Germany: The 1893 Reichstag Election in Eastern Saxony

Historians have long recognized the 1893 Reichstag election as a pivotal moment in German history, defined by an increasing role of anti-Semitism in political life and a surge in the German right. Occurring the year after the German Conservative Party (DKP) formally embraced anti-Semitism in its Tivoli Program, the election swept tens of anti-Semitic Conservatives into office alongside 16 delegates from newborn anti-Semitic parties that embraced a mass-agitational style. In the eastern half of Saxony, the anti-Semitic Reform Party took six of the seven seats it contested, including a shocking first-round majority (51.4%) won by the Reformer Heinrich Gräfe in the electoral district (Wahlkreis) of Bautzen-Kamenz against an equally anti-Semitic Conservative rival (27.7%) and two more distant challengers. To dub Germany’s 1893 election the “Anti-Semitic Reichstag Election” would be no overstatement, yet the successes of political anti-Semitism varied widely across space for reasons poorly understood. While eight in ten voters in Bautzen-Kamenz casted first-round ballots for virulent anti-Semites, the sole anti-Semitic candidate in neighboring Löbau district earned just 37.0% of first-round votes. The anti-Semites of adjoining Zittau failed even to field a candidate. Mapping the three districts’ voting results reveals a clear partition of eastern Saxony into a highly anti-Semitic northwesterly zone (Bautzen-Kamenz and parts of Löbau) and a southeasterly zone (Zittau and the remainder of Löbau) where anti-Semites gained little traction. Such a map problematizes existing literature on Saxon anti-Semitism—common claims that anti-Semitism resulted from real Jewish-gentile economic competition does not hold for Saxony’s most anti-Semitic district, home to almost no Jews—but also allows close interrogation of prevailing class-based explanations of German anti-Semitism more broadly. What might account for the drastic variation in anti-Semitism between eastern Saxony’s northwesterly and southeasterly zones? What does that say about German anti-Semitism more generally? Drawing on a range of statistical and discursive primary sources, we argue that political anti-Semitism became especially potent in areas where a particular constellation of social, economic, and political factors allowed residents to imagine Jews in far-off places as responsible for their local hardships. Much of the scholarly literature on German anti-Semitism overlooks the conditions under which such imagined Jews—a fabricated Jewish community created via propaganda—became the focal point of discontent among certain social groups. In eastern Saxony’s northwesterly zone, the predominance of the outdated woolen industry, the excessive interdependence of local agrarian and manufacturing interests, and the vulnerability of local economies to foreign competition both intensified late-century economic crises and made compelling the Reform Party’s claims that Jews in Berlin and abroad were to blame for local hardship. In the southeasterly zone, such conditions did not hold. The same anti-Semitic discourse that in the northwest spoke to the perceived interests of eastern Saxony’s disproportionately large cottager population and brought Gräfe to a first-round victory thus had little appeal. We corroborate our analysis not only by examining the results of the 1893 election, but also by detailing the stunning successes of the Reform Party in forming local branches and winning town council elections throughout Bautzen-Kamenz in the run-up to 1893—successes never matched in the southeasterly zone whose distinct mode of production left little room for anti-Semites to explain local hardships by way of imagined Jewish enemies.