Sport popolare italiano e Arbeitersport tedesco-occidentale (1945-1950)

2009 ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Leo Goretti

- Focuses on the sport policies of the Italian Communist Party and the West German Social Democratic Party in the post-war period. Whereas the Pci leadership decided to build up a flanking sports association (the Unione Italiana Sport Popolare, established in 1948), the Spd abandoned the pre-Nazi tradition of the Arbeitersport (workers' sport). Based on a research undertaken in the archives of the two parties, the article analyses their sport policies in a comparative perspective. Particular attention is paid to the legacy of the Nazi and Fascist regimes and the different political contexts in the two countries after World War II.Keywords: Italian Communist Party, West German Social Democratic Party, Sport, Labour Movement, Leisure.Parole chiave: Partito comunista italiano, Partito socialdemocratico tedesco-occidentale, sport, movimento operaio, tempo libero.

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 104-128
Author(s):  
Florian Wilde

Despite being ‘one of the most notable leaders of the German Communist movement’, Ernst Meyer (1887–1930) remains relatively unknown. Prior to the online publication of the author’s PhD dissertation – an extensive 666-page biography of Meyer – there existed beyond two short biographies – an informative political autobiography from Meyer’s wife Rosa Meyer-Leviné and an essay by Hermann Weber published in 1968 – and some recent texts from the author, no other publications dealing closely with his life and work. Of these, only Meyer-Leviné’s biography has been published in English. Meyer played a major role in the left wing of the German labour movement, beginning in 1908 when he joined the German Social-Democratic Party (spd) until his death over twenty years later. A friend and collaborator of Rosa Luxemburg, he was also one of the founding and leading members of the International Group and its successor, the Spartacus League, in which the radical, anti-war wing of Social Democracy organised itself after the outbreak of World War i. He represented both of these groups as a delegate to the international conferences of anti-war socialists at Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916). Elected to the kpd’s Zentrale at the party’s founding conference, Meyer remained a member of the leadership almost continuously in the years to come, occupying various leading positions. He also represented the party at the Second and Fourth World-Congresses of the Communist International (1920 and 1922).


1965 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Stanley Vardys

Although the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) did not officially abandon Marxism until the Bad GodesbergParteitagin 1959, both intellectually and politically the party's ideology was revised under the leadership of Kurt Schumacher whose “passion, intellect, and will” dominated the SPD for seven years following World War II (1945–52). The final disintegration of German Marxism under Kurt Schumacher can be demonstrated by examining the three crucial elements of Marxist socialist ideology: (1) motivation for socialism, (2) theory of the socialist movement, and (3) relations between German nationalism and socialism.


2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lubomír Kopeček ◽  
Pavel Pšeja

This article attempts to analyze developments within the Czech Left after 1989. Primarily, the authors focus on two questions: (1) How did the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) achieve its dominance of the Left? (2)What is the relationship between the Social Democrats and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM)? We conclude that the unsuccessful attempt to move the KSČM towards a moderate leftist identity opened up a space in which the Social Democrats could thrive, at the same time gradually assuming a pragmatic approach towards the Communists. Moreover, the ability of Miloš Zeman, the leader of the Social Democrats, to build a clear non-Communist Left alternative to the hegemony of the Right during the 1990s was also very important.


1950 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam B. Ulam

Just as the Russo-Yugoslav dispute was reaching its climax, and before the meeting of the Cominform, which issued a detailed condemnation of the Yugoslav Party, a plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party took place. What happened at this plenum of June 3, 1948 is known to us, not directly but from many accounts given at the August 31—September 3 plenum. At the June meeting Secretary General of the Party and Deputy Prime Minister of Poland Gomulka-Wieslaw, (Wieslaw was the party name of Gomulka during the war and it is used throughout the debate), delivered the main report, ostensibly an “historical analysis” of the character of the Polish working class movement. In his speech Gomulka took as the basis of Polish Socialism the tradition of the fervently nationalistic Polish Socialist Party, and condemned the internationalist and Pro-Russian Social Democratic Party of Poland, and by implication as well the pre-1938 Polish Communist Party of which the Workers' Party was supposed to be a continuation in everything but name.


Quaerendo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 256-283
Author(s):  
Frederike Doppenberg

AbstractDuring the Second World War the social-democratic publisher De Arbeiderspers [The Workers’ Press] was transferred into National Socialist hands. The National Socialists wanted to transform the party press of the SDAP, the social democratic party of the Netherlands, into a National Socialist platform. The publisher, however, had a secure circle of socialist customers whom the new management did not want to deter. This article is a study, based on a reconstruction of the list of publications during the period ’40 -’45, of how the National Socialist managers attempted to change the ideological foundation of De Arbeiderspers.


1977 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Peterson

Working—Class women in the Weimar Republic faced a complex and disorienting political situation. The revolutionary government granted women the right to vote in November 1918, but then ousted many women from their wartime jobs with the assistance of the trade unions and factory councils. The growing radicalism of working women during the latter phases of the First World War, marked especially by heavy female participation in the general strike of January 1918 in the munitions industry, was checked by the expulsion of women from exactly those sectors of employment which were most conducive to radicalism, the large plants in the metal industry. In other sectors, however, there was a large expansion of union membership among women during there volutionary period from November 1918 until May 1919, and many women in light industry and rural areas simultaneously joined unions and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Urban women working in large plants who might have supported the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) or the Communist Party (KPD) were fired to make room for returning war veterans, and this led to an eclipse of female radicalism from 1919 until 1923. The inflation of 1923 again activated many women who were attracted to the Communist Party by its neighborhood price control committees, and women took an active part in pressuring food shops to keep prices down and joined in plundering shops or stealing from the fields of landlords and peasants when hunger left them no alternative. The economic chaos of 1923 pushed even women in light industry to the left, and textile workers in Berlin, Saxony, and Thuringia gave the Communists a majority in union elections.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry D. Clark ◽  
Stacy J. Holscher ◽  
Lisa A. Hyland

In the 1992 elections to the national legislature, Lithuania became the first country in Eastern Europe to return its former communist party to power. Headed by Algirdas Brazauskas, the former First Secretary who had led the party in its split from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in December 1990, the party had rejected the Soviet past and renamed itself the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (LDLP). Declaring itself a social-democratic party, the LDLP supported democracy and a free market “with a human face.” In the 1992 elections the LDLP campaigned as a party of experienced, competent administrators capable of managing the reforms in such a way as to lessen their social impact. As a result the party won a resounding victory in the elections of that year to the national legislature, winning 73 of the 141 seats in the Seimas.


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