The revolutionary career is not a series of banquets and a string of honorific titles, nor does it hold the promise of interesting research or professors’ salaries. It is a passage toward the unknown with misery, disgrace, ungratefulness and prison as its way stations. Only an almost superhuman belief illumines it, and merely talented people therefore choose it only rarely. – Horkheimer, Dawn, 1926-1931.
Heinz Epe’s article on the Frankfurt School is remarkable for different reasons. Published in 1939 under the pseudonym Walter Held, it is an early revolutionary Marxist critique of the thought of the Institut für Sozialforschung (IfS) or Frankfurter School.[1] It pioneered a theme that would characterise many future critiques of the Frankfurter School: their abstention from political activism and retreat into abstract theory, what Held called the use of ‘Marxism as a refuge from the present’. Writing in mid 1939, Held criticised the Frankfurt School, and in particular Max Horkheimer, for remaining silent on the ‘severe tremors of our epoch’; ‘the rise and victory of National-Socialism, the decline and decay of the Soviet Union, civil war in Spain’. Held, a collaborator of Leon Trotsky, did not limit his critique to the Frankfurters’s political quietism. With extensive quotes from Horkheimer, he also attempted to show the intellectual consistency of the Frankfurt School and how ‘wrong conclusions were drawn from correct presumptions’.
Horkheimer felt that Held’s critique hit its mark, as pointed out by Helmut Dahmer. In his book Freud, Trotzki und der Horkeimer-Kreis, Dahmer included Held’s article as an appendix and referred to a letter from July 1939 to Leo Löwenthal by Horkheimer.[2] In this letter, Horkheimer wrote; ‘In the evaluation of this article [by Held], our judgements are obviously very different, because I consider it by far for the best thing about us that I ever read. This work is based on a thorough study of our writings. The negative statements, which by the way hit their mark, appear to me more as advertisement than as a malicious attack.’[3] Dahmer described Held’s article as ‘sketching the political positions that could be expected from (or at least be ‘‘imputed to’’) the critical theoreticians and most of all criticised their diplomatic silence regarding the Stalinist counter-revolution’.
This silence was deliberate. Dahmer pointed out that, while Horkheimer expressed appreciation for Lenin as a thinker and a revolutionary, and admired Rosa Luxemburg, he always avoided referring to Trotsky and his supporters. Trotsky was, after all, still alive and ‘in respecting the taboo regarding Trotsky and ‘‘Trotskyism’’, a taboo that had been declared by almost all political camps, Horkheimer and his circle (correctly) saw a part of the protection of their lives’.[4] Making explicit the unspoken politics would have made the Institute for Social Research a target of both Western intelligence services as those of the Soviet Union, and would have destroyed the chance to find an academic home for the exiled Institute for Social Research.
Epe’s life is an example of the deadly nature of the Stalinist counter-revolution. Born in 1910 in Remscheid, Germany, he in 1931 joined the Trotskyist Left Opposition (LO) in the German Communist Party, the KPD.[5] As such, he worked for its journal Permanente Revolution. The following year, he was expelled as a Trotskyist by the KPD. In January 1933, Epe joined the national leadership of the LO. Plans to work on a doctorate were cut short when the Nazis took power and Epe went into exile. His marriage with the Czech Trotskyist Hella Villem allowed him to reside in Czechoslovakia. For his political work, he now assumed the pseudonym Walter Held, Held referring to the maiden name of his mother. Held was tasked with organising the journal of the German Trotskyist organisation, the Internationale Kommunisten Deutschlands (IKD). Named Unser Wort, its first issue came out just after the German elections of 5 March 1933. With the aid of terror against its opponents, Hitler’s NSDAP had received some 17 million votes, 44 per cent of the total. On 23 March, with the KPD deputies prevented from participating and only the Social Democrats voting against, the German Reichstag granted Hitler dictatorial powers. KPD calls for a general strike fizzled.
