Frank Hirschinger. "Gestapoagenten, Trotzkisten, Verräter": Kommunistische Parteisäuberungen in Sachsen-Anhalt 1918 - 1953. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. 412 S. EUR 42.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-36903-6.
Reviewed by Gary Roth (Rutgers University at Newark)
Published on H-German (March, 2008)
Communist Party Purges
Frank Hirschinger's book is best understood as a catalogue of the many internal purges that were conducted between 1918 and 1953 by the German Communist Party (KPD) and its successor, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED). Exquisitely researched, Hirschinger's volume situates each episode within its own unique set of contemporary events. He focuses primarily on the events of the 1920s, the formation of the SED in 1948-49, and the purges that shaped the East German bureaucracy from 1949 until Stalin's death in 1953. Purges occurred nearly every year, except for the period 1933-45 when they were supplemented by jail sentences, banishment, or execution in the Soviet Union.
The initial purge in 1919 involved the party's left wing, and Hirschinger's discussion reflects recent research on this topic, as the fate of the expellees has become something of a bellwether for the history of communism in the early Weimar period. The 1919 episode was the first of many lurches towards the right that the KPD undertook in order to embrace a larger membership base, in this case by merging with the numerically stronger Independent Social Democratic Party, the socialist antiwar coalition that found itself politically adrift and divided in the post-World War I era.
In the period immediately following World War II, members and former members of the Social Democratic (SPD) and KPD formed the SED in the areas occupied by the Soviet Union. In the regions on which Hirschinger focuses, the Social Democrats were the stronger partner, with 131,000 members compared to 99,000 KPD members. Nonetheless, pressure on the Social Democrats to amalgamate emanated from the Soviet authorities and resulted in one of the many waves of repression Hirschinger documents. Whole groups were harassed during the immediate postwar period: the nearly 300,000 party members who had belonged to a non-communist political organization prior to 1933, survivors of concentration camps and prisons, KPD members who fled west to France and England, 45,000 party members from Czechoslovakia and other ethnic settlements outside Germany, émigrés to the Soviet Union, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Jewish communists, and even those who had belonged to Esperanto societies twenty years earlier. The most contextualized part of Hirschinger's book centers on tensions between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and the implications they held for German party members.
We thus have a fascinating history of the security reviews and repressive mechanisms used by a government that had been imposed by occupation but nonetheless had deep roots in the political traditions of the country. Sections of Hirschinger's book are devoted to specific East German ministries. In them, he follows developments through memoranda, reports, and meeting notes. Among the best features of the work are the short political biographies of those targeted for exclusion, since a person's political background was the basis upon which decisions were made.
Nonetheless, Hirschinger proceeds as if each purge were the equivalent of every other. During the 1920s, however, the purges were as much tactical as they were ideological. The left wing was purged whenever a potential membership group developed to the immediate right of the party. The periodic purges of the party's right wing occurred when the right wing embraced its own political convictions to a degree that clashed with the highly flexible, even if ideologically rigid, policies in force in the Soviet Union. Invariably, these clashes involved the degree to which the market economy should serve as a lever of socialist development.
The purges of the post-World War II period were of an altogether different nature. The party found threatening any formation that might have offered a more or less coherent structure for dissent. Distinctions between the left and right wings were no longer important, notwithstanding the politicized language used to justify the purges. The party's status was precarious enough that it could not rely on a majority of the population to support its policies. Within the KPD itself, the various groups--veterans of the Spanish Civil War, returnees from Czechoslovakia, and so on--were suspect precisely because of their collective experiences, which were perceived as producing a bond that could serve as an alternative route for communication and faction-building.
Unfortunately, Hirschinger never moves to this level of analysis but remains fixed in localized examples. His emphasis throughout falls on victims of the purges and not on their perpetrators, as if they occurred without human intentionality. Symptomatic of the book's deficiencies is the absence of a conclusion. The exclusive focus on Sachsen-Anhalt raises still other unaddressed themes about the interplay between the local manifestations of the purges and the international political tensions that prompted them. Were developments in Sachsen-Anhalt similar to those elsewhere?
The brief invocation of the post-1989 Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS) in the introduction crystallizes the book's conceptual shortcomings. While highly visible resignations and splits (as well as mergers) characterized its brief history, these do not conform to Hirschinger's definition of a purge as the forceful removal of an individual from the party. The PDS becomes part of a continuum that begins in 1919 and continues throughout the post-World War II period. Hirschinger unites phenomena that are just as easily separated. The outward manifestations of the purges--name-calling and branding of opponents as Gestapo agents, Trotskyites, and spies--took place in highly diverse situations. This lumping together is itself a legacy of anti-communist ideology, not as a political doctrine but as a set of underlying methodological assumptions. Hirschinger's nuanced and carefully researched biographical sketches attempt to move beyond these limiting parameters, but the lack of any comparative discussion about the periods under consideration undermines his contribution. As a catalogue of events, however, the book is a valuable reference tool.
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Citation:
Gary Roth. Review of Hirschinger, Frank, "Gestapoagenten, Trotzkisten, Verräter": Kommunistische Parteisäuberungen in Sachsen-Anhalt 1918 - 1953.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14316
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