The League Against Imperialism

In the office of the "International Secretariat" of the League against Imperialism at Friedrichstrasse 24 in today's district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, things must have been hot at times in 1929. In this office, which was close to numerous film companies, transnationality and diversity were very important (at least in the ethnic dimension). The inner circle of the secretariat consisted of Willi Münzenberg, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and Bohmir Smeral, born in Erfurt, Germany, Hyderabad, India, and Trebitsch in the Czech Republic. From the fall of 1929, however, the League for the Defense of the N*** Race (LzVN), founded as the German arm of the French organization of the same name, was also located in the same office. The seven founding members were Joseph Bilé, Louis Brody, Richard Dinn, Thomas Ngambi ul Kuo, Victor Bell, Thomas Manga Akwa and Manfred Kotto Priso. ^[1] They were all Duala and came from the former German colony of Cameroon, but according to internal activity reports, this league had even more at the beginning, namely about 20 members, some of whom had also immigrated to Germany from other regions of the African continent. Although all participants in the office had shifted towards the common goal of the worldwide struggle against imperialism, there were constant conflicts. Especially since Chattopadhyaya, called "Chatto", rarely kept his opinion to himself.

Smeral became secretary of the LAI in September 1929 on direct instructions from Moscow. Since its founding in 1927, the "League" had been subordinate to the "Communist International" (Comintern, also called the "Third International"), which Lenin had initiated in 1919 as a union of all communist parties. He was supposed to organize the day-to-day business and at the same time report to the headquarters. In November, Chatto expressed a sharp criticism of this personnel decision to the responsible authorities in Moscow. Smeral had no connection to the colonial countries at all, and he, Chatto, did not understand why a "superficial politician" came to Berlin instead of "comrades with real knowledge of and relations in the colonies". ^[2] Here the conflict was palpable, which accompanied the LAI from the beginning and would lead to its end a few years later.

The Comintern, the "world party" in Moscow, was at the same time a pillar of anti-colonialism and a problem for the anti-colonial movements. On the one hand, the Comintern had stipulated in its "guidelines" that "international proletarian communism" would "support the exploited colonial peoples in their struggles against imperialism". ^[3] Such clear statements stood in contrast to the theoretical and practical manoeuvres of most socialist parties, which conceded colonialism a "civilisational" character. Five days before the adoption of the Comintern guidelines in the Reichstag, the German SPD, for example, had agreed to a cross-party motion (introduced by the SPD deputy and later Reichstag president Paul Löbe, among others), which demanded the "restoration of Germany to its colonial rights". Only the USPD, which split off in 1916, had voted against it – with reference to the resolutions of the Socialist Congress in Stuttgart in 1907.[^4]

On the other hand, after 1927 the Comintern had abandoned the strategy of the so-called united front and tightened control to such an extent that Chatto's complaint seemed more than justified. The united front was a strategy that allowed communist parties (which in their own view represented the working masses) to collaborate with those anti-colonial liberation movements that were nationalist and bourgeois in character. However, the Comintern had abandoned this approach in 1927, when the Kuomintang movement in China, which was initially perceived as left-wing, took brutal action against the allied communists. This disappointment led the Comintern to insist that anti-imperialist cooperation should only take place with reliable communists. In 1929, Chatto was undoubtedly such a communist, but his focus remained on liberation from colonialism. Only two years earlier, Margarete Buber-Neumann had written about him in her memoirs that she had gained the impression "that Chatto was not a communist, but an Indian nationalist." ^[5]

In fact, Chatto's story shows the entire field of tension of anti-colonial resistance at the level of the emigrants. Coming from a wealthy Indian family, Chatto had enrolled as a student in Berlin in 1914.

