Ebook: German social democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism

No political parties of present-day Germany are separated by a wider gulf than the two parties of labor, one democratic and reformist, the other totalitarian and socialist-revolutionary. Social Democrats and Communists today face each other as bitter political enemies across the front lines of the cold war; yet they share a common origin in the Social Democratic Party of Imperial Germany. How did they come to go separate ways? By what process did the old party break apart? How did the prewar party prepare the ground for the dissolution of the labor movement in World War I, and for the subsequent extension of Leninism into Germany? To answer these questions is the purpose of my study. The development of the schism within the body of the old party provides the theme of the work; the history of the late German Empire, its setting. I have attempted to illuminate the internal dynamic of the split in the light of the external political and economic pressures which forced it forward.