International Solidarity in the Low Countries during the Twentieth Century

New Perspectives and Themes

Kim Christiaens, John Nieuwenhuys, Charel Roemer, Kim Christiaens, John Nieuwenhuys, Charel Roemer

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110635195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

During the 20th century, a variety of social movements and civil society groups stepped into the arena of international politics. This volume collects innovative research on international solidarity movements in Belgium and the Netherlands, and places these movements prominently in debates about the history of globalization, transnational activism, and international politics.

Chapter 1 A Revolutionary Robin Hood

Max Hölz (1889 – 1933) and the Dutch Communist Movement

Wouter Linmans

His name will likely be unfamiliar to most modern day readers. Yet, in the eyes of the German establishment, Max Hölz was the embodiment of anarchy and wickedness for nearly fifteen years. In the eyes of the German working classes, however, Hölz symbolized their revolutionary aspirations. He was well-known in the Soviet Union too: schools, factories and other buildings, army battalions and steamships moving along the Volga river bore his name.¹

Despite his fame in revolutionary socialist milieus in Germany and elsewhere, Hölz came from humble beginnings. Over the course of his forty year lifespan, he grew into a figure of socialist violence and revolutionary action. Inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 he took up a leading role in the German Revolution of 1918 and the subsequent revolutionary skirmishes in the German countryside. In June 1921 he was arrested and sentenced to jail, only to be released in July 1928. Mounting conflict and tensions between Hölz and the Soviet Komintern would lead to his untimely death in 1933. His body was found on the 16^th of September 1933 in the river Oka by a group of fishermen. He seems to have been killed by the Soviet Secret Police, although the exact cause of death remains unclear to this day.²

In recent literature, Hölz has been portrayed as a rebel who was driven by heartfelt socialist sentiment and revolutionary conviction, a man who fought against the repression of the working classes without striving for personal gains. Nonetheless, Hölz did not shun violent and harmful practices. He took part in a conflict that resulted in much damage dealt to both property and people. Hölz himself was well aware of his notoriety at the time. In a letter he wrote during his incarceration in the Breslau prison on the 18^th of December 1922, he explained his motivation behind his actions:

Ein Großer Teil der öffentlichen Meinung erklärt mich für einen “Räuber”, “Mordbuben”, “Brandstifter” und dergleichen mehr, aber nur die allerwenigsten Menschen halten es überhaupt für notwendig, auch nur die Frage nach den Beweggründen meines Handelns aufzuwerfen… Ich habe mich bei allem nur von dem Gefühl der Zusammengehörigkeit mit den notleidenden Massen leiten lassen.³

To the wider public, Hölz was a violent anarchist, a murderer and an arsonist, but Hölz claimed to have acted out of feelings of solidarity with the working classes and with only one goal in mind: the liberation of the proletariat. Hölz found admirers amongst comrades in revolutionary socialist circles. He reiterated his heartfelt connection to the working classes in the foreword to his memoirs, published in 1929 under the title Vom Weißen Kreuz zur roten Fahne, by explicitly devoting his nearly 400 page-long autobiography to all prisoners, fellow outcasts of society and revolutionaries. Hölz connected his life to that of the working classes who saw themselves as being repressed at the hands of the capitalist establishment.⁴

These feelings of solidarity with the revolutionary working classes were reciprocal. This contribution will show how the international solidarity between Dutch and German communists took shape partly around the figure of Hölz. The focus will be on the Dutch Communist Party (CPN), with the addition of other revolutionary perspectives for comparative purposes. That Hölz played an important role in the Dutch communist milieu becomes clear from the columns of the daily communist newspaper De Tribune (The Tribune). It was founded in 1907 as a weekly journal, appeared on a daily basis from April 1916 onwards, and served as the official party magazine of the relatively small but radical group of Marxists who had united in what would later be called the CPN. De Tribune was the authoritative voice within the communist party. Whomever received and read the newspaper on a daily basis would have had a strong connection with the party.⁵

There is much uncertainty about the exact size of the CPN. The haphazard administration of the Dutch communist bureau results in unreliable statistics. Numbers are scarce and unevenly distributed, which makes it difficult to paint an accurate picture. On the whole, the CPN was relatively small. The official number of party members ranged from around eighteen hundred in 1919 to over ten thousand in 1939. During the 1920s and 1930s, the number of subscribers to De Tribune far surpassed the number of people who were officially registered as party members, by often more than double the amount. This indicates that the communist community was in fact much larger than the number party membership suggests.⁶ This, in turn, makes De Tribune an important source for studying communist party culture in the Netherlands. The newspaper had a wide readership and gives insight into what was a main source of daily information for communists. The newspaper served as an important conduit of the ideas in circulation among communists and their sympathizers, making it a very valuable source when researching the practice of solidarity.⁷ This contribution, then, deals with the question of how Hölz was mediated through (first and foremost) De Tribune.

