Chapter Fifteen The Communist Party After January 1919

The crushing of the January 1919 uprising dealt a severe blow to the KPD(S). In the following months, its members were engaged on every front, in the front ranks of every struggle, without coordination or centralisation. Despite the fact that the KPD(S) had been proclaimed, the working class did not yet have a revolutionary party, but only scattered fragments, which the leadership elected in January did not succeed in unifying.

Paul Levi The Zentrale was re-constituted in the early days of March. Paul Levi, who succeeded the great victims of January, was relatively new in the movement, but there was no opposition to him, at any rate for the moment. He was the son of a banker in Hechingen, and, at the age of 36, was of a generation younger than the founders of the Spartacus League. Before the war, he had been a lawyer in Frankfurt, joined the SPD, and been elected as a municipal councillor. But he became an activist only after he had met Rosa Luxemburg in September 1913 and had undertaken her defence in the trial which followed her Bockenheim speech.1 She introduced him to the small circle of

1 Beradt, op. cit., pp. 12–15. 300 • Chapter Fifteen revolutionaries who repudiated the union sacrée. After being called up for military service, he was one of the first correspondents of the group which was formed on the evening of 4 August 1914, and he was very harshly treated in the army.2 Still in uniform, he was to be one of the twelve delegates at the conference held on 5 March 1915 in Pieck’s apartment in Berlin.3 At the end of 1916, having been discharged from the army, he went to Switzerland, where the welcome he received from the émigré internationalist circles showed that he was regarded as an important figure in the German revolutionary movement. He expressed a lively hostility not merely to the social-chauvinists, but also to the centrists, which drew him to the attention of the Bolsheviks.4 Lenin in his correspondence deplored certain of his tendencies which were later to be called ultra-leftist,5 and was to write, years later, after Levi had broken from the Communist movement: ‘I made Levi’s acquaintance through Radek in Switzerland in 1915 or 1916. At that time, Levi was already a Bolshevik.’6 It was indeed Radek who introduced him to Lenin and Zinoviev. In December 1916, with Guilbeaux and Sokolnikov, he was one of the founders of the International Socialist Group which was to publish the significantly-named journal La Nouvelle Internationale [The New International].7 He took the pseudonym ‘Paul Hartstein’, and under that name, on Zinoviev’s invitation, on 1 February, he joined the bureau of the Zimmerwald Left at the conference in Olten.8 He was a valuable contact as much for Radek, that outlaw of the German workers’ movement, as for Lenin, who was always seeking a way into Germany. Levi proved himself an ally of the Bolsheviks in the discussions of 1917, because he called in the columns of Arbeiterpolitik for a break with the centrists.9 He signed the manifesto of the internationalists when Lenin left Switzerland to return to Russia, and he then returned to Germany, where he became one of the editors of the Spartacus Letters, and a leader of the Spartacus League.

2 He was stationed with a territorial unit in the Vosges, and underwent a long hunger-strike against the ‘disciplinary’ conditions in his unit. 3 Bartel, op. cit., p. 222. 4 Guilbeaux, op. cit., p. 106. 5 V.I. Lenin, ‘To Inessa Armand’, Collected Works, Volume 35, op. cit., p. 265. 6 V.I. Lenin, ‘A Letter to the German Communists’, Collected Works, Volume 32, op. cit., p. 516. 7 Guilbeaux, op. cit., p. 108; Gankin and Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, Stanford, 1960, p. 565. The first issue included an editorial by Loriot, ‘Towards the Third International’ (La Nouvelle Internationale, no. 1, 1 May 1917). 8 Guilbeaux, op. cit., p. 127; on his presence, see the statement by Münzenberg, cited in Gankin and Fisher, op. cit., p. 538. 9 See Chapter 5.