Timelines

The massive economic boom in the years immediately following the empire’s founding came to a sudden end in 1873 with the global economic crisis, later known as the Great Depression. Mass layoffs and a sharp decline in production followed. The middle-class citizens and dismissed workers were the ones who suffered most. Antisemitism grew because Jews were publicly blamed for the crisis. Politically antisemitic groups such as the “Berlin Movement” exploited the growing dissatisfaction to spread their ideology through extensive propaganda. By the mid-1870s, a strong antisemitic attitude had established itself in society. Years later, this reached the educational elite through the so-called “Antisemitism Dispute.” In 1880, the teacher Bernhard Förster and the publicist Max Liebermann drafted an “Antisemite Petition.” This petition called for the repeal of constitutional equality for Jews and their exclusion from government offices. Furthermore, it demanded a ban on immigration of so-called “Eastern Jews” (see labor migration in the German Empire, 1880). About 250,000 people signed it. Among the signatories, besides professors, merchants, and lawyers, were mainly students and their fraternities. The petition was characterized by its racist conception, replacing the formerly religiously motivated anti-Judaism with a volkisch (ethnic nationalist) ideology. As a result, the term antisemitism entered the German language, although its precise definition refers to opposition against the Semitic language family. In the political context of that period, however, it was understood and reproduced as hostility toward Jewish people. Chancellor Bismarck ignored the petition. With the founding of the “German Social Party” and the “Antisemitic People’s Party” (later the “German Reform Party”) in the early 1890s, antisemitic ideology became openly present in politics. In the 1893 Reichstag elections, both parties increased their voter base and together held 16 seats. The following year, they merged to form the “German Social Reform Party.” After initial successes, they suffered an electoral defeat and ended their alliance. Both splinter parties also failed in subsequent elections, causing open antisemitism to disappear from the political stage for a time. This changed again with the 1913 Reichstag elections, which antisemitic parties and groups later called the “Jewish elections.” They suspected “Jewish forces” behind the clear victory of the SPD and refused to recognize the new parliament. However, antisemitic parties had almost no parliamentary significance until the end of World War I. Extra-parliamentarily, volkisch-nationalist and racist-antisemitic associations immediately organized themselves after the Reichstag elections into the “German National People’s Party” (later the “German Fatherland Party”). In 1918, it had around 800,000 members and served as a gathering point for many national associations and right-wing organizations. In response to the growing antisemitism in politics and society during the German Empire, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith was founded in 1893, quickly attracting several tens of thousands of members. They fought for civil rights, equality, and the compatibility of “being German” and “being Jewish.” During the Weimar Republic and the early years of National Socialism, the Central Association was the most important organization representing the interests of Jewish people until it was banned in 1938 (see Antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933).