ABSTRACT
The German trade unions experienced at least four decades of changing fortunes and of dogged struggle for the survival of their organizations before the demise of the Sozialistengesetz allowed them. Germany had a long tradition of authoritarian laws against combination which actually reached a new peak in the repressive measures against the journeymen's movements at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Class-motivated and official repression was thus inherent in the development of the constitutional state of Prussian Germany in modern times. The history of the German employers' associations can certainly not be said to date only from the early 1890s and certainly not only from the well-known strike of the textile workers of Crimmitschau in 1903. The early history of the German labour movement displays certain decisive characteristics which can only be attributed to the specific development of modern Germany.
