How the Guard was Changed

Abstract

The party conference at Stuttgart in May, 1958, approved the first draft of the new basic program. That meant, for all practical purposes, that the leadership’s task of development, education, and persuasion had come to a successful conclusion. Yet that same conference marked a changing of the guard, the replacement of the leadership responsible for the party’s ideological evolution by a new generation of leaders who were to complete the party’s modernization. The paradox is apparent: the representatives of the party accepted the draft, then dismissed its authors. The question of how the postwar leadership effected adoption of its changing ideas has been answered. How, then, did that leadership, over the same period, lose its control of the party? The answer to this question is complex. It can best be approached by stepping down from the national level to examine in some detail a series of events in one of the local organizations, the Land organization of Berlin. There a prolonged struggle took place. It was, in exaggerated and personal form, a struggle which occurred at every level of the party in the postwar years: the conflict of the traditional with the modern. The outcome of this struggle had far-reaching effects on the subsequent development of the SPD.