As a revolutionary nationalist, he also campaigned for the expulsion of the British from India. During the First World War, the German Reich appeared to him as a potential partner. So he began working for the Intelligence Office for the Orient , where Max von von Oppenheim tried to organize Muslims worldwide in German interest against the colonial rule of the Entente powers. In 1915, the Indians in Berlin succeeded in making themselves independent of the intelligence office and Oppenheim's mediation. The Indian Independence Committee, known as the "Berlin Committee" for short, resided in a Charlottenburg office and negotiated directly with the Foreign Office – Chatto saw himself as a kind of ambassador. But the (worldwide) efforts of the Committee for an Indian uprising against the British failed for many reasons, so that Wilhelmstraße increasingly lost interest even before the end of the war. ^[6]

In Stockholm, Chatto finally came into contact with the Bolsheviks, whose explicit commitment to the liberation of India seemed more honest to him. With the founding of the Soviet Union, the British had also created a new main enemy with whom Chatto wanted to ally himself. So a delegation of the "Berlin Indians" traveled to Moscow to talk to the Comintern about cooperation, which did not actually come about until years later. ^[7] During his stay in Moscow, he was expelled from Sweden at the instigation of the British. Back in Berlin, he founded the Indian News Service and Information Bureau (INSIB)^[8] with offices in Halensee, which was intended to provide both German and Indian media with independent news, but was also there to help the Indians in Germany (students and businessmen). At the time, Berlin was attractive for students from overseas, with about 5,000 staying in the city – not least because the German Reich had had no colonies since 1919 and the Weimar Republic seemed comparatively open. In the years that followed, however, the "Berlin Indians" also protested several times against German politics. This concerned the increasing trade with the British in the colony, but also events in Germany. The sharpest reactions were triggered in 1926 by an "India Show" by John Hagenbeck (Carl's half-brother) at the Berlin Zoo of all places – the Indian emigrants wrote indignantly to the Chancellery and the matter was controversially discussed in the German media. ^[9] Soon afterwards, Willi Münzenberg recruited Chatto for the predecessor organization of the LAI.

Chatto, however, not only had problems with the "superficial politician" Smeral, with whose rather reserved manner he was soon able to come to terms with, but also with the members of the League for the Defense of the N*** Race. Chatto did not consider them "sufficiently revolutionary", but rather insecure cantonists with exaggerated expectations, especially in financial terms. Joseph Bilé, the leading secretary of the LzVN, who suggested going back to Cameroon to recruit students for the struggle, countered Chatto personally with the remark that he would rather promote recruitment in India – and in any case, the dissolution of the LzVN would not be the least loss for the LAI. ^[10] In fact, the LzVN certainly had something of a cardboard comrade – the only collective activity that has survived is the performance of a "racial theatre" entitled "Sunrise in the Orient", apparently initiated by Louis Brody. It is true that the founding of the LzVN was based on contacts between the LAI and the incomparably more relevant organisation of the same name in Paris, which was initially led by Lamine Senghor, who is unjustly largely forgotten today^,[11] and later by Tiemko Garan Kouyaté. But Münzenberg, whose talent in what is now known as "organizing" was downright phenomenal, was not very convinced of the political consciousness of the immigrants from Africa whom he contacted in Berlin, and apparently wanted to train them first in a kind of front organization and, to a certain extent, also test them.

However, these immigrants did not have a noble family background like Chatto and often lived in Berlin rather poorly than well, also due to the omnipresent discrimination. Frauds sometimes served as a survival strategy, whereby the deception was often accompanied by a "performance" of "blackness" based on stereotypes. Wilhelm Munumé, who appeared as a "West African delegate" at the founding meeting of the LAI predecessor organization, had not shied away from using anti-colonialism to put money in his own pocket. ^[12] From 1921 onwards, he was involved in several racketeers (in which he pretended to be a representative of the government of Liberia or a fictitious king in Accra).

From 1925 onwards, he received regular support from the colonial revisionist "German Society for Native Studies", whose tasks also included the care of Cameroon residents who had emigrated to the Reich. In 1927, Munumé was convicted of trying to print counterfeit money and put it into circulation. ^[13] When his deportation was threatened, the different interests between the black activists and Chatto became unmistakably apparent. For the former, the case offered an opportunity to draw attention to their own precarious residence status and the unjustly denied access to citizenship. Chatto, on the other hand, who showed interest in the case, saw it only as a way to denounce the revisionist demands for the return of the colonies. ^[14]

Bilé, on the other hand, complained in Paris and Moscow about Chatto, whose arrogance undoubtedly overshot the mark. In fact, Bilé was the only reasonably coherent activist in the LzVN (and before that in the African Relief Association), although he also had partly exaggerated expectations of the financial resources of his activities. ^[15] Bilé attended courses at the MASCH (Marxist Workers' School) in Berlin, became a member of the KPD and went to Moscow in the summer of 1930. From the end of 1932 to the beginning of 1934 he was again in Moscow and studied at the Communist University of the Working People of the East, founded by the Comintern. Bilé was a welcome speaker at all kinds of events when it came to the colonies or the cause of "the blacks" worldwide.

