by Merilyn Moos
Sports activities should draw people towards left ideas, towards the importance of cooperation and against the competition which ran through most ‘bourgeois’ sports. The competitive character of sport aligned itself with the competitive character of capitalism and needed to be challenged. Labour sport supporters, in opposition to ‘conventional’ sporting activities, wanted to present a new set of ideals for workers through sport: not simply to add sport to the arena in which the working class could oppose the ruling classes, but because physical culture and the body was the foremost aspect of the workers’ existence. Since they did not own or could acquire readily means of production, property or political influence, it was their own bodies that they needed to retain control over (Lehmann, 29.0778 ). To quote Lehmann on the significance of proletarian sport in Germany in the 1920s: ‘The body of the worker is his and her very own physical capital; literally the ‘engine’ that would drive, through work, political participation and cultural demonstration, the progress towards a different social and economic system. The body was both the site where change needed to happen and the expression that would demonstrate collectively this change. The body needed to be improved through better healthcare, safer work, improved diet, standard of housing and, of course, physical exercise; and such a body then could perform, in solidarity with others, the tasks needed to improve the cultural, social and political standing of the working class.’ But, if the worker’s body failed, then their ability to hold a job, earn a living wage and keep a reasonable standard of living also fails. As Lehmann eloquently puts it: ‘The body becomes the site for repression, alienation and exploitation at work but …remains also the site of potential liberation.’ There is no obvious equivalent in the UK, unless one goes back to the far narrower, smaller though largely working class Clarion Cycling Clubs, when a sports organisation was linked to a left political perspective of rejecting the imperative and dominance of money in sports.79
Though the Social Democrats saw the political importance of their sporting clubs, the SPD’s support in Parliament for war credits against Social Democratic Party policy paved the way for the setting up of separate Communist sports groups from 1917 and the Communist ‘Red Sports International’, even though the SPD linked clubs continued to retain by far the larger membership nationally (though not in Berlin).
Red Sport International (RSI) was founded on 23 June 1921 in Moscow. Its mission was “the creation and amalgamation of revolutionary proletarian sports and gymnastics organizations in all countries of the world and their transformation into support centres for the proletariat in its class struggle”. It was not till 1924 that the Comintern EC recognised it. Many clubs sympathetic to the communist movement nevertheless re-joined the Social Democratic ATSB (Gounon, A). The KPD finally modified their position: having previously maintained that involvement in sports activities was petti-bourgeois, the KPD formed a separate faction within the SWSI in 1928.
In 1928, the two workers’ sport internationals, the Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International (RSI), had over two million members between them (Steinberg, 197880 ). But the 1920s were marked by an increasing hostility and sectarianism between the SPD and KPD aligned sporting organisations. Finally, in July 1927, relations between the RSI and LSI broke down completely and the two organisations ceased to even try to have any sort of fraternal relationship (Steinberg, 1978). Indeed, the LSI changed its statutes to be able to exclude members from their clubs for political reasons and even excluded 60,000 of their own members who had played with KPD members. (So Hans may have been pushed out of his SPD dominated sports club, as well as jumping.) This sectarian position lasted till well after the Nazis took over power.81
One of the RSI’s main functions, according to Copper, writing in E Germany in 1988, was to have been to offer a home to athletes expelled from the SPD dominated Fichte. The Red Sports groups were supposedly to provide unity in workers sports. Their aim was to provide working people, especially the young, with the opportunity to participate in healthy physical activity in a positive working class atmosphere and to avoid ‘achievement addiction.’ By the late 1920’s, the Fichte were connected with ‘Red Sports’. (For further information on different Workers’ Sports Internationals, please see Appendix.)
As the Third Period approached, the RSI saw its role increasingly to pull working class youths from the SWSI’s clutches (Steinberg, 1978). Condemning the SWSI’s claim to political neutrality and perceiving them as sidling up to the bourgeoisie, the RSI put their energies into fighting them. “Only ‘Red Sports’ is a worker sport,” wrote Ernst Grube (the CC member with responsibility for sports, subsequently murdered in October 1932). Red Sports was banned in 1933.
