Germany

Wladek Flakin, of the German section of the Revolutionary Internationalist Organisation , discusses opportunities and obstacles facing the German working class with Daniel Randall of Workers' Liberty. What austerity measures is the government introducing? On June 7, the government announced a massive social cuts programme: they plan to cut €80bn from the federal budget over the next 10 years. The cuts effect different sections of the working class in different ways. There are supposed to be 15,000 job cuts in the federal bureaucracy, combined with a wage freeze. There are also massive attacks...

Stan Crooke reviews Utopia or Auschwitz – Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust by Hans Kundnani. Kundnani argues that the wave of radicalism which swept through (parts of) Germany in the mid to late 1960s had an “ambivalent relationship” to the country’s Nazi past, and that this “ambivalent relationship” also found expression in the “Red-Green” coalition governments elected in 1998 and 2002. German radicals of the 1960s differed in some basic aspects of their politics from their counterparts in other European countries. They were more influenced by the writings of the Frankfurt School...

Halil Senturk is a miner in Germany's Ruhr coalfield. He told the Financial Times (10 March) why he and his workmates have been fighting job cuts in their industry. "I was in England a few times, in Durham and Yorkshire, and saw what happened to the mining community there. We're trying to stop that happening here". On 7 March the German government announced that it would drastically cut state subsidies and force the closure of most of the country's pits. Miners struck the same day, occupied their pits, invaded town halls, blocked motorways, and sent thousands of delegates to the capital, Bonn...

Review of the film: The Baader Meinhof Complex This film traces the history of the German “Red Army Fraction” (RAF) from its origins in the predominantly student protest movement of the late 1960s through to the prison suicides of its remaining leaders in 1977. In total, the RAF had 39 members, but never more than 20 at any one time. It was the most famous — or infamous — of a flurry of similarly-sized groups which emerged in Germany in the 1970s and which equated “anti-imperialist struggle” with armed struggle: bombings, kidnappings, hostage-taking, and killings, all financed by armed bank...

Part 2. The first part of this article can be found here The pact between Ebert and Groener had been sealed on the evening of 10 November. Thereafter, with the full support of the SPD leadership, the General Army Command recruited, organised and trained new military detachments (the Iron Division, the Freikorps and the Republican Soldiers’ Defence Corps) for the purpose of crushing the revolution. The working-class military forces — for which the “revolutionary government” of the SPD provided no support – were much weaker: a trade union-based security force which had been set up by Emil...

First part of a two-part article. Part 2 here The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been founded in 1875. After a period of illegality it began to expand dramatically in the opening years of the twentieth century and by 1914 it numbered a million members and was the largest political party in the world. Its share of the vote in elections and its number of seats in the Reichstag (German parliament) likewise steadily increased. In 1898 it won 27% of the votes (56 seats), in 1903 31% of the votes (81 seats) and, in 1912, 34% of the votes (110 seats). On the eve of the First World War the...

Part 1 was in Solidarity 3/136 . In this second part, the author traces the history of the German workers’ movement in the decade before Hitler consolidated power. It was published in the US Marxist journal Fourth International in February 1943. Sherry Mangan (writing under the name Terence Phelan) was a well-known US journalist and secretly, using his journalistic assignments as cover, a key organiser of the international Trotskyist movement of the time. Unlike classic police reaction, fascism builds on a mass base. To obtain this, it offers the disoriented and desperate petty bourgeoisie and...

Those who do not know what the working class movement has done will not be able to imagine what it is capable of doing and will do in the future. Much of the real history of the movement is lost; it is one of the central functions of revolutionary socialists to act as the custodian of the memory of the working class and its movement. The history of the revolutionary German labour movement that went down to defeat before the Nazis in 1933 is a case in point. This article, which we publish in two parts, outlines the history of the German workers’ movement in the 15 years before Hitler...

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were victims of a wave of terror unleashed by the leaders of German Social Democracy in order to crush working-class revolution. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been founded in 1875. After a period of illegality it began to expand dramatically in the opening years of the twentieth century. By 1907 it had over half a million members. By 1914 it numbered a million members and was the largest political party in the world. Its share of the vote in elections and its number of seats in the Reichstag (German parliament) likewise steadily increased. In...

Shop workers have been on strike in Berlin (and other parts of Germany) — 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 employers since January. They...