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This book analyzes how a sizable group of Gennan workers came to
support Communism and how they in turn influenced the emergence and
development of the German Communist Party (KPD) in its fonnative
period as a mass party. It reconstructs the interaction between a
party and the constituency to which it appealed within the
constraints and opportunities set by social structures, econo mic
conditions, and political competitors. This interaction revolved
around the elaboration and implementation of a specific concept of
revolutionary politics, and this study investigates both the rise
of the KPD as a mass party and its failure to set off a socialist
revolution in the early 1920s in light of the contradictory ways
German workers responded to its revolutionary strategy. When I
began to study the KPD in the mid 1970s, scholarly works in the
West portrayed a party so out of touch with the realities of German
life from 1918 to 1933 that its history was a litany of political
mistakes that led from crisis to catastrophe. The KPD was dominated
by the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, by factional
disputes and personal rivalries among the leadership, by an
authoritarian, centralized party structure that stifled
rank-and-file initiative and imposed a party line determined in
Moscow and Berlin, and by a rigid ideology largely irrelevant to
trends in German economy, society, and politics with at best
compensatory value for a minority of the most impoverished
workers."
This book analyzes how a sizable group of Gennan workers came to
support Communism and how they in turn influenced the emergence and
development of the German Communist Party (KPD) in its fonnative
period as a mass party. It reconstructs the interaction between a
party and the constituency to which it appealed within the
constraints and opportunities set by social structures, econo mic
conditions, and political competitors. This interaction revolved
around the elaboration and implementation of a specific concept of
revolutionary politics, and this study investigates both the rise
of the KPD as a mass party and its failure to set off a socialist
revolution in the early 1920s in light of the contradictory ways
German workers responded to its revolutionary strategy. When I
began to study the KPD in the mid 1970s, scholarly works in the
West portrayed a party so out of touch with the realities of German
life from 1918 to 1933 that its history was a litany of political
mistakes that led from crisis to catastrophe. The KPD was dominated
by the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, by factional
disputes and personal rivalries among the leadership, by an
authoritarian, centralized party structure that stifled
rank-and-file initiative and imposed a party line determined in
Moscow and Berlin, and by a rigid ideology largely irrelevant to
trends in German economy, society, and politics with at best
compensatory value for a minority of the most impoverished workers.
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