A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany

A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany

Author: Ralf Hoffrogge

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-07-10

Total Pages: 654

ISBN-13: 9004337261

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Walter Benjamin derided Werner Scholem as a ‘rogue’ in 1924. Josef Stalin referred him as a ‘splendid man’, but soon backtracked and labeled him an ‘imbecile’, while Ernst Thälmann, chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), warned his followers against the dangers of ‘Scholemism’. For the philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem, however, Werner was first and foremost his older brother. The life of German-Jewish Communist Werner Scholem (1895–1940) had many facets. Werner and Gerhard, later Gershom, rebelled together against their authoritarian father and the atmosphere of national chauvinism engulfing Germany during World War I. After inspiring his younger brother to take up the Zionist cause, Werner himself underwent a long personal journey before deciding to join the Communist struggle. Scholem climbed the party ladder and orchestrated the KPD's ‘Bolshevisation’ campaign, only to be expelled as one of Stalin's opponents in 1926. He was arrested in 1933, and ultimately murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp seven years later. This first biography of Werner Scholem tells his life story by drawing on a wide range of original sources and archive material long hidden beyond the Iron Curtain of the Cold War era. First published in German by UVK Verlagsgesellschaft as Werner Scholem - eine politische Biographie (1895-1940), Konstanz, 2014.


Weimar Radicals

Weimar Radicals

Author: Timothy Scott Brown

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2009-04-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1845459083

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Exploring the gray zone of infiltration and subversion in which the Nazi and Communist parties sought to influence and undermine each other, this book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between two defining ideologies of the twentieth century. The struggle between Fascism and Communism is situated within a broader conversation among right- and left-wing publicists, across the Youth Movement and in the “National Bolshevik” scene, thus revealing the existence of a discourse on revolutionary legitimacy fought according to a set of common assumptions about the qualities of the ideal revolutionary. Highlighting the importance of a masculine-militarist politics of youth revolt operative in both Marxist and anti-Marxist guises, Weimar Radicals forces us to re-think the fateful relationship between the two great ideological competitors of the Weimar Republic, while offering a challenging new interpretation of the distinctive radicalism of the interwar era.


Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution

Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution

Author: Ralf Hoffrogge

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 9004280065

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Richard Müller, a leading figure of the German Revolution in 1918, is unknown today. As the operator and unionist who represented Berlin’s metalworkers, he was main organiser of the ‘Revolutionary Stewards’, a clandestine network that organised a series of mass strikes between 1916 and 1918. With strong support in the factories, the Revolutionary Stewards were the driving force of the Revolution. By telling Müller's story, this study gives a very different account of the revolutionary birth of the Weimar Republic. Using new archival sources and abandoning the traditional focus on the history of political parties, Ralf Hoffrogge zooms in on working class politics on the shop floor and its contribution to social change. First published in German by Karl Dietz Verlag as Richard Müller - Der Mann hinter der November Revolution, Berlin, 2008, this english edition was completerly revised for the english speaking audience and contains new sources and recent literature.


Werner Scholem

Werner Scholem

Author: Mirjam Zadoff

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-02-02

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0812249690

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In Werner Scholem: A German Life, Mirjam Zadoff has written a book that is at once a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era.


Jews and Germans

Jews and Germans

Author: Guenter Lewy

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-10

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0827618514

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Jews and Germans is the only book in English to delve fully into the history and challenges of the German-Jewish relationship, from before the Holocaust to the present day. The Weimar Republic era—the fifteen years between Germany’s defeat in World War I (1918) and Hitler’s accession (1933)—has been characterized as a time of unparalleled German-Jewish concord and collaboration. Even though Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the German population, they occupied a significant place in German literature, music, theater, journalism, science, and many other fields. Was that German-Jewish relationship truly reciprocal? How has it evolved since the Holocaust, and what can it become? Beginning with the German Jews’ struggle for emancipation, Guenter Lewy describes Jewish life during the heyday of the Weimar Republic, particularly the Jewish writers, left-wing intellectuals, combat veterans, and adult and youth organizations. With this history as a backdrop he examines the deeply disparate responses among Jews when the Nazis assumed power. Lewy then elucidates Jewish life in postwar West Germany; in East Germany, where Jewish communists searched for a second German-Jewish symbiosis based on Marxist principles; and finally in the united Germany—illuminating the complexities of fraught relationships over time.


