Remembering Catalonia: The Lesson of Die Thälmann-Kolonne

As of this writing, yesterday was the anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War (mentioned here and here) – possibly one of the most significant but least-talked about conflicts of the Early 20th Century, sandwiched as it was right between the World Wars. This war is, when it is considered, thought of as a dress rehearsal, of sorts, for World War II. On one side, you had the belligerent Nationalists – a coalition of Fascists, Conservatives, and Catholic Traditionalists. On the other side, you had the Communists, Anarchists, and Republican factions.

I’m not going to go through the whole history – there are many other, and better sources, for this conflict, and I highly recommend researching it when you get a chance. It feels, in some ways, uncomfortably familiar.

Butler, notably, had a change of heart in his later years — before that, he was all-in on the American imperial project. When I discuss my admiration for him, it is purely in this later period.

Like all wars, it was a messy and awful business. There’s a minefield with praising any part of military history, because, ideally, war isn’t a thing that will happen. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of living in that ideal world. Still, I will admit that I’m somewhat embarrassed by the fact that I feel admiration for the people I am going to describe today: I’m not really a fan of military history, and – to belie that a little bit – a major reason for that is that, like Smedley Butler, it seems to me that war is, first and foremost a racket. A way for powerful, safe men to enrich themselves by making those less powerful than them incredibly unsafe.

What I want to do today, briefly, is shine a light on the group in the war that is often pushed to the margins. You see, on the Republican side of the war were not simply Spaniards fighting the Fascist takeover of their homeland, but the International Battalions. People from all over the world who poured into Spain to try to stem the tide of Fascist takeover. Many people who know about the International Battalions know about the Abraham Lincoln Battalion – the American contingent, which was largely made up of Jewish men from New York and surrounding environs – and their history is fascinating and important. Others might be familiar with the French and Italian contingents, but there were representatives from much further afield, as well: Palestinian Jewish, Chinese, Mongol, Japanese, Indian, Filipino, and Syrian fighters all served in Spain (almost all of them were men – women were allowed in the support staff, but only in the earliest days of the war were women represented among the fighters.)

All of them fought the fascists. They traveled, many of them without official leave, to risk death to stop the traitor General Fransico Franco and his men.

There was also a German contingent on the Republican side, and they’ve been an object of fascination for me recently. They were called the Thälmann Battalion.

Every time I think of Hemingway, I think of this image. It is not a pleasant line of thinking.

Ernest Hemingway, a writer whom I don’t much care for, described them as follows:

They had nearly all had military training or had fought in the war. They were all anti-Nazis. Most of them were Communists and they marched like the Reichswehr. They also sang songs that would break your heart and the last of them died on the Muela of Teruel, which was a position they sold as dearly as any position was sold in any war.

John Comford, a British poet, said of them that they were:

...the finest people in some ways I have ever met. In a way they have lost everything, have been through enough to break most people, and remain strong and cheerful and humorous. If anything is revolutionary it is these comrades.

Though he doesn’t mention them by this name, George Orwell does mention several Germans serving on the Republican side in his book Homage to Catalonia.

It strikes me, sitting as I am in the relative comfort of the United States, nearly a century later, that these men provide an important example. Allow me to explain.

Have you read All Quiet on the Western Front? Just think about All Quiet on the Western Front for this first part.

Imagine that you are a veteran of the most brutal war in history. Imagine this, but not only, that you were on the losing side. Your country is punished for its belligerence, and sent spiraling into madness as a result: many of your countrymen blame a minority population for the hardships that they are going through, but you know this is false. You fight against it, even after everything you have seen.

You lose again.

You are punished for this.

Others didn’t have the luxury of formal military training, according to professor Josie McLellan of the University of Bristol, who summarized one volunteer’s odyssey in Antifascism and Memory in East Germany:

Many, like Eduard Schmidt, were members of the Weimar Republic’s ‘lost generation’, who had never known stability or regular employment. Initially apprenticed to a builder, Schmidt lost his job and, unable to find work, led a vagabond-style existence around Europe.

You are disavowed by your homeland, and can never return. How much strength of will and moral courage does it take to illegally cross a hostile nation, to go someplace far away and fight so that the madness that took your homeland doesn’t take root elsewhere?

Could you go, singing, into the jaws of death for the freedom of people you do not know?

It seems to me that, if any military act was justified, it would be this. If any group in any war is to be celebrated, it would be this.

