Abstract
The USP — Germany’s anti-war party — resulted from a split in the Majority Socialist Party (SPD) after the Gotha conference in early April 1917. Those who formed the new party came largely from the centre and left of the SPD. Between 9 November and 28 December 1918, the USP provided three of the six members of Ebert’s cabinet. At the end of December 1918, its Spartacist wing, numbering only a few hundred members, mainly middle-class intellectuals, split away to form the German Communist Party (KPD) out of a mixture of revolutionary impatience and organisational dissatisfaction. Despite this initial split and concomitant loss of some of its most distinguished members (such as the ill-fated Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg), the USP remained a very significant force in German politics throughout 1919 and 1920 — mainly because it seemed to offer, during a period when revolution seemed a real possibility, a non-violent revolutionary strategy to a generation which had had more than its share of violence. According to this strategy, socialism was to be brought about through gradual, but radical reform, a process in which revolutionary workers’ councils were to play the central role.
This article is a drastically abridged version of an essay which appeared in 1991 in the Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch. It is included here by kind permission of the Jahrbuch’s editors.
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Notes
For this information I am indebted to Max Schwarz, Biographisches Handbuch der Reichstage (Hanover, 1965), pp. 814―15 and, of course, to the three standard works on the USP
David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1975)
Robert E. Wheeler, USPD und Internationale: Sozialistischer Internationalismus in der Zeit der Revolution (Frankfurt, 1975)
Hartfrid Krause, USPD (Frankfurt and Cologne, 1975).
Georg Lukács, ‘“Größe und Verfall” des Expressionismus’, in Essays über Realismus (Neuwied and Berlin, 1971), pp. 109–49 (pp. 110 and 130).
For a detailed list of and information about the (many) USP newspapers, see Robert Wheeler, ‘Bibliographie und Standortverzeichnis der unabhängigen sozialdemokratischen Presse von 1917–22’, Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeit (June 1968), pp. 35–55; also Morgan, pp. 77–9.
Written on 31 December 1918 and first published in the Berlin USP newspapers Die Freiheit and Die Republik on 1 January 1919. Subsequently published with various disclaimers in footnotes in Kurt Hiller, Geist werde Herr [Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit, No.s XVI/XVII] (Berlin, 1920), pp. 93–103, this essay is a clear account of Hiller’s initial enthusiasm for and rapid move away from the USP (see especially pp. 100–1).
Of which the classic statement is Lenin’s ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’ (1905), in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1962) pp. 44–9.
Little is known about either of these men; both lived extensively outside Germany after the early 1920s and neither seems to have left any papers or memoirs. Moreover, Goldschmidt (who allegedly wrote over 12,000 newspaper articles) does not even merit a mention in Paul Raabe’s comprehensive Die Autoren und Bücher des literarischen Expressionismus (Stuttgart, 1985) even though he played a key role in the socialisation of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, was involved in setting up Berlin’s first, short-lived Proletarisches Theater and merged the offices of the (associated) Bund für proletarische Kultur with those of the Räte-Zeitung following the resignation of Friedrich Natteroth as the Bund’s director in late 1919.
For material relating to some of these groupings see: Wolfgang Rothe (ed.), Der Aktivismus 1915–1920 (Munich, 1969)
Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Activists: Kurt Hiller and the Politics of Action on the German Left 1914–1933 (Philadelphia, 1977)
Juliane Habereder, Kurt Hiller und der literarische Aktivismus (Frankfurt and Beme, 1981)
Helga Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe (Berlin, 1969)
Walter Rossow (ed.), Arbeitsrat für Kunst: Berlin 1918–1921 [catalogue] (Berlin, 1980)
Eberhard Steneberg, Arbeitsrat für Kunst: Berlin 1918–1921 (Düsseldorf, 1987)
Oskar Maria Graf, Wunderbare Menschen [novel] (Stuttgart, 1927)
Hansjörg Viesel, Literaten an der Wand (Frankfurt, 1980), pp. 766–75
Walter-Jürgen Schorlies, ‘Der Schauspieler, Regisseur, szenische Bühnenbildner und Theaterleiter Karlheinz Martin’, PhD thesis (University of Cologne, 1971), pp. 76–82
Klaus Petersen, ‘Die Gruppe 1925’ (Heidelberg, 1981)
Eva Kolinsky, Engagierter Expressionismus (Stuttgart, 1970)
Lothar Peter, Literarische Intelligenz und Klassenkampf: ‘Die Aktion’ 1911–1932 (Cologne, 1972)
Ursula Madrasch-Groschopp, Die Weltbühne: Porträt einer Zeitchrift (Königstein/Ts., 1983)
Joachim Radkau, ‘Die Weltbühne als falscher Prophet?’, in: Thomas Koebner (ed.), Weimars Ende (Frankfurt/Main, 1982), pp. 57–79
William Ludwig Bischoff, ‘Artists, Intellectuals and Revolution: Munich 1918–1919’, PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1970, especially pp. 29–70 and 160–80.
Felix Stössinger, ‘Die Geistesarbeiter zum 1. Mai’, Die freie Welt, 1, No. 1 ([May] 1919), p. 7.
Curt Geyer, Die revolutionäre Illusion: Zur Geschichte des linken Flügels der USPD, edited by Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Granl (Stuttgart, 1976), p. 60.
Raabe, pp. 575–9 and 600–1; Werner Kohlschmidt, ‘Zu den soziologischen Voraussetzungen des literarischen Expressionismus in Deutschland’ (1970)
Hans Gerd Rötzer (ed.), Begriffsbestimmung des literarischen Expressionismus (Darmstadt, 1976), pp. 427–46.
See, for example, Franz Mehring, Beitrage zur Literatur-Geschichte (Berlin-DDR, 1948). The list of novels serialised in the Leipziger Volks-zeitung 1894–1919 (published in that newspaper on 1 October 1919) also gives some insight into Mehring’s views on literature, he having been the LVZ’s principal editor 1902–7 and on its staff until December 1913.
Felix Stössinger, ‘Moderne revolutionäre Kunst’, Die freie Welt, 2, No. 39 ([October] 1920), pp. 4–5 and 8.
For this information I am entirely indebted to Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Das Theater des sowjetischen und des deutschen Proletkult 1917–1922: Zur Programmatik und Organisationsgeschichte’, PhD thesis, (Humboldt University, Berlin, 1987).
Wilfried van der Will and Rob Bums, Arbeiterkulturbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 2 vols (Frankfurt, 1982), I, pp. 142–4 and 170–1.
See Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector, Linksradikalismus und Literatur, 2 vols (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1974), I, pp. 126–9.
C.f. Kurt Tucholsky, ‘Das politische Kino’, Die Freiheit, 10 September 1920 (where Tucholsky — rightly — claimed that Die freie Welt was the first German newspaper to use photography for propaganda purposes (‘als Tendenzbild’). In both vol. 10 of Tucholsky’s Gesammelte Werke (p. 225) and Deutsches Tempo: Gesammelte Werke Ergänzungsband 1911 bis 1922 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1985), pp. 168–72, the publication date of this important essay is wrongly given as 10 May 1920.
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Sheppard, R. (1992). Artists, Intellectuals and the German Independent Socialist Party (USP): Some Preliminary Reflections. In: Dove, R., Lamb, S. (eds) German Writers and Politics 1918–39. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11815-1_2
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