Since the beginning of the anti-immigration demonstrations in Dresden, organized by the movement Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (Pegida) in the fall of 2015, the politics of the German state of Saxony have become a hot-button issue in the German and even the international press. The electoral successes of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which edged past Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the federal elections in Saxony in 2017, to become the largest party there, have raised even more questions about the state's political trajectory, not least with state elections scheduled for September 2019. As a result, The New York Times ran numerous stories on Saxony and the rise of the far right; The Atlantic published a story on the rivalry between left-leaning Leipzig and right-leaning Dresden; and James Hawes claimed in his bestselling and entirely monocausal Shortest History of Germany, which appeared in 2017, that the all-defining border between democracy and autocracy runs right through Saxony along the Elbe. How “brown” the state really is (and often, by extension, all the territory that once belonged to the German Democratic Republic—and sometimes even all of Germany) is the question that lurks behind this coverage. Do events in Saxony foreshadow a return of Germany's darker past?

Almost counterintuitively, then, here is a book that, in some ways, asks similar questions, yet reminds the reader that Saxon voters were historically the very opposite of brown. James Retallack's Red Saxony tells the story of the rise of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) during the Second Empire, and of the various ways in which bourgeois and conservative politicians attempted to stop the party from gaining political influence. From the 1890 Reichstag elections onward, the SPD garnered the most votes of any party in Saxony in national elections, trouncing both National Liberals and Conservatives at the polls. On the state level, the Socialists were well on their way to such a position, too, drawing even with the Conservatives in the 1895 elections. The 1896 suffrage reform was meant to stop their advance by introducing indirect voting in three classes, based on taxable income, which aimed to minimize the influence of working-class voters. The Socialists’ share of the vote nevertheless continued to increase. By the turn of the century, the SPD won the most votes on the state level, too. The suffrage law proved effective, however, in one way: the votes did not translate into parliamentary seats. These attempts at blunting the voters’ verdict by weighing their ballots differently lie at the heart of Retallack's book. The “red menace” was of very real concern to the so-called state-supporting parties of the center and right. They regularly encountered the strength of the SPD at the polls, at public rallies and assemblies, during strikes, and in the growing circulation of the party's newspapers. Retallack describes the responses of these parties as ranging from bumbling to efficient, from logical to entirely irrational.

After years of research and the publication of some of the most important publications on the Second Empire and the German right, Retallack is too nuanced a historian to draw facile comparisons to today's Saxony, even if the current rise of populist and antidemocratic politicians and parties does indeed concern him. He mentions US President Donald Trump and Britain's pending withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit) at the very end of the book, but he does not refer to contemporary Saxon politics at all. Facile or not, some parallels are nevertheless striking—for example, the territorial division between a townhall dominated by liberals and socialists in Leipzig, and a conservative and antisemitic one in Dresden, which mirrors the different political cultures described in the Atlantic piece of 2017.

Retallack's main interest lies elsewhere, however. His goal is to intervene in the historiographical debate around the degree of democratization in the German Empire and the consequences that this had for the Weimar Republic. In a sense, it is a more nuanced extension of the Sonderweg debate, to which Retallack directly alludes in his introduction. Retallack takes aim not at those who still embrace the Sonderweg approach, but rather at Anglo-American historians of Germany who, he believes, have become too sanguine in their assessment of the Empire's democratizing effort because they are blinded by the ritualization of, and high rate of participation in, elections on all levels. It is especially Margaret Lavinia Anderson's Practicing Democracy, which appeared in the year 2000, that is in his sights. Retallack agrees with her that Germans had become habituated to voting by 1914, and, in that sense, democratized. But he draws a line between “social” and “political” democratization; the former term, he explains, refers to the “fundamental politicization of German society, whereby more and more Germans were pulled into the world of political activity” (3). But this did not result in “political democratization,” Retallack argues, something that “implies some degree of constitutional reform” (3). Rather than social and political democratization going hand in hand, they operated in different directions during the Empire. As social democratization accelerated, political democratization slowed down, stopped, and even occasionally went in reverse. Gaining political power through democratic practices such as universal suffrage proved elusive. Conservative and bourgeois elites successfully resisted political democratization at every turn, which laid the groundwork for the later denunciation of democracy as socialist, Jewish, and entirely “un-German” (628–29).

To substantiate this claim, Retallack adopts a subnational approach, focusing on Saxony, a state that is not only interesting because of the two suffrage reforms it introduced over the course of the empire's existence, but also because it was one of the larger Mittelstaaten situated on the nexus between conservative Prussia and liberal South Germany. In fourteen chapters, Retallack, like Anderson, follows elections and electoral rules in Saxony between the birth of the North German Federation and the collapse of the Empire. But, in contrast to Anderson, he is less interested in the practice of voting, and more in the counting of votes. Retallack focuses on the way in which votes translated into parliamentary seats and political influence, and on how political modernization and authoritarian reaction were connected. Suffrage laws and the weighting of ballots are therefore of most importance to him. The contrast between universal manhood suffrage on the Reich level, on the one hand, and successively more restrictive laws on the state level, on the other, provides Retallack with the opportunity to study the effects of the laws on voters’ and politicians’ behavior. Saxony, with its relatively frequent suffrage reform, thus offers a window onto efforts by bourgeois politicians to counter voter behavior with laws that would effectively maintain bourgeois and conservative dominance in the state parliament (Landtag).

