Continuing the theme on riots...
The Centre for the Study of Global Security and Development in association with the Centre of Ethics and Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, invite you to:
Recession, Racism and Riots
Wednesday 14th March, 2012: 6-8pm
A roundtable discussion, with audience participation, between:
Stafford Scott (Tottenham Defence Campaign)
Denise Ferreira da Silva (Queen Mary)
Devon Thomas (Brixton ’81 Retrospective Group)
Mark Thompson (Cultural Chameleon Press)
Other speakers TBA
The shooting of unarmed Mark Duggan by police and their subsequent conduct towards the affected family and wider community in Tottenham were the flashpoints that sparked the August unrests of 2011. Join us for a discussion on the links between the recession, racism and the riots. Questions discussed will include:
· How are austerity measures impacting upon Black communities in particular?
· Are these measures exacerbating institutional racism?
· What has changed and what has stayed the same between 1981 and 2011?
· What positive visions are available to an increasingly embattled and excluded youth? And how might art serve social justice?
Fogg Lecture Theatre, Fogg Building
Queen Mary College, Mile End Road E1 4NS
http://www.qmul.ac.uk/docs/about/26065.pdf
ALL WARMLY WELCOME!
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Luddites festival
Festival of Luddite Culture and Ideas
Huddersfield, April 28/29th 2012.
The Luddites 200 group, in conjunction with a group of Huddersfield-based devotees of the Luddites is planning a one-day festival in Huddersfield in April. The aim of the event is to bring together different groups who have developed plays, music, poetry, etc related to the Luddites’ anniversary, and to combine that with discussions around issues related to technology today. There is a great deal of interest in the anniversary in Huddersfield and surrounding areas and we will be working closely with many parts of the community including local museums. We will create an exciting celebration, which will be both fun and accessible to the general public. The event will take place in several venues in Huddersfield town centre.
The festival will include:
• Theatre, poetry, music, art, storytelling, film
• Exhibitions including materials developed by local schools
• Talks/workshops on: the story of the 1812 uprisings; were the Luddites right?; debates on technology issues eg digital/internet, nuclear, reproductive technology/genetics, alternative technology; is technology leading to unemployment today, how can we respond to this?
• Hands on/demonstrations of old/alternative technology: spinning/weaving, cropping, blacksmithing, micropower.
• Evening concerts
• Childrens’ activities
• Frame smashing re-enactment
• Stalls
The Luddites200 group
Our group is an informal network of historians, artists, technology politics activists, including scientists and engineers who have shared interests in the Luddites. We aim to both celebrate the anniversary and to open up debate about issues related to technology today. We have set up a website (www.luddites200.org.uk) and blog, and have produced a couple of publications - a special issue of The Land magazine and a feature in the
Housmans Peace Diary 2012.
Contact: luddites200@yahoo.co.uk, huddersfieldluddites200@gmail.com
Huddersfield, April 28/29th 2012.
The Luddites 200 group, in conjunction with a group of Huddersfield-based devotees of the Luddites is planning a one-day festival in Huddersfield in April. The aim of the event is to bring together different groups who have developed plays, music, poetry, etc related to the Luddites’ anniversary, and to combine that with discussions around issues related to technology today. There is a great deal of interest in the anniversary in Huddersfield and surrounding areas and we will be working closely with many parts of the community including local museums. We will create an exciting celebration, which will be both fun and accessible to the general public. The event will take place in several venues in Huddersfield town centre.
The festival will include:
• Theatre, poetry, music, art, storytelling, film
• Exhibitions including materials developed by local schools
• Talks/workshops on: the story of the 1812 uprisings; were the Luddites right?; debates on technology issues eg digital/internet, nuclear, reproductive technology/genetics, alternative technology; is technology leading to unemployment today, how can we respond to this?
• Hands on/demonstrations of old/alternative technology: spinning/weaving, cropping, blacksmithing, micropower.
• Evening concerts
• Childrens’ activities
• Frame smashing re-enactment
• Stalls
The Luddites200 group
Our group is an informal network of historians, artists, technology politics activists, including scientists and engineers who have shared interests in the Luddites. We aim to both celebrate the anniversary and to open up debate about issues related to technology today. We have set up a website (www.luddites200.org.uk) and blog, and have produced a couple of publications - a special issue of The Land magazine and a feature in the
Housmans Peace Diary 2012.
Contact: luddites200@yahoo.co.uk, huddersfieldluddites200@gmail.com
Sunday, 26 February 2012
Occupy History
From: Sandy Polishuk (polishuk@easystreet.net):
We invite all historians to join in showing support for Occupy Wall Street
and the entire Occupy Movement by signing on to Occupy History.
Inspired by the creativity and strength of Occupy Wall Street and the
Occupy movement around the world, Occupy History adds its voice in support
of those speaking out against and demanding solutions to growing injustice
and inequality, both economic and social.
We encourage historians to work to build the discussion beyond inequality
and injustice to include the history of these struggles, and the changes
needed.
You can add your name to this statement by going to occupyhistory.us
We will only use your email address to communicate with you.
In addition to showing our support for the Occupy Movement, Occupy History
plans to provide resources to the Occupiers:
Locally we would like to be a resource Occupies can go to for speakers and
discussion leaders
On our website, we plan to provide resource pages with book and film
recommendations Occupies can use for educational purposes
We hope to develop a list of films, or perhaps the films themselves, that
could comprise a film festival of the history of progressive political
movements in America and around the world.
We hope you will join us.
Please share with your colleagues.
We invite all historians to join in showing support for Occupy Wall Street
and the entire Occupy Movement by signing on to Occupy History.
Inspired by the creativity and strength of Occupy Wall Street and the
Occupy movement around the world, Occupy History adds its voice in support
of those speaking out against and demanding solutions to growing injustice
and inequality, both economic and social.
We encourage historians to work to build the discussion beyond inequality
and injustice to include the history of these struggles, and the changes
needed.
You can add your name to this statement by going to occupyhistory.us
We will only use your email address to communicate with you.
In addition to showing our support for the Occupy Movement, Occupy History
plans to provide resources to the Occupiers:
Locally we would like to be a resource Occupies can go to for speakers and
discussion leaders
On our website, we plan to provide resource pages with book and film
recommendations Occupies can use for educational purposes
We hope to develop a list of films, or perhaps the films themselves, that
could comprise a film festival of the history of progressive political
movements in America and around the world.
We hope you will join us.
Please share with your colleagues.
Conference reviews historical lessons of riots
London Socialist Historians Group
Press Release 26TH February
Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
Conference reviews historical lessons of riots
A well attended conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London on Saturday, organised by the London Socialist Historians Group, reviewed some historical lessons of riots in the context of recent events in the UK, Greece and elsewhere.
Conference organiser Dr Keith Flett opened proceedings by noting that the Riot Act had been abolished in 1973 and historians themselves had tended to see riots as purely historical matters. Recent events had challenged that and he noted that inquiries into the UK riots of August 2011 had lacked an historical perspective. The aim of the conference was to revisit and review historical approaches to the riot.
Sean Creighton spoke on the Trafalgar Square riots of 1887 one of which saw the death of Alfred Linnell a friend of William Morris. He emphasised that the police had played a key role both in terms of provoking riotous behaviour and, on occasion, by lack of numbers in allowing for smashing of windows and looting in London’s West End. He went on to note that several of those who had led the rioting went on to become notable figures in subsequent Liberal Goverments- such as Battersea MP John Burns-and acted to relax rules on protest in the Square.
Neil Davidson spoke about riots around the 1706 Scottish Union negotiations and noted that the political character of the rioting meant parallels fitted better with Greece 2012 than the UK in 2011. He argued that rioters who were opposed to Union achieved economic concessions but were ultimately concerned politically about where a successful attempt to block the 1707 Treaty would lead.
John Newsinger shifted the focus to Chicago and to the Memorial Day Massacre police riot on May 30 1937 in which ten people involved in the ‘Little Steel Strike’ demanding the right to picket were shot and killed by police. Discussion focused on the role of official violence in preventing radical and trade union organisation bringing an understanding that authority could riot as well as those opposed to it
LSHG Convenor Dr Keith Flett, said this conference of research historians represented as it should work in progress. It reflects the fact that riots whether from below or above are not just something for the history books. The detail of why people riot, what authority does and what the impact is, are very much ones for the present day.
Press Release 26TH February
Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
Conference reviews historical lessons of riots
A well attended conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London on Saturday, organised by the London Socialist Historians Group, reviewed some historical lessons of riots in the context of recent events in the UK, Greece and elsewhere.
Conference organiser Dr Keith Flett opened proceedings by noting that the Riot Act had been abolished in 1973 and historians themselves had tended to see riots as purely historical matters. Recent events had challenged that and he noted that inquiries into the UK riots of August 2011 had lacked an historical perspective. The aim of the conference was to revisit and review historical approaches to the riot.
Sean Creighton spoke on the Trafalgar Square riots of 1887 one of which saw the death of Alfred Linnell a friend of William Morris. He emphasised that the police had played a key role both in terms of provoking riotous behaviour and, on occasion, by lack of numbers in allowing for smashing of windows and looting in London’s West End. He went on to note that several of those who had led the rioting went on to become notable figures in subsequent Liberal Goverments- such as Battersea MP John Burns-and acted to relax rules on protest in the Square.
Neil Davidson spoke about riots around the 1706 Scottish Union negotiations and noted that the political character of the rioting meant parallels fitted better with Greece 2012 than the UK in 2011. He argued that rioters who were opposed to Union achieved economic concessions but were ultimately concerned politically about where a successful attempt to block the 1707 Treaty would lead.
John Newsinger shifted the focus to Chicago and to the Memorial Day Massacre police riot on May 30 1937 in which ten people involved in the ‘Little Steel Strike’ demanding the right to picket were shot and killed by police. Discussion focused on the role of official violence in preventing radical and trade union organisation bringing an understanding that authority could riot as well as those opposed to it
LSHG Convenor Dr Keith Flett, said this conference of research historians represented as it should work in progress. It reflects the fact that riots whether from below or above are not just something for the history books. The detail of why people riot, what authority does and what the impact is, are very much ones for the present day.
Friday, 24 February 2012
Before racism
Black and Asian British history seminar
Tuesday, March 13 2012 (room S349 Senate House 3rd floor)6 to 7.30 pm,
Tessa Hosking, 'Medieval Perceptions'
The 12th and 13th centuries were imbued with religious prejudice. Yet Europeans who were travelling to Africa or Asia then betrayed little or no sense of racial prejudice in their writings. What can we learn from this?
