Workers and Revolution In Germany, 1918–1919: The Urban Dimension
Mary Nolan
In the past decade and a half the German revolution of 1918–1919 has been rediscovered by historians and sociologists. Whereas previous scholars had argued that there was collapse, chaos, and utopian leftism that attracted only weak interest, current writers insist that Germany experienced a genuine if unsuccessful revolution that enjoyed mass support, developed coherent and partially realizable goals, and displayed innovative forms of militancy. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils, strike movements, socialization demands, and the actions of the Communist Party (KPD) and Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) have displaced the Provisional Government, parliamentary elections, and the conservative practice of the national Social Democratic Party (SPD) as the objects of analysis. This renewed and reoriented concern with the German revolution of 1918–19 is part of a larger attempt to reinterpret the history of the German working class, which has usually been depicted–with praise or scorn–as thoroughly reformist, negatively integrated, passive, and timid. This new concern also reflects the growing interest in the strengths and limitations of workers’ councils, the forms of workers’ control, and the possibilities of revolution in more advanced industrial societies.
Three problems have stood in the forefront of recent scholarship. First, the economic and political causes of the moderate revolution of November 1918 and its subsequent radicalization have been explored. Wartime and postwar deprivation, dislocation, and economic reorganization, the lack of political reform despite social democratic collaboration in the war effort, military defeat, the incompetence of the SPD, and the actions of the left have all been explored. Although the complex links between wartime developments and working-class protest have been analyzed, the revolution tends to be viewed exclusively as a product of war. Prewar social, political, and cultural developments have been neglected; the influence of prefigurative institutions and patterns of behavior on workers’ consciousness and actions in 1918–19 remains unexamined.
Second, the viability of the various revolutionary programs with their demands for political democratization, partial socialization, and a primary or secondary role for workers’ councils has been evaluated in an effort to show that there was a large middle ground between the conservative Weimar Republic, which the SPD established, and Bolshevism, which it eschewed. But a critical assessment of those possibilities by and large remains to be done.
The third focus of current work has been a reassessment of the failure of the revolution. Some scholars blame the SPD and its reliance on the old military and industrial elites, while others give priority to the weakness of the USPD or the lack of a Leninist party, and a third group focuses on the structurally induced reformism of skilled workers undergoing dequalification. While these works have provided a wealth of new information on local and national events, they tend either to overemphasize the role of political parties at the expense of social and cultural developments or to fall back on a sterile reductionism, which precludes an exploration of how workers make sense of and act on their structural situation.
My concern is not with the causes of the revolution, although I shall allude to them in my analysis, but rather with programs and goals, strategies and shortcomings. I am concerned with how and why the German workers who made the revolution in 1918–19 made it in such different ways. These differences have often been ignored in the effort to prove the very existence of radicalism. The historiography is doubly biased—first, toward political as opposed to economic actions, for the former have been better documented, and second, toward metal workers, for they played a prominent role in Germany and had radical counterparts in other countries. The search for broad similarities within Germany and among European countries, however valuable, overlooks the different forms of class consciousness and radicalism manifested by different types of workers. It preempts an investigation of the extent to which diversity was an indication of vitality and a source of strength and the degree to which it weakened the revolutionary forces. An emphasis on the pervasive popularity of workers’ control and socialization, while correct on the most general level, blurs rather than clarifies these already murky concepts.
A simple assertion of the prevalence of radicalism frequently leads to a romanticization of the revolt of the less skilled and less organized and limits our understanding of the successes and failures of the German revolution. Historians have not been wrong to place ultimate blame for the failure of 1918–19 on the continued power of the right and on the majority Social Democrats in Berlin, who allied themselves with traditional industrial and military elites, thwarted extensive political as well as economic reform, and used troops against rebellious workers. But a concern with final responsibility must not blind us to the weaknesses within the radical traditions of different regions and occupations. It must not lead us to ignore the limits of workers’ goals and strategies or the persistent difficulties they had in merging politics and economics in theory and practice.
The distinction of interest here is not between reformists and radicals or between the more democratic, less industrialized south of Germany and the authoritarian, economically advanced north. Rather, what will be investigated is the differences within radical regions. Even in the most militant areas of Germany, such as the Ruhr and Lower Rhine—where left workers fought from November 1918 until May 1919, where the political order was attacked most strongly and the campaign for socialization most extensive, and where workers’ and soldiers’ councils and workers’ security forces, general strikes, and Communist takeovers proliferated—distinctly different patterns of revolution emerged. Workers in Essen, Dortmund, Remscheid, Elberfeld, and a multitude of other industrial centers played diverse parts in the revolutionary drama, often speaking their own language and pursuing their own course of action with little heed to other actors.
In some cities revolutionaries emphasized political demands and actions and aimed at the seizure of political power locally and nationally. They controlled and worked through left parties and unions rather than ad hoc structures. Having at best a vague notion of workers’ control on the shopfloor, they envisioned socialization as a process of nationalization, to be imposed piecemeal and from the top down. They were aware of and tried to coordinate their actions with revolutionaries elsewhere. In other cities and towns revolutionary workers focused on economic demands, ranging from wages to socialization and workers’ control. Preferring strikes to political actions more traditionally conceived, and operating through ad hoc organizations with popularly elected leaders, they acted outside of and often against not only the SPD and free trade unions but also the USPD and KPD. They understood workers’ control as control of the workplace and wanted to begin socialization from the bottom up. These revolutionaries, who generally worked in mining or basic iron and steel industries, were profoundly isolated from radical workers in other occupations—not only outside the region but within it as well.
Düsseldorf and Hamborn, two Ruhr towns in which workers were singularly radical and active during 1918–19 provide clear examples of the two patterns of revolution, with Düsseldorf adopting what we can call the political model and Hamborn pioneering the economic one. The emergence of different patterns and their respective strengths and weaknesses cannot be understood if we look only at the experience of war and revolution and thereby posit a sharp break between prewar structures and practices and subsequent developments. Nor can we deduce political behavior from different workers’ positions in the labor process, looking for threatened skilled workers in one place and alienated, unskilled proletarians in the other. Such reductionism is both simplistic and ahistorical. Instead, we must explore the manifold similarities and differences in the two cities and in the experiences of their workers, similarities and differences that go back to the pre-World War I era.
