In German history, there is the uncanny, and then there is the unlikely. Depending on your disposition, Adolf Hitler appears either as a demonic apparition of the German people's own destructive capacities or as a political nobody catapulted into prominence by the sheer incompetence of his adversaries. Depending on your politics, social democracy can be understood as the lonely sentinel of political defiance, embodied by Otto Wels's rejection of the Enabling Act in 1933 and Willy Brandt's Kniefall in Warsaw in 1970, or as the pathetic repository of all the turns that German history failed to take, from the decision to vote for the war credits in 1914 to Gustav Noske's collaboration with the Freikorps after World War I. For Lars Fischer, German social democracy was both. In this provocative and original book, Fischer highlights the uncanny ability of social democrats to get the most important things completely wrong, and just how unlikely they were to understand the existential threat posed by anti-Semitism.
In often devastating manner, Fischer dissects the inadequate response of socialist leaders to anti-Semitism, then takes them to task for the improbable reason that they were not Marxist enough. Precisely because Marx's approach to Jewish emancipation was either not read or not read correctly by socialists, Fischer argues, there were no voices in German social democracy—and by political extrapolation, all of German society—free of anti-Jewish resentment. Although he concedes that “self-avowed Marxists were susceptible to the myths of nationalism and anti-Semitism, or at least to some of the concepts and notions on which these myths drew,” Fischer maintains that their vulnerability to anti-Jewish resentments flowed not from “their historical materialism but in spite of it” (p. 5). As a result, “German Social Democracy had . . . not succeeded in immunising the bulk of its constituency sufficiently against antisemitism for it to have presented a serious hurdle to the perpetration of the Shoah” (p. 2).
After an introductory summation of the historiography on German socialism and Jews and a brilliant discussion of the pitfalls of engaging with anti-Semitic thought, Fischer devotes several chapters to the proposition that Marx's infamous essay “On the Jewish Question” was not widely read before its republication in 1902, and was misunderstood afterward as legitimating the conflation of Jews with capitalism so common in Imperial Germany. As Fischer observes with great eloquence, SPD leaders objected vociferously to political anti-Semitism on the grounds that removing Jews from German society would only make way for Christians to take their place as the agents of capitalist exploitation. Yet such a position hardly implied any defense of Jews as a social group, much less a principled attack on the disdain for all things Jewish that pervaded Wilhelmine society. The anticapitalist impulse in anti-Semitic thought, moreover, led social democrats to view anti-Semites as potential allies—as the exponents of a popular revulsion against exploitation who simply misidentified its social and economic origins in Judaism rather than capitalism.
To illustrate his point, Fischer presents a series of fascinating cases, the most interesting of which involves Hans Leuß, a former Reichstag deputy for the anti-Semitic German Social Party who wrote on occasion for the socialist press and for that reason became the subject of controversy at the SPD's 1903 party congress. As Fischer documents in sometimes excessive detail, the dispute over social democratic collaboration with Leuß had nothing to do with his anti-Semitism and everything to do with party political tactics, which were fueled by the growing rift between revisionist and orthodox Marxism. If the examples of casual anti-Semitism that Fischer has uncovered are at times shocking, his unsparing yet evenhanded assessment of both factions reveals just how villainous the SPD's pantheon of heroes could be. Franz Mehring, never a particularly admirable character, comes off as both far worse than we remember and far more representative; August Bebel, incorrectly apostrophized as the originator of the slogan “antisemitism is the socialism of fools,” is caught in flagrante delicto making vicious anti-Semitic jibes in a major speech; and Eduard Bernstein, an otherwise courageous thinker, is exposed as cravenly perpetuating anti-Semitic slurs even while “defending” Jews. In fact, according to Fischer, the only German socialist truly free of anti-Semitic thought was not German at all, but a Pole of Jewish extraction: Rosa Luxemburg.
As many historians of Germany will recognize, the circuitous route traced in the book—Marx to Luxemburg without stopping at Bebel or Bernstein—describes one tortuous and tortured narrative of German social democracy, the one in which the revolutionary potential of 1918 was never realized and the hopes of a united front against fascism were brutally extinguished and unceremoniously dumped into the Spree. All politics aside, however, Fischer's choice of Luxemburg as the uncanny socialist among socialists is, simply put, unlikely. Luxemburg was completely indifferent to the plight of European Jewry and contemptuous of Jewish culture. More importantly, Fischer's evidence of Luxemburg's rise above the anti-Semitic fray is slim at best, depending entirely on her anonymous interventions in a Polish debate. Luxemburg's secretive contribution to a debate at the fringes of German social democracy hardly amounted to a convincing dissection of anti-Semitic thought, much less a defense of Jewry.
There are plenty of other objections to Fischer's arguments, not all of which smack of the internecine conflict that plagued the left before 1989. If his heroization of Luxemburg is improbable, his failure to engage with Karl Kautsky is implausible, especially given Kautsky's key role in elucidating nationality policy and his expressions of sympathy for European Jewry. And while Fischer's interpretation of “On the Jewish Question” is at times brilliant in its attention to text and context, it is unconvincing. Reading the essay as part of the contemporary debate over civil rights recovers the historical context of Marx's more egregious rhetorical flourishes. But resorting to the distinction between the early, Hegelianized Marx, whom Fischer terms the “pre-Marxist Marx” (p. 89), from the later, “scientific” Marx to rationalize the essay's abuse of Jews and Judaism is thin gruel. At any rate, even a cursory reading of the anti-Semitic invective embedded in the footnotes to Capital is enough to make one's head spin and turn that argument on its head.
More troubling, Fischer's attention to historical context in his analysis of Marx contrasts poorly with his thoroughgoing condemnation of acceptable anti-Semitic fare among socialists. While he is depressingly correct that their “anti-antisemitism” did not amount to a rejection of anti-Jewish resentment, Fischer never explores what sorts of non-anti-Semitic plants might have flourished in the racialized hothouse that was late Imperial Germany. Besides, even if more Marx had made the socialist response to anti-Semitism more effective, Fischer never clarifies how the views of socialist leaders influenced the opinions of ordinary party members, much less the individual workers who supported the party.
But my disagreement with Fischer's arguments should not obscure the book's considerable virtues. However implausible Fischer's conclusions may be, the method by which he arrives at them merits the highest praise. Quite aside from the excellent empirical examples he has amassed, Fischer's analysis is distinguished by deft exegesis and incisive logic. Particularly impressive is his use of abductive logic, or the technique of distinguishing between likely and unlikely inferences. In his discussion of Bebel's speech, for example, Fischer goes to great lengths to avoid foreclosing a multiplicity of interpretations to understand the possible meanings generated by the gap between Bebel's intention and expression. By permitting the polysemic play of political discourse to play itself out, Fischer develops an analytic approach that is exceptionally well suited to his exploration of political culture. This, along with his nimble use of indirect evidence to transform the possible into the likely, makes Fischer's approach extraordinarily refreshing. Given our tendency as historians of late modern Europe to react to the overwhelming number of primary sources with interpretive haste, The Socialist Response to Antisemitism represents a landmark in the art of teasing meaning out of recalcitrant sources that is well worth emulating. For this reason alone, I highly recommend Fischer's book.
