ABSTRACT
A survey of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) from 1969 to the 1990s must be preceded by an account of its development since its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century. The SPD organization, a model for many other European socialist parties, was a hierarchical structure of national, regional, and local organs. A socialist trade union movement emerged then, strengthening the party's reformist wing. Party reformists strengthened their case for working within the existing capitalist system by pointing to striking gains made by the SPD in successive Reichstag elections. After the Nazi regime collapsed in May 1945, former SPD officials received permission from Allied occupation authorities to rebuild their party. The party's evolution from its birth in the 1860s to the 1990s is characterized by its remarkable continuity or revival but also by its ideological and factional schisms and its leadership struggles spanning the decades of the Empire, Weimar Republic, and Federal Republic.
