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Germany's Postwar Socialism: Nationalism and Kurt Schumacher (1945–52)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

V. Stanley Vardys
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Extract

Although the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) did not officially abandon Marxism until the Bad Godesberg Parteitag in 1959, both intellectually and politically the party's ideology was revised under the leadership of Kurt Schumacher whose “passion, intellect, and will” dominated the SPD for seven years following World War II (1945–52). The final disintegration of German Marxism under Kurt Schumacher can be demonstrated by examining the three crucial elements of Marxist socialist ideology: (1) motivation for socialism, (2) theory of the socialist movement, and (3) relations between German nationalism and socialism.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , April 1965 , pp. 220 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1965

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References

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4 This situation actually had the proportions of a major crisis. In 1952, that is, at the end of the examined period, the SPD still had only 3% of its total membership consisting of people younger than 25 years. Of the total membership of 650,000, about 75% were older than 45, that is, people who were old enough to vote at the time the SPD was suppressed by the Nazis. See Lange, Max G. et al. , Parteien in der Bundesrepublik (Stuttgart and Dusseldorf, 1955), p. 190Google Scholar. The percentage of the party's total electoral vote, combined with that of the Communists, was smaller than in 1912.

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20 In Wandlungen des Sozialismus (Verlag fuer Wirtschaft und Politik, 1947)Google Scholar Ortleib wrote that the aims of both socialism and liberalism “are the same. Their means are different. The aim of both is social order conceived in freedom and justice. Liberalism strives at this aim through an individualistically organized free economic order; socialism believes that only a socially interwoven economy can reach this goal.” (p. 38); further, see Ortleib's, article “Neuer Liberalismus?” in Das sozialistische Jahrhundert, No. 17/18 (1947), esp. p. 258Google Scholar; see also his very interesting criticisms of the party's ideology after the lost Bundestag elections in 1953, in Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte, October, 1953, pp. 593 ff., esp. p. 598.

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68 Protokoll … 1946, pp. 32–33.

69 Ibid., p. 24.

70 See Protokoll … 1950, pp. 101 ff.

71 See, for example, Protokoll … 1946, p. 32; Protokoll … 1950, p. 67.

72 Fuer Frieden, Freiheit und Sozialismus, pp. 4–5.

73 Cf. “Brief von Kurt Schmidt an seine Freunde in New York,” Her neue Kampf um Freiheit, p. 15. “We were not liberated,” he said, “we were vanquished.” How deeply Schumacher was hurt by the Allied refusal to treat the“good” Germans as equals is shown, for example, in Protokoll … 1946, p. 32; cf. Wesemann, Fried, Kurt Schumacher (Frankfurt A.M., 1952), p. 109Google Scholar.

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79 Idem.

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89 Protokoll … 1950 p. 248; cf. Wahrhaftig, S. L., “Der Weg der Sozialdemokraten,” first publ. in Frankfurter Hefte (1952)Google Scholar, reprinted in Ossip K. Flechtheim, Die deutschen Parteien seit 1945 (Berlin, 1957), p. 110.

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