He died for love. Three days after the badly ended duel over a woman, Ferdinand Lassalle (born 1825) died on August 31, 1864 from his injuries. With him died the most important intellectual, the “head” of the workers’ movement in Germany – of all things after such an anachronistic ritual as the honorary trade. Worse, by the time the duel began, the woman had long since turned her back on him.
Lassalle, born Ferdinand Lassal in Breslau in 1825, had already had numerous love affairs with women. And although emancipation in the sense of a “liberation of mankind” was the decisive goal for him, he thought little or nothing of gender equality. As far as is known, he had first seriously courted a wife in 1860. But the young Russian Sophie Sontzeff refused.
Four years later Lassalle met Helene von Dönniges, the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat, in a health resort. She adored the almost 18-year-old, who in turn fell in love “with her love for him”, as the political scientist Iring Fetscher put it. Lassalle decided to ask Helene’s parents for their daughter’s hand. But the ambitious family turned down the suitor, who in their eyes had a bad reputation.
Helene fled to Lassalle in the expectation that he would “elope” with her. But the labor leader, who was influenced by bourgeois concepts of honor, believed that he could earn the thanks of the Dönniges family and the daughter’s hand by bringing Helene back immediately. Not surprisingly, the daughter saw this as a betrayal and turned her back on Lassalle.
That could have ended the matter. But now Lassalle absolutely wanted to win Helene as his wife. He asked various friends to intercede for him, even with Richard Wagner, the court composer of King Ludwig II. But without success: Helene renewed her engagement, which had already been broken off, to a Romanian count named Janko von Racowitza, her parents’ favourite.
Angrily, Lassalle (having also contemplated suicide aloud) decided to provoke a duel by willfully insulting the Dönniges family; the demand for satisfaction was the intended consequence. Due to age, Helene’s father asked his future brother-in-law to step in for him.
On August 28, 1864, the time had come: at 7:30 a.m., Lassalle and Racowitza faced each other south of Geneva. According to the rules of the duel, both shot each other with pistols. Lassalle missed, his opponent scored. The injury was so severe that the failed duelist died from it three days later.
This ended the life of the most important social democratic pioneer in the German-speaking world. His ideas were opposed to the ideological socialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for Lassalle did not believe in their concept of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. His idea of a fairer social order was more cooperative and national.
In 1863 Lassalle had co-founded the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV) and became its first president. He was one of the founding fathers of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), even though it did not emerge from the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP) until 1890, 26 years after his death. The SAP was formed in 1875 from the merger of the ADAV with the previously split-off, more Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht.
Large crowds celebrated him enthusiastically for his rousing speeches, mainly in the Prussian Rhineland. For one of these speeches he was accused of high treason; his defense speech, delivered during the March 1864 trial, first articulated the possibility of a “social kingship” that would lean directly on the workers across the privileged upper and middle classes. This also confused ADAV supporters considerably. Lassalle was first sentenced to a year in prison for high treason, after an appeal to six months; but he remained at liberty.
The historian Ute Frevert wrote in her habilitation thesis “Men of Honor. The duel in bourgeois society” in 1991 showed how the feudal tradition of the duel had spread in bourgeois circles in the 19th century. Even Karl Marx wrote in 1858, incidentally to Lassalle: “Individuals can get into such an unbearable collision with one another that a duel seems to them the only solution”, although “the duel itself”, as he quite aptly found, the “relic of a bygone stage of culture ” be. Nevertheless, it seemed legitimate to Marx that citizens resorted to “certain feudal forms” in order to “defend their individuality”.
How the German labor movement would have developed if the declared Marx critic Lassalle had not died must remain a matter of speculation. It is at least conceivable that the unified ideology of “historical materialism” aimed at violent revolutions and thus civil wars would have found less support. This would probably have avoided many conflicts. In this respect, Lassalle’s self-inflicted death in the thoroughly bourgeois ritual of a duel caused lasting damage to mankind.
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