Leon Trotsky - Fascism, Stalinism & the United Front

In the early 1930s, as fascism in Germany grew from strength to strength, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a series of pamphlets and articles to explain the nature of fascism and to argue for a working class strategy that could defeat it. These articles, several of the most important of which are collected here, remain some of the best studies of German fascism and Hitler's rise to power. They remain crucial reads today for those trying to understand contemporary fascism - not because the situation is identical, but because Trotsky's method is to place the far-right into the political and economic context.

That said, the essays collected here, contain a great deal of insight, strategy and tactics, that can help us understand how to defeat the far-right and fascism today. Key to this, as Trotsky understood in the 1930s, was mobilising the largest number of workers in militant and mass opposition to the fascists. This required the use of the United Front tactic, a strategy developed in the revolutionary circumstances of 1917 by the Bolsheviks, and adopted by the early Communist International. It required the revolutionary left to build a strategic alliance with forces and workers' organisations to the right of them in order to shape a mass movement. The potential, as Trotsky repeatedly notes, was there but the principle barrier to such unity was the ultra-left position of the German Communist Party (KPD). The KPD argued, following the lead of the now Stalinised Comintern, that the Social Democrats were no better than the fascists. Indeed, at times they made it clear they thought that the Social Democrats and the millions of German workers' who supported and voted for them were worse than the Nazis.

This positioning was tragic. It cut the revolutionary left off from wider workers' forces. This fundamentally weakened the anti-fascist movement and it also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the revolutionary left. Throughout these essays there is a growing sense of urgency from Trotsky as he desperately argues for a different course. 

In 1930 he writes:

If the Communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. 

But the opposite is also true. Trotsky continues:

The election revealed... counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat. 

Later he points out that:

those workers who remain with Social Democracy, as well as those who voted this time for the National Socialists, did do not out of simple ignorance, not because they awakened only yesterday, not because they have as yet had no chance to know what the Communist Party is, but because they have no faith, on the basis of their own experience in the recent years.

The mistakes of the KPD in the revolutionary era of the early 1920s were one thing, but a bigger problem was the wrong-headed approach to the Social Democrats. One problem of course, was the failure to build unity also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the sort of struggles that could have undermined some of the political and economic base of the Nazi's support.

The belief that the SPD were as bad as the fascists meant that the KPD wasn't able to launch the sort of industrial strategy that could have raised the confidence of the working class and transformed the situation. In his 1932 article, The Only Road, Trotsky points out that it is precisely the chaos of capitalism itself that is leading the capitalists towards seeing fascism as a solution. That requires a clearer revolutionary strategy from the KPD, one that was sorely lacking:

If the economic evils of our epoch, in the last analysis, result from the fact that the productive forces of humanity are incompatible with private ownership of the means of production as well as with national boundaries, German capitalism is goring through the severest convulsions just because it is the most modern, most advanced, and most dynamic capitalism on the continent of Europe.

He continues a few pages later:

The petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road. The proletariat can inspire this faith only by its strength, by the firmness of its actions, by a skilful offensive against the enemy, by the success of its revolutionary policy.

The barrier to this was, in the first instance, the fact that the Soviet Union's isolation meant that country was no longer led by revolutionaries, but by a "national-opportunistic bureaucracy, which does not believe in world revolution". This is the "misfortune" for the whole proletariat.

Many of these essays are available elsewhere, and some of them have been collected in different collections. One thing that stands out from this edition from Bookmarks in Britain is a very useful framing essay by Steve Wright, and contextual introductions to each year by Chris Harman. This new edition of Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front also benefits from an excellent essay by British socialist and anti-fascist organiser Samira Ali, who brings Trotsky's analysis of fascism up to date. As she says, these articles "endure because of their theoretical clarity and their strategic questions remain profoundly contemporary". 

In Britain we live in the most dangerous times since Trotsky was writing. If the specifics of fascist organisations today are different, as Samira Ali says, we "return to Trotsky['s writings]... not because they offer a ready-made template for understanding fascism today, but because they provide something more important than historical analogy. They provide a method: analyse fascism concretely, identify the forces that can stop it, and argue for forms of working class unity before the decisive moment has passed."

As such this book is one for our dangerous times.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Zetkin - Fighting Fascism: How to struggle and how to win

George Clare - Berlin Days: 1946-1947

In 1938 George Clare, then aged 17 and an Austrian Jew, fled Vienna where he had grown up to escape the Nazi annexation of the country. Clare's parents would eventually die in the Holocaust, but in those pre-war years they initially ended up in Berlin where they expected to get passes to travel to France. Somewhat surprisingly, given the political situation, Clare fell in love with Berlin. Though he eventually made it to England and spent the war there, when he eventually was called up after the war he made it back to Berlin where he began playing a key diplomatic and legal role in the denazification process that the Allies imposed on the population of defeated Germany.

Berlin Days is the second part of Clare's autobiography. The first covers his youth in Austria and the fate of his family. This is a book that covers Clare's time in Berlin, a short period but one that was foundational for European geopolitics and Clare himself. While the book looks at the denazification process and the problems that the Allied authorities faced, it is also Clare's coming to terms with what Nazism meant and how the people of Germany came to follow Hitler. In no small part it is also Clare's reckoning with the deaths of his parents in Nazi concentration camps.

Some of the most interesting, and poignant, parts of the book occur when Clare follows up on people who his family knew from before the war, or does similar on behalf of friends back home. His own family members, being Jews, have simply vanished. Clare's friends fiancee have survived, clearly having suffered through the war, and seek his support to navigate labyrinthine military beauracracy in order to get permission to work. On his arrival there's a certain naivete to Clare as he tends to see the good in people. Later he becomes more cynical as he experiences various former Nazis trying to escape the net or hide their backgrounds.

Alongside other military officers Clare eventually gets to discuss the fates of hundreds of Germans. Those wanting to take on particular jobs, in particular jounralists or actors, have to demonstrate that they hadn't been a member of the Nazi party. This is made more complicated by the different regulations for the Soviet, French, British and American sectors. The division of Berlin adds confusion when, as in the case of the famous condutor Furtwangler, one or other side (in this case the Soviets) want to use them for their own ends. On occasion Clare and his colleagues expose someone who has hidden an appalling past. They, after all, have all the Nazi documents that have escaped destruction.

Unfortunately Clare's rather plodding style doesn't suit the material and the anecdotes are often lost in the material. It's hard to get a wider picture of Berlin in these crucial period, as Clare's focus is so narrow on the immediate bureacracy he experienced. That's not to say there's nothing of interest. For instance Clare meets (in 1946 and again towards the end of her lifetime), Else Bongers the wife oif the Bauhaus architect  and socialist, Richard Paulick. Bongers helps get Paulick out of Germany immediately after the Nazis take power, saving his life. But she remains. But this interesting story is all too brief. The real problem perhaps is that too many actual Nazis were helped out by the various administrations when they had knowledge and skills that were needed.

In his attempts to understand the Nazis and the Germans, Clare is similarly disappointing. He tends to see Hitler as having a unique ability at a time of great Nationalism, to sway millions. There is no doubt truth in this, but Clare fails to grasp why fascism was so effective at destroying political opposition. That said Clare, who was a leftist at the time, does understand that the failure of unity between the Communists and Socialists was crucial to Hitler's breakthrough. He does not, however, not the systematic violence that was used to stop any opposition.

