Norman LaPorte, The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. x + 399 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography. $53.97 (paper), ISBN 0-8204-5857-0.
Reviewed by: Sara A. Sewell, History Department, Virginia Wesleyan College.
Published by: H-German (June, 2005)
Forging a New Historiography in the Study of German Communism
Norman LaPorte's The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933 situates itself squarely in the middle of a historiographical debate about the development of German communism after the mid-1920s. After the publication of Hermann Weber's seminal work Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus in 1969, the study of the German Communist Party (KPD) was dominated by Weber's Stalinization Thesis, which essentially argued that beginning in 1924 the KPD initiated a process of "Stalinization," that resulted in the subordination of the interests of German communism to those of the Soviet Union and the silencing of all dissent within the party. "Communists tried to think and behave in a militarily disciplined fashion in order to win their revolutionary 'war,'" Weber argued. "Decisions became commands; the party resembled an army; discipline became obedience, which comrades often voluntarily performed for the 'cause.'"[1] Despite the ideological divide that separated the two Germanys after the Second World War, both Eastern and Western historians generally concurred that interwar German communism was stamped by a drive to "Bolshevize" the KPD. While Western historians often criticized this Bolshevization as an unequivocal step toward totalitarianism, East German historians celebrated the unity and clarity within the KPD that Bolshevization engendered.
In 1983 Eve Rosenhaft launched one of the most decisive blows against the historiography of Stalinization. Examining political violence between Communists and Nazis in Berlin's working-class neighborhoods, Rosenhaft showed that Communists' confrontations with Nazis were informed more by their socio-cultural milieu than by party platforms.[2] Despite Rosenhaft's compelling argumentation and solid empirical research, only in the 1990s did scholars of the KPD start to build upon her assertion that rank-and-file Communists were not as pliable as earlier histories had maintained. In particular, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Eric Weitz published two key studies on German communism that critiqued Weber's approach for overlooking the dynamics of everyday politics that gave meaning to communism to the party's rank and file.[3] As Mallmann asserted, "The interpretation of communism as a monolithic, one-dimensionally defined system misunderstands that members were primarily subjects who formed their politics from location based on their own criteria, ignoring instructions from above when they held them to be false."[4]
LaPorte finds a middle ground between these positions. While cognizant that "rank-and-file membership could never be coerced into carrying out policies that failed to account for the realities of their own specific political environment" (p. 31), LaPorte maintains that "revisionist" historians, such as Mallmann and Weitz, who emphasize autonomy on the part of the KPD's membership, fail to recognize "the crucial role ... the party's 'democratic centralist' organization" played "in enabling the leadership to purge dissidents at [the] local level" (p. 30). Thus, LaPorte sets out to re-evaluate Weber's Stalinization Thesis against a historiography he argues has exaggerated rank-and-file agency.
LaPorte centers his research on the KPD in Saxony. Focusing primarily on the relationship between rank-and-file Communists in various Saxon cities and KPD leadership, which was based in Berlin, LaPorte maintains that "while the KPD's national and district leaderships ultimately became dependent on Moscow's sanction, the membership remained rooted in their local environments." Local Communists were "rooted in a diversity of local conditions" that often prompted them to challenge KPD national policies." These conflicts, he argues, led to "factionalism, fratricide, and political failure" (p. 18).
Historiographically, LaPorte's "post-revisionist" interpretation strikes a good balance between Stalinization versus rank-and-file agency. While "revisionist" scholarship that emphasizes diversity of experience and membership autonomy has contributed enormously to the study of German communism by showing the conflict within the KPD overlooked by historians who depicted the KPD as a monolithic organization, LaPorte cogently argues that the KPD's drive for "democratic centralism" fundamentally shaped the culture of the party. From periodic purges, to calls for political unity, to uniformity of slogans, to uniforming of members, KPD leaders worked diligently to discipline the rank and file. And the conflicts that ensued as a consequence of the leadership's relentless drive for unity did indeed result in "factionalism, fratricide, and political failure."
LaPorte's work likewise contributes significantly to understanding how communism unfolded throughout Germany during the Weimar Republic. In particular, by examining communist attitudes and activities in a variety of Saxon locales (i.e. Dresden, Chemnitz, Leipzig), LaPorte successfully demonstrates that locality decisively informed political action. Indeed, the history of working-class agitation, the influence of the SPD, and local industrial development all influenced communist politics, which explains why some Saxon KPD branches followed the party line closely, while others contested it.
This work is particularly compelling when it demonstrates the deep rifts between local branches and party leadership. For example, chapter 7 examines the relationship between Socialists and Communists during the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, showing that the KPD's Anti-Fascist Action campaign was yet another attempt by communist leaders to drive a wedge between SPD leaders and members. Despite KPD leaders' insistence that Communists were to work only with rank-and-file Social Democrats, LaPorte demonstrates a great deal of cooperation between Socialists and Communists in Saxony--even among local KPD and SPD leaders--despite KPD directives limiting such collaboration.
