August Thalheimer

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August Thalheimer (born March 18, 1884 in Affaltrach , Württemberg ; † September 19, 1948 in Havana ) was a German communist politician and theorist.

Life

youth

Thalheimer was born as a child of a Jewish merchant family in Affaltrach (today the municipality of Obersulm ) in Württemberg. The family moved to Winnenden in 1892 and to Cannstatt in 1899 . He attended the Realgymnasium in Stuttgart and then began studying medicine in Munich, but soon switched to linguistics and ethnology . After a short time in Oxford and London , he matriculated in Berlin in 1904 , then moved to Strasbourg , where he received his doctorate in 1907 on the subject of pronouns personalia and possessiva of the languages ​​of Micronesia . Further studies in philosophy and economics in Berlin followed.

SPD, Spartakusbund, KPD 1910–1928

In 1910 he worked briefly on the mediation of Rosa Luxemburg as a trainee at the Leipziger Volkszeitung under the guidance of editor-in-chief Franz Mehring . At that time he joined the SPD . He then took over the editing of two other newspapers related to the left wing of the SPD, the Göppinger Freie Volkszeitung (1911–1912) and the Braunschweiger Volksfreund (1914–1916). After the outbreak of war in 1914 he joined as an opponent of burgfriedenspolitik the circle of the SPD-Left Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg to whom he in the Spartacus League and the Communist Party followed. Because of his anti-war activities, Thalheimer was drafted into the military in mid-1916, where he was not allowed to carry a weapon due to "political unreliability" and night blindness and was used as an armored soldier and interpreter until his release in September 1918 .

In November 1918 Thalheimer and Fritz Rück were among the leaders of the Stuttgart Spartakus group and from the beginning of November 1918 to the publishers of the Red Flag, which was printed on behalf of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council . Rück and Thalheimer took an active part in the preparation of the actions that finally led to the revolution in Württemberg on November 9th . In an attempt to bring the revolutionary movement to Friedrichshafen as well, Rück and Thalheimer were arrested in Ulm on the evening of November 6, 1918 and remained in custody until the late evening of November 9. Since the Stuttgart Spartakists were therefore without a leadership on November 9th, the initiative of the revolution in Württemberg passed to the moderate Social Democrats around Wilhelm Keil and Wilhelm Blos . Thalheimer refused the offer to join the provisional government of Württemberg as finance minister. Instead, he was chairman of the Stuttgart workers' council from November 10 to 18, before moving to the headquarters of the Spartakusbund in Berlin.

From 1919 to 1924 he was a member of the headquarters of the KPD. He designed the party program and led the party together with Heinrich Brandler in 1923/24 . As a KPD functionary, he came into conflict with the "ultra-left" party line of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow , which had prevailed from 1924 onwards , which accused him and Brandler of a failure in relation to the Hamburg uprising in October 1923. He then spent the following years in Moscow , where he taught philosophy at the Marx-Engels Institute and gave a series of lectures at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow.

Return to Germany and KPO 1928–1933

Against the wishes of the Comintern , he returned to Germany in 1928. From now on he refused to transfer Stalin's methods to the Comintern and Germany, as the KPD uncritically propagated under Ernst Thälmann's leadership , even if he remained a Leninist and defended the Soviet Union as a “socialist state”. Thalheimer gathered around him party members who disagreed with "the intensified relapse into 'left-wing teething troubles" "of the Communist Party leadership, and with Heinrich Brandler founded the Communist Party Opposition (KPO), an organization with a few thousand members and insignificant at the electoral level , which was ridiculed by the SPD as "KP zero". During this time Thalheimer developed his later famous analysis of fascism (see below).

Exile 1933–1948

In view of the intense terror that began after Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, part of the Reich leadership of the KPO was relocated abroad. Thalheimer had to emigrate, first to Strasbourg , then to Paris . At the beginning of the Second World War he was interned in France and was interned in about ten different French camps . The political leadership work of the KPO's foreign committee was thus paralyzed.

