Ernst Thälmann

by Willi Bredel

Miljoner arbetare i Tyskland slöt under 20- och början av 30-talet upp bakom Tysklands Kommunistiska Parti och borgarna såg med fasa på hur kommunisternas inflytande växte. De såg sin enda räddning i den framväxande fascismen som de gav allt sitt stöd. 1933, vid det fascistiska maktövertagandet, kände de sig starka nog att slå till mot kommunisterna och partiets ordförande Ernst Thälmann greps och fängslades. Utan rannsakan eller dom tvingades han sedan tillbringa 11 1/2 år i ensamcell tills fascisterna slutligen av skräck mördade honom 1944 då de stod inför sitt totala sammanbrott. Överhuvudtaget ger denna biografi en bild av den tyska arbetarrörelsens kamp under första hälften av 1900-talet.

259 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1951

About the author

Willi Bredel (May 2, 1901 – October 27, 1964) was a German writer and president of the Akademie der Künste. Born in Hamburg, he was a pioneer of socialist realist literature.

Soon after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Bredel was imprisoned at Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp. He was released in spring 1934. After fleeing from Nazi Germany to Czechoslovakia and Moscow, where he lived at Hotel Lux. He published Die Prüfung (1934), a novel describing the Nazi concentration camp, which was reprinted several times and translated into other languages. He also published accounts of his experiences in the Deutsche Zentral Zeitung, a German-language newspaper published in Moscow.

Bredel took part in the Spanish Civil War as commissar of the Thälmann Battalion as well as the Second World War, in which he fought on the Soviet side. After the war, he returned to Germany as part of the Sobottka Group, sent to lay the groundwork for the Soviet occupation of Mecklenburg. He later lived in East Germany and died in Berlin.

Reviews

[Herrmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book detailing the objective history of Thälmann's political journey, the journey of the german working class and of the german comunist party from its infancy and the unfortunate naive spartacists to Thälmann's reorganisation on a scientific socialist basis and so on. It has many good teachings on how a comrade should strive to be, how to organise workers, how we must become intimate with the lives of the workers, how we must speak as a worker does in order to be understood by the workers, how in a time of fascist rise we must strive for a united front with the social democrats in an effort to reach a peoples democracy //which necesitates a soviet socialist republic exists as a base for comunism abroad like during the Glorious Stalin era in the soviet union.// and so on and so forth, a must read for every proper Communist.