The politics and structures of the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) have been explored in countless works, many of which offer quite contradictory assessments. Short biographies of its functionary corps have also appeared, as have comprehensive studies of all KPD leaders from 1919–33 – from Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to their successors Paul Levi, Heinrich Brandler, Ruth Fisher and especially Ernst Thälmann. Yet a scholarly book on the life and work of Ernst Meyer, leader of the KPD from 1921–2, has so far been lacking.
Thanks to the present volume by Florian Wilde (the shortened version of his extensive dissertation), a proper account of Ernst Meyer’s career is finally available. It presents Meyer’s life in a detailed and sensitive manner on the basis of all available materials while making particular use of extensive archival records that have only recently become accessible. With precision and considerable nuance, it also describes the political circumstances that determined Meyer’s outlook. What makes Wilde’s study of the KPD so remarkable is that it presents not only the latest state of research, but also the author’s own analyses. These elements of the biography guide both its clear reconstruction of the KPD’s Stalinist transformation and its compelling account of Meyer’s opposition to this process as the leader of the party’s ‘conciliator faction’.
Proceeding chronologically, Wilde comprehensively reconstructs Meyer’s life from his birth in 1887 to his early death in 1930. As he does so, he brings numerous additional details to bear on the well-known facts:
Ernst Meyer was raised in a staunchly religious working-class home in East Prussia. A Marxist as a student, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) in 1908. In 1910, he took his doctorate at Königsberg, and in 1913, he became an editor of the Berlin-based Vorwärts (Forward), the main party paper of the SPD. As a member of the SPD’s left wing and an opponent of the First World War, he was dismissed from this position in late summer of 1915. Meyer then spent several months in ‘preventative custody’ in 1915–16 due to his activities with the illegal Spartacus Group, whose newspaper Spartakusbriefe (Spartacus Letters) he co-published from January–August 1916. In 1918, he was temporarily employed in Berlin at the Russian Telegraph Agency, the state news agency of the Soviet Union. When revolution erupted while Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches were all in prison, the leadership of the Spartacus Group fell to Meyer.
At the KPD’s founding congress in Berlin around New Year’s Eve 1918–19, Meyer was elected to the Zentrale, or executive, of the new party, where he served almost without interruption in the early years. After a stint in prison between his arrest after the Berlin clashes in January 1919 and release the following autumn, Meyer was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) at the organisation’s Second World Congress in 1920. He then assumed leadership of the KPD as chairman of the party’s Political Bureau in 1921, a role in which he advocated for the moderate policy of the ‘united front’. However, in August 1922, he was replaced by Heinrich Brandler at the instigation of the Comintern headquarters in Moscow. From 1921–4, and from 1928 until his death, Meyer was a member of the Landtag of Prussia. When a group of KPD left-wingers around Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow came to head the party in 1924, Meyer was one of their fiercest internal critics, and when the Fischer-Maslow leadership was ultimately deposed in 1925, he was put in charge of the KPD’s Press Service. As part of an ‘agreement’ with KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann in 1926, Meyer accepted the party line in exchange for leadership responsibilities. Admitted to the Central Committee, he served as the KPD’s de facto leader alongside Thälmann, even taking charge of the German party’s policy following the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1927. However, Meyer was forced to suspend his political activity in Germany after becoming seriously ill that October. He did not return to Berlin until December 1928.
By that time, Meyer’s moderate followers (Arthur Ewert, Hugo Eberlein, Gerhart Eisler) – a group derided by the Central Committee as the ‘Conciliators’ (‘Versöhnler’) – had been neutralised. The terminally ill Meyer attempted to keep them together but was himself pushed to the margins. Shortly after taking yet another stand against ultra-leftism at the KPD’s Twelfth Party Congress in June 1929, Meyer was forced into a sanatorium by his deteriorating health when a lung infection aggravated his tuberculosis in July. Following surgery, he died on 2 February 1930.
Florian Wilde has supplemented these sparse facts with vivid details, embedding Meyer’s life in its unique political context. Important assertions can already be recognised in some of the headings of this chronologically structured volume, such as ‘Radicalisation in the Pre-War SPD’, ‘Exponent of the Left Wing [of the KPD]’, ‘Retreating from the Theory of the Offensive’, ‘Hoping for Revolution, Experiencing Defeat (1923)’, ‘Leading the Party with Thälmann’, ‘Defending Rosa Luxemburg’s Tradition’, ‘Between the Fronts in December 1928’ and ‘Back to the Wall Against Stalinisation’.