With its over focus on the bureacracy this book will probably interest specialists more than the casual reader.

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Paul Frölich - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most remarkable revolutionaries to emerge from the European socialist milieu in the late 19th century. There is a tendency on the left to discuss Luxemburg in the context of things that she wrote or did that were wrong. I've been to many meetings which bemoan her failure to "launch a revolutionary party" early, rather than staying part of the German Social Democratic Party, hence dooming the German Revolution. These are, of course, crude criticisms even if they do have some basis. Nonetheless it is important that we say, as Lenin did:

'Eagles may at times fly lower than hens but hens can never rise to the height of eagles'. Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (She corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 when she was released). But inspite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.

Paul Frölich's biography of Luxemburg was one of the very first to be written, and was published in unusal circumstances just before World War Two. In fact the English translation became a huge best seller as part of the Left Book Club during the War. It is very much a political biography that places her ideas in the context of her political activty and her organisational context. The Lenin quote above matters not just because of his list of criticisms, or indeed his celebration of Luxemburg's work - but his acknowledgement that her ideas changed in the context of struggle. Indeed part of the celebration of her work that Lenin mentions was impossible because the archive that Frölich built up was trapped by Stalin during WWII and kept from the movement.

What shines through is Luxemburg's understanding of political theory and strategy, based always on working class power. For instance, in the great debate within the German left about how the left should organise and the role of parliamentary activity, Frölich says that Luxemburg 

did not insist merely on agitation: the task of a socialist parliamentarian also consisted in taking part in the positive legislative work, whenever possible with practical success-a task which would become increasingly difficult with the strengthening of the party’s representation in parliament. The task could be correctly fulfilled only if Social Democracy retained an awareness of its role as an oppositional party and, at the same time, found the golden mean between sectarian negation and bourgeois parliamentarism-always remembering that its real strength lay outside parliament, in the proletarian masses. Above all, however, it had to give up without reservation the illusion that a working-class party could overpower a capitalist state by a majority vote in parliament, i.e. solely by parliamentary means.

Nonetheless it is clear that the context of Luxemburg's main area of work - the German socialist movement - did have its impact on her throught. Frölich's book is very much a celebration of Luxemburg's work and life - but he isn't uncritical. But in one area he does acknowledge mistakes - her debate with Lenin over the question of political organisation.

This first disagreement between her and Lenin-even if all the various background factors are taken into consideration-nevertheless revealed characteristic differences between these two great leader personalities. Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any corrections in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations. To overstate the point, it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass; for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.

This is a much better approach than the "she didn't set up a revolutionary party" argument. Not least because it is clear that Luxemburg did always fight for revolutionary organisation, and I was reminded that the Polish group she led played such a role in the crucial war years and during the 1917 revolutionary period.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of Luxemburg's "mistakes" are in her work on the accumulation of capital. Here again there's a tendency for some reviewers simply to say that she was wrong. Yet in doing so they miss Luxemburg's real attempt to grapple with the limits of Marx's own work on accumulation (born out of his abstraction of the economy from reality in order to clarify his argument) and the fact that she was one of the first to link accumulation to imperialist expansion. She was also, it should be said, someone who was very clear about the role of imperialism in the destruction of indigenous peoples. Her theory here may not be fully developed, but it is a very real attempt to place a Marxist critique of capitalism into a global context. 

Luxemburg's work also included two other great pieces of work that developed revolutionary politics to adapt to new eras. Her Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike both remain indispensible booklets for socialists in the 21st centutry as we grapple with the interactions between social movements, capital and political organisation. The Mass Strike in particular will no doubt be read again and again as workers engage in mass struggles over austerity and politics. The "Gen X" revolts spring to mind.

But it is in the last four years of her life that Rosa Luxemburg comes into her own. Her fight to shape a new revolutionary era out of the ruins of the betrayal of the German socialist movement at the start of World War One and then her attempts to learn from and extend the revolutionary epoch after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here Frölich engages with her criticisms of the Russian Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, particular towards the National and Agrarian questions. He acknowledges her errors, while placing them in context. Not least the fact that Luxemburg was in prison and had limited access to the movement at times. Nonetheless we see how Luxemburg is constantly striving to develop the movement, and with the outbreak of the German Revolution we she how her politics place her far ahead of almost all her comrades. Her clarity of ideas in December 1918 and January 1919 with the counter-revolution flexing its muscles is poignant given her murder by them in early January.

There is no doubt that the loss of Luxemburg robbed the German working class of one of its most able leaders. Frölich's book is one of the best introductions to her life and politics, but it is also an incredible celebration of working class power and the vision of socialism from below that Luxemburg strived for her whole life. If at times it feels a little hagiographic this is, perhaps, to be expected given that Frölich is writing in the darkest period for humanity as Hitler has won and Stalin's politics is stamping over the revolutionary tradition that Paul Frölich's subject stood for. 

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Clara Zetkin - Fighting Fascism: How to struggle and how to win

Editors Mike Taber and John Riddell open their introduction to this short but incredibly useful collection by writing "seldom has there been a word more bandied about, yet less understood, than fascism". That's certainly true. As the right and far-right gain confidence around the globe understanding who and what fascists are and represent is crucial for the left in order to defeat them. We can learn a great deal from those who fought fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and this short collection of pieces by Clara Zetkin is a superb introduction.

Zetkin deserves a brief introduction. She was a leading figure in the German Communist Party who had been active since the 1870s. A close friend and collaborator with Rosa Luxembourg in the SPD, she was particularly active around the women's movement. Opposed to the First World War and a principled anti-imperialist she joined the Spartakist League and became a leading figure in the KPD. She was an elected member of the German Reichstag, and as this collection makes clear, she fought hard for a United Front of Communists and non-Communists against the Nazis - using Parliament as a platform. When the Nazis came to power she went into exile in the Soviet Union and died in 1933.

The importance of a brief outline of Zetkin's life is to illustrate an important fact - she was part of the Communist movement in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, through the defeat of the German Revolution and into the period of Stalin's counter-revolution against the Russian revolution. Through this time she was part of debates on fighting fascism at the Communist International, and the first, most important documents in this collection are actually reports made to that body.

The first thing to say is how prescient these are. Writing in 1923 she is able to immediate discern what is unique about fascism through her analysis of Mussolini in Italy. Her explanation is important for contemporary analysis. She says:

At first, the prevailing view was that fascism was nothing more than violent bourgeois terror, and its character and effects were thought to be similar to those of the Horthy regime in Hungary. Yet even though fascism and the Horthy regime employ the same bloody, terrorist methods, which bear down on the proletariat in the same way, the historical essence of the two phenomena is entirely different.

Rather,

Fascism... is not at all the revenge of hte bourgeoisie against the militant uprising of the proletariat. In historical terms, viewed objectively, fascism arrives much more as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution that began in Russia. 

Then:

[Communists] view fascism as an expression of the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy and as a symptom of the bourgeois state's dissolution. We can combat fascism only if we grasp that it rouses and sweeps along broad social masses who have lost the earlier security of their existence and with it, often, their belief in social order. 

