Luise Dornemann, Clara Zetkin. Leben und Wirken (Berlin [Ost], 1973)

Abstract

Clara Zetkin's life and career (1857-1933) spanned two distinct phases in socialist history. Her political maturation coincided with the heyday of Social Democracy and its commitment to mass parties and to the acquisition of political power through democratic means. Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution broke with both principles and, after 1917, Zetkin embraced his model of revolutionary action, his "dictatorship of the proletariat" and his shibboleth "from dictatorship to democracy." Luise Dornemann's revised biography of Clara Zetkin makes interesting reading precisely because her subject was such a remarkable figure. The list of Zetkin's political accomplishments is impressive. She participated in the founding of the Second International, rose to prominence in the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD), ran its Women's Movement, edited the only women's paper in the pre World War I German socialist movement, Gleichheit (Equality), and was the moving spirit behind the formation of the International Socialist Women's Movement in 1907. World War I found Zetkin in opposition to the majority socialist policy and a member of the Spartacus League (the forerunner of the German Communist Party). Her commitment to the new Russia as well as her international reputation among European socialists secured her a seat on the Executive Committee of the Third International and in 1921 she headed its West European Women's Bureau. There is a tragic side to Zetkin's career which parallels both the misplaced hopes and expectations of European socialism and the hardening of lines in Soviet Russia. Zetkin suffered both personal and political misfortune. The early death of her common law husband, Ossip, in 1889 and the murder of her very close friend and political mentor Rosa Luxemburg in 191.9 affected her profoundly. In the political realm, the German socialist war credit vote in August, 1914, the failure to institute meaningful change during the so-called German Revolution of 1918, the diminution of women's rights in Russia (about which the biography is silent) coincident with the drive for industrialization, and the growing fascist threat in Germany, contradicted all she had fought for. As a testimony to the depths of her political commitment, Zetkin returned from Russia to Germany in 1932, old and sick, to give an impassioned and courageous plea before the Reichstag against the fascist menace; she died nearly five months after Hitler assumed power in Germany. Dornemann's biography is weighted toward documenting Zetkin's radical credentials, as is to be expected in East German scholarship. The authoress stresses Zetkin's opposition to reformism and. opportunism in the SPD as well as her anti-militarist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist stance. Oornemann gentiy criticizes Zetkin's equivocation and failure to follow Lenin's war-time call for an immediate and complete break with the "socialist-chauvinists", and her hesitancy to found an independent Marxist/Leninist Party in Germany before December, 1918. (The same criticism is applied :o Rosa Luxemburg.) Much emphasis is given to the "maturing" of Zetkin's thought through her reading of Lenin, and to her total commitment to the new workers' and peasants' state. The ideoioeicai constraints acting on Dornemann probably account for numerous unanswered questions. Above aii, Zorkin's relationship with the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) and her renunciation of USPD membership for tactical reasons only in March 1919 are shrouded in vagueness.