The Last Revolutionaries

The Last Revolutionaries

Author: Catherine Epstein

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674036549

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"The Last Revolutionaries" tells a story of unwavering political devotion: it follows the lives of German communists across the tumultuous twentieth century. Before 1945, German communists were political outcasts in the Weimar Republic and courageous resisters in Nazi Germany; they also suffered Stalin's Great Purges and struggled through emigration in countries hostile to communism. After World War II, they became leaders of East Germany, where they ran a dictatorial regime until they were swept out of power by the people's revolution of 1989. In a compelling collective biography, Catherine Epstein conveys the hopes, fears, dreams, and disappointments of a generation that lived their political commitment. Focusing on eight individuals, "The Last Revolutionaries" shows how political ideology drove people's lives. Some of these communists, including the East German leaders Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, enjoyed great personal success. But others, including the purge victims Franz Dahlem and Karl Schirdewan, experienced devastating losses. And, as the book demonstrates, female and Jewish communists faced their own sets of difficulties in the movement to which they had given their all. Drawing on previously inaccessible sources as well as extensive personal interviews, Epstein offers an unparalleled portrait of the most enduring and influential generation of Central European communists. In the service of their party, these communists experienced solidarity and betrayal, power and persecution, sacrifice and reward, triumph and defeat. At once sordid and poignant, theirs is the story of European communism--from the heroic excitement of its youth, to the bureaucratic authoritarianism of its middle age, to the sorry debacle of its death.


Weimar Germany

Weimar Germany

Author: Eric D. Weitz

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 0691183058

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"Weimar Centennial edition with a new preface by the author."--Title page.


A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany

A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany

Author: Ralf Hoffrogge

Publisher: Historical Materialism Book

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 14

ISBN-13: 9789004309524

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This biography of Werner Scholem (1895-1940), former Zionist activist and later chief organiser of the German Communist Party, sheds new light on German-Jewish relations in the Weimar Republic, focussing on a revolutionary's lifelong struggle against Anti-Semitism.


Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933

Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933

Author: Dirk Schumann

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-04

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0857453149

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In noting that political violence was the product of choices made by political actors rather than the result of irresistible forces ...Schumann issues a pertinent warning while making a first-rate contribution to the scholarly literature on the Weimar Republic. Central European History A well-documented and skillfully argued book. German Studies Review In his exceptional regional study of the Prussian province of Saxony, Schumann offers a richly detailed analysis of political violence in the Weimar Republic...This is a wordy but methodical and ultimately convincing work of scholarship. Choice Schumann ... calls into question some assumptions, provides interesting nuances, and helps to refine our understanding of the nature of political violence in Weimar Germany. Journal of Modern History ... provides a well-documented, solid narrative and challenging analysis of Weimar's political violence... American Historical Review This] definitive work, rich in source material and analysis, dispels stereotypes of political violence in the Weimar Republic. Historische Zeitschrift The Prussian province of Saxony-where the Communist uprising of March 1921 took place and two Combat Leagues (Wehrverb nde) were founded (the right-wing Stahlhelm and the Social Democratic Reichsbanner) - is widely recognized as a politically important region in this period of German history. Using a case study of this socially diverse province, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of political violence in Weimar Germany with particular emphasis on the political culture from which it emerged. It refutes both the claim that the Bolshevik revolution was the prime cause of violence, and the argument that the First World War's all-encompassing "brutalization" doomed post-1918 German political life from the very beginning. The study thus contributes to a view of the Weimar Republic as a state in severe crisis but with alternatives to the Nazi takeover. Dirk Schumann is Professor of History at Georg-August University, G ttingen. He is the co-editor of Life After Death (2003), Violence and Society after the First World War (first issue of Journal of Modern European History 2003]), Between Mass Death and Individual Loss (2007). Most recently, he has edited Raising Citizens in the "Century of the Child" The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective (2010).


Jewish Domination of Weimar Germany

Jewish Domination of Weimar Germany

Author: Eckhart Verlag

Publisher: Blurb

Published: 2017-06

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 9781389995002

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The National Socialist government's first English-language attempt to explain the rationale behind their legislative moves to restrict Jewish influence in Germany after 1933. Using official pre-Nazi-era demographics, this work showed that Jews were massively over-represented in all fields of German social and economic life-except that of farming and creative work. It lists the ownership of mass media in Weimar Germany, the astonishing financial scandals, Communism and political subversion, degenerate theater, sexual psychology, Communist indoctrination in educational institutions and the media-all of which was predominantly Jewish in origin. This new edition contains the entire original text and illustrations, and benefits from a series of appendixes by Francis Dupont which reveal: - The measures taken by the Nazi state against Jews; - Details of the Havaara transfer Agreement whereby the Nazi government and the World Zionist movement worked together to help create the state of Israel; - The World Jewish declaration of war against Germany in 1933; and - A series of eye-opening parallels between Weimar Germany and the present-day United States of America, showing exactly the same trends of Jewish domination of educational institutions, the mass media, and financial scandals-proof that history does repeat itself.