Düsseldorf and Hamborn represented two typical models of Ruhr urban economic development: the diversified industrial metropolis and the sprawling mining town. Located in the western Ruhr and integrally involved in the mining and metal industries that dominated that region, these cities shared many important characteristics. Both were very much a product of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialization and experienced not only dramatic economic transformation but also extremely rapid urbanization and high rates of in and out migration. Both towns were predominantly Catholic, a fact of cultural and political significance in Protestant Germany. As a part of Prussia, Düsseldorf and Hamborn were governed provincially and locally by authoritarian political institutions and had a restrictive three-class suffrage that excluded the working-class from representation and power. During World War I both played a pivotal role in the war economy, and their workers enjoyed the leverage accruing from that strategic position. Simultaneously, both towns experienced a dramatic restructuring of their economies and work forces as well as a marked deterioration of working and living conditions.
Despite these similarities the two cities and the experiences of their workers differed in four fundamental ways—ways that created markedly different forms of class consciousness and revolutionary activity. First, the economic structures varied in terms of diversity, skill, occupation, and the organization of work. Second, both the class structures of the two cities and the background and experiences of their working class differed. Third, working-class communities and culture as well as the urban environment in which they were embedded were organized in fundamentally different ways. Fourth, the Social Democratic Party and free trade unions in the two cities did not develop along similar organizational and political lines, and their relationship to their respective working class bore little resemblance to one another. These economic, social, and cultural as well as political differences between Düsseldorf and Hamborn created two distinct patterns of revolution.
Düsseldorf was one of the most important, prosperous, and rapidly expanding cities in Imperial Germany. Situated on the Rhine, north of Cologne and south of the Ruhr mining and basic metal centers, it had been transformed from a sleepy provincial town, without economic or administrative significance, into an industrial metropolis in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By World War I it had over 400,000 inhabitants. A product of German unification and industrialization, Düsseldorf was a symbol of the economic power and pride of the Empire. It was also a victim of the social problems and political conflicts that plagued an authoritarian society with powerful preindustrial remnants and sharp class divisions.1
Industrial capitalism transformed all aspects of Düsseldorf’s economy, creating a powerful and modern factory sector, vigorous artisan trades, and thriving commerce. Metal was undisputably king, employing one-third of the work force. Unlike the Ruhr, however, Düsseldorf produced semifinished and finished goods, above all machinery, rather than basic iron and steel. Other factory industries, such as textiles and chemicals, existed but were relatively insignificant. The sector that produced consumer goods for the rapidly expanding population prospered, and both construction and wood workers constituted a major element in the working class and workers’ movement. Both within and between sectors of the economy, firm size, the degree of mechanization, and skill levels varied enormously. Machine making, for example, encompassed everything from the sprawling factory of Rheinmetall, Krupp’s main competitor, to the small and specialized artisan shop. While the metal, wood working and construction industries relied heavily on skilled male labor, the highly mechanized, medium-sized chemical and textile factories used unskilled men and women, as did the small-scale, unmechanized food and clothing sectors.2 Commerce blossomed as well as industry, but it was an appendage to the metal sector rather than autonomous. In addition to being a center for trade and production, Düsseldorf was also the administrative city for the corporations, cartels, and economic interest groups that dominated the Ruhr and Lower Rhine industrial area.3 Finally, after 1900 the city government, which ran public transportation, gas, water, electrical and sewage works, and a variety of cultural institutions, became the largest single employer in Düsseldorf.4
Industrialization fundamentally altered Düsseldorf’s precapitalist social order. Economic expansion attracted thousands of migrants, who formed a majority of the population in the prewar years and made Düsseldorf the tenth-largest city in Germany. Most migrants came from towns and cities in the Rhineland and neighboring Westphalia or from the other major cities in Germany rather than directly from the countryside or eastern Germany.5 Hence, they were acquainted with and committed to urban life and employment in an industrial capitalist economy. Although Ruhr towns, such as Hamborn, were solidly industrial and working class, Düsseldorf was more diverse. Sixty percent of the population depended on industry and two-thirds of the labor force were proletarian, but there was a sizeable old and new lower-middle class, a professional bourgeoisie, and a substantial industrial upper class.6 As a result, class divisions were sharp and visible, and class conflicts complex.
Whereas neighboring Krefeld had its spinners and weavers, Solingen its cutlery makers, and the Ruhr proper its miners, there was no typical Düsseldorf worker. The work force in metal ranged from unskilled helpers and semiskilled machine operators to skilled factory turners and artisan smiths. Migrant Protestant carpenters, native Düsseldorf painters, and unskilled migrant Catholic helpers all worked in construction. Wood workers and printers were highly skilled, well paid, and well organized, and many had stable family lives and roots in Düsseldorf. Chemical, paper, and textile workers, on the other hand, were transient, semi- or unskilled, and poorly paid. And that was only the male portion of the proletariat. Women workers, low paid and largely single, worked in commercial establishments, the sweated trades, and most frequently in domestic service. Three-fourths of the working class were Catholic, but the Düsseldorf-born and the migrant elements were hardly cohesive and the Protestant contingent was increasing. Although most workers were young male migrants, that fact did not overcome differences in occupation, religion, place of birth, and length of stay.7 Culture and community, background, and expectations as well as current economic condition all splintered Düsseldorf’s proletariat.
