Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde, eds. Die Rote Hilfe: Die Geschichte der internationalen kommunistischen "Wohlfahrtsorganisation" und ihrer sozialen Aktivitäten in Deutschland (1921-1941). Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2003. 326 pp. Photos, illustrations, charts, documents, bibliography. EUR 24.90 (paper), ISBN 3-8100-3634-X.
Reviewed by: Gary Roth, Rutgers University at Newark.
Published by: H-German (February, 2006)
Prisoner Rights and Support in Weimar
This collection of essays on the prisoner rights and support group, Rote Hilfe, reflects the new wave of scholarship about the German Communist Party in that it both recognizes the international political currents that dominated Rote Hilfe while nonetheless showing that Rote Hilfe had an existence all its own. Rote Hilfe had an exceptionally large membership. From its founding in the mid-1920s until it was banned by the fascists, there were always several hundred thousand individual members and an equally large institutional base, a membership much larger than the Communist Party itself. Nonetheless, it was a membership-driven organization in which the membership's scope of activity and responsibility remained within prescribed bounds.
The theme that most motivates the contributors to this volume is Rote Hilfe's duality as a center of agitation for the Communist Party versus its role as a social welfare agency. Rote Hilfe advocated for victims of political violence and persecution as well as providing a wide range of social services to these individuals and their families, of whom there were many in Germany during the 1920s. Rote Hilfe offered legal assistance to detainees, arranged prison visits for family members and other supporters, and helped ex-prisoners and their families after their release. It also sponsored orphanages, children's summer camps, medical care and examinations for family members, and socialization activities for adolescents, including special left-wing boys' and girls' clubs. The orphanages and children's homes are given considerable attention in several of the book's essays. Although there were only a few actual homes, they were exemplary in their efforts to mitigate the traumatic effects on children whose fathers had been killed or given long-term sentences because of their roles in political uprisings.
Rote Hilfe campaigned actively against the "white terror" of the radical right and the misuse of legal restraints by the judiciary and police. It conducted public campaigns on behalf of political prisoners and lobbied in favor of amnesty laws. Some 300 lawyers throughout Germany offered their services to the Rote Hilfe during the late 1920s and early 1930s, although there were fifty-odd lawyers who formed the core of its legal staff. Not only did they perform legal work for prisoners, but they also intervened in workplace situations, landlord-tenant matters, and family law on behalf of ex-prisoners and their family members. As spelled out in several of the volume's essays, members of Rote Hilfe worked to minimize the effects of a social system that they hoped to replace altogether, and this tension was keenly felt in the legal work undertaken by the organization.
Quite distinct about Rote Hilfe was the number of professionals who joined its ranks--doctors, lawyers, actors, writers, and others. Rote Hilfe appealed to members of the middle classes whose employment or status might otherwise be affected by party membership; it allowed fellow travelers to support political activity without being tainted by it directly. Rote Hilfe also allowed for political involvement without becoming enmeshed in the never-ending turmoil within the Communist Party itself. The organization attracted many well-known figures, including Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Käthe Kollwitz, and Thomas Mann, who were then profiled prominently. Similarly, political personages such as the well-known anarchist Erich Muhsam were featured in many Rote Hilfe campaigns and publications.
At its peak, the organization counted over three thousand local committees and sixty-odd full-time employees. The full-timers were virtually all members of the Communist Party. Throughout the decade the proportion of party to non-party members declined. In its formative years as many as two-thirds of the members of Rote Hilfe were also party members, but by 1932 this proportion had fallen to 39 percent. The politically non-aligned members occupied virtually all local leadership positions, although Communist Party members dominated the organization on the district and national levels. For most of the 1920s, those expelled from the party could still volunteer for work within Rote Hilfe, although towards the end of the decade, the organization's focus was tightened, a change spearheaded by individuals who would become key citizens of the future East Germany. Similarly, Rote Hilfe was selective in its support of victims of political persecution; Trotskyites and ultra-leftists were generally bypassed, although Social Democrats were often singled out for support, in line with the party's ongoing attempts to attract the more conservative wing of the socialist movement into its ranks.
Rote Hilfe received as much as 50 percent of its funding from the International Rote Hilfe, the organization funded by the Soviet government which counted some nine and a half million affiliated members throughout Europe and North America. Over 50 percent of collections went to perpetuate the organization itself. Despite the support from the Soviet Union, there was no prisoner rights group in the Soviet Union itself since the Bolsheviks denied that there were any political prisoners, only reactionaries and criminals. This line of reasoning was also used by the Social Democratic Party in Germany; that is, until the Social Democrats themselves became the object of political violence by the Nazis in the early 1930s.
Of the special sections at the end of the volume, one includes eight short biographies of lesser-known members of Rote Hilfe. These were the "work-horses" of the organization, people whose commitment was so total that it was because of them that the organization played a prominent role in German society. Carole Tischler poses the dilemma faced by the biographers quite nicely: how does one write a biography of someone who did not leave an archive, never wrote memoirs, about whom not much was written by contemporaries and whose those contemporaries are no longer alive. The biographies are meticulously researched, and it is clear that they result from enormously time-consuming searches through many archives in order to find traces scattered here and there. Several of the biographies, however, are written with little contextualization and critical distance, as collections of facts in narrative form.
Another section of the book includes reprints of original documents: membership and organizational statutes, a few selected letters and copies of articles. That they are appended to a collection of essays lends to the entire volume an additional sense of fragmentation. A summary essay drawing together the themes and information provided throughout the volume would have been helpful and would have complemented the introductory essay by Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde, which provides a history of the research on Rote Hilfe, and the short overview written by Rudolf Bauer. The publication of this volume coincides with the publication of Nikolaus Brauns's Schafft Rote Hilfe! (2003), a book that in many ways both complements and supplements this volume of essays.[1] Anyone interested in the topic of prisoner rights and support groups will find both books worthwhile.
Note
[1]. Nikolaus Brauns, Schafft Rote Hilfe!: Geschichte und Aktivitäten der proletarischen Hilfsorganisation für politische Gefangene in Deutschland (1919-1938) (Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 2003).
Citation: Gary Roth. "Review of Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde, eds, Die Rote Hilfe: Die Geschichte der internationalen kommunistischen "Wohlfahrtsorganisation" und ihrer sozialen Aktivitäten in Deutschland (1921-1941)," H-German, H-Net Reviews, February, 2006. URL: [url]http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=297921147197032[/url].
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