He also appeared at protests against the conviction of the black "Scottsboro Boys", who were sentenced to death by an all-white jury in the USA in 1931 for an alleged rape – such cases were also noted in the German Reich at the time. Of course, he always appeared as a representative of his "race". At this point, the communist associations very often seemed to have only a tactical relationship with the respective "representatives". In her memoirs, Buber-Neumann describes a person of Algerian origin who was born in Wedding but appeared at KPD meetings as a "representative of the Rif Kabyles fighting for their freedom". ^[16] Even worse stories to offer (although certainly not always credible) is Jan Valtin^,[17] who reports that at the first world congress in 1932, organized by the Comintern front organization "International of Seafarers and Dock Workers (ISH)", Chinese students from Berlin appeared as dock workers from Canton. When it became clear that the delegation from the East Indies would not come because of passport problems, Valtin himself lured three "Hindus" who were working on a freighter to the congress with absurd promises of a free revue theater, where they then operated as silent emissaries.

Nevertheless, even in the latter example, it must be added that the congress had been largely organized by two black trade unionists, the American James Ford and George Padmore from Trinidad. Until Stalin's "purges" began, the structures of the communist organization offered many opportunities. Joseph Bilé, however, wanted to return to Cameroon from the end of the 1920s onwards – this resulted in the suggestion mentioned above to act as an agitator there. In the Soviet Union, he was no longer considered equipped for this role. In 1932, the Soviet Africanist Alexander Zusmanovich reported that Bilé had become "German" and that his approach to colonial problems and African realities was only abstract, sometimes even mythical. ^[18] Bilé found himself in an impossible situation: the more he tried to adapt to the KPD, the more he lost his usefulness as a "representative". Incidentally, Ralph Ellison impressively described this situation in his novel "Invisible Man": In Harlem, the main character becomes a sought-after speaker of the "Brotherhood" (easily identifiable as the Communist Party USA).

Two years before the LAI moved into its premises at Friedrichstrasse 24, another organization with close ties to many of the people mentioned had resided just across the street at 232, the Chinese National Agency, headed by Hansin Liau. Liau was the representative of the Kuomintag in Berlin and, as head of this "agency", was supposed to fan the flames of anti-colonial propaganda on the subject of China (with all news coming from Moscow). However, Liau, who sympathized with the Communists, was caught off guard in April 1927 by the brutal coup of the Kuomintang against its communist allies in Shanghai. The propaganda suddenly had no clear line, and the office was closed again. As mentioned, the Comintern issued the motto that it was only allowed to work with reliable Communists in the respective countries.

That was different in the early days. The idea for an international anti-colonial movement – proactively communist, but politically overarching – came from Willi Münzenberg. With the help of Moscow, he had founded the "International Workers' Aid" (IAH) in Berlin, basically a charitable organization, which, however, collected its donations under the aspect of "international solidarity" of the workers. He had risen as an unskilled worker in the communist nomenklatura and had built up a veritable media empire in Berlin in the service of the Comintern, which competed with the Hugenberg Group. Münzenberg, which was quite unusual at the time, considered the anti-colonial struggle to be one of the most important tasks for the future, whereby he saw a convergence of interests between the European working classes and the oppressed colonial subjects. As early as 1925, he had orchestrated a campaign with the IAH against the imperial encroachments of the Western powers in China, which were closely observed, especially in the pacifist-oriented public of the Weimarar Republic: "Hands off China". Money was collected, China stamps were sold, and an international conference on China took place in August in the Berlin Herrenhaus (the former Prussian state parliament and then meeting place of the Prussian State Council chaired by Konrad Adenauer) at Leipziger Str. 3.