Organised by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, in conjunction with the Black & Asian Studies Association at Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1
Everyone is welcome. You do not have to pre-book/register. (Contact: Marika.Sherwood@sas.ac.uk)
Tuesday, March 13 2012 (room S349 Senate House 3rd floor)6 to 7.30 pm,
Tessa Hosking, 'Medieval Perceptions'
The 12th and 13th centuries were imbued with religious prejudice. Yet Europeans who were travelling to Africa or Asia then betrayed little or no sense of racial prejudice in their writings. What can we learn from this?
Organised by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, in conjunction with the Black & Asian Studies Association at Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1
Everyone is welcome. You do not have to pre-book/register. (Contact: Marika.Sherwood@sas.ac.uk)
Thursday, 23 February 2012
Aspects of Popular Protest seminars
Forthcoming Socialist History Society Meetings
In a series on aspects of popular protest
Duncan Bowie (Chartist magazine) on
'From Radicalism to Socialism: Working Class Politics in London 1860-1900'
7pm, Tuesday 13 March
Paul Burnham on
'The Squatters' Movement of 1946'
7pm, Thursday 5 April
David Goodway on
'The Real History of Chartism'
7pm Thursday 19 April
Venue for all:
Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2
Admission free
In a series on aspects of popular protest
Duncan Bowie (Chartist magazine) on
'From Radicalism to Socialism: Working Class Politics in London 1860-1900'
7pm, Tuesday 13 March
Paul Burnham on
'The Squatters' Movement of 1946'
7pm, Thursday 5 April
David Goodway on
'The Real History of Chartism'
7pm Thursday 19 April
Venue for all:
Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2
Admission free
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Unofficial Histories provisional conference programme
The first ‘Unofficial Histories’ conference will be held on Saturday 19th May 2012 at Bishopsgate Institute in London. The provisional programme is now on-line. It is FREE to attend the conference and everybody is welcome.
Programme here
Programme here
Sunday, 19 February 2012
Reminder of next LSHG seminar
On Monday 20th February at 5.30pm Room G34, Ground Floor South Block Institute of Historical Research, Manus McGrogan will be speaking on the left press in France after May 1968. It should be interesting paper in the context of an election year in France and much else...
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
Riots and the Law
As well as the LSHG conference on 25 February on 'A History of Riots', the Socialist History Society have the following meeting:
Wednesday 22 February (7pm)
Jerry White speaks on
'Aspects of Popular Protest - Riots and the Law in 18th Century London'.
Venue: Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2. Admission free.
About The Speaker: Jerry White is a leading social historian of London, a former student of Raphael Samuel and has long been associated with the History Workshop movement. His interests are in the history of working class Londoners which he has explored through oral history among other sources. His main publications include Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 (winner of Jewish Chronicle non-fiction book prize, 1980; republished with new introduction by Pimlico, 2003), The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986 (republished as Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars, with new introduction by Pimlico, 2003), London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People, Viking, 2001 (winner of the Wolfson History Prize, 2001, reprinted with new introduction, Vintage, 2008) and London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’, Jonathan Cape, 2007 (paperback edn. Vintage, 2008)
Wednesday 22 February (7pm)
Jerry White speaks on
'Aspects of Popular Protest - Riots and the Law in 18th Century London'.
Venue: Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2. Admission free.
About The Speaker: Jerry White is a leading social historian of London, a former student of Raphael Samuel and has long been associated with the History Workshop movement. His interests are in the history of working class Londoners which he has explored through oral history among other sources. His main publications include Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 (winner of Jewish Chronicle non-fiction book prize, 1980; republished with new introduction by Pimlico, 2003), The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986 (republished as Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars, with new introduction by Pimlico, 2003), London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People, Viking, 2001 (winner of the Wolfson History Prize, 2001, reprinted with new introduction, Vintage, 2008) and London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’, Jonathan Cape, 2007 (paperback edn. Vintage, 2008)
Saturday, 11 February 2012
Beatrice Webb on the web
100 years on…Beatrice Webb launches LSE’s digital library
One century on and Beatrice Webb, one of the founders of LSE and its library, would be proud to know that her diaries are launching LSE’s Digital Library.
A savage attack on bankers, reflections on a demoralised Labour party, preparations for the monarch’s diamond jubilee and a celebration of the joys of retail therapy. They might sound like a portrait of the contemporary world but in fact are some of the highlights from the diaries of social reformer Beatrice Webb – today published digitally and in full for the first time.
Beatrice Webb, co-founder of both the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Fabian movement, left a fascinating 70-year account of social upheaval and history in the diaries which have now been made freely available online to launch LSE’s digital library.
They record not just her personal struggles but her place in the front-line of public life from the late 19th century to her death in 1943.
The financial crisis of the early 30s, for example, drives her to an attack on financiers and politicians which sounds strangely familiar to a modern audience. Writing in September 1931 after the formation of a national government forced by the great depression, Beatrice thunders:
“We know now the depth of the delusion that the financial world have, either the knowledge or goodwill to guard the safety of the country over whose pecuniary interests they preside. They first make an appalling mess of their own business – involving their country in loss of business and prestige – and then by the most bare-faced dissimulation and political intrigue they throw out one Cabinet and put in their own nominees in order to recover the cost of their miscalculation by hook or crook from the community as a whole.”
She also recorded the effects of the crisis on the Labour party whose conference that year she found:
“Dull, drab, disillusioned but not disunited”
The Webbs founded LSE in 1895 and Beatrice was a busy researcher all her life, publishing studies on poverty, housing, wages, equality and co-operatives among other subjects.
The diary is now available online for the first time. Two versions of the diary have been digitised - the actual manuscript as well as a transcribed version that is cross-referenced with the date fields indexed from the manuscript version. Both versions can now be viewed side-by-side for comparison. The diaries are fully-searchable and contain a wealth of information not just on Beatrice's personal and working life, but on the social history of Britain and the world, spanning 70 years of social upheaval.
The diaries were chosen as the launch collection for the new LSE Digital Library. LSE is one of the first academic libraries to provide a digital library, a service which is becoming more and more necessary due to the requirement to collect, preserve and provide access to digital material. This is compounded by the popularity of social media today and its importance as a historical record, particularly to an institution like LSE.
A range of collections will be added to LSE Digital Library in the future. There is plenty of material held in LSE’s archives such as Fabian Society pamphlets, Charles Booth’s Poverty Map and 19th Century photographs. However it opens the doors for a much wider range of material such as LSE theses, blogs, working papers and podcasts from LSE’s lively public events programme. Library staff are also considering statistics, posters, microfiche, audio visual content, historical broadcasts, exam papers, websites and material relating to LSE history and staff.
LSE Library's collections are at the heart of the life and research of the School and of internationally recognised importance to the social sciences. They have been growing in breadth and stature for over 100 years and include many rare and unique materials. Collecting and preserving digital material is central to the continued distinction of these collections and a part of LSE Library’s role as a research library for the next 100 years.
"Webbs on the Web" project was made possible with funding from the Webb Memorial Trust, to provide online access to the works of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. LSE Digital Library provides a single access point through which users can search and browse this material, with the intention that additional material, such as manuscripts, correspondence and other major collections will be added in the future.
One century on and Beatrice Webb, one of the founders of LSE and its library, would be proud to know that her diaries are launching LSE’s Digital Library.
A savage attack on bankers, reflections on a demoralised Labour party, preparations for the monarch’s diamond jubilee and a celebration of the joys of retail therapy. They might sound like a portrait of the contemporary world but in fact are some of the highlights from the diaries of social reformer Beatrice Webb – today published digitally and in full for the first time.
Beatrice Webb, co-founder of both the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Fabian movement, left a fascinating 70-year account of social upheaval and history in the diaries which have now been made freely available online to launch LSE’s digital library.
They record not just her personal struggles but her place in the front-line of public life from the late 19th century to her death in 1943.
The financial crisis of the early 30s, for example, drives her to an attack on financiers and politicians which sounds strangely familiar to a modern audience. Writing in September 1931 after the formation of a national government forced by the great depression, Beatrice thunders:
“We know now the depth of the delusion that the financial world have, either the knowledge or goodwill to guard the safety of the country over whose pecuniary interests they preside. They first make an appalling mess of their own business – involving their country in loss of business and prestige – and then by the most bare-faced dissimulation and political intrigue they throw out one Cabinet and put in their own nominees in order to recover the cost of their miscalculation by hook or crook from the community as a whole.”
She also recorded the effects of the crisis on the Labour party whose conference that year she found:
“Dull, drab, disillusioned but not disunited”
The Webbs founded LSE in 1895 and Beatrice was a busy researcher all her life, publishing studies on poverty, housing, wages, equality and co-operatives among other subjects.
The diary is now available online for the first time. Two versions of the diary have been digitised - the actual manuscript as well as a transcribed version that is cross-referenced with the date fields indexed from the manuscript version. Both versions can now be viewed side-by-side for comparison. The diaries are fully-searchable and contain a wealth of information not just on Beatrice's personal and working life, but on the social history of Britain and the world, spanning 70 years of social upheaval.
The diaries were chosen as the launch collection for the new LSE Digital Library. LSE is one of the first academic libraries to provide a digital library, a service which is becoming more and more necessary due to the requirement to collect, preserve and provide access to digital material. This is compounded by the popularity of social media today and its importance as a historical record, particularly to an institution like LSE.
A range of collections will be added to LSE Digital Library in the future. There is plenty of material held in LSE’s archives such as Fabian Society pamphlets, Charles Booth’s Poverty Map and 19th Century photographs. However it opens the doors for a much wider range of material such as LSE theses, blogs, working papers and podcasts from LSE’s lively public events programme. Library staff are also considering statistics, posters, microfiche, audio visual content, historical broadcasts, exam papers, websites and material relating to LSE history and staff.
LSE Library's collections are at the heart of the life and research of the School and of internationally recognised importance to the social sciences. They have been growing in breadth and stature for over 100 years and include many rare and unique materials. Collecting and preserving digital material is central to the continued distinction of these collections and a part of LSE Library’s role as a research library for the next 100 years.
"Webbs on the Web" project was made possible with funding from the Webb Memorial Trust, to provide online access to the works of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. LSE Digital Library provides a single access point through which users can search and browse this material, with the intention that additional material, such as manuscripts, correspondence and other major collections will be added in the future.
Friday, 10 February 2012
Emancipation, Slave Ownership and the Remaking of the British Imperial World
Dear Colleagues
The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London cordially invite you to the next Neale Lecture and Colloquium in British History, entitled "Emancipation, Slave Ownership and the Remaking of the British Imperial World." The colloquium will take place at UCL from March 29th - 31st 2012, and will be opened by a public lecture from Professor Robin Blackburn on "Slavery and Finance in Britain's Empire of Free Trade." This lecture will take place at 5:30pm in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Main Building, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Over the next two days, the colloquium will debate current work, including that of the LBS project, on the centrality of slavery and slave ownership to the remaking of the British imperial world after abolition in 1833, and consider the implications of these legacies for history writing.
