Forgotten Biography of Ernst Thälmann

Peter Maslowski's Forgotten Biography of Ernst Thälmann as Führer of German Communism under the Weimar Republic.*

* Peter Maslowski, Thälmann, Leipzig: R Kittner Verlag, 1932.

Almost two decades after the fall of East German communism in 1989, there is still no critical biography of one of twentieth-century communism's most well-known leaders - Ernst Thälmann. For former East Germans over thirty years of age, his name remains today associated with the 'antifascism' propagated by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in order to legitimate its rule. [ 1 ] In no small part, this confirms how far the 'Thälmann myth' was a central feature in the East German school curriculum and, more broadly, stood at the apex of the state's 'political-ideological' educational work. [ 2 ] It was disseminated using a vast array of means and materials, from school textbooks, exhibitions, films and slide shows with sound recordings to the national Buchenwald Memorial centre, where Thälmann had been murdered by the Nazis in August 1944. Thälmann's image was also carried through the streets in the official events commemorating 'antifascist resistance'.

Importantly, too, a highly formulaic form of biography writing played a central role in the SED's construction of the 'Thälmann myth'. From the appearance in 1948 of Willi Bredel's Ernst Thälmann, which carried a foreword by Wilhelm Pieck, the former leader of the KPD was stylised as an exemplary communist, a hero of the antifascist resistance to be emulated by East German citizens. [ 3 ] Autobiographies, too, were used to cultivate the SED's 'Thälmann image' (Thälmann-Bild). In all such accounts, from the highest SED leader to unknown local officials, a meeting with - or recollection of - Thälmann was de rigueur. [ 4 ] In this legitimating narrative, party veterans participation in the pre-war 'antifascist struggles' was presented as what Epstein called 'the embodiment of revolutionary virtue and personal authenticity'. [ 5 ]

It was a leadership cult in all but name which, despite some shift in presentation over time, lasted until the end of the GDR's existence in 1989. But its origins were not in the GDR, but rather in the KPD during the Weimar Republic. The key features of the SED image of Thälmann were also core components of the cult of leadership constructed by the KPD's agitprop department from the mid-1920s. [ 6 ] It is in this respect that Peter Maslowski's 1932 biography of Thälmann valuably summarises many aspects of the KPD's Führerkult. His depiction of Thälmann had at its core four interrelated components: (1) he was the son of a worker, who enjoyed an intimate relationship with the 'working masses'; (2) he was close to Lenin, both ideologically and in terms of his 'honesty' and loyalty to the party; (3) he was a brave 'soldier of the revolution', as demonstrated by his model role in the 'Hamburg Rising' of 1923 and the pursuit of the fight against fascism. Each one of these characteristics was included in the later SED depiction of Thälmann; only Thälmann's subsequent martyrdom under the Third Reich was missing.

Notably, Maslowski's biography was not commissioned by the KPD leadership. It was published by the Leipzig-based 'bourgeois' publishing company 'R Kittler Verlag' in a series of biographical studies entitled 'Männer und Macht' (Men and Power). But, as an editor working on a wide range of the party's regional newspapers from 1920 onwards, he was in a position to know from the inside how Thälmann had been built up by the KPD as the leader of German communism. [ 7 ] What is most intriguing about Maslowski's biography is that it underlines the importance of the cult of leadership constructed around Thälmann during the Weimar Republic. Although this evolved in stages, from becoming the public face of communism in 1924 to receiving a Führer ovation at the party's twelfth congress in 1929, there is good reason to identify Thälmann as a prototype of the cults of leadership later featuring through the world communist movement. [ 8 ]

In almost identical fashion to the SED account, Thälmann's social origins are presented by Maslowski as resolutely proletarian. He is the 'son of a worker' who took risks to support the illegal activities of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) during the Anti-Socialist Laws of the later nineteenth century. Maslowski then presents Thälmann's experiences in the German workers' movement as the development of the 'natural leader' of the KPD. As a member of the SPD (1903) and the Free Trade Unions (1904), he turned down offers of a salaried position in the Hamburg branch of the transport workers' union on the grounds that membership of the union bureaucracy would have alienated him from the 'mass of workers' in the factories. His experience of the 'moderate' pre-war Hamburg SPD, its support for the Kaiser's war effort and the suppression of the 'German Revolution' led him from the SPD through the USPD to the KPD in 1920. Even before joining the KPD, Thälmann is depicted as being a leninist. During the revolution of 1918/19, he had read Lenin's State and Revolution in German and 'understood' that 'the basic cause of defeat, in Hamburg as throughout Germany, lay in the absence of a united revolutionary party' (p.33). It was this knowledge that led him to work within the USPD to bring its left wing to the KPD. His role here is acclaimed by emphasising that 90% of the Hamburg USPD came over 'with Thälmann' to the KPD at the unification congress in late 1920.

