Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
'I Wanted to be a Little Lenin': Ideology and the German International Brigade Volunteers
Author(s): Josie McLellan
Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), pp. 287-304
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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@ 2006 SAGEPublications,
London,ThousandOaks,CAand
of Contemporary
History
Copyright
Journal
New Delhi,Vol41(2),287-304. ISSN0022-0094.
DOI:10. 177/0022009406062069
Josie McLellan
288
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 41 No 2
Socialist regime from without. A significant number were Jewish.3 All continued to fear the long arm of the nazi security services and many fought under
assumed names. After the International Brigades were demobilized in the
summer of 1938, returning to Germany was an impossibility. The majority
ended up in internment camps in southern France. From here, a fortunate
few managed to obtain visas to a neutral country. The unlucky ones were
deported to Germany after the occupation of France and faced years in prison
or concentration camps.
The soldiers of the International Brigades were neither professionals nor
conscripts, nor were they fighting for their country. Not only their status as
volunteers, but also their political homogeneity was relatively unusual.
Although by no means the first international army, the 35,000 volunteers of
the International Brigades have attracted popular and scholarly attention far
beyond that which their numbers might appear to warrant.4To some commentators, both at the time and in retrospect, they seemed to embody the impulse to
fight oppression and dictatorship. To others, they were a 'Comintern army' of
ideologically blinkered communists, there to do the bidding of the Soviet
Union.5 Both interpretations are oversimplified, and neither does much to illuminate the often complex motivations of those who volunteered. A study of
combat motivation in the International Brigades as a whole would be a vast
project which cannot be attempted here. Nor does this article allow space for a
meaningful comparison between national groups. Instead, it will focus on the
German volunteers, a fascinating case study not only of International Brigade
soldiers, but of the role played by ideology in combat motivation. How do
soldiers whose primary motivation is ideological differ from those who are
fighting for money, for their country, or for self-preservation? This article
examines what drove them to volunteer for a war in Spain, and examines how
their combat motivation changed over time. Whatever role ideology played in
the decision to volunteer, political commitment alone was not enough to prepare men for combat and keep them in battle when the going got tough. And,
of course, factors which inspired men to volunteer, or motivated them during
3 Arno Lustiger estimates their number to have been around 500. A. Lustiger, 'German and
Austrian Jews in the International Brigade [sic]', Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXXV (1990),
301. Cf. A. Lustiger, Schalom Libertad! Juden im spanischen Biirgerkrieg (Berlin 2001), 64.
4 On the International Brigades as a whole, see K. Bradley and M. Chappell, International
Brigades in Spain 1936-39 (London 1994); S. Alvarez, Historia politica y militar de las Brigadas
Internacionales (Madrid 1996); M. Jackson, Fallen Sparrows (Philadelphia, PA 1994); R.D.
Richardson, Comintern Army. The International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Lexington,
KY 1982); V. Brome, The International Brigades. Spain 1936-1937 (London 1967). A number of
excellent recent studies of national groups have made use of Moscow archives to great effect: J.K.
Hopkins, Into the Heart of the Fire. The British in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA 1998); P.
Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Stanford, CA 1994); R. Baxell, British
Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (London 2004). On the historiography and reception of the
Brigades see R. Stradling, History and Legend. Writing the International Brigades (Cardiff 2003);
P. Monteath, Writing the Good Fight. Political Commitment in the International Literature of the
Spanish Civil War (Westport, CT 1994).
5 Richardson, op. cit.
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'IWantedto be a LittleLenin'
McLellan:
289
the earlyphaseof the war, could changeas the war wore on and the euphoria
of arrival faded. In many ways, the experiencesof the Germanvolunteers
soldiers:cold, fear,hungerandpain
resembledthoseof othertwentieth-century
on the one hand,espritde corpsand a senseof professionalprideon the other.
This articleaskswhat differenceideologymade.
For all the ferventinternationalismof the Republicanwar effort, in retrospect the historyof the Germanvolunteersappearsnow more closelywedded
to events in Germanythan the broadersweep of Spanishhistory.As we shall
see, the volunteers'motivation stemmedin large part from events at home.
