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Biography A forgotten inspiration

Described by MI5 as ‘notorious,’ WILLI MUNZENBERG was at the top of the nazis’ most wanted list in the run-up to WWII. His name may have vanished from history but he was one of the most prominent, charismatic and revered figures in the world socialist movement during the inter-war years and, in this extract from his new biography, John Green explains why

IN THE former communist countries Willi Munzenberg, like Leon Trotsky, was disappeared from history. Even in the West, apart from two US biographies which do more to reinforce Cold War prejudices than illuminate his life, he has also been ignored. The only decent biography was written by his partner, Babette Gross.

 

Why is Munzenberg not better known?

 

Unlike many other leading socialists and communists of the period, he left few written works but he did leave a legacy of brilliant organisation and practical internationalism. He was a turbo-charged activist and ideas flew from his head like sparks from a grinding wheel.

 

Writer Arthur Koestler, who worked with him during his exile in Paris, described him as “a born leader of men and a fiery and arresting speaker.”

 

He was born in Germany in 1889 in the south-eastern Thuringian town of Erfurt and not into the most auspicious of circumstances. His mother died when he was four and his alcoholic father, a tyrannical publican, killed himself accidentally when Willi was 14.

 

Shortly after his father’s death, he began working in a local shoe factory. There he met a socialist trade unionist who introduced him to left-wing politics. Soon, he himself was organising and leading a local group of young socialist workers.

 

He was soon blacklisted throughout the city. Unable to find another job, he trudged on foot to Switzerland, with the intention of travelling overseas.

 

In Zurich, he found a lively social-democratic and radical tradition and a group of exiled Russians with whom he soon became involved. Among them were Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek who would strongly influence his future political thinking and action. This decided him to stay put.

 

As a result of his anti-war activities in Switzerland, he was imprisoned but, with the war over in November 1918, he was dumped unceremoniously back over the border into Germany.

 

The country was in turmoil. Echoing the Russian Revolution and inspired by the soldiers and sailors in the northern German cities of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, soviets — workers’ and soldiers’ councils — were soon established everywhere, patrolling the streets, maintaining law and order and running local administrations. The country was on the cusp of revolution.

 

Munzenberg settled in Stuttgart, still in the throes of revolutionary upheaval, and there he threw himself into revolutionary activities. For the following years of his life, throughout the 1920s, and with Germany in an almost permanent state of civil war between revolutionary forces and the conservative state in collusion with the right-wing military, Munzenberg was forced to live the life of a fugitive.

 

This, though, didn’t stop him continuing to organise and rebuilding the international socialist youth movement into an effective force.

 

He was one of several revolutionaries arrested in Stuttgart, where he was imprisoned and charged with high treason. He was lucky to escape by the skin of his teeth the same fate that befell Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were murdered by right-wing military units.

 

In 1921, Lenin asked Munzenberg to take on the enormous task of raising international solidarity and aid abroad for the struggling young Soviet Union.

 

With enthusiasm and energy, Munzenberg returned from Moscow to Berlin that same year with Russian diamonds sewn into his shirt cuffs and he immediately set about his new task. Without an office or staff and with no clear idea how to go about things, he at least had a name. His new organisation would be called International Workers’ Relief (IWR).

 

The role Lenin gave him allowed him to work semi-independently of party and Comintern structures, even though he worked closely with them. Within a very short space of time he built up an effective network with branches of the IWR in many countries, including Britain and the US.

 

Thus began a concerted and focused effort to send desperately needed aid to the Soviet Union. Munzenberg was able to build bridges across party political lines and win support from leading intellectuals in order to maximise the effectiveness and international scope of the organisation.

 

Out of this single task, there mushroomed an enormous and very effective business undertaking. As the renown of IWR grew, Munzenberg soon found himself being approached by a whole number of labour movement and national liberation organisations requesting help.

 

He was proving himself to be a consummate organiser on an international scale and went on to set up solidarity campaigns on behalf of many countries, including raising aid for the starving in Ireland as a result of the famine in 1923-24, promoting awareness and giving help to the liberation struggles in Syria, China, Japan, Spain and elsewhere, as well as offering support to Britain’s trade unions during the 1926 general strike.

 

But his most effective and pioneering contribution was the setting up of the League against Colonialism and Imperialism, to provide support for the colonial countries struggling for independence. Many modern-day NGOs have been built following his example.

 

Secret service archives are useful sources of information about the way governments think and Britain’s had begun keeping Munzenberg under surveillance from 1924 onwards. But they increased this surveillance considerably in the wake of the formation of the League against Colonialism because they saw it as a serious threat to the Empire.

