The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933

Norman LaPorte's The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933 contributes new and important material to the major debates on the history of German Communism during the Weimar Republic. Laporte distinguishes between an older historiography, which focused on the top-down imposition of a Stalinist model, with a post-1960s revisionist “history from below.” The revisionist historians explained Communist behavior “as a response to a range of social and economic conditions that influenced the mentality of party members and the choices of the party leadership” (p. 22). LaPorte sees his own work as a step beyond both schools. Following Weber, he argues that policy was indeed formulated from above, and he suggests that the revisionists have downplayed the significance of the “top-down system of control” in the KPD. At the same time, the party leaderships' directives were interpreted and responded to in specific political contexts. The rank-and-file could not be easily forced to carry out policies that “failed to account for the realities of their own specific political environment,” and the attempt of the party leadership to impose ideological uniformity, Laporte argues, “destabilized” the relationship between the party and its membership. Hence, he views his work as an attempt to fuse history “from above and below” (p. 31).