Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110 brill.

nl/hima

Editorial Introduction to Paul Levi,

Our Path and What Is the Crime?

David Fernbach
david.fernbach@wanadoo.fr

Abstract
These two key texts of German Communism appear in English for the first time. Paul Levi’s
Our Path and What Is the Crime? were the response of the KPD leader to the disastrous ‘March
Action’ of 1921. Over two years, Levi had succeeded in building a mass revolutionary party that
drew on the traditions of both Luxemburg and Lenin; this was now over-ridden by a stereotyped
Bolshevism enforced by the Comintern’s emissaries. In the first text, subtitled ‘Against Putschism’
and written within days of the attempted coup, Levi criticised the attempt to seize power without
the majority-backing of the working class, which had decimated the Party’s membership. Its
publication led to Levi’s exclusion from the Party for breach of discipline, even though his
critique of the March Action was shared by Lenin. The second text was delivered verbally to the
Central Committee, as an unsuccessful appeal against his expulsion, and the transcript gives a
unique flavour of the atmosphere in the KPD leadership at this crucial moment.

Keywords
Germany, communism, Comintern, revolution, tactics

The revolutionary movement in Germany in the years after the First World
War has a lasting fascination in the perspective of Marxist politics as the closest
approach to proletarian power in a developed capitalist country, which, had it
been successful, would certainly have given the twentieth century a far happier
coloration. In November 1918, the War was ended by popular uprising,
workers’ councils established across the country, and the empire replaced by a
republic. Despite the inauguration of bourgeois democracy, the radicalisation
of the working class continued in the following years, and the German
Communist Party grew from a small sect on its foundation to a mass party of
three hundred thousand members. In 1923, with the Entente occupation of
western Germany and a total economic collapse, the Comintern proclaimed
the ‘German October’, and it seemed at the time as if only conjunctural factors
had prevented a successful seizure of power. Though many histories of the
period are available, the most comprehensive as well as the most politically
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156920609X460381
102 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110

acute is Pierre Broué’s The German Revolution 1917–1923, published originally

in 1971, but which has only recently appeared in English translation.1
Broué’s magisterial work of close to a thousand pages takes the reader step
by step through each phase in this epic struggle, and excels above all in its
presentation of the dialectic between objective and subjective factors, the
spontaneous activity of the working class and the project of its vanguard to
steer a course towards revolution. The marked regional variations in German
conditions are fully taken into account, and some twenty individuals emerge
as distinct political figures whose varying understanding of the developing
situation contributed to defining the tactical orientation of the movement.
Two men in particular stand out as more significant than any others for
their role in the German workers’ movement of this time. They each appear
throughout Broué’s book, and, towards the end, the author offers an overall
assessment of their contributions in two special chapters. One of these was
Karl Radek, who though not himself German, had been closely involved with
the radical wing of the German workers’ movement since before the War, and
remained Lenin’s personal emissary to the German Communists irrespective
of his formal position in the Comintern. The other was Paul Levi, an early
Spartakist who led the KPD for two years after the murder of Leo Jogiches in
March 1919, but remains less well-known – not only to English readers – due
to his expulsion from the Party in 1921 and his subsequent disappearance
from official Communist historiography except as negative example.
Only Levi and Radek, writes Broué, ‘seem at certain moments to have been
able to play the necessary role of theoretician and guide, of team-builder, of
master and arbiter, which Lenin played in the International . . .’. Moreover,
‘the transfer of moral authority from Levi to Radek was already significant of
the difficulties encountered in the construction of the KPD’s leadership, and
of the close dependence of the latter on Moscow’.2
This early period of the KPD was fraught with many difficulties, not just
because of a rapidly changing political context in which it also had to cope
with bouts of hefty repression. Basic decisions on its orientation had to be
made, as this had by no means been settled when the conference of 30–1
December 1918 founded the new party. Though the name chosen at this time
was the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Spartakus), less than half of its
original members came from the Spartakusbund; most of the rest – eagerly
inspired by their reading of the Russian experience – were ultra-leftists who
rejected work in trade unions or electoral campaigns, and viewed the prospects

1. Broué 2005. Page references to this work are given here only for specific quotations.
2. Broué 2005, p. 874. (Translation modified.)
 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110 103

of imminent insurrection through the distorting lens of their own zealous

militancy. In October 1919, at the Party’s Heidelberg congress, Levi forced
the expulsion of this left wing, seeing this as a necessary precondition for
linking up with the far larger numbers of revolutionary workers who were
flocking into the ‘Independent’ USPD that had split from the SPD in 1917.
In March 1920, the persistent leftism within the Party was shown when the
question of defending the Republic against reaction was raised by the Kapp
putsch. Levi was in prison at the time, and, in his absence, the Party Zentrale 3
initially refused to ‘lift a finger’ for the Weimar constitution; Levi’s denunciation
of his colleagues was supported by the Comintern and published in Moscow.
In December of that year, however, Levi’s efforts were greatly rewarded, when
the majority of the USPD united with the KPD(S) to form the VKPD,4
increasing the number of Communists from about 50,000 to at least a third
of a million.

