Group spark

The Funke group was a Trotskyist group around Kurt Landau that existed in Germany and in exile between 1931 and 1937 . The actual name of the group was from 1931 to 1933 Left Opposition of the KPD (Bolshevik-Leninists) , from 1933 Left Wing of the KPD / Marxist-Internationalists, but was often called Gruppe Funke or Landau-Gruppe after their newspaper .

The organization came into being in May 1931 after personal and political conflicts (such as the concrete assessment of the danger posed by the NSDAP and the correct trade union tactics ) as a split from the Left Opposition of the KPD (LO), recognized by Leon Trotsky as the official section of the international left opposition, and carried until 1933 the same name as this one. About a third of the (approx. 80, with a focus on Berlin and Ludwigshafen) members of the LO, including the majority of the Central Committee, joined it; the organ of the organization Der Kommunist was also appropriated. Trotsky then broke off all contact with Landau and his group.

In 1933, after the National Socialists came to power , the group, now operating illegally, named itself the Left Wing of the KPD / Marxist Internationalists , underlining that, unlike Trotsky, the KPD and Comintern were still considered reformable and the building of a new one , Fourth International refused. The group now published the underground newspaper Funke every fortnight and the company newspaper The Confidant . However, the Berlin group was already exposed in March 1934, 170 members and sympathizers were arrested, 15 of them brought to justice in the summer of that year, after which the group was only able to develop sporadic activities. At the same time, Kurt Landau formed an exile leadership of the organization in Paris, which was relocated to Barcelona at the beginning of the Spanish civil war . There Landau and the group worked closely with the POUM and coordinated contact with foreign journalists and the integration of international volunteers into the POUM militia . After Landau disappeared without a trace (probably abducted by NKVD agents ) in September 1937, the group disintegrated.

See also

• List of left communist organizations in the Weimar Republic

literature

• Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8375-1282-3 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2015032415081 .
• Hans-Rainer Sandvoss : The “other” capital of the Reich. Resistance from the labor movement in Berlin from 1933 to 1945. Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-936872-94-1 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-201605131589 .