{"text":"The history of German social democracy began even before the unified German state was created. The theoretical foundations for the formation and subsequent activities of the labor movement were laid by the works of Karl Marx.\n\nThe first mass socialist organization was the \"General German Workers' Association,\" founded in 1863 by Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle believed that the working class should ally with the Prussian authoritarian monarchy against the liberal bourgeoisie and turn Prussia into a social \"people's kingdom.\" The main tool for transformation was to be universal suffrage and electoral victories, not revolution.\n\nIn 1869, in the Thuringian town of Eisenach, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party. Unlike Lassalle, they were more orthodox Marxists and believed in the impending world proletarian revolution. Their party advocated for political democratization but also paid great attention to workers' union activities. Bebel and Liebknecht were opposed to the Prussian monarchy and the military-bureaucratic unification of Germany.\n\nBoth organizations competed for the same working audience and eventually decided to join forces despite their differences. In 1875, the Socialist Workers' Party was created, uniting the \"Lassalleans\" with their focus on politics and the \"Eisenachers\" with their attention to economics.\n\nThe German government saw a threat in the new movement, and in 1878, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck succeeded in passing the \"Anti-Socialist Law.\" According to it, all socialist organizations and propaganda were banned in Germany. Moreover, Bismarck began implementing social support measures for the population so that workers would henceforth see the government as the expression of their interests and lose interest in the socialists. Old-age and disability pensions appeared in Germany, and a system of health insurance was created.\n\nHowever, all these measures proved insufficient. Socialists continued to be elected to the Reichstag as private individuals, and from election to election, more voters supported them. In 1890, the new Emperor Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck, and the \"Anti-Socialist Law\" was repealed. In 1891, the Socialist Workers' Party was finally renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).\n\nThe 12-year underground period only united the German socialists. A kind of working-class subculture emerged – their own trade unions, sports associations, creative circles, and other clubs of interest. If desired, a conscious worker could live their entire life in a completely homogeneous socio-political environment.\n\nDuring Wilhelm II's reign, the Social Democrats found themselves in a peculiar position. The legislative ban on party activities was lifted, they freely participated in elections, and in 1912 became the largest faction in the Reichstag. But the imperial authorities continued to find fault with the SPD on any pretext and closely monitored all the actions of its members. The Social Democrats were perceived as the vanguard of the coming world revolution. Representatives of state power, conservatives, and even some liberals considered the socialists the main internal threat to national security.\n\nIn August 1914, a sensation occurred. The Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag unanimously voted for war credits for the Kaiser government. The overwhelming majority of German socialists supported Germany in the war that had begun. They believed that the German Empire, with its limited parliamentarism and social state system, represented a \"golden mean\" between \"reactionary\" Russia and \"bourgeois\" England and France.\n\nDuring the war, the SPD effectively became part of the state system – a mediator between the government and factory workers. At the same time, the Social Democrats opposed the annexationist plans of German annexationists and demanded peace \"without annexations and contributions,\" so that all participants in the war would return to their pre-war borders. In the Reichstag, the SPD formed a coalition with the Catholic Center and the left-liberal Progressive Party, which demanded democratic reforms.\n\nNot all socialists supported the course of their party leadership. A smaller part of them split into a separate Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which refused to support the government and advocated for the revolutionary transformation of society. The \"Independent\" Social Democrats welcomed the February and October revolutions in Russia and did not hide that they would like a similar scenario for Germany. However, they opposed active actions and preferred to wait for the objective historical process to bring Germany to revolution.\n\nWithin the USPD, the \"Spartacus\" group was formed, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. They believed that the revolutionary situation should not be waited for but brought closer. For these calls, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were imprisoned until the end of the war.\n\nIn October 1918, a liberalization of the regime began in the \"Second Reich.\" Generals recognized Germany's hopeless position in the war and convinced the Kaiser to share power with the parliamentary majority. Firstly, this was supposed to soften the Entente, which actively used the slogan \"war for world democracy.