 

He was viewed by the secret services, as well as by the right-wing leadership of the Labour Party, as one of the most dangerous Soviet agents.

 

Despite this reputation, he was able to win over key allies within the Labour Party and developed warm relations with a number of leading figures, including Ellen Wilkinson MP, DN Pritt QC, Lord Marley, Arthur McManus, James Maxton, and the MPs Fenner Brockway and George Lansbury among others.

 

Aneurin Bevan, against Labour Party advice, accompanied him on a speaking tour of the US to raise funds for the anti-fascist struggle.

 

Setting up the world’s first international organisation to combat colonialism and imperialism was undoubtedly one of his greatest achievements. The League against Imperialism and Colonialism worked with early nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru, Jomo Kenyatta, Sukarno and Ho Chi Minh to promote liberation.

 

It was this organisation that particularly alarmed the governments and secret services in France and Britain.

 

After taking on the role of Comintern representative-at-large, Munzenberg developed a flair for publicity and propaganda and sophisticated new ways of putting across ideas. He became a highly successful media entrepreneur, publishing several newspapers, magazines and books, making and distributing films and organising large events. His Universum book publishing enterprise was a forerunner and model for Britain’s Left Book Club.

 

Munzenberg’s media consortium was the biggest and most successful empire of its kind ever created by anyone on the left. He had realised that if his campaign on behalf of the Soviet Union was to be truly effective, he would need good publicity and propaganda to help galvanise enough people to work for the campaign and generate the quantities of aid needed.

 

His publications pioneered the use of photography and used visual innovation as a means of attracting working class readerships. With John Heartfield — the father of photo montage — he was the first to promote its use in the print media.

 

His Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper (AIZ) was a forerunner of the popular illustrated magazines that appeared in other countries later. He also used it to promote and nurture the first worker photography movement, encouraging young workers to take up photography and depict their own reality.

 

Once Munzenberg arrived in Paris in 1933, he continued his anti-fascist activities without a break. There, he set up the most effective anti-fascist organisation outside Germany and established a new publishing house to begin producing books and pamphlets to be smuggled into Germany.

 

He also published the famous Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag (1933), with an introduction by British Labour peer Lord Marley. It was the first such compilation to comprehensively document nazi atrocities and reveal the existence of concentration camps and Jewish persecution.

 

It became one of the most successful publishing events of the period, selling tens of thousands of copies, with Koestler declaring that it “probably had the strongest political impact of any pamphlet since Tom Paine’s Common Sense.”

 

Alongside his publishing ventures, Munzenberg also set up a highly effective worldwide organisation of support and solidarity with the victims of fascism.

 

Increasingly, however, the German Communist Party and Comintern came to resent Munzenberg’s semi-autonomous activities, particularly his early attempt to forge a united front before the Comintern put its weight behind the idea of popular fronts.

 

They began to distance themselves and attempted to undermine what he was trying to do. This, together with his increasing realisation of the danger Stalin posed to democratic socialism, led him in 1938 to resign from the Communist Party.

 

Following the nazi-Soviet Pact a year later, he also published in his paper an article under the dramatic headline: Stalin, you are the traitor! It was a frontal attack on Soviet policy towards nazi Germany and it marked the unredeemable severing of his links to Stalin’s Soviet Union.

 

With the declaration of war, the French began interning all German refugees. Along with others, Munzenberg and his partner were interned shortly before the nazis invaded in Chambaran, in south-eastern France.

 

With the approach of German troops, the camp was evacuated but some internees chose to escape. Munzenberg was one of those, heading through the woods and hills towards the Swiss border. What happened after that is clouded in mystery.

 

In October 1940, five months after his escape, two French hunters found a decomposed body beneath a tree in a forest close to where Munzenberg was last seen, not far from the Swiss border.

 

French police determined that it was the body of Munzenberg and concluded that he had committed suicide. This has since been disputed, with many arguing that he was probably murdered by Stalin’s NKVD.

 

But there is no concrete evidence for such a hypothesis and speculation continues. Whatever the truth, it was an ignominious end to such a great fighter, socialist and internationalist.

 

We can learn much from Munzenberg’s life and apply it to our situation today — the need for broad alliances, for genuine democracy in our organisations, commitment to the anti-fascist struggle, the practice of solidarity, the importance of imaginative publicity and propaganda in our own media and about making selfless sacrifices on behalf of humanity.

 

Willi Munzenberg: Fighter Against Fascism and Stalinism is published by Routledge, £34.99.

 

 

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