Elun T. Gabriel. Assassins and Conspirators

Since the second half of the 1990s, the history of socialism and Social Democracy in Germany has not been among the “hottest” research topics. As transnational history became one of the field’s most important focal points during the early 2000s, interest in German socialism before 1914 waned. Recently, a number of historians have begun to buck this trend, among them John Phillip Short and Dennis Sweeney. Assassins and Conspirators: Anarchism, Socialism, and Political Culture in Imperial Germany, written by Elun T. Gabriel, does so as well. The book is a most welcome addition to the historiography on the German Empire. Gabriel demonstrates how vital both the German Social Democrats and the public debates that surrounded them were for the development of a modern, liberal (in the normative sense of the term), and democratic public sphere in Germany before 1914. Gabriel’s research has a double focus. On the one hand, he scrutinizes the inner-Social-Democratic debates about the illegitimacy of political violence as championed by anarchists. On the other hand, he analyzes the general political discussions sparked by the German Imperial government’s response to the perceived threat of anarchism and Social Democracy: the Anti-Socialist Law that prohibited socialist and Social-Democratic organizations in Germany from 1878 until 1890. In Gabriel’s view, these debates democratized German political discourse as well as German expectations regarding political practice before World War I. Beginning in 1878, within Social-Democratic ranks violence and politically motivated assassinations were harshly condemned and sympathizers with anarchist positions (of which there existed very few in the first place) were expelled. At the same time, left-liberals as well as many representatives of the Catholic Center Party sharply criticized the use of blunt administrative force to combat the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Left-liberals and Center Party politicians argued instead for an open political engagement with socialism based on rational political arguments rather than supporting the declaration of a legal state of exception (Kleiner Belagerungszustand) that justified curbing the political rights of German socialists. After 1878, the stress placed on civil political debate, disavowing violence, and the rule of law by the SPD as well as its left-liberal and Center Party opponents thus “normalized” the SPD. According to Gabriel, by 1890 the party therefore operated within the confines of “respectable” political discourse in Germany, thus even making it possible for prominent liberals such as Franz Mehring, who in the 1870s had written multiple critical essays about German Social Democracy, to join their ranks

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