Karl Liebknecht
Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht was a German socialist in the Social Democratic Party of Germany and a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany which split way from the SPD. He is best known for his opposition to World War I in the Reichstag and his role in the Spartacist uprising of 1919; the uprising was crushed by the Freikorps. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were executed. After their deaths and Luxemburg became martyrs for socialists. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, commemoration of Liebknecht and Luxemburg continues to play an important role among the German left, including Die Linke. Liebknecht was born in Leipzig, Germany, the son of Wilhelm Martin Philipp Christian Ludwig Liebknecht and his second wife Natalie, who came from a family with a strong political background as her father Theodor was a member of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. Liebknecht's parents were second cousins as his maternal great-grandmother was the sister of one of his paternal great-grandfathers.
His father was a co-founder with August Bebel of the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Liebknecht became an exponent of Marxist ideas during his study of law and political economy in Leipzig and Humboldt University of Berlin. After serving with the Imperial Pioneer Guards in Potsdam from 1893 to 1894 and internships in Arnsberg and Paderborn from 1894 to 1898, he earned his doctorate at Würzburg in 1897 and moved to Berlin in 1899, where he opened a lawyer's office with his brother, Theodor. Liebknecht married Julia Paradies on 8 May 1900; the couple had two sons and a daughter before Julia died in 1911. As a lawyer, Liebknecht defended other left-wing socialists who were tried for offences such as smuggling socialist propaganda into Russia, a task in which he was involved, he became a member of the SPD in 1900 and was president of the Socialist Youth International from 1907 to 1910. Liebknecht wrote extensively against militarism. In his speech at the Bremen party conference in 1904, he insisted to his audience: "Militarism is our most deadly enemy and the best way of waging the struggle against it is to increase the number of social democrats among the soldiers".
One of his papers, Militarismus und Antimilitarismus led to his being arrested in 1907 and imprisoned for eighteen months in Glatz, Prussian Silesia. In the next year, he was elected to the Prussian parliament despite still being in prison. Liebknecht was an active member of the Second International and a founder of the Socialist Youth International. In 1912, Liebknecht was elected to the Reichstag as a Social-Democrat, a member of the SPD's left-wing, he opposed Germany's participation in World War I, but in order not to infringe the party's unity he abstained from the vote on war loans on 4 August 1914. On 2 December 1914, he was the only member of the Reichstag to vote against further loans, the supporters of which included 110 of his own party members, he continued to be a major critic of the Social-Democratic leadership under Karl Kautsky and its decision to acquiesce in going to war. In October that year, he married art historian Sophie Ryss. At the end of 1914, together with Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Paul Levi, Ernest Meyer, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin, formed the so-called Spartacus League.
The Spatacus League publicized its views in a newspaper titled Spartakusbriefe, soon declared illegal. Liebknecht was arrested and sent to the eastern front during World War I despite his immunity as a member of parliament. Refusing to fight, he served burying the dead and due to his deteriorating health was allowed to return to Germany in October 1915. Liebknecht was arrested again following a demonstration against the war in Berlin on 1 May 1916, organized by the Spartacus League and sentenced to two and a half years in jail for high treason, increased to four years and one month. Liebknecht was released again in October 1918, when Prince Maximilian of Baden granted an amnesty to all political prisoners. Upon his return to Berlin on 23 October, he was escorted to the Soviet embassy by a crowd of workers. Following the outbreak of the German Revolution, Liebknecht carried on his activities in the Spartacist League, he resumed leadership of the group together with Luxemburg and published its party organ, Die Rote Fahne.
