Acknowledgements
Some of the chapters of this book have their own long history, and I am afraid that I may not be able to acknowledge all the debts accrued during their writing.
While the usual disclaimers apply regarding my responsibility for any possible errors or omissions, I have benefitted over the years from discussions of German labour movement history with a number of colleagues, among whom I would like to thank particularly Frank Bongiorno, Matt Fitzpatrick, Dick Geary, and John Moses. I would like to thank Sébastien Budgen for his encouragement and assistance, especially for his encouragement to prepare this book for Brill, and I also thank the other members of Sébastienâs informal email group on the history of German Social Democracy for their generosity with their expertise. While teaching German history at the University of Queensland, I have benefitted from working with some very talented postgraduate students, and I thank them here for what I have learned from them.
Colleagues at numerous conferences have provided me with useful feedback. These conferences include: the regular conferences of the Australian Historical Association and the Australasian Association of European Historians, staff-postgraduate seminars at the University of Queensland, the ISOS Conference on Slave, Forced and âFreeâ Labour in Comparative Historical Perspective, University of Nottingham, 2010, and conferences of the Australian Society for Labour History.
I am indebted to the archivists and librarians at all the institutions in which I have conducted research for this book â the archives are listed in the bibliography, and it would be tiresome for the reader to list them again here. In particular, however, I would like to thank Dr Anja Kruke of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), Bonn, for welcoming me as a visiting researcher in the FES in 2012, during one of the research trips on which I gathered material for this project, and for the staff of the FES for all their assistance on this and other visits. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst for enabling the 2012 visiting fellowship at the FES to take place. I also thank the University of Queensland for supporting periods of research leave in Europe and for funding the research travel that is indispensable for projects such as this one.
It is a pleasure to thank my friends Josef Engel and Mehmet Dökmeci for their hospitality on my research trips to Germany.
I also thank my wife Debbie for putting up with my absences on research trips as well as for all her other support.