Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg

Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (21 August 1848 – 17 November 1911) was a German officer who became noted as an anti-Semitic politician and publisher. He was part of a wider campaign against German Jews that became a central feature of nationalist politics in Imperial Germany in the late nineteenth century.

The foundation of the Christian Social Party by Adolf Stoecker in 1878 helped to galvanise anti-Semitic activity in Germany and brought Liebermann von Sonnenberg, then an officer in the German Imperial Army, to politics. He came to the fore in 1880 when he was central to the organisation of a petition calling for the removal of the Jews from all public positions. The petition attracted as many as 225,000 signatories.

Joining with Bernhard Förster, the brother-in-law of Friedrich Nietzsche, he set up the Deutscher Volksverein (German People's League) in 1881 to support the anti-Semitic agenda. The group struggled for support as it focused on a single issue that spawned a number of movements at the time and it declined further when Förster left for Paraguay in 1886 to set up his ill-fated Nueva Germania project.

Following a June 1889 conference of anti-Semites in Bochum Liebermann von Sonnenberg set up his own political party, the Deutsch-Soziale Partei, which became the Deutschsoziale Reformpartei when it merged with Otto Böckel's Deutsche Reformpartei in 1894. Active co-operation had actually started at the 1890 election when a joint list captured five seats in the Reichstag. The two leaders however often found themselves in disagreement as Liebermann von Sonnenberg was basically a conservative whilst Böckel held a more radical world-view beyond his anti-Semitism, including a desire for land reform.

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