Red Saxony throws new light on the reciprocal relationship between political modernization and authoritarianism in Germany over the span of six decades.
Election battles were fought so fiercely in Imperial Germany because they reflected two kinds of democratization. Social democratization could not be stopped, but political democratization was opposed by many members of the German bourgeoisie. Frightened by the electoral success of the Social Democrats after 1871, anti-democrats deployed many strategies that flew in the face of electoral fairness. They battled socialists, liberals, and Jews at election time, but they also strove to rewrite the electoral rules of the game. Using a regional lens to rethink older assumptions about Germany's changing political culture, this volume focuses as much on contemporary Germans' perceptions of electoral fairness as on their experiences of voting. It devotes special attention to various semi-democratic voting systems whereby a general and equal suffrage (for the Reichstag) was combined with limited and unequal ones for local and regional parliaments. For the first time, democratization at all three
tiers of governance and their reciprocal effects are considered together. Although the bourgeois face of German authoritarianism was nowhere more evident than in the Kingdom of Saxony, Red Saxony illustrates how other Germans grew to fear the spectre of democracy. Certainly twists and turns lay ahead, yet that fear made it easier for Hitler and the Nazis to win elections in the 1920s and to entomb German democracy in 1933.
Industry Reviews
Retallack's magnificent study explores election battles - encompassing both election campaigns and debates over suffrage laws - as the best site for understanding the course of regime transformation Historians will be impressed by [Retallack's] breathtaking knowledge of political life in Saxony, based on a firm command of the archival and secondary materials. * Anna Ross, German History *
Retallack in many ways presents a masterpiece of sober historical research By delivering in-depth studies of election and suffrage battles in Saxony, Retallack produces a cutting-edge, culturally inflected political history that combines a view from above with a view from below. * Stefan Berger, German Historical Institute London Bulletin *
[Retallack] has produced probably the most important English-language study ever published of the suffrage struggles that characterized 19th-century Europe. * Robert J. Goldstein, CHOICE *
Red Saxony is a powerful contribution that calls into question long- and widely-held assumptions while establishing new ones: it will define the field for years to come. The appearance of this book within the current global political moment, as long-held democratic commitments are increasingly under attack, makes Red Saxony a work as timely as it is erudite. * Hans Rosenberg Book Prize laudatio, Central European History Society *
James Retallack has become perhaps the most interesting and important historian of Imperial Germany currently working in the field. It is hard to think of a better book on Imperial Germany published in recent years. * Andrew G. Bonnell, European History Quarterly *
[A] combination of exhaustive archival research, complete mastery of the existing body of secondary scholarship, and writing that is engaging, erudite, and replete with literary references. The result is a singular accomplishment that will rank for years to come among the very best studies of Germany and the transformations of its political culture in the tumultuous period between unification and the end of World War I. * Larry Eugene Jones, American Historical Review *