On 9 November, Liebknecht declared the formation of a Freie Sozialistische Republik from a balcony of the Berliner Stadtschloss, two hours after Philipp Scheidemann's declaration of a German Republic from a balcony of the Reichstag. On 31 December 1918 and 1 January 1919, Liebknecht was involved in the founding of the Communist Party of Germany. Together with Luxemburg and Zetkin, Liebknecht was instrumental in the January 1919 Spartacist uprising in Berlin, he and Luxemburg opposed the revolt, but they joined it after it had begun. The uprising was brutally opposed by the new German government under Friedrich Ebert with the help of the remnants of the Imperial German Army and militias called the Freikorps. By 13 January, the uprising had been extinguished. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were captured by Freikorps troops on 15 January 1919 and brought to the Eden Hotel in Berlin, where they were tortured and interrogated for several hours. Following this, Luxemburg was beaten with rifle butts and afterwards shot and her corpse thrown into the Landwehr Canal while Liebknecht was forced to step out of the car in which he wa
Democratic socialism
Democratic socialism is a political philosophy that advocates political democracy alongside social ownership of the means of production, with an emphasis on self-management and democratic management of economic institutions within a market or some form of decentralized planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists espouse that capitalism is inherently incompatible with what they hold to be the democratic values of liberty and solidarity. Democratic socialism can be supportive of either revolutionary or reformist politics as a means to establish socialism; the term democratic socialism is sometimes used synonymously with socialism, but the adjective democratic is sometimes used to distinguish democratic socialists from Marxist–Leninist-inspired socialism which to some is viewed as being non-democratic in practice. Democratic socialists oppose the Stalinist political system and Soviet economic model, rejecting the perceived authoritarian form of governance and centralized command economy that took form in the Soviet Union and other socialist states in the early 20th century.
Democratic socialism is further distinguished from social democracy on the basis that democratic socialists are committed to systemic transformation of the economy from capitalism to socialism whereas social democracy is supportive of reforms to capitalism. In contrast to social democrats, democratic socialists believe that reforms aimed at addressing social inequalities and state interventions aimed at suppressing the economic contradictions of capitalism will only see them emerge elsewhere in a different guise; as socialists, democratic socialists believe that the systemic issues of capitalism can only be solved by replacing the capitalist system with a socialist system—i.e. By replacing private ownership with social ownership of the means of production; the origins of democratic socialism can be traced to 19th-century utopian socialist thinkers and the British Chartist movement which differed in detail, but all shared the essence of democratic decision making and public ownership in the means of production as positive characteristics of the society they advocated.
In the early 20th century, the gradualist reformism promoted by the British Fabian Society and Eduard Bernstein in Germany influenced the development of democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is defined as having a socialist economy in which the means of production are and collectively owned or controlled alongside a politically democratic system of government. Peter Hain classifies democratic socialism along with libertarian socialism as a form of anti-authoritarian socialism from below in contrast to Stalinism, a variant of state socialism. For Hain, this democratic/authoritarian divide is more important than the revolutionary/reformist divide. In this type of democratic socialism, it is the active participation of the population as a whole and workers in particular in the management of economy that characterizes democratic socialism while nationalization and economic planning are characteristic of state socialism. A similar, but more complex argument is made by Nicos Poulantzas. Draper himself uses the term "revolutionary-democratic socialism" as a type of socialism from below in his The Two Souls of Socialism and writes: "he leading spokesman in the Second International of a revolutionary-democratic Socialism-from-Below Rosa Luxemburg, who so emphatically put her faith and hope in the spontaneous struggle of a free working class that the myth-makers invented for her a'theory of spontaneity'".
He writes about Eugene Debs: "'Debsian socialism' evoked a tremendous response from the heart of the people, but Debs had no successor as a tribune of revolutionary-democratic socialism". Tendencies of democratic socialism follow a gradual, reformist or evolutionary path to socialism rather than a revolutionary one; this tendency is invoked in an attempt to distinguish democratic socialism from Marxist–Leninist socialism as in Donald Busky's Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey, Jim Tomlinson's Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy: The Attlee Years, 1945–1951, Norman Thomas Democratic Socialism: A New Appraisal or Roy Hattersley's Choose Freedom: The Future of Democratic Socialism. A variant of this set of definitions is Joseph Schumpeter's argument set out in Capitalism and Democracy that liberal democracies were evolving from "liberal capitalism" into "democratic socialism", with the growth of workers' self-management, industrial democracy and regulatory institutions. For example, the new version of Clause IV of the constitution of the British Labour Party, though affirming a commitment to democratic socialism, no longer commits the party to public ownership of industry as in its place advocates "the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition" along with "high quality public services either owned by the public or accountable to them".
