By Paul Levi
David Fernbach (ed. & Intro)
Paul Levi is still some of the most attention-grabbing and arguable figures within the early background of the Communist circulation. As chief of the KPD after the homicide of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, he effectively outfitted up a celebration of a 3rd of 1000000 individuals, yet via 1921 Comintern strain for ‘Bolshevisation’ compelled Levi’s resignation and expulsion. until eventually his early demise in 1930 he remained ‘a innovative socialist of the Rosa Luxemburg school’ (Carl von Ossietsky), and used to be defined through Albert Einstein as ‘one of the wisest, so much simply and brave folks i've got come across’. the 1st English variation of Levi’s writings fills a long-standing hole within the files of German Communism.
Reviews:
Mit [Fernbach's] Auswahl der Texte legt der Band [...] einen anderen Schwerpunkt als die auf Deutsch zugängliche Sammlung, .... Zugleich werden so einige Artikel Levis zugänglich, die auf Deutsch – soweit ersichtlich – nur im unique, nicht aber in einem Nachdruck vorliegen. Gerade dieseTexte sind sehr spannend, zeigen sie doch Levi als politischen Denker, der für innerparteiliche Demokratie Stellung bezieht, und sich als scharfsinniger Analytiker der politischen Lage in der Weimarer Republik erweist.
Thilo Scholle, Magazin 188: 65
Seit 1969 hat es in Deutschland keine variation der Schriften Paul Levis mehr gegeben, weder in der DDR, wo er bis 1983 als Verräter galt, noch im Westen, wo er in Vergessenheit geraten warfare. Insofern füllt die unlängst erschienene englischsprachige Levi-Ausgabe eine Lücke. [...] Gegenüber der Ausgabe von 1969 hat Fernbach intestine ein Viertel der Texte vollständig neu ediert, darunter zwei Artikel zu den Räte-Experimenten in Budapest und München sowie einen Schlüsseltext Levis, das vierzig Seiten umfassende Protokoll seiner Verteidigungsrede vor dem Zentralausschuss der deutschen Kommunisten im Mai 1921. Einleitung und Bibliographie spiegeln weitgehend den aktuellen Stand der historischen Kommunismusforschung wider.
Rolf Wörsdörfer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 23 may well 2012.
With this skillfully edited choice of Levi's speeches and writings, Fernbach, lengthy validated as a number one pupil of Marxism, makes a tremendous contribution to figuring out the Left in Europe within the years after WW I.
Highly instructed. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
Choice, March 2012
Levi’s writings in English [...] enable English-reading socialists to procure a fuller realizing of the German progressive interval after the 1st international conflict, a interval wealthy in classes for anti-capitalists at the present time. [...] Brill and David Fernbach have performed a provider to the left in making them on hand to the English reader.
Stuart King, in everlasting Revolution, vol. 22 (Winter 2012), pp. 29-34.
Contents:
Introduction
Part One: top the KPD
Address to the Founding Congress of the KPD
Letter to Lenin (1919)
The Munich adventure: An Opposing View
The Political scenario and the KPD (October 1919)
The classes of the Hungarian Revolution
The World-Situation and the German Revolution
The starting of the difficulty within the Communist social gathering and the International
Letter to Loriot
Part : The March Action
Our direction: opposed to Putschism
What Is the Crime? The March motion or Criticising It?
Letter to Lenin (1921)
The calls for of the Kommunistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft
Part 3: The Soviet Question
Letter to Clara Zetkin
Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet The Russian Revolution
Introduction to Trotsky, the teachings of October
The Retreat from Leninism
After Ten Years
Approaching the End
Return
Part 4: The German Republic
The homicide of Erzberger
The wishes of the Hour
Why we're becoming a member of the United Social-Democratic Party
The Assassination of Rathenau
The state of affairs after Rathenau’s Death
The Reich and the Workers
The Defenders of the Republic
After the Oath
Preview of In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi (Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 31) PDF
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Additional info for In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi (Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 31)
This letter has nonetheless now not arrived. it's going to were the first factor to reach following the choice, and might have relieved us of the complete difficult and unsightly activity of ourselves taking a place and ourselves creating a antagonistic statement in the direction of the KAPD. yet we needed to do that, to teach our face, and we did achieve this in our primary place opposed to the KAPD. We have been obliged to take action, as, after the fight we had waged with the KAPD approximately our primary place, lets no longer enable the KAPD to be admitted with our creating a public statement. Our Berlin comrades rather remorse that the protest we then released used to be no longer by way of any confident assertion. i need to assert to them: a similar lively place that you simply yourselves sought after, i. e. that we must always call for concrete measures from the administrative, is already there in our protest-statement. After the administrative Committee of the Communist foreign had determined to confess the KAPD, we needed the administrative Committee to provide the connection of the KAPD to the Communist overseas a concrete shape, expressed first of all in an ‘adjustment’ of the KAPD’s language; provided that the administrative Committee might now observe its impression and disciplinary strength, it may have forced the KAPD to stay, in Germany itself, in the entrance that it approved in Moscow. it's our opinion that, if that had come from Moscow, the advance may were terribly speedy, and the KAPD may have obvious that club of the Communist foreign doesn't suggest sending a commis- The starting of the drawback • sion to Moscow yet accepting a definite entrance in Germany. This we already defined within the first letter to the administrative Committee. we won't erase the truth that the KAPD has been admitted, this topic can simply be resolved through the administrative Committee preserving in the direction of the KAPD the organisational results of its club, and compelling it both to stay within the entrance or to split off back. Comrades, if we think of front of the oppressed opposed to the oppressors, we don't simply need to identify the old line that this entrance takes, we don't simply need to ponder the historic initiatives, yet we needs to challenge ourselves with what the current initiatives of this entrance are. and that i come right here to a question that has performed a undeniable position within the previous couple of years less than the query: ‘offensive or protecting strategies for the get together? ’. I already spoke approximately this offensive tactic in Berlin, in a press release that used to be, in my opinion, misunderstood. i don't are looking to repeat this the following, yet ask you to learn the speech within the fabric that you've got earlier than you. I say: the strategy of the Communist overseas needs to, at least, be an offensive tactic within the current scenario. Why I say this effects from what I defined first and foremost: the Entente is caught quickly, it truly is experiencing a hindrance and has been pressured via this quandary directly to the protecting, and so it's the second for us to head over to the offensive. And what does the offensive suggest?