Speakers and respondents include Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, Keith McClelland, Zoe Laidlaw, Richard Huzzey, Miles Taylor, Pat Hudson, Chris Evans, Julian Hoppit, Heather Cateau, Anita Rupprecht, Clare Anderson, Alison Light, Andrea Stuart, Cora Kaplan, Sir Hilary Beckles, Vijaya Teelock, Francoise Verges and Andrea Levy. A programme and registration form are available on our website. We have a reduced rate for postgraduates - please see the registration form for details. We very much hope you are able to attend. Please get in touch if you require any further information.
Yours sincerely
Prof Catherine Hall
Keith McClelland
Dr Nick Draper
The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London cordially invite you to the next Neale Lecture and Colloquium in British History, entitled "Emancipation, Slave Ownership and the Remaking of the British Imperial World." The colloquium will take place at UCL from March 29th - 31st 2012, and will be opened by a public lecture from Professor Robin Blackburn on "Slavery and Finance in Britain's Empire of Free Trade." This lecture will take place at 5:30pm in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Main Building, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Over the next two days, the colloquium will debate current work, including that of the LBS project, on the centrality of slavery and slave ownership to the remaking of the British imperial world after abolition in 1833, and consider the implications of these legacies for history writing.
Speakers and respondents include Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, Keith McClelland, Zoe Laidlaw, Richard Huzzey, Miles Taylor, Pat Hudson, Chris Evans, Julian Hoppit, Heather Cateau, Anita Rupprecht, Clare Anderson, Alison Light, Andrea Stuart, Cora Kaplan, Sir Hilary Beckles, Vijaya Teelock, Francoise Verges and Andrea Levy. A programme and registration form are available on our website. We have a reduced rate for postgraduates - please see the registration form for details. We very much hope you are able to attend. Please get in touch if you require any further information.
Yours sincerely
Prof Catherine Hall
Keith McClelland
Dr Nick Draper
Thursday, 9 February 2012
The World Turned Upside Down - 40 years on
One-day Conference at the University of Sheffield on 14 April 2012
Christopher Hill’s classic work, The World Turned Upside Down, was published in 1972. The book, though much criticised, remains one of the most popular books on the history of the English Revolution, offering an enduringly attractive and accessible introduction to the period. In order to mark the 40th anniversary of its publication this conference will bring together experts on popular politics, radical religion, political ideas and the literature of the 1640s, to offer critical appreciations of the book and its influence.
Speakers (and provisional titles):
Thomas Corns, ‘Hill on Milton, Bunyan and Winstanley’
Rachel Foxley, ‘Ideas and individuals in Hill’s revolution’
Ann Hughes, ‘Heterodox religion and radical traditions’
Nicolas McDowell, ‘Decorum Personae: “The World Turned Upside Down” and the Praise of Folly’
John Morrill, ‘Christopher Hill and the epihenomena of revolution’
John Walter, The Radical and the Popular: Popular politics in The World Turned Upside Down
REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS NOW OPEN.
FEE: £10
Christopher Hill’s classic work, The World Turned Upside Down, was published in 1972. The book, though much criticised, remains one of the most popular books on the history of the English Revolution, offering an enduringly attractive and accessible introduction to the period. In order to mark the 40th anniversary of its publication this conference will bring together experts on popular politics, radical religion, political ideas and the literature of the 1640s, to offer critical appreciations of the book and its influence.
Speakers (and provisional titles):
Thomas Corns, ‘Hill on Milton, Bunyan and Winstanley’
Rachel Foxley, ‘Ideas and individuals in Hill’s revolution’
Ann Hughes, ‘Heterodox religion and radical traditions’
Nicolas McDowell, ‘Decorum Personae: “The World Turned Upside Down” and the Praise of Folly’
John Morrill, ‘Christopher Hill and the epihenomena of revolution’
John Walter, The Radical and the Popular: Popular politics in The World Turned Upside Down
REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS NOW OPEN.
FEE: £10
Remembering when workers shut Saltley Gate
'In 1972 I was an engineer and union shop steward at Woodhead Manufacturing in Yorkshire. As a young man and a fervent reader of Karl Marx, even at that age, I believed that the workers had the power to change society. At Saltley Gate I saw proof of it. I saw workers’ power first hand.'
Pete Shaw interviewed by Will Howlett in this weeks Socialist Worker - for more on the mass picket that shut down Saltley Gate coking depot during the 1972 miners’ strike - forty years ago this month - see here and here
There is also a rally in Birmingham this Friday on the anniversary itself with Arthur Scargill and also miners and engineers who were involved in the Battle of Saltley Gate. Also speakers from current struggles and Banner Theatre will perform their song ‘close the gates’.
Friday 10th February, 11am, Gate Street, Saltley Gate roundabout
This Saturday (11 February) there is also a rally in Barnsley:
'Close the Gates—40 years since the 1972 miners’ strike'
With Ralph Darlington and ex‑miners
Sat 11 Feb, 1pm Cooper Art Gallery, Church St, S70 3AH
Pete Shaw interviewed by Will Howlett in this weeks Socialist Worker - for more on the mass picket that shut down Saltley Gate coking depot during the 1972 miners’ strike - forty years ago this month - see here and here
There is also a rally in Birmingham this Friday on the anniversary itself with Arthur Scargill and also miners and engineers who were involved in the Battle of Saltley Gate. Also speakers from current struggles and Banner Theatre will perform their song ‘close the gates’.
Friday 10th February, 11am, Gate Street, Saltley Gate roundabout
This Saturday (11 February) there is also a rally in Barnsley:
'Close the Gates—40 years since the 1972 miners’ strike'
With Ralph Darlington and ex‑miners
Sat 11 Feb, 1pm Cooper Art Gallery, Church St, S70 3AH
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
HWO Call for Papers
A message from our friends at History Workshop Online:
The History Workshop Online is seeking new contributions to the website: www.historyworkshop.org.uk. We are seeking new original articles, notices, comments and reviews of around 1000 words, as well as substantial multi-media essays which draw on the web’s ability to include images, audio and video to accompany text.
From its inception, History Workshop has been a place where those engaged with the past – historians, enthusiasts, activists – could share, inform and argue. Our perspectives are loosely leftwing but not sectarian and we welcome open debate. The internet is ideally suited to this purpose. History Workshop Online is a collaborative project.
We are always happy to discuss proposed articles or postings: please get in touch with your ideas.
To contact us, please email lorna@historyworkshop.org.uk
Please think about how you can contribute to HWO: history is too important just to be left to the professional historians!"
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Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Merilyn Moos on researching the KPD, 1929-37
From the personal to the political. Researching the KPD 1929-37
by Merilyn Moos
Paper given at the Institute of Historical Research, London, as part of the LSHG seminar series on 6 February 2012
I did not set out to research the KPD and I will first explain how that came about. The main body of this paper will then focus on interviews I had last November with 3 centenarians in Berlin who had been in the KPD in the 1930s and my reflections on what they said, and finally I will touch briefly on the period after my father had arrived in the UK and my personal conclusions. I am very aware that I am not talking as a historian but as somebody who started researching their father, and then stumbled deeper and deeper into the KPD mire. Inevitably the results of my research did not follow in any logical or historical order so I've done some thematic tidying up in this paper to make more sense of it all.
I had wanted to find out more about my father, Siegi who had arrived in this country in 1934 as a political refugee from Nazi Germany. My parents, like many refugees - especially those who had fled Germany or other parts of Nazi-dominated Europe – did not want to talk about their pasts. All my father had told me was that he had been deeply involved in workers theatre and an active anti-Nazi in Berlin, and therefore had to flee on the night of the Reichstag fire, Feb 28 1933.
About ten years ago. various intriguing bits of information had fallen into my lap. Ted Crawfords- Comintern/India link which suggested that my father acted as some sort of link between the Russian oil co and India + Barry McCloughlin's researches into my mother's dalliance with an Irish spy for the Russians in the mid 1930's.
I started with what I knew about my father - that he had been involved in agit-prop. In fact, some distant relatives, at his request, while he was still alive had brought him a book from E Germany- a place he refused to go to- on German workers theatre in the 1930s. I had thought it had bitten the dust but when my mother died and I got access to their books, there it was with quite a bit about Siegi in it.
Then I found a book by Weber who is a leading authority on the German revolutionary left pre 1933 and also specialises in agit-prop theatre in 1920s and 30s in Germany. Here there were a multiplicity of articles by Siegi written for the Arbeiterbuhne und Film, the rank and file journal for workers in theatre and cinema, which, I then realised, Siegi had written for between approx 31-32 and, I came to suspect, edited during its brief life under KPD control. It had been dominated by the SD till about 28/29 when the Communist Berlin faction had taken it over, just in time for Siegi's arrival from Munich to Berlin.
Siegi’s political activity in Berlin had taken place during what is known in Communist International historiography as the ‘Third Period’. To summarise: from 1928/9 to 1934, the CI’s – and the KPD's -analysis was that capitalism was approaching a terminal crisis, with an increasing possibility for revolutionary struggle. Consequently, capitalism would increasingly turn to ‘non-orthodox’ politics which could include fascism, various forms of ‘emergency rule’ and the attempt to -further- co-opt social democracy. Social democracy was thus even more of a barrier to the revolutionary solution than it had always been since 1919 and was indeed frequently presented as being as counter-revolutionary as fascism. Thus the Soc Dem were labelled as social fascists (a position Trotsky and others condemned) though the meaning of this kept shifting. The professed keystone of the 3rd period position-to build a united Front 'from below'- excluded 'Social fascist' SD leaders, and in effect therefore much of the SD membership. So to understand Siegi’s politics and activity I found myself exploring what this policy meant on the ground.
What was distinctive about Siegi's writing- and why his articles are noteworthy- was that he was trying to apply the 3rd period line to the role of agit-prop. He opposed both the SD appeal to populism, which he criticised as being too un-political but also the hard line presented by some in the Party of caricaturing the class enemy with cigar and belly rather than using the stage to highlight the working class audiences lived daily struggles, at work and play. Interestingly, his line drew over at least one of the leading Social Democrats but as with most of the evidence I found for this period, it looks as if he did not draw over many from the SD fold.
By the by, I still have not found out which agit-prop group my father belonged to, though I now my mother's group and as she had told me she met Siegi when he was directing a group in which she was acting, maybe they both belonged to Truppe 31.
At about the same time, I idly put my fathers name into Google in preparation for a commemoration gathering for both my parents and there, to my astonishment, discovered that that year, 2009, there was a concert taking place at the Edinburgh Festival of a piece by the modernist composer Wolpe, who also had come from Berlin, with words by my father. This led me into lengthy and useful contact with various Wolpe specialists in Germany and the US. About a month ago, I received a published script of Wolpe's score for Alles am der Roten Start, originally performed in 1932 at the International Sports Palace -that is before the police broke it up, with words by my father, never since published, with an extensive and illuminating commentary on Siegi.
