The Development of Workers' Choirs in Germany

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The workers’ choral societies of Germany recently celebrated a kind of jubilee: the number of worker-singers reached 100,000, with a total membership of 165,000 in these societies. The number of women workers in them is 11,000.

The workers’ choirs have their own periodical, Arbeiter-Sänger Zeitung, which began to appear regularly only in 1907.

The beginnings of the workers’ choral societies date back to the 1860s. A choral section was founded in the Leipzig Artisans’ Educational Society, and one of its members was August Bebel.

Ferdinand Lassalle attached great importance to the organising of workers’ choirs. At his insistence, members of the General Association of German Workers founded, at Frankfurt am Main in 1863, a workers’ society called the Choral Union. This Union held its meetings in the dark and smoky back room of a Frankfurt tavern. The room was lit with tallow candles.

There were 12 members of the Union. Once, when Lassalle, on one of his speaking tours, stayed overnight at Frankfurt, these 12 worker-singers sang him a song by the well-known poet Herwegh, whom Lassalle had long been urging to write the words for a workers’ chorus.

In 1892, after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law, there were 180 workers’ choral societies in Germany with 4,300 members. In 1901, the membership reached 39,717, in 1907, 93,000, and by 1912, 165,000. Berlin is said to have 5,352 members of workers’ choral societies; Hamburg, 1,628; Leipzig, 4,051; Dresden, 4,700, etc.

We recently reported how the workers of France and other Romance countries had marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Eugene Pettier (1816–1887), the author of the famous Internationale. In Germany, the propaganda of socialism by workers’ songs is much more recent, and the “Junker” (landowners’, Black-Hundred) government of Germany has been throwing up many more foul police obstacles to such propaganda.

But no amount of police harassment can prevent the singing of the hearty proletarian song about mankind’s coming emancipation from wage-slavery in all the great cities of the world, in all the factory neighbourhoods, and more and more frequently in the huts of village labourers.