Ferdinand Lassalle – a charming, gallant workers leader

He wanted to organize the workers, but also lead them. Many had already found themselves in the workers’ training associations, which were still under the guardianship of bourgeois supporters. Ferdinand Lassalle wanted to emancipate them from them. The workers should find themselves, become aware of their own strength. In early 1863, in his “open reply” he formulated the principles that should be based on a workers ‘organization that is independent of the liberal bourgeoisie: “The workers’ stand must be constituted as an independent political party and make the general, same and direct right to vote for the fundamental solution word and banner of this party. The representation of the workers’ status in the legislative bodies of Germany – this is solely that can satisfy its legitimate interests in political terms. “

On April 11, 1825 in Wroclaw as the son of the Jewish silk dealer Ferdinand Johann Gottlieb Lassal, he actually wanted to enter the father’s footsteps professionally. But after a year, the son broke off the study of the commercial school in Leipzig. He was more interested in history, philosophy and philology and was politically interested at an early stage. The 15-year-old entrusted his diary to him that he appears to him as a “great dungeon with people whose rights are taken by tyrants with feet”. He eagerly read the works of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne.

From 1843 to 1846 he studied at the universities of Breslau and Berlin. In between he had visited Paris, where he now got to know Heine and Börne personally as well as the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Fascinated by the freelance spirit in the French capital, he then changed his name Lassal to the French -sounding Lassalle.

How much lassalle is still in today’s SPD, which just dares another coalition with the Union?

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After his return from France, Lassalle met the Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt in Berlin. At the time, she unsuccessfully tried to return her assets and the legal divorce from her authoritarian husband. Although Lassalle had never studied law, he took over her defense. He left the university and fought for the wife he revered for eight years. In 1854 he won the process after numerous disputes before various courts. The countess received a high severance payment. She insisted that Lassalle received an annual income of her that made him financially independent in all his political projects.

One of his intellectual teachers and lifelong friend was Wilhelm Wolff, publicist, politician and companion of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In the revolution of 1848/49, Lassalle in Düsseldorf was one of the most impressive personalities of the revolutionary fights there. He often met Karl Marx and other members of the Communist Federation in Cologne. Now he also saw himself as a communist. Because of his many subversive speeches and essays, he was arrested and brought to court where he could not be forbidden. The exposure of the authorities in Prussia, which was formulated as sacrosanks on May 3, 1849, was particularly impressive and moving on May 3, 1849. Lassalle defended the bourgeois rights, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, conjured up in general democratic values ​​and explained: “The basic principle of the constitutional state is that in it there is no longer the will of the monarch that it is rather the expression of the general spirit that was to be used by the people’s representation.” Although the court was not guilty in the sense of the indictment ” The Prussian state forces for the resolution of violence against the crown in prison. He remained in custody for more than two months, but was then released temporarily. In 1850 he was finally detained again and was only released again in April 1851.

After his release from prison and the completion of the Hatzfeldt matter, Lassalle resumed his political and literary work. A treatise on the Italian War of 1859 and an investigation into the system of the acquired rights of 1861. Lassalles drama about Franz von Sickingen, the noble revolutionary leader of the Peasant War, attracted attention in literary circles in 1858. He helped Engels in the publication of his writing “PO and Rhine” in Germany and supported Marx financially. In 1861 and 1862 Marx and Lassalle met in Berlin and London. The relationship between the two was friendly and characterized by mutual respect – but only on the surface.

The time from 1860 was shaped by the strengthening of the labor movement in Germany. While Marx and Engels defined the class struggle as a necessary result of economic laws, Lassalle saw the state as a guarantor of an ethical mission: as a tool for fulfilling the demands of the workers. In contrast to Marx and Engels, he believed in an alliance of the labor movement with the Prussian state against the liberal bourgeoisie. Therefore, he put his hope for the Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, with whom he met several times in 1863. Bismarck wanted to use the starking labor movement as a means of the still existing liberal opposition that opposed its authoritarian system. But when it became clear that Bismarck did not need the workers’ movement and Lassalle could not make it served him, the Prime Minister Rasch from Lassalle moved away again.

For Lassalle as for every democrats of his time, democracy was defined as a system of election processes and representative bodies that legitimized the existing social order. He saw the minimum prerequisite for a functioning democracy in regularly held elections, in which only the men were supposed to take part, but he also saw the rule of the poor, owned classes, especially the worker, as a basic requirement for a democracy that opened the way towards socialism.

Lassalle was able to win a good part of industrial workers, especially in Saxony, Berlin and in the Rhineland. MPs from these areas provided the majority of the delegates who met on May 23, 1863 in Leipzig for the founding conference of the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV). Lassalle was not the founder of the AdAV, his participation in the conference was rather back to an invitation that had assumed the same group of workers who also asked him about the “open answer”. However, through his tireless activities, his intellectual and journalistic skills, he was almost predestined for the management of the young organization and was elected to her first president. He also did a lot to popularize Marx ‘Ideengut and prepared the workers for the appropriation of Marxism. But his authoritarian leadership style led to sharp internal party criticism. On August 31, 1864, Lassalle’s life near Geneva came to a sudden end in the duel with a gelding noble because of a history of women. His body was buried in the Jewish cemetery of his hometown Breslau, where the grave survived the Nazi rule.

On the 120th anniversary of the death of Lassalles, the SPD and the SED laid wreaths and flower containers in 1984, but was delayed in order to avoid a meeting of both delegations. Hermann Oncken and Gustav Mayer deservedly made themselves for Lassalles inheritance in the Empire and in the Weimar Republic, Helmut Hirsch in the Federal Republic, Shlomo Na’aman in Israel and the Leipzig historian Hans Jürgen Friederici and literary Stefan Heym in the GDR.

In the meantime it has become silent about this workers leader. How much Lassalle is still in today’s SPD, which now dares to coalition with the Christian social and Christian Democrats again? That doesn’t mean lassall charm and its galantry.

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