After the coming to power of the Nazis, Held had been among the first in the LO to pose the question of forming a new party rather than continuing in the attempt to reform the KPD. Such a new party would need to consist of forces coming from the left-wing of Social Democracy and the SAP, a left-wing split from the SPD, as well as ‘healthy’ elements from the KPD and the LO.[6] According to Peter Berens, Held came to this conclusion even before Trotsky himself.[7]
In September 1933, when the production of Unser Wort was moved from Prague to Paris, Held also moved to the French capital. But already the next month, he was sent to the Netherlands. Held became the contact person of the International Communist League (ICL), as the international organisation of the Left Opposition was now called, to the Dutch revolutionary-socialist leader Henk Seevliet. Sneevliet himself had asked for a secretary to help him with, among other things, his international contacts. Sneevliet’s Revolutionary-Socialist Party (RSP) had been one of four parties signing a call for a new international in August 1933. This ‘declaration of the four’ was signed by the ICL, the German SAP and two Dutch parties: the RSP, and the Independent Socialist Party, OSP. The RSP was in unity talks with the OSP, a left-wing split from Social Democracy. After the two groups fused in 1935, the new organisation, called the RSAP, had some 3,700 members.
Sneevliet was not only a party-leader but also the leader of the radical trade-union federation Nationaal Arbeids Secretariaat (NAS). With some 21,000 members, the NAS was much smaller than the Social-Democratic trade-union federation NVV which, in 1934, counted some 600.000 members. But the NAS was much more radical, with many of its members sympathising with revolutionary-syndicalist ideas. Shortly after his arrival in the Netherlands, Held wrote a letter to Trotsky describing the Dutch situation and praising Sneevliet’s patient work in convincing NAS members to support the RSP. But Held became more critical of the orientation to the NAS as it became clear the organisation was in decline. Held argued with Sneevliet that revolutionaries should work in the mass trade-union organisations. That revolutionaries should work in the mass organisations of the working class so as not to isolate themselves was, after all, the classical Leninist position.
But, when Held raised the issue with Sneevliet, he was brusquely brushed off. Sneevliet probably felt that he was being challenged by a young upstart who did not understand the situation. Held’s letters to Trotsky show that he, maybe still hindered by language difficulties, had misunderstood one element of the Dutch situation. The Dutch government subsidised unemployment funds set up by trade unions, including that of the NAS. Held overestimated the importance of these subsidies and thought they made the federation, and, with it, the RSAP, financially dependent on the state. But such subsidies did not finance the federation, they were passed along to members that had become unemployed. For the government, it was cheaper to subsidise the unemployed funds than to pay the social assistance that the unemployed otherwise had to rely on. And, for the unions, the advantage was that this scheme provided a strong incentive for unorganised workers to join.[8]
When Trotsky later broke ties with Sneevliet and the RSAP, he raised the supposed dependence on state funds. But Trotsky was wrong in saying that the state-support for the unemployment funds was contingent on the political attitude of the trade union in question. In fact, one reason why membership of the NAS declined in this period was that the government banned public employees from membership in revolutionary organisations. In several larger cities, the NAS had had relatively many members among such employees.[9]
The discussions with Sneevliet were not the only task of Held. In line with the ‘declaration of the four’, the youth groups of SAP, OSP, RSP and the ICL planned a conference to discuss closer collaboration. The meeting took place in February 1934 in the Dutch city of Laren. Held was present as a representative of the youth of IKD. The conference was however broken up by Dutch police. Three German participants (Kurt Liebermann, Hans Goldstein and Franz Bobzien of the SAP youth organisation Sozialistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands and Heinz Hoose of the IKD) were handed over to the Nazis by Dutch authorities. After the raid, while held in a police cell in Amsterdam, Epe had a chance to get to know another participant, his future political opponent Willy Brandt. The future German chancellor was a participant in the meeting as a SJV representative. Rather than being deported to Germany, the remaining participants were brought to Belgium where the meeting continued.