Scholar Lyman Tower Sargent proposes: Democratic socialism can be characterized as follows: Much property held by the public through a democratically elected government, including most major industries and transportation systems A limit on the accumulation of private property Governmental regulation of the economy Extensive publicly financed assistance and pension programs Social costs and the provision of services added to purely financial considerations as the measure of efficiencyPublicly held property is limited to productive property and significant infrastructure. And in practice in many democratic socialist countries, it has not extende
2nd World Congress of the Comintern
The 2nd World Congress of the Comintern was a gathering of 220 voting and non-voting representatives of Communist and revolutionary socialist political parties from around the world, held in Petrograd and Moscow from July 19 to August 7, 1920. The 2nd Congress is best remembered for formulating and implementing the 21 Conditions for membership in the Communist International; the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International, held in the summer of 1920, has been regarded by scholars as "the first authentic international meeting of the new organization's members and supporters," owing to the ad hoc nature of the 1919 Founding Convention. The gathering is significant for the level of participation of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, who participated in the affairs of the gathering more intensely than at any other, preparing a host of key documents and helping to chart the gathering's course; the 2nd World Congress took place at a time of heated world political passion, as British historian E.
H. Carr recalled: "The second congress marked the crowning moment in the history of the Comintern as an international force, the moment when the Russian revolution seemed most on the point of transforming itself into a European revolution, with the destinies of the RSFSR merged in those of some broader European unit." Whereas in 1919 no mass Socialist party had participated in the activities of the Founding Convention, the 1920 gathering saw the inclusion of credentialed delegates from several large European groups, including the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, the French Section of the Workers' International, the Social Democratic Party of Czechoslovakia. The Bolsheviks denied permission to attend to the formed Ukrainian Communist Party, it was at the 2nd World Congress that the nature of Communist parties was decided upon, the conditions for their admission to the Communist International set, the relationship of the national organizations to their international directing center formally established for the first time.
The official records of the 2nd World Congress indicate that a total of 218 delegates participated in the proceedings, including 54 representatives of Socialist, Social Democratic, other non-Communist political parties and 12 representatives of youth organizations. At least 30 delegates were representatives of the various nationalities of Asia. Delegates were housed in Moscow at the Delevoi Dvor, a hotel a short walk from the Congress's sessions held at the Kremlin. With food in short supply, fare provided to the delegates was poor, with some delegates forced to rely to some extent upon stores brought into the country with them. Upon arriving at their hotel rooms, delegates were provided with an assortment of written reports, draft resolutions, copies of two published books — Terrorism and Communism by Leon Trotsky and ""Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder by V. I. Lenin. Delegates participated a wide range of events, touring the country, attending shop meetings, watching theatrical performances, participating in a subbotnik loading railroad ties.
On April 22, 1920, the Executive Committee of the Communist International voted to hold a 2nd World Congress of its member parties at some indefinite date in the near future. This was followed on June 14, 1920, by the formal publication by ECCI of a call for a 2nd World Congress to be held in Moscow one month hence. Political parties pledging allegiance to the organization were urged to send delegations at once. During this period Soviet Russia was subject to an armed blockade by land and sea, making travel difficult. Legal passage was possible only through the Estonian port of Revel, but this means was difficult due to the systematic denial of travel passports to radicals intending on traveling to Central Europe. War between Soviet Russia and Poland raged in the summer of 1920 and wrecked locomotives and derailed freight cars lined the tracks, further complicating the transportation situation; some delegates were forced by circumstances to use false passports and identity documents or to travel without any legal documentation whatsoever, such as by stowing away on a ship.
