NEWS CENTER -The origins of the word “antifa” – antifascist shorthand for direct-action, decentralized street activism associated with its own aesthetic and subculture – may be hidden to most activists today. Even in Germany, few know anything about the popular roots of anti-fascist resistance that coined the term.
The movement’s short, inspiring political legacy proved very uncomfortable for both German states during the Cold War, and was ignored in scholarly narratives and by the left.
Straight from the ruins
By 1945, Hitler’s Third Reich was physically destroyed and politically exhausted. The basics of society had ceased to function in many areas, and as Nazi power faded, the regime’s supporters, particularly in the middle and upper classes, realized that Hitler’s “final victory” was a fantasy.
On the left, many communists and social democrats had been murdered by the Nazis or died during the ensuing war. The unimaginable human and material destruction caused by the Nazi regime killed millions and turned German society upside down, decimating the labor movement and murdering part of the German Jewish population. Thousands of people who supported or at least agreed with the regime – including many workers and even some former socialists – now faced the prospect of a new beginning in unfamiliar political terrain.
However, despite the failure to prevent Hitler in 1933 from the real political dismantling in subsequent years, the socialist labor movement in Germany and its decidedly progressive traditions were able to survive Hitler in the factories of its industrial cities; these fragments began to be picked up as soon as open political activity became possible again. As historian Gareth Dale describes:
“Of all sectors of the population, it was the industrial workers in the big cities who showed the greatest immunity to Nazism. Many trade unionists and socialists were able to maintain their traditions and beliefs, at least in some form, during the Nazi period. A courageous minority, including about 150,000 communists, participated in the illegal resistance. Broader layers [of workers] avoided danger, but were able to keep the values and memories of the labor movement alive in their groups of friends, workplaces, and housing estates.”
These groups, drawn from the aforementioned housing estates, were generally called “Antifaschistische Ausschüsse,” i.e., “Antifascist Committees” or the now famous “Antifaschistische Aktion” – “Antifa” in short form. They used the slogans and strategic guidelines of the pre-war Single Front, adopting the word “Antifa” still from the experience of 1932, when a last attempt at an alliance between the Communist and Social Democratic workers was made. The iconic symbol of the alliance was devised by designers Max Kleison and Max Gebhard, members of the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists, and has since become one of the best-known symbols on the contemporary left.
After the war, Antifa groups varied in size and composition throughout the former Reich, now divided into four occupation zones, developing interactions and activities with each local power. Emerging seemingly overnight in dozens of cities, most formed immediately after Allied forces arrived, and some groups, such as the one in Wuppertal “broke free” in street battles against Hitler’s supporters before the Allies could even arrive.
Fundamentally, these groups were not examples of spontaneous solidarity among war-traumatized survivors, but the result of the reactivation of pre-war networks by veterans of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Albrecht Lein reports that the core of the Braunschweig antifa was composed of older members of the KPD and SPD on their fronts. There was also involvement from Catholic workers’ organizations and other political forces.
The antifa groups numbered in the hundreds to thousands of members in most cities. The lack of youth involvement can be attributed to the twelve years of Nazi education and socialization, a fact that annihilated the previously very common proletarian-socialist attitude in most German youth. Although the material needs of war and reconstruction incorporated women into economic life in new ways, the male predominance characteristic of German society was also reflected in the Antifa movement, which was largely (but not entirely) built of men.
The antifa tended to direct their focus to a combination of hunting down Nazi criminals and underground Nazi supporters (so-called “werewolves”) and practical concerns that affected the general population. The Braunschweig antifa, for example, printed a twelve-point program, demanding, among other things, the removal of Nazis from all administrative bodies and their immediate replacement by “competent antifascists,” liquidation of Nazi assets to provide for war victims, emergency laws to prosecute local fascists, and the restoration of the public health service. Typical of an organization led by socialists and thus aware of the need for a print media as organizing media, the twelfth and final point consisted of a “daily newspaper.”
