It was 1881, and German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had a serious socialist problem. He’d passed the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878, which banned Social Democratic meetings, associations and newspapers, but he couldn’t remove the party outright from the Reichstag. The socialists still found favor with too many constituents.
The political climate of the era was a result of German unification, the period stretching across the 19th century and culminating in 1871, when 26 small states, principalities, duchies and territories formed the German Empire. But thanks to the German constitution, Bismarck didn’t have to worry about pleasing the populace; his chancellorship was approved solely by Wilhelm I. But with the European economy in free fall, a nearly successful assassination attempt on the kaiser, and a short-lived but bloody socialist uprising in France, Bismarck was determined to undermine a party that he saw as a danger to the volatile new nation state. So the Iron Chancellor came up with a masterful plan: beat the socialists at their own game by offering health insurance to the working class.
“That was a calculation,” says historian Jonathan Steinberg, the author of Bismarck: A Life. “It had nothing to do with social welfare. He just wanted some kind of
— source smithsonianmag.com | Lorraine Boissoneault | Jul 14, 2017