The province, now federal state, of Brandenburg has long occupied a distinctive place in the history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. While the March of Brandenburg is best known as the historic heartland of the Kingdom of Prussia and as the seat of Prussian monarchical and military power, in the late nineteenth century the province also included the hinterland of the sprawling city of Berlin. The city's rapidly growing working-class population, many living in new suburbs that only formally became part of Greater Berlin in 1920, turned some Reichstag constituencies in Brandenburg into strongholds of social democracy. Organizing the workers’ party in the more rural parts of Brandenburg, however, was a particular challenge for some of the socialist activists portrayed in the book under review.
Brandenburg produced significant SPD leaders such as Otto Braun, prime minister of Prussia in the Weimar Republic, and Otto Wels, best remembered for speaking out against Hitler's Enabling Law in March 1933, the only parliamentary party leader to do so. When Brandenburg was reconstituted as a Land of the newly-unified Federal Republic in 1990, it produced some of the most prominent SPD politicians in the “New Länder,” such as minister-president Manfred Stolpe, Regine Hildebrandt, and Stolpe's successor (and briefly national chairman of the SPD) Matthias Platzeck.
This volume (the first of a projected two-volume set) is the work of the SPD's Historical Commission of the State of Brandenburg and is intended to promote awareness of the party's traditions in the region. Following a brief survey of the party's regional history, pitched at the general reader, the main part of the book consists of nineteen biographical chapters on individuals who played significant roles in the development of the party in Brandenburg from its origins in that province in 1868 to the Nazi takeover of power in 1933. These chapters deal with seven women (the mother and daughter Pauline Staegemann and Elfriede Ryneck share a chapter) and thirteen men. These chapters are followed by another fifty short biographies, with about a paragraph on each, a chronology, and a bibliography.
Some of the individuals portrayed here have already been the subjects of book-length biographies: Pauline Staegemann, pioneer of Social Democratic women's organizations in Berlin; the lawyer Arthur Stadthagen; the aristocratic general's daughter turned Social Democratic author Lily Braun; Gustav Noske (who has been the controversial subject of a major biography by Wolfram Wette); Otto Braun; and Otto Wels. But even readers relatively familiar with the history of German Social Democracy before 1933 will broaden their circle of acquaintances with the chapters devoted to less well-documented figures. These include some quite significant people: among the women, the trailblazing trade-unionist Emma Ihrer and Marie Juchacz, founder of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Worker's Welfare Organization). Other noteworthy figures include Fritz Zubeil, a pillar of the party organization before he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) as a result of his opposition to the First World War. Zubeil represented Imperial Germany's most populous electorate, Teltow-Beeskow-Storkow-Charlottenburg (the population of which reached 1.28 million by 1918, mostly in Berlin suburbs), from 1893 to the end of the Empire. Alongside such individuals with a national profile, there are also portraits of party functionaries whose work helped shape the party in Brandenburg. The concise accounts of their lives provide insight into the issues involved in organizing the party at the local and regional level.
The chapters dealing with the Imperial period give a feel for the restrictions the Social Democrats had to work under, as they faced constant discrimination from the authorities and electoral systems massively weighted against them. Individuals portrayed here found themselves divided by the party split during the First World War and its revolutionary aftermath. It is not surprising that the Berlin-based parts of the Brandenburg party organisation tended to be more leftist, with some leading figures joining the antiwar USPD, while the more rural and small-town parts of the province tacked more to the right, sticking with the Majority Social Democrats.
Anyone with an interest in the political life of the Weimar Republic at the regional level will find material of interest in the accounts of the many Brandenburg Social Democrats who played a role in the government of Prussia under leaders such as Otto Braun, under whose premiership the state became (to quote the title of Dietrich Orlow's 1986 book) “the unlikely rock of democracy” in Weimar Germany. The chapter on SPD Prussian party leader Paul Szillat records his defiance of the Nazis when they abolished parliamentary government in Prussia in May 1933, in a parliamentary speech less well-known than Otto Wels’ speech against the Enabling Law but no less remarkable, considering that it was made when the Nazis had already gained absolute power. After the end of the republic, some of these men and women were incarcerated in prisons or concentration camps, as Szillat was, or were forced into exile. Karl Engelbrecht of Luckenwalde survived the Nazi concentration camps but died in 1947 in a Speziallager of the NKVD.
The twenty-three contributors include some well-established historians noted for their expertise in German labour movement history, such as Siegfried Heimann and Christoph Klessmann, as well as some present and former SPD functionaries. As in most such collected volumes, the standard is variable, and a few chapters could have benefited from a more rigorous editorial hand. In terms of the age of the contributors, they range from the oldest born in 1933 to the youngest born in 1996, but the older generational cohorts predominate. Sometimes the commemorative and tradition-building side of the volume comes to the fore (perhaps most evident in the chapter on Otto Wels), and there is sometimes a self-conscious distancing from GDR labour movement historiography. This may explain why Karl Liebknecht, perhaps the best-known socialist from Brandenburg, is confined to a capsule biography in the latter part of the book, although his life is, of course, amply documented elsewhere. Liebknecht was, after all, a Social Democrat for most of his career, before co-founding the German Communist Party at the end of 1918. At the opposite end of the political spectrum within the labour movement, the trade-union leader Carl Legien also receives a potted biography here. Although he originally hailed from Thorn (Toruń), and first achieved prominence in Hamburg, Legien is counted as an honorary Brandenburger on the grounds of his years of residence in a Berlin suburb in an unconventional domestic arrangement with Emma Ihrer and her husband, while Legien was a member of the Reichstag and chairman of the General Commission of the Free Trade Unions.
The book makes for an accessible contribution to regional political history. It usefully complements biographical reference works on German Social Democracy, such as those by Wilhelm Heinz Schröder, and the broader literature on the party in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. There is some overlap in this book with William Smaldone's Confronting Hitler: German Social Democrats in Defense of the Weimar Republic, 1929–1933 (2009), which includes substantial chapters on both Juchacz and Wels. The book by Carl et al. does not list any English-language works in its bibliography, highlighting the way it targets a general readership in Germany. Interested historians can find useful nuggets of material here nonetheless.