Although surviving records indicate that many antifa groups were dominated by KPD communists, the political climate in the early months was far removed from the adventurism of the “Third Period” at the end of the Weimar Republic. The local antifas were motivated by a desire to learn from the mistakes of 1933 and build a non-sectarian trade union movement that would overcome internal divisions. This was driven by a widespread sense that the horrors of Nazism had resulted from the instability and inequality of capitalism and that a new egalitarian economic system was needed for the postwar order.
Demands for nationalization of industry and other leftist policies were widespread. Even the forced marriage between the KPD and SPD into the Unified Socialist Party of Germany (SED) in the Soviet zone was based on this sentiment and recruited many former oppositionists in the first year. In British-occupied Hamburg, a joint KPD-SPD action committee met in July 1945 with broad support from their respective members to declare:
“The desire to merge into a powerful political party lives in the hearts of the millions of partisans of the feisty German workers’ parties, as the most significant result of their shared suffering. This desire is deeply engraved in all survivors of the concentration camps, prisons and Gestapo institutions.”
The remainder of the document consisted of practical demands around uniting the fragmented Hamburg labor movement.
The antifas enjoyed various successes, depending on the local composition of each movement and the amount of freedom allowed to them by each of the occupying powers. Although they formed outside Allied rule and pushed popular policies of denazification against occupation forces seeking to reconcile with old authorities, they were in no position to challenge Allied hegemony and at best represented militant minorities.
The industrial city of Stuttgart, for example, was fortunate enough to be involved in territorial maneuvers between the United States and France, which occupied the city pre-emptively. Eager to avoid civil unrest and thus give the Americans a pretext to regain control, French authorities allowed the Stuttgart antifascists a considerable opening to dismantle the Nazi-era German Labor Front (DAF) by rebuilding political organization on the factory floor and organizing the population into anti-fascist party alliances.
Stuttgart is also notable for the presence of the Communist Party (Opposition), known as the KPO. Orbiting around former KPD leaders August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler, the group recruited a large number of KPD militants and employees from the factories after the party’s ultra-leftist turn in 1929. The KPO’s defense of an anti-Nazi front of all workers’ organizations in the run-up to 1933 allowed them to consolidate a small but considerable base of experienced communist cadres repelled by the Stalinization of their party.
Although it was never a mass organization and only a shadow of its former post-war power, what remained of the KPO had decisive influence over the Stuttgart metalworkers’ union for several years and was able to play an active role in the factories. These activities provided the city with a core of militants capable of understanding, from experience, the need to unite workers on a cross-party basis around basic social demands.
As elsewhere in Germany, Stuttgart’s antifa movement was soon neutralized and diverted back into the old divisions between the SPD and the KPD, but the city’s rebellious tradition and propensity for unity in action would resurface in 1948, when a general revolt over drastic price increases triggered a general strike that involved 79 percent of the workforce and spread to several other localities.
Overdetermined
The antifa movement faced an almost impossible situation in 1945. The country was in ruins in every way imaginable and was going through an unprecedented phase of destruction, brutality and arbitrary murder.
Antifa’s situation was generally “overdetermined,” in the sense that historical forces beyond its control would ultimately seal its fate. These socialists and antifascists, although numbering tens of thousands nationwide, were not seen as the force that could provide a plausible political alternative to confront the Cold War.
Germany in 1945 was about to become the stage for the longest geopolitical confrontation in modern history, and there was no way, with the socialist movement fragmented and destroyed, that the antifascists could influence the political process in any significant way. However, statements and documents from the time reveal the determination of thousands of antifas and socialists, aware of the unprecedented nature of their historical moment, seeking to present a political perspective for what had remained of the country’s working class.
Although its members were comparatively and regrettably few given the movement’s former glory, its existence refutes the notion that the pre-war German left was entirely destroyed by Nazism. Hitler certainly broke the backbone of German socialism, but postwar West Germany, accompanied by an anti-communist paranoia, would finally bury what was left of the radical traditions in the country before the war.