All the soccer clubs in the Berlin-Brandenburg regional federation joined the Communist worker Red Sport organization. The suggestion by Copper (1988) is that about 16% of athletes in Berlin belonged to proletarian sports organisations. (Before we dismiss this as a low number, imagine having a UK sporting club attached to the revolutionary left which 16% of all athletes belonged to!) The little we know about the Red Sport unit (Rote Sporteinheit) in Berlin is that Kurt Seibt, who joined the youth KPD in 1924, was its State youth leader from 1930-1931.
But Kruger (in Kruger and Riordan, 1996:148282 ) suggests that workers did not generally do as well in these Red sports clubs as in the bourgeois clubs - workers who were keen on sports, would generally join better equipped clubs, with better trainers. Both Gounon (2001) and Kruger (1996:15) argue that Red Sports, although its aim was to endow sports with a new political meaning of collective endeavour and class struggle, did not develop a distinctive attitude or spirit to the bourgeois character of sports or to the SPD sports clubs. Its purpose, to link sports and politics, led to tension, even conflict between organisers and members as worker sportspersons joined for the sport, personal satisfaction and achievement, rather than the politics and solidarity. The fundamental structural problem of how to integrate individual subjective expression and autonomy into collective performance remained in the KPD dominated sports groups, as it had for the earlier socialist groups.
LaPorte (2002) also emphasises the significance of the sporting and cultural clubs, and emphasises the sports clubs political character. He too highlights that here is an example of some limited cross party membership between the SPD and KPD, but that where local Communists belonged to the SPD-dominated sporting and cultural organisations; this loosened their allegiance to the Party line. One illustration is in Saxony, where the KPD dominated Sports Organisations expressed a form of non-acceptance of the implications of the Third Period line in 1928 (LaPorte, 2002).83 LaPorte’s (2002, drawn from F. Walter, 1991) argues that these clubs provided a source of identity which helped keep back the Nazi tide.
Though ‘Fichte’ and Sports Revues are outside British experience, Siegi clearly understood their pivotal role in resisting fascism. Siegi on at least a couple of known occasions wrote and was involved in agit-prop political events to be presented to Sports and Cultural events in Berlin, discussed under the section on Siegi’s agit-prop activities, one of which was called: ‘Die Fichte’.
Although Siegi’s writings for the Sports Revue in 1932 will be fully discussed in the next section, Siegi’s lyrics which were critical of seeing sports as a refuge in the storm will have been a response to the character of the Red Sports and Fichte, as we shall see, emphasizing the importance of solidarity, not individualism and competition. (Till his death, Siegi would refer to the contradictory nature of sport - both palliative and possible site of resistance to capitalism.) Yet again, what we have here is another link between Siegi’s different activities, in this case the Proletarian Freethinkers and his lyrics for the Sport Revue, within a socialist network of sporting and cultural organisations and activities which we can only imagine.
Further work on the Freethinkers in the early 1930s at a grass roots level would be useful to establish not just its exact structure but also how far its overlapp
ing membership with the sports club -surprisingly - led it to be categorised as a ‘para-military organ-isation’. Coming from a ‘British’ perspective, we lack an understanding of a tradition of a working class ‘cobweb’ of political and cultural organisations. But one is left with the impression that the Red Front, the BPF and a variety of sports clubs were probably closely aligned, probably under a large KPD umbrella but maintaining some levels of autonomy. For example, both the Freethinkers and the Red Front were involved together in the ‘Large Press and Cultural Exhibitions in Red Wedding’ in March 1930, organised by the KPD (Bodek, 1996). Again, it is Siegi, one assumes not single-handedly, who ‘personifies’ this cobweb of activities and allegiances.
Agit-prop
One of the few things I knew about my father was that he was involved in agit-prop theatre. Indeed it provided, as I now realise, a cover of ‘respectability’ for why he had to flee Germany. He did not need to tell me or remind himself that there had been other causes, which he had ceased to embrace, by the time I was asking him questions about his enforced flight.
