ABSTRACT
Analysis of the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) massive cultural and leisure organisations has focused on the way in which they embodied or reflected ‘bourgeois’ cultural values. The extent to which the German SPD shared national values and became integrated into the prevailing social and political order of the Wilhelmine Reich has been the subject of much controversy. The view that SPD cultural organisations simply reproduced Txnirgeois’ culture is open to question. First of all, most members of these organisations were also members of the SPD; and such membership could spell trouble with employers and die police. The predominant view of Britain in Wilhelmine Social Democracy reinforces the author’s contention that social-democratic attitudes were not those of Imperial Germany’s social and political establishment. The protectionist and even pro-Prussian attitude of the group of ‘revisionist imperialist’ intellectuals on the right of the SPD was far from typical of the party as a whole, as even Fletcher has to admit.
