information:extraction
Return to Germany

In 1901, Bernstein returned to Germany after the end of the ban that had kept him from entering the country. He became an editor of the newspaper Vorwärts that year and a member of the Reichstag from 1902 to 1918. He voted against the armament tabling in 1913, together with the SPD fraction's left wing. Although he voted for war credits in August 1914, he opposed World War I from July 1915 and, in 1917, was among the founders of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which united antiwar socialists, including reformists like Bernstein, centrists like Kautsky and revolutionary socialists like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

He was a member of the USPD until 1919, when he rejoined the SPD. From 1920 to 1928, Bernstein was again a member of the Reichstag. On 4 March 1920, as an expert on Anglo-German relations under the German Empire, he became a member of the parliamentary committee investigating the war guilt question. He was one of only a few deputies on the committee to admit Germany's responsibility for the outbreak of war, setting himself apart from the majority of Reichstag members in the bourgeois parties. He retired from political life in 1928.