The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

BIBLIOGRAPHY
A bibliography on the communist left in the Netherlands cannot be limited to the sources and studies existing
either in the Dutch language or in The Netherlands.
The merging of the KAPD current, descended from the Spartakusbund – with the Gorter and Pannekoek current
– gave birth to an international revolutionary current, from 1920 onwards. This current developed
simultaneously in a number of countries: Bulgaria, Russia, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Great Britain;
then – during the thirties – in France, Belgium, Denmark and in the United States. The Dutch Communist left
must be placed in this international context, which shows something of the state of the subject. The existence of
archives and documents, dealing with German-Dutch left communism, in almost ten languages, gave us an idea
of the scope of the research work.
In this bibliography, up-to-dated (1988-2002), we shall deliberately confine ourselves to a few countries, more
particularly the Netherlands and Germany.
AVAILABLE SOURCES
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi
istorii (RGASPI) [Russian Center for Preservation and Study of Records of Modern History]: Dossiers 488-493:
Komintern’s congress; 495: Exekutiv Komitee der Kommunistischen Internationale (EKKI); 497: Amsterdam
Bureau; 499: West-Europäisches Büro (WEB); 581: Wijnkoop archives; 626: Rutgers archives.
Het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie [RIOD] (Amsterdam): The State Institute for War Documentation,
in Amsterdam, includes an important dossier on the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front led by Henk Sneevliet as well
as illegal publications of this group. (Web: )
IISG (Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam)
(The web site of the International Institute of Social History gives up-to-dated descriptions of its archives:
)
Above all to refer to the essential books of:
Mies CAMPFENS, De Nederlandse archieven van het IISG, Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1989 (Relates to the
Archives of the International Institute of Social History).
Henk HONDIUS and Margreet SCHREVEL, Inventaris van het archief van de Sociaal-Democratische
Arbeiderspartij (SDAP) 1894-1946, working paper, Amsterdam: IISG, 1985.
Margreet SCHREVEL and Gerrit VOERMAN, De communistische erfenis. Bibliografie en bronnen betreffende
de CPN, Amsterdam: IISG/DNPP, 1997. At the IISG, since the fall of Berlin Wall and the autodissolution of the
CPN on June 15, 1991, all the documents of the Komintern (in the form of microfilms) from Moscow, all the
archives of the Party in The Netherlands can be consulted at the International Institute of Social History of
Amsterdam. This book draws up the complete list of these archives.
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