Wilhelm Blos

Wilhelm Josef Blos (5 October 1849 – 6 July 1927) was a German journalist, historian, novelist, dramatist and politician (SPD). He served as a member of the imperial parliament (''Reichstag'') between 1877 and 1918, albeit with one three year break. After the end of World War I he served between 1918 and 1920 as the first president of the newly launched Free People's State of Württemberg.

One high-point of his career as a journalist was his one-year stint as editor-in-chief of the (initially) Hamburg-based popular left-wing satirical magazine ''Der Wahre Jacob'' between 1879 and the publication's (temporary) closure, triggered by expulsion of William Blos from Hamburg in October 1880. His own contributions appeared under the pseudonyms "Hans Flux" or – on at least one occasion – "A. Titus".

Life

Provenance and early years

Wilhelm Joseph Blos was born at Wertheim am Main during the aftermath of the 1848 uprisings, the son of a physician who had moved away from the big city on account of his delicate health. Aloys Blos died from an incurable lung disease in 1856, when his son Wilhelm was just seven years old. His children's mother almost immediately remarried, selecting on this occasion a forester. Wilhelm and his sister acquired a step-father who abused Wilhelm. In 1863 he went to live with his grandparents. His grandfather died almost at once, but his grandmother attended to his education. He became a pupil at the (subsequently renamed and rebuilt) Lyceum (secondary school) in Wertheim, his hometown, located slightly above 100 km to the north of Stuttgart. Wilhelm Blos would later sue his step-father successfully for stealing his inheritance. Meanwhile, he embarked on a commercial apprenticeship in Mannheim, but broke it off uncompleted in order to study for and pass his Abitur (school graduation exam) which in 1868 opened the way for him to enrol at the University of Freiburg to study History and Philology. At university he also joined the Corps Rhenania (student fraternity).

Journalist: satire and socialism

After just three terms Blos was obliged by lack of funds to abandon his university career. He turned to journalism. Between 1870 and 1875 he led a somewhat itinerant career, working for a succession of Social Democratic publications. After a brief period contributing to the "Konstanzer Volksfreund" he was on the receiving end of an indictment under the press laws. Meanwhile, in 1872, in Nuremberg, he became a member of the recently launched Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP), which is widely seen as the precursor of the SPD. After that he got to know August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. After Bebel, Liebknecht and Adolf Hepner were all arrested and subjected to a show trial, it fell to Blos to take charge of the editorship of the Leipzig-based Der Volksstaat (newspaper). However Hepner was found to be "as innocent as a new-born child" – in the words not of the court but, much later, of August Bebel – and released (while his two co-accused each received a two-year jail term). In 1874, still working at Volksstaat. it was Blos who was arrested and sentenced to a three-month jail term for "press offences". Following his release, still in 1874, Blos met Karl Marx, who was visiting Leipzig with his daughter on the way home from a cure at Karlsbad.

More journalism: more politics

In 1875 Blos founded his own magazine, the weekly satirical "Mainzer Eulenspiegel". However, it was apparently in connection with this publication that he was very soon indicted and locked up. His incarceration appears to have been brief, but "Mainzer Eulenspiegel" seems not to have survived. In May 1875 he attended the Gotha Unification Congress which gave birth to the Social Democratic Party (SDAP / SPD). He participated as the delegate representing no fewer than 125 party members from Mainz and Gartenfeld. Dieter Fricke: Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung 1869–1914. Ein Handbuch über ihre Organisation und Tätigkeit im Klassenkampf. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1976, pp. 33, 66, 93, 122, 144, 148 f., 152, 368, 381, 417, 513, 556 ff., 562. In the national parliamentary elections of 1877 and 1881 (but not 1878) he won the electoral district of "Reuss Elder Line" for the SDAP / SPD.