The political differences were too great for much real cooperation to be established. The delegate of the youth of the Norwegian Labour Party (NAP) argued against any attempt to launch a new youth international, something that Held and his comrade Al Glotzer strongly favoured. Others, including Brandt and Jan Molenaar of the OSP youth organisation Socialisties Jeugdverbond took a position in between, arguing for founding a new youth international at some later time. In the end, the meeting decided to support Brandt’s proposal to organise a new youth secretariat, to be based in Stockholm, that was to lay the foundation for a new youth international in the future. Its members were Brandt, Epe and Kurt Forslund of the Swedish Communist Youth League (Sverges Kommunistiska Ungdomsförbund), an organisation close to the SAP/SJV.[10] In a letter to Held, Trotsky severely criticised him for concessions made to the other groups and for not drawing out the disagreements more sharply.[11]
Most of the member organisations of the new International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organisations where in solidarity with the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity, also known under its nickname the London Bureau. The Bureau counted organisations such as the British ILP and the POUM in Spain among its members. For a while, the Dutch RSAP was involved in both the movement for a Fourth International and the London Bureau.
The International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organisations did not last long. When, in March 1935, the Norwegian Labour Party (NAP) came to power and, in Held’s words, ‘carried on a completely bourgeois policy similar to that of the Swedish and Danish Social Democrats’, the Norwegian Mot Dag group ‘instead of fighting the monstrous treachery of the NAP’, ‘sought a “theoretical” justification of the betrayal. Besides they declared their agreement with the Stalin-Laval declaration and with the preparation of the union sacrée by the French Stalinists’. Held went on the attack, demanding at a meeting of the Secretariat on 18 August 1935 that the Youth Bureau would be reorganised, break ties with Mot Dag and join the call for the formation of the Fourth International. This was strongly opposed by Brandt and his allies. Brandt and Forslund proceeded to exclude Held from the secretariat.[12]
At this point, Held was based in Norway. He had worked hard to convince the new Labour Party government to grant Trotsky a visa. In June 1935, Trotsky moved to Norway where he stayed in a small town near Oslo in the house of NAP parliamentarian Konrad Knudsen. Held, now married to a Norwegian, Synnøve Rosendahl-Jensen, joined the household. As Trotsky’s assistant, Held took on several tasks, writing articles on topics such as the role of the NAP and fascism as well as working to defend political refugees. He was also involved in the founding of the journal Oktober, around which the Trotskyist organisation in Norway would be formed. He would help win Jeanette Olsen, one of the most prominent women in Norwegian socialism to the organisation.
When, in December 1936, Trotsky was forced to leave Norway for Mexico, he asked that Held be allowed to accompany him as his assistant. This was refused. In 1938, Held participated in the founding congress of the Fourth International, travelling from Norway to France. While taking part in the youth meetings before the congress, the news came that the mutilated body of Rudolf Klement had been found. Klement, the secretary of the movement’s International Secretariat and as such responsible for a large part of the organisation of the congress, had been abducted and murdered by agents of the Soviet GPU. It seems that, on the urging of Paris comrades, Held declined Trotsky’s proposal to succeed Klement.[13]
Events were moving fast. On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Less than three weeks later, Soviet forces invaded Poland from the East. The ‘Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ had been signed only the previous month. That this treaty contained secret clauses in which the Soviet-Union and Nazi-Germany divided Northern Europe and split up Poland was not yet known. The Hitler-Stalin pact vindicated Trotsky’s predictions that this would happen, but the Soviet invasion of Poland, and about two and half months later of Finland, divided the Trotskyist movement.
A minority in the US SWP, led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham, was moving to the position that the Stalinist counterrevolution had destroyed the last ‘conquests of October’ and that the Soviet-Union’s policy could be characterised as ‘imperialist’. Trotsky insisted on the qualification of the Soviet-Union as a ‘workers’ state’, albeit a degenerated one, and saw Soviet policy as essentially defensive.[14] Held took a middle position: unlike Trotsky, he denounced the invasion of Finland, but he opposed the US minority splitting from the SWP and maintained the traditional Trotskyist slogan of ‘unconditional defence of the USSR’.[15]
That month, Daniel Guérin, at the time a member of the French Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan also arrived in Norway. Guérin was tasked with organising an international secretariat of the International Workers’ Front against the War, a movement based mainly on organisations that supported the London Bureau as well as some other groups.[16] Guérin was more sympathetic to Trotskyism than most other supporters of the London Bureau and befriended Held. With great effort, he convinced Held, ‘a militant of exceptional qualities’ and among ‘the flower of the Fourth International’, to support the work of the secretariat.[17]
When Nazi-Germany occupied Norway in 1940, Held, Synnøve Rosendahl-Jensen and their young son fled to Sweden. In Stockholm, Held would briefly share a house with Brandt.[18] Since the beginning of the War, the leadership of the IKD and the organisation of its journal Unser Wort was in the hands of German Trotskyists who had made their way to New York.[19] It was in this context that Held came up with the doomed plan to cross the Soviet Union by train and take a boat to the US from Istanbul. Somewhere en route in the Soviet-Union, Walter Held, his companion and their son were arrested.