Having then outlined some of the "thousands  seeking new possibilities for survival", she explains that its not enough to see the growth of fascism "solely as a result of such economic pressures alone". It is, she repeats, the "halting pace of world revolution resulting from betrayal by the reformist leaders of the workers' movement". The failure of these figures to carry forward the struggle and offer an alternativge vision or "global change" to the embattled middle classes allowed them to find solace and hope in the fascist movement. Fascism she says "became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned". But it's her analysis of the dynamics that make the book so useful. She predicts, for instance, that the fascist leadership (as Hitler's Nazis did) would "flirt with the revolutionary proletariat, even though they may not have any personal sympathy for it". This is why they called themselves "National Socialists" rather than for any sympathy for socialism.

Having explored what fascism is, and what it is like in government (in Italy) Zetkin talks about how the left can defeat it - challenging the suffering that people are experiencing and challenge the fascists themselves. Crucial is a United Front of workers from whatever position. As she says:

But proletarian struggle and self-defense against fascism requires a proletarian united front. Fascism does not ask if the worker in the factory has a soul painted in the white and blue colors of Bavaria; or is inspired by the black, red, and gold colors of the bourgeois republic; or by the red banner with a hammer and sickle. It does not ask whether the worker wants to restore the Wittelsbach dynasty [of Bavaria], is an enthusiastic fan of Ebert, or would prefer to see our friend Brandler as president of the German Soviet Republic. All that matters to fascism is that they encounter a class-conscious proletarian, and then they club him to the ground. That is why workers must come together for struggle without distinctions of party or trade-union affiliation.

With the rise of Stalin, and "third period" thought, the Communist International broke with the principled position of United Front strategy and instead labelled the reformists as being the same as the fascists. The editors of this volume explore how this affected Zetkin - she was essentially isolated and ignored, though the Stalinists weren't able to destroy here. Zetkin did, it is true, pull some of her criticisms of Stalin and the direction of the in order to maintain her ability to play a role in the Comintern and the KPD. Nonetheless she did manage to keep arguing for a United Front, most memorably and movingly in a speech to the German Reichstag, while being heckled by fascists and Nazis, in 1932. Extracts from this remarkable speech are reproduced here, with a framing introduction by editor John Riddell,. Riddel explains the context. Zetkin was almost blind and so frail she had two KPD members carry her to the platform. She started by saying

Our most urgent task today is to form a united front of all working people in order to turn back fascism. All the differences that divide and shackle us - whether founded on political, trade-union, religious or ideological outlooks - must give way before this imperious historical necessity.

Tragically the Stalinised KPD was no longer a force willing to construct such a united front and many thousands of Communists would pay the price with their lives in the Nazi concentration camps. Zetkin had not been able to win the necessary argument in the face of Stalin's forces inside the Comintern. But she had never lost hope. She finished:

The united front must embrace all those who are dependent on wages or salaries or otherwise must pay tribute to capitalism, for it is they who both sustain capitalism and are its victims. I am opening this session of the Reichstag in fulfillment of my duty as honoary chair and in the hope that despite my present infirmities I may yet have the good fortune to open, as honarary chair, the first congress of workers' councils of a Soviet Germany.

This collection of essays, brilliantly edited by John Riddell and Mike Taber, is a crucial tool to understand and organise against fascism today. But it is also a tribute to a brave and principled socialist who fought her whole life for the liberation of humanity. Everyone should read it.

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Lyndal Roper - Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy

2017 saw the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther beginning the Reformation. By lucky coincidence, rather than design, it was also the year that Lyndal Roper's epic biography of Luther was published. As a result Roper was asked to speak at numerous debates, lectures and events that marked the Reformation and this book, is the result of that experience. In her preface Roper recounts speaking in Wittenberg, the town where Luther was based and were the Reformation was centred. She was in St Mary's Church, where Luther preached and was married, but the Church is also the site of a hideously racist antisemitic sculpture. This then was the occasion for much debate and discussion, and in particular how she thought about Luther himself, and his antisemitism.

But the book then is not another biography of Luther. Rather it is an attempt to understand Luther's life and ideas in a deeper context. It is, she writes to be taken in the spirit of Lutheranism that she admires, "its profund anti-authoritarianism, its political engagement, and its insistence on argument, discussion, and critical appraisal of its own history". At the same time Roper is open that she is critical and prepared to highlight unpleasant and "less comfortable" aspects of Luther's ideas and life.

The book opens with a study of Luther's image. Luther's Reformation ran on image and ideas. He was the first figure in history to make use of the printing press in a systematic way. But the use of the press was for more than producing large quantities of sermons and printed texts. It was also, as Andrew Pettegree has pointed out in his book Brand Luther to create a Brand. Pamphlets had a style, and as Roper shows, Luther's image was carefully curated for "instant legibility". She points out that:

There is Luther the monk, and image which had run its course by 1524; Luther in the Wartburg; Luther as a marrid man; the standard portrait; the full-body Luther; and dead Luther. Each of these was made famous by the Cranach workshop. Finally there is a type I shall term 'Luther and Co.' which was produced only after Luther's death.

This curation of Luther's image created in a time before mass media, an instantly recognisable figure and thus helped propel Luther to leadership of the Reformation itself. But Roper continues, these images went further, "gave rise to a whole new material culture of images.... Indeed, Cranach's portrait proved so successful that it escaped the bounds of Luteranism altogether and became a signifier not just for the Lutheran Church, but for German-ness itself". Luther came to stand in for the religious changes and the society they helped create.

Another chapter looks at the role of dreams in Luther's life and those of his religious contemporaries. How particular dreams are understood was important, but I mostly refer to them because while Roper says that "Luther... wa scharacteristically sceptical about the significance of dreams", she places a some importance on them in understanding Luther himself. Indeed this includes her analysis of Luther's antisemitism. Here she writes:

In contrast to medieval anti-Semitism, Luther's was linked to a set of fantasies surrounding circumcision and the Jews as the Chosen People. Psychologically, in Freudian terms, such fears would be connected with the Oedipal stage and with castration... The infant feels rivalry towarsd the father, and fears that the father will take revenge on him by castrating him. Jews, so the irrational fear would run, have undergone a kind of symbolic castration ... The circumcised Jew would therefore function as a nightmare vision of what might happen to oneself. Anti-Semitism would consequently be connected to issues about sexual difference, power and parents. It would be fundamentally concerned with identity.

This is, I think, a remarkably weak analysis of Luther's antisemitism. It should be said that Roper's account of Luther's antisemitism is incredibly important. She notes herself that it was rarely acknowledged, often ignored, and only recently have books studied it closely. This acknowledgement of Luther's antisemitism by historians, biographers and scholars has been important. But Roper's own explanation of why Luther was an antisemite here, removes Luther, his ideas, and principly the Jewish people from their historical context. Rather than seeking to explain Luther's antisemitism in Freudian terms, we need to locate it in both his own developing religious ideas and the way that Jewish people were the victim of oppression and racism due to their economic and religious positions in 16th century Europe. This chapter was disappointing and inadequate.

Roper, it must be emphasised, does not in any way diminish or excuse Luther's antisemitism. Indeed she notes how it has been both exposed, and forgotten in the final part of her study of Luther's impact - Luther Kitsch. Here she highlights the Luther Playmobil figure, the most popular such plastic figure of all time, and one that was initially made with a version of a Bible that essentially emphasised Luther's antisemitic beliefs. This was hurridly corrected, but the kitsch continues. Even today, many years after the 500th anniversary, Wittenberg's shops are full of socks, ornaments, pictures and even honey, that celebrate the image of Luther.

