Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Greater Berlin 1930
- Map 2 Central Berlin 1930
- 1 Introduction: Social crisis, radical politics and organized violence in Weimar Germany
- 2 The Party, the neighbourhood and the uses of violence in the ‘Third Period’
- 3 Defining the enemy: The wehrhafter Kampf against the SA in theory and propaganda
- 4 Organizing the wehrhafter Kampf: The Communist defence formations
- 5 Between ‘individual terror’ and ‘mass terror’: The campaign against the SA-taverns, 1931
- 6 The shape of violence in the neighbourhoods
- 7 Who were the streetfighters?
- 8 Conclusion: Communist politics in the Weimar Republic
- A note on sources
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The Party, the neighbourhood and the uses of violence in the ‘Third Period’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Greater Berlin 1930
- Map 2 Central Berlin 1930
- 1 Introduction: Social crisis, radical politics and organized violence in Weimar Germany
- 2 The Party, the neighbourhood and the uses of violence in the ‘Third Period’
- 3 Defining the enemy: The wehrhafter Kampf against the SA in theory and propaganda
- 4 Organizing the wehrhafter Kampf: The Communist defence formations
- 5 Between ‘individual terror’ and ‘mass terror’: The campaign against the SA-taverns, 1931
- 6 The shape of violence in the neighbourhoods
- 7 Who were the streetfighters?
- 8 Conclusion: Communist politics in the Weimar Republic
- A note on sources
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In order to understand the context in which one form of violent action arose among Communists, it is necessary to consider the place that violence of any kind had in the official tactics of their party. Violent action against the Nazis was one of a series of agitational methods being propagated in this period, ranging from public demonstrations to various forms of direct, extra-legal self-help, all characterized by the exercise of physical force. In this chapter some of those methods will be described and their functions examined. There are several ways in which an analysis of this kind might be approached: in terms of the tactical prescriptions of the Communist leadership, of the general economic and social conditions of political activity, or of the character of the KPD's constituency. A combination of these approaches makes it possible to see the Party's violent agitation as the product of a specific conjuncture of social and political circumstances. The exercise of physical force, as a form of the street-politics being pursued by the KPD, appears as a characteristic function of the relationship between the Party and the working-class neighbourhoods that were so much a focus of the fight between Communists and Nazis.
The association of the KPD with certain residential areas had a firm basis in reality, not only in terms of electoral support but also in patterns of association and the structure of daily life. Initially a legacy of pre-war Social Democracy, the existence of neighbourhood ‘strongholds’ by the 1930s reflects the increasing isolation of the Communist Party from the majority of organized labour and from the factories which the Party regarded as the primary sites of class struggle.
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- Information
- Beating the Fascists?The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933, pp. 28 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983
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