After years of relative neglect in the historiography of modern Germany, labour history has recently regained some importance. This renewed interest has been accompanied both by a reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of former research in the field and by a new pluralism of methods.Footnote ¹ Andrew G. Bonnell's monograph is to be situated in this context. As Bonnell is a long-standing expert on the book's subject, his inspiring and well-composed book synthesizes many years of deep reflection both at the thematic and the conceptual levels. Not only does it give new insight into the history of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and “the movement culture of the party” (p. 5), but it also demonstrates how cultural–historical approaches can enrich labour history without abandoning social history.

While labour history has often focused on the split and failure of the SPD by reading its history “backwards from 1914” (p. 5), Bonnell takes the opposite approach.Footnote ² His monograph centres on the issue of “why the Social Democrats were as successful as they were in creating a mass working-class party under the conditions of an authoritarian imperial state” (p. 5), and aims at re-evaluating the history of the pre-1914 SPD as part of the Second International. But the book's claim goes beyond labour history as a specialized field, emphasizing the continuing, while often marginalized, relevance of its findings for the history of Imperial Germany, which is currently the subject of renewed controversy.Footnote ³

The book is composed of eight thematic chapters – revised journal articles and primarily published essays – which raise already well-studied questions anew as well as address hitherto existing research desiderata. All chapters build on a wide variety of sources, ranging from the party press, pamphlets, and memoirs to police reports and further archive material, including the voices of ordinary workers wherever possible. The eight chapters draw a multi-layered picture of the socialist milieu and its political culture. This picture includes both important theoretical controversies within the various SPD factions and the interplay of ordinary workers’ everyday experience, socialist agitation, and the circulation of socialist ideas. Furthermore, it comprises both the independent sphere of socialist culture and the numerous overlaps, interfaces, and encounters between different political milieus.

Though the book's structure is thematic, each chapter is arranged in chronological order. Starting with the foundation of two competing parties – the “Lassallean” General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV) and the “Eisenacher” Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) – in the 1860s, the author describes their political unification in 1875 and the formation of a diverse socialist culture in the movement's heyday from around the turn of the century. The book concludes by discussing the relationship between socialism and republicanism, giving a brief outlook on its legacy in Weimar Germany.

Chapter 1 on “Ideology, Leadership, and Party Culture” and Chapter 2 on “Internationalism, Nationalism and Particularism” cover important theoretical controversies from the 1860s on. As Bonnell convincingly argues, the theoretical differences between the ADAV and the SDAP were less explicit than could be assumed, Lassalle's texts being reprinted by the SDAP despite its Marxist orientation. Moreover, after unification, a Lassalle cult remained dominant in socialist tradition-building until the turn of the century, not least for strategic reasons to demonstrate the movement's unity. The greatest disagreement between the two parties existed on the “national question”, as evidenced, among other things, by their attitude toward the Franco-Prussian War. Furthermore, different positions on nationalism and internationalism existed within the party's factions and its rank-and-file members. The author traces their unfolding history throughout the following decades until World War I, closing the chapter by discussing the legacies of 1870/1871 for 1914 – a thought-provoking question, though it could have been elaborated in more detail.

The following chapters on “Attitudes to Labour” (Chapter 3), “The Politics of Subsistence” (Chapter 4), and “Reading Marx” (Chapter 6) concentrate on the relationship between the SPD and its working-class base, more precisely the adaption and transformation of socialist theory by rank-and-file members. Bonnell's approach of not narrowing the analyses to strict reception of the socialist theoretical classics proves to be particularly conclusive. Notions of and attitudes towards labour rarely evolved against the backdrop of reading Marx's theory of alienation; few rank-and-file members fully read Marx's Capital or other theoretical classics. Nevertheless, socialist ideas and theorems diffused in more ambiguous ways, through pamphlets, newspapers, and other means, whose production costs decreased significantly in the period under consideration. All three chapters show that workers perceived the world through socialist lenses because socialist theorems paralleled their everyday experiences. The SPD, on the other hand, used this correspondence for agitation. The impressive analysis of the recurring food protests (Chapter 4), which took place with a high degree of female participation, is just one example of this connection.

Chapter 7 on “Culture, Sociability, Organisation” and chapter 5 on “Reds in the Ranks” provide somewhat opposing perspectives on the object of research. Chapter 7 elaborates the socialist cultural activities directed against – but nevertheless influenced by – bourgeois culture as something like a counter-world to Imperial German society; it analyses the ways in which these activities met the needs of rank-and-file members and their families after a long day of work – thus tackling the question of their contribution to successful socialist mass mobilization. In contrast, Chapter 5 focuses on the encounters, interfaces, and demarcations between different milieus in the military, and Chapter 8 on “Socialism and Republicanism” discusses the socialist controversy on republicanism under the perspective of state persecution. The findings will be discussed in more detail in the following paragraphs.