Between Lenin and Luxemburg

Levi was better placed than any of his colleagues to seek a synthesis between
the specific revolutionary tradition of the German workers’ movement and
the successful example of Bolshevism. He had been a close disciple of Rosa
Luxemburg since shortly before the War, but, after extricating himself from
the army in 1916, he made Lenin’s acquaintance in Switzerland, endorsed
Lenin’s return through Germany to Russia on behalf of the German radicals,
and subsequently moved to Berlin where, after Jogiches’s imprisonment, he
joined Ernst Meyer and Eugen Leviné in leading the Spartakusbund. When
Luxemburg sought to publish her critique of the Bolsheviks in the Spartakusbriefe,
it was Levi who visited her in prison to settle the dispute,5 and, at the foundation
conference of the KPD, when Luxemburg was averse to a ‘Communist’ party
(and Jogiches to a new party under any name), Levi successfully mediated
between the Spartakist old guard and the leftist hotheads.
If later Communist historiography labelled Levi a ‘Luxemburgist’ opposed
to Leninism, this was not how the issue appeared to either Levi or Lenin at
that time. Levi worked closely with Radek at the helm of German Communism,
despite Radek’s frequent absence in Moscow and occasional differences over

3. The Zentrale, not to be confused with the larger Central Committee, was the day-to-day
leadership of the Party, broadly equivalent to the later Political Bureau.
4. The V stood for Vereinigte (United). It was dropped in mid-1921.
5. Levi 1922, p. 1. Luxemburg wrote in a letter to him that Levi cites here: ‘I am writing this
pamphlet for you, and if I convince only you, I shall not have done this work in vain.’ On Levi’s
intimate relationship with Luxemburg, see Fernbach 1999, p. 6, and infra.
104 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110

tactics. Lenin had been worried by the expulsion of the leftists, and sought to
keep open a bridge with the Communist Workers’ Party (KAPD) that they
subsequently formed. But the Comintern backed Levi on all the key disputes
of this period, and, even after Levi’s expulsion, Lenin hoped he would return
to the fold. Lenin allegedly said that though Levi had ‘lost his head entirely . . .
he, at least, had something to lose: one can’t even say that about the others’.6
At the high tide of the revolutionary movement in Germany, a synthesis
of ‘Luxemburgist’ and ‘Leninist’ traditions seemed possible, despite the past
tactical differences between their two protagonists. Levi and his Spartakist
friends accepted the need for a Communist party that grouped the revolutionary
vanguard of the working class, excluding reformists and centrists, and could
practise a disciplined tactic through to the seizure of power. Lenin, on the
other hand, accepted that the Bolshevik experience had been too Russian to
generalise to the countries of advanced capitalism, and recognised the need to
build mass revolutionary parties. This was the time of ‘Left-Wing’ Communism:
An Infantile Disorder. Yet, within three months of the birth of the new united
party, a conflict had broken out that was to lead to a major defeat for German
Communism, the expulsion of Paul Levi, and a retrenchment that signalled a
permanent parting of the ways between the two traditions.
Despite the formation of the VKPD with 350,000 members, the Communists
still had the allegiance of no more than a fifth of the German working class.
Yet the more recently radicalised workers from the USPD now often displayed
the impatient leftism that Levi had painstakingly worked to root out among
the ‘old Communists’. Even on the Zentrale, the idea gained ground that
with the Party so much larger, great things should be possible. Radek came
round to the idea that Levi’s consistent opposition to ‘putschism’ had led to a
passive attitude, especially after two events had shown how Levi was less than
happy with the practice of the Comintern’s Executive Committee – which
only from autumn 1920 was in a position to effectively intervene in the affairs
of national parties.
The first of these was that, simultaneously with the unification congress of
the VKPD, the Comintern recognised the KAPD as a ‘sympathising party’.
Lenin and Trotsky made clear to a KAPD delegation their differences with the
German leftists, but Levi saw this compromise arrangement (which lasted
only a few months) as undermining his effort against these rivals and
strengthening the leftists within the VKPD itself. The second was that at the
Livorno Congress of the Italian Socialist Party (already affiliated to the Third
International) in January 1921, the Comintern representatives Rákosi and

