Philipp Scheidemann - Life

Life

Born in Kassel, Scheidemann, from a modest artisan background, attended middle school and did an apprenticeship as a printer. He joined the SPD in 1883, in protest against Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws. A member of the Free Trade Union, he worked in Marburg, where he attended lectures in philosophy at the university held by Hermann Cohen. In 1895 he took to editing Social Democratic newspapers, first at Giessen and afterwards successively at Nuremberg, Offenbach, and again in Kassel.

Upon the 1903 federal election, Scheidemann became a member of the Reichstag parliament, delegated from the Solingen district for the Social Democrats, and soon rose to be one of the principal leaders of the party. In 1911 he was elected a member of the executive committee and two years later succeeded August Bebel as chairman of the SPD parliamentary group together with Hugo Haase. An eloquent and witty orator, he and the grave party chairman Friedrich Ebert complemented each other. During the early years of his career, Scheidemann, actually a pragmatic politician, was regarded as a left-wing exponent. His vitriolic rhetoric once made Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg leave the Reichstag debate chamber in protest. A speech held in Paris in 1912, on the eve of World War I, earned him the libel of a traitor of his country.