Once they reachedSpain,the structureof the Republicanarmy and linguistic
limitations meant that their contact with Spaniardswas limited, and their
grasp of Spanishpolitics even more so. For many, their political goals in
Germanyremainedmuch more tangiblethan vague conceptionsof Popular
Front victoryin Spain.Equally,when it comes to the sourcesavailableto the
historianof this topic, the most enduringtracesof the volunteers'experiences
are to be found in Germanarchives.Very few contemporarysources,such as
letters,have survived.Many of the soldierswere unable or unwillingto contact their familiesin Germany.Letterssent to friends and relativesin exile
frequentlywent missingin the war years. Likewise,soldierswho kept diaries
often lost them in the chaos that followed demobilization.6The Brigadepress
and publicationswere heavilycensoredand tend to reflectthe partyline fairly
assiduously.The InternationalBrigadearchives in Moscow are invaluable
sources for the military history of the conflict, but inevitably,the histories
of individualsoldiers tend to be eclipsed by the broadersweep of military
administrationand discipline.
After Germancapitulationin 1945, the majorityof the survivingveterans
settled in East Germany.7Most of them were communists,and either emotional ties or party disciplinedrew them to the new socialist state. After the
West GermanCommunistParty was banned in 1956, many West German
veteranswere orderedby the partyto 'retreat'to the East. The East German
state liked to present itself as the 'better Germany',representativeof the
progressive,anti-fascistGermantradition,and the SpanishCivil War was an
important part of this legitimizingtactic. The InternationalBrigadeswere
often portrayedas the vanguard of communist anti-fascismand the forerunnersof the East Germanarmedforces. This official version of events had
an impact on individualmemoriestoo. Even veteranswho had travelledto
Spain as non-communistsoften filteredtheir experiencesthroughthe lens of
6 A few diaries or diary fragments did survive in the archives, most notably those of the writer
Bodo Uhse. Uhse's diaries were held by the East German Academy of Arts and a lightly censored
version was published in the 1980s. The use of diaries published post-1945 is fraught with difficulty. See J. McLellan, 'The Politics of Communist Biography. Alfred Kantorowicz and the
Spanish Civil War', German History, 22, 4 (2004), 536-62 on the changes made to one diary in
the postwar period.
7 See McLellan, Antifascism and Memory, op. cit., for more on the veterans' situation in East
Germany.
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 41 No 2
later political commitments. One man, describing the battle of Teruel to me,
said 'we were ten comrades altogether', before catching himself and adding, 'I
say comrade, although in those days I wasn't a comrade yet.'8 Published
accounts of the war were often aimed at a youthful readership, with the hope
that the young would be inspired to make similar sacrifices for the socialist
cause. Writers were encouraged to emphasize the political over the personal or
everyday. And, of course, histories of the war and collections of memoirs were
often heavily censored to fit the official line on the war.
Given these limited sources, and their partial, retrospective nature, how can
the historian hope to reconstruct the motivation of those who joined the
Brigades? It goes almost without saying that no body of sources is without its
limitations, and that even unlimited access to contemporary letters and diaries
does not open a window onto the soldier's mind. As experience is related whether five minutes or five decades after the event - it is inevitably overlaid
with hindsight, nostalgia, wishful thinking, bravado or bashfulness. All social
historians of war must be alive to the narrative structures used by soldiers to
make sense of what they have done and seen. In the case of sources available
for this study, the narrative overlay is often a thickly ideological one. But even
the East German archives preserved fragments of more personal memories,
which offer a glimpse into the motivations of individual soldiers.
For all their zeal in implementing the official line on the war, the East
German censors kept painstaking records of their cuts, which can be used to
reconstruct individual veterans' stories. Letters exchanged between veterans
reveal an irreverent perspective on the war, far from the formulaic heroism of
official histories. Equally, veteran memoirs collected by East German
archivists were often much franker than published accounts. Veterans proved
particularly prone to depart from the party line during interviews, perhaps
because it is easier to escape from the stylistic conventions of official histories
while speaking than while writing. Those interviewed by party historians often
used the licence of old age to wander wilfully off topic and pursue their own
agendas, in the knowledge that the interview would be transcribed and
archived for posterity.' Even those who did not have access to such official
repositories worked to preserve their memories. One veteran, who had been
imprisoned after a Stalinist show trial in 1957, wrote a lengthy memoir covering his time both in the International Brigades and in prison. With absolutely
no prospect of publication, and given that his family was under constant secret
police surveillance, this was a risky activity. There would have been severe
repercussions had the manuscript been discovered. His wife typed three copies
and gave one each to their daughter and son, spreading the burden of concealing the manuscript." None of the copies was ever discovered and his memoirs
were published in full in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall."11
