Poster Saturday: Albatros. Union for Aircraft

For probably only the second or third time here, I'm putting up a poster from the Great War's Central Powers, this one for the Albatros aircraft.

My German is rusty, but I think this says some something like "Union for Aircraft", with the locations for the same.  It's likely a labor union poster.

This poster may say more than we might know. For one thing, Germany was heavily industrialized by World War One, even though big sectors of its economy remained nearly Medieval in other ways.  Anyhow, labor was a major, and fairly radical, sector of the German demographic at the time and the government worried about it continually.  Fears were constant that Socialist workers would reject the war or even overthrow the government.  And, in fact, there was something behind those fears.

Socialist Germans, like every sector of the German population, rallied to the crown in 1914 when the war came and by and large the Social Democratic Party remained loyal to the German government and war effort.  The SDP, while Germany's largest political party at the time, saw itself begin to fracture during the war, however, and by 1917 really radical elements had started to split into Communist parties as the SDP pulled back from a pre war heavy leaning towards Communism.  The SDP would in fact end up being the party that tried to bring Germany into being a true parliamentary democracy without a crown in 1918, something that would taint it with some voters thereafter, although those voters were likely not in the SDP crowd to start with.  Nonetheless, there would be no post war reunion with Communist who went on to try to foment rebellion prior to the end of the war and who went into a civil war with the SDP government immediately after the war, a rebellion that was only put down through the aid of the very conservative German Army which never supported the republic itself. 

Those tensions would all lead to the German republic being very short lived.  It functioned from 1918 to 1932, a mere fourteen years, before a final election brought the Nazis to power.  Communist elements in Germany were completely anti democratic.  German conservatives tended to lean towards monarchy and there were a lot of them.  Only the SDP and the collection of Christian parties, with the Catholic Center Party being the biggest, supported the parliament.  By the 1932 election the stress of the Depression and the near state of civil war between Communist and Nazi elements had undermined the SDP sufficiently that it wasn't able to hold on any longer as Germans turned to the Nazis and the Communist and brought down their republic and sent into and Europe into a thirteen year long nightmare.