Rosa Luxemburg - The Junius Pamphlet

Rosa Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet was written between February and April 1915 while the author was imprisoned for her anti-war agitation. It was smuggled out, but not published, Luxemburg finding it on her desk when she was released in January 1916. The pamphlet is an extraordinarily powerful work. It begins by describing how quickly the scene has been transformed, from the wild joy and celebration at the outbreak of war, to the sullen acceptance at the slaughter in the trenches a few months later. And as the soldiers die in their thousands, companies make fortunes from providing the food, clothing and weapons for the war "while profits are springing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead".

But this is much more than an anti-war pamphlet in which Rosa Luxemburg does two things. She tries to explain the origins of the war, describing in detail the Imperialist system but also why German Social Democracy, the most powerful and developed socialist organisation of workers in the world surrendered so readily at the outbreak of hostilities.

Luxemburg warns that the world has changed, there is no return to the pre-war situation for socialists and revolutionaries. Interestingly, this is very similar to Lenin's position taken around the Zimmerwald conferences.

"It is a foolish delusion to believe that we need to only live through the war, as a rabbit hides under the bush to await the end of a thunderstorm, to trot merrily off in his old accustomed gait when all is over. The world war has changed the condition of our struggle, and has changed us most of all."

Luxemburg traces the origins of the war in the development of capitalism. Much like Lenin and Bukharin used the outbreak of the war to clarify their understanding of Imperialism, Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet explains the logic of imperialism through analysing Germany's historic development. In particular she notes the importance of "two naval bills" which promote a different era of politics, a "change from Bismarckian continental policies to 'Welt Politik'." She notes that once the decision was made to build and expand a German navy, war was inevitable, "The naval bill of December 11, 1899 was a declaration of war by Germany, which England answered on August 4, 1914."

But Luxemburg's analsysis is more than a simple argument that Germany was competing with England for markets and resources,

"It should be noted that this fight for naval supremacy had nothing in common with the economic rivalry for the world market.... Side by side with England, one nation after another had stepped into the world market, capitalism developed automatically, and with gigantic strides, into world economy."

Britain and Germany were, Luxemburg argues, interdependent, but

"When Germany unfolded its banner of naval power and world policies it announced the desire for new and far reaching conquest in the world by German imperialism... Naval building and military armaments becmae the glorious business of Germany industry, opening up a boundless prospect for further operations by trust and bank capital in the whole wide world."

Luxemburg analyses this linking up between state and capital through he study of Turkey in which Germany had poured large amounts of investment into in the later half of the 19th century. The German banks loaning money to build harbours and railways, tying Turkey's exports into German companies and forcing the countryside to pay rent for the privilege of this development, since industry was not advanced enough to pay the debt.

Luxemburg's understanding of the development of late capitalism rested on the way that the advanced capitalist nations required the under-developed world to absorb surplus value. It's a position that has been critiqued since by other Marxists. However it is not a major flaw in this work which seeks to try and understand the origins of the world war within a clash of states fighting to carve up the world in the interests of their home-grown capital.

The second half of this book is a polemic deployed against the arguments of German social democracy in their support for the war. Luxemburg tackles these positions powerfully, showing how the leaders of the socialist left use half-remembered quotes from Marx and Engels to argue that their was a duty to fight Tsarist Russia. But in doing so, they undermine and set back the growing Russian working class movement. The world of Imperialism is very different from the world of 19th century Europe when Russia could be considered the prison house of nations.

The betrayal of German socialist movement (and indeed that of most of Europe) still has the power to shock. Knowing now what we know of the Somme, Verdun and the rest of the slaughter is to view the betrayal with hindsight. But even in the first weeks of the war, Luxemburg understood how rotten German socialism had become. Take this quote from a newspaper of the German SPD. Note that this was an organisation that still claimed the inheritance of Marx and Engels.

“As for us, we are convinced that our labour unionists can do more than deal out blows. Modern mass armies have by no means simplified the work of their generals. It is practically impossible to move forward large troop divisions in close marching order under the deadly fire of modern artillery. Ranks must be carefully widened, must be more accurately controlled. Modern warfare requires discipline and clearness of vision not only in the divisions but in every individual soldier. The war will show how vastly human material has been improved by the educational work of the labour unions, how well their activity will serve the nation in these times of awful stress. The Russian and the French soldier may be capable of marvellous deeds of bravery. But in cool, collected consideration none will surpass the German labour unionists. Then too, many of our organised workers know the ways and byways of the borderland as well as they know their own pockets, and not a few of them are accomplished linguists. The Prussian advance in 1866 has been termed a schoolmasters’ victory. This will be a victory of labour union leaders”

It is no surprise then, that the Junius Pamphlet ends with a call for revolution. Though Luxemburg, unlike Lenin, avoids calling for the defeat of her own ruling class. Instead calling for neither victory nor defeat. While the difference is slight, it perhaps reflects the different emphasis of the two revolutionaries, as well as their different experience of reformist socialist organisation. Luxemburg writes that

"For war as such, whatever its military outcome may be, is the greatest conceivable defeat of the cause of the European proletariat. The overthrow of war and the speedy forcing of peace, but the international revolutionary action of the proletariat, alone can bring it to the only possible victory."

While praising the book, Lenin critiqued a number of aspects of the Junius Pamphlet in a review which all readers of the booklet should also read. In particular he noted that "Junius" (he wasn't aware of the real identity of the author) abandons internationalism in favour of a "national programme" when suggesting how revolutionaries should have acted in 1914. Lenin argues that the problem is that the author hasn't broken completely from the old organisation.

"Junius has not completely rid himself of the “environment” of the German Social-Democrats, even the Lefts, who are afraid of a split, who are afraid to follow revolutionary slogans to their logical conclusions. This is a mistaken fear, and the Left Social-Democrats of Germany must and will rid themselves of it. They will do so in the course of the struggle against the social-chauvinists."

This meant that "Junius" panders to their politics.

"Secondly, Junius apparently wanted to achieve something in the nature of the Menshevik “theory of stages,” of sad memory; he wanted to begin to carry out the revolutionary programme from the end that is “more suitable,” “more popular” and more acceptable to the petty-bourgeoisie. It is something like the plan “to outwit history,” to outwit the philistines. He seems to say: surely, nobody would oppose a better way of defending the real fatherland; that real fatherland is the Great German Republic, and the best defence is a militia, a permanent parliament, etc. Once it was accepted, that programme would automatically lead to the next stage-to the socialist revolution."

In other words, Lenin thought that "Junius" was influenced by the very pressures that had set the SPD down the road of supporting the war in the first place, i.e. the concerns about being pushed outside of the legal methods of operating for socialists, fear of losing parliamentary influence etc.

Lenin's had of course spotted Luxemburg's greatest mistake. For all her brilliance, she hadn't yet broken with the errors of the old SPD. - though she was on that road with the call for a "New International". Lenin finishes his review with this point.

"Probably, it was reasoning of this kind that consciously or semi-consciously determined Junius’ tactics. Needless to say, such reasoning is fallacious, Junius’ pamphlet conjures up in our mind the picture of a lone man who has no comrades in an illegal organisation accustomed to thinking out revolutionary slogans to their conclusion and systematically educating the masses in their spirit. But this shortcoming—it would be a grave error to forget this-is not Junius’ personal failing, but the result of the weakness of all the German Lefts, who have become entangled in the vile net of Kautskyist hypocrisy, pedantry and “friendliness” towards the opportunists. Junius’ adherents have managed in spite of their isolation to begin the publication of illegal leaflets and to start the war against Kautskyism. They will succeed in going further along the right road."

In the Theses on the Tasks of International Social Democracy included with the Junius Pamphlet and adopted by Luxemburg and her comrades, the revolutionaries understand that the key task was to fight for the overthrow of capitalism. Their opportunity would come in November 1918 with the outbreak of the German Revolution.

Related Reviews

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Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Sherry - Empire and Revolution: a Socialist History of World War One
Nation - War on War
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Peter Linebaugh - Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance

Peter Linebaugh has been one of those historians who over the last few decades has rescued the history of some of the most marginalised and forgotten people. In particular he has looked at those who were side-lined or lost their livelihoods (not to mention lives) in the earliest days of capitalism. In this volume of essays, Linebaugh examines the way that as capitalism developed, there was an associated transformation in the way that the majority of the population could live and work on the land. In particular, this 
frequently meant the destruction of common rights, the enclosure of common land and the creation of new laws to criminalise old activities. Linebaugh notes, for instance, that alongside enclosure (the "historical antonym and nemesis of the commons") there was a "massive prison construction program".

That capitalism destroys old customs to improve the ability of a small group of individuals to better make themselves wealthy should be no surprise. Linebaugh quotes no less a figure that J.S.Mill, "a world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature with every foot of land brought into cultivation... and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow." to aptly capture those who thought that nature would be utilised in the interest of society, controlled, shaped and driven in the interest of commerce and social improvement.

