We Cannot Escape History by Neil Davidson

Author:Neil Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608465064
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2015-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

7

WHEN HISTORY FAILED TO TURN: PIERRE BROUÉ ON THE GERMAN REVOLUTION

INTRODUCTION

“This not a German event. There no longer are any ‘German events.’”1 With these words to the founding conference of the Communist Party of Germany in December 1920, its president, Paul Levi, declared the inseparability of the German Revolution from the global struggle for socialism. There had, of course, been many events in Germany during the preceding three years. And what events they were. Apart from Russia, no other country could boast of a comparable succession of revolutionary episodes in such a relatively short period of time. But Germany was not just inseparable from the world revolution in the years following 1917, it was also central to its ultimate success or failure. In October 1923, only three years after Levi had optimistically greeted the formation of the Communist Party of Germany as the harbinger of the working class’s ascent to power, the party proved itself incapable of seizing the opportunities presented by the capitalist crisis. That defeat, that refusal to even seriously engage in battle, was a decisive precondition for the rise of Stalinism in Russia and Nazism in Germany itself.

An understanding of this moment in German history is therefore of considerable importance to contemporary socialists. Where should we turn to gain such an understanding? In his own book on the German Revolution, first published in 1982, Chris Harman noted that he had written it for “all those who are—like myself before I began work on the book—frustrated by the need to pull together a fragmentary knowledge of the German Revolution out of a plethora of different sources, some out of print and many of the best only available in German or French.”2 Thankfully, one of the French works to which Harman alludes, perhaps the best of all, Pierre Broué’s The German Revolution, has at last been published in English.3

BROUÉ’S ACHIEVEMENT

Broué does full justice to the importance of his subject. This is a work conceived on an epic scale, comprising nine hundred pages of carefully researched text, plus a chronological table and biographical notes. The editors are particularly to be congratulated for giving up-to-date English references for Broué’s original Russian and German sources wherever these were available. The main problem with this excellent edition is that the publishers have neglected to provide an index—a quite extraordinary omission in a book of this size and one that is likely to prove the biggest obstacle to anyone trying to negotiate their way through it. Those prepared to try will, however, find it worth the effort.

Revolutions—even failed revolutions like the German—occupy definite periods of time, starting from the moment at which the victory of the contending class becomes possible and ending in either victory or defeat, but one way or the other with the passing of the “revolutionary situation,” at least for the immediate future. The periodization of even successful revolutions has posed significant problems for historians; with unconsummated “revolutionary situations” these difficulties are multiplied.4 Prior to Broué’s book first appearing in 1971,

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