The essays in Living I was your Plague are interesting, but the book felt disjointed and directionless. I have found Lyndal Roper's work stimulating and enjoyable, and her biography of Luther is unparalled. But this book was weak and in places flawed.

Related Reviews

Roper - Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
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Loren Goldman & Massimiliano Tomba - Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants' War at 500 Years

I don't often review academic journals on this reading blog, but this special issue of History of the Present caught my eye. Despite the intense discussion around the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants' War in Germany there are few publications in English so I was pleased to get hold of this. 

At first glance this is an eclectic mix. Alongside some engaging and penetrating articles on Thomas Müntzer and his legacy, there are some new translations by Andrew Drummond of key related texts and extracts from Eric Vuillard's excellent novel The War of the Poor. Drummond's contributions also include a fresh working of the Twelve Articles of the rebellious peasants. Though the most useful translation here is of Martin Luther's Letter to the Princes of Saxony, Concerning the Rebellious Spirit. It is helpful to have this accessible as it is not in every Luther collection. In it we see, once again, Luther's use of the Bible as an authority to justify princely destruction of the rebels:

For Your Princely Graces know well that your power and worldly sovereignty are given to you by God with the command that they should be used to keep the peace and punish the unruly, as St. Paul taught in Romans 13. So Your Princely Graces should neither slumber nor miss this opportunity. God will demand an answer of you if you neglect to use the sword that has solemnly been entrusted to you. And the people and the world would not forgive it if Your Princely Graces were to tolerate and suffer such rebelliouos and outrageous violence.

Later, says Luther, "it is either us or them". But note. This is an article from June 1524 before the main rebellion has started. The "sword" here is not yet the physical sword, though the ambiguity must have been useful. It is the metaphorical sword. Luther warns "we are quite prepared to allow and tolerate it if you fight back with words, so that the true teaching is protected. But we declare that you should not use force or mobilise any troops. For we, who chamption God's word, should never fight back with the fist". Within a year Luther would abandon that position and urge the princes to "stab, smite, slay".

Understanding why Luther could come to such a violent position, and in particular the role of Müntzer in advocating for a rebellious struggle against the status quo is part of the purpose of the new material in the book. An excellent introductory article by the editors places Müntzer and the "War" in the context of 500 years of history. They conclude that "to remember Müntzer and the Peasants' War today means exploring the not-happened and the not-yet-explored". This highlights the importance of the period and the struggle (as well as Müntzer's own ideologies) in creating spaces to think about the future and try and shape it. Müntzer was expert at drawing and building on radical traditions to advocate for a common future, at the same time as "protecting it in a tehological shell". His thinking is both universally radical, while at the same time being constrained by the time and place in which he was developing his thought.

This "insurgent theology" is the subject of Massimiliano Tomba's main piece. He makes an important point that while Luther created new ideologies to "justify the princes' authority" as above. But others expanded on this. Hegel "celebrates the Reformation" and sees in it the transition to a new order freer of theological constraints, constructing a "specific conception of freedom and rationality to a universal principle for the foundation of law and the modern state". Tomba points out, that this was to stabalise society in the wake of a struggle that had almost torn apart the old world. It would be Engels and Marx who would take this further and see within the post Peasants' War society a stagnation of development and theory that would hamper German development until the 20th century. As Tomba says:

The trajectory that emerged victorious from this clash used armed violence to suppress the insurgents and used theoretical violence to weaponize concepts and categories in order to neutralise the concrete possibilities contained in diffrent political and legal trajectories. 

The Reformation, at least in this stage, was shaped by the class struggle of the GPW, and the ideologies (principly Müntzer's) that emerged out of the struggle. Had Michael Graismar not been isolated in time and space on the other side of the Alps, he might also be listed here for his more developed economic thinking. What came out of this Reformation's victory, was a top down process that imposed change from above. It was, as Tomba says, the "culmination of a war machine against different visions and practicies of life in common". Though here I would suggest culmination is an inadequate and passive definition. A better word would perhaps be victory. It was, if nothing else, a class war that was won by the ruling class.

These themes are explored further in Loren Goldman's article on Müntzer in the "Marxist imagination". Goldman points out the way Marxists, in three key periods, have used the GPW to explore their own contexts. Engels, famously, in 1850. Kautsky in the 1920s seeing Müntzer as "harbinger and herald of the urban industrial proletariat class" and and Bloch who sees Lenin in Müntzer. It is a reminder, Goldman says, that any historical character, "reflects the insurgent particularlity of those who summon it". Here it is difficult to agree, but we could also add that the State Capitalist regime of East Germany put their own spin on Müntzer. A revolutionary precurrsor to their own society, that helped a veneer of socialism to be painted over the anti-democratic nature of their hierarchy. 

Two other essays are worth mentioning. Alejandro Zorzin's study of the impact of Müntzer in Latin America, particularly on revolutionary liberation theology, opened up new areas for me. It is remarkable to see how radicals, working with limited translations, were able to use Müntzer for new activist and theoretical reasons. Anne Norton's study on Müntzer also brings fresh material. Here she explores the way Müntzer could use scatalogical and vulgar language to pierce the powers of hierarchy and wealth. She says, quoting Müntzer "They stink, all of them, the powerful and their military minions, for these 'enemies of the cross have crapped their courage into their pants'."

Parallels with 2025 are obvious. But Norton cautions us not to draw too many parallels, not least between the "sovereignty" of the rebels of 1525 and contemporary revolutionary democratic theory:

This conception of sovereignty differes radically from the conception of 'the people' as a unifed and uniform whole... It acts in a dispersed, disseminate form, seeding the democratic. It is embedded in people as they work to rule themselves. Sovereignty is in them, in their bodies. If is in their earthly, material presence, that the right to rule is present in the world.

Perhaps the common theme that emerges from most of these essays is that Müntzer's radical vision in 1525, which emerged from the class struggle that was the Radical Reformation, is not a blueprint, but an inspiration. It is a tool to shape contemporary revolutionary thought - to inspire of course - but also to open the radical imagination. Müntzer will continue to be read to remind us that we can think beyond the political spaces we already have.

Related Reviews

Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer
Bradstock - Faith in the Revolution: The political theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley
Ming - Thomas Müntzer: Sermon to the Princes
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Scribner & Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints
Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

David Olusoga & Casper W. Erichsen - The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide

In the late nineteenth century Germany was straining at the boundaries of its borders. Most of the Global South had been carved up by European powers. Britain, France, Italy all had their Empires. German capitalists needed more markets and more natural resources. They too wanted an empire that they could subjegate and pillage, like the other industrial powers. Five thousand miles from Germany, Namibia was to become the African country were German empire building began, and it became an experiment in racist control, genocidal war and colonial rule. The consequences for the people of Namibia, tribes like the Herero, Tibooi Nama and Bethanie Nama was appalling. 

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's remarkable history is a study of this history. But they are making a wider argument. What happened in Nambia was a trial for the Holocaust and the Nazis. As the authors say:

What Germany's armies and civilian administrators did in Namibia is today a lost history, but the Nazis knew it well. When the Schutztruppe attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia a century ago, Hitler was a schoolboy of fifteen. In 1904, he lived in a continent that was electrified by the stories of German geroism and African barbarism emanating from what was then German South-West Africa.

