Excuses for the lunacies of the Comintern line may no doubt be found, even though there were socialists and dissident or silenced communists who opposed it. Seventy-odd years later, and with the historian’s professional hindsight, one is less sanguine about the possibility of stopping Hitler’s rise to power by means of a union of all antifascists than we came to be later in the 1930s. In any case, by 1932 a parliamentary majority of the centre-left was no longer possible even in the doubly improbable case that the communists had been willing to join it, and that the social democrats, let alone the Catholic Centre Party, had accepted them. The Weimar Republic went with Brüning. Hitler could indeed have been stopped by the President, the Reichswehr and the assorted authoritarian reactionaries and businessmen who took over then, and who certainly did not want what they got after 30 January 1933. Indeed, Hitler and the momentum of the rise of the swastika was stopped by them after the Nazis’ electoral triumph in the summer of 1932. There was nothing inevitable about the events which led to his appointment as Chancellor. But by this time there was nothing either social democrats or communists could have done about it.
Nevertheless, in retrospect the Comintern line made no sense. Were we in any sense critical of it? Almost certainly not. Radical, once-for-all change was what we wanted. Nazis and communists were parties of the young, if only because young men are far from repelled by the politics of action, loyalty and an extremism untained by the low, dishonest compromises of those who think of politics as the art of the possible. (National Socialism did not leave much public scope for women, and at this stage, alas, its passionate support for women’s rights did not attract more than a minority of exceptional women to an overwhelmingly male communist movement.) Indeed, the militant Young Communist Leagues were the Comintern’s chief catspaws in pushing the often reluctant adult leadership of the Parties into the extremes of the ‘class against class’ policy. The Nazis were certainly our enemies on the streets, but so were the police, and the chiefs of police of Berlin, whose men had killed some thirty men on May Day 1929, were social democrats. The KPD had made this incident into an emblem of social-democratic class betrayal. And who could respect the institutions of Weimar law and government, which were essentially those of the empire, without the Kaiser?
We were thus recognizably like the young ultras of 1968, but with four major differences. First, we were not a minority of radical dissidents in societies that had never been more prosperous and with political systems of unquestioned stability. In the economically storm-tossed and politically brittle Germany of 1932 those who radically rejected the status quo were the majority. Second, unlike the 1968 student radicals, we – right or left – were not protesters but engaged in an essentially revolutionary struggle for political power; more exactly, disciplined political mass parties seeking sole state power. Whatever was to come after, taking power was the first, indispensable step. Third, comparatively few of us on the ultra left were intellectuals, if only because even in a well-schooled country like Germany over 90 per cent of young people never got even a secondary education. And among the intellectual youth, we on the left were a modest minority. The bulk of secondary students were almost certainly on the right, though – as in my own school – not necessarily on the National Socialist right. Among the university students support for Hitler was notoriously strong.
The fourth difference was that the communist intellectuals were not cultural dissidents. Culturally the major divide was not, as in the era of rock music, between generations, but the basically political conflict between those who accepted and those who rejected what the Nazis called ‘cultural bolshevism’, that is to say almost everything that made the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic such an extraordinary era in the history of the arts and sciences. In Berlin, at least, we shared this culture with our seniors, for pre-Stalinist communism, while distinguishing sharply between writers and artists with the ‘right’ and those with the ‘wrong’ line, did not yet reject the men and women of the cultural avant-garde who had so patently hailed the October Revolution and shared the KPD’s distaste for the Republic of Ebert and Hindenburg. ‘Socialist Realism’ was still below the horizon. An admiration for Brecht, the Bauhaus and George Grosz did not separate parents and children, but it did separate the right from a sort of cultural popular front that stretched from the social-democratic authorities of Prussia and Berlin to the furthest outskirts of anarchist bohemia. It also united liberals with the left. The chief reason why in its day the German Democratic Republic had a far more liberal legislation on birth control and abortion than the western Federal Republic was that, in the days of Weimar, legalizing abortion, prohibited by the German Civil Code, had been a major campaigning issue for the KPD. I look at my surviving copy of the Schulkampf , and there it is still, together with announcements of meetings by the medical men so long associated with sexual emancipation.
Reconstructing my experience of the last months of the Weimar Republic, how can I disentangle memory from what I now know as a historian, what I now think after a lifetime of political reflections and debates about what the German left should or should not have done? Then I knew no more of what was happening between the triumph of the Nazis at the elections of 30 July 1932 and Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 than I read in the Vossische Zeitung. In any case, I did not really react to the news politically or critically, but as a romantic partisan, or a football supporter. The Berlin transport strike, which took place shortly before the last democratic election of the Republic in early November 1932, was then, and has been ever since, the subject of bitter polemics. It was successfully called, against the official (social-democratic) unions by the communist RGO (Red Union Opposition) and, since the National Socialists were anxious not to lose contact with the workers, supported by the Nazi union organization. It is not surprising that this temporary common front between red and brown in the dying weeks of the Republic has had a bad press, and is still quoted against the Weimar communists. It certainly demonstrates the irrationality of a party which, knowing that the entry of Hitler into government might be imminent, continued to treat the social democrats as its main adversary. As it happened the principal immediate consequences of the strike were, probably, to help the communist vote to rise quite sharply in the election on 6 November, and to contribute to the dramatic decline of the Nazi vote in that election – but both were soon forgotten. And yet I cannot remember either discussing the issue with anyone during the strike, or being worried about it, or even thinking about it. It was ‘our’ strike. Hence we were for it. We knew that we were the main enemy of the Nazis and their main target. Hence the idea that we could be accused of lending a helping hand to Hitler was absurd. Where was the problem?