After Thälmann entered the KPD's Central Committee (1921), Maslowski's anti-bureaucratic rhetoric continues. Rather than taking his salary from the party, Thälmann reputedly retained the closest possible connection with the 'masses' as a Hamburg shipyard worker. As a party editor, Maslowski would have been familiar with the central importance of this image of Thälmann as the Hamburg worker who spoke, dressed and acted like a fellow (communist) worker. In his first visit to Moscow, during the Third World Congress of the Comintern (1921), an explicit link is made between Thälmann's 'honesty' and his class background: he is held up by no less a figure than Lenin as 'a genuine proletarian' from the USPD and, thus, in a position to bring the proletariat under KPD leadership in the mass struggles to come.

An important aspect of both the SED's and Maslowski's 'Thälmann image' is his role as 'hero' of the 'Hamburg Rising' of 1923, which was the KPD's last armed action under the Weimar Republic. Following the 'line' adopted by Moscow at the time, both accounts emphasise that the struggle of the 'Hamburg proletariat' had only failed because it had been abandoned by the then party leader, Heinrich Brandler. While Brandler's strongholds in Saxony and Thuringia failed to fight, the Hamburg party organisation with Thälmann at its head proved able to hold out at the barricades for three days and nights. Intriguingly the SED's Ernst Thälmann (1979) and Maslowski's biography conclude with the same quotation from Thälmann on the 'lessons of the Hamburg struggle': 'The uprisings of the proletariat are stages in the triumphal march of the revolution: not only through their directly positive results, but also as a result of the lessons which are hammered into the entire working class'. [ 9 ] Importantly, too, both accounts present Thälmann as a symbol of hope in the coming German revolution: 'Saxony and Brandler - that in the minds of the workers is the epitome of failure. But Hamburg and Thälmann - there their hearts beat; their mood of conviction rises that success could have been on their side if the German proletariat had fought like the Hamburg workers under the leadership of the KPD' (p49).

In Maslowski's account, it is Thälmann's pre-eminent role in the KPD, rather than Moscow's intervention, that explains how he took on the leadership in 1925. Thälmann is credited with defeating rival factions in the party's power struggle, enabling the KPD to finally re-orient itself toward the bolshevik ideological and organisational model. In extra-parliamentary campaigning, it is Thälmann who recognised how to 'fight fascism' - an understanding that led to terror attacks on his Hamburg home by 'bands of young fascists' in 1922. Notably, too, Thälmann is credited with enabling the KPD to break with Rosa Luxemburg's belief in the 'spontaneity' of revolution, replacing this with the ideology of the vanguard party. It is Thälmann who sweeps away the 'remnants' of the party's social democratic past, replacing it with bolshevism. He is also applauded as the head of the communist Reichstag faction, whose 'Marxist-Leninist analysis and prognosis' enabled him to 'point the way' in the 'line to be marched' by the party (p55-56). His role as chairman of the party's paramilitary organisation, the League of Red Front Fighters (RFB), and his candidacy in the 1925 and 1932 presidential elections are also used as examples of how Thälmann was both pre-eminent German communist and a 'typical man of the communist workers' (p54). In short, he is depicted as the person enabling 'Bolshevik unity and clarity of leadership' (p54).