But the rights that people had. To collect fallen wood, or hunt rabbits, or glean the fields after harvest, were not granted from on high. They had been fought for an won by generations of peasants. Their removal thus was brutal. But it was also resisted. From Wat Tyler, to the "Luddites", Peasant Revolts and the Iroquois, people resisted losing their lands and rights. It was a losing battle, but it was a struggle that helped shaped a vision of a different world, as well as opening eyes to the nature of the system.

Two chapters in this collection deal with those who learnt from these struggles and envisaged a world with a new "commune". One is on Marx, whose early radical journalism was in part a reaction to his anger at new laws that criminalised the right of peasants to collect wood. The second is on the socialist William Morris, whose writings are sometimes dismissed as overly romantic socialism, harking back to a time that never existed. But Linebaugh however, in a essay that serves as an introduction to E.P. Thompson's biography of Morris, sees Morris as a socialist who saw the world, not as an abstract nature, but one that should be used and enjoyed for the benefit of all. He quotes Morris,

"The Communist asserts in the first place that the resources of nature, mainly the land and those other things which can only be used for the reproduction of wealth and which are the effect of social work, should not be own in severalty, but by the whole community for the benefit of the whole."

Morris' activism, his tireless speaking tours and writing thus become an extension of this vision. Not an abstract dream, but an object to struggle for.

On occasion, Linebaugh comes close to romanticizing the past himself. But he understands that the struggle to protect the Commons was that of the poorest fighting for what little they had. That struggle was brutal, but so were their lives. He recounts the story of a "Mr. Samuels" who "lost his hand to a mechanical coconut shredder" and so his friends and fellow villagers burnt the "pumping station" in revenge.

Linebaugh sees such struggles as in a continuum with today's battles to prevent further erosion of our rights. For this author, the struggle for a new commons, is as important as the fight to protect what we have and had.

Peter Linebaugh's writing is filled with passion, forgotten histories, and literary quotes. Here are Shelley and Wordsworth, Frankenstein's monster and the words of miners, peasants and all those men and women who've struggled at the bottom of the society.

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Sönke Neitzel & Harald Welzer - Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying

The discovery of forgotten transcripts of the conversations of German POW's in the Second World War, is a remarkable opportunity for scholars of the period to try and better understand the motives and ideas of Germany's combat troops. This accessible book gives the reader an insight into much of the material, from ordinary soldiers to Generals, Sailors and Aircrew, to members of the SS. It also enables the authors to discuss some of the age old questions concerning the Nazi regime. To what extent did the Germany Army know about the Holocaust? Why did they fight on and on, when defeat was inevitable? To what extent were ordinary soldiers committed Nazis?

While understanding that the authors have had to pick and choose from among vast quantities of data, often to illustrate a specific point, readers will still be shocked by much of the contents of the conversations. Allied forces didn't transcribe everything the POWs said, concentrating on material that would have helped the war aims, or possibly be used in post-war war crimes trials. So among all the debates on military strategy, or the oneupmanship by soldiers discussing their personal role, we find that knowledge of war crimes among the Wehrmacht was remarkably common. Partly this was based on personal experience. One solider, identified  describes an event he witnessed in Poland.

"I wanted to take some photographs... and I knew an SS-leader there quite well and I was talking to him about this and that when he said 'Would you like to photograph a shooting?' I said, 'No the very idea is repugnant to me', 'Well I mean, it makes no different to us, they are always shot in the morning, but if you like we still have some and we can shoot them in the afternoon sometime.'"

The authors comment that;

"Regardless of whether individual soldiers found those acts right or wrong or simply surreal, the Holocaust was not a central part of their world in the way it has been ascribed to them.... Knowledge that mass murders were taking place was widespread. It could hardly have been otherwise. But what did that knowledge have to do with the world of war the soldiers were charged with?"

There is some truth in this. From the transcripts it is clear that soldiers often saw the mass killings as something that involved others, and as the quote above suggests, found it morally repugnant, it was something that was linked to the war they were part of. However I think it is wrong to conclude as the authors do, that this makes the actions of German troops in World War Two identical to other soldiers "just doing their job" in other conflicts. True there are similarities. One description of the destruction of an entire Russian village in order to kill some partisans, with the use of grenades to burn homes down, reads eerily like depictions of US troops actions in Vietnam.

The particularly extreme violence of the Eastern Front, with its backdrop of racist ideology, the struggle for "living space" and eight years of Nazi rule back home created an atmosphere were mass murder, violence and the murder of prisoners could become common place. There are of course similarities to massacres and executions in other conflicts, as well as by other forces (Allied included) in the Second World War. But it is noticeable, for instance, that in Vietnam, the conflict that the authors draw most parallels, large numbers of American GIs refused to fight, and engaged in open rebellion. That was not a feature of German forces in World War Two.

There is much in here for those trying to understand World War Two. Much of it is difficult. The chapter on sexual violence and mass rape, and the attitudes of some soldiers to female Jews is particularly difficult. As are the accounts of the murder of civilians. Not all of these can be blamed simply on the dehumanising, brutalising reality of war. Its noticeable, for instance, that one airman who celebrates the bombing and machine gunning of refugees is describing his actions on day three of the conflict.

While finding the book fascinating, I was not always convinced by the over-view offered by the authors, but I do recommend the book for those trying to understand both World War Two and the particular nature of Fascism.

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David Fernbach (ed) - In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the work of the German revolutionary socialist, Paul Levi. In part this has been inspired by the publication in English of Pierre Broue's classic book on the German Revolution, which emphasised the role that Levi played in the early years of the German Communist Party. Following the murders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibneickt, Paul Levi took on the difficult task of guiding the fledgling party in its early years.

Building mass revolutionary organisation during a revolution is not an easy task. The revolutionary wave that swept Germany at the end of World War One dragged millions of workers into action. Levi's task then, was to try and shape the rapidly growing Communist Party into the type of organisation that could lead a revolution.

The first few articles in this selected works, deal with Levi's writings and speeches in this early period. His address to the founding conference of the Communist Party (KPD) is a polemic designed to win an argument that KPD members needed to involve themselves in the elections to the German Parliament. On this question, and others, Levi was trying to challenge the ultra-left instincts of the new, young communists. Levi lost the argument and the KPD abstained. But millions of workers didn't and the KPD found themselves isolated in the debates around the election.

That said, the KPD grew rapidly, benefiting in part from its links with revolutionary Russia. Nonetheless, the lack of theoretical clarity meant that the KPD's leadership made some serious tactical errors. Paul Levi was the most able of the leaders and his articles are often critical looks at strategy and tactics, trying to learn lessons and teach the party.

Most famously the KPD attempted to force a revolutionary situation in Germany in March of 1921, the so called "March Action". This was a dismal failure and the KPD lost tens of thousands of supporters and many people were killed. Using the unemployed to try and force strikes, KPD members invaded work places, blew up railcars and tried to provoke a revolution that didn't fit with the experience of the majority of German workers.

Paul Levi, who by this point was no longer on the party's central bodies, wrote a long polemical critique of the Action. When published, his pamphlet led to his expulsion for breaking party discipline. It seems fairly clear to me though, that by this point, Levi had decided the KPD was broken beyond repair. His critique is a brilliant defence of the role of revolutionary socialist organisation and roots of the KPD's mistakes. This, and his speech in his defence to the KPD's CC are must reads for anyone trying to understand what took place in Germany in the early 1920s.

Comrades no doubt might argue whether or not he was justified in his actions. But famously Lenin quipped, that while Levi had lost his head, "at least he had a head to lose". But it is clear from these writings that Levi rapidly lost much of what made him such a brilliant leader. In the aftermath of his expulsion and his creation of a new, small left organisation, Levi argued that the KPD was no longer reformable. Part of the blame for this, he argued lay in the decline of the Russian Revolution and the resultant rot in the Communist International. What marks out Levi from others who drew these conclusions, was that Levi was doing this as early as 1921, long before the battles for the future of the Comintern or the Soviet Union had been decided. Levi's intervention in support of (say) Leon Trotsky could have been crucial. Instead he appears to have abandoned them.

Paul Levi

So, contained in these writings are two pieces that Levi writes at this time, one an introduction to a piece by Rosa Luxemburg on Russia, the other a very critical introduction to Trotsky's In Defence of October. Levi critiques the Russian Bolsheviks for their actions post October. But in the latter of these essays, and in other pieces, he clearly fails to see that Trotsky's polemic that is part of an argument about the way forward for the Soviets. Indeed in critiquing Trotsky, Levi ends up siding with those in the Bolshevik leadership who had done most to damage the Germany party.

Having written a brilliant defence of the Democratic Centralist method pioneered by Lenin in 1919, Levi is reduced to criticising the Bolsheviks for a method that meant the "stations of its development... were resolutions and splits on account of resolutions". Levi ignores the decades of brilliant underground work that the Russian Revolutionaries undertook, in order to blur the reasons for the very creation of the Bolshevik party on very specific principles of organisation.

Similarly he attacks Trotsky for writing long polemics on (eg) the Anglo Russian agreements or the revolution in China. Clearly Trotsky does this for fun. Levi seems to miss that both of these arguments went to the heart of Trotsky's battle with Stalin over the direction of Russian policy. Was the Russian party going to look outwards to Revolution, or inwards to Socialism in One Country?

