RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Light on German left’s infighting before nazi seizure of power
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
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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