8 Interview with Alfred Katzenstein, 5 February 1999.
9 Cf. McLellan, Antifascism and Memory, op. cit., 98-9.
10 Interview with Charlotte Janka, 11 April 2000.
11 W. Janka, Spuren eines Lebens (Hamburg 1991).
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For some volunteers, being on the spot was an important factor. A number of
Germans who were in Spain when the war broke out, either as emigr6s or as
participants in the Workers' Olympiad, planned as an alternative to the Berlin
Olympics in Barcelona in summer 1936, were amongst the first volunteers to
fight for the Spanish Republic, pre-dating the International Brigades by a
number of months."' Clearly, ideology played a role, but there was also an
element of impulse and opportunity. Germans in exile elsewhere saw Spain as
a chance to escape from the boredom, loneliness and poverty of their uprooted
lives. German emigres were often cut off from their professional lives and networks of friends and family. Unable to speak the language and living on the
breadline, their opportunities for meaningful political work were limited. One
man I interviewed, recalling his time in exile in Prague, felt that his political
work there was trivial, 'too conventional, too small'.19Veteran memoirs often
convey a real sense of adventure and excitement - finally it was possible to
use one's initiative and do something significant.20Given that few of those
Germans who fought in the International Brigades experienced anything
approaching a normal civilian life until 1945 at the earliest, it is unsurprising
that they remember life in the International Brigades as a short window of
freedom. For those in their late teens or early to mid-twenties when they
travelled to Spain, it was their only opportunity to experience anything
approaching the autonomy of young adulthood, for all the restrictions of army
discipline.
For others, the International Brigades offered an escape from communist
infighting. The novelist Gustav Regler saw the war as a liberation from the
claustrophobic atmosphere of Moscow at the time of the show trials. 'In
Spain, I felt sure of it, I would breathe a different air. There, death was a protection against treachery and judges; one died at the hands of the enemy. How
good it was to think of death!'21To Regler, Spain represented a second chance
for communism, an opportunity to cast off the shackles of Stalinism and fight
and possibly die for a worthy cause. He wrote this, however, after his break
with the communist movement following the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Like another
later ex-communist Alfred Kantorowicz, he tended to recast his decision to go
to Spain in retrospect, as a defence of 'good' communism against 'bad'
Stalinism. In a passage written in 1959, two years after his defection from
East Germany, Kantorowicz wrote of Spain: 'Some of us fled from the desperate doubts, which gave us headaches and homesickness, fled to the front,
where, in the face of the enemy who lay before us, we could forget our inner
18 E.g. G. Wohlrath, 'Als Arbeitersportler zur Volksolympiade nach Barcelona' in H. Maassen
(ed.), Brigade International ist unser Ehrennahme. Erlebnisse ehemaliger deutscher Spanienkiimpfer, 2 vols (3rd edn, Berlin 1983), 44-7.
19 Interview with Max Kahane, 22 February 1999.
20 One social democrat volunteer claimed that he and a Spanish comrade had disguised themselves as peasants and worked their way along the Mediterranean coast, blowing up bridges as they
went to halt the Nationalist advance. SAPMO-BArch, SgY 20/1706, 13. Erinnerungen Alfred
Berger.
21 G. Regler, The Owl of Minerva (London 1959), 266.
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wife shortly beforehis death in December1936: 'How well I felt, when I had
the shooter in my hand for the first time ...
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Brigades', one of the most famous of the war, encapsulated this bittersweet
outlook:
Born in the far-away fatherland,
We brought nothing with us but the hate in our hearts.
