The KPD in the Weimar Republic and the Problem of Terror during the ‘Third Period’, 1929–33

Abstract

For insurrectionary groups the use of violence as a political tool is not, in principle, problematic. When a revolutionary party aims to take an active part in the organisation of social and political life during periods preceding the moment of insurrection, however, the appropriate forms and occasions of violent action have to be continuously reviewed, debated and reassessed. The use of any kind of violence is made problematic at times like these by the contrast between the enormity of the threat that organised public violence is generally held to pose to civil society — and the corresponding harshness of official response to it — and the relative weakness of the party, as implied in the party’s recognition of a non- or at best pre-revolutionary period: even where the party may recognise the tactical utility of certain forms of violence, it cannot allow an escalation of violence that might force it into the position of fighting a rearguard action in a premature civil war or result in its suppression by the police. These basic tensions can become acutely problematic in practice when the party’s policy-makers have to contend with pressures for violent action coming from within the party itself and/or from its opponents. For the German Communist Party — the KPD — the question of political terror was a problem in both these senses during the better part of its existence; in the years between 1929 and 1933 the official analysis of the ‘Third Period’, with its combination of threat and promise, joined with conditions of social and political crisis to raise that question to the status of a central issue in Communist tactics.