Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman

with captivating intellectual figures, reading the theoretical analyses of the calamity, and the pressing sense of crisis motivated Otto Albert to explore the connections between thought and action. This preoccupation pushed him further beyond the Collège and into the circles of SAJ militants. The explosive election of 1930 at the end of the summer, whose results blared across Berlin’s headlines—Nazi Victory!—added drama to the theory. While Otto Albert was reading Marx and Marxists for the first time, the Social Democratic Party, with which he and his parents were aligned, was undergoing an ever-deepening party
crise de coeur
. Discussions and debates reflected the growing political unease around the country, especially in Berlin, which shifted from the world’s capital of avant-garde modernism to the global epicenter of crisis thinking and the frantic search for alternatives.
    Among socialists, these anxieties spilled into a vibrant internal debate and growing calls for change of tactics and new visions. Weekend excursions by militants were devoted to discussions of important tracts, workshops in political tactics, and plans for future meetings. On Sundays, OA and sometimes Ursula, who would later affiliate with the Communist Party, donned their blue shirts and red kerchiefs and took the train to assemblies in the countryside. Youth hostels became the meeting grounds for leftist students and young workers from around Berlin. Erich Schmidt, the charismatic head of the SAJ chapter in Berlin, steered thegroup further to the left within the Social Democrats and argued for the creation of a coalition of Social Democrats and Communists. In this, he was taking on the SPD establishment, incarnate in the Reichstag faction of the Brüning (of the Center Party) government, which was desperately trying to cope with a growing crisis and focusing on the older party line. Figures like Erich Ollenhauer and Rudolf Hilferding “tolerated” the bourgeois parties and put their trust in Brüning until he dropped the remaining Socialists from his coalition and brought in Nazis as part of his botched electoral gambit. In the meantime, the SPD leadership stuck with a government that had swung to such deflationary, antilabor, pro-military, pro-clerical, and even increasingly anti-Semitic standpoints that it made a mockery of whatever the republic’s reformists and moderate socialists had envisioned. Rudolf Hilferding wrote to the elder SPD leader and intellectual, Karl Kautsky, on December 1 that “the situation is certainly unpleasant. The fascist danger still threatens and the increase [in support] for the Communists disturbs our people even more. Indeed, a further advance in this direction would certainly bring the greatest danger that the attraction of the Communists would increase powerfully as soon as they surpassed our numbers. It is not a pretty scene, but adventurous stupidities would only make matters worse.” As if to mock the SPD leader’s cautionary diagnosis, two months later Hindenburg named Hitler Chancellor of Germany. 15
    This kind of blindness to imminent dangers drove younger militants to distraction. For Schmidt, the 1930 elections revealed that old rivalries on the left had to be set aside to confront the common enemy. At stake was parliament itself. Something different had to be done to rescue it, and it was clear to those of the SAJ that the extremes of the Left and especially the Right had no interest and the Center had no ability. Along with Walter Löwenheim (aka Kurt, who had been evicted from the KPD for “right-wing deviationism”), Schmidt called this movement the Circle, and later ORG; sometimes it was known as LO, or just O, for Gruppe Leninistische Organisation. It would become the incubator for the Neu Beginnen movement in 1933, a self-described Leninist vanguard within the Socialist camp devoted to a full-throated analysis of the economic crisis andthe practical necessity of a left-wing alliance.