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Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben Mit Und Gegen Kommunisten 1895-1961 (Zeithistorische Studien, 51)
Ruth Fischer (1895-1961) war 1924/25 weltweit die erste Frau an der Spitze einer der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands. Wie niemand sonst stand sie fur die Angleichung der KPD an das autoritare sowjetische Parteimodell. Spater wurde sie - von Hitler und Stalin verfolgt - zur leidenschaftlichen Antikommunistin, die in den USA sogar gegen ihre Bruder Gerhart und Hanns Eisler sowie gegen Bertolt Brecht aussagte. Zuletzt suchte sie wieder Anschluss an eine undogmatische Linke. Ruth Fischers bewegtes Leben wird in dieser Biographie auf der Grundlage bisher unerschlossener Archivquellen, darunter FBI-Akten, erstmals ausfuhrlich dargestellt. Das Buch zeigt exemplarisch, wie Kommunismus und Antikommunismus sich im Kalten Krieg in einer Person verschranken konnten. Eine Biographie, die einen herausragenden Beitrag zur Kommunismus-Forschung liefert und der man viele Leser wunscht. (Thomas Kroll, Jena)
759 pages, Hardcover
Published March 3, 2013
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December 16, 2021
This is a massive biography of Ruth Fischer, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) from 1924–1926. I am getting #Stolpersteine (commemorative brass cobblestones) placed in front of her former home in Berlin-Neukölln. So even though the author of this book, Mario Keßler, joked that it was way too long to read from cover to cover, I thought I would give it a try.
Fischer is not a popular figure. She was both a communist and an anticommunist, and thus antagonized everyone. As an obituary by Sebastian Haffner put it, "her fate was to unintentionally damage the side she was temporarily aligned with more than the side she was fighting." Fischer must have been an absolutely enthralling speaker, because she had great influence for a time, even though it does not seem like she was ever a particularly talented politician.
Fischer grew up in Vienna as Elfriede Eisler. Her younger brothers were Gerhart Eisler, a communist politician (though he later became a very loyal Stalinist, and she denounced him fanatically), and Hans Eisler, a composer. This radical family is typical of Jewish life in the first half of the 20th century. Myriad forms of discrimination pushed Jewish young people like the Eisler siblings towards different forms of revolutionary modernism, whether political or artistic. Basically: "You are going to reject me? Well too bad, bourgeois society, because I reject you first!"
Ruth Fischer got membership card #1 when the Communist Party of Austria was founded in 1918. In 1920, she moved to Berlin to be at the center of world revolution, leaving her infant son with her parents in Vienna. She quickly took on a leading role in the KPD's Berlin-Brandenburg organization, where she opposed the party leadership with ultraleft positions. After the events of 1923, when the KPD's bid for power failed, the militants were enraged and swept Fischer's faction to power. She became the KPD's chairperson at just 28. (This is where such a thorough biography is interesting: She was technically the "Chairperson of the Political Secretariat of the KPD," called "Politleiter" in Comintern-speak. Party chairperson was a separate, more symbolic post that was held at the time by Ernst Thälmann.) Fischer was the de facto leader of the KPD from 1924 to 1925 — meaning the KPD was the first mass party anywhere in the world to have a woman leader (Rosa Luxemburg), and also the second.
As a leader, however, Fischer never seems to have seriously studied the question of how Communists could win over the majority of the working class and take power. She was great at holding speeches about bold revolutionary action etc., but in the face of a revolutionary situation that required a clear strategy, she was appears to have been largely helpless.
After being expelled from the KPD in 1926, Fischer was an unaffiliated leftist with no program. She at first joined the Leninbund, formed by expelled members of the KPD's left wing, but resigned in an (unsuccessful) attempt to get back into Stalin's good graces. In the second half of the 1930s, she was a member of the Fourth International for a while, at Trotsky's urging, against the will of the German section — an episode I'm sure most Trotskyists would prefer to forget.
How did Fischer become a virulent anticommunist and a collaborator of McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee? It appears the shift came quite suddenly after the murder of her lifelong partner Arkadi Maslow in Havana, in all likelihood by Stalinist agents. After the German invasion of France, Fischer made it to New York, but Maslow with his Soviet passport and could get to Cuba. Six months later, Fischer managed to secure a U.S. visa for him. When she called to give him the news, she learned he was dead!