I also slowly started to find out about Siegi's activities in the Red Front and also the Proletarian Freethinkers but I am going to discuss these activities later on in this paper, when talking about the Berlin 3.
But first I want to mention an additional source of information from the same time, though this is a personal note. My mother died four years ago and I finally had access to all the documents my parents had kept hidden about their home, from the world and from me. What I found there was heartbreaking and does not really fall within this paper, but I did finally work out who the different people were who had brought up my father and that the person whom I think he thought of as playing the main father role, Hermann, had been a rich manufacturer of liqueur, and had sent Siegi, despite his being a wayward revolutionary, regular small sums of money, which always helps when one is an unemployed refugee. I also discovered that Hermann was taken to Theriesenstadt because he was a Jew where he died a terrible death.
I want to move on now to the major theme of this paper which is my research into members of the KPD. I had by now started to look for people who either might have know or at least known of my father, but I had really left it too late. I concentrated instead on trying to understand the lived experience of being in the KPD in Germany between about 1929-33 and then in the UK from 1934-37, which is roughly when my father leaves the KPD. I suggest this is important firstly because, for reasons I explore in a moment, very little has been done on the lived experience of KPDers as opposed to the KPD 'line', and secondly because the KPD official line, which has of course been well studied, was full of zigzags and nuances. which it was difficult, if not impossible, to apply consistently. Therefore looking at how KPDers worked in practise is important.
I was very lucky to find and be allowed to interview 3 centenarians who had been in the KPD in the early 30s, who had remained loyal KPD/SED members through the Nazi period and then the entire existence of the DDR (East Germany) and who are now living in Berlin, and I will talk about them in a moment.
First I want to situate the attitude (or lack of it) towards the Third Period, not only of these interviewees and other people from KPD backgrounds. I had learnt at my parents knee and then from other historical sources that the victory of Nazism was in part a result of the failure of the left to work together on an anti-Nazi platform: the ‘social fascist’ line of the KPD combined with the craven collaboration of the SDs (the balance between these being an area of dispute or relative emphasis). This widely shared view, I was to discover, was not central to the understanding of many of those with a KPD background.
This raises two questions which have emerged from my researches on my father. It was unusual, at an official level, both within the KPD and the Comintern, to prioritise, as strongly as most commentators think they should have, the fight against Nazism over the fight against the SPD almost up till 1933. This position undermined the KPD's leadership’s ability to understand the distinctive threat posed by the Nazis or to develop a coherent strategy against them. Indeed, the failure to distinguish the Nazis from other right wing forces helps to explain the KPD's initial inability to understand the significance of the January 1933 elections. Their analysis, infamously stated by Remmele, one of the KPD leaders, that after the fascists would come the Communist revolution, further debilitated any fight back. I emphasise this point here because, unlike what is now often assumed and Hobsbaum, representing a modern Communist view, now professes, many people in or associated with the KPD neither were strongly committed to active anti- Nazi struggle- as opposed to holding an anti-Nazi position, nor understood the meaning of the January elections or of Hitler becoming Chancellor. My father did so, and I am curious why.
I also want to raise the question of why, though this is not my field of research, there has been so little attention or research into the area of German Communist anti-Naziism in the 1930’s or indeed into these people, particularly in E Germany. After all, the E Germans, unlike the W Germans, celebrated their anti-Nazi heroes. But which heroes? I suggest that it was those who in one way or another, always with unbelievable bravery, fought and resisted fascism during the war who have received the accolades, rather than the far less visible -though always courageous-underground fighters of the period leading up to and soon after Hitler's ascendancy who -after all- failed to stop the Nazis. Moreover, though this is surmise, the 3rd period line was anything but consistent and the E German government may not have welcomed too extreme an expression of anti SD views, when, after 1945, they were in a supposed coalition with at least some SDs. Who became celebrated, who not and why is not my area of interest but would be worth somebody examining
Anyway, back to my interviews of the people I refer to as the 3 Berliners. I will first introduce who they were, then highlight the main issues they raised which I will link where applicable to my father.
As luck would have it, the 3 people represented a cross section of society:in the early 1930s, Elfreide had been a writer, Hans a white-collar/skilled worker (later on, he became a high up police officer in E Germany) and Rudi had been semi - unemployed. All had been active members of the KPD, though in different areas. My principal concern was with the 3 areas of my father's political activism- agit-prop, the Red and the prol FT, but I was also interested in their total political experiences in the early 1930s. My focus was not on their lives in a fuller sense or in what had become of them after 1945. Nor would they-or I- have had the energy for much longer interviews.
Another limitation was that I speak little German, though I found I could understand far more the German of these people who were about the same age as my parents as I can my own generation! I was and am therefore dependant on the good will of others and in this case, I have to thank Irene Fick for translating for me so generously. But this cannot be the same as being able to follow up for oneself the issues of interest in the interview.
Another problem which was in itself fascinating was how difficult it was to persuade the 3 to separate out their experiences before and after January/February 1933. All of them talked about the power of the SA, and as I was asking consistently about the period between 29 and 33, their replies will generally have related to this period, but sometimes I suspect were drawn from post Feb 33. I had grown up in a family where the Reichstag fire of February 28 33 had marked the beginning of exile. It was the night my father had gone underground, finally reappearing in Paris, as I only discovered recently, via Saarland, some eight months later. This assumption of the Reichstag fire marking a fundamental break is reinforced by most academic literature on this period which presents the January/February events as a division, between supposedly democratic Weimar Germany and the start of Nazism. But this was not how the 3 Berliner appear to have expeeinced it.
What quickly became apparent was how active the SA were before 1933. They were active amongst the unemployed (Rudi) but also amongst white-collar workers (Hans). In addition, the employers, Hans reported, for example in metal, tobacco and coal would give SA men jobs, pay for their uniforms and different sorts of hand outs. Elfrieda talked of the nightly battles between the SA and the Red Front in Prenzlauerberg in Berlin. For Rudi, who lived in a hut on his allotment in Wedding, the red centre of Berlin, every day involved a battle with the SA and he described their lives as if it were a military operation. They had people on bikes and 'courting couples' as look outs. He wrote, printed and then distributed the illegal leaflets by putting the leaflets under the baby in the pram which his wife pushed. You could never trust anybody, nobody at all. Indeed, the most vivid example of not distinguishing between 1930 and 1933 but rather seeing it as a continuum, where the changes were quantitative, not qualitative, was when Rudi became really irritated that Irene, at my insistence, was asking him about whether his activities had taken place before or after Jan/Feb 1933. But then Rudi had been arrested before 1933 during an 'illegal' demonstration, and had experienced and witnessed many beatings up, prior to 33, by the -SD controlled- police as well as the SA. Rudi did not remember the Reichstag fire, not even roughly the year it took place, but did say that in 1933, he went to hide with his parents- in - law for a few weeks till everything calmed down. So he did not conceptually distinguish the two periods, but did remember the need to hide.
But what was really new to me was the importance of the Red Front, how it was part of the daily lived experience of these young KPDers. For anybody who doesn’t know about it, this was an anti-fascist organisation set up by the KPD which had been made illegal in 1929. I'd known about it from Rosenthal who is one of the few to write about it. My mother had also told me, shortly before she died, in disparaging tones that my father had belonged and had owned a gun and had gone to the woods to practice. He was a lousy shot. 'A lot of good they did' was her implication. It was never safe to believe my mother but then in papers sourced from the Bundewarchiv which I’m yet to talk about, I received confirmation from Gestapo papers that my father had indeed been a member of the Red Front.
Yet the Red Front is not an organisation that most historians spend time on. But talking to these 3 old comrades, I suddenly realised it was not just one of many of the KPD front organisational, but was the key organisation for protecting not just the comrades, but local left meetings, streets and taverns. Of course, as Rudi stated, there were differences according to region and place, but certainly in Berlin and Leipsig, Hans' home at the time, the battles between the SA and Red Front were daily. The SA were organised into groups (and as many of their members were unemployed youth, they had the time to roam) and would attempt to attack most left meetings and demonstrations and indeed any informal group of lefties who made the mistake of walking the streets as a group. That all 3, from their different class fractions, all attested to this, increases its reliability as a source.
What also emerged, which Rosenthal does write about, was that the Red Front did recruit from a wide range of political backgrounds. What mattered was where one lived, so young people who sided with the SD would join the Red Front if they lived in an area where it was organized and the SA were a threat, and to that degree the 3rd period line of working with rank and file SDs was working in practice. Rudi who was the leader of his small group of 7 or 8 young red fronters, also attested how some members were out for trouble and he had to calm them down. Their aim was to be defensive he said, until attacked. Rudi led his group of 8 and walked a tightrope, or so it seemed to me, between cooling down his hotheads and defending his comrades by whatever means necessary. My impression from the interview was that this had little to do with the line of the KPD and far more to do with the reality of the situation and expediency.
The cadres of the Red Front were generally KPD, but the RFB/Red Front can clearly not be reduced to the KPD, although conventionally it has been presented as no more than the its military adjunct. I suspect that the KPD saw it as far too unruly and too apt to use violence when their line from above was intermittently to eschew violence. Indeed, so great was their mistrust of the Red Front, that the KPD set up their own military organisation to defend their leadership, as I will discuss later.
The Red Front has also a personal interest for me. My father I guess was the local KPD cadre in his local Red Front group. He too must have had to walk a tightrope between the squaddy demands of his young hot heads, the need to protect his neighbourhood and his comrades, and the vacillating line of his KPD leaders. How well, I do wonder did my father succeed from his half bourgeois background and with his Bavarian accent?
But there are wider questions which I only appreciated after talking with the 3 Berliners. Given the essentially random nature of the sample, how come the KPD leadership was so out of touch with their members' every day experiences on the street? The 3 interviewees had experienced the growth of the SA as a daily experience. One does not have to be Trotsky to wonder about the bureaucratisation of the KPD.
Secondly, how far did these comrades experiences really change with Jan/Feb 33? The KPD CC itself did not at first recognise that the January election and Hitler's becoming Chancellor marked a fundamental shift. So is it so surprising if some of the members did not either? Yet, according to both Palmier and Merson, the arrests on the night following the Reichstag fire were substantial and therefore make Rudi's unawareness of the event more significant. 1500 Communists were arrested in Berlin alone and about 10,000 in Germany as a whole. A high proportion of middle ranking functionaries and regional full time officers were arrested within days. Palmier suggests that the fire took the KPD leadership by surprise.and decimated the hierarchy of the KPD cadres in a single night... 'Those functionaries who escaped often had no further precise orders.'
