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By Root 1532 0

social-democratic and communist working-class pupils in the so-called Aufbauschulen – the schools supported by the Prussian government, where selected children would make the transition to full secondary education and eventually the Abitur. Arriving in Neukölln as a dynamic new agit-prop cadre in 1926, Benario inspired school Young Communists to form a ‘communist secondary fraction’ (Kopefra)5 in the Aufbauschulen on the analogy of the already existing ‘student fractions’ (Kostufra). Since these schools contained students from both working-class parties, it was decided to form a wider association covering both, the SSB. Inevitably, when social democrats became ‘social fascists’ for the Communist International, not much of this spirit of unity remained. The SSB had become a dependency of the Communist Party. By 1928 it had also extended outside the red areas of Berlin, with groups in Zentrum and Westen – that is to say in middle-class schools such as mine – and indeed into other parts of Germany. It also published the newly founded Schulkampf.

By the time I joined it in the autumn of 1932, the SSB was pretty well on its last legs, largely, it seems, because financial cuts during the economic crisis made life increasingly difficult for the Aufbauschulen, which were still its main support. Several groups ceased to exist in the second half of 1932, or met only irregularly. Co-ordinated action was no longer possible. Even in the strongholds of the cause, such as the Karl-Marx-Schule in Neukölln, the atmosphere at the end of 1932 was depressed and resigned. The Schulkampf is said to have ceased publication after May 1932, but I assume that this meant in printed form, since I still possess a later copy of it, patently duplicated by comrades who were not very skilled at handling duplicators. However, my small West Berlin cell of the association showed no signs of discouragement.

We met first in the apartment of the parents of one of our members, then fairly regularly in the backroom of a communist pub situated close to Halensee. The grassroots history of both the German and the French labour movements, neither of which had a strong temperance component, can be largely written in terms of the bars, in the front rooms of which comrades met to lift a glass of wine or (as in Berlin) beer, while more serious meetings were going on round the table in the back rooms. Of course drinks could be ordered in the front room and taken to the back, but the practice was discouraged. As a proper organization we had an Orglei (organizational leader), a boy called Wolfheim – first name Walter, I think – and a Polei (political leader or commissar), Bohrer, whom I recall as chubby. German and Russian communist organizations preferred syllabic abbreviations to initials, as in Komintern, Kolkhoz and Gulag and the use of second names gave meetings a certain formality. The only other member of the cell who has remained in my memory is a handsome and stylish Russian called Gennadi (‘Goda’) Bubrik, who came to meetings in a Russian shirt and whose father worked for one of the Russian agencies in Berlin. I assume we must have discussed the situation in our various schools and potential recruits or ‘contacts’, but by late 1932 national politics was incomparably more urgent than the problems with a reactionary master in, say, the Unterprima of the Bismarck Gymnasium. So the political situation undoubtedly dominated our agenda, Bohrer indicating ‘the line’ we were to follow.

What did we think? It is now generally accepted that the policy which the KPD pursued, following the Comintern line, in the years of Hitler’s rise to power, was one of suicidal idiocy. It rested on the assumption that a new round of class confrontation and revolutions was approaching after the breakdown of the temporary stabilization of capitalism in the middle twenties, and that the chief obstacle to the necessary radicalization of the workers under communist leadership was the domination of most labour movements by the moderate social democrats. These assumptions were not in themselves