\" Secondly, the participation of civilian politicians in peace negotiations seemed to shift the responsibility for defeat from the generals. The Social Democrats entered the government for the first time and, together with their allies from the Center and the Progressive Party, gained the constitutional ability to remove chancellors by a vote of no confidence.\n\nHowever, at the very beginning of November, a revolution occurred. German sailors revolted in Kiel against the command's plans to go to sea and give a suicidal \"last battle\" to the English squadron. Then the revolution flared up across the country. At the forefront of street demonstrations were activists from the USPD and the \"Spartacus\" group.\n\nThe party leadership of the SPD reluctantly had to join the revolution to end it as soon as possible and return to constitutional order. The head of the party and the new chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, even advocated for the preservation of the monarchy, but his comrade Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German Republic on November 9 to appease the crowd in Berlin.\n\nThe first revolutionary government consisted of representatives of the two socialist parties – the SPD and the USPD. However, this union was short-lived. The SPD advocated for a coalition with Catholics and liberals to lay the foundations of a democratic republic and only then proceed to a long parliamentary struggle for the evolutionary transformation of capitalist society into a socialist one. In contrast, the USPD believed that a socialist revolution should be sought as soon as possible here and now. As a result, the \"independent\" Social Democrats left the government as early as the end of December 1918. At the same time, Liebknecht and Luxemburg founded the Communist Party of Germany.\n\nIn January 1919, supporters of the Soviet Republic raised an uprising in Berlin. Then the Social Democratic Minister of Defense Gustav Noske began creating volunteer corps (Freikorps), recruiting veterans, many of whom held far-right views. They did not like the Social Democrats, but the \"non-systemic left\" seemed a much greater threat to them. The volunteer corps suppressed the January uprising and killed Liebknecht and Luxemburg without trial. Throughout 1919, the Freikorps crushed numerous Soviet republics across Germany, for example, in Bremen and Munich. This marked the beginning of a deadly enmity between the Social Democrats and the Communists, which continued in the following years.\n\nAs a result of the elections to the Constituent Assembly in January 1919, the SPD confirmed its status as the most popular party in the country – 38% of voters supported it. The Catholic Center party came in second with 20%, and the left-liberal German Democratic Party came in third with 18.5% of the votes. These three parties formed the ruling \"Weimar Coalition,\" named after the city of Weimar in Thuringia, where the Constituent Assembly was held.\n\nIn July, deputies from the three parties ensured the adoption of a new republican Constitution. They were also forced to vote for the Treaty of Versailles, which all political forces in the country considered \"unfair.\" For example, the SPD advocated for general disarmament, which would apply not only to Germany but to all its neighbors.\n\nFor the sake of maintaining civil peace, the Social Democrats effectively postponed the implementation of their socialist program indefinitely. The Weimar Constitution established liberal political institutions and enshrined the right to private property. Nevertheless, the SPD managed to include provisions in the Constitution such as the possibility of forced expropriation of property for public needs with compensation, state regulation of labor relations, the right of workers to create trade unions and production councils with the ability to control the actions of employers.\n\nFrom November 1918 to June 1920, representatives of the SPD headed the first republican governments, and out of thirteen chancellors who governed the state from 1919 to 1932, four were Social Democrats. In addition, in 1919, party leader Friedrich Ebert was elected by the Constituent Assembly as the country's first president. He held this post until his death in 1925.\n\nThe responsibility for the Treaty of Versailles negatively affected the reputation of the Social Democrats among the right. By early 1920, the left-radical Soviet republics had been suppressed, meaning the common threat no longer united the SPD and the volunteer corps. In March 1920, the Freikorps staged a coup against the \"Weimar Coalition\" and briefly captured Berlin. The Social Democrats organized a general strike that paralyzed the actions of the rebels. The Kapp Putsch failed. However, since then, the SPD always had to consider the existence of threats from both flanks of the political spectrum – the far left and the far right. The party became the main guardian of the centrist character of the new republic.\n\nDue to its compromise policy, part of the left-oriented voters became disillusioned with the SPD. Already in the next parliamentary elections in June 1920, the party fell from 38% to 22%. Almost all the disillusioned voters went to the more left-wing USPD, which received 17.5%.