social fascism

BUT WHAT of women communists? Among the major parties in the Weimar Republic, the KPD held the dubious distinction of having the fewest female members and attracting the fewest female voters. Women ranged from 9.1 percent of party members in July 1920 to 16.5 percent of party members in 1929. For many women, the KPD’s combative poli- tics may have seemed too masculine and belligerent. The party presented itself as a body of young, male, muscle-rippled proletarian workers. The party’s activities—armed uprisings, violent strikes, militant demonstrations, and uniformed marches—also reflected its masculine self-image. The KPD shunned any image of itself as soft or feminine. Indeed, in the communist literature of the period, these qualities characterized the enemy. Social democrats were depicted as old, fat, impotent, and female, while communists were invariably virile, tough, and male. In addition, the KPD conveyed ambiguous images of women. Although the party preached a rhetoric of women’s emancipation, party propaganda frequently depicted women as “objects of sympathy and pathos.” But the communist press also circulated images of the “proletarian new woman.” In many ways like her male counterpart, she was, as one historian has written, “youthful, healthy, slender, athletic, erotic.”6 Neither image may have appealed to the hard-pressed, hard-working proletarian woman of the 1920s. Finally, the KPD focused little attention on tradi- tional women’s issues. The party assumed that the problems that women faced, just like all other social problems, would be resolved by the coming revolution.

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Even in the face of mounting Nazi successes, hostility toward the SPD continued to preoccupy the communist movement. As Schirdewan later recalled of SPD-KPD relations, “I was always the witness of large, at times very polarized rallies and bloody clashes. We were not able to set aside our differences [and] to bring about the potential and necessary unity to defend Weimar.” Schirdewan correctly noted that the KPD’s stance prevented the formation of a united left response to the Nazis. He failed to remember, however, that the militant, street-fighting KPD did not wish to preserve what it viewed as the corrupt, repressive Weimar system.