The International Workers’ Relief, Communism, and Transnational Solidarity

Willi Münzenberg in Weimar Germany

Kasper Braskén

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137546852
• eBook ISBN: 9781137546869
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first major study on the making of new cultures, movements and public celebrations of transnational solidarity in Weimar Germany. The book shows how solidarity was used to empower the oppressed in their liberation and resistance movements and how solidarity networks transferred visions and ideas of an alternative global community.

1

Introduction

As dusk was falling over Berlin on a midsummer’s evening in 1931, a trumpet fanfare was heard filling the night air. Tens of thousands of people had gathered to celebrate the annual International Solidarity Day organised by the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, and the grand finale was about to begin. Suddenly a great fireworks display commenced, and a massive symbol of the Arbeiterhilfe was illuminated. A thundering cannonade then echoed through the grounds, and the enthusiasm of the crowd allegedly knew no limits: a spontaneous joint singing of the Internationale broke out, and simultaneously a great blaze of red light started to illuminate the Berlin night sky, symbolising the bright future of the working class.¹

It was one of the numerous dazzling spectacles of transnational solidarity that were arranged by the legendary German communist, anti-militarist and propagandist Wilhelm “Willi” Münzenberg (1889–1940), who was the principal leader of the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (International Workers’ Relief, hereafter referred to as the Arbeiterhilfe).² He had, from the Arbeiterhilfe’s inception in 1921 until its destruction in Germany in 1933, allegedly had “everything in his hands”³ when it came to issues pertaining to the organisation. Although this is not a biographical study of Münzenberg, one of its central aims is to reveal Münzenberg’s often forgotten, but influential role in the shaping of transnational solidarity movements during the interwar era. One could argue that Münzenberg’s political biography as the Arbeiterhilfe’s leader follows, in a significant way, the historical development of transnational solidarity during the interwar period. Already during the early 1930s, both Münzenberg and others even claimed that the Arbeiterhilfe was the “embodiment” or “the organisational expression of international solidarity” which had shouldered the gigantic task of spreading the idea of international solidarity after the First World War. It was subsequently argued that its creation and history represented a revival of international solidarity as it had never previously been conceived in history. The main issue of this study is thus to investigate how the Arbeiterhilfe under Münzenberg’s leadership actually envisaged, organised and brought to life cultures, movements and celebrations of transnational solidarities in Weimar Germany.

The Arbeiterhilfe had its international headquarters in Berlin which functioned as the base, one could argue, for some of the period’s most spectacular solidarity campaigns. The Arbeiterhilfe initiated a broad spectrum of solidarity ventures including famine and hunger relief; strike support; a social political programme for workers’ children and women; and launched campaigns against war, imperialism and fascism. As a part of its cultural work the Arbeiterhilfe produced proletarian films both in Moscow and Berlin and brought Soviet films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1926) to Germany and the world. The Arbeiterhilfe also created an impressive red media empire that published amongst others Kurt Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (1929) and the main illustrated newspaper of the Left in Germany, the Arbeiter–Illustrierte–Zeitung (AIZ) featuring John Heartfield’s photomontages; and it built an extensive international organisation which was supported at different times by artists such as Käthe Kollwitz, Georg Grosz and Heinrich Zille; intellectuals and socialists such as Albert Einstein, Bernhard Shaw, Anatole France, Heinrich Mann, Arthur Koestler, Jon Dos Passos, Romain Rolland, Clara Zetkin, Maxim Gorky and Henri Barbusse; as well as by tens of thousands of German communist and non-communist workers. Characteristically, the Arbeiterhilfe’s activities were built upon the concept of international solidarity which was never restricted to a European solidarity. Instead it specifically promoted the idea of an international solidarity which extended from West to East and from North to South. The Arbeiterhilfe’s various ventures were linked by an overarching theme consisting of the idea and practice of international solidarity, and it is this specific aspect of the organisation that is at the heart of this study.

