Left opposition of the KPD

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As the Left Opposition of the KPD (Bolshevik-Leninists), section of the International Left Opposition (LO), the German supporters of Leon Trotsky organized themselves in the Communist Party of Germany from the late 1920s to October / November 1933 , when they were part of their political Reorientation adopted the name International Communists of Germany .

The organization was formally constituted in March 1930 through the union of a minority movement of the Lenin League around Anton Grylewicz with a remainder of the Weddinger opposition around Kurt Landau . The Left Opposition fought for a reform of the party, above all for the KPD to actively approach all other organizations of the labor movement , especially the Social Democratic Party of Germany , in order to jointly organize the defense against fascist terror, i.e. for a policy of United front . In doing so, she distinguished herself from the Lenin League around Hugo Urbahns , who in her opinion had written off the KPD prematurely and who, years before the surrender of the German workers' movement to National Socialism, was striving to form a new communist party.

The Left Opposition first published the newspaper Der Kommunist , then, after the group around Kurt Landau split off, the weekly newspaper Permanent Revolution , the first issue of which appeared in July 1931. The edition was around 5,000 copies. (In exile, Permanent Revolution was replaced by the magazine Unser Wort , which appeared in 104 issues up to 1941. In the first years of the Hitler dictatorship, the Trotskyist groups in Germany were able to get 1,500 to 2,000 copies of the magazine, initially as a bi-monthly, later even as a weekly newspaper Before 1933, the writings of Leon Trotsky published by the Left Opposition achieved comparatively high sales figures. In 1931/32, 67,000 brochures were sold within one year, including Against National Communism , How is National Socialism Defeated? and should fascism really win?

Strongholds of the left opposition were in Bruchsal , Oranienburg and Dinslaken , where sometimes entire local groups of the KPD had joined Trotskyist positions; in these places it was possible to pursue a united front policy at the local level, for example with local structures of the SPD and the ADGB .

Well-known members of the Left Opposition were Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht , Georg Jungclas , Oskar Hippe , Anton Grylewicz , Walter Held , Helmut Schneeweiss , the Prussian state parliament member Oskar Seipold , the former Reichstag member Maria Backenecker , Otto Kilian , Karl Jahnke and Roman Well (who later turned out to be Agent of the Soviet secret service GPU turned out). In total, the German Left Opposition should have had between 600 and 1,000 members in almost 50 locations at the turn of 1932/33.

The Fourth International emerged from the International Left Opposition in 1938 .

See also

literature

  • Wolfgang Alles: On the politics and history of the German Trotskyists from 1930 (= science and research. 1). 2nd Edition. Neuer ISP-Verlag, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-929008-01-7 (also: Mannheim, University, diploma thesis, 1978).
  • Peter Berens: Trotskyists against Hitler. Neuer ISP-Verlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-89900-121-1 .
  • Marcel Bois: In the fight against Stalinism and fascism. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic (1924–1933). In: Kora Baumbach, Marcel Bois, Kerstin Ebert, Viola Prüschenk (eds.): Currents: Political Images, Texts and Movements (= Rosa Luxemburg Foundation: Manuscripts. 69 = Rosa Luxemburg Foundation: Doctoral Seminar. 9). Dietz, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-320-02128-3 , pp. 86-109, (PDF; 12.0 MB).
  • Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. An overall picture. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8375-1282-3 (also: Berlin, Technical University, dissertation, 2014).
  • Falk Engelhardt: Development and politics of the Trotskyist left opposition in Leipzig from 1924. Chemnitz 2005, as a PDF file here (PDF; 766 kB).
  • Hans Schafranek : The short life of Kurt Landau. An Austrian communist as a victim of the Stalinist secret police. Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-900351-90-2 , pp. 167–346.
  • Annegret Schüle : Trotskyism in Germany until 1933. “For the workers unity front to ward off fascism”. A. Schüle, Cologne 1989.

Web links