Kamerad or Genosse? The Contested Frontkämpfer Identity in Weimar Revolutionary Politics

Abstract

Fifteen years after the end of the First World War, former private Kurt Wolff described the war as ‘the great experience that was unique for hundreds of thousands of the Front Generation, and would be definitive for their entire life’.¹ However, within this generation of young men who fought in the conflict, Wolff believed that one group stood apart: ‘the Field Soldier, the soldier on the front, in the trenches, was entirely distinct from the soldier of the Heimat, the soldier of the garrison’.² Veteran, and political assassin, Ernst von Salomon highlighted the unique place that front soldiers held in German society. ‘The Frontkämpfer is generally recognised as the only possible reflection of the character of the World War’, argued Salomon; ‘Neither the war profiteer, nor the Inflation profiteer, nor the revolutionary, nor the parliamentary People’s Representative, nor the opportunist, can be held as the symbol of our time in the post war era, but rather only the Freikorps kämpfen’³ While Salomon’s conception of the front fighter was politically and socially divisive, Wolff stressed the unity of the front soldiers in the face of the violence of the trenches: ‘The prospects were all the same; the enemy machine gun bullets and grenades made no distinctions. The Kameradschaft was the important factor, it grew into the gigantic, unbreakable bond, an iron hard cement for all.’⁴