In December 1915, when the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) again faced an agonizing decision about whether to support war credits, August Bebel's two successors, Hugo Haase and Friedrich Ebert, dueled in the party's parliamentary caucus about the former leader's legacy. Ebert argued that Bebel's last wish had been that the leadership act to hold the party together. Hence, Ebert continued, the minority that opposed credits needed to bow to party discipline and vote with the majority. Haase countered that Bebel had also instructed his “heirs” to remain on the path set out in party resolutions, i.e., to oppose any support for the imperial state. In his biography of Bebel (1840–1913), Jürgen Schmidt analyzes the SPD founder's diverse statements on war and patriotism to suggest that, in light of Bebel's ambiguous positions on a variety of issues, no one can know for sure what stance he would have taken on the war. Ralf Hoffrogge, by contrast, presents Bebel as having “established an anti-war stance as a constant in Social Democratic foreign policy” (22) since the 1870s, thereby underestimating in his biography of Richard Müller (1880–1943) the contrary tendencies within the party after the turn of the century. It is ironic that Hoffrogge's protagonist Müller—who concentrated on organizing shop stewards against the war—could have not cared less what Bebel's stance might have been. It was not party tradition but rather contemporary situations that interested Müller.

Both authors explicitly draw an analogy between their protagonists’ life trajectories and the trials of Sisyphus. As Schmidt writes, “Bebel won and won, yet stood again and again before a similar problem” (219): how to proceed against the revisionists, reformists, and radicals within his party and, at the same time, against an oppressive state? Hoffrogge concludes that his biography “portrays Müller as the Sisyphus of the Revolution who was ultimately destroyed by the scale of his political task, changed sides, and eventually gave up his revolutionary vocation” (238). Both biographies are organized chronologically, with Schmidt following Bebel from his poverty-stricken origins to a successful business career and party leadership. He takes the reader through Bebel's travels as an artisan apprentice, during which time he became enmeshed in the Social Democratic movement. A stay in Leipzig proved to be of decisive influence: it was “here [that] he became economically independent, found the woman of his life, and started his life in politics” (39–40). Like other biographers, such as Ursula Hermann (August Bebel. Eine Biographie [1989]), Schmidt describes Bebel's successful woodworking firm and his companionate marriage. The chapter on family, friends, and daily life illustrates how Bebel moved between a traditional and more “equal” marriage, and between representing workers and living a bourgeois existence—all the while clashing ideologically with friends, yet retaining contact with political associates. Schmidt discusses private and personal details, such as the prolonged illness and early death of Bebel's only daughter, but he focuses mainly on his involvement in the labor movement. Schmidt reviews Bebel's ideological struggles with the state-focused Lasalleans, his slow move toward Marxism, and the personal sacrifices required to build a mass movement in the face of social and legal obstacles—concluding that Bebel's life was, in short, the history of the politics of organized labor.

Along those lines, Schmidt underscores the idea that, for Bebel, politics became a consuming passion; his forthrightness, dedication, and skills as speaker and organizer made him a model in that realm. Using the Weberian concept of “politics as a vocation,” Schmidt suggests that “as of 1889 the life of politics had become a living from politics” (136) for Bebel, as the royalties from his publications, the sale of part of his business, as well as income from party sources “made possible the shift to professional politician” (137).

Hoffrogge's protagonist, Müller, also had difficult beginnings as one of six children; his father was an innkeeper and he lost his mother at age eight. Müller apprenticed as a lathe operator but did not join a union until ten years later. His public life began in 1911, when he published an article opposing Taylorism in the metal workers’ national paper. By 1913, he had also published a tract about the agitation methods of lathe workers. Hoffrogge considers Müller to have been a typical unionist of the prewar era—one who advocated socialism in the future but, for the time being, promoted bureaucratic reforms at the shop-floor level: “Müller's professionalization of union work was necessary and successful, but, ironically, it contributed to the very bureaucratisation and fetishisation of organisational detail in the labour unions of imperial Germany that Müller would later vehemently fight against” (19). Having quickly sketched Müller's personal and union background, Hoffrogge devotes the bulk of the study to the period from 1914 to 1925. After illustrating Müller's clashes with diverse groups on the political left—especially as a communist during the postwar era—the author writes an insightful chapter on Müller as a historian of the revolutions of 1918–1919; this is followed by a discussion of his checkered career outside the political parties.

Writing from a left-wing perspective that aligns ideologically with the German unionists and social democrats who opposed the war, Hoffrogge shows that Müller soon challenged the dominant union and SPD positions. The latter had accepted a Burgfrieden, or social and political truce, by agreeing not to strike during wartime. Citing Müller, who collected and published three volumes of documents in the mid-1920s, Hoffrogge maintains that many workers were, in fact, unenthusiastic about the war. The actual degree of worker support for, or opposition to, the war remains speculative among historians because of censorship and inconclusive documentary evidence. Müller is undoubtedly right, nevertheless, in underscoring the fact that lathe workers in particular had a decisive role in war production. The workers’ immediate concerns about wages and working conditions gradually assumed political implications as an informal network of oppositional shop stewards emerged from their ranks.