Why had Held refused to listen to the warnings of Brandt and others? According to Pierre Broué, ‘Held could not stand the temporary political inactivity to which he was reduced by his refugee status in Sweden’.[20] Seeing Europe fall to fascism, Held wanted to join his comrades in New York rather than remain isolated in Sweden.
Some information on Held’s final days comes from Henryk Erlich, a leader of the General Jewish Labour Bund. In a letter to the Norwegian authorities, Erlich writes; ‘I have spent two years in Soviet prisons and the last two weeks in prison at Saratov in the same cell as a Norwegian citizen, a well-known journalist and member of the Socialist Party, Walter Epe.’ According to Erlich, Held was accused of espionage, ‘or perhaps only of Trotskyism (which is equated by the NKVD with espionage)’.[21] Held was separated from his wife and child and treated harshly, suffering from hunger and extreme cold. On 9 September 1941, Erlich and Held were separated. Only in 1956 did Soviet authorities admit that Held and his family had all died in the Soviet prison camp system, victims of the Stalinist counterrevolution.
Daniel Guérin later remembered Held as a delicate and cultured revolutionary. Held’s Norwegian comrade Nils Dahl remembered him in similar terms ‘as much an artist and literary man as a politician’, a charming individual who could win people over.[22] One question is why this dedicated revolutionary sought to engage with the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. The affinity Held must have felt with the politics present in this journal is certainly part of the answer. Held and the IfS agreed that fascism was not an accident of history, not only a short lived aberration, as the Communist International claimed in the early thirties. In the first issue of Unser Wort, Held warned against the ‘foolishness’ of underestimating the strength of German fascism.[23] Held and IfS saw fascism as capitalism’s offspring, it was bourgeois liberalism’s ‘legitimate son’ as Horkheimer wrote.[24]
The feeling of isolation and foreboding tone in Horkheimer’s work over the course of the thirties probably also resonated with Held. But, unlike Horkheimer, Held was convinced there was a way out of the isolation; organising a new revolutionary vanguard organisation, independent from the ‘twins’ of Stalinism and Social Democracy, ‘the yellow agencies of rotting capitalism’.[25] This theme also appeared in Held’s critique of the IfS. ‘A proletarian party cannot be made the object of contemplative criticism’, Horkheimer had written in his early work Dawn, ‘for every one of its mistakes is due to the fact that the effective participation of more qualified people did not prevent it from committing them.’[26] Socialism was a possibility ‘one had to fight for’, a ‘contemplative treatment of Marxism in real life is the accommodation to things as they are.’[27] Held was determined not to remain a contemplative critic.[28]
On Critical Theory without political praxis
Walter Held’s article consists, for a large part, of comments on Horkheimer’s essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’. This essay was first published in 1937, in the Institute’s journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.[29] Held had good reason to single out Horkheimer and this essay.[30] Although, in the English-language literature, Max Horkheimer is not as prominent as other ‘Frankfurters’ like Theodor Adorno, he played a key role in the IfS during the thirties. Horkheimer was not only the organisational leader of the institute and editor of its journal: he was the author of ‘programmatic’ texts such as ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ that set the research agenda of the IfS.