Albrecht Lein tells how the incredibly difficult conditions faced by the antifas also necessarily restricted their political prospects. Although they attracted thousands of socialists and were soon supported by communists and other political prisoners returning from concentration camps, soon becoming the majority force in cities like Braunschweig, the antifas failed to offer a political escape from the country’s social misery.
Lein argues that the failure of the labor movement to defeat Hitler and the fact that Germany had demanded their liberation drove the antifascists out with a largely reactive policy, vigorously persecuting former Nazi officers and purging so-called “collaborators” from society, while sidelining the building of a “new Germany” beyond fascism and Cold War machinations.
After the Communists dissolved the “National Committee for a Free Germany” (NKFD) in the weeks after the war, underground Nazi resistance groups began calling themselves the “Movement for a Free Germany.” Lein claims that this circumstance symbolized the general political trajectory in Germany at the time:
“Apart from the notable exceptions of Leipzig, Berlin and Munich, the anti-fascist movements described themselves as ‘organizations for the struggle against fascism’ rather than as ‘Committees for a Free Germany.'”
The failure of the Germans to engage in popular resistance against Hitler, even in the second half of the war, understandably demoralized the left and shook its faith in the capacity of the masses-a trait that historian Martin Sabrow also attributes to the caste of communist officials operating under Soviet tutelage in the East.
In the French, British, and American zones, antifa began to recede near the end of the summer of 1945, marginalized by prohibitions coupled with political organization and emerging divisions within the movement itself. The Social Democrats, under the leadership of Kurt Schumacher, allied themselves with the Western occupiers and soon returned to the pre-war anti-communist line, decreeing before the end of the year that membership in the SPD was incompatible with participation in the antifascist movement.
In Stuttgart, antifa and what had remained of the old trade union bureaucracy fought each other for influence from the beginning. The old leadership of the ADGB, the central trade union federation of pre-war Germany, sought to re-establish formalized employment relations in the occupied areas, which would at least mean a return to normality for the German working class. However, this was at odds with the approach of the antifas, who cultivated strong ties with the left-wing unions and factory committees and demanded nationalization and workers’ control of industry. These demands eventually proved unrealistic in a destroyed economy occupied by powerful foreign armies.
The prospect of stability and a degree of economic recovery under the SPD simply proved more attractive to the workers, who were forced to choose between this and the harrowing but honorable struggle proposed by the antifa.
In particular, the antifa were further hampered by the decisions of the United States and Britain, which sought to cooperate with what remained of the Nazi regime below their executive levels. Antifascists, in attempting to arrest local Nazi leaders or expel them from municipal bureaucracies, were often stopped by officials who preferred to integrate officials of the old state into new “democratic” institutions.
This had less to do with any particular affinity with the Allies and former fascist officials than with serving the practical interests of keeping German society functioning under extremely difficult conditions without ceding its influence to the re-emerging radical left. Outnumbered, disarmed and outnumbered by the SPD, the influence of antifa in the three Western zones of occupation would evaporate in less than a year. West German society stabilized, the Cold War polarized the continent, and the political forces of the old Germany, allied with social democracy and the emerging Western bloc, consolidated their hold on the country.
The KPD, in turn, initially overwhelmed by a wave of new members, saw its prestige increase in light of the Soviet victory over Hitler and a broad anti-capitalist sentiment among the workers. The party soon rebuilt its industrial bases and by 1946 controlled as many shop floor committees as the SPD in the Ruhr region. In his classic study of the German labor movement, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung, scholar Arno Klönne states that the total membership in the three western zones was 300,000 in 1947, and 600,000 in the Soviet zone, before the founding of the Unified Socialist Party of Germany (SED) in 1946.