Three French delegates lost their lives in transit, when a small fishing boat setting sail from Murmansk in an attempt to run the Allied blockade went down in stormy weather. The Congress was scheduled to open on July 15, but owing to rampant transit difficulties, many delegates had not arrived in Soviet Russia by that date. ECCI decided to postpone the first working sessions by one week. Following a meal in the Great Hall of Smolny, the delegates, accompanied by thousands of Petrograd workers, marched to the Uritsky Theater where they heard a keynote address on the international situation and the tasks of the Comintern delivered by Lenin. Afterwards the delegates participated in a mass demonstration before gathering at the former stock exchange to see a costume drama called "Spectacle of the Two Worlds" performed by a cast of 3,000. Following the opening festivities in Petrograd, a three-day break followed, after which the Congress reconvened in Moscow in the former Vladimir Throne Room of the Kremlin.
Four official languages were used at the convention — English, French and Russian — with secretaries typing convention documents in each. The primary languages spoken on the floor were French and German, with simultaneous translations taking place in various corners of the room; the Congress elected a Bureau to make decisions about procedure. All delegates had the right to submit resolution proposals to the Congress and the privilege was not an empty one, as a number of such proposals were submitted. Voting delegates were provided with red cards, non-voting "consultative"
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany, or SPD, is a social-democratic political party in Germany. Led by Andrea Nahles since 2018, the party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in Germany along with the Christian Democratic Union; the Social Democrats have governed at the federal level in Germany as part of a grand coalition with the CDU and the Christian Social Union since December 2013 following the results of the 2013 and 2017 federal elections. The party participates in 14 state governments and 7 of them are governed by SPD Minister-Presidents; the SPD is a member of the Party of European Socialists and initiated the founding of the Progressive Alliance international for social-democratic parties on 22 May 2013 after criticising the Socialist International for its acceptance of authoritarian parties. Established in 1863, the SPD is by far the oldest extant political party represented in the German Parliament and was one of the first Marxist-influenced parties in the world.
The General German Workers' Association founded in 1863 and the Social Democratic Workers' Party founded in 1869 merged in 1875 under the name Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. From 1878 to 1890, any grouping or meeting that aimed at spreading socialist principles was banned under the Anti-Socialist Laws, but the party still gained support in elections. In 1890, when the ban was lifted and it could again present electoral lists the party adopted its current name. In the years leading up to World War I, the party remained ideologically radical in official principle, although many party officials tended to be moderate in everyday politics. By 1912, the party claimed the most votes of any German party. Despite the agreement of the Second International to oppose World War I, the Social Democrats voted in favor of war in 1914. In response to this and the Bolshevik Revolution, members of the left-wing and of the far-left of the SPD formed alternative parties, first the Spartacus League the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany while the more conservative faction was known as the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany.
After 1918, the SPD played an important role in the political system of the Weimar Republic, although it took part in coalition governments only in few years. Adolf Hitler prohibited the party in 1933 under the Enabling Act and party officials were imprisoned, killed or went into exile. In exile, the party used the name Sopade; the Social Democrats had been the only party to vote against the Enabling Act while the Communist Party was blocked from voting. In 1945, the Allied occupants in the Western zones allowed four parties to be established, which led to the Christian Democratic Union, the Free Democratic Party, the Communist Party and the SPD being established. In the Soviet zone of occupation, the Soviets forced the Social Democrats to form a common party with the Communists. In the Western zones, the Communist Party was banned by West Germany's Federal Constitutional Court in 1956. Since 1949, the SPD has been one of the two major parties in the Federal Republic of Germany, with the other being the Christian Democratic Union.
From 1969 to 1982 and 1998 to 2005, the Chancellors of Germany were Social Democrats whereas the other years the Chancellors were Christian Democrats. Shortly before the reunification of Germany in 1990, the East German Social Democratic Party merged into the West German SPD; the SPD was established as a Marxist party in 1875. However, the Social Democrats underwent a major shift in policies reflected in the differences between the Heidelberg Program of 1925 which "called for the transformation of the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production to social ownership" and the Godesberg Program of 1959 which aimed to broaden its voter base and move its political position toward the centre. After World War II, under the leadership of Kurt Schumacher the SPD re-established itself as a socialist party representing the interests of the working class and the trade unions. However, with the Godesberg Program the party evolved from a socialist working-class party to a modern social-democratic party working within liberal capitalism.