Expulsion

In Fall/Autumn 1875, Blos started work at the '' Hamburg-Altonaer Volksblatt'', a socialist daily paper newly launched by the politician-journalist Wilhelm Hasenclever. He stayed with the newspaper as a contributing editor – initially alongside the worker-poet Jacob Audorf – till 1880. He was also working between 1878 and 1881, alongside Ignaz Auer at the short-lived "Gerichtszeitung" (''loosely, "Court Reporter"'' newspaper). The so-called "Socialist Laws" of 1878 put an end to many socialist and social democratic newspapers and magazines, though as matters turned out the effectiveness of press censorship was very variable in the different regions of the newly "united" Germany. Hamburg and the adjacent (but at that time determinedly separate) more proletarian municipality of Altona were both robustly opposed to the centralising tendencies of the emerging German nation-state, and both had powerful traditions of political liberalism and radicalism of their own. That rise to hopes that the de facto censorship of socialist media. In 1879 to the support of the politically committed publisher Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz, Wilhelm Blos found himself installed as the first editor-in-chief of ''Der Wahre Jacob'', a socialist satirical magazine published monthly between November 1879 and October 1880. Publication ended in October 1880 when Blos – along with Dietz and Audorf – was among the approximately 75 social-democrat activists deprived of residency entitlement in Hamburg and Prussia by "government authorities". He was given 48 hours to leave what had by this time become his home city.

Württemberg

Blos found refuge initially in Mainz, and subsequently in Bremen. In 1883 he was invited by his old comrade Dietz to team up together in Stuttgart, where Dietz had re-established his publishing operation in December 1881. It turned out that the persecution to which Social Democrats were prey across the German empire during the twelve years of the "Socialist Laws" was very much less intense in the Württembergisch capital than it had been in Hamburg. Berlin and Prussia felt far away: for the eventful final four and a half decades of his life, the Stuttgart region became home for Wilhelm Blos. At Stuttgart he took work as a proof reader on ''Die Neue Zeit'', Dietz's (at that time) monthly socialist theoretical journal of the SPD. Its headquarters was in Stuttgart, Germany. It was only in 1884 that he began, cautiously and "semi-officially", submitting his own contributions under the section heading "Politische Rundschau", and identified only by his initials as W.B.

Parliamentarian

Despite the laws against socialist press and party organisations, the SAPD / SDP retained a small but unignorable presence in the Reichstag during the 1880s. There are, indeed, indications that support for social democratic policies in the industrial heartlands may actually have been boosted through the 1880s by Bismarck's "Socialist Laws". When the Steamboat subsidy dispute blew up in the imperial parliament (''Reichstag''), Blos came out as a strong supporter of the new laws. The party was deeply divided, since the subject of a government backed international mail-boat network was clearly enmeshed in wider discussion of whether and how far Germany should be seeking to emulate the global imperialism of France and Britain. In backing the Steamboat subsidy Law, Blos presented himself as an unapologetic internationalist. As early as 1881, in addressing the parliament, he asserted, "they say that within the Social Democrats there are two parties, as you might say one that is moderate and another that is extremist or revolutionary. I want to make a different distinction. There are two parties, one global and the other parochial: that is how the thing will develop" In 1887 a conservative commentator wrote that "... Messrs Geiser, Blos and Frohme, whose political output mostly appears in the Dietz Press, have the same interests ... The application over many years of their moderate journalism is naturally not without influence on the wider thinking mong social democrats

Politics and journalism under the ban

In 1884 Dietz and Blos revived "Der wahre Jacob". Production of the satirical magazine now continued in Stuttgart without further interruption till 1914. Wilhelm Blos contributed frequently under his pseudonym "Hans Flux", though the job of editor-in-chief now passed to others. During the second half of the 1880s, parliamentary duties combined with other journalistic responsibilities to detain him in Berlin. He served as editor-in-chief at the Berliner Volksblatt between 1884 and 1890. Many Social-Democratic publications were banned under the "Socialist Laws" during this period: a fine line was pursued under the editorial leadership of Wilhelm Blos whereby the "Berliner Volksblatt" narrowly avoided that fate. After 1890 the newspaper was relaunched and in 1891 rebranded as "Vorwärts". Blos stayed on briefly as co-editor-in-chief, sharing duties with Wilhelm Liebknecht

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