Commemorating Labour: the May Day holiday in Germany

May Day is the oldest public holiday still celebrated by the international labour movement. Established in 1889 by the founding congress of the Second International to commemorate the victims of the violent clashes in Chicago in 1886 (Haymarket Affair), it has since been used by labour movements around the world as a day to demonstrate for better working conditions, particularly the limitation of the industrial working day to eight hours. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been trying to make May Day a public holiday since the end of the First World War, but it was not until 1933 that the Nazis succeeded, after having brought the trade unions into line and reinterpreting the day as the "Day of German Labour". Even before that, different commemorative discourses had been linked to May Day: the establishment of a democratic culture of remembrance involving the working class in the SPD, the exhortation to complete the socialist revolution in the KPD and, after 1945, the advocacy of "working people for peace and socialism" in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In the Federal Republic of Germany, May Day is now celebrated under different state-specific titles; for example, in North Rhine-Westphalia, it is called the "Day of Commitment for Freedom and Peace, Social Justice, International Reconciliation and Human Dignity".

The history of Labour Day (May Day) in Germany