The current party platform of the SPD espouses the goal of social democracy, seen as a vision of a societal arrangement in which freedom and social justice are paramount. According to the party platform, freedom and social solidarity form the basis of social democracy; the coordinated social market economy should be strengthened and its output should be distributed fairly. The party sees that economic system as necessary in order to ensure the affluence of the entire population; the SPD tries to protect the society's poor with a welfare state. Concurrently, it advocates a sustainable fiscal policy that does not place a burden on future generations while eradicating budget deficits. In social policy, the Social Democrats stand for political rights in an open society. In foreign policy, the party aims at ensuring global peace by balancing global interests with democratic means, thus European integration is one of the main priorities of the party; the SPD supports economic regulations to limit potential losses for people.
They support a common European economic and financial policy and to prevent speculative bubbles as well as environmentally sustainable growth. The SPD is composed of members belonging to either of the two main wings, namely the Keynesian social democrats and Third Way mod
German Empire
The German Empire known as Imperial Germany, was the German nation state that existed from the unification of Germany in 1871 until the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918. It was founded in 1871 when the south German states, except for Austria, joined the North German Confederation. On 1 January 1871, the new constitution came into force that changed the name of the federal state and introduced the title of emperor for Wilhelm I, King of Prussia from the House of Hohenzollern. Berlin remained its capital, Otto von Bismarck remained Chancellor, the head of government; as these events occurred, the Prussian-led North German Confederation and its southern German allies were still engaged in the Franco-Prussian War. The German Empire consisted of 26 states, most of them ruled by royal families, they included four kingdoms, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, three free Hanseatic cities, one imperial territory. Although Prussia was one of several kingdoms in the realm, it contained about two thirds of Germany's population and territory.
Prussian dominance was established constitutionally. After 1850, the states of Germany had become industrialized, with particular strengths in coal, iron and railways. In 1871, Germany had a population of 41 million people. A rural collection of states in 1815, the now united Germany became predominantly urban. During its 47 years of existence, the German Empire was an industrial and scientific giant, gaining more Nobel Prizes in science than any other country. By 1900, Germany was the largest economy in Europe, surpassing the United Kingdom, as well as the second-largest in the world, behind only the United States. From 1867 to 1878/9, Otto von Bismarck's tenure as the first and to this day longest reigning Chancellor was marked by relative liberalism, but it became more conservative afterwards. Broad reforms and the Kulturkampf marked his period in the office. Late in Bismarck's chancellorship and in spite of his personal opposition, Germany became involved in colonialism. Claiming much of the leftover territory, yet unclaimed in the Scramble for Africa, it managed to build the third-largest colonial empire after the British and the French ones.
As a colonial state, it sometimes clashed with other European powers the British Empire. Germany became a great power, boasting a developing rail network, the world's strongest army, a fast-growing industrial base. In less than a decade, its navy became second only to Britain's Royal Navy. After the removal of Otto von Bismarck by Wilhelm II in 1890, the Empire embarked on Weltpolitik – a bellicose new course that contributed to the outbreak of World War I. In addition, Bismarck's successors were incapable of maintaining their predecessor's complex and overlapping alliances which had kept Germany from being diplomatically isolated; this period was marked by various factors influencing the Emperor's decisions, which were perceived as contradictory or unpredictable by the public. In 1879, the German Empire consolidated the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary, followed by the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882, it retained strong diplomatic ties to the Ottoman Empire. When the great crisis of 1914 arrived, Italy left the alliance and the Ottoman Empire formally allied with Germany.
In the First World War, German plans to capture Paris in the autumn of 1914 failed. The war on the Western Front became a stalemate; the Allied naval blockade caused severe shortages of food. However, Imperial Germany had success on the Eastern Front; the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917, contributed to bringing the United States into the war. The high command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff controlled the country, but in October after the failed offensive in spring 1918, the German armies were in retreat, allies Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, Bulgaria had surrendered; the Empire collapsed in the November 1918 Revolution with the abdications of its monarchs. This left a postwar federal republic and a devastated and unsatisfied populace, which led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism; the German Confederation had been created by an act of the Congress of Vienna on 8 June 1815 as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, after being alluded to in Article 6 of the 1814 Treaty of Paris.
