Written during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, this book is about a political movement, Social Democracy, that many Germans in the nineteenth century regarded as a scourge on society. That "scourge" emerged from a tiny germ after mid-century, it mutated repeatedly in the face of efforts to combat it, and it changed prevailing assumptions about how class relations, democratic institutions, and global solidarities thrive or break down.Before the First World War, as a response to persecution and other forms of exclusion, Social Democrats in Germany practised self-isolation -not by choice but of necessity. They created for themselves a vast network of working-class cultural associations where they could escape the condescension or hostility of the middle and upper classes. There were integrative tendencies too: workers who supported the Social Democratic Party (SPD) 1 were proud of Germany's place in the world and they were ready to defend it if attacked. They also sought social respectability, often adopting bourgeois manners and dress codes. Yet they were kept apart, at a distance, by more privileged and powerful segments of society, who thought that socialists, like the Jews, still had to demonstrate good intentions and assimilate more successfully before they were welcomed as fully equal partners in society and political life. In the meantime, isolation and containment remained the order of the day. Freeing up society too soon, opening the door to "the reds," foretold consequences too dark to imagine. After the fighting stopped in 1918, bourgeois Europeans recalibrated their retrospective lenses, but still they could not easily fit Social Democracy into the image of a pre-war belle époque.

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