Isaac Deutscher and Heinrich Brandler had in common the fact that they were among the small number of communist oppositionists from the twenties and thirties who survived into the post-war era without modifying their fundamental political stance: without succumbing to cold-war, social-democratic or Stalinist pressures. In short, both remained revolutionaries and Marxists. However, they had a widely divergent political formation, and the correspondence below shows deep differences as well as significant areas of agreement. The material published here essentially covers two great complexes of events in Germany, commonly summed up in two dates, 1923 and 1953. 1923—the ‘German October’; 1953—the German Kronstadt (as Brandler might have put it) or the German Vendée (Deutscher’s implied evaluation). Even the sharp contrast of views on the latter, however, does not prevent the correspondence from being a notably fruitful and instructive exchange.

Deutscher’s general political position will be sufficiently familiar to most readers of nlr to make any elucidation superfluous. But Brandler’s comments need, I think, to be set in the context of his whole political life and activity, both inside and outside the Communist Party of Germany (kpd). In the leadership of the Party from its foundation, he was its dominant leader—despite periods in prison and political exile—from 1921 to 1924. Subsequently, despite being held in Moscow in ‘honorary imprisonment’, he was the absent presence in the factional struggles of the twenties within the kpd. After Stalin’s break with Bukharin in 1928, and the initiation of the ultra-left ‘Third Period’ course in the Comintern, the ‘Right’ was expelled from the German as from the Russian Party. A new Party was formed, the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) (kpo), headed by Brandler and dubbed by its opponents ‘the Brandlerite faction’. There followed for Brandler years of struggle within Germany to achieve a united front against Fascism with the Social Democrats; then clandestine action against the Hitler régime, followed by years of exile, first in France, then in Cuba. Finally, remarkably enough, came Brandler’s post-war return to Occupied Germany and the reconstitution of the cadres of the old kpo and the renewal of political activity through the Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik.

The continuity of Brandler’s political activity from the twenties to the fifties is matched by a substantive continuity in his positions. In the early years of the kpd, he supported participation and work in the spd dominated trade-union movement; participation in elections and parliamentary debates; the expulsion of those communists who did not accept this policy (i.e. Levi’s coup at the Heidelberg Congress of 1919); and finally, and most importantly, the united front tactic of co-operation on the basis of a minimum programme with other working-class organizations—instituted in Germany in January 1921 well in advance of any decision by the Comintern. From 1921 to 1923, together with Thalheimer, he played a key role in the majority leadership of the kpd, defending and implementing the united front tactic against the attacks of the rising stars of the ‘Left’, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow.footnote1 The Left position was that the united front should only be applied ‘from below’; i.e. that appeals should be made to spd workers to come over to communism, but there should be no negotiations or joint action with the leaders of the spd or the trade-union Confederation (adgb).