Prewar Hamborn presented quite a different picture. Located in the western Ruhr, Hamborn had not been a traditional mining center in the mid-nineteenth century, when mines were state run and miners had a strong corporatist tradition. Instead, like many neighboring industrial centers, Hamborn had been created literally from nothing by the westward expansion of the fully capitalist mining and basic metal industries and the huge migration that it drew in its wake. And the town had been created somewhat later than Düsseldorf. In 1870 Hamborn had a mere 2,000 inhabitants, by 1910 over 101,000. Only at that date was it officially accorded the status of a city, with its own government.8
Thousands of German- and Polish-speaking migrants flocked to Hamborn, primarily from east of the Elbe river. For these proletarianized rural laborers, the transition to mining on the other side of Germany was as traumatic as emigration. These migrants, consisting predominantly of men (due to the structure of job opportunities), came to fill the less skilled positions in the three firms that dominated the Hamborn economy, the mines Deutsche Kaiser and Neumühl and the Thyssen steel works, which by 1913 employed 14,000, 6,000, and 11,000 workers respectively.9 Although these workers were new to urban life and lacked a tradition of industrial employment, they were united not only by a similar background but also by a common work experience in Hamborn. This was especially true of miners, for the nature of mine work created a strong occupational identification and solidarity. Miners worked in groups, whose members had relatively little direct supervision but were heavily dependent on one another for wages and safety. Because mining was expanding rapidly and the hierarchy of skills was rudimentary, most could expect to move through it from hauler to apprentice hewer to hewer.10
Working-class solidarity was further reenforced by the overwhelmingly proletarian character of this dual industry town. Hamborn’s middle class was miniscule, for the industrial elite preferred Düsseldorf to the dirt, poverty, and unrelievedly proletarian character of Ruhr mining centers. For their part, professionals, civil servants, and shopkeepers found few opportunities in a quasi-company town with a poorly developed urban infrastructure.11
In these two industrial centers, wages, working conditions, and the standard of living were remarkably similar despite the differences in the structure of their economies and working classes. Wage differentials were greater in Düsseldorf due to the occupational and sexual heterogeneity of its work force, and weekly earnings varied more in Hamborn due to the variability of different coal seams, but average money wages were unquestionably high in both cities and rose throughout the prewar period. Real wages, however, presented a gloomier picture. Although optimists and pessimists are still debating the national movement of real wages after their undisputed rise in the late nineteenth century, recent scholarship on the Ruhr indicates stagnation after 1900 and actual decline for many workers immediately before World War I. On the one hand, inflation, housing shortages and high rents, and increased agrarian tariffs after 1906 pushed the cost of living steadily upward. On the other hand, employer pressure on the large wage bill of labor-intensive industries and the enormous obstacles to unionization and collective bargaining in the region prevented wages from rising commensurately.12
Nor were the life chances and security of workers fundamentally different in the two cities. In a comparison of metal workers in Remscheid, an old artisan town with a highly skilled work force employed in small shops, and miners and factory workers in Hamborn, Erhard Lucas argues that Remscheid workers had significantly better living and working conditions, greater job stability, and predictable life prospects, whereas Hamborn workers lacked all of these.13 Düsseldorf, with its heterogeneous working class, high rates of in and out migration, and extremely unstable floating population of young workers, resembled the latter more than the former. A 1909 survey of the yearly budgets of better paid, more highly skilled workers in Düsseldorf, for example, showed that between 50 and 60 percent of their income went for food alone and that most families ended the year with no savings or in debt. If the situation was worse in Hamborn, the difference was one of degree, not kind. Unemployment plagued both towns in the recessions of 1901–3, 1907–9, and 1913, and workers in both areas frequently changed jobs, often leaving the city in the process.14 Work time, an issue of constant contestation between mine owners and workers, ranged from eight to ten hours a day in the Hamborn mines, a figure that compared favorably with the best organized construction and wood workers in Düsseldorf and that represented a marked improvement over many metal workers in both cities who had twelve-hour shifts until 1912 or later. Hamborn workers suffered from more unsafe conditions, especially in the mines, and from the worm disease that ravaged the Ruhr, but accident and death rates rose steadily in Düsseldorf as well.15
The urban environments of Düsseldorf and Hamborn reflected both similarities imposed by rapid industrialization and differences resulting from their preindustrial histories and from varied capitalist strategies. The overwhelming majority of workers in both towns rented apartments in low-density housing. In Düsseldorf these were generally owned by speculative builders; in Hamborn, where job turnover was very high and labor shortages frequent, these might well be part of a company-owned “colony.” Such company housing served the dual purpose of stabilizing the work force and curbing militancy. Throughout the western Ruhr, government investigators and trade unionists alike documented housing shortages and high rents for working-class dwellings from the turn of the century onward and noted that these made overcrowding and taking in roomers a necessity for many, especially in towns like Hamborn.16
Urban institutions and amenities diverged much more than housing patterns. Düsseldorf was a multi-class, well-established urban center before it industrialized from the 1870s on. There was thus a basic physical and social infrastructure of roads, schools, hospitals, churches, and pubs, which was expanded, albeit inadequately, thereafter. Moreover, from the 1870s on Düsseldorf had both a rich “high” culture, centering around theater, concerts, and museums, and an urban popular culture, built on a social base of craftsmen, small tradesmen, and factory workers. The relative richness of urban life in Düsseldorf by no means integrated workers into the dominant society, but it did facilitate the socialist and Catholic political and educational organizing efforts and gave them a less work-centered orientation. Hamborn, by contrast, was desolate indeed. Like so many new mining centers, it lacked a halfway developed urban infrastructure, bourgeois cultural institutions, and the residues of an older artisan tradition. The company and the Catholic church filled the resulting gap inadequately, thus leaving miners to organize many of their recreational and cultural activities in an informal manner, centering around work groups or traditional miners’ institutions like the Knappenvereine, a sort of friendly society.17
Forms of capitalist control were more varied in Düsseldorf than in Hamborn. Construction, wood, leather, and some metal workers were employed in small and medium-sized shops with more patriarchal and personal modes of supervision, less hierarchy, more job control, and less skill dequalification. These conditions facilitated solidarity and organization among such relatively privileged workers but set them apart from many metal workers, as well as textile and chemical laborers, who worked in large firms with finely graded hierarchies, close supervision, and more anonymous methods of control. Although Düsseldorf’s large employers generally preferred authoritarianism to welfare paternalism, several of the largest metalworking and machinery firms, worried about both an adequate supply of skilled workers and potential unionization, did establish a variety of management-run insurance programs, educational courses, and recreational facilities. Such policies fragmented the work force and increased the costs of organization. Workers in the shoe, food, and clothing industries were threatened by mechanization on the one hand and intensification, feminization, subcontracting, and even homework on the other. Municipal workers faced a vigilant city government that rigorously imposed its fiscally and politically conservative policies. One could elaborate still further, but the point is clear: both within and among occupations, Düsseldorf workers faced very different working conditions and capitalist strategies, and there was a corresponding diversity in the tactics and goals they could and did pursue for workplace improvements.18
In Hamborn authoritarian mine owners and steel magnates alike insisted on being Herr-im-Haus. They combined the power accruing from company housing, stores, insurance programs, and the like with the use at the workplace of ruthless foremen, detailed regulations, firings, and blacklists to assure as far as possible that discipline not be breached and authority not challenged. The situation was particularly stark in mining, where the last residue of state control and with it the privileged position of miners had disappeared after 1865. Throughout the western Ruhr, mine owners sought to increase productivity and cut labor costs by screwing down piece rates, which had to be renegotiated each time a new seam was worked, as well as by zeroing (declaring loads to be unacceptable) and, finally, by undermining the traditional eight-hour day. Such a consistent capitalist strategy generated among miners a community of workplace interests that centered around earnings, hours, and greater worker control of such issues as appraising seams and evaluating coal leads.19