\n\nIn turn, right-oriented voters became disillusioned with the \"bourgeois\" allies of the SPD, who also lost many votes. The \"Weimar Coalition\" forever lost its majority in the Reichstag and could no longer form governments without the participation of other parties. As a result, the Center and left liberals formed a coalition with the right-liberal German People's Party, which defended the interests of large industrialists. The SPD was not ready to join such a coalition. Nevertheless, it remained the most popular party in the country, and therefore the right-centrist \"minority governments\" tried not to quarrel with it to avoid a vote of no confidence.\n\nIn 1920, the \"Weimar Coalition\" led by the Social Democrats failed at the federal level, but in Prussia, which covered 60% of the territory and 60% of the country's population, the coalition continued to win and form governments from 1919 to 1932. Most of this time, the Prime Minister of Prussia was the Social Democrat Otto Braun. Here were located most of the industrial centers and large cities, where workers lived, who mostly voted for the Social Democrats. Contrary to the opinion of many of his party members, Braun managed to prevent the division of Prussia into several smaller states. United Prussia was considered the electoral stronghold of the SPD and the citadel of the republican regime throughout Germany.\n\nAll the activities of the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic took place against the backdrop of internal debates about the admissibility of further compromises with \"bourgeois\" parties or, on the contrary, about the admissibility of compromises with more radical socialists. For example, in September 1922, the SPD and USPD reunited, and this naturally shifted the party \"to the left.\" Some regional branches of the Social Democrats, for example, in Saxony and Thuringia, in October 1923, in the conditions of hyperinflation and the threat of a right-wing coup, allied with the Communists. In 1926, the Social Democrats, together with the Communists, campaigned for participation in a referendum on the expropriation of property of former royal dynasties without compensation.\n\nAnother part of the party, primarily its leadership, was still inclined to compromise with the \"bourgeois\" part of the political spectrum. From August to November 1923, at the peak of economic and political crises, the SPD even joined the \"Grand Coalition\" government led by the right-liberal Chancellor Gustav Stresemann from the very German People's Party, which defended the interests of large entrepreneurs. At the same time, the imperial leadership of the party and the Social Democratic President Ebert sanctioned the introduction of troops into Saxony and Thuringia to forcibly break the coalitions of local regional branches of the SPD with the Communists. On May 1, 1929, the Social Democratic police of Berlin shot a Communist demonstration, and in 1931, Communists killed two capital police officers – members of the SPD.\n\nTo protect the republic, the Social Democrats, together with Catholics and left liberals, created the \"Reichsbanner\" organization in 1924. It consisted of civilian and security blocks. There was also a youth wing – \"Jungbanner.\" The total membership of the \"Reichsbanner\" at its peak reached 3 million people, although the number of its paramilitary wing (\"Schufo\") did not exceed 250,000.\n\nThe Social Democrats returned to the \"Grand Coalition\" government and even led it after the 1928 elections when the SPD received 30% of the votes. The party reaped the benefits of those few years when it was in opposition to right-centrist cabinets. By that time, the economic situation had improved, and radicalism had subsided.\n\nThis prosperity ended just two years later when Germany became one of the hardest-hit countries by the Great Depression. The political crisis that killed the republic a few years later began due to the confrontation between the \"right\" and \"left\" wings of the SPD. In March 1930, the government led by Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Müller proposed cutting unemployment benefits to save the budget. However, the SPD parliamentary faction voted against the initiative of its own chancellor, and he was forced to resign.\n\nA new right-centrist government came to power, led by the Catholic Heinrich Brüning, which no longer included Social Democrats. They opposed his deflationary policy, which led to the dissolution of parliament and new elections in September 1930. The SPD's results fell from 30% to 24.5%, mainly in favor of the Communists. These same elections were a triumph for the NSDAP, which gained over 18% and became the second party in the country.\n\nSoon, Catholics and left liberals left the \"Reichsbanner,\" and it turned into an exclusively Social Democratic organization. In 1931, the \"Iron Front\" emerged, which included the SPD, Social Democratic trade unions, the \"Reichsbanner,\" and various workers' sports associations. \"Iron Front\" posters called for the fight against the three main enemies – monarchists, Nazis, and Communists.\n\nNevertheless, there was no final break between Brüning and the Social Democrats. The Center and the SPD still maintained the \"Weimar Coalition\" in Prussia and together opposed the Nazis. In the spring of 1932, at Brüning's request, the Social Democrats even supported the conservative monarchist President Paul von Hindenburg as the only candidate capable of defeating Hitler.