This study's main weakness, however, is that it does not successfully bridge the empirical research with its own historiographical stance. Despite LaPorte's assertion that the history of the KPD "cannot be explained without reference to the localities in which it was played out" (p. 39), his scholarship generally emphasizes democratic centralism over rank-and-file agency. In other words, the empirical research is often divorced from the historiography, particularly as LaPorte works avidly to discredit "revisionist" scholarship. LaPorte does illuminate moments of clear dissension within the party, for instance when KPD branches in Saxony questioned the leadership's rejection of united front tactics in 1923. However, this study generally fails to examine independent action on the part of rank-and-file Communists from the perspective of those historical actors, independent of an institutional perspective. This is not because LaPorte is not sensitive to conflict. Indeed, one of the study's key aims is to explore the conflict between leaders and members. The main reason for the failure to explore rank-and-file agency fully is due to the method LaPorte employs, particularly the sources he consults. Specifically, this study is based primarily on party documents housed at the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR. While certainly these documents must be examined thoroughly in any study of the KPD, LaPorte has allowed them to dictate his research. The evidence of rank-and-file dissent in his sources thus comes mainly from official party documents. Although many of these documents were top-secret, they were nonetheless shaped by the KPD's drive for Bolshevization. In other words, LaPorte has relied primarily on documents that would never offer a full picture of dissent because their authors' perception of their own position vis-a-vis the party leadership colored their reports. Including more documents from other kinds of sources (i.e. police files, SPD documents, trade union sources) would likely have provided alternative perspectives and a fuller picture of dissension.
More problematic than the limited scope of this study's sources, however, is the fact that the KPD's development as seen from the highest echelons of the party dictates the conceptual framework of this study. The structure of this book closely adheres to the dominant historical periodization of the KPD, following every political swing from the rise of Ruth Fischer to the policy of "social fascism." Thus, LaPorte employs a historical structure determined by KPD leaders and reinforced by historians, simply plugging Saxony's rank and file into this framework. This is not a "history from below," despite LaPorte's acknowledgement of the importance of locality in informing political attitudes and action. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the end LaPorte argues that "the Stalinist 'monolithic' party 'of a new type' may not have been able to impose its will on a membership rooted in their localities, but it could proscribe factionalism and purge those individuals or local organizations involved in persistent 'deviation'" (p. 296). Indeed, in the final analysis, LaPorte returns to an interpretation in which the party line determines the historical analysis. Even though the party membership rolls were bleeding profusely by the early 1930s, LaPorte's study is framed by the leaders' call for political unity and its concomitant purge of those who did not follow the ideological gymnastics of interwar communist politics. By contrast, the members' attitudes and actions are left under-explored because LaPorte allows top party officials to determine the questions his scholarship pursues.
LaPorte's lack of commitment to "history from below" is especially evident in the dearth of gender analysis. Men dominated the KPD, and as LaPorte correctly points out, women "were strongly underrepresented" (p. 289). Gender factors, in other words, decisively shaped communist politics in Weimar Germany; yet LaPorte fails to examine how gender influenced KPD politics at the grassroots level. In his criticism of research "using the methodology of social and cultural history" that "places the 'view from below' at the center of the interpretative discourse" (p. 294), LaPorte fails to consider how gender dynamics at the grassroots level shaped the political culture. Once again, the source base dictates his historical interpretation: while LaPorte acknowledges the fact that KPD leaders bemoaned the party's lack of appeal to women, LaPorte--like his subjects--overlooks the gender dynamics within the KPD that failed to attract women to communism because the sources failed to address this problem seriously. To examine the gender dynamics in the KPD, one would have to "place the 'view from below'" squarely "at the center of the interpretative discourse"--in this case, a gender discourse. One cannot rely primarily on official party documents to analyze gender at the grassroots level because party leaders never fully comprehended the gendered nature of the KPD and they never launched a serious campaign to bring women into the KPD.
Despite the conceptual and empirical weaknesses of this study along with significant errors of copy-editing, LaPorte's work is essential reading for all scholars of German communism. Its scope is beyond the beginning student of German communism, as it assumes considerable knowledge of KPD politics. But for experts of German communism, it offers excellent insight into communist leaders' attempts to establish democratic centralism, as well as rank-and-file responses. Moreover, LaPorte offers a cogent analysis of the historiographical questions regarding the KPD. While I was ultimately dissatisfied with his attempt to forge a middle ground between Weber's Stalinization Thesis and the more recent social-cultural approaches to the study of the KPD, I applaud his efforts to grapple with a dominant methodological issue currently facing historical interpretation--namely, is there a middle ground between post-structuralism and structuralism?
Notes
[1]. Hermann Weber, Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus: Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer Republik, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/M.: Europische Verlagsantalt, 1969), 1: p. 11.
[2]. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929-1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. ix.
[3]. Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik. Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionaeren Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996); and Eric Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protest to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
[4].Klaus-Michael Mallmann, 'Milieu, Radikalismus und lokale Gesellschaft. Zur Sozialgeschichte des Kommunismus in der Weimarer Republik,' Geschichte und Gesellschaft 21 (1995): pp. 5-6.
Citation: Sara A. Sewell. "Review of Norman LaPorte, The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933," H-German, H-Net Reviews, June, 2005. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=307591126549704.
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