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Strassenpolitik. Zur Sozialgeschichte der offentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by David Crew

The main aim of Thomas Lindenberger's extremely original and quite fascinating study, is to "establish the importance of the street as an arena of politics . . . in the late Kaiserreich." (p. 385) This he does admirably through a detailed analysis of three main forms of "street politics;" (1) everyday struggles between the police and crowds of people on the street - what he calls an "alltagliche Kleinkrieg" - for the control and use of public space, (2) conflicts between the police and crowds in the context of strikes and lockouts (Streikexzessen), and (3) street demonstrations organized by the Social Democratic party. Lindenberger's first category - "alltagliche Kleinkrieg" might appear to stretch the definition of "politics" beyond recognition. Yet detailed analysis of more than four hundred incidents in which crowds formed and the police intervened shows that the police themselves politicized almost every collective challenge to their authority. Haunted by the knowledge that, in nineteenth-century Europe, revolution had repeatedly been nourished by the life of the streets, the police created endless occasions for conflict by their unrelenting discrimination against the lower classes of the city. Recruited largely from the army, the police expected to be obeyed without question, and tended to view street conflicts in terms of military actions. Armed with sabres, the police could be extremely dangerous. Despite some signs of a less paranoid approach just before the war, the police and their political masters "remained the prisoners of this unbroken tradition of 'fortress practice' [Festungspraxis]." (p. 394)

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"From below," on the other hand, street politics gave expression to lower class conceptions of appropriate behavior in public and local resentment of"intruders" from "outside." Ordinary people's animosity might be directed against employers, publicans, landlords, or shopkeepers who infringed local norms - even against members of one's own social stratum (i.e. strikebreakers, but also wife beaters, animal abusers). But the primary targets of popular anger were the police, whose practices "were felt by male and female workers to be not only petty and spiteful, but discriminatory and demeaning." (p. 395) Street politics "from below" was thus not simply directed against public order, per se, but attempted to assert alternative popular conceptions of public order, justice, honor, and dignity.

Popular actions against "demeaning treatment" by the police could not dispense with the "body language" (including violence) which led authorities to dismiss street crowds as unruly, irrational and dangerous "mobs" and to restore "order" with force. By insisting on discipline and self-control, SPD street demonstrations, especially those in support of suffrage reform, attempted to delegitimate the use of force by the police. Putting tens of thousands of bodies on the streets, only for symbolic purposes (i.e. not to stage a rebellion) contradicted previous experiences - whereas the traditional Volkstumult threatened the existing order with "disorder," mass demonstrations staged by the labor movement challenged the existing order with the image (and promise) of an alternative order. The Social Democrats did such a good job of policing themselves that even bourgeois observers came to see SPD street demonstrations as relatively harmless affairs, hardly requiring the attention of the police at all.

While each of the three forms of "street politics" displayed distinctive characteristics they were interrelated in important ways. Lindenberger finds, for example, that all three forms of "street politics" achieved a common high point between 1906-12, then, from 1912/1913 their incidence diminished with remarkable simultaneity. Yet, the relationship between the different strands of "street politics" varied considerably from one urban neighborhood to the next. In the inner city, street politics was dominated by the "everyday conflicts" between the police and young, single males under thirty who had immigrated to Berlin and who "in the leisure time they spent together [on the streets], challenged the state's authority and defended themselves against its disciplinary interventions." (p. 390) This everyday Kleinkrieg was certainly not absent from the outer working-class districts of the city but here "strike excesses" assumed a greater significance than in the inner city and they tended more commonly to involve women and children as well as older married males. Street demonstrations were, however, influenced less by particular social milieus than by political symbolism and police practices. Illegal demonstrations that were meant to make a symbolic statement by marching to the central-city seats of power would almost certainly come into conflict with the police. Legal assemblies in the open air that remained in the city's outer districts could avoid such clashes.

By 1910, the Berlin police appeared to be in retreat. Public criticisms of their treatment of political gatherings that included left liberals and women's rights activists forced them to concede a partial legalization of street demonstrations. But the Berlin police president von Jagow was determined to regain the initiative and reverse SPD successes. That same year, the police escalated the confrontation in the Moabit district between strikers, employers and the strikebreakers they had hired into a miniature civil war, lasting several days. (p. 401) Moabit clearly restricted the SPD's room for future political action. Even though the police suffered enormous loss of face as a result of their brutality in Moabit (some foreign journalists covering the story were even attacked by sabre-wielding policemen), they nonetheless regained the initiative in the "struggle for the streets." Social Democratic leaders' fears of any future confrontation with the police froze SPD street politics at the stage reached by 1910. (p. 351) Legalized street demonstrations were now powerless to achieve much more than a temporary disruption of street traffic. The dynamic produced by the three mutually reinforcing strands of "street politics" before October, 1910 rapidly began to dissipate. In the remaining years before the war "the police . . . remained sovereign masters of the streets." (p. 388) Only the demonstrations toward the end of the war managed to regain the explosive power of the street demonstrations before 1910.

Strassenpolitik. Zur Sozialgeschichte der offentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by David Crew

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