History
The DKP considered itself a reconstitution of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which had been banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956 for its aggressively militant opposition to the West German constitution. The new party was formed on 25 September 1968. [5]
The foundation was preceded by talks between former KPD functionaries and Gustav Heinemann, the West German minister of justice, who explained to them that while a refounding of a banned party was not legally possible, Communists were free to form an entirely new party. [6] Even though the close links to the banned KPD made the new party vulnerable to be declared illegal, no such declaration was requested by the German government as West German authorities were liberalizing the attitude towards the communist bloc and East Germany in particular.
The DKP remained on the political fringe, never winning more than 0.3% of the total votes in federal elections. [7] It had relatively greater local support in the 1970s: it achieved up to 2.2% of the vote in Hamburg, 3.1% in Bremen and 2.7% in the Saarland, yet still not enough to enter any Landtags. However, the party enjoyed some success in municipal elections, two patterns of municipalities can be identified in which the DKP was able to win seats: on the one hand working-class residential communities with a long left-wing tradition such as Bottrop in the Ruhr area or Mörfelden-Walldorf in Hesse, and on the other university towns such as Marburg or Tübingen. [8] Following German reunification, the DKP entered a steady decline. [2]
The DKP received national public attention in early 2008 when Christel Wegner, elected to the state parliament of Lower Saxony on the list of the Left Party as the first DKP member of a state parliament, allegedly endorsed the Berlin Wall, the Stasi and other aspects of the East German state in an interview. This caused embarrassment to the national Left Party leadership. [2] Despite denying that she made the controversial statements (at least in the form that was reported), she was expelled from the Left Party faction a few days later. [9]
The DKP ended its observer status in the Party of the European Left on 27 February 2016. [10]
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Ernst Grube is a German teacher and Holocaust survivor. He never tires of presenting - "up to a hundred times a year" - the story of his childhood in Nazi Germany. In contrast, he speaks very little of what happened after his release from the Theresienstadt concentration camp and his return to Munich in May 1945: his involvement with the FDJ and the Communist Party itself during the period when it had been banned in West Germany. His trades union activism, his campaigning against re-armament during the 1950s and in favour of reunification receive little coverage. Several times his activism led him to violent police encounters and arrest. A leafleting campaign he undertook for the (illegal) Communist Party led to several months of solitary confinement and a conviction from a federal court.
Antifa is a political movement in Germany composed of multiple far-left, autonomous, militant groups and individuals who describe themselves as anti-fascist. According to the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the view of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the movement. The antifa movement has existed in different eras and incarnations, dating back to Antifaschistische Aktion, from which the moniker antifa came. It was set up by the then-Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the late history of the Weimar Republic. After the forced dissolution in the wake of Machtergreifung in 1933, the movement went underground. In the postwar era, Antifaschistische Aktion inspired a variety of different movements, groups and individuals in Germany as well as other countries which widely adopted variants of its aesthetics and some of its tactics. Known as the wider antifa movement, the contemporary antifa groups have no direct organisational connection to Antifaschistische Aktion.
Josef Ledwohn was a prominent German trade unionist and Communist Party official who became an anti-Nazi resistance activist in 1933. He resurfaced in what became the British occupation zone after 1945 and was then, between 1946 and 1954, a leading member of the state parliament ("Landtag") in the newly reconfigured state of North Rhine-Westphalia. He was a leading exponent of German reunification, albeit under conditions to be determined by the East German ruling SED party and the residuum in the west of the old German Communist Party.
Philipp Dengel was a German communist journalist and politician. Dengel was a member of the Reichstag for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) between 1924 and 1930, a member of the KPD Central Committee and Politburo, and an editor of Die Rote Fahne. Dengel was a close ally of KPD leader Ernst Thälmann until they fell out over the so-called Wittorf affair in 1928, for which he was demoted within the KPD and removed as a candidate for the 1930 federal election. Dengel lived principally in Moscow and worked as an official for Comintern between 1931 and 1947. Dengel returned to Germany shortly before his death in East Berlin in 1948.
The German October was a plan of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) to attempt a communist revolution in the Weimar Republic in October 1923, amidst acute political and economic crises in the country. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD), under the United Front strategy, was directed to enter into coalition governments with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the states of Thuringia and Saxony and utilize their resources to assist the revolution. Despite their efforts, the KPD and ECCI leadership found no support and the plan was called off on 21 October. However, local branches of the KPD in Hamburg and Bremen launched their own insurrections, which were suppressed by the local police.
Kurt Bachmann was a German politician, Holocaust survivor, and member of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany. From 1969 to 1973 he was leader of the German Communist Party (DKP).