Maslow was certainly more political than Fischer, and without him she seems to have lost her bearings. All of a sudden, she was willing to embrace anyone and and anything as long as they were opposed to Stalin. She made wild denunciations of her brother Gerhart as the "top red in America" — which besides being cruel, wasn't even true. Gerhart had been a Comintern agent, but was not playing much of a role in the United States in the 1940s.
By the early 1950s, Fischer was such a well-respected anticommunist that she was getting offers for collaboration from all over the world. This included a glowing letter from one Eberhard Taubert, a prominent anticommunist in West Germany. Fischer recalled that Taubert had been a Nazi leader in Berlin. In 1933, the SA leader had detained and tortured her teenage son. This seems to have been a bit of a wakeup call. Fischer scaled back her work with the FBI and moved to Paris, where she again became a kind of eclectic leftist, who was sympathetic to Tito and different anticolonial movements. She died in 1961 in Paris.
This book is an incredible work of scholarship. If the introduction is to be believed, Keßler wrote the whole thing in just a couple of years years, but he clearly studied tens of thousands of pages. Like many academic historians of communism (Rabinowitch for example), Keßler seems to support a "democratic" version of communism. The idea is to use coalition politics to overcome capitalism without having to destroy the capitalist state – like Eurocommunism, but for historians.
This leads, in my much less learned opinion, to some important errors. Keßler presents the discussion on the "Workers' Government" in the Communist International in the early 1920s very differently than I understand it. I think of the "Workers' Government" as a tactic to capture positions for revolutionary struggle: form a government that disarms the bourgeoisie and arms the working class on the eve of great revolutionary clashes. Keßler, in contrast, sees it as a strategy for a forming coalition governments with social democrats that would implement profound democratic reforms.
There are similar problems with the discussion of the united front against fascism. For Trotsky, this was a tactic for a revolutionary party to gather forces for the struggle against capitalism. But for many historians who feel sympathetic to Trotsky, the idea of common actions between communists and social democrats becomes an end unto itself, or a prelude to the formation of a "left government." Such a view of the united front has more to do with politics of Albert Einstein and Käthe Kollwitz, or perhaps the SAP, than Trotskyism.
Despite these criticisms, a great book. A long read, but consistently informative and entertaining.
p.s. I should briefly comment on the most famous episode in Fischer's life. When speaking to university students in Berlin in the mid-1920s, with many nationalists and fascists in the audience, she was quoted in a newspaper report saying something like: "You want to kill Jewish capitalists? Great! But we must kill German capitalists too." This is often presented as an example of communist antisemitism — a bizarre accusation against a party with a mostly Jewish leadership at the time. Based on Keßler's research, we can say that Fischer definitely said something like this. At the same time, it was an off-the-cuff remark to hecklers. I don't think the comment deserves much attention, even if it is objectionable.
Fischer is not a popular figure. She was both a communist and an anticommunist, and thus antagonized everyone. As an obituary by Sebastian Haffner put it, "her fate was to unintentionally damage the side she was temporarily aligned with more than the side she was fighting." Fischer must have been an absolutely enthralling speaker, because she had great influence for a time, even though it does not seem like she was ever a particularly talented politician.
Fischer grew up in Vienna as Elfriede Eisler. Her younger brothers were Gerhart Eisler, a communist politician (though he later became a very loyal Stalinist, and she denounced him fanatically), and Hans Eisler, a composer. This radical family is typical of Jewish life in the first half of the 20th century. Myriad forms of discrimination pushed Jewish young people like the Eisler siblings towards different forms of revolutionary modernism, whether political or artistic. Basically: "You are going to reject me? Well too bad, bourgeois society, because I reject you first!"
Ruth Fischer got membership card #1 when the Communist Party of Austria was founded in 1918. In 1920, she moved to Berlin to be at the center of world revolution, leaving her infant son with her parents in Vienna. She quickly took on a leading role in the KPD's Berlin-Brandenburg organization, where she opposed the party leadership with ultraleft positions. After the events of 1923, when the KPD's bid for power failed, the militants were enraged and swept Fischer's faction to power. She became the KPD's chairperson at just 28. (This is where such a thorough biography is interesting: She was technically the "Chairperson of the Political Secretariat of the KPD," called "Politleiter" in Comintern-speak. Party chairperson was a separate, more symbolic post that was held at the time by Ernst Thälmann.) Fischer was the de facto leader of the KPD from 1924 to 1925 — meaning the KPD was the first mass party anywhere in the world to have a woman leader (Rosa Luxemburg), and also the second.