Certainly Guerin touring Germany for a second time in Spring 33 soon after an earlier visit prior to the Nazi take over, put a lot of emphasis on the becalmed quality of what had previously been oppositional areas and attitudes. But then as Ian Birchall wisely suggested to me, Guerin was writing to convince French comrades of the real threat of Nazism. What does appear to be the case though is that the KPD line that Nazis could not really be distinguished from the SPD as upholders of capitalism and that it was the SPD, not the Nazis who were the more pressing threat, left the membership lacking in the intellectual and political tools to appreciate the seismic qualitative change which the January and February events represented.
Another question to which Ive found no answer so far is how come the KPD failed to build more of an underground network by 1933, given the lengthy experience of operating illegally by the Red Front, whose leadership were primarily KPD. None of the 3 Berliners ever considered leaving Germany, even though all were arrested at different points, so they would not have known about that aspect of the underground but my impression was that Rudi, with his amazing illegal printer and leaflets, was seizing an opportunity, rather than being a part of some organised underground resistance.
Another issue which surprised me and which deserves more research but which I don't have time to go into here is how far there were attempts by the KPD to draw members of the SA over to them. Both Elfriede and Rudi talked about this. Elfreida writers group had a member, Felix, who was a member of the SA, indeed arrived in his uniform and ultimately betrayed them. SA spokespersons were invited to speak at KPD meetings. The joint demonstration at the Berlin transport strike was not an aberration, though apparently not endorsed by KPD HQ. Rudi provided an eloquent explanation for this policy: the people who joined the SA were workers too, he said. They belonged to the same families, had gone to the same schools, lived in the same streets and were often good friends. This semi-official attempt to draw over workers may have helped legitimate what happened next. Rudi talked of counter-recruitment but noted that most of the traffic was one way, especially after 1933 (his dating) because some Communists were so harassed by the SA and so afraid, that they joined the SA. Rudi knew that, as the going got ever tougher, especially after 1933, that it was KPD members who joined the SA, not the other way round, though he was not clear about how far this was expediency, how far ideological.
Finally, a quick reference to a few of the other key issues which came up in these interviews. Hans was the only person employed and unionised in this period. He did not belong to the Red Union but the SD union. The union was his main area of activity. I unfortunately couldn’t get clear why he did not belong to the Red Union As this was Saxony, with it own very specific trajectory after 1921, where the SDP had remained well rooted and unusually effective anti- Nazi organisers, it may not be representative of other areas. But whatever the reason was, this is an example of the limitation of the KPD policy of separate Red Unions.
In fact, the absence of reference in the interviews to the Social Democrats except in essentially perjorative terms was itself significant and gives weight to the evidence on the absence of cooperation at grass roots level, between the KPD and SPD. LaPorte suggests in his work on Saxony, that the 3rd Period decreased the ideological hold of the KPD leadership and link to the rank and file and it would be really interesting to assess how far there was some sort of contact between KPD and SPD members or fellow travellers. But from the limited-evidence, drawn primarily from Berlin, only those who left the two organisations, for instance from the KPD to the KPD(O) or from the SPD to what became the SAP, in practice cooperated but these were minute organisations, which had little influence on their original parties.
Hans was also the person who was active in the Prol FT, insisting that it was a separate organisation in Leipsig. There isnt time to discuss the FT but they were an essentially humanist organisation which had until 1928 been controlled by the SD, when in one form or another, the KPD either seized control or set up a separate Prol FT faction. Hans changed sports club because the one he had been attending was SD dominated and he was not comfortable there and went over to a Red sports club! Here the 3rd period line held! But it still isn’t clear how far the separate Prol FT was a feature of Leipzig, and that maybe in Berlin, where, my father had told me, he had been the secretary, the Prol FT had taken over the ‘official’ FT rather than forming a breakaway group.
To conclude this section, I firstly want to highlight that at least Rudi appears to have experienced the growth of the Nazis, the SA at street level and while his resistance to them was a consequence of his Communist politics, he seems to have understood far more clearly than most of the KPD leadership the importance of consistently opposing the SA.
Yet at the same time,what emerged from Rudi and Hans in particular was how far their politics was still influenced by 3rd period politics. Hans, although decrying the use of the term 'social fascist' went on to blame the SD for their defeat. Rudi, the person most active on the front line against the SA through the Red Front who had already been subjected to much violence and persecution, still did not recognise that the Nazis gaining power and the Reichstag fire were a turning point. In none of the interviews did I get the impression that these comrades saw their task as to draw those sympathetic to the SD over to them, though Rudi did refer to some SD youth joining the Red Front.
But while the 'social fascist ' line was a historical disaster, the reasons for the KPD rank and file to see the SPD as social fascists were numerous. The 3 Berliners will have been too young to have been directly influenced by events in 1919 when the Freicorps,with SD collusion, shot down the revolutionaries in 1919, and murdered R Luxembourg and Liebnecht. But they were quite old enough for this event to have been keenly remembered by their older comrades. In 1969, my father, who was born only five or so years before these comrades, produced an unpublished paper in honour of the failed 1919 revolution, which he actually remembered, excoriating the betrayals of the Ebert and the S democrats. And again to refer to my parents, my mother told me about 1929, when the streets of Berlin ran with blood after the police had fired on an -illegal- KPD backed May Day demo. Moreover, for Hans and Rudi, their everyday experience of the police under SD control in the early 1930s, breaking up meetings and demos,sometimes brutally, will have confirmed to them the truth of the 'legends' of 1919 and 1929, and made the 'label of social fascist' seem fitting.
So while the 'social fascist' analysis played its part, the January/February events was not experienced by the Berliners as a fundamental turning point. My suspicion is that these voices are not untypical of this layer of KPDers who experienced the 30s and survived to live in E Germany. But we must not let the tragic mistakes of this period cloud our awareness of the bravery of these people. I will end this section with a comment by Rudi: By 1945, none of his old comrades from the early 1930s were still around.
Finally, I want very briefly to consider the period after my father fled Berlin. He arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1933 and left for London in February 1934. I can only surmise why he went West rather than to Prague (or even the USSR), and whether he did so because instructed by the Party or because my mother-and this was her story- had said she would leave Germany with or without him. Nor have I managed to find out what happened in Paris. He reappears in the records in London in late 1934 as the Secretary of the KPD exile group.
Another major source has been the Bundesarchiv in Germany. One of the documents they sent showed that my father had been the man most trusted to run the exile KPD group in London and that set me off in a near fruitless hunt to find out about this group. It is referred to by the man who took over from my father, Kuzinski, but, in his memoirs, he dismissed everything that took place before him in about one sentence as essentially bohemian dilettantism. I have the membership list for 1938 and my father's name is no longer there. It is not possible to analyse why he left the party-or was pushed-without reference to my mother's political and personal trajectory which there isn't time to go into. Indeed, the exile group does not seem to have provided a real basis for organisation, despite some attempts at producing a paper to inform British opinion and, later, to be smuggled into Germany. My impression is that most KPD exiles got involved instead from the late 1930s in the Kulturbund, which could pretend not to be political. It must have been a shock for my politically active father to suddenly discover himself in this political and largely meaningless and faction ridden backwater. My guess is that he never really recovered from the loss of his comrades and his previous Party influenced activism.
What though the interviews with the Berlin 3 did reveal to me was that what I had taken as normal- that people like my father-active anti-Nazis -would flee after the Reichstag fire, was wrong. I had assumed till a few months ago that my father's flight was typical of a particular layer of the left. We all know that the top leadership-except famously Thaelman- did get out immediately after the Fire, so there was some understanding there by the KPD CC of the importance of protecting their leadership. But it now appears to me that most activists either did not see the imperative to flee or were not able to do so. Indeed, if we exclude some famous names who happened to be outside Germany at the time of the Reichstag fire, like Brecht, Weil and indeed Wolpe, most people on the left, including the middle ranking KPD apparatus stayed put and were picked up by the Gestapo or the police in the weeks following the Fire. When I asked Harald Marpe, a well researched historian of this period in the Brandburg area of Berlin, about how far the KPD had anything like a plan for an underground network in the event of a Nazi take over, he said that the CC had set up a network for itself. He later sent me details that the KPD CC ordered in autumn 1930 that a small illegal military organization of the party should be set up, made up of groups of ten, some of them with “handfeuerwaffen”(handguns) to protect them. This may have been based on a Russian model but its remit or effectiveness is unknown. Really we have very little evidence about how far an underground existed, but we do know that the CC was still saying 'After the Nazis, us', which will not have heightened any sense of urgency.
My hunch about my father is that his Bavarian experiences: the Kapp putsch and early rise of the NSDAP- which I suspect had made him more acutely aware than his Berlin comrades of the nature and threat of Nazism throughout, gave him a more sensitive political nose to the way the wind was blowing. Maybe my father's-and mother's paranoia which I experienced so acutely as a child and had ascribed to the consequences of flight was one cause of flight. Maybe the Party did appreciate his value, maybe because of his earlier contacts resulting from the Russian/Indian oil link, and, unlike with most middle ranking comrades, instructed him to get out.
My father disappears from the political scene after 1937. The HO was keen on tracking down refugees who broke their commitment to say out of politics and apt to threaten them with expulsion. But anyway, by then he knew too much about Stalinism. He died a socialist but his attitude to the USSR remained ambiguous. He retained a belief that it could change towards a more socialist direction at the same time as decrying its excesses. As some of you will have heard me say before, my earliest political memory is of my father donning a red tie that I’d never seen before and bringing out a rare bottle of wine. I was invited to sit with my parents as he and my mother toasted the death of Stalin!
by Merilyn Moos
Paper given at the Institute of Historical Research, London, as part of the LSHG seminar series on 6 February 2012
I did not set out to research the KPD and I will first explain how that came about. The main body of this paper will then focus on interviews I had last November with 3 centenarians in Berlin who had been in the KPD in the 1930s and my reflections on what they said, and finally I will touch briefly on the period after my father had arrived in the UK and my personal conclusions. I am very aware that I am not talking as a historian but as somebody who started researching their father, and then stumbled deeper and deeper into the KPD mire. Inevitably the results of my research did not follow in any logical or historical order so I've done some thematic tidying up in this paper to make more sense of it all.
I had wanted to find out more about my father, Siegi who had arrived in this country in 1934 as a political refugee from Nazi Germany. My parents, like many refugees - especially those who had fled Germany or other parts of Nazi-dominated Europe – did not want to talk about their pasts. All my father had told me was that he had been deeply involved in workers theatre and an active anti-Nazi in Berlin, and therefore had to flee on the night of the Reichstag fire, Feb 28 1933.
About ten years ago. various intriguing bits of information had fallen into my lap. Ted Crawfords- Comintern/India link which suggested that my father acted as some sort of link between the Russian oil co and India + Barry McCloughlin's researches into my mother's dalliance with an Irish spy for the Russians in the mid 1930's.
