A01=Eric D. Weitz
Activism
Aftermath of World War II
Author_Eric D. Weitz
Bolsheviks
Bourgeoisie
Bureaucrat
Capitalism
Category=JPFC
Category=JPFF
Category=JPL
Central Committee
Class conflict
Communism
Communist International
Communist Party of Germany
Comrade
Criticism
Dictatorship of the proletariat
Employment
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Federal republic
German Revolution of 1918-19
Germans
Hostility
Ideology
Imperialism
Italian Communist Party
Karl Liebknecht
Labour movement
Left-wing politics
Leninism
Leuna
March Action
Marxism
Marxism-Leninism
Mass meeting
Militant (Trotskyist group)
Nazi Germany
Nazi Party
Nazism
Party leader
Political culture
Political party
Political repression
Political violence
Politics
Princeton University Press
Proletarian revolution
Protest
Public sphere
Radicalism (historical)
Rhetoric
Right-wing politics
Rosa Luxemburg
Social class
Social conflict
Social democracy
Socialist society (Labour Party)
Socialist state
Soviet occupation zone
Soviet Union
Stalinism
State socialism
Trade union
Unemployment
Weimar Republic
Welfare
Wilhelm Pieck
Work council
Workforce
Working class
Workplace
World War I
World War II
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691026824
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 12 Jan 1997
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Eric Weitz presents a social and political history of German communism from its beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1990. In the first book in English or in German to explore this entire period, Weitz describes the emergence of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) against the background of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and clearly explains how the legacy of these periods shaped the character of the GDR to the very end of its existence. In Weimar Germany, social democrats and Germany's old elites tried frantically to discipline a disordered society. Their strategies drove communists out of the workplace and into the streets, where the party gathered supporters in confrontations with the police, fascist organizations, and even socialists and employed workers. In the streets the party forged a politics of display and spectacle, which encouraged ideological pronouncements and harsh physical engagements rather than the mediation of practical political issues. Male physical prowess came to be venerated as the ultimate revolutionary quality.
The KPD's gendered political culture then contributed to the intransigence that characterized the German Democratic Republic throughout its history. The communist leaders of the GDR remained imprisoned in policies forged in the Weimar Republic and became tragically removed from the desires and interests of their own populace.
Eric D. Weitz (1953–2021) was Distinguished Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was also the author of A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States; Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice; and A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (all Princeton).
