MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Savages, The Legend of Ochi, and The Naked Gun
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Light on German left’s infighting before nazi seizure of power
GORDON PARSONS advises you to get up to speed on obscure ancient ceremonies to grasp this interpretation of a late Shakespearean tragi-comedy
DENNIS BROE enjoys the political edge of a series that unmasks British imperialism, resonates with the present and has been buried by Disney
STEVE JOHNSON speaks to DJ and singer/songwriter Mark Radcliffe
JAMES WALSH takes advantage of an evening of comedy snippets to pick out which clowns will make it in Edinburgh
MAYER WAKEFIELD is swept up by the tale of the south London venue where music forged alliances across race, class and identity
Weimar Communism as Mass Movement, 1918-1933
Edited by Ralf Hoffrogge and Norman Laporte
(Lawrence and Wishart, £20)
IF THE KPD — the largest communist party outside Soviet Russia — and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had united to fight Hitler, then history would have turned out very differently and millions of lives would have been saved. Debate has raged over who was to blame for this historical catastrophe, in which Germany’s two largest working-class parties fought each other rather than the fuehrer.
Stalin alone has usually been blamed for this calamity by the professional Kremlinologists but now that KPD archives and Comintern documents are freely available to researchers, it's possible to examine the background to this historical era and distinguish speculation from the facts.
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