The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

English lord. To defend Van der Lubbe the council communists produced a ‘Red Book’ (Roodboek), which used
a multitude of testimonies to dismantle point by point the accusations against him. 766 A Van der Lubbe
committee was formed, made up of a member of the ex-KAPN, Lo Lopes-Cardozo, a member of the GIC, the
psychiatrist Lieuwe Hornstra (1908-1990), and the proletarian writer Maurits Dekker (1896-1962). This
committee had offshoots in several countries, including France. 767 It was in fact a cartel of groups and
personalities, not very distinct from anarchism, since anarchists were included in it. 768
The formation of this committee could not prevent a debate from emerging within Dutch council communism on
the significance of ‘personal acts’ and of terrorism in general. On the one hand there were those who considered
them ‘proletarian acts’, and on the other those who rejected all terrorist action on principle.
The first tendency, supported by the German council communists 769 , was motivated as much by a reluctance to
‘run with the hounds’ as by political confusion. It saw in the Reichstag fire, not an act of despair but a
proletarian method which in other circumstances could ‘awaken’ the German proletariat and draw it into
struggle. 770 The reaction of groups like the LAO and the Radencommunist grouping was typical in this respect.
766 The translation in French of the Roodboek can be found, with numerous testimonies from Van der Lubbe’s comrades, in
the Revue anarchiste, No. 19, March 1934: ‘Van der Lubbe et les mensonges du Livre brun (avec témoignages et pièces
justificatives)’.
767 André Prudhommeaux (1902-1968) was part of this committee in France, which published numerous documents in
French, such as: Marinus Van der Lubbe : prolétaire ou provocateur (1933), reprinted as a pamphlet in Sept. 1971 by the
‘Librairie La Vieille Taupe’. This pamphlet – by a textile worker, Age van Agen, written – was first published in Dutch.
Leo Hornstra had been member of the CPH till 1927. Psycho-analyst and Friesian poet, he became a council communist
after 1928. In 1958 he converted to Catholicism. Living in Friesland, after 1960, he shown himself as a “Friesian
nationalist”.
Maurits Dekker was not linked to the council communist movement. Autodidact, born in the Jewish workers’ milieu of
Amsterdam, poet, then novelist. He began to publish in 1923 (Homo cantat). In 1926 he published a novel where the
mankind is subjected to the power of the machines and the state. In 1929, by the fact that his novels were neglected by the
critics, he published a famous novel under the pseudonym of Boris Robazki (Waarom ik niet kankzinnig ben). He obtained
renown as ‘social novelist’. In 1933, he was – with Jacques Gans, Jef Last and Frans Goedhart – an important animator of
the Dutch association of proletarian writers ‘Links Richten”, which published in 1932-33 the periodical Links Richten.
Dekker, ex-fellow-traveller of the CPN who sustained van der Lubbe, was denounced as “petty bourgeois” by the CP and
Jef Last within ‘Links Richten’. Active in literature, Dekker wrote novels on the Dutch Beggar’s revolt. After having
written a pamphlet against Hitler in 1937, he was condemned to a fine in 1938 for “offending a friendly head of state” (sic).
After the war he gained consecration by obtaining Prizes in literature. Outside Holland, he was known for his historical
novel, Beggars’ revolt (New York: Garden City, 1938), and over all for his drama drama The world has no waiting room
(1950), on the responsibility of the atomic scientists after Hiroshima, a play translated in many languages.
[See: N.A. Donkersloot, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde te Leiden 1962-1963, pp. 94-98;
A. Lammers, Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland 3, The Hague, 1989; and J.M.J. Sicking, Kritisch Lexicon van de
Nederlandstalige Literatuur na 1945, 1994.]
768 The GIC did not associate itself with this committee, but let some of its members like Lieuwe (Leo) Hornstra do so.
769 The KAU seems to have held this position. The KAPD’s is not known.
770 Lehmann, a member of German ‘worker-communist groups’ in exile in Paris, wrote in the Revue anarchiste No. 19.
March 1934: “Only a daring act – repeated and followed by similar ones – could save the situation. Thus [Van der Lubbe]
set fire to the Reichstag as a beacon of a new social order ... But for the leaders of the KPD and SPD, the act of Van der
Lubbe was an excuse for their own worthlessness and political bankruptcy. This is why they refuse so obstinately to
recognise the act of Van der Lubbe as a revolutionary act”. The position of the Italian communist left was somewhat similar
and just as ambiguous: “Communists have never participated in these unanimous concerts against terrorist acts and – on
each occasion – they silence the choir of hypocritical lamentations and timid exonerations, and may in certain circumstances
not proclaim their opposition of principle to terrorist acts. That could play the game of the enemy who exploits these events,
to extirpate from the brains of the working class the idea of the necessity of violence”. But the Italian Communist Left did
not take position explicitly on the personal act of Van der Lubbe: communists “do not have the duty to pronounce for or
against: they have the duty to explain that in the face of the assassinations of workers by social democrats or fascists, the
gesture of a proletarian against the Reichstag in the end has no more significance than a brick thrown into a sea of workers’
blood” [‘Van der Lubbe : les fascistes exécutent, socialistes et centristes applaudissent’, in: Bilan, Brussels, No. 3, Jan.
1934.]
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