Through Arbeiterhilfe’s international solidarity campaigns, it encouraged workers to ‘think globally’ and to make them realise that, just as major strikes in neighbouring countries were inextricably linked with their own future prospects, so too were the far-off struggles in the colonies. The Arbeiterhilfe’s history was also integrally connected with the rise of the first global anti-imperialist movement, the League Against Imperialism (LAI) which under the leadership of Münzenberg secured the support of some of the future leaders in the Third World, including Jawaharlal Nehru (India) and Achmed Sukarno (Indonesia).⁴

The Arbeiterhilfe’s network connected all parts of the world as Arbeiterhilfe bureaus were established on all six continents in countries such as China, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the USA, Canada; and most European nations including Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Austria. The German section of the Arbeiterhilfe was, however, the strongest of them all and one of the few areas where the Arbeiterhilfe was successful in forming the organisation into a so-called above-party mass organisation. The establishment and history of the Arbeiterhilfe’s global network forms in this study a significant role, although the main empirical results are placed in the context of Weimar Germany.

Throughout the book, the changing and complex character of international solidarity that in modern terminology is better conceptualised as a form of transnational solidarity, will be analysed. How was the concept of workers’ international solidarity provided with meaning through the creation of a vivid language, visualisation and the practices of solidarity? How were the Arbeiterhilfe’s articulations of solidarity created and changed in relation to the Communist International (Comintern) and the Soviet Union’s policies? As will be demonstrated, most prior studies on solidarity have focused on the sociological and philosophical aspects of this idea, whereas very few have investigated the contextual expressions, representations and articulations of international solidarity. Furthermore, studies on international communism have not focused on the issue of international solidarity from such a perspective.

Through the analysis of a number of the Arbeiterhilfe’s major solidarity campaigns, this study will not only present a new history of the Arbeiterhilfe and Münzenberg but also contribute to a new history of international solidarity in interwar Europe. The subsequent narrative and analysis of the Arbeiterhilfe’s history is both chronologically and thematically structured. All of the chapters thematically share the same basic questions concerning the formation of a transnational solidarity community; for example, the questions of inclusion and exclusion; the construction of ‘the other’; and the relationship between international solidarity and concepts such as charity, philanthropy, humanitarianism, brotherhood, sisterhood and internationalism.

The history of the Arbeiterhilfe is consequently perceived as being integrally connected to the historical understanding of the experiences, mentalities and outlooks of the ‘morbid’ interwar period. In essence, it forms a study of how transnational unity and imaginaries can be constructed beyond borders and national frameworks. But likewise it is a study of the vast number of contentions and difficulties that any such endeavour might entail.

Resurrecting a ‘hidden history’

The history of the interwar period has until recently been largely characterised by methodological nationalism as most studies on the period have either focused on individual states or the international relations between governments. As Laqua (2011) has argued, the vitality of interwar internationalism has frequently been underestimated. There has indeed been a historical tradition in which international institutions have been written out of the study of the twentieth century.⁵

The current study highlights the significance of international organisations being the focal point of any study of the transnational history of the twentieth century. In the words of Iriye (2013) if international history deals with relations amongst nations as sovereign entities, then transnational history focuses instead on cross-national connections and on non-state actors such as international organisations.⁶ Transnational history has stressed the significance of abandoning methodological nationalism in favour of studying the “entanglements of people, ideas, technologies and economies with cultural, political and social movements”. As this study also shows, the focus on the transnational does not imply that state borders or nations would fall outside the scope of any such analysis. On the contrary, the transnational history presented here is written within the specific context of Weimar Germany. In this case, Germany provides a necessary limitation as the historical context would be lost if additional countries were included. The nation provides, therefore, the context in which the transnational can be studied in depth.⁷

