The Trials and Tribulations of Hermann Duncker

 

Hermann Duncker was born in Hamburg on the 24th of May 1874 and died on the 22nd of June in 1960, he was buried in the Friedrichfelde Central Cemetry in Berlin. That was a turbulent time for most and especially politically active Germans. In summary Duncker was an active participant in the 1918 German Revolution, WWII and the Cold War, and was often in the middle of the action.

Hermann's introduction to socialism came from his wife Kate Doell who was a teacher and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Duncker were from the SPD's first generation of Marxist activists after the Marx wing of theoreticians established a hold on the party leadership. He became an fervent supporter of the Marxist wing of the SPD, and in the run up to the First World War supported the anti-war minority alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. He followed them in founding the Spartacus League and alongside his wife Kate were on the first Central Committee of the Communist Party (KPD). 

When the Nazis came to power Herman spent a year in a Concentration camp, caught in an early crackdown on political dissidents, but luckily he was released. Soon after the Duncker family went into protective exile, eventually settling in France. While supporters of the Soviet Union Stalin's growing paranoia and political maneuveres caused the Duncker family great distress. The Duncker's had become close to Nikolai Bukharin who was destroyed politically and then executed in 1936 during the Great Purge. The purge also targetted Herman's son Wolfgang was also attacked and persecuted while in the Soviet Union. Wolfgang died in the Vorkutlag Gulag in 1942, Herman and Kate found out about their son's fate years later. Things got worse for the family when the Soviet Union signed a pact with Hitler in 1939 with the support of the remaining KPD leadership in Moscow. The Duncker's found themselves again in an oppositional minority within their party. 

When France fell to the Wehrmacht Duncker fled through Vichy France to Casablanca before finally reaching the United States of America in 1941 after his wife Kate was able to obtain travel papers for him. While in the USA Herman joined the anti-Nazi Council for a Democratic Germany, a group that sort to unite the German diaspora in the United States in their efforts to oppose the Third Reich. Duncker's membership of this body demonstrates the extent of the rift between him and the Communist movement at this time, the Council was set up in 1944 in opposition to the Communist party dominated National Committee for a Free Germany which was founded in Moscow in 1943.

After the war in 1947 Herman and Kate returned to Germany and settled in the Soviet Occupation zone which became the German Democratic Republic (DDR) more commonly known as East Germany. They joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), which was created out of a merger of the SPD and KPD, echoing a position Duncker had advocated in his time in the KPD during the Weimar Republic. Duncker returned to academics occupying several prestigious teaching positions, Professor and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Rostock, Rector of the academy of the Free German Trade Union Federation etc. And in his last years was awarded several high honours including the Patriotic Order of Merit in 1955 and the DDR's highest honour the Order of Karl Marx in 1953. When he passed away in 1960 his body was interred in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetry, a graveyard reserved for high officials of the DDR and located close to a memorial dedicated to German Socialists.

His views and his circumstances would change often throughout his life which isn't surprising or unique, time and experience change us all. His life is interesting, and at time of writing getting easier to look up, more of his articles are being translated into English on the Marxist Internet Archive, and more biographical information is slowly popping up on wikipedia and an eclectic mix of socialist blogs and webpages. 

Personally speaking though, I think the main lesson to be learnt about the life of Herman Duncker is in his relationship and evolution through Marxism. I first became aware of Duncker when getting into a friendly disagreement with a Marxist who was making some pretty tall claims about Marxist cannon. I read the article that was sent my way, looked Duncker up, read what I could find about him, then started reading through a selection of the articles that had been translated and uploaded and found him an interesting fellow but was confused as to why he was being presented to me as evidence for the argument being made. Duncker was being held up as an example of "proper" or "real" Marxist thinking. The article in question was Duncker's What is Socialism? published in 1909. If you're wondering why I used quotation marks, its because what he meant by real Marxism was Marxist writing that tallied with his views on Marxism. Marxism is a fundamentally incoherent field of thought with over a hundred schools and doctrines all competing with each other. For what it's worth I agree that What is Socialism? did tally fairly well with his particular Marxism, (Socialist Party of Great Britain if you're curious) but sectarian arguments no longer really interest me.

