Political Contestation and Internal Strife: Socialist and Anarchist German Newspapers in London, 1878–1910

Daniel Laqua In 1910, Theodore Rothstein – a socialist émigré from Tsarist Russia – traced the ‘long and glorious history’ of the German political press in London. Fittingly, his survey appeared in the Londoner Volks-Zeitung – a weekly founded in 1909 ‘to form a connecting link between the working-class movements of both sides of the North Sea’. Summarizing nearly a century of publishing ventures, Rothstein portrayed the Londoner Volks-Zeitung as the ‘heiress of a beautiful bequest’. Like many of its forerunners, the paper itself was short-lived, lasting for only nine months. Nonetheless, the existence of such publications illustrates the political dynamism of London’s German community. Britain’s role as a site for activists from different countries was linked to its openness towards refugees: the country’s liberal asylum policy only changed with the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. As Bernard Porter has noted, ‘between 1823 and 1906 no refugee who...