In the final chapter of SPD und Parlamentarismus, Bernd Faulenbach opens with the observation that “like no other German party Social Democrats have been the guarantor of parliamentarianism”. In his introduction, editor Detlef Lehnert draws attention to Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Rudolf Hilferding, party notables who, a long time before the Godesberg Programme (1959), saw the virtues of politics mediated through a parliament and its parties. In SPD und Parlamentarismus, there is little to suggest that Social Democracy has ever stood apart from the German tradition of parliamentary democracy. Under the leadership of Bebel or Schmidt, Ebert or Brandt, Social Democracy has played host to much debate since its earliest days about whether socialists can be too Reichstag-orientated – see Wilhelm Liebknecht’s 1869 talk “Über die politische Stellung der Sozialdemokratie insbesondere mit Bezug auf den Reichstag” – but even taking into consideration leftist enthusiasm for the mass strike in 1905, the council movement a decade later, or the Jusos platform of the mid-twentieth century, the commitment of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) to the parliamentary route to government has never seriously faltered.

As Holger Czitrich-Stahl points out in his chapter on the years after the SPD’s 1903 electoral surge, the party was morphing “from a socialist party of opposition and struggle to become a socialist party of the masses, anchored in parliamentary work and with an expanding organizational role to play [Gestaltungsanspruch]”. The party was engaged in a problematic but marked process of integration, at a time when its hostility to bourgeois institutions was loud and proud. While the term “Problemfelder” in the subtitle implies that a revision of a too pat association between Social Democracy and parliamentarianism is on the cards, the general emphasis in this edited collection is on the continuity of the association. Granted, this is not a uniform narrative without interruptions. This book’s editor and contributors would, no doubt, be quick to point out bumps in the road. But, on reading SPD und Parlamentarismus, a strong impression is made of the intimate relationship of the SPD with parliamentary rule. It was present in the thinking of the avowedly Marxist first generation of Social Democrats, articulated most forcefully at Bad Godesberg in 1959, and has been inescapable thereafter.

SPD und Parlamentarismus is in two parts. The first features key moments in the SPD’s rise from outlaw party to party of government. For example, Karl Heinrich Pohl’s chapter deals with the SPD’s southern strategy, the local SPD’s formally heterodox approach to reckoning with the German Empire in the Grand Duchy of Baden, and the kingdoms of Bavaria and of Württemberg in the 1890s: “heterodox” because in these Erfurtian years – the SPD’s 1891 Erfurt Programme setting the parameters – the southern Social Democrats’ inclination to cooperate with bourgeois parties and state institutions was tantamount to collaboration. It was “formally” because in these Erfurtian years the peaceful promotion of the party and its interests through acquiring institutional influence was implicit in the logic of the SPD’s growth. In his chapter, Lehnert discusses the critical period of war, splits, revolution, and Weimar. With just over a third of Reichstag seats in 1912, the SPD was the largest party in a severely restricted legislature in an authoritarian state. In 1922 it was a party of government in a fledging German Republic. Despite constant jockeying between left, right, and centre, despite splits that saw its left leave, and its centre-left depart and return to the Social Democratic fold, the formal vehicle of socialism in Germany had acquired influence in the Weimar political system, yet was unsure how to wield it, having no republican experience of using parliament as an executive instrument.

The second part of the book details the SPD’s rise again to a party of government, but this time from the depths of its treatment under the Third Reich. In his chapter, Peter Brandt charts some of the moderate lessons learnt in exile, following the SPD’s radical positioning of the late 1930s and early 1940s, a period captured by Peter Steinbach in his preceding chapter. Wartime exile organizations such as Union deutscher sozialistischer Organisationen in Großbritannien appealed to a Weimarian-like arrangement of democratic rights, parliamentary governance, and decentralized power, free of the scourge of presidentialism. What radicalism was present was found in economic policy. For Brandt, Kurt Schumacher is central in this stage of the SPD’s development. It was his commitment to pluralist democracy – “[…] [t]here is clearly only one democracy, and that which the acumen and vitality of a class make of it” – and the SPD’s regional commitment to coalition government in the states which not only gave the fledging Federal Republic of Germany a chance, but also shaped the official oppositional character of the SPD within the Bundesrepublik.