As a leader, however, Fischer never seems to have seriously studied the question of how Communists could win over the majority of the working class and take power. She was great at holding speeches about bold revolutionary action etc., but in the face of a revolutionary situation that required a clear strategy, she was appears to have been largely helpless.
After being expelled from the KPD in 1926, Fischer was an unaffiliated leftist with no program. She at first joined the Leninbund, formed by expelled members of the KPD's left wing, but resigned in an (unsuccessful) attempt to get back into Stalin's good graces. In the second half of the 1930s, she was a member of the Fourth International for a while, at Trotsky's urging, against the will of the German section — an episode I'm sure most Trotskyists would prefer to forget.
How did Fischer become a virulent anticommunist and a collaborator of McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee? It appears the shift came quite suddenly after the murder of her lifelong partner Arkadi Maslow in Havana, in all likelihood by Stalinist agents. After the German invasion of France, Fischer made it to New York, but Maslow with his Soviet passport and could get to Cuba. Six months later, Fischer managed to secure a U.S. visa for him. When she called to give him the news, she learned he was dead!
Maslow was certainly more political than Fischer, and without him she seems to have lost her bearings. All of a sudden, she was willing to embrace anyone and and anything as long as they were opposed to Stalin. She made wild denunciations of her brother Gerhart as the "top red in America" — which besides being cruel, wasn't even true. Gerhart had been a Comintern agent, but was not playing much of a role in the United States in the 1940s.
By the early 1950s, Fischer was such a well-respected anticommunist that she was getting offers for collaboration from all over the world. This included a glowing letter from one Eberhard Taubert, a prominent anticommunist in West Germany. Fischer recalled that Taubert had been a Nazi leader in Berlin. In 1933, the SA leader had detained and tortured her teenage son. This seems to have been a bit of a wakeup call. Fischer scaled back her work with the FBI and moved to Paris, where she again became a kind of eclectic leftist, who was sympathetic to Tito and different anticolonial movements. She died in 1961 in Paris.
This book is an incredible work of scholarship. If the introduction is to be believed, Keßler wrote the whole thing in just a couple of years years, but he clearly studied tens of thousands of pages. Like many academic historians of communism (Rabinowitch for example), Keßler seems to support a "democratic" version of communism. The idea is to use coalition politics to overcome capitalism without having to destroy the capitalist state – like Eurocommunism, but for historians.
This leads, in my much less learned opinion, to some important errors. Keßler presents the discussion on the "Workers' Government" in the Communist International in the early 1920s very differently than I understand it. I think of the "Workers' Government" as a tactic to capture positions for revolutionary struggle: form a government that disarms the bourgeoisie and arms the working class on the eve of great revolutionary clashes. Keßler, in contrast, sees it as a strategy for a forming coalition governments with social democrats that would implement profound democratic reforms.
There are similar problems with the discussion of the united front against fascism. For Trotsky, this was a tactic for a revolutionary party to gather forces for the struggle against capitalism. But for many historians who feel sympathetic to Trotsky, the idea of common actions between communists and social democrats becomes an end unto itself, or a prelude to the formation of a "left government." Such a view of the united front has more to do with politics of Albert Einstein and Käthe Kollwitz, or perhaps the SAP, than Trotskyism.
Despite these criticisms, a great book. A long read, but consistently informative and entertaining.
p.s. I should briefly comment on the most famous episode in Fischer's life. When speaking to university students in Berlin in the mid-1920s, with many nationalists and fascists in the audience, she was quoted in a newspaper report saying something like: "You want to kill Jewish capitalists? Great! But we must kill German capitalists too." This is often presented as an example of communist antisemitism — a bizarre accusation against a party with a mostly Jewish leadership at the time. Based on Keßler's research, we can say that Fischer definitely said something like this. At the same time, it was an off-the-cuff remark to hecklers. I don't think the comment deserves much attention, even if it is objectionable.
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