Headings such as these also indicate that this superb portrait of Ernst Meyer is not limited to the highlights of his life and work in the KPD. Also noteworthy is its excellent bibliography, and especially its compendium of Meyer’s writings. One article not mentioned that was most likely also written by Meyer is the editorial of the July 1921 issue of the KPD magazine Internationale, titled ‘Tasks of the Party’ and signed with the initials ‘e. m.’. This foreword cannot and need not go into the details of this book by Wilde. As a whole, Wilde’s work on Ernst Meyer paints a picture of a party leader who does not fit the mould of a typical Communist functionary. A reserved intellectual, Ernst Meyer was a virtual outsider in a changing KPD marked by a growing dependence on Moscow. The loss of autonomy and the disappearance of internal democracy led to a strictly enforced general party line. Even more than shedding light onto interventions in party structures and politics mandated by Stalin, biographies such as those of the preeminent KPD leader Meyer demonstrate the drastic transformation undergone by Communism in Germany as it morphed from the radical wing of the movement for the emancipation of German workers into an organisation subordinated both personally and politically to the Comintern and Stalin. For his own part, Meyer regarded Moscow as a pernicious influence, just as had Paul Levi before him.
As early as the beginning of 1921, the independent KPD leader Paul Levi – the successor to Luxemburg and Liebknecht – was harassed by the Comintern due to his oppositional efforts and ultimately expelled from the party. In particular, Levi was subjected to the targeted machinations of Soviet proxy Karl Radek.1 As archival records demonstrate, Radek then proceeded similarly against Ernst Meyer. For example, in a letter sent to the Comintern chairman Zinoviev on 20 January 1922 (copies were sent to Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Bukharin), Radek denounced then-KPD leader Meyer and his ‘unspeakable vacillations’, claiming ‘a leader of the Party is lacking’. Meyer was deposed at the end of that same year. While Wilde’s analysis of Meyer’s downfall takes into account a variety of factors, Radek’s behaviour shows that Rosa Meyer-Leviné was absolutely justified when she claimed in her memoirs about her husband that ‘Ernst’s fate as party leader was decided in Moscow’.2
In spite of fully heeding the Comintern’s line, Meyer suffered the same fate as Levi. However, his almost obsequious attitude towards Soviet Russia saved him from expulsion. Meyer’s political life was characterised by disciplined comportment, and this remained the case even as both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Comintern became increasingly ‘captured’ and dominated by Stalin.
After Meyer was once again suppressed as a ‘Conciliator’ in 1928–9, poor health prevented him from radically resisting the ruling party apparatus. Walter Ulbricht, the soon-to-be leader of this body and a one-time follower of Meyer’s Middle Group (Mittelgruppe), now set the hostile tone against dissenters. Following a meeting in Moscow that year, Meyer submitted a request to the German Commission of the ECCI for immediate return to Berlin due to illness. In response, Ulbricht wrote on 1 December 1928, ‘1) After you and Comrade [Jules] Humbert-Droz made an attempt to develop a platform against the line of the Comintern and the Central Committee at the last session of the Polit-Secretariat, it is absolutely necessary for you to hear the ideas of the members of the Secretariat and to take cognizance of any answer. 2) I believe that if your physical condition permitted you to speak for 1¼ hours you are certainly strong enough to listen to the answer’. Responding to these unsavoury attacks, Meyer wrote on 3 December, ‘Without questioning the high political qualities of Comrade Ulbricht, who so perceptively discovered that my defense of the theses of the Sixth Congress against the falsifications of the Central Committee majority was a platform against the Comintern, I do not have enough confidence in Ulbricht’s medical opinion. I cannot therefore postpone my necessary and already overdue departure any longer. … With comradely greetings’.3 This demonstrates Meyer’s intelligent composure, a quality that was nevertheless of little use to him in the KPD.
