Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch group

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The Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch group describes a nationalist movement that emerged within the SPD in 1915 , which consisted of anti-revisionist Marxists formerly belonging to the party left , and tried to obtain the approval of the SPD majority for the war credits in August 1914 and the civil peace policy of the SPD leadership under Friedrich Ebert to underpin Marxistically.

Protagonists

The protagonists of the group were (with their functions in the SPD 1914):

  • Lensch

  • Haenisch

In the intellectual environment of the group to settle also include Ernst Heilmann (later leader of the SPD in the Prussian parliament , who died in a concentration camp), August Winnig (1922 expelled from the SPD), and the Münster Professor Johann Plenge , in which the later SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher received his doctorate. The group was mentored by the Russian revolutionary and entrepreneur Alexander Parvus .

  • Heilmann

  • Crazy

Positions

Based on the August experience in 1914, the apparent national unity of all parties and social forces at the beginning of the war, the group propagated terms such as “state socialism”, “war socialism” and “ national community ” and hoped that a German victory in World War I would lead to the establishment of a socialist social order throughout Europe and the liberation of the European peoples from tsarist oppression and British and French imperialism .

The group was, above all through Haenisch, close to the Russian-German journalist and revolutionary Parvus ( Israil Lazarewitsch Helphand ), in whose journal Die Glocke the group's most important writings were published from 1915 onwards. The group disintegrated in 1917 when Parvus turned away from her and began to campaign for the revolution in Russia and more and more members of the SPD became aware of the impending military defeat.

After the establishment of the Weimar Republic , the protagonists again assigned themselves more to the political "mainstream":

  • Heinrich Cunow worked alongside his professor at the Berlin University ( ethnology ) a. a. participated in the Heidelberg program of the SPD, lost his professorship in 1933 and died penniless in Berlin in 1936.
  • Paul Lensch was the only one in the group that did not find their way back into the "SPD mainstream", but continued to alienate himself from the SPD. From 1920 he worked for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung , which was financed by Hugo Stinnes ( DVP ) , from 1922 also as editor-in-chief, and the publishing director was Hans Humann , who before 1918 had been a naval attaché in Constantinople. Lensch resigned from the SPD in autumn 1922 and thus preceded a party exclusion process; he had been accused of indirectly supporting the Kapp Putsch . The former Marxist finally moved to the national conservative camp and died in 1926.

literature

  • Robert Sigel, 1976, The Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch Group: Berlin, Duncker and Humblot (Series: Contributions to a History of Bavaria in the Industrial Age, Volume 14), ISBN 3-428-03648-4
  • Steffen Bruendel, The Birth of the “Volksgemeinschaft” from the “Spirit of 1914”. Development and change of a “socialist” social concept, in: Zeitgeschichte-online, topic: Front experience and post-war order. Effect and perception of the First World War, May 2004, URL: < http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/thema/die-geburt-der-volksgemeinschaft-aus-dem-geist-von-1914 >
  • Joseph Rovan , 1980, Die Sozialdemokratie im Krieg 1914–1918: in: ders., Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (foreword by Richard Löwenthal ): Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Chapter 5, pp. 105–120 (discussion of the intellectual environment of the L.- C.-H.-Gruppe and its history of impact on p. 109), ISBN 3-596-23433-6

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rovan, p. 109.