Sozialistische Monatshefte


Sozialistische Monatshefte was a German journal edited by Joseph Bloch from 1897 to 1933 and published by the Verlag der Sozialistischen Monatshefte in Berlin.

History and contents

It was close to the revisionist wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It was not controlled by the party and provided a space for debates within the labor movement. Its opponents were representatives of the revolutionary viewpoint as well as the center of the party; they regarded the Monatshefte as the journalistic "center of international revisionism".
The journal was originally founded in 1895 by as Der sozialistische Akademiker - Organ der sozialistischen Studirenden und Studirten deutscher Zunge. Two years later there were disagreements and Sassenbach left the editorial office. From then on Joseph Bloch continued the journal under the title Sozialistische Monatshefte as chief editor in July 1897, restarting the volume count. Since 1903, the Sozialistische Monatshefte had been a GmbH company with 20,000 German gold marks of capital. Shareholders were Jakob Bamberger, Eduard Bernstein, Joseph Bloch. Charles Hallgarten also supported the magazine, for example with 5,000 marks in 1905.
The magazine was independent of the SPD. It first appeared monthly, fortnightly from the beginning of 1908 to 1922, and then monthly again. The magazine was close to the political viewpoint of the publisher, the revisionist wing of the SPD, but also offered room for representatives of other views, including some anarchists and sympathizers of Labor Zionism. The latter was rejected within the SPD because of his ideas of settlement colonialism in Palestine, but the Monatshefte did not share the SPD's strict colonial criticism. In 1902, August Bebel strongly opposed the magazine and believed that the newspaper was "outside the party". However, a petition to punish publication in the Monatshefte by party exclusion was unsuccessful at the Leipzig Party Congress of 1909. In 1913, the SPD's party committee again considered the question of whether party members could publish in the Monatshefte Issues. Philipp Scheidemann describes it as a meeting point: "where everything is gathered that can give satisfaction to the opponents of our party".
The Monatshefte had great significance for the struggle for recognition of the consumer cooperative movement as one of three pillars in the labor movement. This included not only the essays in the main section, by and others, but also regular reports in the section Genossenschaftswesen. Another fixed component was the column Frauenbewegung supervised by. In addition, the Monatshefte published belletristic texts, for example, 17 novellas by the West Prussian writer appeared between 1908 and 1923.
The journal contained the supplements The Socialist Student and Documents of Socialism.
included Julius Bab, Eduard Bernstein, Gertrud David, Eduard David, Adolph von Elm, Henriette Fürth, Wolfgang Heine, Gerhard Hildebrand,,, Max Nettlau,,, Gustav Landauer, Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann, Élisée Reclus, Karl Renner, Rosa Schapire, Max Schippel,,,,, Georg von Vollmar,.