Received: 12 August 2019 Accepted: 20 August 2019 DOI: 10.1111/lands.12449

BOOK REVIEWS

WELTKREIG. SPALTUNG. REVOLUTION: SOZIALDEMOKRATIE 1916–1922

Uli Schöler, ed. j Thilo Scholle, ed.

Bonn: Dietz, 2018. 472 pp. Euros € 30.00 (paperback)

One could make an educated guess as to what the takeaway message of a Dietz publication on the history of German Social Democracy around the time of the Great Socialist Schism is going to be. Sympathies are to be had with the Social Democratic rather than the Communist offshoot of the split naturally. The party of democratic socialism and its associates will be complemented, albeit with some reservation—it is hard, for example, to overlook the SPD's nationalistic tendencies during the First World War or its unsettling relationship with right-wing paramilitaries in the Weimar Republic's early days. The SPD's ethical dimension will be credited, for idealism is not the sole preserve of radi- cal socialist tendencies. Its building of a fledgling democratic welfare state will be recognized; the sins of war and burdens of responsible government will be properly appreciated. The Cold War may be long gone, but in-house Social Democratic historiography plows a familiar furrow, as it has done since the era of West Germany, Bad Godesberg, and the Wall. Whatever its faults, German Social Democracy stands for the progressive best of the modern liberal democratic tradition. The Schism's birth, years of war, splits, and revolution at the end of the 1910s are the focus of an edited collection of papers Weltkreig. Spaltung. Revolution: Sozialdemokratie 1916–1922 published by Dietz last year, 100 years after the tumultuous revolutionary events of 1918 and 101 years after the founding of the underappreciated third wheel of the Schism, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). This collection is intended to differ from cosy familiar interpretations of the German Revolution, whether in-house or standard Leninist accusations concerning selling out the German proletariat. For instance, it is the USPD that complicates too glib a Cold War-influenced account of this period for this collection's edi- tors, Uli Schöler and Thilo Scholle. It is the USPD neither fully removed from nor utterly at home in its original Social Democratic host that points to the flaws in the familiar view. For Schöler and Scholle, the routine portrayal of the Social Democratic German revolutionary past, particularly in its heighted form of left versus right, of crass counterrevolutionary bureaucrats versus crass putschists, is “unproductive” (17). This book provides an excellent reference point for the latest scholarship on the Social Democrats of an early Weimar vintage. Many of the authors included in this collection are the current biographical authori- ties on their respective subjects. If there is a point to the 32 short papers making up this collection, it is the credence given to the old idiom caught between two stools. The idiom crops up in the titles of Teresa Löwe-Bahners' chap- ter on Eduard Bernstein's postwar activities and of Hartfrid Krause's portrait of Georg Ledebour, an unpigeonholeable Social Democrat who was not a Spartacist, Kautskyite, or orthodox party function- ary. It is hard to put Social Democrats into two distinct camps according to Weltkreig. Spaltung. Revolution. If war policy sundered Social Democracy organizationally for a short time, it did not nec- essarily divide Social Democrats over their progressive commitment to transform German and inter- national society, and the republican duty to turn the Kaiserreich into a Volksstaat. This commitment

© 2019 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Labor and Society. 2019;22:917–928. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lands 917 918 BOOK REVIEWS crossed party lines. It was evident in the departure and eventual return of many from the USPD to their old party home in 1922, and evidences how Social Democracy was more than the extension of the SPD wartime bogeyman and the first Weimar President, Friedrich Ebert. An obvious characteristic of Weltkreig. Spaltung. Revolution is that it is comprised of mostly bio- graphical sketches. And a large proportion of these are devoted to prominent USPD-ers such as Luise Zietz, Kautsky, Bernstein, Hugo Hasse, Ledebour, Rudolf Hilferding, Robert Dißmann, Heinrich Ströbel, Arthur Crispien, Alfred Henke, and Ernst Däumig. Mehrheitssozialdemokraten are also cov- ered. There is a chapter on the internal party conduct of the three Social Democratic chancellors of the Republic by Bernd Braun, Bernward Anton looks at the incubation of the wartime policy of col- laboration and pragmatism in the thought of a leading figure of the party right Wolfgang Heine, in the pages of the revisionist Sozialistische Monatshefte, and Ralf Regener sketches the solidly moder- ate leadership of Heinrich Peus and Heinrich Deist in the small Duchy later Free State of Anhalt. Peus's and Deist's type of classic Social Democrat reformism was due to Anhalt's liberal political cli- mate, as the description of Anhalt in Bernd Rother's compare and contrast with fellow Federal State and Duchy Braunschweig demonstrates. The positive contribution of this collection can be said to be that how it shows the ambiguities of its Social Democratic cast. Carl Legien, the long-standing trade union leader and committed opponent of left-wing radicalism, was not as pro-war as may be thought; his bellicosity tempered by scepticism over government claims. Ebert did not find it easy to purge the left from the party, and unity was too important for this right of center, not right-wing politician. The long-standing President of the Wei- mar Reichstag, Silesian Paul Löbe, was the model of a constructive leftist who remained within the SPD. Even Erhard Auer, the successor to Georg von Vollmar as the lodestar of right-wing Bavarian Social Democracy, wished to explore peace overtures as war dragged on. In the case of Paul Levi, his political life took him through all three of the major left of center parties. Levi's fellow right Com- munist Clara Zetkin's internationalist feminism meant that she still held some store in reviving the spirit of the Second International. East Prussian Otto Braun's service to the largest component part of the new Republic was to be the consummate anti-Prussian Prussian, rooted in his community but by no means a continuity figure as regards the Bismarckian mantle of Minister President. Core to Weltkreig. Spaltung. Revolution's cast of characters are the Independent Socialists. Despite the pejorative of centralism often leveled at these last of the Erfurtains, those who would defend Social Democracy's gradualist traditions and foreswear the Bolshevization of revolutionary socialism were not quietist. As represented in Weltkreig. Spaltung. Revolution, there were quite a few grades of USPD-er. One had the militant peace activist, idealist, and Marxist Ströbel, for example, a consistent advocate for international cooperation. Zietz, the ceaseless advocate for equality between the sexes, toed the party line, joined the USPD, and then spoke up for proletarian government by the revolutionary councils in the 1918/19 debates. Mathilde Jacob, a Spartacist member of the USPD and Levi's coworker and fellow traveler, was a tireless revolutionary and defender of the intellectual leg- acy of Rosa Luxemburg, her more famous coworker. For his efforts, USPD chair Hasse gets a glow- ing write up in his chapter by Ernst-Alberts Seils. Weltkreig. Spaltung. Revolution is certainly not SPD hagiography. But neither is it the challenge to historical common sense that its editors intend. That the Social Democratic family was inclusive, more than a collection of acolytes around Ebert or the infamous Gustav Noske, is an important qualifications to in-house SPD history, yet one does not need to participate in the Manichean blame game highlighted by the editors in their introduction, or carry a torch for the far-left condemnation of Weimar's socialist sell-outs, to note that these caveats do not challenge the fundamental view as regards the limitations of Social Democracy in this period. It is still the case, as this collection tacitly bears witness to, that the