Building on this broad thematic overview, how does the monograph contribute to the author's central question? Bonnell's answer is a multi-layered one; he persuasively argues throughout his book that the SPD “was successful in mobilising its mainly working-class base precisely through the combination of addressing the real concerns of workers in the present, in a society that was experienced as highly stratified by class, and offering a radical, transformative perspective, that promised a qualitatively different kind of social order” (p. 7). Additionally, socialist agitation profited from the comparatively high literacy rate among the continuously growing urban working class as well as the decrease in paper- and printing-technology costs. Despite this collective promise for a better socialist future, the SPD was a highly ambivalent and sometimes even self-contradictory movement, the question of nationalism and internationalism being the most evident example. Against this background, it is far from implausible that the promise meant different things to the distinct factions of the movement, let alone socialist individuals. Remarkably, these differences notwithstanding, the promise temporarily united the movement, which might be explained by the interaction of the party's political exclusion and its orientation towards a better future, concealing present conflicts within the movement.

What significance do the results have for the general history of Imperial Germany? Bonnell's book reveals that socialist culture criticized bourgeois culture, while simultaneously incorporating and reinterpreting some of its elements. Socialist agitation in turn had a major effect on Imperial German state and society as a whole. The chapter on Social Democrats in the military – an issue so far widely neglected in historical research – proves to be especially compelling in this regard. It not only elaborates conflicting socialist positions on the issue, criticizing militarism while also adhering to ideas of manhood, comradeship, and honour, it also discusses the experience of socialists and workers in the army, which was characterized by humiliation and physical abuse, on the one hand, and mutual solidarity and covert agitation on the other. Furthermore, the chapter elaborates the reactions of the German authorities, which included banning soldiers from attending socialist pubs, changing the military's recruiting patterns, intense monitoring, marking and dislocation of socialist soldiers, and imposing draconic punishments on suspects of socialist agitation. Social Democrats in turn responded in part with public scandalization, legal education, and the intensification of the socialist theoretical preparation of young recruits.

Reading Bonnell's book, two further questions in particular arise. First, how can his findings be related to the history of the divided labour movement in the Weimar Republic? While Bonnell's focus on socialist mass mobilization is of central importance, one could object that it tends to disregard the precursors of the SPD's split and failure in 1914, and, more important, at the end of Weimar Germany. Some parts of the book – the ones on prejudices against Polish workers (p. 52), on the socialist emphasis on war and comradeship (pp. 105–108, 125–126), on something like a specific German notion of work (pp. 62–67), and the orientation towards the Volk – indicate that nationalism and antisemitism also existed within the labour movement. Were these precursors marginalized by the uniting promise of a better socialist future? And did the promise's integrating force wane and the diverging ways of understanding it unfold their explosive power in 1918/1919 when the historical possibility to realize it was finally there? Chapter 8 points in that direction. It argues conclusively that there existed no concrete idea “about what a republic meant” (p. 196) but fairly discusses the anti-republican sentiments in parts of the labour movement and their impact on the failure of Weimar Germany.

Second, how were the SPD and the important themes around which it was centred influenced by the International, and how does the book's case study relate to labour movements in other countries? While Bonnell discusses the theory and practice of internationalism at some points (Chapter 2), he explicitly excludes comparative and transnational perspectives. As with any case study, this limitation reflects practical reasons. Nevertheless, it raises important further research questions such as: To what extent did the organized labour movements in other countries centre around the same topics, and in which way did they differ from the German case? Was there, for example, a unique German tradition in notions of labour and work? Future research on these questions can build on Bonnell's approach, by offering a similar thematic history of the labour movement in Weimar Germany and other national contexts.

These further questions notwithstanding, Bonnell's impressive monograph offers rich new insights for historians familiar with the field and can also serve as an introductory overview. Furthermore, Bonnell's study convincingly demonstrates that labour history is not just a specialized field, but highly important for modern German history; it offers crucial approaches to examining this interrelated history. This joint perspective should inspire further research on different issues such as the history of democracy and democratization, including the local and regional level of analysis. Since the book will be valuable to a large audience, it is only to be welcomed that an affordable paperback edition was published by Haymarket Books in October 2021.