But we haven't forgotten our homeland
Today our homeland's in front of Madrid.35
'IWantedto be a LittleLenin'
McLellan:
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298
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299
But if these were the problems associated with the first days of fighting, new
challenges appeared as the war dragged on, and morale faded. During the
course of the war, initial optimism could quickly give way to despair. After his
first experiences at the battle of Quinto in late August 1937, the novelist Willi
Bredel had written in his diary, 'I don't just feel healthy, but fresh and lively
like seldom before.'53But on returning to Paris in the summer of 1938, Bredel
estimated that the past 12 months had aged him by 10 years.54The German
volunteers were involved in every major battle of the war, with a correspondingly high casualty rate. Six months after baking under the hot sun at the
battle of Brunete, the volunteers found themselves fighting at Teruel in one of
the coldest winters of the century. As the majority had no safe home to return
to, most rejoined their Brigade as soon as they had recovered from their
injuries. Not fighting could be dispiriting too. The German members of the
Thirteenth Brigade found themselves on the bleak southern front, where cold,
hunger and boredom ate into their morale. As Jef Last's song 'On the Sierra
Front' put it: 'Those bare mountains were so lonely/ That enemy fire almost
cheered us up.'55The men of the Thirteenth wryly dubbed themselves the
'forgotten brigade', languishing at the top of a mountain, while the Eleventh
received all the glory.
There were few opportunities for leave, and the replacement of fallen
International Brigade volunteers with Spanish conscripts undermined the
solidarity of the troops. Experienced soldiers were scattered amongst the
new recruits, a very different situation from the early stages of the war when
platoons and companies were predominantly German-speaking. Veteran
memoirs abound with complaints about shortages of weapons and ammunition, and the poor quality of the equipment that was available.56Even the most
committed volunteers found it hard to keep up their morale under these conditions. Particularly in the later stages of the war, as more and more friends
and comrades were killed, exile in Spain could be just as dispiriting as exile
anywhere. The impossibility of sending and receiving regular letters home
meant that soldiers had no news from loved ones for years on end. One officer
wrote in his diary on New Year's Day 1938 of his 'loneliness' and the 'emptiness' and 'boredom' of the war. 'Has the war already blunted everyone, so that
no one can be happy with all their heart? Is the hard battle of Teruel weighing
on us all? Are we all thinking too much about home, about our homeland
somewhere in Europe?'57As the defeat of their adopted homeland came to
seem inevitable, the soldiers' displacement returned to haunt them. Losing the
53 Stiftung Archiv Akademie der Kiinste (henceforth SAdK), Berlin, Willi-Bredel-Archiv Nr
870, 9. Diary entry 30 August 1937.
54 SAdK, Berlin, Willi-Bredel-Archiv Nr 3109, 53. W. Bredel to L. Bredel, 23 July 1938.
55 Busch,LiederderArbeiterklasse,
op. cit.
56 E.g. SAPMO-BArch, SgY 30/1411, 19. Erinnerungen Ewald Munschke. SAPMO-BArch, SgY
30/0922, 59. Erinnerungen Gustav Szinda.
57 Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzsky, Alfred-KantorowiczArchiv, BI:K1. The author was Hans Kahle.
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 41 No 2
warmeantfailingtheirnew-foundSpanishfriends,andleavingthecommunity
of thefrontfortheisolationanduncertainty
of exile.
ByMarch1938 moralein the EleventhBrigadehadreachedits nadir.By this
troopswerein an almostconstantstateof withstageof thewar,Republican
drawal.Onesoldierhadtheimpression
thattheywere'arriving
justin timeto
Thosewho hadwitnessedthe victoriesof thewar'searly
joinin the retreat'.58
stagesat leasthad theirmemoriesof routingthe fascists.But laterarrivals,
someof whomonlyreceivedpermissionto travelto Spainin 1938, had the
feelingthat the outcomeof the war had beendecidedbeforethey had had
the opportunity
to firea shot.59
Whydid mencontinueto fightunderthese
conditions?Officialcommunist
accountstendto creditthepoliticalleadership
60 In some cases,reminding
of the Brigades.
men of theirinitialideological
commitmentmay well have beeneffective.A memberof the EdgarAndre
Battalionremembered
a momentof collectivehesitationwhen his section,
depletedby heavylossesand disorientated
by the noiseof the battle,were
orderedto crossa roadunderheavyfire.TheGermaninchargeof themachine
or what?!'The
gunsroared'Getover,comrades,
getover.Areyouanti-fascists
entirecompanycrossedthestreetwithoutlosinga man.61
Communist
accounts
stressthe importanceof ideology,arguingthat the 'fightingspirit'of the
volunteersallowedthemto overcomepoorleadership
andfaultyweapons.62
Veteransof the firstworldwar oftenmadefavourable
between
comparisons
the soldiersof the International
Brigadesand those of the Kaiser'sarmy.63
Ludwig Renn, chief of staff of the EleventhBrigade,was surprisedthat the
mendidnottelldirtyjokes,andattributed
thisto theirpoliticalcommitment.64
(They may of course have simply been reticent in the presence of a senior
officer.)