Florian Wilde has not only written an excellent biography of the exciting political life of Ernst Meyer. Especially fortuitously, he has also – as far as possible – investigated the personal sides of this remarkable leader of German Communism and provided a brief account of his youth and family. In past works on Ernst Meyer in the KPD, it was precisely certain familial facts that had remained unclear. Now, Wilde’s successful research has brought a number of unknown details on this topic to light for the first time, such as details concerning Meyer’s first marriage to Elsa Ehlert. As recently as 1994, it was not possible for me to include information on Meyer’s first wife in my encyclopaedia entry on Meyer in the Neue Deutsche Biographie (New German Biography) – as even her last name was unknown, I had to write N.N. in its place. Wilde has succeeded in remedying this situation.
Meyer subsequently married Rosa Leviné in 1922. She was the widow of the executed leader of the short-lived Bavarian Council Republic, Eugen Leviné. In 1957, I became a contemporary witness to Rosa Meyer-Leviné’s later life, and she became an important ‘source’ for me on Meyer and the KPD. She wrote me in June 1957 and proposed a collaboration between the two of us: ‘Susanne [Leonhard] has described you to me as a genius of erudition and memory. … Perhaps we can do something together’. We were in contact from then on. In the 1960s, Gerda looked after her in Heidelberg, and we soon became close friends.4 Little by little, I learned a great deal of unknown things about Ernst Meyer, the great love of her life, and also about certain lore of KPD history. So it was that in 1979, I was finally able to publish Meyer-Leviné’s memoir,5 which has now become an important source for Wilde.
In my introduction from 1979, I wrote, ‘In fact, when I met her over 20 years ago, Rosa Meyer-Leviné was primarily an important historical source for me. … Over the course of our long friendship, I urged her, as did many others, to put her experiences down in writing’. After all, she was intimately acquainted with all the greats of Communism, including Trotsky and Lenin. Already in 1963, I had written in my capacity as editor of the first West German edition of a volume of collected works by Lenin, ‘For valuable advice and suggestions in editing and introducing this Lenin selection, I am deeply indebted to my friends Susanne Leonhard, Rosa Meyer-Leviné, and Helmut Fleischer’.
Through Rosa Meyer-Leviné, we also met Ernst Meyer’s sons from his first marriage, whom she had raised: Rudi (1914–76), who went on to work for the UN as an expert on timber, and Heinz (1912–82), who was involved in political and literary activity. However, we became most closely connected with Rosa’s son Eugen Leviné,6 whose father was the legendary Communist Eugen Leviné (‘We Communists are all dead men on leave’). Gerda and I met him and his wife often and stayed friends with him until his death.
Rosa Meyer-Leviné ultimately allowed me glimpses of her private archive, which contained documents and letters from Ernst Meyer that facilitated new insights into the history of the KPD. Moreover, she did so at a time when these documents were mostly off limits. Now housed in the German Federal Archive in Koblenz, her materials are still of significant importance, as is evident from Wilde’s book.
After publishing some documents from Meyer-Leviné’s archive in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Quarterly Journal of Contemporary History) in 1963–4 and 1968 (see footnote 4), I was then able to fill nearly 60 pages with even more in my 1969 book Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus (The Transformation of German Communism). This was a minor sensation. Included were twelve pages of private letters written by Ernst Meyer from 1925–7 and by Rosa Meyer in 1925. Though she managed to rescue these letters in her 1933 emigration, she began to fear in 1940 that Hitler’s troops would make it to England as well. She therefore ‘purged’ the collection of certain political statements, although many important fragments survive and are still of interest today.
Also prior to her escape in 1933, Meyer-Leviné brought a manuscript by Ernst Meyer to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin. Unfortunately, this document has never been recovered. In the 1970s, Heinz Meyer waged an energetic battle with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany’s archive to have the manuscript discovered and published – without success. Witnessing such experiences of the Meyer family have fed my interest in the figure of Ernst Meyer, which is why I am especially pleased that Florian Wilde has now produced this biography.