Given Retallack's primary interest in the conversion of votes into political influence, it is surprising that he does not study, other than debates about suffrage laws, the effects of these laws on parliamentary behavior in the Landtag. He sometimes has to acknowledge that parliaments, even in authoritarian Saxony, became more independent and that parties forced governments to act as they wished. It is true that parliamentarians in Saxony did not reflect, at any point before 1918, the voting preferences of Saxon voters in a proportional manner; that, for ten years, Social Democrats were excluded entirely from the chamber; and that parliamentarization does not equal democratization—even if Retallack does not treat these as separate issues in his definition of political democratization. But the growing influence of parliament suggests something different from authoritarianism, and if the focus of the book is on constitutional change moving toward democratization, then a shift toward greater parliamentarization is certainly not irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Red Saxony’s singular focus on suffrage laws and election outcomes aside: to what extent does the book successful challenge Anderson's positive assessment of the Empire's emerging political culture? A clear-cut answer to this question is, to some extent, stymied by the fact that both studies deal in counterfactuals. Both acknowledge that World War I was a radical rupture, and that any arguments regarding further constitutional change that would have led to real parliamentarization and democratization in the absence of that war remain speculative. To Retallack, however, the electoral retrenchment in Saxony offers proof of just how effective prewar anti-democrats were; he believes, moreover, that their playbook would have proved effective under the right circumstances—and here he points to the fateful year 1933. Retallack assembles a wealth of archival sources and draws on his deep knowledge of the Second Empire, and especially of the politics of the Right, to make a very convincing case through 1908. Yet, the voting reforms adopted in 1909, and subsequent election results, complicate matters. The new law marked a return to direct voting, but it also introduced a multiple-ballot vote. Under this system, voters were given up to four votes, depending on their income, occupation, education, and age. Only one election was held under the new electoral law because of the outbreak of World War I. That is why guesses about future developments must remain speculative.

Red Saxony’s chapters on the 1909 suffrage reform are nevertheless the richest and most important ones for Retallack's argument about the successes anti-democrats had in devising strategies aimed at keeping Socialists out of positions of influence. By Retallack's own account, the plural voting law of 1909—while far from democratic—bowed to public pressure to increase the franchise and move away from the system of indirect voting. The reform thus seemed more like a rearguard action—an attempt to cling to the wave of democratization rather than being swept away by it. The drafters of the reform were entirely modern in their use of statistics, however, and Retallack's attention to the latter, to their compilation and use, is one of the great strengths of his book.Footnote ¹ Saxon officials made extensive use of this fairly novel tool and, while doing so, they tried to understand the way in which the society around them was modernizing. Using economic and social indicators, they attempted to predict voting behavior and draft suffrage laws that would keep Socialist representation low, while, at the same time, not abolishing the idea or semblance of representation. Both the Saxon government and National Liberals were clear, especially in the 1909 reform, that Social Democrats would have to be allowed into the Landtag, if only to serve as a pressure valve. Establishing the right criteria for apportioning voting rates based on statistical data (i.e., working out the income at which [presumably socialist] skilled workers would give way to supposedly conservative artisans) would make certain that there would not be too many of them.

The reform misfired: rather than the expected fifteen SPD delegates, twenty-five entered the Landtag. This made the Socialist faction only marginally smaller than the Conservative and the National Liberal ones, which each had twenty-eight members. Because the Conservatives remained reluctant to cooperate with the state government, the election result brought the SPD into closer contact with the state than either the Socialists or the government had planned. The law and its results sowed discord between National Liberals and Conservatives, i.e., between the “state-supporting parties” on which the government had mainly relied thus far. Instead, with the Socialists now holding slightly more than a quarter of the seats in the Landtag, the “state ministry in Saxony was showing signs in 1911 that it was willing to deal with the SPD as a legitimate political party—for example, by inviting the SPD to discuss pending legislation” (557). And, during the war, “the Saxon government battled to keep Majority Social Democrats in the camp of ‘state-supporting parties’” (607)—to which they had never before belonged. That these steps were not universally endorsed, that especially Conservatives in Saxony, horrified by this specter already before the war, argued for yet another suffrage reform, certainly speak to the strong anti-democratic sentiment of the Conservatives. Yet, further exploration of this theme, beyond Retallack's focus on the response of the anti-democrats, may have been illuminating for what it might have said about the potential for political democratization in the late Empire, even under the constraints of unequal suffrage laws. Retallack's hedged statement in the conclusion, that “neither universal manhood suffrage nor Germany's parliamentary system enjoyed as much legitimacy among certain sectors of the Bürgertum as scholars presently believe” (623, emphasis added), is much more nuanced than his earlier statement in the introduction claiming that the “opposing currents [to democratization] were stronger” (12).

