Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

mixture of force and free will. Events took a different course in
Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example.
The experiences with communist claims to power, communist ideology
and communist practice prompted a decided anti-totalitarianism
in German social democracy which also included a strain of
militant anti-communism – albeit not to be compared with other
forms of anti-communism. A protagonist of this attitude was the
first post-war Chairman of the SPD, Kurt Schumacher, who was
locked up in concentration camps for practically the whole of the
National Socialist period but survived, deeply marked by the experience.
He regarded the communist parties as mere tools of Soviet
imperialist power politics.
German social democracy traditionally tended to look to the West.
It saw the Marshall Plan as an opportunity to overcome the poverty
of the post-war period. The German Social Democrats, some of
whom had emigrated during the Third Reich, also managed to resume
relations with sister parties in other countries quite quickly in
the post-war years. The Socialist International was re-founded in
Frankfurt in 1951, strengthening democratic socialist principles and
taking a more resolute anti-totalitarian and anti-communist, anti-
Stalinist line.
Remarkably, leading social democrats like Willy Brandt and Carlo
Schmid joined the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’, a US-backed
European organisation with a strong anti-communist bias, which
brought together leftists from various backgrounds. There can be no
doubt about it; most western social democrats clearly took sides in
the Cold War.
At the same time, however, German social democracy was more
energetic in calling for a critical appraisal of the National Socialist
system and crimes committed by National Socialists than the middle-class
parties, which reflected to a greater or lesser extent the
tendency in German society to bury the past. They had taken a resolute
stand in favour of compensation to victims and reparations to
Israel, and against any statute of limitations on National Socialist
crimes outside the Reich. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that
they continued to give unqualified support to the anti-totalitarian
consensus, complete with all the anti-communist trappings, until
well into the 1960s, even though Adenauer among others had
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