What did catch my eye though, was the timeline of his life and political career and another article written in 1925 attacking his former mentors in the SPD called Ferdinand Lassalle's Centenary

 The leaders of social democracy, which pretend to be Marxist, indeed concealed both condemnations from the mass of their members for many years. The marginal notes were only published 16 years later, the letter to Kugelmann 17 years after the other letters had been printed.Even in the Marx-Engels correspondence certain very harsh expressions against Lassalle seem to have been suppressed by the publisher. This is how the socialist party of Germany guards against any wrong being done to its party saint Lassalle. As a matter of fact, the socialist party of Germany has much more in common with Lassalle than with Marx, although now it is far behind Lassalle in "practical politics" and can no longer claim to be heir to his views, for he was at least always a bitter opponent of the bourgeois party.

 Again the text isn't breaking new ground for me, but the passage quoted above did get my gears working. Duncker is discussing a little known fact about the history of the works of Karl Marx. While Marx was a live and for a number of years after his death the vast majority of his works were completely unknown to the world. It's known that his private correspondence remained private and that the last three volumes of Capital were published posthumously, but many including most Marxists I've met do not know that the majority of his published work remained in his study or at most received one or two very limited print runs before disappearing. And a number of those that did see some circulation while Marx was alive survive in history as edited versions republished by Engels after Marx's death. Here, Duncker is accusing the leadership of the SPD who took over the works and archives of both Marx and Engels after their deaths of using this access as leverage.

And its true that for much of the early days of Marxism the only people who had access to the majority of Karl Marx's works and ideas was a small group of intellectuals with the German Social Democratic movement. This changed in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union successfully bought the complete archives from the SPD leadership in exile, the Soviet Union then started printing and translating and releasing them. If you're wondering where I'm going with this I'll cut to the point. Herman Duncker an avid reader of theoretical works who took his knowledge seriously went from a Marxist Social Democrat to a Leninist, to a Stalinist at the same time his access to the works of Marx and Engels increased significantly.

There's a very alarming tendency in left wing circles to treat texts like holy relics and theoretical work like revelations. The argument being that through intensive study and reaching the "correct" interpretation of the learning will make one a better Marxist/Communist/whatever. However, Herman Duncker was a man who dedicated his life to this study and ending up supporting a brutal regime that murdered his own son! And the well from which he drew most of the material for his studies was the Soviet Union which at the time was led by Joseph Stalin. Popularising the works of Marx and Engels didn't cause a massive wave of anti-Stalin communist reaction, the dissident Marxists remained small and isolated.

So, this raises some questions, either the works of Marx and Engels lead logically to the Berlin Wall and the Gulag Archipelago, or the study of texts in a vacuum are insufficient for the task of building a movement of conscious revolutionaries aware of the dangers and the task of building a better world. I don't think the first option is quite true, you can certainly take bits and pieces from both to stitch together an argument for it, that's what Stalin and Marxism-Leninism i.e. Stalinism with pretensions does after all. Its also what most of the other Marxists do for their own ends, the Socialist Party of Great Britain member was happy to claim Duncker's early work when he felt it backed him up in an internet disagreement but didn't seem to bother knowing more about the man then that, or if he did know about Duncker didn't really care that his ideas and trajectory took him into the arms of the heretics.

The point of theory like all educational materials is that you're supposed to engage with it and not submit to it. One of Herman's articles that has been translated into English touches on this subject, How Should One Read? published in 1931. It sounds like an exploration of how to approach knowledge but is largely about how to access information quickly and often. The task of the reader (apparently) is not to evaluate the work being read but to try and fully absorb the authors argument in outline. Most of the advice is physical on how to build your own library and indexing system, he advocates reading and re-reading works and constantly adding notes and summarises on the key points of each passage. At no point does he talk about using critical thinking or checking the work you've been reading, the assumption is made that "important literature" which seems to mean Communist party approved literature is ultimately correct and the issue lies with the reader to work out the argument. There's a section on how to set up a study group whose sole purpose seems to be to make sure that each individual member can learn the correct argument being made by the text with the assistance of the others. 