Possibly with his wider 'bourgeois' readership in mind, Maslowski's presentation of Thälmann as theoretician and public speaker departs form the KPD's official propaganda and later SED accounts. Maslowski concedes that there are 'more elegant' writers, better theoreticians and 'fierier speakers'. But the text remains hagiography. Maslowski stresses that Thälmann - who is known as 'Teddy' to his comrades - can hold his own with any party intellectual. Trust in him is linked to his class background, as is his 'instinctive' ability to know the correct party line and to spot even the slightest deviation from it. At party conferences he 'picks apart' political deviations and demonstrates how they would damage the party. In short, Maslowski present Thälmann as the embodiment of the party: Thälmann's 'political instinct is not the property of a single person […it] rises from the collective experience of the entire party' (p63). This aspect of the biography also implicitly aims to explain why the 'anti-bureaucratic' Thälmann become a 'professional revolutionary'. Maslowski refutes the non-communist claims that a 'professional revolutionary' is someone who earns money through revolutionary activity. Instead, it is redefined as a total identification with communism that all party members should aspire to without remuneration:

[A] Communist will never state that he is firstly a sportsman or Free Thinker or the father of a family or a "person" or something of the sort and then alongside this a communist. Rather, in his entire interests, functions, work, in all of his emotions and in his entire life and everything he undertakes, in every case he is first and above all else a Communist and decides everything according to communist principles' (p65).

As Börrnert's study of the SED's mobilisation of the 'Thälmann myth' in the East German education system convincingly demonstrates, for many young people growing up in the GDR the 'Thälmann legend' offered an attractive image, even an imagined alternative to 'really existing socialism'. [ 10 ] But it is an image which owed little to reality. [ 11 ] Since the opening of the archives, researchers have had access to Thälmann's own autobiographical sketch, written during his imprisonment by the Nazis, which offers a very different life history and self-representation. Perhaps the most surprising of Thälmann's autobiographical revelations is that he was a brave soldier on the Western Front throughout the First World War. Wounded four times, Thälmann recalled that, 'I only ever spent short times in the garrison, because I was not a malingerer, a scaredy cat [or a] coward'. [ 12 ] In the typed East German version of the manuscript, Thälmann's recollections about the war and his attitude towards it are omitted and a note inserted which read 'to be related verbally'.

In the historiography of German communism, the movement phase is almost always isolated from the regime phase. Yet, as this review hopes to show, a fuller understanding of communism as a twentieth century phenomenon would be well served by overcoming this artificial periodisation. Similarly, we know much more about the SED's construction of the 'Thälmann myth' than the historic figure, which underlines the importance of a critical biography.

Norman La Porte

With thanks to Dr Rene Wolf for making available to me valuable literature on the 'Thälmann myth' in the GDR.

 

Notes

1. For English-speaking readers see, for example, A. L. Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth. Historical Methodology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1989 (Ann Arbor, 2000), esp. chapter three.
2. R. Börrnert, Wie Ernst Thälmann true und kühn! Das Thälmann-Bild der SED in Erziehungsalltag der DDR (Bad Heilbrunn, 2004)
3. S. Barck, Antifa Geschichten. Eine literarische Spurensuche in der DDR der 1950er und 1960er Jahre (Cologne, 2003), esp. chapter four.
4. See, for example, the memoirs of party veterans in: Author Kollektiv/SED, Deutschlands unsterblicher Sohn. Errinnerungen an Ernst Thälmann (Berlin, 1963).
5. C. Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries. German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge Mass., 2003), p9.
6. In addition to the party press and related materials, a collection of material, in particular articles carrying Thälmann's name, are collected in: Bundesarchiv (Berlin) SAMPO, RY 1/I/2/707/57.
7. For a biographical sketch, see Weber/Herbst, Deutsche Kommunisten. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 bis 1945 (Berlin, 2004), pp487-88.
8. N. LaPorte/K. Morgan, 'Kings among their Subjects: Harry Pollitt and Ernst Thälmann and the Cult of Leadership as Stalinisation', in: N. LaPorte/K. Morgan/M. Worley (eds.), in: Stalinisation and Beyond (Basingstoke, 2008).
9. Maslowski, p46; IML, Ernst Thälmann. Eine Biographie (Berlin, 1979), p186.
10. Börrnert, op. cit., p189.
11. For an interesting, if little documented, study pulling apart the 'Thälmann myth', see Thilo Gabelmann, Thälmann ist neimals gefallen? Eine Legende stirbt (Berlin, 1996).
12. Ernst Thälmann, 'Gekürtzter Lebenslauf', in: SAPMO-BArch, Thälmann Nachlass, NL 4003/1 (pp1-29), p20.