The Last Revolutionaries
by Catherine Epstein
Harvard University Press

"German communists" — it's a term rarely heard anymore, but one that nevertheless conjures up some very distinct images: Think of Mike Myers' Dieter, or the kidnappers from The Big Lebowski. Dour characters, black-clad and funless, laughable and frightening at the same time. And yet, as Catherine Epstein makes clear in her enlightening new book The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century, the movement's tragic story — unlike the Soviet Union's initial triumph and slow decline, or the go-nowhere politics of the American Communist Party — captures, better than any other, the travails of the Marxist left during the past 100 years.

Modern communism, after all, began with a German — Karl Marx — and until the 1933 Nazi takeover, observers believed that Germany was on the verge of going red; such was the power of the German communist party. But, thanks to endless infighting and an effective dose of state repression, the movement never came close to revolution — and, once Hitler assumed power, the party was forced underground, its members pushed into exile or thrown into concentration camps; 20,000 were executed. When the survivors emerged in 1945, they quickly built a communist Germany under Soviet auspices — but even then they were servants, doomed to carry out the wishes of their eastern patrons. And when East Germany (officially known as the German Democratic Republic) collapsed in 1989, its leadership was forced to face the crimes they had committed in the name of state socialism.

Most remarkably, and the focus of Epstein's book, was the robust core of Germans whose active lives spanned this entire history — joining in the late 1920s, as Epstein writes, these "pre-1933 KPD [Communist Party of Germany] cadres lived the entire sweep of communist history." They were a legal political organization, a center of fascist resistance, and at the head of Europe's second most powerful communist state; they were also persecuted by the Nazis and, during Stalin's Great Purges, the Soviets. And through it all they never veered from their communist ideals, even when those ideals proved elusive and their consequences destructive. In fact, as Epstein shows repeatedly, the constant persecution justified, in the eyes of many KPD members, their revolutionary work — if they weren't on the verge of great change, why did their enemies oppose them so viscerally?

Epstein, a professor at Amherst College, focuses her work on eight "veteran" communists, going into great and, at times, bizarre detail (in 1945 Fritz Selbmann, a high-level functionary, was so involved in party affairs that he almost forgot his own wedding, a fact he later used to prove his revolutionary street cred). Some of them, such as Erich Honecker and Walter Ulbricht, are familiar. Others, such as Selbmann or Gerhart Eisler, are not; all of them, though, experienced the same harsh trials and small victories. And all of them, though leaders of the party, proved incapable of containing the recurrent purges and totalitarian mindset that overtook the Eastern Bloc in the 1950s and '60s. They couldn't even control their biographies — one of the most fascinating parts of Epstein's book is her insight into how the party co-opted the lives of these "heroes" and used them to its own ends, creating a myth of the socialist ideal that rarely reflected reality.

The fundamental question concerning Germany Democratic Republic, in Epstein's mind, is not why it collapsed but rather how it managed to stick around so long. The Soviets plundered most of its industrial base after the war, and a large percentage of its population was either killed in the war or fled to the west soon after. Epstein argues that the answer to both questions — how it lasted and why it collapsed — lies in the peculiar strengths of the veteran communists; ironically, she writes, "the very dynamics that helped stabilize the regime also undermined it." The German communists' experience during the war not only made them more determined to bring about a revolution, but it drilled into them the idea that the rest of the world was against them. They "emerged from the Nazi era with a deep sense of a world divided into fascists and antifascists, communists and anticommunists, persecutors and persecuted." Thus they brooked no dissent, lest the enemy use it to gain a foothold, and to solidify control they established an enormous security apparatus, the infamous Stasi. They weeded out opposition and built a wall that imprisoned their people. By sheer will the GDR leadership kept its state together.

But the war also gave the veteran communists a severe case of shell-shock; many could never accept that the world, and especially West Germany, had found a way to move on. Even Honecker, who ousted Ulbricht as the head of the GDR in 1971 and promised a new era of German socialism, couldn't jump start his arrested ideological development — socialism, to all of them, meant 1930s-era socialism. Veterans' memoirs relied on stock metaphors of class revolution and fascist dictatorship, even when the rest of the world (and their own citizens) saw them, not the West, as the greater threat to liberty. And by the 1970s, East Germans could look across the Berlin Wall and see fancy cars, department stores and other markers of a vibrant, modern society; from then on, it was only a matter of time before the entire edifice came crashing down.

The Last Revolutionaries focuses on an aspect of communist history not often discussed; instead of asking how the East German government operated or the economy stayed upright, Epstein asks: How did the GDR leadership experience communism? What did it mean to them, both as individuals and as a group? And, building from their individual histories, how did their experiences affect the formation and dissolution of East Germany? While the history of the GDR is increasingly less relevant in the post-communist era, the experiences of its leadership can nevertheless help us to understand the psychologies of contemporary authoritarian governments — something our own leadership, with its democratizing, missionary zeal, would do well to understand.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)