Berlin has long been a hotbed for working-class organizing and radical left-wing politics. The city has a reputation for being unruly. When Joseph Goebbels was appointed the Nazi Party's district leader in 1926, he described Berlin as "the reddest city in Europe besides Moscow." From the Tailors' Revolution of 1830 and the barricades of 1848, to the rise of a vast industrial working class later in the 19th century, revolution, protest and rebellion run deep throughout the city's history.
While the future German philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx was still in high school in the small town of Trier in Prussia's Rhine Province, Berlin was fast becoming a center of the country's labor movement. It was during the March Revolution of 1848, a failed attempt to create a democratic German nation-state, that the General Workers' Brotherhood was founded, one of the first workers' organizations to become active in Germany.
By the 1870s and 1880s, major industries from mechanical and railway engineering to ready-made clothing were located in the city. As the working-class population grew, this, in turn, impacted the city's political culture. "It became more populist in a positive sense: moving away from the traditional, elitist politics of the bourgeois liberals who had long dominated Berlin, and toward the inclusion of ordinary people, since at least men were now also important voters," Axel Weipert, a historian and author of the book "Red Berlin" (2019), tells DW.
Berlin's labor movement became increasingly radical, partly in response to heavy-handed repression under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Although Bismarck created the first modern welfare state to try and undercut the rising popularity of the socialist movement, he also introduced laws banning socialist and communist organizations, newspapers and public gatherings, as well as independent trade unions. After Bismarck resigned in 1890, the anti-socialist laws were repealed, and the ideas of Karl Marx and his fellow revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels became the ideology of what Weipert describes as a "genuine mass movement" in Berlin.
In 1914, the labor movement was seriously discredited when the SPD leadership and the trade unions decided not to oppose the war pushed by Kaiser Wilhelm II. But from 1916 onwards, Berlin became the center of mass labor strikes against the war. In January 1918, around half a million Berlin workers joined the January Strike, triggered by war-weariness, severe food shortages and economic ruin. The Spartacist Uprising of 1919 was launched to overthrow Germany's provisional government and establish a republic of workers' councils. Its violent suppression, which resulted in scores of deaths — Liebknecht and Luxemburg were both murdered by soldiers of right-wing paramilitary militias — permanently fractured the political left.
As the capital of the newly founded Weimar Republic, Berlin remained a hotbed of radical politics in the interwar period. This was especially true in neighborhoods with large numbers of tenement buildings, such as Wedding, Kreuzberg and Neukölln, where thousands of factory workers lived in squalid conditions. "Bloody May" in 1929 saw brutal attacks on illegal May Day demonstrations, which left over 30 people dead. During the Great Depression era, the SPD lost much of its support between 1929 and 1933, as joblessness ravaged the city. Some joined the KPD, which became known as the "Party of the Unemployed." Others joined far-right paramilitary groups such as the Nazi stormtroopers.
After the Nazis took power in 1933, many of the labor movement leaders were killed or exiled. Then, in the aftermath of World War II, Berlin was divided into two separate political systems. East Berlin became the capital of the communist German Democratic Republic. Isolated from the Federal Republic of Germany, West Berlin deindustrialized, the labor movement weakened, and the SPD moved to the right. During the Cold War, many left-leaning young men moved to West Berlin to evade military service. This intensified the student movement, the center of which was Berlin's Free University. It was there that historic sit-ins were held. The fatal shooting of student Benno Ohnesorg by a police officer during a demonstration against the visiting Shah of Iran in 1967 radicalized a generation that led the widespread protests of 1968.
In the early 1970s, a housing shortage led parts of the student movement, as well as apprentices and young migrant families, to squat in West Berlin's empty buildings. Today, as gentrification sweeps the city, Berlin is home to the strongest and most radical tenants' movements in Germany. In a 2021 referendum, 59% of voters in the city approved the expropriation of property from private real-estate companies. "It's not Berlin tenants against Berlin landlords. It's tenants against global capital. I think people have started to realize these contradictions, and this is why class-based policy concepts are becoming popular again," says Hoffrogge.
Source: www.dw.com