From 'Einheitsfront' to 'Volksfront': Ernst Toller and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

During the 1930s Ernst Toller was a keen supporter of the ‘Volksfront’, the broad anti-Fascist coalition proclaimed by the Communist International in 1935. Previous studies have noted this, but, it will be argued here, have either ignored or misunderstood the impact it had on his political outlook. Before being forced to leave Germany, Toller had viewed Fascism as a product of the crisis in the capitalist system and believed it could be defeated only by the working class organised in what he and others who shared his views called an ‘Einheitsfront’. In exile, as he looked to the capitalist democracies for help in building the ‘Volksfront’, Toller abandoned this standpoint and argued that Fascism could be defeated only by a wide coalition of all people of progressive opinion, irrespective of social class. Though understandable in the historical circumstances, this belief led Toller not only to ignore the revolution which broke out in Republican Spain after Franco’s attempted coup but also to his supporting the interpretation of the Spanish Civil War advanced by the Stalinists in an attempt to conceal from the world their efforts to crush the revolution in the name of the defence of democracy. This calls for a revision both of the view which claims that Toller became a supporter of liberal democracy late in life and of that which argues that his basic socialist beliefs remained unaltered.