\n\nBut by the middle of the year, the situation sharply deteriorated. In April, the Nazis won the Prussian Landtag elections, and the \"Weimar Coalition\" lost its parliamentary majority. However, the NSDAP could not form a cabinet alone, so the Social Democrat Braun remained the head of the Prussian \"minority government.\"\n\nIn May, as a result of intrigues, the centrist Brüning resigned as chancellor, replaced by the non-partisan conservative Franz von Papen. He was already openly hostile to the SPD. In July, Papen convinced President Hindenburg to declare a state of emergency in Prussia and remove the \"Weimar Coalition\" government under the pretext that it could not control street clashes between Nazis and Communists. On July 20, the Reichswehr occupied Prussian government institutions and removed Braun's cabinet. All power in the largest German state passed to the imperial government. The legal support for the Prussian coup was provided by the famous jurist Carl Schmitt, who defended the priority of strong executive power with extraordinary powers.\n\nThe Social Democrats did not undertake any forceful actions. Armed resistance by the \"Reichsbanner\" and the Prussian police could lead to civil war. A general strike by trade unions could fail because, in conditions of mass unemployment, workers were unlikely to risk their jobs for political demands. Instead, the SPD filed a lawsuit against Papen in the Constitutional Court, which recognized the legality of the state of emergency and left everything as it was.\n\nThe indecisive conciliatory policy again collapsed the popularity of the Social Democrats among the electorate, mainly in favor of the Communists. In the July 1932 elections, the SPD fell to 21.5% and finally ceded the status of the most popular party in the country to the Nazis. The decline continued further – to 20.5% in November 1932 and to 18% in March 1933.\n\nBy capitulating to Papen, the Social Democrats capitulated to Hitler. In 1933, the SPD, trade unions, \"Reichsbanner,\" and \"Iron Front\" were defeated without any armed resistance on their part. The most vivid act of moral resistance can be considered the last opposition speech in the Reichstag, delivered by party leader Otto Wels on March 23, 1933, during the vote on granting the Hitler government extraordinary powers: \"We can be deprived of freedom and even life, but not honor!\" The SPD faction was the only one to vote against the Enabling Act. Already in June, the party was banned. Some of its leaders and activists went into exile, while others were arrested and sent to concentration camps.\n\nSeveral reasons can be highlighted for the ultimate failure of the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic:\n\n- The SPD limited itself to \"class\" boundaries as a party of the working class, which made up 45% of the country's population;\n- The reputation of a \"revolutionary\" Marxist party, which repelled the \"middle class\";\n- The reputation of an \"anti-national\" party responsible for the defeat in the war and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles;\n- In 1920 and 1930, the party preferred to go into opposition rather than compromise principles and remain in government. This narrowed its opportunities for action;\n- In 1932 and 1933, the party capitulated to brute force and did not oppose it with its own brute force.\n\nDuring the years of the Nazi dictatorship, those SPD functionaries and activists who did not go abroad were persecuted, and many were killed. There were Social Democratic underground resistance groups, and several prominent SPD figures (Julius Leber, Wilhelm Leuschner) participated in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler, for which they were executed.\n\nIn 1945, after the collapse of Nazism, the SPD was restored in both occupation zones. In the Soviet zone, the negative experience of the split in the socialist movement was taken into account, and already in 1946, local Social Democrats and Communists united into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), which later became the ruling party of the GDR. Those Social Democrats who compromised with the Communists took leadership positions in the new state. For example, Otto Grotewohl became the first head of government of the GDR.\n\nThe Western SPD refused to cooperate with the Communists. Instead, the party became the left-centrist pillar of the bipolar party system in the Federal Republic. The first head of the revived SPD in the West was Kurt Schumacher – a World War I veteran who lost an arm in it, a Reichstag deputy, and a prisoner of Nazi concentration camps. Marxist Schumacher considered himself a German patriot and set about correcting the SPD's \"anti-patriotic\" reputation. From now on, the party positioned itself as the defender of the country's national sovereignty, unlike Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats, who sought to fully integrate into Western integration projects – NATO and the European Community.\n\nThe next generation of SPD leaders, led by Willy Brandt, revised the party's class character. In 1959, references to Marxism were removed from the party program, and the SPD was proclaimed a \"people's party.\" Its election results improved, and in 1966, the Social Democrats entered the FRG government for the first time. In 1969, Willy Brandt became the first Social Democratic Chancellor of Germany in 39 years. The Social Democratic Party remains one of Germany's leading parties to this day."}