son, well suitedto confront the failureofrevolution once more–but this time
through the lens of literarytechnique.
The MarchAction had started on21 March with the VKPD’scall forageneral
strike, allegedlyinresponse to the arrival ofSicherheitspolizei(security police, or
Sipo) in Mansfeld Land. On 24 March,astate of emergencywasdeclared for Sax-
ony, with the Reichswehr stabilizingthe situation around27 March. Alreadyby1
April, everything was over.For little more thanaweek, the possibility ofarev-
olutionary situation meant massdemonstrations, actioncommitteemeetings,oc-
cupations of factories, clashes with security police and armed forces, and bomb-
ingsofcity halls andrail lines, as well as isolated acts of arson, sabotage, and
looting.Not countingsmall uprisingsinHamburgand parts of theRuhr region,
the MarchActionremainedaregional affair.The outcome: No more than120,000
workers wereonstrike at anygiven time. Most accounts acknowledge 180 fatal-
ities, with thirty-five policemen and 145 civilians among the dead.Numerous ar-
rests,highlypoliticized trials, and lengthyprison sentences followed, with the
state of emergency in Saxonylasting until September.
Compared to the 1920 Ruhr Uprising,the 1921 MarchAction was little more
than an amateurish reenactment ofarevolutionary fantasy.Subsequent explan-
ations for the workers’defeat and its political consequences followed predictable
patterns of argumentation. The intensification of class conflictpriorto the March
Action, the moreself-serving explanations went,had revealed the underlying
contradictions in capitalism, clarified the differencebetween revolution and
counterrevolution, and delivered ever more workersto themovement.Inhis
memoirs, even Hoelz admitted to what was euphemisticallycalled tactical er-
rors.⁷Writing in British exile, former KPDactivist Evelyn Anderson disparaged
the MarchAction as“one of the most pathetic chapters in the history of the Ger-
man Labour movement.”⁸
Historical assessments by HeinrichAugustWinkler and SilviaKoch-Baum-
garten put much of the blame on internal struggles among the leftradical par-
ties, with VKPD,USPD,and KAPD creating thevery conditions to which their
competingversions of communism weresupposedtooffer solutions.Limited
mass support,local infighting,bad organization, andavolatile mixture of revo-
lutionaryromanticism and left-wingactionism madefailure almost inevitable.
Today, most scholars agree that the MarchActionwasneitheralong-planned
putschattempt by the KPD norajustified mass response to state violence. In-
See Max Hoelz,Vomweißen Kreuzzurroten Fahne. Jugend-,Kampf-und Zuchthauserlebnisse
(Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg, 1984).
Evelyn Anderson,Hammer or Anvil: TheStoryofthe GermanWorking-ClassMovement(Lon-
don: Gollancz, 1945),79 and 80.
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