German nationalism shifted from its liberal and democratic character in 1848, called Pan-Germanism, to Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck's pragmatic Realpolitik. Bismarck sought to extend Hohenzollern hegemony throughout the German states, he envisioned a Prussian-dominated Germany. Three wars led to military successes and helped to persuade German people to do this: the Second Schleswig War against Denmark in 1864, the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, the Franco-Prussian War against France in 1870–71; the German Confederation ended as a result of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 between the constituent Confederation entities of the Austrian Empire and its allies on one side and the Kingdom of Prussia and its allies on the other. The war resulted in the partial replacement of the Confederation in 1867 by a North German Confederation, comprising the 22 states north of the Main; the patriotic fervour generated by the Franco-Prussian War overwhelmed the remaining opposition to a unified Germany in the four stat
Ernst Thälmann
Ernst Thälmann was the leader of the Communist Party of Germany during much of the Weimar Republic. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement for eleven years, before being shot in Buchenwald on Adolf Hitler's personal orders in 1944. Ernst Thälmann's father was Johannes Thälmann, born in Weddern in Holstein, working there as a farmworker. Thälmann's mother, Mary-Magdalene, was born in Kirchwerder; the wedding took place in 1884 in Hamburg. There, Johannes Thälmann earned his first money as a coachman. Ernst's parents had no party affiliation. Ernst Thälmann was born in Hamburg. After his birth, his parents took a pub near the Port of Hamburg. On 4 April 1887, his sister Frieda was born. In March 1892, Thälmann's parents were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, because they had bought stolen goods or had taken them for debt payment. Thälmann and his younger sister Frieda were placed for care in different families. Thälmann's parents were released early, his parents' offense would be used 36 years in the campaign against Ernst Thälmann.
From 1893 to 1900, Thälmann attended elementary school. He described history, natural history, mathematics and sports as his favorite subjects. However, he did not like religion. In the mid-1890s, his parents opened a vegetable and wagon shop in Eilbek, a suburb of Hamburg. In this business, he had to help after school. Thälmann did his schoolwork in the morning. Despite this burden, Thälmann was a good student, his desire to become a teacher or to learn a trade was not fulfilled because his parents refused to give him the necessary money. He had to continue working in his parents' business, causing much sorrow and conflict with his parents. Therefore, he sought a job as an unskilled worker in the port. Here the ten-year-old Thälmann came in contact with the port workers on strike from November 1896 till February 1897, the bitter labor dispute known as the Hamburg dockworkers strike 1896/97. At the beginning of 1902, he left home, he first he lived in an emergency shelter in a basement apartment, in 1904 he was fireman on the steam engine freight ship AMERIKA which traveled to the USA.
He was a Social Democratic Party member during 1903. On 1 February 1904, he joined the Central Union of Trade and traffic workers of Germany and ascended to the chairman of the'Department carters'. In 1913, he supported a call of Rosa Luxemburg for a mass strike as a means of action of the SPD to enforce political demands. From 1913 to 1914, he worked for a laundry as a coachman. In January 1915, one day before he was called up for military service in World War I, he married Rosa Koch. At the beginning of 1915, he was posted to the artillery on the western front, where he stayed till the end of the war, during the course of which he was wounded twice, he said that he fought in the following battles: Battle of Champagne, Battle of the Somme, Second battle of the Aisne, Battle of Soissons, Battle of Cambrai and Battle of Arras. Thälmann received several awards: Iron cross second class Hanseatic Cross Wound BadgeTowards the end of 1917, he became a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany.
In October 1918, Thälmann deserted together with four fellow soldiers. He did not return from home to the front. On the day of the German Revolution, 9 November 1918, he wrote in his diary on the Western Front, "...did a bunk from the Front with 4 comrades at 2 o'clock." In Hamburg, he participated in the construction of Soldiers. From March 1919, he was chairman of a member of the Hamburg Parliament. At the same time he worked as relief worker in the Hamburg city park he found a well-paying job at the employment office, he rose to Inspector. When the USPD split over the question whether to join the Communist International, Thälmann sided with the pro-Communist faction which in November 1920 merged with the KPD. In December Thälmann was elected to the Central Committee of the KPD. In March 1921 he was fired from his job at the employment office due to his political activities; that summer Thälmann went as a representative of the KPD to the 3rd Congress of the Comintern in Moscow and met Vladimir Lenin.
