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17 1 “Heil Moskau!” Whenever biographers wanted to depict Ernst Thälmann as having had an exemplary proletarian upbringing, they had to invent one.1 Neither of his parents came from a working-class background. His father, Jan, was born in the town of Weddern in Holstein on 11 April 1857. After military service in Potsdam, he moved to Hamburg, where in 1884 he married Maria Kopheisz, who was younger than her husband by around seven months. Like Jan, she had been born in a small town, Kirschwerder in Vierlanden, not far from Hamburg. The couple had two children: Ernst, born on 16 April 1886, and a daughter, Frieda, born about a year later. Neither parent exhibited any interest in workingclass politics, and Jan, under his son’s influence, would join the KPD only in 1923.2 Among the most important—and clearly the most interesting— sources regarding Ernst’s childhood is a brief autobiography (“Mein Lebenslauf”) penned by the Communist leader, probably in 1935, for his Nazi captors. Written in preparation for his trial for treason—although Thälmann never did see his day in court—the “Lebenslauf” provides not only important information regarding Ernst prior to his joining the KPD, but also valuable insight concerning the way that Thälmann saw himself as well as how he wanted his captors, not to mention posterity, to view him. In short, the “Lebenslauf” affords one of the few instances in which Thälmann had the opportunity to contribute to the creation of the mythology that would emerge about him following his death.3 Hence, a close analysis of this document can provide an illuminating point of departure for an examination of the Thälmann myth. Thälmann began his statement with a brief chronicle of his family ’s origins, the place of birth of his parents, and so forth. But he very quickly moved on to accounts of what he experienced as a child growing up in Hamburg. The city was dominated by arguably Germany’s most important harbor, which employed around 30,000 people at the 18 HITLER’S RIVAL turn of the twentieth century. Hamburg’s working class was among the most radicalized and organized in the country, and the city was known as one of Germany’s “fortresses of socialism.” Although an electoral system that favored the bourgeoisie assured that the mercantile classes dominated local politics, after 1890 the city consistently elected SPD deputies to all three of its Reichstag seats.4 Hence, although Ernst contended that his “education at home and at school was in no way socialist, rather one could almost rightly contend that it was the opposite ,” and that his parents were an “antisocialist” influence, he did see working-class life firsthand, claiming to be more influenced by “the experiences, events and reality of everyday life [Volksleben].”5 Ernst claimed to have witnessed many of the inequities of the capitalist system simply by walking the streets of Hamburg. But much of the young boy’s introduction to “everyday life” came through his father ’s business. Maria Thälmann’s family was apparently reasonably well off, and she had brought some money to her marriage with Jan.6 This enabled Jan, shortly after his son’s birth, to purchase a tavern in Hamburg’s harbor district, which helped to introduce young Ernst to the city’s proletarian culture. The Thälmanns, in contrast to their customers , had petit bourgeois aspirations. Jan, Ernst recalled, “belonged to every possible bourgeois and military association,” and Maria was devoutly religious—although Jan was not. Maria was apparently disturbed by her son’s lack of religiosity—Ernst claims always to have seen the deceit inherent in religion—and it was a bone of contention between them. Ernst claimed to have asked Maria repeatedly why her God did not do more for the poor, hungry people whom he saw every day. Even as a child, the future Communist leader asserts, he saw through his mother’s unsatisfying replies.7 In spite of his parents’ outlook, Ernst’s childhood was anything but the bourgeois ideal, and his experiences of “everyday life” went well beyond the confines of his father’s public house. He learned a great deal in what he calls “the hard school of childhood [Kinderlebens].”8 In 1892, for example, both of Ernst’s parents were convicted of receiving stolen property and sentenced to two years in prison. Not much is known about this incident, but in the early 1950s...

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