After a brief period of participation in the postwar provisional governments, the Allies soon marginalized the KPD and the party returned to its former ultra-leftist line. It sealed its political irrelevance in 1951 with the passage of “Thesis 37,” a document on labor strategies full of insults to the Social Democrats and the trade unions. The motion, passed at the party conference, forced all KPD members to obey vertical party decisions and go against union directives if necessary. This move obliterated Communist support in the factories overnight and relegated the party to the margins. The KPD failed to get elected to parliament in the 1953 elections and was banned by the West German government in 1956.
Political developments were decisively different in the Soviet zone, but ultimately ended in an even darker dead end: the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – completely stalined by SED leader Walter Ulbricht. Known to be a former Communist cadre from the party’s early years, Ulbricht survived twenty years of Stalinist purges and fascist repressions to lead the “Ulbricht Group,” a team of exiled KPD officials now returning from Moscow to rebuild the country under Soviet occupation.
Although the Red Army generals did not have a particularly democratic or egalitarian vision for East Germany, they rejected cooperating with the old Nazi hierarchy for their own reasons, and for a time allowed the antifas and their institutions to operate with relative freedom. Eyewitnesses report that by 1947, in some East German industrial centers, such as Halle (a traditional Communist prewar corral), KPD-led workers’ councils exercised a decisive influence over factory life, and that in some cases there was enough confidence to conduct negotiations and argue with the Soviet authorities.
In an interview for Jacobin, veteran KPO activist Theodor Bergmann tells of Heinrich Adam, a KPO member and mechanic at the Zeiss factory in Jena, who joined the SED in the hope of realizing socialist unity. Heinrich was also an antifa and active trade unionist, who organized protests against the Soviets’ decision to take over the Zeiss factory as war reparations-he suggested building a new factory in Russia. Adam was expelled from the party for his independent views in 1952 and lived out his last days in Jena on a modest state pension for anti-fascist veterans.
In Dresden, a group of about eighty Communists, Social Democrats, and members of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP) formed a committee in May 1945 to turn the city over to the Red Army. In cooperation with Soviet authorities, this group would later loot food and weapons stores of the German Labor Front and other Nazi institutions, organizing a distribution system for the city’s population in the first postwar weeks.
Reports from Soviet officials and the Ulbricht Group described rival anti-fascist groups, generally tolerated by the occupation, which in addition to arming residents and organizing shooting practices, also arrested local Nazis and even opened a kitchen for refugees in the eastern provinces. Internal communications reveal that the Communist leaders took little notice of Antifa, dismissed by Ulbricht as “the anti-fascist sects” in a communiqué to Georgi Dimitrov in mid-1945.
The Ulbricht Group’s initial goal was to incorporate as many of these antifascists into the KPD as possible; they feared that repression would repel rather than attract them. Wolfgang Leonhard, a former member of the Ulbricht Group, later stated in his memoir, Child of the Revolution, that Ulbricht explained to fellow Communist officials, “It is very clear – it must look democratic, but we must have everything under our control.”
This period ended when the German Democratic Republic began to establish itself as a Soviet-style one-party state in the late 1940s, particularly after relatively free elections in 1946 resulted in disappointing returns. Former KPO members and other oppositionists, allowed to organize after the war, were investigated for past political crimes, purged, and often imprisoned. In the workplaces, the SED sought to rationalize production, thereby neutralizing the instances of factory control and democratic representation that had emerged.
The establishment of the Free German Federation of Trade Unions (FDGB) in 1946 marked the beginning of the SED’s attempt to establish its control over the factories. These “unions,” in effect, organized East German workers aligned with the interests of their practical bosses, the East German state, and sought to buy their loyalty through “socialist competition” schemes, piecework, and union-sponsored vacation packages.
However, the “free” unions could not afford to phase out competitive elections overnight. In the early years, antifa activists were often elected to FDGB shop floor committees, thus exerting a little more continuing influence in the workplace. Some were integrated into mid-level management, while others refused to betray their principles and resigned or were removed for political reasons.