In June 1922, Thälmann survived an assassination attempt at his flat. Terrorists from the ultranationalist group Organisation Consul threw a hand grenade into his ground floor flat, his wife and daughter were unhurt. Thälmann participated in and helped to organise the Hamburg Uprising of October 1923; the uprising failed, Thälmann went to underground for some time. After the death of Lenin in January 1924, Thälmann visited Moscow and for some time maintained a guard of honour at his bier. From February 1924 he was deputy chairman of the KPD and, from May, a Reichstag member. At the 5th Congress of the Comintern that summer he was elected to the Comintern executive committee and a short time to its steering committee. In February 1925 he became chairman of the Rote Frontkämpferbund, the defence organisation of the KPD. In October 1925 Thälmann became chairman of the KPD and that year was a candidate for the German Presidency. Thälmann's candidacy in the second round of the presidential election split the centre-left vote and ensured that the conservative Paul von Hindenburg defeated the Centre Party's Wilhelm Marx.
In October 1926 Thälmann supported in person the dockers' strike in hi
Germany
Germany the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north and the Czech Republic to the east and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to the west. Germany includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,386 square kilometres, has a temperate seasonal climate. With 83 million inhabitants, it is the second most populous state of Europe after Russia, the most populous state lying in Europe, as well as the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is a decentralized country, its capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while Frankfurt serves as its financial capital and has the country's busiest airport. Germany's largest urban area is the Ruhr, with its main centres of Essen; the country's other major cities are Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bremen and Nuremberg. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity.
A region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation was formed in 1815; the German revolutions of 1848–49 resulted in the Frankfurt Parliament establishing major democratic rights. In 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the revolution of 1918–19, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic; the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to the establishment of a dictatorship, the annexation of Austria, World War II, the Holocaust. After the end of World War II in Europe and a period of Allied occupation, Austria was re-established as an independent country and two new German states were founded: West Germany, formed from the American and French occupation zones, East Germany, formed from the Soviet occupation zone.
Following the Revolutions of 1989 that ended communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, the country was reunified on 3 October 1990. Today, the sovereign state of Germany is a federal parliamentary republic led by a chancellor, it is a great power with a strong economy. As a global leader in several industrial and technological sectors, it is both the world's third-largest exporter and importer of goods; as a developed country with a high standard of living, it upholds a social security and universal health care system, environmental protection, a tuition-free university education. The Federal Republic of Germany was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957 and the European Union in 1993, it is part of the Schengen Area and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999. Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G7, the G20, the OECD. Known for its rich cultural history, Germany has been continuously the home of influential and successful artists, musicians, film people, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors.
Germany has a large number of World Heritage sites and is among the top tourism destinations in the world. The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine; the German term Deutschland diutisciu land is derived from deutsch, descended from Old High German diutisc "popular" used to distinguish the language of the common people from Latin and its Romance descendants. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz "popular", derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- "people", from which the word Teutons originates; the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a coal mine in Schöningen between 1994 and 1998 where eight 380,000-year-old wooden javelins of 1.82 to 2.25 m length were unearthed. The Neander Valley was the location where the first non-modern human fossil was discovered.
The Neanderthal 1 fossils are known to be 40,000 years old. Evidence of modern humans dated, has been found in caves in the Swabian Jura near Ulm; the finds included 42,000-year-old bird bone and mammoth ivory flutes which are the oldest musical instruments found, the 40,000-year-old Ice Age Lion Man, the oldest uncontested figurative art discovered, the 35,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest uncontested human figurative art discovered. The Nebra sky disk is a bronze artefact created during the European Bronze Age attributed to a site near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, it is part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. The Germanic tribes are thought to date from the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From southern Scandinavia and north Germany, they expanded south and west from the 1st century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well
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