6. Reported in Trotsky 1975, p. 179.

 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110 105

Kabakchiev pressed through a split that not only expelled the reformists under
Turati, but also the majority under Serrati whom Levi saw as, in the main,
revolutionary workers who should belong in the ranks of the Communists.
Radek now aligned himself with the ‘Berlin leftists’ on the Zentrale, led
by Fischer, Maslow and Friesland, and claimed that the VKPD needed a
more active new leadership. On 22 February, Rákosi addressed the Central
Committee of the German party, defending the Livorno decision and maintaining
that ‘splits, ten times over if need be, whether in Italy, France or Germany’
were needed ‘in the interest of political clarity’.7 His rhetoric won over the
Committee by a small majority; Levi and his co-chairman Ernst Däumig (ex-
USPD) resigned from the Zentrale together with Clara Zetkin and two other
members, with Heinrich Brandler emerging as the Party’s effective leader.
As Broué writes, ‘from that time onwards, Levi fought the battle on the
political plane with great clarity’.8 In a series of articles in Rote Fahne, he argued
that the international situation was not now propitious for a proletarian
offensive, that it was essential for the VKPD to win trade-unionised workers,
that revolution depended on the will of the proletariat in each country, and
that the tactics appropriate for Western Europe were necessarily different from
those that had proved successful in Russia. It was a dangerous sign that the
ECCI saw the way to build Communist parties ‘not by progressive education,
but by mechanical splits’.9

The ‘March Action’

It was at this point that Béla Kun arrived in Berlin, fresh from his appointment
as chair of the ECCI. His mass executions of White prisoners in the Civil War
had infuriated Lenin, who sent him off on a mission to Turkestan; on return,
he now proved a close supporter of Zinoviev. Opposed as he was to the
proposed NEP, Zinoviev apparently hoped that struggles abroad might obviate
the need for this compromise. The theory of the ‘revolutionary offensive’,
discredited the previous year in the Polish campaign, was revived with the
pretext of relieving the immediate pressure on Soviet Russia.
In the first two weeks of March, Kun lobbied individual members of the
Central Committee in favour of the new policy. Zetkin was so alarmed by
what he said to her that she refused to meet him again without the presence of
a witness. When the Committee met on 16–17 March, Brandler and Frölich

7. Broué 2005, p. 486.

8. Broué 2005, p. 488.
9. Broué 2005, p. 489.
106 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110

explained that an Anglo-American war could soon be expected, sanctions on

Germany were imminently to be stiffened, and there was a 90 per cent chance
that the Silesian referendum on the 20th would lead to armed conflict between
Germany and Poland. In this context, the Zentrale proposed ‘a complete break
from the past’, ‘forcing the revolution’ and doing all possible to provoke a
breach between Germany and the Entente.
Though the new leadership may not have sought to take action quite so
precipitously, news arrived while the meeting was still in progress that the
Oberpräsident of Prussian Saxony, Hörsing (a Social Democrat), planned to
send troops to occupy various industrial zones in central Germany that were
Communist strongholds, and where the workers had kept the weapons they
had acquired at the time of the Kapp putsch. The Zentrale immediately decided
to launch ‘partial actions’ in this region that would create a local civil war. This
not only required manipulating the working class in these districts to believe
that seizure of power was on the agenda, but stoking the struggle by a variety
of ruses, including bombing the Party’s own offices in order to blame the
Right, using unemployed workers to drive employed colleagues out of the
factories, and so on. The VKPD now coordinated its actions with the KAPD,
and Max Höltz, a KAPD activist, started an urban guerrilla in the region. But,
even in the occupied districts, the general strike was only partially successful,
and the appeal for its national extension met with a very poor response.
The ‘March Action’ was a dismal failure. Hundreds of workers were killed,
thousands imprisoned, and, in its wake, membership of the Party dropped
by half. Though Radek and the Zentrale at first sought to defend the action,
as did the ECCI in Moscow, two months later the German leadership was
roundly condemned by Lenin and Trotsky at the Third Congress of the
Comintern. In substance, Levi’s line was completely vindicated against that
associated with Béla Kun, Radek and Thalheimer. Levi, however, had publicly
criticised the ‘March Action’ in his pamphlet Unser Weg [Our Path], even
exposing the underhand ruses that the Zentrale had employed (a charge that
the new leaders sought to deny, until compromising documents that Zetkin
was taking to Moscow were confiscated en route and subsequently published
by the SPD). Though, the previous year, the Comintern had itself published
Levi’s criticism of his colleagues’ passivity towards the Kapp putsch (not to
mention that Zinoviev, president of the Comintern, had publicly attacked the
Bolshevik plans for insurrection in October 1917), Levi’s pamphlet was now
seen as an impermissible breach of discipline, and it was for this that Levi was
expelled from the VKPD.
Lenin still hoped that, after a period of months, and a show of self-criticism,
Levi could be brought back to the German Party and even to a leading position.
 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110 107

