A German Collection of Ferdinand Lassalle’s Political Speeches
A Speech Collection Under a Plain Title
[Reden] is a German-language collection of speeches by Ferdinand Lassalle. It appears as the second volume in the series Redner der Revolution and includes a foreword by J. Altmaier. The edition recorded by the International Institute of Social History runs to eighty-two pages. Its title is simply the German word for “speeches,” and the book’s identity is that of an oratorical collection rather than a systematic treatise.
The Documentary Function of the Volume
Library cataloguing places [Reden] under history, labor and laboring classes, socialism, and sources. Those headings describe a book whose value lies in primary documentation: it preserves Lassalle’s public speaking as evidence of nineteenth-century socialist and labor politics. The series title, Redner der Revolution (“Orators of the Revolution”), frames the volume around political speech as a force in revolutionary politics. The method is therefore that of the speech collection: the reader encounters Lassalle as a speaker addressing audiences, not as the author of a single continuous argument.
The Orator Behind the Speeches
Lassalle was a German jurist, philosopher, and socialist activist, and in 1863 he founded the General German Workers’ Association, the first independent German workers’ party. His political activity was carried out through public agitation and speechmaking, and his program sought an independent workers’ party, universal suffrage, and state-aided producers’ co-operatives. A collection of his Reden thus documents the oral side of a career that was central to the early German labor movement.
The IISH record gives Berlin as the place of publication and Neuer Deutscher Verlag as the publisher, with the year recorded as [1925]. It assigns the volume to classification D 1195 (Germany; social history; 19th, 20th century; socialism; socialist theories; Ferdinand Lassalle; selected works) and gives the call number IISG D 1195/27. A catalog metadata entry records a first publication date of 1892.
Online Listing
The Online Books Page lists [Reden] as a Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1925 item with page images at HathiTrust; those images are marked US access only. It describes the entry as an uncurated book entry from its extended bookshelves, readable online now but without a stable link, and advises not to bookmark the page. It notes that a request can be made to add the book to the curated collection with stable links, and it directs readers to look for editions of the book at a library or elsewhere.
Lassalle’s Biography and Political Setting
Ferdinand Johann Gottlieb Lassalle was born on 11 April 1825 and died on 31 August 1864. His political theories, a form of state socialism, are known as Lassalleanism. Born in Breslau to a prosperous Jewish family, he became a follower of Hegelian philosophy in his youth. During the 1840s and 1850s he gained public renown for his involvement in a long and sensational legal case to vindicate the rights of Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt. Active in the revolutions of 1848, he formed a complex and often antagonistic relationship with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He authored several major intellectual works, including the philosophical treatise Heraclitus the Obscure (1857) and the legal study The System of Acquired Rights (1861).
Political Agitation and Later Career
Lassalle’s political career began in the early 1860s during the Prussian constitutional conflict. Breaking with the liberal progressives, he began a public campaign on behalf of the working class. His political strategy focused on electoral politics and co-operation with the state, and he entered into secret negotiations with Prussian Minister President Otto von Bismarck in an attempt to forge an alliance between the workers’ movement and the conservative Prussian state against the liberal bourgeoisie. His flamboyant and notorious personality, unique in the history of German social democracy, brought him great recognition but also contributed to a leadership style more suited to a demagogue than a democratic leader. His political career was cut short at the age of 39 in 1864 when he was killed in a duel following a dispute over a young woman he wished to marry. Although the party had only a few thousand members at the time of his death, it grew to become a major political force in the German Empire. In 1875, it merged with the Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany to form the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Lassalle’s ideas, particularly his statist and nationalist tendencies, exerted a lasting influence on German social democracy, often in conflict with the theories of Marxism.
