Report:  German Studies Association 2002 Session Nr. 23, The
Anti-Fascist Fight: Constructing the Fascists as Enemy from Weimar to
Post-War Germany

Moderator:  Robert Goodrich, Northern Michigan University

"Weimar Communist Visions of Masculine Militancy in the Anti-Fascist
Struggle"
Sara Sewell, Marquette University

"An Antifascist Education:  Communicating Antifascism in the Soviet Zone
of Germany, 1945-1949."
Benita Blessing, Ohio University

Commentator:  H. Glenn Penny, University of Missouri-Kansas City

During this session of the 2002 GSA, Sara Sewell and Benita Blessing
attempted to situate anti-fascism more broadly in German history, to
move beyond the literature on Widerstand, and to plot out, in at least
an initial fashion, the trajectory of anti-fascism from the early years
of the Weimar Republic through the first decades of the GDR.  These were
provocative papers.  Historians of Europe and Germany know very well
that anti-fascist rhetoric was harnessed during these periods; anyone
who has read Orwell is aware of the ways in which antifascism motivated
a range of individuals to action during the Spanish Civil war. The
detailed studies of paramilitary politics in Weimar Germany by James
Diehl and others have also touched on it, and although the majority of
the literature on mass politics and violence during the Weimar Republic
tends to privilege the Nazis, we have seen the antifascist flyers and
proclamations circulated by the Communists before.  But using
antifascism as an analytical category that can be applied across party
lines and historians' periodization is surprisingly uncommon. Even in
the exceptional work on German communism that has come out in recent
years, antifascism fails to appear as one of the vehicles that can be
traced across Germany's different regimes.

Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the general texts most historians
use to teach twentieth-century Germany (those by Volker Berghahn and
Mary Fullbrook) hardly mention antifascism at all, and antifascism gets
surprisingly little play in the books on Weimar.  Detlev Peukert's
volume on the Weimar Republic, for example, which is perhaps the most
widely cited and used, lists a host of "antis" in the index:
anti-Bolshevism, anti-Jewish boycott, anti-liberalism, anti-Marxism, and
of course anti-Semitism, but no anti-fascism.  Similarly, we know a lot
about the Anti Fascist Action Committees that sprang up spontaneously in
both the Allied and Russian zones of occupation in 1945, and the fact
that they were eventually dissolved in even the Soviet zone.  And we
know about the ways in which the three non-Communist parties in the East
were quickly forced into an 'anti-fascist block', but our discussion of
that usually turns around the ways in which this block functioned to
undermine the freedom of the parties it absorbed, and the general
argument is that it was designed to create the illusion of something
similar to the western coalition governments.  But there has been little
attention to the ways in which antifascism was actually a shared ideal
as much as a rhetorical tool, an ideal that many Germans seemed to
eagerly embrace.

In short, as Sewell and Blessing tried to suggest, it appears that we
may not have taken German anti-fascism, as either rhetoric or movement,
seriously enough.  Indeed, Sewell and Blessing encourage us to think
about the ways in which Germans from a range of different social
backgrounds and political orientations, Germans who historians and
social scientists usually divide up into separate categories in their
studies of party politics, paramilitary organizations, and electoral
results, came together over a series of decades and under three
political regimes to resist fascism.  Antifascism was not a clearly
organized movement, but it was a concept or ideal with broad emotional
appeal that went well beyond the communist party and its closest
supporters.  And that seems worth exploring, because it has the
potential to offer us a useful addition to current efforts to rethink
the history of twentieth century Germany as a whole, to reconceptualize
the consistencies in German society and culture that flowed through
National Socialism and persisted after it, and it may even offer us
insights into if and how Weimar failed and how Germans became Nazis.
Sara Sewell's paper was focused on the ways in which Weimar Communists
drew on anti-fascist rhetoric in order to pull together working class
neighborhoods in a kind of red front against Nazi street fighters and,
in their greatest hopes, perhaps even boost support for their party.
She stressed that although they failed to achieve that second goal, the
rhetoric of antifascism was enough to unite the supporters of a range of
parties on the political left against Nazi aggression in their
neighborhoods.  The dynamic she presented was more a reaction to fascist
assaults than a pro-active attack on fascist ideals, but she argued that
there was a striking solidarity around the funerals of martyrs in
Cologne, and even in the neighborhood actions she discussed.

