Anyone walking through a German city on the morning of May 1st sees two scenes simultaneously. In one, red flags wave, a union secretary grabs the microphone, a maypole stretches towards the sky, and somewhere a beer collection box clinks. In the other, screens flicker. In the country's data centers, the servers continue to run, and in the open-plan offices, empty today, language models are writing reports that yesterday would have been written by clerks. The holiday lies between these two scenes like a hinge. It evokes a battle our grandparents considered won, and it poses the question of whether it is still the same today.

It's worth asking what we are actually celebrating on this day. The answer is more complex than the red carnations on our lapels might suggest.

Chicago, Haymarket, and the Red Carnation

May Day is not a German legacy. It is an American import, and it bears the scars of a bloodbath that many demonstrators today would hardly know how to name. On May 1, 1886, around 400,000 workers in the United States went on a general strike to demand a cause that seems self-evident to us today but sounded utopian back then: the eight-hour workday. In Chicago alone, 90,000 workers gathered in Haymarket Square, a city with migrant workers from Germany and Bohemia who toiled for one and a half dollars a day and worked over sixty hours a week.

Three days later, on the evening of May 4, a demonstration that had initially been peaceful escalated. A bomb was thrown into a police unit, the police opened fire, and there were fatalities on both sides. The subsequent legal proceedings were flimsy and politically unambiguous. Four leaders were hanged in November 1887, one committed suicide in his cell, and three were pardoned years later. August Spies, one of those hanged, is said to have remarked before his death that the time would come when his silence would be louder than the voices that silenced him. It was a phrase that became a rallying cry.

Three years after the Haymarket incident, in July 1889, the founding congress of the Second International in Paris resolved to commemorate the dead of Chicago. On May 1, 1890, workers worldwide were to take to the streets simultaneously in every country and every city. In Germany, Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws were still in effect at that time. Social Democracy was considered a danger to the public and could not demonstrate legally. From the underground, the slogan was to place a red carnation in one's buttonhole. Flowers could not be arrested. Six months later, the Anti-Socialist Laws expired.

From Day of Struggle to Public Holiday, with a Nazi Interlude

The history of May 1st in Germany is a lesson in how a political date can be repurposed multiple times. In 1919, the young republic declared it a public holiday for the first time. Then it disappeared again amidst the partisan squabbles. Things became truly ironic from 1933 onward. The National Socialists, who saw the labor movement as their declared enemy, transformed the day into the "Day of National Labor" and used the marches as a stage for their propaganda. A day later, on May 2nd, trade union headquarters were occupied, officials arrested, and the independent unions dismantled. The holiday, which was meant to honor the working class, became the overture to its disempowerment.

After 1945, this day, too, became divided. In East Germany, it was celebrated as "International Workers' Day" with mass parades, which the regime needed to reassure itself of its own power. In West Germany, it remained a public holiday, albeit in a less restrictive form, declared a "Day of Commitment to Freedom and Peace, Social Justice, International Reconciliation, and Human Dignity"—a formulation that says everything and nothing, and precisely because of this, it became acceptable to a wider audience. Today, May 1st is a public holiday in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and parts of Switzerland, and in many other countries as well. It is the highlight of May Day traditions, with maypoles and dancing into May, and it is also the day of the German Trade Union Confederation's march. Both aspects coexist, sometimes more, sometimes less peacefully.

Kreuzberg, Hafenstraße, and the Liturgy of Riots

Those who only know May 1st as a public holiday only know half of it. For nearly forty years, its other half has been playing out in the radical left-wing circles of two cities: Berlin-Kreuzberg and Hamburg's Schanzenviertel, within sight of the legendary Hafenstraße. May 1st, 1987, in Kreuzberg is considered the birth of a myth. Against the backdrop of Berlin's 750th anniversary celebrations, which were rejected by left-wing alternative groups, a campaign against the official census, and a confrontational police operation at Lausitzer Platz, the situation escalated in a way that surpassed all previous street battles of the squatters' movement. The police had to withdraw completely from SO 36, the eastern part of Kreuzberg, for several hours. Shops were looted, and the Bolle supermarket near Görlitzer Bahnhof was set on fire. From the perspective of the autonomous scene, this was a triumph. From the police's perspective, the beginning of a new liturgy. Since then, there has been a so-called Revolutionary May Day demonstration every year, long since a ritual with its own choreography, lead-up, Walpurgis Night celebrations, and aftermath.

In Hamburg, the roots are even deeper and more precisely defined in terms of urban geography. Hafenstraße in St. Pauli, those eleven Gründerzeit-era apartment buildings between the Reeperbahn and the Landungsbrücken piers, had been gradually occupied starting in late 1981. The city-owned SAGA housing association had allowed the once architecturally sophisticated buildings to fall into disrepair; a "string of pearls" of office buildings along the Elbe riverbank had been planned. Students, anarchists, and people looking for housing moved in. Evictions, reoccupations, barricades, contracts, terminated contracts, and new barricades followed. In November 1987, five thousand police officers faced off against barricaded residents; the press spoke of "civil war-like conditions." Mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi negotiated a lease agreement against the resistance of his own party. In 1995, the buildings were sold to the cooperative "Alternatives on the Elbe Riverbank." The housing struggle was over, but the symbolism remained. To this day, on May 1st, it primarily draws young men to the Schanzenviertel district, to the area around the Rote Flora, the former theater stage occupied since 1989, where encounters with the police have become a dress rehearsal for their own biographies.

