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The slump and social order
Pundit from the past: Ernst Thälmann
What would an "ultra-radical" German communist have made of today's crisis?
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A global economic crisis always looks like a good time for revolutionaries, and a worrying time for those anxious about social stability. On the face of it, sharply increased unemployment and political and financial turbulence should provide plenty of willing recruits to leaders promising struggle, even violent struggle, against the powers that be.
But historians who have studied earlier crises know that the likelihood of revolutionary breakdown can vary greatly between societies, even if they appear to face similar problems.
Other, more profound factors may have shaped these societies in ways that an economic crisis cannot sweep away.
A period much on politicians' minds at present is the interwar slump of the 1920s and 30s, seen as posing similar challenges to today. And the contribution of the slump to the rise of fascism serves as a particular warning of the impact such crises can have. But why were the effects in Germany so different from, say, those in Britain? I've been discussing this contrast with Dr Norry LaPorte, a senior lecturer at the University of Glamorgan.
How great was the contrast between British and German responses to the interwar slump?
Norry LaPorte: The wave of social protests that followed the slump was one of a series of crises to blight both nations in the years after the First World War. The disorder was far more extreme in Germany, where the slump followed defeat in the war, revolution, de facto civil war and hyperinflation. The early postwar years were scarred by armed uprisings by the communist left and the ultra-nationalist right, which assassinated politicians who tried to stabilise domestic politics by accepting the terms of the hated Versailles Treaty and its demand for reparations.
During the so-called 'Golden Twenties', all of the major political movements had paramilitary organisations, which fought each other and the police for control of the streets. Serious injury and even deaths were commonplace. The slump made a bad situation worse as the unemployed filled the streets and those still employed feared for their futures. Most notoriously, the Nazis' storm troopers saw political violence against their opponents as almost an end in itself and, after Hitler's appointment as chancellor, waged a campaign of terror against the workers' movement.
In Britain, the war was also a turning point: it marked the slow demise of empire. The rise of nationalism in India as well as Ireland saw high levels of violence. In mainland Britain, however, stability and continuity were the hallmarks of politics. The franchise was extended in 1918 and workers channelled their protests through a resolutely constitutional Labour Party.
Britain did suffer from mass unemployment during the slump and some demonstrations staged by unemployed workers raised concerns about public order. But the liberal-democratic political system was never brought into question - symbolised by the election in 1931 of the Conservative-led national government.
Were other factors as well as politics important?
NL: The brutalising experience of war, in which soldiers witnessed death on a vast scale, is often identified as the seminal experience informing political violence in Weimar Germany. Notably, however, British soldiers also witnessed the barbarity of war, yet there was no mass basis for the political extremes.
Rather than the experience of war per se, what made Germany a violent society was the double whammy of defeat and the almost ubiquitous feeling of 'national humiliation' played out in a political culture lacking long-standing democratic structures. Recurrent postwar financial and economic crises magnified these trends and tended to legitimise political violence as a response to the crisis of the Weimar system.
In Britain, political violence alienated voters; yet in Germany, the extremists' brutality proved attractive. For the dispossessed in Germany, 'modernity' meant social division and dislocation; by contrast, the unifying claims of the Nazis' Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) and the communists' classless society was an inviting proposition.
What are the key factors today in determining how far economic crisis leads to social breakdown?
NL: At the moment, we don't know how hard the credit crunch will hit and how high unemployment will rise. What politicians do know is that following the Wall Street Crash, the failure to provide any fiscal stimulus to what was believed to be a self-regulating system turned a financial crash into the slump. By injecting liquidity into the economy, Gordon Brown hopes to avoid full-blown depression. What he's worried about is not a violent challenge to the political system, just a challenge to his role as prime minister. As in 1931, the electorate is likely to turn to the Conservatives - at least in England.
As the recent G-20 meeting in London showed, any street protest is also likely to come from the margins - this time a loose coalition of anti-globalisation activists. In Germany, the hyperinflation of 1923 still casts its political shadow, ensuring that the printing press is unlikely to be working overtime producing euros.
Another spectre from the past is haunting the German political system: the Left Party, which largely comprises post-communists from the former East Germany. This has performed well in regional elections and, if the economic crisis deepens, will make its mark in national elections later this year. Far right parties will also have high hopes. So, as in the interwar period, political extremists may do better in Germany than in Britain, though to nothing like the extent that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
Pundit from the Past: Ernst Thälmann
What would an "ultra-radical" German communist have made of today's crisis?
One man who would have relished today's crisis, just as he hoped to benefit hugely from the interwar slump, was the German communist leader Ernst Thälmann. He is little remembered today but, in his time, was seen as Hitler's great rival in the battle for power on the streets of Weimar Germany. Born in Hamburg in 1886, he worked as a docker, and was an enthusiastic trade unionist, and also lived for a while in the USA. After fighting in the First World War, he joined the German communists and became leader in 1925 as champion of the Stalinist faction.
As an "emotional ultra-radical", says his biographer Dr LaPorte, Thälmann would have hoped today's global recession was the "final crisis of capitalism", producing much more support for the far left. In Britain, he might well have viewed New Labour - with its close ties to the business community - as a modern version of his bitter enemies the Social Democrats in Weimar Germany. They were condemned as the "social mainstay" of the capitalist system and therefore the main barrier in the way of those seeking radical political and economic change.
Dr LaPorte suggests Thälmann would have been disappointed by the small, fragmentary and single-issue nature of modern protest. Mass demonstrations according to strict political discipline were more his scene, with action on the streets, rallies, leaflets and impassioned speeches. He would have been baffled too by how far society in Britain and Germany has changed, with the decline of industry and spread of consumerism. Thälmann was a "political radical but a social conservative", shocked, Norry LaPorte notes, by the liberation of women that he witnessed in the USA.
While hoping for more activity from the radical left, Thälmann would have been keeping a very wary eye on the progress of the far right - also enthusiastic exploiters of times of crisis. After much communist optimism in the late 1920s and early 30s as the slump took hold, he and his supporters in Germany faced the crushing disappointment of Nazi takeover. The Social Democrats, it turned out, had been far from their worst enemy. And Thälmann himself paid the heaviest personal price for this miscalculation. Seized by the Nazi regime in 1933, he spent over a decade in prison before being shot in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 as part of the reprisals following Claus von Stauffenberg's unsuccessful bomb plot against Hitler.
July 2009
Norry LaPorte is a specialist on the history of political violence and communism in the Weimar Republic