The Curious Path of German Socialism

From Marx to Hitler to Honecker, and beyond.

As I was listening to a podcast about the Civil War, a character jumped out- August Willich. Willich was a Union general, both loved and respected, who had been born as a Prussian aristocrat and attended the Prussian military academy. But then he took a turn, along with many Germans of his generation, and fell in with the socialists and communists (including, later in England, Karl Marx), and the revolutionaries of 1848, going to far as to command a revolutionary corps with fellow-Prussian Friederich Engels at his side. This era was a confused mess of motivations, (maybe a bit like the 1960's), inspired by the nationalist and socialist/ liberal ideals of the French revolution, while fighting against the monarchies that the Napoleonic era had ultimately, by its defeat, propped up all over Germany. The simultaneous nationalistic revolution in Italy was a template, as was the prosperous development of democracy in the US. The philospher Georg Hegel had even chimed in, a few decades before, putting the progressive and liberal spirit of the French revolution into sufficiently turgid terms to inspire a generation of German philosophers and social reformers.

The revolutions of 1848 in Germany were crushed, but the reformers found other outlets. Willich fled through Switzerland to England, as had his fellow-Prussian, Karl Marx. This communist league was concerned with far more than nationalism, finding in the new capitalist system another, and perhaps even worse, feudalism spreading across the continent, crushing traditional cultures as it ground workers to dust. While one branch of this movement continued to plot and feud and agitate in Europe, (with Vladimir Lenin as its ultimate expression), others became social democrats and found ways to work within the gradually loosening political systems. Many German socialists (as did Willich) went to America, a fertile territory for self-government as well as the battle with capitalism. And they saw the fight for the Union as the same old pattern- of the joined forces of the planter aristocracy (plus a particularly soul-less form of capitalism) fighting liberal progress and social justice. Several prominent generals of the Civil war, and many whole regiments, were of German origin.

August Willich, during the Civil War.

In fact, there was a large influx of prominent and educated Germans to the US around this time, which led to to a heavy concentration of Germans in the Midwest, especially Wisconsin. Milwaukee became a stronghold of (democratic) socialism in the later 1800's and early 1900's. Like the democratic socialists of Germany, they introduced the old age pensions, health and unemployment insurance, public housing, and other public works that typify the reform era. It is something of a lost story, how these reforms that we take for granted today had significant origins in the migration of progressive-spirited Germans in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. For example, they propagated the Turnverein, sometimes now named Turner halls, which were early gyms and community centers.

Naturally, all this innovation came under a cloud when Germany turned into the enemy of the US and much of the rest of the world, not once, but twice, in the 20th century. I often marvel at the growing practice of pronouncing Hispanic names and words properly in the media these days. If such care were devoted to German names, the media would sound quite different! All that is to say that there is another inheritance to appreciate.

Ethnic composition of the US.

Back in Europe, socialists took various paths, as noted. The extreme and involuted form that became communism and bolshevism was successful only once- in Russia, to cataclysmic consequences. Elsewhere, democratic socialists were the dominant type, with a great deal of popular support. Bismark, no socialist himself, put forth the first national health insurance system, and old age and accident insurance, as ways to coopt the socialists in Germany at the time. The continuing superiority of labor laws and practices in Germany today, compared with the US, speaks to the strong historical influence of socialism. This influence also led to the curious choice by Hitler's party to call itself national socialism, though we would regard them today as quite on another end of the political spectrum. But socialism was held in high esteem and spoke strongly to the solidarity that Germany needed in the wake of economic and military disaster, so that it apparently could be twisted to fascist ends. They just discarded the politically liberal elements, and focused on the economically (and militarily) communal ones. One can conjecture that socialism generally hearkens back in somewhat atavistic fashion to the tribal and village societies/economies that, while doubtless harsh, were highly personal and arguably more humane than the pitiless and impersonal operations of modern capitalism.

The sad irony is that German-originated socialism, in the form of communism that had filtered through Russian theory and experience, came back in force over Eastern Germany after World War 2, back to its Prussian homeland, more or less. And boy, what a system it had turned into by that point. Its rhetoric of solidarity had turned into empty propaganda, its nationalist aspirations into a Russian prison, and its hope of freeing workers into a state of the most stringent surveillance and terror.

Socialism today remains variable and amorphous, depending on where and who you are. Its formal definition of public ownership of the means of production (as opposed to communism, where everything is owned communally and distributed centrally) seems nowhere in sight in the West. That part of the program seems a dead letter, and what is left, for the democratic socialists, is more in line with the Social Democratic reform movements in Germany and the US; progressive reform to sand some edges off the capitalist system. That program has been stunningly successful in making capitalism both reasonably humane and highly productive, but it took place, historically, under the impetus of great extremism at the fringes- the labor wars, the bombings, and most of all, the spectre of communism looming over the early 20th century. Can we find a reasonable and reasoned path to reform now, without the fires of a revolution glowing in the distance?

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