Indeed Hitler was "closely associated" with one of the leading figures in the genocide. When Hitler joined the ranks for the far-right in 1922, it was "under the command of the charismatic Gerneral Franz von Epp, a violent, racist, military leader who firmly believed in "lebensraum". One of the startling things about this book is how words that readers will associated with the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War were first used in Nambia in the 1900s. Lebensraum was a term coined to justify the need of Germany to expand and build colonies. Konzentrationslager, the German translation of the English term Concentration Camp - first used in the Boer War - was used to describe the slave-labour camps in Namibia.

When "war" broke out between the German military and the Namibian people, it took place on racial lines:

From the start, the outburst of intense fury againt the Herero was channelled and manipulated by an array of nationalist and pro-colonial societies. Along with the right-wing press, they set out to portray the Herero as savages, their uprising motivated by innate brutality. Ignoring the facts, they repeatedly claimed that the Herero had launched an indiscriminate racial war and that, as savages, they fought without restraint. Many newspapers also carried reports of atrocities - most exaggerated, some entirely fabricated - claiming that a number of German children had been killed, that white women had been raped and that some of the male settlers who had been killed had had their noses and testicles cut off.

The racial war against the Nambian people was carried out in the brutal fashion. Those in command were imbued with hardened nationalist and racist views. On his way to Africa, von Epp wrote, "The world is being divided... With time we will inevitably need more space; only by the sword will we be able to get it. It will be up to our generation to achieve this. It is a matter of existence." 

But least that we conclude this was only a German problem, note that another volunteer for action in Namibia, "regarded the recent history of the United States as a model of how Germany might transform her own colonial frontiers". Economic "development" in the colony went alongside the "extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples". The camps were sources of slave labour for the colony, including for industrial corporations as well as individual families. But, it is crucial to emphasise, they were not work camps. Writing about one of the colony's heads, von Lindequist, the authors contrast the British in South Africa with Germany in Namibia:

Von Lindequist's promise to the Herero - that their suffering in the concentration camps might come to an end if their 'compatriots, who are still in the bush' surredered - bears the hallmarks of Kichener's earlier strategy. Yet there was one crucial difference. In the Boer War the concentration camps had been part of a strategy aimed at ending an ongoing insurgency. In German South-West Africa, the Herero were defeated when von Linsequist took command. As he admitted in mid-1906, they had no ability and no desire to fight. The concentration camps were not part of a military strategy.

The "defeat" however of the Namibian tribes came at a cost for Germany. Indeed the most inspiring chapters of The Kaiser's Holocaust are the remarkable story of the extended, guerilla war that fought the German army to a standstill. A war that was not marked by atrocity on the part of the Nama and Herero people, but rather the opposite. The Namibian fighters in fact treated women and children with kindness and did not arbitarily kill or rape them. Their warfare was directed against the male settlers and the army sent against them. Its a remarkable story of rebellion and war, against a foe unable to imagine that poorly armed black people were able to fight them to a standstill.

But eventually, by subterfuge and starvation, the Namibians were defeated. Led into concentration camps while being promised peace and relocation, they were taken to brutal torture and death. The lessons from German South-West Africa taught a new generation of far-right nationalists. Events in African were a blueprint for the Nazis own behaviour:

Soldiers and scientists whose careers began on the pastoral deserts of South-West Africa or in the killing fields of East Africa, Togo and Cameroon were to play leading roles in the Nazi tragedy. 

and

When designing the lasws needed to create the 'racial state'... the Nazis found a number of definiations and legal precedents, along with a whole lexicon of racial terminology, in legislation passed in Germany's former colonies.

The authors also show how the pattern that led to the "Kaiser's Holocaust" was also repeated in Eastern Europe as the needs of their racist programmes clased with the military needs of the Nazi economy:

The desire to exterminate or expel their racial enemies ran counter to a growing and desperate need for labour and concerns for the well-being of the fighting men. Tese contradictions were never fully solved, but as in South-West Africa, one solution was the creation of forced labour camps in which labour becames a means of liquidation.

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's book is a remarkable piece of history. It rescues a forgotten period of colonialism from deliberate obscurity. It reminds us again of the bloody reality of colonial rule, and it shows how Nazi ideology has a long and terrible antecedent. But it tells us something else. Reading this book at the same time as the Israeli state continued its murderous assault on the people of Gaza, the book reminds us that settler colonialism always rests on racist ideas and can have genocidal conclusions. If there is one other thing to remember, with this in mind, it is that the resistance of the people of South-West Africa was brave and principled, and that in Germany at least a minority on the left did seek to highlight and stop the war. Tragically that was not enough to stop the Kaiser's Holocaust. This book is an essential read for anyone trying to understand twentieth, and twenty-first, century history.

Related Reviews

Achebe - An Image of Africa
Hamouchene & Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism
Lindqvist - 'Exterminate All The Brutes'
Pakenham - The Scramble for Africa
Rüger - Heligoland
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World

Karin Wieland - Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin & a century in two lives

Marlene Dietrich was one of the great artists, actors and performers of the early twentieth century. Her life was shaped by the twists and turns of the German Weimar period, when poverty, capitalist crisis and radical politics shaped a generation. Whatever the particular nature of her beliefs, Dietrich was one who was unafraid to call out things she disagreed with. While she could be a problem to work with, and her casual dismissal of lovers and relationships left many shocked and confused, she was, no doubt on the right side of history.

Leni Riefensthal an admirer of Hitler, a calculating careerist who saw in the Nazi regime a chance to become close to power, to advance herself and to share in the wealth and adoration that went with it. At times this meant she literally used Gypsy prisoners from concentration camps as film extras, before returning them to their inevitable deaths. That she herself was playing a romanticised gypsy in the film being made only heightens the horror. 

Karin Wieland's double biography tries to tie these two individuals together. It is a difficult task. There is little or no physical overlap between the two, though a photo of them together is included. Instead what Wieland is trying to do is to tell the story of the 20th century through the lives of her two subjects. As such the book ends up falling between biography and history and getting neither particularly well. 

What the reader gets from this book will depend on their particular interests. I approached it hoping to learn more about Dietrich, who for me is the enigmatic singer and actor, who threw her lot in with Hollywood and left German as the Nazis rose. Her principled refusal to return to Germany and act in Nazi films, despite her perennial lack of money, was a genuine blow to the propaganda efforts of Hitler's regime. As a result of this, and her choice to become the entertainer of choice for the US military, sparing no effort or personal discomfort to sing, perform and cheer up the troops on the front lines, felt more like a powerful effort at anti-fascism. But Wieland also makes it clear that Dietrich also found a renewed love of applause and adoration. Here she was at her best - not the leading lady from Hollywood, but the Weimar era cabaret superstar who had a instinctive ability to speak to the crowds. 

On the other hand I had little interest in Riefenshtahl who, in my opinion had little talent, and whose close links to Nazism and Nazi leaders was carefully hidden through post-war manipulation. While she clearly had some talents as a director, it is also abundantly clear that these talents came through because of a close identification with the Nazi aesthetic cultivated by Hitler and Goebbels. 