Why there in particular? Because neighborhoods have memories. Because cobblestones remain where they once flew. Because conflicts are inscribed in topographies long after the original issue has been resolved. This is no sociological secret, but a political challenge. In these neighborhoods, Labor Day has ceased to be about the eight-hour workday. It's about gentrification, about identity, about the question of who owns the city, and sometimes simply about who wins the May Day evening.

A Liturgy in Search of Its Purpose

This raises the uncomfortable question that the day itself hasn't openly addressed for years. Does a Labor Day, historically dedicated to the eight-hour workday, still make sense in an economy where most employees no longer stand on assembly lines but sit in front of screens, and where the next wave of substitution is no longer machines but algorithms? The figures published in recent months leave little room for excuses. German industry lost around 124,000 jobs in 2025, the automotive industry alone about 50,000. Since 2019, one in seven jobs in the automotive sector has disappeared—more than 100,000 positions. The number of industrial bankruptcies reached a twelve-year high in 2025. Energy costs in Germany are sometimes four times higher than in neighboring countries. Added to this are the lingering effects of the pandemic, the disruptions to global supply chains, the uncertainty surrounding trade routes from Hormuz to Taiwan, and an erratic tariff policy from Washington that turns every quarterly report into a forecast.

Into this same situation bursts the second wave of artificial intelligence. A study by the Institute for Employment Research from the summer of 2025 speaks of around 1.6 million jobs that will change in terms of content or structure over the next decade and a half. McKinsey researchers assume that by 2030 almost a third of all working hours in Europe and the United States will be automatable. Years ago, Goldman Sachs floated a figure that has haunted the debate ever since: up to 300 million full-time jobs worldwide that could be replaced by generative AI. These estimates are rough, they are disputed, but they should nevertheless be taken seriously. Unlike the automation waves of the twentieth century, the current one is not first affecting the factory floor, but rather the office, the legal profession, publishing, and administration—precisely the sector that most recently celebrated the transition from physical to cognitive labor.

Anyone who speaks of a crisis here is not a pessimist, but an accountant. When a significant portion of middle knowledge work is at risk within a decade, while at the same time the industrial base is migrating, this is not a sectoral problem, but a societal one. It's about what will get people out of bed in the morning when their work is no longer needed, or more precisely: when their work is still needed, but no longer paid for, because machines can deliver the same results in seconds. The social question of the twenty-first century is not one of working hours, but one of work itself.

Wouldn't we rather have a day dedicated to education?

This is the point at which May Day needs to reinvent itself if it doesn't want to become mere folklore. Perhaps, to put it polemically, we need a day dedicated to education. A day that doesn't celebrate the eight-hour workday of the industrial worker, but rather creates the conditions that enable people to thrive in an economy where routine work, whether on the assembly line or at a desk, is being outsourced to machines. The industrialized nations that win in the coming decades will be those that invest faster in education, research, and basic science than their competitors, and that distribute these investments broadly, extending all the way to vocational schools and adult education centers.

Connected to this is a second, almost forgotten question: that of self-sufficiency. The last five years have shown that global supply chains are fair-weather systems. Pandemic, war, energy price shock, Hormuz, Suez, Taiwan: every crisis has taught the same lesson. Those who don't produce themselves are vulnerable to blackmail. This isn't about economic nationalism, but about a sober assessment of risk. Energy, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical raw materials, and increasingly, computing power should be produced in Europe on a scale that makes the country resilient. This is more expensive than the current situation. But it is cheaper than the next crisis.

The risks of the present have been identified. The opportunities are less visible, but more real than the public lament suggests. An aging and shrinking economy not only can afford machines that take over routine tasks, but it needs them. Nursing, medicine, administration, and science benefit from automation to an extent that collective bargaining has rarely achieved. The model of "ninety percent routine, ten percent judgment" becomes "ten percent routine, ninety percent judgment." Those who can make judgments are needed. Those who cannot are left behind. This is the second, more benign version of the social question. It can certainly be answered. But certainly not through silence, and certainly not with paving stones.

What Remains of May Day?

May Day is a good 140 years old. It has an American father and an international mother; it has survived the imperial era, dictatorship, division, and reunification. Its meaning has changed repeatedly; it has been worn down, instrumentalized, celebrated, and pelted with objects. Perhaps that is precisely its strength. A day with so much history is not suitable for a liturgy without substance. But it is certainly suitable as an occasion to re-examine, every few years, what work actually means and what we honor about it. Perhaps the eight-hour day, historically won and currently crumbling again. Perhaps the dignity of action, which exists independently of wage labor. Perhaps the right to participate in change instead of being swept away by it.

The police officer in Berlin and the demonstrator in the Schanze district, the maypole in the Franconian village and the server in Frankfurt, the assembly line worker in Wolfsburg and the language model trainer in Heilbronn—they all belong to the same story. Its story is not yet complete. It is being written right now. Some write it with paving stones, some with contracts, some with code. The beautiful duty of this holiday is to remind us, one day a year, that writing, too, is work. And that work is the last thing we should ever forget.

Sapere aude!

S. 

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