Butoverthe courseof a two-yearconflict,politicalcommitment
alonewas
teers as 'anti-fascists',
Germancommandersresortedto jokingto lift the
moraleof theirdazedtroops.Afterthemenof theEdgarAndreBattalionhad
reachedcover,oneof theircommanders
beganto foolaroundwithanumbrella he had found,pretendingit could protecthim fromenemyfire.6"
When
of armylife,
writingfor eachother,veteransoftendwelton the camaraderie
thevolunteers'
in adversity.One
emphasizing
groupidentityandcheerfulness
veteranrecalledhow a meal of unripegrapesled to what he describedas
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
'IWantedto be a LittleLenin'
McLellan:
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But in some cases the will to fight was simply not strong enough.
Communistrecordsshow that about 200 of the volunteersspent some time
under lock and key - that is to say that, on average,every tenth German
volunteerwas arrestedat some stage of his time in Spain.About half of these
SAPMO-BArch, NY 4072/154, 120. Fritz Rettmann to Franz Dahlem.
Alfred Kantorowicz, Spanisches Tagebuch (Berlin 1948), 52.
SAPMO-BArch, SgY 11/V237/13/204, 38. Fritz Rettmann, 'Erlebnisse als Polit.-Komm. der
II. Komp.'.
76 SAPMO-BArch, DY 55/V241/113, 82.
77 SAPMO-BArch, SgY 30/1349, 60. Erinnerungen Richard Stahlmann.
78 SAPMO-BArch, SgY 30/1448, 17. Erinnerungen Karl Deutscher.
79 Uhl, Mythos Spanien, op. cit., 82.
80 SAPMO-BArch, SgY 11/V237/13/204, 38. Fritz Rettmann, 'Erlebnisse als Polit.-Komm. der
II. Komp.'.
73
74
75
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303
There can be no doubt that the majority of the German volunteers were highly
politically committed. Ideology was extremely important to them in numerous
ways: their membership of or alignment with the communist movement, the
sense of an anti-fascist crusade, their derogatory attitudes towards anarchists
and other non-communists. But alternative combat motivations surface in
memoirs too: boredom, longing for adventure, desire to escape communist
infighting, circumstance. The wish to be a 'little Lenin' was an ideological one,
but it also expressed a yearning for a purposeful, active masculinity. Soldiers'
motivation was neither homogeneous nor stable. What may have started as an
ideological decision was complicated by emotions felt for the Spanish people
and for fellow volunteers. Ideology was important, but it was not everything,
and even ideology could fail you in the heat of battle. Particularly in retrospect, soldiers tended to distance themselves from the brand of self-sacrificing
heroism propagated by party historians. Even the veterans themselves could
not identify with the steel-like masculinity of communist legend.
The German volunteers acted on a complex mixture of ideological and personal motivation. In lives shaped by political commitment, campaigning and
persecution, there was rarely a sharp definition between personal and ideological goals. Victory in Spain would have been a victory for the Left, but the
volunteers hoped it would also be their first stop on the road back to
Germany, to their families, and to civilian lives. Ultimately it is impossible to
untangle the political and private threads. As another Englishman Esmond
Romilly recognized, 'they were fighting for their cause and they were fighting
as well for a home to live in . . . they had staked everything on this war.'84
Nothing demonstrated this more clearly than the fate of the German volunteers after the demobilization of the Brigades. While their international
81
82
83
84
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workers for a just cause, for peace, for socialism and for the liberation of
For all the bathos in these lines, they give a sense of how much
humankind.'8s
the Germanvolunteershad ventured.Althoughthey had volunteeredto take
up arms in Spain,once the war was over they had no choice but to carryon
fighting.
Josie McLellan
is Lecturerin ModernEuropeanHistoryat the Universityof Bristol.
Her publicationsincludeAntifascismand Memoryin East Germany.
Rememberingthe InternationalBrigades1945-1989 (Oxford2004).
She is currentlyworkingon a study of sexualityand everydaylife
underEastGermancommunism.
85 Kurt Hofer, 'Wir kampfen weiter' in Immer bereit fiir die Verteidigung der Freiheit des
Volkes. Spaniens Freiheitskampf 1936-1939 (Berlin 1956), 59.
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