The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

member of the KAPD. He had been one of its founders, representing the party at the Third Congress of the
Komintern. But he was more a man of the Unions, of the AAU – he was editor of Klassenkampf in Düsseldorf,
the AAU organ for Westphalia – than of the KAPD, even though he had a leading position within the latter. His
imprisonment between 1923 and 1925 took him away from the political life of the KAPD. It did enable him
however to reflect on the Russian experience. This reflection was to give birth to the Fundamental Principles of
Communist Production and Distribution (the Grundprinzipien), which was partly written in prison. This book
became the ‘bible’ as much of the German Unionen movement as of the GIC, and revealed a fixation on the
In November, he participated as a worker and a revolutionary delegate in the great naval shipyard strikes in Hamburg.
Linksradikal in 1917, he became a member of the Spartakusbund in December 1918. In January 1919, after Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been murdered in Berlin, he made the acquaintance of Ernst Thälmann of the USPD,
the future chairman of the stalinist KPD. Soon he advocated the formation of Factory Organisations
[Betriebsorganisationen] which led to the founding of the Allgemeine Arbeiter Union Deutschlands or AAUD and was one
of the main propagandist for the AAU. He was Chairman of the ‘Revolutionäre Obleute’, and assumed partially the function
of Chairman of the Hamburg District of the KPD. He was with the Hamburg opposition but he soon withdrew his support to
them. For this reason, he was delegate to the Heidelberg Congress of the KPD in October 1919. He was one of the main
workers’ leaders of the KAPD in April 1920. The same month, he was the second official KAP delegate to represent the
KAPD at the Executive Committee of the Communist International [ECCI], then in session in Moscow – with Franz Jung,
Willy Klahre, and Hermann Knüfken, he hijacked the fishing boat ‘Senator Schröder’, to reach Murmansk. After having
spoken with Zinoviev in Leningrad, he travelled on to Moscow. With Jung and Willy Klahre, he was shortly received by
Lenin himself. According to him, “Lenin, of course, opposed our and the KAPD’s standpoint. During the course of a second
reception, a little while later, he gave us his answer. This he did by reading to us extracts from his pamphlet Left Wing
Communism – An Infantile Disorder, selecting those passages which he considered relevant to our case. He held the
manuscript of this document which had not yet been printed, in his hand.” On year later, Appel, with 4 other comrades, in
June-July 1921, he spoke to the Third Congress of the Komintern, under the pseudonym Hempel. According to his
testimony (1966), “At the Third Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, we (KAPD) were afforded every
freedom to express our point of view concerning the kind of policy which should guide our work. But we met with no
agreement from the delegates from the other countries present. The main content of the decisions which were adopted at this
Congress held that we should continue to cooperate with the KPD in the old unions and in the democratic assemblies, and
that we should let drop our slogan ‘All Power to the Workers’ Councils!’”
In 1920, he has played an active part in the combat of the Red Army of the Ruhr: he became one of the editors of the organ
of the AAU, Klassenkampf, in Düsseldorf. At the end of 1921, he was against the formation of the KAI, and stayed in the
Berlin KAPD. He was arrested in November 1923 ‘for armed aggression’ (expropriation) and was condemned to two years
in prison for having diverted the fishing boat ‘Senator Schröder’ and piracy, an affair which lasted three years. This allowed
him to read Marx’s Capital in depth and to write the Grundprinzipien. When he left prison (in Düsseldorf), in Dec. 1925, he
moved away from the KAPD, but not the AAU. In April 1926 he moved to Holland and worked in the naval shipyards in
Zaandam (North of Amsterdam). He joined the GIC. In 1933, the Hitler government demanded his extradition, so he went
into clandestinity under the name Jan Vos. During the war, and up till 1948, he was in the Spartacusbond. After an accident
which obliged him to come out of clandestinity (1948), the authorities discovered that he was a ‘German foreigner’. But, “a
testament from over 20 bourgeois citizens, good and true, was required in order to protect me from being simply pushed
over the border! That I had been active in the resistance [verzet, or ‘opposition’, in Dutch. Ed. Note] movement decided the
issue in my favour. Jan Appel made his appearance once again, but it was necessary for him to refrain for a time from all
political activity.” In fact, the Dutch authorities made him promise to abstain from political activity. This in no way
prevented him from remaining unquenchably loyal to his revolutionary convictions. In 1975, in Paris, he took part in the
founding congress of the ‘International Communist Current’, of which he remained a far away sympathiser until his death
on 4 th May 1985 in Maastricht.
He was married with Lea Berreklauw (1914-1997), Dutch novelist, poet, author of radio programmes and musical
spectacles for children. In 1982, Lea Appel – Berreklauw published a novel on the history and destruction by the nazis of a
Dutch Jewish orphanage for girls in Amsterdam: Het brood der doden. Geschiedenis en ondergang van een joods meisjesweeshuis
(Baarn: Bosch & Keuning).
[Cf. J. Halkes, Jan Appel: het leven van een radencommunist (Leiden: Uitgeverij Comsopolis, 1986); Hubert van den Berg,
‘Jan Appel – ein deutscher Rätekommunist im niederländischen Exil und Widerstand 1926-1948’, pp. 252-265, in: A. Graf
(ed.), Anarchisten gegen Hitler. Anarchisten, Anarcho-Syndikalisten, Rätekommunisten in Widerstand und Exil (Berlin:
Lukas Verlag, 2001).]
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