After a transitory period in the late twenties, Horkheimer had become a Marxist, a phase that would end in the early forties.[31] During the thirties, ‘critical theory’ initially referred to a form of dialectical materialism based in Marxism, so much so that Horkeimer could refer to ‘Traditional and Critical Theory as an ‘anniversary essay’ for the seventieth anniversary of the original publication of Capital.[32] ‘There is a human activity which has society itself for its object’, Horkheimer wrote in ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, clarifying that ‘this activity is called ‘‘critical’’ activity. The term is used here less in the sense it has in the idealist critique of pure reason than in the sense it has in the dialectical critique of political economy. It points to an essential aspect of the dialectical theory of society.’[33]
As National-Socialist rule stabilised, the philosophical element in Critical Theory became more pronounced. After a discussion with Herbert Marcuse, Horkheimer wrote in a postscript to ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’; ‘the philosophical character of the critical theory emerges by comparison not only with political economy but also with economism in practice. The struggle against the illusory harmonies of liberalism and the broadcasting of the contradictions immanent in it and in the abstractness of its concept of freedom have been taken up verbally in very different parts of the world and turned into reactionary slogans’.[34] Whereas Held was convinced that the philosophers had ‘sufficiently interpreted the word and today the point is to change it and realise philosophy’, Horkheimer would come to the conclusion that the work of philosophy, of critique, was not yet finished.
Another essay by Horkheimer quoted by Held is the text ‘Die Philosophie der absoluten Konzentration’ from 1938. This text is a critique of the work of fellow German exile Siegfried Marck. Marck was one of the few Social-Democratic intellectuals involved in an attempt to create a popular front among the German exiles.[35] He was, writes Kouvelakis, ‘a typical example of the German version of the anti-fascist intellectual, ‘‘fellow traveller’’ of the Communists in the framework of the alliances driven by the popular fronts’. Horkheimer targeted Marck’s work as one attempt among others to offer an ‘ideological program for unification’ of the German opposition.[36]
Horkheimer criticised the ‘neo-humanism’ of Marck for attempting to uphold liberal values while ignoring the complicity of liberalism in defending the same social-economic order as fascism. According to Horkheimer, liberalism in the Europe of 1938 was a matter of the past. What Marck called liberalism’s ‘defensive elements’ against the authoritarian state (Machtsstaat)—freedom of religion, of speech, inalienable human rights—had ‘not prevented those liberals who were allowed to do so from defecting to the authoritarian state, not because they were bad liberals but because, in liberalism, the inalienable human rights find their true meaning and support, their reason for being, in the solidly anchored right to dispose over means of production and consequently must be surrendered where this right is endangered. The true liberals back then were not sitting in the editorial board of the Frankfurter Zeitung but in the board room of the IG Farben concern and remained true to themselves’.[37]
Marck wanted to see a non-Marxist, ‘idealist’ socialism to carry on liberal values but refused to see that ‘the prize that falls to the fascists is rightly theirs, it is the legitimate son of liberalism’.[38] Horkheimer’s criticism of Marck’s positions implied the rejection of popular front politics and a reminder of Social Democracy’s role in the collapse of Weimar – positions that the Trotskyist revolutionary Walter Held could completely agree with.
After the War, Horkheimer was hesitant to republish his old texts, as he had abandoned the revolutionary ideas that informed them. Of the founding members of the Frankfurt School, it was Horkheimer who ‘most openly took his distance in regard to the project of the Institute in the years before the war’.[39] Old editions of the journal were literally kept under lock and key, inaccessible to students.[40] It was only after the German student Left started to circulate pirated editions of pre-war IfS publications that Horkheimer agreed to republication of his old texts. In 1968, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ and ‘Philosophie der absoluten Konzentration’, were re-published as part of a two-volume collection Kritische Theorie.[41] In his preface to the collection, Horkheimer stressed the distance between his contemporary views and those of the pre-war years. Where, before, he had socialism considered a possibility, although a highly uncertain one, Horkeimer now had come to see ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ as contradictory.[42]
Horkheimer also introduced what he described as ‘stylistic corrections and a few cuts’ to the text of the 1968 republication. His publisher was hesitant about such changes, but Horkheimer insisted on them.[43] Taken together, these changes de-emphasised the Marxist inspiration of the text and emphasised the distinction between the theoretician and the working class. Some of the more significant changes appear in parts of the text quoted by Held. Such changes are placed in brackets below. As the English translation of ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ is based on the 1968 version it does not mark such changes.[44]
Read Walter Held’s article here.
[1] Held’s article deals with an early phase in the development of Critical Theory, one that ends with Adorno and Horkheimer’s work on Dialectic of Enlightenment. Other critiques of the Frankfurter School focus on its later development. For an early example of such a critique, see the work of Leo Kofler, discussed in Jünke 2007, pp. 453-493.