Turning from working and living conditions to popular culture and religion, one finds more differences than similarities between the two towns. To begin with, Catholicism, which became a political force in addition to being a religious and cultural one as a result of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf of the 1870s, played a much more prominent role in all aspects of life in Düsseldorf than it did in Hamborn. Indeed, Düsseldorf was one of the major cities where political Catholicism made its strongest effort to hold the industrial working class and avoid becoming a party exclusively of agrarian and bourgeois interests.20
As even the Social Democrats recognized, the power of political Catholicism was not the result of a clerical swindle, perpetrated on an ignorant populace. There were many reasons, material and cultural, for Catholic workers to look to the Church and its political wing. Catholics mobilized and organized the working class in political associations, Christian trade unions, and educational and recreational clubs. Their cradle-to-grave associational network included welfare services, legal aid bureaus, consumer cooperatives, and labor exchanges as well. Political Catholicism provided a comprehensive ideology, which mixed religion, politics, and economics and promised to harmonize group conflicts. It offered a community that integrated family, religion, politics, and leisure. Finally, the Catholic Center Party controlled the Düsseldorf Reichstag seat until 1911 and exerted a powerful voice in municipal politics throughout the prewar period. In addition to retaining the loyalty of middle and lower-middle class Catholics, political Catholicism was particularly appealing to that one-third of the proletariat who were native-born Catholics. Allegiance to political Catholicism enabled them to satisfy their material, cultural, and political needs without leaving their familial and cultural networks. Migrant Catholics, however, who had broken with traditional authority patterns and social relationships, found neither appeal nor place in Düsseldorf’s Catholic milieu.21
If political Catholicism dominated the life of many Catholic workers, Social Democracy structured the culture of those Protestants and migrant Catholics who stood outside of the Catholic milieu and found little in their work experience or background to unite them. From the turn of the century the Social Democrats established a rich associational life, centering on singing groups, bicycle clubs, consumer cooperatives, libraries, and legal aid bureaus. They ran educational courses, took workers to the opera and theater, and sponsored a variety of festivals. Special constituencies, such as women and youth, had their own organizations. In the years before World War I a Social Democrat could spend his (or more rarely her) entire life within the ambit of the movement.22
The Social Democrats devoted themselves to building this culture not out of aversion to action, love of isolation, or organizational fetishism but rather because the sphere of popular culture in Imperial Germany was thoroughly politicized.23 Like the workers’ movement, the state and the institutions of civil society viewed culture instrumentally and organized actively. The state, fearing that workers would reject the existing order, and political Catholicism, worried that they would defect from the Center, competed directly with Social Democracy by providing many associations for proletarian needs.
Given this competition, the Social Democrats’ concern with culture did not represent an escape from action but was part of their active confrontation with the organizations and ideologies of the state and their Catholic opponents. The social democratic cultural, recreational, and service organizations played a crucial role in providing workers, who did not share similar backgrounds, religions, or work, with common experiences and values. It brought the movement into working-class neighborhoods and into daily contact with workers’ lives. The creation of a politically oriented, party-mediated culture and community reenforced political principles and taught the political and conflictual character of all aspects of life. The social democratic workers’ culture was a means of reaching out to the unorganized and indifferent. By providing the physical and social space in which an alternative community could develop and by offering the experience of practical solidarity, the Social Democrats both attracted migrant workers seeking a place in a new urban environment and lessened the risks of being a dissident in a city dominated by political Catholicism and organized capitalism.24 In short, the creation of a social democratic culture was central not only to that party’s politics but to the very process of class formation in Düsseldorf.
Hamborn also had a rich working-class associational life, but it was not politicized or polarized between Catholics and Social Democrats in the extreme way it was in Düsseldorf. On the one hand, the Church and political Catholicism were institutionally less well developed. In part this resulted from and reenforced the general underdevelopment of the town. In part, it reflected Catholic confidence about retaining the allegiance of miners and factory workers, who came from conservative rural backgrounds and were less receptive to social democratic overtures.25 On the other hand, the weaker social democratic movement in Hamborn had less success in linking up to existing cultural institutions or creating its own. Class and culture were cohesive in Hamborn, but they had little to do with the organized workers’ movements that played such a central role in Düsseldorf.
Hamborn workers built their community and culture around family ties, the work experience, and, if Polish, ethnic identity. They coped with the new urban environment and organized leisure through informal groups, on a subpolitical level. Family played a central role, and family also had a special form. Due to the large number of single miners, high rates of job fluctuation, and a shortage of housing, a “half-open” family structure of kin and roomers was particularly prevalent in the Ruhr. This provided workers with solidarity and support and socialized young men into the miners’ way of life. That culture in turn focused on the work group and, to a lesser extent, on traditional miners’ associations like the Knappenvereine. Informal drinking clubs, composed of members of a particular work team or shift, were especially popular. Indeed, they were necessary for miners who worked odd hours and lived in a town with few public amenities. Familial and cultural life, in short, built on and reenforced workplace identities and interests. Recreation and entertainment, rather than education, politics, or welfare, formed the leitmotifs of Hamborn’s workers’ culture.26
The structure and character of popular culture in the two cities reflected not only the differences in their economies and working classes but also the very different histories of the social democratic movement in the two areas. In both cities the SPD and free trade unions developed relatively late and encountered serious obstacles due to the prevalence of large-scale heavy industry, the power of political Catholicism, and the presence of authoritarian political institutions and limited suffrage systems. Yet in Düsseldorf a large social democratic movement emerged in the decades before World War I, while in Hamborn it was much weaker. In Düsseldorf Social Democracy was a vehicle for mediating working-class diversity, creating class, and directing its concerns in a political direction, while in Hamborn a homogeneous work and community situation served as the basis of class and the arena toward which it directed its concern. Finally, Social Democracy in Düsseldorf was consistently radical and prided itself on being on the movement’s extreme left wing, while its counterpart in the western Ruhr was unequivocally reformist.27
When the miniscule Düsseldorf social democratic movement emerged from twelve years of illegality in 1890, it entered a decade of frustration and failure. Although they won roughly 30 percent of the vote in Reichstag elections, the Social Democrats were unable to recruit the overwhelming majority of these voters into the party and unions. With unstable and ineffectual leaders, little money, and no aid from the national party, the SPD could not construct viable political organizations, cultural associations, or a press. As a result, it was unable to challenge political Catholicism in the political arena or employer power in the economic one.
From the turn of the century onward, however, Social Democracy in Düsseldorf entered a period of unprecedented expansion, which brought party membership to nearly 8,000 and trade union membership to over 23,000 by 1914.28 The Social Democrats were finally able to build an efficient party organization, a rich culture, and a viable press. After having gradually gained control of such institutions as the worker-employer mediation courts and the health insurance boards from their Catholic competitors, they finally wrested the Reichstag seat from the Catholic Center Party in 1911 and again in 1912. No one factor explains this reversal of social democratic fortunes. On the one hand, changes in the economy and government policy, continued migration, and the increasing conservatism of political Catholicism laid the groundwork. On the other hand, the emergence of effective local socialist leadership, new forms of agitation and education, and the appeal of the movement’s energy and success translated possibilities into actualities.
