New Left Review I/61, May-June 1970

Eric Hobsbawm

Confronting Defeat: the German Communist Party

Hermann Weber has added about nine hundred pages to the already long bibliography of German Communist history, with his massive work Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus. [1] Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt, 1970. Two volumes, 892 pp. The first question prospective readers will ask is: did he have to? The answer, on the whole, is yes. These two volumes are a monument of erudition and patient, thorough research—17 public archives in Western Germany alone have been consulted—though unfortunately only a provisional one. The major sources for the history of the kpd in the Weimar Republic are in Moscow, and therefore likely to be inaccessible for quite a while, and in East Berlin, and therefore also inaccessible to researchers without the backing of the Central Committee of the sed, among whom Dr Weber is not going to be numbered. He has had to rely essentially on public records, notably police files (when will students of the British left in the 1920’s have as much access to relevant material in our Public Records as historians in other countries?), on a few private archives, a mass of interviews and memoranda from survivors of the period, printed sources and the literature. Probably he has not missed very much, but a monograph about 6 years of kpd history designed on this scale must inevitably suffer far more than a less detailed book from the inability to get at crucial documentation.

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