The public split between the Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1948 accelerated the stalinization of the Soviet occupation zone, and the limited spaces for self-organization were soon closed altogether. Subsequently, the tradition of the GDR anti-fascist movement would be diluted, distorted, and recreated into a national origin myth in which East German citizens were proclaimed the “winners of history,” but where little room remained for real history, not to mention the ambivalent role of Stalinist communism behind it.
Dare to Dream
After their collapse in late 1945, the antifa were to disappear from the German political scene for almost four decades. The modern antifa with which most people associate the term has no practical historical connection to the movement from which it takes its name, which is actually a product of the invasion of the walking scene and the autonomist movement of the 1980s – itself a result of 1968 considerably less oriented toward the industrial working class than its Italian fraction.
The first antifas of this new period functioned as platforms for organizing against far-right groups like the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) in an autonomist movement with thousands of active members and capable of occupying entire blocks in some West German metropolises.
As the far right began to rebuild after German reunification, expressed in shocking attacks on refugees in several eastern provinces in the early 1990s, antifa quickly became a movement in itself: a national network of antifascist groups organized into the “Antifaschistische Aktion/Bundesweite Organisation” (AA/BO)
In a sense, these groups were the inverse of their progenitors: instead of a broad alliance of socialists and progressives from ideologically distinct currents, they were specific, expressly radical groups, more vague and deeply heterogeneous in their specifics. Rather than a starting point for young activists on the broader political and socialist left, antifas outside the big cities are often the only suburban political force and function in countercultural spaces, with their own styles, music scenes, and slang, rather than being a component of a mass movement rooted within a broader society.
After the AA/BO split in 2001, antifas continued to work locally and regionally as dedicated networks of antifascists who opposed far-right demonstrations and gatherings, although many also adopted other left-wing issues and causes. What remains of the walkers and the infrastructure built between the 1970s and 1990s continues to serve as an important organizing and socializing space for the radical left,and the “antifascists” as a movement, a path, an overall political vision, will no doubt continue to exist for quite some time.
The movement has been steadily shrinking since the late 1990s, fragmented along ideological lines and unable to adjust its original autonomist strategies to changing patterns of urbanization and the rise of right-wing populism. Its most promising products lately have been the mass mobilizations against neo-Nazi marches in cities like Dresden, as well as the formation of a new, characteristically post-autonomist current in the form of the Interventionist Left – marking a departure from, rather than a revival of, the classic antifa strategy.
Antifascism has emerged at the forefront of debates about the American Left under President Trump, and many of the tactics and visual styles of German antifa can be seen emerging in cities like Berkeley and elsewhere. Some argue that with the arrival of European-style neo-fascist movements on American shores, it is also time to import the European tactics of antifa as a response.
However, today’s antifa is not the product of a political victory from which we can draw our own strengths, but of a defeat – the defeat of socialism at the hands of Nazism and the resurgence of global capitalism, and later the exhaustion of the autonomist movement in the wake of the neoliberal turn and the gentrification of many German cities.
Although the antifas continue to function as important poles of attraction to radicalize youth and ensure that the far right is rarely left unopposed in many European countries, their political form is exclusive in nature, expressed in their aesthetic, rhetorical style and inaccessible to the masses of people joining activism for the first time. A left-wing subculture with its own social spaces and cultural life is not the same thing as a mass social movement, and we cannot afford this confusion.
Of course, the experience of antifa in 1945 offers us equally few concrete lessons on how to combat a resurgence of the far right in the Trump era. Looking back at the history of the socialist left is not about distilling victorious formulas to be reproduced in the 21st century, but about understanding how previous generations understood their own historical moment. And how in response they built political organizations in order to develop their own (hopefully more successful) strategy today.
Antifas in Stuttgart, Braunscheweig, and elsewhere faced impossible difficulties, but still sought to articulate a series of political demands and a practical organizational vision for radical workers willing to listen. Antifas refused to capitulate to their seemingly hopeless situation and dared to dream big. Faced with a left even more fragmented and weakened than in 1945, antifascist movements around the world will have to do the same.