The Dutch communist community provides a case study to analyze international solidarity and influences.⁸ The Dutch communists were proud of their heritage, yet due to their relatively small numbers they failed in their aspirations to start a socialist revolution. November 1918 had seen the outbreak of socialist revolutions throughout Eastern Europe and Germany. At the end of October, sailors of the German war fleet had started a revolt that soon spread through large parts of Germany. The revolutionary unrest in Germany in early November 1918 inspired Dutch revolutionaries and resulted in a “Red Week” in the Netherlands. Dutch Marxists and other revolutionaries from Amsterdam felt as though they were on the brink of a revolution. Around 3,000 communists, anarchists and other sympathizers assembled in the streets of Amsterdam on Wednesday the 13^th of November 1918. They were supported by no less than 400 armed soldiers. In the end, their radical approach amounted to nothing. The demonstration resulted in a relatively small but violent confrontation between the revolutionary activists and the soldiers who were housed in Amsterdam barracks. This event, during which four revolutionaries died and several others were wounded, came to be both the culmination and the premature ending of a week of revolutionary unrest in the Netherlands. The revolutionary class war, which had been fought successfully in Russia in 1917 and which was being fought in Germany at that very moment, quickly passed over the Netherlands.⁹

In this situation, transnational solidarity mattered a great deal. The vacuum left by the failed attempt at a revolution in the Netherlands could be filled by laying claim to the strength of the international communist movement. By claiming to be part of a much larger, international class war and a swelling international revolutionary tide, the Dutch revolutionaries were able to write themselves into a larger and more potent revolutionary movement. This was not only an important means to uphold a certain posture to outsiders, but served to strengthen the commitment of insiders as well. Transnational solidarity, in this respect, was a means of keeping up the fighting spirit. It helped strengthen the idea that the revolutionary movement was very much alive and still had potential – one only needed to look at the successes booked by revolutionaries in Russia. The lack of Dutch revolutionary heroes or heroines could be evened out by the adoption of foreign heroes such as Hölz.

As historian Kasper Braskén noted in his study on interwar transnational solidarity, a great many studies on solidarity have in the past focused on the sociological and philosophical ideas behind international solidarity. Braskén advocates a relatively new approach to solidarity that investigates not the theoretical or ideological background but rather its p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction The Power, Borders and Legacies of International Solidarity in the Low Countries
• Chapter 1 A Revolutionary Robin Hood Max Hölz (1889 – 1933) and the Dutch Communist Movement
• Chapter 2 Mobilizing Internationalism The Dutch League of Nations Union (1919 – 1932)
• Chapter 3 Mains libres vs Internationalism The Belgian Workers’ Party’s Internationalist Solidarity with Republican Spain in Times of National Withdrawal
• Chapter 4 “23a Paradise,” a Dutch “Salon” in North London Rosey E. Pool’s Promotion of African American Poetry (1950s – 1960s)
• Chapter 5 Human Rights for Spain Anti-Francoism in Belgium, Between Old and New Forms of Protest (1960s–1970s)
• Chapter 6 Forgotten Friends and Allies Belgian Social Movements and Communist Europe (1960s – 1990s)
• Chapter 7 Hooligans Without Borders Transnational Perspectives on the Dutch Anti-Vietnam War Movement (1965 – 1975)
• Chapter 8 Insurrection in the Schools The Dutch Critical Teachers as Part of a Transnational Solidarity Movement (1969 – 1973)
• Chapter 9 Connecting People, Generating Concern Early Belgian Solidarity with the Liberation Struggle in South Africa and the Portuguese Colonies
• Chapter 10 Belgium’s Wider Peace Front? Isabelle Blume, the Peace Movement and the Issue of the Middle East (1950s – 1970s)
• Chapter 11 Dutch Unions’ Solidarity with the Third World (1950s – 1970s) Reappraising Transnational Solidarity as an Entangled History of Globalization
• Chapter 12 Divided by a Common Language Flemish and Dutch Engagements with Apartheid in South Africa
• Chapter 13 Solidarity or Indifference? Polish Migrants in Belgium and Solidarność
• About the authors
• Index of Persons