“Red Saxony!”

Abstract

The long build-up to the Reichstag elections of 1903 produced a dramatic outcome when Social Democrats scored an overwhelming victory. The epithet “Red Saxony” was born overnight, and thereafter it remained a triumphal shout for Social Democrats and a nightmare for their enemies. This chapter begins by examining the 1903 election in its local, regional, and national contexts. The SPD’s organizational strength and élan are considered in light of the shock this election produced. The election also restarted a suffrage reform debate that convulsed Saxon political society until 1909. The Saxon government presented a complicated, hybrid suffrage proposal at the end of 1903. It was torpedoed by the anti-socialist parties in the Landtag. But by 1905 this defense of Saxony’s three-class suffrage had confounded National Liberal attempts to challenge Conservative hegemony, and it fueled further working-class protests.

Joining Forces against ‘Strike Terrorism’: The Public-Private Interplay in Policing Strikes in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914

“…In 1906, for example, the Berlin Police Chief remarked that he was 'more afraid of the soldiers' rowdiness than of the Social Democrats'. 22 Prussian military commanders were not adequately prepared to intervene in the policing of civilian society and they tended to avoid inter-institutional cooperation with civil servants. 23 The security architecture of the German Empire rested on the assumption that the military had to support the police in cases of great labour unrest; however, the focus of the army was clearly on external threats.…”

“…The authorities in Dresden did not implement the legal and administrative framework for the Zechenwehren, although auxiliary formations known as Wohlfahrtsbeamten were used to help Saxon gendarmes during the suffrage reform demonstrations of 1905. 94 Along with the Saxon Wohlfahrtsbeamten, special constables in the United Kingdom were another formation of volunteer officers somewhat similar to the Zechenwehren. Special constables were also private citizens who were often recruited among clerks and foremen chosen by their employers to oppose striking workers.…”

Discussion Forum: The Vanishing Nineteenth Century in European History?

“…18 James Retallack's exposition of how conservative politics in Saxony grew to accept and work with antisemitic parties is enormously instructive, for it displays the process by which the politics of short-term alliances, fraught with ethical compromises, became an ingrained habit over time that changed the old right. 19 Comparing the West's evolving uses of nativism, chauvinism, xenophobia, and antisemitism will require a number of lenses to focus on trends and patterns of antidemocratic agitation.…”

“…A similar trend can be observed in the British journal German History, as well as at the annual meetings of the German Studies Association (GSA). 19 Only six panels at the GSA's 2017 annual conference contained the word women in the title, three gender, and one masculinity. All ten of these panels-3 percent of the 306 panels in toto-focused on the twentieth century.…”

Anti-Semitism, Denunciation, and the Frankfurt Trial against Rosa Luxemburg

“…These practices were manifest in the willingness of German right-wingers under the Kaiserreich (and indeed earlier) to appeal to the state to crack down on socialistsespecially when the socialists happened to be Jews, or foreigners, or both. As James Retallack's recent magisterial study of electoral politics in Saxony demonstrates, 40 when it came to resisting the electoral advances of the Social Democratic Party, the anti-Semitic political parties, for all their anti-establishment demagogy, counted themselves among the 'state-supporting' parties, and felt themselves able to enlist the aid of state authorities in the fight against socialism. Denunciation was thus an asymmetrical political weaponit could be invoked against the political Left, while the German Left would have been both unwilling to resort to it, and unable to do so effectively against more conservative or right-leaning political opponents.…”