Ultimately I found this a frustrating collection. Some of the articles are very important and will help socialists understand the German revolutionary process and the mistakes of the KPD. However the picture they paint of Levi himself is confused. In the immediate post-war period he comes across as a brilliant revolutionary, striving for revolutionary clarity and a party capable of leading a revolution. His 1919 polemic is a particularly brilliant example of this - it meant the forcing out of a section of the party that was influenced by anarchism and syndicalism. The resultant renewed clarity of ideas meant the KPD recruited thousands of new members within months on a much clearer basis.

But quickly after he leaves the KPD he comes across as a much more liberal socialist (an able one at that) whose polemics against the Russian Revolution seem more about a sectarian assault on the KPD than developing revolutionary clarity.

Sadly this book is also marred by an awful introduction, which, while an excellent outline of the life and times of Paul Levi, has several problems. Not least of these is that the author of the introduction tries to recast Levi as the living embodiment of Rosa Luxemburg's ideas. I think this is unfair on both Levi and Luxemburg, who were both brilliant individuals capable of making judgments based on concrete situations, rather than having some innate set of ideas that remained unchanged over years. Speculation whether Luxemburg would have taken the same decisions as Levi at key points is not particularly useful in clarifying the historical process in my view.

More worryingly, the introduction appears to lay the blame for the failure of the German Revolution and the rise of Fascism on "Leninism". But the KPD of the late 1920s and early 1930s was a long way away from Leninism - it had become, as Broue points out well, a tool of Stalin's foreign policy. It was no longer a revolutionary organisation that was struggling to end capitalism. It's weaknesses flowed from this position, not from a Leninism that was far from its own practise. Indeed in the earlier 1919 article, Levi clearly models his vision of the KPD in part on the Bolsheviks' own practise.

These criticisms aside, few of Paul Levi's writings have been available to the English reader and this book makes some of his key writings (particularly his critique of the March Action) available. This is something that should be welcomed by socialists and historians everywhere. But the book needs to be read in conjunction with a decent history of the German Revolution - Pierre Broue's brilliant work would be ideal, or Chris Harman's Lost Revolution.

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Roger Moorhouse - Berlin at War: Life & Death in Hitler's Capital, 1939-1945

Roger Moorhouse's history of life in Berlin during World War Two is an exceptionally readable and detailed account of the lives of ordinary people during the war years. It by turns horrifying and inspiring, and it deserves to be read alongside other social histories of the conflict, in particular Angus Calder's Peoples' War with which it compares very favourably.

 Moorhouse does not accept that the majority of ordinary Germans were complicit, or even supportive of the Nazi regime and its actions. Berlin, he argues, was not a city whose population was a "indoctrinated mass of Nazified automata, sleepwalking into catastrophe... Berlin was a city where minorities of active Nazis and active anti-Nazis flanked an ambivalent majority, who were often simply motivated by self-preservation, ambition and fear."

Berlin was not a strong city for the Nazis, even though it was their capital. It had never returned more than a third of its votes for the fascists and had a long history of left wing activism. Additionally:

the city was the natural home of the nation's elite and attracted a large number of intellectuals, lawyers and politicians, many of whom opposed the Nazi regime. Their opposition was in part political, but it was primarily based on higher ideals; on a fundamental objection to the regime's habit of riding roughshod over established legal and moral principles. As a result of these factors, Berlin gained a deserved reputation as a hotbed of resistance against the Nazi regime, with as many as 12,000 individuals involved in organised opposition.

Whether or not the presence of the "elite" helped create an anti-Nazi opposition during the war is debatable. Certainly the inspiring parts of this book are the accounts of the resistance that took place (on however small a scale) and those Berliners who protected or tried to protect Jews through the war. It is noticeable that for the most part it was not intellectuals and lawyers who did this, but working people (often from a left wing background). I was particularly struck by the story of a factory worker who caught the eye of a Jew she worked with and dropped her ID card near the woman at the end of her shift. Having an "Aryan's" ID card saved the woman's life, yet her saviour never once spoke or interacted with her. There are plenty of similar stories, though the horrific parts of the book deal in large part with those Jews who couldn't be saved.

Resistance took place on many levels. Indeed, the scale of the repression against those who spoke out meant that acts of resistance sometimes seem very minor, but involved enormous bravery. One example were the "Swing Kids" who danced to banned music in side rooms and toilets in music halls and fought the Hitler Youth who tried to stop them.

Moorhouse does describe one example of mass resistance, a protest by hundreds of non-Jewish women, whose Jewish husbands had been rounded up from their workplaces during the Nazis' Fabrik-Aktion. Their protests led to these men being released and even a couple being returned from Auschwitz. This is the only example of mass resistance that is known. But hundreds of people were involved in other acts. Moorhouse quotes a figure of 5-7000 for the number of Jews who went underground, each of them required the co-operation of an average of seven Germans to survive.

Some of the most fascinating parts of this book though, are the accounts of the lives of ordinary Berliners. In particular I was struck by how little enthusiasm the majority had for the war, their shock at the invasion of the Soviet Union and the way that air-raids took them completely by surprise. Even those who hated the Nazis seemed to believe the propaganda that the war would never reach them. For those who have read accounts of the Blitz or the German Occupation of France there are many parallels; the hunt for food, the stresses of rationing, the rumours and the hope that peace was around the corner.

Ian Kershaw's recent book The End looked in detail at the reasons that Germany kept fighting until the end. Its an excellent book which I reviewed here. Roger Moorhouse however looks at what kept the ordinary German going until the end of the war - how they survived and what they endured, as well as what some of them did to try and fight the Nazis. It's a powerful read, with some amazing photographs and I recommend it.

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Barbara Tuchman - The Zimmermann Telegram

When the US President Woodrow Wilson delivered his "war message" to Congress on April 2 1917, he was taking his country into a war that had already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Europeans. He was also making a startling personal political reverse. Only three months before, he had declared that to take the United States into war would be a "crime against civilisation". Indeed he had spent much of the previous years trying to help broker a peace, without victory between the European powers.

What caused this reversal? Wilson himself seemed committed to peace. He was narrowly re-elected, in part because of his slogan "he kept us out of the war" and there was a substantial anti-war population in the country. One of the key factors that changed his mind was the Zimmermann Telegram. The story of the interception and decoding of this message forms the core of Barbara Tuchman's history of the US entry into World War One.

Zimmermann was the German Foreign Minister. An able and intelligent politician he, like many German's believed that the entry of the US into the war would be a bitter blow to their hopes. But he also believed, that the potential for unrestricted submarine warfare against Allied shipping, as well as vessels belonging to neutral powers who were supplying their enemies would bring the war to a rapid end. Their was some reality to this. By 1917, Britain and France were suffering the effects of years of naval blockade and the  warfare on the Western Front. The trick for Germany was to engage in this unrestricted conflict and delay or prevent the United States coming into the war on the side of the Allies.

To do this, Zimmermann hoped to bring Mexico and Japan into a war against America. Today this seems fanciful, but then, there were real indications that it might have been possible. Tuchman documents many examples during the preceding years of popular belief that Japanese soldiers were training in Mexico and that Germany was funding Mexican revolutionaries. Not all of these were rumours, some were rooted in reality, and it was not an impossible belief that overtures to the Mexicans might lead to a war that would occupy America's time.

The reality is, of course, that Mexico was unlikely to ever engage in a serious war with the United States, even if in recipient of Germany support. The German's however thought there was, though their initial dreams of an uprising by American-Germans against war with the mother country were quickly dropped.

The Zimmerman telegram then, pandered to the prejudices of both sides. When it was first revealed to an incredulous American public it sent shock waves through the population. When Zimmerman admitted that it was real, the country was set on course for war.

Tuchman points out though, that the Telegram was not the only trigger. If it hadn't been that telegram, she says, Germany would have done something else. Nor did the telegram turn Wilson from pacifist to pro-war overnight. Wilson was moving in that direction because of the pressures of global politics and the realities of German militarism. Interestingly, Tuchman points out, that a final key factor was the February Revolution in Russia. The end of Tsarism meant that for Wilson, the arch-democrat, the war could now be portrayed as a war in defence of democracy. Whatever the interests of America Imperialism, Wilson's particular liberal consciousness was comforted.

Sadly The Zimmermann Telegram is a somewhat disappointing book. Tuchman's other works, that I've reviewed, particularly her Guns of August and her history of fourteenth century Europe are excellent works of popular history. Zimmermann on the other hand feels like a plodding diplomatic history of the entry of America into World War One. A top down history that leaves the reader lacking in a real sense of the mood in the majority of the United States. While the stories of spying in Mexico and the interception of telegrams is exciting in parts, the book is probably aimed more at an American readership trying to understand a key point in their country's history, rather than the general reader.

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Mike Gonzalez & Houman Barekat - Arms and the People: Popular Movements and the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring

The classic Marxist account of the State is that it is the collective institutions within society that help ensure the continued position of the ruling class. Some of these are subtle - the laws, religious institutions, prisons and so on that seek to restrict and control peoples lives. Others of these are more physical, what Engels and Lenin describe as "armed bodies of men".

