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All eyes followed me eagerly as I left the hall after this scene, to pay my respects to the conductor. It was Herr Hasselmann, a native of Strasburg, and apparently a very good-natured, amiable fellow. He accompanied me to my hotel and, amongst other things, told me the circumstances connected with the performance of my overture. These somewhat surprised me.
He became, however, more and more violent, and in 1880, at a secret gathering of the German socialists at Wyden in Switzerland, he and his friend Hasselmann were expelled from the Germany party.
"All measures," cried Most from London, "are legitimate against tyrants;" while Hasselmann, his friend, advised an immediate insurrection, which, even though it should fail, would be good propaganda. It was inevitable that in the early moments of despair some of the German workers should have listened gladly to such proposals.
As a result of the Wyden congress, Most and Hasselmann were ejected from the party, and the tactics of Bebel and Liebknecht were adopted. After 1880 there developed an underground socialist movement that was most baffling and disconcerting to the police. Socialist papers, printed in other countries, were being circulated by the thousands in all parts of Germany.
The immediate consequence of Most and Hasselmann's programme was the formal expulsion of both agitators from the party by the secret congress at Wyden, near Ossingen, in Switzerland. But just because of the disposition engendered by the Socialist law, this decision was quite powerless to stifle the Most and Hasselmann movement.
Hasselmann had several years before launched the Red Flag, which advocated much that was not in harmony with socialism, and eventually the German socialist congress requested him to cease the publication of his paper. A few individuals without great influence had endeavored at various times to import Bakounin's philosophy and methods into Germany, but their propaganda bore no fruit whatever.
It was only in the natural order of things that, in 1878, when the German policy of force happened partially to paralyse the legal agitation of the Social Democrats by exceptional legislation, a radical group arose among the Socialist working classes which, led by the agitator Most, always an extremist, and Hasselmann, drew from these circumstances the lesson that now, being excluded from constitutional agitation, they must devote all their powers to prepare for revolution.
Whilst I was discussing the state of music in Strasburg with Conductor Hasselmann, Orsini's famous attempt on the life of the Emperor took place in Paris. I heard some vague rumours of it on my journey the following morning, but it was not until the 17th, on my arrival in Paris, that I heard the full details of it from the waiter in my hotel.
It would then almost seem that with this bill only a very small distance separated us from the murderous band of Hasselmann, the incendiary writings of Most, and the revolutionary conspiracies of the Congress of Wyden; and that even this distance would soon disappear. Well, gentlemen, this is, of course, the very opposite of true.
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