End the truce!

© Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin Karl Kautsky, photograph around 1925

In August of 1914, the parties represented in the Berlin Reichstag had agreed to no longer carry out their disputes in public („truce“). Before that Kaiser Wilhelm II had declared: „I no longer know any parties. I only know Germans“. On 19 June 1915, against the background of an increasingly critical attitude toward the conduct of the war within the SPD Reichstag fraction, the prominent social democrats Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Hugo Haase admonish their party to terminate the „truce“.