This book has enhanced the picture we have of Meyer as a person. Having been personally acquainted with two other important leaders of the KPD, Heinrich Brandler and Ruth Fischer,7 in addition to numerous functionaries, it has long been clear to me that ‘the’ typical KPD functionary, let alone leader, does not exist. That being said, particular characteristics and modes of behaviour were of course either innate or ‘instilled’ in all. This included the total acceptance of the Soviet Union as a model and subordination to its leadership in practice. Until 1929–30, there existed in the KPD various orientations towards the strategy and tactics that the party should pursue, which led to conflicts between the leading cadre and the Comintern. The first figure to come under fire as a consequence was Paul Levi; after his expulsion and return to the SPD, he went on to expose the politics of the ‘Communists’, and then Stalin’s dictatorship above all, as anti-socialist. Members of the left-wing opposition such as Ruth Fisher and comrades close to her including Arkadi Maslow and Hugo Urbahns subsequently underwent a similar experience before increasingly revealing the barbarity of Stalin’s politics. (Even more critical than they were the ultra-leftists led by Karl Korsch, Werner Scholem and Ernst Schwarz, among others.) Although the ‘right-wing’ Communists such as Brandler (and his allies such as August Thalheimer and Jacob Walcher) condemned Stalin’s politics in the Comintern, they largely viewed his barbaric methods in the USSR as ‘historically justified’.8
It is well known and documented that Ernst Thälmann was dependent on Stalin and supported him in the KPD.9 In contrast, Ernst Meyer and the Conciliators maintained independent positions. Yet unlike Levi, Brandler and Fischer, who risked expulsion in struggle and later formed their own fixed groups outside of the KPD, the Conciliators negotiated. They resisted the ultra-left politics ordered by Stalin and ultimately helped bring about their downfall. But they did not dare openly attack the fundamental problem of the Comintern’s complete dependency on the Soviet Union and Stalin. And they were prepared to compromise on whatever it took to avoid expulsion from ‘the party’.
These were the positions of Ernst Meyer as well, though it is unclear whether he would have continued to stand by them had he not died in 1930. Yet as a ‘highly intelligent, tactful and sensitive person’, as Wilde aptly describes him, he did not fit the mould of a KPD leader by Stalin’s grace. This is already clear from his dismissal and replacement by Brandler in 1922 during the Lenin era, though it is even more obvious from his sidelining by Thälmann in 1928.
Meyer operated as a committed Communist who not only rejected Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolsheviks but indeed venerated Lenin without restraint – in contrast to Paul Levi. Yet even he recognised the Bolsheviks’ aberrations. Similarly to figures such as Clara Zetkin, he stood somewhere between ‘critical and bureaucratic Communism’.10 Thus, our image of Ernst Meyer remains that of a man of high integrity and a committed Communist who was nevertheless an outsider to the Communist movement.
Thanks to this tremendous biography by Florian Wilde, Ernst Meyer has been rescued from oblivion. Linking a life story with history in general, this book will hopefully find numerous readers. It deserves nothing less.
Hermann Weber (1928–2014)
For a new biography of Radek, see Gutjahr 2012. However, Gutjahr hardly mentions Radek’s conduct towards Meyer and does not consult archival records.
Leviné-Meyer 1977, p. 45.
Letter from Walter Ulbricht to Ernst Meyer, Moscow, 1 December 1928, in Leviné-Meyer 1977, p. 144; letter from Meyer to the members of the ECCI Political Secretariat, Moscow, 3 December 1928, in Leviné-Meyer 1977, pp. 144–5. Both letters were printed in Rosa Meyer-Leviné’s 1979 memoir (translators’ note: the English version appeared in 1977, the German translation thereof in 1979), though I had already managed to publish them – first in 1963 in the SBZ-Archiv (Archive of the Soviet Occupation Zone), and then again in 1964 in my polemic Ulbricht Falsifies History (Weber 1964). At the time, I was not able to name my source, the private archive of Rosa Meyer-Leviné (now housed in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz). Meyer-Leviné permitted me to print the letters but did not want to make her archive publicly known at the time. Later, in my 1969 book The Transformation of German Communism (Weber 1969), I was able to print extensive documents from the archive, which brought numerous unknown details about Meyer and the leadership of the KPD to light.
For more details, see Weber and Weber 2006, pp. 279–81.
See Leviné-Meyer 1977 and Meyer-Leviné 1982. Translators’ note: Hermann Weber edited and introduced the German translation of Meyer-Leviné’s memoir, which first appeared in English in 1977 and then in German in 1979 (reprint 1982).
See Kahlenberg and Weber 2006, pp. 11–12.
See Weber and Weber 2006. See also Becker 2001 and Keßler 2013.
See Weber (ed.) 1981 (including Brandler’s letters to me), p. 252.
See Weber and Bayerlein (eds.) 2003.
See Weber 1971.