The transnational focus on non-state actors or international organisations is problematic when studying the era before 1945. The actual term for “non-governmental organisations” did not exist before the adoption of the United Nations Charter in 1945, and the general use of the term NGO was not established until the 1980s. However, as amongst others Reinalda (2009) has shown, international organisations have a long history, which is often traced back to 1815 and the Congress of Vienna. The organisations established there were not non-governmental organisations, but most often so-called IGOs or intergovernmental organisations. There were of course much older ‘transnational citizens networks’ formed across Europe and America into private associations and societies against issues such as slavery or poverty. It seems, therefore, that international organisations such as the Arbeiterhilfe represented in essence something completely new. In a sense, it resembled organisationally the International Red Cross and several other humanitarian organisations created mainly during or immediately after the First World War, as the Arbeiterhilfe was created as an international relief organisation. In stark contrast to humanitarian initiatives, however, the Arbeiterhilfe was a strong opponent to charity and philanthropy, and advocated instead a class-based international solidarity. In this spirit the Arbeiterhilfe was even described as the “Red Cross of the international working class” in 1924. As Willetts (2011) shows, the definition of what should be accepted as “non-governmental” organisations is in reality far from clear. As the term NGO is so strongly connected to the UN system, one could describe the pre-1945 non-governmental international organisations simply as transnational actors or transnational civil society organisations.⁸

What was the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe?

A number of labels and typologies have been applied to classify organisations such as the Arbeiterhilfe. During the interwar period, it was defined by German government agencies both as a subsidiary organisation of the communist movement (Nebenorganisation/Unterorganisation) and as a communist aid organisation (Hilfsorganisation). The national socialist ‘research’ on the communist movement classified the Arbeiterhilfe as both a united front organisation (Einheitsfront-organisation) and a subsidiary international (Nebeninternationale).⁹ Again in 1926, the Comintern classified the Arbeiterhilfe as part of the system of communist organisations which functioned as “sympathising mass organisation for special purposes”. The special purpose of the Arbeiterhilfe was to function as an international solidarity organisation on a global scale. In its own publications, the Arbeiterhilfe itself used a number of different labels, including “relief organisation of the working class”, “world organisation of proletarian solidarity”, or “above-party mass organisation”.¹⁰

However, previous research has primarily classified the Arbeiterhilfe as a front organisation due to its origins in and close connections to the Comintern. The concept of a front organisation has been an integral part of the totalitarian perspective developed by Hannah Arendt (1951) who highlights that the most striking new organisational device of totalitarian movements before their coming to power was the front organisation which represented a new form of “totalitarian organisation”.¹¹ Looking back, it was first during and after the Second World War that US scholars and state institutions began to utilise the concept of communist front organisations. Fronts were defined as organisations delivering communism in disguise so that “well-meaning people who normally would not participate in openly communist-led activities can be drawn into them”.¹² Here, it was assumed that normal people would only support communism if lured by others. The fear of ideological ‘contagion’ was especially obvious in Cold War America, where for example the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, dedicated a whole chapter to communist front organisations in his book on American communism in 1958.¹³

Curiously, advocates of the front organisation perspective have since 1945 utilised the Arbeiterhilfe as a prime example of a front organisation. The only problem is that the very fundament of a front organisation is that it should not have any outward connection with Moscow or with communism. This is, without any doubt, inaccurate and largely anachronistic in relation to the Arbeiterhilfe.¹⁴ One only has to be reminded of the facts that Münzenberg, as the Arbeiterhilfe’s General Secretary, was a renown communist and Member of the Reichstag in Germany (1924–1933); the Arbeiterhilfe proudly proclaimed that the organisation had been founded on the initiative of Lenin himself; and finally, that it throughout the period openly supported both the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties (CPs). As Mally (2007) notes in an attempt to introduce a post-Cold War analysis of an interwar front organisation (albeit still calling it a front!) one did not have to be a genius to identify ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Awakening International Solidarity, 1921
• 3  Reimagining International Solidarity, 19221923
• 4  Solidarity for Germany, 1923
• 5  Creating a Permanent International Solidarity Organisation
• 6  Broadening and Radicalising Solidarity, 19241932
• 7  Towards a Global International Solidarity, 19241926
• 8  Solidarity on the Screen and Stage
• 9  Celebrating International Solidarity, 19301932
• 10  International Solidarity against War and Fascism, 19271933
• 11  Conclusions: Hidden Cultures of Transnational Solidarity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index