The explanation for this frankly obsessive manner of rote learning is that Karl Marx did it, so the implication being that if it's good enough for him its good enough for you. 

It will be seen how one "grows into" a really good book and how it gives one new rays of light all the time. As for books one can only borrow, one should copy the important passages from them. At the age of seventeen, Marx wrote to his father "I have made a habit of making excerpts from all the books I read... and jotting down reflections underneath."Among the papers left by Marx there are 200 notebooks full of such excerpts. In this connection one should not forget to make a note of the origin of the passage extracted and possibly also the date of the excerpt

 

It will be seen how one "grows into" a really good book and how it gives one new rays of light all the time. As for books one can only borrow, one should copy the important passages from them. At the age of seventeen, Marx wrote to his father:"I have made a habit of making excerpts from all the books I read... and jotting down reflections underneath."Among the papers left by Marx there are 200 notebooks full of such excerpts. In this connection one should not forget to make a note of the origin of the passage extracted and possibly also the date of the excerpt.

 And then further supports this argument with a quotation from Lenin,

There will certainly be no lack of reading material as long as there is a genuine will to study. Serious and steady intent will help on to get over a single ruined evening and the technical difficulties. After all, what did Lenin say in his great speech to the Young Communists in October 1920:

"But you would be committing a great mistake, if you attempted to draw the conclusion that one can become a communist without acquiring what human knowledge has accumulated. It would be a mistake to believe that it is sufficient to learn communist slogans, the conclusions of communist science, and that it is not necessary to acquire the sum of knowledge of which communism itself is a consequence."

(Lenin's Selected Works: Vol. 9, p. 470, "Tasks of the Youth Leagues".)

The practically advice for taking notes isn't bad, it can help quite a few readers, I use a different system myself but if Herman's works for you than that's fine. My issue with Herman's advice is the end for his means, he wants Communist party members to read like this so they can obtain the "correct" message, its an argument for theoretical orthodoxy. The beginning of the article has a very interesting passage,

 When even so vain and affected a bourgeois scholar as Prof. Sombart does not feel embarrassed to admit, in a booklet, that he had read the "Communist Manifesto" a hundred times and yet still finds new stimulus in it, then a worker thirsting for learning cannot regard it as "beneath his dignity" to study over and over again writings like the "Manifesto" and many more by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others.

He wants his audience to read from an approve canon over and over again. That is how doctrine's form and I find the Lenin quote chosen to be very curious because in that passage he's saying  "But you would be committing a great mistake, if you attempted to draw the conclusion that one can become a communist without acquiring what human knowledge has accumulated." But Herman appears to have taken human knowledge and replaced with the knowledge promoted by the Communist party printing presses. The rare occasions he references literary work outside of this in the article he is always dismissive and hostile.

I did wonder why the Duncker's went to East Germany after the fallout of World War II and the Great Purge and the death of his own son. But I stopped wondering after reading How Should One Read? The main points of disagreement with the two parties he dedicated his life to, the SPD and then the KPD/SED were spurred by events that were largely unexpected and didn't have much theoretical preparation. The SPD participation in the German war government was surprising, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 came after three years of intense support for anti-fascist agitation, and the Great Purge not only targetted the Duncker family directly, it too arrived with little preparation. Outside of these major events he had been a loyal supporter of Lenin's and then Stalin's Communist movement which was never free of repression and power squabbles. If How Should One Read? is genuinely autobiographical it makes a lot of sense why he turned out the way he did.

Herman Duncker was a clever and brave man, he was not afraid to oppose the majority when he believed them to be wrong, but in the end he submitted and became another functionary in a repressive system that claimed many lives. Herman is a warning to us not to let our fixations become tools to ensnare us and betray the things that make us human. 

The Order of Karl Marx, I wonder if it was worth it?