Germany

Shop workers strike in Germany

Shop workers are on strike in Berlin (and other parts of Germany) at the moment (11 December 2007) - a number of supermarket chains, department stores, the biggest bookshop chain, and also H&M. The employers want to abolish the bonuses for late and Sunday shifts - 20% bonus after 6.30pm Monday-Friday, 50% bonus after 8pm, 120% bonus on Sundays and public holidays, 20% bonus on Satudays after 4.30pm. These bonuses make up a lot on top of the basic pay. When abolished, a full time worker would lose 180 Euro per month (or the equivalent in time). The union have attempted to hold talks with the...

German rail strike will smash sweetheart deals

Far from being only a footnote to the French strike, the rail workers’ strike on 14-17 November — about union recognition and pay — is an important struggle. In 1994, the former East German Reichsbahn was merged with the West German Bundesbahn, and the new company, Deutsche Bahn, became a “private” company, albeit owned entirely by the state. Since the fall of the Wall, 400,000 jobs on the German railways have been destroyed, yet the new company has only made a profit since 2005. The major union, Transnet, part of the German TUC, supports a planned sell-off, and Transnet’s leader Norbert...

A country of spies

Dan Katz reviews The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) In East Germany in 1984, just before Gorbachev and Soviet glasnost, a Stasi (secret police) agent Gerd Wiesler sets up a surveillance operation on playwright Georg Dreyman. Dreyman has been being targeted by a senior Communist Party official, not for political reasons, but because he wants to sleep with Dreyman’s girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, and therefore wants to gather “evidence” against Dreyman. Wiesler wires up Dreyman’s East Berlin flat, and he and an assistant set to work monitoring their victim 24 hours a day. Dreyman is...

How could Hitler win power?

As the establishment commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of “Hitler’s war” in Europe, we take the opportunity to examine the question: how did it happen that Hitler, the crazy war-lord of German imperialism, was allowed to come to power? How did it happen that the German labour movement let Hitler smash it, without a fight? It was the most powerful labour movement in the world. Its majority party, the Socialist Party, was the mainstay of the Weimar Republic set up after Germany’s defeat in the 1914-18 war, commanding eight million votes and its own powerful organisations. The CP...

1945: The Internationale in Buchenwald

While the Allied press does its utmost to whip up a poisonous lynch spirit against the entire German people, the prisoners of all nationalities released from the Nazi concentration camps express warmest solidarity with their German comrades who were the first victims to feel the barbaric whip of the Nazi oppressor. At Buchenwald, one of the worst camps, the 15,000 prisoners organised an inspiring celebration of May Day, demonstrating the brotherhood of the world working class on this traditional holiday. Here is how PM’s correspondent [2 May] described it: “Many of these men… have been in...

The German Trotskyists' Response to the Nazis Taking Power (February 1933)

Smash Hitler. German Left Opposition Appeals for United Proletarian Resistance Hitler is Chancellor! Workers, do you know what that means? It means complete starvation and loss of all rights, it means the destruction of all the active elements of the proletariat! After the speeches of the Nazi leader, there can be no doubt of this. Hitler’s program is the complete smashing of all the political and trade union organizations of the working class, to clear the way for a still more monstrous impoverishment of the working class. The aim of his foreign policy is war with Soviet Russia. If Hitler...

Letter from Germany

According to the various polls in Germany they [the new Left Party [formed by former SPD left leader Oskar Lafontaine getting together with the PDS, the old CP] stood at around 12% for a while, over the last two weeks or so they dropped to 8%. The Left Party just had their party congress last Saturday to decide on their final manifesto and didn't really kick off their campaign before that. Personally, I don't think that the Left Party will get more than 10%, but even that will be enough to shake the "Bundestag" up and provide a platform of resistance from the left. To see this as a part of a...

German socialist women’s movement — self-organisation and class unity

During the nineteenth century, the emerging workers’ movement began to develop its policy on the “woman question”. Some of the early, “utopian” socialists argued strongly for women’s liberation. Ferdinand Lassalle led the “proletarian anti-feminists”, opposing votes for women and urging male workers to strike against women’s entry into industrial labour. Marx and Engels opposed Lassalle, arguing that women’s work was a step forward, a precondition for liberation. In 1875, the Socialist Labour Party of Germany — later to become the Social Democratic Party (SPD) — was formed. The party went on...

Space for German left to fight

by david broder Over three weeks after the German election which left both the Social Democrats (SPD) and the conservative CDU with too few seats to form a government, the two parties finally agreed on 10 October to form a “Grand Coalition” for the first time since 1969. The SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is one casualty of the coalition, since the deal gives each of the parties 8 of 16 cabinet posts, with the Chancellorship going to the CDU's Angela Merkel. What the deal really indicates is the need for a rebellion against the neoliberal SPD leadership by trade unionists and the left within...

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