I started with what I knew about my father - that he had been involved in agit-prop. In fact, some distant relatives, at his request, while he was still alive had brought him a book from E Germany- a place he refused to go to- on German workers theatre in the 1930s. I had thought it had bitten the dust but when my mother died and I got access to their books, there it was with quite a bit about Siegi in it.
Then I found a book by Weber who is a leading authority on the German revolutionary left pre 1933 and also specialises in agit-prop theatre in 1920s and 30s in Germany. Here there were a multiplicity of articles by Siegi written for the Arbeiterbuhne und Film, the rank and file journal for workers in theatre and cinema, which, I then realised, Siegi had written for between approx 31-32 and, I came to suspect, edited during its brief life under KPD control. It had been dominated by the SD till about 28/29 when the Communist Berlin faction had taken it over, just in time for Siegi's arrival from Munich to Berlin.
Siegi’s political activity in Berlin had taken place during what is known in Communist International historiography as the ‘Third Period’. To summarise: from 1928/9 to 1934, the CI’s – and the KPD's -analysis was that capitalism was approaching a terminal crisis, with an increasing possibility for revolutionary struggle. Consequently, capitalism would increasingly turn to ‘non-orthodox’ politics which could include fascism, various forms of ‘emergency rule’ and the attempt to -further- co-opt social democracy. Social democracy was thus even more of a barrier to the revolutionary solution than it had always been since 1919 and was indeed frequently presented as being as counter-revolutionary as fascism. Thus the Soc Dem were labelled as social fascists (a position Trotsky and others condemned) though the meaning of this kept shifting. The professed keystone of the 3rd period position-to build a united Front 'from below'- excluded 'Social fascist' SD leaders, and in effect therefore much of the SD membership. So to understand Siegi’s politics and activity I found myself exploring what this policy meant on the ground.
What was distinctive about Siegi's writing- and why his articles are noteworthy- was that he was trying to apply the 3rd period line to the role of agit-prop. He opposed both the SD appeal to populism, which he criticised as being too un-political but also the hard line presented by some in the Party of caricaturing the class enemy with cigar and belly rather than using the stage to highlight the working class audiences lived daily struggles, at work and play. Interestingly, his line drew over at least one of the leading Social Democrats but as with most of the evidence I found for this period, it looks as if he did not draw over many from the SD fold.
By the by, I still have not found out which agit-prop group my father belonged to, though I now my mother's group and as she had told me she met Siegi when he was directing a group in which she was acting, maybe they both belonged to Truppe 31.
At about the same time, I idly put my fathers name into Google in preparation for a commemoration gathering for both my parents and there, to my astonishment, discovered that that year, 2009, there was a concert taking place at the Edinburgh Festival of a piece by the modernist composer Wolpe, who also had come from Berlin, with words by my father. This led me into lengthy and useful contact with various Wolpe specialists in Germany and the US. About a month ago, I received a published script of Wolpe's score for Alles am der Roten Start, originally performed in 1932 at the International Sports Palace -that is before the police broke it up, with words by my father, never since published, with an extensive and illuminating commentary on Siegi.
I also slowly started to find out about Siegi's activities in the Red Front and also the Proletarian Freethinkers but I am going to discuss these activities later on in this paper, when talking about the Berlin 3.
But first I want to mention an additional source of information from the same time, though this is a personal note. My mother died four years ago and I finally had access to all the documents my parents had kept hidden about their home, from the world and from me. What I found there was heartbreaking and does not really fall within this paper, but I did finally work out who the different people were who had brought up my father and that the person whom I think he thought of as playing the main father role, Hermann, had been a rich manufacturer of liqueur, and had sent Siegi, despite his being a wayward revolutionary, regular small sums of money, which always helps when one is an unemployed refugee. I also discovered that Hermann was taken to Theriesenstadt because he was a Jew where he died a terrible death.
I want to move on now to the major theme of this paper which is my research into members of the KPD. I had by now started to look for people who either might have know or at least known of my father, but I had really left it too late. I concentrated instead on trying to understand the lived experience of being in the KPD in Germany between about 1929-33 and then in the UK from 1934-37, which is roughly when my father leaves the KPD. I suggest this is important firstly because, for reasons I explore in a moment, very little has been done on the lived experience of KPDers as opposed to the KPD 'line', and secondly because the KPD official line, which has of course been well studied, was full of zigzags and nuances. which it was difficult, if not impossible, to apply consistently. Therefore looking at how KPDers worked in practise is important.
I was very lucky to find and be allowed to interview 3 centenarians who had been in the KPD in the early 30s, who had remained loyal KPD/SED members through the Nazi period and then the entire existence of the DDR (East Germany) and who are now living in Berlin, and I will talk about them in a moment.
First I want to situate the attitude (or lack of it) towards the Third Period, not only of these interviewees and other people from KPD backgrounds. I had learnt at my parents knee and then from other historical sources that the victory of Nazism was in part a result of the failure of the left to work together on an anti-Nazi platform: the ‘social fascist’ line of the KPD combined with the craven collaboration of the SDs (the balance between these being an area of dispute or relative emphasis). This widely shared view, I was to discover, was not central to the understanding of many of those with a KPD background.
This raises two questions which have emerged from my researches on my father. It was unusual, at an official level, both within the KPD and the Comintern, to prioritise, as strongly as most commentators think they should have, the fight against Nazism over the fight against the SPD almost up till 1933. This position undermined the KPD's leadership’s ability to understand the distinctive threat posed by the Nazis or to develop a coherent strategy against them. Indeed, the failure to distinguish the Nazis from other right wing forces helps to explain the KPD's initial inability to understand the significance of the January 1933 elections. Their analysis, infamously stated by Remmele, one of the KPD leaders, that after the fascists would come the Communist revolution, further debilitated any fight back. I emphasise this point here because, unlike what is now often assumed and Hobsbaum, representing a modern Communist view, now professes, many people in or associated with the KPD neither were strongly committed to active anti- Nazi struggle- as opposed to holding an anti-Nazi position, nor understood the meaning of the January elections or of Hitler becoming Chancellor. My father did so, and I am curious why.
I also want to raise the question of why, though this is not my field of research, there has been so little attention or research into the area of German Communist anti-Naziism in the 1930’s or indeed into these people, particularly in E Germany. After all, the E Germans, unlike the W Germans, celebrated their anti-Nazi heroes. But which heroes? I suggest that it was those who in one way or another, always with unbelievable bravery, fought and resisted fascism during the war who have received the accolades, rather than the far less visible -though always courageous-underground fighters of the period leading up to and soon after Hitler's ascendancy who -after all- failed to stop the Nazis. Moreover, though this is surmise, the 3rd period line was anything but consistent and the E German government may not have welcomed too extreme an expression of anti SD views, when, after 1945, they were in a supposed coalition with at least some SDs. Who became celebrated, who not and why is not my area of interest but would be worth somebody examining
Anyway, back to my interviews of the people I refer to as the 3 Berliners. I will first introduce who they were, then highlight the main issues they raised which I will link where applicable to my father.
As luck would have it, the 3 people represented a cross section of society:in the early 1930s, Elfreide had been a writer, Hans a white-collar/skilled worker (later on, he became a high up police officer in E Germany) and Rudi had been semi - unemployed. All had been active members of the KPD, though in different areas. My principal concern was with the 3 areas of my father's political activism- agit-prop, the Red and the prol FT, but I was also interested in their total political experiences in the early 1930s. My focus was not on their lives in a fuller sense or in what had become of them after 1945. Nor would they-or I- have had the energy for much longer interviews.
Another limitation was that I speak little German, though I found I could understand far more the German of these people who were about the same age as my parents as I can my own generation! I was and am therefore dependant on the good will of others and in this case, I have to thank Irene Fick for translating for me so generously. But this cannot be the same as being able to follow up for oneself the issues of interest in the interview.
Another problem which was in itself fascinating was how difficult it was to persuade the 3 to separate out their experiences before and after January/February 1933. All of them talked about the power of the SA, and as I was asking consistently about the period between 29 and 33, their replies will generally have related to this period, but sometimes I suspect were drawn from post Feb 33. I had grown up in a family where the Reichstag fire of February 28 33 had marked the beginning of exile. It was the night my father had gone underground, finally reappearing in Paris, as I only discovered recently, via Saarland, some eight months later. This assumption of the Reichstag fire marking a fundamental break is reinforced by most academic literature on this period which presents the January/February events as a division, between supposedly democratic Weimar Germany and the start of Nazism. But this was not how the 3 Berliner appear to have expeeinced it.
What quickly became apparent was how active the SA were before 1933. They were active amongst the unemployed (Rudi) but also amongst white-collar workers (Hans). In addition, the employers, Hans reported, for example in metal, tobacco and coal would give SA men jobs, pay for their uniforms and different sorts of hand outs. Elfrieda talked of the nightly battles between the SA and the Red Front in Prenzlauerberg in Berlin. For Rudi, who lived in a hut on his allotment in Wedding, the red centre of Berlin, every day involved a battle with the SA and he described their lives as if it were a military operation. They had people on bikes and 'courting couples' as look outs. He wrote, printed and then distributed the illegal leaflets by putting the leaflets under the baby in the pram which his wife pushed. You could never trust anybody, nobody at all. Indeed, the most vivid example of not distinguishing between 1930 and 1933 but rather seeing it as a continuum, where the changes were quantitative, not qualitative, was when Rudi became really irritated that Irene, at my insistence, was asking him about whether his activities had taken place before or after Jan/Feb 1933. But then Rudi had been arrested before 1933 during an 'illegal' demonstration, and had experienced and witnessed many beatings up, prior to 33, by the -SD controlled- police as well as the SA. Rudi did not remember the Reichstag fire, not even roughly the year it took place, but did say that in 1933, he went to hide with his parents- in - law for a few weeks till everything calmed down. So he did not conceptually distinguish the two periods, but did remember the need to hide.
But what was really new to me was the importance of the Red Front, how it was part of the daily lived experience of these young KPDers. For anybody who doesn’t know about it, this was an anti-fascist organisation set up by the KPD which had been made illegal in 1929. I'd known about it from Rosenthal who is one of the few to write about it. My mother had also told me, shortly before she died, in disparaging tones that my father had belonged and had owned a gun and had gone to the woods to practice. He was a lousy shot. 'A lot of good they did' was her implication. It was never safe to believe my mother but then in papers sourced from the Bundewarchiv which I’m yet to talk about, I received confirmation from Gestapo papers that my father had indeed been a member of the Red Front.
