Marcel van der Linden. Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critial Theories and Debates since 1917. Leiden: Brill, 2007. ix + 380 pp. $139.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-15875-7.
Reviewed by Henry Reichman
Published on H-Russia (November, 2008)
Commissioned by Nellie H. Ohr
A Fading Tradition
This is a revised, corrected, updated, and expanded version of a work that began as a PhD dissertation and was originally published in Dutch in 1989 and again in German in 1992. Marcel van der Linden, a labor historian at Amsterdam University and executive editor of the International Review of Social History, summarizes an extraordinarily broad range of Western Marxist thinkers in an effort to understand how Marxists who were politically independent of the Soviet Union "theoretically interpreted developments in the Soviet Union" (p. 4). Noting that "in the history of ideas Marxist theories have not received the attention they deserve" (p. 2) and that "the 'Russian Question' was an absolutely central problem for Marxism in the twentieth century" (p. 1), van der Linden seeks simultaneously to shed light on both the Soviet experience and "the historical development of Marxist thought" (p. 1), succeeding perhaps more in the latter goal than the former.
The book opens with a brief introduction, which postulates that the development of Western Marxist thinking about the Soviet Union was shaped by three "contextual clusters:" 1) "The general theory of the forms of society (modes of production) and their succession" adopted by differing Marxist thinkers; 2) the changing "perception of stability and dynamism of Western capitalism"; and 3) the various ways "in which the stability and dynamism of Soviet society was perceived" (pp. 5-8). Six chronological chapters summarize debates in, respectively, the years 1917-29, 1929-41, 1941-56, 1956-68, 1968-85, and 1985 to the present. Two brief summary chapters, "In Lieu of a Conclusion" and "Meta-theoretical Note," bring the work to a close.
Hermann Weber, Gerda Weber. Leben nach dem "Prinzip Links": Erinnerungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten. Berlin Christoph Links Verlag, 2006. 450 pp. EUR 19.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-86153-405-1.
Reviewed by Bernd Schaefer (Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, D.C.)
Published on H-German (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Memoir of a Critical "Left" Historian
Hermann Weber, known since the 1980s as (West) Germany's "Nestor der deutschen Kommunismusforschung," was born in 1928 in Mannheim into a poor communist family, soon to be persecuted under the Nazis. He joined the re-emerging KPD in 1945 and entered SED party college between 1947 and 1949, during the heyday of the early Cold War, in order to be trained as a future communist youth cadre leader in West Germany. In a previous book, now the first part of his memoirs, he described the years of his fascination and gradual disillusion with communism, and the experiences that led to a slow but complete break with both Stalinist ideology and the German parties that represented it. In order to understand Weber's particular biography, the volume under review here must be read in conjunction with the earlier one, now unfortunately out of print.[1]
The second volume benefits greatly from increased access to GDR documentation of Weber's personality and writings. Weber was able to unearth many nuggets in various East German archives after 1990. He is a sober, honest, very personal, sometimes dour chronicler of his life, but he undoubtedly has stories to tell. Both volumes also contain autobiographical passages by his wife, Gerda, whom he met at SED party college. Coming from an East German communist family, she briefly advanced to higher party positions than Hermann when she held the chairwomanship of the Democratic Women's Association (DFD) in the FRG, one of the GDR mass organizations that was temporarily legal in West Germany during the 1950s. Hermann and Gerda grew disillusioned with Stalinism together and jointly orchestrated their breaks with the SED and KPD. Gerda Weber, however, soon left politics and became the family breadwinner during the 1950s in a still-tight West German economy. Later, she assisted Hermann's journalistic and academic career and helpd him with his writings.