If he soon slammed the door behind him, this was initially seen as personal
stubbornness, and condemned even by Zetkin who had been his closest
political associate. Broué is inclined to accept that the real question at issue
was simply one of tactics. But, although Levi saw himself for a while as a
dissident Communist, seeking to win his former Party back to the right path,
reading Our Path and its sequel What Is the Crime? with subsequent hindsight
suggests very clearly a difference in principle that harks back to the fundamental
disagreement between Luxemburg and Lenin, and is confirmed by Levi’s
introduction to Luxemburg’s pamphlet on the Russian Revolution, finally
published in 1922. Luxemburg had written into the founding document
of her party, ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, that the German
Communists ‘will never take over governmental power except in response to
the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass’;10 in
German conditions, this would also mean a majority of the whole population,
and thus avoid any conflict between the legitimacy endowed by workers’
councils and the legitimacy of universal suffrage. Despite apparent agreement
that the Communists had to seek a majority of the working class, the Comintern’s
response to the ‘March Action’ showed that this was not a necessary principle
of Bolshevik practice. But, for Levi as for Luxemburg, the deployment of the
Party to divide the working class rather than unite it was something outside
the universe of Marxist politics; and a power constructed on this basis would
be flawed at its very origin.
The ‘German October’ of 1923 was to demonstrate how the two roads had
already diverged. Germany certainly faced a crisis without precedent, in which
the state was visibly shaken. But there was no sign that a majority of workers
yet supported the KPD, nor was the Comintern willing to wait for the formation
of soviets. The question was the possibility of seizing power; the rest could
come later. Preparations were made, the signal for insurrection was all but
given, then at the last moment rescinded. If things had worked out better,
it would have been a great victory for Leninism, broadening the space of
the politically possible still further beyond the bounds of orthodox-Marxist
thinking. By this time, however, the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg was already
a suppressed memory in German Communism.
Paul Levi, having returned to the USPD, found himself back in the SPD
when the two parties merged; until his early death in 1930, he remained a
leading figure on the SPD’s left wing and stood for a united front with
the Communists. The ‘Luxemburgist’ trend continued to surface on the
German Left, with the Kommunistische Partei Opposition in 1929, then the

10. Hudis and Anderson (eds.), pp. 356–7.

108 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110

Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP) of the 1930s that attracted a number of

former Spartakists and specifically appealed to Levi’s legacy.11 Its leaders
included Paul Fröhlich, who had been in 1921 a key exponent of the ‘offensive’
and shared responsibility for the ‘March Action’, but now became once more
a champion of Luxemburg and her first biographer.

The personal equation

In the campaign against Levi that followed, Radek wrote a vitriolic article
attacking him personally.12 Levi was a ‘dilettante’ from the bourgeoisie who
had flirted with the workers’ movement for a while, but, when the struggle
came to a head, he had reverted to his roots. His profitable career as a lawyer,
and his collection of Chinese porcelain, were more important to him than
the cause of the proletariat. ‘The passive weakling, the psychological enigma’,
Radek called Levi: ‘the bourgeois youth, driven to the side of the proletariat
by the stench of his decaying class, becomes a renegade.’ August Thalheimer,
more subtly, wrote that the German Communists had to separate themselves
from a man who had been ready to die for the cause, but not to put his entire
life at the service of the Party.13 As this calumny still echoes after so many
decades,14 a few lines on the subject are needed here. Levi was hardly unique
among Communist leaders in hailing from the bourgeoisie, and his lifestyle
was typical of a middle-class intellectual bachelor. He lived unfashionably in
a top-floor apartment, preferring ‘not to have anyone over him’ as Mathilde
Jacob put it. If his door was answered by a domestic servant, that had likewise
been true of Rosa Luxemburg, whose ‘stout Gertrude’ kept house for her in a
leafy suburb. In both cases, this degree of material security was the basis for a
personal life that was not confined solely to politics. If Levi had a passion for
blue-and-white porcelain, Luxemburg had been an enthusiastic botanist and
Sunday painter. Both enjoyed holidays in the south and cultivated a circle of
intimate friends.
There are two possible reasons why the same human qualities for which
Luxemburg is widely admired are still cited today against Levi. A case could be

