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Election
Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860-1918 Oxford University Press Cloth 2017, Paperback 2020 30%
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Red Saxony throws new light on the reciprocal relationship between political
modernization and authoritarianism in Germany over the span of six decades.
Election battles were
fought so fiercely in Imperial Germany because they reflected two kinds of
democratization. Social democratization could not be stopped, but political
democratization was opposed by many members of the German bourgeoisie.
Frightened by the electoral success of the Social Democrats after 1871,
anti-democrats deployed many strategies that flew in the face of electoral
fairness. They battled socialists, liberals, and Jews at election time, but
they also strove to rewrite the electoral rules of the game.
Using a regional lens to
rethink older assumptions about Germany’s changing political culture, this
volume focuses as much on contemporary Germans’ perceptions of electoral
fairness as on their experiences of voting. It devotes special attention to
various semi-democratic voting systems whereby a general and equal suffrage
(for the Reichstag) was combined with limited and unequal ones for local and regional
parliaments. For the first time, democratization at all three tiers of
governance and their reciprocal effects are considered together.
Although the bourgeois
face of German authoritarianism was nowhere more evident than in the Kingdom of
Saxony, Red Saxony illustrates how other Germans, too, grew to
fear the spectre of democracy. Certainly twists and turns lay ahead, yet that
fear made it easier for Hitler and the Nazis to win elections in the 1920s and
to entomb German democracy in 1933.
Jacket illustration: “Election Outcome.” Caption: [Kaiser Wilhelm II:] “There’s the red monster again,
crawling out of the voting urn; things will only improve when I name the
parliamentary deputies myself.” By one reading of this cartoon, not only the
Kaiser’s authority was threatened; so was his manhood. Source: Thomas Theodor Heine, „Wahlergebnis“, Simplicissimus 8 (1903-4), Nr. 53,
Extra-Nummer, Reichstagswahl, 1 / Simplicissimus Online: Herzogin
Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar.
© 2017, 2021 James Retallack. All
rights reserved.
Latest update: 1 November 2021.