The story was a simple one. He directed plays for the workers theatre, my mother was one of the actors. My mother’s view of all this, insofar as she said anything, was that the plays and my father’s directing really left a lot to be desired.
My first glimpse of light, many years ago, was when my father asked a distant American cousin, Danny, who was, God forbid, visiting E Germany (make sure you come back, my parents hissed at him, while I studied them curiously as if they were mad creatures in a zoo) to bring him back two volumes on the German workers theatre in the 1920s and 30s. My father never of course showed me the volumes but Danny told me, knowing that this was a secret, that he had looked Siegi up, and there he was, an important man in the revolutionary theatre in the early 1930s. Danny recently told me that when he gave Siegi the volumes all those years ago, Siegi said that one of the chapters was all about him. I could write a song in the evening and it would be performed across Germany the next day, my most unboastful father had told Danny, comparing himself, I suspect with good cause, to Brecht and Weill.
Then, one day, many years later, I was going to speak at a memorial gathering to my parents and had idly put my father’s name into Google, only to discover to my utter astonishment, that a few of his songs were being produced at that year’s Edinburgh festival, with music by Wolpe. I tracked down an expert in Germany on Wolpe who kindly sent me copies of many of my father’s songs, and, many articles about agit-prop theatre. Roll forward another year and I finally got these translated. Much of the next section is based on these articles, written for the Arbeiterbühne und Film, and our interpretation of them. (For anybody interested in the fascinating debates about the role of revolutionary theatre, check ‘Arbeiter Bühne und Film’, edited by Henke and Weber, first published in 1974, which contains all the articles written between 6.1930 and 6.193184 ).
First, it is necessary to situate the organisation: Arbeiter, Bühne und Film (ABF) within the context of the existing ‘revolutionary theatre’ in Germany and its relationship to the KPD. According to Weber in his introduction to ‘Arbeiterbühne und Film’ (1974), at the beginning of the 1920’s, the KPD did not have a perspective on the role of culture in the revolutionary struggle (Compare that to the heated debates amongst the Bolsheviks.) At the 1st National Educational Congress of the KPD, they were unable to resolve their position, though they did agree on the importance of political theatre as a means of popular propaganda and to win the broad masses over to class struggle. The leading theoretician was Gertrude Alexander, who disagreed with both Grosz and Heartfield on the one hand, and Piscator on the other. It seems Alexander defended the existing culture, in effect opposing the development of proletarian theatre. She was not open to the notion that even in a transformative phase, proletarian revolutionary art should be encouraged.
Piscator, the most well-known figure from the early 1920s, took a contrary view. Piscator had first joined the Sparticist League and then the KPD. In 1924, he was already putting on propaganda performances in the pursuit of revolutionary theatre on their behalf. Piscator saw theatre as revolutionary because it was rooted in working class experience, and as propaganda and agitation to defeat class injustice and build the final triumph of socialism. As far as I can gather, however, he did not have any dealings with Arbeiterbühne und Film (ABF).
In the mid 1920’s, Reimann favoured the development of a revolutionary theatre programme to ideologically strengthen proletarian theatre troupes and to turn them into the centres of class struggle. He wanted them to revolutionise workers in the fight against the ideological influence of Social Democratic fascists. At this point, the emphasis was very much on Greek choruses, directed to the ‘community’, not to the class, with its usual backward looking ideology, both of which came in for much later critique.
By 1926, the KPD’s Youth Organisation had founded a troupe under Maxim Valentins, which encouraged other agit-prop groups. By the time of the 11th Party Congress, the KPD had changed its mind and decided not to boycott the movement and agit-prop groups, the ABF (Arbeiterbühne und Film) but to join it. Agit-prop should have a propaganda function. They agreed that agit-prop groups should be centrally organised. Cultural areas were to be encouraged to combat imperialism.