In Britain where I live, most progressive activists have experienced the behaviour of one "armed body" - the police. Less common for us is the role of the military. Though recent experiences during the Egyption Revolution has shown that this is not true everywhere. This new collection of essays is an attempt to draw out the experiences of the role of the military, in particular, the army during periods of social upheaval. In his introduction, Mike Gonzalez draws out the contradictory role of military forces using quotes from the German revolutionary Karl Leibknecht:

"[Modern Militarism] wants neither more nor less than the squaring of the circle; it arms the people against the people itself; it is insolent enough to force the workers ... to become oppressors, enemies and murderers of their own class comrades and friends, of their parents, brothers, sisters and children, murderers of their own past and future. It wants to be at the same time democratic and despotic, enlightened and machine-like, to serve the nation and at the same time to be its enemy."

In order to do this those who make up the army have to be changed;

"First of all, the proletarian in uniform is sharply and ruthlessly cut off from his class comrades and his family. This is done by taking him away from his home, which is systematically done in Germany, and especially by shutting him up in barracks. One might also speak of a repetition of the Jesuit method of education, a counterpart of monastic organisation."

Leibknecht understood however that under the pressure of social events the "proletarians in uniform" could be pulled away from the role assigned to them by the state and won to the interests of the working class. But this could only occur at moments when the working class was able to reach out to the army and fight for their loyalty. In a chapter on the experience of workers and the armed forces during the Portuguese revolution in 1974/5, a soldier describes what happens when he and his comrades are ordered to prevent a demonstration:

"the commander told us that he'd received a telephone call about a demonstration at Lisnave, led by a minority of Leftist agitators and that our job was to prevent it from taking place. We were armed as we had never been before with G3s and 4 magazines... The demo began and a human torrent advanced with shouts of "the soldiers are the sons of the workers", "tomorrow the soldiers will be workers" and "the arms of soldiers must not be turned against the workers". The commander soon saw that we weren't going to follow his orders, so he shut up. Our arms hung down by our side and some comrades were crying... The following day in the barracks things were livelier. Before morning assembly many comrades were up and shouting the slogans of the demo."

Many of the essays in this book explore this process. Some of the essays, like the two on the Russian and German Revolution demonstrate how mass conscript armies are both won towards the Revolution by the impact of the war, economic crisis and the reality of life in the trenches. But the soldiers (and sailors) are also part, at key points of driving the revolution forward. The masses, in the shape of the workers and their organisations, remain essential to winning the revolution, but the loyalty of the armed forces is crucial to ensuring the revolution isn't drowned in blood.

The book also looks at other aspects of the military and progressive change. One chapter - dealing with the Free Officers movements of Egypt and Iraq, explores the way that the military, or sections of the military have been at the front of struggles against colonial rule. In these situations the army tried to move independently but often found itself unleashing wider social forces, which then needed to be controlled.

Two excellent chapters, one looking at the limitations of Guerrilla movements within South America in the 1950s and 1960s, but more particularly Jonathan Neales' chapter on the experience of the US Army in Vietnam, examine the role of the wider population and its impact on the army. In South America with the exception of the unusual circumstances in Cuba, Guerrilla movements made little impact because they remained isolated from the wider population and their struggles for liberation. Conversely in Vietnam the overwhelming US military might was unable to sauced because their opponents were supported by the bulk of the population.

The role of the military is never an independent one. In fact, one of the mistakes of many of those who have tried to change society, is to think that the army stands outside of politics. In a brilliant chapter on Chile in 1973, Mike Gonzalez draws out the limitations of this reformist analysis as he examines the military coup that destroyed Salvador Allende's attempts at reform. As the right wing and the military prepared to drown the Allende government and the rising working class movement in blood, Gonzalez points out the "astonishing... blindness of the Popular Unity leadership to these realities." Indeed in order to try and appease the right, Allende went so far as to introduce three army generals to his cabinet, including Pinochet.

To the last, Chilean activists and foreign commentators spoke of "loyal" officers who would not fight their elected government. But unlike in Russia, Germany or Spain in 1936 (the subject of an excellent chapter by Andy Durgan) there was no pole to pull the mass of the soldiers away from their officers and the state. This, as Gonzalez points out, would have been "an organised, well prepared working class that could fight back across the country". Unfortunately, Allende and most of the left, including the Communist Party had prevented that force developing.

There are many lessons to be learnt from these valuable essays. I would make a couple of criticisms though these are mainly ones of omission rather than disagreement. The first is that there is no chapter on the Red Army. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution Leon Trotsky built from scratch an army that was able to defeat the invading counter-revolutionary forces. That army, like Republican forces in Spain in 1936 had many different attributes to a normal capitalist force and it deserves more than a passing mention here. Secondly there is not enough in here about how revolutionary movements have won, or attempted to relate to soldiers. A recent, non-revolutionary, example might have been the Military Families Against the War campaign in the aftermath of the UK's participation in the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Of course there can be no blue-print for how revolutionary movements should relate to the armed forces. The key answer is that at any point of mass struggle institutions must be created that attempt to win those in the military who want to rebel, or break from their officers to "an embryonic alternative state power". In the Russian and German Revolutions those were the workers councils. In Spain it was the mass revolutionary movement that seized power in the cities. Ultimately it is on the question of power that revolutions are won or lost, and the failure to win the rank and file towards an alternative centre of power has doomed many a revolutionary upsurge. This book helps us learn that lesson today.

Cathy Porter - Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography

Alexandra Kollontai's life matches almost exactly the rise, and then fall of revolutionary Russia. She was born to a well-off, upper middle class Russian family, but her life was shaped by the socialist politics of the early twentieth century. Cathy Porter's detailed and readable biography traces Kollontai's life, from her early engagement in underground revolutionary politics, on to her role as a central committee member of the Bolsheviks. Along the way she traces the development of Marxist parties, the crisis of socialist politics during World War One and the Russian Revolution. Kollontai was an early opponent of Bolshevik politics in the early 1920s, eventually her critical engagement with the building of a revolutionary society was used against her with the rise of Stalin's bureaucracy. In fact it was only Kollontai's fame in Russia and abroad that saved her from the purges. She died in the 1950s, one of the few old-Bolsheviks to have survived so long, having made a decision to remain quiet for the sake of her own life.

Today Kollontai is remembered for her writings about the position of women under capitalism, and the potential for a socialist society to transform this. She was one of the first Marxists to explore how human sexuality might be transformed under a classless, equal society. Her articles and theories were often popular, if sometimes lacking a grounding in what was really happening. Both the right and left wing of the revolutionary movement seem to have on occasion dismissed her as idealistic.

Porter's book traces Kollontai's development as a Marxist as well as her growing concern with the position of women in Russia's backward economy. From early on, Kollontai fought for the Russian revolutionary movement to take work amongst women workers and peasants seriously. In this she was often derided or ignored as this was seen to be a distraction from the more important task of developing revolutionary politics and ideas. Kollontai also faced the sexism of the early socialist movement, and after her exile to Germany, the entrenched ideas of the German socialist parties.

One of the most interesting chapters in this biogrpahy is the section where Porter looks at Kollontai's experiences in Germany. A popular and passionate speaker, she toured the country speaking to crowds of workers, trying to win them to the German SPD. In this she was enormously successful, though the party's bureaucrats where often less sure of her arguments around the emancipation of women.

In early 1911 Kollontai spoke in the industrial town of Grossenhain; describing the aged Party secretary, she recounts:

His tone changed sharply when she enquired about women's activities. When women worked men suffered he said. 'The house becomes a pigsty, the children die... and what does a woman look like when she works in a factory? You expect love to survive when a man's wife looks like a witch?" A crowd of women gathered around her after the meeting and took her to the station. 'Silly old fool,' they said. 'We're stronger than he knows'.

Such attitudes certainly prevailed within the German Party and women like Kollontai fought hard to change them, by creating women's organisations and sections. Inside Russia underground socialist organisation made it even harder for women to organise. In addition the male dominated revolutionary organisation often saw incipient "feminism" within attempts to struggle for women's liberation. Kollontai herself was often accused of feminism, and not keeping to the party line, but in reality she and her comrades were fighting hard against the middle-class women's movement that saw all women, irrespective of class, being part of the same fight for suffrage.

Porter quotes Trotsky's "jaundiced" comments on Kollontai, "During the war she veered sharply to the left.... Her knowledge of foreign languages and her temperament made her a valuable agitator. Her theoretical views have always been somewhat confused however." Nonetheless, as the war lead to revolution, Kollontai became a leading member of Bolshevik organisation in Petrograd.

She was part of the Bolshevik central committee that agreed the insurrection in October 1917. Porter describes 1917 as being happiest of Kollontai's life. In the midst of revolution, Kollontai talents as a speaker and organiser came to the fore. She spoke to mass meetings and, was delegated to the Petrograd soviet to represent a unit of male soldiers. A perfect example of the way that class struggle begins to transform peoples ideas.