Yet the Red Front is not an organisation that most historians spend time on. But talking to these 3 old comrades, I suddenly realised it was not just one of many of the KPD front organisational, but was the key organisation for protecting not just the comrades, but local left meetings, streets and taverns. Of course, as Rudi stated, there were differences according to region and place, but certainly in Berlin and Leipsig, Hans' home at the time, the battles between the SA and Red Front were daily. The SA were organised into groups (and as many of their members were unemployed youth, they had the time to roam) and would attempt to attack most left meetings and demonstrations and indeed any informal group of lefties who made the mistake of walking the streets as a group. That all 3, from their different class fractions, all attested to this, increases its reliability as a source.
What also emerged, which Rosenthal does write about, was that the Red Front did recruit from a wide range of political backgrounds. What mattered was where one lived, so young people who sided with the SD would join the Red Front if they lived in an area where it was organized and the SA were a threat, and to that degree the 3rd period line of working with rank and file SDs was working in practice. Rudi who was the leader of his small group of 7 or 8 young red fronters, also attested how some members were out for trouble and he had to calm them down. Their aim was to be defensive he said, until attacked. Rudi led his group of 8 and walked a tightrope, or so it seemed to me, between cooling down his hotheads and defending his comrades by whatever means necessary. My impression from the interview was that this had little to do with the line of the KPD and far more to do with the reality of the situation and expediency.
The cadres of the Red Front were generally KPD, but the RFB/Red Front can clearly not be reduced to the KPD, although conventionally it has been presented as no more than the its military adjunct. I suspect that the KPD saw it as far too unruly and too apt to use violence when their line from above was intermittently to eschew violence. Indeed, so great was their mistrust of the Red Front, that the KPD set up their own military organisation to defend their leadership, as I will discuss later.
The Red Front has also a personal interest for me. My father I guess was the local KPD cadre in his local Red Front group. He too must have had to walk a tightrope between the squaddy demands of his young hot heads, the need to protect his neighbourhood and his comrades, and the vacillating line of his KPD leaders. How well, I do wonder did my father succeed from his half bourgeois background and with his Bavarian accent?
But there are wider questions which I only appreciated after talking with the 3 Berliners. Given the essentially random nature of the sample, how come the KPD leadership was so out of touch with their members' every day experiences on the street? The 3 interviewees had experienced the growth of the SA as a daily experience. One does not have to be Trotsky to wonder about the bureaucratisation of the KPD.
Secondly, how far did these comrades experiences really change with Jan/Feb 33? The KPD CC itself did not at first recognise that the January election and Hitler's becoming Chancellor marked a fundamental shift. So is it so surprising if some of the members did not either? Yet, according to both Palmier and Merson, the arrests on the night following the Reichstag fire were substantial and therefore make Rudi's unawareness of the event more significant. 1500 Communists were arrested in Berlin alone and about 10,000 in Germany as a whole. A high proportion of middle ranking functionaries and regional full time officers were arrested within days. Palmier suggests that the fire took the KPD leadership by surprise.and decimated the hierarchy of the KPD cadres in a single night... 'Those functionaries who escaped often had no further precise orders.'
Certainly Guerin touring Germany for a second time in Spring 33 soon after an earlier visit prior to the Nazi take over, put a lot of emphasis on the becalmed quality of what had previously been oppositional areas and attitudes. But then as Ian Birchall wisely suggested to me, Guerin was writing to convince French comrades of the real threat of Nazism. What does appear to be the case though is that the KPD line that Nazis could not really be distinguished from the SPD as upholders of capitalism and that it was the SPD, not the Nazis who were the more pressing threat, left the membership lacking in the intellectual and political tools to appreciate the seismic qualitative change which the January and February events represented.
Another question to which Ive found no answer so far is how come the KPD failed to build more of an underground network by 1933, given the lengthy experience of operating illegally by the Red Front, whose leadership were primarily KPD. None of the 3 Berliners ever considered leaving Germany, even though all were arrested at different points, so they would not have known about that aspect of the underground but my impression was that Rudi, with his amazing illegal printer and leaflets, was seizing an opportunity, rather than being a part of some organised underground resistance.
Another issue which surprised me and which deserves more research but which I don't have time to go into here is how far there were attempts by the KPD to draw members of the SA over to them. Both Elfriede and Rudi talked about this. Elfreida writers group had a member, Felix, who was a member of the SA, indeed arrived in his uniform and ultimately betrayed them. SA spokespersons were invited to speak at KPD meetings. The joint demonstration at the Berlin transport strike was not an aberration, though apparently not endorsed by KPD HQ. Rudi provided an eloquent explanation for this policy: the people who joined the SA were workers too, he said. They belonged to the same families, had gone to the same schools, lived in the same streets and were often good friends. This semi-official attempt to draw over workers may have helped legitimate what happened next. Rudi talked of counter-recruitment but noted that most of the traffic was one way, especially after 1933 (his dating) because some Communists were so harassed by the SA and so afraid, that they joined the SA. Rudi knew that, as the going got ever tougher, especially after 1933, that it was KPD members who joined the SA, not the other way round, though he was not clear about how far this was expediency, how far ideological.
Finally, a quick reference to a few of the other key issues which came up in these interviews. Hans was the only person employed and unionised in this period. He did not belong to the Red Union but the SD union. The union was his main area of activity. I unfortunately couldn’t get clear why he did not belong to the Red Union As this was Saxony, with it own very specific trajectory after 1921, where the SDP had remained well rooted and unusually effective anti- Nazi organisers, it may not be representative of other areas. But whatever the reason was, this is an example of the limitation of the KPD policy of separate Red Unions.
In fact, the absence of reference in the interviews to the Social Democrats except in essentially perjorative terms was itself significant and gives weight to the evidence on the absence of cooperation at grass roots level, between the KPD and SPD. LaPorte suggests in his work on Saxony, that the 3rd Period decreased the ideological hold of the KPD leadership and link to the rank and file and it would be really interesting to assess how far there was some sort of contact between KPD and SPD members or fellow travellers. But from the limited-evidence, drawn primarily from Berlin, only those who left the two organisations, for instance from the KPD to the KPD(O) or from the SPD to what became the SAP, in practice cooperated but these were minute organisations, which had little influence on their original parties.
Hans was also the person who was active in the Prol FT, insisting that it was a separate organisation in Leipsig. There isnt time to discuss the FT but they were an essentially humanist organisation which had until 1928 been controlled by the SD, when in one form or another, the KPD either seized control or set up a separate Prol FT faction. Hans changed sports club because the one he had been attending was SD dominated and he was not comfortable there and went over to a Red sports club! Here the 3rd period line held! But it still isn’t clear how far the separate Prol FT was a feature of Leipzig, and that maybe in Berlin, where, my father had told me, he had been the secretary, the Prol FT had taken over the ‘official’ FT rather than forming a breakaway group.
To conclude this section, I firstly want to highlight that at least Rudi appears to have experienced the growth of the Nazis, the SA at street level and while his resistance to them was a consequence of his Communist politics, he seems to have understood far more clearly than most of the KPD leadership the importance of consistently opposing the SA.
Yet at the same time,what emerged from Rudi and Hans in particular was how far their politics was still influenced by 3rd period politics. Hans, although decrying the use of the term 'social fascist' went on to blame the SD for their defeat. Rudi, the person most active on the front line against the SA through the Red Front who had already been subjected to much violence and persecution, still did not recognise that the Nazis gaining power and the Reichstag fire were a turning point. In none of the interviews did I get the impression that these comrades saw their task as to draw those sympathetic to the SD over to them, though Rudi did refer to some SD youth joining the Red Front.
But while the 'social fascist ' line was a historical disaster, the reasons for the KPD rank and file to see the SPD as social fascists were numerous. The 3 Berliners will have been too young to have been directly influenced by events in 1919 when the Freicorps,with SD collusion, shot down the revolutionaries in 1919, and murdered R Luxembourg and Liebnecht. But they were quite old enough for this event to have been keenly remembered by their older comrades. In 1969, my father, who was born only five or so years before these comrades, produced an unpublished paper in honour of the failed 1919 revolution, which he actually remembered, excoriating the betrayals of the Ebert and the S democrats. And again to refer to my parents, my mother told me about 1929, when the streets of Berlin ran with blood after the police had fired on an -illegal- KPD backed May Day demo. Moreover, for Hans and Rudi, their everyday experience of the police under SD control in the early 1930s, breaking up meetings and demos,sometimes brutally, will have confirmed to them the truth of the 'legends' of 1919 and 1929, and made the 'label of social fascist' seem fitting.
So while the 'social fascist' analysis played its part, the January/February events was not experienced by the Berliners as a fundamental turning point. My suspicion is that these voices are not untypical of this layer of KPDers who experienced the 30s and survived to live in E Germany. But we must not let the tragic mistakes of this period cloud our awareness of the bravery of these people. I will end this section with a comment by Rudi: By 1945, none of his old comrades from the early 1930s were still around.
Finally, I want very briefly to consider the period after my father fled Berlin. He arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1933 and left for London in February 1934. I can only surmise why he went West rather than to Prague (or even the USSR), and whether he did so because instructed by the Party or because my mother-and this was her story- had said she would leave Germany with or without him. Nor have I managed to find out what happened in Paris. He reappears in the records in London in late 1934 as the Secretary of the KPD exile group.
Another major source has been the Bundesarchiv in Germany. One of the documents they sent showed that my father had been the man most trusted to run the exile KPD group in London and that set me off in a near fruitless hunt to find out about this group. It is referred to by the man who took over from my father, Kuzinski, but, in his memoirs, he dismissed everything that took place before him in about one sentence as essentially bohemian dilettantism. I have the membership list for 1938 and my father's name is no longer there. It is not possible to analyse why he left the party-or was pushed-without reference to my mother's political and personal trajectory which there isn't time to go into. Indeed, the exile group does not seem to have provided a real basis for organisation, despite some attempts at producing a paper to inform British opinion and, later, to be smuggled into Germany. My impression is that most KPD exiles got involved instead from the late 1930s in the Kulturbund, which could pretend not to be political. It must have been a shock for my politically active father to suddenly discover himself in this political and largely meaningless and faction ridden backwater. My guess is that he never really recovered from the loss of his comrades and his previous Party influenced activism.
