Democratic Union (Germany)

The Democratic Federation ( DV) was a political party in the German Empire.

The DV was founded in 1908 by former members of the Free Radical Association, who opposed the parliamentary group of her party skeptical with the Free Radical People's Party and the South German People's Party and the contribution of this fraction Community on so-called Bülow- block, a Reichstag majority of left-wing liberals, National Liberals and Conservatives, strictly rejected. They saw it as an alliance against the SPD and the working class, to which they refused to participate.

The program of the DV contained demands for universal, equal, secret and direct suffrage, separation of church and state or the uniform structure of the school system. With their socially liberal by today's orientation, the Association was temporarily " the extreme left wing of liberalism " in Germany. Many of their demands for reform were incompatible with the political reality of Wilhelmine Germany - yet the DV was oriented as bourgeois opposition party neither revolutionary nor anti-monarchical principle.

Her most important members included Theodor Barth, her " spiritual father ," Rudolf Breitscheidstraße, its first chairman and Hellmut von Gerlach, the " left from right " at numerous parties made ​​a stopover on his way. Was a member since 1908, Carl von Ossietzky, who from 1911 in the free people, the weekly newspaper of the DV, published. In addition, also belonged to the women's rights activist Minna Cauer, the educator Georg Schümer and the journalist and later member of parliament Wolfgang Bartels of DV.

Although the organizational structure of the party made ​​good progress in the early years - according to her own account she had in 1911 about 11,000 members in 80 local chapters - dwindled their future prospects very soon after its foundation. Back in 1909, Theodor Barth died at the age of 60 years and in the same year it came to the disintegration of the Bülow- block, from whose criticism is the raison d'être of the DV was derived in the first place. In 1910, the other left- liberal parties merged to form the Progressive People's Party, which soon for the SPD as much more interesting allies proved to be the small DV that could define and claim their place between these two parties only with difficulty.

In the general election of 1912 was the Democratic Association, which ran only in a fraction of constituencies, win a mandate. Only Gerlach came into the runoff election, in which he lost his anti-Semitic opposition candidate in the constituency of Marburg - Frankenberg. Breitscheidstraße explained according to this result, the experiment of the party establishment had failed and joined the SPD. A number of members followed him, while now Gerlach took over the party leadership. With the outbreak of the First World War, the party's work came a virtual standstill. 1918 belonged Gerlach with some remaining faithful to the Berlin circle of founders of the German Democratic Party ( DDP).