Readers who are inspired by the Russian Revolution, will find Porter's accounts of the period and Kollontai's involvement fascinating. Here are some brilliant accounts of mass meetings and debates within the working class. There are detailed accounts from Kollontai's own diaries of the pressures on the leading revolutionaries;

Trotsky had collapsed from fatigue the previous day; that afternoon, after three astounding days charged with an almost electrical tension, and after a particularly fraught argument with a Socialist Revolutionary, Alexandra was overcome by dizziness. She was prevented from falling by a Red Guard, who offered her a rouble for bread. She was grateful, but refused; but he insisted on taking her address, and later that evening crept into her flat, left some bread there for her, and crept out again before she could discover his name to thank him.

After the seizure of power, Kollontai was appointed the head of the Commissariat of Social Welfare. Her work was blocked by a strike of civil servants, but her struggles to attempt to help those in need, impoverished by war and economic chaos are central points to the book. Her attempts to create communal kitchens, orphanages and the like are met with hostility, both from representatives of the old order, such as priests, but also from workers themselves who often believed the Bolsheviks were out to "nationalise the family" and take children from their parents.

The years of economic collapse, famine, disease and civil war that followed the successful insurrection helped undermine the basis of Soviet Power. During this period argument raged about the way forward for the revolution. Always a free thinker, Kollontai was often in opposition to leading Bolsheviks and she was an early member of the Workers Opposition. Her thoughts and writings about the potential for sexual liberation flourished in this period, though again they were often at odds with other leading revolutionaries, who were more concerned with trying to drive forward attempts to stabilise the Russian economy and strengthen the basis for Soviet rule. Kollontai argued that women must be central to a developing economy;

Her chief hope therefore, was that women's continued involvement in production would have a dramatic effect on their consciousness and confidence, and would help to free them from the vestiges of fatalism and ignorance which so tenaciously clung to them from the past. Women's release from the private family was not only an essential precondition of their liberation; of equal importance in her opinion, was the fact that all the labour hours women spent on housework were unproductive and of no value to the revolution. It was only when women contributed these labour hours to social production in the factories that the material conditions for creating socialism could be said to exist.

Despite these confused ideas, which downplay the existing economic role of women, Kollontai was at the heart of Bolshevik attempts to try and dramatically transform the role of women's lives in the early Soviet state. Her speech at the Party congress in 1919 had led to a "flood of complaints" from women that their work was being undermined, leading to the establishment of the Zhenotdel. Much of Kollontai's work over the next few years was associated with this organisation. Zhenotdel took on many tasks, involving women in factory inspections, ensuring that pregnant women were adequately protected and taking up issues such as prostitution, venereal disease, education and child care.

The Zhenotdel delegate, with her red headscarf and shabby clothes was soon a familiar and popular figure in every village and town in Russia, as she trudged from house to house, often taking abandoned children into her own home, and when necessary, picking up a rifle and leaving for the front.

During the Civil War Kollontai travelled the length and breadth of the front on agit-trains, speaking to large and small crowds on station platforms and in cold halls. She rallied women to the revolution and to the war, helping in no small way to enable the Red Army to win.

But the rise of Stalin and the isolation of Russia further undermined Kollontai's ideas. As an old-Bolshevik, who had briefly joined the Menshevik party, she was particularly vulnerable and she was driven out of the Party leadership. Stalin used Kollontai in a diplomatic role, further leading to her isolation. Kollontai herself understood that she was threatened, returning in 1930 to Russia from Stockholm were she was a diplomat, she wrote "How can you oppose the apparatus? How can you fight, or defend yourself against injury? For my part, I've put my fight into a corner of my conscience and carry out as well as I can the policies dictated to me."

She even went so far as to write participles criticising old Bolsheviks Kamenev and Zinoviev who had been put to death by Stalin.

Kollontai's life was dedicated to the emancipation of working people. She was one of the few to try and grapple with what socialist transformation might mean for the relationships between people, freed from economic chains. She was not by any means always correct at particular points, and in places her ideas were often idealistic given the concrete situation. Nonetheless, her life spanned an incredible period of history, and her importance to the genuine revolutionary movement, is demonstrated by the way that her death barely warranted a mention in the pages of Pravda despite her years of work.

Cathy Porter's 1980 biography of Alexandra Kollontai is a must read for anyone trying to understand revolutionary history and the ideas at its heart. Her detailed accounts of life in exile, of the German movement, and the early days of Soviet power are fascinating. The exploration of Kollontai's ideas has rarely been done better and the book is a brilliant tribute to one of the socialist movement's most important figures.

Related Reviews and Reading

Cathy Porter in Socialist Worker on Alexandra Kollontai and International Women's Day
Tony Cliff: Alexandra Kollontai: Russian Marxists and Women Workers

Krupskaya - Memories of Lenin
Smith - Red Petrograd; Revolution in the Factories: 1917 - 1918
Davis - A Rebel's Guide to Alexandra Kollontai

Norman Stone - The Eastern Front 1914-1917

Here in western Europe we are apt to forget that both World Wars took place over a vast expanse of the globe. In particular World War One is often discussed in terms of the great battles at The Somme, Verdun or Passchendaele. Of the numerous books devoted to World War One that I've seen in English almost none of them deal with the enormous conflict that took place on the Eastern Front as Russia clashed with Germany and Austro-Hungary.

 Norman Stone's book then is very important as it is one of the few that look in any detail at the events that took place in the east during World War One. However its significance is far more than this, because these events helped shape the one of the great events of modern history, the Russian Revolution.

Stone's history is mostly a military one. In places his detailed reconstruction of events, with explanations of the different movements of regiments, divisions and armies is almost tiresome. For those not versed in military tactics some of the descriptions of the preparations for battle and the engagements themselves will be impossible to follow. Nonetheless there are sections of great fascination and insight. 

One of Stone's themes is that the shape of the war, on a macro and micro scale was determined by wider changes taking place within Russia. While I don't think that Stone is close to being a Marxist politically, his understanding of the social and economic tensions within Russian society would be close to some of those on the left who have analysed Russian history.

In analysing why the Revolution took place, Stone writes:

"This economic chaos was frequently ascribed quite simply to backwardness: Russia was not advanced enough to stand the strain of a war... But economic backwardness did not alone make for revolution, as the examples of Romania or Bulgaria showed... The economic chaos came more from a contest between old and new in the Russian economy."

This battle between "old and new" shaped more than the economy. It shaped different attitudes to the way that military production took place - the Tsar wanted production through state factories, but emerging capitalists wanted to make profits. As a result goods cost more and more as profits boomed during wartime. More importantly however, the old and new played out in the military leadership. 

As with elsewhere in World War One almost no-one understood in August 1914 the way that the war would play out. Russian commanders as with their counter-parts in the west and the central powers imagined a brief conflict. In fact, in Russia early conflicts were fought much in the way of battles of the 19th century. Stone recounts one engagement between Russian cavalry and their enemy taking place as though the 20th century hadn't happened. The Austro-Hungarian horsemen in this conflict being almost unable to ride as they'd taken their dress saddles in order to look good as they rode. A detachment of infantry broke the sabre duel up with rifle fire and presumably the commanders were dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

The Russian army was beset more than most by backward looking and incompetent military leadership. Many of the generals were Tsarist appointees and even when they failed they were frequently promoted due to friends at court. Their leadership was often further undermined because of personal feuds or communications failure. In one conflict in 1915 the fortress at Libau was evacuated by Russian troops in the face of a German threat. As the Russians left, cutting the telegraph cables, a second Russian army was sent in to defend the base. In the confusion, the Germans occupied.

The chaos described by Stone is not of course limited to Russia. Austro-Hungary in particular had its own share of idiotic and unprepared commanders. The tragedy of course, is that this lack of leadership lead to enormous casualties. When the commanders got it right (in terms of military organisation) they often were younger men, with different ideas and experiences. Interestingly Stone notes that many of the most successful commanders were to take their experiences into the Red Army in 1919 and help Trotsky to defeat the Whites during the Civil War that followed the Revolution.

Much of the blame for failures by the Russian army were put at the feet of the Russian economy. Failed military campaigns were often blamed on the lack of shells for the artillery. Stone argues that this was not the case, and convincingly shows the way that failure was more to do with the inept leadership and bad military organisation. He also argues though, that while "virtually all sectors of the economy grew.... their growth was not even and a series of bottle-necks threw the economy into chaos as it encountered them. The Tsarist regime had little idea as to how such crisis might be surmounted, and in any case they provoked the final crisis of an already badly-strained society."

Stone's book is not without faults. Though some are not of his making. Written in 1975 it suffers from lack of access to the Russian archives and could well do with an update. However, Stone underplays the role of the revolutionary movement in helping to shape the revolutionary movement. His analysis rightly doesn't put the success of the revolutionary solely on the base of military and economic crisis, but he does say that the Bolsheviks had limited support amongst the front-line troops. For him the revolution was more a result of the particular way the crisis played out and the way that Lenin was able to offer hope to the masses of Russian society. But this is contradicted by the example of Germany where a revolutionary situation arose in a similar way, but the lack of mass revolutionary socialist organisations did not lead to the establishment of soviet power.

