Fritz Wolffheim - National Bolshevism

National Bolshevism

Within the Hamburg party a power base had been built up by Heinrich Laufenberg with Rudolf Lindau, Wilhelm Düwell and Paul Frölich amongst his closest lieutenants. Wolffheim became associated with this tendency and before long became Laufenberg's closest collaborator.

As leaders of the KPD in Hamburg the duo strongly attacked imperialism in Germany, publishing a joint pamphlet in 1915 in which both expansionism and the support that they felt was being given to it by the SPD were attacked. In October 1919 Wolffheim and Laufenberg brought their ideas, which were already known as "national Bolshevism" by that point, to Karl Radek arguing that they should unite behind a dictatorship of the proletariat which would harness German nationalism in order to renew war on the Allies in an alliance with the Soviet Union. The policy emphasised a co-operative struggle for national liberation at the expense of class war and thus broke from Marxist orthodoxy. Wolffheim even suggested that in order to bring about the desired revolution the far left combat units could be fused with elements of the far right Freikorps. The idea was rejected as nonsense by Vladimir Lenin whilst Radek also criticised the plan strongly. Before long Wolffheim was expelled from the KPD along with Laufenberg after the pair had tried to wrest control from Wilhelm Pieck.

Along with Laufenberg and Jan Appel, Wolffheim was in attendance at the Heidelberg conference Laufenberg that saw the birth of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) and was a founder member of this group. By 1920 however he had been expelled from the party, with his national Bolshevism the official reason for his departure. Individually Wolffheim was close to the rightist General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck whilst along with Laufenberg he had met with Ernst Graf zu Reventlow immediately prior to the Kapp Putsch.