If they don’t fuck up as badly, and it would be really hard to reach Wiemar levels of failure, it’s probably not a great analogy.
Thalmann and the communists were going with accelerationism and straight up wanted Hitler to win, so they blocked every coalition they could. The SPD reacted by ruling by decree (something they could do in that system) and didn’t even bother to pick popular decrees, so when a new president was chosen he basically just blocked that as well, and a crisis ensued.
July 1932 was a snap election in that moment. More dysfunction happened between that election and November 1932’s snap election (where Hitler actually lost ground), and then the famous Reichstag fire and Hindenburg pact stuff happened.
If the AfD succeeds further it will be for different reasons, basically.
Thalmann and the communists were going with accelerationism and straight up wanted Hitler to win, so they blocked every coalition they could.
That’s… not how the situation unfolded.
To further understand the position taken by the KPD against the SPD, Ernst Thälmann’s 1932 speech “The SPD and NSDAP are Twins” reveals how the KPD leadership envisioned its struggle against fascism in all forms. Thälmann’s incendiary speech declared that “joint negotiations between the KPD and the SPD… there are none! There will be none!”¹³
This was not to say that the KPD did not recognize the [Fascist] threat, as Thälmann articulated that “KPD strategy directs the main blow against social democracy, without thereby weakening the struggle against […] fascism; [KPD] strategy creates the very preconditions of an effective opposition to […] fascism precisely in its direction of the main blow against social democracy.”¹⁴
It is imperative to recognize, though, that the KPD only advocated the blow against the SPD leadership. As Thälmann argued, The KPD’s policy envisioned, the creation of a “revolutionary United Front policy… [that mobilized the masses from below through] the systematic, patient and comradely persuasion of the Social Democratic, Christian and even National Socialist workers to forsake their traitorous leaders.”¹⁵
Here’s another choice Thalmann quote from that election’s Wikipedia: “Hitler must come to power first, then the requirements for a revolutionary crisis [will] arrive more quickly”
Unfortunately the source given doesn’t provide a path all the way to a primary one, and my geography and language skills aren’t conducive to searching newspaper archives for it. That gives you a sense of the philosophy of the KPD, though, at least until the last minute in the other election later that year when they woke up.
Your link reads like a giant wall of text to paper over a straightforward historical mistake.
If they don’t fuck up as badly, and it would be really hard to reach Wiemar levels of failure, it’s probably not a great analogy.
Thalmann and the communists were going with accelerationism and straight up wanted Hitler to win, so they blocked every coalition they could. The SPD reacted by ruling by decree (something they could do in that system) and didn’t even bother to pick popular decrees, so when a new president was chosen he basically just blocked that as well, and a crisis ensued.
July 1932 was a snap election in that moment. More dysfunction happened between that election and November 1932’s snap election (where Hitler actually lost ground), and then the famous Reichstag fire and Hindenburg pact stuff happened.
If the AfD succeeds further it will be for different reasons, basically.
That’s… not how the situation unfolded.
(Source herein.)
His reward was imprisonment and a bullet to the head.
Here’s another choice Thalmann quote from that election’s Wikipedia: “Hitler must come to power first, then the requirements for a revolutionary crisis [will] arrive more quickly”
Unfortunately the source given doesn’t provide a path all the way to a primary one, and my geography and language skills aren’t conducive to searching newspaper archives for it. That gives you a sense of the philosophy of the KPD, though, at least until the last minute in the other election later that year when they woke up.
Your link reads like a giant wall of text to paper over a straightforward historical mistake.
Oh. I never thought about that before. That is a good point. I wish that I were as smart as you.