Life
Born in Kassel, Scheidemann, from a modest artisan background, attended middle school and did an apprenticeship as a printer. He joined the SPD in 1883, in protest against Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws. A member of the Free Trade Union, he worked in Marburg, where he attended lectures in philosophy at the university held by Hermann Cohen. In 1895 he took to editing Social Democratic newspapers, first at Giessen and afterwards successively at Nuremberg, Offenbach, and again in Kassel.
Upon the 1903 federal election, Scheidemann became a member of the Reichstag parliament, delegated from the Solingen district for the Social Democrats, and soon rose to be one of the principal leaders of the party. In 1911 he was elected a member of the executive committee and two years later succeeded August Bebel as chairman of the SPD parliamentary group together with Hugo Haase. An eloquent and witty orator, he and the grave party chairman Friedrich Ebert complemented each other. During the early years of his career, Scheidemann, actually a pragmatic politician, was regarded as a left-wing exponent. His vitriolic rhetoric once made Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg leave the Reichstag debate chamber in protest. A speech held in Paris in 1912, on the eve of World War I, earned him the libel of a traitor of his country.
Read more about this topic: Philipp Scheidemann
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“But that beginning was wiped out in fear
The day I swung suspended with the grapes,
And was come after like Eurydice
And brought down safely from the upper regions;
And the life I live now’s an extra life
I can waste as I please on whom I please.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“Glorious bouquets and storms of applause ... are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys. But to move an audience in such a role, to hear in the applause that unmistakable note which breaks through good theatre manners and comes from the heart, is to feel that you have won through to life itself. Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, but becomes part of one’s own life.”
—Dame Alice Markova (b. 1910)