During the periods of both failure and success the Düsseldorf Social Democrats remained committed radicals—indeed, they became progressively more radical as the war approached. In the 1890s they were radicalized by their isolation from other parties in Düsseldorf and the national movement in Berlin as well as by their inability to defeat political Catholicism or challenge capitalist employers. Between 1900 and 1914, the period of expansion and apparent success, they were radicalized because the limits of reformism remained very narrow and because they could not translate numbers, organizational strength, and visibility into economic and political power. The Social Democrats were unable to win significant material improvements for the working class, unable to gain any representation in the city government or Prussian parliament, and unable to find bourgeois allies. When they finally won the Reichstag seat in 1911, they discovered that the victory had symbolic significance but brought no real power because of the impotence of parliament and the hostility of other parties.
The Social Democrats became radicals by virtue of who they were as well as what they experienced. The bulk of Düsseldorf’s Social Democrats were young, skilled, male migrant workers from the metal, wood, and construction industries. At the peak of their earning power, most of these workers joined the movement for the first time upon arriving in Düsseldorf. Their confrontation with an environment that relegated them to a second-class economic, cultural, and political status was mediated by a party leadership that was itself new and young. There was not a generation gap within the Düsseldorf party, nor was there the dominance of vested interests and anxious conservatism that characterized many other locals. Leaders and members alike neither had close ties to the national party nor venerated established organizations and the grand old men of the movement.29 This distance created the space in which radicalism could develop.
The experience of the Düsseldorf Social Democrats led them to reject theoretical revisionism as well as practical reformism, with its emphasis on short-range gains and collaboration with bourgeois parties. It led them to criticize the bureaucratization and organizational preoccupation of the SPD as a source of caution and strategic error. Throughout the endless debates about revisionism, militarism, and parliamentarism, they urged an unequivocal defense of Marxist principles. From 1910 on they became vociferous proponents of an active strategy of confrontation centering on the mass strike.
The radicalism of the Düsseldorf Social Democrats stressed political goals, such as universal suffrage in Prussia and antimilitarism, and urged political means, such as organization, demonstrations, and the political mass strike. This orientation matched that of the workers, who did not share a common work experience, who encountered extremely strong opposition to their efforts to win union recognition and collective contracts, and who recognized the necessity of organizations that extended beyond the workplace. The working class and the workers’ movement alike saw political power and transformation as the prerequisite for social change. It was politics that united Düsseldorf’s workers and political reform that they sought first and foremost.
The very factors that promoted radicalism in Düsseldorf, however, limited its effectiveness. Organized capitalism, authoritarian government, and political Catholicism precluded reformism but made organization and mobilization difficult and militant confrontation dangerous. Rapid industrialization and migration provided the movement with ready recruits but undermined organizational stability and educational work. Düsseldorf’s isolation from the national movement created a critical distance in which radical ideas could develop, but it also minimized Düsseldorf’s influence on Berlin, limited its contacts with leftists elsewhere, and contributed significantly, as will be seen, to the defeat of the postwar revolution. In addition, Düsseldorf workers contributed to the weakening of their prewar radicalism. By catering to the needs of some elements of the working class—above all, young skilled male migrants—they limited their appeal to others, such as women, the unskilled, and native Catholics. Despite their criticism of the national movement, they bowed to its conservative decisions until forced to leave the SPD during the war. Although they created a strongly organized, politically oriented radicalism, they never developed economic organizations, economic protests, and an economic program to match their political ones.
Both the character of Social Democracy and the forms of worker activism were quite different in the western Ruhr. In the late nineteenth century, a very reformist social democratic movement had developed in the traditional mining centers of the eastern Ruhr. The cautious policies of the party and the socialist miners’ union, the Alte Verband, reflected both the rural and conservative origins of eastern miners, who retained strong vestiges of their corporatist tradition and its elitism, and the relatively stable and prosperous character of communities there. Social democratic reformism was a product of both growing union strength and the Herr-im-Haus standpoint of employers, and it continued the tradition of trying to curry favor with a state that had periodically intervened on the behalf of miners.
After the turn of the century the development of the western Ruhr, with its rapid urbanization, high immigration, and deteriorating working conditions, destroyed the structural conditions that had fostered reformism and union strength. Neither the SPD nor the Alte Verband spoke to the needs and experiences of workers, such as those in Hamborn, who were new to mining and lived and worked in conditions markedly different from those in the eastern Ruhr. As a result, Hamborn workers were much less involved in political organizations and activism. Instead, like their fellow western Ruhr miners, they engaged in industrial militancy, sometimes sanctioned by the unions, as in 1905 and 1912, but frequently not. They demanded shorter hours, higher wages, and reform of the manner in which the mines were run. These economic struggles over material conditions and control issues were not accompanied by political radicalism. Indeed, the gap between the social democratic movement and the working class widened steadily in the prewar years, and some of Hamborn’s more active workers even turned toward syndicalism.30
World War I exacerbated the differences between the character of the Düsseldorf and Hamborn workers’ movements and their relationship to the working class, even though the war had a very similar impact on economic and social conditions. The outbreak of war temporarily curbed the prewar radicalization and brought prosperity, but its continuation precipitated the disintegration of both the social and political order and the social democratic movement and radicalized the working class in Hamborn and Düsseldorf.
