“The Left wonders if the Comintern Executive is at last going to recognise that ‘we are the real ones’, the only revolutionaries, the only possible leadership for a German revolution. Ruth Fischer, Arkadi Maslow, Heinz Neumann, and Arthur Rosenberg believe that their hour has come. I have met Rosenberg on a number of occasions at the Rote Fahne. This brilliant intellectual gives me a slight jolt by asking ‘Do you really think that the Russians want a German revolution?’ He doubts if they do.”[1]
The anecdote related by Victor Serge in his Memoirs describes in incisive fashion the contradictions that characterized the life of Arthur Rosenberg (1889-1943). At the moment he was held in highest esteem, and his reputation had reached its peak within the communist movement, he doubted the will and ability of that movement to carry out its historical task. He was one of the most renowned leaders of the German Communist party, but he put himself in opposition to its leadership. In effect, Rosenberg was forced to go through repeatedly and in various contexts the situation of being on the wrong side, the losing side, of the barricades. That this happened in a period of growing political polarisations in every field determined all his troubled existence.
Born in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century into a Jewish middle class family of retailers, Rosenberg studied classical philology and ancient history at the Friedrich Wilhelm Universität, where he was a promising alumnus of Eduard Meyer. His research, devoted to Italic, Roman, and Greek political institutions, led him to study the problem of ancient democracy. Driven by his interest in the field of political and constitutional organisation, and impressed by the spread of workers’ councils during the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany, he sided with the Independent Socialist party (USPD), first, and then with the Communist Party (KPD). His so-called “conversion” to communism caused him to be ostracised from his working environment, that is, German classical academia, which was unanimously conservative in its political outlook. His break with the German classical tradition led to an academic persecution of Rosenberg, which lasted until he had to leave his country in 1933.
In the months following his affiliation to the Communist Party, Rosenberg published many journal articles and brief textbooks, often written in an educational style, dedicated to class struggle and democracy in the ancient world. Here he tried to define the cornerstones of his understanding of ancient history. He thought that Athenian democracy was the forerunner of the contemporary council democracy of Russia and Germany in the years of revolution. In his words,
“It is possible to discover close similarities between the Athenian constitution of the period of proletarian democracy and the political organisation developed by the Paris Commune in 1871: in both there were small districts from which poor people sent their delegates; both paid civil servants a worker’s salary; both had a central authority, wielding at the same time advisory and executive power, formed by delegates from small districts. In addition to this, in regard to the effects that the ideas developed by the Paris Commune had on the present Councils’ Republic in Russia, it is easy to find many analogies between that political system and the Athenian constitution.”[2]
Rosenberg’s progression through the ranks of the Communist Party was swift. Elected city council member in 1921, he sided with the left of the party, led by Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. In 1924 he became a member of the central committee, and then an MP. Even more important was his role as German member of the executive committee of the Communist International. However, his growing scepticism about the Moscow leadership, as recalled in the quote above by Victor Serge, isolated him in the political field too. The Bolshevisation of the communist parties and the acceptance of the “Socialism in one country” policy drove him away from the international communist movement. In April 1927 he left the Party, and found himself totally isolated once again, while Nazism was getting stronger.
During the thirties Rosenberg tried to break out of his academic isolation, writing monographs and essays on contemporary history. He was author of books on the history of the German Empire and of the Weimar Republic, and wrote the first history of Bolshevism ever published. These works were fairly successful among contemporary historians, but he never managed to receive a chair in contemporary history, as he hoped. When Hitler came to power and he had to go into exile in Switzerland, then in Great Britain, and finally in the USA, he could not obtain anything more than less important teaching posts in the field of classics.
He died in poverty in 1944, and his works, in the following decades, had a similar destiny to what he had experienced in life. In the DDR he was considered a social democratic historian and an icon of the cultural crisis of the Weimar Republic, whereas in the West his study of democracy and socialism was perceived as being too dependent on his Marxist reading of society and his communist militancy. Much like his life, his work was caught between the lines.
This profile was written by Vittorio Saldutti
[1] Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, New York: New York Review Books, 2002: 202.
[2] Arthur Rosenberg, Demokratie und Klassenkampf im Altertum. Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klassing, 1921, 37-38 (my translation).