Stone's book nonetheless is not meant to be a serious examination of the Russian Revolution, but a study of a near forgotten part of World War One. In this it succeeds admirably and socialists will gain much from reading it, as a background to a deeper understanding of the events of 1917.

Related Reviews

Tuchman - The Guns of August

Gitta Sereny - Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder

Gitta Sereny's book on the life of Albert Speer is one of the best biographies I've read. Meticulously detailed, researched and challenging to subject and reader it deserves to be read by everyone interested in the Second World War and the causes of the Holocaust.

Into That Darkness is an earlier work of hers. Her subject in this case, Franz Stangl, was the commander at the Treblinka Death Camp, were up to 900,000 Jews and an undetermined number of Gypsies were murdered. Unlike the case of Speer though, Stangl is not as fascinating character, while clearly a deeply troubled individual, he was not the gleeful and unrepentant killer like Eichmann. Nor was he a senior figure in the regime, close to other leading Nazis, with personal acquaintances like Hitler.

As a result, this study of Stangl is an attempt to grapple with a question that has been the subject for intense debate amongst historians of the Holocaust. How did seemingly "ordinary men", become the perpetrators of such appalling acts of violence. In Stangl's case it seems that rather than him being a particularly virulent anti-semite before the rise of Hitler, or even an enthusiastic sympathiser of the Nazi Party (he did retrospectively join the organisation and give up his faith) when the Nazis invaded his Austrian homeland, he was a fairly ordinary police officer who rose to the top of his organisation precisely because he was able to administer and organise the Death Camps, while ignoring events around him.

At the same time, the book is also the story of those who went to the gas chambers in Treblinka, and those who fought back, in particular the mass uprising that eventually forced the camp to close.

The parts of the book where Sereny explains and documents the industrial slaughter that took place at the two camps organised by Stangl (he was at Sobibor before he was redeployed to Treblinka) can only be described as horrible. But  equally appalling are those were she discusses the slaughter with Stangl, who is dispassionately removed from the murder. On his arrival at Treblinka he is more concerned and appalled by the disorganisation, rather than the realisation that mass murder is taking place.

Survivors from Treblinka differ in their accounts of his involvement in murder. Most seem to think that he limited himself to organisation matters, rarely talking to those arriving in the transports. At least one eyewitness claimed that Stangl (who always met each new train, immaculately dressed in a white riding suite) carried a whip, like many of the most brutal of guards.

Stangl's inability to feel remorse is notable throughout Sereny's interview, which took place. Here for instance is his own, dispassionate account of a camp worker (Blau) who approached him trying to save a relative.

"There was one day when [Blau] knocked at the door of my office... and asked permission to speak to me. He looked very worried. I said, 'Of course Blau, come on in. What's worrying you?' He said it was his eighty-year-old father; he'd arrived on that morning's transport. Was there anything I could do. I said, 'Really, Blau, you must understand it's impossible. A man of eighty...' He said quickly that he understood of course. But could he ask me for permission to take his father to the Lazarett rather than the gas chambers. And could he take his father first to the kitchen and give him a meal. I said, 'You go and do what you think best, Blau. Officially I don't know anything, but unofficially you can tell the Kapo I said it was all right.' In the afternoon, when I came back to my office, he was waiting for me. He had tears in his eyes. He stood to attention and said, '... I want to thank you. I gave my father a meal. And I've just taken him to the Lazarett - it's all over. Thank you very much.' I said, 'Well Blau, there's no need to thank me, but of course if you want to thank me, you may.'"

Blau, it should be noted was an informer, one of a number of Jewish inmates at Treblinka who co-operated with the system. No doubt this was his special reward. Others at Treblinka worked for the Nazis, but not as collaborators, as workers who helped, on pain of death, keep the machine running. Theirs was a daily struggle for life, and it was them, who after months of threats, torture, violence and death organised the revolt that helped bring Treblinka's to a close. Their uprising is one of the other stories in this book, in fact the story of those who lived, worked and died at Treblinka is the real story. Sereny's insightful examination of Stangl paints his banality as part of a wide machine of slaughter. But he was only a cog (though a very important one) in that machine.

Sereny's book then is much more than a biography of a commander of a Death Camp. It is also an examination of the whole structure of the Nazi death camps and an insight into what happened there. Her interviews with survivors, eyewitnesses (such as the Polish resistance member who worked on the railways and counted every train into Treblinka and noted the numbers inside - coming to a higher total of 1,200,000 - a third more than the official figure) and Stangl's colleagues, illuminate the Holocaust. But centrepiece are the stories of the survivors. These people suffered appalling, yet still managed to keep the flame of resistance alive. The tale of their successful revolt and the enormous sacrifices made by them to allow others to escape, makes this book well worth reading.

In an attempt to frame events at Treblinka and Stangls own actions, Sereny examines several aspects of German and Austrian life before and during the war. Some of this, such as the stories of those who sheltered Jews and others in their homes, nunneries or monasteries are well know. Others, such as the role of the church are discussed here in detail because of the importance of those bodies to people like the Stangl. Sereny is particularly critical, though always objective in her examination of the evidence, of the role of senior figures in the Catholic Church. She argues convincingly that the failure of the Pope to explicitly condemn the murder and violence taking place, was rooted in antisemitism, but also the Pope's hostility to Soviet Russia. For the Pope, better a Nazi Germany that committed mass murder than a Soviet Europe. Sereny is careful to point out that many lower figures in the Church did not fail this test, sheltering and protecting Jews for the whole war at considerable risk to themselves.

Sereny also makes it clear the extent to which the Holocaust was known. For Frau Stangl, rumours of life in places like Treblinka made her question what her husband was doing. But governments in the US and Britain as well as elsewhere in Europe had ample evidence as early as mid-1942 about the slaughter. Sereny argues convincingly that the decisions they took increased the numbers of victims through failure to offer refuge, or support aid efforts by other countries.

At the end of the war, despite being aware of who he was, Stangl was able to easily escape from his open prison. It is perhaps a reflection of his lack of engagement with his own crimes that he lived openly under his own name in Brazil even registering with the Austrian authorities. His own wife left their home country to see him, declaring her purpose of travel as to meet her "escaped" husband.

Eventually Nazi hunters like Simon Wisenthal forced the Allies to bring Stangl to justice. He was sentenced to life, but died immediately after Sereny's interviews. The failure of the Allies to deal with Stangl properly is in itself a tragic crime. Few individuals come out of this book well and Sereny has done us an amazing service by bringing all this evidence and analysis together.

I want to finish with the words of Richard Glazar of one of the survivors that Sereny interviewed. The revolt that he helped organise at Treblinka is one of the few bright moments in this horrific tale. It shows that even in the darkest times, people sometimes are able to fight back against brutality, repression and racism. Sereny's book is a monument to them, and educates us all on the importance of the struggle to prevent fascism rising again.

"No one at all could have got out of Treblinka if it hadn't been for the real heroes: those who, having lost their wives and children, elected to fight it out so as to give the others a chance. Galewski - the 'camp elder'; Kapo Kurland who had worked in one of the most tragic places in this tragic place, an extraordinary man and the senior member of the revolutionary committee, to whom we prisoners swore an oath on the eve of the uprising.

Sidowicz and Simcha from the carpentry shop; Stnda Lichtbalu one of our Cazech group... who worked in the garage and blew it up with the petrol tanks - the biggest, most important fire of the uprising, he died in it. And of course, Chelo Bloch who survived 4 hellish months to lead the revolt in the upper camp and died in it.

And finally Rudi Masarek; tall blond Rudi who of all the men in Treblinka would have had the best change of getting away; he looked more German than the most 'Aryan' of the SS... He had his mother in Czechoslovakia and could have gone back... to a life of ease and plenty. He came to Treblinka deliberately, because he loved someone else more than himself. He died, deliberately, for us."

Related Reviews

Sereny - Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth
Kershaw - The End
Black - IBM and the Holocaust 

Joseph Kanon - The Good German

Partly because of its setting, this is an unusual detective story. Set in the midst of the ruins of Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the European theatre of the Second World War, the hero is no detective, but a journalist, sent to the capital to cover the Potsdamn Conference. At the conference, our hero, the oddly named Jake Geismar, finds a body in a lake, and begins a quest to explain what's happened and get his last, great wartime story.

Like many detective novels, there are coincidences aplenty. The author however gets away with alot because his descriptions of the destroyed city and the people who continue to survive there are amazing. Perhaps the author gleaned his knowledge of the streets from Google Maps, but I suspect that he has sat down at a cafe in the Oliverplatz.

More interestingly, Joseph Kanon is an expert at portraying the weird duality of life in postwar Germany. The struggle for food and survival, and for identity. He captures those who haven't quite comprehended what's happened. In a clever bit of dialogue a young German woman is hoping to escape to London with her lover, a British Soldier. She imagines it all destroyed, like the Berlin around her, and cannot believe Jake's assurances that London is not flattened. But they told us it was, she says, refering stubbonly to the wartime propaganda.