In the context of the anti-democrats’ response to the 1909 elections, Retallack raises a key point that has direct bearing on Anderson's argument. Quoting Hannah Arendt, he describes the drafters of the 1909 law as unthinking in their analysis of the Social Democrats’ success, claiming that they were driven by clichés about Socialists and had failed to investigate the real base of the party's support. If they had thought harder about the SPD's appeal—rather than focusing only on numbers—they would not have devised a law such as the one that they did. Retallack might be too hopeful here about the power of rational thought to stop the anti-democrats’ efforts, but this point offers a more relevant challenge to Anderson's arguments. These countervailing habits and practices “twisted” (481) Germany's road to democracy in a way that could hold it back, in slow meandering terms, for long periods.Footnote ² Two factions in the SPD fought over the party's relationship to the state and to parliamentary procedure, as did the Conservatives in their camp. But habitual anti-Socialism, Retallack argues, made any move toward a different understanding of Social Democrats and their supporters difficult, thus blocking any true acceptance of parliamentary procedure. This inner-conservative split continued into the Weimar Republic, and, at least for a few years in the middle of the 1920s, the pro-parliamentary lessons that were drawn were as important as the anti-democratic ones.

These illuminating insights are occasionally obscured by the sheer amount of material Retallack has assembled in Red Saxony. This comes down, in part, to a question of editing and intended audience. Retallack's writes in his acknowledgments that he hopes to reach a lay audience. Given the breadth and detail of research in this six-hundred page book, a certain level of repetition is probably not only unavoidable but also necessary. Yet, at times, this clashes with Retallack's intention to tell the history of Saxon elections in a clear and chronological fashion. Considering how fluidly and often engagingly written the book is over long stretches, tighter editing and a somewhat reduced length could have made Red Saxony more accessible to a wider audience—while also preventing some minor yet nonetheless irritating errors.

This should not distract from the almost dauntingly broad overview that Retallack offers of Saxon politics and, by extension, German politics. A question that Retallack addresses in more detail than political histories of Germany (beyond ones with a focus on German-Jewish history) usually do, is the importance of antisemitism on the German Right during the Empire. He concludes that radical antisemitism was not something that the Conservatives coopted in order to fend off the challenge posed by antisemitic parties: the amount of agitation by Saxon conservatives against the supposedly nefarious influence of Jews in the liberal economy, especially in matters of credit, suggest to Retallack “why we should abandon any notion that Conservatives ‘co-opted,’ ‘instrumentalized,’ or ‘tamed’ radical antisemitism. Instead we should recognize the central role antisemitism played in a broader spectrum of ideology and practice” (207). Retallack agrees with Shulamit Volkov that antisemitism became the “cultural code” of the Right from the 1890s onward, and that, together with anti-democratic and anti-Socialist sentiment, it structured political action by the Right. Antisemitism clearly played a central role on the Saxon right. Yet, Retallack's examples of coalitions between the “state-supporting” parties and radical antisemites, or of the presence of the latter among the ranks of the former, are not always conclusive about whether it was really antisemitism or instead anti-Socialism that bound them together. In fact, an 1887 assessment by George Strachey, the British envoy at the Saxon court—which Retallack quotes right after the sentence just cited—mentions antisemitism as only one aspect of the Conservatives’ goals: not as an organizing principle, but rather as being on the same level as opposition to the universal franchise and to Social Democrats.

This perspective might not entirely capture the self-perception of Saxon Conservatives, yet they were also not always entirely in agreement themselves about their own ideology. Based on what Retallack writes himself, it was anti-Socialism more than antisemitism that could unite wider circles on the Right—though one could argue that those other parties (e.g., the National Liberals) were not properly of the Right. But, for most of the book, Retallack treats them as such. To be sure, National Liberals usually had no problem supporting antisemitic candidates, but they did not usually exclude Jews from their ranks. Here Retallack seems to be too keen to link 1890 to 1933, when it comes to antisemitism—something he convincingly does for anti-Socialism, though the incorporation of the word socialism into the NSDAP's name once again suggests a more “twisted” path. Statements claiming, without further evidence, that “the Nazis themselves acknowledged the importance of the Antisemitische Correspondenz” (from a late nineteenth-century antisemitic paper; 218), or that propaganda was as important for the success of imperial antisemites as it would be for Hitler, seem curiously underdeveloped arguments for establishing that link, especially considering Retallack's detailed argumentation elsewhere.

All in all, Red Saxony offers many, often new insights into the attempts by German anti-democrats to slow, halt, and, if possible, reverse the movement toward democratization. Retallack's account, as a historiographical intervention, offers a very nuanced picture of the Second Empire's experience with voting and the effect this had on social and political democratization. For the period after 1909, Retallack persuasively shows how anti-democrats struggled to keep further political democratization at bay. Yet, the short amount of time left to the Empire, not least under peacetime conditions, as well as the Saxon state ministry's moves toward including Social Democrats into government practice, leave a more ambivalent and open-ended picture of the Empire's trajectory than Retallack wishes, at times, to suggest. Some semblance of parliamentarization, if not full democratization, may have been possible. But Retallack shows convincingly that the actual practice of voting alone certainly did not make it inevitable.