This chapter examines socialist-secularist intellectuals. Secularist intellectuals were noted both for their quick rise within the socialist party, which offered them newspaper editorships and Reichstag candidacies, and for their tendency to heresy. They provided many of the key figures in anarchism, revisionism and radicalism. The first section focuses on how an important oppositional movement of 1890 to 1893, the so-called “revolt of the Jungen” was led by some of the Berlin secularists introduced in Chapter 1. The Jungen have been the subject of a number of reflections on the role of intellectuals in the party; however, none of these has dealt with the secularist dimension of this conflict. By taking up this lacuna, the chapter reinterprets key aspects of the history and the theory of the intellectual. The second section of this chapter shows how Berlin secularists strategically employed heresy as a means of developing their charisma as autonomous intellectuals within the socialist milieu.

The socialist movement had two worldviews, monist materialism a la Ludwig Büchner and dialectical materialism a la Karl Marx. This chapter examines how party leaders and secularist intellectuals theorized the relationship of the two and then looks at the role of popular science in party educational policy. It then moves from the theoretical and policy level to an investigation of the intellectual world of rank-and-file socialists. It opens up new perspectives to explain the well-established fact that workers more happily read works of scientific materialism than the works of Kautsky or Marx. Autobiographical texts are examined to understand why conversion experiences were usually tied to the acceptance of scientific rather than historical materialism. It introduces the role of secularism in the biographies of important socialist leaders, such as Walter Ulbricht, the future leader of the GDR (1949-71). Based on the growing realization that many social groups organized in socialism were attracted to secularist worldview, the chapter will also look at the women’s movement inside the SPD and its particular take on monism.

This chapter examines the impact of anticlericalism and secularism on German politics. It charts the significance of secularism in the relations between radicals, revisionists and liberals in the period between the church-leaving campaign 1906-14 and the end of the German revolution in 1923. It examines how factions of the SPD clashed over the church-leaving movement of 1909 to 1914. Special attention will be given to the cooperation of secularist revisionists around Eduard Bernstein with left liberals and anti-political leaders of cultural reform efforts, such as Eugen Diederichs.

This chapter shows the significant role played by religious politics in the German Revolution of 1918. It examines first how the secularist subculture within German socialism contributed to the formation of wartime opposition that led to the 1917 split of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It then follows the actions of secularists during the revolution itself, beginning with the attempts of one of Germany’s most prominent secularists, Adolph Hoffmann, to force through a radical program of secularization upon assuming a key position in the revolutionary government of 1918. It traces the politics of secularism in the writing of the Weimar Constitution before taking up the relationship of secularism to the “pure” council movement, which emerged in the years from 1919 to 1922 as an alternative both to parliamentary democracy and to Bolshevik party rule.

Histories of monism have generally ended with the First World War and placed it within the context of the technocratic fantasies of liberal supporters of antipolitical Kultur in late Wilhelmine Germany. This article argues instead that monism achieved its widest practical dispersal during the Weimar Republic in the socialist milieu. It follows the path of liberal intellectuals from opposition to war and monarchy into the socialist movements, where they took leading positions in local government, union educational institutions, and the expanding universe of socialist cultural associations. There they sought to revise Marxism to bring it in line with their theories of biological and sociological evolution. The article follows key four areas of the socialist workers’ culture movement and examines how monism shaped the theories and practices of sex reform, free body culture, festival culture and educational innovation. It thereby demonstrates for the first time the central role of secularist dissent and monist worldview in some of the iconic utopian projects of interwar socialism.

The Epilogue examines the failure of red secularism to reassert itself after 1945 due to the political climate in East and West Germany. It examines the further decline of Freethought as a consequence of lessening of confessional tensions in German society and the secularization and de-churching of German society in the 1960s.

The final chapter examines the impact that the intense struggle over secularism had on German politics in the years 1930 to 1933. This chapter examines the many camps involved in this struggle. In particular it aims to demonstrate that antisecularism became a key binding agent for formations on the right that were promoting authoritarian solutions to the deepening political crisis. It looks at the role of church leaders in elaborating the slogan of “cultural Bolshevism” and promoting church militancy and calling for a “Christian front” to battle godlessness. It will make an original contribution to the significant recent scholarship on the collaboration of the Christian churches and National Socialism but bringing to the table not the religious, but rather a confessional basis of collusion. The affirmation of “positive Christianity” in the 1920 program of the NSDAP reflected the party’s commitment to an ecumenical struggle against secularism and Judaism. Hitler repeatedly placed his party’s position on religion in a quasi-confessional context.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and lasting well into the Cold War, socialism represented the most powerful and sustained force of political and social dissent in Europe. Prior to the First World War, this dissent operated largely outside of the dominant order. Socialist political parties were excluded from participation in government and the industrial actions undertaken by labor unions were often met with violence and state repression. After the war, the socialist movement split into rival Social Democratic and Communist parties. The former entered government in many countries, while the latter contributed substantially to the political polarization that fed the emergence of authoritarian regimes across much of Europe.

This chapter maps secularism as a culture, using the example of Berlin. It takes the reader through all of the venues that provided materialist monism and establishes their relationship to the socialist milieu. It begins in Free Religion, and then analyzes the city’s chief popular scientific institutions. It looks in detail at the offerings of each to illuminate how monism was communicated. This chapter argues that despite political polarization among the secularist organizations, there was nonetheless a great deal of ideological and personnel coherence across the secularist spectrum