In Robert Philipps’s chapter on the SPD in the 1960s, he invokes the well-worn motif of the Social Democratic tension, “the dualism of revolution and reform” that persisted up until the Godesberg Programme. The left of Social Democracy had always cast aspersions on any veneration of parliamentary representation, but with the Programme an end was brought to such exclusivity. The party was now in keeping with liberal democratic common sense. In Philipps’s chapter nothing is more telling of the Godesberg turn than the SPD’s cooperation with other parties in the Bundestag. This was the era of the grand coalition of the SPD and the Union. Although this cohabitation sparked another Social Democratic phase of extra-parliamentary leftist activism, and the left had some discursive success in their calls for further democratization in Willy Brandt’s initial tenure as Chancellor, by the 1972 election the SPD had emerged from its postwar doldrums, resplendent in its electoral machine guise. With a charismatic and liberal leader in Brandt, it got a little under a half of the seats in the Bundestag.

Other chapters in SPD und Parlamentarismus highlight why Social Democracy has embraced parliamentary democracy in the face of counterarguments and trends. Volker Stalmann lists six reasons why early Social Democrats were hostile to parliamentary participation in the run up to Erfurt. These include the Prussian, Bismarckian origins of the Reichstag, the good instrumental rationale for ignoring a parliament so constitutionally impaired, the vice of class collaboration in most legislative proceedings, and the inclination to see direct democracy as more socialist. What changed was success at the ballot box, and the significance of the parliamentary party’s legality during the state repression of the 1880s. In the fallow years of the 1950s, described by Siegfried Heimann, in which the SPD under Erich Ollenhauer came a distant electoral second to the Christian Democrats, the party struggled to adapt to the new West Germany. As the mythos of its exclusive proletarian vehicular identity was undermined by its grasp of sociological verities, the party had little choice but to note the weakness of its position. By the end of the 1950s, i.e. Godesberg again, the party was confident enough to acknowledge what it was for: to gather votes for a moral and a representative end within the current order.

Parlamentarismus can be translated as “parliamentary democracy”. To English eyes, this could well be the more appropriate, the more idiomatic translation. Yet, perhaps there is something about parliamentarianism as a term. Parlamentarismus is indeed about conveying the distinct quality of a systematic, ideological “ism”. One could argue, for instance, that the SPD did have an aversion to parliamentarianism that did not necessarily correspond to an aversion to parliamentary participation: the SPD did not embrace parliamentarianism even though it was a parliamentary party. Contrary to interpretations that aggrandize the singular reformist history of Social Democracy, it is only with the Godesberg moment that revolution no longer had a function in the party. 1959 was a moment of discontinuity.

Overall, SPD und Parlamentarismus does not present such a picture. It is a series of ten-year snapshots that depict a protagonist growing increasingly comfortable with its parliamentary lot. To turn to Kautsky’s 1911 Parlamentarismus und Demokratie as a guide and exemplar, as Lehnert does in his introduction, the value of winning power through the ballot box and of translating the interests of a constituency into a national, inclusive representative agent was a hegemonic fixture of the Social Democratic operation before and after Godesberg. This finding has less than radical implications. As historical object, the SPD appears wedded to a moderate liberal democratic path, unwilling to explore new tangents, the exception being experiments in municipal and industrial democracy. As an interpretative model, the relationship between a party and parliament in SPD und Parlamentarismus is very much in the tradition of high political history, whatever the dynamic, ideological connotations of parliamentarianism. To be clear, SPD und Parlamentarismus is not a précis of the peculiarities of Social Democratic parliamentarians, along the same lines as Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke’s The House of Commons, 1754–1790 (1964), it is a biography of a party and its leading actors that accepts their political agency and explicative centrality first and foremost.