11. See Trotsky 1975, pp. 199–208.

12. The essentials of this are extracted in Gruber 1967, pp. 341–6.
13. Beradt 1969, p. 53. Cf. Fernbach 1999, p. 18.
14. See, for example, Birchall 2006, p. 265. Birchall says that ‘Levi’s action in publicly
criticising the KPD at a time of vicious state repression can only be described as political
scabbing’. This goes well beyond the charge of ‘breach of discipline’ for which Levi was expelled,
as the transcript of his appeal before the Central Committee (What Is the Crime?) makes clear.
And Lenin would hardly have been so keen to win back to the Party a ‘political scab’.
 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110 109

made that, at a certain stage in the proletarian struggle, when the time comes
to ‘make’ revolution, a different kind of leader is required, one whose life
outside of politics is reduced to a minimum. Certainly, Lenin was not only a
leader of outstanding ability, but devoted sixteen hours a day to party-work.
In the German situation, however, it would have been folly to argue that
Luxemburg’s ‘dilettantism’ did not still leave her head and shoulders above
possible rivals, and the same was true, on a lesser scale, of Levi after the KPD
was robbed of its historic founders.
The other reason is less excusable, but only too obvious: qualities that are
endearing in a woman are unacceptable in a man, for Levi did not present a
sufficiently macho image. Indeed, as the Bolshevisation of the KPD proceeded,
not only did it seem more important to have a ‘genuine proletarian’ leader,
eventually found in Thälmann, but the Party preferred to look back to Karl
Liebknecht rather than Luxemburg: erratic in his tactical judgements, never a
Marxist in his theoretical beliefs, but at least a real man, properly German, and
not even Jewish.
Levi’s friendships with women were well-known, and an article on his funeral
in 1930 described this as attended by ‘fur-clad young women, more than one
of whom could have worn widow’s weeds’.15 Broué is not unique in drawing
from such reports a conclusion that may very well be false: Levi as a womaniser.
Read through the perspective of a later sexual politics, today’s readers are
as likely to infer that none of these fur-clad beings was his mistress. Indeed,
the only love-affair of Levi’s for which any hard evidence exists, that with
Luxemburg, may itself not have been quite what it seems at first sight. The
letters from Luxemburg that survive (none of Levi’s have) suggest a passionate
affair that began at the time she visited Frankfurt in February 1914, when Levi
defended her in a political trial.16 But the tone of Luxemburg’s letters cools
after a few months, and, even before Levi was drafted into the army, it would
seem the pair had reverted to being ‘just good friends’, if remaining close both
personally and politically.17 Something put the brakes on their relationship,
and though it is unlikely that the missing details will now be discovered, one
hypothesis suggests itself to contemporary eyes, and may perhaps be supported
by a circumstantial detail in Levi’s pamphlet. At one point, he describes
the provocateurs used in the ‘March Action’ as Achtgroschenjungen, literally
youths whose services are available for 1.60 marks: a term coined in the

15. Gruber (ed.) 1967, p. 392, paraphrasing a contemporary report.

16. Fifty letters from Luxemburg to Levi from February to November 1914 are reproduced
in Quack 1983; a further seven appear in Luxemburg 1993.
17. See, for example, Mathilde Jacob’s description of Levi’s visit to Berlin for the weekend
that Luxemburg was given leave from jail in March 1915; Jacob 2000, p. 33.
110 D. Fernbach / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 101–110

eighteenth century for a police spy, but which by this time had also acquired
a sexual connotation.
We may wonder whether Levi let something slip here. Together with the
ambiguous relationship with Luxemburg, the elegant ladies, the blue-and-
white china and the top-floor apartment, could a case be made that Levi was
gay, and that this was an unspoken subtext in the character-assassination that
followed his expulsion?

References
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Europaische Verlagsanstalt.
Birchall, Ian 2006, ‘Review of Jean-François Fayet’s Karl Radek (1885–1939)’, Historical
Materialism, 14, 3: 259–74.
Broué, Pierre 2005, The German Revolution 1917–1923, Historical Materialism Book Series,
Leiden: Brill.
Fernbach, David 1999, ‘Rosa Luxemburg’s Political Heir: An Appreciation of Paul Levi’, New
Left Review, I, 238: 3–25.
Gruber, Helmut (ed.) 1967, International Communism in the Era of Lenin, New York: Fawcett.
Hudis, Peter and Kevin B. Anderson (eds.) 2004, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Jacob, Mathilde 2000, Rosa Luxemburg: An Intimate Portrait, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Levi, Paul 1922, ‘Introduction’ to R. Luxemburg, Die russische Revolution, Berlin.
Luxemburg, Rosa 1993, Gesammelte Briefe, Volume 6, Berlin: Dietz.
Quack, Sybille 1983, Geistig frei und niemandes Knecht, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
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