Opposition or affirmation

The history of the parties of the religious, national, and regional minorities in Imperial Germany is, in part, a story of a resistance to oppression and struggle against the ruling powers thoroughly comparable to that waged by the Social Democrats. These minority parties represented groups who were at best reluctant participants in the German Empire of 1871 and apprehensive about its future development: the French, Danes, and Poles with different national loyalties, the Hanoverians, conquered and annexed by the Prussians, and, above all, Germany's Roman Catholics, turned into a permanent minority following the exclusion of the Habsburg monarchy from German affairs as a consequence of the war of 1866. The initial decade of the empire's history showed that their fears and apprehensions were thoroughly justified. No sooner was the new empire created than its government began a policy of vigorous harassment and persecution of the Catholic Church, the Kulturkampf. The Jesuits were expelled from Germany, priests arrested by the hundreds, bishops forced to flee the country. Among the predominantly Roman Catholic national minorities in Alsace-Lorraine and Prussian Poland, the struggle between church and state quickly became intermingled with national antagonism and so was carried out with a special bitterness and vehemence.

In the face of such policies, the leaders and activists of the minority parties, themselves often men of basically conservative opinions, had no choice but to employ the democratic strategies of popular political agitation via the press, public meetings, and mass membership organizations.