In 1941 Thalheimer, his family and Heinrich Brandler were able to leave for Cuba . In Havana Thalheimer worked on philosophical and political problems of Marxism under very difficult material conditions. The manuscripts from this period have been lost. After the end of the war, he and Brandler resumed contact with his comrades in Germany and, for their information, worked out a world-political overview every month (published in 1992 by the Workers' Policy Group under the title West Bloc - Eastern Bloc ). His efforts to return failed despite the intensive efforts of his sister Bertha Thalheimer . He died on September 19, 1948 in Havana and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Guanabacoa .

Fascism theorist

Thalheimer's analysis of fascism is based on the Marxian analysis of Bonapartism and the experience of Italian fascism , which came to power in 1922. Fascism destroys bourgeois democracy and all civil liberties. He wanted to destroy all proletarian organizations. He plans to arm German capitalism in order to make it a world power and to implement a new division of the still colonial world. This goal can only be achieved through a new world war. This is the domestic and foreign policy program of German capitalism, which the NSDAP promotes, finances, armed and transferred political power to it on January 30, 1933 in order to secure and increase its economic power. Thalheimer explained why “German fascism” would be more brutal than Italian. Therefore it applies u. a. to defend bourgeois democracy as "the best ground for fighting socialism" against its destruction.

Due to the balance of forces in the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the fascist movements in Germany and Italy have with their mass support from substandard or the declassification threatened members of all classes can conquer the political executive of the bourgeoisie in relative autonomy. Fascism still represents the interests of the bourgeoisie objectively, insofar as it defended them with terrorist means against the supposedly oncoming revolution. Nevertheless, he had become politically independent from it, so that the attempts by the fascist executive to mediate between the classes and even attacks by the fascists against entrepreneurs could also be explained. The Marburg political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth re-edited Thalheimer's essays in the sixties. They gave important impulses to the fascist theoretical discussions of the 1968 movement and influenced historians and political scientists such as Timothy Mason and Reinhard Kühnl .

Later ratings in the GDR

In the propaganda film Ernst Thälmann - Son of His Class (1954, directed by Kurt Maetzig ), which reflects the official history of the SED shortly before the de-Stalinization, Thalheimer was portrayed as an American agent. It was not until December 1983 that SED politburo member Horst Sindermann declared him an “outstanding fighter of the German labor movement” and placed him on a par with Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Pieck , Hermann and Käte Duncker , Hugo Eberlein and Paul Frölich , Leo Jogiches and Ernst Meyer , Paul Levi and Paul Lange .

See also: Thalheimer's theory of Bonapartism

Works

  • "So reason itself is worldly". Selected philosophical and religious-critical writings. Classics of Religious Criticism, Volume 10, Alibri-Verlag, Aschaffenburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-86569-130-9 .
  • Western Bloc - Eastern Bloc. World and German politics after the Second World War. International monthly overviews 1945–1948. Expanded through letters and documents, Workers Policy Group, 1992.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ KPD opposition. What is the Communist Opposition? 1930. In: Hermann Weber (Ed.): Der deutsche Kommunismus, documents 1915–1945. Cologne 1964, pp. 297–301 ( online ( memento of July 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 13, 2012)

literature

  • Jens Becker: August Thalheimer - Formerly a critic of Stalinization . In: Theodor Bergmann, Mario Keßler (Ed.): Heretic in Communism. Hamburg 2000, pp. 75-100.
  • Theodor Bergmann in Manfred Asendorf, Rolf von Bockel (ed.): Democratic ways - German curricula vitae from five centuries. Dictionary. Stuttgart / Weimar 1997, pp. 638-639.
  • Theodor Bergmann: Against the Current - The History of the KPD (Opposition). Hamburg 2001, pp. 543-544.
  • Theodor Bergmann: The Thalheimers - history of a family of undogmatic Marxists . Hamburg 2004.
  • Karl Hermann Tjaden : Structure and function of the KPD opposition (KPO) . Meisenheim am Glan 1964.
  • Theodor Bergmann, Wolfgang Haible: The Thalheimer siblings. Sketches of their life and politics . Mainz 1993.
  • Thalheimer, August . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Thalheimer, August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist politician
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Affaltrach , Württemberg
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1948
Place of death Havana , Cuba