McLellan quotes the writer Willy Grunert, who in turn quoted a soldier of the Battalion, who said:

It was a great day, we had weapons! Gold prospectors must have clung to their first find in the same way that we did to the rifles. What I had dreamt as a child, when my father told me stories about the struggle of the working class for a decent existence—Spartacus, Berlin, Leuna on the Ruhr, the victorious Soviet army—wasn’t a dream any more, it had become reality.

I was a soldier of the working class.

This, to me, seems to be one of the bravest things a person can do. I live a life of relative comfort, and I don’t know if I possess the fortitude to do what they did, but it seems to me that this is an example of the best thing that someone can do.

They did not start as a cohesive unit, many of them previously having been partisans fighting against their government in their homeland. There is a description, in McLellan’s book of this passage, about how the recognition of their comrades in the international battalions allowed the Thälmann Battalion to come together, alchemizing their atomization and shame into a shared purpose:

The volunteers themselves were delighted by this recognition [by the American Writer Ernest Hemingway], which, along with their national grouping within the Brigades, allowed them to reclaim a positive, antifascist, German identity. As another Englishman, Esmond Romilly [nephew of Winston Churchill], recognised, ‘they were fighting for their cause and they were fighting as well for a home to live in . . . they had staked everything on this war’. In a letter to his girlfriend written in October, shortly after his arrival in Spain, Alfred Katzenstein, a young Jewish volunteer, proudly described the layout of the training camp in Albacete: ‘A comrade has written “Germany” very beautifully in front of the tents of the Germansection. (The real Germany is here.)’ For men and women who had been stripped of their nationality on racial or political grounds, even identifying themselves as German could be problematic. Rudi Engel recalled how thenewly arrived German recruits stood out: while the French and British volunteers sang and talked and laughed unselfconsciously, the German group was ‘quieter, more reserved, in a word, mistrustful. Conversations only came about slowly, the suspicion that the other might be a Nazi spy lay in the air.’ Few men were willing to admit to being German: most identified themselves in regional terms as Bavarians, Rheinlanders, Silesians, or Saxons. The lifting of this burden of mistrust and the rediscovery of the camaraderie which came so easily to the French and the British were crucial elements of the German volunteer experience.

Membership of the International Brigades was a chance for Germans to fight fascism legally and legitimately. The previous three years of illegal, clandestine work had been a terrible strain, and several volunteers remembered their emancipation at being able to ‘fight with an open visor’. As Karl Mewis put it: ‘the outlaw [Illegale] became a person again, a comrade’. The collective nature of the war was perhaps particularly significant for communists such as Mewis, for whom group identity was so important. Fritz Dickel described the relief of the German volunteers as a collective exhalation, ‘as if liberated from a heavy burden’. However demanding life in the Brigades was, it was infinitely preferable to the isolation and subterfuge of underground work.

It must be acknowledged that they were not morally superhuman – the Thälmann Battalion did fall victim to some of the worst excesses of Stalinism, purging themselves of “ideologically impure” elements as the war became harder for the anti-nationalist side. It was a tragic turn for an otherwise laudable group.

Despite this, though, I think it is important to remember them: they were decidedly human men, with human failings, who decided to do something that was above and beyond what anyone could reasonably expect from them. And though we can point to this and say that it was a failing, we cannot dismiss them because of it.

Also notable were the Weiße Rose — “White Rose” in English — who were a nonviolent student organization that resisted Nazism.

I think that it is necessary to remember groups such as the Thälmann Battalion – and other German anti-Nazi organizations – as time goes forward, just as it is necessary to remember British dissenters to their imperial project, American abolitionists during the time of slavery, and the like.

All too often, when looking at history, it is easy enough to write off the crimes of the past as “that was just what people thought at the time,” and this is not true. We must acknowledge that it has never been true. There were good Germans who fought the Nazis, good Italians who fought the Fascists, good Britons who fought the Empire, and good Americans who fought slavery and genocide. In fact, this is why we can agree that these projects were wrong, and why we can condemn the people who didn’t.

Because it allows us to acknowledge that those who went along with these things made a choice to go along with them. Stating that there’s a clear-cut, transcendent sense of right and wrong is a dodgy proposition – but if there’s any argument that such a thing exists, it’s that there were people who made the right choice in these situations. The kind of choices that we all hope that we would be brave enough to make in their place.

And it allows us to look at our own surroundings, it encourages us to recognize where we have gone wrong, and to try to muster the courage to do the right thing.

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