Steven E. Aschheim's review of Werner Scholem: A German Life
provides a thoughtful analysis of Scholem’s intellectual development and tragic
end. However, he overlooks Scholem’s political shift towards the German Left
Opposition and his later cooperation with the international Trotskyist
movement, which significantly distorts the historical record. This omission is
more than biographical; it affects our understanding of the crisis facing the
German Communist Party (KPD) in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as the
broader struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism.
Pierre Broué’s research remains indispensable for
reconstructing Scholem’s political trajectory. Broué identifies Scholem as “a
master organiser” who carried out the campaign around the Letter of the 700
“from one end to the other.”¹ This campaign—700 members of the KPD demanding
the publication of the Russian Opposition’s documents and rejecting the
doctrine of “socialism in one country”—represented the most substantial
expression of international support for the United Opposition outside the
Soviet Union. Its signatories were purged, vilified, and ultimately left
exposed to the Nazi terror.
Scholem’s political journey continued beyond the Letter of
the 700. He separated from the Leninbund in February 1928, aligned more with
Trotsky’s views, and by 1931, was frequently meeting with Leon Sedov in
Berlin.² He wrote unsigned articles for Die Permanente Revolution, the
theoretical publication of the German Trotskyists. Trotsky himself held Scholem
in high regard, though he opposed Scholem travelling to Prinkipo, as the
uploaded document notes—because he did not want "someone like Scholem to
risk ending up in Turkey during the critical moment of the struggle on German
soil.”³ Ultimately, Scholem represented a living link between the Russian
Opposition and the German Communist Left.
Both the Stalinist apparatus and the Nazi state recognised
this. When the Gestapo arrested Scholem, they understood they had seized not
only a Communist and a Jewish intellectual but a Trotskyist.⁴ At the same time,
the GPU was actively infiltrating and destroying the German Left Opposition.
Stalinist agents such as the Sobolevicius brothers (Roman Well and Adolf Senin)
operated inside the German section, reporting to Moscow and sowing confusion
and disruption.⁵ The KPD leadership under Ernst Thälmann denounced Trotskyists
to the police, facilitating their arrest.⁶ The convergence of Stalinist and
Nazi repression was not accidental: both regimes recognised in the Left
Opposition the last coherent revolutionary alternative to their respective
forms of counterrevolution.
Aschheim’s omission therefore has broader historiographical
consequences. It conceals the fact that some of the most principled and
farsighted figures in the German Communist Left found their way to Trotsky. It
obscures the existence of a political alternative to the catastrophes of
Stalinism and Social Democracy. And it breaks the continuity between the German
Opposition and the Fourth International—a continuity that Scholem’s life and
death exemplify. As the uploaded document rightly states, “His life… is a
chapter in our history, and no amount of academic omission can change that.”⁷
Scholem’s adherence to Trotsky’s international organisation
was, as Broué writes, “not just an episode.”⁸ It was the culmination of a
political evolution that deserves recognition, not erasure. Any serious account
of Scholem’s life must therefore integrate his role within the German Left
Opposition and acknowledge the political significance of his final years.
Notes
- Pierre
Broué, The German Left and the Russian Opposition (1926–28), cited
in the uploaded document: “a master organiser… from one end to the other.”
- Broué,
ibid.; see also Leon Sedov’s correspondence with the German Opposition.
- Previous
document “Trotsky himself keenly wished to meet him but opposed Scholem travelling
to Turkey, not wanting ‘someone like Scholem to run the risk of finding
himself in Turkey at the moment of the decisive struggle on German soil.’”
- Previous
document: “The Nazis knew exactly who they had when they arrested him: a
Communist, an intellectual, a Jew — and a Trotskyist.”
- Historical
and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany),
chapter on Stalinist infiltration of the German Opposition.
- Ibid.;
see also contemporary KPD denunciations of Trotskyists in police records.
- Previous
document: “His life… is a chapter in our history, and no amount of
academic omission can change that.”
- Broué,
The German Left and the Russian Opposition.