Oddly the rather strange and convoluted plot seem to matter little because, to use a cliche, the real hero of the novel is the city itself. Nonetheless, the complicated strands are drawn together well, and tightly, and the ending is unsatisfactory, because it is dealing with the contradictions of Berlin in 1945. The Potsdam Conference that opens the story is the beginning of the end of the wartime Allies. By the end of the story, the world's two superpowers are jokeying for position and often the pawns in their game are some of the Germans who made the war possible. Dealing with the consequences of that, meant ignoring some of the more unpalatable truths about wartime behaviour. The solution to Jake Geismar's puzzle is rooted in that, and it creates an excellent bit of tension.

Ian Kershaw - The End

There will probably never be an end to the publication of books about World War Two. The sheer scale and horror of the conflict, combined with the enormous numbers of people involved, both as combatants and non-combatants will produce an endless variety of viewpoints and histories. Two of the big names have new books about the war out now, or in the near future, and I suspect that I'll join those who read Max Hastings or Antony Beevor eventually. Despite their brilliance as writers and historians, it has to be open to question how much more they'll add to the discussion.

On the other hand, Ian Kershaw's latest book is a very different work. Kershaw is famous for his studies of Hitler, including an exceptional two volume biography, which is reviewed in detail here, by the British Marxist Alex Callinicos. In The End Kershaw turns his hand to the last year of the European war. His approach is to ask a seemingly obvious question, which, it turns out, is remarkably difficult to answer simply. Why did the Germans keep on fighting despite the obvious facts that they were military defeated?

Kershaw makes the point that most countries, faced with military defeat eventually seek terms. Germany didn't. The fact that they kept fighting right up to the moment that Russian troops arrived near Hitler's bunker and the Dictator finally shot himself, brought immense destruction upon the German people and country. Kerhsaw sums it up:

"In the ten months between July 1944 and May 1945 far more German civilians died than in the previous years of the war, mostly through air raids and in the calamitous conditions in the Eastern regions after January 1945. In all, more than 400,000 were killed and 800,000 injured by Allied bombing... The Soviet invasion then occupation of the eastern regions of Germany after January 1945 resulted in the deaths.... of around half a million civilians... Had the attack on Hitler's life in July succeeded and the war been promptly bought to an end, the lives of around 50 per cent of the German soldiers who died would have been saved."

There are many more similar statistics that Kershaw uses, that only underline this point. The attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944, was a turning point and its right that Kershaw uses this as the pivot point of his book. Its not so simple to suggest that had that succeeded, all would have been ok. Kershaw himself points out that at that point in the war there were sufficient numbers of fanatical Nazis alive who could have precipitated civil war in an attempt to keep the wishes of the Dictator alive. But Hitler was a lynch pin. Kershaw describes his rule as charismatic, and puts him, as he did in his earlier works, at the centre of a network of belief and bureaucracy that generated its own momentum.

This momentum meant, that in the midst of collapse the bureaucratic state machine that Hitler headed up, continued to function. During the last seconds of the war, civil servants sat at their desks under a hail of Russian missiles, completing meaningless paperwork. On the Western Front, police men filled out requisition forms for replacement buckets damaged in bombing.

So were the German people simply mesmerised by Hitler? Kershaw argues not. He points out that in places people did rebel against the regime (though usually in an act of last minute desperation, rather than an organised uprising. One exception seems to be Cologne, where a small scale rebellion took place, which was ruthlessly put down). Central to Hitler's ideology, and indeed to much of the inter-war year German Nationalist arguments was the concept of the "stab in the back" that took place at the end of the First World War. The German Revolution of 1919, that effectively ended Germany's part in the First World War and brought the conflict to a close involved millions of people in a genuine mass revolution. Hitler was terrified that this would reoccur and much of his activity in the last months of the war was geared to preventing this.

So, in addition to the ruthless nature of the regime, and in particular in the aftermath of the attempted coup in July 1944, Hitler removed even more of those who, from top to bottom of the system, might be seen as potential internal enemies. By doing this, he selected, particularly in the armed forces, for even more fanatical and brutal officers, which helped to make the war even more prolonged. In addition, the reality of war, particularly on the Eastern Front meant people fought, because they had nothing to lose. Soviet territories had been subject to a horrific onslaught by the German army, and their response, was brutal. German propaganda portrayed the "Bolsheviks" as brutal monsters, though the reality for many wasn't far off. This helped to provoke individual Germans to even more bitter defence, prolonging the war and making fear of occupation even greater.

Those who ran away were killed or returned to the front. The top of the German hierarchy, in particular the Nazi party ensured that continued right to the last moment. Those immediately below Hitler were all, at particular moments, convinced that the end was near. Interestingly, Kershaw points out that the particular nature of the dictatorship meant that there was no easy way that this could be achieved. The need for the individual leaders to build their own power base, at the same time as jockeying for favours from Hitler meant they were a band of warring brothers. Constantly worried about their own position and never able to form a block against the Dictator. This contrasts, Kershaw points out, with Italy, where the monarchy and Fascist party formed a block which could oppose Mussolini at times, and did, eventually stop him. Despite the misgivings of the German leadership, few acted in ways that would have curtailed the war, saved lives, or challenged Hitler's madness. This condemned millions of death, injury and suffering.

The End contains much more. The stories of the last days of particular towns can be heartbreaking. The senseless murder of individuals who had had enough and wanted to stop. The continued murders in the Gas Chambers and the death marches of concentration camp victims, that took tens of thousands of lives, right up to the last moments of the war, the stories of refugees and bomb victims, as well as the soldiers who lost their lives trying to capture some last redoubt, where some fanatical Nazis refused to give in, are horrific, and perhaps unique to this conflict. Also telling are the stories of the higher ups, who used their position to better themselves and save their families even to the last moment, then abandoned their principles rapidly when all fell to pieces in front of them.

One final aspect of Kershaw's book that was new to me, was the way that he points out that Hitler's death didn't simply precipitate an immediate end. Hitler's successor, Admiral Donitz kept the war going as long as he could, in the belief that he could save troops from the Eastern Front. In part this was a naive belief, shared by many in the Nazi Party, that the Western Allies would seek Germany as a new ally against the Soviet Union. Donitz's unreal grasp of the situation and tactical blunders as he sought to big himself up as the new leader of Germany actually condemned thousands more to death or the work camps of Siberia. It was a tragic end to an even greater tragedy.

Ian Kershaw's brilliant writing makes this a stunning read. His eye for detail and story mean that it is not an overwhelming book, though it is difficult to read in places. His final answer to the question posed at the beginning is a dialectical one. All the factors that meant individuals might continue to fight, or undermined their desire to surrender combined together in a particular set of circumstances, created by Hitler's ideology and the structures of the Nazi Party. When we say "Never Again!" today, and organise against modern fascists, we do so, on the understanding that those tiny movements today could contain the seeds of future war and holocaust. Kershaw shows the ultimate horror of what happens when they aren't stopped.

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Pierre Broué - The German Revolution 1917-1923

In the introduction to his own book on the German Revolution, the Marxist Chris Harman wrote that "Revolutions that are defeated are soon forgotten. They become lost from view; footnotes to history, glossed over by all but a few specialist historians." This is indeed true of the German Revolution, in part because the defeat of this revolution was the beginning of the "midnight of the century". Had the German Revolution been successful, it is likely that Hitler would never have come to power, the Holocaust been avoided together with the Second World War and the Russian Revolution would have lost its economic and political isolation. Stalin might not have seized power and the history of the second half of the twentieth century could have been very different.

Pierre Broué's book on the German Revolution is extremely important. Its detailed analysis and systematic use of the archives available at the time it was written mean that it is an important text of history itself. This is part serves to rescue some of the "Lost Revolution" for new generations. But Broué is no objective historian, he writes with the explicit intention of understanding the defeated revolution and the forces involved to better arm future socialists and revolutionaries. He concludes that "the history of the Communist Party of Germany during the early years of the Communist International ceases to be a history of lost illusions, and become the prehistory of a struggle which continues to this day."

Despite covering an event that lasted barely five years, the book is enormous in its scope. The Brill edition that I have read weighs in at almost 1000 pages (though rather extraordinarily and frustratingly it has no index, which for a book of this nature is a terrible omission). It would be a mistake for me to attempt to tell the actual narrative of the German Revolution in this review, instead I recommend both this book and other readings below.

Broué begins with the concrete forces on the ground, or the "battlefield" as the first chapter is called. Broué weighs up the isolation of the revolutionary left in Germany during the First World War, a few thousand individuals, with no common organisation or strategy. A few individuals such as Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Leibnickt remain prominent, both from their anti-war campaigning and their prestige from years in the German Social Democratic Party. The SPD had, at the outbreak of war, abandoned its traditions of revolutionary Marxism and supported its own national bourgeoisie. Millions of workers were demoralised and isolated by this, and many supported the war itself. But as the years passed, conditions worsened and the reality of modern warfare became apparent. The German Revolution exploded in November 1918, driven by a enormous mutiny of sailors who refused to take their ships to certain destruction. Within days the revolt had spread the length and breadth of the country and revolutionary organisations, councils representing workers, sailors and soldiers were elected. This was enough to force the abdication of the Kaiser and bring an end to World War One. The weakness of the movement was the lack of political clarity and the old SPD, reclaiming its socialist mantle was able to take the movement by the head and subdue the revolutionary impulse. With a new government in power, the counter-revolution began and many militants, including Luxemburg and Liebknecht, who had just formed the German Communist Party (KPD) were murdered.