What though the interviews with the Berlin 3 did reveal to me was that what I had taken as normal- that people like my father-active anti-Nazis -would flee after the Reichstag fire, was wrong. I had assumed till a few months ago that my father's flight was typical of a particular layer of the left. We all know that the top leadership-except famously Thaelman- did get out immediately after the Fire, so there was some understanding there by the KPD CC of the importance of protecting their leadership. But it now appears to me that most activists either did not see the imperative to flee or were not able to do so. Indeed, if we exclude some famous names who happened to be outside Germany at the time of the Reichstag fire, like Brecht, Weil and indeed Wolpe, most people on the left, including the middle ranking KPD apparatus stayed put and were picked up by the Gestapo or the police in the weeks following the Fire. When I asked Harald Marpe, a well researched historian of this period in the Brandburg area of Berlin, about how far the KPD had anything like a plan for an underground network in the event of a Nazi take over, he said that the CC had set up a network for itself. He later sent me details that the KPD CC ordered in autumn 1930 that a small illegal military organization of the party should be set up, made up of groups of ten, some of them with “handfeuerwaffen”(handguns) to protect them. This may have been based on a Russian model but its remit or effectiveness is unknown. Really we have very little evidence about how far an underground existed, but we do know that the CC was still saying 'After the Nazis, us', which will not have heightened any sense of urgency.
My hunch about my father is that his Bavarian experiences: the Kapp putsch and early rise of the NSDAP- which I suspect had made him more acutely aware than his Berlin comrades of the nature and threat of Nazism throughout, gave him a more sensitive political nose to the way the wind was blowing. Maybe my father's-and mother's paranoia which I experienced so acutely as a child and had ascribed to the consequences of flight was one cause of flight. Maybe the Party did appreciate his value, maybe because of his earlier contacts resulting from the Russian/Indian oil link, and, unlike with most middle ranking comrades, instructed him to get out.
My father disappears from the political scene after 1937. The HO was keen on tracking down refugees who broke their commitment to say out of politics and apt to threaten them with expulsion. But anyway, by then he knew too much about Stalinism. He died a socialist but his attitude to the USSR remained ambiguous. He retained a belief that it could change towards a more socialist direction at the same time as decrying its excesses. As some of you will have heard me say before, my earliest political memory is of my father donning a red tie that I’d never seen before and bringing out a rare bottle of wine. I was invited to sit with my parents as he and my mother toasted the death of Stalin!
London Socialist Film showings
LONDON SOCIALIST FILM CO-OP
AT THE RENOIR CINEMA, Brunswick Square, London WC1
Nearest London Tube: Russell Square
Buses: 7, 17, 45, 46, 59, 68, 91, 168, 188
10.30 FOR 11AM SUNDAY 12 FEBRUARY 2012
JUST DO IT
Emily James, UK 2011 [12A], 88 mins
Emily James spent a year within the environmental movement documenting
the clandestine activities of the major players. In this feature
documentary, she presents an insider's account of the new global
movement, an independent group funded by volunteers; inspiring,
anarchic individuals with inventive strategies challenge the multi-
nationals, frustrate the police and create confusion. This film shows
what one group of committed individuals can achieve.
NOT IN OUR NAME
Gabrielle Tierney, Ireland/UK 2009 [12A], 30 mins
Nine men were totally acquitted of their £350,000 criminal damage to
the International Arms manufacturer in Derry in 2006. The decision
became a legal benchmark; an act of deliberate civil disobedience
recognised as a weapon in the fight for peace. This film documents the
victory and their solidarity with the people in the Lebanese town of
Qana; knowledge of the production of those weapons and their use in
the Israeli massacre became an impetus for the men to act.
Discussion led by Emily James, Gabrielle Tierney and Anne-Marie
OÃReilly, Outreach Co-ordinator, Campaign Against Arms Trade
AT THE RENOIR CINEMA, Brunswick Square, London WC1
Nearest London Tube: Russell Square
Buses: 7, 17, 45, 46, 59, 68, 91, 168, 188
10.30 FOR 11AM SUNDAY 12 FEBRUARY 2012
JUST DO IT
Emily James, UK 2011 [12A], 88 mins
Emily James spent a year within the environmental movement documenting
the clandestine activities of the major players. In this feature
documentary, she presents an insider's account of the new global
movement, an independent group funded by volunteers; inspiring,
anarchic individuals with inventive strategies challenge the multi-
nationals, frustrate the police and create confusion. This film shows
what one group of committed individuals can achieve.
NOT IN OUR NAME
Gabrielle Tierney, Ireland/UK 2009 [12A], 30 mins
Nine men were totally acquitted of their £350,000 criminal damage to
the International Arms manufacturer in Derry in 2006. The decision
became a legal benchmark; an act of deliberate civil disobedience
recognised as a weapon in the fight for peace. This film documents the
victory and their solidarity with the people in the Lebanese town of
Qana; knowledge of the production of those weapons and their use in
the Israeli massacre became an impetus for the men to act.
Discussion led by Emily James, Gabrielle Tierney and Anne-Marie
OÃReilly, Outreach Co-ordinator, Campaign Against Arms Trade
Monday, 6 February 2012
The WASU Project website
Dedicated to preserving the history of the West African Students’ Union (WASU) and all Africans in Britain during the 20th century who struggled for African independence and self-determination and an end to colonialism and racism. The West African Students’ Union was formed in London in 1925 based on the spirit of ‘Self-help, Unity and Co- operation.’ The WASU Project is based on the same spirit. We aim to present information, photos, and eventually a film about the West African Students’ Union and we appeal to everyone to co-operate by helping us to find any relevant photos, documents or other information.
LSHG Seminar on KPD reminder
Dear Comrade
A reminder that the next seminar in the Spring series is on Monday 6th Feb, 5.30pm in the Gordon Room, South Block, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet WC1.
Merilyn Moos will be presenting: 'From the personal to the political- researching the KPD 1929-37'. It promises fascinating new research on the German Communist Party during the period of the rise of the Nazis.
A reminder that the next seminar in the Spring series is on Monday 6th Feb, 5.30pm in the Gordon Room, South Block, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet WC1.
Merilyn Moos will be presenting: 'From the personal to the political- researching the KPD 1929-37'. It promises fascinating new research on the German Communist Party during the period of the rise of the Nazis.
A History of Riots conference timetable
History of Riots conference 25th Feb: timetable
Saturday 25th February 2012
Midday-5pm, Room 350
Institute of Historical Research
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1
The British riots of summer 2011 were a powerful reminder that rioting is still on the agenda even in one of the centres of market capitalism. Rioting has a long history and historical context. While authorities have tended to use the language of criminality historians have often taken a different view.
The papers at this conference – the first to look at the history of riots since the events of 2011, and the broader sweep from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movements of that year – are based on original research into a
range of aspects of the riot in history.
History of Riots conference 25th Feb: timetable
Room 350 Institute of Historical Research, Senate House Malet St WC1
SPEAKERS INCLUDE
SEAN CREIGHTON:
From Revolution to New Unionism; the impact of Bloody Sunday on the development of John Burns’s politics
NEIL DAVIDSON:
Riots around the Scottish Union negotiations in 1706
JOHN NEWSINGER:
Memorial Day Massacre, a Chicago Police Riot
___________________________________________________________________
Registration from Midday
Papers and discussion from 12.30pm including introduction: Keith Flett Riots, the form of protest that could not be consigned to the history books
Round Table discussion: Understanding the history of riots today at 4pm
Afterwards discussion and beer at the Euston Tap [front of Euston station]
Entry is £10 [£5 unwaged]. We ask people to donate in advance, if possible, to speed registration on the day.
Cheques, payable to ‘ Keith Flett’, to 38 Mitchley Rd London N17 9HG
Inquiries to: keith1917@btinternet.com
Saturday 25th February 2012
Midday-5pm, Room 350
Institute of Historical Research
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1
The British riots of summer 2011 were a powerful reminder that rioting is still on the agenda even in one of the centres of market capitalism. Rioting has a long history and historical context. While authorities have tended to use the language of criminality historians have often taken a different view.
The papers at this conference – the first to look at the history of riots since the events of 2011, and the broader sweep from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movements of that year – are based on original research into a
range of aspects of the riot in history.
History of Riots conference 25th Feb: timetable
Room 350 Institute of Historical Research, Senate House Malet St WC1
SPEAKERS INCLUDE
SEAN CREIGHTON:
From Revolution to New Unionism; the impact of Bloody Sunday on the development of John Burns’s politics
NEIL DAVIDSON:
Riots around the Scottish Union negotiations in 1706
JOHN NEWSINGER:
Memorial Day Massacre, a Chicago Police Riot
___________________________________________________________________
Registration from Midday
Papers and discussion from 12.30pm including introduction: Keith Flett Riots, the form of protest that could not be consigned to the history books
Round Table discussion: Understanding the history of riots today at 4pm
Afterwards discussion and beer at the Euston Tap [front of Euston station]
Entry is £10 [£5 unwaged]. We ask people to donate in advance, if possible, to speed registration on the day.
Cheques, payable to ‘ Keith Flett’, to 38 Mitchley Rd London N17 9HG
Inquiries to: keith1917@btinternet.com
Final CFP: Social Movements Conference
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CONFERENCE - FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
abstracts due by Monday 27th February 2012
From 1995 to 2011, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on 'ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST'.
We're very happy to announce that the Seventeenth AF&PP Conference will be held, between Monday 2nd April and Wednesday 4th April 2012.
The Conference rubric remains as in previous years. The aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their activists and supporters and which contribute to shaping their fate.
Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 60 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics, history and geography. The Manchester conferences have also been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes. Papers should address such matters as:
* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protests
* social movement theory
* utopias and experiments
* ideologies of collective action
* etc.
To offer a paper, or for more info - please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract:
EITHER Colin Barker, Dept. of Sociology
OR Mike Tyldesley, Dept. of Politics and Philosophy
Manchester Metropolitan University
Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West
Manchester M15 6LL, England
email: c.barker@mmu.ac.uk
Tel: M. Tyldesley 0161 247 3460
email: m.tyldesley@mmu.ac.uk
Fax: 0161 247 6769 (+44 161 247 6769)
(Wherever possible, please use email, especially as Colin Barker is a retired gent. Surface mail and faxes should only be addressed to Mike Tyldesley)
abstracts due by Monday 27th February 2012
From 1995 to 2011, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on 'ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST'.
We're very happy to announce that the Seventeenth AF&PP Conference will be held, between Monday 2nd April and Wednesday 4th April 2012.
The Conference rubric remains as in previous years. The aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their activists and supporters and which contribute to shaping their fate.
Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 60 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics, history and geography. The Manchester conferences have also been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes. Papers should address such matters as:
* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protests
* social movement theory
* utopias and experiments
* ideologies of collective action
* etc.
To offer a paper, or for more info - please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract:
EITHER Colin Barker, Dept. of Sociology
OR Mike Tyldesley, Dept. of Politics and Philosophy
Manchester Metropolitan University
Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West
Manchester M15 6LL, England
email: c.barker@mmu.ac.uk
Tel: M. Tyldesley 0161 247 3460
email: m.tyldesley@mmu.ac.uk
Fax: 0161 247 6769 (+44 161 247 6769)
(Wherever possible, please use email, especially as Colin Barker is a retired gent. Surface mail and faxes should only be addressed to Mike Tyldesley)
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