Richard Scheringer, the KPD and the Politics of Class and Nation in Germany, 1922–1969

Hitler's storm battalions, the SA—their creation, organization, and worldview—have been the object of extensive scholarly study. A key factor in the victory of National Socialism, the SA has been understood above all as an exemplar of the political violence that helped to destabilize Germany's first parliamentary democracy. Attention to the role of the storm troopers in the Nazi seizure of power—a narrative in which the SA is centrally embedded, and in which it has been largely confined in the scholarship—has tended to foreclose other lines of analysis. Indeed, the metanymic linkage of the SA to the “failure of Weimar” has prevented scholars from considering the complex ideological and social field in which the storm troopers operated as the site of contingency that it was for contemporaries. Alongside a marching, singing, monolithic SA, policing the streets against National Socialism's enemies—an SA appropriate to the long-dominant scholarly focus on the reasons for Weimar's failure and Nazism's rise—another SA exists, one that had to be spoken for, indoctrinated, won over, infiltrated, and surveilled; an SA around which moral persuasion and ideological discussion played at least as prominent a role as the political violence that has so dominated the analytic concerns of historians and social scientists; an SA that attracted the attention of self-styled revolutionaries of every stripe in the seething chaos of Weimar politics, revolutionaries who sensed in the not-quite-closed ambit of the SA's political commitments—and in classed and gendered cultural assumptions with which these commitments were bound up—the utopian horizons of the possible, both before and after January 30, 1933.

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Reappraising Communism and Nationalism

Mevius¹

2009

Natl. pap.

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There are two popular myths concerning the relationship between communism and nationalism. The first is that nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The second is the assertion that in communist Eastern Europe nationalism was oppressed before 1989, to emerge triumphant after the Berlin Wall came down. Reality was different. Certainly from 1945 onwards, communist parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions and guardians of national interests. The communist states of Central and Eastern Europe constructed “socialist patriotism,” a form of loyalty to their own state of workers and peasants. Up to 1989, communists in Eastern Europe sang the national anthem, and waved the national flag next to the red banner. The use of national images was not the exception, but the rule. From Cuba to Korea, all communist parties attempted to gain national legitimacy. This was not incidental or a deviation from Marxist orthodoxy, but ingrained in the theory and practice of the communist movement since its inception.

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Richard Scheringer, the KPD and the Politics of Class and Nation in Germany, 1922–1969

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The SA in the Radical Imagination of the Long Weimar Republic

Reappraising Communism and Nationalism

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