Socialist monthly issues

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Socialist monthly issues
Front page Sep. 1908
description political journal
language German
publishing company Publishing house of the Sozialistische Monatshefte GmbH, Berlin
First edition January 1897
attitude February 4, 1933
Frequency of publication 2 × monthly / monthly
Editor-in-chief Joseph Bloch
editor Joseph Bloch

The Socialist Monthly Issues - International Revue of Socialism was a magazine published by Joseph Bloch from 1897 to 1933 , which was published by the “Verlag der Socialist Monthly Issues” in Berlin .

History and content

It was close to the revisionist wing of the SPD . It was not controlled by the party and provided a space for debate within the movement. For their opponents, representatives of the revolutionary point of view as well as the center of the party, the socialist monthly books were regarded as the journalistic "center of international revisionism".

The magazine was originally published in 1895 by Johann Sassenbach as The Socialist Academic. Organ of the socialist students and students of the German language was founded. Two years later there were differences and Sassenbach left the editorial office. From then on, Joseph Bloch continued the magazine under the title Socialist Monthly Issues as the publisher with a new count in July 1897. Since 1903, the Sozialistische Monatshefte were a GmbH with a capital of 20,000  gold marks . Shareholders were Jakob Bamberger (5,999 marks), Eduard Bernstein (2,000 marks), Joseph Bloch (6,000 marks, of which 5,000 marks came from Leo Arons ). Even Charles Hallgarten supported the magazine for. B. 1905 with 5,000 marks.

The magazine was independent of the SPD. It first appeared monthly, from the beginning of 1908 to 1922 every 14 days, and then again monthly. The magazine was close to the political standpoint of the publisher, the revisionist wing of the SPD, but also offered space for representatives of other views, including some anarchists and sympathizers of left-wing Zionism . This was rejected within the SPD because of its ideas of settlement colonialism in Palestine, but the monthly issues did not share the SPD's strict colonial criticism. August Bebel turned against the magazine in 1902 and was of the opinion that the newspaper was "outside the party". An application to punish participation in the monthly bulletins with exclusion from the party, however, was unsuccessful at the Leipzig party congress of 1909. In 1913 the party committee of the SPD dealt again with the question of whether party members could publish in the socialist monthly bulletins. Philipp Scheidemann describes it as a gathering point: “where everything is brought together that can give satisfaction to the opponents of our party”.

The Socialist Monthly Issues were of great importance for the dispute about the recognition of the consumer cooperative movement as one of three pillars (party, trade unions, consumer cooperatives) in the labor movement. This not only included essays in the main part, e.g. B. by Adolph von Elm , but also regular reports in the category of cooperatives . Another integral part was the "Women's Movement" section overseen by Wally Zepler . In addition, the booklets published fiction texts. Between 1908 and 1923, for example, 17  novellas by the West Prussian writer Elisabeth Siewert appeared .

The magazine contained the supplements The Socialist Student (nine issues in total) and Documents of Socialism .

The employees included Julius Bab , Eduard Bernstein, Gertrud David , Eduard David , Adolph von Elm, Henriette Fürth , Wolfgang Heine , Gerhard Hildebrand , Max Hochdorf , Erwin Marquardt , Max Nettlau , Paul Kampffmeyer , Julius Kaliski , Gustav Landauer , Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann , Élisée Reclus , Karl Renner , Rosa Schapire , Max Schippel , Anna Siemsen , Heinrich Spaemann , Felix Stössinger , Franz Staudinger , Georg von Vollmar , Max Klesse and others.

Original editions of the journals can still be found in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and in the library of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn and in many other German libraries.

“ My program has always been: to cooperate with the bourgeois parties on all purely political issues (not with the 'Democratic Association', but with real parties); in all questions of economic policy, pure representation of the workers' point of view, which requires protectionism, including the protective tariff system; so on this point the sharpest opposition to liberalism. "

- Joseph Bloch to Kurt Eisner June 14, 1909, quoted from Dieter Fricke, p. 465.

