Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany

The SDAP was one of the earliest organizations to arise from German workers' unionizing activity, but it was not the first. At the group's founding in 1869, the fast-growing working class of the Industrial Revolution had already established several notable associations for workers' advocacy. Chief among these were Leopold Sonnemann's Assembly of German Worker Associations (Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine, VDAV) and Ferdinand Lassalle's General German Workers' Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV).[1]

The largest group by far was the VDAV. Through the 1860s, it remained mostly apolitical, dedicated to pocketbook matters and fully integrated with the paradigms of liberal economic interests. The VDAV did its best to ignore the political agitation of Lassalle's much smaller yet more active ADAV. The Lassalleans were seen as insufficiently committed to basic economic matters. Much of their political appeal was based on what socialists considered to be an alarming militancy in support of German nationalism and the question of Greater Germany. They displayed a discomfiting closeness to the militaristic Kingdom of Prussia.[2] Eventually, the sundry turmoil created by the German unification wars helped politicize large elements of the previously unmoved VDAV. Some followed Sonnemann to the new moderately socialist German People's Party (founded in 1868), while others were ready to abandon the VDAV structure altogether and establish a more radical political party.[1]

Meeting in the city of Eisenach in Saxony, the VDAV activists founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) on 7–9 August 1869. The Eisenachers, as they came to be called, were under the leadership of Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel.[3]

The political theorist Karl Marx had a significant personal influence upon the newly formed party, being a friend and mentor to both Bebel and Liebknecht. Marx and Friedrich Engels steered the party toward more Marxian socialism and welcomed them (as far as German law would allow) into their International Workingmen's Association (IWA).[4][5]

The party press was a vital element of the SDAP's political strategy. The party's newspaper was first called Demokratisches Wochenblatt (Democratic Weekly Paper) and later Der Volksstaat (The People's State) and was edited by Liebknecht.[6] The paper was published in Leipzig from 2 October 1869 to 23 September 1876.[7] The party did not yet have its own printers, but Liebknecht was ambitious in his efforts to promote its publications on a wide scale as educational tools for workers. Although most issues of Der Volksstaat were primarily composed of incendiary writing about the German political situation, Liebknecht attempted as much as possible to include essays on political theory, transcripts of academic lectures and even some popular fiction.[8]

The competition between moderate and radical factions reached a boiling point when SDAP and Lassalle's ADAV finally merged to form a united front. In a convention at Gotha in 1875, the new fusion party was renamed the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany^b (German: Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SAPD).[12] Though the resultant Gotha Program largely satisfied the conventioneers, the new policies were denounced by Marx himself in the scathing essay Critique of the Gotha Program (1875).[13]

Despite its relatively moderate stance, the SAPD organization was deemed subversive and officially banned by the German Empire under the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878. Under proscription, the party's members continued to organize successfully. After the ban was lifted in 1890, it renamed itself the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) and surged at the polls.[14] By the 1912 elections, the SPD, a direct descendant of the small SDAP, had become the largest party in Germany.[15]

Logo of the modern SPD

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• Blackbourn, David (2003). History of Germany, 1780-1918: the long nineteenth century. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 063123196X. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
• Bonnell, Andrew (2005). The people's stage in Imperial Germany: social democracy and culture 1890-1914. London: I.B. Tauris. ISBN 1850437955. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
• Kitchen, Martin (1975). A History of Modern Germany, 1800–2000. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 1405100419. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
• Lindemann, Albert S. (1984). A History of European Socialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300032463. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
• Maehl, William Harvey (1980). August Bebel, shadow emperor of the German workers. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. ISBN 9780871691385. OCLC 7272323. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
• Marx, Karl (1994). Lawrence H. Simon (ed.). Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. p. 315. ISBN 9780872202184. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
• Roberts, Geoffrey K. (1997). Party politics in the new Germany. London; Herndon, VA: Pinter. ISBN 1855673118. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
• Steenson, Gary P. (1991). After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 9780822976738. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
• Turk, Eleanor L. (1999). The History of Germany. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 79. ISBN 031330274X. Retrieved 6 May 2013.