I was, however, intrigued to see that Wieland pulls no punches in retelling Riefenshtahl's career. While there's less material that for Dietrich, she draws out the essential emptiness of Riefenshtahl's life. At the same time Wieland makes it very clear just how close to fascism and the Nazis the filmmaker was. Her post-war career is shaped by the same controlling, manipulative behaviour and a singular failure to atone for her sins. 

Unfortunately there is not enough of a parallel between the two figures to tell the story of the century. Indeed Dietrich isn't enough of a principled political thinker and Riefenshtahl's too limited an actor and performer to make the lives parallel. They just happened to live the same lives - with little or no overlap. At the end of her life Dietrich comes across as a sad, lonely and impoverished former great - someone who made some amazing films, with personal determination and principle. But she was at least a great performer and actor in her time. And after the war Dietrich was at least obsessed with trying to understand and atone for her native country's sins. Riefenshtahl comes across as a pig who got away with a host of crimes, and was accepted back by the establishment as soon as it could.

Readers wanting to learn more about either figure will find lots of material in this book of interest. But it failed too offer any insights into the period, or real connection between the two.

Related Reviews

Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich
Boyd - Travellers in the Third Reich

Lyndal Roper - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War

Lyndal Roper is one of the most prominent historians of Germany in the Reformation era. Her books include an excellent biography of Martin Luther, which I reviewed here. Just in time for the 500th anniversary her monumental history of the German Peasants' War has been published. It has been eagerly anticipated by me and many others interested in the period. 

Roper argues that understanding the Reformation, and its "possiblities, as well as its limits" cannot be done without an understanding of the German Peasants' War. But likewise the War cannot be understood without knowing "the heady atmosphere of religious excitment in which it took place". The book begins with the context for the rebellion - the religious turmoil and the conditions of oppression and exploitation of the peasants. It was a very different world. One where

animals such as oxen, horses, cows, pigs, sheep and poultry lived closely with people, and where the vagaries of the weather mattered in a way that modern generations have often forgotten. The relationship between labour, harvest, and food was obvious, rather tahn mediated by powerful firms and complex industrial processes. The energy to drive machines came from water, from wood and from charcoal and it was clear who owned these resources and evident when they restricted access to them.

Roper casts peasant life (and struggles) in its ecological context - referencing the way they relied on, understood and shaped their landscape. She understands that their relationship to the land was more than a negative one, and she criticises contemporaries, even radicals such as Michael Gaismair, when they don't grasp the peasant ecological reality. 

Roper also shows how the context for the rebellion, and the Reformation, was a slowly changing world. Referring to the rebels' grievances she says: 

The sense of exploitation is unmistakable in these grievances, as is the sheer drudgery of agricultural labour. And yet the precise cause of the misery remains intangible, a fact that may well have increased the peasants' anger, while also making it harder to negotiate in the time honoured way, becamse more than just specific practices were at stake. Though they doubtless idealised a golden age that had never existed, peasants were complaining that relationships which had formerly been based on mutual respect had become matters of compulsion. The entire system had become more complex because of its growing entanglement in an economy where many owned rural rights.

The close links between exploitation of the peasants' labour, their ecological context and the rebellion's demands are drawn out well. As Roper writes in an illuminating sentence "for the peasants, the land was a working environment; for the lords it was a locale of peasure - and a resource to be exploited for profit." 

The rebellion condensed all the anger and frustrations that the peasants' were experiencing. Roper's book explores these well, but its strength is her understanding that the rebellion arose out of the context of the Reformation and a changing economy, but then went on to pose alternatives. The Reformation, she writes, "provided a set of ideas shown that such [existing] arrangements were 'not Christian'. They had to be transformed." In the early weeks of the rising, "lordship was exposed as a bond not of affection but of domination". Consequently, the "whole social structure therefore fissured under the impact of the peasants' revolt."

What was the alternative? Much is made, rightly in my opinion, of the politics of the more utopian minded of the radical leaders - Thomas Müntzer and Michael Gaismair in particular. But running through the peasant demands from 1524 and 1525 is a vision of a world turned both upsidedown - there would be no serfs, priests would be elected, taxes would be raised locally and controlled demoncratically. But it would also be a world that functioned in a new way. The vision was not of an anarchist utopia with no leaders, but one of a "new kind of authority in which men of respect, locally known and chosen, would have power". But what was this power? Roper suggests it would have been very different to the power known from feudalism:

It took imagination to conceive of a world without the lordship that the peasants knew. They probably did not want to overturn the entire system of authority, or at least not at first, nut merely to change the system of landlordship. And yet their slogn, "We want to have no lords". addressed everyone - peasants, miners and townsfolk alike - because everyone had some experience of lordship in its different forms or could tell a story about the overbearing behaviour of some lord or other. In its place they wanted a society based on mutuality, brotherhood and trust... they began to envision a world without the familiar semifeudal structures, with a new kind of rulership that would give them agency and the power to decide.

It was a great vision, and the ruling class had to destroy it by drowning it in blood. In her grasp of this, and other key dynamics of the period and the rebellion, Roper's book is exemplary. 

Roper writes from a feminist viewpoint,and she does her best to highlight the central role of women in the rebellion. While we know only a few names of women involved in the rebellion, Roper does give us many examples of their anonymous involvement. I didn't always agree with the conclusions that arose from this viewpoint, such as her suggestion that the anonymous author of the remarkable revolutionary pamphlet To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry is writing an explicity "male vision" of revolution. Here the problem is partly language. "Brotherly love" and "brother" in the context of mass rebellion, may well be meant to include women. But it might simply not have mattered to the ordinary women and men who were engaged in a revolutionary struggle and were constructing their own "vision" and challenging those who were holding on to older stereotypes and prejudices. 

Roper makes some important points about sexual violence in the conflict. She notes that the threat of such violence was used by some of the peasants against the wives and daughters of the lords, their enemies. But she concludes "the peasant armies do not appear to have used rape as a tool of domination". The counter-revolutionary forces on the other hand, did use such violence on a large scale. Given the accusations levelled against the peasants by their contemporary enemies, and ones since, this is an important corrective. 

Roper's argues that the peasants' "ideal of brotherhood created potential kinship even with the lords, constraining the wish to make the enemy's women bear one's children." I think this gets closer to an understanding of the Peasants' War as a revolutionary movement, motivated by ideals. The discipline of its participants in the peasant armies arises out of common radical visions and politics.

But its on the question of revolution that Roper is less clear. This is particularly obvious in her critique of Marx and Engels. 

She goes so far as to say that "an unwillingness to theorise how peasants engaged in revolution was one of Marxism's great failures". This is a unhelpful, and inaccurate, generalisation. In fact Marx's analysis of the peasantry is remarkably useful for understanding the failure of the peasants to achieve their aims in 16th century Germany. Roper dismisses Marx's comment that the peasantry is a "sack of potatoes". She does this because she understands it as meaning that "peasants are all the same". But Marx was actually discussing the economic reality of a peasant economy,  that it is made up of multitudes of independent producers. Following the "potato" quote, Marx wrote:

Insofar as millions of [peasant] families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. 

The differing interests of the peasant households would inevitably lead to tensions and contradictions that would undermine any victory over the feudal lords, unless there could be a breakthrough elsewhere in society. But in 16th century Germany, the economic base in the urban areas was insufficiently developed to allow the urban producers to build a society based on collective production. Thus the best that the peasants could hope for was to win some temporary space and defeat particular lords, but they could not hope to defeat feudalism and institute a new social order. This is the source of Engels' powerful passage about Thomas Münzter being a leader ahead of his time. He could imagine the future, but not be in a position to win it, but nevertheless be compelled to fight for it. 