[2] Dahmer 2020.
[3] Quoted in Dahmer 2020, p. 492.
[4] Dahmer 2020, p. 491.
[5] Pierre Broué wrote a biographical sketch of Heinz Epe / Walter Held in ‘Quelques Prôches Collaborateurs de Trotsky’, Cahiers Leon Trotsky, No.1, January 1979, English translation: Broué 1988. The section ‘Der Remscheider Heinz Epe als Sekretär Trotzkis’ in Berens 2007, pp. 121-126 gives some more details and a few corrections. For the history of German Trotskyism in the pre-war period, see Alles 2022.
[6] Alles 2022, p.156.
[7] Berens 2007, p. 121.
[8] Erik Nijhof and Peter Schrage 1984, pp. 260-285. Thanks to Ron Blom and Herman Pieterson for their comments.
[9] Trotsky’s open letter to Henk Sneevliet, published in May 1938, is online at marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/05/sneevliet.htm. Trotsky’s reference to ‘younger comrades’ who since 1934 insisted ‘on the need to openly clarify our profound divergences on the theoretical, political and practical plains’ is likely a reference to Held who in letters to Trotsky insisted on especially the differences regarding trade-union policies.
[10] Mistakenly spelled as Forsland in Broué 1988.
[11] Trotsky 1979, pp. 469-472.
[12] Internationales Jugend-Bulletin 1935, pp. 4-6.
[13] Alles 2022, p. 125.
[14] See Drucker 1994, pp106-120 for a summary of the discussion.
[15] Alles 2022, pp. 233-234.
[16] Buschak 1985, p. 299.
[17] Guérin 1970, p. 255.
[18] Brandt 2012, pp. 112-113.
[19] Alles 2022, p. 235.
[20] Broué 1988.
[21] Erlich’s 1941 letter on Held was published in the ‘Walter Held file’ published by Revolutionary History, 1:4, 1988/1989, online: marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol1/no4/held.html. Erlich was again arrested by Soviet authorities and executed in 1942. See Albert Glotzer 1943, ‘Murder as a Political Weapon’, The New International, IX:3, March 1943, pp. 69–70, online: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/glotzer/1943/03/murder.htm
[22] Nils Dahl 1988, ‘Some memories of Walter Held’, Revolutionary History, 1:2 1988, online: marxists.org/history/etol/document/1930s/held02.htm.
[23] Alles 2022, p. 173.
[24] Horkheimer 1938, p. 384.
[25] Reisner 1973, p. 129. This book collects different documents adopted by the Fourth International and its predecessors. Held wrote the document ‘The evolution of the Comintern’ for the 1936 conference for the Fourth International. The document was subsequently adopted as an educational text. The term ‘twins’ is a reference to Stalin’s declaration that fascism and Social Democracy were ‘not antipodes but twins’.
[26] Horkheimer 1978, p. 40.
[27] Horkheimer 1978, pp. 36, 37.
[28] Horkheimer 1968, bd. II, p. 347.
[29] Horkheimer 1937.
[30] Kouvelakis 2019, p. 33.
[31] See the introduction to Horkheimer 1974 by Alfred Schmidt, pp. xxi, xxxvii.
[32] Wiggershaus 1988, p. 211.
[33] Horkheimer 1972, p. 206, Wiggershaus 1988, p. 211.
[34] Horkheimer 1972, p. 247.
[35] Kouvelakis 2019, pp. 137-138.
[36] Horkheimer 1938, p. 376.
[37] Horkheimer 1938, p. 379.
[38] Horkheimer 1938, p. 384.
[39] Kouvelakis 2019, p. 34.
[40] Wiggershaus 1998, p. 604.
[41] Edited by Alfred Schmidt, the two-volume collection Kritische Theorie was subtitled ‘Eine Dokumentation’. Horkheimer 1968.
[42] Horkeimer 1968, bd. I, p. XI.
[43] See the comments by Korthals in Horkheimer & Marcuse 1981, pp. 63, 195, 196.
[44] Horkheimer 1972.