These antifascist actions, however, emerge more as the product of
negative integration than ideological consensus.  Indeed, ideology is
the bugbear in her story.  The fact that the KPD attempted, and to a
large degree succeeded, to organize antifascists without trying to
recruit them into the party is striking.  And yet it was clearly the
KPD's epithet of "social fascist" that did the most to undermine the
very united front they sought to create.  This tension, between the
efforts at unifying opposition toward the fascists and even stronger
efforts to assail the socialists is one that needs much more attention.
We need to know what, precisely, the relationship between the KPD and
the broader antifascist front looked like, and we also need to know
where that broader front broke down.  Because despite the moments in
which socialists, communists, and even the Reichsbanner come together in
the streets to confront the SA, they never translate into a broader
political coalition, effective electoral results, or an ability to
undermine Nazi aggression in Germany.  Nor does the organization of a
broader platform of antifascism prevent some workers from joining with
the Nazis, a point Sewell failed to address. That, of course, is the
main reason why antifascism has gotten so little play in the scholarship
on Weimar so far-it remained, in many ways, a political failure.

If the antifascist movements presented by Sewell eschewed ideology,
those presented by Blessing emphasized it.  Indeed, this is one place
where the papers diverged.  The antifa movements immediately after the
war may have been spontaneous and widespread, but the movement by
teachers in the Soviet zone to create a new educational structure around
antifascism was based on a well thought out, carefully articulated, and
in many ways unifying ideology. As Blessing presented it, this movement
turned around an argument that the divisions within the German
educational system before 1945 both reflected and perpetuated class and
political divisions in Germany.  These divisions had weakened the German
nation and made Germans susceptible to Nazi propaganda.  Because the
divisions in Germany had facilitated the Nazi seizure of power, these
pedagogues argued that the new Germany needed a unified vision based on
equal educational opportunities and grounded in antifascism.  This was a
unifying vision, in that it was meant to work for all Germans, not
simply those in the Soviet Zone, but it was also a vision that became,
with the division of Germany, a point of disjuncture and another way in
which East Germans could blame the West for undermining unification.

This commentator was particularly taken with Blessing's efforts to link
pre-war and post-war stances on fascism and to show that much of the
anti-fascist rhetoric in the Soviet zone returned to a focus on ideology
because of the failure of a united anti-fascist front that had not been,
as Sewell argues, grounded in ideology.  Yet in both cases, before and
after the war, the united fronts grounded in antifascism seem to have
been hindered more from the connections to Moscow and the strong hand
that the Comintern had on these movements-a point that neither Sewell
nor Blessing addressed directly.  Indeed, they both skirted the issue.
Blessing went to pains to point out that the anti-fascist movement was
not directed nor controlled from Moscow, and Sewell tried to distance
the movement from the party.  I am quite sympathetic with their
efforts.  But we cannot talk about antifascism promoted by the KPD in
either Weimar Germany or the Soviet Zone without engaging the larger
context of the Soviet Union's influence on Communists in these times and
places.  Home grown Germans may very well be given much of the credit
for the successes of anti-fascism before and after the war, but in both
cases Soviet influence in the party (real or perceived) helped to
undermine the KPD's ability to unify Germans around the banner of
antifascism.  Returning the context of KPD-Soviet relations to their
analyses would only strengthen their arguments about the strange life of
antifascism in a series of different political regimes and stimulate, I
suspect, much further discussion.

H. Glenn Penny
University of Missouri-KansasCity


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2002 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

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