DARREN ROSO Review: A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany Ralf Hoffrogge, A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany: The Life of Werner Scholem (1895-1940) . Translated by Loren Balhorn and Jan-Peter Herrmann. Brill Historical Materialism Series, 2017. Readers of this journal are more likely to have heard of the Zionist Gerschom Scholem than his faithful communist brother Werner, and unlikely to have read much about the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) past the lost October Revolution of 1923. 1 They are likely to be acquainted with Ralf Hoffrogge’s account of the revolutionary shop stewards and the origins of the council movement as detailed in Hoffrogge’s Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller (2014). As for Werner Scholem, those who examined the biographical details of Pierre Broué’s classic The German Revolution would read this: Son of printing worker, higher studies in history and law. In Socialist Youth in 1912, in SPD in 1913. Conscripted in 1914, sentenced in 1917 for anti-militarist activity. In USPD [ Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany] in 1917, journalist in Halle. In VKPD [ Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands; United Communist Party of Germany] in 1920, worked on Die Rote Fahne. Arrested after March 1921, played important role as organiser in Berlin district, supported Left in 1923. Member of Zentrale and Politbureau, responsible posts in Organisation Bureau in 1923, de facto KPD leader with Fischer until 1925, when he co-led ultra- Left. Expelled in 1926, joint organiser of Leninbund, worked with organ of German Trotskyist opposition. Arrested in 1933, executed in 1940. 2 Eighty years ago, on 17 July, the SS guard Johannes Blank murdered Werner Scholem in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Blank shot Scholem in the back. Scholem died wearing a yellow triangle overlaid with a red – a symbol that he was a Jew committed to working-class liberation. It is therefore very precious that Hoffrogge has written a full-length biography of Scholem’s life; here is a labour of remembrance of the first order. A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany details Scholem’s break with his bourgeois-Jewish family, his spurning of Zionism, the rise of German communism after the First World War and the November Revolution, its fall in defeat, the Stalinisation of the KPD and Nazism’s totalitarian counter-revolution that culminated in imperialist carnage and the Holocaust. Hoffrogge divides Scholem’s life into six distinct periods: the early years (1895-1914), the First World War and Revolution (1914-1918), revolutionary journalism, parliamentary work and time in the German Communist Party (1919-1926, but comprised of two chapters), brief anti-Stalinist organising (1926-1928), renewed education as a lawyer and Scholem’s arrest, imprisonment and murder (1933-1940) in the “triumph of barbarism”. Hoffrogge’s attention to historical detail makes this book a very significant contribution to our understanding of the history of German communism. 3 Despite some reservations I have with aspects of the author’s approach, it is a must-read book. The break with Zionism, war and revolution 1 I would like to thank those who read this article prior to publication and provided useful feedback: Ian Birchall, Ralf Hoffrogge, Sean Larson, Michael Buckmiller, Mario Kessler and Omar Hassan. 2 Broué 2006, p984. 3 Loren Balhorn and Jan-Peter Herrmann should be commended for their fine translation. Many standard works on left-wing Weimar do not yet exist in English: Ossip K. Flechtheim’s Die KPD in der Weimarer Republik (1969) and Hermann Weber’s Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus: Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer Republik (1969) are the most notable. Other studies, of lesser worth yet nonetheless important, like Rüdiger Zimmermann’s Der Leninbund: Linke Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik (1978) and Marcel Bois’ more recent Kommunisten gegen Hitler und Stalin (2014), provide insight into what was the largest and most important anti-Stalinist left in Europe in the late 1920s. With the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) the KPD’s party archive became available in the Federal Archive (of parties and mass organisations) in Berlin, altering the conditions for historical research.