In “Blut und Eisen auch im Innern,” a phrase coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the midst of a construction workers’ strike in Potsdam in August 1898, Amerigo Caruso presents a fascinating study of the exercise and control of violence during mass demonstrations and strikes in pre-World War I Saxony and Prussia. His aim is to investigate the interstices of an authoritarian, hierarchical regime that was “based unambiguously on democratic participation and the principles of a law-governed state (Rechtsstaat)” (9), in which a willingness to use violence was a “niche phenomenon” in a “precariously pacified society” (10), characterized by feelings of insecurity and images of violence in the press. The book also explores the penumbra of a “modern slave trade” (188) of migrant workers and yellow unions, which surrounded the world of strike breakers, the police, and industrial paternalism. In these respects, it extends the earlier work of Thomas Lindenberger on the violent politics of “the street” in Straßenpolitik. Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914 (1995).

The book is most successful in bringing to light half-hidden threats and acts of violence by privately employed factory guards, who worked closely with the police and organized gangs of strike breakers, who were given gun licences by local authorities and treated leniently by the courts, even in cases of homicide (which were usually reduced to manslaughter or self-defence). Officials and bosses in the Kaiserreich had become increasingly concerned about union organization, industrial unrest, and strikes, especially after the lapsing of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890. The police in Prussia (gendarmerie, Schutzmannschaften, and Kommunalpolizei) had increased in number from 3,000 to 40,000 in the course of the long nineteenth century, meaning that there was one officer per 700 inhabitants by 1913 compared to one for every 2,500 or so in the first half of the nineteenth century. Despite this, factory owners and officials seem to have become more anxious, seeking to quell unrest and protect property by allowing “mixed state-centric and private notions and practices of security” (236) to come into being through the use of the municipal police, who were deployed in factories and answerable to elite-controlled city administrations, and the arming of “loyal workers” (113) during disputes, amongst other things. Nationally, there were disagreements between the government in Berlin and local industrialists, with criticism of the lies and deceptions of business-friendly publications in the Crown Council itself during the Ruhr miners’ strike in 1905, for instance. Locally, though, officials, manufacturers, and mine owners usually collaborated with each other. In 1909, regular bribes and inducements given by businessmen to police officers were effectively complemented by the highest German court, which granted “a form of legal approval to the mixed private-public financing of police forces” (127).

Caruso rightly points out that strikes in Germany before 1914 “have been examined, for the most part, from the perspective of the workers’ movement” (28). This study investigates “strike terrorism” (31–39) from the standpoint of businessmen and officials as well as union activists and members of the SPD, providing a convincing interpretation of official records, the right- and left-wing press, and relevant treatises by economists, union leaders, and publicists. Arguably, such sources could have been supplemented by autobiographical material and correspondence. Nonetheless, the author's alternation between detailed analysis of strikes, mass demonstrations (labour and electoral reform), and other events, from shootings by “revolver heroes” (120–128) to examples of “slave labour” (188–196), in both nationalist and socialist publications, helps him paint a revealing picture of the menace and actuality of violence that was inherent in turn-of-the-century labour relations.

How such violence was related to other violent acts, including domestic beatings, rape, assault, and murder, to imagined instances or depictions of violence in novels and newspapers, and to the military and paramilitary violence of wartime and the early Weimar era is more difficult to gauge. “The revolutions and civil-war-like conflicts after 1917 turned prewar anxieties into open panic,” Caruso writes, before adding that “the states and societies of Europe were under acute stress after four years of total war, which was incomparably greater than it had been before the war” (233). This caveat leaves the question of wartime radicalization unanswered. What the study does very effectively, by contrast, is to examine, from varying points of view, “the discursive radicalization in the last years of the Kaiserreich” (243), which served in part as a substitute for and in part as a constraint on actual violence. The book is a concise and authoritative addition to the wider literature on cultures of violence, economic discipline, and the exercise of political power in pre-Nazi Germany.