Marx and Engels' argument that the peasants could not win in 1525, was not because they were "mesmerised by industrial production", but because he and Marx understood that it would take further economic development at the base of European society before a system of general abundance and sustainability could be created. Roper's attacks on Marxism here felt like they were responding more to the crude economistic Marxism of the East German historians than the actual ideas of Marx and Engels.

When I set out to write this post I hoped that I wouldn't end up writing the sort of review that just denounces an author for getting Marx completely wrong. I have probably failed in that ambition. So I want to emphasise that how remarkable I think that Lyndal Roper's book is. Even for those of us who have spent years reading about the subject she has found a wealth of new material. I read and re-read sections with great excitement and found fresh insights in every chapter and learnt a great deal. I should also add that I think the book is beautifully produced and illustrated. If I disagree with her I do share Roper's inspiration at the peasants' desire to fight for a better world. So while I disagree with Roper's theoretical framing I hope people will read and enjoy Summer of Fire and Blood. 

Related Reviews

Roper - Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
Scribner & Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints
Bak (ed) - The German Peasant War of 1525
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

Franz Mehring - Absolutism & Revolution in Germany 1525-1848

Franz Mehring was one of the most fascinating characters to come out of the great period of central European Marxist thought in the early 20th century. Initially an social democrat, he developed into a serious Marxist thinker and historian. When I originially picked up this book I assumed it was a single work, but in fact it is an edited volume of works about the history of Germany, written as educational booklets for the Marxist schools that were part of German Social Democracy in the 1900s. 

I was particularly interested in his writing on the German Reformation, "and its consequences", which built upon the insights and approach taken by Friedrich Engels in his writing on the German Peasants' War. Disappointingly for me, this is the shortest section, but nonetheless it is packed with insights. Especially around the consequences of the counter-revolutionary defeat of the peasantry. 

Mehring writes about the defeat, in a characteristicly colourful way, "the blood of the peasants flowed in rivers on German soil... and yet, in the long run, this fearful defeat did not worsen the position of the peasant class." He continues by explaining how all the other classes, "the clergy, the nobility and the towns" were victims of the revolution and its defeat, and continues:

Thus only the princes had any real advantages from the pesasants war. They seized the property of the Church; a gertaer or a lesser part of the nobility had to recognise their authority, and the fines from the towns flowed into their coffers. Apart from the secular principalities there were still, it is true, ecclesiastical rulers, town republics, and sovereigh Counts and Lords. But in gernal historical development in Germany was driving towards provincial centralisation and the subordination of all other estates of the empre by the princes.

He then goes on to say, "the German Reformation, after the revolutionary fire had been extinguished with the blood of the peasants, became a campaign of robbery and plunder by the German princes and their ever growing emancipation from Imperial authority". It is this that shapes the following centuries of politics for Germany, and these then form the basis for Mehrings remaining accounts in the book.

Some of this is difficult for readers not seeped in Germany history. I found the chapter on the evolution of the "Brandenburg-Prussian State" interesting, but hard work. This looks at the series of rulers of that crucial German state, such as the "enlightened despot" Frederick II, who was trapped in a situation where the economic evolution of his state did not match that of comparable monarchs across Europe. The importance of the French Revolution for Mehring is that it both demonstrates a way forward for the masses, and is the hammer that smashes upon the German anvil transforming Germany and shaping the outlook of its rulers. It was the French Revolution that "restored the vitality of a Germany that had defenerted in the swap of feudalism". By the 1830s, the situation was smoothering for the German bourgeoisie who were trapped by the older fetters of feudal relations, and by the realities of wider European politics. Mehring writes:

It was the renown, and the undoing, of this class [the German bourgeoisie] that it could win itse revolutiion gloriously enough in the cloudy heights of literature and philosophy, but never on level ground with bare fists and cold steel.

That said, the beginnings of capitalism within Germany at this time were seeing immense fortunes made for a tiny minority on the backs of hard labour for the masses. Mehring documents these realities, and the early struggles of the German proletariat. "The original accumulation of capital was only carried out in Germany in blood, misery and shame." 

The final section, and probably the most important, of Mehring's book deals with the 1848 revolution and the class struggles within. Again, this will introduce many names and events that the non-German reader might be unfamiliar with, but the chapter can be read as a sweeping introduction to the class tensions within the 1848 revolution as it evolved in Germany. But betraying its origin in works presented to students of the Social Democratic Party's internal schools, the book fails to really teach the modern reader the events and how they concluded. I found it useful and interesting, but intend to go away and study the period more, before returning to Mehring's analysis. I suspect that his detailed study of the class conflict and tensions within the revolution will help readers understand more general history's of the period. That said, there's much here, and this is an excellent example of the Marxist method in history.

Related Reviews

Mehring - Karl Marx: The Story of his Life

Greg Steinmetz - The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The life and times of Jacob Fugger

In 1526, the Tyrolean radical Michael Gaismair, wrote a remarkable document known as The Landesordnung. In it, he outlined how a radicaly democratic society could function, based on social justice, religious freedom, equality and, through curbing the actions of the rich and powerful. In it, he demanded that the mines, an important part of the Austrian economy, be bought under democratic control and taken off the likes the Fugger bankers. They, and their kin, had

forfeited their right to them for they [bought] them with money acquired by unjust usury in order to shed human blood. Thus also they deceived the common man and worker by paying his wages in defective goods…raised the price of spices and other products by buying up and hoarding stocks. They are to blame for the devaluation of the coinage, and the mints have to pay their inflated price for silver. They have made the poor pay for it, their wages have been lowered in order that the smelters can make some profit after buying the ore. They have raised the prices of all consumer goods after they gained a monopoly, and thus burdened the whole world with their unchristian usury. 

Sadly this quote doesn't appear in Greg Steinmetz' account of the life and times of Jacob Fugger. But having read it, one can certainly sympathise with Gaismair and the rebellious peasants and miners who flocked to his call. Fugger was indeed one of the richest men ever to have lived, and as Steinmetz's account makes clear Fugger was uniquely for his time, adept at seeing business opportunities and using his existing wealth and power to get further wealth and power. He counted among his clients kings, monarchs and popes, and he played politics like a giant game of chess across Europe all in order to further his own ambitions.

Unfortunately Steinmetz's book suffers from superficial analysis and simplistic comment. Writing of the great German radical Thomas Müntzer, Steinmetz says that he "was the most dangerous to Fugger. It was not because he had the most guns but because his populist agenda held enormous appeal". Müntzer did indeed rail against "the profiteering evildoers", but then so did many others. Müntzer was a threat because his brand of radicalism was linking up with a mass movement - not because he was uniquely radical. The revolutionary movement of 1525 was, after all, a massive challenge to all the powerful and weathly. 

Steinmetz charts Fugger's rise to power, and in particular highlighting the way he was able to extract wealth from labourers and use that to strengthen his hand. It is notable, and Marxists might appreciate knowning it, that the world's first capitalists and bankers were as ruthless as others. Despite the lack of serious competitors, Fugger seems personally driven to accumulate wealth for the sake of it. Even Steinmetz who is clearly sympathetic to the banker's lot is forced to acknowledge that Fugger's methods were devious and nasty. In the case of the repression of the peasantry and their allies, Steinmetz notes that Fugger "sponsored" "savagery".