As a parallel event to the official "Press Ball", the "Sozialistische Monatshefte" organized their own ball, which was a central, brilliant event in the year for liberal and left-wing society and offered a meeting platform. It was there, for example, that Eduard David and Helene Stöcker got to know each other, who then campaigned for the rights of illegitimate mothers and children.

literature

  • Franz Osterroth : Joseph Bloch . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Sozialismus , Vol. 1: Deceased personalities . JHW Dietz Nachf. GmbH , Hanover 1960, p. 25 f.
  • Dieter Fricke : The German labor movement 1869-1914. A manual about their organization and activity in the class struggle . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1976, pp. 462-466
  • Michel Prat: Sorel collaborateur of the Socialist monthly issue. Lettres à Joseph Bloch 1897–1899 . In: Cahiers Georges Sorel . Vol 2, 1984, No. 2 pp 107-129 digitized
  • Christa Uhlig (ed.): Reform pedagogy and school reform. Discourses in the socialist press of the Weimar Republic. Sources selected from the magazines " Die Neue Zeit ", " Die Gesellschaft " and "Sozialistische Monatshefte" (1919–1933) . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008 ( Studies on Educational Reform 47) ISBN 978-3-631-55703-7
  • Max Bloch: The Socialist Monthly Issues and the Academic Debate in the German Social Democracy before 1914: The "Cases" of Göhre, Schippel, Calwer and Hildebrand. In: Bulletin of the Institute for Social Movements. Volume 40, 2008, pp. 7-22
  • Andreas Morgenstern: The Socialist Monthly Bulletins in the Empire - Spokesman for Workers Zionism? , in: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Volume III / 2012. Online: [1]
  • Andreas Morgenstern: `Material for the famous split within the party´ - The socialist monthly books as a sheet of the revisionists in the SPD 1912 , in: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Issue II / 2014.
  • Charles Bloch : The struggle of Joseph Bloch and the "socialist monthly books" in the Weimar Republic. In: Yearbook of the Institute for German History , Tel Aviv. - 3.1974, pp. 257-287.
  • Alfons Breuer: Socialist monthly books (1895-1933) . In: Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (ed.): German magazines from the 17th to the 20th century . Pullach 1973, pp. 265-280.
  • Roger Fletcher: Revisionism and empire. Joseph Bloch, the Sozialistische Monatshefte and German nationalism, 1907-14 . In: European Studies Review , 10.1980, pp. 459-484.
  • Dieter Fricke: A model magazine of opportunism: the "Socialist monthly books" at the end of the relatively peaceful development of capitalism in Germany (1909) . In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , 21.1973, pp. 1209–1228.
  • Dieter Fricke: The socialist monthly books "and the imperialist conception of a continental Europe, 1905-1918 . In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft, 23.1975, P. 528-537.
  • Dieter Fricke: On Eduard Bernstein's break with the "Socialist Monthly Issues" in autumn 1915 . In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement , 17.1975, pp. 454–468.

"Magazines of the same name"

  • Socialist monthly issues . Volkswille publishing house, Stuttgart 1946–1949
  • New socialist monthly issues. Journal for the theory and practice of scientific socialism in economics, politics and culture . Deutscher Arbeiter Verlag, Eitorf, Sieg 1962–1965

Web links

Wikisource: Socialist monthly bulletins  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andreas Morgenstern: Material for the famous split within the party - The Socialist Monthly Issues as a sheet of the revisionists in the SPD 1912 . In: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement . tape 13 , no. 2 , 2014 ( online ).
  2. ↑ They were the most important organ of the revisionists and reformists and were also open to left-liberal authors. […] For the presentation of the history of revisionism and reformism, the 'Sozialistische Monatshefte', which appeared up to February 1933, are an inexhaustible and extremely important source . Dieter Dowe (Ed.): Reprints on social history by JHW Dietz Nachf. General catalog 1978/79 , Bonn 1978, p. 84.
  3. ↑ Dieter Fricke, "Zum Bruch der ..." (1975), p. 464.
  4. ↑ Andreas Morgenstern: The Socialist Monthly Bulletins in the Empire - Spoke of a Worker Zionism? In: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement . tape 11 , no. 3 , September 2012, p. 5-25 ( online ).
  5. ↑ The reason was the article by Karl Leuthner : Umlernen , which appeared on May 6, 1909 in the Socialist Monthly Issues and which called on us to refrain from any criticism of the foreign policy of the German Reich in future.
  6. ^ Minutes of the party committee meeting of December 19 and 20, 1913 , p. 10 (quoted from Dieter Fricke, p. 466.)
  7. ↑ See also: Erwin Hasselmann : History of the German consumer cooperatives. Knapp, Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 246.
  8. ↑ Helene Stöcker (2015): Memorabilia, ed. by Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin u. Kerstin Wolff. Cologne: Böhlau, 180.