In both cities the war led to a restructuring of the economy and the labor force as well as to a marked deterioration of working and living conditions. The metal and mining sectors were converted to war production and rationalized as far as possible in order to meet the munitions and manpower demands of a two-front war, while nonessential industry was cut to the bone. In both cities, the labor force swelled enormously as women, youths, and inexperienced men were recruited for production.31 In Düsseldorf alone 30,000 new workers found jobs in the armaments sector between 1915 and 1917, and two-thirds of them were women.32 Despite extensive government intervention in the economy, munitions production lagged and manpower shortages continued. This, in turn, led to long hours, an intensive work pace, and unsafe conditions in factories and mines. To compound the situation, food shortages became acute in 1916, the first of the infamous turnip winters, and scarcely improved for the remainder of the war.33 Inflation was rampant, war profits excessive, and real wages fell by nearly one-quarter in war industries and almost one-half in nonessential ones.34 Finally, even though the national SPD, the Ruhr party, and many unions enthusiastically supported the war effort in the expectation of political and economic concessions, Ruhr employers refused to recognize unions, and government officials and politicians were no more forthcoming on the local level.35
In Düsseldorf the wave of social democratic-led mass protests against the war in July 1914 was followed by a tense truce as the national party endorsed war credits and martial law was proclaimed. By early 1915, however, signs of disaffection appeared within the social democratic movement and the working class. The party press attacked war profiteering; the party members publically criticized Düsseldorf’s SPD Reichstag deputy Haberland for voting war credits; and, as local leaders made contact with nationally prominent antiwar leftists, nearly all local party and union functionaries signed a letter condemning the SPD for abandoning the class struggle and supporting an imperialist war.36 By year’s end the police predicted that Düsseldorf would split from the right-wing Social Democrats, and two years later that in fact occurred.37 In the wake of the February revolution in Russia, acute domestic crisis and continued SPD support of the war, 77 of 81 Düsseldorf party functionaries and 561 of 600 members voted to join the newly formed USPD. The Düsseldorf branch of the German Metal Workers’ Union and nearly all other organized workers soon followed suit.38
Simultaneously, workers were taking to the streets. Acute food shortages precipitated demonstrations and strikes but political demands soon surfaced. According to the police,
the mass of workers, who are very revolutionary, can only be calmed without violent means if political rights are granted and food is supplied.39
As the government would not concede the former and could not provide the latter, unrest escalated to the point of extensive looting and property destruction, which could only be stopped by using force and punitive prison sentences and by sending militants to the front.40
In 1918 persistent economic crisis, the absence of domestic reform, and continued repression further rebounded to the benefit of the USPD, and SPD influence on the working class all but disappeared. Of equal importance, the Düsseldorf USPD was moving far to the left. It demanded immediate peace and political democratization, applauded the October revolution in Russia, and spoke with increasing frequency of a socialist republic for Germany. As in the prewar period, political goals were given top priority. The vision of the Düsseldorf Independents was as yet vague, their strategy barely worked out, yet their revolutionary aspirations were clear.41 The workers’ movement thus moved in step with the working class—at times it moved even more quickly to the left—and the ties between workers and their institutions remained close.
A very different situation developed in Hamborn. There, as in most areas of the Ruhr, the Social Democrats continued to support the war to the bitter end, even distributing a prowar pamphlet written by the army as late as 1918.42 In Hamborn the relatively weak social democratic organization virtually ceased to function, while the Alte Verband, which unlike the metal workers’ union had few dissidents, cooperated willingly with the state and employers.43 What little contact had existed between the social democratic movement and the working class was destroyed when miners and factory workers in Hamborn moved from a critical wait-and-see attitude toward the war to a stance of active opposition.
As the war progressed, wages and working conditions, inflation and food shortages, owner intransigence, and trade union weakness radicalized workers.44 Protests first involved food issues, then wages, and finally political demands, albeit of a poorly articulated kind. Unlike in Düsseldorf, the newly emerging left groupings—the USPD and the Spartacists—could not capitalize on this radicalization. On the one hand, there were no functionaries or institutions that switched allegiance and provided leadership and structure for a leftist political movement. On the other hand, Hamborn workers remained concerned primarily with local economic issues. A few joined the syndicalist Free Association of Miners, just as they had in the prewar years, but most shunned formal organizations.45
The revolution, which began in Düsseldorf on November 8, 1918, with wide popular support and strong USPD leadership, gave the Düsseldorf working class the long-awaited chance to put its radicalism into practice. The revolution intensified the close ties between the working class and the organized workers’ movement and heightened the concern with political goals. But it also illustrated the limits of such a political strategy. It revealed the workers’ inability to develop a conception of workers’ control and to wage a struggle for socialization that went beyond rhetorical support for the plans of workers elsewhere.
There were three phases to the revolution in Düsseldorf, and with each successive one the working class had more radical political and economic aspirations and less real power. In November and December the revolution was run by the USPD-dominated Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, which began to democratize the government, build alternative institutions, and initiate economic reform while maintaining order and broadening its base of support. Understanding the necessity of thoroughgoing political change, the Council suspended the city council, established control over the bureaucracy, and established a 1,500-man security force to supplement and curb the police.46 The Council and its USPD and Spartacist supporters demanded that the middle and upper classes be more heavily taxed and that unoccupied houses be given to the poor. They condemned the SPD’s plans to call a National Assembly, arguing that such a strategy would subvert the revolution and “save capitalism.” They enthusiastically endorsed the regional Workers’ Council’s call for partial socialization, beginning with the mines. In so doing, they recognized both the need for economic transformation and the inevitability of strong bourgeois opposition to it. But such socialization was to apply elsewhere, be implemented from above, and not entail shopfloor workers’ control.47 Although the SPD left the Workers’ Council by early December, the USPD and unions, especially the metal workers’, continued to support it.48 Although works councils were formed in the larger factories, they cooperated closely with the unions and were subordinate to the Workers’ Council. Thus old and new institutions were merged, and traditional leaders and forms of action and organization were perpetuated.
Despite great determination and some success, it was clear by late December that the USPD and working class were unsure how to advance the political revolution or initiate the social one of which they spoke with increasing frequency. Their failure and the growing conservatism of the SPD national government opened the way for a Communist-led council government with strong USPD participation.49 Workers endorsed the Spartacist takeover and street tactics because organization and mobilization alone had neither sustained the momentum of the revolution nor prevented the broad socialist alliance from disintegrating and because control of the administration had not brought sufficient democratization. They favored council rule because they were convinced that a National Assembly would restore the old order.
The Communists held power for two months, despite several armed battles between workers and the police and despite two strikes by civil servants. But the form and style of their rule distinguished itself little from that of the USPD. Political parties continued to play the leading role and major decisions were made by the leaders of formal organizations. Of greater importance, the Communists engaged in demonstrative actions, such as renaming the elegant Königsalle Karl Liebknechtstrasse, but failed to implement revolutionary measures.50 They lacked not only a positive political program but an economic one as well. They called on the national government for unemployment funds and government contracts—hardly radical measures—but the SPD leaders predictably refused the requests.51
Neither the left political leadership nor the rank and file initiated a socialization campaign that would affect local industry. They supported the socialization demands of the Ruhr miners but did not consider Düsseldorf’s industry, even its metal sector, ripe for transformation.52 The diverse structure of industry, the complex and varied character of the labor process, and the heterogeneity of the working class and its lack of experience with shopfloor militancy all militated against any spontaneous socialization movement from below. Düsseldorf workers, like their leaders, regarded city hall and Berlin—not the factory—as the center of action despite Düsseldorf’s isolation from Berlin and from the USPD elsewhere. The more skilled workers, who led the revolution, channeled not only their own militancy but also that of the unskilled into political actions and to a lesser extent into a political demand for socialization from above. To be sure, the Düsseldorf working class wholeheartedly supported the February 1919 general strike called by Ruhr miners to demand socialization and an end to the military occupation of parts of the Ruhr. And they stayed out even longer than their comrades elsewhere.53 Their action was born out of solidarity with other workers and a commitment to revolutionary change. But it also reflected defensiveness, frustration about recent failures, and confusion about the most appropriate goals and strategies for the revolution in Düsseldorf.
