The Impact of the Comintern on the Western European Party System
The projects aims at publishing and presenting through a comprehensive and systematically orientated critical edition of documents, mostly from Russian archives, new evidences regarding the German-Russian relations and the history of German Communism during the Comintern period from 1918 to 1943.
The conclusive work on the general documentary edition "Germany and the Comintern / The Comintern and Germany" has been mostly accomplished. Meanwhile, an important part of recently released documents from different Comintern secretariats have been translated from Russian and integrated in the manuscript. It has been consented by the Russian partners, that the last remaining documentary sources from the Historical Archives of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow will be received shortly. The editorial and supervising of the manuscript will be concluded until the end of the year. This includes the partly reworking and the standardization of the three introductions submitted and the harmonization of the footnotes.
The manuscript contains 2000 pages and 4000 footnotes. Empirical evidence may be gathered concerning mutual perceptions, interactions and caesura throughout the most different periods under the omen of European revolution and instrumentalization by Soviet and Stalinist politics. The documents confirm the German-Russian relations as central European axis of XX century Communist history. The mecanisms used by Russian and Comintern leaderships changed from friendly support and imposition to decomposition and existential liquidation. Finally German Communism – until 1941 – has been reduced to a handful of political cadres before a new mobilisation period characterized by various "Antifa" and resistance activities.