The strength of Broué research though, is to put this into the context of the changing Germany. The story of World War One here, is not one simply of passive acceptance of the slaughter in the trenches, but also of heroic individuals who organised anti-war activities, who printed leaflets and distributed them on pain of death, who organised underground networks of workers and militants to strike and protest against food shortages and worsening conditions.

This approach to the history of the revolution continues throughout the book. Broué constantly attempts to get across what the situation was like on the ground. In part he does this by reporting the slogans and "political lines" of different left organisations, such as the KPD. But he also reports from the memoirs of individuals involved. This is a social history from the bottom up, but not one were individuals are examined in isolation. The role of the political parties is scrutinised deeply, particularly the KPD and its predecessors. Related to this, is the importance to which Broué places the role of the Communist International.

The Russian Revolution had a profound importance for the German Revolution and those who took part in it. Early photos of the street demonstrations of November 1918 show placards with "All Power to the Workers Councils" written on them, and Karl Liebknecht in his speech to the assembled masses in which he declared the Socialist Republic of Germany, extended greetings to the brothers in revolutionary Russia.

The Russian Revolutionaries, conscious of the need to spread the revolution, created the Communist International to assist with this, and the influence of the International was felt throughout the years covered by this book and beyond. This was in terms of financial aid, Broué comments on how the resources of the KPD during 1923, the year of extreme economic crisis were helped by the CI which:

"in 1923, the material help of the ECCI [Executive Committee of the Communist International] permitted the Party to maintain 27 daily papers, and to pay 200 full-time workers. With its own resources, the KPD could have maintained only four papers, and barely a dozen employees."

But the assistance was also personal, both in terms of individuals like Karl Radek who spent months at a time in Russia assisting and advising the German socialists, as well as reporting back to Moscow. Additionally, delegates from the German socialist parties would visit Russia for advice and discussions.

One of Broué's themes is that the revolutionaries were frequently unprepared for events. The spontaneity of the November revolution took even the most brilliant Marxists by surprise. Yet frequently the KPD were left bewildered by events. Take the Kapp Putsch, when a proto-fascist leader attempted to seize power, only to be prevented by mass strike action happened almost independently from the KPD leadership who initially denounced the strikes.

Part of the problem was that the KPD constantly looked to Russia for advice. While this was was understandable, the Bolsheviks had, after all, made their own revolution, the situation was very different. It also led to a certain lack of self-confidence from the Germans as well as a certain naivete. Broué quotes one German KPD leader, again in 1923, as arguing that;

"under no circumstances should we proclaim a general strike. The bourgeoisie would find out what we are planning and would destroy us before we start. On the contrary, let us soften down out spontaneous movements. Let us hold back our groups in the factories and the unemployed organisations so that the government will think that the danger is over. And then - after they are lulled into an illusion of complete safety - let us strike in one night, quickly and decisively, arrest the government, storm the Reichswehr barracks and ring the knell of the last battle."

Such simplistic notions of how class struggle can be carried out were extremely worrying, but in part they had be fostered by an International that had encouraged the German's to believe that they were on the verge of revolution. Despite the bravery of thousands of communists, the belief that revolutionary movements could be turned on and off like this had soured the organisation for several years. The faith in the CI as an instrument of revolution helped undermine the ability of the KPD to understand the mood inside the workplaces and on the streets. This is why the mass strikes that brought down the Cuno government in 1923 seemed to come out of the blue for the Communists and why, when the CI insisted that another revolutionary movement was on the cards in October 1923, the leaders of the KPD were unable to argue against them, or present a more realistic portrayal of the balance of forces.

This is not to say that the CI was a negative force. Without the CI the KPD would have indeed been short of resources, as mentioned above. But they would also have been without some brilliant leaders and ideas. The turn taken by the Communist International towards United Front work in the early 1920s as the revolutionary moment ebbed was crucial in Germany. It meant that the growing KPD would try and find common ground with the members of the SPD over concrete demands, and pull them towards revolutionary politics, out of the arms of reformist leadership of the SPD. As the fascists began to grow, and increasingly use murderous methods against the left, such united tactics would prove indispensable. Their abandonment in the Stalin era, post 1923 for a set of politics that deemed the SPD worse than Hitlers' movement, would lead directly to the destruction of the left.

The problem was that the KPD became a mass party in the midst of successive revolutionary periods, or at least periods of intense class conflict. This meant that at its core were very few revolutionaries who had been skilled in years of organising. The lack of self-confidence at crucial moments, betrays a lack of confidence in their own organisation and ideas and that in turn, is a consequence of lack of experience.

This problem begins with the death of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Their murder removed the best leaders of the revolution, individuals who, had they survived would have developed and learnt from the different stages of the revolution. Certainly, it is hard to imagine Rosa Luxemburg who had, over the decades, engaged in fraternal debates and polemics with Lenin and Trotsky, accepting the ideas of the CI automatically.

A third key individual, was the revolutionary Paul Levi. Broué's book in some ways is an attempt to rescue Levi and his legacy from the mud that has been thrown at him over the years. For a period in the immediate aftermath of the deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht he was the KPD leadership. His instincts were cautious and balanced the ultra-leftist tendancies of the young organisation, but mixed with this caution was a genuine gift for understanding the balance of forces. His critique of the KPD in calling the March Action in 1921, an attempt to physically kick-start the revolution, was entirely accurate, yet his breach of discipline was severe enough for him to be expelled. Sadly Levi refused to attempt to work for conciliation and he became another lost leader, in a time when his experience and links to the pre-war socialist movement would have been invaluable.

Broué finishes the book with an analysis of the CI itself. It is clear that the author puts much importance to this body, indeed he wrote a history of the Third International that has yet to appear in English. For Broué the CI was a brilliant tool, but a flawed one. He quotes Lenin, arguing that many of the motions passed by the CI were "too Russian", i.e. that they were based too much on the Russian experience, with all the differences that existed between that country and those of Western Europe. As one chapter title has it, "Grafting Bolshevism onto German Stock" was never going to be easy. Broué acknowledges that often the KPD had it right,

"relations between the KPD and the Russian Party between 1919 and 1922 followed almost constantly the same pattern: a sharp conflict at the level of proposals made or initiatives taken by the Germans; a vigorous critique by the leaders of the ECCI; and then an intervention by Lenin, who while making some formal criticisms, judge the German initiative acceptable". 

With Lenin's death and the loss of his personal prestige and brilliant analysis, this process was made worse. Lenin fought to develop and build the independence of the KPD as well as maintain its organisation integrity, taking a deep and close personal interest in the ideas and activities of individual German leaders. Following the defeat of 1923, Broué concludes ominously, that the role of the CI was fundamentally different, from then onwards "the policies of the KPD were to be written almost entirely in Moscow, and in Russian."

Broué's has produced a rich and important text here. The detail is astounding and, particularly I imagine, for those engaged in the socialist movement today, the defeat and mistakes made in this period are terrible to read about. The lost opportunities doomed millions to a terrible fate in World War Two and the Holocaust. But learning from the past, and in particular, learning the lessons of revolutions, even lost ones, is something that is important to those organising today. Broué's book deserves to be a key text for revolutionaries today, those building movements or engaging in revolution will find much of use here.

At the heart of Pierre Broué's monumental work, is the idea that ordinary people can and do change the world. Its this revolutionary emphasis that makes this book more than a work history but part of helping us change the future. As he puts it near the end;

"We believe that the German Communist Party could have been victorious, even though it was defeated. There does not exist any Book of Destiny, in which the victory of the Russian October and the defeat of the German October, and the victory of Stalin and then Hitler, could have been written in advance. It is human beings who make history."


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Recommended Reading

Chris Harman's history of the German Revolution, The Lost Revolution, is a superb introduction to this event and, while similar in analysis to Broué he has a number of differences. It is also shorter and much easier to carry on the bus. You can buy it here. Revolutions don't just have economic consequences, they change all sorts of aspects of people's lives, The German Revolution for instance, led to new freedoms for gays and lesbians, Colin Wilson's article here has much more about this aspect.

Neil Davidson has reviewed Broué's book here and I recommend that review. Leon Trotsky's Lesson's of October is a polemic written about and in response to the failure of the German Revolution. My own review of this contains further links to aspects of that discussion.

In this Socialist Worker article Ian Birchall introduces two short extracts from The German Revolution. His conclusion that "Broué was a revolutionary first and an academic second. He knew which side he was on and he knew what was at stake" is a fitting tribute. He also wrote a obituary of Broué here.