Saturday, March 15, 2014
Executive (Omni Shoreham)
This paper addresses the turn to Marxism-Leninism and the politics of the 1920s KPD [German Communist Party] within the West German Left of the 1970s. The year 1968 marked an important moment in historical memory in Europe and beyond. Student activists called attention to the crimes of National Socialism – most importantly, the Holocaust – as well as pioneered bold new forms of political participation and forged unprecedented political alliances with students from Latin America, Africa and Asia. Without doubt, students politics paved the way for much of the political liberalization that was to follow on the national political stage. Yet, when the SDS [Socialist German Student Federation] – the largest organization of the student movement – disintegrated at the end of the sixties, many of its former members abandoned their anti-authoritarianism and found a new political home in one or more of innumerable Marxist-Leninist party-building projects, frequently rejecting de-Stalinization and the “revisionism” of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. How is it that these harbingers of European democracy found themselves entangled in a web of Stalinist party-building? To put this question differently, how can we reconcile the fact that the purported liberalizers of the Republic turned to such anti-liberal ideology in the 1970s? Based on research conducted in Berlin and Amsterdam, this presentation will investigate these questions by following the ways in which the 1920s KPD became a reference point for student activists in the late 1960s and 1970s and the political possibilities and limitations they entailed.
