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Hamburg at the Barricades

Reissner, Larissa
http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/reissner/works/hamburg/ednote.htm
http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/reissner/works/hamburg/ednote.htm

Publisher:  Pluto
Year Published:  1977   First Published:  1925
Pages:  209pp   ISBN:  0-904383-36-9
Resource Type:  Book

Articles by the revolutionary journaliist Larissa Reissner, covering the Hamburg uprising of 1923 and the life and times for Germany in the years 1923-1925.

Abstract: 
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Table of Contents

Editorial Note

Part I - Berlin, October 1923
1. In the Reichstag
2. Workers' Children
3. A Prosperous Worker's Family
4. 9 November in a Working-Class District

Part II - Hamburg at the Barricades
5. Hamburg
6. Barmbeck
7. Schiffbek
8. Portraits
9. About Schiffbek Again
10. Hamm
11. PostScript: German Mensheviks after the Rising

Part III - In Hindenburg's Country
12. Preface to the German Edition
13. Krupp and Essen
14. A Concentration Camp of Poverty
15. In the Ruhr - Under the Ground
16. Ullstein
17. Junkers
18. Milk

Notes
Maps



Excerpt:

An uprising passes by without trace in big cities. A revolution has to be great and victorious if the traces of havoc, its heroic abrasions and white bullet-scars on walls pock-marked by machine-gun fire are to be preserved on stone and iron if only for a few years.

Two or three days or two or three weeks later, together with shreds of newspapers and tattered posters either ripped front the walls by bayonet points or washed off by dirty showers of rain, the brief memory of street battles, churned-up roadways and trees thrown like bridges across river-like streets and stream-like alleyways also passes away.

Prison doors slam behind the convicted while fellow-fighters, thrown out of their factories, are compelled to look for work in another city or a remote district; those who are unemployed following the defeat take refuge in the most far-flung and anonymous nooks; the women keep quiet, the children, wary of the security policeman's smarmy inquiries, deny everything. Thus the legend of the days of the Rising dies away, forgotten and drowned by the noise of restored traffic and resumed work. In corners of workshops a new group of workers that has taken over at the deserted benches in the factories may still repeat a name or two and recall the particularly good shots -- but that too is passing away.

For a worker there is no history within the confines of the bourgeois state; the list of his heroes is kept by the drumhead courtmartial and the factory guard from a Menshevik trade union. The bourgeoisie, once having cracked down with armed force, stifles the hateful memory of the danger it has so recently escaped.

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