“Revolutionary Mass Propaganda”: The German Communist Party, the Reichstag Election and Extra-parliamentary Struggle in the Summer of 1932

This article examines the German Communist Party’s (KPD’s) propaganda campaign during the Reichstag election in the summer of 1932. It asks why a movement which openly rejected parliamentary democracy fervently contested elections and it analyzes the KPD’s strategy, campaign organization and publicity. The article argues that the party’s culture created a distinctive electoral appeal. As a Stalinized, heavily bureaucratized party, the KPD ran a centralized campaign with tightly controlled ideological messaging. Yet its leadership was also able to compete with better-funded rivals by tapping the party’s ethos of revolutionary activism and showing hitherto unrecognized pragmatism in encouraging independence and initiative. Supercharged by an extra-parliamentary campaign that summer, the KPD waged an edgy, violent “battle of symbols” in the streets which united the party’s revolutionary aims with its supporters’ neighborhood activism. Revolutionary mass propaganda projected a uniquely Communist visual and audio appeal, embodying protest, poverty and radicalism.