This change of line by the KPD had profound political consequences for the control of the ABF. The ABF had originally been established in 1913 and been under the influence of the Social Democrats. However, in 1928, the 10th Congress of the Arbeiterbühne und Film brought victory to the Berliners and the ‘young guard’ (Bernhard 9.1930, a social democrat, from Weber, 1974) for the ATB, causing the old Social Democratic leadership to step back. The Berlin group, presumably Siegi’s grouping, was under KPD influence.
The Berlin district in the KPD had put in intensive preparation to show the delegates what a left wing troupe could achieve. Troupes like Red Blouses put on new forms of plays, which emphasised the possibility and importance of propaganda. Pieck was elected President of the AITB, Bela Belaze the artistic leader (Weber, 1974), both KPD. The Berlin group also introduced many well-known and impressive dramatists and theoreticians, such as Piscator and Frieriche Wolfe, and also a booklet by Pieck himself.
The umbrella organisation, the DTLB, was also now ‘taken over’ by the Berlin/ KPD groupings. The congress proclaimed that the DTLB, essentially under Social Democratic control, should be renamed the ATBD. The ATBD was to be a national organisation of workers and agit-prop theatres/troupes, to be the umbrella to direct the activities of the agit-prop troupes. (How far this was the actual case, will be discussed further down.) The ATBD was to be responsible for the publication of the ABF, should join the international theatre movement and should have an agitational function.
The KPD’s control of the organisation was reinforced by the 1929 National Conference of the Arbeiterbühne und Film (ABF) which gave a unanimous confidence vote to the KPD position originally adopted in 1928. The debate then and again at the 1930 11th Congress was around whether the role of revolutionary theatre was to put on popular but revisionist rubbish or to back the need for centralisation and a revolutionary perspective. Pieck stated that politically independent troupes were threatening to split the movement. The KPD line was carried by 200:50. The 11th Congress also added a couple of film pages to the ATB publication and agreed to go for articles which were less abstract and more to do with real issues of concern to the class.
In 1930, the Social Democratic core left and formed their own troupes, yet some of the articles from 1930 reveal how far there was still a tussle between the more open church of the old Social Democratic stalwarts and the far more disciplined approach presented by Siegi. Bodek wrote the following to me (2010): Now, here’s where my memory kicks in. I believe that before Arbeiter und Film began publishing, it existed as a journal with a title (I think) like Arbeiterbuhne, which was an SPD organ. When it became Arbeiter und Film, it was completely Communist. The ATB was also, aft
er 1930, completely Communist. Social Democrats had their own theatre league…In short, the Communists took over the organization. This was part of the suicidal split on the Left, which certainly helped the right take power. 85
It is at this point, in 1930, it is safe to surmise, that Siegi becomes the editor and chief theorist. Arbeiterbühne und Film was one of the key sources for Agitprop troupes from 1930-33. Indeed, it was probably the single most important thing that agitprop players read (besides the Rote Fahne, the KPD’s official newspaper) (personal email from Bodek 2010). My father’s songs would have been spread all over Germany, I presume by means of the ABF.
But before we look at Siegi’s precise role, it is worth highlighting how ambiguous and controversial the relationship between the agitprop troupes and the KPD actually was. While this is a matter of historical interest, it also has relevance to my father’s story. Formally the KPD had a guiding, if not vetting role in terms of line and content (Bodek, 1996: 68). The troupes were supposed to submit their scripts for their political acceptability to the ATBD, and also to the new ‘Red Union’, the RGO and to party factory cells (Bodek, 1996). But how far the KPD was in control is open to debate. It seems likely that in practice, even by 1930 (Bodek, 1996) the troupes, even if in theory under the thumb of the KPD, in practice maintained a healthy independence, partly rooted in their own lived or learnt working class experiences and the high levels of participation of working class audiences, especially its youth, in the performances. This gave rise to the accusation that the troupes grossly overestimated their own importance in the class struggle and - largely unsuccessful - attempts by the KPD to rein them in as late as 1930 (Bodek, 1996).