals.

The workers 'movement withdrew into the still existing workers' education associations, new migrant and nature lovers 'movements emerged as well as the workers' singers 'associations and, above all, workers' gymnastics clubs, often formed as cover organizations in place of the banned party or trade union groups, in which political work, albeit at high risk afflicted, was continued, with the workers gymnastics clubs in particular being closely monitored by the police. Nonetheless, the Social Democrats succeeded in increasing their degree of organization, which became apparent after the Socialist Act was repealed: if seven Social Democrats from Saxony (out of 23 constituencies) entered the Reichstag in 1890 and 1893, in 1898 it was already 11 out of 23 constituencies that were elected by Social Democrats in the Reichstag were represented.

Conservatism tightening in Saxony

Despite the Socialist Law, Saxony had developed into a stronghold of the workers' movement: “In Saxony, 'the cradle and classic soil of German social democracy', that socialist type of workers' movement was constituted, which served as a model in the Second International and the European workers' movement It has given essential traits up to the present day. ”The moderate and parliamentary-democratically oriented course of the Saxon SPD was mostly in line with large parts of the Saxon workforce.

However, despite strong social democracy and influential trade unions, Saxony was particularly a center of reaction, in which influential conservative circles successfully defended a restrictive suffrage until the mid-1900s. In 1896 the census suffrage of 1868, which had gradually increased the proportion of voters to two thirds of the Reichstag voters (universal male suffrage), was replaced by an extremely restrictive three-class suffrage , which allowed even less representative political representation of the population than before. The state governments consistently provided the conservative and ultra-conservative parties. The Social Democrats were to come to terms with a single deputy in the Second Chamber of the Saxon state parliament, despite an average of about 45% of the vote (1903–1907), which had to provoke opposition and resistance.

Until the First World War

After 1896, the Saxon social democracy strengthened its organization considerably: On the one hand, the number of members increased considerably: at the turn of the century there were 25,000 members of the SPD, in 1910 in Dresden alone 28,000 members (about six times more than all conservative associations in Dresden put together) and shortly before the outbreak During the First World War, Saxony, only the third largest of the German federal states, had more Social Democrats (= members of the SPD) than all of France and Italy put together.

On the other hand, a five-month strike by the Crimmitschau textile workers to reduce working hours between August 1903 and January 1904 caused a sensation not only across Saxony, but also nationally and internationally. "Although the demands of the approximately 8,000 workers were not met, the strike was one of the most important labor disputes in Germany before the First World War, which received widespread attention and in some cases glorifying appreciation until the GDR era."

On the one hand, this led to a considerable increase in the influence of the Saxon Social Democrats in the Reich: in the Reichstag elections in June 1903 , the Saxon Social Democrats won 22 of the 23 constituencies, which attracted the greatest attention across the Reich and, also under the influence of the immediately following Crimmitschau textile workers' strike from August 1903 led directly to the term Red Kingdom . Although the proportion of seats won by Social Democrats in the Reichstag election in 1907 was reduced to eight out of 23 constituencies, which was also due to the appearance of leading National Liberals, above all the charismatic Gustav Stresemann (who in turn received six seats), it rose in the Reichstag election in 1912 again on a vote gain in 19 out of 23 constituencies for the Social Democrats.

On the other hand, the fight against the restrictive Saxon three-class suffrage was successful, because it led to large suffrage demonstrations (including in Leipzig) up to 1908: In May 1909 it was replaced by a plural voting system in which each person entitled to vote had up to four votes, one universal vote and others Votes by age, tax capacity, education and military service (these were then capped at four in total). In the elections on October 21, 1909, with a turnout of 83%, the Social Democrats won 25 of the 91 seats in the state parliament, twice as many as previously assumed and also the surprise that those privileged with three and four votes to an unexpectedly high degree voted social democratically.

Social democracy was thus once again anchored as a political force: there are no further state election results after 1909 that could verify the result of 1909, but the political development in Saxony immediately after 1918 was directly linked to that from the turn of the century to 1914.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Foundation: Paris 1889
  2. ↑ Karsten Rudolph: A "Red Kingdom" in Wilhelminian Germany . In: Dresdner Geschichtsverein (Ed.): The "Red Kingdom" and its monarch (= Dresdner Hefte - contributions to cultural history. , No. 80, 4/2004). Dresden 2004, ISBN 3-910055-74-5 , pp. 3–12, here: p. 7.
  3. ↑ Quoted from The “Red Kingdom” of the SLpB, accessed on March 30, 2018.