Peter C. Caldwell

The Life of the Dead: Karl Marx in Context

In Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Gareth Stedman Jones draws a distinction between Marx’s nineteenth-century views and those of twentieth-century Marxism, which abandoned ideas of Marx that seemed outdated. Stedman Jones’ careful reconstruction of Marx’s philosophical, political, and economic thought in the context of the new social thought of the early nineteenth century, however, reveals aspects of Marx that returned to challenge official Marxism. In this respect, Stedman Jones’ conception of intellectual history as the careful placement of ideas in their historical context conflicts with his actual practice of intellectual history, which discovers challenges to the present in past debates.

Review: Cindy Skach, Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2005; 192 pp.; 0691123454,

that the Weimar years represented a kind of golden age of reading culture, which encompassed not only new, cross-class forms of reading material, but also the tried and tested book format so prized in the bourgeois hierarchy of virtues. Yet, it was precisely because of the privileged position of the book that these developments attracted criticism. Above all, there were widespread concerns about the deleterious effects of a ‘reading frenzy’ on subaltern and highly impressionable social groups: women, youth, and the labouring classes. Chapter 5 thus examines the attempts to reassert elite authority over reading culture via censorship. The crusade against so-called ‘smut and trash’, which culminated in new legislation in 1926, is a fairly familiar story that has been covered elsewhere. But as Reuveni emphasizes, in many ways the entire campaign was less about steering reading habits, which it patently failed to do, than about reasserting the right of educated elites to make such judgements about the merits of cultural artefacts in the first place. From this standpoint, the 1926 law was but the clearest expression of a theme running throughout the book, namely that the transformation of German reading culture after the First World War did not reflect the decline of bourgeois culture in the face of consumerism but rather its triumph. In other words, it was the very growth of reading among the bulk of the populace, which critics often lambasted as a ‘homogenization’ or ‘standardization’ of culture, which prompted a search for new means of cultural distinction. Reuveni’s basic argument is that reading was in two ways an integral element of consumer culture during the first third of the twentieth century: firstly, as an act of commercialized consumption in itself, and secondly, as an activity which promoted the new world of goods and the values that went with it. It is a convincing argument, which overturns a number of conventional assumptions and furnishes a wealth of insights along the way. The main shortcomings of the book lie in its presentation, which is beset by the occasional repetition and awkward passage. Although it is, to its credit, solidly grounded in recent cultural theory, at times this seems surplus to requirements; a lighter touch would, if anything, have enhanced the crispness of the arguments. Overall, however, this fine study significantly enhances our understanding not only of the history of reading, but of German consumer culture and inter-war cultural history more generally.

32.95/£19.95 (hbk)

the 1930s he had skillfully used the Stalinist system (as well as beneated from Stalin’s own purges of prominent German Communists) to eliminate colleagues who were capable of someday threatening his control. As a result, by the 1950s he had to deal only with fainthearted ofacials such as Wilhelm Zaisser, Rudolf Herrnstadt, and Karl Schirdewan, who were no match for him. In this sense Ulbricht was one of Stalin’s clones in the Communist movement. But it is also clear from Frank’s account that Ulbricht became a representative for the Communist leaders who after 1953 acted rather independently, to the point of defying Moscow on certain issues. This deaance Frank calls one of the biggest mistakes of Ulbricht’s career, and he is correct in viewing it as a major cause of the East German leader’s removal from power in 1971. Despite repeated warnings that the GDR would not be allowed to take the lead in responding to West Germany’s new Ostpolitik, Ulbricht persisted in his semi-independent stance, giving Honecker and a growing number of SED Politbüro members the opportunity to present themselves to Moscow as a docile and altogether preferable alternative. Frank does not try to force his own ideas on the reader. He seeks neither to indict nor to exonerate his subject. One could quibble over whether he gives the ideological and moral issues so central to Communism’s history in the twentieth century enough attention, but it is refreshing to read an account that does not try to aght old battles as if they were still with us today. In light of what Frank’s book tries to be, it succeeds very well and is also eminently readable. Given sufacient time, resources, and archival access, some future scholar may be able to go beyond this book’s achievements, but until then Frank’s biography will stand as the most complete and up-to-date study of Walter Ulbricht.

The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR (review)

Comintern. Similarly, the reason that the PZPR and the SED more aggressively pursued their own economic interests after the death of Josif Stalin was not that their leaders had an epiphany, but simply that they were conforming to Georgii Malenkov’s “New Course,” with its emphasis on economic rationality. Likewise, it was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, not the “Polish reformers,” who “set the record straight about what happened to the [interwar Polish Communists] during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s” (p. 114). Despite these shortcomings, A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc represents the best account of the Polish–East German relationship available in English and drawing on new archival sources. With its detailed narrative based on newly released documents, it provides useful insights into the conoictual aspect of the Polish–East German relationship after 1945.