Germany
Clara Zetkin’s struggle for the united front
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Alexandra Kollontai: International Women's Day -- a militant celebration
To mark International Women's Day 2010, Links International Journal of Socilalist Renewal reproduces Alexandra Kollontai's classic history and explanation of this important anniversary. Thanks to the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA) for making this and other writings by Kollontai available. Notes by MIA.
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By Alexandra Kollontai
Mezhdunarodnyi den' rabotnitz, Moscow 1920 -- Women's Day or Working Women's Day is a day of international solidarity, and a day for reviewing the strength and organisation of proletarian women.
Leninism: It’s not what you think
By Paul Kellogg
[This article first appeared in Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2), Fall 2009. It has been posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission.]
`Freedoms won, freedoms lost' -- left views on the fall of the Berlin Wall
November 15, 2009 – For the past few weeks the international capitalist mass media has been awa
Positive developments in the European left
By Ian Angus
Germany: Big gains for Die Linke as Social Democrats’ support collapses
By Duroyan Fertl
October 5, 2009 – Germany’s ``centre-right’’ Chancellor Angela Merkel was returned to power in federal elections held on September 27, but with a record low voter turnout and an increased vote for the far-left party, Die Linke (The Left).
The election was a clear success for Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Her preferred coalition partner – the free-market fundamentalist Free Democratic Party (FDP) – increased its support by 4.8 per cent to an all-time high of 14.6 per cent, enough to form a CDU-FDP government. The FDP will now replace the CDU’s main rival – the ``centre-left’’ Social Democratic Party (SPD) – as coalition partner in the government of Europe’s largest economy.
At the same time, the SPD’s support collapsed by more than 6 million votes, dropping a massive11.2 per cent to only 23 per cent – its worst result since World War II. As one leading SPD member pointed out on election night, “We have been bombed back into the Weimar Republic”. SPD leader Walter Steinmeier described the result as “a bitter day” for German social democracy.
The Holocaust: `May history attest to us' -- resistance, collaboration and survival
Hitler’s Priests, by Kevin Spicer, Northern Illinois University Press, 2008, 369 pp. US$34.95
Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, by Samuel D. Kassow, Indiana University Press, 2007, 523 pP., US$34.95
Kasztner’s Train: the True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, by Anna Porter, Scribe, 2008, 548 pp., A$32.95
The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman, Pantheon, 1996, 296 pp., US$35.
Review by Barry Healy
July 28, 2009 -- In October 2008 the Catholic Synod of Bishops convened in Rome for a four-day theological discussion. Without warning, on the first day, Pope Benedict XVI suspended discussion and ordered the 200 participants to attend a special commemoration mass for Pius XII, who was the pope between 1939 and 1958.
Germany: Die Linke, Hesse and the `super election’ year
By Duroyan Fertl
Germany: Die Linke, one year on (+ video)
By Thies Gleiss
One year after the foundation of the Die Linke (Left) party, commentators on both right and left agree that the political situation in Germany has been changed. Following three regional elections in spring 2008, Die Linke is solidly installed on the landscape.[1] On paper it is now the third biggest party in the country, whether in terms of members, elected representatives or other holders of paid political functions at all levels of the state, or again in terms of financial strength.
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Germany's Die Linke: ‘We have the wind of history in our sails’
By Duroyan Fertl
May 30, 2008 -- After a year of stellar successes, almost 600 delegates from Germany’s new left-wing party, Die Linke, came together for the party’s first ever congress, held in the east German city of Cottbus on May 25 and 26. Former East German communist Lothar Bisky and former Social Democratic Party (SPD) national president Oscar Lafontaine, once dubbed by the media as “Europe’s most dangerous man”, were re-elected as co-chairs of the party, and a social justice-oriented platform was adopted for the coming period, which includes state elections in Bavaria this September and federal elections next year.
Die Linke was officially formed in 2007 as a fusion between the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS — the successor to the former East German ruling party) and a collection of militants, unionists and socialists from the west organised as the Electoral Alternative for Jobs and Social Justice (WASG). Die Linke now has almost 80,000 members.