Hoffrogge focuses on three decisive strikes—initiated by these shop stewards in June 1916, April 1917, and January 1918—that crystallized the main working-class opposition to the war and the regime. Although the term “Revolutionary Shop Stewards” only appeared in 1918, Hoffrogge asserts that the June 1916 strike “was in fact organized by the Revolutionary Shop Stewards” (36) and that Müller had proposed the starting date. The author presents a great deal of novel information on the underground networks and informal organizations involved; their activities included preparations for another strike, which led to Müller's arrest and compulsory military service until June 1917. By this time, workers’ councils had emerged to challenge the union leadership's support for the war and its collaboration with the state. Meetings of the unions’ congresses and of the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) helped the shop stewards obtain nationwide contacts, which later provided the basis for the mass strike of January 1918. That work stoppage, which involved 400,000 participants in Berlin, spread to many other industrial centers and lasted nearly a week, thus providing a practice run of sorts for the revolution that took place later that year. In this context, Hoffrogge makes the claim that “witnesses report … the January Strike was largely the work of women” (51). This is a potentially significant and surprising suggestion, but is left undeveloped because of inadequate evidence. In fact, no one has yet delineated the role of women in that strike.

Hoffrogge does add new details about the negotiations that took place during the strike and about its termination. Most historians, such as Suzanne Miller in Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg (1974), see the shop stewards as having been outmaneuvered by the SPD leaders. Hoffrogge, by contrast, insists that the shop stewards “paralyzed the armament industry and forced the SPD leadership into a unified front from below” (56). He nevertheless acknowledges that during the revolution itself, SPD leaders refused to share power with the workers' councils; moreover, he describes the frustrations Müller experienced as he and the USPD endeavored to create some form of council democracy.

This is significant because, taken together, Hoffrogge's evidence and narrative challenge the view that the Spartacists (especially Karl Liebknecht) and the USPD primarily spearheaded opposition to the war—even if they cooperated with the councils on many occasions. His study deserves special consideration because it addresses two of the main puzzles of modern German history: how did a supposedly strong state collapse in 1917 and 1918, and how did the SPD subsequently assume power? Already in the 1920s, Arthur Rosenberg pointed out that the Social Democrats followed a dual tactic of propagating but also preventing revolution. By clarifying the roles played in all this by Müller and the shop stewards, Hoffrogge has moved the discussion forward, showing the way in which revolutionary unrest spread and forced the Social Democrats into a much more active role than they had previously adopted.

Schmidt used a variety of published sources to uncover the details of Bebel's life and ideas, including the ten-volume collection of Bebel's writings and speeches. Where appropriate he notes historiographic disputes but does not overburden the text or notes with minor issues. The clearly written result makes Bebel an accessible figure for readers not versed in the entire historiography of the SPD. By contrast, Hoffrogge had to look at a wide range of dispersed sources—from news-papers to police files located in archives from Moscow to Amsterdam—in addition to Müller's personal collection of documents on the revolution. His well-executed study demonstrates the evidentiary lacunae created when historical actors hide from authorities or play their cards close to their chest in order to survive. An examination of Hoffrogge's notes reveals the extent to which he relied on oral testimonies collected in postwar East Germany, where historians lionized the oppositional efforts of the figures who had founded the German Communist Party, such as Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg; the oral accounts by a wide range of lesser-known activists illustrate the importance of more obscure figures such as the shop stewards.

Both studies suffer from certain deficiencies. Neither author addresses, for example, the way that the prewar Social Democratic leadership functioned, i.e., by giving representation to all ideological factions at the top of party institutions. Schmidt acknowledges that the leadership operated as a collective that constrained policy-setting and decision-making by individual leaders, but does not specify the actual roles of major leaders like Bebel. Both men had auctoritas but not necessarily potestas in the party central—a distinction made by Ursula Reuter in Paul Singer (1844–1911) (2004). The minor role played by the issue of gender is problematic as well. Hoffrogge mentions it at the beginning of his study and then returns to it in his discussion of the January 1918 munitions strike, but his study would have benefited from a consideration of Belinda Davis's Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (2000), which argues that the lower-class women of Berlin were as important as shop stewards and workers’ councils in undercutting the authority of the imperial regime.

Labor, SPD, and oppositional leaders have been increasingly left out of more recent accounts of Imperial Germany. For example, Bebel receives three mentions, whereas Ebert, Haase, and Müller receive none in the recent compendium edited by Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp: Imperial Germany Revisited (2011). These biographies begin to restore proper historiographical attention to their subjects as individuals who fought for ideals and interests while building the world's largest mass political party, whose membership reached one million in 1913.