"The red flag"

A scene from the TV series Babylon Berlin.

Behind Gereon Rath, on the newsstand at Alexanderplatz (episode 4 of the first season) we see a copy of the newspaper Die Rote Fahne. Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) was, during the Weimar republic, the organ of Germany’s Communist Party (K.P.D.). It had two daily editions (morning and afternoon) and was sold not only in newsstands but also by party members on the street. It was possible to subscribe on monthly or even weekly (!) basis (these were hard times, especially for workers, and not everybody could cough up 2.60 marks for a whole month’s subscription).

Even if the Fahne had a loyal audience, it was not much compared with another communist paper, Die Welt am Abend, expertly directed by Willi Münzenberg and not officially recognized by the Party. 

The Fahne was forbidden under Hitler. And when Communist East Germany was created after the war, the official paper was not the Fahne but a new one, Neues Deutschland. The reason appears to be that the ruling party in the new state was not the KPD but the SED, a new organization formed by the (forcible) fusion of Communists and Social Democrats. Before the war, the social democratic organ was Vorwärts (Forward). In the new socialistic state, there would be neither Red Flag nor Forward, only New Germany (Neues Deutschland).

The copy we see in the videocaption is dated 1st May 1929. It calls for a worker’sdemonstration, and several episodes of Babylon Berlin revolve around that demonstration and what followed.

On the front page, under the title in Fraktur lettering, we read that the paper was founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (both murdered by extreme-right bands in 1919) and that it is the official organ of the KPD. Between brackets : « Section of the Communist International ». That International (the Third one) was founded in the Soviet Union and better known as the Comintern, responding to Stalin’s orders. The First and Second had been founded in Germany by Marx-Engels and by reformist Socialdemocrats respectively. And the Fourth International was the trotskyite one. There is no Fifth International, as yet.

The thickest title, in Latin (not Fraktur) script reads : Fighting May 1929. And under it : « Radicalization of class contradictions, growing danger for an imperialistic war, dramatic progress of the KPD : all these are forebodings of a new, mighty wave of proletarian revolutions ! »

Several pages are dedicated to attack Karl Zörgiebel, socialdemocratic chief of the Berlin police and one of the secondary characters of Babylon Berlin. 

 

 

From Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin