STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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Light on German left’s infighting before nazi seizure of power
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
Weimar Communism as Mass Movement, 1918-1933
Edited by Ralf Hoffrogge and Norman Laporte
(Lawrence and Wishart, £20)
IF THE KPD — the largest communist party outside Soviet Russia — and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had united to fight Hitler, then history would have turned out very differently and millions of lives would have been saved. Debate has raged over who was to blame for this historical catastrophe, in which Germany’s two largest working-class parties fought each other rather than the fuehrer.
Stalin alone has usually been blamed for this calamity by the professional Kremlinologists but now that KPD archives and Comintern documents are freely available to researchers, it's possible to examine the background to this historical era and distinguish speculation from the facts.
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