Despite these insights, Steinmetz tends to give Fugger far more credit than he is due. He is portrayed as the figure who personally drives forward key moments in central European history. Steinmetz doesn't appear to be engaging in hyperbole when he improbably claims, that Fugger

roused commerce from its medieval slumber by persuading the pope to life the ban on moneylending. He helped save free enterprise from an early grave by financing the army that won the German Peasants; War, the first great clash between capitalism and communism. He broke the back of the Hanseatic League... He engineered a shady financial scheme that unitnetniotnally provoked Luther to write his Ninety-Five Theses... he most likely funded Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe.

Like Brecht, we might wonder who else built Thebes of the Seven Gates? The problem is that this account fails to acknowledge the very real changes taking place within the economic base of European society in the early 16th century. The changes that were driving all sorts of economic, political and theological changes and opening up a space for others. By placing these changes in the hands of one individual (to be fair Steinmetz does say "helped") the authors is simply engaging in that favourite bourgeois fantasy of the individual discontected from society and the wider world. 

Tragically there are no modern biographies of Jacob Fugger, and Steinmetz has at least written one that covers the key moments of Fugger's life. Sadly its not without fault. It also has some annoying mistakes. Fugger claims that Müntzer was finally defeated in battle at Mühlhausen "a small city Müntzer gad seuzed and sought to run as a communist utopia". But this is wrong. The battle took place at Frankenhausen, and is today marked by a significant museum.

Greg Steinmetz's biography of Fugger will likely have a renewed readership as a result of the anniversary of the Peasants' War. It is perhaps most charitable to say that it is the sort of biography you would expect "a securities analyst for a money management firm in New York" to write, and use it as a jumping off point for more serious studies elsewhere.

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Rudolf Hoess - Commandant of Auschwitz

This is, in everyway possible an utterly repugnant book. I must start out by saying two things. Firstly none of the proceeds from this publication go to Hoess' family. The publishers say that royalties go the "help the few survivors from the Auschwitz camps". Secondly, reading this book is an insight into the minds of the figures who made the Holocaust happen. Written as it while under arrest and facing trial for crimes against humanity, it is naturally distorted and with much self-justification. The shocking thing is that Hoess is surprisingly unashamed of his actions.

Hoess starts his book with his childhood, in a strictly Catholic family. He was himself expected to become a priest, and his parents seem strict, but highly moral. He says, without any sense of self-irony, that "I was taught that my highest duty was to help those in need". From his early life he believed in the importance of service, duty and obeyance of orders from those in superior positions. He eventually served in the First World War in Iraq, and like many Nazis, he saw action in the Freikorps. This led to his imprisonment for his role in the murder of a far-right figure who was believed to have betrayed another nationalist to the authorities. Following his imprisonment, Hoess who was already a Nazi member, lived in a far-right rural commune, until the new Nazi regime found him a position in the Concentration Camp system. Hoess' knowledge and contact with leading Nazis in the aftermath of WW1 say him rise quickly - as did his commitment to the cause, and his organisational skills.

This background is important. Partly because it is important to understand the trajectory that Hoess took to get his position runing Auschwitz. Mostly however it ensures that the reader understands that Hoess was a committed Nazi. He wasn't in charge of the world's most appalling death camp because he was good at organisation. He was in charge because he was committed to Nazi ideology and to following the orders of the regime's leaders. 

According to the Auschwitz museum, about 1.1 million people died in the camp. Most of these died while Hoess was in charge. It is impossible then for the reader to be anything but shocked by Hoess' comments. He says, for instance, of his work in Auschwitz:

I though that the construction and completion of the camp itself were more than enough to keep me occupied, but this first progress report served only to set in motion an endless and unbroken chain of fresh tasks and further projects. From the very beginning I was so absorbed, I mist say obsessed, with my task that every fresh difficulty only increased my zeal. I was determined that nothing should get me down. My pride would not allow it. I lived only for my work.

"I lived only for my work" in the death machine that was Auschwitz is such an extraordinary statement that it takes the readers breath away. With paragraph's like the above, it can seem that Hoess is trying to depict himself as a technical functionary, obsessed with the details of the "machine" but unconnected to the wider murder of the camp. Indeed, Hoess's anger at the extreme Nazism of the Der Stürmer newspaper, the newspaper that was avidly read by SS staff in the camp for its extreme antisemitism, is because it undermined the proper functioning of the camp and "far from serving serious anti-Semitism, it did a great deal of harm". This is a theme for Hoess. His frustrations at problems in the camp are because he is frustrated at being unable to properly carry out his order. Hoess himself explains.

When in the summer of 1941 [Himmler] gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: i had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.

While he says that he did not form an opinion at the time. He does not allow himself to argue that it was wrong after the event. Indeed, much of his criticism of the extermination policy comes, not from a moral outrage, but because he thinks it was a waste of labour. Thus the millions of Jews and others who died in the camps are dismissed by Hoess.

Indeed Hoess "watching the killing" himself. The sections of the book where he describes this, and the individual tragedies his witnessed are some of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever read. Time and again he says things like "the killing of these Russian prisoners-of-war did not cause me much concern at the time". Hoess is more focused on describing the technical solutions, and supply problems that hampered the extermination programme. In fact, at times, the book reads most as a tract written to prove that Hoess was good at his job. Hoess was happy in his work, "In Auschwitz I truly had no reason to complain that I was bored". He continues by explaining that when he was "deeply affected by some incident" he was able to go riding, or see his family, until the "terrible pictures" had been "chased away". Homelife was idylic:

My family... were well provided for inAuschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammelled life. My wife's garden was a paradise of flowers. The prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children, and thus attracting their attention.

I will spare the reader here by not quoting the passages were Hoess indifferently describes the murder of people, or watching their deaths through the windows of the gas chambers, or his efforts to make the process more efficient. In his introduction Primo Levi says that the book is "filled with evil, and this evil is narrated with a disturbing bureaucratic obtuseness; it has no literary quality, and reading it is agony". He continues that Hoess comes across as "a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel, who sometimes blatantly lies".

The "bureaucratic obtuseness" that Levi refers to is accurate. But we have to be careful at simply seeing Hoess' actions as just reflecting the "banality of evil". What Hoess did and describes in this book reflects that he was more than just a functionary. He was committed to Nazism. His strict obeyance of orders flowed not from having a personality that enjoyed organisational work, but because he saw in Himmler and Hitler leaders who he was personally and politically commited to. He was a Nazi through and through, and his last paragraph statement that he was "unknowingly a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich" is exposed as a lie by every preceeding paragraph. Hoess was not a cog in an office far away from the camps. He was looking in through the glass observation panels as trainload after trainload of Jewish people died. He was also happy to kill himself. To those SS men whose moral was sapped he could only offer inspiration by reminding them of the Nazis' plan. 

My interest in Rudolf Hoess came from seeing the recent film Zone of Interest. If anything this book exposes Hoess as a far nastier and brutal person than the film does. I don't think I have previously read a book by a Nazi. It has left me feeling sick and angry. But also committed to making sure that the 21st century fascists never get a chance at power again.

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