Restarting Socialism: The New Beginning Group and the Problem of Renewal on the German Left, 1930-1970

by Terence Ray Renaud

Doctor of Philosophy in History and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Martin E. Jay, Chair

https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/Renaud_berkeley_0028E_15190.pdf

This dissertation concerns the problem of renewal on the German Left. How did crises of

renewal and moments of generational conflict shape the theory and organization of

German socialism during the tumultuous four decades between 1930 and 1970? When

and how did socialism cease to be a viable political alternative to democratic capitalism?

I treat the history of one small organization, New Beginning, as paradigmatic for the

experience of the socialist renewers generation—the generation that renewed socialism

through antifascist struggle and remade the German Left after the war.

Born between 1905 and 1915, the renewers were too young to have served in the First

World War or actively participated in the November Revolution. They matured amid the

political and economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic and later pioneered the formation

of “socialist splinter groups.” Between the fronts of social democracy and communism,

these small organizations like New Beginning, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP), the

International Socialist Fighting League (ISK), and the Communist Party-Opposition

(KPO) sought to unify and renew the German socialist movement through a curious

combination of elite vanguardism and grassroots initiative. They believed that the fight

against fascism provided socialists a unique opportunity to finish the democratic

revolution that had begun as early as 1848, leapt forward in 1918-19, but stalled during

the conservative Weimar Republic. New Beginning distinguished itself from the other

splinter groups in the way it explicitly articulated the problem of socialist renewal and

linked the fate of socialism to the fate of its own generation.

After twelve years of anti-Nazi resistance and war, former members of New Beginning

such as Fritz Erler, Waldemar von Knoeringen, Richard Löwenthal, Wolfgang Abendroth,

Ossip K. Flechtheim, and Robert Havemann either arose from the rubble or returned from

exile to acquire leading posts in German academia and politics. They set about applying

the theories and methods they had learned during the 1930s to the new problems of

reconstruction, divided Germany, and the developing Cold War. The majority of the

renewers generation helped modernize the Social Democratic Party and develop a new

kind of socialism that renounced Marxism and embraced a liberal, middle-class ethos. An 

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important minority of renewers, however, stayed true to the promise of radical socialism.

These dissident left socialists paved the way toward a New Left, and in the 1960s the

original revolutionary élan of the renewers passed on to a new generation of militant

young intellectuals: the Sixty-eighters.

Political ideologies as well as mass social movements grow old. Their proponents and

participants physically age, and their ideas start to rust. Revival and rejuvenation, then,

periodically capture the attention and shape the objectives of multi-generational social

movements. The former members of New Beginning were keenly aware of how the

problem of renewal could cause dysfunction in the established parties of the Left. But

they also recognized an opportunity to mobilize the German youth against capitalism and

conservative reaction. Instead of restarting socialism, however, the New Left and the

Sixty-eighters unwittingly extinguished the original promise of German socialism and the

renewers generation. Subsequent movements for social change in Germany and

elsewhere in Europe would occur largely outside the socialist tradition.