Of equal importance, the strike intensified social democratic and bourgeois opposition to radicalism in Düsseldorf and precipitated national government intervention. On February 28 the Free Corps Lichtenstrahl marched into the city and the last, defensive phase of the revolution began. Despite militant working-class resistance to the military and the national SPD, which had sent it, and despite growing support for the USPD and KPD and a second general strike in April, the tide of counterrevolution could not be turned.54 Although the revolution in Düsseldorf was floundering by late February owing to political isolation and the lack of an economic strategy, it was military repression that dealt the death blow.
The revolution took an entirely different, although no less radical course in Hamborn. The revolution exacerbated the conflicts between the SPD and free trade unions on the one hand and the working class on the other. It led to an intensification of industrial protest, but that protest continued to lack a political component. It illustrated the strengths and limits of a spontaneous, economically focused revolution from below.
The November revolution in Hamborn proceeded relatively peacefully under the auspices of an SPD-dominated Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, which demanded democratization, the eight-hour day, a National Assembly, and socialization. Although the party leaders took few concrete actions in subsequent weeks, trade union functionaries immediately began negotiating with mine owners. Clinging to its previous cautious reformism, the miners’ union asked only for union recognition, a moderate wage increase, and slightly shorter shifts, thereby both ignoring the more extensive wage and work demands of the miners and attempting to exclude all syndicalist influence.55 Although the miners were relatively unconcerned with the Social Democrats’ political passivity, they were angered and radicalized by the unions’ attempt to quell the revolution with inadequate reforms. From late November to January the Hamborn miners demanded an eight-hour day, which included the travel time of the entire shift, substantial wage increases, a one-time payment of 500–600 marks per worker, and more control over working conditions. Instead of working through the Alte Verband, they formed works commissions, which were elected by the various shafts and responsible to the mass of workers. Although some syndicalist spokesmen encouraged the movement, it was largely spontaneous but not, however, unorganized. Instead of negotiating with employers, miners struck and staged militant demonstrations, which marched to the mine directors’ homes and to mines in neighboring towns. These tactics did extract more concessions than the bargaining of the unions had, even though they failed to achieve the miners’ ambitious program.56
But the miners’ vision did not extend beyond the pithead. They wanted economic improvements and workers’ control but had no political program. Due to the continued isolation of mining communities, the weakness of political parties, and the ineffectiveness of the regional Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, miners had little knowledge of conditions and developments elsewhere. Neither the USPD nor the Sparticists gained more than a foothold in Hamborn during the most militant months of the revolution, and works councils remained at the heart of the movement.
From January through April 1919 the Hamborn miners supported broader struggles for socialization going on in the Ruhr, even though their understanding of the implications of these struggles was limited. They came to the direct aid of their fellow miners in nearby towns during strikes and demonstrations. They endorsed the work of the Essen socialization commission, which advocated multi-level councils and nationalization from above, even though this commission, with its painfully slow deliberations and complete lack of influence on the national government, had the effect of defusing militancy. Finally, when the SPD government’s determination to reject socialization and pacify the Ruhr by force became clear, the Hamborn miners struck en masse in February. After the late February military occupation of the city, they struck again in March and for a third time in April.57 As in Düsseldorf, the actions were both defensive and futile.
The failure of revolution in Düsseldorf and Hamborn had first and foremost to do with the continued power of the army and bureaucracy, the collaboration of the SPD with the old industrial and military elites, and its willingness not only to oppose the left politically but also to attack it militarily. Isolated local action, even uncoordinated regional uprisings, could not survive in such a hostile national environment. But the problems of revolutionary change in capitalist societies and the potential and limitations of council movements cannot be understood if we stop the analysis there. The two patterns of revolution that have been explored testify to the depth of the radical tradition among many German workers. But they also testify to the shortcomings, imbalances, and contradictions of different strands of that radicalism.
Düsseldorf workers created strong organizations, effective and responsive leaders, and a clear political analysis and goals. But they were unable to find a strategy for economic reform, let alone revolution, and were unable to overcome the diversity of their work situations in economic, as opposed to political and cultural, ways. Hamborn workers excelled at ad hoc industrial protest, which was spontaneous but not unorganized, which covered not only material demands but control questions, and which was extremely responsive to rank-and-file sentiment. But they had no political vision, organization, or strategy. The very particularity of their economic concerns made it difficult for them to unite with other workers. Düsseldorf workers could sustain action but not give it adequate direction, while Hamborn ones suffered from the opposite problem. Düsseldorf workers sought to solve the problem of economic power by seizing control of the state, while those in Hamborn sought economic power as an end in itself and ignored the state. Each pattern of revolution was the product of distinct economic structures, working-class experiences, and political histories. The strength of each was also its weakness. Neither was able to overcome the German working class’ longstanding inability to merge economic and political action. Neither was adequate to the task of transforming the economy and state in capitalist society.
Notes
1. Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York, 1981); Hans-Arthur Lux, Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, 1921–22); and Hugo Weidenhaupt, Kleine Geschichte der Stadt Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, 1968), 131.
2. Josef Wilden, Grundlage und Triebkräfte der Wirtschaft Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, 1923), 12, 20. Mitteilungen zur Statistik der Stadt Düsseldorf, Nr. 3, Industrie und Handelsgewerbe in Düsseldorf nach der Betriebszählung von 12. Juni 1907, ed. Otto Most (Düsseldorf, 1908), passim.
3. Lux, 56, 206, and Wilden, 33.
4. Weidenhaupt, 129–131, and Otto Brandt, Studien zur Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsgeschichte der Stadt Düsseldorf im 19. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1902), 403. Mitteilungen, Nr. 3, 20.
5. Wolfgang Köllmann, “Industrialisierung, Binnenwanderung und die ‘soziale Frage,’” Vierteljahresheft für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 46 (1959), 53, 66. Mitteilungen zur Statistik der Stadt Düsseldorf, Nr. 4, Die Nichteinheimischen in Düsseldorf nach der Volkszählung von 1. Dezember 1905 (Düsseldorf: Statistisches Amt, 1912), 10*, 18*–19*.
6. Köllmann, 66. Statistik des deutschen Reiches, neue Folge, Bd. 108, p. 183; Bd. 207, Part II, p. 477.
7. Statistik des deutschen Reiches, neue Folge, Bd. 108, p. 183. Mitteilungen, Nr. 4, 10*, 18*–19*.
8. Jürgen Tampke, The Ruhr and Revolution: The Revolutionary Movement in the Rhenish–Westphalian Industrial Region, 1912–1919 (Canberra, 1978), 3–7; Klaus Tenfelde, Sozial Geschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft an der Ruhr im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1977), 164–170; Erhard Lucas, Zwei Formen Arbeiterradikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt, 1978), 29–36.