In accordance with the Comintern motto of the united front, Münzenberg wanted to forge an alliance that went beyond party boundaries and therefore tirelessly established contacts in all directions: to the milieu of German pacifism, to the anti-colonial-oriented socialists, to the representatives of the anti-colonial movements all over the world. He had to coordinate all his efforts with Moscow, where Münzenberg's zeal, independence and pragmatism did not always meet with the corresponding approval. After the founding of several committees (against the colonial atrocities in Syria, for example), a conference in Berlin in 1926 led to the founding of the predecessor organization of the LAI, the League against Colonial Oppression, whose International Secretariat (there were also national offices) resided in the IAH rooms at Wilhelmstrasse 48. ^[19]

In 1927, Münzenberg was able to achieve an astonishing success when he organized the "Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism" in Brussels from February 10 to 15. The writer and politician Ernst Toller wrote about this in March in the weekly Die Weltbühne, directed by Kurt Tucholsky: "After my return from the Congress in Brussels, I think about what it means, I dare to say, without prejudice to the hackneyed nature of the expression: 'A world-historical event'. In Brussels, nothing more and nothing less was created than the organizational synthesis of all the rebellious forces of the Orient, the Occident and Europe against the supremacy of the European-American ruling class." ^[20]

174 delegates had come to the Belgian capital, and they were not only intellectuals, but representatives of organizations and parties from Europe, the USA, Latin America and the colonies in Africa and Asia. The meeting in the Palais Egmot was a bridge between European greats such as the Labour doyen George Lansbury, the well-known pacifist Helene Stöcker or the writer Hernri Barbusse as well as current and later greats from former or then still current colonies: Present were José Vasconcelos, shortly before Mexican Minister of Education, Josiah Tshangana Gumede, who was soon to become President of the African National Congress, as well as Jawarharlal Nehru, Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho-Chin Minh) and Mohammad Hatta, who became Prime Ministers or Prime Ministers after the independence of their respective countries India, Vietnam and Indonesia. ^[21] Albert Einstein could not come, but sent a greeting. ^[22]

The euphoria of the Palais Egmont did not last long, however: soon the socialists turned their backs, there was friction with the "bourgeois" movements, and Moscow became increasingly authoritarian under Stalin. When LACO was renamed the League Against Imperialism, the organization became clearly communist, but its activities remained impressive. The Secretariat in Berlin coordinated the protest actions of a number of national groups, it organized another international meeting in Frankfurt (which was attended by later Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta,^[23]), youth conferences in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Berlin, and an anti-war conference in Amsterdam, and maintained contact between the Comintern and representatives of the liberation movements. ^[24]

There is no doubt that the LAI never exhausted its potential because the tension between political views was too great. From 1932 onwards, it sank into insignificance, although the secretariat still moved to Paris. Münzenberg also went to Paris in 1933, where he finally turned his propaganda activities against Stalin. In 1940, he died under unexplained circumstances. Joseph Bilé actually moved to Cameroon in 1935, withdrew from politics and worked as an architect. ^[25] Chatto and Smeral turned to Moscow. Smeral remained true to his functionary life and was ordered by the Kremlin to Mongolia, where he was significantly involved in the post-revolutionary "purges" as an advisor. Chatto, on the other hand, became a victim of these "purges". In July 1937, the secret police picked him up without warning, and on September 2, the military wing of the Supreme Court sentenced him to death. On the same day, Chatto was handed over to the firing squad.

Historically, the offices of the anti-imperialist leagues on Friedrichstrasse and half a kilometer further north on Wilhelmstrasse in today's Mitte district form something like points of circulation of people and transnational connections. A network was created here that actually had a "world-historical" significance because it co-founded and anticipated pan-African, pan-Arab, pan-Asian, and overarching anti-colonial solidarities. ^[26] Jawarharlal Nehru paid tribute to Münzenberg's preparatory work at the legendary Bandung Conference of 1955, the conference at which the "Non-Alignment" and "Third World" movements were born.