The Socialist

The observance and implementation of the Socialist Laws undermined the political work of social democracy in the German Reich. Although individuals of the SAP were able to stand for elections and then carry out their parliamentary work legally, political meetings outside the Reichstag were forbidden. Workers' sports clubs and nature-loving groups served for years as camouflage organisations for party work. Many members went into exile in the 1880s in Switzerland, France, England and North America.

The German-American painter Robert Koehler (1850-1917) lived in Germany in the mid-1870s, mainly in Munich. After a stay in the USA, he returned to the painting class of Franz Defregger in Munich in 1879. He stayed until 1892 and worked at a Munich art school. In 1883 and 1888 he organized the American contribution to the international art exhibitions in Munich. The painting "The Socialist" was also painted in Munich. Koehler confronts the viewer with an agitator with clenched fists and raised arms standing behind a table covered in red cloth, talking himself into fury. He'll probably hit the table with his fist. A red bow is attached to his coat as a political confession. The newspaper in front of him still shows the title: "Socialist".

Although painted in Munich, Koehler exhibited the painting in the same year at the National Academy of Design in New York. The Academy published it with the surprising title "A German Socialist Propounding His Bloodthirsty Ideas". Koehler could have gotten the inspiration for the motive and the desire to exhibit it in the USA through the numerous agitation trips of German social democrats to the industrial cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Milwaukee. These events were not only calls for fundraising campaigns for the oppressed German colleagues during the period of the Socialist Act, but also the attempt to anchor the socialist movement in German-speaking communities of the USA. The great response from the working class to the agitators who had arrived during the economic crisis of the 1880s was a cause for concern among the American political public. This all the more as some agitators proved to be anarchists preaching violence. For a long time, they thus shaped the American idea of a German "bloodthirsty" social democracy.