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
Preface
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
The aim of this book is to examine the reasons why Communists in German cities during the closing years of the Weimar Republic engaged in a highly organized and often brutal form of gang warfare with their political opponents, usually the National Socialists. I have tried to show how it was possible that members of the Communist movement should have taken up such activities, and how the vigour and tenacity with which they carried on their ‘battle for the streets’ became a source of discord within the movement. When I began my research on this theme, as a graduate student in Cambridge, it was because I was interested in ‘political violence’ as such and its causes. It should be apparent that the book in its present form is very much a study in the history of the German Communist Party (KPD). I am convinced that such a shift of focus must arise inevitably from the nature of the question, once it is recognized that ‘collective violence’ and especially that kind that is known explicitly as ‘political violence’ is simply one of a number of possible forms of political action. Politics, so a leading British politician has recently declared, is for people. What is more certain is that politics is what people do for and about each other, and what people say they are doing. And in the last century it has been the parties of the working-class movement and their organized opponents who have provided the language and arguments in terms of which popular politics has been carried on in Europe.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beating the Fascists?The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933, pp. ix - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983