9. Lucas, 29–36. Tenfelde, 230–231. Klaus Bade, “Massenwanderung und Arbeitsmarkt im deutschen Nordosten von 1800 bis zum ersten Weltkrieg,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 20 (1980), 277.
10. Stephen Hickey, “The Shaping of the German Labour Movement: Miners in the Ruhr,” in Richard Evans, ed., Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), 221. See also Tenfelde, 340–342.
11. Lucas, 24–28. Wilden, 50.
12. Tampke, 13–14, 27. Hickey, 221–222. Kenneth P. Barkin, The Controversy over German Industrialization, 1890–1902 (Chicago, 1970), 267. Gerhard Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton, 1960), 71–74. Jahresbericht des Statistischen Amts Düsseldorf, 1907, p. 15; 1909, p. 20; 1912, p. 27.
13. Lucas, 21–109, passim, 249–256.
14. Beiträge zur statistischen Monatsberichten der Stadt Düsseldorf, July 1909, XL–XLIII. Lucas, 57–70. Georg Renard, Struktur- und Konjunkturtendenzen im Düsseldorfer Wirtschaftsraum (Essen, 1939), passim. Franz J. Brüggemeier and Lutz Niethammer, “Schlafgänger, Schnapskasinos und schwerindustrielle Kolonie,” in Jürgen Reulecke and Wolfhard Weber, eds., Fabrik, Familie, Feierabend (Wuppertal, 1978), 150–151.
15. Tampke, 7–12. Hickey, 220–223. “Statistik des Jahres 1906 über Lohn- und Arbeitsverhältnisse der Arbeiter in Düsseldorf,” Bericht des Gewerkschaftscartell, 1906. Nolan, 237–238.
16. Tampke, 14–15. Brüggemeier and Niethammer, 135–148. Franz J. Brüggemeier, “Ruhr Miners and Their History,” in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981), 330. Nolan, 24, 66–67, 220.
17. Lutz Niethammer, “Wie wohnten Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976), 101–107.
18. See Nolan, 106–110 for a detailed discussion.
19. Lucas, 119–130. Hickey, 227–231. Tampke, 6–12. Hans Mommsen, “Die Bergarbeiter an der Ruhr,” in Jürgen Reulecke, ed., Arbeiterbewegung an Rhein und Ruhr (Wuppertal, 1974), 278.
20. For discussions of political Catholicism, see Michael Berger, Arbeiterbewegung und Demokratisierung (Freiburg, Ph.D. dissertation, 1971); August Erdmann, Die christliche Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1909); and Ronald Ross, Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in Wilhelmian Germany (Notre Dame, 1976).
21. Nolan, 42–52, 113–114.
22. Information on the cultural activity of the Düsseldorf SPD was drawn from the social democratic papers, Niederrheinische Volkstribune and Düsseldorfer Volkszeitung, the Bericht des Gewerkschaftscartells, 1902–6, 1911–12, and police reports, Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, III 6918–33, 1890–1910.
23. For the standard interpretation of the SPD culture as passive, isolationist, and integrative, see Peter Nettl, “The German Social Democratic Party, 1890–1914, As a Political Model,” Past and Present 30 (April 1965), 66, and Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Totowa, N.J., 1963), 203–231.
24. See Patrick de Laubier, “Esquisse d’une theorie du syndicalisme,” Sociologie du travail 10 (1968), 364–366. Nolan, 134–145.
25. Although there was an active Catholic miners union in the Ruhr, the Center Party was much less prominent than in Düsseldorf. Tampke, 26–27.
26. Lucas, 92–109. Brüggemeier and Niethammer, 154–165. Robert Giebisch, “Miners and Workers’ Control in the German Revolution of 1918–1919,” senior thesis, Harvard University, 1980, chapter 2.
27. Nolan, parts I and II.
28. At the time of the last prewar occupational census in 1907, there were 63,833 blue-collar workers in Düsseldorf. Statistik des deutschen Reiches, neue Folge, Bd. 207, part II, 478–481. Movement statistics are from the Düsseldorfer Volkszeitung, November 21, 1914, April 23, 1915.
29. The analysis of the party membership is from information on over 4,000 new male members that was collected by the police from lists that the party submitted. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, III 6929–33, 1896–1908. For information on the leadership, see the police files in Staatsarchiv Koblenz, 403 6867, n.d. and 403 6870, n.d.
30. Tampke, 19–27. Hickey, 223–233.
31. Tampke, 34–5. Jürgen Reulecke, “Der erste Weltkrieg und die Arbeiterbewegung im rheinisch-westfälischen Industriegebiet,” in Reulecke, Arbeiterbewegung, 205–239.
32. Adelbert Oehler, Düsseldorf im Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf, 1927), 243.
33. For a discussion of the war economy and its impact on social conditions, see Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966); Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Kriege, 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 1973); and Oehler.
34. Kocka, 18.
35. Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf (Düsseldorf, 1974).
36. Staatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf 15985, March 5, 1915. Institute für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, ed., Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Reihe II, Bd. I, 157–159 (referred to hereafter as Dokumente und Materialien).
37. Staatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf 15985, May 1915.
38. Dokumente und Materialien, Reihe II, Bd. I, 582–583.
39. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, III 4604, April 1917.
40. Ibid. Volkszeitung, July 14, 1917. Oehler, 363.
41. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, III 4604, November 17, 1917, September 23, 1918, October 18, 1918.
42. Tampke, 48–51.
43. Lucas, 146–149.
44. Mommsen, 280–281. Tampke, 33.
45. Tampke, 39, 55–66.
46. Reinhard Rürup, ed., Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte im rheinisch-westfälischen Industriegebiet (Wuppertal, 1975), 15–16, 21–23. Volkszeitung, November 11 and 14, 1918.
47. Volkszeitung, November 1918, passim. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat, XXI 332, November 29, 1918. Dokumente und Materialien, Reihe II, Bd. 2, 511.
48. Oehler, 560.
49. Ibid., 653. Dokumente und Materialien, Reihe II, Bd. 3, 440–441.
50. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, XXI 333, January 9 and 14, February 4, 1919.
51. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, January 14 and 30, February 4, 1919.
52. Volkszeitung, January and February 1919, passim.
53. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, XXI 334, February 21, 1919. Wochenschrift der Handelskammer zu Düsseldorf, Nr. 9/10, March 15, 1919, 86–87.
54. The Düsseldorf general strike demanded the resignation of the SPD national government and the formation of a council republic. Volkszeitung, April 15, 16, and 18, 1919.
55. Mommsen, 286–288.
56. Lucas, 155–192. Tampke, 102–107.
57. Ibid.