workers who sawthe instability caused by thehyperinflation and the resulting
state of emergency asawelcome opportunityfor the KPDtotake action.Accord-
ing toTrotskyist historian Pierre Broué,“the fiasco of Germany’s‘failed Octo-
ber’”proved especiallytraumatic in the country that before the war had seen
the rise of the largest socialist party in the world and that after the war offered
the best chances foracommunist revolution in an advanced capitalist society.³
ForKPD leader Ernst Thälmann (1886–1944), the HamburgUprising confirmed
the party’sforemost role inguiding the revolutionary workingclassand, with the
help of trained paramilitary troops,preparingfor the dictatorship of the proletar-
iat.Tothis day, discussions continue on the fringes of theradical left about
whether 1923 put into question thevery concept of revolution or whether the ser-
ies of uprisingsmust be seen as part of an incompletepolitical project,“the pre-
history ofastruggle that continues to this day.”⁴
Gumperz’sreflections on the month of March point to the symbolic signifi-
cance of short-livedrevolts and localized insurrections to the competingproletar-
ian dreams associatedduring theWeimaryears with SPD,KPD,and various
other leftist partiesand splitter groups.Inmaking sense of these events, the
communists foundguidance in Vladimir Lenin’sprewar writingsonthe so-called
revolutionary situation, which he defines as an intensification of contradictions
resulting from the unwillingness of the lower classesand the inability of the
upper classes to continue living in the oldways.⁵But can one reallyspeak of
what Lenin calls“growingdynamism”in these particularhistoricalinstances?
Or are these events evidence of the weakness of parliamentary institutions
and democratic commitments duringthe Weimar Republic?InMarxist theory,
revolution–as strategy, position, and program–functions as the critical cate-
gory that distinguishesthe proletariat as the agent of history from the working
class underconditions of oppression. Accordingly, the failureofrevolution
threatens to undermine, if not undo, anyheroic conception of the proletariat.
Compensating for these threats to the revolutionary fantasy,the literary repre-
PierreBroué,TheGerman Revolution 1917– 1923 ,trans.John Archer,ed. Ian Birchall and Brian
Pearce, intr.Eric D. Weitz (Leiden: Brill,2005), 899.
Broué,TheGermanRevolution,912.Onthe later political context, see HermannWeber,Die
Wandlung des deutschenKommunismus. Die Stalinisierung derKPDinder WeimarerRepublik
(Frankfurt am Main: EVA, 1969); Klaus-Michael Mallmann,Kommunisten in derWeimarerRepub-
lik. Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung(Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgemein-
schaft,1996); and Klaus Kinner,Der deutscheKommunismus. Selbstverständnis undRealität.
Band1. DieWeimarer Zeit(Berlin: Dietz,2009).
See Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,“MayDay Action by the Revolutionary Proletariat,” Collected
Works,Vol. 19:218–227.
178 Chapter9